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marchers of the ACLU, the local United Nations Association, and other open border groups were countered by armed, Second Amendment advocate Trump supporters at a demonstration in Dallas during the weekend. [Marchers chanted, “Say it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here,” reported The Dallas Morning News. There were approximately 1, 700 people at the rally, the local newspaper reported. An imam was said to have told the group, “We will continue to live without fear. We will not allow cities to be bullied by [people] who don’t understand the Constitution. ” ”We will continue to live without fear. We will not allow cities to be bullied by ppl who don’t understand the constitution.” Imam Suleiman pic. twitter. — Claire Ballor (@claireballor) February 18, 2017, And they’re off pic. twitter. — Claire Ballor (@claireballor) February 18, 2017, ”I’m Old Liberty and I’m pissed.” pic. twitter. — Claire Ballor (@claireballor) February 18, 2017, The march through the streets of Dallas was a gathering of not only those who spoke out against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies and the recent ICE raids, but supporters of his policies. The Morning News reported that a wife of a legal immigrant, Brooke Wang of nearby Plano, Texas, said she was there to show support for the president. “We are just for legal immigration … We want people to come here legally. ” Wang’s husband is a legal permanent resident who emigrated from China. She sported a “2016 Trump for President” and was carrying an assault weapon. Wang and others at the march took the opportunity to not only support the president and his immigration policies, but to exercise their constitutional right to carry arms. The march in Dallas followed protests at schools in the city, and in Austin, Texas, and the #DayWithoutImmigrants. There’s a #protest at #Dallas #TX in my school. #AntiTrump pic. twitter. — 🇺🇸Nick Wilde🇲🇽 (@9NickPWilde9) February 17, 2017, As reported by Breitbart Texas’ Bob Price: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are continuing to defend themselves against the national media which continues to mischaracterize the role and intent of the of criminal aliens. Media reports have called the Operation Cross Check arrests of criminal aliens a effort by ICE officials and the Trump Administration, despite the fact that this operation has been carried out in the past. More than 2, 000 criminal aliens were rounded up in March 2015, Breitbart Texas reported at the time. The nearly 700 arrests in last week’s operation pales in comparison, yet the mainstream media appears to have lost total perspective in its attacks on the men and women tasked to protect our nation from these criminals. As reported by Breitbart News, the #DayWithoutImmigrants was “a political dud” however, some who decided to skip work, including those who did not show up in order to protest were fired. Lana Shadwick is a writer and legal analyst for Breitbart Texas. She has served as a prosecutor and associate judge in Texas. Follow her on Twitter @LanaShadwick2. | 1 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. President Donald Trump signed executive orders aimed at rolling back financial regulations. The rules of the Act were intended to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis. Democrats and consumer groups called Mr. Trump’s orders a gift to Wall Street. A government lawyer said more than 100, 000 visas were revoked by the Trump administration as part of the president’s ban on travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries. The State Department said the number was “fewer than 60, 000. ” And Kellyanne Conway, the president’s adviser, said she erred when she talked about a “Bowling Green massacre” that never occurred. _____ 2. Confirmation hearings for Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees will pick up next week. Betsy DeVos, the nominee for education secretary, is expected to have a final, confirmation vote on Tuesday. After Ms. DeVos seemed ignorant of major provisions of education law, some Senate offices reported receiving more calls opposing Ms. DeVos than any other Trump nominee. _____ 3. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump questioned a deal to bring migrants held by Australia into the United States as refugees. But on Thursday, his spokesman said he would honor the deal. Here is a video of what daily life looks like for one of them, a Kurdish dissident from Iran. He has been held on Manus Island for over three years. “Take us from this hellhole prison,” he pleads. _____ 4. As the New England Patriots seek their fifth N. F. L. championship this weekend, controlling the explosive Atlanta Falcons — who are looking for their first title — will be a major challenge. Here is a look at the championship matchup in Houston and who we think will win. Now, what to cook for the game. Our collection of Super Bowl recipes includes dips, chicken wings, potato skins, chilis, cheese steaks, nachos and vegetarian options. _____ 5. A little more than a week ago, François Fillon seemed all but certain to become France’s next president. Now he’s in deep trouble for payments of nearly $1 million from the public payroll to his wife and children. The scandal has tapped a wellspring of anger in the French electorate and called into question the standard operating procedures of the political class. The country has been in a state of emergency since the 2015 terror attack in Paris. Early Friday, a man shouting “God is great” in Arabic, tried to attack soldiers outside the Louvre. He was shot and no one else was injured. _____ 6. Photos and video from a spectacular sight off the coast of Hawaii circulated on social media this week. The images showed hundreds of millions of gallons of lava flowing into the ocean, like blood from a ruptured artery. Visible lava streams usually last only a day. This one began on New Year’s Eve and ended on Thursday, when a seacliff collapsed and cut it off. _____ 7. More young women are smoking pot while they’re pregnant. Most think it’s harmless. But preliminary research suggests otherwise. Experts say marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, THC, can cross the placenta to reach the fetus, potentially harming brain development, cognition and birth weight. (If you’ve used marijuana while pregnant, we’d like to hear from you. We won’t publish any of the information without your permission.) _____ 8. We’re doing a series on the “lions of New York,” the movers and shakers who helped shape the city’s comeback from the depths of crisis in the 1970s and ’80s. This week we speak with Harry Belafonte, the singer and a pillar of the civil rights movement. At 89, he is anxious about voting rights, police violence and the state of the movement he helped build. _____ 9. Sales of George Orwell’s “1984” are up since the election. And now it’s coming to Broadway. Producers plan to bring an adaptation of the 1949 novel to the Hudson Theater in June. It was previously staged in Britain. There’s no word on the cast yet. _____ 10. Finally, if you’re planning on warming up the couch before the Super Bowl, here are the latest recommendations from “Watching,” our team of TV and movie experts. They’ve compiled a list of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and HBO in February, and a guide to your options depending on how much time you have. One of their top picks is Netflix’s “Santa Clarita Diet,” starring Drew Barrymore, above, as a zombie. Have a great weekend. _____ Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
President Donald Trump is planning to hang a portrait of his electoral college win over Hillary Clinton in the White House, according to reports. [A reporter for the One America News Network spotted a White House staffer walking through the building with a framed map of the electoral college victory. “Spotted: A Map to be hung somewhere in the West Wing,” Trey Yingst, a reporter for the network tweeted. Spotted: A map to be hung somewhere in the West Wing pic. twitter. — Trey Yingst (@TreyYingst) May 11, 2017, Since his election victory, Donald Trump has regularly made reference to his electoral college win, in which a 7. 5 million popular vote landslide in the American heartland covered the map almost entirely red. In an interview with three Reuters journalists, Trump reportedly handed out maps of his electoral college victory. “There were three of us in the interview and he had a copy for each of us,” said Jeff Mason, the agency’s White House Correspondent. “It was just clear that the election remains very much on his mind. ” Despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, Trump won the presidency after claiming 306 electoral college votes, compared to Hillary Clinton’s 232. However, Trump has contended that he would have won the popular vote as well “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. ” In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally, — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2016, According to White House officials, Trump is expected to sign an executive order this week launching an investigation into potential voter fraud and voter suppression across America. The commission will be lead by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. I will be asking for a major investigation into VOTER FRAUD, including those registered to vote in two states, those who are illegal and … . — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017, even, those registered to vote who are dead (and many for a long time). Depending on results, we will strengthen up voting procedures! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2017, You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart. com | 1 |
PARIS — Marine Le Pen, the French far right’s presidential candidate, has never hidden her admiration for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, and on Friday she met with him in the Kremlin. Russian television broadcast images of Ms. Le Pen, gesticulating energetically across the table from a Mr. Putin. Earlier, she called for “developing relations” with Russia and “cooperation” in antiterrorism. Both were nods to her presidential campaign platform, which advocates closer ties with Mr. Putin, friendliness toward President Trump and rejection of the European Union. The meeting highlighted the potential for a general realignment of relations with Russia, even at a time when it has been accused of meddling in Western elections through computer hacking and the promotion of fake news, sowing alarm on both sides of the Atlantic. The Trump administration has shown itself sympathetic to Moscow, to the extent that contacts between the two sides are being investigated in the United States. In a crucial election year in Europe, campaigns are now peppered with parties and candidates that could sharply redirect ties with Moscow. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s challengers in Germany, on the left and the far right, tilt more easily toward Russia. The Five Star Movement in Italy, which presents a rising challenge to the political establishment if elections are held there this year, does as well. Then there is Ms. Le Pen, who Russian television reported had met earlier with parliamentary deputies in Moscow, while calling for the lifting of sanctions against Russia for its land grab in Ukraine. Mr. Putin’s Russia has long been a source of aid for Ms. Le Pen’s National Front. In 2014, her party received a $9. 7 million loan from a Russian bank Ms. Le Pen said French banks were shunning her party. The loan nonetheless drew condemnation from the governing Socialists as an unsavory example of foreign financing for a French political party. Denying any quid pro quo, the National Front was the only French party to approve of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and its officials have regularly called for the lifting of Western sanctions against Russia. National Front officials regularly visit Russia. From its earliest origins, the party has not been reticent about displaying an affinity for authoritarian leaders. “I won’t hide that, in a certain sense, I admire Vladimir Putin,” Ms. Le Pen was quoted as saying in the Russian paper Kommersant in 2011. “He makes mistakes, but who doesn’t? The situation in Russia is not easy. ” Her foreign policy positions in the 2017 campaign — Ms. Le Pen is favored to win in a first round of voting on April 23 but lose in the second round two weeks later — have a clear tilt. Aides have praised Ms. Le Pen’s ideological closeness to both Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, saying she is well placed to form alliances with both. “She’s the only one who can speak with both Putin and Trump,” one of Ms. Le Pen’s top lieutenants, Lacapelle, said in an interview here two weeks ago. “She’s got a privileged relationship with Putin,” said Mr. Lacapelle, a longtime friend of Ms. Le Pen. “You can’t be isolated when you’ve got both Putin and Trump on your side. ” Asked whether the Le Pen campaign was in touch with Trump officials, Mr. Lacapelle would say only, “There are lots of things going on. ” In a fiercely nationalist speech to diplomats in Paris last month, Ms. Le Pen criticized the European Union, which she wants France to leave, for having “mistreated” Russia, calling Russia an “indispensable interlocutor” in the Middle East. Ms. Le Pen spoke of wanting to “anchor” Russia to Europe, even as she heaped scorn on the European Union, which she said was “facing contrariwise to the rest of the world. ” “Everywhere, globalization is in retreat,” Ms. Le Pen told a group of bemused diplomats in a gilded hall in the fashionable 16th Arrondissement. “The Europe of peoples will be constructed against globalist dissolution,” she said. “I celebrate the renaissance of the European peoples. ” She “saluted” what she called Mr. Trump’s “realism” and his “desire for change,” while quoting approvingly Charles de Gaulle’s dictum that states have “no friends, but only interests. ” She insisted that the “singularity of the world’s populations is not soluble merely in the market,” while denouncing the “lies of globalization and liberalism. ” | 1 |
Hours after former Representative Anthony D. Weiner of New York apparently deleted his Twitter account in the wake of a New York Post report that he had been involved in another sexting episode with a woman online last year, his wife announced that the couple were separating. It was at least the third public episode involving such behavior by Mr. Weiner, who resigned from Congress in 2011 after it was revealed he had been sending lewd messages and photos to women online. That sexting scandal destroyed his political career, derailed a comeback attempt in 2013 and strained his marriage to Huma Abedin, a top aide to Hillary Clinton. On Monday, Ms. Abedin said in a statement: “After long and painful consideration and work on my marriage, I have made the decision to separate from my husband. Anthony and I remain devoted to doing what is best for our son, who is the light of our life. During this difficult time, I ask for respect for our privacy. ” The woman told The Post that the online chats started in January 2015 and that they continued through this month. Screen shots published by The Post showed that the two exchanged photos — of the woman in various bikinis and of Mr. Weiner showing off his abs or his crotch — and that they talked about sex. In one message, Mr. Weiner abruptly changed the discussion from massage parlors and wrote, “Someone just climbed into my bed. ” “Really?” the woman said. His response, in a screen shot dated just July 31, 2015, showed a child curled up next to Mr. Weiner, who was wearing white shorts. Mr. Weiner and Ms. Abedin have a son, Jordan, 5. The Post did not identify the woman but described her as a “ supporter of Donald Trump and the National Rifle Association who’s used Twitter to bash both President Obama and Clinton. ” Mr. Weiner, asked by The Post for comment, “admitted he and the woman ‘have been friends for some time,’ ” according to the article. “She has asked me not to comment except to say that our conversations were private, often included pictures of her nieces and nephews and my son and were always appropriate,” Mr. Weiner was quoted as saying. Mr. Weiner could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday. ■ When Mr. Weiner resigned from Congress in 2011, he publicly apologized and vowed to change his behavior, but he denied having an addiction. But in 2013, his attempt at a political comeback as a New York mayoral candidate was scuttled when it was revealed he had again been exchanging messages online with at least three more women under the nom de guerre “Carlos Danger. ” A documentary, “Weiner,” released in May, traced the disastrous campaign and the effects on Ms. Abedin, who is shown near tears after the sexting revelations were made public. ■ According to a New York Times report, Ms. Abedin learned only on Sunday while the couple were in the Hamptons with their son that Mr. Weiner had sent a photo of himself and the boy to the unidentified woman. ■ Mr. Weiner’s ties to the Clinton campaign make his explicit messages a useful weapon by the Trump camp in the bruising race to the White House. Indeed, Mr. Trump released a statement on Monday that said the episode was an issue of national security. “I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified information. Who knows what he learned and who he told? It’s just another example of Hillary Clinton’s bad judgment. ” ■ The Daily News said it would no longer carry Mr. Weiner’s columns, which included his writings on New York City politics. “We’ve severed ties with him as a columnist,” Joshua Greenman, a Daily News editor, said on Monday in an email. (The Daily Beast initially reported The News’ decision.) ■ The television station NY1 also put Mr. Weiner on “indefinite leave” from his position as a contributor. Mr. Weiner had appeared on “Inside City Hall. ” ■ As for the involvement of the child’s image in a post, New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services said in a statement that because of confidentiality, it would not comment on the possibility that it may begin an inquiry. In an interview with The New York Times in July, when asked whether he was still engaging in the activities that got him into trouble, Mr. Weiner said: “I’m not going to go down the path of talking about any of that. “But I will say this: There’s no doubt that the Trump phenomenon has led a lot of people to say to me, ‘Boy, compared to inviting the Russians to come hack someone’s email, your thing seems almost quaint.’ ” | 1 |
We are the Anunnaki’s sons, and have been given a push in our development by those minor gods. We are not alone in the Universe, and there exists Entities that are more advanced than us. Those Entities have been watching us and visiting periodically our Planet. All our Religions, that in a certain way teach basically the same, need to be reformulated, as in some cases we have been calling god some of those higher Entities
All that, and much more, is engraved in thousands of tablets that have survived for more than 5.000 years, preserved in the best possible way, as burnt clay! Those clay tablets were cooked by the fire of the library of Nineveh, and by that abnormal fact, were then given an extra resistance to endure time!
The big question is then, who is the Anunnaki’s God? The real Universal God?
The Real Universal God is a much more abstract one and is the togetherness of all Universal Consciousness. The Holly Spirit, the togetherness of all consciousness, is the Universal God, but by being such an abstract idea people have tended to forget, and revert to more humanized types of gods.
Quantum Theory tells us than man go on creating his own world, and in it resides the source of man free will.
We can by our conscience influence the way the wave will collapse. Everything being waves means we are all part of a Universal net, where anyone influences everyone! Evil is a man’s creation. The USA Military and economic cartels have kept some very important discoveries, particularly in the field of Energy generation, hidden from us, for more than 40 years.
To have no doubts about this so delicate and important subject, read the book that Steven M. Greer just published, called “Disclosure”. Steven is a M.D. Doctor, working in the emergency room of an American Hospital, who since 1993 has dedicated most of his time trying to force the American and other Governments to disclose all the facts they have hidden about Human contacts with Alien entities.
After reading his last book, you will be terrible scared, but deeply convinced that something very big and important has been kept hidden for too long, and so well hidden that even some American Presidents knew very little about it!
The late President Eisenhower in his last speech to the Country, in January 1961, alerted about the dangers of the “huge industrial and military machinery of defense”. This machinery does not respect anyone, not even the USA President, who they feel is a transitory person, while they are permanent ones. They have created a real perfect secret environment, where no one has the vision of the global, and neither the capacity to unblock the system.
This covert program is so well protected that today, there is not in the USA anyone capable to give an order to disclose it!
Unbelievable as it may be, one of the reasons why the secret has been so well kept, is that today it is hard to find who can reveal it, or who has the key to open the vaults of the secret! Its control has run out of the governments and no democratic institution has the power, or knowledge, to control it. The biggest reaction to the disclosure of such a secret comes in the first place from the political power, which is dead scared of the consequences such world socio-economical changes will generate
Maybe we can keep this secret till this generation dies, but no doubt we will transmit a moribund planet to our sons and all futures generations. The consequences of avoiding the problem are too high to risk.
The Earth is becoming polluted beyond repair, with 6 billion people wishing to have access to all modern amenities; our fossil energies will be depleted in no more than 20 years. So, by now we know who we are, who re-made us, or gave us a push in the evolution scale, and who those so funny and fierce gods, we were for so long mistook with the real God.
We also have now an idea how the Churches should be reformulated in order as to be able to keep having a place in this new society. We know that certain knowledge, given to us by Entities from another planet, should be soon disclosed, as with it we still can avoid the Earth destruction by pollution and fossil energy exhaustion. We have in our hands the ways to leave to our sons and grandsons a better and cleaner world, and just because of such an egoistic scare, we have no right to cowardly, like Nero enjoying the sight of Rome in flames, keep just for ourselves the last days of our Planet Earth.
We know that to arrive safely to the end, we have to be very cautious and follow a very narrow way The Universe has plenty of time for itself, and if we fail, others will win and pass the bridge safely. The end result is in our hands.
As Neil Freer says in “God Games”:
“We are entering now the end game phase!”
Locklip
SOURCE | 0 |
Record flooding in West Virginia killed at least 23 people, stranded thousands, left thousands more without utilities, and washed away houses, roads and vehicles after a band of thunderstorms battered the region on Thursday. With boats, helicopters and ropes, firefighters, law enforcement officers and National Guard troops rescued people from roofs of flooded houses, cars and trucks, and from mounds that had become temporary islands. Freight barges on the Kanawha River broke loose and slammed into bridges just west of Charleston, forcing them to close until inspectors determined that they were undamaged. More than 500 people were stranded and spent the night at the Elkview Crossings Mall, northeast of Charleston, because the roads leading there were among more than 60 washed out around the state. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin ordered emergency construction of a temporary road to reach the site. In White Sulphur Springs, a house caught fire as it was ripped from its moorings, and it drifted like a floating torch down a creek. At least 23 people were killed, the State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management said. In addition, 100 homes were known to be badly damaged or destroyed, Mr. Tomblin said Friday after declaring a state of emergency in 44 of West Virginia’s 55 counties. The victims included an boy and a boy, both carried off by torrents where there would usually be shallow creeks. “It’s been a long 24 hours, and the next 24 hours may not be easier,” Mr. Tomblin said. “There will be an enormous amount of recovery work. ” In Virginia, Gov. Terry McAuliffe made an emergency declaration for Alleghany County and the city of Covington. With roads impassable and rivers still near record highs in West Virginia, local officials said they did not know what the toll in death and destruction would ultimately be. “I’m afraid that will go higher some of the areas are areas that we can’t get into,” said Kent Carper, the president of the Kanawha County Commission. “How many homes have been destroyed, nobody knows. We have not even started the property assessment. ” “I have seen bad flooding in West Virginia, but not like this,” he said. “It’s devastation, just devastation. ” Most of West Virginia and parts of western Virginia received 1 to 3 inches of rain in a few hours on Thursday afternoon and evening, but the downpour was far more intense in some places. Parts of Greenbrier County, a sparsely populated area bordering Virginia, got 8 to 10 inches of rain, the National Weather Service reported. The mountainous terrain funneled that water into rivers that quickly overflowed their banks. The Elk River at Queen Shoals crested Friday morning more than 14 feet above flood stage, the highest ever recorded. The Greenbrier River at Hilldale crested more than 19 feet above flood stage, the highest since the 19th century. The Greenbrier Sporting Club is scheduled to host its annual PGA Tour event starting July 7, but much of the famed golf course was underwater Thursday and Friday. Calls to the club were not answered. As of Friday afternoon, Mr. Tomblin said, 66, 000 customers in West Virginia were without electricity, and thousands had no gas, water or phone service. | 1 |
A federal grand jury returned an indictment charging 17 defendants for drug trafficking in direct connection with a Mexican drug cartel. [The arrests and indictments of the 17 defendants were the result of a investigation into a Mexican drug cartel operation that smuggled narcotics into the United States from California to Colorado, according to a statement from the Department of Justice. Jeff Dorschner, Spokesman for the Colorado U. S. Attorney’s Office, told Breitbart Texas, “During the course of this investigation law enforcement determined that a Mexican Cartel was involved. The identity of that cartel is not being released as it remains the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation. ” According to the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) the Sinaloa Mexican Drug Cartel is known to be the dominant drug cartel in both California and Colorado. Of the 17 defendants, 11 are from Mexico, four from El Salvador, and two are from California. Seven of the defendants are considered fugitives. The defendants are alleged to have brought large quantities of cocaine and methamphetamine into the United States through California using secret compartments in vehicles. The drugs were kept in stash houses in Aurora, Colorado, before being distributed at a local grocery store. A money transfer station at the grocery store was used to send some of the proceeds back to Mexico. The rest of the funds were smuggled back in secret vehicle compartments. “We are committed to dismantling and removing the threat posed by these criminal organizations flooding American communities with dangerous narcotics,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions. “This organization is alleged to have moved large amounts of meth and cocaine from Mexico to Colorado, with devastating impact on communities in their wake. I want to congratulate the outstanding federal, state, and local law enforcement cooperation that resulted in this highly successful operation. Replicating this kind of aggressive law enforcement take down is critical to breaking the backs of these criminal organizations. ” The Defendants from Mexico are: Jose 58, (naturalized) Selestino 45 Fredy age unknown “Bancholas” age unknown, (thought to be from Mexico) Rodrigo 49, (naturalized) Oscar age unknown Eduardo 37 “Changuito” age unknown, (thought to be from Mexico) “ ” age unknown, (thought to be from Mexico) Leopoldo Age Unknown And Heberto 43. The Defendants from El Salvador are Lara age unknown Claudia 41, (naturalized) Vilma L. Zamora, 67 and Jose age unknown. The Defendants from California are Juan Carlos 31 and Erik Parra. The indictment contains 45 counts, including an asset forfeiture allegation against the stash houses that were used to hide the drugs. Ryan Saavedra is a contributor for Breitbart Texas and can be found on Twitter at @RealSaavedra. | 1 |
LOS ANGELES — “Don’t Breathe” became the latest in a string of hit horror movies over the weekend, while the indie romance “Southside With You” bested the boxing drama “Hands of Stone. ” Between activities and vacations, August can be a time for studios to offload dreck. (See: “ . ” Or don’t.) But “Don’t Breathe,” released by Sony Pictures Entertainment, received reviews from top critics that were 94 percent positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes, expanding the movie’s appeal beyond the core horror crowd. “Don’t Breathe,” from the Uruguayan Fede Alvarez, took in about $26. 1 million at North American cinemas. With a sales effort that started in March, “we really treated this film as an experience that you needed to see on the big screen,” Josh Greenstein, Sony’s president of worldwide marketing and distribution, said by phone on Sunday. Mr. Greenstein noted that Sony has now turned three summer films into moneymakers, with “The Shallows,” a horror movie, and the animated “Sausage Party” as the other two. (Sony’s “Ghostbusters,” on the other hand, not so much.) “Don’t Breathe,” which cost about $9. 8 million to make, pushed “Suicide Squad” (Warner Bros.) into second place, ending that supervillain film’s run at No. 1. “Suicide Squad” took in about $12. 1 million over the weekend, for a new domestic total of $282. 9 million, according to comScore, which compiles box office data. Worldwide, “Suicide Squad” has now taken in $636 million, according to Warner. The only other new movie in the United States over the weekend was “Mechanic: Resurrection” (Lionsgate) which collected an estimated $7. 5 million. While the sequel took in 34 percent less than its series predecessor did over its first three days in theaters in 2011, Lionsgate spent only about $9 million to acquire certain rights to the movie, which was produced by Millennium Films for a reported $40 million. Arriving in roughly 810 theaters apiece were “Southside With You,” which imagines Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date in 1989, and “Hands of Stone,” about the Panamanian fighter Roberto Duran and his trainer Ray Arcel. Costing a reported $1. 5 million to make and starring two relatively unknown actors, Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter, “Southside With You” (Roadside Attractions and Miramax) sold $3 million in tickets. On the other hand, “Hands of Stone,” starring Robert De Niro and Édgar Ramírez, collected $1. 7 million it was released by the Weinstein Company and financed by an outside group for an estimated $20 million. “For this kind of movie, a true story that is also a relatively unknown story, you’ve got to give audiences time to find it — to let word of mouth kick in — and we think that is happening here,” David Glasser, Weinstein’s president, said by phone, noting that “Hands of Stone” received an A grade from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls. Mr. Glasser said plans are for the film to move into wide release starting Wednesday. | 1 |
The way the lawyer William Timmons described the case, it was practically a newsreel melodrama, with a helpless widow being menaced by a heartless tycoon. The story began with the widow, whose name is Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut. She is a onetime heir to the considerable fortune still generated by her husband Harold’s iconic invention, Amazing Live . As her lawyer told it, she was now isolated, often without electricity or running water on a palatial estate on the Potomac River in southern Maryland. Having retreated to a single room in the old mansion, she was prepping for her second freezing winter, barricaded by thick quilts, her bed next to a fireplace stocked with split wood. From this bunker, Signorelli von Braunhut has been waging legal combat against Sam Harwell, chief executive of a toy company whose name seems straight out of a Chuck Jones cartoon: Big Time Toys. In his tiny office in Sayville, on Long Island, Timmons spoke in clipped, tones, handing me a summary of the case, eager to the plotline. “The heart and soul of this case is trademark infringement,” he said. Signorelli von Braunhut “believes in the concept of justice,” he continued, “and when you have that on your side, then you can get through the day. ” A few years after her husband’s death in 2003, Signorelli von Braunhut licensed out part of the labor of his multimillion dollar enterprise, mostly packaging and distribution, to Big Time. If you’ve ever been 8 years old, then you know that arrive in a small plastic aquarium with several small packets that include the tiny critters, which reanimate once you add water — by way of a secret formula that Signorelli von Braunhut keeps locked in a vault in Manhattan. The original deal held that Big Time would supply everything except the specially engineered critters — and the accompanying packets, which von Braunhut would manufacture and sell separately to Big Time, which would then bundle the full kits and handle the sales. Also in the contract was a second deal — to buy the company, including the secret formula. It allowed Big Time to pay a $5 million fee and then $5 million more in installments. Three winters ago, Big Time called up the widow and announced that it considered its previous payments for the packets to be a kind of layaway deal for the company and that, as far as Big Time was concerned, it now owned the franchise. Signorelli von Braunhut first sued in 2013, and last year Timmons filed a further complaint accusing Big Time of breach of contract and trademark infringement. Big Time’s national law firm, Epstein Becker Green, sent me a statement denying any wrongdoing and claiming instead that the widow improperly terminated the contract. In a particularly contemporary twist to the melodrama, Big Time’s court filings revealed that it was now buying knockoff from China. “This is a David and Goliath story,” Timmons said, only “without a slingshot. ” Timmons shrugged as if to invite me to look around. His office is, to be generous, snug. There was barely enough room for me. It was surprising that the door doesn’t bang his desk as in that Alan Cumming gag from this season’s “The Good Wife. ” Timmons is a tall, thin man with some Nicolas to him. At times he seemed uninterested, not so much in but maybe in the law in general, or just in the wanton quotidian reality into which we are all born. Our conversation easily swerved off topic and into, say, a debate about Bill Maher’s atheism, or about how “we are all individuals at the tail end of a universe expressing itself,” or Timmons’s rock band, which plays in the local bars under changing names like Rainbow Bridge and Dreamworld. He likes “renaissance” rock. “It’s a convergence — Lennonesque with Hendrix overtones and some Dylan, maybe ‘dinosauric’ at this point,” he told me. “It’s altruistic, seeking the higher ground instead of just lamenting upon the human condition. ” Timmons represents Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut because years ago he used to go to this legendary Halloween party hosted by a opera singer known as Maestro Signorelli, a Bohemian possessed of “this field of energy. ” The grand patriarch of a bustling family, Signorelli taught bel canto to locals determined to improve their coloratura. His annual Halloween masked ball attracted hundreds of “musicians, dancers and artists,” all of whom came in their most flamboyant costumes. Some attended, if only to meet one of his five beautiful daughters. The Yolanda, was particularly stunning and began a film career in the . She played Lorilie in the 1967 bondage classic “Venus in Furs” — based on the Leopold von novel of that name, as well as various minxes in “All Women Are Bad,” “Too Much Too Often!” “Death of a Nymphette” and “Assignment: Female. ” I watched three of them, for research, and was struck mostly by how these films appeared long before the phrase “money shot” entered the lexicon and the director’s mandatory scene list. When I finally screwed up the courage to ask Signorelli von Braunhut about her previous career, she casually said: “In those days, they might have been racy, but today? I don’t think so. ” Which is true. If anything, her brief movie career looks presciently campy — less like porn than like a Mike Myers parody titled, “Cool It Baby” (which is also the title of a 1967 Signorelli von Braunhut film). On paper, including the legal summary Timmons gave me, the issues of Yolanda von Braunhut v. Big Time Toys might be technical — breach of contract, sure — until you find yourself reading affidavits that suggest this could be one of those unusual contests, not of law but of meaning — maybe not the tail end of a universe expressing itself, but definitely one that leads into that lively place between ordinary truth and hopeful dreams and all the way to the essential contradiction at the core of the American character. As it happened, Signorelli von Braunhut was visiting Long Island that very afternoon to see her sister. We met at Timmons’s office and then walked down to the Aegean Cafe (“Steaks Seafood Pasta”) on Main Street for a luncheon. Von Braunhut is a very good looking woman whose age I was just too chicken to ask. But if she was 18, as she told me, when she started her film career in 1966, then she’s about 70 now. She is trim and looking in skintight jeans and an equally engaged top, reminiscent of the ageless Sophia Loren or Raquel Welch. She has an artful muss of dark hair framing a smile that’s slow to form but amplified by flirtatious eyes that sparkled at the end of each sentence. Over a salad, she said she was eager for me to understand the inventive genius of her husband, Harold. Beginning in the 1950s and ’60s, he took out patents on 196 different inventions, gadgets and toys. That whole last page of zany novelties found in comic books for years was the domain of Harold von Braunhut. He also raced motorcycles under the name the Green Hornet. He was a sometime television producer and the agent for one of those guys who into a wading pool with 12 inches of water. He was a magician who worked under the name the Great Telepo. She said he also invented the — a device into which you punched your destination in New York City, and the machine told you the fastest subway route — half a century before Google Maps. were von Braunhut’s most lucrative toy (and still are: In 2006, according to the filings in this lawsuit, sales were $3. 4 million). Part of what made successful was a scientific breakthrough Harold von Braunhut claimed he achieved in the early years. In 1960, after observing the success of Uncle Milton’s Ant Farm, von Braunhut first started shipping Instant Life — simple brine shrimp that could travel in their natural state of suspended animation. This was the era when a good idea with smart marketing was the dream: D. F. Duncan’s George Parker’s Monopoly game, Ruth Handler’s Barbie. Around the same time, the toy company of the day, started selling a similar product called Instant Fish, which was an immediate dud. “They didn’t work because the formula wasn’t thought through properly,” Signorelli von Braunhut said. ’s product was actually African killifish, which were supposed to come back to life when rehydrated. But they didn’t. “So it really hurt sales for Harold, too. ” ’s 1960 failure led von Braunhut to reintroduce his creation with new science and a new concept. He worked with a marine biologist named Anthony D’Agostino, and using a process he flamboyantly called superhomeogenation, they created a hybrid brine shrimp that could more easily survive the United States Postal Service and be more likely to flourish after reanimation. They worked with the species artemia salina, and because they made their breakthrough at Montauk’s NYOSL, the New York Ocean Science Laboratory they called their new hybrid artemia “nyos. ” (I contacted D’Agostino at his home, but his wife said he was seriously ill and couldn’t come to the phone.) According to Richard Pell, who maintains an aquarium of at the Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh (alongside displays about goats and other attractions) “They were selectively bred in the early ’70s so that they would have this extra long dormant cycle in their egg state, and they were able to increase that yield so that you get that satisfying swarm. ” Pell admits he’s worried these days. “The new ones come from China,” he said, “and they are technically not because they don’t come from that original culture developed by Harold and Dr. D’Agostino. ” Over coffee, Signorelli von Braunhut talked about this formula for altering the shrimp as one of her husband’s greatest scientific breakthroughs, his greatest invention. Timmons himself jumped in to add that Harold’s genius was with “the science to get them to live for a prolonged period of time. ” She agreed and said, “Yes, he went through tremendous efforts to make sure that they — should I elaborate on that?” and then Timmons said, abruptly, no. Whenever the science came up, in fact, Timmons shooed me away. Signorelli von Braunhut met her husband in the late 1960s, when she happened to be in the audience for a taping of a television program he was producing for the magician Joseph Dunninger. “Harold was such an exciting person,” Signorelli von Braunhut said, explaining why she set her movie career aside. “Show business was kind of a tough thing, and I am not into all that myself. I liked being around Harold and the . ” So she went to work for him, and later they married. While Dunninger has been largely forgotten, the couple’s fortuitous meeting on his set came at a crucial juncture in the development of American magic and marketing. Dunninger served as a bridge that led away from live performance — dating to vaudevillian stagecraft — and toward the small stage of television, where magic was more patter than prestidigitation, more pizazz than performance. Harold von Braunhut was the perfect person to attend to this shift, as he was, in a sense, a kind of marketing Jedi master. Remember Amazing Monsters (a bald troll printed on a card that grew green mineral locks when watered)? That was von Braunhut’s, and although his novelty toys were, once they arrived, a bit disappointing, the marketing of them was a wonder of what we’d all come to know as informercialism. His Crazy Crabs were nothing more than hermit crabs in a little cardboard box, but the ad copy described another world: “As gentle as a pussycat, it lives on LAND instead of water, DOES NOT BITE unless mishandled. ” And: “It loves to be touched and petted, and enjoys running from hand to hand, swinging from your fingers or just cuddling on your shoulder like an adorable tame parrot. ” With von Braunhut took his marketing to new levels. He spun off numerous whimsical books with all kinds of imaginary advice for caring for the tiny critters. You could coddle them with “Banana Treat” or “Cupids Arrow” Mating Powder. (Inside joke for the arthropodologists: don’t always need mates.) There were timely variations of the toy. There was a Space kit, and a Speedway that deployed giant eyedroppers to create racecourses. The same equipment was repurposed into kits for Fox Hunt and Mystery . In 1992, CBS broadcast a TV show starring, naturally, Howie Mandel. To this day, there is a website for zealots, who exchange lore and kitschy enthusiasms. What made Braunhut’s work so edgy, so American, was just how wickedly far he’d journey — far past the product itself — into the fictional. I remember Spex (also von Braunhut’s) with that promise of seeing girls naked beneath their clothes, as my first shattering disillusionment with the world of adults and all their horrible lies. Signorelli von Braunhut told me that Harold’s purest novelty was his Invisible Goldfish. “It was a glass bowl with some sea plants,” she said, “and a sign that said, ‘Invisible Goldfish: Do Not Feed. ’’u2009” The kit came with a printed guarantee that you’d never see them. Not everyone appreciated the joke. In the 1970s, at the height of a nationwide focus on consumer protection, New York’s attorney general, Louis Lefkowitz, went after von Braunhut. “The suit against Harold by Louie Lefkowitz,” Signorelli von Braunhut said, “argued that were fraudulent, because it’s a fantasy. ” A federal judge who reviewed Lefkowitz’s case was amused by the attorney general’s intense concern. According to the judge, Lefkowitz argued that the novelty’s marketing included von Braunhut’s claim that “ are covered by ‘Limited Group Life Insurance Policy. ’’u2009” Lefkowitz demanded that von Braunhut cease “the usage of the name ‘ ’ in the sale of brine shrimp” because they “were not miniature monkeys, and are not a miracle or anything new scientifically. ” Finally, Lefkowitz beseeched the courts to “enjoin the issuance of insurance policies covering ‘ . ’’u2009” In the legal record, it’s not clear that Lefkowitz got any further than this legalistic tantrum, but Signorelli von Braunhut remembers a judge’s coming down on the side of whimsy. “ were vindicated,” she said. The judge compared the issue to “sponge cake — it’s not a sponge and butterflies are not made of butter. ” But apparently, this fundamental question about was not settled. In the scores of files that have already been entered into court for the current litigation, one is an affidavit by Sam Harwell, the chief executive of Big Time Toys. He is a very powerful man in Nashville, not only because he owns a toy company but also because his wife, Beth Harwell, is the speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives. Harwell declined to return my phone calls, but Big Time has continued to sell to Walmart and Toys “R” Us, even after Yolanda claimed a breach of contract and quit sending out the specially formulated shrimp. In this affidavit, Harwell explains precisely why he outsourced his to China. He declares that there are seven recognized species of artemia brine shrimp and that artemia nyos “claimed by plaintiffs is not one of them,” because it is a hybrid. Regular old, brine shrimp — at least in terms of their size and life expectancy — “are indistinguishable from the pouches supplied by plaintiffs. ” In essence, Harwell is making a kind of existential case about the fundamentals of American marketing, and a familiar one. He’s practically picking up where Lefkowitz left off by arguing that there is no there there, . It’s all part of the confidence game. Part of the sham. It’s humbug. And if the issues in Harwell’s affidavit go forward, then that is what may be on trial. Humbug. When P. T. Barnum, the great impresario of public entertainment (and of the Barnum Bailey Circus) popularized that word — “humbug” — he was talking exactly about things like . Most assume, as Harwell might, that the word is synonymous with total nonsense and absolute fraud. But that overgeneralization misses Barnum’s sly nuance. “Humbug” is not a lie, the great promoter used to say: “No humbug is great without truth at bottom. ” It’s unfair to say that Barnum peddled pure fantasy. Great humbug simply took off from a small truth and used that to show people what they wanted to see. In his own way, P. T. Barnum was the greatest cognitive scientist of the 19th century. He understood that when you pit humbug against harsh cold reality, reality doesn’t stand a chance. Knowing this explains so much — World Wrestling, Taco Bell, Donald Trump. Humbug is as American as apple pie. Which is why are involved in a lawsuit now and why Barnum got tangled up in one in his time, litigating the nature of humbug. The case involved one of the biggest tourist attractions after the Civil War: the 1869 discovery of the Cardiff Giant in a little town of that name near Syracuse. Just as nowadays, there was an argument between rationalists and people of faith about the science of the Bible, in this case, whether the giants described in the Scriptures were real. (People forget that the reason God flooded the entire earth during the time of Noah is that angels and humans kept having lots of illicit sex and inadvertently created a race of deranged giants.) At the time, “fossil” had become one of the buzzwords in the popular battle between Darwinian scientists and angry pastors. So a cigar maker named George Hull thought it would be entertaining to fabricate a fossil of one of Noah’s giants. He had a man secretly sculpted, treated it to look old and then buried it in rural New York State, where he contrived to have it found. Instantly, massive crowds of astounded Christians started pouring into town, eager to see biblical proof in the petrified man with the feet and the nose and all the other proportionate appendages. Hull made lots of money charging 50 cents a viewing. But as his wealth grew, he became nervous that the hoax would blow up. So he sold the Cardiff Giant to a consortium of businessmen, headed by a man named David Hannum. P. T. Barnum instantly offered the consortium $50, 000 to buy the Cardiff Giant, no doubt convinced that humbug of this magnitude really deserved his marketing skills. Hannum declined, but he clearly did not appreciate just whom he was up against. Barnum had his own copy carved and rushed his giant to New York City. At one point the fake giant and the knockoff fake giant were being exhibited two blocks from each other. Barnum’s marketing drew much larger crowds. And even as Hull, the original forger, publicly confessed that the original Giant was a fake, Hannum took Barnum to court. The judge, of course, ruled in favor of Barnum — you can’t be sued for calling a fake a fake. Humbug won, and the Giants toured for years afterward. Before the judge’s 1870 ruling, Hannum still believed in his giant’s authenticity and fumed about the popularity of Barnum’s, saying, “There’s a sucker born every minute. ” Many mistakenly ascribe the remark to P. T. Barnum himself. And it’s understandable. The quote has a way of making complete sense, no matter which side you’re on. A few weeks after lunch with Signorelli von Braunhut, I visited the grand estate built by south of the nation’s capital just off a road called Hard Bargain. Large metal gates decorated with prancing open to a number of No Trespassing signs. About a mile down the road, it turned into farmland, with a barn and a scalloped wood bridge decorated with large festive red bows crossing a pond gleaming with bright chartreuse scum. From the trees, like a visual illusion, a large brick house emerges. Nearby, a small array of propane generators thrums. Inside, Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut greeted me warmly. She invited me into her kitchen, where a propane heater was at work, a Coleman cooler held her comestibles and a camping stove heated us up some tea. A large yellow bird in the kitchen hopped around, upset. “That’s Josephine, a cockatoo who flew into my window in New York in 1981,” she said as she fixed vegan snacks and recommended some antioxidizing super plant protein called Wild Force Green Formula. “It helps you ” she said. Through a hallway crowded with scores of smiling angel dolls and various cherubim, we parted a few warming curtains to the living room and entered a cabinet of wonders. Whimsies abounded — on the table beside me, a Snow White lamp, a Bambi figurine, bobble heads. On the wall there was a painting of her mother, whose beauty seems familiar. “I met the artist for Superman,” Signorelli von Braunhut said. “He had a few Lois Lane models, and she was one of them. ” Signorelli von Braunhut was dressed in tight jeans with a décolletage Guess top. Josephine perched on her shoulder for the duration of my visit, occasionally striking Angry Bird poses and voicing some shrewd concern at my queries. Signorelli von Braunhut elaborated about what happened after the Instant Fish disaster. That was when her husband changed the name from Instant Life and started marketing them as Amazing Live . Joe Orlando, who would later achieve fame at DC Comics and Mad Magazine, illustrated the cover art. The image itself is famous. You know it: a family with three antennas wagging on their heads and long paddle tails lounging outside their underwater castle. Von Braunhut took his new marketing to the back page of comics — the one place where he could bypass parental skepticism and speak directly to children’s imaginations. His campaign was a textbook case of what we now call “cognitive priming. ” That is, the deep cerebral desire we all have to see what we expect to see. So when you buy a kit, you get the tiny plastic aquarium and fitted into the sides are little magnifying lenses that enhance the tiny brine shrimp just enough, setting off a little motion picture in your head of primates swinging to and fro by their curved tails, gamboling in a watery jungle. The real innovation may never have been the secret formula of his brine shrimp but the cognitive ignition of those four perfect words of distilled humbuggery: Amazing Live . That alone might well have been enough to loft Harold von Braunhut into the pantheon of toy inventors, alongside Uncle Milton Levine, D. F. Duncan and George Parker. Except for one almost unimaginable and horrible thing. Harold von Braunhut was a . Moreover, a Jewish . He was born Harold Nathan Braunhut, to Jewish parents. He inserted the “von” to sound more Germanic. Von Braunhut even indulged his dark side with one particular invention — the Kiyoga, a retractable baton for also known as the Steel Cobra. When Richard Butler, the head of Aryan Nations, was indicted in the late ’80s, he encouraged his supporters to buy Kiyogas because the “manufacturer had made a pledge of $25 to my defense fund for each one sold to Aryan Nations supporters. ” After an League report emerged, von Braunhut refused to answer any more questions and was known to simply slam down the phone when any reporter called him. His background is the source of great remorse on marketing chat boards, where writers are distraught that someone as visionary as the Spex and guy could be such a racist head case. “I came close to writing a biography,” wrote a contributor known as Kierkegaard, but found it would be too “difficult to write a sympathetic account due to his political views. ” Apparently there are some realities that marketing can’t obscure. Signorelli von Braunhut grew quiet, even sad, when I brought up this subject. There are calculated silences at the heart of any marriage, and this was definitely one. “Harold and I never really talked about things like that,” she told me. “We just really loved each other, and I didn’t question him or interrogate him. ” She said, “I am very inclusive with everybody” and “that’s why I live on a farm with all kinds of animals and try to impact the earth in the least possible way and try to live a peaceful, happy, loving life. ” She handed me an kit on the way out the door. On the drive home, I stopped by Walmart and found the Big Time version. The container makes no mystery of the fact that this is a product of China. So I conducted an experiment — setting up both kits at precisely the same time and with the same water. Von Braunhut’s kit had extra packets to keep the water stable. Big Time’s kit seemed very stripped down. On the day that the shrimp reanimated, there was really no comparison. Von Braunhut’s produced hundreds of which — I have to say — are still irritatingly tiny after all these years. Big Time’s tank was very quiet by comparison, requiring a lot of squinting and really good light for the embedded magnifiers to offer a fleeting glance of one or two drifting by. It also felt odd that, for a company that broke with von Braunhut years ago, Big Time enclosed literature that still offered such Haroldian extras as “Sea Medic” Medicine, “Cupids Arrow” Mating Powder and the “ . ” Despite Big Time’s court claims of buying plain old brine shrimp from China, the enclosure boasts that “after years of crossbreeding, we developed a hybrid,” and “These amazing new hybrids grow larger and live longer than any ‘natural’ variety of brine shrimp. ” (Big Time had no comment when asked about its use of natural or hybrid artemia, and dismissed my test as “not reliable. ”) The last item on Big Time’s pamphlet was especially surprising. In small print, it urged its new owners to earn a DLD degree (Doctor of Denizens of the Deep) by writing directly to the Crustacean College of Knowledge. It then lists the Maryland address of the estate where Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut lives in her room and answers mail by firelight. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — When Donald J. Trump descended on the capital Friday, he was expected to finally concede that the racially tinged falsehood he had gleefully propagated, that President Obama was born outside of the United States, had in fact been a lie. But before Mr. Trump got around to what was a grudging and terse admission, which itself included a falsehood about the provenance of birtherism, he had some business to tend to. “Nice hotel,” said Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, delighting in his newest property and the opportunity to plug it free on live television. He was holding his news conference at his new hotel in the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, which, he promised, is “going to be something very special. ” He seemed untroubled in using an ostensible campaign event just a few blocks from the White House to openly promote his personal commercial interests 52 days before the election. In fact, this past week offered a vivid illustration of how little regard Mr. Trump has for the expectations of America’s leaders. He is not only breaking the country’s political norms, he and his campaign aides are now all but mocking them. Besides using his campaign as a platform to make money on a new hotel, Mr. Trump leveled an untrue assertion that Hillary Clinton had been the first to claim Mr. Obama was born abroad. He also boasted about his health on the show of a daytime television celebrity while releasing just his testosterone levels and a few other details about his . Mr. Trump also continued to flout 40 years of tradition by refusing to release his tax returns, a decision that his eldest son admitted this week was not based on an audit, as Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed, but on a desire not to “distract” from the campaign’s “main message. ” Beyond his handling of personal information, he also casually accused the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve of corruption, claimed that the bipartisan national debate commission was rigged against him, and stated that Mrs. Clinton had not proposed a child care plan. (She has, and did so a year before he did.) He also mocked an pastor who had just welcomed him to her church, and again referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who once said she had Native American roots, as “Pocahontas. ” And that was all before Friday night, when Mr. Trump hinted at violence against Mrs. Clinton by inviting her Secret Service detail to disarm “and see what happens to her. ” Routine falsehoods, unfounded claims and inflammatory language have long been staples of Mr. Trump’s campaign. But as the polls tighten and November nears, his behavior, and the implications for the country should he become president, are alarming veteran political observers — and leaving them deeply worried about the precedent being set, regardless of who wins the White House. “It’s frightening,” said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota. “Our politics, because of him, is descending to the level of a country. There’s just nothing beneath him. And I don’t know why we would think he would change if he became president. That’s what’s really scary. ” Stephen Hess, who served in the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations, could not even contemplate the prospect of Mr. Trump as commander in chief. “It’s incredibly depressing,” Mr. Hess said of Mr. Trump. “He’s the most profoundly ignorant man I’ve ever seen at this level in terms of understanding the American presidency, and, even more troubling, he makes no effort to learn anything. ” Mr. Trump’s advocates insist that the critics are missing the larger impact of his candidacy, and how his campaign and presidency could be a force for good. As a New York poll released last week indicated, voters see him as more likely to aggressively confront what they see as a rotten political system, even if they recognize Mr. Trump as a risky choice. “On the things that are really big, he will in some clumsy way force real change,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who is an adviser to Mr. Trump. “Washington won’t be the same when he’s done. ” But that is what is so worrisome to many observers of Mr. Trump’s rise. His critics fear that his campaign portends a political future in which candidates pay no penalty for unabashedly telling untruths, disregarding the public’s right to know, and lobbing racially charged accusations. “I worry that if those of us in politics and the media don’t do a lot of after this election, a slightly smarter Trump will succeed in the future,” said Jon Favreau, Mr. Obama’s former chief speechwriter. “For some politicians and consultants, the takeaway from this election will be that they can get away with almost anything. ” As Martin Nolan, a former editor and reporter at The Boston Globe who has chronicled politics for over 50 years, put it: “Truth has a low priority in the misnomer known as reality TV. ” “Rules,” Mr. Nolan added, “are for losers. ” The only salvation this year, argue Mr. Trump’s detractors, is that he is a singular figure in American life, and his successors will not be able to skirt accountability in the fashion of the celebrity provocateur. “He has inflicted Stockholm syndrome on America,” said Stacey Abrams, a Democrat and the minority leader of the Georgia House. “It’s not even that we’re numb to it, it’s just that we’ve always enjoyed the show. It’s entertaining to hate him, to like him and to imagine being him. ” But while there may not be another Mr. Trump, he does seem to have thrust the country into a new era. With American culture increasingly coarse and ever more obsessed with celebrity, the country’s politics were bound to eventually catch up. Less than 25 years after Bill Clinton shocked some by unabashedly answering a question about his underwear preference on television, Mr. Trump purposefully brought up the size of his penis at a televised debate. It is not difficult to find Republicans who recoil at how their own nominee has, to borrow the phrase made famous by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former New York senator and sociologist, defined deviancy down. “Trump is reflecting a culture that is more crass, more accepting of vulgarity and more attuned to pop culture,” said Matt Lewis, a conservative writer. “The bar has been lowered where going on Dr. Oz is perfectly acceptable and maybe even cutting edge. ” Where Republicans differ is over whether the acceptance of Mrs. Clinton’s transgressions is just as ominous for the country. “You can’t have a republic without virtue and I don’t think there’s great virtue in either of them,” said Tom Coburn, the former Oklahoma senator, of Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton. Still, Mr. Weber, who arrived in Washington as a congressional staff member shortly after the election of 1974, said Mr. Trump’s approach would inflict the most damage on his own party. “You don’t want to say this is the equivalent of Watergate,” Mr. Weber said. “But at least that was a discrete crime. In a way, Trump is harder to deal with. And Republicans didn’t feel compelled to defend Watergate: they drove Richard Nixon out of office. ” | 1 |
Shocking Proof That The Mainstream Media Gives You More ‘Fake News’ Than Any Satire Site Ever Will Our lead-off fake news story is a classic. Filmed during the first Gulf War, it shows CNN "journalists" Charles Jaco and his crew pretending to be giving a "breaking news" update on the fighting. The only problem is that the outtakes clearly show they are not on the front lines but in a poorly decorated television studio. CNN presented this as real-life, happening now news. Completely fake. 23, 2016 In short , the current news that there should be a campaign against ‘fake news’ is of itself a fake news story.
