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Get short URL 0 13 0 0 A new government report released this week states that the Pentagon spent at least $58 billion over the last 20 years on weapons systems that not only were never built, but often never made it past the design phase.
The report, released by the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Frank Kendall, is an internal review of the Defense Department’s acquisition activities, and contains a chart of 23 pricey projects that received billions in initial funding but were later canceled. The report shows this happening as far back as 1997. © REUTERS/ Master Sgt. Kevin J. Gruenwald Pentagon Prepares to Start Raqqa Offensive Within Weeks
The Army’s Future Combat System was one of the most expensive of the doomed military-money pits, costing over $20 billion, with the RAH-66 Comanche attack and reconnaissance helicopter second with a $9.8 billion price tag before operations were ceased. Taken together these two programs account for 50 percent of what was deemed “sunk costs,” according to the Washington Examiner. The $3.7-billion National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System, the $2.7-billion Lockheed Martin VH-71 helicopter, and the $2.5-billion JLENS air-defense blimp are a few of the other pricey and failed ventures detailed in the report.
Out of 23 projects, eight were able to spend all of their allocated money before the plug was pulled. ... | 0 |
WASHINGTON — While much of the attention in Washington is on who will fill the Trump cabinet, it is already clear who some of the most important people will be when it comes to fulfilling the Trump agenda. One group will be particularly well positioned to either accommodate or infuriate Donald J. Trump: a handful of Republican senators who have shown a willingness to break with the and have readily split with their own party on issues in the past. Given the narrower divide in the Senate after the election, these senators must be kept on board if Mr. Trump and the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate want to advance legislation and nominations in the face of Democratic opposition. Some are already making known their readiness to take on the new administration. “There will be some areas where I don’t agree, and it will be my job to represent a coequal branch of the government,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who was outspoken in his criticism of Mr. Trump during the campaign. Other senators who will be prominent in the “ ’ ” caucus include Mr. Graham’s longtime ally, John McCain of Arizona Jeff Flake of Arizona Susan Collins of Maine Lisa Murkowski of Alaska Lamar Alexander of Tennessee Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Rand Paul of Kentucky. They will differ issue by issue, and they will certainly side much more often than not with the Republican majority. And don’t count on them to block cabinet nominees such as their Republican colleague Jeff Sessions of Alabama, Mr. Trump’s choice for attorney general, despite criticism of his civil rights record. They know and like Mr. Sessions. They are poised to challenge the new administration and their colleagues on policy areas in which they deeply disagree or on some of the more extreme proposals that arose from the Trump campaign. “If the president came forth with a legislative proposal that would ban all Muslims from coming into the United States, I would obviously oppose something like that,” said Ms. Collins, a centrist who wrote an article in August announcing that she would not vote for Mr. Trump because he did not represent historical Republican values. She and others in this group are fully capable of building bipartisan coalitions large enough to assert control over an issue and push legislation in one direction or another, siphoning some authority from the leadership. Though House conservatives are agitating to eliminate the filibuster, most of the senators in this group would be reluctant to support such a move since they derive some of their own clout from the threat of that procedural tool. Here’s a look at how the others besides Mr. Graham and Ms. Collins figure to be at the center of activity. Mr. Alexander: As chairman of the Senate health committee, he will be pivotal in any action Congress takes to overturn the Affordable Care Act, and he has urged caution to his colleagues. He has forged a close relationship with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the new Democratic leader, and has worked well with Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the senior Democrat on the committee and now No. 3 in her party’s leadership. He left the Republican leadership a few years ago because he felt constrained by a role requiring allegiance. Mr. McCain: He has already made clear that he will oppose any effort by the Trump administration to reinstate interrogation methods, like waterboarding, that have been deemed to be torture. Given his distrust of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, he, along with Mr. Graham, will serve as a check on efforts to foster closer ties with Russia. As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, he will wield tremendous influence over Pentagon policy. Newly at age 80, Mr. McCain most likely ran his last race, freeing him from electoral concerns about a backlash from the right. Ms. Murkowski: As chairwoman of the energy committee, she is a strong advocate of domestic oil and gas production, but has also raised concerns about climate change and its increasing impact on her state’s environment. Like Ms. Collins, she has a voting record in support of abortion rights, and she can be more of a libertarian than a conservative. Perhaps most important, she won in 2010 as a candidate and clashed with the party leadership, making her something of a free agent. Mr. Flake: One of the most outspoken Trump foes in the Senate, he took Mr. Trump on directly at a private party meeting. Both in the House and the Senate, Mr. Flake has challenged his leadership, and in some cases has won, notably on his crusade against the projects known as earmarks. A champion of immigration reform, he is up for in 2018 and is likely to be hit from right and left. Mr. Paul: He has already threatened to filibuster Mr. Trump’s cabinet picks, and he previously raised the alarm about the reach of government surveillance programs, which could put him at odds with the new administration. He has urged restraint with American military power, putting him distinctly at odds with Mr. McCain and Mr. Graham in that area. Mr. Sasse: A persistent detractor of Mr. Trump throughout the campaign, he seems most likely to challenge Mr. Trump in cases of perceived abuse of executive power. In a Nebraska article after the election, he urged a search for common ground with Mr. Trump, but warned that there would be disagreements. “There are absolutely some things that worry me,” he wrote. The question for these Republicans is how many of those worrisome things will pop up and how far will they go to oppose them. | 1 |
By Adalia Woodbury on Sun, Oct 30th, 2016 at 1:43 pm A Trump supporter sporting a “Hillary for Prison” t-shirt chanted “Jews S-A” in support of his candidate during a rally in Arizona on Saturday. The target was the pen of reporters who have been fodder for Trump’s rhetoric at every rally. Share on Twitter Print This Post
A Trump supporter sporting a “Hillary for Prison” t-shirt chanted “Jews S-A” in support of his candidate during a rally in Arizona on Saturday.
The target was the pen of reporters who have been fodder for Trump’s rhetoric at every rally.
The context: While the crowd was chanting “USA” one man chanted “Jews S-A”. Words like that can’t be spun or read into. The intent and meaning were obvious to everyone.
Watch here on video obtained by The Huffington Post .
This sort of thing comes as no surprise considering that Donald Trump spent the last year spewing hate filled venom in every possible direction. It may seem superfluous to restate every category of people for which Trump has shown contempt, but it is not.
Muslims, Jews, immigrants, labor, taxpayers, Latinos, Hispanics, Mexicans, African-Americans, women, POW’s, veterans, people with disabilities, Gold Star Families, and the military have felt the sting of Trump’s words and the disdain in his heart.
Throughout this campaign season, the vitriol against Hillary Clinton saw no limit. Signs and T-shirts too disgusting to quote in this article. Chants of “lock her up” at the Republican convention and since. Trump promised his base of thugs, lowlifes, and haters he would weaken the first amendment, strengthen the second and establish the alt-right utopia.
Hillary Clinton was already the most qualified candidate in this race. She also proved to have more stamina than any previous candidate needed. Not only was she competing against a vicious and pathological liar, she was competing for who we are and who we could be. For all the Trump claims that the media is rigged in Clinton’s favor, it was Trump who got free advertising, who framed the narrative and whose words were the primary “news” stories of the campaign.
There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton will keep her promise to fight for us. She has been doing it from the beginning of this campaign. Every time Hillary Clinton called out Donald Trump’s sexist comments, she was fighting for all women who were attacked, humiliated and sexually abused by men like Trump. Every time Clinton shamed Trump’s horrific and disgusting comments about the Khan family she was standing up for every Gold Star family. She was also standing up for every Muslim-American. The same is true every time Clinton condemned Trump for mocking a disabled reporter or resorted to alt-right stereotypes about African-Americans, inner-cities, and African-American communities.
Every time Trump spewed hate in whatever direction, Hillary Clinton defended the target.
So no, this isn’t about choosing the lesser of two evils. Like every election, this is about choosing our next president. More importantly, it’s about voting for who we are and who we aspire to be.
Image: Screengrab from video. | 0 |
Last week, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick received a prestigious award from his teammates for “inspirational, courageous play,” despite the fact that Kaepernick’s ”play,” resulted in only one win in eleven starts for the 49ers. [This week, the wife of Senator Bernie Sanders let us know that she thought the award well deserved: Thank you @Kaepernick7 You inspired respect, focused our thoughts on need 4 change thru your dignified . https: . — Jane O’Meara Sanders (@janeosanders) January 7, 2017, So, bestowing upon Kaepernick an award for launching perhaps the most disrespectful, public smear campaign against our military in modern history now has the blessing of the wife of the man who came closest to unseating Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. This reminds us once again of our incredible fortune that neither Jane O’Meara Sanders, nor Bill Clinton, will serve as first lady of the United States of America. Follow Dylan Gwinn on Twitter: @themightygwinn | 1 |
The United States government revealed the identity on Tuesday of an Islamic State operative believed to have been one of the overseers of last year’s attacks in Paris, as well as of the coordinated suicide bombings that tore through the international airport and a metro station in Brussels this year. The operative — who until recently was known only by his nom de guerre, Abu Souleymane — is a originally from Morocco whose real name is Abdelilah Himich, according to a statement issued by the State Department, which announced his designation as a global terrorist. The listing describes Mr. Himich as a senior fighter and “external operations figure,” a reference to his suspected role in planning attacks abroad for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. “Himich created the Tariq Ibn Ziyad Battalion in 2015, a European foreign terrorist fighter cell that has provided operatives for ISIL attacks in Iraq, Syria and abroad,” the statement said. “Himich was also reportedly involved in the planning of ISIL’s November 2015 Paris attacks and March 2016 Brussels attacks. ” The assault on multiple locations in Paris on Nov. 13, 2015, was led on the ground by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, a Belgian member of the Islamic State who traveled from Syria and maintained telephone contact with the various teams of attackers. He was killed in a police shootout days later. But evidence quickly emerged that Mr. Abaaoud and his team had been taking orders from and reporting back to inside the terror group. Among the first clues was the testimony of one of the hostages inside the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, who said he had overheard one of the suicide bombers asking the other, “Should we call Souleymane?” After the March 22 attacks in Brussels, the Belgian capital, the police recovered a laptop belonging to one of the plotters and discovered recorded chats between the attackers and their handlers in Syria, including Abu Souleymane and another commander who went by the nom de guerre Abu Ahmad, according to Brisard, who leads the Center for Analysis of Terrorism in Paris. French officials have refused to confirm that the “Souleymane” mentioned in these two episodes is indeed Mr. Himich. However, a joint investigation by ProPublica and Frontline identified Mr. Himich as one of the architects of the Paris attack and revealed that he had lived in Lunel, France, and was deployed to Afghanistan after enlisting in the French Foreign Legion. “He was promoted very quickly once he reached Syria and became the commander of a brigade of foreign fighters, and this is surely as a result of his background and his combat experience,” said Mr. Brisard, who described Mr. Himich as “the conceiver” of the Paris attacks. According to records consulted by Mr. Brisard, Mr. Himich joined the Islamic State in April 2014 and fought as one of the group’s snipers before being wounded in combat. He participated in at least one filmed execution, in which he crucified two victims, Mr. Brisard said. Mr. Brisard cautioned, however, that the Islamic State’s external operations arm, the unit responsible for inspiring and carrying out terrorist attacks abroad, was a team effort. Although Mr. Himich may have sketched the broad outlines of the plot, the planning passed through multiple hands. Records from the laptop seized in Brussels indicate that Abu Ahmad may have had a more direct role in “piloting” both the Nov. 13 and March 22 plots, Mr. Brisard said. Reached by telephone, the office of the chief prosecutor in Paris, which is leading the investigation into the French attacks, declined to comment on the State Department announcement. | 1 |
PARIS (AP) — A voting station in eastern France has reopened after being evacuated because of a suspicious vehicle parked nearby. [Interior Ministry spokesman Brandet told The Associated Press that the voting station in Besancon was evacuated while explosives experts examined the car, but they deemed there to be no risk. He said no other incidents have been reported in Sunday’s presidential election. Tens of thousands of security forces are guarding voting stations across France after an attack in Paris on Thursday revived security concerns. France remains under a state of emergency after deadly Islamic extremist attacks in recent years. The top two winners on Sunday will advance to a May 7 runoff. | 1 |
Two leading advocates for reforming illegal and legal immigration enforcement were appointed by President Donald Trump to serve as senior advisors for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). [Jon Feere, the former legal analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, and Julie Kirchner, the previous executive director for the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) have both been appointed to senior positions. Feere, who work with the Trump campaign and transition team on immigration policy, will serve as the senior adviser to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency Director Thomas Homan. Kirchner, a campaign alum as well, will serve as the senior adviser to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Commissioner Kevin McAleenan. Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian told Breitbart Texas that the Trump Administration appointed a person who “knows the ins and outs” of immigration when they chose Feere to serve. “ICE needs somebody like Jon because he’s worked on immigration policy for many years,” Krikorian said. “After eight years of Obama, there were civil servants and people at ICE who weren’t as quite up to date on immigration enforcement. ” FAIR spokesperson Ira Mehlman told Breitbart Texas that Kirchner’s appointment is welcome news. “They’re both people with long experience and deep knowledge and they’re highly qualified for their positions,” Mehlman said. Both the Center for Immigration Studies and FAIR have long been advocates for increased border security, a wall, reforming foreign guest worker visas and lower levels of legal immigration to help American wages to rise. The appointments have come with the usual media backlash that the Trump Administration has grown accustomed to. CNN, for instance, has written that Feere and Kirchner’s appointments have “alarmed” the open borders lobby. The network propped up opposition to the appointments through the Southern Poverty Law Center, with Director Heidi Beirich claiming that that the Center for Immigration Studies and FAIR publish “racist” and “xenophobic” reports. Krikorian, though, said the open borders lobby is only outraged because they know how effective both nominees could be. “This isn’t a complaint about qualification,” Krikorian told Breitbart Texas. “Jon and these others know what they’re doing and that’s what the groups are afraid of. ” John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
Hundreds of children, teens, adults and seniors celebrated International Pillow Fight Day by participating in pillow fight in Downtown Los Angeles’s Pershing Square on Saturday for more than an hour. [Soft, fluffy, and occasionally menacing blows were exchanged by all during the event, which coincided with several others both nationally and in other parts of the world. Video of the massive gathering, replete with feathers and colored cases, was posted to YouTube: According to CBS Los Angeles, many wore pajamas, while others wore goggles and masks to protect their faces. By the end of the over fight, the ground of Pershing Square was reportedly covered with feathers. Pillow fights also took place in New York City, Philadelphia, and other U. S. cities: Three girls fighting it out on World #Pillowfight Day #Philadelphia #WVroadtripUSA pic. twitter. — Henry Arvidsson (@WonderingViking) April 2, 2017, Canada also held a pillow fight: #pillowfight #pillow #pillowfighters #tronto #hardworkout #l4l #f4f #yolo . We are pillow fighters A post shared by shuto kitagawa (@shutto) on Apr 1, 2017 at 2:52pm PDT, The day was celebrated with feathers and pillows internationally. In Amsterdam, this shot captured an eventful moment: #Photo taken during the #PillowFightDay in #Amsterdam More https: . #internationalpillowfightday #PillowFight #feather pic. twitter. — Romy Fernandez (@allromy) April 2, 2017, In the small Cyrpus suburb of Nicosia, dozens of youth took their fluffiest and sturdiest pillows to the streets for an amicable fight as club music blared in the background: In Budapest, Hungary, youth convened at Hero’s Square: According to UPI, the international pillow day fights began in 2005. They have been held annually ever since. Follow Adelle Nazarian on Facebook and Twitter. | 1 |
Anorexia sexual, la plaga del siglo XXI: ¿por qué no quieres tener sexo? Publicado: 26 oct 2016 14:25 GMT
En nuestro siglo la inapetencia sexual puede tener causas serias que la convierten en una grave enfermedad. Imagen Ilustrativa Pixabay / Takmeomeo Síguenos en Facebook
La llamada 'anorexia sexual' es un trastorno todavía poco conocido que puede convertirse en la ' plaga del siglo XXI '. Según la definición que el doctor Patrick Carnes propuso en su libro 'Anorexia sexual', publicado en 1997, es "un estado obsesivo en el cual la tarea física, emocional y mental de evitar el sexo domina la vida de alguien".
"Los anoréxicos sexuales son aquellas personas que para evitar la intimidad rehúyen cualquier tipo de vínculo más profundo; de la misma manera que un anoréxico evita comer porque cree que está más gordo de lo que es en realidad, un anoréxico sexual es alguien que evita el contacto sexual porque tiene aprensiones de carácter psicológico", explica la psicoterapeuta sexual Natalia Guerrero. El origen del trastorno
El extraño trastorno afecta tanto a hombres como a mujeres. Son personas que, a pesar de sentir deseo, se prohíben disfrutar de cualquier placer sexual porque lo perciben como una amenaza. Los psicólogos apuntan que las causas del fenómeno tienen un origen muy profundo que podría encontrarse en la sociedad contemporánea. Las personas simplemente no saben construir relaciones y recurren a la producción erótica en forma de revistas, películas e Internet, de manera que proyectan sus deseos sexuales hacia imágenes y videos y no hacia personas.
En algunas ocasiones, la anorexia sexual tiene su origen en la niñez, ya que las personas que durante la infancia fueron víctimas de acosos sexuales en el futuro pueden sufrir el trastorno. Las mujeres violadas también evitan las relaciones íntimas durante mucho tiempo, mientras que algunas personas renuncian al sexo tras haber sido rechazadas por los objetos de sus deseos sexuales. ¿Hay solución?
El problema es cada vez más frecuente, pero tiene solución. "Los problemas que tienen que ver con esta esfera se pueden trabajar con una terapia sexológica , pero cuando los casos son muy graves, se requiere de trabajar en una interconsulta con un psiquiatra, porque a veces el problema forma parte de un cuadro de fobias más generales", afirma Guerrero. | 0 |
Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Here’s the .) Please note: California Today will pause for the New Year’s holiday and be back on Tuesday. What news stories enthralled Californians in 2016? By one measure, they were the ones that explored themes of personal triumph and good will toward others. Crowdtangle, a social analytics company, provided a ranking of the year’s most popular pieces about California on Facebook posted by California news organizations. Here are the top 10, all videos, ordered according to cumulative likes, shares and comments. 1. The transformation of Eric O’Grey. — SFGate. com Mr. O’Grey’s life was a mess: He was depressed. He weighed 330 pounds. He hadn’t been on a date in 15 years. At his nutritionist’s suggestion, he went to a shelter and got a dog, Peety, and everything changed. (Watch the video to see how.) Reached by phone on Thursday, Mr. O’Grey, 57, said the attention to his story (the SFGate video got 34 million views) had been overwhelming. Thousands of people contacted him. One of them was a high school sweetheart he hadn’t heard from in about 40 years. “And here is the grand finale to the entire thing,” Mr. O’Grey said. They were married on Dec. 7. Peety died. Mr. O’Grey keeps a framed print of his paw on his bedroom wall. He adopted another dog, a Labrador retriever mix named Jake. They run 40 miles a week together. 2. Jamie Foxx rescued a man in a car crash. — ABC 7 Brett Kyle, 32, was speeding when his Toyota Tacoma left the road and rolled several times in front of Mr. Foxx’s home in the Thousand Oaks area, reports said. Responding, the actor and another man, an paramedic who was driving by, reached into the burning vehicle, cut Mr. Kyle’s seatbelt and pulled him to safety. “As we pull him out, within five seconds later, the truck goes up,” Mr. Foxx told reporters. 3. A Sacramento girl spread good will. — Fox 40 This summer, Leah Nelson, 10, decided to make the world a better place. So she made a bunch of bracelets, then gave them to strangers and asked that they pay forward the gesture however they saw fit. Tens of millions of people watched a Fox 40 video that showed Leah spreading the word about her project, known as “Becuz I Care,” outside a grocery store. On Thursday, Leah’s father, Charles Nelson, said people had contacted the family from as far as Britain, France and Portugal to ask about replicating it in their cities. He described a letter they got from a woman in Montreal: “What she said is that what Leah’s story restored in her is a sense of hope for the future. ” 4. An abandoned Chihuahua without front legs got prosthetic wheels. — SFGate. com 5. Snoop Dogg and The Game led a unity march to the Los Angeles Police Headquarters after the killings of Dallas police officers. — Los Angeles Times 6. A look at the grueling life of Gaspar Marcos, a Los Angeles high schooler who migrated from Guatemala. — Los Angeles Times 7. Three bears were captured on video frolicking in Lake Tahoe. — KCRA 3 8. Demonstrators shut down Interstate 880 in Oakland to protest police shootings of black men. — KRON 4 9. An aerial view of gridlock on the 405 Freeway in West Los Angeles. — ABC 7 10. Los Angeles firefighters comforted a dog rescued from a burning home. — NBC LA (Please note: We regularly highlight articles on news sites that have metered paywalls.) • The majority in two panels agreed a student was raped by a Stanford football player. That wasn’t enough to expel him. [The New York Times] • A boy, his father and his grandfather were killed over three years in the same Oakland neighborhood. [East Bay Times] • Sales of semiautomatic rifles in California more than doubled this year. [San Francisco Chronicle] • A professor rented the home of a U. C. Berkeley professor, then refused to leave. [Mother Jones] • If a stroke was the primary cause of Debbie Reynolds’ death, a heart squeezed by the loss of a beloved daughter might have contributed. [The New York Times] • In China, a hidden bounty of subsidies has supported the production of Apple’s product: the iPhone. [The New York Times] • Venture capitalists are poised to invest big in and I. P. O.s in the new year. [The New York Times] • When the seemingly invincible Ronda Rousey lost her U. F. C. title, it was a shock. Now’s her chance for a comeback. [The New York Times] • California newspapers’ best photos of 2016 [Orange County Register | San Diego | Los Angeles Times] • Video: Humboldt County has begun an experiment to bring marijuana growers out of the shadows and regulate cannabis farming. [PBS NewsHour] • Los Angeles will get a new museum in 2017 with the opening of the Marciano Art Foundation. [Los Angeles Times] “And this, fellow citizens, is the first freeway in the West. ” So declared Gov. Culbert L. Olson of California on this day in 1940, when the Arroyo Seco Parkway was officially opened, connecting Los Angeles and Pasadena with a roadway unencumbered by traffic lights, streetcars or pedestrians. Mr. Olson continued, presciently: “It is only the first. And that is its great promise to the future — the promise of many more freeways to come. ” Los Angeles’s love affair with the automobile was in full swing in the 1930s when the construction of the Arroyo Seco Parkway put thousands of people to work. The freeway promised to cut travel times by at least half to about 12 minutes between Pasadena, a city with high per capita car ownership, and downtown Los Angeles, where most of the jobs were. Envisioned as a scenic route, it did not cut a straight line but rather traced the contours of the Arroyo Seco riverbed. Today, the freeway remains largely as it was in the 1940s. Transportation historians recognize the Arroyo Seco Parkway as a precursor to the modern freeways that now form a vast web across the Los Angeles region. But even as the city continues to add freeway lanes in an intractable war against congestion, Angelenos are increasingly embracing new ideas in transportation. While the car is bound to remain central, large investments in public transit — subways, light rail, buses — could begin to reshape how Los Angeles gets around. California Today goes live at 6 a. m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: CAtoday@nytimes. com. The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. Follow him on Twitter. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U. C. Berkeley. | 1 |
North Dakota has become the first state to legalize law enforcement use of armed drones.
In late summer of 2015, a law was passed that allowed weapons such as tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbags, pepper spray, and Tasers to be used by police drones. The original bill aimed to ensure that no weapons at all were allowed on law enforcement drones. Sponsor of the original bill, Republican Rep. Rick Becker claimed he is not happy with how the law turned out.
The intent of the bill was to require police to obtain search warrants using drones to look for evidence. The bill also prohibited weapons aboard drones. In order to get the bill passed and require search warrants, Becker compromised on the weapons issue.
While some believe this to be a victory for pro-privacy advocates, many view it as a worrisome defeat for those concerned about the militarization of police in America.
Becker claimed that he aims to change the law when the House returns in session in two years.
Although the weapons that are allowed for use by drones are considered less than lethal, they can still be deadly. According to The Guardian , at least 67 people were killed by tasers alone in 2015 and 2016 alone. The use of any weapon, lethal or not, can cause great extensive injuries and death. Rubber bullets, beanbags, and tear gas canisters are known to cause horrible injuries and are often times used on non-violent civilians and protestors.
While most people are unaware that this bill passed, it could endanger the lives of thousands of protestors and water protectors protesting the North Dakota Access Pipeline.
Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science. Follow her adventures on Instagram. | 0 |
Scandal star Tony Goldwyn hailed what he called Planned Parenthood’s “lifesaving work” for women’s health care in an interview this week, adding that those those who oppose abortion are actually “sabotaging” their “own moral stance. ”[Goldwyn, who plays the role of POTUS on the hit ABC show, wore a Planned Parenthood pin to the PaleyFest television festival in Hollywood this week. The actor says activists are wrong to think putting an end to abortion will save lives. “There’s been a lot of disinformation about Planned Parenthood and the focus of the lifesaving work that they do for women’s health care,” the actor told Glamour magazine in an interview, adding: “I saw a image of all those white men sitting around in a room at the White House talking about what should be done about women’s health care, and I thought I would step up [by wearing this and speaking out]. If Planned Parenthood is defunded, millions of women, particularly women struggling economically, are going to be in serious trouble. And the truth is, there will be far more abortions performed — and unsafe ones as a result. The people that are antiabortion actually are sabotaging their own moral stance by taking this position. ” Glamour writer Jessica Radloff praised Goldwyn for his support of the abortion giant, and also cited Planned Parenthood’s already debunked “3 percent” statistic: “As we’ve pointed out numerous times, abortion constitutes just 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services, and except in cases of rape, incest, or severe threat to a mother’s life, no federal money is used to fund abortion services. But cutting federal funding for PP would put access to breast exams, Pap tests, colposcopy procedures, HPV vaccines, reversible contraception procedures, pregnancy tests, STI tests, and HIV tests at risk. ” Live Action’s video demonstrates how the abortion chain calculates its deceptive “3 percent statistic” by dividing the number of abortions it performs by the total number of services it provides, counting a $10 pregnancy test or a package of condoms as equivalent to a $500 abortion. “To justify its half billion dollars in taxpayer funding, Planned Parenthood downplays abortion — falsely claiming that it only makes up three percent of its business — and instead plays up its cancer screenings and ‘women’s health care,’” explains Lila Rose, president of Live Action. Rose adds: According to its own annual reports, Planned Parenthood does less than one percent of all Pap tests in the United States, less than two percent of all clinical breast exams, zero mammograms, and virtually no prenatal care, yet it does 34. 9 percent of all U. S. abortions, killing over 320, 000 preborn children every year. Former Planned Parenthood managers have provided testimonials about how the abortion giant uses quotas to push abortions, doesn’t provide the health care it claims it does, and “treats women like cattle. ” In fact, when President Donald Trump offered Planned Parenthood the opportunity to keep its taxpayer funding if it would stop performing abortions, the group’s officials rejected the offer. Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards even tweeted that its abortion services were “as vital to our mission as birth control or cancer screenings. ” Planned Parenthood is proud to provide abortion — a necessary service that’s as vital to our mission as birth control or cancer screenings. https: . — Cecile Richards (@CecileRichards) March 6, 2017, activists are urging Congress and Trump to eliminate Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding and redirect it to other community health care centers that provide more comprehensive healthcare services than Planned Parenthood. These community facilities outnumber the abortion business’s clinics by at least 20 to 1. | 1 |
In this News Shot, Joe Joseph quickly discusses a new system being put in place at Detroit International Airport and sixteen other airports nationwide. This is classic “problem, reaction, solution” where they make it so incredibly miserable to travel, that people will gladly give their rights away for convenience.
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Source: New Technology At Detroit Metro Airport Allows Travelers To Move Through Security Lines In A Flash Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
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By Jay Syrmopoulos In a show of kindness and solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux, actor Mark Ruffalo and Native Renewables founder Wahleah Johns presented... | 0 |
Did you know? In some (primarly Eastern) African countries, individuals born with the congenital disorder of albinism are often targeted due to local lore. It is believed that certain body parts of... | 0 |
Same people all the time , i dont know how you can fix this corruption http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/10_09_01_krongard.html | 0 |
At first blush, there’s a baffling, quality to Julian Assange’s latest star turn in our shambolic national story. He belongs in jail for “waging his war” against the United States by exposing its secrets, the conservative Fox News host Sean Hannity has said of him. An “ operative with blood on his hands,” Sarah Palin once called him. Yet last week brought the sight of Mr. Hannity speaking with Mr. Assange in glowing terms about “what drives him to expose government and media corruption” through Clinton campaign hacks that American intelligence has attributed to Russia. And Ms. Palin hailed him as a great truth teller, even apologizing for previous unpleasantries. (Cue sound of needle sliding across record album.) O. K. the fact that WikiLeaks’ splash was bad for the Democrats and good for Donald J. Trump may have a bit to do with their change of heart. But what’s up with Mr. Assange, who seems equally comfortable being a hero of the American left as he is being one of the American right, or even of Russian Putinists? What does he want, anyway? The answer has been in front of us all along. And the current imbroglio over Russia, WikiLeaks and their role in Mr. Trump’s victory — or, more to the point, Hillary Clinton’s loss — might be viewed as the realization of the vision Mr. Assange had when he started WikiLeaks over a decade ago. Mr. Assange spelled it out in prescient terms in an essay he posted online in November of 2006, the year of WikiLeaks’ founding. He wrote it long before becoming the polarizing figure he is today, a “cypherpunk” folk hero with an outsize reputation for being messianic, impetuous and all too cavalier with the personal data that come his way. (He’s currently living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he was granted asylum from Swedish authorities who are investigating a rape accusation against him that he says is false and politically motivated.) Yet even his toughest critics acknowledge how clearly he saw the politically disruptive potential of technology, back when some of us were getting our first BlackBerries. It’s what prompted him to start WikiLeaks, which “pioneered something extremely important and very dangerous to large organizations that keep lots of secrets digitally,” as the journalist Glenn Greenwald told me in an interview last week. From the start, Mr. Assange said WikiLeaks’ prime directive was to expose hidden data sets that “reveal illegal or immoral behavior” in government and big business. But in the essay he also wrote in more ambitious terms about forcing regime change through data and technology rather than through the old, barbaric means of assassination. As Mr. Assange saw it, power was held by vast networks of conspirators who shared vital information in secret, giving them a superior understanding of reality that enabled them to hold on to power. The technology revolution, he wrote, was providing the conspirators with the means to achieve what he called an even “higher total conspiratorial power. ” But it was also making them more vulnerable to sabotage, so that a governing conspiracy could be “slowed until it falls, stupefied unable to comprehend and control the forces in its environment. ” As an example, he pointed to “two closely balanced and broadly conspiratorial power groupings,” the Democratic and the Republican Parties in the United States. “Consider what would happen if one of these parties gave up their mobile phones, fax and email correspondence — let alone the computer systems,” he wrote. “They would immediately fall into an organizational stupor and lose to the other. ” The essay got new attention when WikiLeaks, working in tandem with The Guardian, The New York Times and other outlets, released extensive diplomatic cables in 2010, making WikiLeaks more of a household name. No one seemed to grasp what Mr. Assange was hinting at more clearly than the conservative writer John Sexton, who foresaw the events of 2016 in a post that was published on Breitbart News and his own blogin 2010. “You can take his example further by imagining what would happen to, say, the D. N. C. if it suffered a massive Wikileak of secret data,” Mr. Sexton wrote, referring to Mr. Assange’s essay. “It seems entirely possible that a leak of the contents of their email for one month would be exceedingly damaging to them. ” And here we are, over six years later. Mr. Assange’s essay has resurfaced yet again, after major data breaches of the email accounts of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton adviser John Podesta, committed, allegedly, by hackers and fed to the world via WikiLeaks. Clinton aides have said the breach impeded their ability to communicate electronically afterward, causing them to resort to holding more meetings. But far more damaging were the spilled secrets. They forced the resignations of the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Debbie and of the interim chair, Donna Brazile, from her analyst job at CNN. And they provided Mr. Trump with a steady stream of fresh, data points, which WikiLeaks fed out incrementally, creating a running story that the American news media voraciously seized upon. Political scientists will debate for years to come how decisive the leaks were in the election outcome. But the emails were undeniably in the mix of an election decided by fewer than 100, 000 votes in three key swing states. So, in the end, one political party was technologically compromised in a way the other wasn’t, and that party did indeed “lose to the other. ” It’s a straight line from Mr. Assange’s initial essay. But if WikiLeaks’ disclosures abetted Mr. Trump, how does that square with Mr. Assange’s goals to undercut “authoritarian conspirators” and create incentives for “more humane forms of governance”? Mr. Trump was less transparent than Mrs. Clinton was during the campaign (we’re still waiting for those tax returns) and he made a number of statements (“lock her up! ”) that were unique to modern American politics. A WikiLeaks journalist, Sarah Harrison, recently wrote in The Times that WikiLeaks was a news organization committed to disclosing vital information, not picking political sides. Mr. Assange addressed the question differently in an interview last month with the Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi of La Repubblica. “Hillary Clinton’s election would have been a consolidation of power in the existing ruling class of the United States,” he said. Mr. Trump and his allies, he said, “do not by themselves form an existing structure, so it is a weak structure which is displacing and destabilizing the central power network within D. C. ” That, he said, could herald change, both good and bad. A weak power network in Washington, of course, is just what President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wanted to see, too. Given Russia’s own authoritarianism and opacity — try independent journalism there, if you dare — it’s a wonder and, for some, cause for suspicion that it’s not a bigger WikiLeaks target. Mr. Assange told Repubblica that while he had released plenty of documents, WikiLeaks has no staff members who speak Russian. And he told my Times colleagues Jo Becker, Steven Erlanger and Eric Schmitt last summer that Russia was “a bit player” on the world stage compared with the United States and China. (Their article showed how WikiLeaks’ releases often benefited Russia at the expense of the West despite American assessments that it is likely not directly tied to Russian intelligence services). Though Mr. Assange does not as a rule reveal sources, he has repeatedly said he is confident that the Clinton campaign and D. N. C. email caches that WikiLeaks received did not come from a “state party. ” He maintains that the United States has failed to offer conclusive proof of the Russian government’s direct role, and he is not alone. On Friday, The Intercept, a news outlet by Mr. Greenwald — who led the Guardian team that shared a Pulitzer Prize in 2014 with The Washington Post for coverage of Edward Snowden’s revelations on mass surveillance — declared the intelligence report “underwhelming. ” Mr. Greenwald has been highly critical of mainstream news reports that, in his view, have been too quick to accept intelligence reports pointing to Russia’s role. That has added to the fun house mirror aspect of the latest Assange turn, given that Mr. Greenwald’s past work was celebrated by people who are so solidly opposed to Mr. Trump now. But Mr. Greenwald has long criticized mainstream American journalists as being too credulous with government intelligence claims (see “weapons of mass destruction”). Unlike, perhaps, Mr. Hannity and Ms. Palin, he is being consistent. “What’s changed is the political earth around me,” he said. “And the same thing has happened to Julian. ” That earth is still shifting. Where Mr. Assange turns up on it next is anyone’s guess. | 1 |
WASHINGTON, D. C. — Two leftist females with the CODEPINK activist organization disrupted the launch of the Middle East Forum’s Israel Victory Project in Congress on Thursday before security removed them from the historic meeting in the Rayburn House Office Building. [The Project on Thursday helped to launch the Congressional Israel Victory Caucus, which seeks to generate new policy ideas for the peace process. The Caucus is being led by U. S. Reps. Ron DeSantis ( ) and Bill Johnson ( ). “Palestinians deserve equal rights,” CODEPINK’s campaign director Ariel Gold said as she removed a sign which had “Free Palestine” written on it from her pink Kipling backpack. “Israel is an apartheid state. It was founded on racism and ethnic cleansing,” Gold said as an officer approached and removed her from the room. Someone in the crowd shouted “terrorist supporters out! You have no place here. This is a place for freedom and democracy!” This past March, Israeli Envoy to the UN Danny Danon pushed back against false allegations that Israel is an apartheid state. “The attempt to smear and falsely label the only true democracy in the Middle East by creating a false analogy is despicable and constitutes a blatant lie. ” That falsehood is often perpetuated by the left. Gold, who has been arrested in the past for disrupting the peace, donned the same banner to protest Israeli musician and producer Idan Raichel. Hey @idanraichel’s: music us for liberation, not for Israeli occupation pic. twitter. — Ariel Gold (@ArielElyseGold) April 26, 2017, CODEPINK bills itself as supporting “peace and human rights initiatives” and says it’s “against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, ageism, and other forms of oppression and prejudice. ” Ironically, the group is vehemently opposed to the only true democracy in the Middle East: Israel. Israel is the only nation in the region where there is religious freedom for all, women have equal rights, members of the LGBTQ community can live in peace and free from fear of persecution and death, and Arabs, Africans and minority groups who hold citizenship enjoy full rights. This past January, Gold told Breitbart Jerusalem that the organization was planning “audacious and creative, colorful protests” targeting the inauguration of Donald Trump. ” At the time, Gold said: We always create beautiful disruptions of hatred and violence. And that is what we are committed to as an organization and that is something that we have done from the start. And it is something that we will continue to do. And that is because we support life and health and health care and safety for all human beings. CODEPINK actively promotes the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement which seeks to undermine the State of Israel. Follow Adelle Nazarian on Facebook and Twitter. | 1 |
Rock legend Billy Joel says when it comes to politics, entertainers are “more like court jesters than court philosophers. ”[In a lengthy interview with Rolling Stone, the “Piano Man” crooner said people don’t come to his concerts to hear him preach politics. “I try to stay out of politics. I am a private citizen and I have a right to believe in my own political point of view, but I try not to get up on a soapbox and tell people how to think,” Joel said. “I’ve been to shows where people start haranguing the audience about what’s going on politically and I’m thinking, ‘You know, this isn’t why I came here,’” the singer explained. “As a matter of fact, one of the biggest cheers of the night comes when we do ‘Piano Man’ and I sing, ‘They know that it’s me that they’re coming to see to forget about life for a while,’ and the audience lets out this huge ‘ahhhh’ and I say, ‘OK, yeah, don’t forget that. ’” The who’s scored hits and has toured the world for five decades, did say that he is “still flabbergasted” that Donald Trump won the White House. Joel joins the likes of actor Mark Wahlberg and Transformers: The Last Knight star Josh Duhamel, who recently told Fox News: “I don’t like to get involved politically at all. Nobody cares what I think politically. ” Joel has a residency at Madison Square Garden, a post he calls the “greatest gig in the world. ” “I’m doing a residency at the world’s greatest arena — I mean what’s better than that?” he said. “This is our fourth year and it’s still selling out. I thought it would kind of dissipate. But so far there hasn’t been any indication of that. When there is then we’ll probably stop. ” Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson | 1 |
Hacksaw Ridge: Steadfast Love Amidst the Horrors of War Written by Michael E. Telzrow Email
Mel Gibson's directorial comeback effort, Hacksaw Ridge , plays fast and loose with the facts — but by no means all of the facts — surrounding the wartime exploits of conscientious objector, and devout Seventh Day Adventist, Desmond Doss. While Gibson's story can be faulted for taking some major liberties with Doss' life, in particular the portrayal of his father as a bitter, abusive WWI veteran, as well as the facts surrounding the Army's effort to discharge Doss for refusing to carry a rifle, it hits the mark in its portrayal of Doss' love of God and his fellow man. In some ways, this is not a war movie, but rather a love story with the Sixth Commandment as the guiding principle of Doss' convictions.
