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Former President Barack Obama spoke to the Chamber of Commerce in Montreal on Tuesday, warning against income inequality and the concentration of wealth — remarks from a man who reportedly commanded $400, 000 a speech, or $ at that rate, for his Canadian speech.[ Obama said the world must do more to combat income inequality, noting that the concentration of wealth fans fears that governments exist solely to benefit the powerful, NBC reported. “That’s a recipe for more cynicism and more polarization, less trust in our institutions and less trust in each other,” Obama said. “And it’s part of what leads people to turn to populist alternatives that may not actually deliver,” Obama said in a thinly disguised jab at President Donald Trump without naming his successor specifically. According to the Toronto Star, not everyone could afford to see the man calling for the end of income inequality. “A hall laid out for a rock star, a stroll for giddy VIPs and video screens for the rest of the roughly 6, 000 who were neither sufficiently wealthy nor connected to get a seat,” the Star reported. “This was the scene here at a appearance nine months in the making: Barack Obama’s first address on Canadian soil — one of the few appearances he’s made anywhere since handing power to U. S. President Donald Trump in January,” the Star reported. “Hotly contested, planned and negotiated until the final days and beamed across North America, it was a strategic investment that may have topped half a million dollars and was meant to put on the map a city in the throes of its 375th anniversary celebrations,” the Star reported. The Star speculated Obama may have been persuaded to speak through his friendship with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who tweeted about the former president’s visit: How do we get young leaders to take action in their communities? Thanks @BarackObama for your visit insights tonight in my hometown. pic. twitter. — Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) June 7, 2017, Other dignitaries attending Obama’s speech included the federal cabinet minister and former astronaut Marc Garneau, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, and Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard. “All were seated at the table of honour, surrounded captains of Quebec’s business world, sipping wine at corporate tables,” the Star reported. “The more reasonably priced $375 seats started at a distance where Obama was just a spec on a faraway stage. ” Michel Leblanc, president of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, “refused to say how much they paid for Obama’s visit or what other conditions might have led to their winning bid,” according to the Star. “Obama has reportedly demanded a $400, 000 (U. S.) speaking fee for at least two other speeches,” the Star wrote. “One Canadian source, who was unaware of the payment details, said such a price tag — which works out in Canadian dollars to roughly $7, 700 for every minute Obama spent on the Montreal stage — would not be a great surprise,” the outlet continued. Meanwhile, NBC’s report reveals Obama is now striving to be an international community organizer. “Obama said that in times of economic uncertainty it can be tempting to turn to isolationism and ‘the politics of . ’ and said World War I and World War II were the result,” NBC reported. “He said the U. S. and other nations showed there was a better way “in creating an international order that was based not just on but also on principles. ” | 1 |
Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley discussed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s role in appointing a special prosecutor to investigate alleged ties between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and the Russian government. According to Turley, the underlying crime isn’t clear given the lack of evidence with the exception of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s indiscretions, which he argued would not warrant special counsel. Turley described it as a “ in search of a crime. ” “For weeks I’ve questioned the need for special counsel because honestly I still don’t see the underlying crime here,” Turley said. “You know, when we talk about the Russian influence and collusion, there’s not any evidence I’ve seen of collusion but more importantly, no one has articulated a major crime, as opposed to the reporting and registration violations of people like Flynn, which usually wouldn’t warrant a special counsel. But that’s the great mystery here. ” “You know, with Watergate that people have been talking about, there was a serious crime that began that led to the ” he continued. “Here you seem to have a without a crime. That’s what’s so bizarre about the conduct of the White House. It seems to be a in search of a crime. The problem with the special counsel is what will the special counsel investigate? But having said that, after they fired Comey, my view is that it’s changed, that we do need an independent investigation simply because the White House has created a credibility problem. And lots of Americans believe that there is an effort here to obstruct the investigation. ( RCP Video) Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
The “world’s first smart condom,” i. Con, allows users to track their speed, velocity, and caloric burn during sexual intercourse. [“Have you ever wondered how many calories you’re burning during intercourse?” asks i. Con on their product page. “How many thrusts? Speed of your thrusts? The duration of your sessions? Frequency? How many different positions you use in the period of a week, month or year? Ever wondered how you stack up to other people from around the world?” “Welcome to the future of wearable technology in the bedroom. Welcome to i. Con,” their advertising copy continues. “Utilizing a and sensors, i. Con will measure and remember a number of different variables during your sessions. Once your session is completed, you will then be able to use the i. Con app to download your recent data which is paired to the device using Bluetooth technology. Once you have downloaded your data, the i. Con will automatically clear its memory, making way for your next session. It’s extremely simple to use. ” The “smart condom,” however, isn’t a condom. According to the product page, “it’s a ring that will sit over a condom at the base, which you can use over and over again. ” The page goes on to claim that i. Con “will record”: — Calories burnt during sexual intercourse, — Speed of thrusts, — Total number of thrusts, — Frequency of sessions, — Total duration of sessions, — Average velocity of thrusts, — Girth measurement, — Different positions used (currently BETA testing — will have more info in a release coming soon) — Average skin temperature, i. Con is currently only available to in the UK and will retail at £59. 99. The product will reportedly be released at some point during 2017, though the exact date is currently unknown. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 1 |
President Donald Trump continued to cast doubt on the Senate testimony from his former FBI director James Comey, suggesting that his reliance on leaks to the media was longstanding. [“I believe the James Comey leaks will be far more prevalent than anyone ever thought possible,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday. He questioned whether Comey’s decision to leak details of his conversation with the president was illegal and cited the FBI director’s own testimony by calling him “very ‘cowardly. ’” During the testimony, Comey was asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein why he told the president that “would see what we could do” when he asked the FBI director to help “lift the cloud” of the Russian investigation off of his administration. “Well, it was kind of a slightly cowardly way of trying to avoid telling him, we’re not going to do that — that I would see what we could do,” Comey replied. “It was a way of kind of getting off the phone, frankly. ” Feinstein also asked Comey why he didn’t challenge the president defending his former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, when he believed that Trump was urging him to drop the investigation. “Maybe if I were stronger, I would have,” Comey said. “I was so stunned by the conversation that I just took it in. ” | 1 |
SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s Constitutional Court, which will decide whether President Park is permanently removed from office, on Thursday ordered Ms. Park to respond to one of the most contentious accusations against her: that she neglected her duties on the day in 2014 when hundreds died in the sinking of a ferry. Ms. Park’s presidential powers have been suspended since Dec. 9, when the National Assembly voted to impeach her. The Constitutional Court has until June to decide whether her impeachment is justified, either reinstating her or formally ending her presidency. Thursday’s hearing, which Ms. Park did not attend, was the start of that process. The legislature accused Ms. Park of a wide range of violations of law and the Constitution, including taking bribes from businesses. But for South Koreans, perhaps the most emotional accusation is that Ms. Park failed to protect citizens’ lives on April 16, 2014, the day the Sewol ferry sank off the country’s southwestern coast. More than 300 people drowned, most of them teenagers on a school trip, and the country was scarred by the catastrophe, perhaps the worst in its peacetime history. Ms. Park has been dogged by questions about what she was doing during the first seven hours of the Sewol disaster. She did not emerge from her official residence during that time, and her office has not explained what she was doing, though it has said she received updates and gave orders. In its impeachment bill, the National Assembly said Ms. Park’s reticence undermined the people’s right to know about the government’s activities. On Thursday, the court appeared to agree. “That was such a day for the country that most people will remember what they were doing that day,” Justice Lee said. “I am sure she has such memories. We ask her to give us a thorough account of where in the Blue House she was in those seven hours, an account of what official and private work she was doing then, and what reports and instructions she received and gave. ” A variety of government failures contributed to the Sewol disaster, and it deepened distrust of Ms. Park’s leadership. Lurid rumors have since spread about what she was doing during those hours one such story says she was having a romantic liaison, another that she was undergoing plastic surgery. No evidence has emerged to support either allegation, both of which her office has denied. Her government has sued and even arrested people who have been accused of spreading such rumors. Though Ms. Park’s office said she was kept up to date about the disaster, her visit to an emergency management center later that day led some to conclude that she was not fully informed. At one point, she asked why it was difficult to find missing passengers when they had life jackets an official had to remind her that the passengers were trapped inside the ship, which had overturned and all but disappeared below the water. The hearing on Thursday was brief and largely procedural, attended by only three of the court’s nine justices, as well as lawyers representing Ms. Park and those appointed by the National Assembly to act as prosecutors. Two lone protesters stood outside the court, one supporting Ms. Park and the other calling for her impeachment, with a sign reading, “The 304 who died in the Sewol ferry are watching you!” The next hearing was set for Tuesday. The move to impeach Ms. Park stemmed originally from allegations that she conspired with a longtime friend and confidante, Choi to force big businesses to donate tens of millions of dollars to two foundations that Ms. Choi controlled. Ms. Park was also accused of letting Ms. Choi interfere with government affairs, despite having no official post. Ms. Park’s approval ratings dropped to record lows in the weeks before her impeachment, and huge crowds filled central Seoul calling on her to resign or be removed from office. Prosecutors have indicted Ms. Choi on extortion and other charges and identified Ms. Park as an accomplice, though as a sitting president she cannot be indicted. The National Assembly is conducting its own investigation of the scandal, as is a special prosecutor. Both Ms. Park and Ms. Choi have denied breaking the law. Prime Minister Hwang is serving as acting president while Ms. Park is suspended. If the court removes her from office, a presidential election would be held 60 days later. On Thursday, the special prosecutor’s office said it was asking the authorities in Germany to detain and extradite Ms. Choi’s daughter, Chung who is believed to be there. The Foreign Ministry said Ms. Chung’s passport would be invalidated if she did not return to South Korea. The special prosecutor is looking into allegations that Ms. Choi used millions of dollars from Samsung, South Korea’s largest conglomerate, to finance her daughter’s equestrian career and a luxurious lifestyle in Germany. A special prosecutor in South Korea has obtained a warrant to detain Ms. Chung for questioning. She is accused of illegally enrolling in Ewha Womans University in Seoul. | 1 |
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A suicide bomber struck a hospital in the southwestern Pakistani city of Quetta on Monday, officials said, killing at least 74 people in another devastating attack on civilians in a city that has become a byword for massacre and struggle over the past decade. Before the bomber attacked, dozens of lawyers had gathered at the hospital to condemn the shooting death hours earlier of a prominent colleague, officials said. They feared that the death toll from the bombing would rise, given the vast crowd of people seriously wounded in the attack. Late on Monday evening, a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban, claimed responsibility for the shooting and the bombing. “Our attacks will continue till the imposition of the Islamic system in the country,” the statement of responsibility read. The bombing was also claimed by the regional branch of the Islamic State, according to the Amaq news agency, which is affiliated with the militant group. If confirmed, that would be a first attack by the group in Pakistan — though the claim may be related to the fact that in the past, the Ahrar splinter group has expressed support for the Islamic State. Even as militant attacks have been down sharply across Pakistan as a whole in the past two years, Baluchistan Province, where Quetta is the main city, remains violent. For more than a decade, Baluchistan, a rugged and province bordering Afghanistan and Iran, has been wracked by a separatist war, ethnic and sectarian violence and militant intrigue. Those fault lines come to a point in Quetta, a city of more than one million. Quetta’s Hazara minority, which is mostly Shiite, has been targeted repeatedly by Sunni extremist groups such as . Political tensions between ethnic Pashtun and Baluch leaders have been another source of conflict. Additionally, the Afghan Taliban’s leadership is based in Quetta, and infighting, assassinations and kidnappings have scarred the city. At the same time, Baluchistan is one of the most forbidding environments for journalists. Foreign reporters are routinely barred from visiting, and many local journalists have been killed or intimidated, according to human rights groups. The bombing on Monday came hours after the president of the Baluchistan Bar Association, Bilal Anwar Kasi, was gunned down by unknown attackers. Local news reports said that he was killed by men on a motorcycle while on his way to court. As the news of Mr. Kasi’s death spread through Quetta, dozens of lawyers went to Civil Hospital, where his body had been taken for an autopsy. As they protested the killing, a powerful blast ripped through the entrance of the hospital’s emergency ward. Television footage showed dozens of lawyers running for cover as gunfire echoed in the background. Some lawyers could be seen pushing a stretcher bearing a wounded colleague, as others urged them to safety. “Get inside! Get inside!” one lawyer could be heard saying, as others rushed into the hospital building. Two cameramen working for local news networks were among those killed. The bombing left a trail of destruction. The charred bodies of victims lay in pools of blood. Several vehicles parked nearby were damaged, and windows of buildings were shattered. One witness, Hajji Abdul Haq, who survived the bombing with minor injuries, said in a telephone interview that he was standing outside the hospital entrance with other lawyers, waiting to receive the body of their slain colleague. “I was in the second row, senior lawyers were in the first row,” Mr. Haq said. “Suddenly, there was a deafening explosion. ” Rescue workers pulled Mr. Haq from under a pile of bodies. “I lost my hearing for almost an hour after the blast,” he said. Mr. Haq said the suicide bomber was dressed in the traditional “lawyers’ uniform” of Pakistan — a black suit and black tie. The bomb went off right as the attacker moved toward the center of the crowd. Acme Roger, a cameraman for GEO TV, told his network that he was inside the hospital when he heard a loud explosion outside. “Smoke spread quickly and one could hear loud screams,” Mr. Roger said. “When we got out of the building, there were dead bodies everywhere and people were shouting and screaming, trying to find their loved ones. ” Sam Zarifi, the Asia director of the International Commission of Jurists, said in a statement, “This attack targeted mostly lawyers and intellectuals (many of them from the Pashtun community) who had gathered at the hospital to mourn the loss of one of their own. “As such, it constituted a serious loss for the legal community and increases existing pressure on the independence of the bar. ” Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the bombing on Monday, urging the law enforcement authorities to improve security in Quetta. “No one will be allowed to disturb the peace in the province that has been restored thanks to the countless sacrifices by the security forces, police and the people of Baluchistan,” he said in a statement. By the afternoon, Gen. Raheel Sharif, the Pakistani Army chief, had reached the city to visit victims and express solidarity. General Sharif then led a meeting of senior security officials, according to Lt. Gen Asim Saleem Bajwa, the army spokesman. General Bajwa, in a message posted on Twitter, claimed that the attack was “an attempt to undermine the improved security” in Baluchistan, specifically targeting the Economic Corridor, a endeavor by both countries that includes infrastructure networks and energy projects. Soon after, Mr. Sharif arrived in Quetta and with General Sharif visited the wounded at a military hospital. A spokesman for Baluchistan’s government, Anwar Kakar, said that the perpetrators would soon be brought to justice. “This is indeed a highly condemnable act, but such cowardly acts cannot shake our resolve of eradicating the menace of terrorism,” he said by telephone. The Pakistani Bar Association said lawyers across the country would hold a strike in all courts and spend a week in mourning. | 1 |
BAROLO, Italy — Few places in Italy, and perhaps the world, have been so gifted with exquisite natural abundance as Barolo and its surrounding region. Not only does this land produce some of Italy’s best, and most expensive, wines. It is also home to the famed Italian white truffle, which can run 200 to 500 euros (about $225 to $560) for a knob that will sit in the palm of your hand. But what happens when those resources compete? Vines require clear hillsides, and truffles need thick and damp yet clean woods. Today, hillside after hillside of Barolo is planted in neat rows of vines more valuable than anything else that could be put on them. The forests, on the other hand, have been shrinking. Enter “Save the Truffle,” the brainchild of Carlo Marenda, 34, daytime project manager and passionate truffle hunter, and his associate, Edmondo Bonelli, 35, an environmental consultant. A year ago, the two men met in a chance encounter in a hilltop wood near Alba, the main town of this region in Piedmont, where Barolo is situated. They knew almost immediately that they shared a common goal and complementary skill sets. While Mr. Marenda had inherited two dogs and much knowledge from an older truffle hunter, Mr. Bonelli had the scientific skill to save the tasty tuber for future generations. “We both knew the time was ready to promote a new culture,” Mr. Bonelli said. Soon the two men started meeting with hundreds of truffle hunters and wine producers, and created a website under the “Save the Truffle” name, where they laid out their mission to restore the region’s woods. As they explain it, their mission is not about preserving merely a luxury product, but also the balance of the environment. “We don’t do it for the truffles. You might have only two trees in a hectare where they grow,” Mr. Marenda said. “If these abandoned trees get sick, it’s easy for the parasite to travel to the nearby organic wine production. The whole area is in danger. ” They started working with some wine producers who said they understood the importance of protecting the uncultivated forests around their vineyards and tending to them. Last month, “Save the Truffle” inspired a wider crowdfunding campaign, “Breathe the Truffle,” started by the Alba Truffle Show, an truffle fair in the autumn that allows hunters to sell their mushrooms directly. It hopes to fund the cleanup of four once woods in southern Piedmont, and is the first tangible sign of the community’s rising awareness of the need for greater harmony in the environment. “Truffle hunters were complaining more and more,” Mr. Bonelli explained. “Vineyards and wine sales were doing well, and they had time to focus on something that has a large fallout: environmental preservation. ” Especially in the past decade, the woods in and around Barolo have increasingly been neglected. As wine production has become more profitable, an estimated 30 percent more land has been converted to vineyards in the past 10 years, at the expense of surrounding areas. And the problem is not just that woods are under pressure. Farmers have also stopped collecting forest wood for heating, reducing their incentive to clear the forest floor. On a recent day, Mr. Marenda gave a brief tour of the mounting challenges for truffle hunters, pointing out one of the many slopes of Barolo’s mountains, often angled like the facets of a gem. On one side were rows of nebbiolo grapes, which make Barolo’s wine. On the other was an abandoned, untended wood of oak and poplar trees. The forest floor was so thick with weeds and underbrush there was no way for truffle hunters to enter. “Seven or eight years ago, we could walk into that wood,” Mr. Marenda said. “Now it’s hard even for dogs to explore it. ” Truffles, already tricky to find and certainly no cafeteria food, have become even scarcer. Still, they are big business here. In Italy, the largest zone in Europe for white truffle production, the overall truffle business, which includes the still delicious but less prestigious black truffle, can generate €400 million a year (nearly $449 million). Yet truffle hunting is an ancient activity whose success largely depends on increasingly fickle elements, like the weather and pollution. Climate change, while providing this region’s winemakers with some warm, dry years that have yielded excellent vintages, has not necessarily favored the truffle. Over the long term, if the trends continue, truffle production in certain areas may be reduced or even eliminated, hunters lamented. “White truffles need fresh soil also in the summer, and rain,” said Francesco Tagliaferro, an agronomist at Piedmont’s Institute for Plants and the Environment. “If it’s too hot, truffles do not grow much, or are not very tasty. ” But Mr. Tagliaferro explained that they can only estimate a production loss because official data is scarce. “There is the widespread vow to secrecy about the zones where hunters pick the truffles,” he explained. “And much of the production is sold by private individuals to their own private clients. ” Truffles are a mysterious universe. Italians use dogs to sniff out white truffles underground, and can only guess whether they will still grow in the same area the following year. Many call truffle hunting more of a craze or passion than a job. It is a secretive culture rooted in experience that in Alba has been passed from generation to generation for centuries. Mr. Marenda inherited some knowledge and his two hunting dogs from Giuseppe Giamesio, a truffle hunter in Alba, who believed that depleting the woods and polluting the environment did not damage just the truffle picking, but also the area’s beautiful hills and the planet. Mr. Giamesio used to travel to truffle fairs showing a handmade sign reminding hunters to be proud of and loyal to their territory. “The project is on the internet now,” Mr. Marenda said. “And so is his legacy. ” It is already reaching a wider audience. Their crowdfunding effort offers rewards for benefactors, and they hope to raise €50, 000 by the end of the year to help restore the local ecosystem. Through the Alba Truffle Show website, donors contributed €10, 260 in the first two weeks. “It’s a change in mentality that we also want to promote, and so we set the good example,” said Liliana Allena, the president of the Alba Truffle Show. “You may think we are raising money for a luxury product like truffle,” she said, “but we are actually raising environmental awareness for the entire territory. ” | 1 |
The People Are Laughing at the Liberal Media The People Are Laughing at the Liberal Media 53 am by Cliff Kincaid Cliff Kincaid | Accuracy in Media
Members of the media continue to talk among themselves, as if they had not been repudiated by the people on November 8. Mass firings and new faces are needed if the media are going to have any hope of regaining any credibility with the public.
Some on the far-left are waking up. Anis Shivani of the AlterNet news service asked , “Is the liberal media dead?” She answered: “One of the positives of this campaign is that despite relentless 24/7 propaganda about Trump, exaggerating his personal foibles while painting anyone not supportive of Hillary as a closet misogynist, racist or even sexual predator, the message failed to get through. In the end, no one paid any attention. Those inside the elite bubble were persuaded that they were headed for victory, hearing nothing contrary in their own ecosphere, when they were in fact doomed. The people have shown that they can tune out this noise. The media has fragmented so much that only those who are already persuaded come within the ambit of any new message, so in essence they have pounded their way into their own irrelevance (emphasis added).”
Hillary Clinton had the endorsements of most major newspapers in the United States. Her own website declared , “By all accounts, this election is historic—and so is the list of newspapers from across the country endorsing Hillary Clinton for president. That list includes a number of papers that, for decades, have exclusively endorsed Republican presidential candidates—until now.”
Reid Wilson of The Hill newspaper calculated that Clinton got 57 newspaper endorsements and Trump got only 2.
In addition to The Washington Post and The New York Times, which both endorsed Hillary, some of the other notable losers included: The Columbus Dispatch endorsed a Democrat (for the first time since Woodrow Wilson), and urged voters to elect Hillary. Ohio went for Trump anyway. The Akron Beacon said that Hillary was the change this country needed. The Cincinnati Enquirer broke a century-old tradition to endorse Hillary. The Sun Sentinel editorial board urged Floridians to vote for Hillary. Florida went for Trump. The Arizona Republic broke a 120-year tradition to endorse Hillary. Arizona went for Trump. The Dallas Morning News broke a 75-year tradition of supporting Republicans to endorse Hillary. Texas went for Trump anyway. The Houston Chronicle, the largest newspaper in Texas, usually backs Republicans but endorsed Hillary.
Among major voting blocs, one of the most amazing turnarounds can be found in the Catholic population.
On November 2, the Catholic Jesuit publication America was reporting that Clinton was leading Trump in the polls thanks to the Catholic vote. Citing a poll from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at The Catholic University of America, Clinton was getting support from 51 percent of Catholics, compared to 40 percent for Donald Trump. This is what liberal Catholics wanted to believe and encourage. Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta was a liberal Catholic who got a job as professor at Catholic Jesuit Georgetown University. He had communicated with other campaign officials about a scheme to force the church even further to the left. Elizabeth Yore’s article at The Remnant explained the relationship between George Soros, the Clinton campaign and the Jesuit-led Vatican.
However, exit polls show that Trump won the Catholic vote by a margin of 52 to 45 percent. What happened?
One answer is that Catholics are bypassing the liberal media and turning to alternative sources of news and information, such as The Remnant. Another such source is Boston Catholic Insider, which argued in an article, “ Why Catholics Should Vote for Trump ,” that Hillary had a “monstrous” position on abortion that justified the gruesome procedure up to and including the time of birth.
Another growing source of news and information for Catholics and non-Catholics is LifeSite . Its post-election stories include “Liberal media in meltdown over Trump election” and “America rejects Planned Parenthood and its party.”
Another important development was the airing of the film “ A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing ” by the EWTN Catholic cable channel. As we noted in a previous column, the film examined how Marxists have subverted the church from within by recruiting clergy into revolutionary socialist activities that divide people and cause conflict. The film was described as “a lens into America’s cultural Marxism euphemistically called ‘progressivism.’”
As long as the members of the liberal media continue in their old and discredited ways, without major changes in the journalism business, the alternative sources of news and information will continue to grow in power and influence. The new conservative network CRTV has just announced that Steven Crowder , from the popular show “Louder with Crowder,” is joining the new media venture.
Even with major changes in the liberal media, such as the firing of liberal hacks and the hiring of solid conservatives, it is doubtful that viewership can be maintained. On outlets like CNN, they will continue to talk and act like they still have some credibility left. The public is laughing at them and declaring, “You’re fired.” Cliff Kincaid
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . 0 | 0 |
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BERLIN (AP) — Germany’s foreign minister says there may now be a chance of a “soft” British exit from the European Union that keeps the U. K. in the bloc’s single market, but is warning that Britain couldn’t pick and choose its conditions. [Brexit negotiations start on Monday, with question marks over Britain’s approach after Prime Minister Theresa May lost her parliamentary majority in an election meant to strengthen her hand in the talks. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel told Sunday’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper that “maybe there is now a chance to achieve a ‘soft Brexit. ’” But he said staying in the single market would require Britain to accept EU workers’ freedom of movement. It also would have to accept the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, “or at least a joint court that is staffed by Europeans and Britons” and in principle follows the ECJ’s rulings, Gabriel said. For many Brexit advocates, those conditions would be impossible to accept as last year’s referendum campaign focused on getting back control over laws and immigration from the EU. Gabriel said “it would naturally be best if Britain didn’t leave at all. ” “It doesn’t look like that at the moment,” he added. “But we want to keep the door open for the British. ” The Social Democrat strongly criticized May’s Conservatives, saying that they “played with the emotions of citizens in Britain, told fake news about Europe and left people unclear about what consequences this would all have. ” Referring to the “difficult, even impossible situation” created by the indecisive election, he added: “here, those who created such chaos would have long since gone. ” “We will negotiate fairly,” Gabriel was quoted as saying. “And fair means that we want to keep the British as close as possible to the EU — but never at the price that we divide the remaining 27 EU states. ” | 1 |
New York City led this week’s report from immigration officials for having released the highest number of criminal aliens under a detainer. The report covers detainers issued on February . [The Declined Detainer Outcome Report released on Wednesday by U. S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials stated that out of 73 immigration detainers issued to law enforcement officials in New York City, officials released 12 accused criminals. These illegal aliens are facing charges in New York City for crimes including assault, larceny, burglary, and sexual assault. ICE officials issued the largest number of detainers to jurisdictions within the State of California (162). Of those, California officials declined eight and released criminal aliens with convictions for domestic violence, assault, burglary, cruelty towards a child and immigrants charged with drug possession and domestic violence. Travis County, Texas, which led last week’s report with well over 70 percent of released criminal aliens, received 23 immigration detainers. Of those, two were released during the reporting period. The illegal aliens listed in these detainers are said to be from Barbados, Columbia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Georgia, Honduras, Hungary, Mexico, Nigeria, St. and Tajikistan. The report lags by six weeks, and covers detainers declined during the period of February regardless of the date the detainer was issued. The report also details the policies in place that make the jurisdiction a “sanctuary. ” Last week’s report included some counties that released the person to another jurisdiction. The receiving jurisdiction subsequently declined the detainer and released the criminal alien. The reports are being adapted to report this information more accurately, officials said. The ICE correction states: Due to a data processing error, the Jan. 28 — Feb 03, 2017 Declined Detainer Outcome Report incorrectly attributed issued detainers to Franklin County, New York and Montgomery County, Iowa that were in fact issued to agencies outside of the respective county’s jurisdiction in similarly named locations. Please note, however, the corrections only apply to section I. The data processing error did not impact information on these jurisdictions in Section III. Additionally, detainers that appeared in as being declined by Williamson County, TX were cases that had detainers lodged in that county and where the individuals were subsequently transferred to Travis County, TX. The detainers were then declined by Travis County, TX. These declinations should have been attributed to Travis County, TX. Officials cautioned this report should not be used exclusively to measure a jurisdictions level of cooperation with immigration officials. Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook. ICE Declined Detainer Outcomer Report — Feb by Bob Price on Scribd, | 1 |
She had us at the hat toss. Mary Richards was a modest Midwestern girl, to be sure, but she had style, and she had spunk, as her new boss, Lou Grant, pointed out the day she walked into the newsroom in her white boots, a pleated miniskirt and those impeccable manners. When she threw her tam in the air during the show’s opening credits, we knew she was thrilled to be single and on her own in the big city of Minneapolis. But as the series unfolded, and we watched Mary Tyler Moore’s most famous character dress for work in the uniform of career women all over the country — the clingy knit dresses, the matching pantsuits, the Evan Picone separates — she showed us her heart was in that newsroom. Ms. Moore died on Wednesday in Greenwich, Conn. [ Read Mary Tyler Moore’s obituary | 5 great episodes to stream ] There was a cultural sweet spot in the 1970s, as the old social mores unraveled (along with the “sweater girl”) and women flexed new muscles as working women, divorced women, women commited to the single life, newly conscious women — to use the parlance of the feminist playbook — and fashion reflected the fluidity of that time. As women were reinventing themselves, fashion helped them along. Clothing, even in the office, was colorful and personal those jersey dresses and knit pantsuits moved with the body. And they were womanly. Mary’s inherent authority — that moral compass — was never compromised by the fact that she dressed in the basic idiom of her gender. (By the next decade, that freedom would be snuffed out, and working girls would ape the rigid suits of their male competitors, but that’s another story.) And like all working women, she wore the same outfit more than once, and so her wardrobe became as familiar as our own. Her predecessor, Ann Marie of “That Girl,” played by Marlo Thomas, was our first television singleton, but paired from the with her boyfriend, Donald. She made her debut in the 1960s, a period that for women on the small screen was still the dark ages. Mary Richards had boyfriends, but they were ancillary to her real life, which played out at work. Looking back at both shows, the clothing displayed the maturation, or the evolution, of the female television avatar. Ann Marie dressed almost like a child in the show’s early episodes, in the cartoonish, youthquake fashions of Mary Quant and others, which Ms. Thomas brought with her from London. The bunny hat notwithstanding, Mary Richards looked like a . “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” always embraced the real world, and as it unfurled, that world grew a little darker, as did Mary Richards’ clothes. In the final episode, the newsroom is under assault: Ratings are low, and Mary and the gang are fired. But Mary is armored. Clad in a navy blue jumpsuit, like a fighter pilot, her hair cropped to her shoulders, she is strong enough to say goodbye and turn out those lights. | 1 |
On December 29, the Islamic State released another “Cubs of the Caliphate” training video in which child soldiers are shown murdering helpless prisoners. [As in the previous “Cubs” video, preteen children are shown moving through a training course like a military squad, using their handguns to murder bound captives they discover along the way. Last year’s video had the trainees sweeping through an outdoor area, evidently somewhere in Syria this time they are going through a ruined building somewhere in or near the Islamic State’s capital of Raqqa. Another similarity to the earlier video is that the executions are made to resemble a video game. Unlike the previous video release, this time the prisoners are allowed to move around with their hands behind their backs, turning the exercise into a murderous chase. Some prisoners are shown weeping and pleading when cornered by the children. The bloody aftermath of their executions is shown in detail. One prisoner is shot in the leg or groin and tries to crawl to safety before his child murderer shoots him in the leg again to stop him, prompting a howl of pain and fear. The little boy then stands over his victim and finishes the job with a string of shots. Another hysterically weeping victim is brought to his knees with a bullet to the leg and then shot in the top of the head. The ISIS cameramen linger on him as he takes his last ragged breaths. Several armed children corner the last victim on a rooftop, who appears to leap to his death to escape them. The children go downstairs and pump several bullets into his head. One of the victims is notably identified as a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, the Kurdish separatist group in Turkey. The Turkish government frequently claims the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria, which is allied with the United States and has been fighting the Islamic State since its inception, is a branch of the PKK. Some of the children shown in the video appear to be wounded. One of them has a cast on his arm. The video, titled “My Father Told Me,” also shows children aged 9 to 13 training with firearms, rocket launchers, and combat. They also read the Koran, undergo jihadi indoctrination, and pledge to fight for the Islamic State. Below is an excerpt from the ISIS video provided by the UK Daily Mail. The full video, which contains extremely graphic content, can be seen at Heavy. com. | 1 |
Warsaw (AFP) — Fourteen men and women in their twenties on Friday slaughtered a sheep and took their clothes off at the former Nazi German death camp according to the museum at the site in southern Poland. #Auschwitz shuts down after nude protesters slaughter sheep, chain selves to ’Arbeit Macht Frei’ gatehttps: . — Jack Mendel (@Mendelpol) March 24, 2017, | 1 |
MIAMI — Major League Baseball lost one of its best pitchers this weekend when a boat carrying Jose Fernandez of the Miami Marlins struck a pile of rocks and capsized, killing him and two other men aboard. A Coast Guard crew discovered the crash early Sunday. Fernandez, 24, and the others almost certainly died on impact, the authorities said. “The Miami Marlins organization is devastated,” the team said Sunday morning in a statement, adding, “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this very difficult time. ” A shrine appeared outside the Marlins’ stadium as fans stopped by to lay flowers, cards and signs bearing his jersey number, 16. That number was also painted onto the park’s pitching mound, where a single Marlins cap was placed. Fernandez was with two friends in a motorboat that smashed into a jetty that delineates the northern section of Miami’s deepwater channel, said Officer Lorenzo Veloz, a spokesman for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The channel, called Government Cut, is used by cruise ships and freighters to head into and out of the Atlantic Ocean. It sits on the southern tip of South Beach, a popular tourist destination in Miami Beach. Officer Veloz said it could not be determined whether alcohol or drugs had been involved in the crash because the boat was badly damaged. Toxicology tests will be performed, he said. None of the men were wearing life vests. Fernandez overcame great odds to reach such professional heights. He was jailed as a teenager for attempting to defect from Cuba. He succeeded on his fourth try, at age 15, saving his mother from drowning along the way. He emerged as a baseball star at Braulio Alonso High School in Tampa, Fla. and was chosen by the Marlins in the 2011 draft. He reached the majors in 2013, when he was named the National League rookie of the year. In each of his four major league seasons, Fernandez had an E. R. A. below 3. 00. “He was one of our game’s great young stars who made a dramatic impact on and off the field since his debut in 2013,” Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, said in a statement. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, the Miami Marlins organization and all of the people he touched in his life. ” The two men who died with Fernandez have not yet been identified, but Officer Veloz said they were not athletes. He also said the three men ranged in age from 24 to 27. Fernandez was not the owner of the boat, a sturdy SeaVee, but his family told officials that he enjoyed boating. The Coast Guard found the boat around 3:30 a. m. during a patrol from its nearby base. Coast Guard officers noticed the boat’s lights blinking above the rocks and stopped to investigate, Officer Veloz said. “The boat is in very bad shape,” he said. “It does appear that the vessel went straight into the rocks. ” After the Coast Guard reported the crash, County Fire Rescue divers and a marine patrol began to search for bodies, Officer Veloz said. The boat hit the rocks so hard that debris surrounded the wreckage. Driving a boat at night can be dangerous and difficult, particularly for inexperienced boaters. There are no lights, and distances are difficult to judge. Even the glow from a cellphone or a GPS instrument can impair vision. The men were headed south, presumably toward home or a nearby marina. Weather was not a factor, Officer Veloz said. There were no storms, and the water was not unusually choppy. Officer Veloz said officials had not determined whether the men were returning from a night of fishing or from an excursion. “It’s totally different than driving by day,” he said. “You don’t have streetlights out on the ocean. There is no real view of the surrounding areas. ” Florida has the largest number of boaters in the United States and by far the longest list of boating accidents, injuries and deaths, according to state records from 2012. Boating regulations in the state are relatively loose, and the activity is governed by a patchwork of federal, state and local agencies. | 1 |
President Donald Trump will ask Congress next Tuesday to provide $2. 6 billion in the September budget deal for border infrastructure in 2018, including the construction of new border walls, according to details provided to the New York Times. [According to the report: According to officials, $1. 6 billion of that money would go toward materials to build the wall. That would initially be used for continuing the levy [sic] wall in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and replacing existing fencing in El Paso and in San Diego. The Times‘ report did not explain how many extra miles of border fences or walls would be built, or even how much of the money would be spent building a fence or wall, but it did report that: the government intends to buy all sorts of equipment that will supplement or substitute for a physical wall. The budget request will allocate $239 million for aircraft and aviation sensors $197 million for fixed surveillance technology, including towers, radar and cameras and $202 million for what it described as “critical equipment” such as radios, computers and weapons … [plus] $111 million allocated for roads to gain access to parts of the border that are now hard to reach. “Levee wall” is a term for strong walls alongside rivers, particularly along the Rio Grande river which marks the border with Mexico. Trump’s primary promise in his 2016 campaign was the construction of the border wall, which is being desperately resisted by legislators who went to preserve the northward flow of roughly 550, 000 illegal immigrant workers and customers per year up to businesses and donors in their districts. However, illegal immigration has less of an impact on Americans than does the federal government’s policy of inflating the new labor supply by roughly 25 percent. Each year, four million young Americans enter the labor force, but the federal government also invites 1 million legal immigrants and 1 million temporary workers to compete for jobs against Americans. Also, legislators in Congress have proposed many bills to further increase the legal inflow of foreign workers. The $2. 6 billion request “seems less ambition, there’s no question about it,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. The modest request may suggest they are trying to reduce opposition from Democrats in Congress, Krikorian added. “Maybe they’re trying to come up with something that [Democratic leader Chuck] Schumer won’t shut down the government over … but there’s no reason Schumer won’t threaten a government shutdown in September over wall funding — he did that in April and he got away with it. ” The modest request may suggest they are trying to reduce opposition from Democrats in Congress, Krikorian added. “Maybe they’re trying to come up with something that [Democratic leader Chuck] Schumer won’t shut down the government over … but there’s no reason Schumer won’t threaten a government shutdown in September over wall funding — he did that in April and he got away with it. ” “On the other hand, there is a lot of to buy if you are going to do more wall construction, and maybe [White House officials] are figuring it is not worth asking for money for construction until they have purchased the land,” he added. Trump is also asking to boost the Pentagon’s 2018 budget by $52 billion, which will be used to buy extra aircraft and ships. In March, Trump asked for $1 billion to quickly build an extra 48 miles of border fence during 2017. But Democrats threatened to shut down funding until the budget request was rejected, GOP legislators refused to fight for any money to build a wall, and so the May budget supplemental included no funds for new wall construction. In a White House official predicted the administration would ask for $2. 6 billion for “border protections” in the budget request for 2018. Most immigration reformers say border fences are better than new surveillance technology, which is expensive to buy and maintain and is also easily removed by future spending cuts. If Trump wants to Congress to fund his border wall, he has to start fighting now, said Krikorian. “They need to start making the case now because it takes time to build political momentum for something, and the fight over wall funding in September is going to be a political fight,” he said. “This is an important issue for Trump politically, and he needs to follow through because even those people who tell people they are not for the wall are not against the wall — only a kooky fringe are opposed categorically to the wall,” he added. citing the April comment by Democratic Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi that “the wall is, in my view, immoral, expensive, unwise, and when the president says, ‘Well, I promised a wall during my campaign.’ I don’t think he said he was going to pass billions of dollars of cost of the wall on to the taxpayer. ” “Make Nancy and her kooky moral opposition to border enforcement the face of those who are opposing the budget request,” Krikorian suggested. Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart. com, | 1 |
They may both support the dissemination of government secrets, but Edward J. Snowden and WikiLeaks seem to disagree on how best to do it. On Thursday, Mr. Snowden, the former government contractor who released a trove of National Security Agency documents and now lives in exile in Russia, credited WikiLeaks, a clearinghouse for similar disclosures, with furthering the cause of transparency but also criticized its unfiltered approach. His words prompted a swift and cutting reply from WikiLeaks, which had once come to his aid. Mr. Snowden, it suggested, was trying to ingratiate himself with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, just days after WikiLeaks had released embarrassing emails showing that Democratic Party officials had derided the campaign of her main rival in the primary, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. WikiLeaks is often criticized for releasing documents without editing or regard for the sensitive information they may contain. Mr. Snowden, on the other hand, has said that he chose to work with journalists in 2013 to selectively release the N. S. A. documents in order to limit the harmful consequences of exposing what he called the abuses of government surveillance. The exchange on Thursday was all the more striking in light of the past collaboration between Mr. Snowden and the group, which helped him as he sought to find a place to settle into exile. In June 2013, a WikiLeaks activist accompanied him as he made his way from Hong Kong to Moscow, a week after WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, encouraged the government of Ecuador to accept Mr. Snowden’s asylum request. “Mr. Snowden requested our expertise and assistance,” Mr. Assange said at the time. “We’ve been involved in very similar legal and diplomatic and geopolitical struggles to preserve the organization and its ability to publish. ” | 1 |
Approximately 11% of children 4-17 years of age (6.4 million) have been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2011. The percentage of children with an ADHD diagnosis continues to increase, from 7.8% in 2003 to 9.5% in 2007 and to 11.0% in 2011. Rates of ADHD diagnosis increased an average of 3% per year from 1997 to 2006 [Read article] and an average of approximately 5% per year from 2003 to 2011. Boys (13.2%) were more likely than girls (5.6%) to have ever been diagnosed with ADHD. The average age of ADHD diagnosis was 7 years of age, but children reported by their parents as having more severe ADHD were diagnosed earlier. Prevalence of ADHD diagnosis varied substantially by state, from a low of 5.6% in Nevada to a high of 18.7% in Kentucky. What Exactly Are We Dealing With Here? One big problem we are dealing with is the label of ADHD itself. By simply treating characteristics of ADHD as a disability (something we so commonly see in education) we are destroying the potential and self esteem of so many children. Diagnosing a child with a mental disorder based on their lack of ability and/or desire to pay attention in a classroom seems absurd, doesn’t it? In fact, in my opinion it’s down right crazy. Not wanting to, or not having the ability to pay attention to information that does not nourish the soul, spark the heart or capture the mind is in no way characteristic of a mental disability, but something that seems completely normal. Perhaps we should stop looking at the student and focus more on the environment we surround our children with? If it’s not stimulating enough for some students, that does not mean they have a mental disorder and should be given harmful medications. Some of these children will be in their own world and downright refuse to pay attention, trying to amuse themselves any way they possibly can, doing what they want to do and not what others tell them to do. These children have become targets for pharmaceutical companies and targets for what might very well be a false labeling campaign based on very little science. Characteristics associated with ADHD are in no way a “disability.” In fact, there is evidence to suggest that these characteristics might be more associated with “abilities” that should be placing many of these children in gifted school programs instead of special education programs. Unfortunately, new data from the National Center for Learning Disabilities shows that only 1 percent of students who receive services for their apparent “learning disabilities” (some of which are completely and unquestionably valid) are enrolled in gifted or talented programs. The report concluded that “students with learning and attention issues are shut out of gifted and AP programs, held back in grade level and suspended from school at higher rates than other students.” ( 1 ) This is a pretty disturbing characteristic, and what makes it even more disturbing is the fact that recent work in cognitive neuroscience shows that both creative thinkers, and those with an ADHD diagnosis show difficulty in suppressing brain activity that comes from the “ Imagination Network .” ( 2 )( 3 ) There are no school assessments that provide evaluation on creativity and imagination, these are hard to draw up and measure and receive very little attention in our education systems. In fact, something that’s touched upon in the paragraph below, a tremendous amount of research shows that people who show characteristics of ADHD are more likely to reach higher levels of creative thought and achievement compared to those who don’t show these characteristics.( 4 )( 5 )( 6 )( 7 )( 8 )( 9 ) Research also shows that these characteristics are associated with the broadening of attention, and those who have them tend to have a mental “filter.” In other words, it’s their choice what they chose to give their attention to, and they are very selective and stern when it comes to that. Scott Barry Kaufman, the Scientific Director of The Imagination Institute in the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania says that : “Of course, whether this is a positive thing or a negative thing depends on the context. The ability to control your attention is most certainly a valuable asset; difficulty inhibiting your inner mind can get in the way of paying attention to a boring classroom lecture or concentrating on a challenging problem. But the ability to keep your inner stream of fantasies, imagination, and daydreams on call can be immensely conducive to creativity. By automatically treating ADHD characteristics as a disability– as we so often do in an educational context– we are unnecessarily letting too many competent and creative kids fall through the cracks.” ( source ) Another interesting piece of information to note is that in 2004, an author by the name of Gary Davis reviewed a large portion of literature from 1961 to 2003 and identified 22 recurring personality traits of creative people, most of which were very positive and associated with the same personality traits as people who have been diagnosed with ADHD. Some of these traits included: independence, risk taking, high energy, curiosity, humor, emotional and artistic. Some of the negative ones included: impulsive, argumentative and hyper active. He published his findings in his book “ Creativity is Forever .” It’s not the children, they do not have a disability of any kind. They simply have a different way of learning, and with a lack of differentiated instruction in modern day education systems, having a child spend 8 hours a day in such a non-stimulating environment is wrong. The solution isn’t feeding our children drugs that have been proven to be extremely harmful in multiple ways so that a child is almost forced to pay attention and listen, but rather changing the environment that surrounds the student to make it more simulating and exciting. This is a tough task in modern day education, and something educational institutions struggle with on a daily basis. These children do not need to be singled out and labelled with something that might be completely fictitious. Is ADHD Even Real? When I was in school I received this diagnosis, alongside a learning disability and more. As a child I always knew I was perfectly fine, that everything I did and what I decided to pay attention to was simply my choice. I always felt that none of the labels and the explanations that accompanied them were valid at all, and I personally refused to take any medication that was being recommended to me. I am very glad I didn’t.