The progressive Left , spearheaded by the liberal media and Barack Obama, want you to be outraged over the current level of ‘fake news’ that is disseminating across the globe. What they mean when they say this is that they want satire sites, like The Onion , to be shut down. They attempt to make the laughable claim that satire sites “ changed the course of the presidential election .” But in point of fact, people are no more fooled by these sites than they are by ‘fake news’ broadcasting like SNL’s Weekend Update and The Daily Show . Sites like these fill the gap that magazines like MAD and National Lampoon did years ago. And while a random sampling of low information Americans may be fooled by these satire sites, the vast majority of intelligent, everyday people are not.
In short , the current news that there should be a campaign against ‘fake news’ is of itself a fake news story. But this is how they distract you, much like the streetcorner magician who has you looking off in one direction while he gins up his trick in the other.
So let’s take a look at a few times where the media and our government has deceived us with ‘fake news’ masquerading as an actual story. CNN Classic ‘Fake News’ Broadcast Pretending To Be On The Front Lines But Was Actually In TV Studio:
Our lead-off fake news story is a classic. Filmed during the first Gulf War, it shows CNN “journalists” Charles Jaco and his crew pretending to be giving a “breaking news” update on the fighting. The only problem is that the outtakes clearly show they are not on the front lines but in a poorly decorated television studio. CNN presented this as real-life, happening now news. Completely fake. The assassination of JFK and the ‘fake news’ of the Warren Report commission:
In 2016, there is so much information online regarding the Kennedy killing that no one seriously believes that Lee Harvey Oswald shot him or ever fired a shot at all. But J. Edgar Hoover insisted that Oswald take the fall , and the ‘fake news’ Warren Commission was hatched to advance that narrative 36 Times Obama Said You Could Keep Your Health Care Plan ‘Fake News’ Scam:
One of the greatest ‘fake news’ scams of the modern era is hoaxer-in-chief Obama saying that “ if you like your plan, you can keep your plan “. Not only did this turn out not to be true – but – Obama was fully aware he was lying each and every time he said it. Not only that, every single media outlet in America repeated the lie, knowing it was a lie. George Bush selling the ‘fake news’ lie that Saddam Hussein had ‘weapons of mass destruction’:
Hoo-boy, this was quite the ‘fake news’ whopper. Exactly what you would expect from the Bush Crime Family . Who helped Bush to sell this ‘fake news’ to the American public? Our old frenemies at the main stream media. How many US soldiers died as a result of this ‘fake news’ story? Right around 5,000 men and women were sacrificed for this. How our government and media use crisis actors to drive a narrative at staged horrific events:
Of all the ‘fake news’ stories out there , this is one of the toughest to talk about. No, we are not saying that people didn’t actually die at places like Sandy Hook and other places, because they did. But that does not mean that the event that killed them was not a staged event involving paid crisis actors. So for this one we are going you a couple of videos to consider. FBI’s own statistics reveal that no one died in the Sandy Hook shooting:
Before you go and accuse us of being “insensitive” to tragedy, take a look and see the official number of deaths in Newtown, CT, in 2012. Why are the “27 victims” of the Sandy Hook shooting not on the FBI list? Hmm…looks like the FBI agrees with us. CLICK TO VIEW THE OFFICIAL FBI WEBSITE FOR HOMICIDE STATS IN CONNECTICUT IN 2012
By now, you can clearly see who the real perpetrators of ‘fake news’ actually are. Its brought to you by our own government, and by the crooked and corrupt pretend news media who spend 24 hours per day broadcasting stories that are various degrees of falsehood.
And what they are so upset about this year is that because of WikiLeaks , they were unable to use their ‘fake news’ to elect Hillary Clinton as president. The American people rejected their nonsense and journalistic lies, and they were left swinging in the breeze.
As Kramer said so many years ago “ the only true news is the alternative media “. SHARE THIS ARTICLE | 0 |
One of the most surprising turnaround stories in recent television history began on one of the most surprising nights in political history. On Nov. 8, Stephen Colbert was hosting a live election night special for CBS’s sister cable network, Showtime. A program that was built around an expected Hillary Clinton victory went off the rails almost as soon as it went on the air at 11 p. m. As election returns came in, audience members, who had been asked to shut off their phones an hour earlier, gasped as it became clear that Donald J. Trump could very well become president. Mr. Colbert looked dumbstruck. Sensing the gravity of the moment, Chris Licht, the executive producer of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” walked over to Mr. Colbert’s desk during a musical performance. “Stop being funny and go and just be real,” Mr. Licht told the host. What followed was what Mr. Licht described in a recent interview as the turning point for Mr. Colbert, who had struggled to gain his footing on CBS after shedding the character that made him famous on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report. ” “I think it’s when he became himself,” he said. Five months later, “The Late Show” has done what a year ago seemed unthinkable: It has become the most viewed show in late night. Mr. Colbert’s show has reeled off nine consecutive weeks of ratings victories over Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show,” and is poised to make it 10 in a row when the latest numbers come out on Tuesday. NBC executives have taken solace in the fact that Mr. Fallon still commands a lead in the age demographic vital to advertisers, and are skeptical that this Colbert surge will last forever. It is more than possible that Mr. Colbert and Mr. Fallon, over time, could settle into a battle that will go back and forth. But at this time last year, Mr. Colbert was losing by more than a million viewers to Mr. Fallon and feeling pressure from within CBS, which had named him the successor to David Letterman with much fanfare. The company’s chief executive, Leslie Moonves, had serious concerns about the show, and the network’s 12:35 a. m. host, James Corden, was outshining him. And now? “It’s pizza day,” Mr. Colbert said in his office last Tuesday. Throughout the offices of “The Late Show,” staff members could be heard saying, “Pizza! Pizza!” — celebrating a reward that comes on Tuesdays when they beat “The Tonight Show” in the ratings. Just like “Saturday Night Live” and MSNBC’s lineup, Mr. Colbert has benefited from his decidedly point of view. But even though Mr. Trump’s victory appears to have turned the comedy race upside down, Mr. Colbert’s rise is the product of months of meticulous work. The goal: to earn the chance to be — as Mr. Licht put it — “resampled” by viewers. For its first six months, “The Late Show,” which debuted in September 2015, was adrift. Mr. Moonves was concerned enough to express his frustrations to Mr. Colbert over dinner at the 21 Club in Manhattan, shortly after a live edition of the show fizzled despite a prime spot immediately after the Super Bowl in February 2016. Chief among Mr. Moonves’s concerns was how uncomfortable Mr. Colbert looked on a big stage. He thought the host was worrying over too many trivial details, from the stage lighting down to the color of the dressing rooms. “On the old show, all of us handled all those responsibilities,” Mr. Colbert said, acknowledging that the CBS show was a much bigger undertaking. “And I’m a control freak, and everything — everything — went through my skull. ” Within weeks, Mr. Colbert conceded that a change had to be made. And Mr. Moonves turned to Mr. Licht, an executive producer who had been a career newsman. “I set up a blind date, and I held my breath,” Mr. Moonves said. Mr. Licht, 45, had created a hit as the founding executive producer of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and then accomplished something no one had done before him: He created a morning show on CBS that actually drew some ratings. The TV world rolled its eyes when CBS paired Charlie Rose with Gayle King on “CBS This Morning. ” But Mr. Licht found success in allowing the along with Norah O’Donnell, to be themselves and to talk freely about the most pressing topics of the day. Viewers responded. When Mr. Moonves approached him about Mr. Colbert, Mr. Licht said he didn’t watch the show he quickly burned through several episodes. “My cleareyed scouting report was: ‘This is all over the place. This doesn’t seem cohesive, which suggests to me that behind the scenes, it’s chaotic,’” Mr. Licht said. Then he and Mr. Colbert sat down for a drink. They hit it off instantly. “The deal was, he said, ‘Listen, let me make these decisions and don’t try to take them back from me,’” Mr. Colbert remembered. “And I said, ‘O. K. well, don’t debate with me what’s funny. ’” So Mr. Colbert focused on the comedy and his performance, and Mr. Licht dealt with management issues that the host had been expending energy on: staffing, budgets, sales meetings, the works. Mr. Licht also made changes to the show, including shortening the opening credits and giving “The Late Show” a signature segment by preceding those credits with a comedy sketch. Within two months, he suggested regularly doing live shows after major events. If the show was going to become on the news, he said, this only made sense. It also brought a necessary rigor to the staff. Mr. Colbert had done, by his estimation, about a dozen live shows over 10 years at “The Colbert Report. ” Over the past nine months, he has done 15. He pointed to the live shows he did during the political conventions as truly . “Two weeks of that changed all of our approach to the show, and it also changed the trust I had to place in my staff,” Mr. Colbert said. “You cannot do two weeks of live shows and be a control freak. ” Mr. Colbert became much more forgiving of “a flub here or a flub there,” Mr. Licht said. That is a valuable lesson, said Mr. Licht, who believes that certain imperfections foster intimacy with the audience. “At ‘CBS This Morning,’ I said, ‘Guys, there are going to be mornings where Charlie’s tired and he doesn’t smile, and we’re going to have to live with that,’” Mr. Licht said. “‘Gayle is going to ask questions at the wrong time, and we’re going to have live with that. ’” He continued: “We’re not going to manufacture perfection. Then you build authenticity, and they become more comfortable with each other. Your job as a producer, in my mind, is to allow that to happen and get out of the way. ” Then, in September, on NBC, Mr. Fallon tousled Mr. Trump’s hair when he was a guest on his show, causing an uproar. Some critics of Mr. Fallon say that moment was the breaking point that led to his declining ratings this year. “The theory that that hair tousle made a difference is based on the supposition that Jimmy’s fans went to him for political acumen,” Mr. Colbert said. “I don’t think so. They go there for fun. They go there for his nature, his spirit. ” Mr. Colbert and his writing staff, meanwhile, developed a point of view on how they felt about Mr. Trump. Mr. Colbert’s election night special on Showtime attracted only 238, 000 viewers, fewer than a tenth of his usual viewership. But in the final minutes of the show, Mr. Colbert scrapped a prepared closing monologue about the importance of coming together after a polarizing election, and went off script. He was personal, and he discussed, bluntly, the searing divides in the country. “You stripped away script, you stripped away everything,” Mr. Licht said. “And you leave this bare, exposed human being. ” That moment, Mr. Colbert said, was possible only because of the live shows he had done in the previous months. “That’s when it changed for us,” he said. “And that’s when it started to feel like when you walk off the stage and say, ‘God, what a great freaking job, that I get to do this! ’” (He used slightly more colorful language.) Two weeks into Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Colbert beat Mr. Fallon for the first time. Beyond the political moment, however, Mr. Colbert said he felt more comfortable on the Ed Sullivan Theater stage than ever before. “I always had to keep a certain amount of distance as the character,” he said of his time at Comedy Central. “I always had to be a little of a facsimile of me that they were getting — obviously because I was playing somebody named me who wasn’t me, but even on top of that there was a little bit more of a distance from the audience. ” Mr. Colbert runs out onto the stage every night these days, and audience members in the front row. A cameraman circles around him, and Mr. Colbert looks directly into the lenses and says, “Hey. ” Mr. Licht said Mr. Colbert had started doing that on his own just about three months ago, a brief, intimate moment between the host and the viewer, watching at home, right before bed. “I’m so much more comfortable on my feet now,” Mr. Colbert said. “I’m a quicker and better writer. I am more comfortable being myself in front of an audience. I like this new relationship with the audience. ” | 1 |
Share This: Joseph Kishore and David North, wsws.org A s millions of Americans go to the polls today, a mood of anger and frustration prevails throughout the country. On Sunday, CBS News’ 60 Minutes featured a focus group discussion of the elections. When asked by pollster Frank Luntz for a word to describe how they felt about the more than a year-and-a-half election campaign, the participants responded: “terrified,” “exasperating,” “horrifying,” “disgusted” and “nightmare.” The fact that the two main candidates, Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump, are the most widely despised in the history of presidential politics has been substantiated in innumerable polls. But the contempt felt toward the two candidates expresses a deeper alienation from the entire structure of official capitalist politics. The candidates and the media have ignored the social, economic and political issues that concern the overwhelming majority of the people. The official election “debates”—in which each candidate denounced the other’s criminality—embarrassed and disgusted the electorate. Both Clinton and Trump personify, each in their own way, the corrupt and reactionary character of the political system. What is the choice that has been given the American people? It is hard to say which of the candidates offered by the two parties is more right-wing, the difference being more a matter of style than substance. While the demagogue Trump is trying to direct social discontent along fascistic lines, Clinton is using the cynical narrative of race and gender to provide a “progressive” mask for an agenda of war and the continuation of economic policies that have guaranteed an endless flow of cash into the pockets of the super-rich. The verdict of Wall Street on its prospects under a Clinton presidency could be seen in the reaction of stock markets to the announcement by FBI Director James Comey that the agency is not pursuing criminal charges against Clinton over her emails. The Dow Jones Industrial Average soared 371 points. The Clinton campaign has marshaled behind it significant sections of the Republican Party establishment, including many of the neoconservative architects of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Democratic Party campaign, well aware of its candidate’s unpopularity, is relying on the oldest form of political blackmail to bring out the vote for Hillary Clinton. She is, the party and its apologists insist, the “lesser evil.” As bad as Clinton is, the argument goes, she must be supported to avert the disaster that would inevitably follow the election of Trump. The problem with the “lesser evil” argument is that it leads to results that are worse than what those who voted one way or the other were hoping to prevent. The “terrible Trump” theory of American politics explains nothing. The nomination of this absurd and obscene blowhard is itself an outcome of the deep crisis of American society. He is the political equivalent of the metastatic spread of a primary and deadly tumor. Trump is the product of a corporate-dominated political culture, which, for at least the last 40 years, has promoted social backwardness and reaction. However, it is too simple to blame Fox News, talk radio and campaign finance laws for the nomination of Trump. The popular response to his demagogic slogans reflects genuine social distress. Many workers who are planning on voting for him today previously backed the Democratic Party campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. One of the main consequences of Sanders’ efforts to channel his “political revolution” behind Clinton was to guarantee that social anger and hostility to the status quo would be identified with the political right. In the final analysis, Trump’s rise is a product of the political bankruptcy of the Democratic Party. Unable to present a positive political message that can attract mass support, Clinton has waged her campaign against Trump on the lowest and most reactionary level. First, the Democrats and their media flacks have denounced Trump as an agent of the Russian president, asserting that Vladimir Putin is seeking to influence the elections by hacking Democratic Party emails. This claim has been endlessly repeated without any factual substantiation. The repackaging of McCarthyite red-baiting, with Russia replacing the Soviet Union, has been used to distract attention from the content of the emails released by WikiLeaks. The Democratic Party campaign, well aware of its candidate’s unpopularity, is relying on the oldest form of political blackmail to bring out the vote for Hillary Clinton. She is, the party and its apologists insist, the “lesser evil.” As bad as Clinton is, the argument goes, she must be supported to avert the disaster that would inevitably follow the election of Trump. More dangerously, the relentless anti-Putin propaganda has been employed by Clinton to legitimize a massive escalation of military operations in Syria and against Russia in the aftermath of the election. The extreme danger of world war, which has been ignored throughout the election, was underscored by the announcement Monday that NATO is placing 300,000 troops on high alert, supposedly in response to Russian aggression. Second, as the election reached its final stage, the Democrats escalated their hysterical slanders based on the claim that Trump’s support is coming from “privileged” white workers motivated by the racist desire to return to an era when they ruled the country. Clinton has centered her campaign on a racialist narrative that denies the deep social anger felt among workers of all races. In terms of social policy, Clinton is pledged to continue the policies of the Obama administration, which has overseen a massive transfer of wealth to the rich and the return of social inequality to the historic levels that prevailed in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the days leading up to the election, millions of workers were confronted with the news that their health insurance premiums will rise by double digits, the outcome of Obama’s signature domestic initiative, the misnamed Affordable Care Act. Regardless of the outcome, today’s vote will not solve anything. Nothing that happens on Election Day is going to lead to a rise in living standards, resolve any of the great social problems facing the working class, or put an end to the danger of world war. It will only establish the framework for the next stage of the political crisis in the United States. This political crisis will have far-reaching and global consequences. Media commentators internationally have followed what is happening in the United States with a mixture of shock and horror. Edward Luce, writing in the British Financial Times , sums up the prevailing anxiety in a comment published Sunday under the headline, “American democracy’s gravest trial.” The American political system, he writes, is “teetering, whatever the outcome of the US elections.” Luce asks his readers to “imagine two kinds of threat: one where a bear [Trump] breaks into your cabin, the other where termites eat it from within.” The good thing about a bear, he writes, “is that you can see it coming.” In contrast, “Termites are invisible. It is hard to pinpoint when they began to eat away at the foundation. When and why did Americans lose faith in their system?” The reactionary spectacle of the 2016 elections is the product of protracted decay. Twenty-five years ago, the ideologists of American capitalism proclaimed that the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked the “end of history,” with the United States, the dominant and unchallenged world power, guaranteeing liberal democracy the world over. If nothing else, this election will forever bury this reactionary fantasy. The crisis confronting the United States today is no less profound than the situation that faced the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union a quarter-century ago. Four decades of declining living standards and growing social inequality, a quarter-century of unending war, fifteen years of the “war on terror” accompanied by a vast expansion of the power of the military-intelligence apparatus: These are the pressures that are tearing the democratic fabric apart. Nor is the crisis expressed in this election a uniquely American phenomenon. It is paralleled by global shocks such as the Brexit referendum in Britain, the rise of far-right and fascistic movements throughout Europe, and the general discrediting of political institutions throughout the world. Underlying everything is a crisis of world capitalism, manifested in an expanding imperialist war drive that threatens the entire planet, and the growth of the class struggle, which is the objective foundation for socialist revolution. The time for pragmatic “lesser evil” politics has long since passed. The pressing and urgent necessity is to build a party of the working class, uniting workers of every race, gender, nationality and ethnicity on a program that represents their class interests. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP CLICK HERE
SELECT COMMENT (FROM ORIGINAL THREAD) WHICH POSES ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS WE SHOULD BE CONFRONTING, AT THE PERSONAL AND SOCIAL LEVELS: The fact that tens of millions of civilians are participating at all at the polls — giving the ruling class the fig-leaf of legitimacy which it seeks and requires to cloak itself and to carry out its murderous agenda — illustrates the power of propaganda. Humans today in the US have access to more information than at any other time in history. Yet despite the knowledge that is available to us, despite the numerous examples of fascism, capitalist-imperialist aggression, and state violence and authoritarianism, people continue to obey, defer to, passively go along, and empower the ruling class criminals and this fascist system, stamping it with their seal of validation. You have courageous whistleblowers, journalists, and publishers risking their lives to enlighten the public about what the rulers would prefer to keep hidden–and the public fails to follow through. What exactly have people learned from our predecessors’ social movements and resistance? — Vivek Jain ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joseph Kishore and David North are editorial writers and geopolitical analysts with wsws.org, a socialist publication. Both authors, members of the Social Equality Party (Trotkyist) naturally recommend readers vote for their party in this election. As a rule, The Greanville Post, which uses Marxist analysis in its own interpretation of events, does not endorse any party or Marxian faction. Note to Commenters Due to severe hacking attacks in the recent past that brought our site down for up to 11 days with considerable loss of circulation, we exercise extreme caution in the comments we publish, as the comment box has been one of the main arteries to inject malicious code. Because of that comments may not appear immediately, but rest assured that if you are a legitimate commenter your opinion will be published within 24 hours. If your comment fails to appear, and you wish to reach us directly, send us a mail at: [email protected]
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He called NATO obsolete. He said Germany’s acceptance of refugees is “utterly catastrophic. ” The One China policy embraced by the United States? That’s up for discussion. Just days before Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, world leaders on three continents are on edge after comments the made in an interview on Friday with The Wall Street Journal and in a weekend interview with two European newspapers, Bild and The Times of London. “It’s obsolete, first because it was designed many, many years ago,” Mr. Trump said, according to the German newspaper Bild. The alliance, born in 1949, three years after Mr. Trump, is viewed by many — including his nominee for defense secretary, Gen. James N. Mattis — as essential to American security. “Secondly, countries aren’t paying what they should” and NATO “didn’t deal with terrorism. ” Responding on Monday to Mr. Trump’s comments, Dalia Grybauskaite, the president of Lithuania, which gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and joined NATO in 2004, urged Mr. Trump to continue meeting the United States’ financial obligations toward the alliance. Mr. Trump also criticized the European Union, describing it as “basically a vehicle for Germany. ” He praised Britain for its vote to leave the bloc, known as Brexit, adding: “I believe others will leave. I do think keeping it together is not going to be as easy as a lot of people think. ” French leaders also bristled at Mr. Trump’s swipe against the bloc. Their response comes as they deal with growing domestic support for the Union and party National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, who was spotted on Thursday at Trump Tower in New York. “The best response,” said the French foreign minister, Ayrault, “is European unity. ” In the interview with The Journal, Mr. Trump said the One China policy was up for negotiation. Beijing responded quickly and decisively. Its Foreign Ministry called the policy, which recognizes Beijing as the sole Chinese government, the foundation of States ties, and it said it was nonnegotiable. People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the governing Communist Party, said Mr. Trump “has been stunningly confident in his ostensible knowledge of the job, though he speaks like a rookie. ” An unusually strongly worded editorial in the China Daily said on Monday that Mr. Trump was “playing with fire with his Taiwan game. ” “If Trump is determined to use this gambit on taking office, a period of fierce, damaging interactions will be unavoidable, as Beijing will have no choice but to take off the gloves,” the newspaper said. A spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned Mr. Trump on Monday that any effort to undermine the policy could backfire. Mr. Trump also took aim at German automakers, warning of a 35 percent tariff on any cars they build in Mexico and export to the United States. Shares of BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler fell on Monday after his comments, but BMW said the company would stick to its plans to open a plant in Mexico in 2019. “It’s very clear that we have to be prepared to immediately be able to neutralize the impact of a measure of that nature,” Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, Mexico’s economy minister, said on Friday on a Mexican news show. “It would be a problem for the entire world,” Mr. Guajardo Villarreal warned. Such a tariff “will have a wave of impacts that can take us into a global recession,” he said. Not surprisingly, Russian diplomats were unperturbed by Mr. Trump’s comments on NATO. They welcomed the “obsolete” label and were enthusiastic at his suggestion that he would consider reducing sanctions against Russia if the country agreed to reduce its nuclear arsenal. Dmitri S. Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, said on Monday that “NATO is indeed a vestige,” according to Radio Free Europe. “Let’s wait until he assumes office before we give assessment to any initiatives,” he said. | 1 |
In a speech this month in the East Azerbaijan region of Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said that a war on Iran’s culture and economy is more dangerous to his Islamic regime than any military threat from the West. [“A European official said to our officials that a war in Iran would have been inevitable if it had not been for the ” Khamenei said, referring to the nuclear agreement brokered by the Obama administration and Western allies. “That official said that if the had not been signed, the war would have been definite. ” “This is a blatant lie!” Khamenei said in the speech. “Why do they speak about war? They do so because they want to switch our minds to a military war, but the real war is something else. ” “The real war is an economic war, the real war is the war of sanctions, the real war is the arenas of work, activity, and technology inside the country,” Khamenei said. “This is the real war!” “They draw our attention to a military war so that we ignore this war,” Khamenei said. “The real war is a cultural war. “There are so many television and internet networks which are busy diverting the hearts and minds of our youth away from religion, our sacred beliefs, morality, modesty and the like,” Khamenei said. “They are working in a serious manner and they are spending heavily on this,” Khamenei said. “The real war is this. ” The 2017 Academy Awards on Monday night put Iran and its culture in the spotlight, with the Iranian film The Salesman winning Best Foreign Language film. The Iranian film’s director, Asghar Farhadi, said last month that he would boycott the Oscars because of Trump’s immigration order on halting refugees coming to the United States from seven countries with links to Islamic terrorism, according to a January 29 New York Times article. “To humiliate one nation with the pretext of guarding the security of another is not a new phenomenon in history and has always laid the groundwork for the creation of future divide and enmity,” Farhadi said in a statement published by the Times. “I hereby express my condemnation of the unjust conditions forced upon some of my compatriots and the citizens of the other six countries trying to legally enter the United States of America and hope that the current situation will not give rise to further divide between nations. ” The Iranian Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, tweeted praise for the film’s award and Iranian culture after the win. “Proud of cast crew of ‘The Salesman’ for Oscar stance against #Muslim Ban. Iranians have represented culture civilization for millennia,” Zarif tweeted. The Guardian reported that a “protest vote” against Trump’s immigration policy might have helped the film win. Khamenei tweeted in August that the United States was responsible for creating and supporting ISIL, or Daesh, as part of what he claims is a culture war against “true Islam. ” “US aim of making backing DAESH is to sow discord in Islamic Ummah, defame true Islam promote Wahabi Islam which is far from true Islam,” Khamenei wrote. Khamenei, a Muslim cleric, has been the Supreme Leader of Iran since 1989 after serving as the third president from 1981 to 1989. He regularly calls the United States the Great Satan and promotes the destruction of Israel. | 1 |
NTEB Ads Privacy Policy HOCUS POCUS: Pope Francis Laughably Announces He Extends Priests ‘Power To Forgive Abortions’ The letter continues: "May every priest, therefore, be a guide, support and comfort to penitents on this journey of special reconciliation. "I henceforth grant to all priests, in virtue of their ministry, the faculty to absolve those who have committed the sin of procured abortion." by Geoffrey Grider November 21, 2016 Pope Francis has extended indefinitely the power of Catholic priests to forgive abortions, making the announcement in an apostolic letter released Monday.
“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;” – 1 Timothy 2:5 (KJV)
EDITOR’S NOTE: There is not a man on the face of the earth who has power to forgive your sins. The best anyone can do is point you to where forgiveness is, and that journey begins and ends with Jesus Christ . He shed God’s own blood on the cross at Calvary to obtain that pardon for you, and He did not “transfer that power” to any other human agency. When you step into the Catholic “confessional” and ask a man for forgiveness, you step out of that box just as dirty as you went in. Cut out the phony middleman, and go straight to the Source if you want to be clean. If you put your trust in the black-robed, “hocus-pocus” man from Rome, you will be gravely disappointed. Pun intended.
It continues a special dispensation granted last year for the duration of the Year of Mercy — which finished Sunday — which gave all priests, rather than just bishops and specially designated confessors, the power to absolve the sin of abortion.
While the practical effect of Francis’ announcement remains unclear, it draws attention to the prevailing theme of his papacy: That the doors of the Church must remain open, just as God’s forgiveness and mercy extend to all those who repent from sin. THE GOSPEL TRUTH ABOUT VATICAN CITY AND THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH
That said , the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion has not changed — it is still viewed as a “grave sin.” But it makes it easier for women who have had abortions to be absolved for their actions, and rejoin the church.
“I wish to restate as firmly as I can that abortion is a grave sin, since it puts an end to an innocent life,” the Pope’s letter states. “In the same way, however, I can and must state that there is no sin that God’s mercy cannot reach and wipe away when it finds a repentant heart seeking to be reconciled with the Father.”
The letter continues: “May every priest, therefore, be a guide, support and comfort to penitents on this journey of special reconciliation. “I henceforth grant to all priests, in virtue of their ministry, the faculty to absolve those who have committed the sin of procured abortion.”
“For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:” Ephesians 2:8,9 (KJV)
Forgiveness for the sin of abortion , and for all sins, is found only in Jesus Christ and Him alone.
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WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump and President Obama have been unfailingly polite toward each other since the election. But with Mr. Trump staking out starkly different positions from Mr. Obama on Israel and other sensitive issues, and the president acting aggressively to protect his legacy, the two have become leaders of what amounts to dueling administrations. The split widened on Friday when the Obama administration abstained from a United Nations Security Council vote that condemned Israel for Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and allowed the resolution to pass. A day earlier, Mr. Trump had publicly demanded that Mr. Obama veto the measure, even intervening with Egypt at the request of Israel to pressure the administration to shelve the effort. “As to the U. N.,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter after the vote, “things will be different after Jan. 20. ” It was the latest in a series of Twitter posts and public statements over the last week in which Mr. Trump has weighed in on Israel, terrorism and nuclear proliferation — contradicting Mr. Obama and flouting the notion that the country can have only one president at a time. That longstanding principle has largely collapsed since the victory by Mr. Trump, who campaigned on a strategy of breaking all the rules and has continued to speak in unmodulated tones. “In some ways, Trump is neutering the Obama administration,” said Douglas G. Brinkley, a professor of history and a presidential historian at Rice University in Houston. “They’ve avoided personally attacking each other, but behind the scenes, they’re working to undermine each other, and I don’t know how the American people benefit from that. ” For its part, the Obama administration on Tuesday announced a permanent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along wide areas of the Arctic and the Eastern Seaboard, invoking an obscure provision of a 1953 law, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, to claim that Mr. Trump had no power to reverse it. White House officials asserted a similar privilege in their decision not to veto the Security Council resolution. Israel’s aggressive construction of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, they said, puts at risk a solution to the conflict. Mr. Trump’s opposition to the measure, and the likelihood that his administration will reverse the position, played no part in the decision, they said. “There’s one president at a time,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. “There’s a principle here that the world understands who is speaking for the United States until January 20th, and who is speaking for the United States after January 20th. ” In the last week, Mr. Trump has written on Twitter that the United States “must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability” accused China of an “unprecedented act” in seizing a United States Navy underwater drone in the South China Sea and then, after the Pentagon and the Chinese negotiated the drone’s return, suggested that the United States should “let them keep it!” He condemned the deadly truck rampage at a Christmas market in Berlin as an “attack on humanity,” which he also said vindicated his proposed ban on immigration from countries plagued by Islamic extremism. On Friday, Mr. Trump wrote in a Twitter post that the suspect in the attack had made a religiously motivated threat. “When will the U. S. and all countries, fight back?” he wrote. Mr. Trump’s pronouncements are often so vague and offhand that their impact on policy is open to debate. But his intervention to press Egypt to delay the Security Council vote disrupted a sensitive diplomatic negotiation, and muddied perhaps Mr. Obama’s final opportunity to make a statement on the stalled Middle East peace process. When Egypt buckled, the same resolution was brought to a vote by four other countries on the Security Council: Malaysia, New Zealand, Senegal and Venezuela. The United States watched the proceedings largely from the sidelines. On Friday morning, Mr. Obama, from his vacation home in Hawaii, directed his national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, to tell the ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, not to block the resolution. “In a practical sense, the message this sends is that the Obama administration is over,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to both Egypt and Israel. “Everybody knows this resolution doesn’t carry any weight. The assumption has to be that the Israeli government will take some retaliatory measures. Knowing that Trump is coming into office, and knowing that Trump tried to oppose this, they will do so with impunity. ” This role reversal between the departing and incoming presidents deepened what was already an unsettled moment in American foreign policy: a sense that the White House’s policies toward the world’s most troubled places had run out of steam and were about to change radically, but in ways that were wholly unpredictable. Mr. Trump has been careful to be respectful of his predecessor, and the ’s aides have said that the two men have spoken often. When people at his rallies jeer at the mention of Mr. Obama’s name, Mr. Trump hushes them — a courtesy he does not extend to his former opponent, Hillary Clinton. But Mr. Trump has shown little patience for the traditions of the interregnum between presidents. “President Obama and his team have been unbelievably gracious to the and his team, but at the end of the day, he’s not someone that’s going to sit back and wait,” Sean Spicer, whom Mr. Trump named on Thursday as White House press secretary, said on CNN. Noting the close alliance between Israel and the United States, Mr. Spicer said, “It is something that we should protect, and he wanted to make it very clear that anything that undermined Israel, which is a great friend of the United States, he was going to make sure his voice was heard. ” It is not unprecedented for future presidents to dip into foreign affairs before taking office. During his transition in 1968, Richard M. Nixon dispatched two aides, Henry A. Kissinger and Robert Ellsworth, to meet with Soviet officials to pass along his views on a nonproliferation treaty and a summit meeting, an idea that was being pushed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Nixon later wrote that he “did not want to be boxed in by any decisions that were made” before he took office. More often, though, incoming presidents have been . In December 1932, the departing president, Herbert Hoover, was deeply frustrated when Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had won a landslide victory a month earlier, declined to work with him on the issue of war debts owed to the United States by Britain and France. “Governor Roosevelt considers it undesirable for him to assent to my suggestions for cooperative action,” he said. Eliot A. Cohen, a Republican foreign policy expert who worked in the George W. Bush administration and is a critic of Mr. Trump, said the was still communicating in the style of a political candidate. “I don’t think he has a good sense of how every word that comes out of his mouth can have real consequences,” he said. Whatever their frustrations about his interference, White House officials were careful not to criticize Mr. Trump after the Security Council vote. And in his Twitter message promising change at the United Nations, Mr. Trump pointedly did not criticize Mr. Obama or his administration. Still, Mr. Trump has shown no sign that he will surrender his Twitter account or curb his public statements in the next 28 days, which could lead to more mixed messages and tension with the White House. Experts have said Mr. Trump would do well to follow the example of his reticent predecessors. “This is not politesse,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian. “Even a who has been in public life for a long time has not been fully briefed or fully staffed, and hence may be in a position to do this better once he’s in the White House. ” “What’s the rush?” he said. | 1 |
BREAKING: Andrea Tantaros Outs Fox News Top Brass In Disturbing Lawsuit
Of course a police report was immediately filed, but oddly the situation apparently resolved itself the next day when the car was returned to the owner along with an apology note and some money for gas.
Wednesday afternoon the red Subaru was spotted on the street in front of Hatzi’s house, along with a police officer and the woman believed to have taken the car.
The note explained that the entire incident had been a terrible misunderstanding, as Hatzi’s car had been mistaken for someone else’s car of the same make and color.
The note read: “Hello, So sorry I stole your car. I sent my friend with my key to pick up my red Subaru at **** SE Woodstock and she came back with your car. I did not see the car until this morning and I said, ‘That is not my car.'”
“There is some cash for gas and I more than apologize for the shock and upset this must have caused you. If you need to speak further, with me, I am ** | 0 |
James Baldwin died in 1987, but his moment is now. His books are flying off the shelves. He has inspired homages like Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” and Coates’s memoir “Between the World and Me. ” Baldwin’s prophetic essays on race read like today’s news. And yet a full understanding of this pioneering gay artist remains elusive. While Baldwin’s books are in print, there’s one revealing work that admirers long to read but have mostly been unable to: his letters. The Baldwin estate has held tight to hundreds in its possession, letting only a few scholars see them. It has almost never allowed any of Baldwin’s correspondence to be published, or given biographers permission to quote a single word. Now, Baldwin’s papers have landed in one of the nation’s leading archival institutions, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a division of the New York Public Library, in Harlem. But, in a striking twist, many of his personal letters will remain off limits for another generation — a byproduct of complicated negotiations between the library and the estate, and a reminder that family members are not always comfortable with the spotlight’s falling on a loved one, even decades after death. The acquisition is a coup for the Schomburg, which announced the surprise news at a event there on Wednesday night. It’s also a kind of homecoming for Baldwin, a preacher’s son who grew up not far from the center’s landmark building on Malcolm X Boulevard. “Even though it’s taken 30 years, it’s the perfect time,” Kevin Young, who became the director of the Schomburg in December, said in an interview. “It’s like he never left. ” The archive — the bulk of which is open to researchers immediately — contains a wealth of manuscripts, drafts and notes relating to Baldwin’s sprawling output, most of which have rarely been seen by scholars. There are also letters from luminaries including Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone, Bobby Seale, William Styron and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a testament to the sociability of a man who seemed to go everywhere, and know everyone. Still, Baldwin’s correspondence with four of his closest intimates is under seal, part of a set of restrictions that suggest that his famously protective estate is not quite ready for the world to see the private Baldwin in full. Those confidants include Baldwin’s brother David and three lifelong friends, among them Lucien Happersberger, a bisexual Swiss painter Baldwin once called “the one true love story of my life. ” William Kelly, the New York Public Library’s director of research libraries, described the restrictions, including the seal on roughly half the personal correspondence in the archive, as complicated but “fairly modest. ” “There’s always a balance in guaranteeing access for scholars, while at the same time being sensitive to the family,” Mr. Kelly said. (Gloria Baldwin’s sister and executor, declined through the library to be interviewed for this article.) Other limitations — like a waiting period on any public display of all but a handful of items — seem puzzlingly out of step with current trends at archives, which tend to make as much freely available and visible online as copyright will allow. (The library also declined to let The New York Times photograph anything beyond eight items the estate had approved for display.) But Mr. Kelly said the restrictions were outweighed by the sheer richness of the archive, which sheds light on how Baldwin navigated different aspects of his identity — gay, political, artistic. “I was dazzled by it,” he said, referring to the collection. The library declined to disclose the purchase price, which was paid with donations from the Ford Foundation, the Knight Foundation, New York Life and three individual donors. (One donor, Mr. Kelly said, contributed the last $500, 000.) For its money, the Schomburg got some 70 boxes of material — about 30 linear feet, in . It spans the full range of Baldwin’s career, from typescripts of his teenage poetry to handwritten drafts of “The Welcome Table,” his final, unfinished play about an imaginary dinner party featuring an Panther, a professor and a Josephine dancer. (It was inspired by visits Baker made to Baldwin’s house in the South of France, where he spent the last decades of his life.) “He went where his muse went,” said Steven G. Fullwood, the Schomburg’s associate curator of manuscripts, archives and rare books. “He was always questioning himself and the world. ” The eight preapproved items from the collection will be on view through Monday, in a small exhibition. When I visited the Schomburg earlier this month, archivists had laid out a much larger selection that spoke to the archive’s range and depth. There was a typescript of unpublished notes on Beauford Delaney, a gay painter whom Baldwin met at the age of 15 and came to see as his “spiritual father. ” It was from Delaney that he learned about “the light contained in every thing, in every surface, in every face,” Baldwin wrote. (Correspondence with Delaney is covered by the seal.) One folder held an unproduced play script based on “Giovanni’s Room,” Baldwin’s 1956 novel about an American expatriate in France, torn between his love for a man and societal pressure to marry. (The novel was dedicated to Happersberger.) There were character notes for his novel “Just Above My Head” (1979) scrawled on a card for a jazz club, and a draft of an unproduced screenplay about Malcolm X, written out longhand in an orange notebook labeled “Homework. ” There were also clarion blasts of the prophetic Baldwin, like an unpublished 1978 note recalling the day 10 years earlier when he had learned that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. “Ten years! The mind and the heart refuse that knowledge,” Baldwin wrote. “I really feel, as I write this now, the same, unbelieving wonder, the same shocked and helpless rage. ” That passage echoes a scene in the new documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” which was based on notes for “Remember This House,” a book about King, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers that Baldwin planned but never wrote. In a recent essay, Mr. Peck, who said he gained full access to Baldwin’s papers, recalled the eureka moment when Ms. handed them to him. (Those notes, now at the Schomburg, are sealed for 10 years.) But for others, the real buried treasure is the correspondence. In 2007, the critic Hilton Als wrote that there was “one great Baldwin masterpiece waiting to be published, one composed in an atmosphere of focused intimacy, and that is a volume of his letters, letters his family does not want published. ” One person who has seen some of the most intimate letters is Ed Pavlic, a poet and professor at the University of Georgia. In 2010, Ms. gave him access to some 120 letters from Baldwin to their brother David, written over the course of 40 years and totaling some 70, 000 words. Ms. suggested that Mr. Pavlic try to find a book in them. But when he sent her a manuscript and asked for permission to quote, Mr. Pavlic said, he got no response and was unable to publish it. Mr. Pavlic, who has written about his experiences with the letters, said the lack of access to Baldwin’s correspondence had made it difficult for scholars to make full sense of — or even create an accurate record of — a life spent constantly on the move. And the letters he saw, far from damaging Baldwin’s reputation, would burnish it, he said. “The private record, for me, just amplifies and confirms and makes more dramatic the public messages he was out to convey,” he said. In addition to David Baldwin and Happersberger and Delaney, the seal also covers Baldwin’s correspondence with Mary Painter, a longtime friend to whom he dedicated his 1962 novel, “Another Country. ” Oddly, some of Baldwin’s letters to these intimates (who are all dead) are accessible in other archives, like the Beinecke Rare Book Manuscript Library at Yale, which has even posted some of its Baldwin collection online. As for the restrictions at the Schomburg, Mr. Young emphasized that a vast majority of the collection was open for research, and that the rest would be available “in due time. ” “I take the long view,” he said. “Archives move by decades and generations. We’re here to keep it forever. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders on Thursday presented their members with the outlines of their plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, leaning heavily on tax credits to finance individual insurance purchases and sharply reducing federal payments to the 31 states that have expanded Medicaid eligibility. Speaker Paul D. Ryan and two House committee chairmen stood with the new secretary of health and human services, former Representative Tom Price of Georgia, preparing Republican lawmakers for a weeklong Presidents’ Day recess that promises to be dominated by angry or anxious questions about the fate of the health law. But the talking points they provided did not say how the legislation would be paid for, essentially laying out the benefits without the more controversial costs. It also included no estimates of the number of people who would gain or lose insurance under the plan, nor did it include comparisons with the Affordable Care Act, which has extended coverage to 20 million people. With the House proposal’s rollback of Medicaid payments to the states, it appears likely that the number covered would be smaller. House Republican leaders asserted in a document describing their plan that they would not “pull the rug out from anyone who received care under states’ Medicaid expansions. ” But Kenneth E. Raske, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, expressed alarm, saying the proposals would “put a huge amount of pressure on state budgets and put many Americans at risk of losing health care coverage. ” Sketchy as the outline was, it envisions major changes. It would fundamentally remake Medicaid, a Great Society program that provides health care to more than 70 million Americans, not just the poor, but also people who have run out of money and need nursing home care. Under the plan, Medicaid, an entitlement program designed to cover all health care needs, would be put on a budget. The Affordable Care Act’s subsidies, which expand as incomes decline, giving the poorer people more help, would be replaced by fixed tax credits to help people purchase insurance policies. The tax credits would increase with a person’s age, but would not vary with a person’s income. And new incentives for consumers to establish savings accounts to pay medical expenses still assume that workers would have money at the end of a pay period to sock away. The House Republican plan would also make it easier for consumers to buy health insurance from companies licensed in other states, an idea long promoted by Republicans in Congress and championed by President Trump in his campaign last year. After the recess, Mr. Ryan said: “We intend to introduce legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. It has become increasingly clear that this law is collapsing. People’s premiums are getting higher and higher. Their deductibles are soaring, and their choices are dwindling. ” Mr. Price told House Republicans that Mr. Trump “is all in on this. ” Mr. Ryan’s presentation on Thursday was meant to generate a sense of momentum for the Republicans’ campaign to eviscerate President Barack Obama’s health care law — a campaign that has been plagued by apprehensions, doubts and divisions among Republicans in the last few weeks. It was not clear whether the plan as outlined would get Republicans much closer to resolution. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, chairman of the Senate health committee, said that he and other Senate committee chairmen were working with their House counterparts, with the goal of developing a “consensus document. ” The House, he said, will probably act first but “will have the input of senators and the president. ” House conservatives are saying that any plan must begin with a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act and a replacement that looks nothing like it. Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said Republicans needed to talk about replacement measures “in specific terms, not in aspirational terms. ” “We believe that it’s time that we make some very difficult decisions and move forward,” Mr. Meadows said. Any plan that can satisfy House conservatives would face great uncertainty in the more moderate Senate. The plan unveiled on Thursday by House Republican leaders would make huge changes in Medicaid. It would eventually undo the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid and give each state a fixed amount of money for each beneficiary. As an alternative, they said, a state could receive a lump sum of federal money for all of its Medicaid program, or a block grant. In either case, the federal government would gradually reduce the extra payments it makes to states that have expanded Medicaid under the 2010 health care law. States could continue providing Medicaid to the newly eligible beneficiaries, but the federal share of the costs would decline to the regular federal share of Medicaid costs for other beneficiaries. The federal government now pays more than 90 percent of the costs for newly eligible beneficiaries in states that expanded Medicaid. Under the House Republican plan, the federal share would decline to 50 percent in states like New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and California, resulting in a significant loss of federal revenue. In a number of states that have expanded Medicaid, Republican governors and Republican members of Congress have made clear that they do not like the idea of a block grant or a allotment. The Congressional Budget Office says that 12 million people have insurance because they became eligible for Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, and it estimates that federal spending for this group will be $70 billion this year. The House Republican plan would immediately eliminate tax penalties for people who do not have insurance and employers that do not offer it. It would also eliminate taxes and fees that help pay for the expansion of coverage under the 2010 health care law. These include fees collected from health insurance companies and manufacturers of prescription drugs and an excise tax on makers of medical devices. House Republicans have repeatedly said that they would continue providing some protection for people with medical conditions. But the document describing their proposal does not say how they would do that. Mr. Ryan said the tax credits envisioned by House Republicans were different from those provided in the Affordable Care Act. Under that law, the tax credits are available only for insurance products that meet detailed federal standards and are purchased through an insurance exchange like HealthCare. gov. By contrast, Mr. Ryan said, with the Republican version of tax credits, people can “buy the health insurance plan of their choosing,” which could cost less and have less generous coverage than the plans now available. “You get the freedom to do what you want and buy what you need,” Mr. Ryan said. During a transition period, House Republicans would continue “Obamacare subsidies,” but they would provide a little more assistance to young people and a little less to older Americans. The House Republican plan would provide an unspecified amount of money for “innovation grants,” which states could use to help defray consumers’ costs or to establish “ pools” for people with serious chronic conditions. | 1 |
Thursday, 10 November 2016 Protection pouches available as "form hugging" and "explicit" with full protection guaranteed
A variety of new products has swiftly emerged following Mr. Trump's victory and are smoothing the way into the new presidency.