Andrew Garfield plays Doss close to perfection. His portrayal of the humble Virginian captures Doss' love for his beloved wife Dorothy, played by Teresa Palmer, and his unshakeable resolve to never take a human life. The latter of which lands Doss in hot water with military authorities and his fellow soldiers of the 77th Infantry Division. Although threatened with court-martial, and subject to discharge on psychological grounds, Garfield was successful in convincing a reluctant battalion commander to let him stay in the army as a company aid man. Therefore, the dramatic court-martial scene in movie never actually occurred.
Garfield conveys a carefully nuanced blend of humility and genuine charity for his fellow soldiers without coming off as false, or weak. Although a pacifist, there was nothing cowardly or impotent about Doss. He clearly found strength in his beliefs and in the Bible, and Garfield effectively portrays the depth of Doss' religious beliefs with respect and believability.
The battle scenes, although embellished and fictionalized to some extent, are typical of Gibson's approach. Slow-motion close ups, and the liberal use of blood and gore, although verging on the cartoonish, accurately portray the ferocity of the war in the Pacific, and the type of warfare that characterized the last days of the Japanese Empire. One inaccuracy, however, cannot be ignored. Gibson implies that the men of Doss' regiment and division were not battle tested by the time they arrived at the terrible battle for Okinawa. The scene unfolds with what appears to be a wide-eyed and untested 77th Division watching remnants of the 96th Division moving to the rear after a hard fight for the Maeda Escarpment (Hacksaw Ridge). In reality, Doss and the men of the 307th Regiment, 77th Division had already seen significant action at Guam and Leyte Gulf. In fact, Doss had already demonstrated his propensity to put other lives above his own by repeatedly rescuing men from the front, while under fire. For his efforts at Guam and Leyte Gulf, he was awarded the Bronze Star with Oak Leaf Cluster. So, by the time he reached Okinawa, Doss had already won the respect of his formerly resentful comrades.
Gibson's portrayal of the battle for the Maeda Escarpment contains a series of embellishments, some more puzzling than others. In one instance, he curiously fictionalized Doss' wounding, messes with the timeline, and leaves out a poignant moment where Doss vacates his place on a stretcher for a more critically wounded soldier. In that one act, Doss' true love for his fellow man is illustrated with clarity and strength. One has to wonder why Gibson omitted such a powerful event. Other embellishments and inaccuracies are hardly worth mentioning, largely because they do not detract from the message of the film. The portrayal of Doss going from wounded man to wounded man, and lowering them down the face of the escarpment is the stuff of movies — but in this case it actually happened! Garfield plays the part effectively, and Gibson's dark palette of the blood stained battlefield adds to the tension. Although Doss' exploits are courageous, there is no glorification of the killing of hundreds of men on the escarpment.
The cinematic portrayal of Doss' comrades is fairly typical. We see the usual suspects — rough kids from the metropolitan areas of the eastern seaboard, a few oddballs, and the humble recruit thrown together in the barracks. In this case there is some truth to the old stereotype. Doss did experience some serious hazing from a small group of soldiers who resented his adherence to Seventh Day Adventist doctrine and his pacifist convictions. But, he also had friends who accepted his desire to serve as a company aid man. In general, despite some rather bizarre characterizations, Gibson treats the soldiers with respect. This is never more apparent than in the battle scenes where we see soldiers laying their lives down for one another.
Ultimately, Gibson has created both a love story, and a film that shows the brutal realities of the saddest activity that man may engage in. The juxtaposition of Doss' pure and steadfast love and his Christian convictions stands in stark contrast to the brutality and anarchy of the battlefield. In the end, perhaps Gibson has given us an anti-war love story that illustrates the strength of Christian conviction.
Related article:
Desmond Doss: His Only Weapon Was His Conscience | 0 |
Other Writers By STEVE HENDRICKS Most Trump supporters are not monsters. They just wanted to give the “liberal elites”—or the Establishment—the middle finger. ‘Take that, you bastards!’
As the articles rain down from liberals explaining how Trump won his astonishing, appalling plurality, we can at least give thanks that we’re spared the canard that all of his supporters are racists, xenophobes, and misogynists. Neo-Blackshirts, of course, make up a frighteningly large share (sixty percent? seventy? eighty?) of his supporters, but thanks to months of Brexit analysis and now days of exit interviews here at home, it’s clear that a great many Trump voters aren’t monsters. They merely voted with the monsters because they saw no other way to give the establishment a proud, powerful middle finger.
The non-monstrous supporters of Trump mystify liberals. How could people who are not depraved, people who have a measure of decency, choose to align themselves with America’s Mussolini and his hordes, no matter how deep and well-placed their grievances against neoliberalism, greed, and corruption, which is to say grievances against Clintonism?
This liberal bewilderment bewilders me.
One dear friend in particular comes to mind—a brilliant fortysomething progressive of uncommonly sound judgment who voted for Ms. Bombalot. My friend was not among the liberal dupes who saw in Clinton a pantsuit paladin. She knew, for instance, that Hillary was the supreme embodiment of the American killing machine, a cowboy Crusader who, in the words of rightwing blowhard “Morning Joe” Scarborough, was “the neocon’s neocon. . . . more of a sabre-rattler and more of a neocon than” any of the Republicans contenders for Slayer-in-Chief.
My friend knew that not only did Clinton lustily back the wars that killed hundreds of thousands in Iraq and Afghanistan but that she also bayed for expanding the slaughter years after anyone with a few neurons or a hint of morality knew we should get our troops the hell out of there. My friend has expounded with eloquence on the idiocy of Clinton’s push for imperial adventures in Syria, Lybia, and beyond, and she speaks just as fluently about the big fat kiss that Clinton slobbered all over the brutal right wingers who overthrew the elected government of Honduras.
Matters domestic outrage my friend no less.
Hillary’s role in the awesome expansion of our Orwellian surveillance state is a horror to her, as is her incomparable whoring for big banks and fat cats. (I use the word “whoring” androgynously: Clinton is outdone in financial hooking only by our current POTUS, the Prostitute of the United States.) Then there is Hillary’s stalwart opposition to the Fight for $15, to Medicare for All, to forgiveness of college debt, to free tuition, and, companion to these, her ruthless despoliation of the working class via free-trade agreements (so called, of course, because they make labor free for the industrialists who own our country).
The long memory of my friend holds a special place for Clinton’s support of her husband’s ravaging of black America—the punitive drug sentences, the broader war on crime, the evisceration of welfare. Nor has she forgotten Hillary’s ridicule of the women who accused her sweet Willy not merely of serial philandering but of sexual harassment. (Do you recall Hillary’s charming comments about, say, Gennifer Flowers: “trailer trash,” “I would crucify her”?) Few liberals could tell you, but my friend could, that as senator, Clinton herself once voted to wall off the better part of 1,000 miles of our southern border and that she declared herself “adamantly against illegal immigrants.” And my friend has been near tears when holding forth on the greatest issue of our time, the devastation of our climate, on which Clinton has proven herself a vandal—leading the sabotage of our last best chance, at Copenhagen, to mitigate our climactic disaster, nestling ever deeper into the cozy pocket of Big Oil, from which she peeks out now and again to ferociously defend the interests of the oilmen, the fracking barons, and the oil-soaked sheikhs who’ve lavished her with money—rapists and pillagers all, Kochs in all but name. And yet, knowing all this, my friend still voted for Clinton.
She sympathized with the argument that the only chance for the Left to rise again is to kill off the rightwing imposter called the Democratic Party and replace it with a leftist party, perhaps a reincarnated Democratic Party, perhaps something else altogether. She saw the logic of denying Clinton her vote and giving it, as I urged, to Jill Stein or another protest candidate. But she could not abide throwing the election to Trump and so aligned herself with someone she knew to be vile on most issues of importance but who might once in a while do good on a few big issues like abortion and other women’s rights. Millions of nose-holding liberals made the same choice Tuesday.
Why then is it a mystery to them that other decent-ish people, people with no more hate in their hearts than the rest of us, allied themselves with foul Trump? Is it so hard to see in these members of the Trump Nation the other side of the same coin, voters who swung to a different brute because Clinton was more dreadful on issues of importance to them?
The stocker at Safeway may loathe Trump’s vilification of Latinos, Muslims, women, and on and on, but it was Hillary, not Donald, who shipped his $60,000 unionized factory job to Juárez. For that matter, although she has no vote, try convincing the Pakistani mother whose child was murdered by a Clinton-backed drone that Trump is worse because he wants to ban Muslims from America.
The prescription for understanding how non-racist, non-sexist, non-xenophobic men and women—women, for Christ’s sake—made themselves Trump’s willing executioners, is simple:
LIBERAL, KNOW THYSELF! | 0 |
SAN FRANCISCO — From her apartment at the foot of the celebrated zigzags of Lombard Street, Judith Calson has twice peered out her window as thieves smashed their way into cars and snatched whatever they could. She has seen foreign tourists cry after cash and passports were stolen. She shudders when she recounts the story of the Thai tourist who was shot because he resisted thieves taking his camera. And that is her tally from the last year alone. “I never thought of this area as a neighborhood,” Ms. Calson, a retired photographer, said of this leafy part of the city, where tourists flock to view the steeply sloped, crooked street adorned with flower beds. San Francisco, America’s boom town, is flooded with the cash of technology workers and record numbers of tourists. At the same time, the city has seen a sharp jump in property crime, up more than 60 percent since 2010, though the actual increase may be higher because many of the crimes go unreported. Recent data from the F. B. I. show that San Francisco has the highest property crime rate of the nation’s top 50 cities. About half the cases here are thefts from vehicles, that scatter glittering broken glass onto the sidewalks. The city, known for a political tradition of empathy for the downtrodden, is now divided over whether to respond with more muscular law enforcement or stick to its forgiving attitudes. The Chamber of Commerce and the tourist board are calling for harsher measures to improve what is euphemistically called the “condition of the streets,” a term that encompasses the intractable homeless problem, public intravenous drug use, the large population of mentally ill people on the streets and aggressive panhandling. The chamber recently released the results of an opinion poll that showed that homelessness and “street behavior” were the primary concerns of residents here. “We are the wealthiest big city in the wealthiest state in the wealthiest country in the world, and we have this situation on our streets,” said Joe D’Alessandro, the chief executive of San Francisco Travel, a tourism organization. “People believe that everyone has the right to be on the streets. However, I think there is a tolerance limit to bad behavior. ” Visitors come to bask in the Mediterranean climate, stroll through the charming streets and marvel at the sweeping views of the bay and the Pacific. But alongside those views are tent encampments on sidewalks and homeless people in front of some of the most expensive real estate in America. The divided opinions on how to handle the problems are evident among members of the Board of Supervisors. Scott Wiener, a supervisor and an advocate for more aggressive law enforcement, said his constituents were urging him to act. “I can’t tell you the number of times where I have received emails from moms saying, ‘My kids just asked me why that man has a syringe sticking out of his arm,’ ” he said. “San Francisco at times is a zone,” Mr. Wiener said. “I’m not advocating extreme law and order, but there has to be consequences. Sometimes people might need to spend six months in jail to think about what they did. ” In a bitterly contested vote last year, Mr. Wiener led the passage of a measure adding several hundred officers to the city’s police force, the first increase since the 1980s, when the population was over 10 percent smaller. On the other side is David Campos, a supervisor who opposes the increase in police officers and describes Mr. Wiener’s views as “a very kind of punitive approach that is ineffective and inconsistent with the values of San Francisco. ” Mr. Campos and many others evoke the charitable spirit of the city’s namesake, St. Francis. “We are not going to criminalize people for being poor,” he said. “That criminalization is only going to make it harder for them to get out of poverty. ” San Francisco’s liberal ethos, Mr. Campos said, was changing as the city focused more on business and the needs of the tech industry. “I think there has been a shift in the people who have come to San Francisco,” Mr. Campos said of the city’s new arrivals, a group that is well educated and well heeled. He deplores what he describes as a growing “ ” ideology that stands in contrast to the city’s traditions. “I don’t know which San Francisco will prevail,” he said. At TLC Glass, a repair shop on the edge of San Francisco’s business district, the more prosaic consequences of the rise in car are on display. Customers regularly file in to repair car windows that have been smashed by thieves. “Every day we are full,” the shop’s owner, Louie Chen, said. One customer came in four times in six weeks. A customer who came to have a broken window fixed, Dan showed San Franciscan forgiveness. He said he felt sorry for whoever broke a window of his BMW twice, stealing his gym bag both times. “I have a lot of sympathy for folks who are in need in the city,” Mr. said. “This has become an extremely expensive city to live in. The divide between those who have and those who don’t is ridiculously ginormous. ” The people who commit the property crimes come from a variety of backgrounds, said Albie Esparza, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department. “Some are homeless, some are in gangs, some are freelancers up to no good,” he said. People are rarely caught. “The problem with auto is that they happen so quickly, just a few seconds,” Mr. Esparza said. “Before anyone can do anything about it, they are long gone. ” Violent crime has increased 18 percent since 2010, but the city has a low murder rate relative to other large American cities. Police are barred by city ordinance from installing surveillance cameras that are commonly found in other cities, a restriction that even Mr. Wiener said he did not want changed. Ms. Calson, the retired photographer, said she offered to let the police mount a surveillance camera outside her Lombard Street apartment. The car happen so quickly that she has not been able photograph the perpetrators. On Wednesday, another car was broken into below her window. A woman who was dropping off her daughter at a day care center had parked for 10 minutes and returned to find her window smashed and her purse gone. “It’s just insane,” Ms. Calson said. “On and on and on it goes. ” | 1 |
ASTANA, Kazakhstan — The Astana Opera towers over a windswept plaza in this capital on the Central Asian steppe, a of Moscow’s neoclassical Bolshoi Theater, right down to the sculpture of galloping horses on the roof. Across a broad avenue stands the tilted, irregular cone of Khan Shatyr, a shopping mall designed as the world’s largest tent. Its roof is supported by a single slanting pole to evoke the nomadic history of the Kazakhs, a Turkic ethnic group slowly reasserting its identity after centuries of Russian rule. In between stands a fanciful construction all Astana’s own: one of the “ice cities” that dot the freezing capital in winter. Children scoot down ice slides, and at night, ice sculptures glow with lights. Since the fall of the Soviet Union made Kazakhstan an independent state in 1991, it has been cultivating relationships with Russia, its longtime hegemon, and Turkey, which invested early in the new nation and shares some of its cultural roots. It’s easy to see why Astana was Russia’s choice to host a new track of Syrian peace talks this year. Convening talks five time zones east of Geneva — where talks have been sputtering along without progress for years — underscored what Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, described recently as a desire for a “ ” international order. Astana also represents the success of Kazakhstan’s leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, in managing Moscow. The country’s only president since independence — elected five times with 97. 5 percent of the vote — Mr. Nazarbayev has created a kind of “authoritarian lite” system that has more in common with the strongman rule in Russia, and increasingly in Turkey, than with Europe. He has sought to strike a balance between accommodating Russian power and pushing back, and Kazakhstan has avoided the territorial disputes with Russia and the ethnic and religious conflicts that have plagued other states. “We don’t have such problems,” said Abzal Abdiev, 25, who gave me and two friends an amateur tour of Astana, pointing out the sights with evident pride. The city’s very existence embodies the anxious, dance between Moscow and the mostly Muslim regions that line Russia’s southern periphery, from the states and semiautonomous republics of the Caucasus region north of Turkey all the way to Kazakhstan’s eastern tip, farther east than Kathmandu. When I first visited Kazakhstan in 1993, Astana did not exist. I was sent by my editor at The Moscow Times to buttonhole Mr. Nazarbayev at a for a power plant in the country’s remote north, near the Russian border. A Russian nationalist parliamentarian, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, had been calling for Russia to seize back the mostly ethnically Russian area, where he was born. Mr. Nazarbayev brushed off the threat Russia was weakened then, and any such move was unlikely. But a few months later, he decreed that the capital would move from Almaty — the country’s largest city, in the more populous, more ethnically Kazakh south — to the northern steppe. The move demonstrated power and ambition, but also placed a marker on the map, shoring up Kazakhstan’s possession of the area. Astana was built in a hurry, by renaming and augmenting a provincial town called Akmola (in the Soviet era, Tselinograd). Mr. Nazarbayev was turning Kazakhstan into a consequential state, winning vast Caspian Sea gas fields in negotiations with Russia and cultivating global approval by giving up Soviet nuclear weapons left on his territory. He recruited famous international architects like Norman Foster to dot Astana with structures of his own conception, like a tower with a gilded globe evoking a golden egg from Kazakh legend. More than one public building has an imprint of his palm where citizens place their hands for good luck. Today, Astana is sometimes nicknamed the “Dubai of the North,” bustling with business travelers and offering tourists and residents indoor entertainment in forbidding weather. Its answer to steamy Dubai’s indoor ski slope is a beach club, complete with sand, on the top level of the Khan Shatyr mall. When he dreamed up the city, Mr. Nazarbayev had been dealt a potentially explosive challenge: The population was about evenly divided between ethnic Russians, many unenthusiastic about suddenly being citizens of Kazakhstan, and Kazakhs, estranged by Soviet rule from their language and from an Islamic tradition layered on older shamanism. Astana hints at his approach to the problem. Mr. Nazarbayev has sought to forge a national identity separate from Russia but not too exclusive of Russians, now a large minority. And he has led a restoration of Kazakh and Islamic identity, embedded firmly in moderation — with a dose of a personality cult. The National Museum greets visitors with a portrait of Mr. Nazarbayev decked in medals and flanked with murals from Kazakh history. Exhibits highlight Kazakh crafts and horsemanship, battles with czarist Russia, proud moments in Soviet history (the space program, the World War II victory). But they also document hunger and privation in a prison camp for dissidents’ wives and children where Astana now stands. Mr. Abdiev, our guide, was born a year after independence, but his elders, he said, remember Soviet days as “bad times,” when food was rationed and “you couldn’t get good shoes. ” Things are better now, he said, pointing out toy stores, affordable Turkish clothing shops, modest but sturdy apartment blocks, glassy luxury towers and a CrossFit Astana. Mr. Abdiev grew up in an agricultural area farther south, training colts and riding bareback his family, ethnic Kazakhs, raised horses for riding and meat, the national delicacy. His early playmates, he said, were Russian neighbors, and all the children spoke both languages. In the Hazrat Sultan Mosque, the largest in Central Asia, detailed instructions on how to pray are written in Kazakh — though not Russian — for people still learning the religion, pointing them to Muslim. Kz for more information. Its soaring dome and intricate decoration are reminiscent of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, but with lighter blues — recalling the turquoise of the Kazakh flag. Kazakh officials often sound themes of religious coexistence and moderate Islam, which is reassuring to neighboring Russia, home to 20 million Muslims. Mr. Putin recently noted that 4, 000 Russian citizens and 5, 000 citizens of other states had joined Islamist insurgents in Syria, a concern cited as one reason for Russia’s intervention there. Mr. Nazarbayev has promised political reforms to bring in a new, less powerful president. Still, Kazakhstan falls short of democracy and good governance, ranking poorly in indexes of corruption and press freedom. In smaller, less favored towns, conditions can be far worse, with rickety infrastructure and coal pollution. For now, Astana, an artificially created city, is growing some roots of a real one. At the Astana Opera one night, the gilded and red velvet hall was packed. Latecomers skittered across the marble floor to avoid missing the curtain. Dancers, mostly Kazakh but also from other former Soviet republics, performed excerpts from Russian classical ballets. Posters advertised newer productions based on Kazakh folk tales. At intermission, patrons sported clothing as stylish as any in Moscow. Couples posed with mannequins in costumes designed for classic Russian operas and ballets but featuring Central Asian fabrics, hats and jewelry. Little girls twirled like ballerinas. Asked why he was driving a cab in subzero Astana instead of raising horses down south, Mr. Abdiev, the guide, answered like any young fortune seeker. “Well,” he said simply, “it’s the capital. ” | 1 |
If there’s one thing that’s been missing during this bizarre 2016 election cycle, it’s former Daily Show host Jon Stewart. That’s not to say that his replacement, Trevor Noah, hasn’t done a good job, but there’s nothing like watching Stewart’s magical brilliance.
However, Stewart hasn’t completely stayed out of election talk; after all, he appeared on The Late Show with his friend and partner in crime Stephen Colbert. On Tuesday night, Stewart left us with another comedic treat – and of course the target of his relentless mockery was GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump.
At the “Stand Up for Heroes Benefit” in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Stewart wasted no time in lighting into Trump. He began:
“I’m not as much of a political analyst. But if I could ask you a question that I’ve been saying to my television, it’s ‘What the fuck? What the fuck is going on? What is happening?!'”
Stewart then went on to recall a Twitter war Trump started with him, complete with Trumpian anti-Semitic dog whistles, in which Trump called Stewart “Jonathan Leibowitz” and said that he needs to be “proud of his heritage.” Of course, Stewart trolled Trump harder than Trump could ever troll him, saying:
“So I start to think to myself, Oh, I think this guy is trying to let people know I’m a Jew. And I think to myself, doesn’t my face do that? Honestly, like, where have you seen this face other than a poster for Yentl ? In what world are people like, Stewart, that’s a Scottish name, but there’s something about that fella that looks a little schmeary. It would be funny if it wasn’t so toxically fucking crude and horrible, but. So I decide to tweet back at him, “Many people don’t know this, but Donald Trump’s real name is Fuckface Von Clownstick. I wish you would embrace the Von Clownstick heritage.”
This is just TOO GOOD. Hopefully, Trump has a complete meltdown over this one; after all, we know how thin Trump’s skin is, and he won’t be able to resist responding.
Watch the magic of Stewart trolling Trump below:
Featured image via Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for The Bob Woodruff Foundation Share this Article! | 0 |
1861 Views October 29, 2016 10 Comments Guest Posts The Saker
Moscow-Beijing Express, on The Saker
By Jeff J. Brown, www.chinarising.puntopress.com
Crosslinked at: http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/10/29/putin-and-xi-in-western-propaganda-why-does-xjp-get-off-so-lightly-moscow-beijing-express-on-the-saker-161029/
Podcast is available on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/44-days/putin-and-xi-in-western-propaganda-why-does-xjp-get-off-so-lightly-161029
Better watch out, Vlad. When Western propaganda throws an “-ism” at you, the gloves have come off. Think Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, communism, socialism, extremism and “Islamic” terrorism, for starters. After all, behind the Great Western Firewall, they are all the same thing, right?
A recent cover and main article in the Economist, pictured above, reminded me of just how hyperbolic and ideological is the West’s propaganda against Russian President Vladimir Putin. While maybe good polemical fodder as a cartoon on the editorial page, the fact that this demonic caricature merits front cover status, indicates just how programmed and institutionalized Western mainstream media is. Westerners love to insult the Anti-West press for being “party organs” and “government mouthpieces”. But, why travel so far? They only need to stay home with their national New York Times , Radio France and BBC , to really appreciate Bernaysian psyops being passed off as serious journalism (as in Edward Bernays). I don’t call it living behind the Great Western Firewall for nothing.
I have a friend whose email signature is “Blame it on Putin”. For a while, he changed it to “Blame it on China”. But that didn’t last long and he recently changed it back. As we have seen with the most depressing predictability, President Putin, specifically, and Russia in general are the voodoo pin dolls of Western racism and demonization of another people (Slavs) and other religions (Orthodox Christianity, as well as widespread Islam and Buddhism in Siberia). http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2015/10/01/slavs-and-the-yellow-peril-are-niggers-brutes-and-beasts-in-the-eyes-of-western-empire-the-saker-44-days-radio-sinoland-2015-10-1/
What is so remarkable is how unhinged and psychopathic the West’s racist propaganda is against Putin & Co., compared to the attacks on China’s President Xi Jinping (XJP) and the Chinese people. It transgresses irrational fear, to the point of being sick, black humor. Yet, about the most polemical front cover against XJP was Time magazine in April, 2016, seen below. But, making China’s leader look like a Mao Zedong- Blade Runner replicant is tame and almost quaint, compared to the Orwellian “Emmanuel Goldstein” tsunami being launched nonstop against Putin.
Pretty tame stuff, this, compared to the racist feeding frenzy that Western propaganda is ginning up against Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Slavic countrymen.
True, Russia has the longest border with the European Union, and there is tremendous historical Western precedence to keep Germany from forming any kind of economic or geopolitical alliance with Russia. As well, the West’s Ukrainian color revolution turned out to be a total genocidal failure, with Russia reintegrating Crimea and Donbass, biding its time for a hopeful remarriage in the years to come. Needless to say, the revenge factor, and if there is anything that Western tyranny loves more, it’s to avenge its long list of failed chaos and extermination around the world.
But, Russia is officially a capitalist country. Its current constitution was largely written by American fifth columnists. The Russian Central Bank is widely presumed to be under the thumb of the West’s oil banking families. In spite of widespread ignorance around the world, on these two counts, China can definitely list itself in the opposing column. http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/10/18/so-called-communist-china-an-exclusive-article-for-the-all-china-review-16-10-17/ . Given America’s post-1917, deranged, hysterical fear of, and untold billions spent to crush any communist expression around the world, you would think that red China and Xi would be Public Enemy Number One. But no, it’s Putin and the Russians.
One factor might be Western perceptions of Russia’s and China’s military strength. Russians have shown off their powerful, well-run army, navy and air force in Syria and the Black Sea. The West is probably in a bit of an historic rut, when looking at China’s rapidly modernizing People’s Liberation Army (PLA), like back to the Korean War, when the just liberated New China had no air force, no navy and no nuclear missiles, yet still kicked the pants off Uncle Sam, using mostly World War I vintage arms. But then again, nobody in the West will ever admit that they lost the Korean War, in the first place. http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/09/04/from-may-9th-in-moscow-to-september-3rd-in-beijing-the-anti-west-order-comes-full-circle-reprint/ . I can tell you that here in China, just like 1950-1953, XJP and the PLA do not fear American military power, not one iota. Respect it, yes. Fear it, never. President Xi has put the PLA on combat ready war footing and he means it. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/966932.shtml
But there is a new gadfly in America’s imperial ointment, one who may push President Xi and the Chinese people up the racist hate-o-meter, to Slavic levels, and that menace is the Philippines’ new president, Rodrigo Duterte. http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/09/17/puppet-japan-saves-uncle-sams-face-in-south-china-sea-after-philippines-principled-stand-vs-imperialism-jeff-j-brown-on-press-tv/ . This plainspoken, no bullshit world leader is Uncle Sam’s worst nightmare. He is calling American empire what it is: genocidal, dictatorial and rapacious. Not once, but day after day, meeting after meeting, press conference after press conference.
At September 8-9, 2016’s ASEAN summit in Laos, Duterte showed a colonial era photo and talked about the genocide that the US committed, as it brutally conquered the Philippines, 1899-1913, killing an estimated 1.25 million people, about 25% of the nation’s population. Western media censored it like the plague and even semi-friendly outlets like the South China Morning Post were aghast that he actually associated the West with genocide. Heaven forbid! This, in spite of the fact the easily 80-90% of the history’s genocides and exterminations were and are being perpetrated by Eurangloland, including of course Israel. Behind the Great Western Firewall, genocide is exclusively reserved for powerless, dark skinned people and unrepentant socialists, like Serbia’s framed and destroyed Slobodan Milosevic.
Speaking truth to imperial power, Duterte gives a blunt lesson on Western genocide, during the recent ASEAN summit in Laos. How dare you tell it like it is! (Image by Baidu.com)
Duterte is a semi-official socialist-populist. His cabinet is inclusive and consultative, with former imprisoned and exiled political opposition leaders, including communists and Muslims. He clearly can’t stand America’s grotesque, imperial arrogance and tyranny, in a country that has been a pliant doormat for US mayhem and exploitation in Asia, going back to the turn of the 19 th -20 th century. When Duterte’s hometown of Davao was hit with a very suspicious, false flag smelling public market bombing, on September 2, 2016, he suggested that the automatic-to-blame Abu Sayyef Group, a Muslim independence outfit on his island of Mindanao, is controlled by US Special Forces based there, which is of course true. But, world leaders aren’t supposed to speak truth to power, especially “little brown brothers”, as Filipino Foreign Minister Perfecto Yasay has described America’s attitude to his long suffering and abused nation. http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2016/09/17/1624575/dfa-chief-philippines-no-little-brown-brother-us
After signing with XJP more than three times as many development deals ($15 billion), as the US has totally invested to date in the Philippines ($4.7 billion), Duterte declared to the world that the “US has lost” and that his country was realigning with Baba Beijing. His official government/trade delegation had an unprecedented 300 members and another 150 business people paid their own way to join the Asian lovefest. The two sides set up bilateral committees to discuss and negotiate their South China Sea claims, which is anathema to Uncle Sam, who always insists on being the rabid Rottweiler in the middle. Next stop was US prostitute Japan, where he further declared that the Philippines would be free of all foreign military (meaning US marines and special forces), something that has not happened since 1521, when Spain began colonizing and raping the archipelago.
This is all very powerful, history changing geopolitics. Almost every other world leader who has talked and acted like this, has either been overthrown and/or murdered by the West, sooner than later. Clearly, from the perspective of the West, Duterte’s visionary, regional reset is closely tied to President Xi and China. It is for this reason that XJP may be getting the Slavic-Putin treatment on an accelerated schedule, in a desperate attempt to trash China’s deep, historical leadership and trust role in Asia.
The old story about people being able to see that the emperor is not wearing any clothes, is very apropos to Duterte. He is shouting out to the world that Western empire is a colossal failure and humiliation for his impoverished, exploited citizens, and by extension, equally so for every other member of humanity outside Eurangloland. http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2016/07/16/communist-china-vs-capitalist-philippines-vs-imperial-france-china-rising-radio-sinoland-160716/ . Once one person pierces the veil, it emboldens others to finally have the courage to pile on.
For Uncle Sam, it’s already happening. Malaysian Prime Minster Najib Razak is visiting XJP and Co. in Beijing, October 31-November 6, 2016, an unusually long state visit by a world leader. Najib has declared that Malaysia is committed to strengthening friendship with China and pushing ties to “new highs”. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-malaysia-china-idUSKCN12R0ZU . As more and more countries embrace China’s history founding One Belt One Road plan, in which the whole world is and will benefit into the 22 nd century, including Eurangloland, expect ever more desperate, racist demonization and dehumanization of Xi Jinping and the Chinese people, along the lines of Putin and the Russians. Maybe the CIA-MI6 can dig up that old 19 th century chestnut, “The Yellow Peril”, and give it a modern day makeover. Stay tuned to the New York Times, Radio France and the BBC , as the propaganda psyops campaign takes shape.