I am also a qualified, certified teacher for grades 7-12. Through volunteer as well as work experience my views on this subject matter did not change at all, but strengthened. I have interacted with these children, as well as those within special education programs (with multiple “disabilities) and the way we label/view them is (in my opinion) completely 100 percent backwards and does nothing but harm. The labels and descriptions alone that education uses to define these kids is even worse. The fact that children who “have trouble” paying attention to what they are not interested in are diagnosed and placed into the disability category simply based on observation alone is a frightening thought, and I am glad I’m not the only one who has asked this question. There are many examples, and one of the most recent comes from Neurologist Dr Richard Saul. Richard Saul is a neurologist who has had a long career in examining patients who have been having trouble with short attention spans and an inability to focus. From his first hand experience, he feels that ADHD is nothing more than a fake disorder that is really only an umbrella of symptoms and not actually a disease. He strongly feels that it should not be listed as a separate disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual. You can read more about that here . “We have a habit of always seeing issues in people who don’t fit in with the system. Whether they don’t want to be in standard education, don’t want to work their whole lives or have trouble focusing on things they don’t like, we tend to label this as a problem, but is it? Maybe we just don’t look within enough to figure out what might really be going on or why we are living the way we do. Perhaps it is time we let go of the idea of having to “fit in” to something that doesn’t resonate rather than labelling it as a disorder.”– Joe Martino, Founder of Collective Evolution. It’s also important to note that, according to an article written in the The German Weekly, the founding father of ADHD, American psychiatrist Leon Eisenberg in a death bed interview said that “ADHD is a prime example of a fictitious disease.” The article was written by Der Spiegel and has made its way around the web for years. I cannot however completely verify that this statement was actually true. (10) It’s also important to note the pharmaceutical drug aspect into this equation. For (one small out of many) example(s), American psychologist Lisa Cosgrove and others investigated Financial Ties between the Diagnostic and Statistical Manuel of Mental Disorders (DSM) panel members and the pharmaceutical industry . They found that, of the 170 DSM panel members 95 (56%) had one or more financial associations with companies in the pharmaceutical industry. One hundred percent of the members of the panels on ‘mood disorders’ and ‘schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders’ had financial ties to drug companies. The connections are especially strong in those diagnostic areas where drugs are the first line of treatment for mental disorders. In the next edition of the manual, it’s the same thing. ( 11 )( 12 ) “The DSM appears to be more a political document than a scientific one. Each diagnostic criteria in the DSM is not based on medical science. No blood tests exist for the disorders in the DSM. It relies on judgments from practitioners who rely on the manual.” (11) – Lisa Cosgrove, PhD, Professor of Counseling and School Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry,” Dr. Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California at Los Angeles ( source ) There is lots of evidence to suggest that Pharmaceutical companies have influenced certain psychiatrists to “pathologize” certain behavior as a mental illness so more drugs can be marketed to the masses. In my opinion the evidence is overwhelming, but we’ll save that for another article as it is a big topic. There are lots of things to consider when it comes to ADHD, and the content of this article is just the beginning. What are your thoughts on ADHD? Feel free to share your opinions in the comment section below. Sources: | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The whirlwind first week of Donald J. Trump’s presidency had all the bravura hallmarks of a Stephen K. Bannon production. It started with the inauguration homily to “American carnage” in United States cities by Mr. Bannon, followed a few days later by his “shut up” message to the news media. The week culminated with a blizzard of executive orders, mostly hatched by Mr. Bannon’s team and the White House policy adviser, Stephen Miller, aimed at disorienting the “enemy,” fulfilling campaign promises and distracting attention from Mr. Trump’s less than flawless debut. But the defining moment for Mr. Bannon came Saturday night in the form of an executive order giving the rumpled agitator a full seat on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council — while downgrading the roles of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence, who will now attend only when the council is considering issues in their direct areas of responsibilities. It is a startling elevation of a political adviser, to a status alongside the secretaries of state and defense, and over the president’s top military and intelligence advisers. In theory, the move put Mr. Bannon, a former Navy surface warfare officer, admiral’s aide, investment banker, Hollywood producer and Breitbart News firebrand, on the same level as his friend, Michael T. Flynn, the national security adviser, a former Pentagon intelligence chief who was Mr. Trump’s top adviser on national security issues before a series of missteps reduced his influence. But in terms of real influence, Mr. Bannon looms above almost everyone except the president’s Jared Kushner, in the Trumpian pecking order, according to interviews with two dozen Trump insiders and current and former national security officials. The move involving Mr. Bannon, as well as the boost in status to the White House homeland security adviser, Thomas P. Bossert, and Mr. Trump’s relationships with cabinet appointees like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, have essentially layered over Mr. Flynn. Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said Mr. Bannon — whose Breitbart website was a magnet for white nationalists, antiglobalists and conspiracy theorists — always planned to participate in national security. Mr. Flynn welcomed his participation, Mr. Spicer said, but the general “led the reorganization of the N. S. C. ” in order to streamline an antiquated and bloated bureaucracy. Former White House officials in both parties were shocked by the move. “The last place you want to put somebody who worries about politics is in a room where they’re talking about national security,” said Leon E. Panetta, a former White House chief of staff, defense secretary and C. I. A. director in two Democratic administrations. “I’ve never seen that happen, and it shouldn’t happen. It’s not like he has broad experience in foreign policy and national security issues. He doesn’t. His primary role is to control or guide the president’s conscience based on his campaign promises. That’s not what the National Security Council is supposed to be about. ” That opinion was shared by President George W. Bush’s last chief of staff, Josh Bolten, who barred Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s political adviser, from N. S. C. meetings. A president’s decisions made with those advisers, he told a conference audience in September, “involve life and death for the people in uniform” and should “not be tainted by any political decisions. ” Susan E. Rice, President Barack Obama’s last national security adviser, called the arrangement “stone cold crazy” in a tweet posted Sunday. Mr. Spicer said the language the Trump White House used in its N. S. C. executive order is, with the exception of Mr. Bannon’s position — which was created during the transition — almost identical in content to one the Bush administration drafted in 2001. And Mr. Obama’s top political operative, David Axelrod, sat in on some N. S. C. meetings, he added. There were key differences. Mr. Axelrod never served as a permanent member as Mr. Bannon will now, though he sat in on some critical meetings, especially as Mr. Obama debated strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “It’s a profound shift,” Mr. Axelrod said. “I don’t know what his bona fides are to be the principal foreign policy adviser to the president. ” But Mr. Bannon’s elevation does not merely reflect his growing influence on national security. It is emblematic of Mr. Trump’s trust on a range of political and ideological issues. During the campaign, the sly and provocative Mr. Bannon played a paradoxical role — calming the easily agitated candidate during his frequent rough patches and egging him on when he felt Mr. Trump needed to fire up the white base. The president respects Mr. Bannon because he is independently wealthy and therefore does not need the job, and both men ascribe to a credo when put on the defensive, according to the former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Mr. Bannon is a deft operator within the White House, and he has been praised by Republicans who view him skeptically as the most knowledgeable on policy around the president. But his stated preference for blowing things up — as opposed to putting them back together — may not translate to his new role. The hasty drafting of the immigration order, and its scattershot execution, brought a measure of Mr. Bannon’s chaotic and hyperaggressive political style to the more predictable administration of the federal government. Within hours of the edict, airport customs and border agents were detaining or blocking dozens of migrant families, some of whom had permanent resident status, until John F. Kelly, the new homeland security secretary, intervened. Mr. Kelly’s department had suggested green card holders be exempted from the order, but Mr. Bannon and Mr. Miller, a on immigration, overruled him, according to two American officials. Mr. Priebus, speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, indicated a softening of the stance, saying the order would not block “green card holders moving forward” — but said anyone seeking to enter the country from the listed countries would be subjected to tighter scrutiny. People close to Mr. Bannon said he is not accumulating power for power’s sake, but is instead helping to fill a staff leadership vacuum created, in part, by Mr. Flynn’s stumbling performance as national security adviser. Mr. Flynn still communicates with Mr. Trump frequently, and his staff has been assembling a version of the Presidential Daily Briefing for Mr. Trump, truncated but comprehensive, to be the president’s main source of national security information. During the campaign, he often had unfettered access to the candidate, who appreciated his brash style and contempt for Hillary Clinton, but during the transition, Mr. Flynn privately complained about having to share face time with others. Mr. Flynn “has the full confidence of the president and his team,” Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, said in an email. Emails and phone calls to Mr. Flynn and his top aide were not returned. A president who likes generals and abhors political correctness, Mr. Trump found in Mr. Flynn — who joined Trump backers in an “lock her up!” chant during the campaign — perhaps the most politically incorrect general this side of his hero, Gen. George S. Patton. But Mr. Flynn, a lifelong Democrat sacked as head of the Pentagon’s intelligence arm after clashing with Obama administration officials in 2014, has gotten on the nerves of Mr. Trump and other administration officials because of his sometimes overbearing demeanor, and has further diminished his internal standing by presiding over a chaotic and opaque N. S. C. transition process that prioritized the hiring of military officials over civilian experts recommended to him by his own team. Mr. Flynn’s penchant for talking too much was on display on Friday in a meeting with Theresa May, the British prime minister, according to two people with direct knowledge of the events. When Mrs. May said that she understood wanting a dialogue with Mr. Putin but stressed the need to be careful, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Flynn when the two were scheduled to speak. Mr. Flynn replied it was Saturday — he had delayed it to fit in Mrs. May’s meeting for “protocol” as a United States ally, adding at length that Mr. Putin was impatient to chat. Mr. Trump, the person said, appeared irritated by the response. Still, the episode that did the most damage to the relationship occurred in early December when Mr. Flynn’s son, also named Michael, unleashed a series of tweets pushing a discredited conspiracy theory that Clinton associates had run a child ring out of a Washington pizza restaurant. Mr. Trump told his staff to get rid of the younger Mr. Flynn, who had been hired by his father to help during the transition. But Mr. Trump did so reluctantly because of his loyalty during the campaign, when dozens of former military officials were dismissing Mr. Trump as too unstable to command. “I want him fired immediately,” Mr. Trump said in a muted rendition of his “You’re fired!” line in “The Apprentice,” according to two people with knowledge of the interaction. That has not stopped the general’s son from spouting off: On Saturday, at a time when Trump surrogates were pushing back on the idea that the executive order did not discriminate against any religion, the younger Mr. Flynn tweeted his approval of the policy, adding “#MuslimBan. ” The tweet was subsequently deleted his entire account disappeared later in the day. Still, the national security adviser has also continued to dabble in the kind of behavior that concerns Mr. Trump’s allies, such as planning to attend an “Deploraball” event at the time of the inauguration. He was urged to skip it by Trump allies, and ultimately agreed. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon still regard Mr. Flynn as an asset. “In the room and out of the room, Steve Bannon is General Flynn’s biggest defender,” said Kellyanne Conway, another top adviser to the president. But it is unclear when the maneuvers to reduce Mr. Flynn’s role began. Two Obama administration officials said Trump transition officials inquired about expanded national security roles for Mr. Bannon and Mr. Kushner at the earliest stages of the transition in November — before the younger Mr. Flynn became a liability — but after Mr. Flynn had begun to chafe on the nerves of his colleagues on the team. Mr. Flynn’s reputation has raised questions among some in the cabinet. Two weeks ago, both men held a meeting with Rex W. Tillerson, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the State Department, Mr. Mattis and Mike Pompeo, now the C. I. A. director, to discuss coordination — Mr. Flynn was invited but did not attend. Part of the meeting was devoted to discussing concerns about Mr. Flynn, according to an official with knowledge of it. | 1 |
Written by John Wight To understand the situation in Aleppo is to understand the key to the conflict in Syria at this juncture: Will Washington and its allies or the Syrian Army and Russia liberate Raqqa, the capital of the so-called Islamic State. It does not take a military genius to discern Washington’s strategy in prolonging the military operation being conducted by the Syrian Army, supported by Russia, to liberate eastern Aleppo – which remains occupied by Nusra Front and the “moderates” fighting alongside the Salafi-jihadist group. Keeping the Syrian and Russian military forces bogged down in eastern Aleppo is key to allowing the US-led coalition to complete the operation, currently underway, to take the Iraqi city of Mosul from ISIS, before continuing an east-west advance across the Syrian border to take Raqqa. Raqqa will then be established as the de facto capital of so-called moderate Syrian forces, which will re-group there, presumably under cover of a US-imposed no-fly zone, to become a counterweight to the authority of the Assad government in Damascus. Such a development would also establish a permanent US military presence in a country that has long been key to Washington’s objective of dominating the region. That aspect of this strategy is, of course, illegal under the terms of the UN Charter, and is of minor consequence to an imperial power that has long viewed international law as an optional extra when it comes to pursuing its strategic and geopolitical objectives across the globe. When it comes to the Middle East we are talking a region rich in natural resources, specifically oil. And though not vital in terms of US energy needs, the sea of oil upon which the region sits is undeniably key to the stability of global energy prices. And that is vital to the US economy. As Gal Luft, Senior Adviser to the United States Energy Security Council, observed in a 2014 report, “While the US is not dependent on the Middle East for the physical supply of oil, it is dependent on the region for price stability. The US economy is highly susceptible to spikes in oil prices.” Luft goes on, “Over the past 40 years every major hike in oil prices was followed by a recession, and most of those spikes occurred as a result of turmoil in the Middle East: the Arab Oil Embargo, the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, etc.” As far back as January, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter was discussing the importance of Raqqa to US military strategy in Syria. In a speech to the 101st Airborne Division at its Fort Campbell HQ in Kentucky on 13 January, he said,“…our campaign plan’s map has got big arrows pointing at both Mosul and Raqqa. We will begin by collapsing ISIL’s control over both of these cities and then engage in elimination operations through other territories ISIL [ISIS] holds in Iraq and Syria.” It is an objective the US Defense Secretary trumpeted again in a recent interview with NBC. "It's been long a part of our plan that the Mosul operation would kick off when it did,” Carter revealed. “This was a plan that goes back many months now and that Raqqa would follow soon behind." The howling at the moon we’ve been treated to in recent weeks from Washington and its European proxies, accusing Syria and Russia of targeting civilians in eastern Aleppo, is nothing more than deflection. It is designed to blunt what is an extremely difficult military operation to liberate a civilian population being held hostage by the sectarian butchers of Nusra and other terrorist groups, using women and children as human shields. We know this to be true because despite Russian and Syrian forces regularly establishing humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to leave eastern Aleppo they are prevented from doing so on pain of execution. The hypocrisy is laid bare when we consider the lack of concern in Washington for civilians living in government-controlled western Aleppo, who have been subjected to a reign of terror in the form of daily and nightly rocket attacks, including poison gas shells, from Nusra and their “moderate” allies in the east of the city. Washington’s overarching strategy in the conflict also allows us to understand its refusal to separate those “moderate rebel” groups it claims to have some influence over from their Nusra counterparts, as per the terms of the ceasefire agreed between Washington and Moscow at the beginning of September. The ceasefire was broken just six days after it began by a US-led airstrike killed dozens of Syrian troops during a battle against ISIS in the eastern city of Deir Ezzor, which Washington claimed was a mistake. Such a claim should be taken with the usual pinch of salt, especially when we consider that Deir Ezzor lies adjacent to Raqqa in eastern Syria and therefore will be vital to any future joint Syrian and Russian operation to liberate the city. Reaching Raqqa before the Syrian Army and its allies is now essential for the US, constituting as it does a last throw of the dice when it comes to its objective of bringing down the Assad government in Damascus, which has long been a thorn in the side of US hegemony in the region along with the regional agendas of its closest Middle East allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia. With Syria fatally weakened, US strategists believe, Hezbollah and Iran, the main prize, are also weakened - not to mention Russian power diminished when it comes to the wider struggle for a multipolar alternative to the unipolar status quo. In a repeat of the race for Berlin at the end of the Second World War, with the outcome shaping the future of Europe and wider world in the context of the ensuing Cold War, the future of Syria, the Middle East, and a world crying out for a multipolar alternative to US global hegemony now boils down to Raqqa. Reprinted with permission from RT . Related | 0 |
After First Lady Melania Trump opened President Donald Trump’s campaign rally Saturday in Florida with “The Lord’s Prayer,” she was savagely attacked by leftists on social media, disparaging her for her religious faith, her accent, and other things. [From Fox News: Leftists on social media tore into First Lady Melania Trump, mocking her accent and religion and branding her everything from a hostage to a whore — all for the secular offense of reciting “The Lord’s Prayer. ” Melania Trump began President Trump’s rally Saturday in Florida by delivering the prayer, which Christians — many of whom recite the prayer in church each week — believe was first said by Jesus Christ. The crowd at Airport received the prayer enthusiastically. social media users were a different story, however. Read the entire article here. | 1 |
PHILADELPHIA — Mary Ann Meloy, one of the 54 Republican delegates elected in Pennsylvania on Tuesday as free agents to the Republican National Convention, said she would find it very hard to vote for Donald J. Trump. Ms. Meloy had a sister with cerebral palsy. And Mr. Trump’s disparaging treatment of people with disabilities, she said, “made me want to jump through the television screen. ” Because of the unusual latitude the Pennsylvania Republican Party gives to the delegates like Ms. Meloy who are not required to support any candidate, Mr. Trump’s crushing victory in the state on Tuesday is more complicated than it may appear. “The bottom line is that being an uncommitted delegate gives you the ability to take all the facts into consideration,” said Ms. Meloy, who lives in Harmar Township outside Pittsburgh and got her start in politics volunteering for Richard M. Nixon in 1968. “Certainly the will of the people in your district — there’s a lot to be said for that. ” But, she continued: “We have a representative form of government. Not a democracy. A representative democracy. ” Mr. Trump won Pennsylvania with nearly 57 percent of the vote. He carried every county, including Ms. Meloy’s, and even won large urban ones with diverse and highly educated populations like Philadelphia, the kind of territory that he has often found inhospitable to his rancorous brand of politics. Yet in the trench warfare fight for the Republican presidential nomination — the smaller, less understood delegate races that could prove far more pivotal to Mr. Trump’s campaign — the situation remains fluid. He appeared to have won about 40 of Pennsylvania’s 54 unbound delegates, along with another 17 awarded to him outright as the statewide winner. The remaining 14 delegates have either expressed no preference or said they would not vote for Mr. Trump. Should Mr. Trump fall short of receiving a majority of the delegates he needs to secure the nomination before the convention — an outcome that seems less likely after Tuesday but still looms as a possible spoiler — a small number of unbound delegates could make all the difference. From a former congressman turned lobbyist in Erie to a gastroenterologist in Philadelphia, the uncommitted, unbound delegates chosen in Pennsylvania’s 18 congressional districts to represent the state at the national convention in July were examples of just how unpredictable and counterintuitive the nominating process can be. Completely untethered from the public opinion, the delegates who are unbound under state party rules could find themselves grappling with a number of concerns in a contested convention, both political and personal, many of which have nothing to do with the preferences of the voters who elected them. Together, Pennsylvania’s 54 unbound delegates will form the largest group of free agents when Republicans meet in Cleveland in July. And if the vote is close, the nominee could rise or fall on the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s experiment with political free will. Many newly elected Trump delegates find this maddening. “How do you justify not voting for him at the convention? What rationale could people possibly have?” asked Lynne Ryan, who lives in New Castle, in the state’s northwest corner along the Ohio border. “But people will find a reason. Trust me. ” Ms. Ryan, a topsoil farmer and flight attendant, campaigned as a committed Trump supporter. But at least one of the other delegates elected from her area, Phil English, a former congressman, has been wary of Mr. Trump. In few states are the quirks of the American party system as evident as in Pennsylvania, which delivered only 17 of its 71 delegates outright to the winner of its primary, Mr. Trump. The remaining 54 delegates were elected blindly by voters in each of the state’s 18 congressional districts. The only way voters knew if they were voting for a delegate who supported their favored presidential candidate was if they went to the trouble of educating themselves. That information was not printed on the ballot. And in some cases it was not knowable at all, because many delegate candidates ran saying they would not commit to any candidate now. “The campaign is fluid,” said Bob Bozzuto, executive director of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, recounting his conversations with delegate candidates recently who have said they wanted to leave themselves some flexibility. “We talk to some who have been recruited by a campaign and say ‘I’m going to vote for the candidate I’m signed up to vote for,’” he said. “You have some others,” he added, “who say, ‘the time between April 26 and July 18 might cause me to have some conversations, and I’ll see what happens. ’” Determining how many Pennsylvania delegates are solidly for Mr. Trump, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas or Gov. John Kasich of Ohio is complicated, given that personal preferences can shift so quickly. The New York Times interviewed delegates, analyzed lists of the campaigns’ preferred delegate candidates and relied on media reports to arrive at its totals. But Mr. Trump hopes to prevail on the unbound delegates by sheer force. He has been making an impassioned case that he deserves the nomination because he has a wide leads in the popular vote, and should not be denied the nomination if he falls just short of a majority at the convention. His underperformance in some states to Mr. Cruz has left him short of that majority, and on Tuesday, the Texas senator appeared to pick up only a few delegates in Pennsylvania. The Times’s analysis counted only three. By framing his possible loss as a denial of popular will and a power grab by the establishment, Mr. Trump has frustrated efforts by Republicans who have tried to hold him back and push the convention into multiple rounds of balloting, an outcome that could very well result in the nomination of someone more palatable to party loyalists. But the overwhelming margin of Mr. Trump’s win in Pennsylvania shows that delegates buck the results at their own peril. Some were slowly coming to this realization. “I want to do the right thing,” said Mr. English, a former congressman who was elected as a delegate on Tuesday representing the northwestern corner of the state. He said he has reservations about Mr. Trump’s ability to unite the party and wants to spend more time thinking about his decision. But he said he ultimately could not foreclose voting for Mr. Trump given how well he did in his district. “The expectation had been that Trump would be staying below 50 percent. That clearly is not the dynamic that’s out there,” he said, adding, “That’s loomed very large in my thought process. ” In Pennsylvania, long relegated to the role of political footnote in the nominating process because it holds its primary so late in the cycle, a victory has not been important to Republicans since 1980, when George Bush’s victory in the state revived his campaign against Ronald Reagan. But this year Pennsylvania Republicans could find themselves the center of a contested convention, much as they were in 1976 when Mr. Reagan made an bid to overcome President Gerald R. Ford by naming Richard Schweiker, a Pennsylvania senator, as his running mate. The move did not, however, impress Pennsylvania delegates, or many other delegates for that matter. Mr. Reagan lost on the first ballot. “These delegates are all trying to dance,” said Representative Charlie Dent, a Republican who represents the Lehigh Valley. “On the one hand they say they want to support the district. But they all have their own preferences. And they will come under tremendous pressure from all the candidates. And not just the candidates but party leaders and elected officials. ” Seth Kaufer, a Philadelphia gastroenterologist elected as a delegate on Tuesday, said he has already met personally with Mr. Cruz and Carly Fiorina, who worked on the Texas senator’s delegate outreach team before becoming his running mate on Wednesday. He also met Mr. Kasich. The one candidate he has not met is Mr. Trump. For now, Dr. Kaufer said, he is waiting to decide which one to support at the convention in Cleveland. Hearing from Mr. Trump’s team — or their highly motivated supporters — now seems all but certain, whether Dr. Kaufer welcomes it or not. Mr. Trump carried Philadelphia County with almost 60 percent of the vote. | 1 |
JERUSALEM — How short is a short skirt and who gets to decide? These were the questions vexing members of the Israeli Knesset, or Parliament, on Wednesday as dozens of female employees arrived in attire to protest what they said was the Knesset guards’ sudden eagerness to enforce a longstanding dress code. Many aides also wore thick tights or black leggings, though it was unclear if that was a nod to modesty or the bad weather. The code, which a Knesset spokesman said was recently “refreshed,” calls for dignified dress that becomes the place and bans items like shorts, ripped trousers, skimpy tops, with political slogans, short skirts and dresses, and . While many Knesset members and their aides said they supported the need for a dress code, they questioned the guards’ role as the arbiters of appropriate skirt length, comparing them to the modesty police in conservative religious societies. One employee cheekily said in a radio interview that she was considering looking into jobs in Iran’s Parliament. The dispute was amplified by the deeper cultural and religious wars roiling Israeli society, with women often on the front line. An girl set off a national debate about religious extremism in 2011 after men spit on her and cursed her because her modest dress did not conform to their rigorous rules. More recently, at the height of this summer’s debate in Europe over the swimwear known as the burkini, an Israeli singer ran into trouble for wearing a bikini top at a beachside concert. And some rabbis and retired generals have objected to the proposed integration of the army’s tank crews, with one critic worrying that after nine months in a coed tank, “a little tank soldier would be born. ” The skirmish burst into public conversation after the Haaretz reported on the plight of Shaked Hasson, who was pictured in a slightly crumpled, blue dress and was held up by Knesset guards for nearly an hour on Sunday until her boss, Merav Michaeli of the Zionist Union, intervened. “Yes, yes, no less than five guards stood and visually measured up Shaked’s legs and decided that her attire did not allow her to enter the Knesset to do her job,” Ms. Michaeli, a feminist lawmaker, wrote in a Facebook post. Describing Ms. Hasson’s experience as “humiliating,” Ms. Michaeli added, “Respectful attire yes, but no to modesty patrols. ” Other female workers subsequently reported having been sent home to change clothes, saying they had frequently been allowed into work in the same garments before. Manuel Trajtenberg, another legislator from the Zionist Union, registered his objection on Wednesday after his parliamentary assistant was asked to remove her jacket for inspection. Mr. Trajtenberg took off his own shirt, revealing an underwear vest, and shouted, “You should all come in burqas, covered up completely,” referring to the full Islamic veil and robe. The guards were prepared for Wednesday’s protest. Some women seeking entry in shortish skirts reported being examined scrupulously, with some female guards tugging at their hemlines. Tamar Ish Shalom, an anchorwoman on Israel’s Channel 10 news, posted pictures on Twitter of the British prime minister, Theresa May, in clothing that revealed her knees and some thigh. She wrote that she hoped Ms. May was not planning a visit to the Knesset, or “It could cause a diplomatic incident. ” The Knesset spokesman, Yotam Yakir, described Wednesday’s protest as a “provocation. ” “I am sure other parliaments in the world have a much stricter code,” Mr. Yakir said by telephone. “Here, jackets are not obligatory. We just don’t allow real minis, torn clothes, things like that. It is very elementary. It is not about gender. ” Israel is a casually dressed country, where shorts, and sandals are common at weddings and funerals. But in September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu kicked a minister, Haim Katz, out of a cabinet meeting for showing up in a striped polo shirt. The Knesset banned jeans in 2007, but later reversed course. Ms. Hasson, the aide whose case led to the protest, told the news site Ynet that she had been told hemlines could be no more than 5 centimeters above the knee, something Mr. Yakir said was incorrect. “There are no numbers or centimeters specified in the code,” he said. “It just says no short skirts. ” | 1 |
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Today we call it the status quo, or endless war, or we just don’t bother to notice it. Indeed, now more than ever we don’t notice it. It’s barely part of the 2016 election, even though we’re engaged in active conflict in half a dozen countries, toying with a relaunch of the Cold War with Russia and, of course, hemorrhaging, as always, more than half our annual discretionary budget on “defense.”
World War II has been going on for seven decades now and has no intention of ever stopping . . . of its own volition. But this year’s rocking electoral craziness – not just Hurricane Donald, but the unexpected staying power of the Bernie Sanders campaign – may well be the harbinger of transcendence. Apparently there’s another force in the universe capable of standing up to the American, indeed, the global, military-industrial status quo.
Slowly, slowly this force is organizing itself and taking human shape. This isn’t a simple process. After all, the game of empire – the game called war, the game of domination – has been coalescing political power for several thousand years now.
But our current military budget was birthed by the wars of the 20th century. William Hartung , writing recently at TomDispatch, shows the fascinating connectedness of the wars that followed VE and VJ Days, as the corporate beneficiaries of the Big War aligned with mainstream politicians of both major parties and coalesced into the Washington consensus. Over the decades they have engaged in an ongoing struggle to maintain military spending at breathtakingly high levels and avoid any sort of transition to something called peace.
The two pillars of this consensus, as Hartung points out, are the ideology of “armed exceptionalism,” that a shifting array of enemies are out there itching to destroy us, but we will persist in our mission to maintain order in every corner of the planet; and the “strategic placement of arms production facilities and military bases in key states and Congressional districts,” ensuring entrenched political power for the arms lobby.