Medical experts have been concerned about candidates with the "nothing there" syndrome on repeated backbone tests.
The nothing there problem occurs when the medical expert's hand is passed back and forth across (a patient's) backbone with results of from .012 to .000 resistance.
"Imagine passing your hand back and forth through a column of air to no resistance whatever," the advertising runs.
"Strengthening surgery takes only five minutes per session in your doctor's office!"
Waffling from one position to another, according to what is politically correct (PC), or "bartering with illusion" to get a vote, relates to this "backbone problem" syndrome.
Mr. Trump himself is reported interested although has substantial backbone levels at this time (a "meaty" designation, according to some doctors' reports).
He is being advised toward this surgery over concern with the "I never said that" response, which lowers backbone resistance levels.
Will he stick with his positions--such as being friendly with Russia and other wild ideas--or "walk them backwards," which is another PC backbone no-no?
A bolstered backbone might assist Mr. Trump and his party through upcoming trials of sticking-to-your promises rhetoric in the new presidency.
Mr. Obama has already signed a contract to give personal testimonials on this new backbone re-building surgery.
Mr. Obama is considered the number one advertising role model for this new medical procedure.
As well-remembered by the electorate, his 2008 victory promised serious change from the Bush administration.
However, that led on to a whirling performance (several "silver toe" awards) and the "grand continuation" of Mr. Bush's accomplishments.
A stronger reading (up to around 2.14 levels) on his backbone recently showed some improvement with his "maybe in a few weeks" the Dakota Pipeline Morass could be eased.
On another note, additionally exciting, a new line of "pouch protection" products has emerged.
The "pouch protection" language is code PC for "get your crotch under wraps, just in case."
The new Pouch Protection line includes styles and colors for every gender and comes with special gold and mink features for Political Leaders or The Wealthy.
That is, wearing pouch protection (snidely referred to as a "jock strap" in some locales) guarantees protection against any event that might upset diplomatic negotiations.
An assailant would find his or her fingers ramming into "the equivalent of a cement wall."
Also, "electric shock models are available!"
The UK's Theresa May is reported interested as preparation for meetings with the new US president, as is Chancellor Merkel of Germany.
Even celebrities such as Kim Kardashian and Lady GaGa are being urged toward Pouch Protection, in reverse from "pouch celebration," in these tumultuous days.
Wal-Mart models (with faux gold and mink) will be available, including sizes for juniors. Make joseph k winter's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!) | 0 |
SYDNEY, Australia — More than a week after one of the closest and longest Australian national elections in half a century, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared victory on Sunday after the leader of the opposition Labor Party conceded defeat. “We have won the election,” Mr. Turnbull, the leader of the Liberal conservative coalition, said at a news conference on Sunday. The Australian Electoral Commission has forecast that the coalition could win a combined 76 seats, which would give it an absolute majority in the House of Representatives. Two independent members of the House have also pledged their support to the coalition, solidifying its chances of forming a government. “It is clear Mr. Turnbull and his coalition will form a government,” Bill Shorten, the Labor Party leader, said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon. “I hope they run a good government. ” After an election campaign that ended July 2, neither the Labor Party nor the conservative coalition, which defeated the Labor government in the last national election in 2013, wanted to concede defeat amid uncertainty over whether either side would win a critical number of seats. The Labor Party is forecast to take 69 seats in the House. The Greens are forecast to have won one, other parties, including independents, four. The electoral commission is expected to give the final results of the election around Friday. In government, the coalition will have to deal with a fractious upper house, the Senate. The balance of power in the Senate is likely to be held by a diverse group of and independents and minority parties that may block legislation passed in the House. As a result, some political analysts said they expected another national election to be called by the coalition before its latest term ends. “It is vital this Parliament work,” Mr. Turnbull said. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — President Obama angrily denounced Donald J. Trump on Tuesday for his remarks in the aftermath of the shooting massacre in Orlando, Fla. warning that Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was peddling a “dangerous” that recalled the darkest and most shameful periods in American history. “We hear language that singles out immigrants and suggests entire religious communities are complicit in violence,” Mr. Obama said at the Treasury Department, without mentioning Mr. Trump by name. His statement, an extraordinary condemnation by a sitting president of a man who is to be the opposing party’s nominee for the White House, came after Mr. Obama met with his national security team on the status of the American effort against the Islamic State, a meeting that the president said had been dominated by discussion of the Orlando rampage. “Where does this stop?” Mr. Obama said of Mr. Trump’s approach, noting that Mr. Trump had proposed a ban on admitting Muslims into the United States, and that the Orlando assailant, like perpetrators of previous domestic terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Calif. and Fort Hood, Tex. was an American citizen. “Are we going to start treating all differently? Are we going to start subjecting them to special surveillance? Are we going to start discriminating against them because of their faith?” Mr. Obama asked, his voice rising with frustration. “Do Republican officials actually agree with this? Because that’s not the America we want — it doesn’t reflect our democratic ideals. It won’t make us more safe. It will make us less safe. ” Appearing in Pittsburgh as Mr. Obama spoke, Hillary Clinton gave a blistering denunciation of her own. She echoed many of the president’s points and even some of his language, assailing Mr. Trump’s temperament, ridiculing his proposals and arguing forcefully that he had failed to meet the gravity of the moment. “History will remember what we do in this moment,” she told hundreds of supporters inside a union hall, asking “responsible Republican leaders” to join her in condemning Mr. Trump. “What Donald Trump is saying is shameful. ” Her speech was a rebuttal to Mr. Trump’s remarks a day earlier, when he issued a searing broadside implying that all Muslim immigrants posed a threat to American security. The nearly simultaneous condemnations of Mr. Trump from the president and the presumptive Democratic nominee to succeed him had the feel of a coordinated assault, although the White House insisted there had been no preplanning. Mr. Trump, unbowed by the criticism, said Mr. Obama was coddling terrorists. “President Obama claims to know our enemy, and yet he continues to prioritize our enemy over our allies and, for that matter, the American people,” he said in a statement on Tuesday. “When I am president, it will always be America first. ” Members of Mr. Trump’s party were themselves critical of his rhetoric and proposals. Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the nation’s elected Republican, said at a news conference Tuesday that Mr. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants was not in the country’s interests, nor did it reflect the principles of his party. “There’s a really important distinction that every American needs to keep in mind: This is a war with radical Islam. It’s not a war with Islam,” Mr. Ryan said. “The vast, vast majority of Muslims in this country and around the world are moderate, they’re peaceful, they’re tolerant, and so they’re among our best allies, among our best resources in this fight against radical Islamic terrorism. ” Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who has been among the most outspoken in his party about withholding his endorsement of Mr. Trump, said in a Twitter post that he was “appreciative” that Mr. Ryan had spoken out. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, flatly refused to talk about his party’s presidential nominee on Tuesday, an indication of the precarious position in which Mr. Trump has placed Republican elected officials. Mr. Obama bitterly rejected criticism from Mr. Trump and other Republicans about his steadfast refusal to use the term “radical Islam” to describe the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL. “If there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists who we’ve taken off the battlefield,” Mr. Obama said at the Treasury. “There’s no magic to the phrase ‘radical Islam.’ It’s a political talking point. It’s not a strategy. ” Mrs. Clinton echoed the idea, asking pointedly in her speech: “Is Donald Trump suggesting that there are magic words that once uttered will stop terrorists from coming after us?” The president said he would not use the wording because he was unwilling to give the Islamic State the victory of acceptance of its vision that it is the leader of a holy war between Islam and the West. “If we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush and imply that we are at war with an entire religion, then we are doing the terrorists’ work for them,” Mr. Obama said. Mr. Obama is scheduled to travel to Orlando on Thursday to visit with the surviving victims and the families of those killed in the rampage on Sunday morning. He was to have traveled to Wisconsin on Wednesday for his first campaign appearance with Mrs. Clinton since endorsing her last week, but the event was canceled in light of the shooting. Still, Tuesday’s punch left little doubt that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton plan to savage Mr. Trump on the campaign trail. The president was careful not to cast his criticism in political terms and never mentioned Mr. Trump’s name even as he clearly targeted him — at one point referring derisively to “politicians who tweet” — and his policy proposals. Instead, Mr. Obama spoke ominously of the stakes for the nation’s security, and its very identity, if the ideas espoused by Mr. Trump and many in the Republican Party are widely accepted. “We’ve gone through moments in our history before where we acted out of fear, and we came to regret it,” Mr. Obama said. “We’ve seen our government mistreat our fellow citizens, and it has been a shameful part of our history. ” Mrs. Clinton, in a striking departure from her speech on Monday, when she refrained from saying Mr. Trump’s name and said it was “not a day for politics,” took direct aim on Tuesday at his penchant for conspiracy theory. She reminded the crowd that he was “a leader of the birther movement” questioning Mr. Obama’s birthplace. After the Orlando attack, she noted, Mr. Trump suggested on television that Mr. Obama sympathized with Islamic terrorists. “Just think about that for a second,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Even in a time of divided politics, this is way beyond anything that should be said by someone running for president of the United States. ” “We don’t need conspiracy theories and pathological ” she added. “We need leadership, common sense and concrete plans. ” Mr. Obama staunchly defended his administration’s approach to countering terrorism, listing gains that the United States has made against the Islamic State in Iraq, Syria and Libya: killing the group’s top leaders, capturing more of its territory and whittling away at its financial resources. He also called on Congress to enact gun restrictions that it has so far resisted, including the resurrection of a ban on assault weapons and a measure that would bar people on “ ” lists because of suspected terrorist ties from buying a gun. “Enough talking about being tough on terrorism,” Mr. Obama said. “Actually be tough on terrorism and stop making it as easy as possible for terrorists to buy assault weapons. ” The last time a president so aggressively injected himself into the race to succeed him was in 2000. But Bill Clinton’s criticism of George W. Bush, the governor of Texas and the Republican nominee that year, illustrates just how jarringly different this race is from a normal White House campaign. “How bad can I be?” Mr. Clinton said at a that summer, mimicking the voice of Mr. Bush. “I’ve been governor of Texas. My daddy was president. I own a baseball team. They like me down there. ” ”Everything is rocking along ” he added. “Their fraternity had it for eight years, give it to ours for eight years. ” The ridicule, while tame by today’s standards, infuriated Mr. Bush’s father, former President George Bush, who warned that if Mr. Clinton “continues that, then I’m going to tell the nation what I think about him as a human being and a person. ’’ | 1 |
By Lorraine Chow
Yet another study has determined that hydraulic fracturing, or fracking , might be a major public health threat . In one of the most exhaustive reviews to date, researchers from the Yale School of Public Health have confirmed that many of the chemicals involved and released by the controversial drilling process can be linked to cancer .
“Previous studies have examined the carcinogenicity of more selective lists of chemicals,” lead author Nicole Deziel, Ph.D., assistant professor explained to the school . “To our knowledge, our analysis represents the most expansive review of carcinogenicity of hydraulic fracturing-related chemicals in the published literature.”
For the study, published in Science of the Total Environment, the researchers assessed the carcinogenicity of 1,177 water pollutants and 143 air pollutants released by the fracking process and from fracking wastewater . They found that 55 unique chemicals could be classified as known, probable or possible human carcinogens. They also specifically identified 20 compounds that had evidence of leukemia/lymphoma risk.
One of the scarier parts from this study is that the researchers could not completely unpack the health hazards of fracking’s entire chemical cocktail. More than 80 percent of the chemicals lacked sufficient data on cancer-causing potential, “highlighting an important knowledge gap,” the school noted.
The unconventional drilling rush in the U.S. has expanded to as many as 30 states, spelling major consequences to the air we breathe and the water we drink. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2013 that more than 15 million Americans lived within a mile of a well.
The biggest concern is for people and especially children with fracking operations right in their backyards. In fact, Environment America found that more than 650,000 kindergarten through 12th grade children in nine states attend school within one mile of a fracked oil or gas well.
650,000 Children in 9 States Attend School Within 1 Mile of a #Fracking Well https://t.co/wh8056P669 @MarkRuffalo @FrackAction @joshfoxfilm
— EcoWatch (@EcoWatch) October 13, 2016
“Because children are a particularly vulnerable population, research efforts should first be directed toward investigating whether exposure to hydraulic fracturing is associated with an increased risk,” Deziel said.
Per the study, “Childhood leukemia in particular is a public health concern related to [unconventional oil and gas] development, and it may be an early indicator of exposure to environmental carcinogens due to the relatively short disease latency and vulnerability of the exposed population.”
According to the school, the researchers are now taking air and water samples in a community living near a fracking operation. They are testing for the presence of known and suspected carcinogens and will determine whether these people have been exposed to these compounds, and if so, at what concentrations.
Lorraine Chow is a reporter for EcoWatch. She tweets @lorrainelchow
Source: EcoWatch
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — They are getting used to fewer explosions, and to fewer ambulances racing through their cities. Now, under a tentative across Syria, people have more time to think about concerns. We’ve been keeping in touch with Syrians from all over the country since the truce took effect Monday night. They’re sharing their thoughts, experiences, videos and photos — and their doubts. President Bashar ’s supporters and opponents alike share a sense of misgiving. They know the was negotiated between Russia and the United States, over their heads. They do not know its details, and they do not know if anyone — the world powers or their own putative leaders, whether the opposition or the government — has their interests in mind. As the Syrian government held up promised United Nations aid for a third day, fighters and civilians in Aleppo called the aid a poisoned chalice that legitimized Mr. Assad’s siege tactics. There are also skeptics in areas, some who favor Mr. Assad and some who don’t. In many such places, the has a smaller upside: The residents have not been living under airstrikes, because the rebels lack planes. “I hope this is real, and not a chance for the armed groups to rearm,” said a police officer in a Christian village near Homs. Doubts persist even in the areas that have suffered most from rebel shelling: on the western side of Aleppo and in two Shiite villages in Idlib Province, islands of territory besieged by rebels. They worry that Mr. Assad and his allies — Iran, Russia and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah — are too busy with war to make helping them a priority. Hussein Halaq, 35, a computer technician, lives with his wife and three children in Fouaa, one of those encircled Shiite villages. He said the biggest danger was fighters in neighboring Binnish. We spoke by phone to a lawyer who supports Mr. Assad and lives in the western, section of Aleppo, and who was concerned about the presence of fighters from the Nusra Front, recently renamed the Levant Conquest Front. He asked not to be identified because he was not authorized by the government to speak to reporters. Yusuf 50, a hospital worker, lives in his ’s apartment in central Damascus with his wife, a teacher, and their three children. They fled their home in Yarmouk, a Palestinian refugee camp, in December 2012 after rebels infiltrated and the government started airstrikes the fled to Germany. Mr. Ali spoke in a coffee shop near his home. Firas Alsaid, 28, was also nervous, wondering how long the calm would last. He lives in the town of Talbiseh in the central province of Homs. He has not left the town, which has been hit by frequent airstrikes, since the revolt began, and he finds the quiet almost eerie. | 1 |
COLUMBIA, S. C. — Alex Szkaradek is a landlord who seems to have the best of both worlds. Mr. Szkaradek, 36, collects rent, but he never has to pay for repairs on any of the more than 5, 500 homes — many of them rundown — that his firm manages across the country. The firm, Vision Property Management, blurs the line between what it means to be a renter and a homeowner. These companies do not offer regular leases or mortgages — they offer “rent to own” contracts on homes that require tenants to make all repairs, no matter how big or small. Mr. Szkaradek says Vision, a leader in the market, is bringing the dream of homeownership to Americans who lack good credit or are too poor to qualify for mortgages. In many communities, housing prices have recovered from the financial crisis. At the bottom end, however, banks have all but stopped making loans for homes worth less than $100, 000, leaving millions of people with few options. But these agreements reside in a gray area of the law. An examination by The New York Times of contracts and court filings, as well as interviews with housing lawyers and more than a dozen of Vision’s customers across the country, found that these deals are risky, lack consumer protections and may not be enforceable in some states. Most tenants walk away with nothing, having sunk money for rent and repairs into homes they had once hoped to own. Others faced surprise evictions, having signed a contract that did not disclose what repairs were needed, yet set a deadline for making sure the home was up to local housing code. As different tenants move in and out of the same property over the course of years, many homes fall further into disrepair. A recent report from the National Consumer Law Center found similar issues with certain programs, calling them deceptive in nature. When Donna Thomas signed a lease for a Cincinnati home with Vision, she said she was not told that it had unresolved building code violations and a standing order from the city to remain vacant. Samuel Rankin thought he was starting fresh when he and his two daughters moved out of a 1970s trailer home into a Vision rental home in Alexander, Ark. But he soon discovered that the house, located just outside Little Rock, had no heat, no water and major problems with its sewage system that led to nearly $10, 000 in repairs. Ms. Thomas’s and Mr. Rankin’s cases are not isolated, The Times found. It is difficult to measure the size of the housing market. Nobody tracks activity, and few agreements end in actual purchases, so they tend not to be recorded. Across the country, however, dozens of smaller firms offer to lease cheap homes with options to buy, such as Vision does. Entrepreneurs conduct seminars at conferences for small landlords hoping to strike it rich. And housing lawyers in cities including Detroit, Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, say they are seeing an uptick in disputes involving transactions. Several big Wall Street companies like the Blackstone Group and Home Partners of America offer programs through which people can buy the homes they are renting. But those homes are often relatively new or recently renovated, and worth well over $100, 000. The deals at the lower end of the market are the ones that worry housing advocates. “We’re seeing an influx in these contracts,” said Katarina Karac, a city lawyer for Columbus, who is involved in one case the city has against Vision. “It looks like a relationship, except instead of having the landlord take care of the property, they are putting that obligation on the tenant,” she added. Every home rented by Vision comes “as is” and has strict contractual terms that require a tenant to pay for any repairs, no matter how big. Renters are given a few months to deal with any outstanding building code violations and to make the homes habitable. In interviews, as well as in court documents, customers said they were confused by the contracts’ terms and requirements, and were not sure whether they were owners or renters. They signed their leases and put down an initial payment to reserve the right to buy the house. Unlike most typical home purchases, contracts have no requirement to obtain an independent home inspection. The customers contend they were not informed of outstanding issues with Vision homes, many of which the company had bought for $10, 000 or less. Tenants who are evicted during the tenure of these contracts walk away receiving no credit for money spent on repairs or renovations. leases are similar in many ways to contracts for deeds: installment contracts that call for the resident to make monthly payments to the seller. Unlike a contract for deed — which typically lasts 30 years, at the end of a Vision contract, tenants still need to find financing to complete the deal. The buyer does not receive legal title to the home until the last payment is made. Federal and state regulators began looking into deals after a article in The Times in February highlighted the resurgence of these transactions. Seven United States senators recently wrote to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to express concern over the lack of protections for home buyers. Still, contract for deeds are at least subject to basic regulations like the Federal Truth in Lending Act, which requires firms to detail how much interest they are charging and how many payments prospective buyers must make before they own the house. In most states, landlords are required to keep the homes and apartments that they rent in habitable condition. Some legal experts said contracts like the ones used by Vision could violate that requirement. Cincinnati, for example, has an ordinance that requires landlords to adhere to building, housing and safety codes, as well as to “make all repairs and do whatever is reasonably necessary to put and keep the premises in a fit and habitable condition. ” Judith Fox, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, said that in most states landlord obligations cannot be waived. “If it’s a lease and they are claiming that none of the obligations apply, then I would argue they have to adhere to federal truth in lending rules. ” She added, “You can’t have it both ways. ” Vision, based here, buys homes spread across 24 states through nearly two dozen limited liability companies, all with different names like MI Seven, OH Seven and Kaja Holdings. The firm advertises its properties on its website, through Craigslist and in handwritten signs posted on the lawns of properties promoting low monthly rents. Negotiations are done via phone or email, and prospective tenants are given a code to a lockbox on the door to inspect properties. inspections can be difficult with the power turned off in a home before it is bought, however. Last September, Ms. Thomas signed a lease for a home on McHenry Avenue in Cincinnati that required her to bring the property into a habitable condition within three months. Vision’s contract offered to sell her the home for $27, 000. It was only after signing the contract that Ms. Thomas, 38, learned of at least three unaddressed violations and about $5, 000 in unpaid fines. She then sought a lawyer to get out of her contract and recover her $600 initial payment. “It was like pulling teeth to get them to give me $600 of my money back,” Ms. Thomas said. Within days, Vision found another tenant, a couple who moved into the same house. None of the building code violations had been addressed. Edward Cunningham, a Cincinnati building department official, said the city had issued more than 20 notices to Vision on the property. “Communications have been very poor in this case,” he said. There are $13, 250 in unpaid citations on the McHenry home and the city has referred the matter to a collection agency. Vision bought the house from Fannie Mae for $9, 300 in 2014. Mr. Szkaradek, of Vision, said the firm had a small team that worked with municipal officials to address outstanding code violations. In subsequent emails, he said that Vision offered “a full and unconditional refund” to tenants within the first 30 days of a contract and that the firm had consulted with regulatory counsel in drafting its contract. “Our goal is to put people into houses and turn renters into homeowners,” Mr. Szkaradek said during an interview at Vision’s offices in a building on the outskirts of Columbia, S. C. He declined to comment on specific cases. Mr. Szkaradek refers to Vision’s contract as a “hybrid lease” that enables renters to build up “implied equity” with each monthly rent payment. Vision works with clients to help them through the process of managing payments, he said. Vision, which does not provide financing for tenants to buy homes, pointed to Mr. Rankin as one client it has worked with to help make a home livable. In October, Mr. Rankin moved into his home after signing a contract that valued the house at $38, 000. There was no carpeting and no linoleum on the floors, and the walls were covered with what Mr. Rankin described as a substance. These issues seemed easily fixable, though, Mr. Rankin said, because he runs his own flooring company. But not even a craftsman like Mr. Rankin was prepared for the biggest problem with the house: a condemned septic tank that the local water department said needed to be upgraded. The cost to install a new sewerage system was more than $8, 000, Mr. Rankin said. Vision helped him find a contractor to make the repairs, but it rolled the cost into a new contract that revalued the purchase price of the home to $60, 000 and increased his monthly costs by $65, to $470 a month. “Financially, they kind of stuck it to me,” Mr. Rankin said. But, he added, “when you don’t have any options and someone is willing to work with you, it’s really a blessing. ” Vision paid $10, 760 to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the house last July. “If you’re doubling your money off of people who are scraping by and you’re taking advantage of their vulnerability to enrich yourself, that is being predatory,” said Beryl Satter, the author of the 2009 book “Family Properties,” which chronicled the exploitation of black homeowners in Chicago. Nearly half of Vision’s homes were bought from Fannie Mae, the mortgage firm, according to RealtyTrac. A number of tenants and former tenants interviewed said they had hoped to buy homes from Vision either by ultimately getting a mortgage or saving cash to buy a home outright. But other tenants expressed concern they would end up losing the home. That is what happened to Heidi Anderson, 45, whose two children and partner moved into a Vision house in Vassar, Mich. last fall. They spent the winter months without heat because the furnace had been submerged in water and no longer worked. The only thing they had to keep warm during a cold Michigan winter, she said, was an electric heater and a stove in the kitchen. Ms. Anderson said she called Vision several times about the furnace, but nobody got back to her, so she stopped paying rent. In February, Vision filed a nonpayment proceeding, seeking the family’s eviction and $3, 100 in overdue rent. She sent a check to Vision, she added, but the company returned it, saying it was late. Days before Memorial Day weekend, the family moved out, before the formal eviction. They have since moved into another nearby home through a deal. It was the best option available because, Ms. Anderson said, she still could not qualify for a mortgage. “There is a little bit of work, but mostly it’s cosmetic,” she said. “The furnace works. ” | 1 |
We Are Change
Former Attorney General Janet Reno has died from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Reno was Attorney General during the Clinton administration. She was 78. (Nov. 7)
Reno, a former Miami prosecutor, served nearly eight years as attorney general under President Bill Clinton.
Reno died on Monday from complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to her granddaughter, Gabrielle D’Alemberte. Who informed the Associated Press that she died early Monday morning. She is best known in the alternative media community as serving as prosecutor and exonerating the officers involved in Ruby Ridge , Idaho, in 1992 and in Waco, Texas, in 1993. Reno was sworn in as the first female attorney general on March 12, 1993, under the administration of Bill Clinton where she served in the role until 2001.
According to Republican strategist Dick Morris, also a former adviser to President Bill Clinton. Clinton wanted to drop Reno after his first term in office but Reno threatened to tell the media that it was Clinton, not she, who ordered the raid on the compound in Waco that ended with 76 men, women, and children killed when the building was burned to the ground.
“Reno threatened the president with telling the truth about Waco, and that caused the president to back down,” he said. “Then he went into a meeting with her, and he told me that she begged and pleaded, saying that . . . she didn’t want to be fired because if she were fired it would look like he was firing her over Waco,” Morris said. ” And I knew that what that meant was that she would tell the truth about what happened in Waco. “Now, to be fair, that’s my supposition. I don’t know what went on in Waco, but that was the cause. But I do know that she told him that if you fire me, I’m going to talk about Waco.”
Morris said Clinton disliked Reno.
“That was after Clinton had told me, ‘Janet Reno was the worst mistake I ever made,'” Morris said. “He hated her.” ~ Source Follow WE ARE CHANGE on SOCIAL MEDIA SnapChat: LukeWeAreChange
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by Thomas Sowell
The good news is that we dodged a bullet in this election. The bad news is that we don’t know how many other bullets are coming, or from what direction.
A Hillary Clinton victory would have meant a third consecutive administration dedicated to dismantling the institutions that have kept America free, and imposing instead the social vision of the smug elites. That could have been the ultimate catastrophe — not just for our time, but for generations yet unborn.
In one sense, Donald Trump’s victory was a unique American event. But, in a larger sense, it represents the biggest backlash among many elsewhere, against smug elites in Western nations, where increasing numbers of ordinary people are showing their anger at where those elites are leading their countries.
There, as here, mindlessly flinging the doors open to peoples from societies whose fundamental values clash with those of the countries they enter, has been a hallmark of arrogant blindness and disregard of negative consequences suffered by ordinary people — consequences from which the elites themselves are insulated.
Nor is this the only issue on which the blindness of elites has set the stage for a political backlash. The anti-law enforcement fetish among the insulated elites has even more tragically sacrificed the safety of the general public. This too has been common on both sides of the Atlantic.
Riots in London, Manchester and other cities in England in 2011 were incredibly similar to 2014 riots in Ferguson, Missouri, 2015 riots in Baltimore and similar riots in other American cities.
The fact that the rioters in England were mostly white, while those in America were mostly black, gives the lie to the facile excuse that such riots are due to racial oppression, rather than being a result of appeasing mobs and restricting the police.
Nor is the election of Donald Trump likely to lead the elites to having second thoughts about the prevailing dogmas of their groupthink. On the morning after Mr. Trump’s upset victory over Mrs. Clinton, a newswoman at CNN mentioned the disappointment of some women that “the glass ceiling” was not shattered as expected.
What an insult to everyone’s intelligence is that catch phrase, “glass ceiling.” What does “glass” mean, if not that you cannot see the ceiling, but somehow you just know that it is there? And how do you know? Because it has been repeated so often.
It is like the fable of the emperor’s new clothes, but a fable for adults.
Demagogues like Hillary Clinton can point to the fact that women as a group do not receive as much income as men as a group. But, factual studies over the past 40 years have shown repeatedly that, when you compare women who work as many hours a year as men, and as many continuous years in the same occupations as men, the income differences shrink to the vanishing point, and sometimes even reverse.
But how many politicians or media people care about facts, when the facts go against their preconceptions?
Donald Trump’s unexpected victory should send a lot of people back to the drawing board to rethink their assumptions about many things. That includes not only the political left but also the Republican establishment. But don’t count on it.
The Republican establishment has been called many things, but introspective is not one of them. One thing they might reconsider is their assumption that they alone know just what kind of presidential candidate is needed to win elections.
But the two most surprisingly successful Republican candidates of the past half century — Ronald Reagan and now Donald Trump — bore no resemblance to the candidates who epitomized the Republican establishment’s model, such as Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney.
Among others who could also use some rethinking is Donald Trump himself. When he acted like a petulant adolescent, he may have gotten the adulation of his core constituents. But it was only toward the end, when he began to act like a responsible adult seeking the highest office in the land, that he began to overtake Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump is a wild card. We don’t know whether he was play-acting when he carried on like a juvenile lout or when he played the role of a mature adult. But he and the country could both benefit from some serious introspection on his part.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM Identity Politics in America: a Post-Mortem 0 | 0 |
A former lover of the ailing media mogul Sumner M. Redstone, who is waging a legal battle over his mental competency, made a attempt over the weekend to keep her salacious lawsuit alive. In a filing on Sunday to Judge David J. Cowan of Los Angeles County Superior Court, lawyers for the woman, Manuela Herzer, argued that the court should hear all of the evidence and not dismiss the case, as the judge indicated he might do on Friday after he heard videotaped testimony from Mr. Redstone, a billionaire. Ms. Herzer’s legal team outlined two reasons for continuing the trial: First, the lawyers said, the court should not accept Mr. Redstone’s testimony at face value. They said the court was “ to look behind the testimony to determine whether Redstone’s views are those of a man of a sound mind and whether he came to and has maintained these views absent any undue influence. ” The lawyers said that the court must hear all of the evidence from Ms. Herzer to determine the answer to those questions. Second, they said that aborting the trial after one day and three witnesses would be “a great disservice to Redstone’s best interests because, if his decisions are the product of mental illness or undue influence, the proceedings are not only reasonably necessary, but essential, to protect him. ” In their own filing on Sunday, Mr. Redstone’s lawyers appeared to take their lead from Judge Cowan’s remarks in court on Friday, when he expressed wariness over the need to wade through what he called the “all of these shenanigans” in the Redstone household. The court “need not preside over a trial regarding the breakdown of Mr. Redstone and Ms. Herzer’s relationship,” Mr. Redstone’s lawyers said in their new dismissal motion. Ms. Herzer filed suit last November, claiming that Mr. Redstone lacked the capacity to make the decision to remove her from an advance directive that would have put her in charge of his health care. She said she was waging the legal battle out of concern for Mr. Redstone’s . Lawyers for Mr. Redstone said Ms. Herzer was motivated by greed. On the same day he removed her from the health care directive, he also removed her from his personal estate plan, in which he had planned to leave her $50 million and his $20 million Los Angeles mansion. The trial began Friday with the videotape of testimony from Mr. Redstone, who has not been seen publicly for nearly a year. After viewing the video, Judge Cowan declared that Mr. Redstone had appeared to forcefully reject the notion that Ms. Herzer should be in charge of his health care, or a part of his life at all. While he said he needed the weekend to consider whether the case should continue, Judge Cowan indicated that Mr. Redstone’s testimony had raised doubts about Ms. Herzer’s position. “Your burden now is a hard one,” he told her legal team after viewing the tape. In their filing on Sunday, Ms. Herzer’s lawyers argued that Mr. Redstone’s vehemence in his testimony may result from “serious cognitive impairment,” and manipulation by his daughter, Shari Redstone. Mr. Redstone’s outbursts “do not indicate that he had capacity, but rather confirm that he lacks” it, they argue. The filing said that to terminate the trial without hearing further evidence would risk setting a precedent with “widespread implications” for hospitals, lawyers and others involved in elder care. “It cannot be that an elderly person — particularly an elderly individual whom everyone agrees is susceptible to undue influence — can simply state what he wants, and have that accepted as gospel,” the filing said. Mr. Redstone’s lawyers rejected the suggestion that he was manipulated. “Of course, there is not a scintilla of evidence that Mr. Redstone actually wants Ms. Herzer in his life, but was unduly influenced to testify otherwise,” the dismissal motion said. The Redstone team also reiterated a caution it has raised repeatedly: that the salacious details being presented by Ms. Herzer’s lawyers are compromising Mr. Redstone’s “privacy and dignity. ” The possibility of dismissal after one day of testimony opened a path by which Mr. Redstone’s side might quickly prevail in the case. But the first day’s harsh testimony and the lurid details in pretrial filings had already subjected the Redstone family to acute embarrassment, and raised substantial questions about Mr. Redstone’s continued role in his publicly held companies. Mr. Redstone is a director, chairman emeritus and controlling shareholder of CBS and Viacom, two of the world’s largest media companies. The videotaped testimony presented in court on Friday remained confidential, but a transcript that was made public showed a fiery, yet somewhat feeble, man. Mr. Redstone repeatedly referred to Ms. Herzer in expletives and said that he did not want her to be in his life or to make health care decisions for him. Mr. Redstone responded to some basic questions — especially those that had yes or no responses — but struggled with others. When asked what his birth name had been, for instance, he remained silent. Yet Mr. Redstone did say that he hated Ms. Herzer. When asked about whether he wanted Ms. Herzer to make health care decisions for him, he said, “No. ” He said that the wanted his daughter to make health care decisions if he is unable to do so himself. Also on the witness stand was Dr. Stephen L. Read, a psychiatrist testifying for the Herzer side, who examined Mr. Redstone in late January and said that he lacked capacity and that his “arithmetic was appallingly bad. ” In one example, he said that Mr. Redstone did a poor job when he was presented with a simple array of colored shapes — circles, triangles, stars and squares — and asked to identify them by pointing. In court documents over the last five and half months, Ms. Herzer detailed claims about Mr. Redstone’s incontinence, demands to eat steak while on a feeding tube, and obsession with various lovers. In turn, lawyers for Mr. Redstone asserted that Ms. Herzer exploited their relationship for financial gain. They said that between last August and a period when Ms. Herzer said she was occupied by taking care of Mr. Redstone’s health care, she charged more than $265, 000 to his American Express card. The legal drama has riveted both Hollywood and Wall Street. A decision by the judge that Mr. Redstone was incompetent could set off a contentious succession plan for the two biggest companies in his $42 billion media empire. Upon death, or if he is deemed incompetent, Mr. Redstone’s interests in CBS and Viacom are to be held by an irrevocable trust that was created for his five grandchildren. Among the trust’s seven voting members are Ms. Redstone and Philippe P. Dauman, the chief executive of Viacom. Ms. Redstone and Mr. Dauman have disagreed on how the company should be managed. | 1 |
What if you gave a party and everybody came? That is precisely what occurred on the drizzly night of Nov. 28, 1966, when 540 of Truman Capote’s nearest and dearest turned out for what the writer insisted on calling his “little masked ball for Kay Graham and all of my friends. ” The evening survives on film and in the recollections of the guests who are still alive 50 years later. It was a party of a kind we are unlikely to see again, given that it allowed for a then but now more common, coming together of disparate social spheres. “There will never be another first time that somebody like Andy Warhol could step into a room with somebody like Babe Paley,” said Deborah Davis, the author of the 2006 book “Party of the Century: The Fabulous Story of Truman Capote and the Black and White Ball,” referring to one of Capote’s swans — the socialite wife of William Paley, who built the CBS network. Before the Black and White Ball, no one had ever imagined, let alone attended, a formal party with a guest list so wildly catholic that it brought into one room the poet Marianne Moore and Frank Sinatra, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lionel Trilling, Lynda Bird Johnson and the Maharani of Jaipur, the Italian princess Luciana Pignatelli (wearing a diamond borrowed from Harry Winston) and the documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles. When Capote summoned his pals for a night of dancing (and spaghetti and chicken hash at midnight) he was as famous as he would ever be, and flush with the profits from his critically acclaimed nonfiction book “In Cold Blood. ” In the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza hotel, starting at 10 o’clock that night, European aristocrats rubbed elbows with novelists and scholars social register blue bloods drank Taittinger Champagne with the denizens of Hollywood and Broadway the stolid citizens of Garden City, Kan. who had played host to Capote during the years he had spent researching his masterpiece, danced to the Peter Duchin Orchestra alongside the photographer and film director Gordon Parks, who would later joke that he — along with Harry Belafonte and Ralph and Fanny Ellison — represented “the black of the Black and White Ball. ” In the since that Monday evening just after Thanksgiving, countless other parties have evoked, interpreted or outright copied Capote’s ball. “There are probably more Black and White Balls at this point than Civil War ” Ms. Davis said. Most memorably, perhaps, the mogul Sean Combs used the party as a template for a wingding he tossed for himself in 1998, reportedly spending more than $500, 000 to furnish Cipriani with a translucent monogrammed dance floor and Plexiglas booths for the amusement of a collection of celebrities, among them Martha Stewart, Ronald Perelman, Sarah Ferguson and Donald J. Trump. Now it is difficult to recall a time when the borders between society and celebrity were sharply delineated and seldom crossed. And in an era when many celebrities attend parties because they have been paid to do so (and post the evidence later on Instagram) it is startling to remember a time when people went to parties to have fun. A certain indulgent pleasure can be had in reliving the innocent wonder that inspired Capote’s Black and White Ball, a party its host had in some ways begun to plan as a precocious, lonely in Monroeville, Ala. but did not have the social power to pull off until the year of his huge literary success. “Truman had always had a fantasy of the grand world, the smart world, the literary world, each of which was in some ways precious to him,” said Robert Silvers, a founder and editor of The New York Review of Books. “It was tremendously important to Truman to be a star in all of those worlds,” he added, referring the elites of heredity and of accomplishment Capote cultivated with equivalent ardor. “The mixture of all those groups was so obviously an emanation of Truman’s dream. ” Even after a the party retains a dreamlike aura, one supported by photographs and newsreels that show the guests in black tie and monochrome couture dresses, masks by Adolfo and a young milliner who went by the single name Halston. Sometimes buried in the retellings of the Black and White Ball myth is its guest of honor, Katharine Graham, whose family owned Newsweek and The Washington Post. After the suicide three years earlier of her husband, Philip Graham, Ms. Graham, who would go on to run the newspaper for two of the most noteworthy decades in its storied history, seemed thrust into a role for which she had little preparation, said one party guest, the psychotherapist Gillian Walker. Raised in elite Washington circles, Ms. Walker was a childhood friend of Ms. Graham’s children and thus had a singular perspective on how power was distributed in those years. “For all those women, those swans, however fancy they were, or whatever, they were still wives,” Ms. Walker said, referring to Ms. Graham, Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Gloria Vanderbilt and Gloria Guinness. “Because of the complexities of his own life, Truman as an outsider understood these women. And what he did for Kay was such a great thing, giving her this party that brought her into the larger world she had left behind when she met Phil. ” The reserves of compassion that were characteristic of his best writing were deeply ingrained in Capote’s nature. Or they were, at least, in the days before his big party, which some consider the writer’s unintended swan song, a final golden moment before he began a descent into drugs and drink. “People forget Truman was very gracious,” said Ashton Hawkins, for decades the senior counsel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who was a lawyer on the way up in 1966. He recalled the host taking him by the arm and steering him toward a corner of the ballroom, where Rose Kennedy was stranded alone. “I thought that was fun, that you could sit down with the mother of the president,” Mr. Hawkins said. “Everybody talked to everybody and just sat down where they wanted to sit. ” The relatively loose atmosphere led the bandleader Peter Duchin to later characterize the ball as having “closed an era of elegant exclusiveness and ushered in another of media madness. ” “It was a marvelous party because there was such a mixture of people, all kinds, all ages,” said the jeweler Kenneth Jay Lane, who, at 34, was among the younger attendees. The big moment of the evening for him, Mr. Lane said, was being walked to a gilded settee where the actress Tallulah Bankhead sat holding court and furiously smoking. “I talked to her for about three minutes, but then could say I’d met Tallulah Bankhead,” Mr. Lane said with a laugh. “In the old days, it wasn’t a publicist society, and now it’s all publicists. People then had publicists to keep their names out of the papers, and nobody’d ever been to Kardashia. ” From the first, Mr. Capote had a canny understanding of fame and a prescient sense of celebrity’s untapped potential. Limiting press attendance inside the party to four journalists — including one, Charlotte Curtis, from this newspaper — he heightened its air of exclusivity while managing potential criticism about the affair’s overall modesty. European guests familiar with, say, the heady opulence of Carlos de Beistegui’s 1951 masked ball held at the Palazzo Labia in Venice, were heard to snipe about Capote’s modest supper menu and décor. Yet, in a sense, they were missing the point. Capote understood that the ball’s true ornaments were its boldface attendees, even going so far as to provide The Times with a guest list, which the newspaper published the following day. Never mind that some of those listed, like Greta Garbo, were not actually at the party. The effect had been achieved. Before The Times published a “List of Those Who Were Invited to the Party at the Plaza Hotel,” that distinction had been reserved mainly for White House dinners and the like. In many ways, the Black and White Ball served as a signpost pointing the way to Kardashia, that mythical land where accomplishment is largely optional and fame is an end unto itself. And it also served to help blur forever the lines separating public from private. Of the attendees wearing masks, “There was something radically democratic in the notion of inviting these very famous people to a party and then telling them to hide their faces,” Ms. Davis said. At the last minute, though, the canny host had someone announce each of the guests as they arrived. Almost until that night 50 years ago, said the editor and publisher Jason Epstein, New York society observed the rigid system it had followed since the Knickerbocker days, one dominated by a handful of families not much different from those depicted by Edith Wharton and Henry James. “Then here came this gay fellow who conquered society to the extent that he gave that party,” Mr. Epstein said. “Truman created this new class of talented, funny people, and that lasted for quite a long time. Who really knows what is society in New York anymore?” | 1 |
Trending Articles: Trending Articles: John Podesta's Best Friend At The DOJ Will Be In Charge Of The DOJ's Probe Into Huma Abedin Emails Source: Zero Hedge
Now that the FBI has obtained the needed warrant to start poring over the 650,000 or so emails uncovered in Anthony Weiner's notebook, among which thousands of emails sent from Huma Abedin using Hillary Clinton's personal server, moments ago the US Justice Department announced it is also joining the probe, and as AP reported moments ago, vowed to dedicate all needed resources to quickly review the over half a million emails in the Clinton case. BREAKING: Justice Dept. says it'll dedicate all needed resources to quickly review emails in Clinton case.