As more and more world leaders are emboldened to speak out against Western tyranny, thanks to Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte’s courage to make a public stand, President Xi Jinping can expect his face to morph into Putin’s, who is demonically pictured above on a January, 2014 Newsweek cover.
Check out Jeff’s newest book, the top selling China Rising – Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations : | 0 |
Thursday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Rep Maxine Waters ( ) discussed her multiple calls for the impeachment of President Donald Trump and claimed during the 2016 presidential campaign Trump calling his opponent, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton “crooked” and the rally crowds chanting “lock her up,” was “a play from Putin’s playbook. ” When asked what the standard by which Trump should be impeached, Waters said, “I am talking about strategies that were developed working with the Trump campaign. I really do believe that much of what you saw coming out of Trump’s mouth was a play from Putin’s playbook. I think that when you saw him absolutely calling Hillary crooked, the, “lock her up, lock her up” all of that was developed. I think that was developed strategically with people from the Kremlin, with Putin, and I think it’s more than bank records. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
HAMPTON, Va. — Growing up here in the 1970s, in the shadow of Langley Research Center, where workers helped revolutionize air flight and put Americans on the moon, Margot Lee Shetterly had a pretty fixed idea of what scientists looked like: They were middle class, and worked at NASA, like her dad. It would be years before she learned that this was far from the American norm. And that many women in her hometown defied convention, too, by having vibrant, and by most standards, unusual careers. Black and female, dozens had worked at the space agency as mathematicians, often under Jim Crow laws, calculating crucial trajectories for rockets while being segregated from their white counterparts. For decades, as the space race made heroes out of astronauts, the stories of those women went largely untold. Four of them are the subjects of Ms. Shetterly’s first book, “Hidden Figures,” a history being released on Tuesday by William Morrow. The book garnered an early burst of attention because its movie version, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe, is scheduled for a release and set for an Oscars run. The movie rights were snapped up weeks after Ms. Shetterly sold her book proposal in 2014, and well before she started writing the book in earnest, a disorientingly fast, if exhilarating, turn. “The thrilling thing to me about the book, and the movie, is this is an American story that we’re getting to see through the faces of these women,” Ms. Shetterly said during a recent visit to Hampton, which sits on the southeastern end of the Virginia Peninsula, surrounded by aquamarine waters and Navy ships. “It’s just as American a story as if it were John Glenn or Alan Shepard telling it. ” Ms. Shetterly happened upon the idea for the book six years ago, when she and her husband, Aran Shetterly, then living in Mexico, were visiting her parents here. The couple and Ms. Shetterly’s father were driving around in his minivan when he mentioned, very casually, that one of Ms. Shetterly’s former Sunday school teachers had worked as a mathematician at NASA, and that another woman she knew calculated rocket trajectories for famous astronauts. Ms. Shetterly remembers her husband perking up and asking why he had never heard this tale before. “I knew women who worked at NASA as mathematicians and engineers,” Ms. Shetterly said, “but it took someone from the outside saying, ‘Wait a minute’ for me to see the story there. ” (A book on a similar topic, Nathalia Holt’s “Rise of the Rocket Girls,” about women working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the ’40s and ’50s, was published in April.) Two of the women she would focus on are still living in the area. Christine Darden, now 73 and retired, had worked her way out of NASA’s computing pool to lead engineering research into sonic booms. Katherine Johnson, who recently turned 98, lives in a retirement home with her husband of 57 years, James A. Johnson, and is enjoying a recent surge of fame. She calculated rocket trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions, and last year President Obama personally awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her life’s work. Mrs. Darden and Mrs. Johnson still socialize, and on a recent summer day, made meltingly hot by a heat wave, met to play bridge at Mrs. Johnson’s apartment. (Mrs. Johnson and her partner won.) Ms. Shetterly was visiting too, and presented both women with an early copy of her book. “Fantastic,” Mrs. Darden said, as Mrs. Johnson, whose eyesight is failing, peered at the cover with a slight smile. Yet asked how she felt about the coming film, in which she is played by Ms. Henson, in the starring role, Mrs. Johnson became solemn. (Mrs. Darden is not portrayed onscreen, as the film focuses on the years preceding her arrival at NASA.) “I shudder,” Mrs. Johnson said. She had heard, she said, that the movie might stretch the facts, and that her character possibly came across as aggressive. “I was never aggressive,” Mrs. Johnson said. Ms. Shetterly reminded Mrs. Johnson of her persistence in the late 1950s, when she successfully pressed her supervisor into admitting her into traditionally meetings. “You took matters in your own hands,” Ms. Shetterly said. “For other women, it was a revelation. ” Ms. Johnson said: “Well, I don’t ever wait for something. I remember asking the question, ‘Is there a law?’ And he said, ‘Let her go.’ It was easier than arguing. ” Listening in, one of Mrs. Johnson’s health aides chuckled. “Yep,” he said, “That’s the Katherine Johnson I know. ” Though outwardly their stories are remarkable, both Mrs. Darden and Mrs. Johnson remained when describing their careers, an attitude that seems to have prevailed among their peers. Ann Hammond, whose mother, Dorothy Vaughan, was one of the first black women to be hired by what was then called the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, in 1943, said her mother never wanted a pat on the back. Mrs. Vaughan died in 2005 at the age of 98, and is played in the film by Octavia Spencer. “My mother would’ve probably said, ‘I was just doing my job,’” Ms. Hammond, 80, said, speaking in the Hampton bungalow where she grew up with her five siblings. But what jobs they were. While military budget cuts and sequestration have hurt the economy here in recent decades, some 75 years ago the hungry wartime machine needed manpower, and womanpower, to fill its depleted ranks. This helped open the door for black female mathematicians, who were recruited through job bulletin boards and newspaper ads. Their job title? “Colored computers. ” Mrs. Johnson, a math savant, graduated summa cum laude from what is now West Virginia State University at 18, and heard about the job through a family connection. Mrs. Darden, who went to college at Hampton Institute and earned a master’s degree in math at Virginia State College, was hired to be a NASA data analyst out of graduate school in 1967, and went on to become an aerospace engineer. The military boom lasted for decades, allowing the women and their families to have what Ms. Hammond described as a good life, despite enduring the indignities of segregation in the early years — working, eating and using restrooms apart from white colleagues. Ms. Shetterly discovered in her research that the space agency’s leaders were well aware of the negative effects of segregation. As Virginia began vigorously fighting public school desegregation in 1956, one higher up worried about the face that the United States, with its roiling racial problems, was presenting to the world, using words that still have resonance today. “In trying to provide leadership in world events, it is necessary for this country to indicate to the world that we practice equality for all within this country,” NACA’s chief counsel, Paul Dembling, wrote in a file memo that year. Two years later, the segregated computing pool was disbanded. Through it all, by most accounts, the black women at NASA held their heads high. “Her whole life, my mother never felt superior and never felt less than anybody else,” said Joylette Hylick, the eldest of Mrs. Johnson’s three daughters. “She didn’t let it get in her way. ” | 1 |
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During a radio interview, comic legend and political pundit Jackie Mason joked that the only time Hillary Clinton is not lying “is when her mouth is not moving.”“And even then, she is probably lying because she’s probably sitting there thinking of the next lie she is going to tell,” he added.
Mason claimed that Clinton is so untrustworthy that she likely couldn’t land a job as an “attendant in the ladies’ room because they would be afraid that she would steal the towels or the napkins. Even the toilet paper wouldn’t be safe from her.”
Mason was speaking during his regular segment on this reporter’s talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio,” broadcast on New York’s AM 970 The Answer and NewsTalk 990 AM in Philadelphia.
He continued:
Do you think that if she went for any other job besides the presidency that anyone would hire her anywhere? If you saw her resume which is a resume of accomplishing nothing and running from the police three-quarters of her life. She is always either indicted or almost indicted or about to be indicted. Her whole life spent fleeing from the Justice Departments of different countries. Now, this yenta, do you think she would be able to get any other job? …
Would you think they would hire her as a chambermaid? Do you know what all those sheets and pillowcases are worth? Do you think they would trust her with it? After they found out the history of her life. Let’s be honest about it, if you went on a vacation would you let her watch your house while you went on vacation? Would you expect to come back and find anything still there? | 0 |
The FBI seems to be sick of the DoJ’s favoritism . Two separate sources have told Fox News about serious new breaks in the investigation. The fact that this is being reported on an MSM site is huge. Bigger than huge.
E-freaking-normous.
Watch this video and try to keep from jumping up and down with excitement.
Did you catch that? The laptops that everyone THOUGHT the FBI destroyed were NOT, in fact, destroyed. Anyone who is caught lying has voided their immunity deals. (cough, Cheryl Mills, cough) There are new, not-seen-before emails, even though Clinton said she disclosed them all. It’s goin’ down. Right now.
All of those people who were prepared to take one for Team Clinton might want to reconsider.
It’s hard to imagine even Teflon-coated Hillary Clinton getting out of this mess. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple
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Contributed by Daisy Luther of DaisyLuther.com . | 0 |
The Philippines are doing just fine since kicking the US out under Clinton 1, with now one of the highest growth rates in Asia. They also continue to hold 'special visa' privileges, entering US through Guam, then taking US government and healthcare jobs all across America. What is destroying PI is Chinese drug triads, what is saving PI is Chinese R/E funding, so Duterte must draw a fine line in the sand. The US provides PI nothing. Your post is an absurd statement. | 0 |
Home | World | Experts: Britain’s National Security at Stake Infiltrated by EU Experts: Britain’s National Security at Stake Infiltrated by EU By Guy Fawkes 05/11/2016 11:17:32
Corruptio optimi pessima est
LONDON – England – The High Court decision to quash Brexit is proof that there are clandestine operatives within the system who only hold allegiance to Brussels and not to the United Kingdom.
Only a purge of the political, judicial, and defence sectors can save Britain from the mass infiltration of EU operatives working within the British governmental institutions.
These people have been identified during the EU referendum and must be purged from the system otherwise these treasonous operatives of the EU could cause further harm to the British constitution and Britain’s national security.
We have seen the damage already committed within the judicial system when EU operative judges were allowed to preside over the Brexit ruling and attempted to thwart the vote of the electorate on the EU referendum.
The blatantly biased decision by these EU judges, one of which is Lord Carnwath, 71, who was one of four co-founders of the EU Forum of Judges for the Environment and served as the forum’s secretary general from 2004-05. The body exists to “promote the enforcement of national, European and international environmental law”.
L ord Reed, began his career as an advisor to the Scottish education department, served as a judge in the European Court of Human Rights, who also acted as an expert adviser to the European Union Initiative with Turkey on Democratisation and Human Rights between 2002 and 2004, and the following year he became chairman of the Franco-British Judicial Co-operation Committee.
The other EU judge is Lord Kerr, 68, who also sat as a judge in the European Court of Human Rights, ruling on a case in 2001 involving aircraft noise from Heathrow.
Additionally we have L ord Mance, 73, who began his career working for a law firm in Hamburg, before qualifying as a barrister in 1965. His time in Germany gave him a taste for international legal affairs, and he has represented the UK on the Council of Europe’s Consultative Council of European Judges, which was set up in 2000 to advise the Council of Europe on the “independence, impartiality and competence” of judges. He has also served as a member of a seven-person EU panel that helps select judges and advocates-general of the European Court of Justice and General Court.
These elements within the panel were clearly not impartial in their decision purely on their heavily entrenched links with the EU.
Impartiality within law regarding key national security decisions like Brexit should be paramount to the judicial system within Britain therefore in justice terms, their decision to thwart Brexit, and the EU referendum result, voted for by 52% of the electorate, is wholly unjust and biased, bordering on corruption at the highest levels.
The question of corruption should be implemented with a full public inquiry into how these judges were selected and how they were allowed to come to their obviously biased non impartial decision. We must as a democracy look into any form of clandestine payments given to the judges prior to their decision, and if any discrepancy is found it must be put right.
Britain’s national sovereignty is at stake, and treachery, corruption at the highest judicial levels must be eradicated to conserve our constitution. To purge the institutions of EU collaborators and clandestine operatives should be of paramount import in order to solidify Britain’s national security and overall sovereign status. Share on : | 0 |
President Donald Trump detailed his America First agenda to Republican congressional leaders attending the annual Republican congressional retreat in Philadelphia. He promised to create millions of jobs for the American worker and reasserted his commitment to build a wall and crack down on immigration and sanctuary cities. [“It’s time to restore the civil rights of Americans to protect their jobs, their hopes, and their dreams for a much better future,” he said, vowing to enforce existing laws on immigration. “The hour of justice for the American worker has arrived. ” Trump specifically referred to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s decision to cancel a meeting with him, and vowed that if they failed to respect the United States, he would “have to go another way” in their relationship. He also vowed to renegotiate multilateral trade deals, such as NAFTA and other deals that would favor American workers. “We’re going to pursue new trade deals that create higher wages and more opportunities for American workers, bringing back those magnificent words ‘Made in the USA. ’” President Trump repeatedly returned to the idea of free and fair trade and restoring America’s economic prowess. “Republicans have always been the party of American industry and the American worker,” Trump said. “We must embrace that heritage, rebuilding this country with American goods and American labor. ” Trump also reasserted his promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, implement tax reform, cut regulations, rebuild the military, and take care of America’s veterans. Republicans cheered and applauded throughout his speech as he detailed his agenda. “I am privileged to stand with you, shoulder to shoulder, as we work every single day to make America great again,” he said. “Thank you. God bless you, and God bless America. ” | 1 |
In an interview with sportscaster Jim Gray on Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” host Bill O’Reilly said the reason sports media hammers New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady for his relationship with President Donald Trump is because sports media is mainly liberal. “Brady’s a friend of Donald Trump’s — not an overt political guy, but I did see a bunch of articles saying Brady is the devil because he’s friends with Trump,” O’Reilly said. “Most of the sports press are liberals,” he added. Although Gray said he does not know how the sports media members voted, he does know Brady is loyal to Trump after the president stuck up for him during “ . ” “[Brady] has also said just because he is friends with somebody and happens to like somebody doesn’t necessarily mean that he agrees with the opinions or thoughts or everything that his friends are putting out,” Gray responded. “And that would apply to President Trump. ” He continued, “Tom’s a loyal, honorable guy, and he’s not going to give up on Donald Trump, particularly after he defended him and has known him for so long. ” Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
Posted on October 28, 2016 Media Self-Destruct over Trump Jared Taylor, American Renaissance, October 28, 2016 Their hysteria and dishonesty have backfired.
From the start of Donald Trump’s campaign, the media have covered him dishonestly. They have consistently portrayed him as a closet “white supremacist” who deliberately appeals to “racists.” They have tried to tie him to a wicked movement known as the “Alt-Right.” They are now working on another dishonest angle: that Donald Trump is “mainstreaming hate” and bringing “racism” into public discourse. The media clearly want to stampede voters into Mrs. Clinton’s camp so as to spare us the agony of a “racist” in the White House.
The demonization campaign has backfired. By trying to hang racial dissidents around Donald Trump’s neck, the media have given American Renaissance and other organizations far more publicity than ever before. At the same time, constant shouts of “racist” and “bigot” don’t seem to hurt Mr. Trump: instead they are wrecking what is left of media credibility. The biggest irony, though, is that Donald Trump is probably not one of us at all. But even small deviations from the cast-iron orthodoxy of race are enough to plunge our rulers into dark fantasies about Donald Trump as a secret David Duke fan.
Media dishonesty started immediately. When Mr. Trump pointed out that some immigrants from Mexico were criminals, the press acted as if he had said all Mexican immigrants are criminals. Then, when alert news hounds discovered that those of us they love to call “haters” and “white supremacists” liked Mr. Trump, there was no end of articles with titles such as: “ Meet the Horde of Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and Other Extremist Leaders Endorsing Donald Trump ,” “ Top Racists And Neo-Nazis Back Donald Trump ,” “ ‘Heil Donald Trump’: Neo-Nazis, White Supremacists Show Support ,” and “ The White Nationalists Who Support Donald Trump .”
These articles had a simpleminded purpose: discredit Mr. Trump by parading before the reader any Nazi, Kluxer, or racially conscious white person who had anything nice to say about the candidate. The implication was that if “racists” were going to vote for Donald Trump he must be “racist,” too.
This was deceitful and one-sided. When the chairman of the American Communist Party endorsed Hillary Clinton , no one suggested this meant she was a communist.
It is true that Mr. Trump gave the media just enough of an excuse to pretend he really is a closet “bigot” because he did not repudiate “racists” with the snorts of indignation respectability requires. There was the famous exchange in February when a reporter pushed Mr. Trump to disavow an endorsement from David Duke. As The Hill reported it: “ ‘David Duke endorsed me? OK, alright. I disavow, OK?’ Trump said, seeking to quickly move on to another question.”
That same month, there was another famous exchange with Jake Tapper of CNN :
Tapper : Will you unequivocally condemn David Duke and say that you don’t want his vote or that of other white supremacists in this election?
Donald Trump : Well just so you understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke, OK? I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists. So, I don’t know. I don’t know, did he endorse me, or what’s going on? Because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke. I know nothing about white supremacists.
The media leaped on these exchanges with shouts of joy. “Trump refuses to disavow white supremacists! That’s because he is one!”
There are far better explanations. First, Donald Trump is a pugnacious man. He doesn’t like being pushed around by anyone, especially not by journalists who hate him. If Mr. Tapper had belligerently demanded that Mr. Trump agree that the sky is blue, Mr. Trump would have bridled at that.
Second, Donald Trump probably doesn’t know anything about David Duke or white supremacy. I would be astonished if he has ever looked into the thinking of David Duke or any other alleged “white supremacist.” It is his feistiness and his ignorance of white advocacy that explain his answers, not some carefully concealed racial consciousness.
The press has also pounced on Donald Trump’s retweets of “racist” material, which is supposed to be yet more proof that he is a secret supremacist. Business Insider, for example, published this shocking story: “ 5 times Donald Trump has engaged with alt-right racists on Twitter .” Not one of these tweets is obviously “racist,” and it would be surprising if Mr. Trump or his skeleton staff took the time to vet the sources of the thousands of tweets @realDonaldTrump has sent during the campaign.
Now the press is working on another smear-Trump angle. Recently, I have been contacted by journalists from such places as Bloomberg News, Reuters, and the New York Times , who clearly want to write that Donald Trump is “mainstreaming hate,” that he is responsible for a huge surge in the Alt-Right. They want to know about all the people who have been flocking to AmRen.com because of what Donald Trump says. They want me to tell them about people who have been “emboldened” to “speak out against minorities” because Donald Trump has led the way. They would love to find someone who now thinks he is free to run down the street shouting “nigger!” because Mr. Trump wants to take a hard look at Muslim immigrants.
I have explained to them as patiently as I can that they have it the wrong way around. No one comes looking for AmRen.com because Donald Trump wants to build a wall. They come looking for us because the media have written about us in their attempt to convince the world that Mr. Trump is a “racist.” They come looking for us because Mrs. Clinton kindly called attention to us by complaining about the Alt-Right and her “basket of deplorables.” I also try to explain that if the media had not launched its malicious campaign of trying to hold Donald Trump responsible for the views of certain people who support him, few people would have heard of the Alt-Right. In their zeal to paint their enemy in the darkest colors, they are promoting the Alt-Right, not Donald Trump.
I explain that racial dissent has been growing like never before, for reasons that have nothing to do with the campaign. It is Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Black Lives Matters, and black rioters who are sending hundreds of thousands of frustrated white people our way– not Donald Trump. This will not change whether Mr. Trump wins or loses. The top landing pages on AmRen.com are analyses of race and crime–something Mr. Trump never talks about.
I also explain to reporters that it is idiotic to think Mr. Trump has mainstreamed “hate,” by which they mean sensible observations about race. I ask them to name a single person who has been “emboldened” to say something “racist” just because Donald Trump is the GOP nominee. Of course, they can’t. If anything, it is the opposite. Mr. Trump has been called every name under the sun for the mildest, most common-sense observations about Muslims and immigration. Anyone tempted to come out of the closet is likely to hesitate more than ever. Things could change if Mr. Trump becomes president, but the candidate himself has done very little to spread our ideas.
What Donald Trump has done is spark an unprecedented interest in politics among disaffected young people who recognize that Mitt Romney and John McCain are no different from Barack Obama when it comes to preserving whites, their society, and their culture. I know a number of millennials who never bothered to vote before but who certainly will in November. I know some who have made their first political contribution or who have spent weekends volunteering for the Trump campaign.
I point out to reporters that this is what elections are supposed to be all about: giving the voters real choices. I note that the Trump/Clinton contest will almost certainly produce a record voter turnout for a modern election. Haven’t our rulers been wringing their hands over a lack of political engagement, especially among the young? Well, now they have engagement, alright, but they don’t like it. They don’t like it because so many people are stumping for the candidate they love to call a “ threat to democracy .” Liberals are such transparent hypocrites. They claim to love democracy, but suddenly start worrying about its health if the people refuse vote the way they tell them to.
The whole Trump-is-a-racist fracas shows just how painfully fragile orthodoxy has become. I may be wrong, but I have no reason to think Donald Trump thinks at all as we do. He has never said or done anything to suggest he is anything more than an ordinary American with normal instincts: He doesn’t want criminals sneaking across the border, he thinks sanctuary cities for illegals are crazy, he doesn’t see why we need more Muslims, and he is angry when immigrants go on welfare. Millions of ordinary Americans clearly agree with him, and not because they are racially aware. It is because they are decent, fair-minded people who also have a nagging sense that the country is changing in unwelcome ways.
I am convinced that Mr. Trump does not have a sophisticated understanding of race. So far as I can tell, he doesn’t have a sophisticated understanding of much of anything. He has stumbled by instinct onto a few sensible policies that white advocates have been promoting for a long time, but not because he is one of us.
Maybe–just maybe–he will move in our direction. It’s not impossible to imagine a President Trump asking, in an offhand way, “What’s wrong with white people wanting to remain a majority in the United States?” Or he might casually note that you can’t expect as many blacks as Asians in AP classes because they don’t have the same levels of intelligence. But I can imagine the opposite, too: President Trump so bogged down in Beltway baloney that he never even builds the wall.
There is one thing that Donald Trump has changed. He has proven that Republican bromides about taxes and small government don’t excite people. He has proven that there is tremendous anger against political insiders of both parties. He has proven that Americans do want their country to come first. They don’t want it to try to save the world or to be a dumping ground for people who have wrecked their own countries.
And even if he has not “mainstreamed racism,” he has shown that if you have a backbone you can withstand what is surely the most intense and concentrated program of hate ever directed at an American. On October 11, Roger Cohen wrote in the New York Times that Donald Trump is a “phony, liar, blowhard, cheat, bully, misogynist, demagogue, predator, bigot, bore, egomaniac, racist, sexist, sociopath,” and a “dictator-in-waiting with a brat’s temper and a prig’s scowl.” This must be one of the most unhinged, hysterical outbursts in the history of American political journalism. And it is unusual only for its wordiness, not its tone.
Don’t the editors of the Times realize that this kind of frothing explains why more Americans believe in Bigfoot (29 percent) than trust newspapers (20 percent)? Virtually the entire industry is so consumed with rage at Donald Trump and contempt for his supporters that it cannot control itself. Open, petulant bias is driving more and more Americans to social media and to sites like AmRen.com for their news.
Despite the concerted shrieking of virtually the entire American ruling class, Donald Trump is going to get close to half of the vote on November 8. Some 60 million people are going to vote for a man for whom Roger Cohen has emptied his dictionary trying to insult. Only one major newspaper has endorsed Donald Trump. Only one . And this is a man whom the American people might choose as their president. What better proof could we have of the stark difference between printed opinion and public opinion, between what Americans think and what our rulers want us to think? Donald Trump has ripped away whatever was left of the pretense of media objectivity.
Whether he wins or not, whether he is one of us or not, Donald Trump has laid bare the collusion between big media and a political system in which both parties collaborate to run the country in their interests and those of their big donors. Voters–finally–have a chance to vote against the entire corrupt system. On November 8th they could bring it crashing down, but even if it still stands, it is visibly weakened, badly discredited. These are the perfect conditions in which our ideas will flourish as never before. | 0 |
http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/10/26/1010359-65-us-journalists-at-a-private-dinner-with-hillary-clintons-team-and-john-podesta/
I just heard an NPR presstitute declare that Texas, a traditional sure thing for Republicans was up for grabs in the presidential election. Little wonder if this report on Zero Hedge is correct. Apparently, the voting machines are already at work stealing the election for Killary.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/texas-rigged-first-reports-voting-machines-switching-votes-hillary-texas
From my long experience in journalism, I know the American public is not very sharp. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to believe that Americans, whose jobs, careers, and the same for their children and grandchildren, have been sold out by the elites who Hillary represents would actually vote for her. It makes no sense. If this were the case, how did Trump get the Republican nomination despite the vicious presstitute campaign against him?
It seems obvious that the majority of Americans who have been suffering terribly at the hands of the One Percent who own Hillary lock, stock, and barrel, will not vote for the people who have ruined their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren.
Furthermore, if Trump’s election is as impossible as the presstitutes tell us—Hillary’s win is 93% certain according to the latest presstitute pronouncement—the vicious 24/7 attacks on Trump would be pointless. Wouldn’t they? Why the constant, frenetic, vicious attacks on a person who has no chance? Trump takes aim at those rigging the system
There are reports that a company associated with Hillary backer George Soros is supplying the voting machines to 16 states , including states that determine election outcomes. I do not know that these reports are correct. However, I do know for a fact that the oligarchic interests that rule America are opposed to Trump being elected President for the simple reason that they are unsure that they would be able to control him.
It is hard to believe that dispossessed Americans will vote for Hillary, the representative of those who have dispossessed them, when Trump says he will re-empower the dispossessed. Hillary has denigrated ordinary Americans who, she says, she is so removed from by her wealth that she doesn’t even know who they are. Clearly, Hillary, paid $675,000 by Goldman Sachs for three 20-minute speeches, is not a representative of the people. She represents the One Percent whose policies have flushed the prospects of ordinary Americans down the toilet.
What is really disturbing is the pretense by the presstitute scum that Trump’s lewd admiration for female charms is deemed more important than the prospect of nuclear war. At no time during the presidential primaries or during the current presidential campaign has it been mentioned that Russia is being assaulted daily by propaganda, threatened by military buildups, and being convinced that the United States and its European vassals are planning an attack. Architects of “Regime Change” Wars
A threatened Russia, made insecure by inexplicable hostility and Western propaganda, is a danger manufactured by the neoconservative supporters of Hillary Clinton.
If the American people are really so unbelievably stupid that they think lewd remarks about women are more important than avoiding nuclear war, the American people are too stupid to exist. They will deserve the mushroom clouds that will wipe them and everyone else off the face of the earth.
Donald Trump is the only candidate in the primaries and the general election who has said that he sees no point in conflict with Russia when Putin has shown nothing but desire to work things out to mutual advantage.
In contrast, Hillary has declared the thrice-elected president of Russia to be “the new Hitler” and has threatened Russia with military action. Hillary talks openly about regime change in Russia.
Surely, in a free media at least one person in the print and TV media would raise this most important of all points. But where have you seen it?
Only in my columns and a few others in the alternative media.
In other words, we are about to have an election in which the important issue has played no role. And yet allegedly we are the exceptional, indispensable people, a people’s democracy protected by a free press.
In truth, this mythical description of America is merely a cloak for the rule of the Oligarchs. And the Oligarchs are risking life on earth for their continual supremacy.
Also see:
The Saker explains how Vladimir Putin wrest the sovereignty of Russia away from the Anglo-Zionist Empire. He hopes that Donald Trump can rescue America. His article is republished with his permission.
Can Trump Save America Like Putin Saved Russia? | 0 |
SAN FRANCISCO — This is the year artificial intelligence came into its own for mainstream businesses, at least as a marketing feature. On Sunday, Salesforce. com, which sells online software for sales and marketing, announced it would be adding A. I. to its products. Its system, called Einstein, promises to provide insights into what sales leads to follow and what products to make next. Salesforce chose this date to Oracle, the world’s largest business software company, which on Sunday evening began its annual customer event in San Francisco. High on Oracle’s list of new features: analysis of enormous amounts of data. Oracle calls its product Oracle A. I. Elsewhere, General Electric is pushing its A. I. business, called Predix. IBM has ads featuring its Watson technology talking with Bob Dylan. These moves, along with similar projects at most major tech companies and consulting firms, represent years of work and billions in investment. There are big pushes in A. I. in agriculture, manufacturing, aviation and pretty much every other sector of the economy. It’s all very exciting, the way great possibilities are, and clearly full of great buzzwords and slogans. But will other companies see any value in all this or understand if A. I. has value for them? “No one really knows where the value is,” said Marc Benioff, and chief executive of Salesforce. “I think I know — it’s in helping people do the things that people are good at, and turning more things over to machines. ” Mr. Benioff wasn’t selling Einstein’s capabilities short. He was talking about the value of artificial intelligence, which is passing through a familiar phase — a technology that is strange and new, that sometimes overpromises what it can do and is headed for uses not easily seen at the start. Cloaked inside terms like deep learning and machine intelligence, A. I. is essentially a series of advanced exercises that review the past to indicate the likely future, or look at current customer choices to figure out where to put more or less energy. Perhaps a better question than “What is the value?” of this explosion of advanced statistics is “Why now?” That shows both the opportunity and why many companies are scared about missing out. Much of today’s A. I. boom goes back to 2006, when Amazon started selling cheap computing over the internet. Those measures built the public clouds of Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft, among others. That same year, Google and Yahoo released statistical methods for dealing with the unruly data of human behavior. In 2007, Apple released the first iPhone, a device that began a boom in collection everywhere. Suddenly, old A. I. experiments were relevant, and money and cheap data resources were available for building new algorithms. Ten years later, computing is cheaper than ever, companies live online and in their phone apps, and sensors are bringing even more unruly data from more places. Amazon, Google and the rest have exceptional A. I. resources for sale, but many older companies are wary of turning their data over to these upstarts. That, along with fear of a competitor getting on top of A. I. first, is a big motivation for some to try things out. Salesforce is selling Einstein as a system that can work predictive magic without having to look at your data, in what Mr. Benioff calls a “democratizing” move that will create millions of A. I. users who are not engineers. He said this on his way to attend a series of customer focus groups around the country, however — strong evidence that customers don’t get it yet, even if they’re willing to try it. “There’s fear of Google and Microsoft controlling everything, and there’s a desire to apply A. I. to anything that’s digital,” said Michael Biltz, managing director of Accenture’s technology vision practice. “People are going to have to experiment, most likely first on pain points like security and product marketing. ” How will we know when the A. I. revolution has taken hold? A technology truly matures when it disappears. We don’t marvel at houses with electricity now, or the idea of driving to work at 60 miles an hour. We can say “phone” and mean a computer with processing power and a camera for taking selfies with our drones. A. I. is probably heading for the same places, invisibly sorting through lots of data everywhere to continuously update and automate most of our lives. Goodness knows what the weird new tech thing will be about at that point. | 1 |
Headlined to H3 10/26/16 - Advertisement -
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka "ObamaCare," was intended to dramatically increase the number of Americans with health coverage while "bending the cost curve" (that is, reducing the expected increases in price over time).
The plan managed the first goal, at least in the short term. Unsurprising, isn't it, that more people get coverage when the law requires them to buy it, penalizes those who won't, and subsidizes those who can't afford to?
But the progress on that metric is beginning to disintegrate and we're moving in the other direction. Bloomberg reports that 1.4 million Americans in 32 states will lose the health plans they now have next year as major providers pull out of the ObamaCare "exchanges" because they're losing money. Apaprently a business has to take in more than it spends if it wants to remain a going concern. I'm sure I've read that somewhere.
As far as "bending the cost curve" is concerned ... well ... according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, cited by US News & World Report , average premiums rose by 7.5% last year and will rise by 25% in 2017. Price inflation for most consumer goods over the 2015-2016 period averaged a little more than 1%. Forgive me for thinking that when costs increase at 7-25 times the rate of inflation, that's not really a lot of "bend" to the "curve."
In 2009, I described (the then notional, yet to be passed into law) ObamaCare as "[g]overnment feeds you to the insurance companies, while simultaneously feeding the insurance companies to you. The state takes home a doggie bag." Which is about the size of it, and I was far from the only person who noticed and warned that the plan not only wouldn't work, but COULDN'T work, if the goal was reducing costs and increasing access to health care. Artificially increasing demand relative to supply can only have the opposite effects.