So World War II initially, as we know, morphed into the Cold War, America’s crusade against communism, which was set into motion in 1950 by a long-classified report (NSC-68) prepared by the State and Defense departments and the CIA, urging the vigorous containment of Soviet expansion and the development of the hydrogen bomb.
President Truman “was somewhat taken aback at the costs associated with the report’s recommendations,” according to history.com , and “he hesitated to publicly support a program that would result in heavy tax increases for the American public, particularly since the increase would be spent on defending the United States during a time of peace.”
Peace! What a nuisance! But: “Thank God Korea came along,” as an aide to Secretary of State Dean Acheson put it at the time. The Korean War gave the militarists the enemy they needed and the nuclear arms race, and so much else, was born. The military budget was set for decades.
As Hartung points out, the next terrible hurdle the budget boys faced was in the wake of the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. That war, and the universal draft that essentially pulled the whole country into a front-row seat for it, spawned a passionate antiwar movement and, ultimately, a moldering national disgust for war, known as Vietnam Syndrome. The Cold War continued, but the U.S. military was confined to proxy wars for a while and had to rethink its strategy.
Two things happened. The universal draft was ended, removing most of the American middle class from a life-and-death stake in our military operations; and Saddam Hussein, our ally, was recast as Adolf Hitler. And in 1991, President George H.W. Bush embarked on a month of war with Iraq known as Operation Desert Storm. Not only did the US“win” this war and kill over 100,000 Iraqis (and ultimately cause hideous health problems for American soldiers), but, perhaps most importantly: “By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.” So the president proclaimed.
Unfortunately for the war consensus, the Soviet Union dissolved a short time later and the Cold War ended . . . and a “peace dividend” loomed. Hartung notes that Gen. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, expressed the situation thus: “I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.”
Would military spending be diverted to infrastructure repair, free education, universal health care?
Well, no. The Bill Clinton presidency found a few new demons. It fought a war in Kosovo and, on the domestic front, vastly expanded the prison-industrial complex. Meanwhile, the neocon think tanks cogitated and one of them, the Project for a New American Century, reflecting the fact that geopolitical thinking had stopped with World War II, decided that what America needed was a new Pearl Harbor . And then came the presidency of George W. Bush, 9/11, and the Global War on Terror. And the US military budget was carved, seemingly, in stone.
Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 on the promise of serious change, but any hope that he intended to upend W’s wars was soon dispelled. He dumped the name but kept the wars, essentially settling “for a no-name global war,” Hartung writes. “He would shift gears from a strategy focused on large numbers of ‘boots on the ground’ to an emphasis on drone strikes, the use of Special Operations forces, and massive transfers of arms to US allies like Saudi Arabia. . . . (O)ne might call Obama’s approach ‘politically sustainable warfare.’”
And here we are, immersed in a no-name global war that has no logical end and few serious critics in the world of mainstream media and politics. But maybe the American democracy is not the closed system it’s supposed to be.
For instance, John Feffer , director of Foreign Policy in Focus, points out that Donald Trump, in all his fun-house recklessness, is shaking up the consensus: “Democrats and Republicans disagree about many things. But with a few exceptions they all support an enormous military budget, an expensive overseas expeditionary force, and unilateral acts of force when necessary to protect US national interests (understood broadly).
“It’s an odd paradox that Trump, who blathers on about making America great again, departs from this consensus.”
He won’t win, and he shouldn’t win for a million reasons, but in his recklessness he has touched the raw anger of a sizable chunk of the American electorate. Sanders, speaking with compassion and integrity and delivering a far different message, managed to tap the same well of public outrage. And, as Feffer noted, “the mainstream is worried that the political parties will realize that the ‘bring the war dollars home’ message can win a national election and disrupt the comfortable revolving-door consensus.”
And World War II will finally end? Not this year, but maybe four years from now, if we refuse to let the war consensus have any peace in the interim.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at or visit his website at commonwonders.com . Reprinted with permission from PeaceVoice . Read more by Robert Koehler | 0 |
BY CHRISTINE WILLIAMS
The West has in effect developed a two-tier legal system for Muslims.
The article below is about a baby being dumped in the road, with the Muslim migrant perpetrator escaping jail time. This follows another shocking recent report about the rape of a 10-year-old boy at a swimming pool in Vienna by a Muslim refugee from Iraq; his sentence was overturned because the judge accepted, outrageously, that the man thought the little boy consented.
Our senses have seemingly gone numb to Muslim crime. This is similar to the phenomenon of how Muslim Arab violence against Israel is tolerated, as suggested by Middle East scholar Ephraim Karsh:
The sight of Arabs killing Jews (or other Arabs for that matter) is hardly news; while the sight of Jews killing Arabs is a man-bites-dog anomaly that cannot be tolerated.
Karsh’s comment is based on the unflattering principle of low expectations toward Muslims, which is a costly malady, as Western civilized society is slowly descending into the barbarism seen in Islamic states.
Less than two decades ago, no one could could have imagined reports such as these: Violent “asylum seekers hurl chairs and throw punches in ‘wild west’ fight that left five in hospital”; a 90-year-old woman gets raped by a Muslim; a 79-year-old woman visiting her sister’s grave also gets raped by a Muslim; up to a million girls in the UK are sexually assaulted by Muslim rape gangs; and crime has seized Europe, with coverups of Muslim crime in the U.S. as well.
“No jail time for asylum seeker who dumped baby in road”, by Paul Gillingwater, The Local , October 19, 2016:
The 27-year-old had been living in an asylum centre in Vienna’s Floridsdorf district and had already been given several warnings for being drunk and violent.
So when he turned up again intoxicated with a beer in his hand and was told to leave, he flew into a furious rage.
Spotting his baby daughter in a pram nearby, he grabbed her and ran into the busy road, and put her in the middle of a traffic lane.
The man’s lawyer denied however that he wanted to cause the child any harm, saying he wanted to take a photograph
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Trumps Slim Chance for Greatness
Special Report: Donald Trumps unlikely victory created the opportunity to finally break with the orthodoxy of Washingtons neocon/liberal-hawk foreign policy, but can Trump find enough fresh thinkers to do the job, asks Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
November 16, " Consortium News " - Donald Trump must decide and decide quickly whether he wants to be a great U.S. President or a robo-signature machine affixing his name to whatever legislation comes from congressional Republicans and a nodding figurehead acquiescing to more neoconservative foreign policy adventures.
Or, to put it in a vernacular that Trump might use, does he want to be Paul Ryans bitch on domestic policies? And does he want to surrender his foreign policy to the wise guys of Washingtons neocon establishment.
Trumps problem is that he has few fully developed ideas about how to proceed in a presidency that even many of his close followers did not expect would happen. Plus, over the past few decades, the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks have marginalized almost every dissenting expert, including old-line realists who once were important figures.
So, the bench of confirmable experts who have dissented on neocon/liberal-hawk policies is very thin. To find national security leaders who would break with the prevailing group thinks, Trump would have go outside normal channels and take a risk on some fresh thinkers.
But most mainstream media accounts doubt that he will. That is why speculation has centered on Trump settling on several neocon retreads for Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, such as former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former CIA Director James Woolsey and ex-National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, all staunch supporters of George W. Bushs disastrous Iraq War which Trump has denounced.
Team of Rivals
If Trump is guided in that direction, he will make the same mistake that President Barack Obama made during the 2008 transition when Obama was seduced by the idea of a Lincoln-esque Team of Rivals and staffed key top national security jobs with hawks keeping Bushs Defense Secretary Robert Gates , hiring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and leaving in place top generals, such as David Petraeus .
That decision trapped the inexperienced Obama into a policy of continuity with Bushs wars and related policies, such as domestic spying, rather than enabling Obama to achieve his promised change.
Faced with powerful rivals within his own administration, Obama was maneuvered into an ill-considered counterinsurgency escalation in Afghanistan in 2009 that did little more than get another 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed along with many more Afghans.
Secretary Clinton also sold out the elected progressive president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, when he was ousted in a coup in 2009, signaling to Latin America that El Norte hadnt changed much.
Then, Clinton sabotaged Obamas first attempt in 2010 to enlist the help of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to work out a deal with Iran on constraining its nuclear program. Clinton favored an escalating confrontation with Iran along the lines dictated by Israeli hardliners.
Clinton and the other hawks succeeded in thwarting Obamas will because, as Gates wrote in his memoir Duty , Gates and Clinton were un-fireable in that they could challenge Obama whenever they wished while realizing that Obama would have to pay an unacceptably high price to remove them.
As clever inside players, Gates, Clinton and Petraeus also understood that if Obama balked at their policy prescriptions, they could undercut him by going to friends in the mainstream news media and leaking information about how Obama was weak in not supporting a more warlike approach to problems.
Obamas Real Weakness
Yet, by failing to stand up to this neocon/liberal-hawk pressure , Obama did make himself weak. Essentially, he never got control of his foreign policy and even after the Gates-Clinton-Petraeus trio was gone by the start of Obamas second term, the President still feared angering Washingtons foreign policy establishment which often followed the heed of Israels Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Obama was so worried about Israel that, at the apex of his power after winning reelection in 2012, Obama went on a several-day trip to visit Netanyahu in a craven attempt to show his love and obeisance to Israel. Obama took similar trips to Saudi Arabia.
Still, that was not enough to spare him the wrath of Netanyahu and the Saudi royals when Obama finally pushed successfully for an Iran nuclear deal in 2014. Netanyahu humiliated Obama by accepting a Republican invitation in 2015 to speak to a joint session of Congress where he urged U.S. lawmakers to repudiate their own President.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia demanded and got new concessions from Obama on arms sales and his grudging support for their proxy war in Syria as well as their direct aerial bombardment of Yemen both part of a Sunni Wahhabist sectarian strategy for destroying Shiite-related regimes. (The Sunni/Shiite clash dates back to the Seventh Century.)
Indeed, the little-recognized Israeli-Saudi alliance targeting the so-called Shiite crescent Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Iran is at the heart of what has been driving U.S. policy in the Middle East since the 1990s.
And, if President-elect Trump wants to truly reverse the downward spiral of the United States as it has squandered trillions of dollars in futile Mideast wars, he will have to go up against the Israeli-Saudi tandem and make it clear that he will not be manipulated as Obama was.
Facing down such a powerful coalition of Israel (with its extraordinary U.S. lobbying apparatus) and Saudi Arabia (with its far-reaching financial clout) would require both imagination and courage. It would not be possible if Trump surrounds himself with senior advisers under the thumb of Prime Minister Netanyahu and King Salman.
So, we will learn a great deal about whether Trump is a real player or just a pretender when he selects his foreign policy team. Will he find imaginative new thinkers who can break the disastrous cycles of Mideast wars and reduce tensions with Russia or will he just tap into the usual suspects of Republican orthodoxy?
Sunlight on the Swamp
Trump could also show his independence from Republican orthodoxy by recognizing that government secrecy has gone way too far, a drift into opacity that dates back to Ronald Reagan and his reversal of the more open-government policies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Trump says he wants to drain the swamp of Washington, but to do that first requires letting in much more sunlight and sharing much more information with the American people.
For starters assuming that the timid Obama wont take the risk President Trump could pardon national security whistleblowers who have faced or could face prosecution, such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, Jeffrey Sterling and Edward Snowden.
That could be followed by an executive order forbidding excessive secrecy inside the federal government, recognizing that We the People are the nations true sovereigns and thus deserve as much information as possible while protecting necessary secrets.
Trump could show he means business about respecting average American citizens by sharing with them U.S. intelligence assessments on key controversies, such as the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria and the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shoot-down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. [See here and here. ]
The Obama administration has engaged in selective release of information about these mysteries to manipulate U.S. public opinion, not to inform and thus empower the American people. Trump could go a long way toward restoring public trust by renouncing such tricks.
He also could save many billions of dollars by shutting down U.S. propaganda agencies whose role also is to use various P.R. tricks to shape both foreign and domestic opinion, often in the cause of regime changes or color revolutions.
Trump could shut down the State Departments Office of Public Diplomacy , return the U.S. Agency for International Development to its legitimate purpose of helping poor countries build schools and drill wells, and shutter the trouble-making National Endowment for Democracy .
By steering the world away from the New Cold War with nuclear-armed Russia, Trump could not only help save the future of mankind, he could save trillions of dollars that otherwise would end up in the pockets of the Military-Industrial Complex.
FDR or Coolidge?
Regarding domestic policy, some Republicans expect that Trump will simply sign off on whatever Ayn-Rand-inspired legislation that House Speaker Ryan pushes through Congress, whether turning Medicare into a voucher program or privatizing Social Security.
In this area, too, Trump will have to decide whether he wants to be a great president in the mold of Franklin Roosevelt or someone more of the caliber of Calvin Coolidge.
Trump also must face the reality that he has lost the popular vote by a rather significant margin almost a million votes in the latest tallies and thus only has the presidency because of the archaic Electoral College. In other words, he lacks a real mandate from the people.
When confronted with a similar situation in 2000, George W. Bush chose to pretend that he had a decisive mandate for his right-wing policies, shoved them down the Democrats throats (such as his massive tax cut mostly for the rich that wiped out the budget surplus), and eventually saw his failed presidency sink into bitter partisanship.
Republicans will surely urge Trump to do the same, to ignore the popular vote, but he might do well to surprise people by looking for overlapping areas where Democrats and Republicans can cooperate.
For instance, many Democrats fear that Trump will undo the difficult progress made on climate change over the past eight years. After all, Trump has voiced doubts about the scientific consensus on the existential threat posed by global warming.
But Trump also wants to invest heavily in Americas infrastructure (plus he has vowed to help the inner cities). So, theres potential common ground if Trump were to launch a major program to create a world-class mass transit system for urban and suburban areas.
Trump might even turn to one of his critics, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for Transportation Secretary with instructions to study mass transit in Japan and Europe and implement a similar system in the United States, quickly. Besides creating jobs and improving life for urban dwellers (who largely supported Hillary Clinton), quality and fast mass transit could get millions of Americans out of their cars and thus help in the fight against global warming, too.
To demonstrate a willingness to reach across the aisle on such important issues, Trump might even consider offering Energy Secretary to Al Gore.
But such bold steps would require Trump to have the courage and creativity to go against the Republican playbook which calls for a zero-sum game against the Democrats.
Whether Trump has such courage and foresight is the pressing question of the moment. Will he go for true greatness (both for himself and America) or will he be content to have his name and face on one of those place mats showing the 45 U.S. Presidents?
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, Americas Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com ). | 0 |
By Dr. Mercola
As noted at the very beginning of this 26-minute health documentary by juicing expert Jason Vale: “More people die from chronic diseases than all other causes put together.”
This is a remarkable state of affairs when you consider that the human body is actually designed to maintain healthy homeostasis, given half a chance.
What’s worse, chronic diseases strike the very young as well as the very old. Children are now developing diseases previously relegated to seniors, such as type 2 diabetes , fatty liver, heart disease and even cancer.
Toxicity appears to be a major factor driving this burgeoning wave of chronic disease. Toxins are in our food, in our water and air, in the medications we take, in the products we use each day to clean ourselves and our homes; they’re in beauty products and our furnishings and building materials.
“All chronic diseases are caused by two, and only two, major problems,” Charlotte Gerson, founder of the Gerson Institute, says . “Toxicity and deficiency.”
TOXICITY AND DEFICIENCY ARE CORE PROBLEMS According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), PREVENTABLE chronic diseases are now the world’s biggest killers. And the combination of eating nutrient-deficient foods and being over-exposed to toxins is at the core of our current health crisis.
The answer to this dilemma is certainly not to take medication to mask the symptoms of toxicity and deficiency. The solution is to remove toxins, clean up your system and increase the nutrient density of your healthy food.
Plants — fruits, berries and vegetables — are “live” foods. Provided they’ve not been severely processed, or are eaten in excess and out of season. Ideally, the best time to eat fruit is in the summer when you have plenty of exposure to sunshine and can tolerate higher net carbs.
They contain many phytochemicals your body can use to heal and nourish your cells. The appeal of juicing is that you can consume more nutrient-dense vegetables than when you eat them whole or Vita Mix them in a blender.
This allows you to consume far greater amounts of vegetable nutrients than you would normally be able to eat whole or blended with the fiber.
JUICING IS A GREAT WAY TO BOOST NUTRIENT INTAKE Some will argue that consuming more veggies than you could normally chew through is unnecessary, but when you consider how nutrient levels in most foods have dramatically decreased since the introduction of mechanized farming in 1925, juicing really makes sense.
Healthy soils contain a huge diversity of microorganisms, and it is these organisms that are responsible for the plant’s nutrient uptake, health and the stability of the entire ecosystem.
The wide-scale adoption of industrial farming practices has decimated soil microbes responsible for transferring these minerals to the plants, and synthetic chemicals sprayed on the crops have further destroyed overall soil quality.
For example, as explained by research scientist August Dunning , chief science officer and co-owner of Eco Organics, in order to receive the same amount of iron you used to get from one apple in 1950, today you’d have to eat 36 apples!
How could you possibly get 36 apples into you? Even with juicing that would be a remarkable feat, and would likely overload you with natural sugars as well, so I wouldn’t recommend it.
My point is that even when juicing, you may not get the same amount of nutrients our ancestors used to get from even a fraction of the foods they ate, so you’re unlikely to get superfluous amounts of nutrients by regularly drinking fresh vegetable juices.
When you drink fresh, live juice, it’s almost like receiving an intravenous infusion of vitamins, minerals and enzymes because they go straight into your body without needing to be broken down. Since juicing is essentially “mainlining” live nutrients, it’s no surprise it can produce rapid and profound health benefits.
FOOD ADDICTION IS A PROFIT CENTER There’s a conscious effort on behalf of food manufacturers to get you addicted to foods that are convenient and inexpensive to make. This system is detailed in investigative reporter Michael Moss’ book, “ Salt, Sugar, Fat ” — the top three substances that make processed foods so addictive.
One of the guiding principles for the processed food industry is known as “sensory-specific satiety.” Moss describes this as “the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm your brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more.”
The greatest successes, whether beverages or foods, owe their “craveability” to complex formulas that pique your taste buds just enough, without overwhelming them, thereby overriding your brain’s inclination to say “enough.”
“Vanishing calorie density” is another term used to describe foods that melt in your mouth, which has the effect of making your brain think it doesn’t contain any calories. As a result, you keep eating.
In short, as noted in the film, the big food companies are “manipulating our food so that we keep eating more, and more, and more.” And, as stated by Cherie Calbom, also known as “The Juice Lady:” “It’s corn and soy, and wheat and sugar and salt and chemicals — that’s primarily what people are eating.”
So is it really any wonder that so many are so sick and overweight? Many health authorities make it seem as the obesity epidemic is a great mystery, and largely blame it on laziness. “If only people exercised more, they’d be fine,” the reasoning goes.
But this simply isn’t true, and by sweeping the proverbial elephant under the rug and ignoring the fact that our food supply is the problem, these authorities have done us all a shameful disservice.
Remember, it really isn’t about calories, it is about insulin resistance. And processed foods, sugars and high net carb foods will make it virtually impossible to normalize your metabolism and get lean.
MODERN MEDICINE IS ANOTHER PROFIT CENTER Many times, even severe health problems have simple fixes. For example, in the film, Vale, who’s also the author of “The Juice Detox Diet,” explains that what prompted him to try juicing in the first place was a severe case of psoriasis — an autoimmune disease that causes cells to build up on the surface of your skin, leading to thick, unsightly scaly patches that are very itchy and often painful.
He also had eczema and severe hay fever and asthma. For years he used steroid tablets and various inhalers to manage his symptoms, but he wasn’t getting any better. “Not once did anyone look at what might be causing the problems; they only wanted to treat the symptoms,” he said.
The turning point came when one of his doctors suggested a coal-tar treatment for his psoriasis. He’d be slathered in coal-tar, the same gooey tar placed on roadways, and covered in bandages for six weeks. The idea of resorting to such a bizarre and clearly toxic intervention was the final straw. “There’s GOT to be another way,” he thought.
Indeed, toxicity and a narrow focus on managing symptoms — not actually addressing the root problem, which might result in a full remission or cure — are hallmarks of modern medicine. This mode of operation has turned healthcare into a massive for-profit business that has become increasingly reluctant to embrace strategies that might actually remove an individual from the paying patient pool.
This is tragic, since research exists showing that raising your vitamin D level, for example, can help heal psoriasis, especially if you’re vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D supplements are very inexpensive, and if you optimize your level by getting regular and sensible sun exposure, which is the preferred and ideal way, it’s free (provided you live in a sunny area and don’t use a therapeutic sunbed).
In Vale’s case, juicing was the answer, and he no longer suffers from any of his previous problems. His asthma completely vanished within a month, and his skin gradually cleared up until there was not a trace of psoriasis or eczema left. His weight also dropped “at a rate I didn’t think was humanly possible,” he says. As noted by Dr. Dwight Lundell, author of “The Cure for Heart Disease,” who is featured in the film:
“Not one single person will be cured of heart disease, pulmonary disease, stroke, arthritis, obesity and, of course, diabetes, with our current medical approach.”
INFLAMMATION IS THE DRIVING MECHANISM BEHIND MOST CHRONIC DISEASE Toxicity, nutrient deficiencies , processed foods, sugar and excess net carbs promote inflammation, and chronic inflammation is a hallmark of virtually every chronic disease there is. When your inflammation levels are low, it’s very difficult for disease to take root. When healthy, your body is simply too well-equipped to address foreign invaders and can easily clean out minor toxic exposures.
As noted by Lundell, when we investigate what we’re doing differently today, when inflammation levels are high, compared to decades past when chronic disease rates were much lower, the main difference we find is the foods we eat.
We’ve gotten away from eating fresh, whole foods, most of which come from the plant kingdom, and most of what we eat are processed foods laced with a myriad of chemicals that were never in our food supply before. “In my opinion, this dietary change is the cause of most chronic diseases,” he says.
It may appear as though all these different chronic diseases are very different, and therefore would have different causes. But these variations are deceiving. In the vast majority of cases, the root problem can be narrowed down to inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, caused by toxicity and insufficient amounts of “building blocks” (nutrients) to maintain optimal biological function. The differences in manifestation primarily relate to individual weaknesses.
“It just stands to reason and common sense that if the vast majority of those diseases are caused by diet and lifestyle, then the simple answer, surely, is to change the diet and lifestyle, and they’ll just get better,” Vale says.
Calbom adds: “We should be juicing, because so many people have impaired digestive tracts, and digestion is impaired because of the diet we’ve been on. Along come your beautiful juices; they go right into your intestinal tract, and those nutrients get absorbed into your system.
They’re going right to work within about 20 or 30 minutes. They’re there feeding your body, rejuvenating, giving you energy; giving your body life! This is why you should juice … Juice every day; this has got to be a way of life, because that’s when you’re going to notice your life changing.”
EAT ‘LOW HUMAN INTERVENTION FOODS’ Vale wisely suggests that if a food has a label, it probably shouldn’t be in your diet. What you’re really looking for is real food, or what he calls “low human intervention foods,” meaning foods that has passed through as few human hands and processes as possible. Ideally, you would be growing your own food and eating out of your garden.
In the summer, the majority of my main meal comes from my garden: sunflower spouts, red bell peppers, oregano, rosemary, turmeric and spinach. If you are unable to grow your own, your next best bet would be to get locally grown organic produce that has not been waxed, cut up or processed in any way.
“When you look at the fact that the food you eat really creates the life that you live, everything starts to change,” Philip McCluskey, author of “Weight Loss Blueprint,” says.
‘SUPER-JUICING’ FOR 28 DAYS CURED DIABETES AND CHRONIC PAIN
In a previous documentary, Vale recruited eight people who collectively suffered from 22 different chronic diseases and put them on a juice-only diet for 28 days (plus exercise) in order to explore juicing’s potential benefits for reversing chronic disease. He filmed their experience, which resulted in the documentary “Super Juice Me,” which I’ve included above for your convenience.
The health improvements seen by those eight individuals are nothing short of astounding. Every participant felt energized and lost weight, and most reported a drastic reduction in their symptoms and the number of medications they needed to use. One man completely resolved his diabetes in those 28 days. A woman went from years of chronic pain to being completely pain-free, and others suffering from asthma, colitis and sleep apnea enjoyed a profound reduction in symptoms.
It was not an easy journey, as several experienced detoxification reactions, food cravings and, for some, a temporary increase in symptoms as their bodies began to purge toxins they’d accumulated, but those reactions were relatively short-lived, and they felt immensely better on the other side — better than they’d felt in years.
THE MANY HEALTH BENEFITS OF JUICING There are many reasons to consider incorporating vegetable juicing into your health plan. Whether you use it as an occasional cleanse, or as the start of every morning, juicing:
Helps you absorb all the nutrients from your vegetables. This is important because most people have impaired digestion as a result of making less-than-optimal food choices over many years, which limits your body’s ability to absorb all of the nutrients in whole, raw vegetables. Juicing helps “pre-digest” them, so you won’t lose any of this valuable nutrition. Makes it easier to consume a large quantity of vegetables. Virtually every health authority recommends that you get six to eight servings of vegetables and fruits per day, but very few actually get that. Juicing virtually guarantees you’ll reach your daily target. Makes it easier to get a wider variety of vegetables into your diet. Juicing greatly expands the number of different phytochemicals you receive, as each vegetable offers unique benefits. Juicing also allows you to consume vegetables that you may not normally enjoy eating whole. Boosts your immune system. Raw juice supercharges your immune system with concentrated phytochemicals and biophotonic light energy, which can revitalize your body. The nutrients in fresh juice also feed your body’s good bacteria and help suppress potentially pathogenic ones. Increases your energy. When your blood is flooded with nutrients and your body’s pH is optimized, you’ll feel energized. Since juice is absorbed and utilized by your body very rapidly, juicers report feeling an almost instantaneous “kick” of energy. Supports your brain. In the Kame Project, 1 people who consumed juice more than three times per week were 76 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those who consumed juice less than once a week. Provides structured water. Vegetable juice is one of the purest sources of water and actually qualifies as water. Vegetable water is structured water (living water), which is different from regular water — H3O2 rather than H2O. Water from vegetables is the best quality water you can drink!On a side note, sun exposure is also important for structuring the water in your cells. Part of the energy your body requires can actually be obtained from sunlight, but you must expose your skin directly to it. The ultraviolet (UV) radiation increases nitric oxide (NO) release, which can direct more than half your blood flow to your skin. Once your blood is exposed to the sun, it can absorb UV and infrared radiation, which help to structure the water in your cells and energize your mitochondria.
Download Interview Transcript Keep in mind your juices should consist mostly of green vegetables. You’ll want to minimize fruits in order to keep the fructose and net carb content low. The bulk of your juice should come from organic green veggies. Spinach, celery, kale and Swiss chard are common juicing staples.
If you’re new to juicing, you can start with more mild-tasting veggies, like celery and cucumbers. From there you can work your way up to red leaf lettuce, romaine, spinach and escarole, along with parsley and cilantro. Kale, collard, dandelion, mustard and other greens can be bitter, so you’ll want to start slowly and add just a few leaves at a time.
Some of the most nutrient-dense veggies are the strongest tasting, but don’t avoid them. Just use a lesser quantity in your juice until your taste buds acclimate. Selecting organic, non-GMO produce is very important when juicing, but the price can be a challenge for some. One alternative is to grow your own, making sure to avoid toxic garden chemicals (synthetic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers).
If you’re using non-organic vegetables, your best bet is to peel them, to avoid juicing pesticide residues. This is particularly important for fruits and vegetables that have been waxed, as this seals in the chemicals. It can be difficult to discern if a vegetable has been waxed or not, because the wax can be applied in a very thin, transparent layer.
Beware that even organic produce sold in grocery chain stores will typically be waxed. For unwaxed fruit and vegetables, you typically have to get them from a local source.
TIPS THAT CAN MAKE YOUR VEGGIE JUICE MORE PALATABLE If you’re not used to eating a lot of vegetables, the taste may take a little while to get used to. A great trick to make your juice more palatable, especially in the beginning, is to add one or more of these elements:
Limes and lemons: You can add one half to a whole lime or lemon for every quart of juice. Limes are my favorite for cutting bitter flavors. Cranberries: You can also add some cranberries if you enjoy them. Limit the cranberries to about 4 ounces per pint of juice. Fresh ginger : This is an excellent addition if you enjoy the taste. It gives your juice a spicy “kick.” Limited amounts of apple and carrot (just be mindful of your overall sugar content). HOW TO MANAGE CRAVINGS AND DETOX SYMPTOMS Changing your diet or any other aspect of your lifestyle is sometimes stressful, and stress can sabotage your success. As some of the people in Vale’s super-juicing experiment discovered, you might feel a little worse before you feel better, as detox symptoms and food cravings can arise. Addressing your emotional and mental health is a very important aspect of total body health, so please do not ignore stress.
The Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) can be helpful when anxieties strike, including emotional struggles surrounding dietary changes. In fact, it’s one of the most powerful tools for reducing stress and anxiety that I know of. In 2012, a triple blind study 2 found that EFT reduced cortisol levels and symptoms of psychological distress by 24 percent, more than any other intervention tested!
If you worry that you won’t be able to get the juice down or you won’t take the time to do it, or your food cravings will be unbearable, EFT may be able to help. The first couple weeks of a new eating routine are typically the most challenging, while your body is making the necessary biochemical adjustments. Tapping can be extraordinarily beneficial for reducing anxiety, cravings and detox symptoms during this time.
EFT is easy to learn and once you do, it’s always at your fingertips, whenever and wherever you need it. You can even adapt this intermittent fasting EFT video by Julie Schiffman for juice fasting. Just as juicing helps reduce your body’s toxic burden, you can think of EFT as detoxification for your mind. By combining the two, your healing will have the greatest chance of success.
Source: Mercola
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John P. Warren – Can anyone doubt Donald J. Trump may well become our first Independent POTUS? Conservatives disdain him and all that he stands for, and Progressives of all stripes deplore him and the basket of his supporters. The establishment disavows him. So who will elect him? · The Blue Dog Coalition —represents conservative Democrats who have tired of identity politics, empty promises to working people, destruction of their mores, and the rampant corruption amongst top Dems. · Mainstream Republicans —are all over the map in their beliefs about religion, sexual identity, abortion, gun rights, and immigration, but they are fed up with the take-no-prisoners approach by extremists in their party. Despite putdowns to the contrary, they cross social, wealth, and educational boundaries. · Indies —comprise the big chunk smack in the middle who, like ordinary Republicans, eschew the extreme positions, are willing to compromise, even on sensitive and personal issues, but want something done about immigration and the gaps in job opportunities, education, and wealth. Indies hate corruption more than bad social behavior.
These groups are angry about the banana republic culture of progressive Democrats. They know that for all his personal foibles, Donald Trump is right: the system is rigged against an outlier. That’s not to suggest there’s a group of elites arranging things to their liking with a few string-pulls.
It’s the system of two major party establishments encrusted with the principles of their in-house philosophical tyrants. It’s a society in which progressives infest our educational system, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, and the grossly mis-named mainstream media crowd. It’s a federal government no longer a traffic cop protecting our rights, but rather, but another tool corrupted for the progressive political agenda. Trump’s constituencies know that anyone running outside permitted boundaries has had no chance of success.
Until now. Until Donald J. Trump. He’s the outlier. The underdog tired of being kicked around. Despite myriad splinters this particular example of presidential timber, Trump has beat all the odds, and from this vantage point of over a week out, November 8 looks to be more than a squeaker in his favor.
Unless, of course, the election itself is stolen by Democrats so desperate to keep hidden their secrets. Is it possible to commit vote fraud? Most definitely. It’s not about people registered in both Ohio and Florida, whole cemeteries or ex-residents of state pens going to the polls. That has happened and will happen again, but unless there’s a massive number of people moving a massive amount of votes in exactly the right locales, the national election should remain relatively immune from such shenanigans.
Also, defective voting machines have always been with us, so it’s up to each citizen to pay close attention to what happens before pulling the lever. What they can’t see, however, is the invisible third party electronically camped between county election offices and their respective state capitols flipping votes a few thousand here and there. If THAT happens, we will not keep the republic Ben Franklin and the Founders gave us. For this discussion, however, let’s hope that’s not the case.
If Hillary Clinton is “elected,” her administration will be dogged by journalistic and other investigators digging deeper into the pile of political offal that represents the mass of Clinton pay-to-play activities. And if the FBI “gets religion” this time around, that cancer will not be curable.
If Trump, surviving every barrage, pushes through to electoral victory, November 8 th is one hurdle, but there remain others before Inauguration Day. If possible—despite Hillary’s oh-so-pious promises to the contrary—progressives will challenge the vote everywhere they can. Assuming those challenges come to naught, the next hurdle is the vote by the Electoral College itself.
Currently, there are 538 electors (for 435 representatives, 100 senators, and three allotted to Washington, DC). Except for Maine and Nebraska, which awards its electoral votes by congressional district, the other forty-eight are winner-take-all. Electors are usually chosen by each political party, and most often, they are true to the pledge they have given.
Yet, in this year of all years, when Trump is not a Republican’s Republican, and Democrats will not be shy about dirty tricks, it’s the issue of faithfulness that matters. Only 24 states have laws to punish faithless electors—those who cast a vote for other than the person to whom they are pledged, so the potential for faithless electors in the other 26 states and DC is greater than ever before.
Faithless electors aside, they will meet in their respective state capitals on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December—this year, December 19 th , and ordinarily, the process should be little more than a formality required by the Constitution.
Then, there’s the Twelfth Amendment requiring Congress to convene in joint session on January 6, 2017. There, the newly installed House of Representatives declares the winner of the election. The kicker is that if one member of each house, in writing, objects to the vote count of a state, the entire assemblage, after separate debate in their respective chambers, decides whether to accept or reject the objection. It’s easy to imagine, how in this particular election, the process might be manipulated by a Bernie Sanders or an Elizabeth Warren.
Trump’s last hurdle will be to disabuse the fears of many Americans so heavily stoked by those arrayed against him, and then bring together all but die-hard progressives in rebuilding America as the last best hope of humanity on this planet. It’s a daunting task, but Donald Trump is the only candidate with the political cojones to get it done.
So, let’s get ‘er done! SF Source Townhall Oct. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
Media Bias Has Become Mental Illness Media Bias Has Become Mental Illness 31 am by Cliff Kincaid Leave a Comment 0
Accuracy in Media
Aware that their credibility is shot with the American people, the publisher and executive editor of The New York Times sent a “To our readers” note on Friday, saying, “we aim to rededicate ourselves to the fundamental mission of Times journalism.”
This was another way of saying, “Sorry, we blew it,” without being honest with readers.
Those familiar with the paper’s “journalism” understand this to be media bias. But Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. and Dean Baquet were suggesting something else—that something had gone wrong and they don’t quite know what happened, but don’t worry because the Times will get back to its mission of reporting truthfully.
Beating around the bush, they said Trump’s victory was “the biggest political story of the year,” which had “reached a dramatic and unexpected climax late Tuesday night…”
The word “unexpected” means that the paper’s predictions were wrong.
Then they said that the paper’s newsroom had covered the campaign “with agility and creativity,” which are terms for incompetence and bias. Some people cling to the old-fashioned idea that a paper should report events objectively.
Pretending to reflect on the poor coverage, they finally got to the problem without saying so directly. They asked, “Did Donald Trump’s sheer unconventionality lead us and other news outlets to underestimate his support among American voters?” and “What forces and strains in America drove this divisive election and outcome?”
In other words, Trump’s “sheer unconventionality” caused the paper to misreport what was happening. He had appealed to mysterious “forces and strains,” terms that apparently refer to the voters.
Sulzberger and Baquet insisted that the Times will “report America and the world honestly, without fear or favor, striving always to understand and reflect all political perspectives and life experiences in the stories that we bring to you.”
In other words, they blew it during the 2016 campaign and will try to do better next time. But nothing is really changing at the paper. Nobody is being fired. And nobody is being hired who has an understanding of the conservative electorate.
The paper, they said, will “hold power to account, impartially and unflinchingly.”
But who will hold The New York Times accountable?
In a real howler, they then claimed, “We believe we reported on both candidates fairly during the presidential campaign. You can rely on The New York Times to bring the same fairness, the same level of scrutiny, the same independence to our coverage of the new president and his team.”
This is another indication that the paper is hopelessly liberal, and that nothing will really change.
The business as usual attitude was reflected in the front-page headline in the Times after Trump won: “Democrats, Students and Foreign Allies Face the Reality of a Trump Presidency.”
As Accuracy in Media Chairman Don Irvine noted , the headline was even funny to various MSNBC personalities, because it focused on the disappointment of liberals at Trump’s victory, rather than the victory itself.