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 31, 2016
In the letter to Congress, the DOJ writes that it “will continue to work closely with the FBI and together, dedicate all necessary resources and take appropriate steps as expeditiously as possible,” assistant attorney General Peter J. Kadzik writes in letters to House and Senate lawmakers. #BREAKING Senior DOJ official sends letter to lawmakers responding to request for more information about email review. #8days pic.twitter.com/PCgT2ODkQd
— Just the Facts (@JTF_News) October 31, 2016
So far so good, even if one wonders just how active the DOJ will be in a case that has shown an unprecedented schism between the politically influenced Department of Justice and the FBI.
And yet, something felt odd about this.
Kadzik... Kadzik... where have we heard that name?
Oh yes. Recall our post from last week, " Clinton Campaign Chair Had Dinner With Top DOJ Official One Day After Hillary's Benghazi Hearing " in which we reported that John Podesta had dinner with one of the highest ranked DOJ officials the very day after Hillary Clinton's Benghazi testimony?
It was Peter Kadzik.
In other words, the best friend of John Podesta, Clinton's Campaign char, at the DOJ will be in charge of a probe that could potentially sink Hillary Clinton.
For those who missed it, this is what we reported previously:
The day after Hillary Clinton testified in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last October, John Podesta, Hillary's campaign chairman met for dinner with a small group of well-connected friends, including Peter Kadzik, who is currently a top official at the US Justice Department serving as Assistant Attorney General for Legislative Affairs.
The post-Benghazi dinner was attended by Podesta, Kadzik, superlobbyist Vincent Roberti and other well-placed Beltway fixtures. The first mention of personal contact between Podesta and Kadzik in the Wikileaks dump is in an Oct. 23, 2015 email sent out by Vincent Roberti, a lobbyist who is close to Podesta and his superlobbyist brother, Tony Podesta. In it, Roberti refers to a dinner reservation at Posto, a Washington D.C. restaurant. The dinner was set for 7:30 that evening, just one day after Clinton gave 11 hours of testimony to the Benghazi Committee.
Podesta and Kadzik met several months later for dinner at Podesta’s home, another email shows . Another email sent on May 5, 2015 , Kadzik’s son asked Podesta for a job on the Clinton campaign.
As the Daily Caller noted , the dinner arrangement "is just the latest example of an apparent conflict of interest between the Clinton campaign and the federal agency charged with investigating the former secretary of state’s email practices." As one former U.S. Attorney tells told the DC, the exchanges are another example of the Clinton campaign’s “cozy relationship” with the Obama Justice Department.
The hacked emails confirm that Podesta and Kadzik were in frequent contact. In one email from January, Kadzik and Podesta, who were classmates at Georgetown Law School in the 1970s, discussed plans to celebrate Podesta’s birthday. And in another sent last May, Kadzik’s son emailed Podesta asking for a job on the Clinton campaign.
“The political appointees in the Obama administration, especially in the Department of Justice, appear to be very partisan in nature and I don’t think had clean hands when it comes to the investigation of the private email server,” says Matthew Whitaker, the executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, a government watchdog group.
“It’s the kind of thing the American people are frustrated about is that the politically powerful have insider access and have these kind of relationships that ultimately appear to always break to the benefit of Hillary Clinton,” he added, comparing the Podesta-Kadzik meetings to the revelation that Attorney General Loretta Lynch met in private with Bill Clinton at the airport in Phoenix days before the FBI and DOJ investigating Hillary Clinton.
Kadzik's role at the DOJ, where he started in 2013, is particularly notable Kadzik, as helped spearhead the effort to nominate Lynch, who was heavily criticized for her secret meeting with the former president.
It gets better because, as we further revealed, if there is one person in the DOJ who is John Podesta's, and thus the Clinton Foundation's inside man, it is Peter Kadjik.
Kadzik represented Podesta during the Monica Lewinsky investigation. And in the waning days of the Bill Clinton administration, Kadzik lobbied Podesta on behalf of Marc Rich, the fugitive who Bill Clinton controversially pardoned on his last day in office. That history is cited by Podesta in another email hacked from his Gmail account. In a Sept. 2008 email , which the Washington Free Beacon flagged last week, Podesta emailed an Obama campaign official to recommend Kadzik for a supportive role in the campaign. Podesta, who would later head up the Obama White House transition effort, wrote that Kadzik was a “fantastic lawyer” who “kept me out of jail.”
Podesta was caught in a sticky situation in both the Lewinsky affair and the Rich pardon scandal. As deputy chief of staff to Clinton in 1996, Podesta asked then-United Nations ambassador Bill Richardson to hire the 23-year-old Lewinsky . In April 1996, the White House transferred Lewinsky from her job as a White House intern to the Pentagon in order to keep her and Bill Clinton separate. But the Clinton team also wanted to keep Lewinsky happy so that she would not spill the beans about her sexual relationship with Clinton.
Richardson later recounted in his autobiography that he offered Lewinsky the position but that she declined it.
Podesta made false statements to a grand jury impaneled by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr for the investigation . But he defended the falsehoods, saying later that he was merely relaying false information from Clinton that he did not know was inaccurate at the time. “He did lie to me,” Podesta said about Clinton in a National Public Radio interview in 1998. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in Feb. 1999 of perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to the Lewinsky probe. Kadzik, then a lawyer with the firm Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky, represented Podesta through the fiasco.
Podesta had been promoted to Clinton’s chief of staff when he and Kadzik became embroiled in another scandal.
Kadzik was then representing Marc Rich, a billionaire financier who was wanted by the U.S. government for evading a $48 million tax bill. The fugitive, who was also implicated in illegal trading activity with nations that sponsored terrorism, had been living in Switzerland for 17 years when he sought the pardon. To help Rich, Kadzik lobbied Podesta heavily in the weeks before Clinton left office on Jan. 20, 2001. A House Oversight Committee report released in May 2002 stated that “Kadzik was recruited into Marc Rich’s lobbying campaign because he was a long-time friend of White House Chief of Staff John Podesta.”
The report noted that Kadzik contacted Podesta at least seven times regarding Rich’s pardon. On top of the all-hands-on-deck lobbying effort, Rich’s ex-wife, Denise Rich, had doled out more than $1 million to the Clintons and other Democrats prior to the pardon . She gave $100,000 to Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate campaign and another $450,000 to the Clinton presidential library.
Kadzik's current role
In his current role as head of the Office of Legislative Affairs, Kadzik handles inquiries from Congress on a variety of issues. In that role he was not in the direct chain of command on the Clinton investigation. The Justice Department and FBI have insisted that career investigators oversaw the investigation, which concluded in July with no charges filed against Clinton.
But Kadzik worked on other Clinton email issues in his dealings with Congress. Last November, he denied a request from Republican lawmakers to appoint a special counsel to lead the investigation.
In a Feb. 1, 2016 letter in response to Kadzik, Florida Rep. Ron DeSantis noted that Kadzik had explained “that special counsel may be appointed at the discretion of the Attorney General when an investigation or prosecution by the Department of Justice would create a potential conflict of interest.”
DeSantis, a Republican, suggested that Lynch’s appointment by Bill Clinton in 1999 as U.S. Attorney in New York may be considered a conflict of interest. He also asserted that Obama’s political appointees — a list which includes Kadzik —“are being asked to impartially execute their respective duties as Department of Justice officials that may involve an investigation into the activities of the forerunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.”
It is unknown if Kadzik responded to DeSantis’ questions.
Kadzik’s first involvement in the Clinton email brouhaha came in a Sept. 24, 2015 response letter to Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley in which he declined to confirm or deny whether the DOJ was investigating Clinton. Last month, Politico reported that Kadzik angered Republican lawmakers when, in a classified briefing, he declined to say whether Clinton aides who received DOJ immunity were required to cooperate with congressional probes.
Kadzik also testified at a House Oversight Committee hearing last month on the issue of classifications and redactions in the FBI’s files of the Clinton email investigation.
Finally, it is also worth noting that Kadzik's wife, Amy Weiss , currently at Weiss Public Affairs worked on the 1992 Clinton/Gore Campaign as a Press Secretary, and Communications Director for the Democratic National Committee, and a White House Deputy Assistant to the President/ Deputy Press Secretary to President Bill Clinton.
* * *
And now it seems that Kadzik will be in charge of the DOJ's "probe" into Huma Abedin's emails. Which is why we are a little skeptical the DOJ will find "anything" of note. | 0 |
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President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order on religious liberty issues on Thursday — the National Day of Prayer. [According to Politico, two White House senior officials confirmed that Trump will sign the order but would not release the details of the latest draft. A prior draft of the order, however — leaked to the Nation in February — reportedly would “create wholesale exemptions for people and organizations who claim religious objections to marriage, premarital sex, abortion, and trans identity. ” The leak of the original draft to the Nation, says Politico, was “the handiwork, many conservatives believed, of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who have sought to project themselves as friendly to the LGBT community. ” Leftwing groups condemned the draft executive order as overtly discriminatory. The Nation continued: The draft order, a copy of which is currently circulating among federal staff and advocacy organizations, construes religious organizations so broadly that it covers “any organization, including closely held corporations,” and protects “religious freedom” in every walk of life: “when providing social services, education, or healthcare earning a living, seeking a job, or employing others receiving government grants or contracts or otherwise participating in the marketplace, the public square, or interfacing with Federal, State or local governments. In a statement released Wednesday, Father Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, said the report of the order is “very welcome news. ” “Speaking as one who has spent the last five years in federal courts — and who is still in court — defending the right of religious groups and individuals to practice our beliefs, President Trump’s anticipated executive order is cause for celebration,” Pavone said. “For far too long, government has been trying to confine faith to the four walls of houses of worship. I’m confident that President Trump’s order will reinforce the Constitution’s guarantee that our religious beliefs are to be protected, not attacked. ” Reports of the new executive order come amid complaints that the Trump Department of Justice is still continuing its contraceptive mandate cases against religious such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. Catholic News Agency reports the plaintiffs in these cases expected the federal government would drop its appeals once Trump took office. However, the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty — which represents many of the plaintiffs in the HHS contraceptive mandate cases — observed that the Obama administration’s lawyers who litigated these cases are still on board in the Trump Department of Justice. During his presidential campaign, Trump had promised faith leaders and employers relief from the Obamacare mandate that requires most employers to provide contraception, drugs, and sterilization procedures to their workers in health insurance plans. In a letter to the Catholic Leadership Conference last October, Trump told Catholic leaders prior to the November election that Hillary Clinton’s support for the HHS mandate “is a hostility to religious liberty you will never see in a Trump Administration. ” Trump wrote: On life, I am, and will remain, . I will defend your religious liberties and the right to fully and freely practice your religion, as individuals, business owners and academic institutions. I will make absolutely certain religious orders like The Little Sisters of Poor are not bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs. “We are grateful to have a president who is committed to defending a value so basic to Americans as religious freedom,” Pavone said. “We look forward not only to his executive actions, but also to legislation that will further protect religious liberty from unjust government mandates and from the oppressive restrictions of such measures as the Johnson Amendment. ” | 1 |
Accuracy in Media – by Cliff Kincaid
In one of her secret speeches, Hillary Clinton said, “My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders…” Before this comment was revealed, Adam Taylor of The Washington Post tried to assure everyone that the idea of a North American Union, like the meddlesome and bureaucratic European Union, was dead. Such talk, he said, emanated from “fringe websites” and “conspiracy theorists.”
The Hillary speech was made to a Brazilian bank known as Itaú BBA, which describes itself as “Latin America’s largest Corporate & Investment Bank” and part of the Itaú Unibanco group, “one of the world’s largest financial conglomerates.”
The problem for Taylor and other faux journalists is that there is a whole body of research on the topic of a “ North American Law Project ,” designed to integrate the legal systems of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The project is run out of American University’s Center for North American Studies, where students can concentrate in North American Studies . As a matter of fact, such degrees are being offered by several different colleges and universities, including Canada’s McGill University .
Passed in 1993, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, began the process of harmonizing laws among the U.S., Canada and Mexico. But the Council on Foreign Relations admits that the U.S.-Mexico trade balance swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $54 billion deficit by 2014. This has led to a loss of about 600,000 jobs.
In addition to shipping jobs to Mexico, NAFTA constituted subversion of our constitutional system. President Clinton submitted NAFTA as an agreement, requiring only a majority of votes in both Houses of Congress for passage, and not a treaty, which would have required a two-thirds vote in favor in the Senate. NAFTA passed by votes of 234-200 in the House and 61-38 in the Senate.
A money crash soon followed in 1995 as Mexico was hit by a peso crisis, and a U.S. bailout was arranged. Congress would not bail out Mexico, so Clinton arranged for loans and guarantees to Mexico totaling almost $40 billion through the International Monetary Fund and the “Exchange Stabilization Fund.”
Meanwhile, pressure has been building for the creation of a “North American Community”—also known as a “North American Union”—with regular meetings involving the leaders of the three countries. On June 29, 2016, the Obama White House issued a fact sheet on this year’s “North American Leaders’ Summit.” It said, “The economies of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are deeply integrated. Canada and Mexico are our second and third largest trading partners. Our trade with them exceeds $1.2 trillion dollars annually.”
The leaders of these countries agreed to establish a “North American Caucus” to “more effectively work in concert on regional and global issues by holding semi-annual coordination meetings among our foreign ministries.” One item on the agenda was for the leaders to reaffirm “North America’s strong support for [Colombian] President Santos’s efforts to finalize a peace accord with the FARC guerrillas.” That fell apart on October 2 when a “peace deal” with the communist terrorists was voted down by the people of Colombia.
But notice how these leaders claim to speak for “North America.”
Going global, they also declared, “North America is committed to joint and coordinated actions to implement the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Addis Ababa Action Agenda.”
This is U.N.-speak for global taxes and other forms of foreign aid from the U.S. to the rest of the world.
We noted in a column last year that the American people, through their elected representatives, have had absolutely no input in developing the new global agenda that President Obama has tried to implement without the input or approval of Congress.
Interestingly, one of those deeply involved in this global agenda, as we noted at the time, was John Podesta, the chairman of the 2016 Hillary Clinton presidential campaign who previously served as counselor to Obama. Podesta’s emails are at the center of the WikiLeaks disclosures about the operations of the Clinton campaign, the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic Party.
Podesta, founder of the George Soros-funded Center for American Progress and a member of the elitist Trilateral Commission , went to work for Obama as a senior policy consultant on climate change. A liberal Catholic, he has been a professor at Georgetown Law School. One of the leaked emails shows Podesta saying that he applauds the work of Pope Francis on climate change and that “all my Jesuit friends say the Pope is the real deal.”
Podesta was picked by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to be a member of the “high-level panel” of “eminent persons” planning the future of the globe. This so-called “High Level Panel on the Post-2015 Development Agenda” released an 81-page report titled, “A New Global Partnership: Eradicate Poverty and Transform Economies through Sustainable Development.”
“In simplest terms,” explains Patrick Wood, author of Technocracy Rising: The Trojan Horse of Global Transformation , “Sustainable Development is a replacement economic system for capitalism and free enterprise. It is a system based on resource allocation and usage rather than on supply and demand and free economic market forces.”
In this context, Wood argues that the major significance of the transfer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is not the immediate need by the U.N. or some countries to censor websites, but to generate revenue for global purposes. ICANN will do this, he argues, through management of the so-called Internet of Things (IoT), the links between the Internet and networks, electronic devices and embedded technology with IP addresses. “IoT are the connections between inanimate objects and the humans that depend upon them,” he notes. To accomplish this, ICANN has devised a new IP numbering system called IPV6, described as the “ vital expansion ” of the Internet.
“In terms of ‘follow the money,’ IoT is expected to generate upwards of $3 trillion by 2025 and is growing at a rate of at least 30 percent per year,” Wood argues . “In other words, it is a huge market and money is flying everywhere. If the UN can figure out a way to tax this market, and they will, it will provide a windfall of income and perhaps enough to make it self-perpetuating.”
He adds, “Congress never understood this when they passively let Obama fail to renew our contract with ICANN. However, Obama and his globalist handlers understood it perfectly well, which makes the deception and treachery of it even worse.”
Under the cover of “sustainable development,” Wood predicts the Internet will be used to construct a massive database on human activities, in order to monitor and control nations’ and peoples’ access to resources. It will constitute ultimate socialist control and a form of “digital slavery,” from which he warns there may be no return.
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . | 0 |
9 down, a billion more to go | 0 |
Zero Hedge
Project Veritas has just released Part IV of it's multi-part series exposing numerous scandals surrounding the DNC and the Clinton campaign, including efforts to incite violence at Trump rallies and, at least what seems to be, illegal coordination between the DNC, Hillary For America and various Super PACs.
Part IV focuses on a $20,000 foreign donation made by an undercover Project Veritas journalist to Americans United for Change (AUFC). Ironically, shortly after the $20k donation wire was released, the contributor's "niece" was offered an internship with Creamer's firm, Democracy Partners.
In the new video, Creamer says: “Every morning I am on a call at 10:30 that goes over the message being driven by the campaign headquarters … I am in this campaign mainly to deal with what earned media with television, radio, with earned media and social media, not with paid media, not with advertising.” He also mentions a conference call discussing a woman potentially coming forward to accuse Trump of inappropriate behavior.
Creamer, a seasoned Chicago activist who is married to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), whose Republican opponent, Joan McCarthy Lasonde has called for her to resign over her husband’s activities, also talks about his work with Barack Obama, whom he says he has known since the 1980s, when Obama was a community organizer in Chicago: “He’s a pro, I’ve known the President since he was a community organizer in Chicago.”
Elsewhere, Creamer adds: “I do a lot of work with the White House on their issues, helping to run issue campaigns that they have been involved in. I mean, for immigration reform for the… the health care bill, for trying to make America more like Britain when it comes to gun violence issues.” | 0 |
Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos said President Donald Trump was “in a bit of denial amid these big questions” about his competence and credibility. Stephanopoulos said, “Picking up on what you were saying, also sort of fixing problems, you have to first confront them, accept them. It does seem like the president is in a bit of denial amid these big questions about both his competence which you saw Senator Schumer raise and his credibility. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
Tasmanian Devil Milk is capable of killing the most deadly superbugs
Thursday, October 27, 2016 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer Tags: superbugs , drug resistance , Tasmanian Devils (NaturalNews) Milk from Tasmanian devils and other marsupials may be a natural cure for antibiotic-resistant infections, suggests a study conducted by researchers from the University of Sydney and published in the journal Scientific Reports. The researchers found that the milk contains no fewer than six compounds capable of killing some of the world's worst superbugs .Unlike placental mammals (including humans), which gestate their young within the mother's body, marsupials give birth after just a few weeks to highly immature offspring -- mobile fetuses, essentially -- that still need to complete significant development in their mother's pouch.In particular, the immune systems of newborn marsupials are highly underdeveloped. Because a marsupial's pouch is a significantly less controlled environment than a placental mammal's uterus, researchers wondered if newborn marsupials might need -- and get -- an extra immune boost. Six times as potent as human milk? A previous study, conducted in 2015, cataloged many of the microbes that naturally make up the microbiome of the Tasmanian devil's pouch. These included several disease-causing organisms."There are potential pathogens present in the devil microbiome, so the fact that the under-developed young in the pouch don't get sick was a clue something interesting was going on," co-author Emma Peel said. "That's what inspired our most recent study."For the new study, the researchers analyzed the Tasmanian devil's genome for genes coding for antimicrobial peptides called cathelicidins. They found that Tasmanian devil milk contains six different types of cathelicidin.For comparison, human milk, with all its antimicrobial and immune-boosting properties, contains just a single cathelicidin.The researchers artificially synthesized the peptides, then tested them against several known superbugs, including methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and Enterococci. The peptides killed every type of microbe they were tested against. Although the researchers had expected to find some antimicrobial effect, the potency of the peptides surprised them."We showed that these devil peptides kill multi-drug resistant bacteria," Peel said, "which is really cool."Many marsupials have even more cathelicidins in their milk than Tasmanian devils. Wallabies have eight, for instance, while opossums (a Western hemisphere species) have 12.Preliminary results have also shown that similar antimicrobial peptides are found in koala milk. The global threat of superbugs Although MRSA has gotten most of the media attention, other superbugs such as Enterococci can also be highly dangerous. These bacteria -- which, like MRSA, often naturally occur on or in the human body -- can cause infections at several different sites. While such infections are minor if treated, Enterococci are growing increasingly antibiotic resistant.Health experts were alarmed recently when more strains of Enterococcus started turning up resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin."Vancomycin is a pretty potent antibiotic and if a bug is resistant to that, then there aren't a lot of drug options available to you," Peel said.Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organization, recently called antibiotic resistance "a fundamental threat to human health, development and security".And the United Kingdom's Review on Antimicrobial Resistance recently concluded that unless urgent action is taken to stem the spread of drug resistance , superbugs will kill 10 million people annually by 2050. That's more than the combined death toll of cancer and diabetes.Shockingly, that review estimated deaths from only six varieties of superbug: Klebsiella pneumoniae, E. coli, MRSA, HIV, TB and malaria.Researchers estimate that today, superbugs kill "only" 700,000 people a year. The number is expected to rise so dramatically due to the spread of drug-resistance genes through microbial populations, combined with the ongoing evolution of resistance to new drugs.The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance also failed to estimate the deaths that would come from people being unable to gain medical care, such as surgery or cancer treatment, that would be lethal without the use of reliable antibiotics. Sources for this article include: | 0 |
shorty PEPE ESCOBAR “Your honors, in this venue I announce my separation from the United States…both in military and economics also.” T hus Philippines President Rodrigo “The Punisher” Duterte unleashed a geopolitical earthquake encompassing Eurasia and reverberating all across the Pacific Ocean.
And talk about choosing his venue with aplomb; right in the heart of the Rising Dragon, no less.
Capping his state visit to Beijing, Duterte then coined the mantra – pregnant with overtones – that will keep ringing all across the global South; “America has lost.”
And if that was not enough, he announced a new alliance – Philippines, China and Russia – is about to emerge; “there are three of us against the world.”
Predictably, the Beltway establishment in the “indispensable nation” went bananas, reacting as “puzzled” or in outright anger, dispersing the usual expletives on the “crude populist”, “unhinged leader”.
The bottom line is that it takes a lot of balls for the leader of a poor, developing country, in Southeast Asia or elsewhere, to openly defy the hyperpower. Yet what Duterte is gaming at is pure realpolitik; if he prevails, he will be able to deftly play the US against China to the benefit of Filipino interests.
“The springtime of our relationship”
It did start with a bang; during Duterte’s China visit, Manila inked no less than $13 billion in deals with Beijing – from trade and investment to drug control, maritime security and infrastructure.
Beijing pulled out all stops to make Duterte feel welcomed.
President Xi Jinping suggested Manila and Beijing should “temporarily put aside” the intractable South China Sea disputes and learn from the “political wisdom” of history – as in give space to diplomatic talks. After all, the two peoples were “blood-linked brothers.”
Duterte replied in kind; “Even as we arrive in Beijing close to winter, this is the springtime of our relationship,” he told Xi at the Great Hall of the People.
China is already the Philippines’ second-largest trade partner, behind Japan, the US and Singapore. Filipino exports to these three are at roughly 42.7 percent of the total, compared to 22.1 to China/Hong Kong. Imports from China are roughly 16.1 percent of the total. Even as trade with China is bound to rise, what really matters for Duterte is massive Chinese infrastructure investment.
What this will mean in practice is indeed ground-breaking; the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will definitely be involved in Philippine economic development; Manila will be more involved in promoting smooth China-ASEAN relations in all sorts of regional issues (it takes the rotating chair of ASEAN in 2017); and the Philippines will be more integrated in the New Silk Roads, a.k.a. One Belt, One Road (OBOR).
Three strikes; no wonder the US is out. And there’s even a fourth strike, embedded in Duterte’s promise that he will soon end military cooperation with the US, despite the opposition of part of the Filipino armed forces.
Watch the First Island Chain
The build-up had already been dramatic enough. On the eve of his meeting with Xi, talking to members of the Filipino community in Beijing, Duterte said, “it’s time to say goodbye” to the US; “I will not ask but if they (the Chinese) offer and if they’ll ask me, do you need this aid? [I will say] Of course, we are very poor.”
Then the clincher; “I will not go to America anymore … We will just be insulted there.” Naval Base Subic Bay was a major ship-repair, supply, and rest and recreation facility of the Spanish Navy and subsequently the United States Navy located in Olongapo, Zambales, Philippines. The base was 262 square miles, about the size of Singapore. It was finally turned over to the Filipino government in 1992.
The US was the colonial power in the Philippines from 1899 to 1942. Hollywood permeates the collective unconscious. English is the lingua franca – side by side with tagalog. But the tentacles of Uncle Sam’s “protection” racket are not exactly welcomed. Two of the largest components of the US Empire of Bases were located for decades in the Philippines; Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Base.
Clark, occupying 230 square miles, with 15,000 people, was busy to death during the Vietnam War – the main hub for men and hardware in and out of Saigon. Then it turned into one of those Pentagon “forward operating” HQs. Subic, occupying 260 square miles, was as busy as Clark. It was the forward operating base for the US 7th Fleet.
Already in 1987, before the end of the Cold War, the RAND corporation was alarmed by the loss of both bases; that would be “devastating for regional security”. Devastating” in the – mythical – sense of “defending the interests of ASEAN” and the “security of the sea-lanes”.
Translation; the Pentagon and the US Navy would lose a key instrument of pressure over ASEAN, as protecting the “security of the sea-lanes” was always the key justification for those bases.
And lose they eventually did; Clark was closed down in November 1991, and Subic in November 1992.
It took years for China to sense an opening – and profit from it; after all during the 1990s and the early 2000s, the absolute priority was breakneck speed internal development. But then Beijing did the math; no more US bases opened untold vistas as far as the First Island Chain is concerned.
The First Island Chain is a product, over millennia, of the fabulous tectonic forces of the Ring of Fire; a chain of islands running from southern Japan in the north to Borneo in the south. For Beijing, they work as a sort of shield for the Chinese eastern seaboard; if this chain is secure, Asia is secure.
For all practical purposes, Beijing considers the First Island Chain as a non-negotiable Western Pacific demarcation zone – ideally with no foreign (as in US) interference. The South China Sea – which in parts is characterized by Manila as the Western Philippine Sea – is inside the First Island Chain. So to really secure the First Island Chain, the South China Sea must be free of foreign interference.
And here we are plunged at the heart of arguably the key 21st century hotspot in Asian geopolitics – the main reason for the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia.
The US Navy so far counted on the Philippines to oppose the proverbial, hyped up “Chinese aggression” in the South China and East China seas. The neocon/neoliberalcon industrial-military complex fury against “unhinged” Duterte’s game-changer is that containing China and ruling over the First Island Chain has been at the core of US naval strategy since the beginning of the Cold War.
Beijing, meanwhile, will have all the time needed to polish its strategic environment. This has nothing to do with “freedom of navigation” and protecting sea-lanes; everyone needs South China Sea cross-trade. It’s all about China – perhaps within the next ten years – being able to deny “access” to the US Navy in the South China Sea and inside the First Island Chain.
Duterte’s game-changing “America has lost” is just a new salvo in arguably the key 21st century geopolitical thriller. A Supreme Court justice in Manila, for instance, has warned Duterte that, were he to give up sovereignty over the Scarborough Shoal, he could be impeached. That won’t happen; Duterte wants loads of Chinese trade and investment, not abdicate from sovereignty. He’d rather be ready to confront being demonized by the hyperpower as much as the late Hugo Chavez was in his heyday.
Crossposted with Strategic Culture , first iteration. NOTE: ALL IMAGE CAPTIONS, PULL QUOTES AND COMMENTARY BY THE EDITORS, NOT THE AUTHORS PLEASE COMMENT AND DEBATE DIRECTLY ON OUR FACEBOOK GROUP INSTALLATION ABOUT THE AUTHOR Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). His latest book is Empire of Chaos . He may be reached at [email protected] .
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NEW DELHI — Prime Minister Narendra Modi led his party to a landslide victory in India’s largest state on Saturday, consolidating his power and putting him in a strong position to win in 2019. The scale of the victory in Uttar Pradesh’s legislative elections was all the more stunning because it followed Mr. Modi’s politically risky decision to eliminate most of India’s cash. The vote was seen as a referendum on the prime minister, who campaigned vigorously in recent days in Uttar Pradesh, which, with a population of more than 200 million, would be the world’s sixth largest country if it were independent. “This is a stupendous achievement,” said Ashok Malik, a fellow with the Observer Research Foundation, based in New Delhi. “Here you had a prime minister making himself the face of the election in the absence of a local leader and stitching together a coalition across the state. ” The margin of victory in Uttar Pradesh was the largest seen by any party in more than 30 years. It gives Mr. Modi a significant advantage in the national elections in 2019, which in turn would bring him closer to his goal of becoming a leader of historic significance, steering India away from its more socialist, secular past. Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, commonly called the B. J. P. also won at least one of four other state elections in which ballots were being counted on Saturday. The weakening India National Congress party, which once dominated the nation’s politics, won in Punjab, a powerful farming state, and remained in contention in two smaller states, showing that it was still a factor nationally, though less so than in years past. The Aam Aadmi Party, born of the anticorruption movement that has arisen in India in recent years, failed to win any state, suggesting that it was not yet ready to take over from the Congress party as the main opposition to Mr. Modi. Mr. Modi said on Twitter that his party’s victories were “humbling and overwhelming. ” In Uttar Pradesh, the Election Commission of India said the Bharatiya Janata Party had won or was leading in voting for 308 of the 403 seats in the state legislature, decimating the coalition cobbled together by Congress and the local governing party, the Samajwadi Party. By Saturday afternoon, that coalition had garnered only 57 seats. The coalition had appeared to be gaining steam after it was formed early this year, led by the dynamic, relatively young leader of the Samajwadi Party, Akhilesh Yadav, 43, whose father founded the party and presided over it for decades. That party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, commonly known as the B. S. P. have taken turns governing Uttar Pradesh in recent decades, in each case putting together coalitions that consisted mainly of the party leader’s caste group along with Muslims. But on Saturday afternoon, the B. S. P. led by Kumari Mayawati, a leader of the Dalit caste, won or was leading in only 20 seats, the election commission said. The scale of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory suggested that it had bridged such caste allegiances, some experts said, although it had yet to cross religious lines to attract large numbers of Muslims. While Mr. Modi has largely steered clear of divisive language on religion as prime minister, his party has a Hindu nationalist philosophy, and he was accused of complicity in violence as the leader of his home state of Gujarat. “This is the beginning of a new chapter in the history of India,” Jitendra Singh, a minister of state in Mr. Modi’s office, told the television station Times Now. “The Indian voter has learned to rise above caste and creed and vote for development and the future of India. ” In fact, although Mr. Modi won the 2014 national elections on a platform of jobs and development, his economic record is mixed. He has lured more foreign investment and is close to achieving a tax overhaul, but new job creation has been slow and domestic private investment remains stagnant. The International Monetary Fund this year cut its projected growth rate for India by one percentage point, to 6. 6 percent, in large part because of Mr. Modi’s sudden ban on the country’s largest currency notes in November. Saturday’s results come less than four months after Mr. Modi’s Nov. 8 announcement that India’s largest notes, which made up 86 percent of the currency, would be banned starting the next day in a bid to fight corruption. A cash shortfall persisted for weeks as the government rushed to print enough new notes to replace the banned ones, slowing many of the country’s businesses and leaving many poor people struggling to make ends meet. As the cash crunch persisted, with millions waiting in line for notes, Mr. Modi faced criticism that his policy had hurt people, and many predicted that voters would punish him at the polls. But his big win in Uttar Pradesh — coupled with victory in another state, Uttarakhand, and gains in the eastern state of Manipur, where his party had not been a contender in the recent past — suggests that despite the pain the currency ban caused, voters believed Mr. Modi when he said it was needed to reduce corruption, some experts said. “The narrative became less about whether it was right or wrong on economics, but more about the political narrative, the way Modi was able to shape it,” said Harsh Pant, a professor of international relations specializing in India at King’s College in London. “He said, ‘I am a crusader against corruption, and you have to rise above your mundane economic realities and support me.’ And people did,” Mr. Pant said. Votes were still being counted in the smaller states of Goa and Manipur on Saturday afternoon, and the margins were so close that it was not clear who would form the state governments. Experts said Mr. Modi’s win in Uttar Pradesh meant his party would be able to take control of the upper house of India’s Parliament next year. They expected him to have a freer hand in making the economic policy overhauls that he has long sought to spur development, including changes in the law to make it easier for companies to acquire farmland and to fire workers. But many experts cautioned that it was unlikely Mr. Modi would make major changes before the 2019 election. When he previously tried to ease land acquisition rules, he found himself pilloried as the “suit boot” prime minister, or guardian of the corporate class, the experts noted. “He’ll have the space, but he’ll also be concerned about ” Mr. Malik said. The prime minister may tinker with the laws, perhaps allowing states to change some labor laws to attract industry, but “he’s not suddenly going to shift gears in terms of policies,” Mr. Malik said. | 1 |
Become a Fan - Advertisement - It was not too long ago that many people looked to the U.S. for leadership and not so long ago, our nation was still thought to be a democratic nation of laws, due process, and a prudent separation of powers. Now the U.S. is reviled; Bush is seen the world over as having betrayed his own people as he wages aggressive war against a nation that even he concedes had nothing whatsoever to do with 911, a nation about which he lied in order to justify his dirty, evil little war. The war on terrorism is phony.
And now, Bush proves everything that is said about him by refusing to close Guantanamo, by refusing to end practices of torture and rendition which he denies --even as he defends them. I recommend Robert Jackson 's Place in History by Henry King Jr. An excerpt: In his final report, after he resigned as U.S. Chief Counsel for War Crimes, Jackson stated that "[i]t is not too much to hope that this example of a full and fair hearing, and tranquil and deliberative judgment, will do something toward strengthening the process of justice in many countries. " I believe that after fifty years it can be maintained with considerable credibility that these visions have largely come to pass. Perhaps --at the time of the writing --"these visions" had come to pass. But thanks to the Bush administration's deliberate effort to undermine the very foundations of International Law, that important progress has been undone.
One rightly suspects Bush's motives. Even before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, before the attack on Afghanistan, Tom DeLay sponsored legislation that exempted U.S. soldiers from war crimes prosecution at the International Tribunal at the Hague. Did anyone in Congress stop to ask why? Were we planning to commit crimes for which we sought exemption from prosecution? Wasn't it clear to any thinking person what Bush was up to? Are we not the good guys? [Amendment to H.R. 1646, The Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2001 ]
Clearly --the Bush administration was, in fact, planning to commit war crimes but wanted to make them legal if done by the U.S. I cannot possibly hope to document in a short internet essay the various circumlocutions that have been indulged by the Bush administration and its chief apologist: Alberto Gonzales. All, however, are intended to make legal the very acts that are prohibited by Nuremberg --but only if those acts are done by Americans. Bush is at least consistent in this respect: neither would he press for trials for non-Americans. He would simply decree their imprisonment and torture.
Nazis engaged in similar polemical campaigns. The results were tragic. So too with Bush who most certainly boasted of what can only be the summary executions of thousands who were most certainly murdered before they could assert their innocence: ...more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way -- they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.
This statement must be soberly examined; note that Bush refers to 3,000 suspects . Yet --he smirks that "...they have met a different fate." He boasts that "...they are no longer a problem to the the United States...". - Advertisement - They were only suspects . Since when does the United States summarily execute mere suspects? Do we not know who our enemies are? What were the conditions of their detention? Why are we rounding up mere "suspects" --and not actual combatants? How is the execution of suspects justified under any standard, any morality, any legal system? I am frankly surprised that Bush maintained the pretense when he has since arrogated unto himself the power to define terrorists. "Terrorists" are what Bush says they are. Bush is the judge and jury. Detainees are never charged and, by Bushs' own words, "suspects" are caused to be "...no longer a problem". Others are "terrorists" not because they are "terrorists" but because Bush --the decider --says they are. Some may be combatants. Some may be "evil doers". Others may be innocent. No matter. Bush --the all powerful decider --has thrown them all in the same wire cage. The same suicide factory.
Contrast Bush's remarks with those of American Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson uttered when America still had credibility and moral authority:
"That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason. "
-- Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal, Robert Jackson, Chief American Prosecutor, Nuremberg War Crimes Trials - Advertisement - At the end of World War II, when even Winston Churchill espoused the summary executions of Nazi war criminals and Joseph Stalin favored mere show trials, it was the United States, under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt, that insisted upon war crimes trials. Nazis would not be summarily shot merely because they were Nazis by definition or decree. Rather, they would be given a trial. Even Nazis would be allowed the right of counsel, the right to present a defense.
How can Bush hope to defend democracy --as he has claimed --when he subverts every Democratic principle that has been fought and died for over the last four hundred years? How can Bush justify his war of aggression against Iraq when he subverts the very "democracy" that he claims to bring them? How can Bush accuse anyone outside the United States of "...just hat[ing] freedom" when Bush is himself democracy's most insidious enemy?
If Nazis had engaged in the same disingenuous activities with regard to the incarceration and ultimate extermination of the jews, what moral authority could the U.S. have extended if its own policies differed not a whit in principle? | 0 |
The Most Important Concepts The Manosphere Taught Me The Most Important Concepts The Manosphere Taught Me Lessons that make the world of men a better place Jean-Batave Poqueliche
Jean-Batave is a martial artist from the viking stronghold of Normandy, France. He travels the world looking for new fighting techniques and new beautiful women. Eastern Europe taught him everything he knows and is his second home. His column runs every Thursday. October 27, 2016 Masculinity
An interesting thought recently crossed my mind. What would have happened if I stumbled across the manosphere in my late teens?
Back when I was a blue-pill high school greenhorn, clueless about women and with a mind set on “neutral,” I was destined to be just another cog in the big government machine. Simply put, I would have been the dog’s bollocks.
But having all these resources served on a silver platter would not have given me the hunger that I have for life today. I would take this things as granted instead of considering every opportunity as the last one.
Dwelling on those thoughts is not good. What I can do is to keep writing so other young people and lost men turn their life around for the better. If I must condense the most useful things I have learnt: On Game Logistics are key
Get a private room or an apartment within 20 minutes walk of the date location or party district. Check that the security will not cockblock you. Have alcohol and music ready at your place. Clean it. Have condoms stashed. Get taxi numbers, a local SIM card etc.
Related: How Bad Logistics Can Ruin Your Game Keep an abundance mentality
Stop “over-pursuing” as Quintus puts it. The sheer number of women cruising around prevents you from being needy. Showing this weakness to women NEVER works in your favour.
Next the time wasters. If it is not her, it will be another. Stop dwelling in the past, stop keeping the number of dysfunctional girls from previous bangs. Keep moving forward.
Related: 5 Major Signs That She Is Using You A bad approach is better than none
This should be carved in every man’s brain. What is the worst than can happen? You have balls, use them. Who cares if you mumbled a bit. Smirk and carry on.
If you don’t act, the opportunity is gone. Don’t count to three. You see, you jump.
Related: How To Get Over Your Anxiety When Approaching Women Always escalate
Never apologise for being a man with a healthy sex life or hesitate to be sexual. If she calls you out, double down, fuck it. You are not here for a peck on the cheek or listen about her output on life.
One of the sentence that stayed with me and still is in a corner of my head to this day is “Think of it as the last time you see her.”
Related: | 0 |
Posted on October 30, 2016 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai in News , US // 0 Comments
Hillary Clinton has cancelled all upcoming campaign events following the FBI’s announcement that they are reopening their email server investigation.
The reopening of the case has sent the Clinton campaign into complete chaos, according to reports . Recommended
Donald Trump has overtaken his political rival Hillary Clinton in a major new poll out this weekend, as mainstream media outlets have refused to publish the results to the public. (53 mins ago)
According to “ Citizens for Trump ” Special Projects Director Jack Posobiec, Hillary is looking to get out of the media spotlight for a while.
In a tweet, he stated: “ Hillary has cancelled all campaign events in FL, OH, and NC .”
The Clinton campaign want to focus on states that Hillary lost serious ground in – like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, and Michigan. Hillary has cancelled all campaign events in FL, OH, and NC
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) October 29, 2016 Recommended
WikiLeaks has released a batch of emails revealing that Hillary Clinton was involved in a plane crash that caused her brain injury and left a US Navy Seal dead. (53 mins ago)
Has the latest email scandal finally brought Hillary to her knees?