Since 2010, Republicans (who, by the way, first proposed the "individual mandate" scheme) have slowly but surely retreated from the idea of repealing ObamaCare and replacing it with nothing, instead proposing various schemes for keeping government as involved as possible in health care while pretending to "return" it to "the free market" (there hasn't been a free market in health care for more than a century, since the American Medical Association got licensing schemes imposed by the states so that it could limit the number of doctors and thereby keep their salaries high). - Advertisement -
Most Americans are now worse off vis a vis health care than they were six years ago. The only winners have been government health bureaucrats. And unfortunately, the politicians don't seem to be interested in getting out of the way and letting the market fix things. Next stop: "Single payer." - Advertisement - | 0 |
FRANKFURT — Central bankers like to portray themselves as being aloof from the of politics, coolly assessing the economic data as they ponder whether to add a jolt of stimulus or take some away. But with populism on the rise in Europe and elsewhere, opinion polls have arguably become one of the European Central Bank’s most important sources of data points. Faced with a series of national elections in which candidates play prominent roles, Mario Draghi, the president of the central bank, mounted a spirited counteroffensive on Thursday. He portrayed the currency as the key to European prosperity and even took an implicit jab at the protectionist rhetoric of President Trump. “Open trade has been the pillar of world prosperity for many, many years,” Mr. Draghi said. Although it made no major changes to monetary policy on Thursday, the bank is under increasing pressure to begin withdrawing the stimulus program that has prevailed for a decade. That task, delicate in the best of times, is even more difficult in the charged political atmosphere that permeates not only Europe but also the United States and the rest of the world. Some political candidates are questioning the whole idea of a united Europe and the European Central Bank’s fundamental reason for being. The situation raises the stakes whenever the bank makes a decision. Britain, which was never in the eurozone, has voted to leave the European Union. Marine Le Pen, the candidate for the French presidency, has worried investors with talk of bringing back the franc. Similar nationalist language has been heard from candidates in the Netherlands, Germany and Italy who have been emboldened by Mr. Trump’s election. A wrong move by the European Central Bank could upset a fragile economic recovery and provide fodder for the populists. While insisting that the central bank’s job is to keep inflation under control, Mr. Draghi was unusually direct on Thursday in rebutting opposition to European free trade and political unity. “If we go back to when the euro was created, there were always people who said it’s wrong, it’s a mistake, it can’t be done,” Mr. Draghi said. “They are saying the same today. ” Eurozone members have made “extraordinary shows of solidarity” toward countries in crisis, Mr. Draghi said. “The euro is here to stay. ” No matter what Mr. Draghi does, he will continue to draw strong reactions. As one of Europe’s most powerful institutions, the central bank serves as an piñata for nationalist politicians of all stripes. Frauke Petry, leader of the Alternative for Germany party, regularly accuses Mr. Draghi of endangering Germans’ savings with ultralow interest rates. In Italy, where low interest rates have helped ease a severe credit crunch, sentiment runs the opposite direction. When the European Central Bank does begin gradually reducing its stimulus efforts, perhaps around the middle of the year, expect leaders of the populist Five Star Movement in Italy to accuse Mr. Draghi of selling out to the Germans. The prospect that Ms. Le Pen could become president of France has pushed up the government’s borrowing costs. The higher rates feed through to the economy and work against central bank measures intended to make sure credit remains cheap. The political landscape in Washington is also a concern for the European Central Bank. The United States is the European Union’s largest trading partner. If Mr. Trump erects trade barriers, as he has threatened to do, European exporters would suffer along with the region’s economy. Mr. Draghi will have his first direct contact with the new American administration next week at a summit meeting in Germany of central bank governors and finance ministers. He declined to say on Thursday what message he planned to deliver. A further complication for the European Central Bank is that its policies are out of sync with those of the Federal Reserve. Fed officials have signaled that an increase is likely next week. That could be a problem for the European Central Bank, if higher market interest rates in the United States spill over to the eurozone and undermine efforts to keep borrowing costs low. Analysts say they expect the European Central Bank to give a clearer view of its intentions around June, probably by signaling a reduction in purchases of government and corporate bonds, a way of pumping money into the economy. An increase in official interest rates may be years away. On Thursday, the European Central Bank left its benchmark interest rates unchanged, and it said it would continue the stimulus measure of buying government and corporate bonds through the end of the year, albeit at a reduced level starting in April. However, in a statement, the central bank was less alarmist about the eurozone outlook than in the past. Mr. Draghi said the bank would not extend an emergency lending program for commercial banks because there was no need. “There is no longer that urgency in taking further actions,” he added. It will be nearly impossible to time the easing of the stimulus in a way that does not open the European bank to criticism. The economies of the eurozone are also badly out of step with one another. Unemployment in Italy, at 11. 9 percent, is three times as high as Germany’s. The European Central Bank has already been drawn into Italian politics. The central bank, which regulates commercial lenders in the eurozone, has endorsed a rescue plan for troubled Italian banks that critics in Germany say violates European rules. In Germany, by contrast, there are complaints that the European Central Bank’s low interest rates penalize savers, who earn almost no return on their nest eggs. The resentment has grown recently because of an increase in inflation. Consumer prices in Germany rose at an annual rate of 2. 1 percent in January, above the European Central Bank’s target of just under 2 percent. The inflation rate for the eurozone as a whole was 2 percent in February. But the increase was almost entirely because of food and fuel prices, which frequently fluctuate. The European Central Bank will probably not react until there is evidence that prices in other categories, like services, are also rising. That may be too late for some in Germany. “It is time for the European Central Bank to start phasing out its expansionary monetary policy in Europe,” Clemens Fuest, president of the Ifo Institute, an influential research organization in Munich, said on Thursday in a statement. “It should now take its foot off the gas. ” | 1 |
Donald J. Trump wants to keep New York’s crusading United States attorney on board, and is reportedly eyeing the professional wrestling impresario Linda McMahon for the Small Business Administration. And a new name has popped up to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs: Sarah Palin. The Department of Veterans Affairs’ massive network of hospitals and clinics has been under a microscope since scandalously long waiting lists and allegations of burst into public. The management morass seemed so intractable that in 2014, President Obama pushed out a decorated former general, Eric Shinseki, and hired a former chief executive of Procter Gamble, Robert A. McDonald, to sort it out. Now, according to people close to the transition, Mr. Trump is thinking of taking Veterans Affairs in a new direction, handing its reins to former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. Given Mr. Trump’s passionate campaign pledges to the nation’s veterans, the response — if she is chosen — would be . .. interesting. Spotted at Trump Tower on Wednesday afternoon: Linda McMahon, the former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, an outfit the has some experience with. “The meeting went great,” she told reporters. “It was really nice to be up, and I was honored to be asked to come in. Anytime I think the of the United States asks you to come in for a conversation, you’re happy to do that. We talked about business and entrepreneurs and creating jobs, and we talked about S. B. A. ” Her connections to Mr. Trump go beyond their mutual love of bloated men in spandex suits. Her net worth, estimated at around $855 million, would put her in the same income brackets as the candidates tapped to be the secretaries of Commerce, Treasury and Education, as well as the deputy Commerce secretary. Senate Democrats, unable to get their Republican counterparts involved, are looking at a new recruit to examine allegations of Russian tampering with the elections: President Obama. In a letter, written by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and signed by fellow members of the intelligence committee, seven senior Democrats asked the president to declassify and release “additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U. S. election. ” They cryptically added: “We are conveying specifics through classified channels. ” The Office of Government Ethics is usually a pretty quiet corner of the federal government, but when ethics officials thought that the had vowed to sell off all of his assets into a blind trust, they came alive. In a series of Twitter posts, the ethics office was full of praise . .. for something Mr. Trump hasn’t actually done yet. Then: And: And finally, the coup de grâce: In fact, Mr. Trump has not said exactly what he will do, beyond a promised news conference on Dec. 15 to reveal his plans for his business empire. Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan who has built a reputation as a fierce prosecutor of public corruption cases, said on Wednesday that he intended to remain in office under Trump’s administration. Mr. Bharara, who was appointed in 2009 by Mr. Obama, disclosed his intention to stay on after emerging from a meeting with the at Trump Tower. Mr. Bharara told reporters that Mr. Trump had asked to meet with him to discuss “whether or not I’d be prepared to stay on as the United States attorney to do the work as we have done it, independently, without fear or favor for the last seven years. ” “We had a good meeting,” Mr. Bharara continued. “I said I would absolutely consider staying on. I agreed to stay on. ” Mr. Bharara said that he had already talked to Senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican of Alabama who is Mr. Trump’s choice to be attorney general. “He also asked that I stay on, and so I expect that I will be continuing,” Mr. Bharara said. Appearing on the business cable channel CNBC, Steven Mnuchin, Mr. Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary, made a series of promises and pledges sure to be remembered in the years to come: ■ Mr. Trump’s tax cuts will be huge, with the corporate tax rate dropping to 15 percent from 35 percent. Mr. Mnuchin said: ■ But it will provide no net benefit to the rich. Details? Not many, but he did hint that he will push to cap the mortgage deduction for and second homes. ■ The Trump administration expects sustained economic growth of 3 percent to 4 percent a year. “That is absolutely critical for the country,” Mr. Mnuchin said. Critical, perhaps, but difficult, considering the United States has not seen consistent growth like that since the 1990s. ■ The Trump administration will label China a currency manipulator “if we determine” that’s warranted. ■ The top regulatory priority will be eliminating “parts” of the financial regulatory overhaul that discourage lending, but the administration will not push for a full repeal. Mr. Mnuchin: The is full of surprises, but absent a big one, Wednesday morning’s announcements may be all we get for the rest of the week. In addition to Mr. Mnuchin, there were Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor, for commerce secretary, and Todd Ricketts, part of the Ameritrade fortune and a part owner of the Chicago Cubs, for deputy commerce secretary. The Trump cabinet, assuming it is confirmed, will be worth billions of dollars (add Mr. Trump’s previously announced education secretary pick, Betsy DeVos of the Amway fortune). But the team is not shying away from its Wall Street and moneyed roots. Mr. Mnuchin said on CNBC: With Republicans expected to hold 52 seats in the Senate, blocking confirmation would be hard, but Democrats signaled that both men would face tough questioning. Mr. Mnuchin’s time atop a Los Angeles bank known for its foreclosures will definitely come up, as suggested by a joint comment released Wednesday by Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Among the himself, his commerce secretary pick, his deputy commerce pick, his education secretary choice and his prospective Treasury secretary, much of Mr. Trump’s team ranges from multimillionaires to billionaires. And that doesn’t include Ms. McMahon, no slouch on the money front. So is the incoming administration truly populist? Anthony Scaramucci, the financier and Trump transition official, had some thoughts Wednesday: Are millionaires and billionaires really “draining the swamp”? Mary Fallin, Oklahoma’s conservative Republican governor, is under consideration for interior secretary. Ms. Fallin had been floated as a potential nominee shortly before the Republican National Convention over the summer. Her aide, Steve Mullins, is also being mentioned for a top staff post if she gets the job. With Alabama and New Mexico certifying their votes, an update is in order. Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead over Mr. Trump climbed overnight to 2, 370, 700 — or 1. 8 percentage points. Eleven states and the District of Columbia now record a higher percentage of votes for Mrs. Clinton than President Obama received in 2012. Mr. Trump said on Wednesday that he would leave his “great business in total” before moving into the Oval Office, promising further details next month about his efforts to avoid conflicts of interest as he becomes the nation’s 45th president. It is unclear whether the steps Mr. Trump is prepared to take would be enough to satisfy ethics experts who say that putting his children in charge of the business would not be enough to ensure that his official decisions are independent of his personal financial ones. His daughter Ivanka has attended a number of meetings with heads of state since the election, and she would be one of the main officers of the Trump Organization. In an interview with The New York Times last week, Mr. Trump said that presidents “can’t have a conflict of interest” and that it would be extremely difficult to sell his businesses because they are real estate holdings. | 1 |
Юный житель поселка Строймаш Ярослав Адоньев живет вместе с бабушкой и сестрами. В апреле этого года он спас годовалого ребенка, который едва не выпал из окна. Рассказать о своем героическом поступке школьник решился только сейчас.
По словам мальчика, в тот день он ждал на улице своих друзей и заметил, что на втором этаже на подоконнике стоит маленькая девочка.
«Я её заметил и сразу понял: что-то плохое может произойти, - рассказал в интервью "Стерлитамакскому рабочему" Ярослав. - Смотрю, она всё ближе к краю подходит, ну и я приближаюсь. Только подумал - как ловить, а она уже летит. Руки успел подставить и упал под её весом».
В итоге девочка только расплакалась, сам же он ничего не почувствовал от шока. Ярослав отделался царапинами на локтях и коленках. Немного придя в себя, мальчик побежал в квартиру, откуда выпал ребенок. Дверь никто не открыл, тогда Ярослав передал малышку соседям, которые позвонили ее матери.
Мама спасенной девочки потом долго благодарила Ярослава. Поступок оценили и сотрудники полиции, приехавшие на место происшествия.
Правда.ру ранее писала, что в Железнодорожном районе Хабаровской области после падения с высоты девятого этажа скончался 29-летний мужчина.
По данным местных СМИ, буквально за несколько минут до трагедии молодой человек выпрыгнул из окна съемной квартиры, расположенной на четвертом этаже. Он спокойно поднялся на ноги, зашел в подъезд и вскоре вновь оказался под окнами дома.
А недавно рядом с одной из многоэтажек Саранска полицейские обнаружили тело мужчины, одетого в маску и плащ, напоминающие костюм известного героя комиксов Бэтмена. По предварительной информации мужчина выпал из окна на десятом этаже.
"Установлена личность погибшего, им оказался 51-летний житель многоэтажки, проживавший один на десятом этаже дома. По версии следствия, он покончил жизнь самоубийством", - говорится в сообщении СУ СК по Республике Мордовия.
"Сегодня около многоэтажного дома в Саранске было обнаружено тело мужчины с повреждениями, характерными для падения с высоты. На нем была маска и плащ, как у Бэтмэна", - сообщил источник агентства РИА Новости.
Правоохранительные органы уже начали доследственную проверку по факту гибели человека. Устанавливаются обстоятельства случившегося, и идет поиск возможных очевидцев трагедии.
Напомним, что 27 мая в Саранске произошел похожий случай . 85-летний пенсионер упал с балкона, когда вешал белье.
Его жена рассказала, что перед смертью он стирал белье. Потом он вышел на балкон, чтобы развесить вещи, но почему-то свалился за перила.
Следователи не исключают, что мужчине стало плохо. У него могла закружиться голова или прихватило сердце. Кроме того, не снимают со счетов и версию о том, что мужчина выпал с балкона по своей воле. Поделиться: | 0 |
Milo Yiannopoulos — the infamous internet troll, Donald J. Trump supporter and editor at Breitbart News — has compared Islam to cancer, mocked transgender people and suggested that women who are harassed online should stay off the web. Last July, he was permanently barred from Twitter for violating the platform’s rules against hate speech and harassment. So when Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint at Simon Schuster, gave him a publishing contract, the blowback was swift and furious. There were calls for a boycott of all of the company’s books, a vast catalog of some 2, 000 titles from 50 imprints. Some of Simon Schuster’s authors — including Karen Hunter, Danielle Henderson and Bradley Trevor Greive — denounced the publisher on social media. The Chicago Review of Books said it would not review any of the company’s books this year. The criticism highlights the minefield that publishers face as they try to court an emerging market of young conservatives who identify with extreme stances on issues like immigration and gender equality — positions embodied with devious, irreverent glee by Mr. Yiannopoulos — that they feel are undermining the nation. Many liberals and moderates say, however, those positions amount to outright racism and misogyny. And the issue has cast an uncomfortable spotlight on a lucrative but often overlooked niche within the largely publishing world. Every major publishing house has a conservative imprint — Penguin Random House has two, Sentinel and Crown Forum — and maintains a stable of authors who may not attend literary festivals or mingle at the National Book Awards but command a sizable audience in red state America. Most mainstream publishers try to claim partisan neutrality and publish books across the political spectrum. (Simon Schuster, for example, published Hillary Clinton’s memoir and campaign book, as well as Mr. Trump’s “Crippled America. ”) But occasionally, publishers get dragged into a political scrum. This past weekend, Broadside Books, a conservative imprint at HarperCollins, became embroiled in a controversy involving a CNN investigation that found that one of Broadside’s authors, the conservative radio host and columnist Monica Crowley, had plagiarized numerous passages in her 2012 best seller, “What the (Bleep) Just Happened. ” Ms. Crowley was recently selected by Mr. Trump to serve in a senior communications role at the National Security Council. In defending Ms. Crowley, the Trump transition team called the plagiarism charges “a politically motivated attack,” and described HarperCollins as one of “the largest and most respected publishers in the world,” invoking the company’s stature and reputation as way to lend credibility to the author. But on Tuesday, HarperCollins announced it was withdrawing the digital edition of the book until Ms. Crowley revises it with proper attribution, placing the publishing house in the awkward position of being at odds with the incoming administration. Conservative books have been a blockbuster category for publishers for decades, dating to the rise of radio and cable in the 1980s. The genre exploded during Bill Clinton’s presidency and has thrived in the last eight years, under President Obama, as writers forged a united front as ideological underdogs. For publishers, the books have been reliable cash cows. Bill O’Reilly’s historical “Killing” series has more than 17 million copies in print. In the weeks leading up to the election, the lists were dominated by partisan polemics by Dinesh D’Souza, Michael Savage, Edward Klein and Gary J. Byrne, whose book “Crisis of Character” sold some 247, 000 hardcover copies, according to Nielsen. But now, without conservatives filling the role as the voice of opposition, the urgency and potency of books will almost certainly be diminished. And with the political principles that conservative writers have advocated — the repeal of Obamacare, a crackdown on immigration and the dismantling of environmental regulations — set to become the policy goals of a government, the commercial future of conservative publishing looks far more unsettled. Publishers are proceeding cautiously. After the election, many editors quietly scrapped plans to publish books attacking Mrs. Clinton and canceled other sober reflections on the future of the Republican Party in the wake of a Trump defeat. Some are planning to release fewer titles in 2017. Others are returning to safer topics, like Ronald Reagan or the founding fathers. “Conservative publishing is always a better business when the other side is in power,” said Adam Bellow, the editorial director of a new political imprint at St. Martin’s Press. At the same time, the ideological identity of the right is murkier than it was before Mr. Trump became the nominee and then the making it harder for conservatives to reach a broad readership. Will books that hold Mr. Trump accountable to his campaign pledges alienate his supporters, and will mainstream Republican politicians and pundits appeal to or repel his base? Will voices from more extreme wings of the Republican Party find a bigger foothold in publishing, further cementing their place in mainstream political discourse? In a way, it’s not surprising that a major publisher wants to appeal to Mr. Yiannopoulos’s base of young conservative followers. Mr. Bellow, who read Mr. Yiannopoulos’s proposal but did not bid on the book, said he was open to publishing other new voices from the at St. Martin’s. “Donald Trump has brought into politics a lot of people who were previously excluded, and the boundary of political speech has shifted to the right,” Mr. Bellow said. “This is a new force in American politics, and they deserve to be heard. ” Simon Schuster was far from alone in its willingness to embrace Mr. Yiannopoulos, according to his literary agent, Thomas Flannery Jr. who said “virtually every major conservative imprint expressed interest. ” Threshold — which has published books by Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney and, recently, Mr. Trump — was appealing to Mr. Yiannopoulos because “they don’t shy away from publishing controversial figures,” Mr. Flannery said. But the fury Simon Schuster has encountered underscores the perils publishers face as they tailor their publishing plans to reflect volatile new political realities. Mr. Yiannopoulos, who is gay and describes himself in interviews as more of a cultural figure than a political one, is unlikely to appeal to older or more religious conservatives. His book “Dangerous” — which will address his relationship to the his role as a crusader and his banishment from Twitter — is more of a memoir than a new conservative manifesto. Marji Ross, the president and publisher of Regnery, a conservative publishing house, said she considered Mr. Yiannopoulos’s book proposal but did not pursue it because she felt it would be too polarizing among mainstream conservatives. “Some of our market would have loved it, and some of our market would have been very uncomfortable with it,” Ms. Ross said. It is a dilemma many conservative writers and editors are now facing. As the political ideology of the right has been injected with populism and nationalism, conservative writers and publishers are wrestling with how to reach a wide audience now that a block of readers that was once reliably in lock step philosophically has splintered. Once dependable formulas for generating best sellers — write a book attacking the Clintons, plug it on Fox News, repeat — may no longer deliver a hit. “The 2016 election turned the political world upside down, and it also turned the publishing world upside down,” said Matt Latimer, a literary agent at Javelin whose clients include conservative writers. “The audience has fractured. A few years ago, a Paul Ryan book was widely embraced by conservative book buyers. Would Trump voters buy a Paul Ryan book today? I don’t know. ” authors are also losing a reliable driver of book sales — the Clintons. Last year, Regnery alone had three books that took aim at Mrs. Clinton, including its first graphic novel, “Clinton Cash,” adapted from the book by Peter Schweizer, and “Hillary’s America,” Mr. D’Souza’s book, which sold more than 200, 000 copies. “We had certainly planned to take advantage of those opportunities if Hillary Clinton had won the election, and we looked at several books that we had signed up or considered the day after the election and thought, well, those aren’t going to work,” Ms. Ross said. “Oftentimes, we have said here that what’s bad for America is good for Regnery book sales. ” Regnery has instead pivoted to courting Trump voters with forthcoming books like “How Trump Won,” by the Breitbart Joel Pollak and Larry Schweikart, and a series of “Deplorables Guides” to issues like immigration, gun control and climate change, using a moniker Trump’s supporters adopted for themselves. “The mood of our market is far, far different with Trump as president than it would have been with Hillary Clinton as president,” Ms. Ross said. “It’s hopeful, but cautious. ” | 1 |
Hundreds of news clips, declassified documents, and evidence demonstrating the establishment media’s propaganda campaign against conspiracy theories and the truth. A Documentary Film by Adam Green SF Source Know More News Oct. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
October 26, 2016 Trump Has Hissy Fit After Reporter Points Out Pausing Campaign To Open Hotel Is Really Dumb (VIDEO)
Don’t bother pointing out how incredibly dim-witted it is to pause a losing campaign just days away from Election Day to open up a luxury hotel to the Republican nominee, Trump doesn’t want to hear it.
After inexplicably spending a day participating in an opening ceremony for a new Trump Hotel in Washington DC, its namesake was in no mood to discuss his failing campaign. CNN’s Dana Bash learned that the hard way when she asked the question on everyone’s mind: What were you thinking?
Rather than answer, Trump threw a hissy fit.
“I say the following: You have been covering me for the last — long time. I did yesterday eight stops and three major speeches, and I’ve been doing this for weeks straight,” Trump said.
“For you to ask me that question is actually very insulting because Hillary Clinton does one stop and then she goes home and sleeps. And yet you’ll ask me that question. I think that’s a very rude question, to be honest with you.” Dana Bash: Is your DC hotel opening free advertising? Donald Trump: “No, not at all” https://t.co/6OZtrfIwim https://t.co/9HHqooom8r
— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 26, 2016
For those keeping score that short answer checks a lot of boxes: Whining about the media Flagrant conspiracy theory about Hillary Clinton’s health Groundless accusation that asking a simple question is “rude” No answer whatsoever
Trump may be testy due to his slow realization that his campaign is under water, he has no practical way forward, and it would take a miracle to win.
Instead of even trying, he seems to be retreating to the things he knows will make him money after the election. His campaign recently launched the prototype to “Trump TV,” a daily live stream filled with confused campaign staffers, shameless opportunists and Rudy Giuliani. He also seems desperate to salvage his failing properties, something that may not be possible after running a campaign that offended practically every group in America.
Already there are signs that Trump’s hotels have taken a hit. Yahoo explains : Rates for rooms at Trump’s new D.C. hotel are being slashed as travelers weigh their options, and smartphone data suggest fewer people are visiting his properties compared to rival venues nearby. The Republican nominee for president is in danger of losing not just the election, but something dear to a man who claims the marketing value of his name alone is worth $3 billion: the many customers, mostly wealthy, who have stayed at his hotels, played a round at his golf courses or held galas at his oceanside resorts.
Trump may find that his bigotry has cost him not only the election, but the fortune he valued more than his reputation as well.
Featured image via Twitter | 0 |
Страна: Сирия В своей новой статье постоянный обозреватель НВО Тони Карталучи отмечает, что многие до сих пор связывают надежды на окончание конфликта в Сирии с фигурой Дональда Трампа. Автор напоминает, что агрессия против Дамаска является лишь частью более грандиозного плана по уничтожению Ирана, который был запущен в действие Джорджем Бушем и затем подхвачен администрацией Барака Обамы. И поскольку среди ближайших советников Трампа внимательный наблюдатель может заметить немало неоконов, единственная надежда сирийского народа на мир продолжает таиться где-то на поле боя. С полной версией статьи вы можете ознакомиться здесь . Популярные статьи | 0 |
Foxes in Arctic Alaska are creating beautiful gardens around their dens.
These 6 to 12 pound foxes mostly prey on lemmings and small game and are found throughout the circumpolar Arctic, from Alaska and Canada even up into Europe and Greenland.
By digging their dens, and creating a safe hiding place for their offspring and a home to live in that is safe from the elements, they are fertilizing the ground and creating a nutrient rich for plants.
Some dens are over a century old, and due to the harshness of the Arctic frozen ground, some dens take years to fully develop. Foxes sometimes reuse old den sites or steal dens from smaller animals like squirrels. The best dens are the ones that are elevated on ridges, mounds, or riverbanks.
Arctic foxes can have litters that contain as many as 16 cubs. They deposit high amounts of nutrients in and around their dens through urination, defecation, and left over kills. Because of this fertilization, vibrant diamondleaf willows and yellow wildflowers pop up from their dens, coloring the otherwise gray landscape.
These dens exist throughout the Arctic and they turn the otherwise gray landscape into something that is spectacularly beautiful. These dens also boost the environment by creating more plant diversity. This greatly helps herbivores find food during the short summers, which in turn helps carnivores. The ongoing cycle provides more food, and better health to animals living in an otherwise desolate region.
Many species such as caribou and other herbivores visit these dens creating a great environment for healthy growth within the ecosystem.
The cute foxes have been dubbed the “ecosystem engineers”.
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WASHINGTON — Two United States Air Force bombers attacked Islamic State training camps in Libya overnight, killing more than 80 militants, including some who were involved in plotting terrorist attacks in Europe, the Pentagon said on Thursday. The attack, which also included strikes by armed reaper drones flying from a base in Sicily, was a parting shot from President Obama at the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and one of his final actions as commander in chief. “We need to strike ISIL everywhere they show up,” Ashton B. Carter, the departing defense secretary, told reporters. “We know that some of the ISIL operatives in Libya were involved in plotting attacks in Europe. ” Islamic State fighters were driven out of Surt, the group’s coastal stronghold, last year by Libyan fighters backed by American air power. After conducting 495 strikes against truck bombs, heavy guns, tanks and command bunkers in the city, the Pentagon’s Africa Command announced an end to air operations on Dec. 19. But the taking of Surt did not put an end to Islamic State operations in Libya. The militant group is believed to have several hundred fighters in the country. Many of them, including fighters who fled from Surt, began to regroup at two training camps about 25 miles southwest of the city, officials said. When the initial flurry of airstrikes in Surt were completed last year, Mr. Obama asked to be notified if the Pentagon saw another opportunity to strike. On Monday, Mr. Obama approved airstrikes against the camps. “We had 100 terrorists training,” said Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary. “That was a risk we could not accept. ” To buttress its assertions, the Pentagon released surveillance video of the militants at one of the camps unloading grenades and shells from a truck. The bombers dropped more than 100 bombs and were chosen in part for their ability to loiter over the target area, Pentagon officials say. After the dropped their bombs, the Reaper drones followed up with their strikes. The Pentagon did not say whether any of the plots it said were being hatched at the camps were imminent, whether senior Islamic State commanders were among the targets, or if Libyan fighters supported by the United States moved in on the ground after the strikes were carried out. Jonathan Winer, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Libya, told Congress in November that the Islamic State, as it suffered defeats in Surt, was most likely forming cells elsewhere in the country. He called on Libyans to unite behind the country’s fledgling Government of National Accord to combat the terrorists. A recent analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a policy organization in Washington, found that Islamic State militants operating as “desert brigades” south of Surt had ambushed Libyan military positions, disrupted supply lines with explosives and established checkpoints on key roads. The Islamic State is recruiting foreign fighters into southern Libya and is most likely relying on the same havens used by Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, according to the analysis. Mr. Carter, at a Pentagon news conference, suggested that the Islamic State would continue to have a foothold in Libya as long as the country was racked by internal strife. “As long as the conditions of civil war are there, the Libyans don’t have the unity,” Mr. Carter said. “If they did, I think they themselves could make short work of ISIL. ” The two bombers flew a mission of about 34 hours from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, military officials said. It was the first time that a had been used in combat since March 2011, when three of the planes carried out airstrikes in Libya. | 1 |
Next Swipe left/right This is how a newspaper covered the story of a car smashing into their office
@Wizbates over on Twitter says, “Best headline ever. The splash is that a car drove into the newspaper’s office” | 0 |
Nikki Haley, U. S. ambassador to the United Nations, has penned a blistering targeting the controversial U. N. Human Rights Council. She uses her toughest language yet and slams the body as a “haven for dictators” ahead of a visit to its headquarters in Switzerland next week. [“When the world’s preeminent human rights body is turned into a haven for dictators, the idea of international cooperation in support of human dignity is discredited,” she says in an for the Washington Post, published Friday. Haley is due to address the Council in Geneva on June 6 — the address to the Council by a U. S. Permanent Representative — before she then travels to Israel, where she will meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and visit a number of Israeli historical sites. The visit to Switzerland is likely to be a tense one. The Trump administration has reportedly contemplated an exit from the Council over its bias and its questionable membership, which includes countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia. A Senate subcommittee met last month to assess if the U. S. should remain a member of the body. The U. S. boycotted the Council’s opening session in March over the agenda before it, and Haley herself has called the Council “so corrupt” and filled with “bad actors,” using it to protect their own behavior. In her piece for the Post, titled “The U. N. Human Rights Council whitewashes brutality,” Haley notes that the Council has done good work in places such as North Korea but says that it also allows countries on the Council, such as Venezuela and Cuba, to have their abuses ignored: Venezuela is a member of the council despite the systematic destruction of civil society by the government of Nicolás Maduro through arbitrary detention, torture and blatant violations of freedom of the press and expression. Mothers are forced to dig through trash cans to feed their children. This is a crisis that has been 18 years in the making. And yet, not once has the Human Rights Council seen fit to condemn Venezuela. Calling on the U. N. to “reclaim the legitimacy of this organization,” Haley says she will outline the needed changes when she visits the Council. Those changes include competitive voting for membership on the council — to keep “the worst human rights abusers from obtaining seats” and end the practice of singling out Israel for criticism. “When the council passes more than 70 resolutions against Israel, a country with a strong human rights record, and just seven resolutions against Iran, a country with an abysmal human rights record, you know something is seriously wrong,” she says. Adam Shaw is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY. | 1 |
UNITED NATIONS — Before and after he became president, Donald J. Trump made it pretty clear that he didn’t see much value in the United Nations. So when he named Nikki R. Haley as his choice for United Nations ambassador, many wondered whether he was simply shunting a tough critic into a trivial post. In the past week, Ms. Haley has made it increasingly clear that she has no intention of being sidelined. To the contrary, as diplomats at the United Nations saw it, she managed to elbow herself into a leading, outspoken role in the Trump administration. On Wednesday, wielding pictures of dead Syrian children, she was the first senior official in the administration to warn that the United States could take unilateral action against Syria’s president for the chemical attack that killed more than 80 people in his country. The same day, she was named a full member of the coveted principals’ committee on Mr. Trump’s National Security Council, where crucial policy work is done. In the United Nations Security Council, she pushed for a sharply worded draft resolution to remind the Syrian government to share the flight logs of all its air operations with international investigators. She confronted Russia for blocking it, and on Thursday evening, in what diplomats described as tense, negotiations, Ms. Haley not only rejected a compromise, but made it clear she was not happy to be led by other countries in the direction of a compromise. Their attempt at diplomacy had changed her script of pushing Russia to veto. Soon after she walked out of the Council’s chambers that evening, news emerged that the United States had, in fact, fired dozens of Tomahawk missiles at an air base in Syria. Diplomacy is as much theatrics as it is dialogue. And Ms. Haley, 45, a former governor of South Carolina, has created at least the impression among her fellow ambassadors that she is carving out a space for herself in an administration where it isn’t always clear who is guiding contentious policy. The French ambassador, François Delattre, concluded Thursday evening that she was “clearly very influential in the Trump administration. ” On Friday, it was left to her to dangle yet another warning. She called the American strikes “fully justified,” though she offered no clear legal justification. “The United States took a very measured step last night,” she said during a Security Council meeting. “We are prepared to do more. But we hope that will not be necessary. ” Ms. Haley’s office has not responded to repeated requests for interviews, but when asked onstage at the Women in the World conference in New York on Wednesday whether she liked her the job, she cheerfully put it this way: “You can move the ball. It’s not just about talking. ” Is she actually setting foreign policy? That would be highly unusual for any envoy to the United Nations. But in these unusual days, vital positions in the State Department remain vacant, Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson is far more distant from the public than his predecessors, and many American embassies are still without an ambassador. That, say current and former American officials, seems to have given Ms. Haley, a neophyte in foreign affairs who works closely with a small band of trusted political aides, a great deal of visibility and, possibly, latitude. “I think she has been, from the beginning, willing to be out front with policy statements before the White House or Secretary Tillerson,” said Michèle Flournoy, a Pentagon official in the Obama administration and now chief executive of the Center for a New American Security. “She right now has established herself as the more public voice of American diplomacy. That may be by design. ” But given that Ms. Haley has no foreign policy background, many wonder if the United Nations job is simply a useful steppingstone for her political ambitions. Her remarks on world affairs are usually leavened by slogans — “call them out” is one of her favorites when referring to nations that run counter to American interests. Her statements are also sometimes thin on substance, offering no blueprint on how to approach North Korea or Iran, or how to make the United Nations deliver “value,” as she says, for American taxpayers. “By being so high profile and ready to pronounce, there may be a perception that she’s more focused on positioning herself publicly than learning all the complexities of the job,” said Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official who noted that the hard lessons of diplomacy come from experience. United States decisions on crucial United Nations matters used to take shape through consultations among senior officials and experts in New York and Washington. These days, policies are drafted in Ms. Haley’s office, and sent to Washington to clear, according to two American officials who were not authorized to speak on the record. The policies are on everything from how to handle peacekeeping missions to what to do about United States membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council to who will be part of the delegation to the annual women’s rights meeting. Ms. Haley came to United Nations headquarters two months ago with a brash promise that she would be “taking names” of those who did not side with the United States. She brought with her a handful of aides from South Carolina and hired a few conservative advisers. Those in her inner circle meet every morning on the 21st floor of the United States mission. Career foreign service staff members are invited only as necessary. Ms. Haley is close to powerful members of Congress, including Senator Lindsey Graham, a fellow South Carolina Republican, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, and Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, who leads the Foreign Relations Committee. She has said she speaks to Mr. Trump often, including a talk on Wednesday, the same day she dangled the possibility of unilateral American action in Syria. Her political instincts have been on sharp display. She posts on Twitter about her dog, roots for South Carolina sports and wears the symbol of her home state — a palmetto and crescent moon — as a locket around her neck. She got a rousing welcome at an American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in March her high heels, she told that audience to great applause, could be useful for kicking those she needed to. And she heard a collective murmur of disbelief when, during a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations, she defended the president’s travel ban by pointing to last month’s terrorist attack in London the crime was the handiwork of a native Briton, not a migrant. She has used her time here to speak out, again and again, on a handful of issues that have domestic political currency: Iran, Israel, toughness on Russia. She has promised to make the United Nations more efficient, and said she and the secretary general, António Guterres, “think alike. ” (She aligned herself with the Tea Party he was president of the Socialist International.) Several diplomats noted privately that Ms. Haley had not bothered to go around and meet most of them, and only on the highest profile subjects has she been present in the Security Council. In contrast to her predecessor, Samantha Power, Ms. Haley goes home in time for dinner with her family most days. She said she was appalled by how much overtime staff members had piled up before she arrived. She has been seemingly at odds with her boss on at least two things. She has repeatedly expressed her distrust of Russia, insisting that sanctions should be maintained for its annexation of Crimea. And she maintained that the United States remained committed to a solution for the conflict, even after the president vaguely suggested otherwise. R. Nicholas Burns, a veteran United States diplomat and a trenchant critic of the president, called her “one of the most pragmatic and one of the most courageous voices in the administration. ” He pointed to her insistence that sanctions on Russia should remain, even as Mr. Trump signaled his admiration for the Russian president. “In this case, within the fluidity of this administration, she has been a refreshing tough voice,” Mr. Burns said. “I wouldn’t say formally she was making policy. She was articulating positions that were not repudiated by others in the administration, and in some cases they then followed her lead. ” | 1 |
This proves that even though the "power elites" are NOT behind TRUMP, but rather, they are behind the evil daughter of SATAN, the PEOPLE are behind DONALD TRUMP | 0 |
Halloween and The One World Religion The Meaning of Halloween
Christian fundamentalism is a ‘malignant form of Christianity’ more dangerous than Islamic terrorism, scholar says – The Blaze
A humanist scholar has declared Christian fundamentalism more dangerous than Islamic terrorism, the Chicago Maroon reported.