Mark Halperin commented, “If a Democratic candidate who was thought to have a 10 percent chance of winning by The New York Times that ended up winning, and winning red states as Trump won blue states, I don’t think that would have been the headline. And I’ll just say again, the responsibility of journalists is to not report on their biases. It’s to go out and understand the country through the prism of the election and say, ‘Why are people feeling the way they’re feeling?’”
Of course, the Times was not alone.
Consider the story in Politico headlined , “Insiders: Clinton would crush Trump in November.” It began, “In the swing states that matter most in the presidential race, Donald Trump doesn’t have a prayer against Hillary Clinton in the general election.”
In a story headlined, “The Democrat Media Complex Will Never Understand What Happened Tuesday Night,” Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media commented that the talking heads want desperately to avoid the topic of the “overwhelming lack of political and intellectual diversity in their ranks,” but that the problem of their liberalism is compounded by their laziness.
This is a fact, as reflected in my analysis of Post “journalist” Dana Milbank, who got caught asking Democratic Party officials for help on an anti-Trump column.
For his part, Milbank crafted another anti-Trump column after the Trump victory, in the form of a letter to his daughter. “This is a sad day for our country,” he told her . “I want you to know that I did everything I could to prevent this from happening. My efforts and those of many others came up short.”
Those “many others” were in the media and the Democratic Party, for whom Milbank worked. Perhaps Post owner Jeff Bezos ought to ask the Democrats to pay Milbank’s salary.
Milbank told his daughter, “You are going to be okay.”
That’s more than what we can say about Milbank. He is not okay. He is more than just a lazy liberal who gets the Democratic Party to help write his columns. He is completely out of touch with the America he claims to be writing about.
Like those at the Times, Milbank and others at the Post will never change. They are elitists whose hatred for their fellow Americans borders on mental illness.
Like other liberals, they claim to be on a crusade for “the children,” in his case his daughter. It’s frankly despicable that he would use his kid as a political prop. She needs our prayers. Cliff Kincaid
Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid . 0 | 0 |
La niña afgana de National Geographic es arrestada en Pakistán 17:54 GMT
La afgana de ojos verdes viene siendo investigada desde 2015 y será trasladada a un reclusorio de mujeres. Twitter / @journalist11
Sharbat Gula, la 'La niña afgana' que protagonizó una de las portadas más famosas de la revista 'National Geographic', fue detenida este miércoles en Pakistán por posesión ilegal de documentos, informa 'Pakistan Today' .
La afgana de ojos verdes, inmortalizada por el fotógrafo Steve McCurry en 1985, es acusada de obtener documentos pakistaníes falsos para ella y sus dos hijos tras sobornar a varios funcionarios públicos.
Al respecto, la Agencia Federal de Investigación de Pakistán (FIA, por sus siglas en inglés) señaló que Gula, de 44 años y que vive en este país en calidad de refugiada, viene siendo investigada desde 2015 luego de que se conociera que numerosos ciudadanos afganos han intentado obtener la nacionalidad pakistaní de forma ilegal para evitar ser deportados.
La protagonista de la fotografía (un retrato que ha sido comparado con 'La Gioconda' de Da Vinci) será trasladada a un reclusorio de mujeres hasta ser juzgada y podría pasar hasta siete años en prisión. | 0 |
The Trump Administration may put off any major infrastructure plan until 2018, Axios’ Jonathan Swan reports. With fiscal fights, Obamacare repeal legislation, and a Supreme Court nomination all on the horizon, Capitol Hill’s agenda is crammed. Pushing off consideration of Trump’s infrastructure plan will both give “Republican lawmakers more breathing room amid a crowd of issues,” and strategically time the debate for when midterm elections heat up. [From Axios: For the rest of the article, click here. | 1 |
A Peruvian woman originally hoping to become a naturalized citizen in Illinois now faces deportation after her record of illegal voter registration and casting ballots for federal candidates has come to light. [Margarita Del Pilar Fitzpatrick, a Peruvian woman married to an American citizen in Illinois, became registered to vote at a driver’s license issuing office in 2005, according to court records. She presented a valid green card and passport from her home country to satisfy the identification requirements to obtain a license. Because of guidelines under the National Voter Registration Act (a. k. a. Motor Voter) the DMV employee reflexively offered Fitzpatrick the opportunity to register to vote, despite her documented alien status. Having studied English in college and working as a translator in the medical field, Fitzpatrick reportedly questioned the state employee if she was “supposed to” register. The DMV agent responded, “it’s up to you. ” The woman would later sign a document attesting to U. S. citizenship, allowing her to become a fully registered voter, reportedly casting ballots for federal candidates in 2006. Federal law currently bars noncitizens from voting in federal or state elections, potentially leading to deportation. Fitzpatrick’s voting record would likely have remained unnoticed had she not pursued citizenship and her registration experience. In the waning days of the Obama Administration, Fitzpatrick appealed her deportation order to the U. S. 7th Circuit in Chicago, arguing that the DMV employee essentially entrapped her for not counseling against registering to vote. The appellate court placed little stock in her defense, noting that she was fully literate in English and the conversation was likely scripted from the state officer’s perspective. DMV employees and other state agents that are required to offer voter registration opportunities are barred from saying “anything that will discourage an applicant … from registering to vote,” the court noted. In general, state agencies providing voter registration opportunities are not in the business of verifying the contents of applications. Documents are checked for completion and are then forwarded to appropriate election officials. In Fitzpatrick’s case, the Illinois DMV employee’s duty was complete when they had an attestation of voting eligibility in hand. Election law expert J. Christian Adams said in a statement shortly after the 7th Circuit ruling that the case “demonstrates how difficult it is to pursue noncitizen voting crimes without verification measures in voter registration. ” As Breitbart Texas has reported recently, states like Texas and Virginia are currently considering legislation that would require documented proof of U. S. citizenship when registering to vote, similar to current law in Kansas. The 7th Circuit panel inquired if individuals like Ms. Fitzpatrick were priorities for removal by the Department of Homeland Security. Government attorneys told the court on January 17 that “the answer was yes. ” Logan Churchwell is a founding editor of the Breitbart Texas team. You can follow him on Twitter @LCChurchwell. He also serves as the communications director for the Public Interest Legal Foundation. MARGARITA DEL PILAR FITZPATRICK by Public Interest Legal Foundation on Scribd, | 1 |
By Robert Fisk on November 2, 2016 Robert Fisk — The Independent Nov 1, 2016
They’re keeping open the eight passages to western Aleppo , just in case. There have been no more air strikes on the surrounded east of the city by either Syrian or Russian jets – despite the anti-government bombardment by Jabhat al-Nusra and its largely Islamist allies. The Syrian army has pushed its enemies nine miles further north of the city, in which more than 80 civilians have been killed over the past six days and the militia offensive has predictably failed.
Not that the United Nations could be left out. “Shocked and appalled” it was, of course, and Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy, has churned out the old “war crimes” threat, this time directed at the West’s friendly ‘moderates’ in eastern Aleppo – whom he was keen to talk to a couple of weeks ago – rather than the Bashar al-Assad regime. But the UN’s bleatings will make no difference. Nor will the John Kerry’s oddly Gaelic fears of Aleppo smashed to “smithereens” – originally an Irish word – have the slightest effect.
Yet the Syrian government still hopes more civilians – militiamen, too – will leave the besieged east and allow it to reabsorb the enclave without another war. Everything depends right now on three people: the commander of the Syrian Aleppo garrison, the head of the Baath party in the city, and the boss – whoever he is – of the Jabhat al-Nusra militia and their Ahrar al-Sham allies and other outfits who are defending or imprisoning (delete as appropriate, as usual) the 200,000 to 300,000 civilians in eastern Aleppo.
So we’ll start with the bespectacled general in charge of the evacuation whose office I found adorned with vast operational maps of Aleppo – in which the east of the city appears as a grey, bent sausage with a circle to the left (the ancient citadel, still held by Syrian troops) pierced by eight large red arrows. Whether the arrows represent planned attacks or the crossing points which the government opened on 20 October from 8am to 4pm each day – with only 48 takers so far – was unclear. But the four large banners hanging from flagstaffs behind the general’s desk told their own story: Hezbollah’s green and yellow, the red, white and blue of Russia, the black, white and red of Syria and the green white and red of Iran.
A multicoloured coalition, then, with a lot of firepower – and an intriguing set of military video clips of the crossings as they opened on 20 October. Each shows a Syrian armoured vehicle with a loudspeaker calling on “the people of Aleppo” to “take out the wounded and civilians from the east of Aleppo along the routes that have been planned by the government”, adding revealingly that “the Syrian government, in cooperation with the Russian forces, will guarantee safety for you and your family”. Russian officers were indeed at the crossing points on the three first days. Two of them were wounded by snipers. One of the video clips shows a shell, apparently fired from eastern Aleppo, exploding in the background as two men run from the east to the Syrian army lines.
The general thought there were only 75,000 civilians left in eastern Aleppo, an intriguing figure since the number of trapped families in the enclave have moved between 70,000 and 300,000 according to various “experts”. The UN believes the higher figure, a Syrian army officer on the front line suggested 200,000, another far more senior Syrian intelligence officer thought 250,000, the Ba’ath party guessed between 112,000 to 115,000. All of which proves that no one – neither the UN, the Syrians or journalists – has the slightest idea of just how many souls are waiting to be saved or to die.
“We promised to take care of the injured,” the general announced. “We did. The people who came across were free to go and live with their relatives in the west of the city or to apartments which we had reserved for them. They chose their relatives.” Then he added, almost without hesitation: “Now the decision is that we must enter the battle and put an end to the Nusra and other terrorist groups to help the people themselves to get rid of them.”
Did this mean that the halt in Russian and Syrian bombing of eastern Aleppo would resume? A telephone rang on the general’s desk and a flurry of staff officers ran into his office with aerial photographs – presumably the work of a drone – and his attention suddenly turned to more pressing matters. “There are armed men crossing from Turkey through the Bab al-Howa border point to the north of Lattakia” – which showed just how far the general’s remit ran in northern Syria – “and they are driving a lot of vehicles with explosives and ammunition. Look! We search for a political solution and they are ready to attack and fight.”
But would the Syrians and Russians bomb east Aleppo again? “There are orders that the planes cannot bomb within 10km of eastern Aleppo,” the general replied. An interesting remark, since the general is the man who orders the air strikes – along with his Russian colleagues, of course – and he followed up with a slightly ambiguous remark when I asked for his feelings when he saw the wounded children of east Aleppo on television. “I see them as like my kids,” he replied. “I have a very high sense of humanity with civilians. But with terrorists, I have to do my national duty – to defend the civilians and protect them. The terrorists” – and the general thought there were 15 separate armed groups in eastern Aleppo – “are the same wherever they exist – in Syria, Iran, Britain, Russia, Lebanon…”
Perhaps. But the general also made a remark about “medical facilities for terrorists” which suggested that hospitals who treated militiamen in east Aleppo were targets for the Syrian-Russian coalition, whomever else the hospitals treated. Which also tells its own grim tale. So now to the Baath headquarters in Aleppo, bathed in generator light and sudden power cuts, where the local party head, Ahmed Ibrahim Saleh, described how he talked to east Aleppo civilians by phone, claiming that – through these interlocutors – he has contact with 12,000 civilians in the enclave.
And negotiations were continuing, he said. The Ahrar al-Sham group had indirectly received a message from the government via text and they replied by recorded phone calls: the government’s message was that they could send over a group of their men if they wanted to cross to the west of the city as a test – just two if they wanted – and these two could telephone when they arrived through the government lines and reached a safe place.
“They said: ‘We trust you, but we don’t trust the [Syrian] government or the [state] security apparatus’. I said, ‘just find four or five armed men to cross’. They said they would discuss this. The problem is that the leaders of these armed groups, the foreigners, make them afraid and tell them that the security apparatus will execute them. But all the armed men who have come to this building have been well-treated.” This appears to be perfectly true. But the constant reference to the ‘security apparatus’ was telling; everyone in Syria fears the mukhabarat security police.
When I asked Mr Saleh about hospitals in the east of the city, I heard a familiar story. “This is war. Maybe there are some mistakes. Maybe the plane cannot see women and children. One hospital shelled by a plane was a base for the leaders of the terrorists and was full of arms and weapons.” This was quite an admission. When Nato found soldiers hiding in a hospital during the 1999 war on Serbia, its bombs killed all the civilians in the building but none of the soldiers. No one spoke of war criminals. A different morality is in play in Syria, of course, where the bombing of hospitals is immediately – and legally correctly – referred to as a war crime.
As for the conflict, “war ends when foreign support stops”, Mr Saleh said. “If America says ‘Stop the war’, the war will stop.” So now to a young Syrian army captain on the front line who guards one of the crossing points. During the truce, he received two armed men who had contacted him earlier to arrange the crossing. “They came right here to my office,” he said. “One of them was from Ahrar al-Sham, we let them come with their guns. We had vehicles ready for them with covered windows so that no one could shoot at them. I told them which road to use to come out. They were checked by our people in case they carried booby traps. We could see them but the two men could not see our soldiers.
“They told me that their life stopped when the war began and did not advance any more in the following years. One of the men said his dream was ‘just one more night of sleep and one more day of life for me and my family’. The two men knew each other and they complained that the armed groups were uneducated and illiterate. Yes, when we shell east Aleppo, we are defending ourselves – just as they will defend their side of the city when we rocket them. How many people are there? I myself think the UN’s figures might be exaggerated. When the passages were opened, eight wounded men from Ahrar al-Sham came out and we offered them health care and they refused and said they wanted to join the other terrorists in Idlib province. Because they were wounded, they were friendly to the army. I met the eight of them. We allowed them freely to go to Idlib.”
And this is also true. The armed men who surrendered in Homs were allowed to go to Idlib. So were the armed opposition in the Damascus suburbs, including those of Mouadamiya. Idlib seems to be the favourite dumping ground for all varieties of Islamist fighters. For the Syrian government, the armed men of Aleppo should either agree to go home or head for Idlib themselves, along with their families. But will they? The captain had heard of 40 executions by Ahrar al-Sham of armed men who wished to leave eastern Aleppo. Propaganda? Maybe. But the commanders of the Islamist groups there give no interviews to visiting western reporters – because western journalists have wisely decided not to turn up in east Aleppo and have their heads cut off.
So was the recent offensive against western Aleppo the answer to the Syrians’ “passageways” to freedom, to the “corridors” of safety which were opened for the civilians? Perhaps. But given the amount of weaponry the militias deployed in recent days, they may have decided that they still have no need to negotiate another truce or take the bus to Idlib. Then we are left with the general’s remark about how “the decision is to enter the battle”. In other words, Aleppo’s agony is far from over. | 0 |
Trump vs. Clinton: A risk vs. a disaster Larry Elder: Hillary has never been asked by anyone in media about Juanita Broaddrick Published: 53 mins ago × Receive Larry Elder's alerts in your email
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Two weeks left to go in the election and the electorate feels like a battered NFL fan. The game gets increasingly old and tiring to watch, and playing it can inflict permanent brain damage.
Democrats can be counted upon to call the Republican opponent racist, whether the opponent is the priestly Mitt Romney or the Supreme Court justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision. Donald Trump, you see, is “racist” because, among other reasons, at a campaign stop he pointed to a black man and called him “my African-American.” Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, is not anti-Semitic, even though three witnesses, one of whom took and passed a polygraph, claim that she referred to her husband’s former congressional campaign manager as a “f–-ing Jew bastard.”
With a Republican candidate, the media can be counted upon to seize upon any deficiencies – big or small, real or imagined – while giving the Democrat a pass. So Trump’s “failure to ever apologize” outweighs an examination of Clinton’s flat-out lie during the third debate when she insisted that the Supreme Court Heller case was about “toddlers,” as opposed to the fundamental issue of whether the Second Amendment confers an individual right to keep and bear arms.
In Heller, nowhere in the majority decision or in any of the dissenting decisions does the word “toddler” appear. Clinton, a year ago, flat-out said, “The Supreme Court is wrong on the Second Amendment.” To normal people, this meant she opposed what the decision ruled on, which, again, was whether we, as individuals, have a right to keep and bear arms.
Meanwhile, we learn more and more about what the media labels an “email scandal,” when the accurate description is “national security scandal.” The Espionage Act criminalizes gross negligence in the handling of important national security matters. The law does not require, as FBI Director James Comey falsely stated, an “intent.” Nor is it relevant, as Clinton insists, whether or not her private server, the one she maintained in her basement, was “hacked.”
Five people who worked with or for Clinton, including her chief of staff, all received immunity deals, something normally given to get someone to flip on a target. Some of the five were involved in deleting emails after the emails were subpoenaed. But the “target,” that is to say Hillary Clinton, was deemed by Comey to have lacked sufficient criminal intent to be prosecuted. So why the immunity deals? Who knows – and as far as most of the media are concerned, who cares?
Clinton insists that “President Obama doesn’t get enough credit” for the swell job he did with the economy. This would be the economy in which, for the first time in history, a president has presided over a recovery without a single year of at least 3 percent growth in gross domestic product. This would be the same economy with an alleged low unemployment number that Gallup CEO Jim Clifton calls “the big lie,” given the large number of people who simply abandoned the job hunt or are under-employed.
Meanwhile, it’s yet another day in which another woman who alleges she was kissed, groped, touched, or made fun of by Trump has appeared with her attorney, feminist Gloria Allred. Allred, a Clinton supporter, sees no contradiction between representing alleged victims of Trump’s sexual misconduct and her support for Clinton, who is alleged to have hired private detectives and lawyers to dig up dirt on her husband’s accusers. One such accuser, Juanita Broaddrick, claims not only that she was raped by Bill Clinton but also that two weeks after the alleged rape, Hillary Clinton verbally threatened her.
Hillary Clinton, mind you, has never been asked by anyone in the media about Broaddrick’s allegation. Never. And only one national reporter, Sam Donaldson, has ever asked Bill Clinton about Juanita Broaddrick’s allegation. Ever. Clinton’s answer? He referred Donaldson to his lawyer, David Kendall. Donaldson quickly tried again, asking the then-president to “simply deny it.” Same answer: “My attorney … speaks for me.” And that was that.
So Hillary Clinton is a candidate who wants to continue the same policy that’s given us the worst recovery since 1949; who has clearly violated the Espionage Act and placed the nation’s security at risk; who told the Benghazi victim’s families that the death of four Americans was inspired by a video, while telling her daughter and foreign officials something entirely different; whose charitable foundation engaged in pay-to-play in Haiti, so that donors got contracts for disaster relief and non-donors went to the back of the line; who wants to gut the Second Amendment; who wants to continue the same foreign policies that that have encouraged aggressiveness on the part of ISIS, Russia and the Chinese; and whose media compadres, including scribes with the New York Times, Washington Post and CNBC, have been outed by WikiLeaks as colluding with her campaign. And she is now odds-on favorite to become the next president of the United States. Receive Larry Elder's commentaries in your email BONUS: By signing up for Larry Elder's alerts, you will also be signed up for news and special offers from WND via email. Name * | 0 |
I think I was raped by DJT at that party too.. add JOHN DOE to the affidavit. I remember a blonde pube comb over and it was short fat and greasy….. the drugs were so good. | 0 |
Update: Madonna told Us Weekly in a statement that she is not planning to adopt two more children. [“I am in Malawi to check on the children’s hospital in Blantyre and my other work with Raising Malawi, and then heading home,” she said. “The rumors of an adoption process are untrue. ” Original story below: Blantyre (Malawi) (AFP) — US pop superstar Madonna appeared in person at a court in the Malawian capital Lilongwe on Wednesday to apply to adopt two more local children, a court spokesman told AFP. Madonna, who runs a charity called Raising Malawi in the southern African nation, adopted Malawian children David Banda in 2006 and Mercy James in 2009. Local media reports said the singer appeared before Justice Fiona Mwale amid tight security, accompanied by two unidentified children and several other people, before being driven away in an SUV vehicle. “The court is looking at the application now to determine whether Madonna can adopt these two children,” said Mlenga Mvula, spokesman of the Lilongwe High Court. “The … process requires the court to make a ruling on the adoption. ” She also inspected her charity’s work, including progress at a surgical unit for children at the Queen Elizabeth hospital in the commercial capital Blantyre. It was Madonna’s first visit in nearly two years to Malawi, where she has at times been embroiled in controversy after her earlier adoptions. — Adoption controversy — She was stripped of VIP status by former president Joyce Banda’s government in 2013 and accused of being “uncouth” and wanting eternal gratitude from the impoverished country for adopting the two children. But Banda was ousted in 2014 elections and the new president, Peter Mutharika, moved to repair relations, saying “my government has always been grateful for the passion Madonna has for this country”. Last July, Madonna said she would not revive plans for a $15 million academy for girls in Malawi, which was cancelled amid allegations of mismanagement — leading to her tiff with Banda. The singer, who divorced film director Guy Ritchie in 2008, reportedly landed in Malawi by private jet and was staying at a exclusive lodge outside Lilongwe. Madonna, who has four children, is reportedly among the biggest individual donors to children’s projects such as orphanages in Malawi, which is ranked by the UN Human Development Index as one of the world’s 20 least developed countries. On Saturday, she made an unannounced appearance in Washington at a rally protesting against US President Donald Trump a day after his inauguration. Madonna had campaigned for Hillary Clinton to become America’s first woman president, and told Billboard Magazine after the Democrat’s loss that women had a “tribal inability” to accept a female president. | 1 |
A suspect who kicked in his ’s door died from multiple gunshot wounds after the former girlfriend’s brother opened fire. [The incident occurred in Detroit on Tuesday. According to ClickonDetroit, the suspect began kicking on his ’s door around 8:10 a. m. The girl’s brother opened fire on the suspect, shooting him “multiple times in the chest” and killing him. Police and the ’s neighbors said, “the man had been stalking his ex … [in] a case of domestic violence that had been going on for too long. ” One neighbor said “the woman hasn’t lived at the apartment for long, but her garage door and window already have scratches and dents caused last week by her . ” The suspect was allegedly armed when he kicked in the door. Police have recovered the suspect’s gun and the gun used to kill the suspect. It is interesting to note that the suspect apparently did not plan on being at his ’s residence long police arrived on scene to find his car parked in the street with the engine running. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 1 |
At M. I. T. ’s Media Lab, the digital futurist playground, David Rose is investigating swaddling, bedtime stories and hammocks, as well as lavender oil and cocoons. Mr. Rose, a researcher, an and the author of “Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire and the Internet of Things,” and his colleagues have been weighted blankets to induce a swaddling sensation and listening to recordings of Icelandic fairy tales — all research into an ideal sleep environment that may culminate in a nap pod, or, as he said, “some new furniture form. ” “For me, it’s a swinging bed on a screened porch in northwestern Wisconsin,” he said. “You can hear the loons and the wind through the fir trees, and there’s the weight of 10 blankets on top of me because it’s a cold night. We’re trying a bunch of interventions. ” Meanwhile, at the University of California, Berkeley, Matthew P. Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory there, is working on direct current stimulation as a cure for sleeplessness in the aging brain. Dr. Walker is also sifting through the millions of hours of human sleep data he has received from Sense, a delicately lovely polycarbonate globe designed to look like the National Stadium in Beijing that measures air quality and other intangibles in your bedroom, then suggests tweaks to help you sleep better. “I’ve got a mission,” he said. “I want to reunite humanity with the sleep it is so bereft of. ” Sense is the first product made by Hello Inc. a technology company started by James Proud, a British entrepreneur, for which Dr. Walker is the chief scientist. In Paris, Hugo Mercier, a computer science engineer, has invested in sound waves. He has raised over $10 million to create a headband that uses them to induce sleep. The product, called Dreem, has been on 500 people (out of a pool of 6, 500 applicants, Mr. Mercier said) and will be ready for sale this summer. That is when Ben Olsen, an Australian entrepreneur, hopes to introduce Thim, a gadget you wear on your finger that uses sound to startle you awake every three minutes for an hour, just before you go to sleep. Sleep disruptions, apparently, can cure sleep disruption (and Mr. Olsen, like all good sleep entrepreneurs, has the research to prove it). It is his second sleep contraption. His first, the a pair of goggles fitted with tiny lights that shine back into your eyes, aims to reset your body’s clock. He said that since 2012, he had sold 30, 000 pairs in 40 countries. For years, studies upon studies have shown how bad sleep weakens the immune system, impairs learning and memory, contributes to depression and other mood and mental disorders, as well as obesity, diabetes, cancer and an early death. (Sedated sleep — hello Ambien — has been shown to be as deleterious as poor sleep.) The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls sleeplessness a public health concern. Good sleep helps brain plasticity, studies in mice have shown poor sleep will make you fat and sad, and then will kill you. It is also expensive: Last year, the RAND Corporation published a study that calculated the business loss of poor sleep in the United States at $411 billion — a gross domestic product loss of 2. 28 percent. Companies now fight “presenteeism,” a neologism that describes the lackluster performance of employees, with sleep programs like Sleepio, an online sleep coach, and sleep fairs, like the one hosted last month in Manhattan by Nancy H. Rothstein, director of Circadian Corporate Sleep Programs and otherwise known as the Sleep Ambassador, for LinkedIn. For the last few years, Ms. Rothstein has been designing sleep education and training programs for a number of Fortune 500 companies. At the LinkedIn sleep fair, she taught attendees how to make a bed (use hospital corners, please) and gave out analog alarm clocks. (It was her former husband’s snoring, she said, that led her to a career as a sleep evangelist.) If sleep used to be the new sex, as Marian Salzman, a trend spotter and chief executive of Havas PR North America, proclaimed 10 years ago, today it is a measure of success — a skill to be cultivated and nourished — as a “human potential enhancer,” as one West Coast entrepreneur told me, and life extender. “Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body,” Dr. Walker of U. C. Berkeley said. “We have a saying in medicine: What gets measured, gets managed. ” Sleep entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and beyond have poured into the sleep space, as branders like to say — a $32 billion market in 2012 — formerly inhabited by mattress and pharmaceutical companies. “I can see sleep being another weapon in competitive parenting and ” Ms. Salzman said. “If you want your child to succeed, do you have to buy them these sleep devices? Sleep is personal, it’s class, not mass, and now the sleep industry is based on technical services, customized for me. It’s a bizarre marriage of high tech and low tech. Chamomile tea is going to have a resurgence, as the antithesis to the whole pharma thing. ” The familiar paradigm of success used to center on the narrative of the short sleeper: Corporate titans and world leaders — like Martha Stewart and our last two presidents — counted abbreviated rest as proof of their prowess. It turns out that short sleepers, as they are known, may have a genetic mutation, as Arianna Huffington pointed out in her 2016 book, “The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life One Night at a Time. ” (It’s worth noting that George W. Bush, formerly a sleep outlier among his presidential peers for clocking in around nine hours of nightly along with a daily nap, is newly popular.) The Army has proclaimed sleep a pillar of peak soldier performance. Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, who used to take a sleeping bag to work when he was a lowly computer programmer, has said that his eight hours of sleep each night were good for his stockholders. Ms. Huffington’s new company, Thrive Global, whose investors include the internet entrepreneur Sean Parker and the venture capital firm Greycroft Partners, is working with Accenture, JP Morgan Chase and Uber, among other companies, on antiburnout programming, which educates their employees on the importance of sleep. Aetna, the health care company, is paying its workers up to $500 a year if they can prove they have slept for seven hours or more for 20 days in a row. But the growing pile of apps, gizmos and gurus — some from unlikely corners — has led to “pandemonium in the bedroom,” Ms. Rothstein said. In 2015, the actor Jeff Bridges made a album, “Dreaming With Jeff,” a project for Squarespace, that reached No. 2 on Billboard’s New Age chart and raised $280, 000 for the No Kid Hungry campaign, for which he is the national spokesman. He collaborated with Keefus Ciancia, the composer and music producer, on a truly weird collection of stories, musings about death and also a humming song, with Mr. Bridges’s familiar gruff voice and all manner of ambient sounds that many listeners found more alarming than . “I don’t know where this is leading,” Mr. Bridges said the other day, “but I’m steeping myself in the subject. We’re working on something called Sleep Club, which will be sort of a hub for all things sleep related. ” “Dreaming With Jeff” made me anxious, as did “Sleep With Me,” a podcast by Drew Ackerman, a gravelly voiced librarian in San Francisco, whose “boring bedtime stories” are designed to cure insomnia and are downloaded at a rate of 1. 3 million a month, as The New Yorker reported last year. I’m more drawn to the thousands of “songs” in Spotify’s Sleep Sound Library, particularly “full gutters” and “office ” and I have a white noise machine. But recently, desperately, I craved a more substantial intervention, perhaps a cure for the 3 a. m. fretting that has plagued me for years. Mr. Mercier sent me his Dreem headset, a weighty crown of rubber and wire that he warned would be a tad uncomfortable. The finished product, about $400, he said, will be much lighter and slimmer. But it wasn’t the heft of the thing that had me pulling it off each night. It skeeved me out that it was reading — and interfering with — my brain waves, a process I would rather not outsource. I was just as wary of the goggles, $299, which make for a selfie in a darkened room. My eye sockets glowed a deep fluorescent green, and terrified the cat. The Ghost Pillow, $85, has “ technology” designed to keep your head cool. It is wildly comfy, but when I read what it is made from, a polyurethane foam, I lost sleep. I bought a Good Night Light LED Sleep bulb, $28, which comes with its own “patented technology” to support your body’s melatonin production. I can’t tell if that’s what happened, but since the bulb is too dim for my eyes, I struggled to read my sleep aid, a worn copy of “The Pursuit of Love,” by Nancy Mitford, and knocked off a good earlier than usual. I was up again at 3 a. m. however, as my new Sense pod alerted me the next day, through an app on my phone. And again at 5 a. m. when the cat swatted the pod off the night stand and it glowed red in protest. “There was a noise disturbance,” the app explained. My sleep summary, as provided by Sense, was both compelling and . Why is my air quality “not ideal”? And how comfortable am I sharing my sleep habits with a Silicon Valley ? Ms. Rothstein, the sleep ambassador, is less bothered by privacy concerns than by the temptation to wakefulness that phone interfaces pose. And nearly every gizmo seemed to have one. “I’d like to have a survey done to show how many people are also reading their texts while they’re tracking their sleep,” Ms. Rothstein said. “If you want to improve your sleep, you have to make some changes. Your Fitbit and your Apple Watch are not going to do it for you. We’ve lost the simplicity of sleep. All this writing, all these websites, all this stuff. I’m thinking, Just sleep. I want to say: ‘Shh. Make it dark, quiet and cool. Take a bath. ’” Ms. Rothstein taught me her relaxation recipe, a practice that mixed gratitude with body awareness and breathing. Start with your toes, she said, and thank your body parts for their hard work. (My favorite: “Knees, I know it’s not always easy for you. You can rest now. ”) Still, the best sleep I’ve had in weeks cost $22, and lasted 33 minutes. It was a Deep Rest “class” at Inscape, a meditation studio in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan designed by Winka Dubbeldam, the Dutch architect, to evoke the temple at Burning Man, and other esoteric spaces, and created by Khajak Keledjian, a founder, with his brother, Haro, of Intermix, which they sold to the Gap for $130 million in 2013. Mr. Keledjian, a meditator, aims to make the practice both secular and modern: a “mindful luxury,” he said. Though there are human “facilitators” in each class, who gently touch the feet of snoring attendees if they get too loud, the practice is guided by a recording made by an Australian female member of Mr. Keledjian’s company. “We call her ‘Skye,’” he said. It was lunchtime on a rainy Tuesday, and I settled onto a soft mat outfitted with a bolster, a pillow and a cozy fleece blanket. “Skye” urged me to stay awake, and then delivered a script like Ms. Rothstein’s, in mellifluous antipodean tones. I drifted once or twice, and from the muffled snorts of the other attendees, they did too. That night, I slept until dawn. | 1 |
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had been aware of, but did nothing about, the mental problems afflicting Esteban Santiago Ruiz before he attacked Florida’s Ft. Lauderdale international airport. [Ruiz is a veteran of both the Alaska and Puerto Rico National Guard and had sought treatment for mental illness at the VA, according to the shooter’s former girlfriend. “We had let Veterans [Affairs] know that he was having some mental problems, that he wasn’t feeling all right, and they did nothing,” Esteban’s former girlfriend Michelle Quiñones told ABC News. “They didn’t do anything. ” The Sun Sentinel reports that the VA in Puerto Rico said it had provided Santiago, who killed five people at the airport and wounded six others, with some medical treatment, but added that his family did not have any details. According to the news outlet, the VA headquarters in Washington, D. C. issued a statement that indicated the agency was not providing any benefits to Esteban, without elaborating further. “The FBI failed there,” Bryan Santiago, the killer’s brother told the Associated Press (AP). “We’re not talking about someone who emerged from anonymity to do something like this. ” “The federal government already knew about this for months, they had been evaluating him for a while, but they didn’t do anything,” he added in Spanish, speaking outside his family’s house in Peñuelas, Puerto Rico and echoing the killer’s former girlfriend. Nearly a month prior to the deadly incident in Florida, Estaban confessed to the FBI in Alaska, where he was residing at the time, that he was suffering from government mind control linked to Islamic State ( ) videos. The FBI reportedly contacted the Anchorage police department and told the police the veteran had been having “terroristic thoughts” and believed he was being influenced by ISIS. As a result the authorities took him to a mental facility, revealed Anchorage Police Chief Chris Tolley. AP quotes Tolley as saying the shooter “left a gun and his newborn child in his vehicle when he went to the FBI office. Police held the gun until Santiago was released and contacted him about picking up the weapon, which he did on Dec. 8. ” Authorities in Alaska have reportedly defended the actions they took in regards to Esteban. The shooter broke no laws when he walked into the Anchorage FBI office “making disjointed comments about mind control,” Special Agent in Charge Marlin Ritzman told reporters on Saturday. Ritzman identified Esteban as a “ complaint,” which he said FBI offices across the country receive daily. Meanwhile, some of the Iraq War combat veteran’s family members thought Esteban had “lost his mind in Iraq,” before the shooting. “He started talking to me, you know, that he’s seeing things weird things, that he’s hearing voices, that the government is using him … that the CIA is sending him secret codes to his laptop. And that he don’t want to do that. So I told to him go and ask for help,” said the shooter’s brother Bryan. “Go to the church or to psychologist or something. ” Two members of Esteban’s unit were killed during his yearlong deployment to Iraq, the New York Times learned from Lt. Col. Candis Olmstead, a spokeswoman for the Alaska National Guard. Although it remains unclear whether the shooter suffered from Stress Disorder (PTSD) as many as one in five veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan are diagnosed with the affliction each year, according to the VA, notes AP. “A 2014 Veterans Affairs study found that almost 30 percent of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who sought treatment at VA hospitals were diagnosed with PTSD symptoms,” it adds. The VA has received criticism in recent years for providing inadequate health services to veterans or no care at all. Last year, a Navy veteran Peter A. Kaisen committed suicide in the parking lot of the of a VA hospital after reportedly being turned away for emergency care. In July 2016, the VA itself acknowledged the existence of a mental health epidemic among veterans, noting that 20 veterans committed suicide per day in 2014. Christian Santiago, identified by the Miami Herald as someone who served with Esteban in Iraq, wrote on Facebook about the toll the war took on the shooter and others in their company. “The [Veterans Administration] makes life impossible and often denies us rights acquired … the government, the Army … will not take PTSD seriously,’’ he wrote. DisabledVeterans. org, a website founded by veterans advocate and lawyer Benjamin Krause, suggests Esteban may be one of the many veterans who suffer from severe mental health issues and are not receiving treatment at the VA or the U. S. Department of Defense (DOD). The deadly incident “certainly highlights failures between DOD and VA where veterans fall through the cracks who obviously suffer from mental health problems,” reports the organization. According to the Alaska Army National Guard spokeswoman Olmstead, Esteban had received a general discharge from the Alaska Army National Guard in August 16, 2016, for unsatisfactory performance. AP, citing the Pentagon, also reports that the shooter had gone AWOL several times and was demoted and discharged. | 1 |
This post was originally published on this site Russia calls on Western countries to persuade Ukraine to carry out its obligations as part of the Minsk settlement process, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Friday in remarks announcing preparations for four-way talks next week. “Russia sees its task in encouraging Western partners who have influence on the leadership of Ukraine to urge Kiev to strictly follow the obligations assumed in the framework of the Minsk process,” the ministry said. The ministry said it was preparing for Normandy format talks in the Belarusian capital of Minsk next Tuesday, November 29, after receiving an invitation from Germany and France. DONi News Agency | 0 |
PALM BEACH, Fla. — There will be no this weekend outside the Borislow family’s oceanfront home here: They live across the street from Donald J. Trump’s winter resort, and now a Coast Guard patrol boat is parked right outside their window. Mr. Trump arrived at on Tuesday night for his first visit as . The difference was notable: Police cars stopped trucks trying to pass down the road approaching the estate, and dark sedans with rather drivers were parked along the street. Coast Guard boats toured the water that surrounds both sides of the road, while a tent was set up nearby where delivery trucks were searched. News vehicles camped out a few blocks away, for a better shot of ’s waterfront view. Shelly Borislow, standing in front of her house, where several Palm Beach County sheriff’s cruisers were parked and officers shooed away pedestrians, had no problem with the excitement. “There are so many handfuls of people who would want to live across the street from the president,” she said. (At least, she hopes so. Her home is for sale for $27. 5 million, and she is thinking now she might have a few takers.) Palm Beach is used to accommodating all kinds of dignitaries — the Kennedys spent time here at their winter home when John F. Kennedy was in the White House. But the urgent need to secure Mr. Trump’s resort and be mindful of car and pedestrian traffic seemed to take the town of less than 9, 000 by storm. Law enforcement officials have long worried about the challenges of protecting which Marjorie Merriweather Post left to the federal government in 1973 with the intent that it would become a presidential retreat. But according to a club history provided by the United States government eventually returned the property “due to maintenance and security concerns. ” Mr. Trump purchased it in 1985 and turned it into a membership club a decade later. Now, Mr. Trump’s ascendance means security concerns and presidential buzz are mixing in almost equal measure in this haven for the wealthy and superwealthy. Federal officials, led by the Secret Service, are overseeing an array of security restrictions. The Federal Aviation Administration has limited pilots around Palm Beach, and the Coast Guard established three security zones for the Intracoastal Waterway and offshore areas near Palm Beach. “The security zone is necessary to protect the V. I. P. and accompanying official party, the public and the surrounding waterway from terrorist acts, sabotage or other subversive acts, accidents or other causes of a similar nature,” the Coast Guard said in a statement. Breaching one of the security zones, the Coast Guard warned, could lead to heavy fines and up to 12 years in prison. Secret Service officials, as usual, were tight lipped about security issues, but Palm Beach’s public safety director, Kirk Blouin, emphasized that Mr. Trump’s visit was no stretch for the department. “We’ve had to protect every president since I’ve worked there in my 28 years,” Mr. Blouin said. “Every president has come multiple times, including world leaders. This is nothing new to us. ” He said the agency was playing a supporting role to the Secret Service. Although he said discussing the challenges of protecting a waterfront estate was a question for the Secret Service, he added, “I think it’s almost obvious that it does present some additional challenge. ” About 20 protesters rallied near on Saturday night for about three hours, but there were no incidents or need for arrests, Mr. Blouin said. Homeowners have been understanding about the inconveniences, he said. “It’s not bad today, but it may be worse other times,” he said. Mr. Trump has sometimes had a fraught relationship with the surrounding community. sued Palm Beach County last year, part of a longstanding feud over its request to route air traffic away from the club. After Mr. Trump’s election, which left federal officials poised to put in place flight restrictions, the club’s legal posture changed. On Nov. 16, it asked a court to dismiss the lawsuit. Many locals took this week’s attention in stride. “All the presidents, everyone who runs for public office, comes to Palm Beach,” said Marie Hope Davis, president of the Palm Beach Republican Club and a resident of nearby Singer Island. “And the reason they do is because that’s where they raise money. ” Ms. Davis, who lived in Palm Beach for many years, said she suspected the chief side effect of a presidential outpost in Florida would be clogged streets. Ms. Davis recalled that when her aunts and uncles would visit Palm Beach, they often wanted to see where President Kennedy had stayed. And she was reluctant to describe Mr. Trump as anything resembling a true Palm Beacher. “He’s a businessman, and these clubs are his business,” she said. “I think Trump Tower, that’s his home, that’s where his heart is. ” Others wondered what the changes would mean for their bottom line. Louis Rose is selling one house around the corner from and is in the market for another. “We’re selling, we’re buying. We’re believers,” Mr. Rose said. “I think he will hopefully begin unifying. ” One homeowner who flew in from Pennsylvania on Tuesday had mixed feelings about the extra attention and the enormous caravan of cars that accompanied the upon his grand arrival, but was glad the authorities did not hassle residents. She would only give her first name: Mindy. “Clearly there’s a huge difference: a gazillion billion police cars everywhere, Secret Service,” she said. “I haven’t decided whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. ” | 1 |
A massive global debt write-down of sovereign bond is coming, on the back end of the Global Financial RESET. Think paradigm shift of the most disruptive type while power shifts eastward. By Jim Willie
The Western central bank franchise system is totally broken, totally insolvent, and totally corrupt. It invites the Gold Standard return. The entire financial system is built upon a debt-based monetary system. The debt saturation process has run its full course. The central bank heads have been covering the sovereign debt for the last five years, having rendered their balance sheets as ruined.