Will there even be an election on November 8th, or will we be watching Hillary Clinton go on trial? It seems like anything is possible right now. | 0 |
BETHESDA, Md. — The young surgeon was mystified. A tumor had been removed from the stomach of his patient 12 years earlier, but his doctors had not been able to cut out many smaller growths in his liver. The cancer should have killed him, yet here he lay on the table for a routine gallbladder operation. The surgeon, Dr. Steven A. Rosenberg, examined the man’s abdominal cavity, sifting his liver in his fingers, feeling for hard, dense tumors — but he could find no trace of cancer. It was 1968. Dr. Rosenberg had a hunch he had just witnessed an extraordinary case in which a patient’s immune system had vanquished cancer. Hoping there was an elixir in the man’s blood, Dr. Rosenberg got permission to transfuse some of it into a patient dying of stomach cancer. The effort failed. But it was the beginning of a lifelong quest. “Something began to burn in me,” he would write later, “something that has never gone out. ” Half a century later, Dr. Rosenberg, who turns 76 on Tuesday and is chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute here, is part of a small fraternity of researchers who have doggedly pursued a dream — turbocharging the body’s immune system so that more cancer patients can experience recoveries like his patient’s. Dr. Rosenberg, Dr. Carl H. June of the University of Pennsylvania and Dr. Michel Sadelain of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have been at the forefront of this research for decades, laboring in separate labs in an intense pursuit to bring to fruition a daring therapy that few colleagues believed would work. Now, versions of the therapy for a limited number of blood cancers are nearing approval by federal regulators, and could reach the market as early as next year. The technique, known as cell therapy, gives each patient an individualized and version of their own immune system, one that “works better than nature made it,” as Dr. June puts it. The patient’s the soldiers of the immune system, are extracted from the patient’s blood, then genetically engineered to recognize and destroy cancer. The redesigned cells are multiplied in the laboratory, and millions or billions of them are put back into the patient’s bloodstream, set loose like a vast army of tumor assassins. This is an unusual pharmaceutical — a drug that is alive and can multiply once inside the body. Dr. June calls these cells “serial killers. ” A single one can destroy up to 100, 000 cancer cells. The killer cells are genetically engineered to produce a complex protein, an amalgam of pieces from different parts of the immune system that is unlike anything seen before. “I call it a molecule,” said Dr. Renier J. Brentjens, the director of cellular therapeutics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. This radical, therapy differs sharply from the more established type of immunotherapy, developed by other researchers. Those drugs, known as checkpoint inhibitors, release a molecular brake on the immune system, freeing it to fight the cancer much as it fights infections by bacteria or viruses. Cell therapy, in contrast, is brewed specially for each patient, one of the many challenges the field faces in broadening its use. So far, the number of patients treated with cell therapy is in the hundreds, not thousands. And for now it works only for certain types of blood cancers, not common malignancies like breast and lung cancer. Researchers are also still working out how to control potentially lethal side effects. Just recently, a clinical trial was briefly halted after three patients died of brain swelling. Still, cell therapy has produced complete remissions in some patients who were out of treatment options, stirring excitement among doctors and patients and setting off a race among companies to bring the treatments to market. Getting to this point has taken decades of painstaking work, with many false starts and setbacks. “It was conceivable we were pursuing a ghost,” Dr. Rosenberg recalled. The son of Orthodox Jews who immigrated from Poland to New York and ran luncheonettes, Steven Rosenberg was about 6 years old when his family learned that many relatives, including six of his father’s nine siblings, had been murdered in the Holocaust. “I saw so much evil in the world that early on I decided I wanted to do something that would help people, not hurt people,” he said in an interview here. He received a medical degree from Johns Hopkins and a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard. From the start, he was a workaholic. At one point he tried to call off his relationship with Alice O’Connell, whom he would later marry, because he was afraid it would distract him from research. “I loved the night,” Dr. Rosenberg wrote in his book, “The Transformed Cell,” published in 1992. “I remember the exhilaration of working through the night in the lab, drinking thick pasty coffee that had been on the burner for hours, walking out into the sunrise. ” He added: “To be alone and out on the edge like that, there was no feeling like it in the world. ” When Dr. Rosenberg arrived at the National Cancer Institute in 1974, his first attempt at immunotherapy was to give patients harvested from pigs. That failed. He then began giving patients or a protein made by the body that spurs to proliferate. In some cases he treated patients with their own white blood cells that had been incubated in . The treatments sometimes set off such a violent immune system reaction that patients had to be placed in intensive care. From 1980 to 1984, he treated 66 patients without success. Then, in late 1984, he encountered patient No. 67, Linda Taylor, a Navy officer with melanoma whose personnel file carried the stamp “death imminent. ” Ms. Taylor is still alive her case and others catapulted Dr. Rosenberg and onto the cover of Newsweek and the front pages of newspapers. Some of his colleagues at the National Cancer Institute began referring to him as Stevie Wonder, thinking he had developed a swelled head. But ’s vaunted prowess fizzled, helping only a few percent of patients with melanoma or kidney cancer. Dr. Rosenberg then tried to surgically remove tumors and extract the that had already penetrated them, lymphocytes. He multiplied those cells in the lab and infused them back in the patient, along with shots of . He limited his focus to melanoma, the skin cancer that seemed most susceptible to immune attack. The treatment eventually achieved remissions in about 10 percent to 25 percent of patients. But it was and its application to other cancers unclear. There had to be a better way. Indeed, one approach was taking shape across the street from Dr. Rosenberg, at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda. The Navy was not Carl June’s desired career choice. Accepted at Stanford in 1971, he instead chose the Naval Academy to avoid the draft and Vietnam. The Navy sent him to medical school and for training in transplantation, geared toward treating people irradiated by nuclear weapons. When the Cold War ended, the Navy lost interest. Dr. June turned to working with at the Naval Medical Research Institute in the . He and a colleague, Dr. Bruce Levine, found a way to multiply in huge numbers outside the body, a method still used today. And in the working with Cell Genesys, a gene therapy company, Dr. June began trying to genetically modify patients’ to kill H. I. V. the virus that causes AIDS. But when his wife, Cindy, the mother of the couple’s three children, developed ovarian cancer in 1996, Dr. June’s research turned personal. Dr. June had tried everything to save her, including the primitive immune therapies under development. But Ms. June died in 2001. “A lot of other scientists would have been disillusioned by the failure, in his case the personal tragedy,” said Sean Parker, the internet billionaire who is funding some of Dr. June’s work. Instead, Dr. June, who had moved to the University of Pennsylvania, stopped treating patients, and devoted himself to creating cell therapies for cancer. “Things that were back burner on cell therapy became front burner,” he said. In the 1980s, scientists began experimenting with gene therapy, putting new genes into cells of the body to treat disease. Michel Sadelain, while still a graduate student studying immunology at the University of Alberta, told colleagues that he thought the technique could be used to supercharge to fight cancer. “At the time it sounded very pipe dream,” said Douglas Green, who was one of Dr. Sadelain’s doctoral thesis advisers and is now chairman of immunology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. But Dr. Sadelain, he continued, “believed in his approach and he pursued it relentlessly. ” After earning his Ph. D. Dr. Sadelain headed for the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass. to learn how to do gene therapy, using disabled viruses that could not cause disease to deliver genes into cells. By 1992, he had demonstrated that he could genetically engineer mouse . He then moved to Sloan Kettering. In 2003, he and his colleagues — including his partner and now wife, Isabelle Rivière — showed that genetically engineered could eradicate certain cancers in mice. How is this done? To fight cancer, have to recognize cancerous cells. Each in the body has unique receptors, sort of like claws that jut out from its surface. patrol the body looking for protein fragments that indicate a cell might be infected by a bacterium or virus. If one of its claws latches on to such a fragment, the destroys the cell displaying it. But cancer cells are mutated versions of the body’s own cells, not outsiders. do not always recognize them as something to kill. So scientists like Dr. Sadelain decided to put a new claw on the one that could recognize cancer by latching on to a telltale protein on cancer cells. The new claws came from another part of the immune system known as antibodies. Drug companies already knew how to make antibodies with claws that bind to specific proteins in the body. But the claw was not enough. Once a claw binds to a target protein, it needs a molecule to signal the to go into killing mode. Yet another signal helps sustain the killing. The DNA instructions for all three components are inserted into the patient’s . Since this concoction is part antibody and part it is a chimera, like the monster of Greek mythology that is part lion, part goat and part serpent. The claw is called a receptor and the protein it binds to on the cancer cell, the target, is called an antigen. So the whole construct is called a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, and the use of it to treat cancer is called CAR therapy, or . Dr. Sadelain was not alone in this work. Zelig Eshhar, an Israeli scientist, is credited with developing one of the first crude CARs around 1989. Dr. Rosenberg, always on the lookout for new types of immunotherapy, invited Dr. Eshhar to be a visiting scientist in his laboratory at the National Cancer Institute. Another early developer was Dr. Dario Campana of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As scientists worked to perfect the formula in the 1990s and early 2000s, there was quite a bit of sharing. Cancer cell therapy was still mostly an academic exercise it was highly uncertain whether it would ever really work. Dr. June, after hearing a presentation by Dr. Campana at a conference in 2003, requested a sample of Dr. Campana’s CAR. Dr. Sadelain shared his design with both Dr. June and Dr. Rosenberg. The most prominent CAR developed at the National Cancer Institute owes a lot to Dr. Sadelain, Dr. Rosenberg said. But the science proved difficult and the research money scarce. Pharmaceutical companies showed little interest, preferring drugs, one size fits all, rather than a treatment that would be made separately for each patient. Again, a death from cancer propelled the field forward. In 2001, a woman, Kimberly Lawrence Netter, succumbed to breast cancer. Her Edward Netter, a wealthy financial services entrepreneur, and his wife, Barbara, formed the nonprofit Alliance for Cancer Gene Therapy, which issued some of its first grants to Dr. June and Dr. Sadelain. Dr. June also got support from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. “Without that,” Dr. June said of the charities, “we would not have had a clinical trial. ” As the first decade of this century neared its end, the three pioneers were ready for the big moment — testing their treatments in patients. They scrambled to be the first to announce results. Dr. Rosenberg and colleagues published first, in the journal Blood in 2010. They described a single patient with lymphoma whose tumors shrank after treatment. (The patient later received more therapy, and has been free of cancer since.) But the approach really attracted attention the next year when Dr. June reported that two of three patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia went into complete remission. One of them, Doug Olson, a chemist from Tinicum Township, Pa. left the hospital and immediately bought a sailboat. He also took to running . “It was like this weight that had been sitting there was gone,” said Mr. Olson, who is free of cancer nearly six years later. Bill Ludwig, a retired captain in the New Jersey Department of Corrections, had already paid for his funeral when he started treatment in August 2010. Once his genetically engineered were unleashed in his system, Mr. Ludwig’s lungs started to fail, his legs ballooned to twice their size, his blood pressure dropped and he began hallucinating. When he emerged from the ordeal, doctors searched for cancer. Detecting none, they ordered another test, certain of error. But there was no mistake. Five pounds of tumor had been destroyed. Mr. Ludwig, now 71, and his wife bought an R. V. “We’re trying to make up for lost time,” he said. He has celebrated the high school graduations of five grandchildren and welcomed his first . As for Dr. June, Mr. Ludwig said: “It’s hard to describe someone who basically saved your life. He lost the one he loved, and turned around and saved me years later. ” The 2011 publication of Dr. June’s results transformed the field. Novartis, the big Swiss pharmaceutical company, licensed the rights to the therapies created in Dr. June’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania, throwing aside concerns that treatments manufactured for individual patients would not be good business. That set off a commercial rush, flooding the field with cash after years of doubt. While various companies are in pursuit, three are in the lead. They hope to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration to bring the first CAR treatments to market as early as 2017 or 2018, although it is not yet clear how easy it will be to get regulatory approval for such a novel therapy. The companies are teamed with academic pioneers: Novartis with Penn Kite Pharma with the National Cancer Institute and Juno Therapeutics with Sloan Kettering, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle and Seattle Children’s Hospital. Somewhat predictably, success provoked jostling and envy. Rather than being allies against a disbelieving world, the pioneers now had something worth fighting over — credit, and the gleam of a possible Nobel Prize. While the Sloan Kettering researchers had done some of the early genetic engineering, they did not publish strong results in five patients until 2013. By then, they had been scooped by Dr. Rosenberg with one patient and Dr. June with three. The spotlight further shifted to Dr. June because of his success with Emily Whitehead, a little girl whose miraculous recovery in 2012 made her the poster child for cell therapy. When Mr. Parker, the internet entrepreneur, announced in April that he would spend $250 million to start a new cancer immunotherapy institute, Emily, now 11, appeared on stage at the launch extravaganza with Lady Gaga. Dr. June’s 2011 publications did not cite Dr. Rosenberg’s paper from the previous year, prompting Dr. Rosenberg to write a letter to The New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. June’s publications also did not acknowledge that the genetic construct he had used was the one he had obtained from Dr. Campana of St. Jude. St. Jude sued the University of Pennsylvania. Novartis sided with Penn, and Juno Therapeutics with St. Jude. The suit was settled last year, with Novartis agreeing to pay $12. 25 million plus possible future payments and royalties. Within days, Dr. June sent a correction and letter of regret to The New England Journal of Medicine, acknowledging that the CAR used in his groundbreaking 2011 study, and in treating Emily Whitehead, was “designed, developed and provided” by St. Jude. Patrick M. Coughlin, who teaches anatomy at the Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton, Pa. now explains the immune system to his classes by telling how one man overcame cancer. Only gradually does it become clear that he is referring to himself. Now 63, Mr. Coughlin noticed a mass the size of a softball in his abdomen in summer 2013. It was a form of ’s lymphoma. Three different types of chemotherapy and a transplant all failed to help him. Desperate, he came to the National Institutes of Health campus here last year for the cell therapy developed by Dr. Rosenberg’s team. The battle between Mr. Coughlin’s genetically engineered immune cells and the cancer was brutal. For four days he had a fever as high as 105, chills and sweats. Even his brain malfunctioned — at one point he could not count to 10 or write his wife’s name. But when the battle ended, the cancer was no longer there. “If I had gotten this thing five years ago,” he said of his disease, “I’d be dead. ” Yet for all the excitement, there are reasons for caution. The CAR therapy works now only for patients with some lymphomas and leukemias, which account for only about 80, 000 of the 1. 7 million cases of cancer diagnosed in the United States each year. It has not been successfully used to treat malignancies of the lungs, breast, prostate, colon or other organs. “The solid tumors that kill over 90 percent of people do not respond to anything we have now,” Dr. Rosenberg said. Because it is personalized, cell therapy is likely to be frightfully expensive — probably hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient, though the companies bringing these treatments to market have not yet said how much they would charge. Producing the cells is lengthy and complex. Some patients have died during the two to four weeks it took to genetically modify and multiply their cells. And the therapy itself can be arduous. First, patients get chemotherapy to wipe out many of their existing to make room for the engineered ones. Once those enter the body, they can set off a ferocious immune response as well as temporary neurological problems like memory loss, seizures and hallucinations. Recently Juno Therapeutics had to temporarily halt its clinical trial after three patients died from brain swelling. The problem arose when the company added a second chemotherapy drug to the regimen preparing the patients for the cell infusion. The authorities allowed the trial to resume without that chemotherapy drug. Still, some patients find themselves hoping they get violently ill, since that is a sign the treatment is working. “Every morning my wife would ask me how I’m feeling,” said Myles Stiefvater, a copier salesman from Newark, Del. who had the treatment in 2014. When he said he felt O. K. they were disappointed. Researchers are also finding, to their dismay, that remissions do not always last. The therapy has had its biggest success in acute lymphoblastic leukemia, producing complete remissions for 60 percent to more than 90 percent of patients. Yet up to half of those patients eventually suffer a relapse. In some cases, the tumor evolves so that it no longer displays on its surface what the claw binds to, making it invisible to the engineered cells. In other cases, the engineered cells might not last long enough in the body, giving the cancer a chance to resurge. Karen Shollenberger, a student at Drexel University with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, thought she was in the clear after being in remission for nine months after a treatment. But in September, as the school year was beginning, the cancer returned. “My high hopes for the rest of the term were crushed,” Ms. Shollenberger wrote on her blog in October. She entered a new trial testing a new CAR therapy directed at another protein on . Again the cancer went into remission, and she returned to school. But fear lurked in her: What if the new therapy also stopped working? That indeed happened recently. Her best hope now is a transplant. “Each relapse is increasingly terrifying as the options continue to shrink,” said Ms. Shollenberger, 22. But, she said, the cell therapies have given her nearly two good years. The big thrust now is to expand the use of cell therapy to additional types of cancer. The key is to find protein targets that the engineered can latch on to to kill cancer cells. Ideally, such a protein should be on all the tumor cells, so the entire cancer would be eradicated. But it should not be on healthy cells, or they would also be destroyed, causing side effects. “ are very powerful,” said Dr. Campana, formerly of St. Jude and now at the National University of Singapore. “In the same way they can eliminate cancer, they can also kill you. ” A protein called HER2, for instance, is found on many breast and other tumors, making it a seemingly good target. But it is also found in tiny amounts in the lungs. When Dr. Rosenberg’s team infused killer aimed at HER2 into a patient, she went into respiratory distress within 15 minutes and died five days later. The treatments work for the blood cancers because there is a good target. But finding these for the most common cancers has been difficult. One problem is that CARs, because of how they are made, can bind only to proteins on the surface of cancer cells. But most proteins made by these cells, or by any cell for that matter, are inside the cell, out of reach. There is an alternative approach that is gaining interest. Patients’ immune cells can be engineered to make what are called receptors, or TCRs. These can recognize proteins inside the cancer cells. Some experts say TCRs, which have a far wider array of potential targets, represent the best hope of using cell therapy to treat solid tumors. There have been hints of effectiveness already in treating one of those, a type of sarcoma. It might turn out that the best target for each patient will be unique to that person. Scientists are now experimenting with using DNA sequencing and other techniques to find the best mutated protein in each person’s tumor at which to aim the claw. “Think of how dauntingly personalized this is,” Dr. Rosenberg said. “We are using their own cells to treat a unique mutation in their own tumor. ” He said this approach might allow cell therapy to be used for most patients. Many other improvements are on the runway. Dr. Sadelain and Juno are working on “armored CARs” that not only bind to the target but produce chemicals. Cellectis, a French company, has treated two babies with an CAR treatment that does not require each patient’s cells to be processed. Bellicum Pharmaceuticals is working on genetic switches that dim or shut off the CAR if the treatment is endangering the patient. “We’re in the Model T version of the CAR now,” said Dr. Levine, now the director of the cell production facility at the University of Pennsylvania. “What’s coming along are Google CARs and Tesla CARs. ” In February, the Center for Advanced Cellular Therapeutics opened on the ninth floor of a Penn medical building, paid for mainly by $20 million from Novartis. It has gleaming new laboratory space, clean rooms with the capacity to manufacture therapy for 400 patients a year, and a great view of downtown Philadelphia. On the wall are photographs of patients with success stories, like Doug Olson running a and, of course, Emily Whitehead. Dr. June, who remarried and had two more children, now jets off regularly to attend conferences and give talks. A world map hanging outside his office is titled “Where in the World Is Carl June?” It has pins stuck in every location he has been, and a picture of him on a bicycle pinned to his location at the moment. In the last two years he has visited more than 150 cities in more than 20 countries. This year alone he has accumulated more than 200, 000 airline miles. Despite that schedule, he runs ultramarathons and participated in July in the Death Ride, a grueling bicycle race in California. Dr. Rosenberg still arrives at the National Cancer Institute nearly seven days a week. The walls outside his office are covered with signed photographs of the hundreds of fellows who have trained under him, many of them now leaders in immunotherapy. Every five years, they gather for a reunion, to reminisce and honor their mentor. Arie Belldegrun, who was a fellow in the 1980s, now runs Kite, the company commercializing the National Cancer Institute’s CAR technology. He recounted what happened when he tried to get Dr. Rosenberg to join the company. “He sits quietly, quietly, quietly, and then he asks, ‘Arie, why don’t you ask me what I want to do?’ “He said: ‘Every day that I go to work, I’m as excited as a kid coming to a new place for the first time. If you ask me what I want to do, I want to die on this desk one day. ’” But not before he conquers cancer. “I want to end this holocaust,” Dr. Rosenberg said in the interview. “I think I’m finally getting the hang of what it will take to widely apply this to cancers. ” | 1 |
20 Views November 03, 2016 GOLD , KWN King World News
Today top Citi analyst Tom Fitzpatrick sent King World News a key update on the action in the gold market.
Top Citi analyst Tom Fitzpatrick: Good resistance for gold comes in between $1,302 and $1,309. This was the break area on the way down and also where the potential top comes in (see chart below).
Gold has retested the break levels that were breached on the way down at $1,302 – $1,308. We also have what could be a short term channel top coming in there…
Continue reading Tom Fitzpatrick below… IMPORTANT: To find out which company the richest man in China has invested in, one that Rick Rule and Sprott Asset Management are pounding the table on that is quickly being recognized as one of the greatest investment opportunities in the world – CLICK HERE OR BELOW: Sponsored
Fitzpatrick continues: At this stage we could not expect to see these levels give way, however a close above ($1,308) would need to be respected. Trend line resistance above this zone is at $1,329 . Also of importance… Fear & Greed Index Shows More Extreme Fear The Fear & Greed Index has moved from a reading of 19 down to 17, showing even more extreme fear. Are the stock markets setting up for a possible rebound (see below)?
What We Just Witnessed Has Rarely Occurred In The Past 20 Years! | 0 |
Thank you! People don’t even know the Panthers rose in opposition to groups like the KKK and the Panthers had Caucasian, Asian, and Latino memebers. | 0 |
‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. Meet 6 Military Veterans Running for Congress By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 3, 2016 Veterans for Congress
By MaryAlice Parks
From George Washington to John McCain, the United States has a long history of veterans running for office.
This year appears to be no exception with the halls of Capitol Hill likely to be filled with even more than the 100 former military members already there, according to Congressional Quarterly.
Here’s a look at some of the candidates across the country who are veterans and how they’ve used their military experience to stand out:
Using his military record to portray himself as a Washington outsider, Kander, a Democrat and former Army National Guard captain, has managed to put his race on the national radar. He has attracted outside spending from both sides of the aisle as Democrats look to regain control of the upper chamber.
Read the Full Article at abcnews.go.co m >>>> Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VNN, VNN authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. Notices Posted by Arnaldo Rodgers on November 3, 2016, With 0 Reads, Filed under Veterans . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can leave a response or trackback to this entry FaceBook Comments
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BALTIMORE — On Capitol Hill, Representative Chris Van Hollen is, literally and figuratively, a Democratic boy. An American son of diplomats born while his parents served in Pakistan, he has used his savvy, policy smarts and easy manner to position himself, party elders assumed, as a potential Democratic speaker of the House. Instead, Mr. Van Hollen, now running for the Senate in his home state of Maryland, is fighting for his survival in an identity politics primary that raises an explosive question: Should a white man, or a black woman, inherit the seat held for 30 years by Barbara A. Mikulski, the female senator in American history? The contest between two members of Congress — the Mr. Van Hollen, who trumpets his legislative résumé, and Representative Donna Edwards, a onetime community activist and single mother — has exposed deep fissures among Democrats as it traverses thorny issues of gender, race and class. It has especially split women. Emily’s List, the political action committee that works to elect Democratic women, has spent more than $2. 5 million on television ads for Ms. Edwards, drawing a backlash from female supporters of Mr. Van Hollen, who say he is “more effective” than Ms. Edwards and every bit her equal in championing women’s rights. On Wednesday, more than 1, 000 “staunch Democrats and feminists” from Maryland published an open letter saying just that. To Ms. Edwards, who worked as an activist to pass the 1994 Violence Against Women Act, the effectiveness argument is “insulting. ” Shaking hands and snapping selfies outside an early voting center here Tuesday night, she offered a succinct rationale for her candidacy: “The Senate is 100 members — 20 women. There’s nobody in the Senate like me. ” As to the uproar over the push by Emily’s List, Ms. Edwards said she was mystified: “I’m a Democratic woman, and Mr. Van Hollen is not. ” Mr. Van Hollen, who helped muscle President Obama’s health care legislation and other bills through Congress as the man to the House Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi, the former speaker, cannot exactly argue with that. He is a white man in a party that has a core coalition consisting of minorities, single women and young people. He has countered with a blitz of endorsements from 100 prominent women in Maryland and from a string of female elected officials. Analysts say black women will decide the race. Perhaps nowhere is the fight for their votes as fierce as here in Baltimore, a majority black city that is about to choose its next mayor. Next week — one day after Tuesday’s Maryland primary — the city will mark the anniversary of the unrest over the death of Freddie Gray. The memory of the black man, who died of injuries he sustained while in police custody, hovers over both races. So as Ms. Edwards was greeting voters Tuesday night, Mr. Van Hollen was at a restaurant across town, mingling with an enthusiastic, and racially mixed, group of supporters over a dinner of chicken and mashed potatoes. Older black women cooed over him. His host, a Baltimore County councilwoman, Cathy Bevins, who is white, said she had just sent Emily’s List “a nasty little email, telling them, ‘Take me off your list.’ ” The congressman, doing his best to avoid race and gender questions, reminded the crowd that he has Baltimore ties (his father grew up here) and of his attention to constituent service. He stiffened slightly when asked if the Senate needs a black woman’s voice. Those who endorsed him, he said, can speak for themselves: “They want somebody with a track record of delivering real results. ” There has not been a black woman in the Senate since Carol Moseley Braun, the nation’s first and only black female senator, left in 1999. In California, Emily’s List is also backing Kamala Harris, who is black and for a Senate seat this year. Here in Maryland, a Monmouth University poll released on Thursday showed Mr. Van Hollen pulling ahead in what has been a tight race with voters, especially women, and starkly divided along racial lines. “This is the state that Harriet Tubman ran away from twice and Frederick Douglass ran away from at least once, and we’ve never had a black woman elected statewide,” said Benjamin Jealous, the former president and chief executive of the N. A. A. C. P. who supports Ms. Edwards, though he insisted it was for policy reasons, not her race. Maryland, a heavily Democratic state, is no stranger to rough primary campaigns, especially when there is a rare open seat. Ms. Mikulski, a gruff former social worker from East Baltimore, ran one herself 30 years ago. Then a congresswoman, she reached the Senate by beating a seasoned colleague, Michael D. Barnes, and a sitting governor, Harry Hughes, with the help of a new group: Emily’s List. Ms. Mikulski, known on Capitol Hill as the “dean of Senate women,” is staying out of the fight over who should carry on her legacy she calls herself “studiously neutral. ” That has not stopped some of her admirers — Van Hollen backers like Jamie S. Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general — from accusing Emily’s List of wasting its money by going after a rising Democratic star with a good record on women’s rights. “I used to give money to Emily’s List,” Ms. Gorelick said. “I never will again. ” Stephanie Schriock, the president of Emily’s List, said the group was “doing what we have always done”: leveling the playing field for women who run against men. “We have an opportunity here to change the face of power in the Senate just as we did in 1986,” she said. In some ways, Mr. Van Hollen and Ms. Edwards are mirror images of one another. Both are 57 years old. Both are lawyers. Both represent affluent districts in the suburbs of Washington — his largely white, hers largely black. The race is being fought around the margins, over slight differences in policy, dueling endorsements and sharp contrasts in personal style. On the campaign trail, there have been nasty ads, insults and slights, filtered through the delicate prism of gender and race. When the Maryland Senate president, Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. who is white, called Mr. Van Hollen “a leader who has been born to the job” (a reference, an aide said, to his years in the Maryland legislature and childhood growing up overseas) it sounded to the congresswoman like talk from the ’s network. “Maybe the first generation to go to college, whose parents lived the American dream,” Ms. Edwards said, referring to herself, “maybe that person is appropriate for the job. ” Still, Ms. Edwards has been disappointed that only four of 46 members of the Congressional Black Caucus have publicly endorsed her, though aides say 18 have donated to her campaign. With Mr. Van Hollen expected to win his district, and Ms. Edwards expected to win hers, Baltimore is a central battleground. Earlier this month, the congressman, in blue blazer and shirt, was in a poor neighborhood, walking through a fruit and vegetable market trailed by a coterie of black women — members of a health care workers union that supports him. Rena Kenely, 59, a volunteer at a community center that helps the poor, had stopped in for coffee that day. She said that she had never met Mr. Van Hollen, but that she knew of him and liked his policies on education. “People think we vote by color, but we don’t,” Ms. Kenely said. Yet as Ms. Edwards was shaking hands outside the early voting center, it was clear that for some women, it is an agonizing choice. Sharon Green Middleton, a member of the Baltimore City Council, was there. She knows Ms. Mikulski well, likes and respects Mr. Van Hollen, and is “struggling, but leaning” toward Ms. Edwards. “This is 2016,” Ms. Middleton finally said. “ women need a voice. ” | 1 |
PHOENIX, Arizona — The Phoenix Police Department (PPD) has lost 20 officers to murder since 1981 — seven of those officers were killed by illegal aliens. With its close proximity to the U. S. border and being situated in the path of main drug trafficking routes for Mexican transnational organized criminal groups (cartels) the PPD and other law enforcement agencies in the Phoenix metro area have suffered numerous deaths and serious injuries to officers at the hands of criminals illegally in the United States. Some of these criminals had numerous previous deportations, but were able to the U. S. through its porous southern border. [Below is a list of Phoenix police officers murdered by illegal aliens since 1981: July 1, 1981 — Officers Ignacio Conchos and John Davis were both shot by an illegalalien who was an armed bank robbery suspect. Conchos died immediately and Davis succumbed to hiswounds one month later. May 27, 1988 — Officer Ken Collins was murdered by an illegal alien carrying out an armed bank robbery in Phoenix. The illegal alien was tied to a drug gang. March 26, 1999 — Officer Todd Atkinson was murdered by an illegal alien suspected of drug activity. Officer Atkinson was murdered after being ambushed by multiple suspects. September 18, 2007 — Officer Nick Erfle was murdered by an illegal alien during a routine stop for a civil traffic infraction. Officer Erfle was shot once, the suspect returned to where Officer Erfle lay and fired one more round, October 25, 2008 — Officer Shane Figueroa was killed by an illegal alien who was driving a vehicle while intoxicated. May 19, 2013 — Officer Daryl Raetz was struck and killed by an illegal alien driving an SUV while on foot investigating an earlier traffic accident. Additionally, the following Phoenix officers were seriously injured by illegal aliens: May 21, 1994 — Phoenix Police Officer Saul Ayala was shot in the face by an illegal alien with a shotgun. The alien had previously been deported and was a gang member that called themselves the “Wetback Power Gang. ” September 15, 1997 — SWAT Officers Jim Kliewer and Officer Jerry Kilgore were shot by an illegal alien who had violated the terms of his probation. The suspect had been placed on probation by a judge even though he was an illegal alien. December 21, 1997 — Phoenix Police Officer Brian Wilbur was seriously injured when he was struck by a car driven by an intoxicated illegal alien. Brian was attempting to remove an injured animal from the roadway. March 26, 2001 — Officer Jason Schecterle was severely burned when an illegal alien driving a taxi cab collided into the rear of his police car. Officer Schecterle was eventually forced him to medically retire. April 12, 2003 — Officer Robert Sitek was shot and seriously injured by an illegal alien involved in an armed . October 16, 2007 — Officer Brett Glidewell was shot in the chest by an armed illegal alien who had been stopped for a civil traffic violation. Robert Arce is a retired Phoenix Police detective with extensive experience working Mexican organized crime and street gangs. Arce has worked in the Balkans, Iraq, Haiti, and recently completed a assignment in Monterrey, Mexico, working out of the Consulate for the United States Department of State, International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Program, where he was the Regional Program Manager for northeast Mexico (Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Durango, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas) | 1 |
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Rick Ross was like a loud fart in a quiet room when his ankle bracelet went off over the weekend at the White House.
Ross was there along with a bunch of other rappers — Nicki Minaj, Busta Rhymes, J. Cole, Wale and DJ Khaled — to support Obama’s Brother’s Keeper youth initiative, ironically to keep men of color out of trouble.
It was a serious and fancy affair … enough to get Ross in a suit, which covered the ankle monitor he has to wear … a condition of release in his kidnapping case .
Sources on scene tell TMZ Obama finished his speech when Ross’ anklet ripped through the silence.
We’re told Ross was even surprised … the anklet’s new and it randomly beeps. | 0 |
JERUSALEM — He is president of the American arm for a yeshiva in a settlement deep in the West Bank headed by a militant rabbi who has called for Israeli soldiers to refuse orders to evacuate settlers. He writes a column for a Israeli news site in which he has accused President Obama of “blatant ” dismissed the solution to the conflict, likened a liberal group to “kapos” who cooperated with the Nazis, and said American Jewish leaders “failed” Israel on the Iran nuclear deal. He also supports United Hatzalah, an Israeli emergency medical services group that prides itself on integrating Arab and Druze volunteers helped build a $42 million village for disabled children — Bedouin and Jewish — in the Negev Desert and is known as an affable host of large holiday meals at the penthouse apartment he owns in a Jerusalem neighborhood. Now, David M. Friedman, an Orthodox Jewish bankruptcy lawyer from Long Island, is Donald J. Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, despite his lack of diplomatic experience and frequent statements that flout decades of bipartisan American policy. “Bankruptcy law and involvement with settlements are not normally seen as an appropriate qualifications for the job,” one of its former occupants, Martin S. Indyk, said on Friday. “But then these are not normal times. ” Mr. Friedman, 58, has done legal work for Mr. Trump since at least 2001, when he handled negotiations with bondholders on Mr. Trump’s struggling casinos in Atlantic City. Mr. Friedman represented Mr. Trump’s personal interests in the bankruptcies of the casinos in 2004, 2009 and 2014. Their relationship was cemented in 2005, friends said, when Mr. Trump traveled three hours in a snowstorm to pay a condolence call on Mr. Friedman after the death of his father, a prominent Long Island rabbi. “He was very taken by Trump spending almost all day just to pay the shiva,” said Yossi Kahana, one of the two friends who described the visit, using the Hebrew term for the week of mourning. “Barely any people came, and here is Trump, coming and sitting with him and talking about things that are important to both of them, their values, their fathers and their legacies. ” Mr. Friedman did not respond to an interview request made to his office. A person close to the Trump transition who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the ambassadorship had been negotiated directly between the two men over many months. Mr. Friedman, who donated a total of $50, 000 to the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee in 2016, according to federal election records, had been openly saying even before the election that the job — one of the most sensitive and high profile in the diplomatic corps — would be his, according to friends. Israel’s conservative settlement supporters and their American backers rejoiced at the selection, while believers in a Palestinian state and the peace process were perplexed and close to despair. Mr. Friedman is a staunch opponent of basic tenets of Washington’s longstanding approach to much of the ambassadorial portfolio. He refers to the West Bank by its biblical name, Judea and Samaria, something hard to imagine his predecessors doing publicly. Upon being nominated Thursday night, he said he looked forward to working “from the U. S. Embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem,” rather than Tel Aviv, where the American Embassy has been for decades, under the State Department’s insistence that the holy city’s status be determined as part of a broader deal between Israel and the Palestinians. The State Department has not allowed its ambassadors to set foot in West Bank settlements. Tax forms list Mr. Friedman as president of the American Friends of Bet El Yeshiva, which has raised about $2 million a year in recent years. He is also described as president of Bet El Institutions, which supports, among other things, the news site for which Mr. Friedman wrote columns, IsraelNationalNews. com, known as Arutz 7. Beit El, as the settlement is more usually spelled, was founded in 1977 and is now home to about 7, 000 religious residents. It was a hotbed of controversy in 2012 when the Israeli authorities followed a court order to evacuate 30 families from five buildings built illegally on private Palestinian land. According to an investigation by The Seventh Eye, an Israeli magazine, the contested neighborhood was built by a company linked to the one registered in the Marshall Islands that controls Arutz 7. Baruch Gordon, the director of development for Bet El Institutions, told Arutz 7 on Friday that it was “proud to be closely associated with Mr. Friedman,” calling him “a pioneer philanthropist and builder of Jewish institutions and housing projects in Judea and Samaria (a. k. a. the ‘West Bank’) and throughout the country. ” Mr. Friedman, whose middle name is Melech — Hebrew for king — grew up in North Woodmere, N. Y. one of four children of Rabbi Morris S. Friedman, who held the pulpit at Temple Hillel there for 46 years. In October 1984, President Ronald Reagan visited the synagogue and went to the Friedman family home for lunch, perhaps an early political influence on the . He graduated from New York University School of Law in 1981, and has worked since 1994 at Kasowitz, Benson, Torres Friedman L. L. P. where he is a partner. The firm represented Mr. Trump in his unsuccessful libel lawsuit against a former New York Times reporter, Timothy L. O’Brien, and its founding partner, Marc E. Kasowitz, twice this year threatened to sue The Times in relation to articles it was preparing regarding Mr. Trump’s treatment of women and income tax returns. Mr. Friedman’s connections to Israel date back to his bar mitzvah at the Western Wall. Friends describe him as a strong Zionist who spends many Jewish holidays and most of his summers in his Jerusalem apartment. He and his wife are renowned for gathering people for dinners in their sukkah, a hut observant Jews build on their balconies during a fall harvest festival. “His whole life, he’s been focused and extremely thoughtful about Israel and about the political situation there,” said Philip Rosen, whose friendship with Mr. Friedman began in law school. Anon Geva, the founder of an Israeli winery in which Mr. Friedman’s son’s company invested, said Mr. Freidman had invited everyone connected with the winery — about 30 people — for dinner one year in the sukkah. Mr. Geva recalled Mr. Friedman saying that he decided to buy a home in Jerusalem on the day in 2002 that a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up at Café Moment, a popular bar in the city, killing 11 Israelis. Mr. Kahana, who directs a task force on disabilities for the Jewish National Fund, said Mr. Friedman and some friends raised and donated several hundred thousand dollars to help build Aleh Negev, the village for disabled people, a joint project of the fund and the Israeli government. “He visited, and I must say, he was very concerned that this village is not only for Jewish kids, that it is also for Bedouin kids,” Mr. Kahana said. He called Mr. Friedman “very generous, very caring for needy people and especially people with disabilities. ” Mr. Rosen, who was of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012 and Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 bid, said Mr. Friedman had developed a strong rapport with Mr. Trump that would allow him to be effective as his envoy. “They’ve worked together closely for a very long time, and he knows what Donald is thinking, and what Donald wants to accomplish,” Mr. Rosen said. Many of Mr. Friedman’s views are far to the right of the stated positions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has endorsed the principle of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Mr. Netanyahu did not respond to Mr. Friedman’s selection, nor did Israel’s Foreign Ministry. But the deputy foreign minister, Tzipi Hotovely, who hails from the right flank of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party, rushed to praise it, saying, “His positions reflect the desire to strengthen the standing of Israel’s capital Jerusalem at this time and to underscore that the settlements have never been the true problem in the area. ” A senior Palestinian cleric, Sheikh Ikrama Sabri, said during Friday Prayers that if Mr. Friedman managed to move the embassy to Jerusalem, “the U. S. is declaring a new war on the Palestinians and all Muslim Arabs. ” Saeb Erekat, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told reporters in the West Bank on Friday that Mr. Trump’s appointments were “his business,” but that it was “not up to Trump or anybody else” to take steps like moving the embassy to Jerusalem. Daniel C. Kurtzer, who served President George W. Bush as ambassador to Israel from 2001 to 2005, was alarmed by the appointment. “He has made clear that he will appeal to a small minority of Israeli — and American — extremists, ignoring the majority of Israelis who continue to seek peace,” Mr. Kurtzer, now a professor at Princeton, said in an interview. “Friedman’s appointment as ambassador runs directly contrary to Mr. Trump’s professed desire to make the ‘ultimate deal’ between Israelis and Palestinians. ” | 1 |
Posted on November 7, 2016 by Lawrence Davidson
For those who might wonder why foreign policy makers repeatedly make bad choices, some insight might be drawn from the following analysis. The action here plays out in the United States, but the lessons are probably universal.
Back in the early spring of 2003, George W. Bush initiated the invasion of Iraq. His public reason for doing so was the belief that the country’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, was on the verge of developing nuclear weapons. The real reason went beyond that charge and included a long-range plan for “regime change” in the Middle East. For our purposes we will concentrate on the belief that Iraq was about to become a hostile nuclear power. Why did President Bush and his close associates accept this scenario so readily?
The short answer is Bush wanted, indeed needed, to believe it as a rationale for invading Iraq. At first he had tried to connect Saddam Hussein to the 11 September 2001 attacks on the U.S. Though he never gave up on that stratagem, the lack of evidence made it difficult to rally an American people, already fixated on Afghanistan, to support a war against Baghdad. However, the nuclear weapons gambit proved more fruitful, not because there was any hard evidence for the charge, but because supposedly reliable witnesses, in the persons of exiled anti-Saddam Iraqis, kept telling Bush and his advisers that the nuclear story was true.
What we had was a U.S. leadership cadre whose worldview literally demanded a mortally dangerous Iraq, and informants who, in order to precipitate the overthrow of Saddam, were willing to tell the tale of pending atomic weapons. The strong desire to believe the tale of a nuclear Iraq lowered the threshold for proof . Likewise, the repeated assertions by assumed dependable Iraqi sources underpinned a nationwide U.S. campaign generating both fear and war-fever.
So the U.S. and its allies insisted that the United Nations send in weapons inspectors to scour Iraq for evidence of a nuclear weapons program. That the inspectors could find no convincing evidence only frustrated the Bush administration and soon forced its hand. On 19 March 2003 Bush launched the invasion of Iraq. The expectation was that, once in occupation of the country, they would surely find those nukes. They did not. Their Iraqi informants had systematically lied to them.
Social and behavioral sciences to the rescue?
The various U.S. intelligence agencies were thoroughly shaken by this affair, and today, thirteen years later, their directors and managers are still trying to sort it out—specifically, how to tell when they are getting “true” intelligence and when they are being lied to. Or, as one intelligence worker has put it, we need “ help to protect us against armies of snake oil salesmen. ” To that end the CIA et al. are in the market for academic assistance.
A “partnership” is being forged between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence( ODNI ), which serves as the coordinating center for the sixteen independent U.S. intelligence agencies, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine . The result of this collaboration will be a “ permanent Intelligence Community Studies Board ” to coordinate programs in “social and behavioral science research [that] might strengthen national security.”
Despite this effort, it is almost certain that the “social and behavioral sciences” cannot give the spy agencies what they want—a way of detecting lies that is better than their present standard procedures of polygraph tests and interrogations. But even if they could, it might well make no difference, because the real problem is not to be found with the liars. It is to be found with the believers.
Believers
It is simply not true, as the ODNI leaders seem to assert, that U.S. intelligence agency personnel cannot tell, more often than not, that they are being lied to. This is the case because there are thousands of middle-echelon intelligence workers, desk officers, and specialists who know something closely approaching the truth—that is, they know pretty well what is going on in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Israel, Palestine and elsewhere. Therefore, if someone feeds them “snake oil” they usually know it. However, having an accurate grasp of things is often to no avail because their superiors—those who got their appointments by accepting a pre-structured worldview—have different criterion for what is “true” than do the analysts.
Listen to Charles Gaukel, of the National Intelligence Council—yet another organization that acts as a meeting ground for the 16 intelligence agencies. Referring to the search for a way to avoid getting taken in by lies, Mr. Gaukel has declared, “ We’re looking for truth. But we’re particularly looking for truth that works. ” Now what might that mean?
I can certainly tell you what it means historically. It means that for the power brokers, “truth” must match up, fit with, their worldview—their political and ideological precepts. If it does not fit, it does not “work.” So the intelligence specialists who send their usually accurate assessments up the line to the policy makers often hit a roadblock caused by groupthink, ideological blinkers, and a “we know better” attitude.
On the other hand, as long as what you’re selling the leadership matches up with what they want to believe, you can peddle them anything: imaginary Iraqi nukes, Israel as a Western-style democracy, Saudi Arabia as an indispensable ally, Libya as a liberated country, Bashar al-Assad as the real roadblock to peace in Syria, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) aka Star Wars, a world that is getting colder and not warmer, American exceptionalism in all its glory—the list is almost endless.
Conclusion
What does this sad tale tell us? If you want to spend millions of dollars on social and behavioral science research to improve the assessment and use of intelligence, forget about the liars. What you want to look for is an antidote to the narrow-mindedness of the believers—the policymakers who seem not to be able raise above the ideological presumptions of their class—presumptions that underpin their self-confidence as they lead us all down slippery slopes.
It has happened this way so often, and in so many places, that it is the source of Shakespeare’s determination that “what is past, is prelude.” Our elites play out our destines as if they have no free will—no capacity to break with structured ways of seeing. Yet the middle-echelon specialists keep sending their relatively accurate assessments up the ladder of power. Hope springs eternal.
This work by MWC News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License .
Dr. Davidson has done extensive research and published in the areas of American perceptions of the Middle East, and Islamic Fundamentalism. His two latest publications are Islamic Fundamentalism (Greenwood Press, 1998) and America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood (University Press of Florida, 2001). He has published thirteen articles on various aspects of American perceptions of the Middle East. Dr. Davidson holds a BA from Rutgers, an MA from Georgetown University and a Ph.D. in history from the University of Alberta. This entry was posted in Analysis . Bookmark the permalink . | 0 |
Alex Jones leaked the audio of a phone conversation Thursday night revealing Megyn Kelly promising him a fair, “gotcha” interview as she invited him to appear on her new NBC News program. [“I don’t double cross,” Kelly tells Jones, repeatedly assuring him that her interview would not dwell on “conspiracy theories” or familiar attacks against the independent broadcast host. Rather, Kelly says that the focus of the news profile would be to humanize Jones and explore his personal life. Jones himself appears in the video, revealing the private phone conversation on his website InfoWars in advance of Kelly’s Sunday broadcast. He annotates the audio clips with his own commentary, NBC’s preview snippet of the interview, and news clips about the ensuing uproar — where a besieged Kelly has denounced Jones’ coverage of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting as “revolting. ” The video puts Kelly in a precarious position. As her fledgling weekend news magazine show fights for viability, agitators have attacked her for interviewing Jones. A boycott sprang up before the broadcast ever aired, pressuring sponsors and reportedly convincing major brands to pull their . In response, she gave a statement contradicting nearly everything she promised in this phone call. “The very question that prompted this interview,” she claimed, is: “How does Jones, who traffics in these outrageous conspiracy theories, have the respect of the president of the United States and a growing audience of millions?” However, Jones has revealed, her pitch was the exact opposite: “I promise you that’s not what this will be [a hit piece],” she says. “It really will be about, who is this guy?” Later on, she expresses her hope that some liberal viewers would come out of the segment saying, “I see the guy who loves those kids and who is more complex than I’ve been led to believe. ” So, which statement is true? That conclusion is not as easy as one would assume. Kelly now finds herself in the unenviable position of appeasing corporate sponsors spooked by outrage while also trying to establish herself as a trustworthy interviewer. bShe has nothing to lose if Alex Jones feels betrayed and never talks to her again, but she does express fear during their conversation that if he calls her out for a “hit piece,” she will have trouble getting any more controversial, subjects to appear on her show. And, based on the preview clips, Kelly will have to square that broken promise with this fervent declaration about her character: She has nothing to lose if Alex Jones feels betrayed and never talks to her again, but she does express fear during their conversation that if he calls her out for a “hit piece,” she will have trouble getting any more controversial, subjects to appear on her show. And, based on the preview clips, Kelly will have to square that broken promise with this fervent declaration about her character: All I can do is give you my word and tell you — if there’s one thing about me, I do what I say I’m gonna do. And I — I don’t double cross, so I promise you when it’s over you’ll say, “Absolutely. She did what she said she was gonna do. ” Jones states that he has only released “a few clips” of his full phone conversation with Kelly and that InfoWars taped the entire NBC interview “so that we can document how she edited, how she manipulated. ” He concludes: “It shows the arrogance of Megyn Kelly that she didn’t think we’d record her to document what she really said and did. ” Read selected transcripts of the Alex Kelly phone conversation below: KELLY: It’s sort of a good opportunity just for storytelling. You know, it’s like — it’s not like the interview, it’s like the profiles of people. And at the top of my list was you. JONES: So it’s like an investigative report into “fake news”? KELLY: No. No, what we’re doing? JONES: Yeah. Come on. KELLY: No no no. Hell no. The reason you — I mean, I know you guys, you know, [inaudible] — The reason you are interesting to me is because I followed your custody case. And I think you had a very good point about the way the media was covering it and for some reason treated you and your family and what was going on as fair game when they never would have done that to, if you will, a mainstream media figure. And I saw a different side of you in that whole thing and I just — here, you know, you became very fascinating to me. I just sort of thought you were this maybe, you know, guy — like, this is your thing — and the comments I heard from you during the course of that trial and your plea to the media to be respectful of you and your kids just reminded me that you’re just like anybody. You’re a dad, you go through the same things we go through, and I thought, “now, that would be an interesting story to tell. ” … JONES: Wouldn’t the argument be, then, in the show, ’cause I’ve seen that as a standard Democrat talking point — I’m not saying that’s what you’re doing — “Well, he asked for privacy in his family, but he didn’t do that for Sandy Hook and he didn’t do that for the pizzeria. ” KELLY: No, I mean, I can ask you about that, you know, but this is not gonna be a contentious, you know, sort of “gotcha” exchange. I — That’s not what this show is and that’s really not what I want to do. I want to do profiles on people, just interesting people. So I can ask you that — “this is what the critics say” — but this isn’t gonna be a “ ! Let’s play a clip. ” … JONES: I don’t mind questions. What I don’t like is, did you know or did your producers do that you, where I said Hillary Clinton personally — and it was so I could get the satire out. You guys, took it out of context, but — did personally kill kids by the Iraq war and Syria war or the Libya situation, and you guys cut the back off of that — it was in the same 30 seconds, where I said I’m not talking about the pizza place, I’m talking about in the Middle East. KELLY: No, this is completely unfamiliar to me. JONES: Remember you had James Alefantis on Fox News, you’re talking about fake news. KELLY: The guy from Comet Pizza? JONES: Yes, and then you played a clip of me saying Hillary personally kills children. KELLY: I, forgive me, Alex, but I don’t remember the clip. I remember him [pause] and, you know, the nature of that exchange, which I think is the only time I’ve ever said — um, [inaudible] anything. [In that Fox News segment, Kelly says to Alefantis: “And someone could have been killed inside of your restaurant for no good reason other than people like Alex Jones fanned a conspiracy theory that even the DC police say has no basis in fact. ”] JONES: Sure, sure, sure. I mean, all I’m saying is, I can send you the Right Wing Watch clip where first reported it, and they said, “Jones ” you know, “said that Hillary killed all these kids but then said it in Syria and Libya. ” So, I mean I’m just telling you, that’s the kind of stuff that scares me, because I can stand for what I’ve said, and I can even say, yeah I probably shouldn’t [crosstalk] Sure, sure. KELLY: Listen, I’ll take a look at that. That’s very unfamiliar to me. All I can tell you is that I bend over backwards to make sure that doesn’t happen. … KELLY: I’m sort of — you know, for lack of a better term, I’m trying to create a different kind of program. And it’s fine. You know, I’ll ask you about some of the controversies, of course. And you’ll say whatever you want to say. But it’s not going to be some gotcha hit piece, I promise you that. I — it doesn’t do me any good. If I do that to you, then you go out there and you say, “She did a hit piece on me. This is what she said, and this is what she did. ” And then the next time I want to get somebody, they’re gonna say, “Look what you did to Alex Jones,” you know. “Screw you. ” So I promise you that’s not what this will be. It really will be about, who is this guy? And we’ll talk about some of the controversy, and I’ll ask you, and you can respond, and we’ll get into the whole, you know, what you’ve been through this past year. And my goal is for your listeners and the left, you know, who will be watching some on NBC, to say, “Wow, that was really interesting. ” [Note: At this point, the audio quality of Kelly’s phone call abruptly changes — All I can do is give you my word and tell you — if there’s one thing about me, I do what I say I’m gonna do. And I — I don’t double cross, so I promise you when it’s over you’ll say, “Absolutely. She did what she said she was gonna do. ” And you’ll be fine with it. I’m not looking to portray you as some boogeyman or, you know, do any sort of a gotcha moment. I just want to talk about you. I want people to get to know you. And the craziest thing of all would be if some of the people who have this insane version of you in their heads walk away saying, “You know what? I see, like, the dad in him. I see the guy who loves those kids and who is more complex than I’ve been led to believe. ” JONES: Sure, but just so you know, like, on all the Sandy Hook things, I’ve had debates where I’ve shown both sides where I go back and forth, but I believe people died there. And then they never show me really saying that, over the years, you know, you can look where the people that think nobody died are the ones all that hate me on the other side of it. And so what I’m saying is, people take clips out of context — and I know I’ve done a lot of stuff, some of which I’m not proud of. So if people want to do a real piece or something, I mean, obviously, I don’t want to sit here and, like, dodge all these interviews. Like, I told — they wanted me to tape something for Charlie Rose’s show, they wanted me to tape something for The View. I’m not saying, oh, I’m such a big, you know, famous guy, it’s just that — KELLY: No no, I understand. JONES: These taping things really just lends itself to be, you know, to ask yourself to be run over. But I understand, obviously, this is a magazine show, so it’s highly produced. … KELLY: It’s like a whole new world over there [at NBC]. They deeply care about this kind of thing [fact checking]. And it’s not that we didn’t care on cable, it’s just a different game on cable. You know, you move faster, and it’s more real time and, you know, that’s just the fact that more mistakes get made. But I will promise you to personally look at any clips we want to use of you and have a producer run by you whether we are taking it in context and what you are saying about — JONES: Well, I say some pretty wild stuff, and I’ll admit to a lot of it’s satire, but also, I’m not trying to be, I’m not being fake about what I’m saying. … JONES: So this is like a reboot, relaunch for you — that you’re not the, you know, or pundit from Fox. You’re an investigative journalist that does magazine, you know, investigations, or — KELLY: Exactly. So it’s like an entirely different set of muscles. And trust me when I tell you, my goal is not to go out there and be like, “Oh my god, if I sit with her, she’s gonna kill me!” Like — but of course I’m gonna do a fair interview. I’m still me! You know, I’m not gonna go out there and be Barbara Walters. You know. You just trust me. It’s — I will ask you about the controversies. I will ask you in a non — you know, I’ll be fair about it. I’ll give you the chance to respond. And I really just want to talk about you, you know. You. … KELLY: I have not enjoyed being, in any way, on the pointy end of the political spear, you know. It was never anything I wanted to do. And so it’s not — you know, I would say that I’m a combination of Mike Wallace, Oprah Winfrey, and Larry the Cable Guy. JONES: [Laughter] I know the Larry the Cable Guy. He’s a good guy. KELLY: I love him! And, so, like, that’s what you’ll get in the interview. [Laughter] That’s — that’s what you’ll get in the interview. [Laughter] Get, you know, a little bit of all three of those. And hopefully, everybody will walk away feeling like they had a good dinner. You know, nutritious, some red meat, with some dessert at the end. | 1 |
Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/overpopulation-lie-debunked-us-farmland.html Daily the mainstream media bombards us with news articles reinforcing the idea that humans are infesting the planet and overpopulating it like parasites sucking it dry of its resources. These bureaucrats have managed to convinced millions of their scheme, when in fact, it’s all a part of their plan to shove the ‘mass death’ agenda down people’s throats all while claiming they are ‘saving the Earth!’ It’s absurd! The truth is if all 6.9 billion of us stood shoulder to shoulder and gathered together in the same general location it would fill only the state of Los Angeles. Or if everyone in the world was given a small house and yard and were once again gathered together in the same general location, it would fill only the states of Texas, California, and New Mexico with room to spare.Don’t believe me? Let’s do the math. Texas has 171 million acres, California has 101 million acres, and New Mexico has 77 million acres , which is a grand total of 349 million acres of land. We can safely assume most households house two persons, (usually it’s more, but we’ll stick with two) If each household was given 0.10 acre (or 20 people per acre because there are 2 persons per household; which leaves plenty of room for a house and land); then we would have the total number of occupants at 6,980,000,000 persons (349 million acres x 20 people per acre). Which is more than enough room to house our 6,900,000,000 population. Keep in mind this doesn’t even take into consideration people living in apartments. The demographics can change based on how people are concentrated. See the map below. Thomas Malthus’ Overpopulation Lie Thomas Malthus, who is the originator of the overpopulation lie, was a British mathematician. His most studied work, “ An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvements of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of M. Godwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers ,” was first published around the late 1700′s. In it he stated, “Overpopulation would destroy the world unless war, famine, and disease rose to check human growth.” He theorized that when population increased and food production increased only arithmetically, then food production would no longer be able to keep up with the populace. He then declared that the world would be out of food by the year 1890. Obviously he was dead wrong and yet we still see his principles applied today. But how realistic is his belief that food would not keep up with demand? Consider this, it takes about 300 sq. meters to feed one person for a year. Since a kilometer is 1,000 meters, we could feed 3,333 people per sq. kilometer, but let’s use 3,000 people per sq. kilometer to make math easy. Meaning it would take 2,333,333 sq. kilometers (or 3000 ÷ 7,000,000,000) to feed the entire population for a year. The total farmland in the US is about 922,000,000 acres of land . There are 247.1 acres per sq. kilometer , meaning there is a total of 3,731,282 sq. kilometers (or 922,000,000 ÷ 247.1) of farm land. That’s more than the 2,333,333 sq. kilometers needed to feed the entire population. In other words, the farmland in the US can feed us all! So why does the Government Continue to Insist we are Overpopulated? That’s simple… MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, MONEY! Along with many major corporations, they seek any opportunity to be billionaires. But even worse, these power elite — per the Georgia Guidestones — desire serious population reduction. Instead of the 6.9 billion population, they desire 500,000,000 people. Ultimately, their end game is EUGENICS! Al Gore , Bill Gates , Ted Turner , and others like them, are using their power, wealth, and influence to manipulate the masses. They believe they can decide who is worthy to live and die. Their eugenics agenda lives on, and the bought and controlled media continues to churn out propaganda telling us we have to die so that the Earth (and the elite) may live on. What a load of crap! In conclusion the world’s population is declining not increasing. As I see it fertility rates are rising, abortions are skyrocketing, contraception are in high demand, governments are limiting the number of children in China, we are eating sterilizing foods, and drinking fluoride water, which are all preventing us from any major population growth. Eventually we’ll enter a new paradigm in which the elderly outnumber the younger. In 30 years or so well see the full effect of what the power elite have in store for us. By Lisa Haven / Cover image 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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Hygge is byllshytte 03-11-16 THE Danish art of liking pleasant things is a load of fyckinge wynk, it has been confirmed. ‘Hygge’, which translates as ‘blindingly obvious’, is a popular philosophy of enjoying nice stuff like cosy fires, eating food and warm winter socks in a smug, irritating way. Professor Henry Brubaker of the Institute for Studies said: “Having read several books on the subject, I learned that nice things are better than unpleasant things. “I’m not sure whether that’s a lesson for many of us, unless you’re one of those men who goes to a dominatrix to have you arse spanked with a cricket bat, in which case I suppose it might make you think. “I just don’t see how anyone could be into this.” Hygge fan Emma Bradford said: “It’s about enjoying the simple things in life, or just yet another excuse to pamper myself and enjoy lots of nice treats while thinking I am deep.” Professor Brubaker replied: “Fycke offe.”