Catherine M. Wallace, an author and faculty member at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, told an audience last week near the University of Chicago that a Christian fundamentalist “in control of nuclear codes was a much, much greater threat” than Islamic terrorists who “need to put bombs on their own children and send young men in to kill themselves” in order to “blow up a concert,” the paper said.
Wallace — a historian and “Christian humanist,” the Maroon said — noted that Christian fundamentalism has roots in the American South: “The religious right in its most contemporary form has an origin in Southern opposition to desegregation and to the Civil Rights Movement … a transparently racist appeal.”
She added that radicalism comes from a literal interpretation of the Bible. “Nobody in the ancient world would have read the Bible literally,” she said, the Maroon reported, adding that a literal reading of scripture is a modern construct.
“Christian fundamentalism is a malignant form of Christianity,” Wallace said,
Christian Fundamentalism – Collins English Dictionary states, “Is the belief that every word of the Bible is divinely inspired and therefore true and advocates strict adherence to the fundamental principles of that set of beliefs.
Jesus and the Apostles would be considered fundamentalists.
John 8:24 Jesus said, “I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins.”
John 10:1, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.”
Acts 4:12, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.”
In 2016, I am a fundamentalist. I believe that the Bible is the word of God, that it is the absolute truth and that it requires strict adherence to the doctrines taught in the Bible to be saved.
Matthew 24:3-4, “And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?”
In response to this question, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth were, “…Take heed that no man deceive you.”
Never forget: “A strict adherence to the doctrines taught in the Bible is absolutely essential for salvation.” Join the Conversation | 0 |
Chart Of The Day: Real Final Sales---The History Of Lower By David Stockman.
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I’ve long been a fan of shaggy white coconut layer cakes, filled and frosted with meringue. But it was only recently that I encountered its more flamboyant cousin, the ambrosia cake. It’s got the white cake layers, billowing frosting and shredded coconut of the classic, crossed with the juicy citrus of ambrosia, the salad or dessert of oranges or mandarins, pineapple, strawberries and coconut embedded in whipped topping or sour cream. Sometimes a few marshmallows are thrown in for good measure. I didn’t grow up eating ambrosia. I didn’t even meet it in the flesh until college, when the cafeteria served it at the salad bar. One of my friends spooned up a hefty portion, explaining that it reminded her of her granny. It also came with a warning: “If your granny didn’t make it, it might not be your thing. ” My granny didn’t make it, and it isn’t my thing. But those same elements combined in a cake? That I can appreciate. Because there are so many ambrosia variations — almost as many as there are grannies — there are many versions of ambrosia cake. Some go all out in the fruit department, using oranges or mandarins, pineapple and bananas. Some add the likes of pecans, maraschino cherries and miniature marshmallows. All have some kind of white frosting and a liberal coating of shredded coconut. In my version, I opt for fewer elements and use them in several ways. I skip pineapple and bananas and stick with citrus, choosing seedless clementines over mandarins and oranges. Some are juiced and stirred into a tangy curd to slather between the layers. I cut others into sections to add a fresh burst of fruit. If you miss the pineapple and bananas, feel free to add some to the filling. Similarly, the coconut appears in the cake itself (as coconut milk, oil and, if you would like, coconut rum or extract) and again in a shredded form in the filling and as a garnish. You can use either sweetened or unsweetened shredded coconut. Sweetened is the more traditional choice. But with its abundance of marshmallowlike meringue frosting, this cake doesn’t need the extra sugar. But I go for sweetened coconut every time. I don’t love it as a salad garnish, but on a cake, it’s ambrosial. Recipe: Ambrosia Cake Follow NYT Food on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. | 1 |
KANGIQSUJUAQ, Quebec — For eight months a year, the flat bay around the village of Kangiqsujuaq in far northern Quebec freezes beneath a white expanse of ice and snow, leaving ravens and foxes as rare signs of life, along with Inuit and their dogs. Throughout the winter the Inuit hunt seal and caribou, and they fish through the ice for arctic char. But in the coldest months, when the ice is thickest, some venture beneath the ice to gather mussels. Every two weeks the pull of the moon combines with the geography of this region to create unusually large tides. The water falls as much as 55 feet in some places, emptying the bay under the ice along the shore for an hour or more. That’s when some Inuit climb aboard their snowmobiles and head out onto the bay. Watch a 360 video of the mussel collecting mission. One recent day I joined two of them, Tiisi Qisiiq, 51, and Adami Alaku, 61, who identified a void and chopped a hole into the ice. Underneath is a beautiful, eerie world of bending ice, glowing blue from the sunlight outside. The sound of trickling water fills the humid, air. On my recent trip it was 20 degrees below zero (minus 29 degrees Celsius) but a balmy 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) beneath the ice. The men lowered themselves through the hole to the bay floor. The ground was covered with kelp, the occasional crab and edible clumps of roe from the fourhorn sculpin, which the Inuit call the ugly fish. But Mr. Qisiiq and Mr. Alaku came for fat blue mussels that cling to the rocks. Using lamps to light the way, they pulled the frigid mussels free with their hands. Before long, the sound of ticks and pops signaled the returning tide as it lifted the ice on the bay. Soon, the water would fill the caverns. The flood tide is deceiving, starting slowly until it rises more than a foot (30 centimeters) a minute. The men headed for the hole and climbed out into the clear, cold air. I first heard of mussel gathering under the ice when I lived in Shanghai and my son was given a children’s book called “Very Last First Time,” by the Canadian author Jan Andrews. It tells the enchanting tale of an Inuit girl’s first time under the ice alone. Ever since, I’ve wanted to go under the ice myself. Now I have, and I saw the bay floor’s bounty brought to the surface. The book’s drawings depict a colorful, cavernous space beneath the ice, far different from the cramped and narrow confines that I discovered. The colder the winter, the thicker and more stable the ice and the larger the spaces left by the ebbing tide. Mr. Qisiiq’s mentor, Lukasi Nappaaluk, remembers gathering mussels as a child in caverns of ice with ceilings 20 feet high. But global warming is making the ice less predictable and more prone to buckling. Warm water currents thin the ice from below, making the snowmobile crossings increasingly dangerous. The mussels are a welcome winter treat these days, but at one time they were a lifesaving source of food during the lean frozen months. Raw meat, with its abundance of vitamins, has allowed the Inuit to live for centuries on a diet almost devoid of fruits and vegetables. The only preparation for the mussels is pulling off their beards, the strings of protein that mussels make to cling to rocks, and then rinsing them. The Inuit still eat a lot of “country food,” caribou and seal and whale and fish that they prefer to eat raw while sitting on the floor. Mussels are no exception. Mr. Qisiiq and his wife, Siasi Qisiiq, shucked the bivalves using the edge of a shell. They scraped out the meat and squeezed it in their fist, wringing out the salty seawater, before eating them as is. Ms. Qisiiq boiled some of the mussels for me. They were rich and meaty, salty with no seasoning, and steaming — welcome warmth after hours outside. I had some of the raw mussels, too, still chilled from the bay. They tasted a lot like raw oysters, but with a bitter finish. I would prefer them marinara style. | 1 |
Donald J. Trump’s support among white men, the linchpin of his presidential campaign, is showing surprising signs of weakness that could foreclose his only remaining path to victory in November. If not reversed, the trend could materialize into one of the most unanticipated developments of the 2016 presidential campaign: That Hillary Clinton, the first woman at the head of a major party ticket and a divisive figure unpopular with many men, ends up narrowing the gender gap that has been a constant of American presidential elections for decades. Surveys of voters nationwide and in battleground states conducted over the last two weeks showed that Mr. Trump was even with or below where Mitt Romney, the Republican Party nominee four years ago, was with white men when he won that demographic by an overwhelming 27 percentage points. For Mr. Trump, who has staked much of his legitimacy as a candidate on his strength in the polls, the numbers are a dose of cold, dangerous math. If he does not perform any better than Mr. Romney did with white men, he will almost certainly be unable to rally the millions of disaffected white voters he says will propel him to the White House. All along, one of the central questions of the election has been whether there are enough white men who will turn out to vote to lift Mr. Trump to victory. And there may be enough, demographers and pollsters said. But for now it appears that after a ceaseless stream of provocations, insults and reckless remarks, Mr. Trump has damaged himself significantly with the one demographic that stands as a bulwark to a Clinton presidency. “If you set out to design a strategy to produce the lowest popular vote possible in the new American electorate of 2016, you would be to do a better job than Donald Trump has,” said Whit Ayres, a pollster who has advised Republican presidential and Senate candidates for more than 25 years. “This is an electoral disaster waiting to happen. ” There are still nearly three months before Election Day, ample time to shift the dynamics of the race. But the question that Republicans inside and outside the Trump campaign are asking is whether or not the damage Mr. Trump has caused himself over the last few weeks is irreparable. Interviews with voters found that Mr. Trump’s increasingly outlandish behavior was rubbing many in his key voting bloc the wrong way. “I liked Trump until he opened his mouth,” said Phil Kinney, a retired middle school administrator and a Republican from Bethlehem, Pa. The recent string of attacks Mr. Trump has unleashed, particularly his criticism of the family of a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq, left Mr. Kinney disappointed. Faced with the choice of voting for Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Kinney said he may just stay home. Two national polls conducted this month have Mrs. Clinton catching up to Mr. Trump among men over all. An NBC Street Journal poll shows Mrs. Clinton with 43 percent support among men to his 42 percent. A Bloomberg Politics survey put Mr. Trump with a lead among men, according to the pollster who conducted the survey, Ann Selzer. Mr. Romney relied on his edge among white men to carry the male vote over all, but Mr. Trump is even more reliant on them because of how poorly he performs with nonwhite voters. If Mr. Trump is only doing as well or worse than Mr. Romney did with white men, he will never make up the votes he is losing among women and nonwhites. Mr. Trump’s troubles with white men do not end there. The data reveal a huge gap in those who have a college education and those who do not. As Mr. Trump saw in the Republican primaries, he is most vulnerable with white men who have a college education or higher. Mr. Romney won that group, which votes at a higher rate than those without college degrees, by 21 points. Recent national polls have put Mr. Trump’s support with them far lower. “We’re looking at a margin among white men for him that’s less than half what Romney won,” said Gary Langer, an independent pollster who conducted an ABC Post survey this month that showed Mr. Trump losing over all to Mrs. Clinton. “And that is problematic for Trump given his need to appeal to whites. ” Mr. Trump’s difficulties with men are symptoms of a larger vulnerability: disapproval that runs deeply through many segments and subgroups of the voting population. Republicans, white women, the wealthy and people of all races are turning their backs on him. Two national polls have recently put his support from at an astonishing 1 percent. Separate Wall Street surveys in Ohio and Pennsylvania from July found that zero percent of black voters said they planned to vote for him. The latest poll of Latinos, conducted within the last week by Fox News, had Mr. Trump with just 20 percent support, below the 27 percent that Mr. Romney received in 2012. Even under the rosiest projections of white turnout, Mr. Trump would still lose the popular vote if his poll numbers among whites do not improve considerably. William H. Frey, a demographics expert with the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, conducted several simulations that tried to determine how much the turnout among white men without college educations would have to increase for Mr. Trump to win. He used the most recent ABC Post poll of registered voters that had Mrs. Clinton beating Mr. Trump in a nationwide race, 50 percent to 42 percent. It was among the better polls for Mr. Trump lately. Mr. Frey tested different turnout assumptions, including improbably optimistic ones, like if 99 percent of white, men turned out to vote. None of the chain of events produced a Trump victory. In fact, even if virtually all of the white, men eligible to vote did so, Mr. Frey found, Mrs. Clinton would still win the popular vote by 1. 1 million. And Mr. Frey said he did not account for the expected growth in Hispanic turnout. “Once you build that in,” he said, “it’s even worse for Trump. ” By not appealing more broadly to Hispanics and other minority groups, Mr. Trump is precariously reliant on a segment of the population that is a shrinking portion of the electorate. White voters were 88 percent of the electorate in the 1980 election, a figure that has declined a few percentage points every four years since then. By 2012, the white vote was down to 72 percent. Most estimates for 2016 put it at or below 70 percent. And if Mr. Trump keeps alienating more of them like Gary Williams, a lifelong Republican and owner from Lexington, Tenn. his base will continue to shrink. “He cusses in front of women and children and everybody else. He’s not a Christian. Everything about him makes me sick,” Mr. Williams said in an interview. He plans to vote for Mrs. Clinton or Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate. An especially worrisome problem for Mr. Trump lies in some of the white, heavily states he hopes to put in play, like Ohio. Mr. Trump is nearly tied there with Mrs. Clinton among men, with 42 percent to her 41 percent, according to an NBC Street poll conducted the first week of August. Illustrating just how much Mr. Trump’s deterioration with men puts him in an electoral hole, Mr. Romney won men in Ohio by seven percentage points four years ago. But that was still not enough. President Obama won the state, capturing 51 percent of the vote to Mr. Romney’s 48 percent. | 1 |
For most of the last year, ESPN in particular and the liberal sports media in general have jumped through hoops to deny that the cable sports network has a liberal bias problem. But now that the obvious has grown too hard to deny, their tactics are changing. Now, all of a sudden, ESPN’s liberal bias is a good thing. [Until now, ESPN and its hosts have repeatedly denied that it has a liberal bias problem. Last year ESPN ombudsman Jim Brady published an investigation into the claim of liberal bias that ran thousands of words only to reach the conclusion that there was no liberal bias. But that wasn’t all the question so vexed the network that it hired a polling firm to find out if there is any liberal bias and, if so, has it hurt the network’s ratings. Unsurprisingly, the survey bought and paid for by ESPN miraculously showed that there was no liberal bias at the network. ESPN’s survey, though, flies in the face of three other surveys that did find that the network has a liberal bias problem and that the constant content is driving viewers away. Many liberal members of the sports media, such as Awful Announcing’s Andrew Bucholtz, joined ESPN to any notion that the network has a liberal bias problem. But there seems to be a changeup in the discussion as at least one liberal sportsman is now saying ESPN’s dive into liberalism is a good thing for the network that is losing 10, 000 subscribers a month. According to Ty Duffy of Awful Announcing, ESPN’s liberal bias is a good thing because it will bring in young, liberal fans. “There is truth in the liberal claim. ESPN has tilted leftward under John Skipper,” Duffy initially observed. Despite that admission, Duffy goes on to claim there is “no proof” that conservative fans have abandoned ESPN over its constant content. Naturally Duffy ignored the three surveys that serve as proof of conservative discontent and relied only on ESPN’s bought and paid for survey to “prove” his contention. But even as he offers no statistical proof to buttress his own claim, Duffy insists that ESPN’s drive leftward is a shrewd move because it will bring young, “woke” viewers to replace the fleeing conservative audience. Major brands, such as ESPN, are now expected to exhibit a political and social consciousness. They pay a cost when they are tone deaf. If there are now two Americas, ESPN (and sports leagues) will move with the one advertisers want to reach: young people, people with disposable income, and growing minority populations. Of course, Duffy indulges gross generalizations. Only far liberals “expect” major brands to “exhibit a political and social consciousness. ” Even if that is the case, he also seems to simply assume that even liberals don’t want a place to escape politics and instead want politics to invade and conquer the sports world. Time will tell, of course, but it is interesting to see how this argument is morphing from staunch proclamations that ESPN isn’t liberal to the admission that, yes, some hosts are liberal, and finally to the obdurate notion that “yeah, we’re liberal. What of it?” Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
Tuesday on Capitol Hill, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ( ) said President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts to State Department funding would “probably not” pass in the Senate. When asked if the Senate could approve the budget that slashes state park funding, McConnell said, “Probably not. When we get to funding, the government obviously will be done on a bipartisan basis. It could be an opportunity for our Democratic friends to participate. They have chosen to not so far. And I for one, just speaking for myself, I think the diplomatic portion of the federal budget is very important. And you get results a lot cheaper frequently than you do on the defense side. So speaking for myself, I’m not in favor of reducing what we call the 150 account to that extent. But we will sort all that out in the course of deciding how much were going to spend and how we’re going to spend it. ” ( The Hill) Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 1 |
Alex Jones Declares Trump Landslide Victory 10/27/2016 In today’s video, Christopher Greene of AMTV reports on Alex Jones Prediction of a Donald Trump Landslide Victory. 10/27/2016 TRUTH REVOLT http://youtu.be/PsVNKmb6jEc There’s a lot of accusations going around that the 2016 election is r ... Netflix Ceo: TV’s Future includes Hallucination Pills 10/27/2016 INDEPENDENT The future of TV might everyone taking hallucinogenic drugs, according to the head of Netflix. The thr ... | 0 |
WASHINGTON, D. C. — Ahead of President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia this weekend, the national chair of the Families Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism advocacy group wrote a letter to the leader of the free world. The letter urges him not to buckle under pressure from Saudi Arabia and potentially weaken a provision in a law that would allow the families of victims of America’s most devastating terrorist attack to sue countries involved in carrying out terrorism. [Breitbart News acquired an exclusive copy of Terry Strada’s letter to President Trump urging him to remain steadfast in his support for families of 911 victims who are suing the government of Saudi Arabia under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) which was first enacted in 1976. JASTA creates a path for U. S. citizens to file civil claims against foreign governments for wrongful deaths, injuries, and property damage related to terrorist acts that were financed by those governments. The law also removes any government’s sovereign immunity — in this case Saudi Arabia’s — from being sued if it were involved in a terrorist attack against the United States. The majority of hijackers on September 11, 2001, were Saudi citizens. Strada lost her husband, Tom, in the devastating terrorist attacks that claimed nearly 3, 000 lives on September 11, 2001. Part of her letter to President Trump reads: We remain deeply grateful for your support for our cause, especially last September when you denounced President Obama’s veto of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. Your backing was essential to ensuring that JASTA — which guarantees that terror victims like us can hold foreign nations accountable when they provide support and funding to terrorists who carry out attacks on U. S. soil — is now the law. … First, we fully expect that the Saudis will try to convince you to betray the families. They will not put it that way, but will instead argue that JASTA should be “fixed” or “modified” to eliminate “unintended consequences. ” Please do not let them get away with this dishonest approach. The Saudis do not want to “fix” JASTA they want you and Congress to pass a new law that arms them with a special defense against our lawsuits. This is the same false claim that Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have made — after voting for JASTA in September and betraying the families just days after the November election. Would you please make it very clear to the Saudis that you will never support any weakening of the families’ legal rights? Second, the Saudis need to hear directly from you that Americans do not appreciate being manipulated by propaganda and fake news peddled by foreign agents. Just this week, the Associated Press reported on how the Saudis are engaged in a $1. 3 campaign to manipulate the public, deceive our military veterans, and fool Congress into weakening JASTA. That news story has been carried throughout the world, and was picked up in the U. S. by outlets as varied as Breitbart, Fox News, Bloomberg, ABC News, and even the Daily Beast. We are sure you especially share our outrage that the Saudi agents are lying to our nation’s veteran community. Would you please tell the Saudi Kingdom that this deceitful campaign must stop? Under U. S. law, foreign governments are generally immune from the jurisdiction of U. S. courts and cannot be sued for injuries they cause, unless one of the exceptions to sovereign immunity — which is set forth in a statute called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act — applies. Congress included a provision in JASTA designed to encourage and empower the president to press for, and ultimately, broker settlements of cases brought under JASTA law. But JASTA provides a path for President Trump to raise this issue with the Saudis and work towards a resolution should he choose to do so. Last year, the Saudi government reportedly attempted to astroturf the United States in an attempt to roll back JASTA. This year, reports surfaced that Saudi Arabia was paying millions to send veterans on trips to Washington and using them as pawns to lobby against the JASTA legislation. As of October last year, Saudi Arabia was reportedly paying American lobbyists and public relations firms $1. 3 million per month to fight against the right of Americans to sue the nation for financing terror. Ahead of President Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia this weekend, the Saudis expressed their hope that he will reverse the legislation that allows for the families of the 911 victims to sue their country for their role in the devastating terrorist attacks. The Saudis’ raising the issue of JASTA legislation being a concern for them could encourage a settlement. It could also provide Trump with the opportunity to showcase his steadfast support for the 911 community and all who were affected by the tragedy. Despite the justice aspect JASTA law provides for the 911 victims and their families, some have raised concerns that it could open the floodgates to a number of foreign countries to sue the United States for frivolous matters. “The law has opened up Pandora’s Box, creating risks with international consequence for Americans working directly or indirectly for our intelligence agencies,” James Zumwalt once wrote. For example, last year an Iraqi lobbyist group, citing JASTA, sought to sue the government to ask the United States for compensation for alleged violations by the American military following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Similarly, retired U. S. Navy Admiral Edward Masso suggested JASTA was a “congressional mistake. ” William W. the deputy dean and professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, shed some light on this matter in an interview with Breitbart News. “There is a long history of countries having claims against one another. This goes back as long as there have been countries,” said: When we think about whether there is a liability on the part of Saudi Arabia for activities, we have to think about it in a background context that countries often have disputes with one another and they often settle them through some sort of international agreement. What the JASTA legislation does do is open up a broader range of private suits wrought by individuals rather than by countries against one another directly. And, in some ways, changes some of the traditional approaches the United States has taken to sovereign immunity. also suggested the JASTA legislation changes the U. S. approach, “but within a consistent background under international law. Countries have always been able to have some flexibility with what suits they allow individuals to bring against countries and the U. S. has been somewhat restrained in that in its prior approach. ” He continued, “JASTA, to some degree, opens up a somewhat broader set of claims that can be brought by U. S. entities against foreign governments. ” noted that many past presidents have resolved the claims of private citizens against foreign governments by reaching a diplomatic deal that involves a lump payment by the culpable foreign government to the United States. He also stated his belief that this trip provides Trump with a real “opportunity to put the American lives and victims of 911 first. And an opportunity to be a great dealmaker, which he is, and to bring a resolution to one of the hardest moments in modern American history. And doing so is fully consistent with his authority. ” Follow Adelle Nazarian on Facebook and Twitter. | 1 |
Many things are blurred about the life and death of Elva Zona Heaster Shue, who lived in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, in the late 1800s. But one thing is known by everyone in the state, she is The Greenbrier Ghost.
The story is that Zona met and soon married Erasmus (Edward) Stribbling Trout Shue in 1896 against her family’s wishes. Edward was a drifter, unknown in the area, and not well received by the community. However, Zone fell in love with him instantly, though her mother was not convinced. Despite her disapproval, the couple married within just a few weeks after meeting.
Edward and Zona lived what appeared to be a very happy life, for about eleven months. Everything changed in their house on January 23, 1897, when Edward had sent a hired errand boy to his home to check on his wife. That is where the boy made a ghastly discovery.
As he entered the home, the young boy immediately spotted Zona lying motionless, sprawled out and unresponsive, at the bottom of the stairs. Shocked and frightened, he rushed home to his mother, who called George W. Knapp, the local doctor, and coroner. But before the doctor could get to Zona, Edward came home and did something very odd with his wife’s body.
Doctor Knapp went as quickly as he could to the couple’s home, only to find that Edward had redressed her, moved her body back upstairs, laid her out on the bed, and was cradling her head in his hands as he sobbed. He noticed that Edward, who continued to cradle Zona’s head the entire time, would get agitated each time the doctor got too close to her body. Finally, Dr. Knapp pronounced her dead from ‘everlasting faint.’
Zona’s mother also reported that Edward acted erratically at the funeral, and her suspicions took root — she believed Zona had been murdered. She began telling friends and family about a recurring nightmare she was having about her daughter and her death. In her dreams, Edward had twisted Zona’s head 360 degrees, snapping it off. Her daughter appeared in a flash of blinding light, explaining that her husband had been a cruel man and that her death was not natural, but murder.
After reporting the story to officials on many occasions, to no avail, her mother would not give up on her insistence of murder. The ghost continued to visit Zona’s mother, telling the same story. Finally, authorities exhumed Zona’s body to examine her.
Edward protested the exhumation of his wife’s body, but the police continued and she was reexamined. This time, it was discovered that she was, in fact, murdered. Her head was snapped and finger-like marks on her skin, indicating strangulation. Which explains why Edward was cupping her head when she was first examined.
Edward was arrested and charged with her death. While in prison, it was discovered that Zona was actually his third wife; his first divorced him for cruelty, and the second had died mysteriously. Authorities found a drawing Edward had made that depicted an ominous scene: a married couple with coffins in the background of their home.
Zona’s death was officially declared a murder. Upon learning the news, a mob of angry locals grouped together to try and lynch Edward by hanging him. He was rescued by the sheriff and taken to safety, where he stood trial for the death of his young wife.
As the Greenbrier Ghost, Zona’s tale is no longer one of many unsolved historic crimes; visitors to the area can visit her grave, and her story is not forgotten. There’s no telling whether her ghost is truly what helped solve her murder, but her mother’s vision certainly did. Zona’s ghost was never seen again, but a marker in the cemetery describes how her ghost helped solve her own murder.
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Saving for retirement should be simple arithmetic — the longer your money has to grow, the more money you should have when you stop working. But saving today for a distant tomorrow isn’t so simple, and has a great deal to do with how people think about money. Sean Furlong, the director of finance and administration at Gilman School, a private secondary school in Baltimore, said he realized that while teaching a business class. He was teaching students, he said, “but then I realized I wasn’t teaching my faculty and staff. ” “They didn’t know the things I was teaching to high school students,” he added. “Many of them had missed that. ” Mr. Furlong said he decided to ask the school for permission to begin a retirement education program. Its goal was to increase participation in its retirement plan and to educate people on thinking about their savings choices and investment options. Nearly five years after Mr. Furlong pushed for that education campaign, the school has an average contribution rate of 22 percent, up from 16 percent. (This includes Gilman’s 8 percent match after participants contribute the first 7 percent of their salary.) At the highest end, people are contributing 35 percent of their salary. Changing how people think about the money they save for retirement is one of the central tenets of a movement that is based on behavioral finance, the approach to economics that aims to understand how average people, not rational economists, make financial decisions. After all, it’s the way people behave around money that tends to derail their plans, not a lack of knowledge about what they need to do if they want to retire comfortably. “The biggest challenge is not saving enough,” said Liz Davidson, founder and chief executive of the consultancy Financial Finesse and author of “What Your Financial Advisor Isn’t Telling You. ” “Historically, there’s been a lot of focus on returns. The return is on what you save, and most people aren’t saving enough. ” Ms. Davidson, whose consultancy works with companies on their financial plans for employees, said that when it came to retirement, her company tried to get employees to think about how much they could set aside each day, and to forget about a larger monthly or annual number. “Most people can save a few dollars a day or even $10 a day,” she said. “That’s doable. But if you say, ‘Can you save $300 a month or a couple of thousand dollars a year?’ people will say, ‘Whoa.’ ” Avoiding that “whoa,” which is the hesitancy that can derail planning, is what consultants like Ms. Davidson are trying to do. Just as saving a bit more today is going to pay off in the future, not saving enough, failing to participate in a retirement plan or taking money out of a plan too early can significantly reduce the amount of money available decades later. Many of these efforts come back to seminal work by Shlomo Benartzi and Richard H. Thaler, behavioral economists who have researched how to get people to be better retirement savers. One of their conclusions is people need to be nudged by employers to stay on track, often in ways that keep them from missing the money they are saving. These strategies include automatically enrolling people in retirement plans, asking whether they would like to increase their contributions when they receive a raise and limiting the investment choices so they would need to opt out of a broadly diversified portfolio, which is likely to produce the best returns over time. As simple as the nudges seem, they have been proved to work. The National Football League’s Players Association, which represents current and former players, moved to automatically enroll its players in 2007. Since then the participation rate has gone to 90 percent, from 82 percent. “You don’t miss what you don’t have,” said Dana Hammonds, senior director of player affairs and development. At Gilman School, Mr. Furlong pushed to limit the number of investment options, cutting the funds its plan offered by 75 percent, while increasing the education about the ones that were available. “It used to be faculty and staff could be invested 100 percent in commodities funds and no one would care,” Mr. Furlong said. “Now the majority are in target date funds. ” (Target date funds are set up so that the allocation of a person’s investment changes as the person gets older.) Increasing the amount people contribute has also been a challenge. The default rate used to be 3 percent, which wasn’t enough, said Aimee R. DeCamillo, head of retirement plan services at T. Rowe Price, which provides plans for two million people at 3, 500 companies. She said a savings rate closer to 15 percent, including the employer match, was better. One way it gets people closer to that number is to use behavioral finance tricks with its online portal. This comes into play with increasing the contribution rate. “If you’re at 10 percent, we’ll show you 13, 15, and 17 percent, knowing you’ll go for that middle number,” she said. “It’s driving behavior in the right direction. ” Another feature is what T. Rowe Price calls its “confidence number,” which aims to predict the likelihood that you will be able to replicate your salary in retirement. “It drives you to an experience where you change assumptions,” Ms. DeCamillo said. “You can change your retirement age. You can adjust your salary you can pull in additional outside assets. It helps you build confidence that you have this control over the outcome. ” Aetna, which has worked with Financial Finesse to develop its workplace program, began a yearlong initiative this month called Retirement Ready. Its goal is to help employees think about what they are saving but also about what that money might be used for in retirement. “It’s about financial readiness but also the emotional and physical readiness for retirement,” said Kay Mooney, vice president for benefits at Aetna. “It’s critical for employees who service our customers. We know the business is challenged if our employees are stressed financially. ” Ms. Mooney said the company would measure the program’s effectiveness based on how employees changed behaviors, like increasing contributions to their 401( k) plans or reducing their credit card debt. But success might also start by getting people to rethink what their retirement savings are for. “Financial independence is a phrase we found resonated very well,” Ms. Davidson said. “It’s living life on your own terms. Flexibility is very important. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — It was utterly avoidable. In retrospect, anyway. The most brazen, disruptive and manipulative attack on the American electoral system since Watergate — a vast cyberattack by Russia, aimed squarely at Democrats in 2016 — hinged on a series of human errors and institutional misjudgments. In the latest episode of “The ” we explore how Russia hacked the election, why a foreign power would take such a drastic step and why everyone seemed to react so underwhelmingly to the historic intrusion — from the main target of the attack, the Democratic National Committee, to most powerful Democrat in the country, President Obama. I traveled to Washington to speak with two of my colleagues, Eric Lipton and David Sanger, who a stunning story about out how the hack unfolded, moment by moment, stealing and publishing thousands of pages of embarrassing internal documents from the D. N. C. and John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. We may never know if Russia’s digital offensive, which spared Donald J. Trump and his Republican allies, cost Mrs. Clinton the election. But we do know how much it hurt candidates in campaigns for Congress. I spoke with a victim of the cyberattack, Annette Taddeo, who believes the embarrassing documents released by Russian hackers were a deciding factor in her defeat this year. “I don’t think we are as shocked as we should be and as angry as we should be,” Ms. Taddeo tells me. “This is very alarming to our democracy and everything we stand for. ” From a desktop or laptop, you can listen by pressing play on the button above. Or if you’re on a mobile device, the instructions below will help you find and subscribe to the series. On your iPhone or iPad: 1. Open your podcast app. It’s a app called “Podcasts” with a purple icon. (This link may help.) 2. Search for the series. Tap on the “search” magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen, type in “The ” and select it from the list of results. 3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, tap on the “subscribe” button to have new episodes sent to your phone free. You may want to adjust your notifications to be alerted when a new episode arrives. 4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, tap on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode. On your Android phone or tablet: 1. Open your podcast app. It’s a app called “Play Music” with an icon. (This link may help.) 2. Search for the series. Click on the magnifying glass icon at the top of the screen, search for the name of the series and select it from the list of results. You may have to scroll down to find the “Podcasts” search results. 3. Subscribe. Once on the series page, click on the word “subscribe” to have new episodes sent to your phone free. 4. Or just sample. If you would rather listen to an episode or two before deciding to subscribe, click on the episode title from the list on the series page. If you have an internet connection, you’ll be able to stream the episode. | 1 |
Linwood Michael Kaine, a son of former 2016 Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, faces criminal charges for allegedly joining in an riot to attack supporters of President Donald Trump in March in Minneapolis, Minnesota. [Authorities charged the Kaine with “fleeing police on foot, concealing his identity in a public place, and obstructing legal process,” according to a detailed Twin Cities Pioneer Press report. “When people seek to prevent others who are peacefully assembled from making their voices heard, it threatens the very foundation of our democracy,” a local attorney said Friday after the charges against Kaine and seven others were announced. Police said Kaine was allegedly part of a violent, masked group: Security officers saw five people dressed in black leaving the Capitol, including one who threw a smoke bomb inside, according to complaints filed by the city attorney’s office. They went to a nearby spot and “tried to change their appearance by doing things like taking off their black clothing, putting on different jackets or hats, and turning their clothing inside out,” the complaints said. When police approached, they scattered and ran. Steve Frazer, who was then a St. Paul police senior commander, chased a man who was later identified as Woody Kaine. A Mar. 7 Twin Cities Pioneer Press report states that Kaine allegedly fought with police after being part of a group that threw a smoke bomb in a government building during a rally for President Trump: Clad in black and wearing a mask, the youngest son of Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Kaine wrested himself from the cop and then “squared off” with him. Woody Kaine, 24, was among five masked, people suspected of lobbing a smoke bomb minutes earlier inside the Minnesota Capitol rotunda Saturday afternoon. Officers had chased him down, but Kaine wasn’t about to submit, according to a more detailed account provided Wednesday by St. Paul police. In the end, it took three officers, a “knee strike” and a chemical spray to subdue Kaine after he was identified as one of the counterprotesters [sic] who allegedly used fireworks or a smoke bomb to disrupt a rally in support of President Donald Trump at the Minnesota State Capitol, according to police spokesman Steve Linders. Less than two months before his son was arrested after the and speech riot, Kaine said on MSNBC that progressives must “fight in the streets” after Trump’s election. “What we’ve got to do is fight in Congress, fight in the courts, fight in the streets, fight online, fight at the ballot box, and now there’s the momentum to be able to do this,” Kaine told MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski on Jan. 31. After his son’s arrest, Kaine issued a statement that did not appear to condemn his son’s alleged actions. “We love that our three children have their own views and concerns about current political issues. They fully understand the responsibility to express those concerns peacefully,” Kaine said, as reported by Breitbart News. On Friday, a Kaine spokeswoman doubled down, ignoring allegations that Kaine had taken part in the Minnesota State Capitol and attempting to dismiss the severity of fighting police officers. “Today’s announcement of misdemeanor charges against Sen. Kaine’s son contains no suggestion that he engaged in disruptive behavior while at the rally, but are instead focused on his actions as he was arrested after he left. Tim and Anne support their son and hope the matter is resolved soon,” she said to the Twin Cities Pioneer Press. Kaine was charged the same day the New York Post revealed that police arrested a prominent Democratic leader, Jacob Schwartz, with ties to Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook, for child pornography charges, for allegedly having thousands of photos and videos of showing “young nude females between the approximate ages of 6 months and 16, engaging in sexual conduct … on an adult male” on his laptop. | 1 |
TEL AVIV — Donald Trump confirmed that his Jewish Jared Kushner will work to “broker a Middle East peace deal. ” [In an interview with The Times of London, Trump said that as part of his role as senior adviser, Kushner would be appointed to handle negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Trump also told the German daily Bild that Kushner has “an innate ability to make deals. ” “Jared is such a good lad, he will secure an Israel deal which no one else has managed to get. You know, he’s a natural talent, he is the top, he is a natural talent,” he added, according to a translation from the Guardian. In the past, Trump has hinted that tapping Kushner for the role was a natural choice, saying his “knows the region, knows the people, knows the players. ” Kushner was the chief speech writer for Trump’s address to Israel lobby AIPAC, and had a hand in Trump’s foreign policy throughout his campaign. Israeli ministers have hailed the prospect of Kushner as peace broker. “We would be so happy if someone could bring peace to the Middle East. We welcome him,” Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely said last month. Israel’s Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman echoed Hotevely, saying, “What we know, he’s a really tough, smart guy, and we hope he will bring new energy to our region. ” Kushner and his wife, Trump’s daughter Ivanka, are Orthodox Jews. Speaking to Bild, Trump slammed the Obama administration’s decision to forego the U. S. veto on an UN Security Council resolution as “terrible. ” He added that he hoped Britain would use its veto against any additional resolution in the next few days, saying he wasn’t sure the U. S. would play ball despite Secretary of State John Kerry’s assurances to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during Sunday’s peace summit in Paris that the Obama administration would prevent further action at the UN. “I’m not sure if the U. S. would do so — extraordinarily enough. They won’t do it, right? Do you believe the U. S. will place a veto?” he said, according to the Guardian’s translation. “I have Jewish friends who organized a donor event for Obama. I say to them: ‘What on earth are you doing? Okay — what are you doing? ’” he added. | 1 |
We Are Change
In this latest Project Veritas video an undercover journalist is offered Huma Abedin’s ballot while wearing a full burka and not even questioned.