Debt is at obscene levels, like $19.7 trillion for the USGovt. No debt limits are in place anymore, a signal that most likely it has already defaulted. A hidden game is underway, with control lost to the creditors, even as they attempt to salvage their debt holdings. The major central banks continue to manage badly the great game, where money is fake phony and a farce.
A titanic battle is underway, where the Eastern nations are discarding their USTreasury Bonds, and doing so in tremendous volume while they set up the many platforms and pieces to the Gold Standard.
The US Federal Reserve monetary policy of hyper-inflation has failed to revive the USEconomy, failed to legitimize the debt securities, failed to halt the financial corruption, and failed to stem capital destruction. The official monetary policy has only succeeded in preventing the failures of almost all big Western banks.
They are all insolvent, mostly supported by narco money laundering in the hundreds of $billions. The Eastern super-powers are leading a campaign to put aside the US$-based financial system, isolate it to the sidelines, while arranging a new system. The Gold-based system will be complete with its currency, sovereign debt securities, transfer systems, global offices, and debt rating agencies, maybe even debit cards. The East strives to install the Gold Standard as the remedy to the ongoing global financial crisis. The West has made exactly no movement toward solution, remedy, or enforcement against bond.
Four graphs display the broken unfixable bizarre situation: Graph 1 – BALANCE SHEET DESTRUCTION Central bank balance sheets could take decades to normalize, so the conventional thinking goes. Their balance sheets will never return to normal. Most assets of toxic paper are far more worthless than junk bonds. A normalization process would require at least 50 years of more financial repression and deep corruption.
A massive global debt write-down of sovereign bond is coming, on the back end of the Global Financial RESET. Think paradigm shift of the most disruptive type while power shifts eastward. The risk of war rises.
The big Western banks find themselves in an impossible Catch-22 situation. The markets are addicted to QE and its destructive money hyper inflation. Federal Reserve policymakers have acknowledged that their $4 trillion balance sheet will not shrink any time soon. Also, Bank of England officials talk of crisis fighting tools as semi-permanent fixtures. In Asia, the Bank of Japan has developed a new monetary policy framework that features admitted infinite QE. The financial crisis the balance sheet volume to GDP ratios for the Bank of England and USFed have peaked at around 25%, the highest level ever recorded. Uncharted territory has been entered.
The USFed balance sheet ratio to GDP previously reached 23% in 1940 during World War II. The Bank of England ratio approached 20% in the 1730s during the South Sea Bubble scheme, 1816/17 during the Great Re-coinage, the 1830s/1840s following other wars, and in the immediate aftermath of WW2. In every scenario above, the central banks managed to unwind their balance sheets. But then the great unwinding took decades, up to 60 years in some cases. This time is different. No economic growth is anywhere remotely on the current horizon, nothing sufficient to unwind the tremendous debt burden.
This is where the conventional analyst turns stupid, even locked in fantasy. They assume the GDP growth has been around 3% in recent years, when it has been closer to minus 4% or minus 5% each year since 2008 in a fierce recession with strong feedback loops. We are not on the verge of economic expansion, which can relieve the balance sheet toxicity, but rather a financial reform to sweep away the USDollar and to render its USTreasury Bonds as near worthless paper. The next chapter will be centered upon the Gold Standard, first in trade payment, next in bank reserves, finally in currencies.
The installation of the Gold Standard will render almost all US$-based debt securities as toxic paper, much like African Govt Bonds. QE might have bought time for the big US banks, but it guaranteed the kill of the USEconomy as host, and the default of the USGovt debt. No semblance of return to normalcy can come. This is why war is being vigorously pursued, to retain power.
Graph 2 – CONCENTRATION OF CENTRAL BANK ASSETS Big Central Bank assets have jumped the fastest in five years to $21 trillion. The toxic sovereign bond bubble is the largest bubble in history. Four major central banks control 75% of all central bank assets. Any currency reform must come from a major nation and its lead. The majority of the world’s central bank assets are controlled by four sites: China, the United States, Japan, and the European Union. The next six each account for an average of 2.5%, namely the central banks of Brazil, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, India, and Russia. The major nations control toxic vats of deeply impaired debt paper which nobody wants.
The big four central banks are often called the major central banks. They are from the so-called industrialized nations, when in fact they are from former industrial states with a strong leaning toward New Third World status. They control the global financial structure and rig markets in order to keep it stable. If any changes are to come to the USDollar and the King Dollar reign of terror, the reform will be done by a major central banks with support from an alliance of other nations. Do not expect reform. Instead expect a revolution from the East, as it installs the Gold Standard in certain key spots. The best one can expect is a dual financial universe, where the USDollar is gradually phased out.
Graph 3 – Dumping of USTreasury Bonds in Worldwide Trend A truly massive international dumping of USDollars has entered a second powerful phase. The Saudis and China recently dumped huge blocks of USTreasury Bonds. Foreign central banks liquidated a record $346 billion in USGovt debt securities in the last 12 months, the trend having accelerated. Numerous factors contribute to the dumping, which manifests the fading global confidence in the USDollar. Amplified Quantitative Easing (QE) volume soaks up the large volumes dumped on the bond market, further eroding the faith in fiat currency.
One month ago, a troublesome sharp decline was seen in the USTreasurys held in custody, which is the formal way to describe central bank holdings kept at the USFed computer banks. The amount fell by over $27.5 billion in a single week, the biggest weekly drop since January 2015. One month later the trend continues with powerful force, enough to capture global attention. The custody volume fell sharply again by another $22.3 billion in the past week, pushing the total amount to $2.805 trillion, another fresh post-2012 low.
The foreign central banks have continued their relentless liquidation of US debt securities held in the USFed’s official custody account. History is being made, as global sentiment and conditions are changing in fierce mode. The King Dollar throne is having its legs removed, kicked out, and cut off. Most financial analysts refuse to put the factors in such stark terms, but the Jackass does so naturally and without hesitation. Three dynamics can be identified as the principal proximal factors, detailed in the Hat Trick Letter for the October edition in the reports.
A month ago was observed a massive $343 billion in USTreasury sales by foreign central banks in the period July 1st 2015 to July 1st 2016, something truly unprecedented in size. Fast forward to the latest monthly update, which was posted as July data. All have gone worse. The running latest 12 months (LTM) in foreign central bank sales shot up to a new all time high $346.4 billion. Thus over one third of a $trillion in USTreasurys were sold in the past 12 months. Recall that in three months late in 2015, the Chinese sold $250 billion in USTBonds, which forced the IMF inclusion of the RMB into their formal basket of currencies. The dumping has been global, massive, and without precedent. China is the major seller, while the Saudis are the newest sellers. The broken Outhouse of Saud requires the funds to offset the collapse of the Petro-Dollar, and to backstop the country’s soaring budget deficit made worse by the obscene Yemen War.
The official story is told that private investors, both foreign and domestic, are soaking up hundreds of $billions in central bank holdings being sold on the bond market. The other dubious story is that bond yields are rising slightly, given the newfound concerns the USFed, the Bank of Japan, and maybe even the EuroCB will soon taper their purchases.
The bigger factor (surely not private investors) is the USFed ramping up hidden QE volume in a huge way, buying the massive bond dumpings, all kept secret and quiet so as not to disturb the pristine AAA rating of the USTBond toxic paper. Expect continued debt monetization of theUSGovt deficit, of which perhaps 75% is supported by the African style printing press. The USEconomy cannot grow its way out of the debt. They will monetize it until it default on the global stage.
The QE process cannot take in all the dumped USTBonds without psychological damage. The USDollar confidence is eroding globally. Faith in the USDollar is eroding very quickly. The nation is moving along in the US isolation process, identified as rogue nation on the financial front, terrorism front, laced vaccine front, and war front. Just the Jackass opinion.
Graph 4 – Evidence of USTBond Bubble (versus Diamonds) The USTreasury Bond bubble is the second biggest asset bubble is history, behind the residential real estate bubble in the last decade. The USTBonds are a massive sanctioned Ponzi Scheme, signifying the default of the USGovt debt and failure of its sovereign bond. The Elite controllers talk of a flight to safe haven, when in reality it is a leap into a black hole and toxic vat. Motive is to keep USGovt borrowing costs to minimal levels while the debt soars toward the $20 trillion mark. The gigantic black hole attracts legitimate capital from around the world. All will be subject to heavy losses. The USTreasury Bond asset bubble is supported by three major forces: the USFed monetary hyper inflation , the Interest Rate Swap derivative contract , the bond carry trade managed by Wall Street banks . More details are provided in the Hat Trick Letter for October.
The relation between top tier assets should remain stable, such as diamonds, special gemstones, classic art works & sculptures, special jewelry items, icon properties, and more. However, the bond price for USGovt debt has gone haywire, rising far beyond anything reasonable. Check out an unusual chart above, for the bond value versus the standard benchmark diamond price. This is a clear visible nasty bond bubble, which will burst just like the US housing market bubble that nobody in the mainstream moronic arenas expected. The Jackass correctly forecasted the housing market bust one year before it occurred. No longer are diamonds a girl’s best friend. It is USTBonds.
GOLD TRADE NOTE INTRODUCTION The Gold Trade Notes for trade payment might be coming into view, initially with commodity transfers, later swap contracts, and finally gold-backed short-term notes which supplant the USTBill. One might think of used newspapers on the floor, or of the dodo bird.
The trade might be made in exchange for either goods delivered or USTBills held. Detect a growing connection to finished goods being withheld from delivery. This is probably another sign of refusal of USTBills as payment.
As footnote, be sure to know that the preliminary steps to the Global Currency RESET will not be laid out in full disclosure for public benefit. It represents a tremendous investment opportunity for the elite, which they never tend to share.
In fact, the RESET might be well along before it is even recognized. End to EuroRaj main thoughts and open analysis, for which much gratitude is given. The Jackass believes a few critical elements to the RESET are in place. More details on DIP Financing feature is included in the September Hat Trick Letter report.
***A major hitch obstacle can be inferred. Payment in USD terms might be the clot in the artery. Demands might be for hard asset swaps, and the contract security from large scale commitment of commodities, facilities, and property. The swap trade is coming into view, a presage of the Gold Trade Note.***
The Jackass concludes the USD rejection could be lifting its head within a gathering storm, without clear identification. It is indeed difficult to identify all the elements when hidden deals at the highest level are underway, and friction is omnipresent. The Bobcat Corp rejection of USTBills at Pacific ports is a clear story. For every one story recounted, there are 10 to 20 not yet heard.
My firm belief is that in Asian banking systems, they do not want the USTBills anymore. The banks in Asia are trying to dump them in heavy volume, not accumulate more worthless toilet paper. Finally the sharp blowback from printing QE money has hit. The USFed monetary policy saves the big insolvent banks, but kills capital. The result has finally seen manifested in USD global rejection, or at least hints toward the same. Asian banks still hold vast sums of USTBonds. They are not going to announce the rejection, but instead fight behind the walls for better terms of payment, even as they pursue the Gold Trade Note for payment at ports. It is coming, like daybreak follows the long night.
NEW SCHEISS DOLLAR & GOLD TRADE STANDARD In time, expect an eventual refusal by Eastern producing nations to accept USTreasury Bills in payment for trade. The IMF reversal decision assures this USTBill blockade in time, and might accelerate the timetable. The United States Govt cannot continue on five glaring fronts of gross negligence and major violations. These violations have prompted the BRICS & Alliance nations to hasten their development of diverse non-USD platforms toward the goal of displacing the USDollar while at the same time take steps toward the return of the Gold Standard.
The New Scheiss Dollar will arrive in order to assure continued import supply to the USEconomy. It will be given a 30% devaluation out of the gate, then many more devaluations of similar variety. The New Dollar will fail all foreign and Eastern scrutiny. The USGovt will be forced to react to USTBill rejection at the ports.
The US must accommodate with the New Scheiss Dollar in order to assure import supply, and to alleviate the many stalemates to come. The United States finds itself on the slippery slope that leads to the Third World, a Jackass forecast that has been presented since Lehman fell (better described as killed by JPM and GSax).
The only apparent alternative is for the United States Govt to lease a large amount of gold bullion (like 10,000 tons) from China in order to properly launch a gold-backed currency. Doing so would open the gates for a generation of commercial colonization, but actual progress in returning capitalism to the United States. The cost would be supply shortages to the USEconomy, a result of enormous export increases to China.
The colonization has already begun, with secret deals galore. It is very unclear what deals are being struck in order to arrange for the USGovt to have a proper gold reserve hoard, for backing a new legitimate USDollar. Meetings at very high level are in progress, with little if any popular representation, only elite members present. Failure to produce a legitimate bonafide gold-backed currency would mean the United States must proceed with the New Scheiss Dollar, an illegitimate fake phony farce of a currency.
It would be subjected to a series of devaluations. The result would be heavy powerful painful price inflation from the import front. The effect would be to reverse a generation of exported inflation by the United States. The entire USEconomy would go into a downward spiral with higher prices, supply shortages, and social disorder. However, the rising prices would come from the currency crisis, and not so much from the hyper monetary inflation. That flood of $trillions has been effectively firewalled off.
Source: Jim Willie — Golden Jackass
Via: Silver Doctors
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This post was originally published on this site
The criminal investigation underway over Anthony Weiner’s alleged child sex infraction has a couple of characteristics that make it especially awkward for Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin, the estranged wife of Weiner and close companion of Hillary.
Ed Timperlake points out to me that in an underage sex investigation, all electronic communications of the investigative target are pursued. This probably led to the grand jury that was announced 11 days ago issuing a subpoena for all of the devices in the possession of Weiner and his family, including Huma. As Lucianne Goldberg quipped, they even seize the Speak & Spell toys in these cases. This grand jury is in New York, possibly less politically supervised than the first Hillary email investigation.
Evidently, some of these devices were not turned over in the first investigation and contained “pertinent” emails. We do not know with certainty, but some reports indicate the pertinent emails may have been found on Weiner’s laptop. Recall that the initial investigation did not convene a grand jury and did not, therefore, have subpoena power. It is possible that Huma Abedin misled the FBI over the existence of pertinent emails on her then husband’s computing devices.
So what could have been on the laptop Carlos Danger used for sexting?
Adam Yoshida, with a background in information technology consulting for affluent and powerful people emails:
…Clinton [was] using e-mails seemingly like most people use IMs or text messaging. Her holding onto Blackberries (and seven switching back to older models when the software was upgraded) [demonstrates this]. It might even explain at least SOME of the motivation for the e-mail server itself. I’ve seen plenty of cases where a powerful person says basically, “I want my e-mails on this thing” and, regardless of whether it’s a good solution, people respond, “ready-aye-ready.”
So, what could they have found on Weiner’s computers that would have caused such alarm?
I’d think one of two things:
1) Either that Huma signed in her e-mail account at one point and, presumably, it being Exchange or IMAP, dumped the whole account onto the computer and that account has plenty of e-mails between her and Clinton that were deleted.
Or –
2) There’s mention of Huma having a Yahoo account to which she would forward things for printing purposes. This struck me right away because, of course, printers are often difficult to configure as are e-mail accounts. It struck me as strange, yet very believable, that she mentioned that she’d forward stuff to that Yahoo account to print them. I mean, printing in theory should be platform agnostic, but – if you’re technically unsophisticated – you might have serious problems trying to setup an e-mail account or a printer on a device. Thus I imagine a scenario where she has a portable machine that either she can’t (or can’t be, for some reason) configured to use her home printer and a desktop machine (I imagine an slightly-older iMac here) that’s physically connected to the printer that serves as a shared “family computer” or whatever. She either can’t setup the e-mail account on that computer (perhaps it requires a VPN or something like that) or doesn’t want to, so she forwards everything that she wants to print to the Yahoo account that she does have setup on that computer. The FBI takes this computer as part of the Weiner investigation and, bam, they find thousands of e-mail messages – again, evidence of what was destroyed earlier. | 0 |
A artist you love makes a new recording — say, the group Clipping or the Chicago punk band Mace or the electronic composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. You feel you have to graft it onto your life. How does that go for you these days? Does streaming from Spotify, Apple Music or Tidal answer your needs in terms of audio quality and how well the artist is paid? Do you have a good record store nearby, and does it sell cassettes and vinyl, too? Do you only buy new records directly from artists, with a cash transaction and a handshake? Do you love spending time on iTunes? If you answered no to all these questions, you probably know about Bandcamp, the online music site known for its equitable treatment of artists, and one of the greatest bazaars of our time. From it, you can stream music to the extent each artist allows, or buy songs at a price set by the artist — which is sometimes “pay what you wish” — or order physical products from the site. The artist gets 85 percent. Always, the artist gets to know who’s buying, without a third party in the way. There’s also a application on the site that lets the consumer know who else is buying and what else they’ve bought in the past. That is significant: You can triangulate your taste with other people, whom you don’t know, but whom you might come to trust. All of which makes Bandcamp a strange categorical combination of Spotify, iTunes — though it is much smaller than either — a big independent record store and a small band’s merch table after a gig. I often buy music on Bandcamp, because I know I’m putting a sandwich in someone’s mouth. But a lot more often, I just listen. All of the time I’ve spent there has felt beautifully unmediated, and mostly dedicated to one kind of music. Which has been, until recently, punk, the noisier the better. That is a conscious limitation — I only have so much time — but also because Bandcamp has become something like punk’s central agency. It’s the right medium for it ergo, nearly all of it is there. I’m not sure there’s ever been anything like that in the past for punk culture, which is international and inherently suspicious of commercialism. To punk bands, Bandcamp may represent a fair business model, and a reasonably direct link between artist and audience. To me, it has represented a fantasy of being left alone with valuable information that I can make sense of however I like. I’ve got the raw data: collections of charged, grimy, songs with uncharismatic titles like “ Demo” and art, by little bands from Chicago and the Czech Republic and Japan. Bandcamp, which started in 2008 and is run out of a number of small offices in San Francisco, Brooklyn and elsewhere, became profitable in 2012 and sells a record every five seconds. It grew 35 percent last year and has paid $169 million to artists, according to its website. Its chief executive, Ethan Diamond, mentioned in an interview that “plenty of artists” have made more than $100, 000 each through it, and all of them get the same deal: The site keeps 15 percent of each sale. (By comparison, iTunes takes about 30 percent, and going that route also requires being on a label or working with an independent distributor, which takes another cut.) Bandcamp’s basic business model is not changing. But the experience of spending time at the site and listening to music through it might be. A sign of a new phase came early this summer. Bandcamp hired a smart staff to create about 20 times the amount of editorial content that had been there previously, writing about music that had just been posted as well as parts of its deep and woolly catalog, in a feature called “Bandcamp Daily. ” A June article surveyed the current rock scene in Bangkok, with embedded musical examples of six different bands. Before, those bands had just made their records available on the site. You knew about the scene, or you randomly found your way to them, or more likely, you didn’t Mr. Diamond told me that the company has never spent money on promotion. Now those bands are being organized, by employees with knowledge and taste, into history. My own reaction, not just as a fan of specific bands but as a fan of the weirdly oceanic Bandcamp experience, is perfectly divided: grateful and wary. The Bangkok piece was soon followed by an interview with the young American Julien Baker, in which she picked her favorite “Bandcamp bands. ” (They were passionate fledglings, like her they included Our Lady, Hodera and Ratboys, all new to me.) That piece, too, included streamable tracks. Very helpful. But: Bandcamp bands? Are there such things? What seems like a great bazaar from a distance can become a much more focused and private experience up close, especially when you narrow down your search to a single genre. When I’m looking through the site’s pages for individual punk bands, Bandcamp suddenly becomes more like a box of punk 45s, individually sleeved and glued, at the foot of a driveway on a rural route, with a sign and a record player. (An invisible hand replenishes the box every day.) The extreme neutrality of the experience has been part of the attraction, and part of the reason I have spent so much time looking. Punk bands are skeptical about being objectified, categorized, rated so am I. Looking without help was how I first found G. L. O. S. S. the trans and queer punk band from Olympia, Wash. which recently had a best seller on the site with its EP “Trans Day of Revenge. ” And Torso and Replica, from Oakland, Calif. and JJ Doll, from Brooklyn and Good Throb, from London and on and on. But now there are experts to guide me. I don’t see the isolated box of 45s anymore. Now I see something with a cultural weight and aura, something — I do not like this word — curated. Bandcamp has an identity because of practicalities: Independent artists from subcultures need it most. Punk is one of them, but some of the most consistently music on the site is video game soundtrack music, like the one for the game Undertale or the ambient hipster kitsch of about five years ago known as vaporwave. Some artists, like Car Seat Headrest and Sufjan Stevens, have been able to grow careers with Bandcamp. Part of Bandcamp’s attraction has been the of some of the creators who upload music to it. The online magazine Fact, since early 2014, has been publishing monthly columns by the writers Laurent Fintoni and Miles Bowe of the best discoveries on Bandcamp, and they’ve been great: sightings in the wild, basically. (A record by Prince Metropolis Known that included surreal takedowns of Bill O’Reilly. An album of field recordings and found sounds by a Belgian artist named Dolphins Into the Future. Et cetera, forever.) The columns weren’t looking for influence or significance they were looking for strangeness and surprise. Bandcamp’s own editorial framing of the music it hosts tends to be more serious, and it’s done, presumably, with some knowledge of what sells and what doesn’t. Are my favorite punk bands now Bandcamp bands? Are they suddenly wanting to conform to a kind of Bandcamp aesthetic? I don’t think so. Not yet. But if that does happen, something might be lost — a sense of these bands defining themselves as they want to, which is sort of the Bandcamp promise in the first place. People can use help navigating the riches of Bandcamp. But its estimable editorial project opens an interesting question: When does help turn into tastemaking? | 1 |
Now that FBI’s reopened Hillary investigation, can THIS be far behind? (Hint: Bill, fire up the jet!) Posted at 2:15 pm on October 28, 2016 by Doug P.
As we’ve reported, FBI Director James Comey said he would be reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails and private server in light of new information: WHOA! FBI director tells Congress Hillary investigation reopening ‘due to recent developments’ (here’s the letter) https://t.co/SfcQhxBWzI
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) October 28, 2016
Can “total coincidence” number two be far behind? I think it's time for another Lynch/Clinton tarmac meeting https://t.co/IzD7715mA7
— Kelly Riddell (@KellyRiddell) October 28, 2016
We wouldn’t put it past them … again . Trending | 0 |
SEOUL, South Korea — It was supposed to be an enormous — but quick — recall. Samsung Electronics of South Korea said two weeks ago that it would recall 2. 5 million units of its new smartphone, the Galaxy Note 7, just days after some customers said their phones had caught fire. The recall is the largest in the history of the smartphone industry, but it also won Samsung praise from some in the mobile industry for the company’s speed and decisiveness. Today, the recall looks anything but smooth. Safety regulators in the United States have issued warnings in recent days cautioning consumers not to turn on their Note 7s on airplanes — and not to use their phones at all. South Korea’s flight regulator, in a reversal, followed suit, as have others around the world. The constant reminders of potential combustibility have further dented Samsung’s reputation and shaved as much as $14 billion off its market value, just when it looked to be gaining ground on Apple, its longtime rival, with its new line of sleek Galaxy smartphones. They also raise questions about whether Samsung’s rush to take back the phones created more problems. Experts say it led to a effort that confused customers, frustrated regulators and continued to generate headlines both in the United States and at home. Data from the mobile analytics firm Apteligent showed that while Samsung’s recall appeared to have stopped new sales of the phone, a majority of people who had the affected phones were continuing to use them. “I thought, ‘How is it that this is happening?’ ” said Jennifer Shecter, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Consumer Reports. She said the group found an inconsistent response to the recall across America, with some stores and carriers still selling the phones days after Samsung’s announcement. “Samsung made an announcement, but the government wasn’t involved, there wasn’t a clear message, there wasn’t an approved remedy and there wasn’t a clear fix,” she said. A Samsung spokeswoman declined to comment on its discussions with regulators, pointing only to a company statement that said it was working with the Consumer Product Safety Commission in the United States. On Thursday, the commission said it was issuing a formal recall of about one million Galaxy Note 7s sold before Sept. 15, urging people to contact their wireless carriers or to call Samsung for help. The recall is an embarrassing comedown for Samsung, an icon of South Korean innovation that accounts for of the country’s exports. Its importance can lead to deference from regulators, experts say. South Korea’s flight regulator recommended last week that airline passengers not use or charge their Note 7 phones on flights only after the United States Federal Aviation Administration made the same recommendation. Flight regulators in Europe, Japan, India and elsewhere have issued similar notices. The situation is “regrettable,” said Kang deputy director of the flight standards division of South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport. He said the ministry initially had not acted because Samsung told it that the risks were manageable. But when the United States made its recommendation, South Korea had no choice but to follow, Mr. Kang said. “As the authority in the country with the company that made the product, the ministry felt concerned about the repercussions, should it be the first to ban the gadget on airplanes,” he said. Samsung confirmed that company representatives had met with the ministry but declined to comment further. Korean consumer safety regulators say the company’s effort had complied with South Korean law, and Samsung has taken additional steps in recent days to minimize the damage. This week it issued a software update that would keep the Note 7 from fully charging, reducing the risk of overheating. It has also bought advertising in American and South Korean media. Samsung has not given specifics about how many affected phones are in which markets, but many of the phones were most likely sold in critical markets where the company ships phones first, like the United States, South Korea and European countries such as Britain. In the United States, the C. P. S. C. requires companies to notify it of defects and to coordinate public notification of recalls. The commission also asks the companies to work with it to determine how to notify customers and coordinate how the defective products can be replaced or returned. But when Samsung said on Sept. 2 that it would replace 2. 5 million Note 7s, it issued a news release by itself. It set up its own website telling Note 7 users to go back to where they had bought the phones or to contact its call center. In a Sept. 9 statement, the C. P. S. C. warned consumers not to use the phones at all. On Thursday, when the agency issued the formal recall, it said people should replace their Galaxy Note 7s with new ones that have a different battery or get a refund. At a news conference, the commission’s chairman, Elliot F. Kaye, hinted at the regulator’s dissatisfaction with Samsung. “I will say as a general matter that it’s not a recipe for a successful recall for a company to go out on its own,” he said, adding that companies that think they can successfully carry out a recall without coordinating with the government “need to have more than their phone checked. ” Samsung said replacement devices would be available in the United States no later than Sept. 21. In Hong Kong, Samsung initially told consumers they would not be affected because the models there used a different battery. A day later, it said about 500 would be affected after all. Experts say Samsung’s desire to deal with the problem quickly may have created confusion. Kim Jinbaek, a professor at the School of Business at University in Seoul and a former Samsung employee, cited the example of Toyota Motor in Japan, which was criticized beginning in 2009 for dragging its heels in what turned out to be a major safety recall. At the time, Mr. Kim said, Toyota was in discussions with American safety regulators. “Samsung, on the other hand, decided not to wait through such coordination,” he said. Adding to the confusion, Samsung in its initial statement said it would replace the phones, avoiding use of the more damaging word “recall. ” Samsung also did not advise users to stop using the phones altogether until Sept. 10. Samsung’s own employees called on the company in an internal electronic bulletin board to act swiftly, according to local media reports that were confirmed by the company. The service allows employees to post messages anonymously. “We want you to make the best decision so we don’t feel ashamed before our customers who use the Galaxy phablet smartphones,” one posting said, using a word for big phones like the Note 7 that approach the size of a tablet. “The company owes much to the customers who preordered our phones or purchased them,” read another. “Our future lies in how well we treat these loyal customers. ” | 1 |
President Donald Trump fumed against a federal judge in Hawaii who blocked his second Executive Order limiting immigration into the United States from six Middle Eastern countries. [“This new order was tailored to the dictates of the Ninth Circuit’s, in my opinion, flawed ruling,” he said. “This is the opinion of many — an unprecedented judicial overreach. ” Trump referred to his second attempt at an executive order as the “watered down” version, vowing to take his case to the Supreme Court if necessary. “We are going to win,” he said. “We are going to keep our citizens safe. ” Trump admitted that he didn’t want to replace his first executive order in the first place, suggesting that perhaps he would go back to the original. “The best way to keep foreign terrorists or, as some people would say, in certain instances, radical Islamic terrorists, from attacking our country, is to stop them from entering our country in the first place,” he said as the crowd cheered. The crowd booed the ruling, which Trump said, “makes us look weak. ” Trump made his remarks during a political rally in Nashville, admitting to his fans that he had to be careful about his rhetoric or the “dishonest” media would accuse him of attacking the courts. He read the text of the prevailing law, which notes that the president can suspend immigration when “he or she” deems it necessary. “Fortunately it won’t be ” he quipped, prompting a roar of applause from the crowd followed by chants of “Lock her up!” | 1 |
November 2015 Ads THE BIG CHILL: Kill Fat Cells Instantly Just by Freezing Them! You’ll Never Believe How it Works
For most people, fat bulges are something they don’t want. It makes our thighs jiggle, our clothes fit tight and look bad, and typically lingers despite our torturous attempts to eliminate it. Too much of it increases our risk for certain illnesses like heart disease and type 2 diabetes, so for decades researchers have looked for ways to reduce it. Humans have two types of fat: white fat & brown fat, and understanding the differences between the two, can help people lose weight. “White fat” is the thin layer of blubber we see on the human belly. backs of arms and on the thighs. This particular fat acts as a thermal insulator, that keeps body temperatures stable. LEARN MORE: “Brown fat,” on the other hand, is less abundant in the body and creates heat, rather than trapping it like white fat does. Brown fat actually warms a cold body by burning energy or calories. White fat however, can take on brown fat characteristics, with the resulting product called “beige fat.” This process is called “browning.” Because beige and brown fat are able to burn calories, they are a positive force for weight loss, while an excess of white fat is associated with weight gain and obesity. According to Dr. Philip A. Kern, a researcher of the University of Kentucky School of Medicine, browning fat tissue would be an excellent defense against obesity, as it would make the body burn extra calories rather than converting them into fatty tissue. Where Do We Have Brown Fat? Brown fat can be difficult to study because it is hard to find in adults, and typically found in unpredictable locations in the body, and not always in the same place on every person. There’s a region in the neck and the shoulders, where you typically find it, but again not on everybody. In a recent study, brown fat was found in the chests and down the spines of a group of healthy young men, along with places in the abdomen….. | 0 |
The early morning call seemed relatively routine: a report of a gas smell at a small, house on West 234th Street in the Bronx. But the nearly 20 firefighters who arrived at the house about a before sunrise on Tuesday noticed something else — materials that indicated that at least part of the home was being used as a drug laboratory, officials said. The firefighters called the police and left the building. On the street, Battalion Chief Michael J. Fahy was directing his firefighters. Then, the building exploded. Chief Fahy, a veteran of the department and a father of three young children, was hit by debris and killed. He had followed his own father, Thomas, into the department. Chief Fahy, 44, lived in Yonkers with his wife and children. He had a law degree and had steadily climbed the Fire Department’s ranks. Chief Fahy had been struck on the head by a piece of the roof, officials said. He died at Pavilion in the Inwood section of Manhattan, after being rushed there by police officers, who tried desperately to save his life, the police and fire officials said. The police said they had a man in custody whom they were questioning in relation to the case. It was the first death for the Fire Department since Lt. Gordon Matthew Ambelas died in 2014, according to the Uniformed Firefighters Association of Greater New York. At a news conference at the hospital on Tuesday morning, the fire commissioner, Daniel A. Nigro, described Chief Fahy as “a rising star” of the department. “He was a star, a brave man,” Mr. Nigro said, emotion weighing in his voice. “We feel it deeply, we feel it deeply today. ” Chief Fahy had briefly worked as lawyer for the firm Proskauer Rose before joining the Fire Department in 1999, according to his LinkedIn profile. He rose from firefighter to lieutenant to captain and, finally, to battalion chief in 2012. He had also earned a master’s degree in homeland security from the Naval Postgraduate School. About 20 other people were injured in the explosion, including nine firefighters, six police officers and three workers from Consolidated Edison, Mr. Nigro said. None of the injuries were . The police had been looking at West 234th Street, in the Kingsbridge neighborhood, after receiving a tip that a house there was being used to grow marijuana, Police Commissioner James P. O’Neill said at the news conference. Officers were in the initial stages of an investigation there, he said. The explosion sent wood, bricks and a large part of the building’s roof tumbling down, much of it into the street and onto cars parked there. Neighbors and residents from the surrounding blocks reported their buildings shaking them awake. Images on Tuesday showed the dwelling reduced largely to rubble. A video shot by a neighbor showed firefighters dousing the smoking building in water as sirens blared nearby. The explosion was felt and heard blocks away, jolting the quiet residential neighborhood and touching on the jittery nerves of a city still on edge from the bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey 10 days earlier. “It’s hard not to make these assumptions these days,” said Campbell Abbott, 24, who lives a block away and shot the video after the explosion. “I thought it was some rogue terrorist. ” Nonetheless, Mr. Abbott left his apartment to head to the scene of the blast to shoot the video, which he broadcast live on Facebook. Matthew Chrisphonte, 21, said he was asleep in his family’s home, across the street and a few doors down on Tibbett Avenue, when he felt the blast. “My entire house shook, and immediately following the explosion I heard screaming, yelling,” he said. Mr. Chrisphonte said a building close to the explosion site housed a day care center, which was evacuated. The person listed in public records as the owner of the property could not be reached for comment. The police said the house was occupied by renters, but they had yet to identify them. Many neighbors said the house was frequently occupied by tenants, but none seemed to know its latest tenants. Marina Uza lived in the neighborhood for 11 years but said she moved away last year because of issues with the home where the explosion took place: parties and people screaming on the street. “There were too many people going in and out,” she said. “There was too much going on. I have a child, so I left. ” Around Chief Fahy’s firehouse in the Bronx, the street was closed to traffic and pedestrians. Another group of firefighters dropped off food. “It’s a terrible loss for the Fahy family it’s a loss for the Fire Department family,” Mr. Nigro said. “He was doing what fire officers do. ” | 1 |
BOSTON — Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite New Hampshire boarding school whose prominent graduates include Daniel Webster and Mark Zuckerberg, disclosed last month that it had forced out a popular teacher in 2011 because of sexual misconduct in the 1970s and ’80s. The school’s delayed announcement — officials said they had been protecting the victims’ privacy — brought forth allegations against other employees. And on Wednesday, Exeter announced that it had fired a second teacher who had admitted to sexual encounters with a student more than two decades ago. The revelations at Exeter are the latest to rock the insular, privileged world of American prep schools. In the past decade, sex abuse allegations have tarnished a litany of top private schools, including Horace Mann in the Bronx, Deerfield Academy in western Massachusetts and the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. Since December, more than 40 alumni of St. George’s School, an elite boarding school in Rhode Island, have reported several cases of molestation and rape, mostly in the 1970s and ’80s. Sexual misconduct is, of course, not limited to select private schools. Educators say that it occurs with alarming frequency across all types of educational institutions. But because boarding schools are usually institutions with powerful alumni, they receive intense public scrutiny when misconduct occurs on their manicured campuses. The rash of recent allegations and bad publicity has started to yield changes, some experts said, with some schools doing more now to try to prevent sexual abuse and be more receptive to students who report it. A 2004 analysis of the scant research on sex abuse estimated that 9. 6 percent of students in public schools experience some form of educator sexual misconduct, ranging from offensive comments to rape, between kindergarten and 12th grade. There appears to be no comparable data available about boarding schools, said Peter W. Upham, executive director of the Association of Boarding Schools, who calls sexual abuse by educators “a national scourge. ” Some researchers and lawyers involved with abuse cases say that while very few teachers take sexual advantage of students, some aspects of boarding school life can be conducive to abuse. “Boarding schools are fertile ground for predatory behavior, mostly because you’re with the kids all the time,” said Eric MacLeish, a lawyer representing several alumni who say they were sexually abused at St. George’s. “It is accepted that teachers will get very, very close to students as they become mentors,” he said. “They work out together, eat together, take trips together, go to Europe together with the school choir. Many live on campus and are dorm parents. ” Hawk Cramer, 48, an elementary school principal in Seattle who said he was molested by a faculty member at St. George’s when he was a student there in the early 1980s, agreed that the unfettered access to students at boarding schools can allow a pedophile to groom victims. “You can call kids into your home, you can be alone with them, and kids think you have control over their future,” he said. And students are loath to report the abuse, at least in real time. “Students are embarrassed and under huge pressure to perform,” Mr. Cramer said. “They don’t want anyone to think they aren’t measuring up or that they’re a victim. ” Dr. Eli Newberger, a Boston pediatrician and specialist in child protection, said these were places “where, for the most part, children are treated extremely well, with very high expectations for career accomplishment. ” As such, he said, abuse in such rarefied settings “may take decades to overcome. ” Until recently, he and others said, the schools were reluctant to acknowledge bad behavior, and victims had little confidence that their complaints would be taken seriously. Now, with so many cases coming to light, educators and analysts said that the schools are making greater efforts both to try to prevent misconduct from occurring, and to be more transparent in their reporting when it did. “I do think a lot of schools are grappling now in a way they haven’t before with what are the best practices in terms of providing safety and enough prevention, training and education,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. He noted that by many measures, reports of current child sexual abuse, at least in public schools, were going down. For example, the Minnesota Student Survey, conducted every three years, said that in 2013, fewer than six percent of ninth graders reported being touched or forced to touch an adult sexually. This was a new low, down from 13 percent in 1992, the first year of the study. As for the boarding schools, many are conducting more rigorous background checks when hiring staff and are proactively training employees to recognize grooming behaviors among adults. They are also teaching students to identify when other students seem stressed and when adults might be crossing a boundary. A number of schools have developed anonymous tip lines and set aside confidential areas where students can air their concerns. “Now, we have schools sending out letters, even without any allegations, saying, ‘If you are ever harmed or abused, we’re here for you,’” Mr. Upham said. He and others attributed the changes in part to liability concerns stemming from the explosive Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal at Penn State in 2011. Mr. Sandusky, a coach who was convicted of abusing 10 boys over 15 years, has cost the university more than $92 million in settlement costs. More recently, the movie “Spotlight,” an account of The Boston Globe’s exposé of sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests and the subsequent may be spurring a new round of reporting. “ ‘Spotlight’ has given survivors the permission to come forward now because they see people siding with them and they see institutions being held accountable,” said Robert M. Hoatson, a former Catholic priest based in Livingston, N. J. and of Road to Recovery, an organization for survivors of sexual abuse. The Sandusky revelations appear to have been a motivating factor behind the report of sexual abuse at Exeter. According to police documents obtained by The Associated Press through a records request, an Exeter teacher cited the Sandusky case when she reported in 2011 that Rick Schubart, a popular history teacher, had been sexually involved with a student in the 1970s. The teacher, who had also been a student at Exeter at that time, said that a classmate had told her she had had sex with Mr. Schubart, according to The A. P. The classmate confirmed to the school that she had had a relationship with Mr. Schubart during her senior year in 1977, when she was 18, but said it was consensual. Mr. Schubart was forced to resign, and the school said at the time that he left for personal reasons. In 2015, a 1982 graduate reported that Mr. Schubart had sexually abused her when she was 17. Mr. Schubart told police it was consensual, The A. P. said, but the woman’s lawyer told the school she had to have extensive therapy and was seeking financial compensation. That second report prompted the school to strip Mr. Schubart of his emeritus status last year and bar him from campus. Mr. Schubart did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On March 30, school officials disclosed the situation to students, parents and alumni, saying Mr. Schubart had been forced out after admitting to sexual misconduct. The revelations shook the Exeter community and unleashed additional charges of sexual misconduct, which led to the firing last week of a second teacher, Steve Lewis, who admitted recently to abuse that happened decades ago, the school said. The police said this was the only report they received against a current teacher. Attempts to reach Mr. Lewis on Sunday were unsuccessful. Still, the charges set off an anguished debate, in conversations and online, among the alumni, many of whom had admired Mr. Schubart and were trying to reconcile the revelations with their own positive experiences. A few said they knew of the relationship at the time, and were now wrestling with whether they should have reported it and whether their view that it had appeared to be consensual made any difference. “We have entered a period of sincere reflection about our school’s history and culture,” Lisa MacFarlane, Exeter’s new principal, who has been on the job less than a year, and Eunice Panetta, the president of the board of trustees, wrote in a letter on Saturday to the school community. The letter announced that Exeter had retained a law firm to investigate additional allegations and review school policies. It also said outside experts would review how Exeter had handled the Schubart matter, which occurred during the tenure of the previous principal, Tom Hassan, who stepped down last year. Mr. Hassan, who has been censured by the Association of Boarding Schools, has apologized for what he called his “inadequate” response. He said he was trying to protect student privacy. It remains to be seen whether the episode will affect his wife, Gov. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, a Democrat, who is challenging Senator Kelly Ayotte. Ms. Hassan, who had received campaign contributions from Mr. Schubart, was living on the Exeter campus with her husband when Mr. Schubart resigned but has said she did not know why he left. | 1 |
The green fraud has a lot to do with it all as exposed in the emails . http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/miranda-devine-foreignfunded-green-groups-could-take-whole-swathes-of-australia-out-of-the-productive-economy/news-story/016e5d9ff252f2444790d05269f4ed90 | 0 |
A Maryland school official was fired from her job after she corrected a student’s spelling over Twitter. [Frederick County Public Schools has fired employee Katie Nash after she stirred up attention on how she ran the district’s Twitter feed last week, the Frederick News Post reported. On Jan. 5, a student tweeted to the FCPS Twitter account @FCPSMaryland and said, “close school tammarow PLEASE. ” Several hours later, Frederick County Public Schools Social Media Manager Katie Nash replied, “but then how would you learn how to spell ‘tomorrow?’ :)” The response drew lots of attention and backlash over social media as thousands of people liked and retweeted the post. She eventually became the subject of a hashtag, #KatiefromFCPS, and later #freekatie when WHAG reported that her Twitter was taken away from her. Nash said she understands why she was fired and said she doesn’t want to be a “distraction” to the school system, but thought her employer would have provided some suggestions on how to improve her job. “As a new employee, I think I sort of would have expected that there would have been some counseling or some suggestions on how to improve,” she said. Nash had decided to take a more playful tone on the school’s Twitter account, citing student feedback. “We had received feedback from some students in a focus group that our tweeting was a bit flat, they were looking for some more engagement,” Nash said. “They were looking for us to tweet back at them and I really took that to heart because I know that I am a little bit older and maybe not as hip as some of the students are, so I took that to heart and I took that feedback in. ” The student later said that he didn’t take the tweet personally, WGHP reported. Michael Doerrer, the Director of Communications, Community Engagement and Marketing with FCPS, said the school gave a personal apology to the student, WHAG reported. | 1 |
http://www.thepoliticalinsider.com/wikileaks-confirms-hillary-clinton-campaign-acknowledge-massive-email-cover/ It’s always the cover-up that gets ya!