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Disturbing Body Cam Shows Cop Execute Native American Woman for Holding Haircut Scissors Disturbing Body Cam Shows Cop Execute Native American Woman for Holding Haircut Scissors Matt Agorist July 28, 2016 56 Comments
Winslow, AZ — In March, police officer Austin Shipley responded to a call about a woman acting irregularly in a store. Within minutes of his arrival, he would kill 27-year-old Native American woman Loreal Tsingine.
Last week, conveniently before they released the body camera footage, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery issued a statement excusing Officer Shipley and said he would not pursue criminal charges against him because he was protecting himself and another officer who felt “threatened” by the 100 lb woman.
“After a careful review of the facts surrounding the case, including available video evidence and witness statements from all involved, my office found no evidence of criminal conduct on the part of Officer Shipley,” Montgomery’s statement said.
Late Wednesday night, officials finally released the body camera footage from that fateful day. It confirms witness testimonies.
Shipley claims that Tsingine brandished a pair of scissors which caused him to fear for his life and put five bullets into the 5-foot tall, 100 lb woman. However, witnesses saw a different version of events.
According to Tsingine’s cousin, David Villaescusa, he watched a video of the incident which he says did not show her threaten the officer with the scissors. “She had a pair of scissors that she used to cut her hair split ends,” Villaescusa said. “She stood only five feet tall and weighed less than 100 lbs. Shipley, on the other hand, is over six feet tall and weighs over 200 pounds. I don’t think he had to shoot her.”
“I watched the video,” explains Villaescusa. “She never raised those scissors towards the officer.”
According to bystanders, Shipley showed up after another officer had Tsingine completely under control and had both hands behind her back — yet he continued to yell “stop resisting” as if he wanted the situation to escalate. Moments later, a troubled woman in need of mental help was lying on the ground twitching in a pool of her own blood.
The cowardly and outright abusive behavior in the video below is hard to watch.
Officer Austin Shipley is no stranger to hurting women, and, in fact, according to his fellow officers — he should have never been a cop.
According to records obtained by the Associated Press , at least two officers who trained Shipley had serious concerns about his work, including that he was too quick to go for his service weapon, ignored directives from superiors and falsified reports.
It gets worse.
Before he was even hired as a police officer out of training in 2013, a police corporal recommended that the Winslow Police Department not hire him.
Before Shipley finished the academy, Cpl. Ron Chisholm wrote to Lt. Ken Arend and police Chief Steve Garnett and said, “I do not believe that this officer should be retained by the Winslow Police Department” and outlined a list of reasons. He cited integrity issues, failing to control suspects, not communicating with other officers, not accurately reporting facts and repeatedly questioning his training officers’ directives, according to the report.
But Chisholm wasn’t the only cop who saw trouble in hiring Shipley. Cpl. Jason Thermen also went on record to voice his concerns about Shipley in July of 2013. According to the AP, Thermen said Shipley wrongly believed his badge gave him license to harass the public and ridicule citizens of the small northeastern Arizona city. Thermen also said Shipley was “pouting” because he didn’t allow the trainee to get into fights with a drunken person and with someone during a welfare check. “Shipley advised me the next day he went home and ‘pouted’ because I took the fight away from him again,” Thermen wrote. In their reports, Chisholm and Thermen both noted that Shipley was a danger to society, yet somehow, this man was still given a badge and a gun. “If this behavior continues, it is going to get someone hurt,” Chisholm wrote, noting Shipley’s tendency to continue to go for his gun in situations where it was entirely uncalled for. Even after he was hired, Shipley continued to build his rap sheet. Twice in only three years, Shipley was written up for abusing girls. The first time was for making inappropriate comments to a teenage girl. But the next time he’d be written up, it was for unnecessarily tasering a different girl. As all of this information comes to light, the Native American community is being vindicated in their original claims of injustice. Their friend and daughter, who was undoubtedly troubled, did not deserve to die that night. However, her killer was irresponsibly given authority to initiate violence against citizens by a police department, and for their incompetence, a community now grieves and a killer cop remains on the streets. Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Follow @MattAgorist Share Google + Sgt. Killgood
The person who hired this murder should be held accountable and brought up on conspiracy charges . Too much corruption in our D.O.J . Time to start thinning it out . Gerry Addley
It would only make sense that all the Dexter’s’ of the world would migrate to this profession. kiljoy616
A lot of them do actually. Plenty of stories over the years about the KKK all over the police forces and even Feds. I mean that is where the power to do anything is. Harder to harass if you don’t have the power of a corrupt system behind you. There is an article came out 2 years ago about how police department only hire 100 IQ or so people. People with higher IQ are not hired. But the best part is the court system upheld they could do this. ROFL. Kris Weibel
When good cops call out the bad ones – publicly – then I will believe in the cops. rick
He should be killed for killing an innocent person. elropo
Be very careful saying this on a social page, DA;s love to prosecute for this kind of comments. Tho many agree with you. anna miller
This follows along the lines of the ex-cop on his channel Downtown White Cop, who states that bad cops are given protection, and the good cops who speak out are punished or fired. Lt. Ken Arend and police Chief Steve Garnett should be held accountable, and also their higher ups as well. This is a systemic problem. The bad cops are under the controls of their higher ups. kiljoy616
The system is to corrupt even up to the judges to fix. So no one is going to get fired and no one is going to be held responsible. If your still spouting the we need to fix the police then you are the problem. The police is a symptom of a bigger issue. anna miller
exactly, we have been usurped, and they are going in for the big moves now. They deliberately hire psychopaths. Many police officials are now being trained in Israel. Oh and they have such upstanding police over there. Stuart H
I know of who you speak, he is a retired cop and seems to be a stand up guy. There are more and more of these bad types out there now, and it is putting the public at risk and creating anymosity and mistrust between the people and police. Marilyn5632
I basically get paid in the range of $6k-$8k monthly doing an online job. For anyone prepared to work basic freelance work for 2h-5h /a day at your house and get good payment in the same time… Then this opportunity is for you… http://ow.ly/bAic302l4rr
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In MINNEAPOLIS we’re working to get a REFERENDUM on the Nov. Ballot to REQUIRE cops to have individual MALPRACTICE insurance that can be recinded for compalints & settlements. NO insurance, NO JOB as a Minneapolis cop. Would get rid of SOME of the legal thugs. Find out more: http://www.insurethepolice.org Ruth8564
sadgasdg Joseph White
The city should be sued for hiring an emotionally unstable bully. If the trainer, and other officers urged for him not to be hired and he was hired, then the city is culpable. Alberto
This imbecile officer should’ve been arrested and fired for unnecessary use force. If I was a family member I would be hiring an attorney to sue the Department, the City, and pressure the DA to relook at this case. John Chabak
They should also fire the people who hired him knowing he is as mentally unstable as any other psychopath with badge and gun. The Supreme Gentleman | 0 |
Russia & CIS Countries Launch Massive Air Drills Over 130 Command Centers in Russia and CIS on Alert In Huge Air Drill Posted on October 27, 2016 by Edmondo Burr in News , World // 0 Comments Seven members of the Commonwealth of Independent States ( CIS ) have deployed over 100 fighter jets, long-range bombers and combat helicopters in a massive joint air defence exercise across eastern Europe and Central Asia.
RT reports:
More than 130 command and control centers have been put on alert in Russia and six former Soviet republics – Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.
All the countries contribute to the integrated air defense system overseen by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) – an alliance of former Soviet republics that emerged after the collapse of the USSR.
The large-scale military exercise is to train high-readiness forces in dealing with “airspace violations, including by hijacked aircraft” as well as “assisting crews of aircraft in distress,” the ministry added.
Some 100 aircraft, including Su-27, MiG-29 and MiG-31 fighter jets, Su-24 and Su-34 bombers, as well as Su-25 ground attack jets and combat helicopters provided by the allies, are expected to take part in the drill.
Troops from electronic warfare and surface-to-air missile units are also participating.
The exercise started at 8am Moscow time with Tu-160, Tu-95MS and Tu-22M3 aircraft given the roles of aggressor. The planes, simulating an adversary force, were spotted over Eastern European and Central Asian airspaces, the Russian military said.
All units are being coordinated from a Russian Air Force command center located outside Moscow.
The joint CIS air defense system, established in 1995, currently focuses on protecting the ex-Soviet countries’ airspace as well as providing air or missile strike early warnings and coordinated responses.
Russia contributes the bulk of the system’s early warning and air defense capacities, with short- and long-range radar stations monitoring the area.
Notably, the system does not have a single commander. It is collectively controlled by the chiefs of the air defense forces of the member states themselves.
Bilateral air defense systems between Russia and its neighbors have also been established in recent years. Last December, an air defense agreement between Russia and Armenia was signed by the two countries’ defense ministers, Sergey Shoigu and Seyran Oganyan, respectively.
In 2013 Moscow signed a separate treaty on a joint regional air defense system with Kazakhstan. Russian and Belarusian anti-aircraft missile forces have already been unified into an integrated system designed to contain any security threats in the European theater. | 0 |
Sen. John McCain wasted no time at the Munich Security Conference in Germany on Friday as he portrayed the Trump administration as being in a state of “disarray,” in contrast to the message of reassurance from administration officials. [McCain used the recent departure of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to defend his portrayal of the administration as in “disarray. ” “I think that the Flynn issue obviously is something that shows that in many respects this administration is in disarray and they’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said, according to the Huffington Post. McCain lauded Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis: “The president, I think, makes statements that on other occasions he contradicts himself. So we’ve learned to watch what the president does as opposed to what he says. ” McCain commented that his job was to work with President Donald Trump on areas where they agree. He spoke of the three coequal branches of the United States federal government, remarking on Trump’s recent temporary travel restriction executive order: “I can assure you that … what we just saw on the immigration order that both the legislative and the judicial branches will be exercising our constitutional responsibilities. ” A senior White House foreign policy adviser told reporters this week that Vice President Mike Pence would seek to reassure U. S. commitment to European partners and the transatlantic alliance at the conference. In opening remarks to the conference, McCain said: I know there is profound concern across Europe and the world that America is laying down the mantle of global leadership. I can only speak for myself, but I do not believe that that is the message you will hear from all of the American leaders who cared enough to travel here to Munich this weekend. The senator continued, “These are dangerous times, but you should not count America out. ” McCain then pointed out that Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Vice President Pence, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, and a bipartisan congressional delegation traveled to the conference. A senior administration official told reporters this week that the vice president is attending the security conference on behalf of the President of the United States. Austrian Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz remarked that there was “still a lot of uncertainty,” according to the Post. Kurz said the “big topic” at the conference has centered around what to expect next from the United States. “Today, on behalf of President Trump, I bring you this assurance. The United States of America strongly supports NATO and will be unwavering in our commitment to this transatlantic alliance,” the vice president stated in a Saturday speech to conference participants. “For our part, thanks to President Trump, the United States will be stronger than ever before. Our leadership of the free world will not falter, even for a moment. ” Pence continued, “Today, tomorrow, and every day hence — be confident, that the United States is now and will always be your greatest ally. ” In closing, Pence said, “Our choice today is the same as it was in ages past: Security through shared sacrifice and strength, or an uncertain future characterized by disunity and faltering will. The United States chooses strength. The United States chooses friendship with Europe and a strong North Atlantic alliance. ” Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana. | 1 |
Jimmy Breslin, the New York City newspaper columnist and author who leveled the powerful and elevated the powerless for more than 50 years with words and a wit, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88 and, until very recently, was still pushing somebody’s buttons with jabs at his keyboard. His death was confirmed by his wife, Ronnie Eldridge, a prominent Democratic politician in Manhattan. Mr. Breslin had been recovering from pneumonia. With prose that was savagely funny, deceptively simple and poorly imitated, Mr. Breslin created his own distinct rhythm in the music of newspapers. Here, for example, is how he described Clifton Pollard, the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s grave, in a celebrated column from 1963 that sent legions of journalists to find their “gravedigger”: “Pollard is . He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3. 01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the President of this country, was a working man who earns $3. 01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave. ” Here is how, in one of the columns that won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, he focused on a single man, David Camacho, to humanize the AIDS epidemic, which was widely misunderstood at the time: “He had two good weeks in July and then the fever returned and he was back in the hospital for half of last August. He got out again and returned to Eighth Street. The date this time doesn’t count. By now, he measured nothing around him. Week, month, day, night, summer heat, fall chill, the color of the sky, the sound of the street, clothes, music, lights, wealth dwindled in meaning. ” And here is how he described what motivated Breslin the writer: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers. ” Poetic and profane, softhearted and unforgiving, Mr. Breslin inspired every emotion but indifference letters from outraged readers gladdened his heart. He often went after his own, from with “ faces” who had forgotten their hardscrabble roots to the Roman Catholic Church, whose sex scandals prompted him to write an angry book called “The Church That Forgot Christ,” published in 2004. It ends with a cheeky vow to start a new church that would demand more housing and better posture. Love or loathe him, none could deny Mr. Breslin’s enduring impact on the craft of narrative nonfiction. He often explained that he merely applied a sportswriter’s visual sensibility to the news columns. Avoid the scrum of journalists gathered around the winner, he would advise, and go directly to the loser’s locker. This is how you find your gravedigger. “So you go to a big thing like this presidential assassination,” he said in an extended interview with The New York Times in 2006. “Well, you’re looking for the dressing room, that’s all. And I did. I went there automatic. ” Early on, Mr. Breslin developed the persona of the Everyman from Queens, so consumed by life’s injustices and his six children that he barely had time to comb his wild black mane. While this persona shared a beer with the truth, Mr. Breslin also admired Dostoyevsky swam every day hadn’t had a drink in more than 30 years wrote a of books and adhered to a demanding work ethic that required his presence in the moment, from a civil rights march in Alabama to a “perp walk” in Brooklyn — no matter that he never learned to drive. The real Jimmy Breslin was so elusive that even Mr. Breslin could not find him. “There have been many Jimmy Breslins because of all the people I identified with so much, turning me into them, or them into me, that I can’t explain one Jimmy Breslin,” he once wrote. Sometimes he presented himself as a regular guy who churned out words for pay other times he became the megalomaniacal stylist — “J. B. Number One,” he called himself — who was dogged by pale imitators with Irish surnames. On occasion he would wake up other reporters with telephone calls to say, simply, “I’m big. ” He cut longstanding ties over small slights, often published an annual list of “the people I’m not talking to this year,” and rarely hesitated to target powerful friends, depending on his depth of outrage and the time until deadline. He would occasionally refer to those who had fallen out of his favor only by their initials. After concluding that Gov. Hugh L. Carey of New York had become too enamored of fine living, for example, Mr. Breslin rechristened his old pal Society Carey, a nickname that stuck like gum on a handmade shoe. But when someone he knew was sick, whether a beloved daughter or the switchboard operator at work, Mr. Breslin would be at the bedside, offering his comforting gift of almost vaudevillian distraction. A man whose preferred manner of discourse was a yell, Mr. Breslin could be unkind, even vicious. In 1990, for example, he was suspended by his employer, Newsday, for a racist rant about a female reporter who had dared to criticize one of his columns as sexist. At the same time, Mr. Breslin was unmatched in his attention to the poor and disenfranchised. If there is one hero in the Breslin canon, it is the single black mother, far removed from power, trying to make it through the week. According to his wife, Ms. Eldridge, Mr. Breslin became so upset by what he had witnessed in the streets of the city, streets he knew as well as anyone, that he often needed time to recover after writing his column. “Bad news puts him to bed,” she said. Mr. Breslin came honestly to his empathy and distrust. Born James Earle Breslin on Oct. 17, 1928, he grew up in the Richmond Hill section of Queens. When Jimmy was 6, his father, James, a musician, deserted the family, leaving him to share an apartment with an emotionally distant mother, Frances — a supervisor in the East Harlem office of the city’s welfare department who drank — as well as a younger sister, a grandmother and various aunts and uncles. Decades later, after Mr. Breslin had become famous, his father, destitute in Miami, came back into his life “like heavy snow through a broken window,” he wrote. He paid for his father’s medical bills and sent him a telegram that said, “NEXT TIME KILL YOURSELF. ” When his father died, in 1974, he paid for the cremation and said: “Good. That’s over. ” Mr. Breslin found early escape in newspapers. As a boy, he would spread the broadsheet pages across the floor and imagine himself on a Pullman car, filing stories from baseball ports of call: Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh. Then The Long Island Press, in Jamaica, Queens, hired him as a copy boy in the late 1940s. High school took longer than necessary, and college received only a passing nod his life centered on deadlines and ink. After getting a job as a sportswriter for The New York Mr. Breslin wrote a freshly funny book about the first season of the hapless Mets, “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” It persuaded John Hay Whitney, the publisher of The New York Herald Tribune, to hire him as a news columnist in 1963. Soon Mr. Breslin was counted among the writers credited with inventing “New Journalism,” in which novelistic techniques are used to inject immediacy and narrative tension into the news. (Mr. Breslin, an admirer of sportswriters like Jimmy Cannon and Frank Graham, scoffed at this supposed contribution, saying that he and others had merely introduced storytelling to a new generation.) Unleashed, Mr. Breslin issued regular dispatches that changed the craft of column writing, said the journalist and author Pete Hamill, a former colleague. “It seemed so new and original,” Mr. Hamill said. “It was a very, very important moment in New York journalism, and in national journalism. ” Mr. Breslin wrote about President Kennedy’s gravedigger, the sentencing of the union gangster Anthony Provenzano, the assassination of Malcolm X, and a stable of New York characters real and loosely based on reality, including the Mafia boss Un Occhio, the arsonist Marvin the Torch, the bookie Fat Thomas and Klein the lawyer. But Mr. Breslin’s greatest character was himself: the boulevardier of bilious persuasion, often chaperoned by his superhumanly patient first wife, “the former Rosemary Dattolico. ” “Jimmy invented himself,” said Donald H. Forst, a prominent New York newspaper editor who died in 2014 and first worked with Mr. Breslin at The Herald Tribune. “He was irascible, extremely talented and very, very . And he understood what news was. ” Mr. Breslin began his day early, making calls to judges, politicians, police officers and other journalists, always greeting them with words that signaled he was in the hunt for news: “What’s doin’?” “He just keeps calling until he has a column in his head,” Ms. Eldridge explained. “But then he has to go see it. ” Over the years, Mr. Breslin would leave daily newspapers in search of better pay. In 1969, for example, he resigned from The New York Post after writing his first novel, “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” a satire about the Mafia that was later made into a forgettable movie. But he repeatedly succumbed to the sirens of daily journalism, first at The Daily News, then at New York Newsday, then at Newsday on Long Island, then back to The Daily News. “Once you get back in the newspapers, it’s like heroin,” Mr. Breslin told The Times. “You’re there. That’s all. ” Mr. Breslin always seemed to be “there. ” He became one of the first staff writers at New York magazine. In 1968, he was nearby when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles. In 1969, he ran for City Council president on a wacky, wildly unsuccessful ticket that included Norman Mailer for mayor. (Their contention that New York City should become the 51st state found little traction.) In 1986, he broke the story of how the Queens borough president, Donald R. Manes, had been implicated in a payoff swindle involving city officials two months later, Mr. Manes committed suicide. And in 1977, most famously, Mr. Breslin received a chilling letter from the serial killer known as Son of Sam, who, by that point, had killed five young people in New York and wounded several others with a . revolver. “P. S.: JB, Please inform all the detectives working the case that I wish them the best of luck,” the killer wrote. Mr. Breslin published the note with an appeal for Son of Sam to surrender, but the killer, David Berkowitz, struck twice more before being captured. The New Yorker magazine accused Mr. Breslin of exploiting the moment and feeding the killer’s ego. But he countered that he had published the letter at the suggestion of detectives, who thought it could encourage the killer to write another note that might bear clearer fingerprints. Mr. Breslin won nearly every award known to the newspaper business, and also distinguished himself as a critically acclaimed author. He wrote novels, including “World Without End, Amen” (1973) a transcontinental love story set against the Troubles in Belfast, and “Table Money” (1986) about a Queens housewife freeing herself from her husband, an alcoholic sandhog. He wrote biographies of Damon Runyon and Branch Rickey. He wrote “The Good Rat” (2008) in which he used the saga of two New York police detectives working as Mafia hit men to share his funny, insights into mob culture. Perhaps the quintessential Breslin book was “The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez,” published in 2002, in which he focused on the death of an unauthorized Mexican worker at a flawed Brooklyn construction site to rail against the shoddy building practices, political cowardice and racism of his beloved city. Trial and tragedy accompanied his many triumphs. In 1981, Mr. Breslin’s first wife, Rosemary, died of cancer she was 50. In 2004, his elder daughter, Rosemary, a writer, died of a rare blood disease she was 47. In 2009, his other daughter, Kelly, died after collapsing in a Manhattan restaurant she was 44. At these times, friends say, words failed even Jimmy Breslin. But Mr. Breslin always returned to the distraction and urgency of writing. In 1982, he married Ms. Eldridge in a union that, with his six children and her three, provided rich column material. (“Everybody hated each other,” he told The Times. “It was beautiful. ”) In 1994, he underwent surgery for a brain aneurysm that threatened what he called his “ memory,” an experience that led to a memoir, published in 1996, called “I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me. ” “Think of it: He still works every day,” former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, a close friend who died in 2015, wrote in remarks prepared for a 2009 celebration of Mr. Breslin. “Writing, or thinking about writing, and he has done it for 60 years, nearly 22, 000 days and nights — except for the short hiatus when doctors were forced to drill a hole in his head to let out of his congested brain some of his unused lines. Then he wrote a book about it!” In addition to his wife, Ms. Eldridge, a former city councilwoman from Manhattan, Mr. Breslin is survived by his four sons, Kevin, James, Patrick and Christopher a stepson, Daniel Eldridge two stepdaughters, Emily and Lucy Eldridge a sister, Deirdre Breslin and 12 grandchildren. In 2004, Mr. Breslin resigned from his job at Newsday to pursue other writing projects. But in 2011, he briefly returned to The Daily News to write a weekly column, in which he revisited old mob acquaintances, reflected on the plight of and denounced the deaths of the young in wars waged by the old. It was as though he could not help himself. Telling the stories of others, he once wrote, allowed him to suppress his feelings about his own story — including, say, a father’s abandonment. “I replaced my feelings with what I felt were the feelings of others, and that changed with each thing I went to, so I was about 67 people in my life,” he wrote. Telling stories was how Mr. Breslin communicated. In 1994, as he was about to undergo brain surgery, he told a nurse about Bo Gee, a small, thirsty man who sold newspapers in the bars and restaurants of the East Side. Between drinks, the man would call out the two headlines that sold the most papers. One was “War!” Mr. Breslin told the nurse. And the other: “Big Guy Dies. ” | 1 |
Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Jake Tapper pressed Health Secretary Tom Price on the American Health Care Act’s cuts from Medicaid. The exchange opened with Tapper asking, “According to the congressional budget office, the health care bill that just passed the house would cut $880 billion over ten years from Medicaid. I know that the trump Administration is excited that Medicaid will go back to the states where they have more control and can experiment and be more efficient, but without question, $880 billion fewer dollars is a cut. How is this not a broken promise?” Price answered, “Look at the Medicaid promise that program that we have right now and of physicians that should be seeing Medicaid patients aren’t. There a flaw in the program. Imagine a system that works better for patients. Medicaid deals with disabled, elderly, healthy moms and kids. and yet the federal government has said to the states up to this point you have to treat every sink gel one of those individuals exactly the same. That doesn’t make sense to anybody. So what we’re fashioning is a system that would allow the states to tailor that Medicaid program to those specific individuals saving money but also a higher level of care than they currently do. Sounds like it makes a lot of sense. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
NASHVILLE — It is the latest chapter in one of the more tangled stories of an American presidential corpse — a tale of love and cholera, betrayal and real estate, honor and probate law. But having been interred in three different places since his death in 1849, James K. Polk, the 11th president of the United States, now faces the prospect of having his sleep disturbed yet again. A new proposal making its way through the Tennessee legislature calls for digging up the bodies of Polk and his wife, Sarah Childress Polk, both of which have been buried on the grounds of the state Capitol for more than a century. They would then be relocated to a final resting place at a Polk family home and museum in the small city of Columbia. Supporters say the move will properly honor an unjustly overlooked president, a man who expanded the territory of the United States by a third, signed a law establishing the Smithsonian Institution and created the Naval Academy. Opponents, including Teresa Elam, 65, a distant relative of Polk’s, are calling it nothing short of macabre, and an unsavory effort to promote tourism in Columbia, a city of 37, 000 about 50 miles south of Nashville that is otherwise known for a colorful yearly celebration of its industry. “They’re desecrating a grave,” said Ms. Elam, who has walked the halls of the Capitol with a sheaf of historical documents, making her case to lawmakers. “It’s been on the Capitol grounds for about 124 years. It’s dishonor and disrespect. ” The relocation of a president’s body after death is not . In 1858, the remains of James Monroe, the fifth president, were moved from New York to his native Virginia, at a time of rising sectional tension. And the coffin of President Abraham Lincoln has been moved around his burial spot in Springfield, Ill. at least 17 times, by one count, including a bizarre thwarted effort in 1876 to steal his body and hold it for ransom. Here, the prospect that the presidential remains could be moved yet again has prompted rare fits of passion on the topic of Polk, a man historians have called “priggish” and “colorless,” and one whose legacy is often overshadowed by his mentor, Andrew Jackson, who is buried at the Hermitage, his family plantation, a major tourist draw here. Indeed, when President Trump, who often likens himself to Jackson, visited Nashville this month, he laid a wreath on Jackson’s tomb, honoring him in a speech as a president who “understood that real leadership means putting America first. ” If Mr. Trump knew where Polk’s tomb was, he did not let on. On Monday, the State Senate is expected to vote on a resolution that would be the first step in an approval process for relocating the bodies. Disinterring the remains will also require the approval of the state’s House of Representatives, the governor, the Tennessee Historical Commission and a local judge. The Polks’ grave, which is currently tucked away on a grassy patch, was designed by William Strickland, the noted Greek Revival architect who designed the state Capitol and George Washington’s sarcophagus at Mount Vernon in Virginia. A handsome monument framed by classical columns notes that Polk “planted the laws of the American union on the shores of the Pacific. ” The grave is dwarfed by a nearby equestrian statue of Jackson. State Senator Joey Hensley, a Republican representing Columbia and the sponsor of the bill, said the grave seems overlooked in its current spot. “I honestly served up here 14 years and had never seen the site,” he said on Thursday. “It’s not handicap accessible. It’s not really talked about much when they do the Capitol tour. Not many people visit it. It’s just not a very good place to honor his legacy. ” Much drama preceded the grave’s ultimate location. Polk had numerous ailments. An operation for urinary stones as a teenager is likely to have left him sterile or impotent, and may explain why he did not have children, according to John Seigenthaler, one of his biographers. Polk left the White House in 1849 after serving just one term, as he had promised, and returned that April to Nashville, where he had previously served a term as governor. But the city was in the midst of a cholera outbreak, and Polk contracted the disease and died in June at age 53. Tom Price, the curator of the President James K. Polk Home and Museum in Columbia, said that by city ordinance, cholera victims at the time had to be buried at the municipal cemetery on the edge of town. By May 1850, however, Polk was moved to Polk Place, a grand home a few blocks from the Capitol that he had bought in 1847. His wife, a formidable woman who did much to shape his career, remained in Polk Place, celebrated as one of the nation’s most famous widows, until her death in 1891. Then things got complicated. In a will he drew up five months before his death, Polk, a lawyer, stipulated that both his body and that of his wife should be buried on the premises of Polk Place. He also stipulated that after his death and his wife’s, the property should be held in trust by the state, which must always allow a blood relative to live there. Upon the death of Polk’s wife, a number of heirs filed a lawsuit arguing that the will was invalid. According to Bill Carey, a local researcher and writer, the court ruled in their favor, on the grounds that the will violated the rule against perpetuities, which limits an owner’s ability to leave property to unborn future generations. Polk Place was sold and torn down today, there is a boutique hotel on the property. On Sept. 19, 1893, Polk’s body was moved to the Capitol, where he was buried alongside his wife. “In my mind,” Mr. Carey wrote in 2015, “the reinterment of President and Mrs. Polk is one of the most disrespectful deeds ever committed by the state of Tennessee. ” Critics of the new plan include Carroll Van West, the state historian. “When Polk left the White House he came home to Nashville, and his wife stayed there for decades afterward,” Mr. Van West told The Nashville Scene last week. On Wednesday, Mr. Price, the curator of Polk House, gave a tour of the historical property. It was late afternoon and there were no other visitors. The handsome home was built by Polk’s father in 1816. Polk lived in it as a young man from 1818 to 1824. Today it is furnished with much of the furniture from Polk Place. A gift shop sells jars of Polk Pickles and bottles of President’s Choice wine. Mr. Price acknowledged that it was difficult to get students, even from schools around Columbia, to tour the home because Jackson’s famous Hermitage is so close by. But he insisted that the proposal to move Polk’s body was not about tourism, as much as it was about honoring a president’s wishes. “He wanted to be buried at home,” he said, and this was as close as Polk could get. | 1 |
While speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill about the American Health Care Act after the GOP’s meeting on the bill on Thursday, Speaker of the House Representative Paul Ryan ( ) stated, “tomorrow, we’re proceeding. ” Ryan said, “We have been promising the American people that we will repeal and replace this broken law [the Affordable Care Act] because it’s collapsing, and it’s failing families, and tomorrow, we’re proceeding. ” After he concluded with his statement, Ryan left, and did not answer a shouted question on whether the bill has enough members who are willing to vote for it to pass. Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
Twitter has long positioned itself as a global town square where anyone — celebrities, politicians, athletes, and you and me — can chat in messages and find out about whatever is happening in the moment. But with that premise not drawing enough new people to the social media service, Twitter is now rethinking whether it can survive as an independent company and is exploring several strategic options. Twitter, based in San Francisco, is talking with Salesforce. com, Google and others about a possible takeover of the company, people briefed on the discussions said on Friday. The talks are in the early stages, these people said, with no guarantee that a deal will be reached. In particular, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, is resistant to selling to some of the potential acquirers, they said. Twitter is also weighing a possible revamping that could involve divestitures and layoffs, the people said. Two divisions that Twitter is considering divesting itself of are Vine, the mobile video service, and MoPub, a mobile advertising business, they said. The company is working with the investment banks Goldman Sachs and Allen Company on its options. A Twitter representative declined to comment, as did a representative from Google. A Salesforce spokeswoman said the company does “not comment on rumors and speculation. ” On Friday, shares of Twitter surged more than 21 percent after CNBC reported that the company had received takeover interest, though the stock still ended the day below the price at which it went public — $26 a share — in November 2013. For two years, Twitter has been casting about for ways to attract new users and to become a social media destination on the order of Facebook. While people initially flocked to Twitter, its growth has slowed sharply as people complained about how difficult it was to use the service. At the same time, Facebook and its suite of offerings like Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger continued to outpace Twitter in user growth and profitability, while Snapchat has become the newest darling of the social media world. Lack of growth also began to erode advertiser demand, which had remained robust even as Twitter’s overall number of users stagnated at around 313 million people. Advertisers aiming for big audiences tended to choose Facebook, while those looking for younger audiences have the option of Snapchat. Twitter has endured internal turmoil and a revolving door of executives and board members. Mr. Dorsey, a who became permanent chief executive of Twitter almost a year ago, has vowed to turn it around by making it easier to use and by emphasizing elements that could make it more essential to people. “Twitter is live: live commentary, live conversations, live connections,” Mr. Dorsey has said. To make good on those comments, Twitter has a signed a series of partnerships to stream live events, including National Football League games on Thursday nights and the coming presidential debates. This month, Twitter unveiled a free app for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Microsoft’s Xbox One so that the live events can be streamed to a much larger audience. The company is also emphasizing selling more premium video ads. But after several false starts, critics are skeptical that these efforts will work. Mark Mahaney, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets, said Twitter’s revenue might fall to less than 10 percent growth this year and added that if no acquirer emerged soon, the stock would plummet further. He recommended this week that shareholders sell their Twitter stock based on an anemic advertising forecast for the company. On Friday, how interested Google or Salesforce might be in buying Twitter, along with the identities of other possible bidders, became something of a parlor guessing game in Silicon Valley. Google’s name has surfaced in the past as a logical buyer because of the internet search company’s size and digital portfolio. Media companies have also been considered possible suitors. Why Salesforce might be interested in Twitter was a to some people. Salesforce is an enterprise technology company that focuses on businesses and not individuals, as Twitter does. But Salesforce has publicly expressed interest in owning a social network, which the company believes can bolster its main business of selling software and services to business clients. Many companies use Twitter to handle customer service requests and complaints, for example. Salesforce’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, conceded this summer that his company had bid aggressively for the social networking site LinkedIn, which instead sold to Microsoft for $26. 2 billion in June. Salesforce’s chief digital evangelist, Vala Afshar, on Friday posted on Twitter some of the attractions that a deal might have for his employer. Among them: Twitter’s “personal learning network,” “the best news,” “democratize intelligence” and “great place to promote others. ” Mr. Afshar later said the thoughts were just his opinion. Compared with its social media and internet peers, Twitter is more susceptible to a takeover because it has only one class of stock. Companies like Facebook and Google’s parent, Alphabet, have multiple classes of shares, which gives their founders tight control over their companies and guarantee independence. Twitter has $3. 6 billion in cash on hand and $1. 6 billion of debt, according to Standard Poor’s Global Market Intelligence. Microsoft paid a premium of nearly 50 percent for LinkedIn, although any sale of Twitter is unlikely to bring such a rich price. | 1 |
The mainstream media have been doing a victory lap since the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) confirmed on Monday in testimony before the U. S. House Intelligence Committee that President Barack Obama did not wiretap Trump Tower. But that was already known. [There was only one new revelation at the hearing, and it was a bombshell: senior Obama administration officials could have known the identities of surveillance targets. One of those targets, retired General Michael Flynn, lost his job after it was revealed that his conversation with the Russian ambassador had been monitored, and that he had discussed sanctions relief, contrary to his early private and public claims. Yet Flynn’s identity was never supposed to have been revealed. The surveillance of the Russian ambassador, routine though it may have been, yielded classified information, and the identity of any U. S. citizen swept up in it should have been redacted. But Flynn’s name was unmasked and leaked to the media. Moreover, the New York Times reported on Jan. 19 — with a headline on Inauguration Day — that “intelligence reports based on some of the wiretapped communications had been provided to the White House. ” And the Times also reported in February that surveillance of Trump aides suspected of ties with Russia had been disseminated widely throughout the government, without privacy protections, by order of the lame duck Obama administration under NSA rules, which the Times had already reported earlier in January. Monday’s hearing “debunked” Trump’s wiretapping tweets, but left his underlying claim intact: that there was surveillance of the Trump campaign that the results were shared throughout the government — even possibly reaching the Obama White House and that intelligence was leaked, illegally, to the mainstream media. In an extraordinary exchange with FBI Director James Comey on Monday, Rep. Trey Gowdy ( ) explored what that meant — that Obama aides could have broken the law: GOWDY: Do you know whether Director [of National Intelligence] James Clapper knew the name of the U. S. citizen that appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post? COMEY: I can’t say in this forum because again, I don’t wanna confirm that there was classified information in the newspaper. GOWDY: Would he have access to an unmasked name? COMEY: In — in some circumstances, sure, he was the director of national intelligence. But I’m not talking about the particular. GOWDY: Would Director [of the Central Intelligence Agency James] Brennan have access to an unmasked U. S. citizen’s name? COMEY: In some circumstances, yes. GOWDY: Would National Security Adviser Susan Rice have access to an unmasked U. S. citizen’s name? COMEY: I think any — yes, in general, and any other national security adviser would, I think, as a matter of their ordinary course of their business. GOWDY: Would former White House Advisor Ben Rhodes have access to an unmasked U. S. citizen’s name? COMEY: I don’t know the answer to that. GOWDY: Would former Attorney General Loretta Lynch have access to an unmasked U. S. citizen’s name? COMEY: In general, yes, as would any attorney general. GOWDY: So that would also include Acting AG Sally Yates? COMEY: Same answer. GOWDY: Did you brief President Obama on — well, I’ll just ask you. Did you brief President Obama on any calls involving Michael Flynn? COMEY: I’m not gonna get into either that particular case that matter, or any conversations I had with the president. So I can’t answer that. Gowdy’s questioning revealed an astonishing list of potential suspects. And given that the FBI and NSA testified that there was still no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, the fact remains that the only crime that is known to have occurred with absolute certainty was the leaking of Flynn’s name and the contents of his conversation with the Russian ambassador. Democrats hoped to hurt Trump. Instead, they raised more questions about Obama’s role. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. | 1 |
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The following remarks were delivered by Milo Yiannopoulos at a Tuesday press conference in New York City.[ I am a gay man, and a child abuse victim. Between the ages of 13 and 16, two men touched me in ways they should not have. One of those men was a priest. My relationship with my abusers is complicated by the fact that, at the time, I did not perceive what was happening to me as abusive. I can look back now and see that it was. I still don’t view myself as a victim. But I am one. Looking back, I can see the effects it had on me. In the years after what happened, I fell into alcohol and nihilistic partying that lasted well into my late 20s. A few years ago I realised it was time to do something good with my life. I started focusing on work. But the black comedy, gallows humor and love of shock value I developed in my 20s did not go away. I’ve reviewed the tapes that appeared last night in their proper full context and I don’t believe they say what is being reported. Nonetheless I do say some things on the tapes that I do not mean and which do not reflect my views. My experiences as a victim led me to believe I could say anything I wanted to on this subject, no matter how outrageous. But I understand that my usual blend of British sarcasm, provocation and gallows humor might have come across as flippancy, a lack of care for other victims or, worse, “advocacy. ” I am horrified by that impression. I would like to restate my disgust at adults who sexually abuse minors. I am horrified by pedophilia and I have devoted large portions of my career as a journalist to exposing child abusers. I’ve outed three of them, in fact — three more than most of my critics. And I’ve repeatedly expressed disgust at pedophilia in my feature and opinion writing. I was also the first journalist in the UK to ask after Jimmy Savile’s death whether the real story of his rampant child abuse would ever be told. My professional record is very clear. But I do understand that the videos you have seen, even though some of them were deceptively edited, paint a different picture. I am partly to blame. I do not advocate for illegal behavior. I explicitly say on the tapes, in a section that was cut from the footage you have seen, that I think the current age of consent is “about right. ” I do not believe any change in the the legal age of consent is justifiable or desirable. I do not believe sex with is okay. When I mentioned the number 13, I was talking about myself, and the age I lost my own virginity. I shouldn’t have used the word “boy” — which gay men often do to describe young men of consenting age — instead of “young man. ” That was an error. I was talking about my own relationship when I was 17 with a man who was 29. The age of consent in the UK is 16. I did say that there are relationships between younger men and older men that can help a young gay man escape from a lack of support or understanding at home. That’s perfectly true and every gay man knows it. I am certainly guilty of imprecise language, which I regret. Anyone who suggests I turn a blind eye to illegal activity or to the abuse of minors is unequivocally wrong. I am implacably opposed to the normalization of pedophilia and I will continue to report and speak accordingly. To repeat: I do not support pedophilia. It is a disgusting crime of which I have personally been a victim. The remarks I made on podcasts and interviews more than a year ago were about my personal life experiences. I will not apologize for dealing with my life experiences in the best way that I can, which is humor. No one can tell me or anyone else who has lived through sexual abuse how to deal with those emotions. But I am sorry to other abuse victims if my own personal way of dealing with what happened to me has hurt you. I will never stop making jokes about taboo subjects. Go into any drag bar or gay club and you will see performers cracking jokes about clerical sexual abuse. I am not afforded that same freedom, because the media chooses to selectively define me as a political figure in some circumstances, and a comedian in others. But I said some things on those internet live streams that were simply wrong. My employer Breitbart News has stood by me when others caved. They have allowed me to carry conservative and libertarian ideas to communities that would otherwise never have heard them. They have been a significant factor in my success. I’m grateful for that freedom and for the friendships I forged there. I would be wrong to allow my poor choice of words to detract from my colleagues’ important reporting, which is why today I am resigning from Breitbart, effective immediately. This decision is mine alone. When your friends have done right by you, you do right by them. For me, now, that means stepping aside so my colleagues at Breitbart can get back to the great work they do. My book, Dangerous, has received interest from publishers after my previous publisher Simon and Schuster informed me they no longer wished to release it. The book will come out this year as planned. I will be donating 10 per cent of my royalties to child sex abuse charities. I haven’t ever apologized before. doesn’t bother me. But to be a victim of child abuse and for the media to call me an apologist for child abuse is absurd. I regret the things I said. I don’t think I’ve been as sorry about anything in my whole life. This isn’t how I wanted my parents to find out about this. But let’s be clear what is happening here. This is a cynical media witch hunt from people who don’t care about children. They care about destroying me and my career, and by extension my allies. They know that although I made some outrageous statements, I’ve never actually done anything wrong. These videos have been out there for more than a year. The media held this story back because they don’t care about victims, they only care about bringing me down. They will fail. I will be announcing a new, media venture of my own and a live tour in the coming weeks. I started my career as a technology reporter who wrote about politics but I have since become something else. I am a performer with millions of fans in America and beyond. I’m grateful for the tens of thousands of messages of support I’ve received and I look forward to making you all laugh, cry and think for many decades to come. My full focus is now going to be on entertaining and educating everyone, left, right and otherwise. If you want to brand or stereotype me, good luck with that. Don’t think for a moment that this will stop me being as offensive, provocative and outrageously funny as I want on any subject I want. America has a colossal free speech problem. The land of the First Amendment has some of the most oppressive social restrictions on free expression anywhere in the western world. I’m proud to be a warrior for free speech and creative expression. I want everyone in America, the greatest country in the history of human civilisation, to be able to be, do, read and say anything. I will never stop fighting for your right to do that. Thank you. I will take 5 questions. | 1 |
Carmela Tyrell November 11, 2016 10 Problems That Kill Your Rural Survival
If you are a rural town dweller, or live on a farm or off-grid, you already have an expanded set of survival skills. Your isolation along with these skills are the keys to your survival, but you still must expect the unexpected.