She is then told that she can vote via a paper ballot instead of voting with a voting machine. Alan Schulkin, a Democratic Elections Commissioner in NYC then explains on video how voter fraud can be committed when people wear burkas inside polling locations on Election Day.
The video starts with the undercover PV journalist talking to Alan Schulkin, the Democratic Elections Commissioner in NYC in which the journalist says, “Not only just voter ID because of voting twice, but people can cover their faces, you know what I’m saying?”
Alan Schulkin responds, “Well the Muslims can do that too. You don’t know who they are.”
The PV journalist then proceeds to test out the information that Alan Schulkin gave to her. An election official then questions the journalist dressed in full burka.
“Do you know where you’re going?” The journalist responds, “No.”
The official then asks the PV journalist for her address in which she responds “254 Park Avenue South.”
The election official then gives the PV journalist a number in line. The video cuts back to Alan Schulkin and the PV journalist’s conversation in which the PV journalist says, “Especially, all those burkas someone could claim, oh it’s my religion, but then you don’t know if they are pretending or not.”
Alan Schulkin responds “Exactly!”
The journalist then proceeds to vote under the name “Huma Abedin,” after talking to an election official who greets her with “Good morning, last name?”
The PV journalist responds, “Abedin”
What follows is shocking, “Since we don’t have your name in the book. You can fill out an affidavit ballot. Ok?” the official says.
The official then asks the PV journalist if she is “Democrat or Republican?” The journalist responds troll-fully “Huma Abedin is a registered Democrat.”
The election official then responds “I don’t have your name in the book but you can vote with a paper ballot.”
The segment then cuts back to Alan Schulkin in which he makes a racist comment about Muslims.
“They detonate bombs in public schools which we’re using that could disrupt the whole election.”
The PV journalist responds “Yeah but they could do it wearing a burka. But then no one could say oh wait let me see your voter ID because they don’t have ID because they don’t want to discriminate because they are wearing a burka.”
Schulkin responds again agreeing with the journalist “exactly” he says.
She then continues to explain. “But no one can do that because your going to offend them, but then it’s like, hey now, I’m not a Muslim but I can go in there you know?”
The video then cuts back to the election official speaking to the PV journalist “But your names not in the book, for some reason it’s not here, but that doesn’t mean you can’t vote by paper ballot. You just can’t vote by machine.” the election official repeats.
“Okay so I can vote today by paper ballot?” the PV journalist responds.
“Yes, yes,” the election official responds.
The journalist then reiterates that she is voting as Huma Abedin to the official who still hasn’t caught on.
“So I can vote today as Huma Abedin, but just with a paper ballot?’
The election official then responds “Whatever you want if that’s you. If that’s the name you voted with last election, and you haven’t changed your name?”
“Okay Ill be back. I’m going to go call my husband Anthony.” The PV journalist then walks away and is told to “come back later” by the election official.
The video ends with a final cut back to Alan Schulkin in which he makes the statement, “Your vote isn’t really counting because they can go in there with a burka on and you don’t know if they are a voter.” He adds, “your vote gets discounted because they come in there with a burka on and they can vote. People think it’s a liberal thing to do, but I take my vote very seriously and I don’t want ten other people coming in negating my vote by voting for the other candidate when they’re not even registered voters.”
The post Project Veritas Undercover Journalist in Full Burka Is Offered Huma Abedin’s Ballot appeared first on We Are Change .
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There have been many prophets and seers throughout the ages with both wonderful and terrible predictions.
Some of the greatest and most accurate prophecies we ever encountered comes from the words of french seer Michel de Nostredame, better known by his latin coverted name "Nostradamus".
During the 16th century, he looked into the future and saw many great calamities engulfing the world, the world wars and even Donald Trump rising to power as President of the United States of America.
Conspiracy theorists are going crazy about these predictions, one of these even speaks of the beginning of a great and terrible war ordered by the "false trumpet". It talks about Greece becoming a landmark for immigrants and refugees which has been a topic at the centre of Trump's candidacy .
So what's gonna become of the world now? How big will the American Wall be?
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In a vote that bucks the liberal trend of eliminating school team names that reference American Indians, student leaders at San Diego State University voted to remain the San Diego Aztecs. [Instead of dumping the name, in a close 14 to 12 vote the group rejected a resolution to phase out the Aztec name and school mascot as proposed by the school’s Native American Student Alliance, the San Diego reported. Liberal supporters of the measure to eliminate the name and mascot insisted that the mascot, in particular, was “racist. ” But, supporters of the team name and mascot said that the school is keeping the glorious culture of the Aztecs alive with the name. “The resolution was based on a thesis by American Indian Studies Professor Ozzie Monge, who wrote that the Aztec name was inappropriate because, among other reasons, it was chosen on the inaccurate historical assumption that the Aztecs once were in the Southwest United States,” The reported. This is Monge’s second attempt to eliminate the Aztec name from the school. His first, in 2014, lost in a lopsided 24 to 1 vote. Despite the loss, the professor promised to continue the fight to whitewash the school’s tip of the hat to Aztec history and will introduce a resolution next year. Arguing in favor of keeping the name, Fred Pierce, an alumnus and chair of Fowler College of Business at SDSU, said, “Today, too often politically correctness goes overboard. ” SDSU Executive Associate Athletics Director Steve Schnall added that the Aztecs were “a proud people. ” “In our strength and conditioning room, the Aztec logo is considered sacred,” Schnall said of the team logo on the floor of the facility. “Students walk around it. ” Those who oppose the name and mascot maintained that using the Aztec culture was “inappropriate” and “indefensible. ” Whatever the final outcome of the vote, though, the final decision would be up to school officials, not the student groups. The ultimate decision belongs to SDSU President Elliot Hirshman. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 1 |
Print This Post After 3 Years of Suffering 19 Year Old Girl Dies from Gardasil Vaccine Injuries Kate was very tall for her age and a very accomplished athlete before receiving the Gardasil vaccine. She died at the age of 19 after suffering for years.
Health Impact News
The film VAXXED continues to be shown in new cities across the U.S., with the film crew also traveling to these cities to sponsor Q&A sessions after the filming. Producer Del Bigtree states that the story of the CDC whistleblower and cover-up told in the film is “ Bigger than Watergate. ”
The film crew also films parents of vaccine damaged or vaccine killed children who turn out to view the film and tell their own stories. Each city they go to reveals incredible stories of families who have suffered from vaccines, and wish they had known more about the risks before agreeing with doctors who seldom, if ever, discuss the side effects and risks.
In the video below, a tearful mother tells the story of the biggest decision she ever made and will regret the rest of her life, when she allowed her teen-aged daughter Kate, a tall and accomplished student athlete at the time, to receive the Gardasil HPV vaccine.
Her health began to decline, and the last 3 years of her life she suffered in terrible pain and had to be on a feeding tube. She tragically died at the age of 19.
Comment on this article at VaccineImpact.com. Young women whose lives were destroyed by Gardasil. More information about Gardasil Leaving a lucrative career as a nephrologist (kidney doctor), Dr. Suzanne Humphries is now free to actually help cure people. In this autobiography she explains why good doctors are constrained within the current corrupt medical system from practicing real, ethical medicine. FREE Shipping Available! Order here . Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? eBook – Available for immediate download.
One of the biggest myths being propagated in the compliant mainstream media today is that doctors are either pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine, and that the anti-vaccine doctors are all “quacks.”
However, nothing could be further from the truth in the vaccine debate. Doctors are not unified at all on their positions regarding “the science” of vaccines, nor are they unified in the position of removing informed consent to a medical procedure like vaccines.
The two most extreme positions are those doctors who are 100% against vaccines and do not administer them at all, and those doctors that believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective for ALL people, ALL the time, by force if necessary.
Very few doctors fall into either of these two extremist positions, and yet it is the extreme pro-vaccine position that is presented by the U.S. Government and mainstream media as being the dominant position of the medical field.
In between these two extreme views, however, is where the vast majority of doctors practicing today would probably categorize their position. Many doctors who consider themselves “pro-vaccine,” for example, do not believe that every single vaccine is appropriate for every single individual.
Many doctors recommend a “delayed” vaccine schedule for some patients, and not always the recommended one-size-fits-all CDC childhood schedule. Other doctors choose to recommend vaccines based on the actual science and merit of each vaccine, recommending some, while determining that others are not worth the risk for children, such as the suspect seasonal flu shot.
These doctors who do not hold extreme positions would be opposed to government-mandated vaccinations and the removal of all parental exemptions.
In this eBook, I am going to summarize the many doctors today who do not take the most extremist pro-vaccine position, which is probably not held by very many doctors at all, in spite of what the pharmaceutical industry, the federal government, and the mainstream media would like the public to believe. Read : Medical Doctors Opposed to Forced Vaccinations – Should Their Views be Silenced? on your mobile device! | 0 |
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A new study shows that after the Obama administration's Department of Justice (DOJ) collected billions in settlement money from U.S. banks after the mortgage collapse of 2008, it directed millions upon millions of dollars to several non-government organizations.
Peter Schweitzer, author of the book “Clinton Cash” and founder of the Government Accountability Institute , told Fox News's Megyn Kelly that tens of millions of dollars from the record-breaking settlements in the bank deals were sent to these ' charitable' groups , some of whose jobs would be to get out the vote for... Democrats:
“The banks are obviously eager to settle [and not go to trial]. [P]art of that settlement... will go to the victims of the crime you committed, but some of the money will go to pay restitution in the form of giving that money to non-profit organizations. These are non-profit organizations that are overwhelmingly progressive and serve as an adjunct to the Democratic party.”
One group he mentioned on “ The Kelly File ” was fairly benign-sounding:
“One organization that has received millions of dollars is in New York called the Asian Americans for Equality. Sounds like a great idea, right? The problem is, when you look into this organization which got money from banks via the Department of Justice, this is an organization affiliated with the Communist Workers Party. I didn't even know the Communist Workers Party was around anymore and, in fact, the organization that received this money is sympathetic to the North Korean regime.”
Indeed, the New York Times reports that many of the founders of Asian Americans for Equality (AAE) were active members of the Communist Workers Party, though AAE has since distanced itself from any modern-day ties.
In August, Andy Koenig of the Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce wrote in The Wall Street Journal about the giveaways by the DOJ to friendly groups, or as he put it, “a handout to the administration's allies” [emphasis added]:
"Some groups on the list—Catholic Charities, for instance—are relatively nonpolitical. Others—La Raza, the National Urban League, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and more—are anything but.
Many of these groups engage in voter registration , community organizing and lobbying on liberal policy priorities at every level of government. They also provide grants to other liberal groups not eligible for payouts under the settlements. Thanks to the Obama administration, and the fungibility of money, the settlements’ beneficiaries can now devote hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars to these activities."
Judicial Watch began an investigation in 2012, and here's what it said about how the Obama administration ladled out the vast amounts of money:
“The Department of Justice (DOJ) will determine which 'qualified organizations' get leftover settlement cash and Democrat-tied groups like the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the open-borders National Council of La Raza (NCLR) stand to get large sums based on the hastily arranged deal which got court approval in just a few days.”
The disgraced ACORN , the group that used protests to pressure banks into giving mortgages to people who couldn't qualify , was among those receiving Obama justice department funds. The group is now known under its new name, Mutual Housing Association of New York.
The DOJ also gave funds to the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which carries the very name of the legislation signed into law by Bill Clinton — The Community Reinvestment Act — believed by many to be responsible for the implosion of the mortgage-lending industry.
Some additional groups receiving the bank settlement money included:
Minneapolis High Rise Representative Council [ACORN affiliate]
La Raza | 0 |
GLENDALE, Ariz. — The N. C. A. A. on Tuesday “reluctantly” lifted its ban on holding championship events in North Carolina, removing its prohibition less than a week after the state’s Legislature and governor repealed a bathroom bill that had led to boycotts of the state. The organization, which governs college athletics, said in a statement that the law’s replacement in North Carolina had “minimally achieved a situation where we believe N. C. A. A. championships may be conducted in a nondiscriminatory environment. ” The earlier law, known as House Bill 2, or H. B. 2, had removed protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and it required transgender people to use bathrooms in public facilities that aligned with their sex at birth. While the replacement bill bars local governments from passing their own ordinances on the topic until 2020, it left regulation of bathrooms up to the State Legislature. The N. C. A. A.’s carefully worded statement left the door open to its continuing to make decisions on a basis and even to retracting hosting opportunities on short notice in light of new developments — as it did last year, when it moved several championship events, including men’s basketball tournament games, out of the state. The N. C. A. A. noted that it requires prospective hosts to submit “additional documentation” — it includes a questionnaire — about their ability to protect visitors from discrimination. At the same time, by providing a clearer blueprint of what is not and, now, is acceptable, the N. C. A. A. gave comfort not only to North Carolina lawmakers but to those in other states considering restrictions similar to those in North Carolina’s new law. In Texas, where next year’s Final Four is set to be held (in San Antonio) the author of such a proposal, known as Senate Bill 6, or the Texas Privacy Act, cheered the N. C. A. A.’s decision on Tuesday. “I applaud the N. C. A. A. for now agreeing that there is nothing discriminatory about the Texas Privacy Act,” its author, Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican state senator, said in a statement, “or our honest efforts to address the serious issue of privacy and safety in our public facilities and school showers, locker rooms and restrooms. ” While advocates on both sides of the debate have tended to describe North Carolina’s compromise as insufficient, the state’s business community, which opposed H. B. 2 on pragmatic grounds, saw the N. C. A. A.’s decision as a vindication. “We’re grateful to see that the N. C. A. A. has renewed its faith in North Carolina and the Charlotte region once again,” Tom Murray, chief executive of the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, said. “The events that the N. C. A. A. touches are far more important to our region than just the significant economic impact they inject into our community. We’re energized that we’ll be able to both partner with the N. C. A. A. and compete to host these events in the coming years. ” J. Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in Salisbury, N. C. said that as a practical matter, “the reluctant hesitancy but acknowledgment of North Carolina having these opportunities from the N. C. A. A. will hopefully start to smooth the waters in this state” and will, to outside businesses, act as a “signal to start putting North Carolina back on their plate of opportunities. ” Bitzer added that this was so even though the policy landscape in North Carolina remained ambiguous: The new law, he said, “certainly took H. B. 2 off the books, but it didn’t necessarily take off the policies, considering that the state still controls nondiscrimination policy. ” (Republicans enjoy supermajorities in the Legislature, he noted.) The two sides that struck the deal last week were motivated in no small part by a desire to placate the N. C. A. A. in a state where college sports are culturally vital (and where the flagship university’s men’s basketball team won its sixth national championship on Monday night). North Carolina Coach Roy Williams and Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski had publicly criticized H. B. 2. Both sides welcomed the N. C. A. A.’s decision on Tuesday. “We are pleased with the N. C. A. A.’s decision and acknowledgment that our compromise legislation ‘restores the state to … a landscape similar to other jurisdictions presently hosting N. C. A. A. championships,’ ” the State Senate leader, Phil Berger, and the House Speaker, Tim Moore, both Republicans, said in a statement. Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said in his own statement that while “more work remains to be done,” the N. C. A. A.’s decision was “good news. ” Critics of the state’s new law condemned the N. C. A. A. “The N. C. A. A.’s decision to backtrack on their vow to protect L. G. B. T. Q. players, employees and fans is deeply disappointing and puts people at risk,” Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, said. “After drawing a line in the sand and calling for repeal of H. B. 2, the N. C. A. A. simply let North Carolina lawmakers off the hook. ” Athlete Ally also released a statement criticizing the N. C. A. A. Hudson Taylor, the organization’s founder and executive director, had said that the N. C. A. A.’s rescinding of its ban would set “a challenging precedent. ” “If the N. C. A. A. is willing to go back to North Carolina when there is still an overt lack of L. G. B. T. protections and respect under the law,” he said in an interview on Monday, “then other states looking to pass . G. B. T. legislation know they will still be rewarded with N. C. A. A. events and can go forward with that legislation. ” Advocates on the right also continued to train a cautious eye on the N. C. A. A. “H. B. 2 was never as controversial as the media and liberal activists wanted us to believe,” said Francis De Luca, president of Civitas, which calls itself North Carolina’s Conservative Voice. He added, “We will be watching to see if the N. C. A. A.’s action matches their rhetoric. ” The N. C. A. A. is expected to begin announcing championship events through 2022 this month. Last week, the Atlantic Coast Conference, which is headquartered in the state and had joined the N. C. A. A. in moving its championships out of the state after the passage of H. B. 2 last year, announced that it was again open to staging such events, like its football title game, in the state. The N. B. A. which moved its Game in February from Charlotte in response to the old law, is expected to address the issue at its owners’ meeting this week. The N. C. A. A.’s boycott of North Carolina for championship events had intense reverberations in the state. The Duke and North Carolina men’s basketball teams had to begin play in the N. C. A. A. tournament in Greenville, S. C. rather than in Greensboro, N. C. closer to campus. An Associated Press study found that House Bill 2 could have cost the state nearly $4 billion over 12 years because of canceled events. | 1 |
Hints of an unidentified, extinct human species have been found in the DNA of modern Melanesians – those living in a region of the South Pacific, northeast of Australia.
Via AlternativeNews
According to new genetic modelling, the species is unlikely to be Neanderthal or Denisovan – two ancient species that are represented in the fossil record – but could represent a third, unknown human relative that has so far eluded archaeologists. “We’re missing a population, or we’re misunderstanding something about the relationships,” Ryan Bohlender, a statistical geneticist from the University of Texas, told Tina Hesman Saey at Science News.
Scroll Down For Video Below! Bohlender and his team have been investigating the percentages of extinct hominid DNA that modern humans still carry today, and say they’ve found discrepancies in previous analyses that suggest our mingling with Neanderthals and Denisovans isn’t the whole story. It’s thought that between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, our early ancestors migrated out of Africa, and first made contact with other hominid species living on the Eurasian landmass.
This contact left a mark on our species that can still be found today, with Europeans and Asians carrying distinct genetic variants of Neanderthal DNA in their own genomes. And that’s not all they’ve given us.
Earlier this year, researchers investigated certain genetic variants that people of European descent inherited from Neanderthals, and found that they’re associated with several health problems, including a slightly increased risk of depression, heart attack, and a number of skin disorders.
And a separate study published earlier this month found evidence that modern genital warts – otherwise known as the human papillomavirus (HPV) – were sexually transmitted to Homo sapiens after our ancestors slept with Neanderthals and Denisovans once they left Africa. While our relationship with Neanderthals has been widely researched, how we interacted with the Denisovans – the distant cousins of Neanderthals – is less clear.
The problem is that Neanderthals are well represented in the fossil record, with many remains having been uncovered across Europe and Asia, but all we have of the Denisovans is a lone finger bone and a couple of teeth that were found in a Siberian cave in 2008.
Using a new computer model to figure out the amount of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA carried by modern humans, Bohlender and his colleague found that Europeans and Chinese people carry a similar amount of Neanderthal DNA: about 2.8 percent. That result is pretty similar to previous studies have estimated that Europeans and Asians carry, on average, between 1.5 and 4 percent Neanderthal DNA.
But when they got to Denisovan DNA, things were a bit more complicated, particularly when it came to modern populations living in Melanesia – a region of the South Pacific that includes Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, West Papua, and the Maluku Islands.
As Hesman Saey explains for Science News:
“Europeans have no hint of Denisovan ancestry, and people in China have a tiny amount – 0.1 percent, according to Bohlender’s calculations. But 2.74 percent of the DNA in people in Papua New Guinea comes from Neanderthals. And Bohlender estimates the amount of Denisovan DNA in Melanesians is about 1.11 percent, not the 3 to 6 percent estimated by other researchers.
While investigating the Denisovan discrepancy, Bohlender and colleagues came to the conclusion that a third group of hominids may have bred with the ancestors of Melanesians.” “Human history is a lot more complicated than we thought it was,” he told her.
This find is supported by a separate study by researchers from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who analysed DNA from 83 Aboriginal Australians and 25 locals from the Papua New Guinea highlands. As we reported last month, this was the most comprehensive genetic study of Indigenous Australians to date, and it indicated that they are the oldest continuous civilization on Earth, dating back more than 50,000 years ago.
But the results revealed something else – DNA that was very similar to that of the Denisovans, but distinct enough for the researchers to suggest that it could have come from a third, unidentified hominid. “Who this group is we don’t know,” lead researcher Eske Willerslev told Hesman Saey.
Until we have more concrete evidence of this hypothesized third human species (some fossils would be nice), we can’t prove this, and we should point out that Bohlender’s estimates have yet to be formally peer-reviewed, so they might shift with further scrutiny.
And it could be that our identification of Denisovan DNA is more ambiguous than we think, given that our only source is a finger bone and a couple of teeth. But the evidence is mounting that our interactions with ancient humans were far more complex than we’d assumed, which shouldn’t be much of a surprise, when you think about it.
Just because we don’t see them in the fossil record doesn’t mean they didn’t exist – preserving the remains of something for tens of thousands of years isn’t easy, and then someone has to be in the right place at the right time to dig them up.
Hopefully, the more we investigate the genetic make-up of our most ancient societies, the more hints we’ll get of the rich and complicated history our species shared with those that didn’t make it to modern times. So much incredible findings of an unknown DNA surface, we may need to think twice before saying that we are ‘alone’ in the universe.
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Late last month, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, hosted a private for Hillary Clinton in Los Altos, Calif. along with his colleague Lisa Jackson, vice president of Apple’s environmental, policy and social initiatives. The private, event required a donation of $2, 700 to $50, 000. While Mr. Cook’s role was as a private citizen — it was not an Apple event — the message to employees about whom he is supporting for president is clear. The influence of chief executives like Mr. Cook over employees’ political leanings and donations, intentional or not, is substantial: It may not be an overstatement to suggest that a chief executive’s politics may be one of the most significant factors in swaying how employees think about elections. The results of a new academic study looking at the power of chief executives over the politics of their employees is stunning and perhaps unsettling. Three business professors set out to examine “how the political preferences of C. E. O.s affect their employees’ campaign contributions and electoral choices. ” The results of the study, which looked at eight federal election cycles from 1999 to 2014 and over 2, 000 companies, showed a statistically significant correlation among campaign contributions made by the chief and his or her employees as well as voter turnout. The study found that “employees direct approximately three times more of their campaign contributions to political candidates supported by their firm’s C. E. O. than to otherwise similar candidates. ” If you’re thinking, “Well, C. E. O.s and employees donate along similar party lines because they share common values and interest,” think again. The study uncovered patterns that show a chief executive’s influence is profound: “When a new C. E. O. contributes to different political candidates from the ones supported by the prior C. E. O. employees tend to follow lead and redirect their donations as well,” wrote the professors, Ilona Babenko of Arizona State University, Viktar Fedaseyeu of Bocconi University in Italy and Song Zhang of the University of Lugano in Switzerland. There is nothing inherently wrong, in most cases, with a chief executive or employee raising money for a particular candidate or party. Mr. Cook, it is worth noting, gives to both sides of the aisle, having just hosted a separate for House Speaker Paul Ryan in June. But the influence of a boss’s political leanings should not be underestimated. “Our evidence indicates that C. E. O.s are a political force, with potentially important implications for firms they manage and for the nature of democracy,” the authors wrote. “The welfare implications depend both on whether C. E. O.s promote their own political agenda or act in the interests of their firms, and on whether the interests of the firm coincide with the interests of its employees. ” Some C. E. O.s don’t just lead by example they actively solicit donations from their own employees for candidates and political action committees, which can create its own thicket of ethical questions. The Federal Election Commission, for example, investigated the way Robert Murray, chief executive of Murray Energy, had solicited political donations from his employees through emails and internal videos. Some employees told The New Republic that they felt pressured to donate, fearing that not to do so might risk their jobs. The Federal Election Commission, ultimately, found Mr. Murray hadn’t broken any laws. Still, the risks — and complex set of election laws — make political a complicated endeavor for those in the corner office. “The potentially coercive effect of an employer’s solicitation counsels in favor of avoiding the situation altogether,” said Harvey Pitt, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the chief of Kalorama Partners, a Washington consulting firm. “The logical alternative — having a very strong and clear disclaimer — doesn’t really work, since many employees might not believe the disclaimer, no matter how strongly it is worded. ” Tony Fratto, a former deputy assistant to President George W. Bush who now operates a consulting firm, Hamilton Place, took issue with the idea that C. E. O.s should remain outside the political campaign arena. “I don’t doubt that some employees feel pressure to align with the C. E. O. politically, but my experience is that in most cases both C. E. O.s and employees are overwhelmingly influenced by a candidate’s views or voting record on industry issues,” he said. “I encourage firms to do more to inform their employees at all levels about what political leaders’ records are on their key policies. I actually think that doesn’t happen enough. ” Alexander a professor at Columbia University, found in his own survey that “a quarter of employees reported that their bosses have tried to engage them in politics,” but reported that “about 7 percent of employees reported clearly coercive kinds of political contact at work — messages that made workers uncomfortable or included threats of plant closures, cuts in hours or layoffs. ” This election cycle, it seems that many C. E. O. s, especially on Wall Street, have chosen to be less public about whom they are supporting in the presidential race. Perhaps because of the lingering negative memories of the financial crisis or perhaps because this presidential election has turned so decidedly nasty, many executives have stayed on the sideline. In June, Brian Krzanich, chief executive of Intel, canceled an event at his home for Donald Trump after it was reported to be causing a firestorm among Intel employees and peers in Silicon Valley that felt Mr. Trump’s policies were damaging to the industry. Mr. Krzanich later said he canceled the event because it had turned into a without his approval. “I do not intend to endorse any presidential candidate. We are interested in engaging both campaigns in open dialogue on issues in technology,” he wrote on Twitter. When it comes to presidential politics, some executives privately say they worry they could see reprisals against their business or industry if they were to actively campaign for one candidate or another. “The risk of being on the record publicly against a politician is high, particularly if that politician may take retaliatory action,” said Brian Richter, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. That didn’t stop 150 technology executives from writing an open letter in July opposing Trump’s policies. The list of signatories included the leaders of Silicon Valley darlings like Slack and Box but notably was not signed by the current leaders of Google, Apple or Facebook, which typically face the most regulatory scrutiny. Clearly the influence of C. E. O.s and other senior executives’ political preferences on the people working for them deserves more scrutiny. In the meantime, while it is hard to know how individuals will ultimately vote when they pull the lever in November, perhaps a new election polling data point should be the preferences of their bosses. | 1 |
Dennis Rodman gives Kim Jong Un eclectic gifts that include ”Where’s Waldo,” Trump’s book, mermaid puzzle and soap. https: . pic. twitter. NBA Hall of Fame’s Dennis Rodman is in North Korea visiting dictator Kim “trying to open a door” between the North Korea leader and United States President Donald Trump. Thursday, Rodman did just that, giving North Korea’s sports minister a copy of Trump’s book “The Art of the Deal,” among other gifts, intended for Kim . Along with Trump’s book, Rodman gifted the North Korean dictator with two autographed generic basketball jerseys, bath soap sets, a mermaid jigsaw puzzle and a “Where’s Waldo?” book. Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent | 1 |
TBILISI, Georgia — Jobless and with graduation looming, a computer science student at the premier university in the nation of Georgia decided early this year that money could be made from America’s voracious appetite for passionately partisan political news. He set up a website, posted gushing stories about Hillary Clinton and waited for ad sales to soar. “I don’t know why, but it did not work,” said the student, Beqa Latsabidze, 22, who was savvy enough to change course when he realized what did drive traffic: laudatory stories about Donald J. Trump that mixed real — and completely fake — news in a stew of fervor. More than 6, 000 miles away in Vancouver, a Canadian who runs a satirical website, John Egan, had made a similar observation. Mr. Egan’s site, The Burrard Street Journal, offers sendups of the news, not fake news, and he is not trying to fool anyone. But he, too, discovered that writing about Mr. Trump was a “gold mine. ” His traffic soared and his work, notably a story that President Obama would move to Canada if Mr. Trump won, was plundered by Mr. Latsabidze and other internet entrepreneurs for their own websites. “It’s all Trump,” Mr. Egan said by telephone. “People go nuts for it. ” With Mr. Obama now warning of the corrosive threat from fake political news circulated on Facebook and other social media, the pressing question is who produces these stories, and how does this overheated, often fabricated news ecosystem work? Some analysts worry that foreign intelligence agencies are meddling in American politics and using fake news to influence elections. But one window into how the meat in fake sausages gets ground can be found in the buccaneering internet economy, where satire produced in Canada can be taken by a recent college graduate in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and presented as real news to attract clicks from credulous readers in the United States. Mr. Latsabidze said his only incentive was to make money from Google ads by luring people off Facebook pages and onto his websites. To gin up material, Mr. Latsabidze often simply cut and pasted, sometimes massaging headlines but mostly just copying material from elsewhere, including Mr. Egan’s prank story on Mr. Obama. Mr. Egan was not amused to see his satirical work on Mr. Latsabidze’s website and filed a copyright infringement notice to defend his intellectual property. Yet Mr. Egan conceded a certain professional glee that Mr. Trump is here to stay. “Now that we’ve got him for four years,” he said, “I can’t believe it. ” By some estimates, bogus news stories appearing online and on social media had an even greater reach in the final months of the presidential campaign than articles by mainstream news organizations. Since then, internet giants like Facebook and Google have engaged in soul searching over their roles in disseminating false news. Google announced that it would ban websites that host fake news from using its online advertising service, while Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, outlined some of the options his company was considering, including simpler ways for users to flag suspicious content. In Tbilisi, the rented apartment Mr. Latsabidze shares with his younger brother is an unlikely offshore outpost of America’s fake news industry. The two brothers, both computer experts, get help from a third young Georgian, an architect. They say they have no keen interest in politics themselves and initially placed bets across the American political spectrum and experimented with show business news, too. They set up a website, walkwithher. com, a Facebook page cheering Bernie Sanders and a web digest of straightforward political news plagiarized from The New York Times and other mainstream news media. But those sites, among the more than a dozen registered by Mr. Latsabidze, were busts. Then he shifted all his energy to Mr. Trump. His flagship website, departed. co, gained remarkable traction in a crowded field in the prelude to the Nov. 8 election thanks to steady menu of relentlessly and stories. (On Wednesday, a few hours after The New York Times met with Mr. Latsabidze to ask him about his activities, the site vanished along with his Facebook page.) “My audience likes Trump,” he said. “I don’t want to write bad things about Trump. If I write fake stories about Trump, I lose my audience. ” Some of his Trump stories are true, some are highly slanted and others are totally false, like one this summer reporting that “the Mexican government announced they will close their borders to Americans in the event that Donald Trump is elected President of the United States. ” Data compiled by Buzzfeed showed that the story was the third fake story on Facebook from May to July. So successful was the formula that others in Georgia and other faraway lands joined in, too, including Nika Kurdadze, a college acquaintance of Mr. Latsabidze’s who set up his own site, newsbreakshere. com. Its recent offerings included a fake report headlined: “Stop it Liberals … Hillary Lost the Popular Vote by Several Million. Here’s Why. ” That story, like most of Mr. Latsabidze’s work, was pilfered from the web. Mr. Latsabidze initially ran into no problems from all his cutting and pasting of other people’s stories, and he even got ripped off himself when a rival in India hijacked a Facebook page he had set up to drive traffic to his websites. (He said that the Indian rival had offered $10, 000 to buy the page, but that he had reneged on payment after being provided with access rights and commandeered it for himself.) Then the notice arrived from Mr. Egan in Canada, which prompted the company that hosts Mr. Latsabidze’s websites, including departed. co, to shut them down for two days until he removed the offending story. “It was really bad for me,” Mr. Latsabidze recalled. “Traffic dropped and I had to start everything all over again. ” Mr. Egan, for his part, said he did not like others making money unfairly off his labor. And he estimated that “probably half” the readers of his stories believe they are true because of the widespread theft by other websites. “A lot of that was conservative readers who see it picked up on other sites and believe it,” Mr. Egan said. “In many cases, they haven’t actually read it, they’re just reacting to a headline. ” Mr. Latsabidze said he was amazed that anyone could mistake many of the articles he posts for real news, insisting they are simply a form of infotainment that should not be taken too seriously. “I don’t call it fake news I call it satire,” he said. He avoids sex and violence because they violate Facebook rules, he said, but he sees nothing wrong otherwise with providing readers with what they want. “Nobody really believes that Mexico is going to close its border,” he said, sipping coffee this week in a McDonald’s in downtown Tbilisi. “This is crazy. ” All the same, the story proved so popular after it appeared on his site that he hunted around on the web for other articles on the same theme. He found a tall tale about Mexico planning to call back its citizens from the United States if Mr. Trump won. This, too, generated huge traffic, though not quite as much as the first one, which Mr. Latsabidze described as “a really great story. ” He insisted he has nothing against Mexicans or Muslims, whose exclusion from the United States is requested by an online petition that often appears on his websites and who are invariably presented in a negative light in the stories he posts. “I am not against Muslims,” he said. “I just saw that there was interest. They are in the news. ” Nor, he added, is he particularly against Mrs. Clinton, though he personally prefers Mr. Trump. If his site had taken off, he said, he would have pressed on with that, but “people did not engage,” so he focused on serving supporters instead. They, he quickly realized, were a far more receptive audience “because they are angry” and eager to read outrageous tales. “For me, this is all about income, nothing more,” he added. The income comes mostly from Google, which pays a few cents each time a reader sees or clicks on advertisements embedded in one of Mr. Latsabidze’s websites. His best month, which coincided with the hit bogus story about Mexico closing the border, brought in around $6, 000, though monthly revenue is usually much lower. Mr. Obama, speaking in Berlin last week, assailed the spread of phony news on Facebook and other platforms, warning that “if we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not” and “if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems. ” While Facebook does not directly provide Mr. Latsabidze any revenue, it plays a central role in driving traffic to his websites. He initially established several fake Facebook pages intended to steer traffic to his websites, including one supposedly set up by a beautiful woman named Valkiara Beka. This woman, he acknowledged, does not really exist. “She is me,” he said. He discovered, however, that such pages were ineffective compared with legitimate Facebook pages from real people, particularly Trump supporters, because they have so much energy and love promoting stories they like. Departed. co — named after Mr. Latsabidze’s favorite movie, “The Departed,” and recently redirected to usatodaycom. com — published dozens of stories daily, many of them similar to one posted on Nov. 17 with the headline, “This Is Huuge! International Arrest Warrant Issued By Putin For George Soros!” The story was not true and had already been published on scores of other fake news sites around the web. Then there are the stories that have a grain of truth, along with big dollops of exaggeration and extrapolation, like “Dying Hillary Says She Just Wants To Curl Up And Never Leave Her House Again After Defeat. ” Mrs. Clinton did say the day after her election defeat that she just wanted to curl up with a book. But she was not, as far as anyone knows, dying. In the prelude to the election, bogus reports about Mrs. Clinton’s health and highly favorable ones about Mr. Trump were promoted with gusto by Russian news media outlets and legions of internet agitators. This has stirred suspicions that the Kremlin has had a hand in the fake news industry, prompting American researchers to assert in recent studies that the online blurring of the boundary between truth and falsehood is in part the result of Russian manipulation. But Mr. Latsabidze and others here say they serve only their bank balances, not Russia or anything else. He insisted that his team operated entirely on its own and that it did not want or need outside help. He said that it took him just two hours to set up a basic website and that anyone with a modicum of computer savvy could quickly start hawking news — real or fake — online. “I did not invent anything,” he said. “It has all been done before. ” Mr. Latsabidze, who apparently has broken no laws, said that any crackdown on fake news might work in the short term but that “something else will come along to replace it. ” “If they want to, they can control everything,” he said, “but this will stop freedom of speech. ” For now, the postelection period has been bad for business, with a sharp fall in the appetite for incendiary political news favoring Mr. Trump. Traffic to departed. co and affiliated websites has plunged in recent weeks by at least 50 percent, Mr. Latsabidze said. “If Hillary had won, it would be better for us,” he said. “I could write about the bad things she was going to do,” he said. “I did not write to make Trump win. I just wanted to get viewers and make some money. ” In the months since he got into the fake news business, Mr. Latsabidze has landed a day job as a programmer with a software company, which he sees as a better future. “This is more stable work,” he said. But he seemed reluctant to quit altogether. “Are there any elections coming up in the U. K.?” Mr. Latsabidze asked. He was disappointed to hear that none were scheduled soon. But, advised that France will hold a hotly contested presidential election next April featuring a candidate in the form of Marine Le Pen, a populist, he perked up. “Maybe I should learn some French,” he said. | 1 |
Why would I want to listen to advice from someone like Steven Schmidt who advised a presidential candidate (McCain) who was not able to make it? How can he say Trumps priorites are off? He has out performed his opponent in the past month in regards to his campaigning for the WH hands down! The only reason so many people are quick to judge Trump and call him a failure is because so many criminals ( career politicians and their partners in crime) have so much to loose. I would imagine that some are even considering leaving the country to avoid prosecution once Trump is elected as POTUS. Afterthought.... This pitstop in DC for the opening dedication of this new Hotel can actually be seen as part of his campaigning as it shows people that he is able to accomplish what others have failed to do, under budget and ahead of schedule. You never hear about Hillary taking tons of time off the campaign trail or her lack of press conferences and interviews with the media or her lack of on the road campaign rallies. Trump takes a brief stop in DC and Schmidt claims the walls are falling in on Trunp... really??? | 0 |
Posted on November 2, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog
By Robert Parry, the investigative reporter who many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. Originally published at Parry’s Consortium News (republished with permission).