This is certainly getting interesting, folks. It’s 13 days before the elections. This email leak confirms Hillary Clinton and her staff were engaged in a cover up designed to prevent Congress from seeing incriminating emails about well – everything!
The issue is this. Early voting has occurred and is occurring across the nation. People have already cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton. If the Democrats pull her as a candidate and put anybody else in – likely Biden – then they will lose all the votes cast for Hillary as she will no longer be the Democratic candidate.
All the Democrat illegal immigrant voting fraud, dead peopl e voting fraud, busing people around to vote in multiple precincts fraud plus all legal citizen Democrat votes cast early will no longer be valid if Hillary Clinton is removed as the candidate!
And the 32K emails haven’t yet been released! How low did you go, Hillary?
It’s a bit late now to do Michelle Obama’s bidding to “take the high road.” For you that might be a gutter. Shift Frequency 2016 SF original Oct. 26, 2016 | 0 |
At a Tuesday press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed last week’s chemical weapons attack in the Idlib province of Syria was a “false flag” — a phony operation staged by enemies of Russia and Syria to discredit them. He said more such false flag operations were on the way. [“We have reports from multiple sources that false flags like this one — and I cannot call it otherwise — are being prepared in other parts of Syria, including the southern suburbs of Damascus. They plan to plant some chemical there and accuse the Syrian government of an attack,” said Putin, as reported by Russia’s RT. com. “President Mattarella and I discussed it, and I told him that this reminds me strongly of the events in 2003, when the US representatives demonstrated at the UN Security Council session the presumed chemical weapons found in Iraq,” Putin continued, referring to Italian President Sergio Mattarella, who appeared with him at the press conference in Moscow. “The military campaign was subsequently launched in Iraq and it ended with the devastation of the country, the growth of the terrorist threat and the appearance of Islamic State [IS, formerly ISIS] on the world stage,” Putin declared. According to RT. com, the Russian General Staff has prepared a report that claims “militants” among the Syrian rebellion are “transporting toxic agents into several parts of Syria. ” “These actions are aimed at creating a new pretext for accusing the government of Syria of more chemical weapons attacks and provoking more strikes by the US,” said Sergey Rudskoy, head of operations for the General Staff. The Associated Press reports that Russia’s General Staff has expressed a willingness to allow international inspectors to examine the Sharyat airbase in Syria for traces of chemical weapons, and offered to provide military security for the inspectors. Putin said he would appeal to the United Nations to investigate the incident. The UK Independent reports that Putin more specifically accused the United States of planning to drop chemical weapons on Damascus and then blame the incident on Assad, although it does not provide a translation of the Russian president’s precise words to that effect. On Monday, Russia and Iran declared the United States “crossed red lines” by attacking Sharyat airbase, borrowing a phrase made infamous by former President Barack Obama. U. S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has accused the Russians of either being “complicit” in the Syrian chemical weapons deployment, or “incompetent” for allowing it to happen. The Pentagon is investigating the possibility that Russia actually participated in the chemical weapons attack, the bombing of a hospital where victims were receiving treatment afterward. | 1 |
John Carney, Breitbart News economics editor, joined Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Wednesday to discuss the recent Super Bowl ads, including the 84 Lumber ad, which drew a considerable amount of attention. [In response to Marlow’s saying it usually does not make news if conservative backlash damages a company’s bottom line, Carney said, “It hasn’t been traditionally. But I think when you see as extreme as what we saw with 84 Lumber, the longer version, which is on YouTube, which the NFL actually turned down to show because it was too political — but they still insisted on making it available … I think this is saying, much like Kellogg but not just about Breitbart, about America, about people who voted for Donald Trump, about the country as a whole. ” Added Carney, “84 Lumber is saying we don’t share your values. And I think Americans are going to look at that. ” As the controversy grew, 84 Lumber CEO Maggie Hardy Magerko appeared to walk back any perceived opposition to a border wall and President Trump. She said the ad “was not meant to be or a political statement at all” and that she is “a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump,” who thinks a border wall “is a need. ” Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 1 |
By Lilian Na’ia Alessa / culturalsurvival.org
Western science and Indigenous worldviews are often seen as incompatible, with the Indigenous view usually being far less valued by society at large. But an inside look at Indigenous ways of knowing shows that they offer unique and dependable insights, in precisely the areas where Western science is often weakest.
I grew up in a family where Bible study was mandatory. Yet, despite the firm Christian branches that shaded my home, there were traditional roots that anchored daily life. My grandmother spoke no English and went about her tasks singing. She sang to things I couldn’t see, to stones and water. She spoke to the breezes that came off the sea. This was not odd to me. No question of sanity or need of counseling entered my mind. It was simply the mechanics of living, of praise to God, to the Creator. She wove fibers into amazing patterns, placing them in water while singing. When she finished singing, the coarse strands would be soaked and pliable and she would sing again until the pattern was done. Her songs, I came to realize, were timers for different tasks. She had no watch, knew no math, indeed had been denied the opportunity to get the education that became the currency of the world in her adulthood and old age. Instead, she had acquired a sophisticated methodology to transform the resources that yielded to her hand, and her hand only. There were no power tools, no mechanical devices to ease her work. There was only an elegance of skill that no machine could replicate. As a child, she was magic to me, and at her deathbed the shock of her mortality severed my faith in these songs. I turned to the precision of Western learning, so that such a fate would never befall me. So I would know the world, and in that knowledge, somehow control it.
My desire to shun those things that had no firm margins grew as I came to learn the beauty and remarkable perfection of the universe through the eyes of those scholars who, like the elders of my youth, had discovered these things before. As I sat in uncomfortable chairs in lecture halls, a number in a sea of students, and despaired at the pain of examinations in those same chairs, a profound awe of the very molecules that composed my body and everything surrounding me settled. When I realized that the ability to pursue this learning fell squarely on my ability to navigate a system of hard edges, I panicked. I had been raised in a home swirling with soft fluidity of being.
And now, my learning rejected these things.
But numbers sing, too. Their words are clear and distinct, and their combinations were refrains of certainty. The slow draining of the deep convictions of my upbringing and generations of women who had sustained children with their hands became a steady flow. Here lay the solution: I could understand all things by measuring them, and in knowing those words I felt I could rewrite the song.
The profound awe I felt as a student failed me when I took a job as a faculty researcher at a university. I came to realize that Western science hummed the words much of the time. I could see it coming: there were too many failures, too many times when it was apparent that politics, egos, and cliques were the white noise that drowned out the song. Like the death of my grandmother, it was a sound blow.
Western science as a way of knowing has precision and discipline, and unlike most other ways of knowing, it can be faithfully replicated (most of the time) and understood by practitioners around the world, regardless of their language. But I was led to believe that it could explain more than it really could. Its limitations could be found not only in the over-simplification of the world but also in the murky stupidity of politics, greed, and hubris. And so, in my 30s, I found my faith in Western science fall away like a rock cast off a mountain for the second time in my life. In my rush to compose, rather than hear, the song, I was missing the synergy of the wisdoms of two worlds: one called “traditional” and the other called “Western.”
The phrases “traditional ecological knowledge,”“traditional local knowledge,” and “folk knowledge” are often associated with “fuzzy knowledge,” the kind that comes from funneling information through a human instrument, whereas “Western science” suggests an absolute objectivity, immune from human bias. In order to discern between the two, one must understand how different cultures, including the “knowledge seekers” of both, come to exist, survive, and thrive in their worlds. The bottom line is that both address knowing the world using different, yet ultimately similar, approaches. Western science excels at unraveling the unseen—our medical technology a testament to this precision—while traditional knowledge reveals the dynamics of larger systems, particularly animals, plants, and habitats, and the wisdom of our place among them.
In general, Western science and traditional knowledge are usually perceived as two separate, distinct, and somewhat incompatible entities. Why is this? In part, it is simply stubbornness and fear on both sides. In practice they are very similar, and in results they are highly complementary, because one works well at small scales and the other at large scales. But in their origins they differ. Western science is relatively new and evolved from the philosophies of Aristotle and Bacon that sought to standardize information so that it could be used by groups of people who did not necessarily live in the same region. People who moved from one region to another relied on this information to aid the growth of their crops, the health of their livestock, and the survival of their young, not to mention the development of weaponry, defenses, and trade. Aristotle stated that humans were separate from the rest of the “natural” world (this including animals, plants, and the places they lived). This was a pivotal time in history: medicine was advancing and people were making connections between cleanliness and protecting food sources from competing interests, such as rats, which also spread disease.
Government were providing security for more and more people, most of whom had descended from tribes that survived by hunting and gathering and competing for these resources with neighboring tribes through conflict and, less often, fragile treaties of cooperation. With this shift from conflict to more and more centralized organization came more time to observe the components of the world not directly related to survival. While not new speculations, a class of “observer” started documenting the way humans behaved with each other and other curious habits of the species. This class of observer was more often than not composed of members of religious sects, such as the clergy, and likely evolved from the strong shamanic heritage of their ancestral traditions. As these observations amassed and humans were ideologically “cleansed” of their socially offensive ties to the animal world, human nature sought to explain the observations. Tied into this desire was an increasing belief that the surrounding world was less and less a living, interacting system and more and more a source of resources, composed of “parts,” each of which could be isolated, understood, and manipulated, usually for the benefit of humans. At this point, any oral histories that linked societies to their environments were rapidly being relegated to the outlying villages and remnants of nomadic peoples. In other words, the “uneducated.” So the “observers” or “scholars” had isolated themselves from their environments and were increasingly reliant on a hierarchy of workers to support their existence and lifestyles, distancing them from the lands and waters that sustained them. Could this be the point where Western science and traditional knowledge diverged as two distinct socially constructed approaches to “knowing?” That remains to be studied, but perhaps one can link this early form of systematic observation and explanation to the relatively recent process called the “scientific method” which is often invoked to settle information-dependent conflicts.
It is my opinion that an important distinction must be made between scales of knowledge with respect to the scientific method and traditional knowledge. Technologies such as microscopes and antibodies have given us insights into the unseen worlds of micro-scale processes that we would otherwise never have acquired. As you increase the level of space (for example a cell in the body) and time, you increase the level of complexity, or how many things interact with each other at any given time. By the time you arrive at ecosystems, the interactions of organisms and their habits, you have accumulated an enormous amount of complexity. It becomes increasingly difficult to resolve what is causing which effect. As a consequence, the scientific method and the Western approach to “understanding” is more tenuous, and it is at this intersection of time and space that traditional knowledge is most apparent as another approach. By necessity, Western science must simplify things to develop testable hypotheses about how they work, which is both precise and useful at smaller scales. In the process, however, it eliminates details, many of which are considered “descriptive” and either not important to understanding or too confounding. A hallmark of traditional knowledge is that details are exquisitely noted and communicated in such a way that the user can detect small changes and respond accordingly.
This approach to traditional knowledge has existed as long as we have as a species. The act of residing, surviving, and thriving in a place means that the resident must “know” her environment in such a way as to repeatedly have a high likelihood of regularly acquiring necessary resources, whether they are physical or not, on a regular basis. The consequence of failure is not the ridicule of one’s peers or the failure to get a research grant; it is sickness, suffering, and death. One could say that the stakes in traditional knowledge are much higher, and hence so is the precision. Traditional knowledge requires something that, with few exceptions, Western science has failed to accomplish: long periods of observation in the same place and the transmission of these observations to others in that place so that they can use them practically and often, from a young age.
Some Western schools of thought romanticize traditional knowledge and perceive that somehow possessing it brings ultimate harmony of the user with his world. No mistakes will be made because there exists a magical link where all things are known. This is part of the devalidation of traditional knowledge because it fails to acknowledge that it, like the scientific method, is a process where information is accepted or rejected based on receiving knowledge continuously, both directly from the system and from one’s colleagues, friends, family, and mentors, usually to benefit the community and future generations.
It should not be surprising that somebody suggests that the approach of traditional knowledge is not limited to humans. We have only recently become aware that elephants have very calculated ways of using and moving through their environments. They will find their food, raise their young, interact, and bury their dead in ways that are distinct to their clans, locations, and preferences and they will transmit this information from one generation to the next using a complex subsonic language. My grandmother told me similar stories about ravens, that we were really not that different, and that if we searched our memories really hard, we could actually see someone we knew in those brilliant, wise, winter eyes.
Lilian “Na’ia” Alessa is of Salish ancestry. She received a doctorate in cell biology from the University of British Columbia and now works in the area of adaptive resource management in Alaska, using tools from both traditional and Western ways of knowing. This article is adapted from Alessa’s chapter, “What is Truth? Where Science and Traditional Knowledge Converge,” in The Alaska Native Reader, edited by Maria Sháa Tláa Williams and published in 2009 by Duke University Press. For more information, go to the Duke University Press website at www.dukeupress.edu [1] . 0.0 · | 0 |
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The play develops with the .1% quarterback doing a reverse pivot (causing the progressive linebackers to hold their position instead of rushing to sack the QB), faking a quick toss to the left outside, where only the down ballot players are located, turns and runs toward the right, threatening to keep the ball, pitch it to Icame/HenowDed or throw downfield to MSM.
MSM does one hell of a fake job getting the gullible and other gatekeepers to concentrate on stopping the OrangeOne, while the down ticket no names streak down the left side of the field in a space created by sleight of hand of the .1%. Many in the crowd could see what was developing, but they were mesmerized and sickening quiet as the .1% dollars reverse flowed to those down ticket of Orange the Dickless. Barrel of Dollars from the Quantitative Facilities. License DMCA - Advertisement -
I have no right to complain even though I suspected a trick play as the .1% came up to the line. Why would the.1% risk having a blabber mouth plant the idea that NATO had outlived its usefulness? Or that the trade deals were a bunch of crap for the 99.99%, certainly the 50%? No, it would not have been prudent. The .1% is not yet prepared to go for total population control this early in their Plan that a Trumpet presidency would cause: riots in the American cities and countryside and the resulting roll out of permanent martial law and surveillance. Their plate was full and their cup runneth over with the likes of a failed coup in Turkey for whom they and their western cohorts must pay the chump change of a couple of billion dollars in extortion demanded by Erdogan or face his unleashing of leased terrorists in European cities. Yes their bloody hands were full from bombed and drone attacked civilians in funeral processions, and UN humanitarian convoys, patients, doctors and nurses in hospitals one of which where those anti-globalist doctors without borders were aiding the sovereign government, droning on and on to Libya, Yemen with a drone strike here and there, keeping a peering eye on Mo-uglies friends in Mogadishu, trying to pave a road to Tehran, while prepping the former Russian protectorates for turmoil and division, aka The Stans, and talking smack to the Russians about the Crimea, as they move to conduct war execercises in Poland and place missile systems in not only Poland but Romania all the while letting the Chinese know that they are pivoting toward them with Australia and the Philippines in tow -- That's a lot all right. I could have edumacated myself about who was running down ticket and yelled and screamed and organize but I was too focused on the fact that the .1% was so obvious that everyone would know to vote downtown to throw out the .1% cronies.
Unfortunately the .1% has a deep bench, and the defense was unprepared. Sucked in by the expectation that the court of referees would throw yellow flags against the .1% for voter interference, personal fouls, holding and widespread unsportsmanlike conduct of the Clinton primaries, I now watch in disbelief as the refs picked up their god damn flags and put them back into their pockets with only seconds left, while the .1% cronies stroll down field pushing barrels of quantitatively eased dollars to win over the brain dead including those with no brains.
I don't think I can stuff any more allegory into this sports analogy, I could talk about the after game show, arm chair quarterbacking by the losing team, but by now I think you have got the freakin picture.
Perhaps someone would like to take a crack along similar lines of the big bad wolf huffing and puffing? We can leave any time we want, so don't cry for us. License DMCA
So to all those including myself, as I step up from my soap box to my high horse, tanks a lot"no really. Tank you very, very much. If we are alive four years from now, perhaps we will remember what happened this tiime and be prepared -- nah, ain't gonna happen, our memories will be wiped or our heads chopped off. | 0 |
U2 frontman Bono condemned the idea of a “national border” as the best way to protect one’s country from Islamic terror. [“I don’t see a body of water wide enough or a wall high enough to keep these problems from our doors,” the Irish rocker said before world leaders Friday at the Munich Security Conference in Germany. “The frontier of national interest is no longer the national border,” Bono said. “You may not be interested in the trouble on a street or across the Mediterranean on the other side of the globe, but let me assure you, that trouble is interested in you. Our fate is a shared fate. But which fate will it be?” A longtime humanitarian activist, Bono urged world leaders to promote investments in development and education in third world countries like Nigeria. He warned that the Islamic terror group Boko Haram could push the African country into a “humanitarian crisis” like the one we see in Syria. “We need to help African leaders make sure that their young people find work, or they’ll find trouble,” Bono said. “From where I stand, if Nigeria fails, Africa fails. If Africa fails, Europe fails. And if Europe fails, well, then the world has a very, very big problem. We need to help African leaders make sure that their young people find work, or they’ll find trouble”: Bono was standing in Germany — a country currently facing its own humanitarian crisis after opening the doors to an unlimited number of migrants in 2015. To combat the refugee crisis in her country, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has set aside tens of million of taxpayer dollars for a fund that will pay migrants to withdraw their asylum applications and leave Germany voluntarily. Bono acknowledged that a “strong military” is necessary to secure freedom, but he added, “In an uncertain world, a strong military is essential, but the best bulwark against violent extremism is hope and opportunity,” he said. “We need a plan to make sure all girls can go to school. On hundred thirty million girls around the world don’t,” Bono explained. “For every extra year a girl goes to school, her income goes up 12 percent. Some studies even suggest that more education can reduce a country’s risk of conflict by 20 percent. ” Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson. | 1 |
■ The General Services Administration disputed House Democrats on Donald J. Trump’s need to sell off his Washington hotel. ■ Senators suggest Mr. Trump’s pick for national security adviser may not be eligible for a security clearance. ■ Senate Democrats to Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trump’s choice for education secretary: Pay the fines for your campaign finance violations. In a letter to the G. S. A. four ranking Democrats on the committees or subcommittee that oversee federal contracting and ethics rules said the agency that controls federal acquisition policy had informed the that he must sell the Trump International Hotel, which he recently opened just blocks from the White House, or be in breach of his lease with the government the moment he is sworn into office. A spokeswoman for the G. S. A. came right back and said no, it hadn’t. That is quite a different characterization than the one House Democrats gave. They wrote: The problem is fairly straightforward. Mr. Trump will soon be in charge of the agency that issued the lease for the Old Post Office Building, which the transformed unto a luxury hotel. He will also appoint the head of the G. S. A. To avoid such an obvious conflict, the lease that Mr. Trump signed states: “No … elected official of the government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom[. ]” No word yet from Mr. Trump about how he will proceed. Not even the G. S. A. ’s deputy commissioner of public building services has heard a peep in response. But the G. S. A. is not exactly saying all is fine with the hotel. More like, let’s wait until Mr. Trump is actually sworn in. Two Democratic senators are raising a new issue about Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s choice for national security adviser: They are questioning whether he should be allowed to hold a security clearance, citing past investigations into charges that Mr. Flynn leaked classified information and into potential conflicts presented by a private intelligence firm he owns. His business, the Flynn Intel Group, has hazy ties to Middle Eastern countries and has appeared to lobby for the Turkish government, and that “creates potential for pressure, coercion and exploitation by foreign agents,” the two senators, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, said in a letter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Office of Personnel Management. The choice of Mr. Flynn, 57, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to serve as national security adviser has already faced widespread criticism. The job does not require congressional confirmation, and Mr. Flynn’s views on a range of subjects — from the threat posed by radical Islam and Iran to his penchant for conspiracy theories and his belief that the Obama administration has politicized the Central Intelligence Agency — tend to hew to the fringes of Republican Party. He also took a paid speaking engagement last year with Russia Today, a television network funded by the Kremlin, and sat next to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia at the network’s lavish anniversary party in Moscow. In addition, Mr. Flynn was investigated, but cleared of any wrongdoing, in 2010 for sharing sensitive data with Pakistan about the Haqqani network, a faction of the Taliban, and for providing highly classified intelligence to British and Australian forces fighting in Afghanistan. But it is Mr. Flynn’s business relationships that remain unresolved. He has said he plans to step back from the Flynn Intel Group and let his son, Michael G. Flynn, run it, according to the senators’ letter, which was provided to The New York Times before its release on Wednesday. But that still does not settle the issue, the senators said. “Any share of partnership profits he obtains from the Flynn Intel Group that are derived from its representation of a foreign government would appear to be a violation of his obligation as a retired general to abide by the emoluments clause of the constitution,” Mr. Blumenthal and Ms. Shaheen wrote. Senate Democrats have found a new bit of leverage against Ms. DeVos, the Michigan Republican Party leader who will soon be considered for the cabinet post of education secretary: her unpaid fines for campaign finance violations. Senators Tom Udall of New Mexico, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Wednesday called on Ms. DeVos to pay $5. 3 million in fines and penalties owed by her All Children Matter political action committee for campaign finance violations dating to 2008. All Children Matter broke Ohio election law by illegally sending $870, 000 from its national PAC to its Ohio affiliate. The state of Ohio levied a record fine against the group. But the debt remains unpaid, the senators said. And now a confirmation vote looms. Two billionaire Silicon Valley executives, Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla, and Travis Kalanick of Uber, joined Mr. Trump’s roster of major American business advisers. The addition of Mr. Musk and Mr. Kalanick to Mr. Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum bring big technology names to the inner circle of Mr. Trump’s transition that has had little engagement so far with Silicon Valley, except for the vocal support of the tech investor Peter Thiel. Mr. Musk and Mr. Kalanick engaged closely with the Obama administration, and their companies have increased their lobbying presence in Washington in recent years. Mr. Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, and his other firms, including Solar City and SpaceX, have been criticized by rivals for using federal and state subsidies. Uber, Mr. Kalanick’s business, has roiled the taxi industry and fought municipalities around the world for new regulations that allow it to operate. The forum, which includes the heads of Walt Disney and General Motors, will be led by Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman and of the investment firm the Blackstone Group, the Trump transition team announced Wednesday. The group is charged with providing Mr. Trump with their individual views on how regulations affect jobs and economic growth. Mr. Trump’s relationship with the tech sector has been tense. His election was greeted with dismay by many in Silicon Valley, who supported the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement, the internet policy of net neutrality, and an increase in the immigration of highly skilled workers. Mr. Trump has promised to unroll all of those efforts. Mr. Trump singled out Apple for manufacturing parts of their devices abroad. He also criticized Amazon for its dominance, and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, for owning The Washington Post, which he said had been unfair in its campaign coverage of him. The announcement that Mr. Musk and Mr. Kalanick were joining his business policy group came ahead of a meeting with several tech leaders at Trump Tower on Wednesday, including Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. To Mr. Trump, the job of the president is to focus on jobs. Virtually everything else is subservient to that: diplomacy, science, conservation. On Wednesday, he officially tapped former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas to lead the Department of Energy, an agency whose primary tasks are to maintain the safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear arsenal, counter nuclear proliferation, clean up Cold War radiation contamination and pursue basic science through the government’s premier research laboratories. His announcement, language errors and all, mentioned none of those: After a rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday night, he thanked Wisconsin and reiterated his jobs message. It is the prism through which his selection of the Exxon Mobil chief executive Rex W. Tillerson for secretary of state, the Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, and the executive Andrew F. Puzder for labor secretary should be seen. Mr. Trump will meet on Wednesday with leaders of the technology industry, including Mr. Cook, Mr. Musk, Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sandberg. The agenda? Creating jobs. As Mr. Trump prepares to meet with Big Tech, 19 organizations from the music industry, including the Americana Music Association, sent him a letter expressing their concern about content theft over shared platforms. Mr. Trump is familiar with musicians’ concerns about using music without permission — he was criticized during his campaign by artists who did not want their songs played at his rallies. The monumental traffic jam at the George Washington Bridge may have made Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey lie low — and thwarted his chances of getting a cabinet post for him. But it appears to have not affected the prospects of a former Christie aide, Bill Stepien, who mentored the central actors of the “Bridgegate” scandal. Mr. Stepien is now the leading contender to be the White House political director. Two people close to the transition said that Mr. Stepien, who was hired by Mr. Trump’s Jared Kushner, and his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, after the final campaign has been repeatedly mentioned for the role, although the decision is not final. Bridgegate aside, Mr. Stepien is credited by some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers with helping him improve his field organization in crucial states, and contributing to his victory. Mr. Trump has chosen (who else?) a television star to sing the national anthem at his inauguration on Jan. 20. Jackie Evancho, a singer who gained popularity as a contestant on “America’s Got Talent,” said on Wednesday that it was “a great honor” to be asked to perform by Mr. Trump. Hers is the first name released by the inaugural planning committee for a day that typically features star power. President Obama had Beyoncé perform the anthem in 2013, and asked other artists like Aretha Franklin and James Taylor to deliver supplementary performances at his inaugurations. But there have been reports Mr. Trump is struggling to secure talent after a bruising campaign in which the celebrity class largely turned out to support his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Ms. Evancho met Mr. Trump at his resort in Palm Beach, Fla. in 2011, after she had finished as the on “America’s Got Talent,” NBC’s hit series. She was 10 at the time. “I’m so excited it’s going to be awesome,” she said after making the announcement on NBC’s “Today” show. Ms. Evancho, of course, is too young to vote. As evidence mounts of a effort by Russian intelligence agents to help elect not only Mr. Trump but also Republicans in Congress, Ms. Nancy Pelosi, of California, called for an independent investigation of foreign interference in the 2016 election. One day after top congressional Republicans said an investigation was necessary, Ms. Pelosi questioned their conviction. “That’s a statement of fact,” she told reporters. “That’s not a statement of action. ” She said a panel of outside investigators with subpoena power needed to be convened. “The people have a right to know why Republicans are afraid of the truth,” Ms. Pelosi said. Whether or not that is a good thing depends on your political affiliation: | 1 |
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Omran Daqneesh, a small Syrian boy from the embattled section of Aleppo, somehow snapped to attention millions of people around the world, who watched and shared the arresting video of him as he wiped dried blood and thick soot from his face. The widespread interest in Omran surprised the doctors who treated him, the photographer who shot the video and many Syrians who wondered whether the world had only just discovered how children have suffered every day in a war that has raged for more than five years. On Saturday, Omran’s brother, Ali, died of wounds he suffered during the same attack, medical workers said. Ali’s death, which did not draw the same instant social media outpouring as Omran’s suffering, only underscored how many Syrian children are dying under the radar of the wider world. Omran was injured on Wednesday by either a Syrian or a Russian airstrike — Russia has denied involvement — that destroyed the building where his family lived in eastern Aleppo. On Thursday, a website published a photograph of a young girl that it said was hurt — around the same time as Omran — by rebel mortar attacks on the western side of the city. The rebels have no air power, and the devastation in Aleppo has been greater on the side. One monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said that 100 children had died on the city’s eastern side this month alone, and 49 on the western side. For each family, the loss is immeasurable. And there are children constantly caught up in battles in other places, on all sides, across Syria. Omran’s picture has resonated for reasons obvious and unknowable. Here are images of seven of the many other children treated in the past week at hospitals in the same region. They are taken from among several that were posted by doctors and other residents of Aleppo on a WhatsApp group for journalists. Doctors did not know who this child was when he arrived at the same hospital that treated Omran. On Wednesday, Ahmad had been separated from his family — as happens to many children in the chaotic aftermath of an attack — in the Mashhad neighborhood of Aleppo. He underwent surgery for serious injuries to his head, groin and right arm and leg. Later identified, Ahmad was kept in the intensive care unit of the hospital along with his father. Late on Friday, he died from his injuries. The Hanoun sisters were wounded on Wednesday in the same airstrike that injured Omran. They were among 12 children under 15 who were treated at the same hospital in Aleppo. Both of the girls had suffered shrapnel wounds, but were treated and then released on Thursday morning. Doctors shared their picture with the WhatsApp group around the same time they shared the photograph of Omran. Aisel suffered wounds to her head and to one of her legs on Tuesday, and was treated at Al Quds hospital. The severity of her injuries could not be confirmed because doctors were busy treating new cases. But activists have nicknamed her “Syria’s Cinderella” because of a picture that one took of her shoes — Mary Janes, worn with white socks. The Hayouk siblings suffered cuts and bruises when an aircraft opened fire on Wednesday over the Sakhour neighborhood, and they were treated around the same time and at the same hospital as Omran. The children’s wounds were relatively minor, but an adult relative suffered a critical neck wound. Efforts to identify this boy, below, were unsuccessful. He was treated on Tuesday night at the Omar Hospital and released, said Baraa a citizen journalist who photographed him. None of the medical workers who could be reached remembered the boy, which is not unusual in the overwhelmed hospitals. At 3 a. m. Saturday, a barrel bomb landed on a house in the Jalloum quarter of Aleppo’s old city, destroying the house and killing seven members of one family — including all four children — said Abdelkafi a friend of the father’s. The children were Aisha, 12 Mohammad, 11 Obaida, 7 and Afraa, 6. There is no picture of their injuries to show because they were pulled dead from the rubble. Their father, Ali Abu Joud, recorded this video of three of his children’s bodies wrapped in shrouds. His voice can be heard breaking as he tells them goodbye, calling them “habibati” — my darlings — “birds of heaven, gone to the one who is better, gone to God. ” | 1 |
Blames Western Failure to Rein in Islamist Factions by Jason Ditz, November 01, 2016 Share This
While there really hasn’t been any indication that such talks were going to happen soon at any rate, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shogu made it official today that Syrian peace talks are “ postponed for an indefinite period .”