Here are ten problems that you may not even give much thought but they still can cause a lot of troubles in turbulent times.
1. Lack of Key Supplements for Livestock
Modern farming methods can feed their livestock any number of things that might have been out of the question in the past. For example, today, many farmers think that it is safe to feed alfalfa to cattle because they also include a supplement in the feed.
Without this supplement, cattle and other sensitive animals will suffer from stomach bloat and die. You have a big pile of these supplements for now, but you will run out of them.
Therefore, be aware of the natural nutritional needs of all livestock in your care, and know exactly why you are giving various supplements to livestock.
Make it a point to see if you can replace these supplements with something you can make on your own or find out how to eliminate them altogether.
Adjust farming methods so that you no longer need antibiotics or other chemicals that won’t be available after a crisis hits.
Your animals will be healthier , and your body won’t be absorbing all those chemicals and toxins through animal based meat, milk, and eggs.
2. Insufficient Genetic Material for Plant and Animal Based Sources of Food
If you do some research, you will find that many animal based industries are already having problems with lack of sufficient genetic variation. For example pedigree dogs and thoroughbred horses are rapidly becoming a point of scandal and derision because of the serious genetic defects that lead to disease and early death.
Now consider a situation where you have just one bull and 5 or 6 milk cows, and that the cows are from all different blood lines. Even though the bull may be different from them, within just a few generations the animals produced will be sicker and weaker.
No matter whether you are raising chickens, cattle, goats, sheep, cats, dogs, horses, or other animals, make sure that you have enough genetic variation in both the males and females .
While one gender may not be as valuable as the other in terms of producing meat or eggs, the genetic variance is truly far more important than the inconvenience of keeping a few extra animals for the sake of genetic diversity.
This is also very important to consider when growing plants for food . Always use heirloom seeds, and try to get them from as many different places as possible. As long as the species and strain are the same, you can keep the plants strong and genetically viable from one generation to the next.
The last thing you will want to do is be ten, or even twenty years into a survival scenario only to realize that major staple plants are less robust or becoming weaker despite proper care of the water and soil. Needless to say, you should also store away triple, or even quadruple the number of seeds that you plan to use during an active crisis scenario.
At the very least, if genetic viability proves to be a problem, you will still have some to start over with, and then look for resources in other locations. This may include studying wild plants in the local area and cultivating them on a larger scale if needed.
3, Inadvertent Hybridization of Key Food and Medicine Bearing Organisms
If you currently use hybrid seeds because they offer more disease resistant plants or other benefits, you may not be thinking about the long term consequences of hybridization.
A hybrid is defined as a cross between two species that are close enough to produce viable offspring, however the offspring usually cannot produce a viable next generation.
For example, if you have two fields of heirloom corn or plant two strains close together, hybridization will occur. From there, the next year’s crop may grow, however, the seeds for the third year may not even sprout let alone produce a mature plant.
When growing plants , be very careful about where you plant different strains as well as which pollinators can create hybrids without your knowing. This includes bees which can carry pollen for miles as well as the wind itself which can transmit pollen from one field to another.
If at all possible, only grow one strain of a plant per year. It is also very important to be aware of: wild plants from a related species that might provide pollen plants grown by other survivors in the area that may be of a different, but related strain
4. Loss of Soil Fertility
Together with soil erosion, loss of soil fertility is a huge problem and apt to get worse in a survival situation.
Many farmers today rely on a range of fertilizers to enhance the soil . While this may produce edible plants, the lack of micronutrients is showing up in poor health and increased risk for disease for consumers.
Since you will be using the same soil over and over again to grow foods, this problem may cause serious health problems sooner than expected.
Take the time now to know how the soil on you farm differs from undisturbed land nearby. Make sure that you know how it differs in key nutrients that you expect to absorb from the foods.
If you find lacking nutrients, then look for ways to naturally recondition the soil in order to restore those nutrients. Some options may include: expand the types of plants used on composting to include wild plants and leaves from surrounding areas find ways to add animal bones and other parts in order to create a natural fertilizer. For example, eggshells are an excellent soil conditioner that you can get from chickens being raised on the farm research safe ways to compost human excrement. It should be noted that there is a good bit of controversy on this matter as human feces and urine carry diseases that have left your body. While animal excrement can also be very dangerous to your health, at least the pathogens are not already established and accustomed to the human immune system, and therefore readily able to evade it.
5. Loss of Key Species Due to Overhunting or Overfishing
Many people think that as long as they live in a country setting, all they will have to do is go out into the woods and shoot a deer or some other animal for food. Aside from the fact that larger populations of people will easily cause animal depletion, there are some other problems with this idea: Overhunting and over fishing can also occur when injured animals get away. Not only is the meat from them lost, the hunter will more than likely go out and shoot at one or more animals until they catch one.
If the person in question is not a very good hunter , this means dozens of animals may be knocked out of the gene pool and also made unavailable to people that need the food from these animals. As the gene pool of target species becomes less diverse, illness and fewer offspring will result.
Just take a look at the changes in deer spot patterns and white deer that signal pending collapse of a herd. Unknown stresses from social collapse may impact vital species. Consider a situation where you are in a rural area that is surrounded by mines or factories. Even though they may appear far enough away to prevent damage to the land in your area, they can still pose a hazard during a collapse.
In particular, waste from factories and mines can be carried for hundreds of miles down a river, or seep into the air and soil via other means. Once these toxins get into the deer, rabbits, and other animals of interest, these animals will die off and leave you with very few, if any to hunt.
In order to mitigate these problems, you must always be aware of how many animals are being taken from the land for food as well as make sure you know how many got away and were never found.
It is very important to keep security patrols going through hunt areas so that you can stop strangers and prevent them from interfering with the wild herds you depend on.
You should also have longer ranging scouts take periodic trips to factories, rivers, and other water features that may impact your local area.
At the very least, if you know that a mine or factory has released a dangerous toxin, you may just have enough time to drive animal herds to another area where they can continue to live and reproduce.
6. Loss of Key Habitats
No matter whether you chop down trees to provide wood for fires or use a nearby pond for potable water and irrigating crops, your activities will change the land around you. This, in turn, can lead to the loss of forests and other key habitats that you depend on for raw survival materials.
As rural families expand or more people find their way out of the cities, this problem will get even worse. You have only to look at the mess of an inner city to see what becomes of areas that were once as filled with trees and other natural landmarks.
As with protecting wild animals used for food, you must also protect the trees and other natural resources that you rely on. Do your best to patrol areas where loggers or scavengers may be looking to cut trees and take them away. Make sure that you know who is coming into the local area and how to keep them away from valuable land so that it is not destroyed.
While you may be inclined to share some of your resources, remember that you can never truly own a tree or the land it grows on. Be careful with these resources so that they will be available to future generations.
Since clearing land is unavoidable, you must replace what was taken. For example, if you cleared some land for farming, look for abandoned areas nearby that no longer have trees or other plants. You can always take tree seeds or even hand started seedlings and plant them in these areas.
If the soil in these areas is toxic or has many contaminants, you can try growing carrots, certain mushrooms, and conifers to clean the soil as quickly as possible. Once the soil is cleared of heavy metals and other contaminants, then you can plant maple trees or other forest bearing trees that will be of use to you.
7. Inadequate Sewage and Sanitation Systems
If you currently have a septic tank and leach field, then you may not realize just how easily your sewage system can become useless in a crisis situation . Among other things, if you don’t have a pump system to clean out the tank, then backing up toilets, sinks, and tubs, can easily force you out of your home. Some things you can do to avoid these problems include: keep a good supply of sludge destroying organisms on hand. These can eat way materials that do not go out into the leach lines and buy you at least a few years before the next cleaning is required. Have an outhouse and other outdoor plumbing ready for use. Know how to make slit trenches and other short term sanitation options. Do some research on composting toilets and how best to use the materials from it.
8. Lack of Common Vaccines
As with people trying to survive in a city setting, you will also be faced with a lack of vital vaccines. This includes those used to fight off tetanus and diphtheria. Many people today are misinformed about vaccines and believe that all of them are bad.
While many vaccines use Thimerisol as a preservative (which contains Mercury), that does not mean every single person that gets the shots will be poisoned or rendered permanently disabled.
In fact, thousands of people (including members of the military) take dozens of vaccines at a time without many long term problems. On the other hand, if you contract tetanus, it will kill you despite access to the best modern medicine.
It is very important to make sure that tetanus, diphtheria and other critical vaccinations are kept up to date. Aside from that, if you are part of a survival community, or have a survival doctor as a friend, ask them to store away these vital vaccines for long term needs.
Even though these vaccines supplies will run out one day, they can still be very important. You can also do some research on how Jonas Salk and other early vaccine developers created their products.
Some of those methods may be within reach of local doctors that may be able to use them in a time of need.
9. Lack of Fuel for Farm Equipment or Other Vehicles
As a prepper, you are sure to be very aware of the problems associated with loss of gasoline and diesel supplies. On the other hand, if you have been putting off converting your farm equipment to run on natural gas or biodiesel, then you may not be as ready as you though you were.
It is also very important to note that biodiesel and natural gas options aren’t completely free of problems. This includes creating long lasting and viable storage solutions as well as making sure that you have enough plant matter to make fuel.
If you have been following the ethanol saga , then you may already know that the loss of arable farm land for the sake of making fuel can be a huge problem.
Aside from expanding the range of fuels that your farm equipment can use, it is very important to have alternative farm equipment on hand. This includes plows and other equipment that you can pull on your own or use a horse, donkey, or oxen to pull them.
Even if you never use these tools, they may still be of use to future generations that may not be able to produce farm equipment to replace machines that wear out or break down.
Here are some other things you can do to manage the lack of fuel problem as well as some others that are likely to come up over time: Consider building either a hydroponics or aeroponics farming system. You can usually grow a good bit of food in a very small space without the need for complex farm equipment. Since water and air based growing systems require very little soil, you can also have peace of mind knowing that you won’t have to worry about soil depletion. If you choose to use fish as the source of nutrition in the hydroponics system, then you can also use them for food once they become large enough to eat. Video first seen on WeLikeShootingVideos . Look for ways to reduce plantings only to plants that will be needed for making new seeds. Instead of allowing so many plants to reach full size, you can get a good bit of benefit from consuming micro plants. Not only will this make it easier to grow food indoors, you will also have access to more nutrients in a limited space.
10. Lack of a Bug Out Plan
Today, the vast majority of preppers tend to see forests, farms, and small towns as the ultimate bug out location. If you are already in this type of setting, then you may also feel that there is no place else to go.
If you do not have a viable bug out plan, then you may be at a bigger disadvantage than expected. No matter whether you need to navigate to another rural area, or to a smaller city that has little damage from a large scale crisis, you will have a lot of problems without a well designed bug out plan.
Here are some things that you should at least have on hand in case you need to leave your bug in location: A bug out bag that includes a complete navigation kit. Maps and other materials that can help you get from one place to another as quickly and safely as possible. Some means of transport other than a motor vehicle and a cart for carrying your bug out supplies. A radio and means of communication so that you can always know what is going on in the area you are about to enter. From military patrols to roving bands of thieves, you are best served by knowing where the highest risks are so that you can skirt around these areas instead of going through them.
Before a crisis hits, it is very important to have reliable sources of information. This goes well beyond how to carry out certain tasks or manage any given project. Rather, you will need real-time information from people in areas you intend to enter.
This includes information on the nature of the crisis in the area, how badly it is damaged, and what the biggest threats are. If you need to build a weapon or change your travel plans, it is best to have up to date information that will help you make the best decisions.
Invariably, there is nothing like trusted contacts in the location to tell you what is really going on.
There is no question that many people see a return to nature or homestead farming as the ultimate form of prepping.
On the other hand, a nuclear bomb in the right place, a hurricane, tornado, or even an earthquake can make all your hard work go to waste.
These are just a few reasons why you need to consider more than basic survival when planning for rural area bugging in.
At the very least, if you consider the ten points listed in this article, you will have a chance to avoid them, and also use them as a basis for looking into other parts of your bug in plan that might need some additional work.
To survive you need to learn the lost ways and skills that helped our forefathers survive during harsh times. Click the banner below and learn how to live without our modern days technologies and gadgets.
This article has been written by Carmela Tyrell for Survivopedia. 28 total views, 28 views today | 0 |
Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers.
That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays.
The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.” Ads that exclude people based on race, gender and other sensitive factors are prohibited by federal law in housing and employment.
[…]
When we showed Facebook’s racial exclusion options to a prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman , he gasped and said, “This is horrifying. This is massively illegal. This is about as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find.” | 0 |
The Crucial Thing We Forget When We Go Crazy Debating About Trump Nov 12, 2016 1 0 This election sure has created quite the ripple effect of intense emotions, division and polarized opinions. Since Trump won, all I see are people angrily debating about whether or not he is a good guy, and whether or not he can “make America great again”. But while we all sit behind our computers and drive ourselves crazy trying to convince others of our stance or spend hours of research trying to find the truth… it’s easy to forget about the basics. The basics that, I believe, are the KEY to real and lasting change. I think the world needs this message big time. Share far and wide if you agree! | 0 |
‘Monster Vote’ Is Happening, Early Voting Poll Numbers You Can’t Know Posted on October 30, 2016 by Rebecca Diserio in Politics Share This Hillary Clinton (left), Trump rally (middle), Donald Trump (right)
For weeks, the mainstream media has pushed a false narrative that Hillary Clinton is so far ahead and this election is over. Luckily, there are some who realized this move is straight out of the leftist playbook and called out the press for what they were up to — lying. No longer can they report Hillary being ahead by double digits. In what’s been dubbed “the monster vote,” here are the poll numbers they do not want you to see.
What’s the monster vote? That’s the silent majority in this country who are going to overwhelm all of the liberal talking heads’ expectations. We started to see the monster vote for Donald Trump in the primaries, where he attracted voters to register as Republicans to vote in the primaries.
Now, we have early voting taking place in some states, and those numbers are proving, here comes the monster vote . Gateway Pundit reported:
DONALD TRUMP Senior Communications Advisor Jason Miller shared some very positive news on FOX News on Sunday morning.
Jason Miller told Melissa Francis the Trump Campaign is up 100,000 votes in Florida and 35,000 votes in North Carolina compared to four years ago . Trump rally (left), “We’re gonna need a bigger basket” meme (right)
Let’s break that down further to see what it means. Based on all the early voting in Florida, which is a must win for Trump, right now, it’s Trump = 51.5%, HRC = 48.5%, which is incredible. Democrats typically rule early voting, and in 2012, at this point, Barack Obama was up by 5% in Florida. Now, for the monster vote news for Florida, as broken down by The Conservative Treehouse (CTH):
This is YUGE because Obama won early voting in FL by 5 points in 2012 and after election night he won the state by less than 1 point. ( LINK ) Actual in person voting on the traditional election day, November 8th, will heavily favor Donald Trump.
Folks, based on what we have data wise so far and the fact that the 16 counties didn’t start early voting until the 29th of October (which favors Trump based on data above), I can now soundly say that we will win FL by 8 to 10 points (54.5 – 46.5). The monster vote is coming.
The mainstream media will continue to slant the early voting numbers for Hillary, so don’t listen to them. I guarantee you, they are taking a sample and then skewing it. Remember, Democrats almost always vote early, but Republicans don’t usually vote until election day. Based on what these smart guys at CTH are saying, North Carolina, Ohio, and Nevada will go Trump and even Minnesota and Wisconsin are slanting towards Trump, which would be just icing on the cake since those states usually go Democrat.
Tune out the mainstream media on the polls and get ready for the monster vote. It seems to be the best-kept secret in this election. The monster voters are the forgotten men and women across this country who haven’t voted in years and are now sick and tired of Washington’s corruption invading their life.
They’re back with a vengeance, and they have hope that we can turn this country around. We all agree it will be pure joy on election night as we watch Hillary and her minions break down in disbelief that We the People took our power back and we will never give it away again. | 0 |
Nigerian authorities announced the release of an estimated 82 of the 276 girls kidnapped by the Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram from a mostly Christian school in Chibok, Nigeria, in 2014 this weekend. The release appears to be part of a deal that may have gained freedom for jailed Boko Haram terrorists. [A Nigerian government official told Al Jazeera the government was keeping the girls in the town of Banki, close to the border. Few details surfaced on the status of the girls following their release Saturday. “According to sources, this may be a result of negotiations — but there have also been some military operations of recent around that area, as well as other parts of northeast Nigeria,” Al Jazeera’s Ahmed Idris reported from Nigeria’s capital. “We were told that Boko Haram was trying to negotiate for the release of some of their top commanders in custody of the Nigerian security services,” Idris reported. “There are also some reports suggesting that they want some ransom to be paid for some of these girls. ” Boko Haram, which roughly translates to “all Western education is forbidden,” seeks to impose Islamic Sharia law in Nigeria’s mainly Muslim north. In March, thousands of women in Nigeria took the streets of the northern capital Maiduguri to protest the government’s inability to eradicate Boko Haram, which continues to commit mass abductions, rapes, and murders since the government claimed it had defeated the group in 2015. The women who organized in Maiduguri, the capital of northeastern Borno state, wanted to attract the attention of representatives of the U. N. Security Council, who were visiting the city at that time. The protests also targeted President Muhammadu Buhari in Abuja, who won the nation’s presidency on a campaign promise to eliminate Boko Haram. Boko Haram jihadists also abuse boys by teaching them at an early age how to rape women while limiting the chances of them escaping. “They tell us to remember to hold the girl tight on both hands, pinned to the floor,” a boy identified as “Ahmed” told reporters last year. “They said we shouldn’t let a woman overpower us. ” On April 14, 2014, the terrorists seized 276 pupils from the Government Girls Secondary School in the town of Chibok, with 57 of them managing to escape in the immediate aftermath of the abduction. Since then, some of the schoolgirls have been released, while others managed to escape. Even with Saturday’s release, that leaves about 100 girls still unaccounted for and the future of the girls is uncertain after years of trauma and many have borne children while in captivity. | 1 |
00 UTC © USGS Map of the earthquake's epicenter An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 5.4 rattled a broad swath of central Italy, including Rome, on Wednesday (Thursday NZT), just two months after a powerful temblor toppled villages, killing nearly 300 people. There were no immediate reports of damage. Italy's National Vulcanology Center said the epicenter was near Macerata, near Perugia. The US Geological Survey said it had a depth of some 10 kilometres, which is relatively shallow. The quake was felt across a broad swath of central and southern Italy, shaking centuries-old palazzi in Rome's historic centre. The Aug. 24 quake destroyed hilltop village of Amatrice and other nearby towns. Wednesday's quake was felt from Perugia in Umbria to the capital Rome to the central Italy town of Aquila, which was struck by a deadly quake in 2009. The mayor of Aquila, however, said there was no immediate report of damage. The quake struck at 7.10pm on Wednesday (local time). "The earthquake only happened a few minutes ago. It's dark here, so impossible to determine if there has been any damage outside," one resident in Penna San Giovanni told EMSC. "All services - electricity, internet, etc - are still working normally." MORE TO COME | 0 |
Am I the only person who sees the irony of John Kerry being a dissident speaking out against the war in Vietnam, now he’s a lackey for a far greater evil government silencing dissent ? | 0 |
0 комментариев 0 поделились
Как пишет EurekAlert, ученые из медицинского Университета Вашингтона в Сент-Луисе показали, что NMN может компенсировать потерю производства энергии и снижения типичных признаков старения, таких как постепенное увеличение веса, потеря чувствительности к инсулину и снижение физической активности.
"Мы показали способ замедлить физиологический спад, — рассказал доктор медицинских наук, профессор биологии и медицины Син-ичиро Имаи. — Метаболизм и энергетические уровни старых мышей теперь напоминают молодых".
По его словам, клетки человека полагаются на этот же процесс производства энергии, и в дальнейшем технология сможет помочь людям не стареть. Биологи уверены, что что столь впечатляющие результаты актуальны и для человека. Как сообщают ученые, испытания препаратов с NMN на человеке уже начаты в Японии.
Исследователи отмечают, соединение NMN содержится в таких продуктах как огурцы, авокадо и брокколи.
Ранее ученые сообщали, что продолжительность человеческой жизни существенно увеличится. Исследователи утверждают, уже в этом тысячелетии она составит в среднем несколько сотен лет.
По мнению известного британского геронтолога Обри ди Грея, люди, которые будут жить до 150 лет, уже появились на свет, а в ближайшие два-три десятилетия родятся те, чья продолжительность жизни будет составлять уже до 1000 лет. Мы станем жить дольше за счет повышения качества жизни, более продвинутой медицины, разнообразных технологий, предотвращающих старение…
Сейчас старость ассоциируется у нас с дряхлым телом и болезнями, поэтому многих пугает перспектива долгой жизни. Таким образом, задача состоит не только в том, чтобы ее продлить, а еще и в том, чтобы удлинить период, в течение которого человек будет оставаться активным и трудоспособным.
Ди Грей полагает, что процесс старения связан с накоплением в организме дефектов и повреждений. Профилактическая гериатрия позволит устранять эти дефекты до того, как их количество превысит критическую отметку.
В свою очередь, профессор Юваль Харари из Еврейского университета в Иерусалиме пророчит, что люди будущего превратятся в киборгов. Часть жизненных функций будет выполнять легко заменяемая электроника, изношенные органы будут заменяться искусственными, более совершенными, чем естественные, поэтому жить мы будем довольно долго.
Компания Alphabet Inc. Calico занимается изучением химических соединений, способствующих образованию новых нейронов. Благодаря этим исследованиям, возможно, удастся избавить человечество от болезней Альцгеймера, Паркинсона и других заболеваний, при которых гибнут нервные клетки мозга и которые, как правило, тоже связаны со старением.
Читайте последние новости Pravda.Ru на сегодня Человечеству подарят "вечную молодость"? | 0 |
November 11, 2016 French Plan for ‘Mega Database’ of Citizens’ Personal Data Triggers Protests
The French government is under fire for quietly issuing a decree establishing a mega-database of personal details of 60 million French citizens, a move privacy campaigners view as potentially dangerous.
The database established by the decree issued by Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve will affect every holder of a French passport or identity card, except for children under 12 years of age.
Information to be stored includes a photo, date and place of birth, address, eye color, weight and marital status. Fingerprints were to have been included too, although Cazeneuve dropped that plan amid massive criticism.
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Sexual abuse was so rampant that it created a “private hell” for some students at an elite prep school in Rhode Island in the 1970s and ’80s, investigators reported on Thursday, describing an atmosphere of terror in which at least 61 students were victimized and some staff members committed assaults for years before being forced out. The investigation found that at least 51 students were abused by employees of St. George’s School, a prestigious private boarding and day school near Newport, and at least 10 others by fellow students — and that the true numbers are probably significantly higher. The inquiry came after years of pressure from victims who said that St. George’s had refused to squarely acknowledge the extent of the problems. The report — with pages of vivid, painful detail from accusers — follows other revelations about sexual abuse at several prominent prep schools in the same area, but none have matched the sheer scale and pervasiveness of the misconduct discovered at St. George’s. More victims will come forward, and “when the sun is set on this case, it could be the largest school sex abuse case in history,” said Roderick MacLeish, a lawyer and St. George’s alumnus who has worked with abuse survivors in pressuring the school to conduct the investigation. “It’s in the thousands of years of suffering this caused. ” The abuses that alumni have recounted, often after decades of silence, include forced intercourse, oral sex and digital penetration one student sodomizing another with a broomstick sexual groping harassment and taking photographs of naked students without their knowledge and showing them to other students. The misconduct by one staff member, the report said, was so frequent and such common knowledge that many of the former students — now and many of them women — told investigators they did not see how other adults could have been unaware of it. “Many of these students remember St. George’s as a place where their abusers created a kind of private hell for them — a place where they suffered trauma and emotional wounds that, for many, remain unhealed,” Martin F. Murphy, the leader of the inquiry, wrote in the nearly report documenting the findings. Both the school and advocates for the victims presented the release of the report as a milestone in the history of a school that had addressed some abuse cases individually, but did not begin to grapple with the scope of the problem until last year. “We have never had something we could point to and say, ‘Here it is in its enormity, in the horror of it,’” said Anne Scott, 53, who was raped while she was a student and later maligned by the school when she sued. Ms. Scott later founded a victims’ group, SGS for Healing. The report “evokes both deep sorrow over the harm inflicted on the most vulnerable members of our community and hope for our future that having finally faced these tragic events with humility and honesty, we may together find the path to reconciliation,” Leslie B. Heaney, chairwoman of the school’s board of trustees, wrote in a letter to the students, staff, alumni and parents. Some former students who claimed to have been abused were not included among the 61 listed in the report, because their stories could not be corroborated, though they may be true, the investigators said. In other cases, people told secondhand stories of abuse, but the victims, themselves, did not come forward and were not included. St. George’s lagged behind most of its peers in facing its past, Mr. MacLeish said, but he praised the school, particularly its headmaster, Eric F. Peterson, for ultimately embracing openness. The report revealed that Mr. Peterson tried to start a broad investigation five years ago, but was dissuaded by the school’s lawyers and some trustees. The report contains repeated echoes of scandals surrounding Catholic priests who preyed on children, in which church leaders moved those priests to different parishes, did not alert the police and pressured victims to remain quiet. Over the years, the report said, St. George’s fired or expelled the abusers it learned about, though only after repeated accusations in some cases. But it did not report them to law enforcement, it misled students and parents about the reasons for staff dismissals, and some of the victims claimed their accusations were brushed aside or that they were bullied into silence for years. The school gave job references and financial support to two faculty members it fired and some who were dismissed went to work at other schools, only to be accused of abuse there as well. A single person victimized more than half the confirmed victims, at least 31: an athletic trainer and coach named Al Gibbs. About of the girls who attended St. George’s in the 1970s told investigators that they had been sexually abused, and at least one had been raped, by Mr. Gibbs, who was fired for sexual misconduct in 1980 and died in 1996. “We expect the number of women actually abused by Gibbs substantially exceeds the reported figure,” wrote Mr. Murphy, a partner in the law firm Foley Hoag in Boston, noting that most sexual assault survivors are reluctant to report the crimes. “These are just the firsthand accounts,” he said. “Many students with whom we spoke indicated that friends had similar experiences, but would not be contacting us. ” Ms. Scott, who graduated in 1980, says she was raped by Mr. Gibbs, an experience that she said left her shattered psychologically and in need of extensive treatment that threatened to impoverish her parents. She sued the school in 1988. “I had stopped talking for periods of time, I was hospitalized, I couldn’t hold a job, I couldn’t leave the house,” Ms. Scott said. “My parents had spent about $200, 000 on my care at that point, and they thought they were looking at a lifetime of care. ” The administration had known for years that Mr. Gibbs was a serial predator, but the school admitted nothing. Its lawyers then played hardball with Ms. Scott, leading her to drop the case in 1989. “I was called a liar, I was accused that it was consensual, I was bullied — they just went into attack mode,” she said. This year, St. George’s and SGS for Healing commissioned Mr. Murphy’s law firm to conduct the investigation, asking to speak with alumni who knew of abuses. The investigative report includes Foley Hoag’s own findings, and those of another firm that was initially retained to conduct the investigation, but was let go over concerns about a potential conflict of interest. The investigators’ mandate was to look at abuses dating back to 1960, but they did not confirm any after the 1980s. The report documented improper and suggestive conduct by one faculty member in the 1990s and 2000s, but nothing that rose to the level of sexual abuse. An accusation against a current staff member was deemed not credible, the investigators reported. “St. George’s School today is a very different place than it was in the 1970s and 1980s,” Mr. Murphy wrote. The report named six faculty members it says were guilty of sexual abuse — those against whom there was the most solid evidence of the more serious charges, including Mr. Gibbs. The other five, all now in their 60s and 70s, refused to talk to investigators. None could be reached for comment on Thursday. | 1 |
Right Now: Here’s how we analyzed in real time the only debate between Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia and Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana. Plus, check out our fact checks and our email exchanges with Walter F. Mondale, the 42nd vice president of the United States. Mr. Kaine challenged Mr. Pence repeatedly to defend statements or proposals made by Donald J. Trump during his chaotic and improvisational presidential campaign, forcing Mr. Pence to filibuster and dodge for minutes on end. It was not quite a defensive crouch: Mr. Pence’s tone and his calm delivery never wavered, and he continued to deflect and deny questions about Mr. Trump’s ideas while turning back to the Obama administration’s foreign policy record. Yet it opened the door for Mr. Kaine — who often interrupted Mr. Pence — to hammer away at Mr. Trump’s business ties to Russian banks, his campaign team’s lobbying work for a Ukrainian strongman and Mr. Trump’s praise for Vladimir Putin. When Mr. Pence broached the idea that the Obama administration had let Russia dominate the response to Syrian policy, Mr. Kaine wore an expression that looked vaguely sad, as though he couldn’t believe Mr. Pence had gone there. What followed was a thumping: Mr. Kaine reeled off chapter and verse on Mr. Trump’s musings on the Russian autocrat and Mr. Putin’s own record as president, from Russia’s struggling economy to his persecution of gay people and journalists. Mr. Pence tried repeatedly to argue that Mr. Trump hadn’t said the things Mr. Kaine had claimed. When that failed, he tried to suggest that merely quoting Mr. Trump was to engage in insults. That set Mr. Kaine up for a revealing summation. “Six times tonight I have said to Governor Pence I can’t imagine how you can defend your running mate’s position,” Mr. Kaine said. “He is asking everybody to vote for somebody that he cannot defend. ” • Mr. Pence criticized Hillary Clinton for using a private email server as secretary of state. After Mr. Kaine said that Mrs. Clinton had been cleared by “a Republican F. B. I. director,” Mr. Pence fired back. “If your son or my son handled classified information the way Hillary Clinton did, they’d be ” he said. • Mr. Kaine, noting that he and his wife were the parents of a Marine, said that “the thought of Donald Trump as scares us to death. ” Mr. Pence replied that President Obama’s tenure had weakened the country’s standing in the world. • After Mr. Kaine said that Mr. Trump had “pursued the discredited and really outrageous lie that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States,” Mr. Pence accused the ticket of trafficking in “an avalanche of insults. ” When Mr. Pence mentioned Russia, Mr. Kaine cut in. “You guys love Russia!” he said. Mr. Pence, appearing taken back by the interruption, said, “I must have hit a nerve. ” • Deflecting a question about Mr. Trump’s suggestion that he was savvy to avoid paying taxes, Mr. Pence said that his running mate was “a businessman, not a career politician. ” Mr. Kaine interjected: “Why won’t he release his tax returns?” Mr. Pence shot back, “We’re answering the question about the business thing. ” • Responding to a question about gun violence and the police, Mr. Kaine spoke of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech, which occurred when he was governor, and called for increased background checks and strengthening the ties between officers and the areas they patrol. Mr. Pence, who said his uncle was a police officer in Chicago, said, “at risk of agreeing with you, community policing is a great idea. ” But he accused Democrats of “ ” officers in the wake of shootings by the police. • Mr. Kaine unleashed a blistering attack on Mr. Trump’s trail of contentious comments during the campaign, ticking off his remarks about Mexicans, women, an judge with Mexican heritage and Senator John McCain of Arizona. “I just want to talk about the tone that’s set from the top,” Mr. Kaine said. Mr. Pence said his running mate’s statements were “small potatoes” compared to Mrs. Clinton’s remark last month that half of Mr. Trump’s supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables. ” Mr. Kaine replied that Mrs. Clinton had apologized for her remark — though, as Mr. Pence pointed out, her apology focused on the “half,” not the descriptor. Mr. Trump, Mr. Kaine said, has refused to apologize for any of his comments. • Mr. Kaine condemned Mr. Trump’s foreign policy credentials, saying that the Republican nominee “can’t start a Twitter war with Miss Universe without shooting himself in the foot. ” Mr. Pence suggested that Mr. Kaine sounded rehearsed. “Did you work on that one a long time?” he asked. Mr. Pence said that America was “less safe today” than it was when Mr. Obama took office. • Sparring over refugee policies, Mr. Pence and Mr. Kaine fiercely defended their running mates’ approaches, with Mr. Pence arguing that Mrs. Clinton would expose the country to heightened risks. Mr. Kaine framed it another way: “We want to keep people out if they’re dangerous,” he said. “Donald Trump said, ‘keep them out if they’re Muslim. ’” • Mr. Pence, seizing on recent comments from Bill Clinton that appeared to be critical of the Affordable Care Act, said that “even former President Bill Clinton calls Obamacare a crazy plan. ” (Mrs. Clinton’s team has moved this week to clarify his remarks, with her husband saying that he always supported the measure and still does.) Mr. Kaine did not immediately respond to the remark, setting off on an answer about Mrs. Clinton’s own economic plans. • After Mr. Kaine mentioned Mr. Trump’s frequent praise of Vladimir Putin and the Trump campaign’s “shadowy connections with forces,” Mr. Pence blamed the Obama administration’s “weak and feckless foreign policy” for Russian aggression. “There’s an old proverb,” Mr. Pence said, “that says the Russian bear never dies, it just hibernates. ” • Mr. Kaine, turning repeatedly to Mr. Trump’s tax avoidance, sought to frame the issue as a matter of national security importance. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Kaine said, “young men and women signed up to serve in the military to fight terrorism” and Mrs. Clinton fought for constituents as a New York senator. “Donald Trump was fighting a very different fight,” he said: skirting tax payments that might have boosted American defenses. • Mr. Kaine accused Mr. Pence of declining to forcefully defend Mr. Trump during the debate, pointing to his frequent deflections when confronted with Mr. Trump’s past comments. “He is asking everybody to vote for somebody that he cannot defend,” Mr. Kaine said. Mr. Pence said he was happy to defend Mr. Trump and accused Mr. Kaine of both misrepresenting Mr. Trump and putting words in his mouth. • Mr. Pence said that Mrs. Clinton had engaged in “ politics” as secretary of state, citing potential conflicts of interest with the Clinton Foundation. “I am glad to talk about the foundation,” Mr. Kaine said. “The Clinton Foundation is one of the charities in the world. ” He turned the focus on Mr. Trump’s foundation, which he suggested — alluding to several newspaper investigations — had often veered far from traditional philanthropy. • Asked about the tension between faith and a public life, Mr. Kaine recalled grappling with his opposition (and the Catholic Church’s) to the death penalty as governor of Virginia, where the law called for it in some cases. “It was very, very difficult to allow executions to go forward,” he said, adding that he promised voters he would carry out the duties of his office. Mr. Pence said he had “a great deal of respect for Senator Kaine’s sincere faith. ” “That’s shared,” Mr. Kaine said. • After Mr. Pence spoke about his opposition to abortion, Mr. Kaine sought to paint the ticket as extreme on the issue, noting that Mr. Trump had once suggested that women should be punished for having abortions if the practice were outlawed. (Mr. Trump later walked back the remark.) “He’s not a polished politician like you and Hillary Clinton,” Mr. Pence said. | 1 |
Poor honest guy will be on the streets now. Sam Houston
Can we start hanging the traitors?!?! Giving votes to foreign nationals/States is tantamount to treason. Donald Costa
Problem is they hate this place and it’s people if you don’t stop them it will never end. Jensen
this is the problem, I have seen videos of people from some where around the vicinity of Syria Africa and these are all MEN who say they use fake passports and they’re goal is to go where there is the best welfare. This is a form of Jihad to use our welfare system and tax us to death. These people will come to American on our dime and vote us out and make us pay for it. Are you ok with that… Im not sjcthrn5 .
That is seriously messed up. I don’t understand our government sometimes. How can they get welfare or public assistance so easily? I was in a rollover accident a little over six months ago where my arm was ripped off at the elbow, had to have six vertebrae in my neck fused, had a couple of skin grafts and a wound on the top of my head that still hasn’t closed all the way up and healed. I went to DSHS to see about help while i recovered and filled out all the applications and medical records releases. I got denied on everything. I will say that they took over healthcare after insurance limits were reached, which didn’t take long the 15 minute helicopter ride was over $29,000 alone. I have never used any public service before, I’m a veteran and I have always had a job since I was 13 years old. I understand helping those immigrants that need it but shouldn’t their be some kind of vetting oversight? Especially when you make your own citizens jump through all kinds of hoops only to tell them no. r.terbeek
sjcthrn5, You need to get an attorney!! Find one that doesn’t get paid if you don’t. millerstwo
For years the Marxist Democrats have openly committed voter fraud knowing that the cowardly Republicans would do absolutely nothing to stop it out of fear of being called racists. Cheating at the polls is now considered ‘the norm’ for this group of America hating liars and cheats. The following has nothing to do with our “voter fraud” conversation per se, but………a couple of days ago I read an article about the genius of Thomas Jefferson and his obsession with America and then I thought about the millions of American hero’s both “gentlemen and commoners” who died in wars defending our Nations freedom then I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sadness realizing what was at stake regarding possibly our last ‘real election’……these great Americans will have died in vane if the Marxists are allowed to steal this election. Then Patrick Henry’s immortal words came to mind….“.. I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!” .
Dido Patrick Bettyj9553
Let’s all pray that Trump gets in. I am so disgusted with how this government and how it is running us all into the ground. The corruption has got to stop. I can’t even believe it is this hard to stop Hillary after all the stuff that has come out about her over and over. How can anyone feel that strongly about voting for a woman who is corrupt in every way. She has never done anything for anyone except when it benefits her. RICARDO36
Why do you think they’re so afraid of TRUMP, He is his own man and servant to none! He would clean up that rat”s nest in Washington and put the D.C. MAFIA out of business! GOD HELP AMERICA!!
Pingback: Dem Official: 'I Think There's a lot of Voter Fraud' - Big Sky Headlines () Mary M.B.
Good guy…so sorry for him ( no good deed goes unpunished), he just lost his job and all forms of employment in N.Y…. Retire and come to Fl. and help us keep Conservatives in office. Keep our state RED! | 0 |
Hillary Clinton was spotted dining with her Saturday Night Live impersonator, comedian Kate McKinnon, Wednesday at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s Theatre District. [The former Democratic candidate reportedly stopped into Orso restaurant before heading off to see the Broadway musical Sunset Boulevard. Hillary Clinton and the woman who plays her on SNL, Kate McKinnon, had dinner yesterday in the theater district https: . pic. twitter. — Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) February 17, 2017, “Lots of laughter emanated from their table,” one fellow diner told Page Six. The dinner photo prompted speculation on social media that Clinton could return to Saturday Night Live for a cameo this weekend. McKinnon took on the role of Clinton throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Clinton and McKinnon sparked a friendship after the pair appeared alongside each other in an October 2015 Saturday Night Live “cold open” sketch. The bit saw McKinnon playing a more relaxed candidate Clinton. The pair traded barbs and ripped on candidate Donald Trump. The actress won an Emmy for her SNL portrayal, after which Clinton admitted that she’s a “big fan” of McKinnon’s. The warm feelings are apparently mutual, as McKinnon told the Hollywood Reporter in the early days of the 2016 campaign that she was “rooting for” Clinton to win. Congratulations on your Emmy, Kate! Big fan of yours, too. pic. twitter. — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 19, 2016, Clinton has spent her days hiking, watching plays, and taking shots at Trump on social media. Last week, Clinton starred in a video for the women’s rights group MAKERS in which she praised the “amazing energy” of last month’s women’s march and proclaimed that the “future is female. ” Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @jeromeehudson | 1 |
Yet another seismic shift is taking place in French fashion. Riccardo Tisci, the creative director of Givenchy and the designer responsible for redefining the brand Audrey Hepburn built for the Kardashian era, said on Thursday that he was leaving the brand after 12 years. A successor has not been announced. Bernard Arnault, chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the French conglomerate that owns Givenchy, said in a statement, “The chapter Riccardo Tisci has written with the House of Givenchy represents an incredible vision to sustain its continuous success, and I would like to warmly thank him for his core contribution. ” Designer moves have become so common of late they are starting to seem more than critical. (A brief list of departures, since 2015, include Raf Simons from Dior, Hedi Slimane from Saint Laurent, Alber Elbaz from Lanvin, Alexander Wang from Balenciaga, Consuelo Castiglioni from Marni and, as of last Monday, Clare Waight Keller from Chloé.) But Mr. Tisci’s amicable divorce from Givenchy, rumors of which WWD reported on last month, could have deeper repercussions. Mr. Tisci had, after all, not only transformed Givenchy into one of LVMH’s most successful brands, but was often held up as a model for the partnership between hot young designer and heritage house. That he was willing to end what appeared to be a happy marriage suggests that the old days of designers staying in place for decades (Karl Lagerfeld has been at Chanel since 1983) may be finally, officially, over. Linda Fargo, senior vice president for fashion and store presentation at Bergdorf Goodman, said, “I guess destabilization is the new normal. ” When Mr. Tisci joined Givenchy in 2005 the brand was floundering after being led by a quick series of creative directors, including John Galliano, Alexander McQueen and Julien Macdonald. In an interview with The Financial Times in 2011, Marco Gobbetti, the former chief executive of Givenchy, said the brand was “a mess, without an identity. ” And Mr. Tisci was a upstart Italian with a gothic sensibility who had barely started his own line. It seemed a surprising match, but Mr. Tisci managed to combine his own sensibility with a certain French classicism and a dose of emotion to give Givenchy a newfound relevance: He made crosses, skulls and the perfect white shirt make sense. Mr. Tisci was also an early adopter of social media, cognizant of the power that those platforms and influencers would have on fashion. He has 1. 8 million followers on Instagram, and many of his famous friends appear in his posts as often as they do in the front row of his shows. LVMH, which also has brands such as Louis Vuitton, Céline and Fendi in its portfolio, does not break down the performance of individual maisons in its financial results. But the number of employees at Givenchy has more than tripled since Mr. Tisci joined the house in 2005, and sales revenue is believed to have grown to around 500 million euros ($539 million) annually. There are now 72 stores worldwide (compared with seven in 2005) with a Rome flagship set to open this year, and plans for a London store are underway for next year. Last week, LVMH, the world’s biggest luxury group, posted record revenue and profits for 2016, beating expectations because of strong sales in the United States and Europe and a pickup in demand in Asia. “Riccardo has accomplished everything a designer can do for a brand, clocking a very respectable tenure and creating a fully realized language for them,” Ms. Fargo said. So, why leave? Mr. Tisci said in his statement, “I now wish to focus on my personal interests and passions. ” But rumors have suggested he may be headed to Versace. It would mean going home to Italy, and to a brand whose unabashed Italian sex and aesthetic mirrors his own. And Mr. Tisci is close to Donatella Versace (he shocked fashion in 2015 when he featured Ms. Versace, at least nominally a rival designer, in a Givenchy ad campaign). Besides, the suggestion, briefly beloved of the industry, that a designer needs a timeout from the increasingly endless show seasons, which was posited when both Mr. Simons and Ms. Waight Keller left their posts, increasingly seems like smoke and mirrors. After Dior, Mr. Simons took an even bigger job at Calvin Klein, and Ms. Waight Keller is said to be moving to a different brand (Givenchy? ). Perhaps this is the answer. Once upon a time, a designer’s name was on the door, and his or her heart was in building a legacy. Now it is rare that any creatives start their own line. Rather, the biggest jobs involve putting their talents at the service of someone else’s already gilded name. That may be an interesting intellectual and creative challenge for a while, but once achieved, it no longer holds the same allure, and the search for the next test begins. “This clearly shows that a lot of folks are about change and evolution, and both designers and brands want to be continually in motion,” said Marc Metrick, president of Saks Fifth Avenue. We tend to romanticize “the designers” and to bestow upon them some sort of mystical, spiritual connection to the houses where they reign, maybe because what they make touches our bodies and can thus transform our lives, maybe because it involves the alchemy of invention or because designers these days have the golden glow of celebrity. But what Mr. Tisci’s move suggests — what all of this may reveal — is another, more parochial, truth: Being a designer is a job like any other. And people change jobs. Pinault, the chief executive of Kering, suggested when Frida Giannini was ousted from Gucci in 2014 that 10 years was probably long enough for any designer to stay at a brand, and after that it was good to mix things up (10 years also being the number most often chosen as an ideal tenure for a chief executive). At the time, it seemed like a radical idea. It does not any more. | 1 |
It is a section of Panama’s newly expanded canal that has troubled veteran canal workers. To safely guide the new generation of massive ships through the two sets of locks, tugboat captains and ship pilots rely on an approach wall to properly align the vessels before escorting them into the first narrow chamber. The wall is an antidote to the currents and winds that push and pull ships into awkward angles, making tugboats wrestle the elements before achieving the proper position. Each entrance has this structure — except one. And it was at this opening on the afternoon of July 21 that the Chinese container ship Xin Fei Zhou struck a lock wall, tearing small holes in its hull — canal officials call it a dent — and forcing it out of service. The new canal was not even a month old. Another container ship had experienced tense moments three weeks earlier as crew members responded to “countless” instructions from a canal employee who was attempting to guide it into the same set of locks. Ultimately, that transit was successful. But the Xin Fei Zhou’s mishap was not the canal’s only setback. Other vessels have sheared or badly damaged up to 100 buffering fenders that are supposed to protect the lock walls and ship hulls should they come into contact, according to interviews with canal workers. Several days before the expanded sea lane opened — nearly two years late and with more than $3. 4 billion in disputed costs — an examination by The New York Times raised questions about its viability, citing concerns over safety, design, changes in the world’s shipping patterns and demand. Canal workers had expressed concern about whether the plastic fenders on the lock walls would be adequate and whether tugboat captains had received the proper training in how to guide the giant ships through the chambers — a procedure that differed from the one used in the original canal. On July 22, in response to complaints, the canal’s administrator, Jorge Quijano, said the expanded canal was safe and was providing service. To back that up, he pointed to the 224 ships that had reserved future transit slots, in addition to the dozens that had already gone through. Canal officials called the Xin Fei Zhou’s incident “minor,” saying it did not significantly damage the vessel, disrupt canal traffic or injure anyone. No official investigation occurred, Mr. Quijano said, “because the informed that they would not attend the investigation meeting. ” Mr. Quijano also defended the utility of the canal’s buffering system, insisting that the fenders are sturdy and effective. “To imply that fenders are falling off as a sign of something wrong or that something is not functioning appropriately is inaccurate,” he said by email. “Because of its intended use, fenders will get damaged and sometimes do fall off the walls and subsequently are replaced. ” If the fenders prove inadequate, he added, changes will be made. “We believe in continuous improvements. ” The expanded canal operates differently from the original one. The new canal uses tugs to move ships through, while the original, which still operates, pulls ships through with locomotives that run alongside the lock walls. According to the Panama Canal Authority, tugs not only are cheaper, but are the only practical way to move the newer giant ships that carry much of the world’s cargo. In a 2014 report, written well before the expanded canal opened, the global insurance company Allianz wrote that the change was risky because it replaced “an elegant, simple system” — one that had lasted for 100 years — with “a more complicated system. ” It added: “Yes, they will be more up to date, but there will also be a greater potential for damage. ” Allianz believes that the tugs will be sufficient, but identified training as the key to mitigating the risks. “This will be a challenge,” the report stated. It is a challenge, tugboat captains say, made more difficult because so many of them have not been fully trained in the new system, said Iván de la Guardia, who heads the tugboat captains’ union. After three weeks of operation, Mr. de la Guardia said, 60 percent of his members had yet to be trained. Mr. Quijano said that “while we have an adequate amount of trained captains to cover our needs, the training is still being provided in order to satisfy the increased demand in the future. ” Given that the expanded canal is new, shippers are closely monitoring its operations, especially since the Xin Fei Zhou accident. “This is not an accident that should be happening,” said Basil Karatzas, a New maritime adviser to shipping companies. He estimated that repairs to the Chinese ship could cost “a few hundred thousand dollars. ” The ship waited several days before resuming its journey. “The delays and costs entailed with repairing the damage easily negate any benefits from passing through the canal,” Mr. Karatzas said. The Times obtained accounts of the two ships experiencing difficulty as they attempted to enter the set of locks without the approach wall. Canal workers also provided pictures of the damaged ship and the damaged fenders. Computer images, apparently recorded in real time, show tugboats struggling to position the Xin Fei Zhou as it approached the chamber before striking the left corner of the lock wall. Five days after the canal opened, the operators of another container ship, the MOL Benefactor, recorded details of its roughly transit through the expanded locks. It was uneventful until the ship reached the lock with no approach wall. The ship’s ranking officer became concerned, records show, because of what he described as “numerous” or “countless” bow thruster orders in addition to helm and engine orders — all indicating a level of uncertainty on the pilot’s part. Unlike the Chinese container ship, the MOL Benefactor eventually passed through the final set of locks without incident. Londor A. Rankin leads the union of canal pilots, who board transiting ships and direct them, along with the tugboats. Two days before the Xin Fei Zhou accident, in response to email questions, Mr. Rankin said pilots were indeed experiencing problems at the entrance without an approach wall. He also said that canal officials had said they were interested in designing and building some sort of structure to help pilots and that they had considered his union’s proposal to buy floating fenders as a better way to ease ships into the chamber. But, he added, “they have mentioned the inconvenience of doing so while the warranty of the new set of locks is still in effect. ” Asked why no approach wall had been built at the one entrance, Mr. Quijano said the walls had been built where the topography allowed it. He also said locks elsewhere do not use approach walls. Panama, in fact, copied the concept of the Berendrecht lock in Antwerp, Belgium, but that chamber is significantly wider than those in Panama’s new locks. Andrew Kinsey, a senior marine risk engineer for Allianz, said he eagerly awaited the results of the canal authority’s investigation, which he said should be shared with all interested parties. The authority has said it is conducting only an internal review that will not be released publicly, rather than a formal investigation. Historical weather data for the area, provided by CustomWeather, reported that when the accident occurred, the wind was around nine miles an hour, with light rain and scattered clouds. Mr. Quijano said that “just at the moment the vessel was entering the lock, it was suddenly hit by heavy crosswinds and very dense rain. ” Cosco Container Lines, which owns the ship, said in a statement: “This is a serious matter. ” “Is it a serious marine incident?” Mr. Kinsey asked. “That will depend on the findings and the extent of repairs. Is it a concern? Yes, there’s a hole in the ship. ” Another Chinese container ship, also owned by Cosco, was the first commercial vessel to pass through Panama’s enlarged canal, in late June. At the time, the authority proclaimed a “new era of global trade” that would provide “greater economies of scale to global commerce. ” Witnessing this historic transit, the officials said, were “25, 000 jubilant Panamanians,” heads of state, shipping executives and nearly 1, 000 journalists. Canal publicists asserted that the ship carried thousands of shipping containers, a load that would not have fit in the smaller, original canal. But the new canal’s sparkling narrative omitted one important fact: Most, if not all, of the shipping containers were empty. And even with the lighter load, the ship awkwardly brushed against a canal wall, according to photos posted online by canal workers. Mr. Quijano said some containers had contained cargo. Besides, he said, cargo containers constitute cargo even when empty. On Tuesday, Mr. Quijano announced that the canal authority was contemplating a ban on cellphones during transits because they were a distraction. | 1 |
November 4, 2016 ‘The FBI is Trumpland’: anti-Clinton atmosphere spurred leaking, sources say
Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.