If Ukraine becomes a flashpoint for World War III with Russia, the American people might rue the day that their government pressed for the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s allegedly corrupt (though elected) president in favor of a coup regime led by Ukrainian lawmakers who now report amassing, on average, more than $1 million each, much of it as cash.
The New York Times, which served as virtually a press agent for the coup in February 2014, took note of this apparent corruption among the U.S.-favored post-coup officials, albeit deep inside a story that itself was deep inside the newspaper (page A8). The lead angle was a bemused observation that Ukraine’s officialdom lacked faith in the country’s own banks (thus explaining why so much cash). Ukraine’s anti-Russian President Petro Poroshenko speaking to the Atlantic Council in 2014. (Photo credit: Atlantic Council)
Yet, Ukraine is a country beset by widespread poverty, made worse by the post-coup neoliberal “reforms” slashing pensions, making old people work longer and reducing heating subsidies for common citizens. The average Ukrainian salary is only $214 a month.
So, an inquiring mind might wonder how – in the face of all that hardship – the post-coup officials did so well for themselves, but Times’ correspondent Andrew E. Kramer treads lightly on the possibility that these officials were at least as corrupt, if not more so, than the elected government that the U.S. helped overthrow. Elected President Viktor Yanukovych had been excoriated for a lavish lifestyle because he had a sauna in his residence.
Kramer’s article on Wednesday tried to explain the bundles of cash as a sign that “many of the lawmakers and officials responsible for inspiring public trust in Ukraine’s economic and banking institutions have little faith that their own wealth would be safe in the country’s banks, according to recently mandated financial disclosures. …
“Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, for example, declared over one million dollars in savings in cash — $870,000 and 460,000 euros — apparently shunning Ukraine’s ever-wobbly banking system. The top official in charge of the country’s banks, Valeriya Gontareva, who is responsible for stabilizing the national currency, the hryvnia, maintains most of her money in American dollars — $1.8 million.
“A tally of the declarations filed by most of Parliament’s 450 members compiled by one analyst, Andriy Gerus, found that the lawmakers collectively held $482 million in ‘monetary assets,’ of which $36 million was kept as cold, hard cash. …
“Some politicians seem to have approached the declaration as a sort of amnesty, revealing everything they have earned from decades of crooked dealings, in an effort to come clean. … One minister reported a wine collection with bottles worth thousands of dollars each. Another official declared ownership of a church. Yet another claimed a ticket to outer space with Virgin Galactic. …
“Another theory making the rounds in Kiev — where people generally acknowledge the inventive, venal genius of their politicians — suggests that the public servants are padding their declarations,” so they can hide future bribes within their reported cash holdings and thus offer plausible excuses for luxury cars and expensive jewelry.
Accessing More Money
Ironically, passage of the law requiring the disclosures of what appears to be widespread corruption among Kiev’s officials unlocked millions of euros in new aid money from the European Union that then flowed to the same apparently corrupt officials. Ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
However, because the Ukraine “regime change” in 2014 was partly orchestrated by U.S. and E.U. officials around the propaganda theme that elected President Yanukovych was corrupt – he had that sauna, after all – the continued corruption in the post-coup regime has been a rarely acknowledged, inconvenient truth. Indeed, some business people operating in Ukraine have complained that the corruption has grown worse since Yanukovych was overthrown.
Yet, only occasionally has that reality been allowed to peek through in the mainstream U.S. media, which prefers to deny that any “coup” occurred, to blame Russia for all of Ukraine’s problems, and to praise the post-coup “reforms” which targeted pensions, heating subsidies and other social programs for average citizens.
One of the rare deviations from the happy talk appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 1, 2016, observing that “most Ukrainians say the revolution’s promise to replace rule by thieves with the rule of law has fallen short and the government acknowledges that there is still much to be done.”
Actually, the numbers suggested something even worse. More and more Ukrainians rated corruption as a major problem facing the nation, including a majority of 53 percent in September 2015, up from 28 percent in September 2014, according to polls by International Foundation for Electoral Systems.
So, as the hard lives of most Ukrainians got harder, the elites continued to skim off whatever cream was left, including access to billions of dollars in the West’s foreign assistance that has kept the economy afloat.
There was, for instance, the case of Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who was regarded by many pundits as the face of Ukraine’s reform before departing last April after losing out in a power struggle.
Yet, Jaresko was hardly a paragon of reform. Prior to getting instant Ukrainian citizenship and becoming Finance Minister in December 2014, she was a former U.S. diplomat who had been entrusted to run a $150 million U.S.-taxpayer-funded program to help jump-start an investment economy in Ukraine and Moldova.
Jaresko’s compensation was capped at $150,000 a year, a salary that many Americans – let alone Ukrainians – would envy, but it was not enough for her. So, she engaged in a variety of maneuvers to evade the cap and enrich herself by claiming millions of dollars in bonuses and fees.
Ultimately, Jaresko was collecting more than $2 million a year after she shifted management of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF) to her own private company, Horizon Capital, and arranged to get lucrative bonuses when selling off investments, even as the overall WNISEF fund was losing money, according to official records. Ukraine’s former Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko.
For instance, Jaresko collected $1.77 million in bonuses in 2013, according to a WNISEF filing with the Internal Revenue Service. In her financial disclosure forms with the Ukrainian government, she reported earning $2.66 million in 2013 and $2.05 million in 2014, thus amassing a sizeable personal fortune while investing U.S. taxpayers’ money supposedly to benefit the Ukrainian people.
It didn’t matter that WNISEF continued to hemorrhage money, shrinking from its original $150 million to $89.8 million in the 2013 tax year, according to the IRS filing. WNISEF reported that the bonuses to Jaresko and other corporate officers were based on “successful” exits from some investments even if the overall fund was losing money.
Though Jaresko’s enrichment schemes were documented by IRS and other official filings, the mainstream U.S. media turned a blind eye to this history, all the better to pretend that Ukraine’s “reform” process was in good hands. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ How Ukraine’s Finance Minister Got Rich .”]
Biden’s Appeal
Worried about the continued corruption, Vice President Joe Biden, who took a personal interest in Ukraine, lectured Ukraine’s parliament on the need to end cronyism.
But Biden had his own Ukraine cronyism problem because three months after the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Yanukovych government Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed his son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors. Vice President Joe Biden.
Burisma a shadowy Cyprus-based company also lined up well-connected lobbyists, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures.
As Time magazine reported , “Leiter’s involvement in the firm rounds out a power-packed team of politically-connected Americans that also includes a second new board member, Devon Archer, a Democratic bundler and former adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Both Archer and Hunter Biden have worked as business partners with Kerry’s son-in-law, Christopher Heinz, the founding partner of Rosemont Capital, a private-equity company.”
According to investigative journalism inside Ukraine, the ownership of Burisma has been traced to Privat Bank, controlled by the thuggish billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who was appointed by the U.S.-backed “reform” regime to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a south-central province of Ukraine (though Kolomoisky was eventually ousted from that post in a power struggle over control of UkrTransNafta, Ukraine’s state-owned oil pipeline operator).
In a speech to Ukraine’s parliament in December 2015 , Biden hailed the sacrifice of the 100 or so protesters who died during the Maidan putsch in February 2014, which ousted Yanukovych, referring to the dead by their laudatory name “The Heavenly Hundred.”
But Biden made no heavenly references to the estimated 10,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians, who have been slaughtered in the U.S.-encouraged “Anti-Terror Operation” waged by the coup regime against eastern Ukrainians who resisted Yanukovych’s violent ouster. Nor did Biden take note that some of the Heavenly Hundred were street fighters for neo-Nazi and other far-right nationalist organizations.
But after making his sugary references to The Heavenly Hundred, Biden delivered his bitter medicine, an appeal for the parliament to continue implementing International Monetary Fund “reforms,” including demands that old people work longer into their old age.
Biden said, “For Ukraine to continue to make progress and to keep the support of the international community you have to do more, as well. The big part of moving forward with your IMF program — it requires difficult reforms. And they are difficult.
“Let me say parenthetically here, all the experts from our State Department and all the think tanks, and they come and tell you, that you know what you should do is you should deal with pensions. You should deal with — as if it’s easy to do. Hell, we’re having trouble in America dealing with it. We’re having trouble. To vote to raise the pension age is to write your political obituary in many places.
“Don’t misunderstand that those of us who serve in other democratic institutions don’t understand how hard the conditions are, how difficult it is to cast some of the votes to meet the obligations committed to under the IMF. It requires sacrifices that might not be politically expedient or popular. But they’re critical to putting Ukraine on the path to a future that is economically secure. And I urge you to stay the course as hard as it is. Ukraine needs a budget that’s consistent with your IMF commitments.”
However, as tough as it might have been for Ukraine’s parliament to slash pensions, reduce heating subsidies and force the elderly to work longer, that political sacrifice did not appear to extend to the officials making financial sacrifices themselves. | 0 |
BERLIN — Investigators undertook a manhunt on Wednesday for a young Tunisian with multiple aliases who had been denied asylum in Germany and was considered a security risk, linking him to a deadly truck rampage through a Berlin Christmas market. The attack on Monday killed 12 people and wounded 48 — 12 of them seriously. The Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the assault, one of Germany’s deadliest acts of terrorism in decades. The aftermath has been complicated by a botched search for the driver, who has remained at large. The revelations added to the growing pressure confronting Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who decided last year to open the country’s border to roughly a million migrants and refugees. A European arrest warrant identified the Tunisian as Anis Amri, 23, and said he had a history of providing false names and nationalities and should be considered armed and dangerous. German news agencies reported that the man had ties to Abu Walaa, a Iraqi Salafist arrested in Germany last month and accused of recruiting jihadists to fight for the Islamic State. A reward of 100, 000 euros, or about $104, 000, was offered for information leading to his arrest. It was not clear if the Tunisian was the actual driver. But the furious effort by the authorities to find someone who only months earlier faced deportation was outrageous, said Stephan Mayer, the home affairs spokesman for the conservative parliamentary bloc that includes Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union. The German interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, confirmed that a manhunt was underway but would not get into specifics. “Success counts, and not speed or speculation,” he told reporters in Berlin. Mr. Amri was recorded as having entered Italy in 2012, according to German news accounts. He traveled to Germany in July 2015 and applied for asylum in April this year, receiving papers that allowed him to stay in the country temporarily. He lived for a time in housing designated for asylum seekers in the city of Emmerich am Rhein, in North Germany’s most populous state, and in Berlin. At a news conference in Düsseldorf, Ralf Jäger, the interior minister of North said that federal prosecutors had been observing the Tunisian man — he did not use Mr. Amri’s name — on suspicion that he might have been plotting an attack. When the man moved to Berlin in February, state authorities there picked up the monitoring. The man was to have been deported in June, Mr. Jäger said. But because he did not have a valid passport, and because Tunisia did not initially acknowledge that he was a citizen, it was not possible to send him home. (Only on Wednesday did the Tunisian authorities issue a passport, he said.) Mr. Mayer, the lawmaker, said the Tunisian man had spent a day in custody pending deportation, but because the authorities were unable to establish his identity “beyond doubt,” he was released. “This is a person who apparently was known to be potentially dangerous and who apparently was to be deported,” Mr. Mayer said. In August, Mr. Amri was arrested in the southern city of Friedrichshafen with a fake Italian document and released a short while later, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a continuing investigation. An identity document found in a wallet left on the floor of the truck led the German authorities to seek the Tunisian man, said Frank Tempel of the Left Party. The document showed that the suspect had been allowed to remain in Germany but that he had not been granted full asylum. Several of the men involved in the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015, in Brussels in March and in Nice in July were of Tunisian origin, but the number of Tunisians in Germany is low. Mr. Amri is believed to come from the impoverished south of Tunisia, on the edge of the Sahara. His father told a Tunisian radio station, Mosaïque FM, that his son left Tunisia about seven years ago and served four years in prison in Italy after he was accused of setting fire to a school. The son was sentenced in absentia in Tunisia to five years in prison for violent robbery, the radio station reported. Tunisians make up one of the largest groups of foreign fighters in Syria and Libya and have held leadership roles in the Islamic State. Tunisian security officials say the militants have been active in recruiting young volunteers in Tunisia and have links to immigrant networks in Europe. A prominent Tunisian commander in the Islamic State, Boubaker who was wanted in connection with terrorist attacks in Tunisia and was linked to the January 2015 attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris, was reported killed last month in a drone strike in Raqqa, Syria. According to the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Tunisian man being sought in Germany had lived in the city of Dortmund with a man named Boban S. who has been arrested and accused of involvement with the Islamic State. Boban S. in turn, is reported to have connections with Abu Walaa, the Iraqi who is known as “the man with no face,” because he often preached in Arabic and in poor German, with his back to the camera. The authorities arrested Abu Walaa on Nov. 8. Abu Walaa, who has also been identified by officials as Ahmed Abdulaziz A. made his base in Hildesheim, a city of 100, 000 south of Hanover, where he drew an increasingly devoted following and even offered his own app in 2014. He was charged with recruiting terrorists and openly supporting the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Officials emphasized that they were not yet certain that the Tunisian man had carried out the attack, and officials cautioned against jumping to conclusions. On Tuesday, the authorities arrested a Pakistani man who had applied for asylum in Germany, but they released him hours later, citing a lack of evidence. Ms. Merkel and other officials have emphasized that they did not want the attack to jeopardize Germany’s commitment to a free and open society, and Foreign Minister Steinmeier reaffirmed that idea on Wednesday. “We want to uphold this way of life, and not let it be destroyed by anyone, not even whoever was responsible for what happened here,” he told reporters. Christmas markets in major German cities appeared to heed a call by Mr. de Maizière, the interior minister, to stay open. In Bonn, crowds continued to show up under the watch of the police. In cities like Dresden, the Berlin attack had its ominous presence felt with large obstacles to keep vehicles from getting among the stalls. The same was true in Vienna’s two famous markets, in neighboring Austria. Laws and traditions in Germany strongly emphasize personal privacy, and the identities of the victims of the attack have barely begun to emerge. One of the victims was a woman from Neuss, a city in North according to news reports. Fabrizia Di Lorenzo, an Italian transportation specialist who has been living in Germany for three years, has been missing since Monday, and her father, Gaetano Di Lorenzo, said he feared the worst. “We are here with my wife, waiting for the DNA results,” he said in an interview with the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. “We are waiting for confirmation, but I am not deluding myself. ” The daughter’s cellphone and transit pass were found near the scene immediately after the attack, her relatives and friends reported on Tuesday on social media. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the attack “may have claimed the life of an Israeli citizen. ” He was referring to Dalia Elkayam, who has been missing since Monday and whose husband, Rami Elkayam, was seriously injured in the attack. Another victim of the attack was a Polish truck driver, Lukasz Urban, 37, who had a wife and young child and who was found dead in the cab of the truck. He had been stabbed and shot. | 1 |
Iraq Iraqi forces gather near the village of Sin al-Dhuban, south of Mosul, on October 27, 2016, during an operation to retake the city from Takfiri Daesh militants. (Photos by AFP)
Iraq’s Joint Operations Command (JOC) has announced that more than 700 Takfiri militants have been killed and nearly two dozen others arrested ever since government forces and allied fighters launched a massive operation to dislodge the terrorists from the northern city of Mosul.
A total of 772 Daesh terrorists have been killed and 23 others arrested since the offensive to liberate Mosul, located some 400 kilometers north of the capital Baghdad, was kicked off on October 17, the JOC said in a statement released on Thursday.
The statement added that 127 car bombs, 27 makeshift mortar launchers, seven explosive belts and a large weapons cache were also destroyed during the mentioned period.
Furthermore, four booby-trapped houses, 397 explosive devices and five motorcycle bombs were blown up, while three tunnels, a command center for terrorists, 40 defensive fighting positions, seven airstrike-resistant bunkers and three Dushka heavy machine guns were destroyed.
The JOC statement added that 1.5 tons of ammonium nitrate, nine 120mm mortar rounds, 380 mortar shells, 61 Katyusha rockets, 31 missile launchers, three PK machine guns and four anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade launchers were also confiscated. Iraqi pro-government forces hold a position near the village of Sin al-Dhuban, south of Mosul, on October 27, 2016, during an operation to retake the city from Takfiri Daesh terrorists.
The Iraqi forces also destroyed four cannons, seized a caravan and four heavy machine guns and discovered two bomb-making workshops.
Also on Thursday morning, Iraqi security forces managed to retake the village of Wadi al-Qasab in al-Shoura district and al-Hamza village in Hammam al-Alil district, both south of Daesh-held Mosul.
Separately, the Iraqi Defense Ministry announced that 12 Daesh extremists were killed when fighter jets from the so-called US-led military coalition struck Mosul's al-Arabi neighborhood.
Fifteen Daesh terrorist were also killed and two others injured when US-led military aircraft targeted a gathering of the militants in Suwayrah village of al-Shoura district, the ministry added.
Mishraq sulphur factory extinguished
In another development on Thursday, the Iraqi forces put out a fire at the Mishraq sulphur factory, located about 30 kilometers south of Mosul. This file photo taken on October 22, 2016 shows Iraqi forces attempting to extinguish flames after Daesh militants torched the Mishraq sulphur plant, near the Qayyarah base and about 30 kilometers south of Mosul.
Last week, Daesh militants set the factory on fire in a bid to prevent army and security units from making advances.
There are reports that about 50,000 Iraqi ground troops are involved in the Mosul offensive, including 30,000 army troops, 10,000 Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and the remaining 10,000 from police and Popular Mobilization Units.
International aid agencies have warned that the military operation to retake Mosul has displaced about 10,600 people from their homes.
“Assessments have recorded a significant number of female-headed households, raising concerns around the detention or capture of men and boys,” said Lise Grande, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, on Tuesday.
She noted that a huge exodus of people from Mosul could occur within the next few days, warning that Daesh terrorists could resort to “rudimentary chemical weapons” as part of efforts to hold up government forces. Loading ... | 0 |
I will be offline a few minutes, I have to take a Terry. lloyd Lisco
Of course Electronic voting is corrupt, Why else would the crooked politicians want it? lloyd Lisco
When Exit poles are opposite machine totals, Does this raise a red flag? Voting machines and Idiot’s keep corrupt politicians in office. Corrine brown’s trial has been delayed to April 2017, She should be in jail before May 2017. ron_baker
I am not doubting these examples of vote changing, but I am at a loss on how one ‘knows’ their vote was changed. Is there a tally on the machine? My township’s machines have a paper ballot that feeds into a machine that reads the marked boxes. Not sure how I can tell if the machine is operating as it should or not. lloyd Lisco
Touch screen voting. Terry
Touch screen voting is heavily protected against these voter cause errors. When you get to the final page you may review your entire ballot, when you see the error it clearly tells you what to do to correct it.
Generally these issues happen because the voter isn’t focused on what they’re touching on the screen and it’s most often with first time voters or those who have difficulty using an electronic tablet. misterdawg
This isn’t BS, It happen to me when John McCain was running against Obuma. I voted a straight GOP ticket and when it came up to vote, It was changed to all Democrats, I had it changed and when we got home, I told my wife that I guess I had made a mistake and she told me that our son’s vote had been changed also and he had caught it to, before he had push the vote button. They have stole the last two elections I believe and are trying to steal this one too. The corrupt News Media, is in the tank for the crooked Democrats. Terry
How could they steal that which by your own admission you corrected? Where is the proof to your conviction of stolen elections or are you just ranting because the internet is free!
What in the world ever happened to common sense? Did some people stick their tongue into a light socket or something? lloyd Lisco
When you have 130% voters to number registered, Does that raise any questions in your small mind? Terry
If they’re not on the registered voter list, depending on the state they are generally given a provisional ballot that only gets counted IF it is found their voter registration was being processed or delayed because of a correctable error or need for verification. It often happens in areas where there is a surge of new voters.
You can untie the knots in your underwear now. You’ll be more comfortable.
See, you just learned something! Aren’t you proud? lloyd Lisco | 0 |
We Are Change
Scientists may have made a significant breakthrough in restoring human sight, as a woman who had been blind for seven years has regained the ability to see shapes and colors with a bionic eye implant. The 30-year-old woman had a wireless visual stimulator chip inserted into her brain by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) surgeons in the first human test of the product. As a result, she could see colored flashes, lines, and spots when signals were sent to her brain from a computer.
View image on Twitter The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, suffered no significant adverse side effects in the process, according to a statement.
The device, which was developed as part of the Orion 1 program by Second Sight, uses technology to restore sight by bypassing the optic nerve to stimulate the brain’s visual cortex, according to chairman Robert Greenberg.
It is designed for those who cannot benefit from the Argus II retinal system that was unveiled at Manchester Royal Eye Hospital last year, but has limited application, as it depends on the patient having some retinal cells.
This new system goes one step further by sending signals directly to the brain. It has the potential to restore sight to those who have gone completely blind for virtually any reason, including glaucoma, cancer, diabetic retinopathy, or trauma, according to the manufacturer.
The next step is to connect the implant to a camera on a pair of glasses, and the company plans to seek FDA approval in 2017 to get the go ahead to conduct these trials.
UCLA neurosurgeon Nader Pouratian, who implanted the stimulator, said the results of the surgery are promising.
“Based on these results, stimulation of the visual cortex has the potential to restore useful vision to the blind, which is important for independence and improving quality of life,” he said.
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On the Thursday edition of Breitbart News Daily, broadcast live on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 6AM to 9AM Eastern, Breitbart London Raheem Kassam will continue our discussion the first 100 days of the Trump administration. [Doran Cart, the senior curator at the National World War I Museum and Memorial, will discuss the Centennial Commemoration of the United States’ entry into World War I, which occurred 100 years ago on April 6, 1917. Ned Ryun, the Founder and CEO of American Majority, will discuss the recent reports about White House . Former U. N. ambassador John Bolton will discuss this week’s state visits to the White House, the Susan Rice surveillance scandal, and the U. N. Security Council’s response to the Syrian chemical weapons attack. Phillip Haney, former Department of Homeland Security official and author of See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad, will discuss how to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. Live from London, Rome, and Jerusalem, Breitbart correspondents will provide updates on the latest international news. Breitbart News Daily is the first live, conservative radio enterprise to air seven days a week. SiriusXM Vice President for news and talk Dave Gorab called the show “the conservative news show of record. ” Follow Breitbart News on Twitter for live updates during the show. Listeners may call into the show at: . | 1 |
Donald Trump and Vice Mike Pence plan to be briefed on the alleged Russia hacking situation later this week, according to Trump’s spokesman Sean Spicer. [“Once the final report on the current situation in Russia is made final by the intelligence community, they have asked for a briefing from senior members of the intelligence community,” Spicer explained to reporters on Tuesday morning, adding that they expect the briefing to happen later this week after the current President of the United States is debriefed. President Obama ordered the investigation. Trump and Pence began Tuesday with a presidential daily briefing and a national security briefing in New York. The search to fill cabinet posts continues on Tuesday, as Trump will meet with Leo MacKay, former United States Deputy of Veterans Affairs under President George W. Bush, as well as Dr. Joseph Guzman, a professor from Michigan State University and a board member of the Armed Forces Foundation. | 1 |
OpEdNews Op Eds 10/28/2016 at 12:50:20 Why Donald Trump is not as horrible as Hillary Clinton " and why you should vote for Jill Stein. Permalink (Page 1 of 2 pages) License DMCA
I could have named this article "Damage Control" -- because it essentially is about that, related to the lobotomizing dilemma of "lesser evil voting".
But let me be clear at the outset. I have already voted for Jill Stein . I had no other choice. I am firm in my conviction that to vote for sociopathic, narcissistic, self-serving, ruthless, guileful corporatists is an unconscionable act and a major crime against my country, irrespective of the convoluted rationalization which might attempt to justify it.
Now let me offer reasoning that goes beyond my "morally pure" posturing.
The accepted wisdom is that a vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Donald Trump. This analysis purports that anyone voting for Stein would likely be a former Clinton supporter, and such a vote would subtract from Clinton's total.
Even though Hillary's elitist, warmongering, anti-democratic, demonstrably criminal world view is diametrically the opposite of Jill Stein's, and I can't imagine anyone who's moved by the Green Party's agenda for the briefest moment being fooled by Clinton's phony populism, for argument's sake I'll accept this proposition.
While I consider both Trump and Clinton to be equally unfit for office, I do not for a moment believe they would be equally ineffective. - Advertisement -
Hillary has for good reason become the choice of the oligarchs, the MIC, the bankers, the media, the people who actually run the country. She will serve them well. She knows her way around the system -- she's been gaming it most of her adult life -- and has all the right connections. Which is why even many prominent Republicans have joined the feeding frenzy and flocked to her like vultures over fresh kill.
Hillary will continue her faux-populist bloviating to keep the stinky masses in line, while her closest allies, the rich and powerful, continue to loot the Treasury, hollow out what's left of the U.S. economy, and bankrupt the middle and lower classes.
Much to the delight of the neocon-infested Department of State, Department of Defense, security agencies, MIC, and media, Hillary will "get tough" with Russia and China, press the war on Syria and the rest of the Middle East , promote and spread more chaos, death, and destruction across the globe in pursuit of military conquest, ultimately world empire. It'll be good for business and pumping up the already inflated egos of the exceptionalists.
On the other hand, Trump will fall flat on his face. His trademark bull-in-a-china-shop approach to making deals has no chance of success in Washington DC. He has no support -- his own party has all but disowned him -- no connections, at least not the political ones necessary for promoting his agenda. Yes, the politicos drank his champagne and ate the food at his extravagant bashes. Who wouldn't? But they don't owe him anything. Nada! Trump's much heralded talents for making great deals will confront hostile Democrats, contemptuous Republicans -- a perhaps long-overdue bipartisanship -- closing ranks to isolate and defeat the outrageous and vulgar outsider who thought he could buy and muscle his way into political power. License DMCA - Advertisement -
He'll try to build his wall. When Congress gets done with it, it'll be a 200-foot white picket fence in Calexico . He'll attempt rapprochement with Russia. That will be sabotaged with a false flag attack, maybe dressing some disgruntled maquiladora workers as Russian infantry men and mounting an invasion on the U.S. -- probably in Calexico -- or by John McCain threatening to fall on a grenade or blow his brains out in the Senate chambers if America doesn't immediately nuke Moscow .
Despite his self-proclaimed success in the business world, Trump simply does not know the rules of the game in Washington DC. Unless he "fires" everyone -- declaring martial law and sending all members of the legislature to a FEMA labor camp in Montana -- he will either be the most ineffective president in history or be impeached. Maybe both!
In a phrase, Donald Trump as president will do 'less damage'.
Anyone who has read my recent writings knows that my greatest concern about a Hillary Clinton presidency is her truculent foreign policy . A decade ago, I might have believed that she was misguided. Now I realize -- as quite a number of others do -- that she is completely insane. She's become drunk on power, poisoned by surrounding herself with neocons and warmongering humanitarians , possessed by visions of herself as the Warrior Queen. | 0 |
Get short URL 0 8 0 0 GOP leaders of the US House of Representatives plan to vote in mid-November on extending the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA) by an additional ten years.
The current ISA, expiring December 31, 2016, imposes nuclear, missile and terrorism sanctions on Iran. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman, Congressman Ed Royce, will likely make the ISA the first order of business when the House returns to Washington on November 14, Reuters reported Wednesday. Royce said, "The Iran Sanctions Act was enacted to curb Tehran's support for terrorism and its very dangerous weapons proliferation. It should remain in place until the regime stops exporting terror and threatening us and our allies with deadly weapons. That's why I'll be introducing a bipartisan, long-term extension of these important sanctions," according to Reuters. © AP Photo/ Vahid Salemi Impatient Iran Issues 'Credit Cards' as US Dithers on Lifting Nuclear Sanctions Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress support extending the ISA, but there is no guarantee that the act will be approved in the Senate, where Republicans have 54 seats, as 60 votes are needed to pass the legislation. US President Barack Obama is unlikely to sign the extension, as earlier his administration asked Congress to postpone a renewal of the ISA. The White House asserted that even if Iran violated the nuclear agreement, the US has enough power to impose sanctions after the ISA expires. White House spokesman Josh Earnest did not say whether Obama would sign the act into law, stating, "I won't prejudge at this point whether or not the President would sign that bill."
In July 2015, a nuclear accord was reached by world powers to limit Iran's nuclear program, in return for the lifting of sanctions on the country. Currently, there are several guidelines in the ISA which allow foreign companies to do business with Iran, unless the US financial system is involved. The US Treasury Department specified that transactions are permitted with blacklisted companies and individuals, including terrorists, if they possess only a minority interest in those ventures. ... | 0 |
(mis à jour 18:29 26.10.2016) URL courte 1 406 0 4 Des centaines de Yézidis restent aux mains des djihadistes de Daech, notamment à Mossoul, en attendant leur libération. © Sputnik. Hikmet Durgun Les djihadistes plient près de Mossoul face aux Kurdes yézidis Selon Xeyri Bozan de l'Administration pour les affaires religieuses du Gouvernement régional du Kurdistan irakien, 70 Yézidis enlevés par les terroristes de Daech en 2014 à Sinjar ont été libérés récemment au cours d'une opération spéciale. « Nous avons réussi à mener une opération destinée à libérer 70 Yézidis pris en otage par Daech, des femmes et des enfants pour la plupart. Les terroristes les détenaient à Mossoul, à Raqqa, à Tall Afar et à Hawija. Ceux que nous avons libérés viennent de Sinjar. Nous les avons transférés (…) chez leurs proches », a fait savoir M. Bozan dans une interview accordée à l'agence Sputnik.
Dans le même temps, plus de 3 000 Yézidis restent aujourd'hui aux mains de Daech, affirme l'interlocuteur de l'agence. | 0 |
In Florida, early polling results showed independents favoring Trump. In addition, slightly more Republicans than Democrats have turned in early ballots, so it is likely that he is leading in Florida so far.
Trump led among independents in Iowa too.
One state where that has not been the case, however, has been Colorado. However, potentially offsetting that is the fact that, so far, men have turned in almost as many early ballots as women. That has not been the case in other states, and since men tend to support Trump at a higher percentage than women, it’s good news for the Trump camp.
These numbers indicate how important independent voters are in this election, and they prove Trump has more of an opportunity of winning the election than most liberals would have anyone believe.