Shogu insisted there were no prospects for new peace talks right now because the West had failed to rein in Islamist rebel factions in the country, adding that this continued in spite of Russia pausing their air strikes against Aleppo.
The previous ceasefire in Syria had been negotiated with an eye on separating the Islamist factions like the Nusra Front from more moderate rebel groups. The US made a public statement calling for such a separation, but it never happened, and ultimately, Russia started trying to convince Turkey and Saudi Arabia to try. None have accomplished anything so far.
In the meantime, the US and its allies began angrily condemning Russia and Syria for attacking the Nusra Front, complaining it proved Russia doesn’t want peace. This too is adding to doubts about getting new talks started, with everyone seemingly agreeing Nusra can’t participate in the peace process, but not able to get them split in meaningful ways from the rebel factions that might be welcomed. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz | 0 |
Every entertainer likes to be subversive — to push the envelope and surprise their audience. At a time when Hollywood has made itself insufferable with its increasingly hysterical political commentary, Lady Gaga shocked the world simply by entertaining it. [Expectations were before the Super Bowl LI halftime show what would Gaga — one of Hillary Clinton’s top celebrity supporters — say or do in this, the first halftime show of Donald Trump’s presidency? How could she possibly top Beyoncé’s tribute to the Black Panthers from last year’s game? “This performance is for everyone,” Gaga coyly told reporters in Houston on Saturday, refusing to divulge her plans. “I want to, more than anything, create a moment that everyone that’s watching will never forget. ” Tantalizing stuff. And yet there was barely a whiff of partisan politics at all during the pop star’s entire set, not even a requisite “Resist,” or “Love trumps hate. ” Opening with a of “God Bless America” and “This Land Is Your Land” from the roof of NRG Stadium under a cloud of pulsating red, white and drones, Gaga literally dove into the building and straight into a collection of her greatest hits: “Poker Face,” “Just Dance,” “Born This Way,” “Telephone” and the grand finale of “Bad Romance,” all delivered (a rare feat given the amount of dancing she was doing) and reasonably well. It was a mesmerizing performance, filled with the kind of expert showmanship that only very confident artists can pull off. It reminded me, if only slightly, of Prince’s pageantry and 2007 halftime show in Miami, in which the late artist, ever the consummate entertainer, ran through a collection of Bob Dylan and Tina Turner covers before hoisting his guitar high for a rousing rendition of “Purple Rain,” in the middle of an actual downpour. Gaga did her set, and then it was over. No raised fists, no inappropriate language, no threats, no protests. No hysteria. She walked off the field after an epic exit in which she dropped the mic, caught a football and dove offstage, and then that stage was reset for what was to become one of the greatest comebacks in the history of the NFL. It is not unlikely — given the current political and cultural climate in America — that Gaga considered going the protest statement route, and then decided against it. After all, it is now firmly established that the endless political grandstanding has gotten celebrities absolutely nowhere. It rarely ever feels authentic, especially coming from people who earn more money in an hour for flashing their ass on TV than most Americans will earn in a lifetime. And even when it does feel authentic, millions across the country are bound to disagree. Conservative media, including yours truly, have made a cottage industry of pointing out exactly how clueless and out of touch celebrities are when compared with ordinary people. Just ask Hillary Clinton and her celebrity army how the last election worked out for them. And consider Beyoncé’s halftime show. For months afterward, the conversation was focused almost entirely on the blatant enforcement message she preached from America’s biggest stage, and now, a year after the show and despite liberals’ claim that everybody loves Beyoncé! half the country now hates Beyoncé. Her show led police groups to boycott her concerts, even as she audaciously used a police escort to get to the game (and later cashed in on the sentiment by offering her very own line of “Boycott Beyoncé” merchandise at her tour stops). More division. More disconnection between law enforcement and the people they serve and protect. All in the name of “love” and “tolerance. ” Or consider Madonna at last month’s Women’s March on Washington, where she casually suggested to the tens of thousands of activists in attendance that she had often thought of blowing up the White House. What did that do for us? Or Meryl Streep’s speech about morality at the Oscars, as if Hollywood is somehow the great arbiter of moral behavior. The only thing Streep’s speech accomplished is that conservatives can no longer enjoy Kramer vs. Kramer in the same way again. The bottom line is this: the best way to unite more than 100 million Americans with wildly disparate political views is to refrain from making any political statements at all. That Lady Gaga was the one to buck the trend freaked out plenty of entertainment journalists and commentators. Could this be the same Gaga that hopped on a sanitation truck outside Trump Tower in the hours of November 9, defiantly holding up a “Love Trumps Hate” sign in a show of silent protest? After the show, Los Angeles Times writer Mikael Wood wrote that the collection of hits Gaga played Sunday night “sounded like objects of distraction, catchy baubles meant to entertain us in the absence of a broader message. ” That sentiment was widely shared among Hollywood journalists, as a cursory look around the Internet revealed on Monday morning. Gaga missed her chance to say something useful, something revolutionary. This would have been The Moment, the chance to break through and show America just how stupid and wrong it was for electing Donald Trump president. Gaga would have found the key. To which I say: good grief. Pop songs are by definition catchy baubles meant to entertain us, and if Lady Gaga wanted to show off her maturity as an artist by performing a collection of her greatest hits (and converting some of the skeptics) then so be it. In the meantime, go masturbate to Meryl Streep’s acceptance speech and dream of better days. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
When you are raised to be a good Christian girl, you don’t just go to church you date the church. Church is the significant other with whom you spend weekends and evenings, the boyfriend whose friends become your friends, the girlfriend with whom you share all your dreams. I was a really good Christian girl, so I didn’t just date the church I married it. After graduating from a Midwestern college whose motto is “For Christ and His Kingdom,” I moved to New York City. It was my first time out of the evangelical cocoon, and my priority was finding a church I could love, commit my life to, and make my spiritual and social center. My search ended in Brooklyn, where I found a church of young creative people and fledgling professionals who, like me, were looking for a faith less burdened by fundamentalism. We forged a quick camaraderie, including with our pastor, who was as much friend and peer as spiritual leader. We hung out in the pews on Sundays, but also in bars and each other’s living rooms throughout the week. Soon this congregation became my beloved. I took my membership vows and began leading a Bible study, teaching Sunday school, attending weekly planning meetings and signing up for countless other duties. I committed to this church with the vigor and joy of a new bride. Like most single women in my position, my next priority was finding a husband in this church. There is a motif of love triangles in Christianity. Like the love of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Evangelicalism 101 also teaches the holy trinity of matrimony: man, woman, church. So I scanned the pews each week looking for someone with an unadorned ring finger. One Sunday, I noticed a new woman in a suede jacket, her short dark hair tucked under a brimmed hat. Our conversation was unremarkable, and yet I was captivated. I tossed out the most evangelical invite: “Do you want to come to my Bible study?” She did. Then she came over for dinner. Then she began sleeping on my couch. We met for coffee and whiskey and eventually lost track of who paid for each other’s tabs. I convinced her that biking in New York wasn’t too hazardous, so she bought a bicycle on Craigslist. When she crashed — twice! — we went back to my apartment, where I cleaned pebbles out of her skin and bandaged her ankle. Then we unknowingly went to a museum exhibition featuring gay and lesbian art, and I was forced to think about us. But I wouldn’t let myself acknowledge what was so painfully obvious. Over the following months, however, as Jess began stashing extra shoes in my closet and bringing home groceries to expand my diet of frozen burritos, I couldn’t deny that I was falling in love. And with that realization, I fell off cloud nine and stared into the fires of hell. I finally came out to myself. Then I scrambled right back in. At stake was my soul and identity, my entire worldview and spiritual cosmology, my relationships with friends, family, God. That holy trinity of husband, wife and church haunted me even as it slipped out of reach. It was a crisis of eternal proportions. I fell deep into an inferno of shame and panic. My fear of hell shut down any capacity to imagine a future with Jess. I repented of what Christians call my “struggle with attraction,” but still I found incomparable delight in her. I read countless books on homosexuality, and yet clarity escaped me. Fighting for solace, I convinced myself that Jess and I were just friends. That worked until one night when we went to the ballet, and I kissed her, and she told me she loved me. For the first time, I felt complete, loved, known. Lying beside her healed my past and present self. It also confirmed my worst fears. I woke up terrified. I needed to kick Jess out and end things with her immediately. But first, we had to go to brunch. It was the kind of brunch we couldn’t skip: a celebration for a good friend. We barely endured the long mimosas and eggs Benedicts as we contemplated our catastrophically changed lives à la Adam and Eve postfruit, full guilt. Finally, the check was squared, and we left to confront the reality of us. As we walked, Jess noticed a distraught homeless man standing in traffic. Never one to ignore a person in need, she called him over to the sidewalk, where he began to share his story of the wounds life had inflicted upon him. Jess listened patiently. I stood aloof and awkward while she offered to buy him lunch. When they exited a nearby bodega, the man had a bag of food, a hot coffee and something like a smile on his face. “How much?” the man asked. “Oh, nothing. It’s a gift. ” “How much?” the man insisted. “O. K. well,” Jess hesitated. “A dollar. ” He reached into his jacket and pulled out a coin purse, counting out four quarters and placing them in Jess’s hand. Then he left. Jess looked at the quarters. “These are the most valuable things anyone has ever given me,” she said. “I don’t even know what to do with them. ” For most of my life, I had been given a slew of definitions around love and relationships that were easy to verify with Scripture, just as a flat Earth was once confirmed by looking at the horizon. But watching Jess interact with this man, I saw a new horizon, one that was more complicated. In Jess, I saw the love Jesus preached, one unconstrained by conditions and extended to everyone, especially the forgotten, the stranger. Jesus never mentioned homosexuality. His cosmology was not studded with creeds, crimes and contempt its essence was loving the marginalized. Every fiber of Jess’s being reflected this. She embodied the attributes Jesus was most passionate about: compassion, kindness, justice. How could loving someone who loved so well be wrong? I felt my cramped religious framework of false dichotomies and moral starkness beginning to collapse. What once seemed like a bleak choice between losing my soul or losing my most cherished friend was in fact a lesson that true love is the only thing that could save me. There was still much turmoil ahead. Many people opposed our relationship and insisted that if we loved each other, we didn’t love God. Our pastor was one. We had first gone to him to confess what we then considered our sinful relationship. But over time, we discussed our evolved thinking with him, hoping that our years of faithfully serving the church would be our witness, and that our pastor — a friend — would agree to disagree where our theology diverged. Instead, he gave us an ultimatum: break up or lose our church memberships. Soon after, the church divorced us. Looking back through that messy love triangle between Jess, our church and me, I kept asking myself what Christ’s love required, and the refrain I kept hearing was “love your neighbor as yourself. ” Jess didn’t usher me into only true romantic love, but also true agape love, showing me that the most foundational precept is the trinity of loving God and your neighbor as you love yourself. We eventually found a new church that champions this belief and embraces all people. I now have the joy of serving as an elder there. Two years after our first kiss, Jess and I sneaked onto an empty Rhode Island beach. Only a few stars and a cloudy moon illuminated our running and jumping as we let freedom eradicate our shame. As our eyes adjusted to the darkness, we saw a lifeguard tower and clambered up. With the ocean at our feet and the horizon at eye level, we sat side by side in the night air. “Let’s write something,” Jess suggested, pulling out the journal we shared. “No, let’s just enjoy this,” I insisted. The moment seemed perfect as is. “Well, I’ll write something, and we can read it later. ” Jess scribbled and then handed me the open notebook, shining her phone’s flashlight on it. The light was a shocking intrusion upon our private darkness, so I asked her to turn it off. Instead, she pushed the journal into my hands. When I looked down, I saw a hole cut out in the middle of all the pages. Inside lay a ring. My head spun. I waited for her to ask me those four fated words, but she was silent. The moment didn’t need words. I took the pen and wrote “yes” on the page. She put the silver band on my finger and gave me a matching ring to place on hers. Then she asked if I remembered the homeless man we met that morning after brunch. I laughed. “Of course! Why?” “I figured out what to do with those quarters. They were melted into our rings. Fifty cents each. ” | 1 |
WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump said on Thursday he had chosen James N. Mattis, a retired general who led a Marine division to Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to serve as his secretary of defense. Mr. Trump made the announcement at a rally in Cincinnati, calling General Mattis “the closest thing we have to Gen. George Patton. ” General Mattis, 66, led the United States Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia, from 2010 to 2013. His tour there was cut short by the Obama administration, which believed he was too hawkish on Iran. But his insistence that Iran is the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East, as well as his acerbic criticism of the Obama administration’s initial efforts to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, made him an attractive choice for the incoming president. After retiring from the military, General Mattis told Congress that the administration’s “policy of disengagement in the Middle East” had contributed to the rise of extremism in the region. The United States, he told lawmakers in 2015, needs to “come out from our reactive crouch and take a firm, strategic stance in defense of our values. ” But in some important policy areas, General Mattis differs from Mr. Trump, who has been filling the top ranks of his national security team with . General Mattis believes, for instance, that Mr. Trump’s conciliatory statements toward Russia are ill informed. General Mattis views with alarm Moscow’s expansionist or bellicose policies in Syria, Ukraine and the Baltics. And he has told the that torture does not work. Despite his tough stance on Iran, General Mattis also thinks that tearing up the Iran nuclear deal would hurt the United States, and he favors working closely with allies to strictly enforce its terms. After Mr. Trump met with General Mattis at Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey on Nov. 19, the said on Twitter that he was “very impressive” and “a true general’s general. ” On Thursday, Mr. Trump surprised the Cincinnati crowd with the announcement, saying: “I gave up a little secret. ” He added that he would formally announce General Mattis’s appointment on Monday. General Mattis, whose radio call sign during the invasion of Iraq was Chaos — reflecting the havoc he sought to rain on adversaries — has been involved in some of the United States’ operations. As a general, he led the first Marine force into Afghanistan a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and established Forward Operating Base Rhino near Kandahar. At times, General Mattis’s salty language has gotten him into trouble. “You go into Afghanistan, you got guys that slap women around for five years because they didn’t wear a veil,” he said in 2005. “So it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them. ” But the retired general, a lifelong bachelor who has said that he does not own a television and has often been referred to as a “warrior monk,” is also famous for his extensive collection of books on military history. “Thanks to my reading, I have never been caught by any situation,” he wrote a colleague in 2003. “It doesn’t give me all the answers, but it lights what is often a dark path ahead. ” General Mattis would be the first former ranking general to assume the post of defense secretary since George Marshall in . He would need a special congressional waiver to serve as defense secretary. He retired from the Marines in 2013, and federal law stipulates that the Pentagon chief be out of uniform for seven years. But he has strong support in Congress, especially from John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. In a recent phone call, Mr. McCain urged Mr. Trump to consider appointing General Mattis or Gen. Jack Keane, a retired Army vice chief of staff, as defense secretary. But General Keane has decided against returning to government in a capacity. Mr. McCain said in a statement that General Mattis was “without a doubt one of the finest military officers of his generation and an extraordinary leader who inspires a rare and special admiration of his troops. ” He added, “America will be fortunate to have General Mattis in its service once again. ” But Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York and also a member of the Armed Services Committee, said that while she respected General Mattis’s service, she would oppose a waiver to allow him to serve. “Civilian control of our military is a fundamental principle of American democracy,” she said in a statement. The selection of General Mattis is a boost for the Marines. If confirmed by the Senate, he would be working with Joseph F. Dunford, the Marine general who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It would also create an unusual situation at the Pentagon because the new defense secretary would be General Dunford’s former commanding officer. During the Iraq invasion, General Dunford was a colonel who led a Marine regiment that reported to General Mattis. General Mattis led the First Marine Division during the 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. He later commanded American troops during the battle to retake Falluja from Sunni insurgents in 2004. As head of the Central Command, General Mattis was heavily involved in plans to counter Iran’s military and protect the sea lanes in the Persian Gulf. William Kristol, editor of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard and a staunch opponent of Mr. Trump’s, sought to persuade General Mattis to mount an independent presidential bid. And he was courted by both the campaigns of Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton to speak at the political conventions, but declined. In a new book, “Warriors and Citizens,” which General Mattis edited with Kori Schake, a Hoover Institution fellow who served in the George W. Bush administration, he complained that politicians had relied too much on military commanders to make the case for their policies. “President Bush left to Gen. David Petraeus the task of overcoming congressional opposition to the 2006 Iraq surge,” General Mattis and Ms. Schake wrote. “President Obama has been mostly silent on the war in Afghanistan since 2009 the case for continuing American troop presence has been made entirely by the military. ” Military commanders, they wrote, have a responsibility to carry out and advocate the president’s policies. “This does not remove elected officials from the responsibility to win political arguments instead of depending on the military to do so,” they added. | 1 |
It hasn’t been a good couple of years for colleges. Many of them, usually offering vocational training, have had to close outlets as the federal government cracked down on their advertising and student loan practices. Two of the largest, ITT Technical Institute and Corinthian Colleges, shut down. Then came the election of Donald J. Trump as president. Stock prices of the companies still running colleges rose sharply. DeVry University shares rose 17 percent in the days after the election. The shares of the company that owns University of Phoenix, Apollo Education Group, the largest increased 6 percent. Both are at a high. The broad S. P. 500 index, by contrast, rose 1. 3 percent in the days after the election. Why are investors bullish on under Mr. Trump? Profits could be coming back. The industry has faced federal and state investigations for their recruitment and student financial aid practices. Investors may expect that Mr. Trump will end the restrictions that slowed enrollments and checked the most lucrative practices. The Obama administration has been tough on the industry. The Federal Trade Commission sued DeVry University for deceptive advertising. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued ITT Technical Institutes for predatory lending. ITT, also the subject of a Justice Department probe, has filed for bankruptcy. Corinthian, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, was recently ordered by a federal court to pay its students a restitution of $820 million and pay civil penalties of more than $350 million for illegal advertising practices. This fall, the Education Department moved to revoke the status of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS) the largest accreditor of colleges. Colleges have to be accredited for their students to get federal aid such as loans and Pell Grants. ACICS was accused of insufficiently policing its colleges, in part because it raised no red flags about Corinthian Colleges, which lost access to federal aid amid accusations of false marketing. Pulling the plug on the accreditor was a clear signal from the Obama administration that accreditors should play their gatekeeper role more forcefully. ACICS has appealed the decision. The Obama administration’s move against was, in part, intended to close the worst colleges and keep the rest on their toes. Students at these colleges borrowed heavily and defaulted frequently on their loans. At the depths of the recession, accounted for nearly half of student loan defaults, even though they enrolled a minority of students. The administration took its action using its regulatory powers. No new laws were passed that led to the heightened attention to . Investors may be expecting that a Trump administration will use a lighter touch in overseeing giving them greater latitude to maximize profits. For example, recent rules dismiss the loans of students defrauded by and put the colleges on the hook for repaying part of their balances. The new administration could choose to put few resources into enforcing these rules. Mr. Trump’s decision on who will lead the Education Department could provide a glimpse of his priorities. Ben Carson, who ran against Mr. Trump in the Republican primaries, was a prominent candidate, but he has said he is not interested in serving in the Trump administration. Recently floated names include Michelle Rhee, a former superintendent of Washington’s public schools, and Eva Moskowitz, founder of a network of New York charter schools (Ms. Moskowitz pulled her name from consideration). Those two reflect a focus on school choice and accountability for elementary and secondary schools. Almost all the other people said to be under consideration have little to no background in postsecondary policy. Investors have little to go on in predicting Mr. Trump’s policy he has released few concrete proposals about postsecondary education during the campaign. (The education section of his campaign’s website focuses on elementary and secondary schools.) But his name is linked to education because he ran Trump University and lent his name to another education business, Trump Institute. Both businesses, now closed, are in a different category from DeVry or University of Phoenix. His sold training sessions, the seminars often held in hotel ballrooms. Neither school was accredited, and their students were ineligible for federal aid. On Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle a series of lawsuits stemming from the Trump University, after fraud allegations by former students. A trial based on those allegations was to begin later this month. | 1 |
American mothers infected with the Zika virus last year were 20 times as likely to give birth to babies with birth defects as mothers who gave birth two years before the epidemic, federal health officials said on Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded last April that Zika infection caused severe birth defects, including the abnormally small heads of microcephaly, but it had not previously estimated how common such defects were. A new study, published in the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, looked at several hundred pregnant women entered into the C. D. C. ’s Zika Pregnancy Registry after lab tests indicated they had probably had the virus. The study compared their birth outcomes to those found in historic registries of birth defects kept in Massachusetts, North Carolina and Georgia. It found that in 2013 and 2014, those states’ typical rate of severe birth defects — including microcephaly, brain abnormalities, eye defects or central nervous system problems — was about 3 out of every 1, 000 live births. By contrast, the 442 women in the pregnancy registry had 26 infants and fetuses with similar defects, which would be a rate of about 60 out of every 1, 000 pregnancy outcomes, including live births, miscarriages and abortions. Comparing a rate based on live births — which is what the states tally — to a rate based on a C. D. C. tally of all pregnancy outcomes “is not a perfect comparison,” conceded Margaret A. Honein, chief of the C. D. C. ’s birth defects branch and one of the study’s authors. “But the difference between three times per thousand and 60 times per thousand does give you the magnitude of the increase. ” The study showed the importance of keeping birth defects registries, the C. D. C. said, and reiterated that Zika is extremely dangerous to fetuses. The agency continues to recommend that pregnant women not travel to areas with Zika. Not every American woman who had Zika is being followed in the pregnancy registry. Some who picked up the virus during travel never showed symptoms, and some were given tests that were inaccurate. In the District of Columbia, for example, tests on about 300 women are now being redone. The Washington Post reported that lab workers there misread labels and watered down test solution that was already diluted, producing false negative results. Federal officials do not think any other state or city laboratory had the same problem. Women in Puerto Rico, which had a major outbreak of the virus, are in a separate C. D. C. registry. | 1 |
Channel list
Post-election shopping tip: look for the PoliticsFree label at your local grocer to make sure you don't buy from companies that don't want your business anymore
In Hillary's America, email server scrubs you
Obama transfers his Nobel Peace Prize to anti-Trump rioters
Democrats blame Hillary's criminal e-mail server for her loss, demand it face prison
Afraid of "dangerous" Trump presidency, protesters pre-emptively burn America down to the ground
Clinton Foundation in foreclosure as foreign donors demand refunds
Hillary Clinton blames YouTube video for unexpected and spontaneous voter uprising that prevented her inevitable move into the White House
Sudden rise in sea levels explained by disproportionately large tears shed by climate scientists in the aftermath of Trump's electoral victory
FBI director Comey delighted after receiving Nobel Prize for Speed Reading (650,000 emails in one week)
U.N. deploys troops to American college campuses in order to combat staggeringly low rape rates
Responding to Trump's surging poll numbers, Obama preemptively pardons himself for treason
Following hurricane Matthew's failure to devastate Florida, activists flock to the Sunshine State and destroy Trump signs manually
Tim Kaine takes credit for interrupting hurricane Matthew while debating weather in Florida
Study: Many non-voters still undecided on how they're not going to vote
The Evolution of Dissent: on November 8th the nation is to decide whether dissent will stop being racist and become sexist - or it will once again be patriotic as it was for 8 years under George W. Bush
Venezuela solves starvation problem by making it mandatory to buy food
Breaking: the Clinton Foundation set to investigate the FBI
Obama captures rare Pokémon while visiting Hiroshima
Movie news: 'The Big Friendly Giant Government' flops at box office; audiences say "It's creepy"
Barack Obama: "If I had a son, he'd look like Micah Johnson"
White House edits Orlando 911 transcript to say shooter pledged allegiance to NRA and Republican Party
President George Washington: 'Redcoats do not represent British Empire; King George promotes a distorted version of British colonialism'
Following Obama's 'Okie-Doke' speech , stock of Okie-Doke soars; NASDAQ: 'Obama best Okie-Doke salesman'
Weaponized baby formula threatens Planned Parenthood office; ACLU demands federal investigation of Gerber
Experts: melting Antarctic glacier could cause sale levels to rise up to 80% off select items by this weekend
Travel advisory: airlines now offering flights to front of TSA line
As Obama instructs his administration to get ready for presidential transition, Trump preemptively purchases 'T' keys for White House keyboards
John Kasich self-identifies as GOP primary winner, demands access to White House bathroom
Upcoming Trump/Kelly interview on FoxNews sponsored by 'Let's Make a Deal' and 'The Price is Right'
News from 2017: once the evacuation of Lena Dunham and 90% of other Hollywood celebrities to Canada is confirmed, Trump resigns from presidency: "My work here is done"
Non-presidential candidate Paul Ryan pledges not to run for president in new non-presidential non-ad campaign
Trump suggests creating 'Muslim database'; Obama symbolically protests by shredding White House guest logs beginning 2009
National Enquirer: John Kasich's real dad was the milkman, not mailman
National Enquirer: Bound delegates from Colorado, Wyoming found in Ted Cruz’s basement
Iran breaks its pinky-swear promise not to support terrorism; US State Department vows rock-paper-scissors strategic response
Women across the country cheer as racist Democrat president on $20 bill is replaced by black pro-gun Republican
Federal Reserve solves budget crisis by writing itself a 20-trillion-dollar check
Widows, orphans claim responsibility for Brussels airport bombing
Che Guevara's son hopes Cuba's communism will rub off on US, proposes a long list of people the government should execute first
Susan Sarandon: "I don't vote with my vagina." Voters in line behind her still suspicious, use hand sanitizer
Campaign memo typo causes Hillary to court 'New Black Panties' vote
New Hampshire votes for socialist Sanders, changes state motto to "Live FOR Free or Die"
Martin O'Malley drops out of race after Iowa Caucus; nation shocked with revelation he has been running for president
Statisticians: one out of three Bernie Sanders supporters is just as dumb as the other two
Hillary campaign denies accusations of smoking-gun evidence in her emails, claims they contain only smoking-circumstantial-gun evidence
Obama stops short of firing US Congress upon realizing the difficulty of assembling another group of such tractable yes-men
In effort to contol wild passions for violent jihad, White House urges gun owners to keep their firearms covered in gun burkas
TV horror live: A Charlie Brown Christmas gets shot up on air by Mohammed cartoons
Democrats vow to burn the country down over Ted Cruz statement, 'The overwhelming majority of violent criminals are Democrats'
Russia's trend to sign bombs dropped on ISIS with "This is for Paris" found response in Obama administration's trend to sign American bombs with "Return to sender"
University researchers of cultural appropriation quit upon discovery that their research is appropriation from a culture that created universities
Archeologists discover remains of what Barack Obama has described as unprecedented, un-American, and not-who-we-are immigration screening process in Ellis Island
Mizzou protests lead to declaring entire state a "safe space," changing Missouri motto to "The don't show me state"
Green energy fact: if we put all green energy subsidies together in one-dollar bills and burn them, we could generate more electricity than has been produced by subsidized green energy
State officials improve chances of healthcare payouts by replacing ObamaCare with state lottery
NASA's new mission to search for racism, sexism, and economic inequality in deep space suffers from race, gender, and class power struggles over multibillion-dollar budget
College progress enforcement squads issue schematic humor charts so students know if a joke may be spontaneously laughed at or if regulations require other action
ISIS opens suicide hotline for US teens depressed by climate change and other progressive doomsday scenarios
Virginia county to close schools after teacher asks students to write 'death to America' in Arabic
'Wear hijab to school day' ends with spontaneous female circumcision and stoning of a classmate during lunch break
ISIS releases new, even more barbaric video in an effort to regain mantle from Planned Parenthood
Impressed by Fox News stellar rating during GOP debates, CNN to use same formula on Democrat candidates asking tough, pointed questions about Republicans
Shocking new book explores pros and cons of socialism, discovers they are same people
Pope outraged by Planned Parenthood's "unfettered capitalism," demands equal redistribution of baby parts to each according to his need
John Kerry accepts Iran's "Golden Taquiyya" award, requests jalapenos on the side
Citizens of Pluto protest US government's surveillance of their planetoid and its moons with New Horizons space drone
John Kerry proposes 3-day waiting period for all terrorist nations trying to acquire nuclear weapons
Chicago Police trying to identify flag that caused nine murders and 53 injuries in the city this past weekend
Cuba opens to affordable medical tourism for Americans who can't afford Obamacare deductibles
State-funded research proves existence of Quantum Aggression Particles (Heterons) in Large Hadron Collider
Student job opportunities: make big bucks this summer as Hillary’s Ordinary-American; all expenses paid, travel, free acting lessons
Experts debate whether Iranian negotiators broke John Kerry's leg or he did it himself to get out of negotiations
Junior Varsity takes Ramadi, advances to quarterfinals
US media to GOP pool of candidates: 'Knowing what we know now, would you have had anything to do with the founding of the United States?'
NY Mayor to hold peace talks with rats, apologize for previous Mayor's cowboy diplomacy
China launches cube-shaped space object with a message to aliens: "The inhabitants of Earth will steal your intellectual property, copy it, manufacture it in sweatshops with slave labor, and sell it back to you at ridiculously low prices"
Progressive scientists: Truth is a variable deduced by subtracting 'what is' from 'what ought to be'
Experts agree: Hillary Clinton best candidate to lessen percentage of Americans in top 1%
America's attempts at peace talks with the White House continue to be met with lies, stalling tactics, and bad faith
Starbucks new policy to talk race with customers prompts new hashtag #DontHoldUpTheLine
Hillary: DELETE is the new RESET
Charlie Hebdo receives Islamophobe 2015 award ; the cartoonists could not be reached for comment due to their inexplicable, illogical deaths
Russia sends 'reset' button back to Hillary: 'You need it now more than we do'
Barack Obama finds out from CNN that Hillary Clinton spent four years being his Secretary of State
President Obama honors Leonard Nimoy by taking selfie in front of Starship Enterprise
Police: If Obama had a convenience store, it would look like Obama Express Food Market
Study finds stunning lack of racial, gender, and economic diversity among middle-class white males
NASA: We're 80% sure about being 20% sure about being 17% sure about being 38% sure about 2014 being the hottest year on record
People holding '$15 an Hour Now' posters sue Democratic party demanding raise to $15 an hour for rendered professional protesting services
Cuba-US normalization: US tourists flock to see Cuba before it looks like the US and Cubans flock to see the US before it looks like Cuba
White House describes attacks on Sony Pictures as 'spontaneous hacking in response to offensive video mocking Juche and its prophet'
CIA responds to Democrat calls for transparency by releasing the director's cut of The Making Of Obama's Birth Certificate
Obama: 'If I had a city, it would look like Ferguson'
Biden: 'If I had a Ferguson (hic), it would look like a city'
Obama signs executive order renaming 'looters' to 'undocumented shoppers'
Ethicists agree: two wrongs do make a right so long as Bush did it first
The aftermath of the 'War on Women 2014' finds a new 'Lost Generation' of disillusioned Democrat politicians, unable to cope with life out of office
White House: Republican takeover of the Senate is a clear mandate from the American people for President Obama to rule by executive orders
Nurse Kaci Hickox angrily tells reporters that she won't change her clocks for daylight savings time
Democratic Party leaders in panic after recent poll shows most Democratic voters think 'midterm' is when to end pregnancy
Desperate Democratic candidates plead with Obama to stop backing them and instead support their GOP opponents
Ebola Czar issues five-year plan with mandatory quotas of Ebola infections per each state based on voting preferences
Study: crony capitalism is to the free market what the Westboro Baptist Church is to Christianity
Fun facts about world languages: the Left has more words for statism than the Eskimos have for snow
African countries to ban all flights from the United States because "Obama is incompetent, it scares us"
Nobel Peace Prize controversy: Hillary not nominated despite having done even less than Obama to deserve it
Obama: 'Ebola is the JV of viruses'
BREAKING: Secret Service foils Secret Service plot to protect Obama
Revised 1st Amendment: buy one speech, get the second free
Sharpton calls on white NFL players to beat their women in the interests of racial fairness
President Obama appoints his weekly approval poll as new national security adviser
Obama wags pen and phone at Putin; Europe offers support with powerful pens and phones from NATO members
White House pledges to embarrass ISIS back to the Stone Age with a barrage of fearsome Twitter messages and fatally ironic Instagram photos
Obama to fight ISIS with new federal Terrorist Regulatory Agency
Obama vows ISIS will never raise their flag over the eighteenth hole
Harry Reid: "Sometimes I say the wong thing"
Elian Gonzalez wishes he had come to the U.S. on a bus from Central America like all the other kids
Obama visits US-Mexican border, calls for a two-state solution
Obama draws "blue line" in Iraq after Putin took away his red crayon
"Hard Choices," a porno flick loosely based on Hillary Clinton's memoir and starring Hillary Hellfire as a drinking, whoring Secretary of State, wildly outsells the flabby, sagging original
Accusations of siding with the enemy leave Sgt. Bergdahl with only two options: pursue a doctorate at Berkley or become a Senator from Massachusetts
Jay Carney stuck in line behind Eric Shinseki to leave the White House; estimated wait time from 15 min to 6 weeks
100% of scientists agree that if man-made global warming were real, "the last people we'd want to help us is the Obama administration"
Jay Carney says he found out that Obama found out that he found out that Obama found out that he found out about the latest Obama administration scandal on the news
"Anarchy Now!" meeting turns into riot over points of order, bylaws, and whether or not 'kicking the #^@&*! ass' of the person trying to speak is or is not violence
Obama retaliates against Putin by prohibiting unionized federal employees from dating hot Russian girls online during work hours
Russian separatists in Ukraine riot over an offensive YouTube video showing the toppling of Lenin statues
"Free Speech Zones" confuse Obamaphone owners who roam streets in search of additional air minutes
Obamacare bolsters employment for professionals with skills to convert meth back into sudafed
Gloves finally off: Obama uses pen and phone to cancel Putin's Netflix account
Joe Biden to Russia: "We will bury you by turning more of Eastern Europe over to your control!"