Current and former FBI officials, none of whom were willing or cleared to speak on the record, have described a chaotic internal climate that resulted from outrage over director James Comey’s July decision not to recommend an indictment over Clinton’s maintenance of a private email server on which classified information transited.
“The FBI is Trumpland,” said one current agent.
This atmosphere raises major questions about how Comey and the bureau he is slated to run for the next seven years can work with Clinton should she win the White House. | 0 |
Share on Facebook Another Avatar moment at Standing Rock. This is a Golden Eagle that landed for about an hour. Natives gathered around it and were able to touch it. American Natives see the eagle as a sacred messenger that carries prayers to the Creator and returns with gifts and visions. Freedom is vital to the survival of the eagle and this teaches us that all people must be free to choose their own paths; to worship as the Creator leads them; and to respect the freedom of others. The Eagle teaches how to master the art of patience and how to move through life without material attachments from their ability to sit for long hours perched on a limb in meditation. Eagles have excellent hearing and can hunt as much by ear as by sight. To those to whom eagle comes, the ability to hear spiritually and psychically will awaken. Eagles have sharp beaks and strong jaws that can remove a finger in one snap. The eagle tells us to mind our words and how they affects others; to speak kindly without sharp rancor. Eagles are renowned for their superior vision, ten times greater than human eyesight. This quality is a gift of vision and clarity that should be used to help others through dark and troubling times. The eagle is a creature of the air, but has strong legs to walk on the earth and often lives near the water for food. These qualities of the eagle teach us to maintain balance in all dimensions to achieve inner-growth. As we soar to spiritual awareness, we remain well grounded in reality as we purify ourselves with the cleansing waters. The eagle teaches us to have the courage to strive for greater heights of spirituality. The Eagle is seen by American Indians as a connection to the Great Mystery – The Creator of all things. VIDEO – Eagles Arrive At Standing Rock Related: | 0 |
Wednesday 9 November 2016 by Davywavy This is what happens when you don’t have the Queen, Canada tells America
Canada has given a sad shake of its head and observed that this is what happens when you don’t have the Queen today.
Browsing the news over its breakfast of bacon, bacon and bacon, Canada met news from The USA with a mixture of incomprehension and pity.
Meanwhile, office conversations around baconcoolers across the country have been held in hushed, horrified tones about the fate which has befallen their neighbour to the south.
“I just called into Tim Hortons for a cup of bacon decaf and a bacon donut when I heard the news from America,” said Canadian Simoon Williams.
“Those poor, poor people. If only they’d kept the Queen as head of state, they’d have avoided all of this.
“Just think; if the American colonists hadn’t been armed in 1776, they’d all be speaking English now.” Get the best NewsThump stories in your mailbox every Friday, for FREE! There are currently | 0 |
Opinion: Economics is a Form of Brain Damage 10/27/2016
UPLIFT CONNECT
Economics is Not a Science and is Not Based in the Real World
In today’s world, economics is king. Everyone’s talking money and economy, yet none of it is actually even real.
Award winning scientist, author, environmental activist, broadcaster, and geneticist, David Suzuki, gives us the thought provoking truth about economics.
“Economics is not a science – it doesn’t even include the earth in its equations. Economics is not based in anything like the real world.”
“Money now grows faster than the real world and economics is so fundamentally disconnected from the real world that it is destructive.”
Here David Suzuki explains how conventional economics is a form of brain damage. | 0 |
GILLETTE, Wyo. — After Kullin Orcutt lost his job at the Peabody coal mine this spring, he knew what he needed to do: join the exodus. “Leave Gillette, leave the state,” he said. Mr. Orcutt is a miner and one of 592 coal workers who have been laid off here since January. Thousands more job cuts are expected this summer. More people will follow Mr. Orcutt. While many businesses in Gillette are struggling to stay open, a dealer has been nearly sold out since the school year ended this month. But 200 miles to the southwest, in Carbon County, where Wyoming’s first coal mine opened a century ago, the mood is different. The last coal mine closed a decade ago, but the county may soon be home to the largest wind farm in North America, if not the world. “Coal is hurting, but wind power is our bright spot on the horizon,” said Cindy Wallace, the director of the Carbon County Economic Development Corporation. “Eventually, we could be the wind capital of Wyoming, the U. S. the world. ” In Wyoming, the country’s biggest state, the energy landscape is transforming along with the nation’s, but in a state of 584, 000 people, that change is happening at hyperspeed. That transition has left men like Mr. Orcutt behind. The new positions and financial opportunities offered by wind and other industries are not replacing all the jobs going up in coal smoke. Many of the current jobs are out of state, at wind turbine factories in Colorado and Iowa. Millions of dollars’ worth of investments are flowing into Wyoming’s wind projects, but much of the profit will flow out of state, as well. The thousands of coal workers who will probably lose their jobs do not necessarily have the technical skills to operate wind farms. In any case, new wind jobs will number in the hundreds, not the thousands. So when Mr. Orcutt left Gillette this spring, he did not head for the wind fields of Carbon County. Instead, he moved to Shelby, Mont. for a job at a privately run prison, leaving behind his wife and son in a groaning apartment that they share with Mr. Orcutt’s sister, her husband — a welder who was laid off from the coal mines — and that couple’s three children. “It’s hard being here without them, but here I have a job,” he said. “In Gillette, those jobs are gone forever. ” The numbers bear out his decision, said Robert W. Godby, an energy economist and professor at the University of Wyoming. “Wind energy is certainly lucrative,” he said. “That’s why so many investors are interested. But it doesn’t create nearly the economic impact of the fossil fuel industry. ” Today, about 66 percent of the electricity in the United States is produced by coal and natural gas, and just 7 percent is produced by renewable sources such as wind and solar. But market forces and government regulations are rapidly changing that picture. A glut of inexpensive natural gas has cut into coal’s dominance of America’s power market. And President Obama’s climate change regulations, known as the Clean Power Plan, take direct aim at coal, the No. 1 cause of greenhouse gases. The Department of the Interior has already declared a halt on new coal mining on public lands, a move with an outsize impact on Wyoming, where a majority of mines are on federal property. And the international Paris agreement on climate change could make the efforts to end the burning of coal a global campaign. All of these policies are closing the remaining plants and freezing the construction of new ones, but they also aim to aggressively increase the production of renewable power. The Clean Power Plan contains a goal for 20 percent of the nation’s electricity to come from wind, solar and other clean sources by 2030. Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has pledged to raise that amount to 33 percent by 2027. Companies from around the world are looking to Wyoming’s wind to meet that demand. “There’s enough wind in Wyoming to power the entire country,” said Michael Goggin, the senior director of research at the American Wind Energy Association. Wyoming’s Republican governor, Matt Mead, is skeptical of climate change, and has been an outspoken opponent of Mr. Obama’s climate change agenda. Still, he also sees economic opportunity in wind power. “We’ve been a state, exporting energy to the rest of the country,” Mr. Mead said in an interview in his office. “With the advances in wind turbines, why shouldn’t we be leading that at the University of Wyoming? Why don’t we do more to bring wind manufacturing to the state?” Perhaps the biggest winner in Wyoming’s wind boom will be one man: Philip F. Anschutz, a Colorado billionaire and major Republican donor. His company, the Anschutz Corporation, is building the Carbon County wind farm on 2, 000 acres owned by Mr. Anschutz and the federal government. When completed, the site will be the largest wind power producer in North America, generating enough electricity to light a million homes — far more than Wyoming needs. Mr. Anschutz is also planning to build the TransWest Express, a power line that would take Wyoming’s wind energy to Las Vegas and California. Construction on both projects is expected to begin late this year or early 2017. On a recent day, Bill Miller, senior vice president of energy and land resources for the Anschutz Corporation, drove his truck through the Carbon County site’s rocky mesas, which channel wind across the green plain. The only visible inhabitants were cows, antelopes, prairie dogs and rattlesnakes. Although wind power has traditionally been more expensive than fossil fuels, Mr. Miller said the Anschutz wind project will be large enough to make wind as cheap, if not cheaper, than coal power. “We can produce wind power here that’s competitive with anything: coal, natural gas,” Mr. Miller said. Mr. Miller estimates that the construction of the wind farm will create about 900 seasonal jobs over the decade it will take to build it, and about 150 jobs to operate and maintain it. In the nearby town of Rawlins, he said, a branch of Western Wyoming Community College has already started programs to train wind power technicians. “You’ll be able to take a coal miner from Gillette — he can go to the community college here for the skills, and get a job as a wind technician,” Mr. Miller said. But, he conceded, “Am I going to replace 800 lost coal jobs in Gillette with new wind jobs? No. ” Another big winner in the Wyoming wind boom may be a Venezuelan company, Viridis Eolia Corporation, which also plans to build a wind farm near Carbon County, one second in size in North America only to the Anschutz project. “It’s the wave of the future,” Juan Carlos Carpio Delfino, Viridis Eolia’s chief executive, said at an energy conference at Little America, a golf resort outside Cheyenne. “With Obama’s clean power regulations, and the signing of the Paris agreement, it creates a stable market for wind — and this is the best wind in North America. ” That remains cold comfort to Wyoming’s coal community. Mr. Godby estimates that in the coming years, Wyoming could lose up to 10, 000 jobs related to the coal industry. Last month, officials from the Interior Department held a public hearing in Casper to gather input on the current halt on new coal mining on the state’s public lands. During the meeting, Jillian Balow, the Wyoming superintendent of public instruction, spoke before a crowd of hundreds, her voice cracking. “We have reached the point where the restrictions and regulations for the industry are past our ability to adapt,” she said. “It has put thousands of people out of work and is devastating families. ” “Give us a chance,” she pleaded. | 1 |
LONDON — He spent nearly 20 years pushing for Britain to leave the European Union, and having succeeded in his aim, he is now taking his leave. Nigel Farage, the politician who probably did more than any other to force the referendum on British membership in the European Union, resigned on Monday as leader of the populist U. K. Independence Party, saying, “I’ve done my bit. ” Mr. Farage, 52, has quit the post before — twice. But on Monday he sounded as if he meant it this time, telling reporters that “my political ambition has been achieved” and that “I want my life back. ” But since the “Brexit” vote he has also been encouraged to quit by Arron Banks, the insurance millionaire who has been a main funder of the party, known as UKIP, and of the unofficial Leave. EU campaign, and who sees the possibility of a more broadly based political party that can appeal to disaffected Labour voters. Mr. Farage — brash, outspoken, loquacious and divisive, a commodities broker turned politician who loves widely striped suits and large glasses of beer — was probably not the man to lead the new party beyond its current limits. In a recent interview with the Financial Times over lunch, he consumed three pints of beer, half a bottle of wine and a glass of port. But his push for a referendum, first as a member of the European Parliament and then as the leader of UKIP, arguing that Britain could manage immigration and regain full sovereignty only from outside the European Union, struck a deep chord with many Britons. It fed into the euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party and made many Conservative legislators fear that UKIP would deny them an election victory in 2015. In the end, UKIP got 13 percent of the vote but only one seat in Britain’s electoral system, and Mr. Cameron won a surprising majority. But he did so having promised this referendum, which he lost. Even within UKIP, Mr. Farage was not universally loved. Internal critics complained of an inability to delegate, and his rivalry with the more cerebral Douglas Carswell, UKIP’s only member of Britain’s Parliament, developed into guerrilla warfare. On Monday, Mr. Carswell greeted Mr. Farage’s resignation announcement by posting on Twitter a smiling emoji wearing sunglasses. Mr. Farage specialized in a blunt political discourse that appealed both to conservatives and to those who felt left behind in an increasingly polarized country. Opponents frequently accused him of racism and xenophobia, most recently just before the referendum when he unveiled a poster depicting refugees at the Croatian border under the slogan “Breaking Point. ” Mr. Farage denied the charge and responded that he was the real “victim” of abuse. The vote to quit the bloc was an enormous and unexpected victory for Mr. Farage, a politician who delights in his own lack of political correctness, discipline and bland sound bites. He infuriated others in the European Parliament last week, telling them that they were “in denial” and gloating over the victory, which he saw as a blow by “little people” against the elite. As they mocked him, he responded: “Isn’t it funny? When I came here 17 years ago and I said that I wanted to lead a campaign to get Britain to leave the European Union, you all laughed at me. Well, I have to say, you’re not laughing now, are you? The reason you’re so upset, you’re so angry, has been perfectly clear, from all the angry exchanges this morning. “You as a political project are in denial. You’re in denial that your currency is failing. Just look at the Mediterranean! As a policy to impose poverty on Greece and the Mediterranean you’ve done very well,” he said, then went on in that vein, both angry and smug. But his claim to be an figure was never convincing. Educated at Dulwich College, a famous and expensive private day school for boys in south London, he skipped college to become a commodities trader. In a 2010 memoir, “Fighting Bull” (updated in paperback as “Flying Free”) he described his years of making money during the day and drinking hard at night, and his various adventures with women, marriage and divorce. He survived testicular cancer in his 20s and, later, a serious accident when a light aircraft he was in crashed. Mr. Farage became involved in the campaign to extract Britain from the European Union in the early 1990s, but the UKIP he joined soon found itself competing with another, group, the Referendum Party. In Britain’s 1997 general election, UKIP won just 0. 3 percent of the vote. But the prospects of Mr. Farage and his party were immeasurably helped when the European Union forced Britain to adopt more proportional voting in elections for the European Parliament. In 1999, Mr. Farage won one of three UKIP seats in the European Parliament, where he has stayed ever since, and where he has used the generous expense allowances for legislators to promote his party and himself. Despite his innate English nationalism, Mr. Farage always seemed at home in Brussels, where he would frequent the bars of Place du Luxembourg, or in Strasbourg, France, the home of the European Parliament, where UKIP held regular, dinners in what was known as the “gadfly club. ” Mr. Farage employed his second wife, Kirsten Mehr, as his assistant, and has acknowledged expense and allowance claims of some 2 million pounds, in the neighborhood of $3 million, since his election to the Parliament. None of which prevented him from pummeling the institutions or its representatives, most notably the former president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, whose appointment he greeted with the sort of polemic seldom heard in the rarefied debates of the European Parliament. In what was to become a YouTube hit, Mr. Farage told Mr. Van Rompuy to his face in 2010 that he had “the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a bank clerk. ” By then Mr. Farage, who was elected UKIP leader in 2006, had already resigned once — after the European Parliament elections in 2009, in which UKIP won 13 seats with 16. 5 percent of the vote. The plan was to run for the British Parliament in 2010, but Mr. Farage lost, and on the day of the election nearly lost his life in the aircraft accident. He tried again in the 2015 British election but failed again, even as UKIP nationally won almost four million votes. In the immediate disappointment of that failure he quit the party leadership, only to reverse his decision, claiming, to some ridicule, that this was by popular demand. During the recent referendum campaign, he was kept out of the official Leave campaign amid fears that his focus on immigration might deter voters. But migration became a dominant issue for all the senior figures who argued for British withdrawal from the European Union, a vindication of sorts for Mr. Farage. “Love him or loathe him — and many people do — it is simply a fact that we would not have had the referendum vote, nor have won it, without him,” said Gawain Towler, a longtime ally and spokesman for UKIP. No one else had a similar reach among voters in poorer, postindustrial areas that had traditionally voted for the opposition Labour Party, Mr. Towler added. Under Mr. Farage, UKIP transformed itself from a rump into an insurgent populist force, switching its focus from support among groups such as personnel in the affluent south to the towns of the east coast and the north of England. UKIP’s support, he has said, is now to be found in areas with “ordinary people who get up at 6 in the morning, commute to work, pay their mortgages and do their best to bring their kids up. ” Last month, millions of those people listened more to Mr. Farage than to the mainstream political leaders, precipitating a referendum result that, just a few years ago, seemed inconceivable. And today, with Mr. Cameron announcing his resignation, the Conservatives competing to see who is the most loyal to Brexit and the Labour Party in chaos — with little to say about immigration — UKIP or a party built on its foundations has an open door for more support. “During the referendum campaign, I said I want my country back,” Mr. Farage said on Monday. “What I’m saying today is I want my life back, and it begins right now. ” Not quite. Mr. Farage said he intended to keep his Parliament seat in Strasbourg until Britain finally left the European Union, just to ensure that there was no backsliding — and undoubtedly to keep annoying the other legislators by his very presence. | 1 |
The City of Dayton, Ohio, has officially dropped a sanctuary policy that prohibited local law enforcement from handing over criminal illegal immigrants to federal officials. [The Dayton Police Department rescinded the policy just weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order in which the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would have authority over cutting federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions which harbor illegal immigrants. Under the sanctuary policy, Dayton officials were not allowed to speak with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) about cases involving illegal aliens who were accused of misdemeanors or felony property crimes, according to the Dayton Daily News. Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl said the policy change was simply so that his police force would be in accordance with federal immigration law. Biehl, though, said his department does not have the legal authority to enforce immigration law, but the policy change means ICE would be able to do that job without obstruction from the police department. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
Many Popular Tea Bags Contain Alarming Amounts of Deadly Pesticides (avoid these brands like the plague) Most conventional tea brands such as Lipton, Allegro, Celestial Seasonings, Tazo, Teavana, Bigelow, Republic of Tea, Twinings, Yogi, Tea Forte, Mighty Leaf, Trader Joe’s, Tetley contain really high levels of toxic substances such as fluoride and pesticides. We are not talking about calcium fluoride which is a natural element, but about the synthetic fluoride which is a toxic by product. These levels are dangerously high to the point of being considered unsafe. So drinking cheap tea can be as bad as eating junk food. Cheap Tea Contains Fluoride and Pesticides
Most teas are not washed before being dried, thus non-organic teas contain pesticide residues. Some tea brands ( even those claimed organic or pesticide free! ) have recently been found to contain pesticides that are known carcinogens – in quantities above the US and EU limits!
A new study published in the journal of, Food Research International , found that cheaper blends contain enough fluoride to put people under the risk of many illnesses such as bone tooth, kidney problems and even cancer.
In fact, some brands of cheap tea contain nearly 7 parts per million (ppm) and the allowed level of fluoride is 4 ppm. This is quite scary since fluoride gets into your bones and accumulates in your body. It stays there for years. So how did fluoride get into tea?
The tea plant accumulates fluoride as it grows. This means that old leaves contain the most fluoride. Cheaper quality teas are often made from old leaves that contain more fluoride than young tea leaves (here is an example) . Additionally, these cheaper brands use smaller leaves which contain more fluoride.
And what about decaffeinated tea?
Well, decaffeinated tea showed higher fluoride levels than caffeinated tea.
So what is the solution? Should you stop drinking tea all together? Of course not! First of all, make sure to buy loose leaf tea and brew your tea from scratch. Bagged tea which might seem convenient and ready to go, is often made from low quality leaves which surely contain more fluoride. Stick to white tea (here) . It has the least amount of fluoride. Buy organic tea because the methods for cultivation are more sophisticated and conscious. They might even use purified water for the soil. We’ve just scratched the surface here, please check out Food Babe’s full report for more detailed information and a chart of which teas came out with their reputations intact – and please share with your tea-loving friends! | 0 |
Actor Chris Pratt, one of Hollywood’s biggest movie stars, has apologized for saying his industry does not represent “the average, American. ”[In an interview with Men’s Fitness, the Parks and Recreation alum decried the disparity of roles that “resonate” with him. “I don’t see personal stories that necessarily resonate with me, because they’re not my stories,” Pratt told the outlet. “I think there’s room for me to tell mine — and probably an audience that would be hungry for them. The voice of the average, American isn’t necessarily represented in Hollywood. ” It did not take long before social media users pounced on Pratt’s comments, some suggesting that several films, including several Academy movies, featured characters and storylines: Recent movies about blue collar people: FencesManchester By the SeaMoonlightHidden FiguresHell or High Water, xo @prattprattpratt, — Scott Weinberg (@scottEweinberg) April 21, 2017, @1followernodad There’s a fucking blue collar mark wahlberg movie every two months. — Brittany and Cory (@bpikecsmith) April 21, 2017, Running away from my Chris Pratt crush like pic. twitter. — Russell (@RussellFalcon) April 21, 2017, ”The average, American worker isn’t represented in Hollywood” says Chris Pratt who played a shoe shiner on a popular sitcom pic. twitter. — Eric Francisco (@EricTheDragon) April 21, 2017, Some blogs also piled on: Jezebel: “Chris Pratt Is Kind of a ” Marie Claire: While it’s nice that Chris wants to see more people like himself he is a straight, white male. And Hollywood has an *actual* diversity problem at the moment — both in terms of race and gender. So, actually, maybe it’s time for there to be less stories like Chris Pratt’s, and more stories about, oh, you know, literally any other marginalized community in this country. The Mary Sue: “I Miss Not Knowing What Chris Pratt Thinks About Things” Pratt hopped on Twitter on Friday and walked his comments all the way back. “That was actually a pretty stupid thing to say,” the Virginia, Minnesota, native wrote to his four million followers. “I’ll own that. There’s a ton of movies about blue collar America”: That was actually a pretty stupid thing to say. I’ll own that. There’s a ton of movies about blue collar America. https: . — chris pratt (@prattprattpratt) April 21, 2017, Pratt, who stars in blockbuster franchise films, including Universal’s Jurassic World and Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy, received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame Friday. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson. | 1 |
SEOUL, South Korea — Did you ever wonder what it would be like to be at your own funeral? Some South Koreans aren’t waiting to die to find out. It’s become a trend in recent years to act out a mock funeral service as a way of better appreciating life. The Hyowon Healing Center in Seoul runs one such program, with financial backing from a funeral service company. After an instructional lecture and video, participants are led into a dimly lit hall decorated with chrysanthemums, where they sit, often tearfully, beside caskets and write their last testaments. Then they put on burial shrouds and lie down in the coffins. A man dressed in a black robe, “the Envoy from the Other World,” hammers the lids closed. The participants are left encased in utter darkness for 10 minutes — which can feel like an eternity. “There was not a single ray of light coming in, and how I cried in the dark, suffocating coffin!” a recent participant wrote in a blog post. Jeong the director of the Hyowon program, said 15, 000 people had gone through mock funerals at the center since 2012. The program is free. Some participants had terminal illnesses and wanted help preparing for the end others had suicidal impulses that they wanted to dispel. Businesses send employees as part of a motivational program. At the end of the session, Mr. Jeong tells the participants: “Now, you have shed your old self. You are reborn to have a fresh start!” It takes a few minutes for them to readjust, but soon they are chatting, laughing and taking selfies with their coffins. Mr. Jeong said he keeps an eye out for the few morbid souls who seem to feel a little too “comfortable in the coffin. ” But most participants say they feel strangely refreshed afterward, gaining a new perspective on the things that matter in life, like family. “I feel my heart pumping,” one participant wrote in a blog post, where she confessed to having thought about suicide before the mock funeral service. “I am alive!” | 1 |
Hollywood actor and Guardians of the Galaxy star Chris Pratt apologized in sign language to deaf people last week after he said “turn up the volume” during a video. [Pratt encouraged viewers to “turn up the volume and not just read the subtitles,” during an Instagram video, which are muted on the platform by default. Pratt made the comment in the context of hoping Instagram users would stop and watch the video, instead of just scrolling past the silent clip. The video was removed shortly after. In the apology video, which was made using American Sign Language, Pratt expressed regret for making “incredibly insensitive to the many folks out there who depend on subtitles. ” Instagram does this thing where it mutes all the videos it shows and forces you to turn on the volume in order to hear them. (maybe because most people are watching those videos at work when they should be working and don’t want to get caught. I know that’s when I do it. 😬) So when I made a video recently with subtitles, and requested that people turn up the volume and not just ”read the subtitles” it was so people wouldn’t scroll past the video on mute, thus watching and digesting the information in the video. HOWEVER, I realize now doing so was incredibly insensitive to the many folks out there who depend on subtitles. More than 38 million Americans live with some sort of hearing disability. So I want to apologize. I have people in my life who are and the last thing in the world I would want to do is offend them or anybody who suffers from hearing loss or any other disability. So truly from the bottom of my heart I apologize. Thanks for pointing this out to me. In the future I’ll try to be a little less ignorant about it. Now … I know some of you are going to say, ”Hey! Chris only apologized because his publicist made him!” Well. That is not the case. As always I control my social media. Nobody else. And I am doing this because I’m actually really sorry. Apologies are powerful. I don’t dole them out . This is one of those moments where I screwed up and here’s me begging your pardon. I hope you accept my apology. And on that note. Why doesn’t Instagram have some kind of technology to automatically add subtitles to its videos? Or at least the option. I did a little exploring and it seems lacking in that area. Shouldn’t there be an option for closed captioning or something? I’ve made them lord knows how much money with my videos and pictures. Essentially sharing myself for free. I know they profit. So … GET ON IT INSTAGRAM! !! Put closed captioning on your app. #CCinstaNow, A post shared by chris pratt (@prattprattpratt) on May 4, 2017 at 5:59am PDT, “More than 38 million Americans live with some sort of hearing disability … I want to apologize. I have people in my life who are and the last thing in the world I would want to do is offend them or anybody who suffers from hearing loss or any other disability,” declared Pratt. “In the future I’ll try to be a little less ignorant about it. ” Pratt also finished off his video by encouraging Instagram to integrate closed captioning to videos on their platform. “Why doesn’t Instagram have some kind of technology to automatically add subtitles to its videos? Or at least the option,” he asked. “I did a little exploring and it seems lacking in that area. Shouldn’t there be an option for closed captioning or something?” “I’ve made them lord knows how much money with my videos and pictures. Essentially sharing myself for free,” Pratt continued. “I know they profit. So … GET ON IT INSTAGRAM! !! Put closed captioning on your app. #CCinstaNow. ” Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 1 |
Actor and comedian T. J. Miller believes that the roles of entertainers have changed drastically with the election of President Donald Trump. [In an interview with the Wrap this week, the Silicon Valley star — whose first HBO special, Meticulously Ridiculous, premiered Saturday — said his whole approach to his craft has changed now that Trump, whom he called “this mother***er in the White House,” was elected in November. “It used to be different — before it was, ‘What is absurdist?’ Then this mother***er in the White House totally changed everything for everyone,” the actor told the outlet. “Immediately after the election, Kumail Nanjiani was walking around the set of Silicon Valley saying, ‘Everything’s changed now — standup, everything.’ Now, I have a political obstacle to a social mission, and the f*ckery that must be dealt with,” he added. Miller has previously spoken out against the president during his hosting gig at the Critics’ Choice Awards in December, the actor joked that trolls did well in 2016, “not the movie, but the dudes on the Internet,” adding: “One of them got elected president. ” Miller also stood on an actual “soap box” for a segment about how celebrities should stick to doing their jobs instead of trying to opine on politics. “All I want to do is talk about what’s going on in the world, but the problem is, I hate when celebrities get on their soap box,” Miller said. “Just do your act. Don’t tell the rest of us how to think, O. K.?” A few days before the awards show, the Office Christmas Party actor was arrested after allegedly slapping an Uber driver during what was reported to be an argument between the two about Trump. While a large number of Hollywood stars have taken their political activism to new heights since Trump’s election, not every celebrity believes it is the obligation of entertainers to discuss political topics. A number of celebrities, including Mark Wahlberg, Billy Joel, and Kevin Hart have said explicitly in the past that they prefer to stay away from talking about their personal politics. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
Support Us Hundreds of rescued refugees arrive at Italian port of Catania | 0 |
In six years of war, President Bashar of Syria has overseen a campaign of carnage, turning an enormous cache of deadly weapons against the very people they were presumably stockpiled to protect. In a campaign to crush rebels and jihadists, Mr. Assad and his allies have relied on tactics that go far beyond the norms of modern warfare to kill many thousands of Syrians. Here are the ways they have done it. In the latest attack on civilians, more than 100 people, including children, were believed to have been killed by chemical weapons in a town in Idlib Province on Tuesday. A doctor there said the victims’’ pupils were reduced to dots, a characteristic of nerve agents and other banned toxic substances. The United States put the blame for the attack on the Syrian government and its patrons, Russia and Iran, and suggested that the salvo was a war crime. While the attack was among the deadliest uses of chemical weapons in Syria in years, it was far from an isolated case. During the war, the Assad government has been accused of regularly using chlorine gas, which is less deadly than the agent used on Tuesday and is legal in its commercial form. According to the Violations Documentation Center, an antigovernment watchdog, more than 1, 100 Syrians have been killed in chemical weapons and gas attacks. There are also reports that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has used mustard agent in northern Syria. In a war that has involved some of the modern world’s most dangerous weapons, Mr. Assad and his allies have also used an ancient tactic to devastating effect: siege warfare. Last year, government troops brought the districts of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city before the war, to its knees. Residents of those areas of the northern city were besieged for months. Hundreds of thousands of people there and in other besieged cities risked starving to death, and many hundreds succumbed to the stranglehold that forces loyal to Mr. Assad had on the city’s food supply. In September, after the Assad government agreed to allow international aid convoys to enter Aleppo, Russian or Syrian warplanes attacked the trucks, killing about 20 people and leading to a suspension in aid. A month earlier, the city of Daraya, after four years of siege and bombings, struck a deal to surrender to the government. Rebel forces and the Islamic State have also besieged areas on a smaller scale. The Syrian government has summarily executed 5, 000 to 13, 000 people in mass hangings in just one of its many prisons since the start of the uprising against Mr. Assad, Amnesty International said in a report in February. Inmates are kept under conditions so dismal — including regular, severe beatings and deprivation of food, water, medicine and basic sanitation — that they amount to deliberate extermination, defined under international law as a crime against humanity, the report said. Syrian and Russian warplanes have bombed civilian targets and population centers, hitting mosques, schools and markets. Government forces have struck areas with barrel bombs, large containers filled with explosive material and shrapnel. Airstrikes have also targeted hospitals. According to the group Physicians for Human Rights, more than 300 hospitals have been attacked, a phenomenon the United Nations has likened to a “weapon of war. ” Rebels have also shelled civilian areas, but their weapons are less powerful. More than 38, 000 people have been killed in shelling attacks and explosions, according to the Violations Documentation Center, a Syrian local monitoring group that compiles data on human rights breaches. Among the deadliest weapons deployed against civilians were Scud missiles, aimed at areas in the early years of the war. Scores of people were killed in explosions and buried under rubble when their homes were hit. | 1 |
Что посеешь, то и пожнёшь! 29 октября 2016
«Пусть это будет незнатный человек, а вдруг он сумеет хорошо управлять страной?». х/ф «Тень», СССР, 1971 год. Россия припомнит США отказ в доступе наблюдателей на президентские выборы. И весьма скоро! В отечественном МИД пообещали вспомнить эту ситуацию, когда американская сторона изъявит желание понаблюдать за голосованием в России.
Возня за президентское кресло – именно возня, глухая, несмотря на всю её кажущуюся публичность, дурно пахнущая, и не важно, в какой стране эта сопящая возня происходит, – сегодня сводится исключительно к поиску разного рода сальностей с прямым или косвенным участием кандидатов.
Да разве не всё ли равно, кого тискал в детском саду или девятом классе средней школы нынешний кандидат в президенты, или с кем миловалась кандидатша на третьем курсе университета? По-моему, гораздо важнее, умеют ли они, смогут ли и как смогут управлять страной?!
И если я увижу, что кандидат способен ширить права и свободы граждан, растить уровень благосостояния населения, по-настоящему сделать так, чтобы можно было гордиться своей Родиной, то мне абсолютно наплевать, кого он щипал или щупал, будучи ответственным лицом рангом пониже, или даже совершенно безответственным лицом в далёкой-предалёкой юности. И в этом отношении – что Америка, что Россия, что Гондурас – всё едино, всё равно.
Потоки нечистот, выливаемые противниками друг на друга, тщательное выискивание сомнительных телодвижений кандидатов когда-то там, где-то там, с кем-то там совсем не обещают правильного выбора с точки зрения способности незапятнанного деятеля грамотно и правильно управлять государством. Подчеркну – грамотно и правильно для граждан этого государства. Для себя-то, и ни капельки в этом не сомневаюсь, они по-любому будут управлять грамотно и правильно. Помните Попандопуло из «Свадьбы в Малиновке»: «Это мне, это опять мне, это снова мне, это всегда мне…»
Приходится признать, что в этом отношении в далёком уже СССР кухарки справлялись со столь сложной задачей много лучше нынешних российских законодателей и законобрателей.
Должен ещё заметить, что подозрительная стерильность кандидата ещё и наводит на мысль о безупречной работе министерства правды – всё подчищено, подправлено, фотографии отретушированы, газеты, журналы и книжки переписаны и изданы заново. В таком случае цена громких обещаний – ломаного грошика не стоит. И мы-то уж который год убеждаемся в этом, но, одурманенные липкой патокой пропаганды министерств правды и любви, продолжаем наступать на одни и те же грабельки.
Ну вот, например, шикарная новость. Буквально фантастична, феерична она своим вопиющим идиотизмом:
Депутатша Государственной Думы Российской Федерации Наталья Поклонская прокомментировала решение суда по делу о высоковзлетевших сынулях, которые устроили опаснейшие для окружающих гонки с полицейскими в Москве.
На просторах и в глубинах всемирной паутины можно во всех подробностях наблюдать эти догонялки по ночной Москве. За такие выкрутасы, на мой скромный взгляд, надо отрубать руки, чтобы эти существа больше не смогли сесть за руль, отрубать, невзирая на посты и ранги их самих, их родителей, бабушек, дедушек и прочих дядьёв. Я в этом абсолютно твёрдо убеждён!
Стыдливое возмущение депутатши в высшей степени преступно – она, получается, сочувствует преступникам, то есть, соучаствует в преступлении. Со всеми долженствующими вытекать отсюда…
«Я в корне не согласна с приговором суда, – цитирует бывшего прокурора Крыма одна из слишком преданных власти телекомпаний, – при этом Поклонская добавила, что была возмущена поведением молодых людей».
« То были уроки здоровой морали и правила прямого ума». (Ж. Ж. Руссо «Исповедь».) О какой здоровой морали и прямом уме может идти речь? Таковы так называемые избранники народа у нашего народа.
Что мы сеем регулярно, сначала раз в четыре года, а теперь уже и в пять, в единый российский праздник «Холуин», то и жнём, колемся, плачем, но жнём, чтобы ещё через четыре года посеять то же самое… И снова колемся, плачем, но жнём и опять сеем…
А в следующий раз я расскажу вам об одном весьма колоритном персонаже российской политической сцены. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Signaling a possible breakthrough in the long stalemate in Congress over tightening the nation’s gun laws, a bipartisan group of senators called on Tuesday for banning gun sales to terrorism suspects on the government’s “ ” list. The proposed measure, while modest, puts new muscle and momentum behind what would be one of the few restrictions placed on gun ownership in the past 20 years. The push for the compromise bill, led by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Senator Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat of North Dakota, came a day after the Senate refused to advance any of four measures intended to make it harder for suspected terrorists to buy guns. Ms. Collins and the lawmakers who joined her, including Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who is frequently mentioned as a potential running mate for Hillary Clinton, voiced deepening exasperation over the failure of Congress to take any action to prevent shootings like the massacre this month in Orlando, Fla. “Surely the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino and Orlando that took so many lives are a call for compromise, a plea for bipartisan action,” Ms. Collins said at a news conference. “Essentially, we believe if you are too dangerous to fly on an airplane, you are too dangerous to buy a gun,” she added. The Collins proposal is tailored narrowly to prohibit gun sales to suspected terrorists who appear on the government’s “ ” list or its “selectee” list, which requires more rigorous security checks before a person is allowed to board an airplane. Those lists, containing a total of about 109, 000 people, of whom just 2, 700 are American citizens, are far smaller than the federal terrorist screening database, which includes about one million names and was the focus of a proposal sponsored by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, one of the four measures defeated on Monday. Ms. Collins’s measure would bar gun sales to anyone on the two lists, but would allow for an appeal by any citizen or green card holder blocked from making a purchase and it would award lawyer’s fees if the appeal is successful. The bill would also require notification of federal and local law enforcement agencies if anyone who had been on the lists in the previous five years seeks to buy a weapon — a provision intended to address the situation in Orlando, in which the gunman, Omar Mateen, had been on placed such lists but removed before he bought his weapons. In addition, the bill would give the federal authorities the flexibility to allow a gun purchase by someone on one of the lists if needed to safeguard a continuing investigation. While leaders in each party expressed pointed misgivings about the proposal, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, indicated that it would be likely to get a vote as an amendment to the Commerce, Justice, Science appropriations bill that is being debated on the Senate floor. “I’m going to be working to make sure she gets a vote on that proposal,” Mr. McConnell said. To overcome procedural hurdles and win approval, the measure would need the support of 60 senators, and it was not immediately clear that enough Republicans would back it. Just three of the 54 Senate Republicans — Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Jeff Flake of Arizona, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — attended the news conference with Ms. Collins, well short of the 16 votes needed even if the entire Democratic conference voted in favor, which was also not assured. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican and author of another of the proposals that was voted down on Monday afternoon, said he was apprehensive about the provision in the Collins proposal because it permitted an appeal only after a gun sale is prohibited. Mr. Cornyn said: “I think it’s a slippery slope when an American citizen is denied a constitutional right without forcing the government to come forward with some evidence on the front end, as opposed to leaving that on the back end. But we’ll see how the vote comes out. ” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York said that there were numerous flaws in the Collins proposal, but Democrats ultimately were willing to consider the measure, noting that it would represent a breakthrough if adopted, given the opposition of the National Rifle Association. “It’ll be the first time that in a bipartisan way, with significant Republican support, the N. R. A. is told, ‘You’re way ’” Mr. Schumer said. Supporters of the Collins measure said they believed it was written strategically to avoid becoming ensnared in that old tug of war, by focusing on a simple goal: “no fly, no buy. ” Mr. Kaine, at one point pounding the wooden lectern in front of him, said: “I am sick of the shootings. I am sick of the vigils. I am sick of the homicide victims’ support groups. I am sick of the claims that we’ll do something about it. I am sick of the partisan rhetoric and I am really sick of getting to the end of all of it and not doing something about it, and seeing that happen again and again and again and again. ” | 1 |
Corey Lewandowski, the former campaign manager for Donald J. Trump, is joining CNN as a political commentator, effective immediately, a spokeswoman for the network said Thursday. Mr. Lewandowski was fired by the Trump campaign on Monday after increasing concerns from allies and donors, as well as Mr. Trump’s children, over whether he could handle a national campaign against Hillary Clinton’s operation. Mr. Lewandowski’s contract will make him exclusive to CNN, meaning he won’t be able to appear on other networks. CNN currently has another Trump surrogate, Jeffrey Lord, as a frequent guest. The Lewandowski hiring was first reported by Politico. Cable news networks have long turned to former campaign operatives to provide commentary. But Mr. Lewandowski’s hiring is fraught: He was charged with battery for grabbing a reporter at a Trump campaign event in March he is known for sometimes combative interactions with the news media and his rise and fall at the Trump campaign made him a singularly polarizing figure. Prosecutors later dropped the battery charge against Mr. Lewandowski, ending the case. But security video taken at a property in Jupiter, Fla. clearly showed him grabbing Michelle Fields, then a reporter for Breitbart News, despite his claims that she was “delusional” for suggesting that he had laid a hand on her. After that incident, several conservative commentators from various networks, including CNN’s S. E. Cupp and Mary Katharine Ham, wrote a letter to Mr. Trump urging the campaign to fire Mr. Lewandowski. Within hours of being fired by the Trump campaign on Monday, Mr. Lewandowski gave his first extended sit down interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, speaking live for nearly a about his firing and his experience with the campaign during the nominating contest. (He had given an interview to MSNBC’s Ali Vitali outside his apartment before making his way to CNN). In his interview with Ms. Bash, Mr. Lewandowski repeatedly reaffirmed his commitment to Mr. Trump, saying he would do “everything I can to make sure” Mr. Trump was elected president. “If I can do that from inside the campaign, that’s a privilege,” he said. “If I can do that from outside the campaign, that’s also a privilege. ” Mr. Lewandowski did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday. Viewers hoping for inside dish on the Trump campaign from its former manager are likely to be left disappointed Mr. Trump requires employees to sign nondisclosure agreements that are binding during the campaign “and at all times thereafter,” according to The Associated Press. Mr. Lewandowski’s first appearance, as of now, is scheduled for Monday on “New Day. ” An NBC spokesman said that Mr. Lewandowski met on Monday with MSNBC executives to discuss a possible contributor contract, and that the network declined to make an offer. | 1 |
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