Share this story Facebook and Twitter to spread the word about how Trump is leading among independent voters in some key swing states. What do you think these figures mean for the election? Scroll down to comment below! Advertisement Popular Right Now | 0 |
At a news conference in Trump Tower on Tuesday morning, the presumptive Republican nominee Donald J. Trump shared his thoughts about the political press and Harambe, the gorilla that Cincinnati Zoo officials shot and killed after a small child wandered into his enclosure. Mr. Trump had nicer things to say about the gorilla. The news conference — which Mr. Trump called to defend himself over questions about for veterans’ charities — was a textbook example of the candidate’s need to devour media attention and deplore it at the same time. The offense reporters committed this time: asking whether the money he said he had raised at a January benefit — organized in place of a Fox News debate he was skipping — had really made it to the beneficiaries, and if so, how much. A candidate said he would do a thing reporters tried to confirm whether he had. (Last week The Washington Post reported that Mr. Trump had not yet made his own donation.) This, to Mr. Trump, was an outrage, an affront, not very nice treatment at all. He said he had not wanted to claim credit for his deeds — which he promoted, allowed to be covered on television and referred to during the campaign — but the nosy press had forced his hand. So he showed up at the news conference with a list of donations and recipients, as well as a list of grievances. Tom Llamas, a reporter from ABC News, was a “sleaze,” he said Jim Acosta, of CNN, “a real beauty. ” The event, carried live on the major cable networks, showed how Mr. Trump uses his media omnipresence to control his message. By railing at the questions, he was able to send a headline to voters, repeated on the chyrons — that the candidate raised money for vets — while mostly pushing past questions of when he did it and whether his earlier claims had been truthful at the time he made them. The reporters pushed back, pressing Mr. Trump not just on the donations but also on his continued attacks against detractors in the Republican Party, on his on whether he is too for the presidency. Mr. Trump, of course, believes that his skin, like all other parts of him, is fine as it is. And he essentially promised that, should he be elected, this news conference would be a preview of White House press room sessions to come. Mr. Trump may dish out abuse to the press, but at least he’s a source of constant quotes. His likely fall opponent, Hillary Clinton, is more polite but also more guarded. (Or as a New York magazine profile by Rebecca Traister this week bluntly put it, “Clinton hates the press” — even if she doesn’t pummel them for the cameras.) This relative silence has helped Mr. Trump dominate airtime and make the news cycle his mirror. Mrs. Clinton has lately tried to fill the vacuum by doing more interviews Tuesday afternoon, she phoned in, to Jake Tapper on CNN and Chris Hayes on MSNBC. Both of them led their interviews by asking her what she thought of Mr. Trump’s news conference. Mr. Trump is not the first candidate to bash the news media while craving its attention. He’s just made the contradiction, like everything he builds, bigger and gaudier. He’s collected, by a New York Times estimate, $2 billion in free media. And he attacks, mocks and threatens news outlets when they aren’t “nice,” building bona fides with a voter base that has been encouraged for decades to see Big Media as the enemy. He can journalists, then turn peevish and furious. The whole impetus for the news conference, remember, was an event he held when he was angry at Fox News. Now he has nothing but nice things to say about Fox News, because he’s sewn up the nomination, and the network has become very, very nice to him. And then there came the question about Harambe, because it is 2016, and this is what we do now: We ask the reality TV star who may become the leader of the free world how tough he would be on large zoo animals. It was poetically fitting. For almost a year, Mr. Trump has been the gorilla whose unpredictable rampages have obsessed the news media. Now he was completing the circle by commenting on the gorilla who briefly stole the spotlight from him for one holiday weekend. For the record, Mr. Trump said that he thought zoo officials had little choice but to shoot Harambe. But, he added: “There were moments with the gorilla, the way he held that child, it was almost like a mother with a baby. It looked so beautiful and calm. And then there were moments when it looked pretty dangerous. ” So it is with Mr. Trump and the news media, and their volatile symbiosis. Tuesday morning, he was in raging silverback mode, glowering, posturing and verbally dragging the press around his gilded Manhattan lair. But viewed from another vantage point, it can look as if he were holding them very close. | 1 |
posted by Eddie One of the world’s largest travel sites announced that it will no longer sell tickets to “attractions” that exploit and put wild or endangered animals at risk. This is big news. After six months of meeting with the animal rights organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Association of Zoos and Aquariums (A.Z.A.), Global Wildlife Conservation (G.W.C.) and a few others, one of the world’s largest travel websites announced that it will no longer sell tickets to animal attractions that exploit and may put endangered or wild animals at risk. This means tourists will no longer be afforded the option to ride elephants, pet tigers, or swim with dolphins – at least not through TripAdvisor. The purpose is to take a stand against activities that exploit wild animals and, ultimately, improve the creatures’ well-being. After all, dolphins and elephants held in captivity for entertainment purposes can suffer severe physical and psychological damage, according to various animal rights groups. Says Stephanie Shaw, a corporate liaison for PETA: “TripAdvisor is a leader in the industry and we understand and applaud that this is a precedent-setting move.” The NY Times reports that the site will also launch an education portal to help educate travelers about animal-welfare concerns and why they shouldn’t be disappointed about not being offered a chance to visit with wild animals. As True Activist has mentioned in the past, the processes required to ‘tame’ wild animals are often barbaric and cruel to the beasts involved, which is why they should not be supported by those who are advocates for equality. Read more about how elephants’ spirits are “broken” here . “We believe the end result of our efforts will be enabling travelers to make more thoughtful choices about whether to visit an animal attraction and to write more meaningful reviews about those attractions,” says TripAdvisor’s chief executive and co-founder, Stephen Kaufer. The site will stop selling tickets to some attractions immediately, but the majority of booking policy changes will be implemented in early 2017. The company says that there will also be an appeals process for the hundreds of affected attractions should they be able to prove they are within the new policy. If you’re an avid traveler and are an advocate for the animals, you have one more reason to support TripAdvisor. In the past, the conscious agency has prohibited listing or posting reviews of blood sports such as bullfights and canned hunts. What are your thoughts? Please comment below and share this news! source: | 0 |
Posted on January 23, 2012 by Dr. Eowyn | 10 Comments While we were transfixed and distracted by the Newt vs. Mitt drama in South Carolina, Obama has quietly begun war with Iran — without informing the American people (or Congress?).
This is the startling assertion made by James Rickards in an interview on January 13 with King World News.
Rickards is a Senior Managing Director of Tangent Capital in New York, whose advisory clients include government directorates around the world. He is the author of Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Global Crisis (Penguin/Portfolio, 2011). Rickards is also the man who had negotiated the release of American hostages from Iran in 1981, and continues to be involved in US national security issues and the Department of Defense.
This is what Rickards told King World News about the situation in Iran: “The fact that we, meaning the United States, are on a path to a war with Iran is very clear at this point. It does seem the countdown has begun and it’s coming to a head sooner rather than later. Things are moving very quickly. General Martin Dempsey, who is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has arrived in Israel and Israel is integrating itself with the U.S. European Command or EUCOM. So, at this point, the integration of the Israeli and the US operational capability, including NATO based in Europe, is very far along. There are an enormous number of US troops in Israel. I don’t know if people realize that, but they are operating the THAAD system (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). They oversee weapons that will shoot down incoming Iranian missiles. There are joint exercises going on between the US and Israel. At the same time Iran is conducting war games. There are a lot of moving pieces on the chessboard at this point. This is not just war gaming or thinking about what might happen, the pieces have actually begun to move on the chessboard. For Israel this is really existential. The US would really like to see a world where Iran did not have nuclear weapons, but for Israel it is not a preference. If Iran gets nuclear weapons, Iran has said they will burn Israel to the ground. So, this is not just a strategic rebalancing, this is life or death for the Israelis….. All of the information I have is that the US is going to do it (attack Iran). So the tension between Israel and the United States is being resolved in favor of letting the US actually launch the attack. Part of the reason for this is the retaliation vector. If the US attacks and Israel keeps out, then Iran has no justification for attacking Israel. They (Iran) will attack US targets in the Middle-East, but we’re ready for that, we’re prepared for that. We will suppress the missiles and their air force is a joke, we’ll take that out in the first day. But they do have a serious missile capability. We’ll need anti-missile warfare and we will need to strike those bases. We will need to do a lot of other damage to Iran, cyber warfare, take down the power grid, take down the command and control structure. Do whatever we can to stop them from attacking our assets in the Middle-East. This war will be fought with air power, sea power, cyberwarfare, financial warfare, sabotage, special operation, assassination, things like that. This is already going on. As an example, yesterday a prominent Iranian nuclear scientist had an unlucky encounter with a magnet bomb. So this war is already being fought. The other day the United States sanctioned the Central Bank of Iran. By the way, we’ve been sanctioning them for years, but we’ve been dialing it up little by little. It’s like the frog that’s boiled in a pot of water and doesn’t know until it’s too late that the water is getting hot. President Obama sanctioned the central bank about a week ago. The Iranian currency, the rial, dropped 30% in a single day. Hyperinflation has broken out in Iran. This is financial warfare. My point to the listeners is this is not theoretical, this is not a war game, not an exercise, it’s happening now and the clock is ticking.” USS Abraham Lincoln
Rickards’ startling claim is verified by the UK’s Telegraph this morning .
In defiance of Iran’s threat to close the critical Strait of Hormuz, the United States, Britain, and France have deployed six warships to the Strait, led by the USS Abraham Lincoln. The 100,000 ton nuclear-powered aircraft carrier entered the Persian Gulf yesterday.
That we are at war with Iran is also confirmed by a defense expert in the Australian government, a member of a military-strategic e-mail list I’m on. This is what he wrote about Rickards’ claim: “Got back from leave today and had our first major brief. The interesting thing to come out of it was that everyone in the 4 Eyes community regard ourselves at being in warlike mode, even though there is no ‘declared’ war. We are at war. It’s just that the general public can’t see it. We are certainly of the view that we have been at a cyber war for the last 12 years.”
God help us. | 0 |
The political climate of the current U.S. election has changed dramatically in the past year, and the biggest evidence of this is the horrifying language that many Trump supporters use to express... | 0 |
Friday, 11 November 2016 Beward England, drunken maniacs like this have breached the border!
English custom's authorities, police and military are on red alert after a border invasion of ginger-headed (Not Harry he's got other problems), kilt wearing, whisky smelling, bagpipe playing Scots entered the country today in seek of revenge!
OK, Brexit was hard enough to take, but the thought of losing to the "Old Enemy" at a game of footy in Wembley, tipped the scales and caused a full scale invasion!
In the night thousands of wild, pissed-up Scottish troops were thwarted by English border control officers as they scaled Hadrian's barb-wired wall (in a kilt? OUCH!). Others, attempted to illegally enter the country through needle-hole border controls. The queues got larger and larger as one Scottish rebel known better as Robby-Rave-heart, stormed a barrier formed by English troops single-handed hurling bottles of his favourite brew, whisky of course, donated by Jim Beam (?) deemed tasteless and worthless compared to real Scotch, but booze is booze even if it comes from the US the Scots say!
Tension and nationalistic emotions boiled over through the night as stubborn English troops refused to surrender, but still a few drunken maniacs got through. Scottish National Party / SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon, then entered the fray, raised her kilt revealing her pussy dyed in family tartan, and this was enough to shock the English troops into surrender as a Scottish tsunami forcibly entered England and is now heading for the Sassenach capital in full force!
English PM, Theresa May, has declared England a disaster zone (has been since 1966) and warned all real-English people (are there any left?) not to confront red-headed maniacs heading south, flashing their ginger cojones; they could be life threatening! Make Jaggedone's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!) | 0 |
As companies push workers to pay more for their medical care, millions of employees are facing a tough decision, choosing between high premiums and high deductibles. The choice is this: Pay more every month for peace of mind later, or pay less and run the risk of having higher costs down the line. And increasingly, people are doing the math and deciding that the risk is worth it — leaving them responsible for thousands of dollars in medical bills and forcing them to make hard decisions about whether some care is worth it. In the last five years, the share of employees enrolled in plans has more than doubled, to 29 percent, according to a new employer survey from Mercer, a benefits consultant. Since the bulk of Americans receive their coverage through an employer, that means about 50 million people are enrolled in plans. There is no doubt that these plans can be a source of real financial hardship and poor medical decisions. They can lead to several thousands of dollars of costs, and the higher burden on working families has been a theme sounded by both Democrats and Republicans in this election season. Yet even people with a steady flow of medical bills have decided that the potential savings are worth the risk. On average, families saved almost $150 a month in premiums, or $1, 800 a year, if they chose the option, coupled with a health savings account offered by many large employers, according to Mercer. “Most employees are choosing to move into them of their own free will,” said Beth Umland, the research director for health and benefits at Mercer. Beth Walker, who signed up for a family plan with a $6, 000 yearly deductible with her husband, Ordell, a football coach, says she is “actually shocked at how much I love our plan. ” The Walkers were offered a choice of plans by Bluefield College, a small Christian college in Virginia, where her husband works. The couple was attracted by the new plan’s lower premiums, about $350 a month. That is less than half of the premium for a traditional plan, known as a P. P. O. or preferred provider option. The couple decided that they could sock away the $4, 200 or so that they would save to spend if costs arrived. And even with two boys, regular visits to specialists and prescriptions, the idea has worked. “For this year, it’s worked out very well,” Ms. Walker said. But she knows if one of her boys were to break an arm and end up in the emergency room, “We’re going to pay for it. ” The Walkers invest the money in a health savings account that allows them to accumulate funds year after year. Still, the move to plans has left many employees facing sticker shock. With a large deductible, they may pay full price for a costly test or medication, uncovering the real cost of health care. Parents, for example, were in an uproar over the $600 price tag for the EpiPen, the injector used to deliver lifesaving epinephrine to reverse severe allergic reactions, because they were having to pay for it with their own money. “If everybody was still in P. P. O. s, and low deductibles, nobody would have ever heard of it,” said Brian Marcotte, the chief executive of the National Business Group on Health, which represents large employers. Companies are often happy to let employees take the risk. They are viewed as a way of warding off the Cadillac tax, a controversial new charge under the Affordable Care Act that would make employers pay an excise tax on the most expensive health plans. The tax, which has been delayed until 2020, is calculated on the cost of a plan’s annual premiums and is aimed at discouraging overly generous coverage that may lead to people getting too many tests and procedures. In addition, the lower monthly cost offered by plans is one of the most direct ways to mitigate the bite taken out of workers’ paychecks for insurance — a pressing issue — as premiums continue to outpace wages. “The absolute dollar amounts coming out of their paychecks is very noticeable right now,” said Edward Kaplan, a senior vice president at the Segal Group, a benefits consultant. He said companies were looking at a wide array of techniques to bring down the share of premiums their employees pay. The encouragement of these plans varies, however. Large employers are offering insurance in increasing numbers, according to Mercer, but the overall share of employers offering them has remained relatively steady in recent years. As long as people are healthy, though, the high deductibles won’t hurt. That is why they are particularly popular among younger people, who are less likely to incur high medical bills and like the lower monthly premiums. Benefitfocus, a benefits technology firm, estimates that about 44 percent of millennials working for large employers, who have a choice, are enrolling in these plans, compared with 36 percent of baby boomers. The risk is that people with plans avoid care because they do not have the money to cover it. A recent analysis showed that workers were more likely than higher earners to avoid certain kinds of care when they were enrolled in plans coupled with savings accounts. The analysis from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonprofit organization, found that people even skipped free preventive services like flu shots and cut back on doctors’ visits. And there is widespread evidence that people have trouble understanding the subtleties of any plan. Many people liken the process of open enrollment and picking a plan to the pleasures of a root canal, said Shan Fowler, an executive at Benefitfocus. “The understanding of a P. P. O. versus high deductible is not good at all. ” As a result, some policy experts worry that these plans benefit some people more than others. People with chronic health conditions who may be older or simply do not have the resources to pay for their care may end up paying too much for a plan with a lower deductible, even when the plan makes more sense. “They’re much more likely to choose the most expensive plans with seemingly higher coverage,” said Saurabh Bhargava, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, whose research has demonstrated that individuals may not make the right choices. He worries that the plans, which allow some employees to accumulate large sums can also widen the gap between the and everyone else. “It can lead to pretty large transfers to the sophisticated from the less sophisticated,” he said. | 1 |
Iowa on Friday became the latest state to enact a law to protect the integrity of its election process, and the state’s elected leaders are already bracing for a legal challenge seeking to invalidate that law before it can go into effect next year. [Gov. Terry Branstad, a Republican who is the governor in the nation, signed the legislation into law on May 5. The bill, House File 516, specifies requirements to cast a ballot in elections, shortens the time period for early voting, and updates the state’s procedures. Acceptable forms of identification include passports, driver’s licenses, IDs, and military IDs. The state will also issue free voter identification cards to provide a form of ID for voters who do not have any of the other documents, ensuring that no one may be excluded because they do not fit into any other category. Voters without proper identification may still cast a provisional ballot on Election Day, which must be later authenticated before the ballot can be tabulated and added to the vote total. The law also reduces the window for early voting in the Hawkeye State from 40 days to 29 days. Many conservatives object to long periods, positing that it facilitates voters casting ballots while campaigns are still underway, before the candidates have been fully vetted by the public. “Protecting the integrity of our election law system is very important,” Branstad declared as he signed the bill into law. “We’re very proud that Iowa has a tradition and history of doing so, and this is going to strengthen our ability and make it more effective and efficient. ” In order to help voters learn about how to comply with this law, poll workers in upcoming local elections will ask voters for proper ID, but still allow voters who do not present proper ID to cast a ballot. The June 2018 primary elections will be the first election in which the new requirements will be mandatory. Additional provisions of the new law go into effect in 2019. The Supreme Court upheld an Indiana law in its 2008 case Crawford v. Marion County. The ACLU is threatening to sue to block Iowa’s law, saying it discriminates against racial minorities and other groups. Legal opponents have succeeded in blocking laws in whole or in part in Texas, North Carolina, and other states. These lawsuits argue that laws violate multiple provisions in the U. S. Constitution, as well as federal laws. More than 30 states currently have some form of law, and legal experts believe the Supreme Court is likely to take another case soon to clarify which requirements pass legal muster. Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski. | 1 |
Since we were children, we have been bombarded with propaganda that romantic love is the ultimate relationship ideal. Hollywood movies, Disney cartoons, and literary fiction all portray romantic love as an absolute necessity in any wedding union, but how much of that narrative has been a lie? Is it possible that our pursuit of romantic love is actually preventing us from forming a lifelong pair bond?
I began to question the notion of romantic love when thinking about its emotional root. Love is a fleeting emotion, and like all emotions, it comes and goes like the clouds in the sky. Why have I been taught to select my life partner based on an emotion? I’m surely not encouraged to use emotion when buying a house, applying for a job, or doing my personal finances, but when it comes to choosing a human being that I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life with, I’m advised by the establishment narrative to use emotion for the biggest decision of them all.
Another major clue that romantic love is a childish strategy for choosing mates is the fact that countries with arranged marriages, where partners are picked based on purely practical matters, have lower divorce rates that in countries where romantic love is used to select mates ( 1 , 2 , 3 ). While there are multiple reasons for divorce in any society, it is rather coincidental that the countries most impacted by notions of romantic love happen to have the highest divorce rates .
Romance was invented
It turns out that your desire to use love as a precondition for marriage or pair bonding is an invented construct that had roots in destroying tradition and theistic authority. Romanticism, a movement that began in the 18th century, put romantic love at the forefront, not just for individuals but nations as well, all from a central thesis of individualism. It wanted you to take the focus away from boring old rules and traditions to focusing on how you feel .
The movement came primarily from bourgeois youth, who used family money to fiddle away on idealistic writings.
…the Romantic Movement was nothing more than a protest against bourgeois conventions, bourgeois society and morality. To be extreme and flamboyant and unusual and violent even at the risk of becoming grotesque was the desire of every young Romantic. The Romantics were, in fact, bourgeois origins, who were trying hard to escape from their own shadows. ( Source )
[…] Romantics believed that men and women ought to be guided by warm emotions rather than the cold abstract rules and rituals established by Bourgeois society. ( Source
They sound a lot like modern day social justice warriors , many of whom are trust fund babies that lash out against “privilege” and “inequality” to relieve the psychological pain of being wealthy without having had to earn it. Combined with the fact that SJWs also trump feelings over logic, it’s clear to see how romanticists were proto-SJWs, whose individualistic ideas are just what the enlightenment needed to complete its destruction of tradition.
Romantics re-defined what relationships should be based on
Prior to the romantic era, companionate love was the relationship form often described in literature and other historical writings.
Passionate love is the arousal-driven emotion which often gives people extreme feelings of happiness, and can also give people feelings of anguish. Companionate love is the form which creates a steadfast bond between two people, and gives people feelings of peace. Scientists have described the stage of passionate love as “being on cocaine,” since during that stage the brain releases the same neurotransmitter, dopamine, as when cocaine is being used. ( Source )
Besides Song Of Songs in the Old Testament , writers were not encouraged to muse endlessly about passionate love, and there is zero evidence it was used as the principal factor in forming new marriages, but it’s this passionate love that we’re told to strive for, of feeling like you’ve been swept up in an exciting whirlwind, before publishing the gory details on Buzzfeed or in a bestseller like Eat Pray Love, authored by a woman who is embarking on her second divorce .
Women of the romantic era played a big part in elevating romantic love, and why wouldn’t they? It’s much more fun to get swept up in the excitement created by non-committal alpha male than it does to do arduous daily duties before you husband, king, and God. Women were given the chance to pick between excitement or responsibility, and we know what they have chosen.
The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding works in that they spoke to a wider audience, partly reflecting the greater distribution of books as costs came down during the period. The Romantic period saw an increase in female authors and also female readers. ( Source )
The modern era has doubled down on the notion of romantic love Jewish psychologist Robert Sternberg proposed the popular triangular theory of love , which is often used today as defining the love ideal. This theory has caused immense harm for stating that all three forms of love are needed in equal measure for a successful relationship.
Anyone who takes an introductory psychology course, or who reads a pop psychology book, will be exposed to this theory, and walk away thinking that passion is absolutely required in a relationship. If it’s not there, the presumption is that the relationship is no longer “consummate” and far short of ideal.
Believing that romantic love and passion are necessary in a marriage makes it that much easier to exit out of it, because when a woman no longer “feels passion,” she will walk away knowing that experts like Sternberg would agree that the relationship degraded and was no longer worth saving. And this is exactly what modern women are doing in droves. They have shown an appalling disregard for their wedding vows, especially upon realizing that they initiate 80% of divorces .
Romanticism and the rise of nationalism
If nationalism came out of the romantic era, and passionate love was a mistake, does that mean nationalism is also a mistake?
One of Romanticism’s key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements that would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning.
[…] Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became popular themes in the arts of this period. ( Source )
Upon closer inspection, it’s easy to see that the ruling agenda of today, globalism , is essentially “world nationalism.” Instead of loving your neighbor, and only those who share your unique traditions or race, you’re supposed to love everyone in the world , because it’s evil to think that there are large differences between a German businessman in a Hugo Boss suit and a Tutsi villager with a lip plate the size of a grapefruit.
The romantic ideal of nationalism is not Adolph Hitler, but George Soros , who insists on loving everyone in the world from the depths of your heartfelt human compassion. A nationalism based on genetics and local bonds will no doubt serve citizens better than a “global nationalism” where you’re supposed to care for those who are nothing like you.
How should men choose their life partners?
It’s clear that using romantic love and passion as your primary standard for long-term relationships will lead to failure and maybe even personal catastrophe. You’ll easily come to this conclusion by evaluating your past relationships and the mistakes you’ve made on women who you had intense passion for.
Instead, practicality must be the order of the day. You must logically evaluate any woman you intend to be with for more than a casual relationship by weighing her values, beliefs, and sexual history. This is easier said than done because we’ve been so brainwashed to believe passion is important, but it simply makes the most amount of sense. Find a woman the same way you would find a new job or buy a new house, and be wary of women who picked you based more on passion than practical matters.
It may sound cold to search for your wife like you would a business partner, but that is exactly what she is. The day-to-day life of a family home is far more business and economics than love, and so you should come to the easy conclusion that that’s what you must use to form a stable home.
Understand, however, that we do not live in a traditional and patriarchal society that aids us in our search for a virtuous woman. Instead, society is encouraging women to corrupt themselves, sexually and physically, in the name of empowerment and independence, making our search exceedingly difficult. This is one of the costs we have to pay for living in the modern world. Some men will be able to overcome it, but many men won’t, and will fail in their search for a woman they can create a family with.
But at least we are now armed with the knowledge of what it takes to have a more successful long-term relationship. It’s not romantic love or butterflies in the stomach, but a matter of practicality. Logically evaluate her past, her values, and her beliefs to make sound predictions of how she’ll behave in the future. From this evaluation will come a logical decision that is likely to endure, instead of relying on emotion, which changes as readily as the direction of the wind.
Read More: Unconditional Love From A Woman Is Impossible
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Anthony Weiner has checked himself into a clinic which provides counseling for those addicted to cybersex, exhibitionism, anonymous sex and porn.
The treatment program separates men and women during their stay and electronic devices are banned at the facility.
Weiner’s world came crashing down in September, when the Daily Mail revealed he was sexting with a 15-year-old school girl, saying such lurid things as, “I would bust that tight p***y so hard and so often that you would leak and limp for a week.”
In another message, the estranged husband of Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin told the teen that he woke up “hard” after thinking about her.
Weiner knew the girl was only 15 at the time.
An investigation involving Child Protective Services was launched and the police seized Weiner’s laptop (which led to the Clinton bombshell).
It was also discovered that Clinton’s team knew Weiner had carried out another inappropriate relationship with a separate underage girl as far back as 2011, but did nothing about it. | 0 |
‹ › Arnaldo Rodgers is a trained and educated Psychologist. He has worked as a community organizer and activist. St. Louis ranks low on list of best cities for veterans By Arnaldo Rodgers on November 9, 2016 veterans Find Your Job Now at HireVeterans.com
With Veterans Day coming on Friday, marketing meisters at WalletHub have released a list ranking the best U.S. cities for military veterans.
Out of the 100 biggest cities in the nation, St. Louis checks in at No. 79.
The listers noted that four main categories with a total of 21 key indicators, such as percentage of military skill-related jobs and availability of VA health facilities, were used to compile the list.
The only category in which our fair burg finished in the upper half, at No. 46, was “quality of life.” We were in the lower half for the other three main categories: job rank (69th), health (70th) and economy (80).
On the west side of the state, Kansas City was ranked at No. 30, fourth among cities in the Midwest. (Omaha, Tulsa and Oklahoma City fared better.)
Read the Full Article at www.stltoday.com >>>> Related Posts: | 0 |
All around the world, millions of smartphone users are preparing for war. Pokémon Go has sent players scurrying outside their homes to hunt cartoon critters, chuck virtual balls at them, and then groom their captured characters into a digital army. Advance far enough in the game, and players are invited to join a Pokémon team and stage at designated gyms — basically, virtual forts — where competitors descend to hold their phones with a grip, stare unblinkingly at the screen and tap furiously on one another’s Pokémon in a bid to seize control of the territory. Or not. Users can also just lazily check for Pokémon as they proceed throughout their days, stopping occasionally to scan the app for nearby characters and snapping screen shots on their commute or evening stroll. Marinate on this lower level of game play, and Pokémon Go feels less like a competition and more like a charming little interlude. In this way, Pokémon Go has become the rare app to unite the two extremes of the mobile gaming universe. One, the compulsive, land of Candy Crush and Clash of Clans. The other, its antidote — the serene, world of slow games. Slow games are less ubiquitous and straightforwardly tantalizing than traditional mobile games. They often seem to lack any point at all. Instead, they invite players to engage in simpler virtual pleasures — taking a stroll, watering plants, feeding stray cats. In the game Mountain, the user plays God, designs a world, then watches powerlessly as “time moves forward,” “things grow and things die” and “nature expresses itself. ” Download Viridi to start a succulent garden in your pocket. Then just check in every few days to collect new seedlings, water thirsty plants and watch them grow. And with the Japanese mobile sensation Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector, you can fill a little yard with toys and kibbles that attract stray cats. It’s like installing a window into a cat cafe on your phone. In these games, the stakes are lowered to nearly imperceptible levels, eliminating the weight of responsibility involved in actual caretaking. Barmark, a mobile app that invites users to play groundskeeper to their own virtual ecosystem, promises “no goals, no points, and no death. ” And it’s no coincidence that many slow games are set in a virtual backyard. If Pokémon Go has brought the thrill of video games into the great outdoors, slow games bring the feel of nature into offices, grocery aisles and subway cars. My succulents and strays grow and play for me in exchange for just a few screen taps a day. While the shiniest, most successful phone apps are designed to push our competitive buttons and light up our pleasure centers with quick rewards, slow games seek access to a different part of our brains. They soothe rather than excite. The author and game designer Ian Bogost has referred to this genre as video game Zen, the mobile equivalent of running a tiny rake across a desktop Japanese garden. David OReilly, the filmmaker and digital artist who designed Mountain, calls these games “relax ’em ups,” a clever play on their departure from the ubiquity of shooters. ThatGameCompany, the studio behind slow games like Cloud and Journey, strives to create “positive change to the human psyche. ” On a very basic level, I find that the simplistic tapping and swiping actions that propel the games forward do provide an odd, unexpected comfort. In Mushroom Garden, a middling game in which you grow fungi on a log, players swipe across the screen to pop the mushrooms out, a sensation that approximates the pleasure of pulling a Bioré pore strip off your nose. Other games manage to transmit a feeling of even more passive . Neko Atsume is my coping mechanism of choice. Six months after downloading the app, the simple act of checking in on my cats a few times a day has relaxed into a mindless habit embedded amid all my others — check email, check Twitter, feed cats. I’ve already collected each of Neko Atsume’s 56 cats — the ostensible point of the game — but I keep playing. It’s evolved from game into ritual, or even atmosphere. It’s the new smoke break. While desktop and console slow games have been around for years (the dreamy, moody indie puzzle game Cloud had its debut in 2005) there’s something particularly entrancing about a slow game on a mobile device. In the early days of the iPhone app store, Koi Pond became a surprise mobile blockbuster upon its release in 2008. The app offers a placid setting with just a touch of interactivity: It invites you to stare down into a clear pool of water, tap the surface and watch as a school of koi scatter from sight and then slowly return to repopulate the screen. The next year, the company behind Koi Pond released Distant Shore, a game in which you stroll along an endless beach, collecting seashells, writing messages to put in bottles, then chucking the bottles into the surf. As you walk, you find bottles written by other players from around the world and read their messages, too — it’s a random, rarefied form of communication you can’t often find on social media. Now, the app store is sprinkled with dozens of tranquil smartphone portals that are antidotes to the maddening intensity of traditional video games and the quickening pace of online life. But in another way, slow games are less a rejection of internet culture than they are a capitulation to it. By freeing up gamers from the burdens of extreme concentration and physical control, slow games allow us to fit a mobile game into every spare moment, to seamlessly multitask among Facebook monitoring and texting and the game play. And while Pokémon Go may beckon casual players with the opportunity to collect cute characters around town, the game can also seduce many of them into more advanced, obsessive, competitive play. These slow games, as the Davidson College professor and video game researcher Mark Sample told me, “fit into the interstices of our lives. ” The rise of slow games on mobile has allowed us to “play games about waiting while we’re waiting,” he said, adding, “It’s kind of perverse: Slow games aestheticize the experience of waiting. ” Slow games offer a release, but their escape is on a screen, too. Run out of lives in Candy Crush and you can check on your aloe plant, tend your garden and feed the cats. | 1 |
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by Yves Smith
By Don Quijones, publisher of Raging Bull-shit and editor at Wolf Street. Cross posted fom Wolf Street
On October 30, the French government announced, as quietly as possible, the creation of a massive new database that will collect and store personal information and biometric data on nearly everyone living in the country. As tends to happen whenever a government seeks to enact this type of “reforms,” the law wasn’t passed by parliament but by decree on the eve of a national holiday.
As France 24 reports , the new decree will affect 60 million people and “marks the first time the country has collected population data on such a scale since the start of the Nazi Occupation in 1940.”
“Unacceptable Excesses”
The move has sparked outrage from civil rights groups as well as French media, with weekly magazine L’Observateur describing it as “ terrifying ,” and daily newspaper Libération dubbing it a “ mega database that will do no good ”. The National Digital Council (CNNum) “laments” the government’s lack of prior consultation and highlights the “many concerns” the new decree raises. “In a digital world where code is law, the existence of such a database leaves the door wide open to likely and unacceptable excesses,” it said.
The new database, known rather optimistically as Secure Electronic Documents ( Titres électroniques sécurisés or TES) will store an individual’s name, date and place of birth, gender, eye color, height, address, photograph, digitized fingerprints, facial features, e-mail address, and the names, nationalities, dates and places of birth of parents. The aim — according to the government — is to make it easier to obtain and renew identity documents, and to aid in the fight against identity fraud.
Unlike a similar law proposed by Nicholas Sarkozy’s conservative government in 2012, which was shot down, the new database will only be used to authenticate individuals, not to identify them. In other words, it will be used to confirm that someone is who he or she claims to be, not to discover, say, the identity of someone whose biometrics have been found at the scene of a crime.
However, the potential for mission creep cannot be discounted. As an article in NextInpact points out , once the database exists, it is highly likely that there will be calls for it to be used for identification purposes, simply “because it is there.” There’s also good reason to suspect that a future government “will modify the aims,” as warns Gaëtan Gorce, a French senator and member of the National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties (Cnil) who likened the TES to a “sort of monster.”
According to today’s government, the biometric data stored on the database could be used to identify criminal suspects only if “violations of the fundamental interests of the Nation and acts of terrorism” are involved. But who gets to decide what constitutes a “fundamental interest of the Nation” or, for that matter, “an act of terrorism”? [That was a rhetorical question, of course].
A Hacker’s Paradise
Another major problem with centralizing biometric data to this extent is that you make it a lot easier for it to be compromised. What’s to stop an insider from copying this data onto a drive and walking out with it, as Snowden and others have, including those who took Swiss banking data to the French and German authorities for money laundering investigations? This data would then most likely be sold online, on the so-called darknet.
“No computer system is impenetrable. All databases can be hacked. It’s always just a matter of time,” thundered French left-wing politician Jean-Jacques Urvoas in a 2012 blog post against Sarkozy’s proposed biometrics super database. Urvoas is now justice minister in Hollande’s government and hence is directly involved in drawing up the new decree, which bears a striking resemblance to Sarkozy’s earlier initiative.
If biometric data is compromised, it is a far more serious issue than a compromised password or an account. You can create a new password many times. But you can create your biometrics only once. If they’re compromised, they remain compromised forever.
There’s still a possibility that France’s constitutional council will throw the new law out, as it did with Sarkozy’s. If it doesn’t, TES risks establishing a very dangerous precedent .
Until now the most extensive biometric data retention schemes have been rolled out (perfected?) in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan . Israel is also on the verge of creating its own centralized biometric database. But if TES were allowed to stand, France would become the first G7 nation to attempt to build a completely centralized, all-inclusive biometric database. And that would send a very clear signal — i.e. green for go — to other ostensibly democratic nations.
There’s also the fact that after Germany, France is the country with the most influence over the future direction of EU policy. The EU already has a biometrics super database called the Visa Information System (VIS), which is the largest shared database on maintaining public security, supporting police and judicial cooperation, and managing external border control in Europe.
If the elected representatives of the 66 million people of France can pass into law a completely centralized system of biometric data storage with absolutely no public consultation whatsoever, what’s to stop the European Commission’s ranks of faceless, unelected, power-hungry appointees from doing the same? Nothing.
Besides aspiring to becoming a pioneer in the collection and use of personal data of all its citizens, France’s government is also one of the most ruthless combatants in the global war on cash, which is progressing on schedule. The Alliance is in place. Read… Who’s Powering the War on Cash? 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 0 |
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