In last-ditch effort to help Ukraine, Obama deploys Rev. Sharpton and Rev. Jackson's Rainbow Coalition to Crimea
Al Sharpton: "Not even Putin can withstand our signature chanting, 'racist, sexist, anti-gay, Russian army go away'!"
Mardi Gras in North Korea: " Throw me some food! "
Obama's foreign policy works: "War, invasion, and conquest are signs of weakness; we've got Putin right where we want him"
US offers military solution to Ukraine crisis: "We will only fight countries that have LGBT military"
Putin annexes Brighton Beach to protect ethnic Russians in Brooklyn, Obama appeals to UN and EU for help
The 1980s: "Mr. Obama, we're just calling to ask if you want our foreign policy back . The 1970s are right here with us, and they're wondering, too."
In a stunning act of defiance, Obama courageously unfriends Putin on Facebook
MSNBC: Obama secures alliance with Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia’s aggression in Ukraine
Study: springbreak is to STDs what April 15th is to accountants
Efforts to achieve moisture justice for California thwarted by unfair redistribution of snow in America
North Korean voters unanimous: "We are the 100%"
Leader of authoritarian gulag-site, The People's Cube, unanimously 're-elected' with 100% voter turnout
Super Bowl: Obama blames Fox News for Broncos' loss
Feminist author slams gay marriage: "a man needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle"
Beverly Hills campaign heats up between Henry Waxman and Marianne Williamson over the widening income gap between millionaires and billionaires in their district
Biden to lower $10,000-a-plate Dinner For The Homeless to $5,000 so more homeless can attend
Kim becomes world leader, feeds uncle to dogs; Obama eats dogs, becomes world leader, America cries uncle
North Korean leader executes own uncle for talking about Obamacare at family Christmas party
White House hires part-time schizophrenic Mandela sign interpreter to help sell Obamacare
Kim Jong Un executes own " crazy uncle " to keep him from ruining another family Christmas
OFA admits its advice for area activists to give Obamacare Talk at shooting ranges was a bad idea
President resolves Obamacare debacle with executive order declaring all Americans equally healthy
Obama to Iran: "If you like your nuclear program, you can keep your nuclear program"
Bovine community outraged by flatulence coming from Washington DC
Obama: "I'm not particularly ideological; I believe in a good pragmatic five-year plan"
Shocker: Obama had no knowledge he'd been reelected until he read about it in the local newspaper last week
Server problems at HealthCare.gov so bad, it now flashes 'Error 808' message
NSA marks National Best Friend Day with official announcement: "Government is your best friend; we know you like no one else, we're always there, we're always willing to listen"
Al Qaeda cancels attack on USA citing launch of Obamacare as devastating enough
The President's latest talking point on Obamacare: "I didn't build that"
Dizzy with success, Obama renames his wildly popular healthcare mandate to HillaryCare
Carney: huge ObamaCare deductibles won't look as bad come hyperinflation
Washington Redskins drop 'Washington' from their name as offensive to most Americans
Poll: 83% of Americans favor cowboy diplomacy over rodeo clown diplomacy
GOVERNMENT WARNING: If you were able to complete ObamaCare form online, it wasn't a legitimate gov't website; you should report online fraud and change all your passwords
Obama administration gets serious, threatens Syria with ObamaCare
Obama authorizes the use of Vice President Joe Biden's double-barrel shotgun to fire a couple of blasts at Syria
Sharpton: "British royals should have named baby 'Trayvon.' By choosing 'George' they sided with white Hispanic racist Zimmerman"
DNC launches 'Carlos Danger' action figure; proceeds to fund a charity helping survivors of the Republican War on Women
Nancy Pelosi extends abortion rights to the birds and the bees
Hubble discovers planetary drift to the left
Obama: 'If I had a daughter-in-law, she would look like Rachael Jeantel'
FISA court rubberstamps statement denying its portrayal as government's rubber stamp
Every time ObamaCare gets delayed, a Julia somewhere dies
GOP to Schumer: 'Force full implementation of ObamaCare before 2014 or Dems will never win another election'
Obama: 'If I had a son... no, wait, my daughter can now marry a woman!'
Janet Napolitano: TSA findings reveal that since none of the hijackers were babies, elderly, or Tea Partiers, 9/11 was not an act of terrorism
News Flash: Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) can see Canada from South Dakota
Susan Rice: IRS actions against tea parties caused by anti-tax YouTube video that was insulting to their faith
Drudge Report reduces font to fit all White House scandals onto one page
Obama: the IRS is a constitutional right, just like the Second Amendment
White House: top Obama officials using secret email accounts a result of bad IT advice to avoid spam mail from Nigeria
Jay Carney to critics: 'Pinocchio never said anything inconsistent'
Obama: If I had a gay son, he'd look like Jason Collins
Gosnell's office in Benghazi raided by the IRS: mainstream media's worst cover-up challenge to date
IRS targeting pro-gay-marriage LGBT groups leads to gayest tax revolt in U.S. history
After Arlington Cemetery rejects offer to bury Boston bomber, Westboro Babtist Church steps up with premium front lawn plot
Boston: Obama Administration to reclassify marathon bombing as 'sportsplace violence'
Study: Success has many fathers but failure becomes a government program
US Media: Can Pope Francis possibly clear up Vatican bureaucracy and banking without blaming the previous administration?
Michelle Obama praises weekend rampage by Chicago teens as good way to burn calories and stay healthy
This Passover, Obama urges his subjects to paint lamb's blood above doors in order to avoid the Sequester
White House to American children: Sequester causes layoffs among hens that lay Easter eggs; union-wage Easter Bunnies to be replaced by Mexican Chupacabras
Time Mag names Hugo Chavez world's sexiest corpse
Boy, 8, pretends banana is gun, makes daring escape from school
Study: Free lunches overpriced, lack nutrition
Oscars 2013: Michelle Obama announces long-awaited merger of Hollywood and the State
Joe Salazar defends the right of women to be raped in gun-free environment: 'rapists and rapees should work together to prevent gun violence for the common good'
Dept. of Health and Human Services eliminates rape by reclassifying assailants as 'undocumented sex partners'
Kremlin puts out warning not to photoshop Putin riding meteor unless bare-chested
Deeming football too violent, Obama moves to introduce Super Drone Sundays instead
Japan offers to extend nuclear umbrella to cover U.S. should America suffer devastating attack on its own defense spending
Feminists organize one billion women to protest male oppression with one billion lap dances
Urban community protests Mayor Bloomberg's ban on extra-large pop singers owning assault weapons
Concerned with mounting death toll, Taliban offers to send peacekeeping advisers to Chicago
Karl Rove puts an end to Tea Party with new 'Republicans For Democrats' strategy aimed at losing elections
Answering public skepticism, President Obama authorizes unlimited drone attacks on all skeet targets throughout the country
Skeet Ulrich denies claims he had been shot by President but considers changing his name to 'Traps'
White House releases new exciting photos of Obama standing, sitting, looking thoughtful, and even breathing in and out
New York Times hacked by Chinese government, Paul Krugman's economic policies stolen
White House: when President shoots skeet, he donates the meat to food banks that feed the middle class
To prove he is serious, Obama eliminates armed guard protection for President, Vice-President, and their families; establishes Gun-Free Zones around them instead
State Dept to send 100,000 American college students to China as security for US debt obligations
Jay Carney: Al Qaeda is on the run, they're just running forward
President issues executive orders banning cliffs, ceilings, obstructions, statistics, and other notions that prevent us from moving forwards and upward
Fearing the worst, Obama Administration outlaws the fan to prevent it from being hit by certain objects
World ends; S&P soars
Riddle of universe solved; answer not understood
Meek inherit Earth, can't afford estate taxes
Greece abandons Euro; accountants find Greece has no Euros anyway
Wheel finally reinvented; axles to be gradually reinvented in 3rd quarter of 2013
Bigfoot found in Ohio, mysteriously not voting for Obama
As Santa's workshop files for bankruptcy, Fed offers bailout in exchange for control of 'naughty and nice' list
Freak flying pig accident causes bacon to fly off shelves
Obama: green economy likely to transform America into a leading third world country of the new millennium
Report: President Obama to visit the United States in the near future
Obama promises to create thousands more economically neutral jobs
Modernizing Islam: New York imam proposes to canonize Saul Alinsky as religion's latter day prophet
Imam Rauf's peaceful solution: 'Move Ground Zero a few blocks away from the mosque and no one gets hurt'
Study: Obama's threat to burn tax money in Washington 'recruitment bonanza' for Tea Parties
Study: no Social Security reform will be needed if gov't raises retirement age to at least 814 years
Obama attends church service, worships self
Obama proposes national 'Win The Future' lottery; proceeds of new WTF Powerball to finance more gov't spending
Historical revisionists: "Hey, you never know"
Vice President Biden: criticizing Egypt is un-pharaoh
Israelis to Egyptian rioters: "don't damage the pyramids, we will not rebuild"
Lake Superior renamed Lake Inferior in spirit of tolerance and inclusiveness
Al Gore: It's a shame that a family can be torn apart by something as simple as a pack of polar bears
Michael Moore: As long as there is anyone with money to shake down, this country is not broke
Obama's teleprompters unionize, demand collective bargaining rights
Obama calls new taxes 'spending reductions in tax code.' Elsewhere rapists tout 'consent reductions in sexual intercourse'
Obama's teleprompter unhappy with White House Twitter: "Too few words"
Obama's Regulation Reduction committee finds US Constitution to be expensive outdated framework inefficiently regulating federal gov't
Taking a page from the Reagan years, Obama announces new era of Perestroika and Glasnost
Responding to Oslo shootings, Obama declares Christianity "Religion of Peace," praises "moderate Christians," promises to send one into space
Republicans block Obama's $420 billion program to give American families free charms that ward off economic bad luck
White House to impose Chimney tax on Santa Claus
Obama decrees the economy is not soaring as much as previously decreeed
Conservative think tank introduces children to capitalism with pop-up picture book "The Road to Smurfdom"
Al Gore proposes to combat Global Warming by extracting silver linings from clouds in Earth's atmosphere
Obama refutes charges of him being unresponsive to people's suffering: "When you pray to God, do you always hear a response?"
Obama regrets the US government didn't provide his mother with free contraceptives when she was in college
Fluke to Congress: drill, baby, drill!
Planned Parenthood introduces Frequent Flucker reward card: 'Come again soon!'
Obama to tornado victims: 'We inherited this weather from the previous administration'
Obama congratulates Putin on Chicago-style election outcome
People's Cube gives itself Hero of Socialist Labor medal in recognition of continued expert advice provided to the Obama Administration helping to shape its foreign and domestic policies
Hamas: Israeli air defense unfair to 99% of our missiles, "only 1% allowed to reach Israel"
Democrat strategist: without government supervision, women would have never evolved into humans
Voters Without Borders oppose Texas new voter ID law
Enraged by accusation that they are doing Obama's bidding, media leaders demand instructions from White House on how to respond
Obama blames previous Olympics for failure to win at this Olympics
Official: China plans to land on Moon or at least on cheap knockoff thereof
Koran-Contra: Obama secretly arms Syrian rebels
Poll: Progressive slogan 'We should be more like Europe' most popular with members of American Nazi Party
Obama to Evangelicals: Jesus saves, I just spend
May Day: Anarchists plan, schedule, synchronize, and execute a coordinated campaign against all of the above
Midwestern farmers hooked on new erotic novel "50 Shades of Hay"
Study: 99% of Liberals give the rest a bad name
Obama meets with Jewish leaders, proposes deeper circumcisions for the rich
Historians: Before HOPE & CHANGE there was HEMP & CHOOM at ten bucks a bag
Cancer once again fails to cure Venezuela of its "President for Life"
Tragic spelling error causes Muslim protesters to burn local boob-tube factory
Secretary of Energy Steven Chu: due to energy conservation, the light at the end of the tunnel will be switched off
Obama Administration running food stamps across the border with Mexico in an operation code-named "Fat And Furious"
Pakistan explodes in protest over new Adobe Acrobat update; 17 local acrobats killed
White House: "Let them eat statistics"
Special Ops: if Benedict Arnold had a son, he would look like Barack Obama | 0 |
A Bryan, Texas police officer was investigating a disturbance call and interviewing witnesses on Wednesday night, when suddenly his parked patrol car he was standing next to was suddenly slammed into by an SUV. Comment on this Article Via Your Facebook Account Comment on this Article Via Your Disqus Account Follow Us on Facebook! | 0 |
Capital Press – by Tom Mallams
Once again, our federal government is “proposing” yet another attempt to lock up more “public” land — this time, by expanding the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument in Southern Oregon and Northern California.
As a citizen and as a Klamath County commissioner, I have consistently opposed locking up more and more public land and not having the ability to use natural resources in a responsible way. These efforts seem to have no end in sight.
Yes, at this point this is still “only a proposal.” But just look at the recent attempts such as the 2.1 million-acre Owyhee Canyon Lands, and the 500,000-acre Crater Lake wilderness area.
If this recent attempt moves ahead, it will have devastating effects on the local communities. Also keep in mind that over 50,000 of these acres are O&C timber lands. The loss of timber harvests will also have a major effect on all 18 of the O&C counties. With no timber sales, there will also be little if any meaningful timber management that will increase the amount of major wildfires.
The supporters claim there is “strong backing from elected officials, citizens and chambers of commerce.” That actually equates to the cities of Ashland and Talent along with their chambers of commerce.
Not exactly a mandate.
In reality, very few in opposition even knew about the recent public meeting in Ashland. Local Bureau of Land Management offices in Klamath Falls and Redding hadn’t even been notified. If the expansion is approved the talk is that the Klamath office would likely be closed — a loss of 60 jobs. The supporters’ sea of blue T-shirts and professional campaign signs that were present show they had plenty of advance knowledge. Well-rehearsed, scripted comments by the supporters often mentioned moving forward on the Owyhee effort as well. The unfolding scenario certainly has the smell of “the fix is in.”
I have requested an additional public comment meeting/hearing be held in Klamath Falls.
These lands belong to the public. The government is supposed to manage them, not lock them up.
These proposals need to die, and the quicker the better.
Tom Mallams is a Klamath County commissioner and a rancher. He lives near Beatty, Ore. | 0 |
Pop superstar Rihanna is hitting back against snowflake “haters” who criticized her for daring to Photoshop images of Queen Elizabeth II on to photos of herself in . [Rihanna first posted the doctored images of the Queen over the weekend, with captions like “be humble,” “ya’ll chickens is ash and I’m lotion” and “it’s not that deep” as Queen Elizabeth’s head was put onto the pop singer’s body. be humble. A post shared by badgalriri (@badgalriri) on Apr 22, 2017 at 9:24am PDT, y’all chickens is ash and I’m lotion. 😂 A post shared by badgalriri (@badgalriri) on Apr 22, 2017 at 9:26am PDT, #gucci UPDATE: Mumz said she won’t too happy bout this post so I had to edit *insert appropriate Gucci Mane lyrics here* A post shared by badgalriri (@badgalriri) on Apr 22, 2017 at 9:37am PDT, it’s not that deep. A post shared by badgalriri (@badgalriri) on Apr 22, 2017 at 12:44pm PDT, Soon after, politically correct followers of the pop singer responded to the images with dismay. “Its rude you know. This is not funny. She’s someone’s grandma. Imagine if its yours,” one Instagram user wrote, according to the Wrap. “Rihanna is craving attention I suppose. The queen is 91 and deserves respect,” another user wrote. “I think it’s a bit degrading. Hasn’t she done enough and earned enough respect for us to ask permission first? (For us to portray her in a way she may not like or find belittling of her accomplishments. She is just another human and might find it hurtful),” a different user wrote. “This is just disrespectful she is our monarch who has ruled for 65 years of her 91 years of life, she has dedicated her whole life to the service of the UK and territories,” another user wrote. “A job as monarch she probably never wanted and had no choice in the matter and is certainly a job she was never brought up to do. She deserves respect no matter what you think of the monarchy. ” On Monday, Rihanna defiantly posted yet another photoshopped image of the Queen, appearing not to let the criticism affect her. haters will say it’s photoshop. A post shared by badgalriri (@badgalriri) on Apr 24, 2017 at 6:27am PDT, Rihanna’s only remark with the photo? “Haters will say it’s photoshop. ” | 1 |
America’s trading partners have walls keeping out U. S. businesses, while the U. S. government has an open door for foreign businesses. [American businesses can run up against these walls when trying to sell goods and services to foreign governments, which often prevent businesses from outside their own countries from taking part in government contracts, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. By contrast, the U. S. government is far more open to allowing foreign businesses to receive government contracts, the GAO report said. The U. S. government has opened about $837 billion in procurement contracts to foreign competition, more than twice the $381 billion reported by the next five largest signatories to a World Trade Organization agreement intended to open government contracts to foreign bidders. Those are the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Norway and Canada. The size of the imbalance is even more remarkable because the total government procurement of those five is 32% larger than that of the U. S. according to the report. Government procurement is a major market for international business, amounting to $4. 4 trillion annually. The U. S. participates with 57 other countries in trade agreements that allow foreign firms to compete for government business. The agreements are supposed to ensure fair and open competition on a reciprocal basis — but in practice have resulted in a strikingly unbalanced arrangement in which the U. S. government is far more open to doing business with foreign companies than foreign government are willing to do business with U. S. companies. The GAO undertook the study at the request of the Office of the U. S. Trade Representative, which monitors U. S. trade under the WTO. Officials from the U. S. T. R. say that “government procurement markets are often closed to foreign competition,” according to the report. The report also noted that flaws in the statistical reporting practices of governments make comparisons difficult and limit transparency — even though both are goals of many trade agreements. The U. S. government’s practices, for instance, create a delay in reporting U. S. government procurement, which means the data in the GAO report is six years old. | 1 |
An illegal immigrant in a small North Carolina town intentionally hit and killed a bicyclist with his car, according to police. [Genaro an illegal immigrant, allegedly struck Jamica Williams with his vehicle after the two were involved in a previous altercation, according to the Johnston County Report. According to eyewitness reports, was upset with Williams after he allegedly made a comment to a woman living nearby. Williams took off on his bike shortly thereafter. was allegedly angered by the comment and followed Williams and confronted him. Eventually, police say, got into his car and intentionally struck Williams. First responders came to the scene and took Williams to a nearby hospital where he later died of his injuries. Williams had just recently moved back to the small town of Kenly to be closer with his family and was recently hired for a new job. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirmed to Breitbart Texas that was in the U. S. illegally and the agency currently has a detainer on him, where he may be deported if released from prison for any reason. is being charged with murder. John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
So these men/women enlist under the promise to give them enlistment bonuses due to a corrupt individual making the promise to them (put into position by the President), they scam these men/women, some die, said corrupt individual is outed for presenting these scam deals and yet.... and yet the soldiers defending this country are made to pay for it?
Yeah....nothing is wrong with that at all Unreal....
The federal government bails out companies for the sums of billions and yet they can't take responsibility for their own hiring error here and help these men/women out who served the country for far less? It's okay though, let's give that money to illegals as they deserve it far more than those who defend this nation. Simply unreal... | 0 |
Update: Bank of America has also cancelled its sponsorship of New York City’s Public Theater, becoming the second sponsor to pull its support from the this summer’s season of Shakespeare in the Park. [“Bank of America supports art programs worldwide, including an partnership with The Public Theater and Shakespeare in the Park,” a spokesperson for the company told the New York Daily News Sunday. “The Public Theater chose to present Julius Caesar in a way that was intended to provoke and offend. Had this intention been made known to us, we would have decided not to sponsor it. ” Original story below: Delta Air Lines has cancelled its sponsorship of New York City’s Public Theater following backlash surrounding a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, a “contemporary” take on the classic play in which a Donald twist on the titular character is graphically stabbed to death on stage. Breitbart News previously reported that this summer’s Oskar production of Julius Caesar — which opened in previews last month in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater — had sparked controversy over its main character’s striking resemblance to President Trump. The character sports blonde, hair and a business suit and tie, and his wife Calpurnia speaks with a Slavic accent, similar to that of First Lady Melania Trump. Video captured at a recent performance shows the Caesar character graphically stabbed to death during the climax of the play. One attendee recently told Mediaite that the character’s resemblance to Trump made the assassination scene particularly “shocking and distasteful. ” In the wake of the controversy, Delta Airlines has reportedly cancelled its sponsorship of the Public Theater, which stages the free productions of Shakespeare in the Park. “No matter what your political stance may be, the graphic staging of Julius Caesar at this summer’s Free Shakespeare in the Park does not reflect Delta Air Lines’ values,” the company said in a statement Sunday. “Their artistic and creative direction crossed the line on the standards of good taste. We have notified them of our decision to end our sponsorship as the official airline of the Public Theater effective immediately,” the statement added. Other sponsors of the New York City’s Public Theater include American Express, the New York Times and Bank of America. The Delta sponsorship cancellation represents a blow to the Public Theater nearly two weeks after another controversy sparked by a graphic depiction of President Trump’s death led to lost sponsorship and business opportunities. In May, comedian Kathy Griffin posed for a photograph with a fake, bloodied head of the president in her outstretched arm. The photograph generated a firestorm of criticism and Griffin was quickly fired from her role on CNN’s annual New Year’s Eve Live broadcast. The comedian also lost out on a commercial deal with a restroom accessories company and had several scheduled performances on her comedy tour cancelled. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” – John F. Kennedy
ReadyNutrition Readers, this article may seem to be inconsistent with one of my recent ones in the form of a letter thanking those who attempted to make a change by voting in the last election. There is, however, no inconsistency of thought, as the efforts to emplace a president who will actually make a change are still laudable on your part: you tried to accomplish a return to a Constitutional Republic by using the vote within the system. As I mentioned in a recent article, “ Are Government Puppet-Masters Using Riots to Incite a Civil War? ” there is still a lot of civil unrest occurring.
Is this a revolution? No, it’s far from it. It is a disgruntled group of Americans being goaded into acts and actions of stupidity by paid and trained left-wing agitators at the behest of their Marxist paymasters. Concurrently, in my recent article, “We Will Not Go Gently Into the Night: the Silent Majority Speaks,” I mentioned this:
“The war is far from over to restoring our nation to a Constitutional Republic where the governors derive their just powers from the consent of the governed…that’s you and I…and making things completely right.”
Since the election as many of you have undoubtedly noticed, there has been a lot of backpedaling by our new president-elect on the issues of Obamacare and on the general issue of replacing Washington insiders with people who are dedicated to restoring the Republic. So far we are seeing the potential appointments of people such as Jamie Dimon, CEO for JP Morgan-Chase to Treasury Secretary, and Reince Pribus, Chairman of the Republican Party to Chief of Staff. We are also seeing that the promised fence across our southern border with Mexico may never materialize.
We are also hearing quotes from Trump, saying (after his meeting with Obama last week) that “Obama is a good man,” and also that he will not bring any charges against Hillary Clinton after the inauguration. What’s the point to all of this? The point is this:
Many promises were made to the American people before the election in the campaign that may just vanish, and the “transition” may be just a changing of personnel without any real change to the establishment…the one that is broken (non-functioning) while it is breaking the citizenry in half.
This is how revolutions start. One of the problems with a revolution in the U.S. is an artificial cultural homogeneity. The “Great American Melting Pot” is just that: it “melted” all of the ethnic diversity out of the culture…destroying ethnic neighborhoods that were once culturally divided (no enforced segregation, mind you…just one of existence…of people with similar origins and cultures living together) that was the strength of America’s greatness at one time (until the conclusion of World War II). As a matter of fact, WWII was the proof that a nation can be united in war although truly multicultural in peace.
During WWII, our greatest successes in discovering enemy plans in Europe came as a result of intelligence gathered by German-American and Italian-American citizens. They were kids born in this country with two naturalized American citizens as parents who had been immigrants. They grew up with the language, customs, and culture of Germany and Italy, respectively. Their parents contributed to society, working and paying taxes. When the time came, these American sons and daughters used their gifts, their inherited language and culture in the service of the United States in ways that could not have been accomplished without them. For more on this read about the Jedburgh teams and the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) operatives who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe behind enemy lines.
The mindset of all of the different ethnicities in the United States gave us an edge, because we were able to develop new and innovative methods and equipment that came from a “pooling” of those different cultural geniuses. Cultures make each nation so unique with an invaluable perspective when it comes to technological advancement and problem-solving. Case in point: the atomic bomb was developed by (among many others) Albert Einstein, a German-Jew, and Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist.
After WWII with the cessation of hostilities and the advent of the Cold War, little by little the ethnic neighborhoods shrank throughout the larger cities. The culture of naturalized immigrants and citizens who came in the prescribed and lawful manner was passed on with the traditions taught to their children born in the U.S. This immigrant culture bequeathed to the American boys and girls deteriorated to be replaced by the big-box, fast-food culture: now we’re homogenous – a culture of consumers and shoppers. Ask someone of their point of origin and heritage and you may either receive a stare of incomprehension or an “I don’t really know that much about my family,” or such answer.
Ask them about what stores are in the local mall and they can draw you a map .
Then came the l960’s, termed by many a “cultural revolution,” although it was nothing of the sort. It was a counter -revolution, because it went against the fabric of the society with an attempt to destroy the existing religion, ethics, and morals, and denigrate the structure of the core unit of American society: the family. It wasn’t a revolution. It was an insurgency , to take key traditional values, beliefs, and practices and replace them with concepts of Marxism and anarchy after labeling the denigrating behaviors as “freedoms” and “liberalism.”
An erosion of our culture is what we’ve seen, and the current national protests are not a “revolution,” but a counter-revolution: they are a revolt against the peaceful revolution that occurred when you voted in the last election. The current national protests are an attempt by the Leftists to force a change in the vote and prevent the degraded culture from recovering. In our next segment, we will detail actual revolutions: their history, component parts, and how they work in either a positive or a negative manner. Until then, keep the powder dry and your eyes on the horizon! JJ out.
Jeremiah Johnson is the Nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces (Airborne). Mr. Johnson was a Special Forces Medic, EMT and ACLS-certified, with comprehensive training in wilderness survival, rescue, and patient-extraction. He is a Certified Master Herbalist and a graduate of the Global College of Natural Medicine of Santa Ana, CA. A graduate of the U.S. Army’s survival course of SERE school (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), Mr. Johnson also successfully completed the Montana Master Food Preserver Course for home-canning, smoking, and dehydrating foods.
Mr. Johnson dries and tinctures a wide variety of medicinal herbs taken by wild crafting and cultivation, in addition to preserving and canning his own food. An expert in land navigation, survival, mountaineering, and parachuting as trained by the United States Army, Mr. Johnson is an ardent advocate for preparedness, self-sufficiency, and long-term disaster sustainability for families. He and his wife survived Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Cross-trained as a Special Forces Engineer, he is an expert in supply, logistics, transport, and long-term storage of perishable materials, having incorporated many of these techniques plus some unique innovations in his own homestead.
Mr. Johnson brings practical, tested experience firmly rooted in formal education to his writings and to our team. He and his wife live in a cabin in the mountains of Western Montana with their three cats.
This information has been made available by Ready Nutrition
Originally published November 21st, 2016 We Will Not Go Gently Into the Night: The Silent Majority… Are Government Puppet Masters Using Riots to Incite a Civil… Majority of Americans Now Believe That Debt Is a Necessity Surviving Occupied America, Part 2 Sign of the Times: Riot Control Gear Sales Are Soaring… | 0 |
On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Jake Turx, White House Correspondent for Jewish news magazine Ami Magazine, who got into a tense exchange with President Trump at his press conference earlier in the day over an increase incidents, stated that “we understand why this is so hurtful for him, to see himself being called an ” and that charges of against Trump are “very unfair,” “And I am with him when it comes to being outraged about him being charged with this . ” Turx said that he had a prior “relationship” with Trump through covering him as a correspondent. He added, “I’ve worked with the president, with his people, throughout the campaign, throughout the transition. And so many times, I’ve seen some of our colleagues in the media describe certain events as — in the way it relates to the Jewish community in a certain light that, no one in our community saw it that way. And there are certain acts that were described as or certain people described as and the people in our community who know these people personally said, that’s not true. Why are people who are not Jewish deciding what is considered ? The president’s relationship with the Jewish community, I’ve only seen it firsthand for the last two years, but, he’s done an unprecedented amount of outreach with the Orthodox Jewish community. And so, we — and we understand why this is so hurtful for him, to see himself being called an when, this his — . ” Turx stated that he doesn’t believe the accusations of and that such charges are “very unfair … and I understand why he’s so defensive. And I am with him when it comes to being outraged about him being charged with this . ” Turx concluded that after the exchange with Trump, he was “very hopeful. ” And that it shows Trump is “committed” against and personally bothered by . ( Mediaite) Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 1 |
By Robert Fisk on October 31, 2016 Robert Fisk — The Independent Oct 30, 2016 People walk past damaged buildings in the opposition-held Tariq al-Bab neighbourhood of Aleppo, Syria, October 5, 2016. Click to enlarge
It was the rain that should have told us. High-altitude jets had flown over Aleppo the previous evening and, just occasionally, we heard their bombs exploding, far away in the countryside beyond the city. Then a soft, warm shower drifted over the ruins downtown and coated the streets and apartment blocks of western Aleppo with drizzle, and there was – for this city, at least – a strange silence. Dawn brought a brown, overcast sky through which no Russian or Syrian pilots could see the ground unless they chose to fly at low level through the downpour, which they never do.
And that was when the bombardment of western Aleppo began. The mortars and shells broke across the city in a steady and growing rumble of sound that left only one question in our minds. Amid the ruins of eastern Aleppo, with its tens of thousands of trapped civilians, where on earth did its few thousand largely Islamist fighters, get all this ammunition? Syrian army long-range artillery, high on the hill behind the old Meridien hotel, banged away at the eastern horizon where smudges of grey smoke began to curl into the dun-coloured sky.
It was not quite the storm of steel that the media – many in far-away Beirut – would have the world believe. The battle for divided Aleppo has been fought for too long and its people besieged and then rebesieged – in both east and west – that the front lines have congealed into the square miles of dust and ruins that are now almost impassable. You might join the chorus of exaggeration about Srebrenica or Grozny, but Stalingrad this is not.
Yet it shook both the civilians and the regime in the west of the city. Just after breakfast, as I was gazing eastwards through the rain towards the ancient citadel, there was a sudden clap of sound as a shell bashed into the governor’s modern office block. I saw bits of the side of the building flying into the air. The Aleppo governor, whose residence is itself sealed off by anti-car-bomb concrete barricades, was safe in Damascus where he was meeting Bashar al-Assad and other regional leaders. Others were not so fortunate.
By midday, Syrian radio was announcing seven dead – a little, almost insignificant figure when you remember the new graves in the packed cemeteries of this place – but the bombardment had a dramatic effect in the streets. The loudspeaker on the minaret of a mosque scarcely 100 yards away clicked – the electrical “click” and hiss of the sound system is the prelude to every supercharged prayer across the Middle East – and a voice shouted: “They are attacking. They are attacking. They are coming from the north, from Zahra, from Bin Yamin and towards al-Hamadaniyeh.”
And this was the first indication anyone in the streets was given that the incoming fire was not only arriving from eastern Aleppo but from south-west of the city, from the fields and ruined factories and broken sewage farms where Nusra and some of its Islamist allies still hold territory that snakes all the way north to the Turkish frontier – from which weapons regularly arrive to increase this feast of violence.
Wars inspire their own Hollywood version of reality and, in a darkened Ba’ath party headquarters with the rumble of explosions outside, I was to hear another rumour of war that will surely acquire its own mystique in the days to come. American planes had been seen dropping arms supplies into eastern Aleppo, Syrian jets had warned them off but some parachutes had been seen. “I think there is a video,” an otherwise extremely rational and intelligent official added.
There was, of course, no video – there never is – nor are Syrian MiGs in any position to challenge US air power. Washington is not going to provoke Russia by sending its fighter-bombers from Turkey over Aleppo. Besides, given the American propensity for inaccuracy, any parachutes would surely have missed their target.
Source Comment — Oct 31, 2016 Robert Fisk’s dismissal of claims that the U.S. was dropping arms supplies into eastern Aleppo calls into question his objectivity as a journalist. For we know from earlier reports that the U.S. and its allies are alleged to have supplied Syrian “opposition fighters” by parachute drops . For example last October Reuters was reporting that the U.S. was airdropping supplies to “Syrian rebels” in northern Syria. More recent reports allege that the U.S. was “considering arming” CIA backed fighters with anti-aircraft weapons. So why is Robert Fisk so quick to dismiss these claims without investigating them? | 0 |
"A man must keep a little back shop where he can be himself without reserve. In solitude alone can he know true freedom." — Michel de Montaigne
If Montaigne is correct, then there are millions of Americans who do not know true freedom.
As reported by The Atlantic on October 19: "If you’re reading this in the United States, there’s a 50 percent chance that a photo of your face is in at least one database used in police facial-recognition systems."
Do the math: the collusion of local police and the federal surveillance state has placed greater than 117 million Americans under the never-blinking eye of the government. From the Atlantic article: Police departments in nearly half of U.S. states can use facial-recognition software to compare surveillance images with databases of ID photos or mugshots. Some departments only use facial-recognition to confirm the identity of a suspect who’s been detained; others continuously analyze footage from surveillance cameras to determine exactly who is walking by at any particular moment.
Of course, the federal Department of Homeland Security offers billions in taxpayer dollars to local and state law enforcement in the form of grants awarded for the purchase of sophisticated surveillance equipment, including perhaps the most pernicious and potentially threatening to liberty: facial recognition software.
From license plate readers to facial-recognition software, from surveillance cameras to cellphone signal trackers, the Department of Homeland Security is providing police with all the gadgets, hardware, and software necessary to keep everybody under surveillance, without the targeted public ever realizing that it’s the Capital, not the cops, that are behind the monitoring.
The technology employed in these devices is astonishingly advanced. For example, a facial recognition product in use by social-media giant Facebook — as well as by dozens of law-enforcement agencies nationwide — is so advanced it sounds almost like science fiction: Using a “nine-layer deep neural network,” the software known as DeepFace uses “more than 120 million parameters” to recreate the user’s face and then scans millions of photos to match the face to the person.
The ability of cash-strapped local law-enforcement agencies to deploy such sophisticated software depends on the largesse of the federal DHS.
According to a report issued by the DHS to Congress, between the fiscal years 2008 and 2014, the DHS doled out more than $9.4 billion in assistance for the fighting of "terrorism" at home. How much of this was spent specifically on facial recognition software is not revealed, although as most such purchases are made through grants under the DHS's Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program (LETPP), the report reveals that nearly $3.4 billion was sent from the feds to local law enforcement from 2008-2014.
In the section of the report highlighting the "successes" of the LETPP, a state-by-state analysis of how the money is being spent is provided, with nearly every state synopsis containing a mention of the facial recognition "advancements" made possible by the DHS.
Here's a sample from the digest for how Illinois is spending its federal funds: Operation Virtual Shield (OVS) is a program implemented in the City of Chicago, Illinois, that created the most extensive video surveillance network in the United States by linking more than 3,000 surveillance cameras to a centralized monitoring system that captures and processes camera feeds in real time. It is able to detect suspicious or dangerous activity and identify its location, and now incorporates facial recognition.
Did you catch that? Surveillance cameras feed images to an "extensive video surveillance network" linking more than "3,000 surveillance cameras to a centralized monitoring system" in real time.
Thanks to Homeland Security and the willingness of state legislators in the Land of Lincoln to surrender their sovereignty (and violate their Article VI oath) in exchange for membership in the massive surveillance system, a network administered by the federal government, citizens of Illinois are now under constant, real-time surveillance by watchers in Washington, D.C.
In a study conducted by Georgetown University and released to the public earlier in October, it was discovered that Of the 52 agencies that acknowledged using face recognition in response to 106 records requests, the authors found that only one had obtained legislative approval before doing so. Government reports have long confirmed that millions of images of citizens are collected and stored in federal face recognition databases. Since at least 2002, civil liberties advocates have raised concerns that millions of drivers license photos of Americans who have never been arrested are being subject to facial searches — a practice that amounts to a perpetual digital lineup. This report augments such fears, demonstrating that at least one in four state or local law enforcement agencies have access to face recognition systems.
The short version of that is that when any American goes in to get a driver's license, the picture taken by the DMV is instantly uploaded to a server owned and operated by the federal government. This creates, as the report describes it, a "perpetual digital lineup" of millions of Americans who have never been accused or even suspected of committing a crime, steps essential to the administration of due process, a protection of personal liberty that has been a key part of Anglo-American liberty since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215!
Notice, too, that local law enforcement is conducting all this vicarious federal surveillance without any oversight or permission from the elected representatives of the people. In other words, the people have no say in this practice of involuntarily submitting their photos to surveillance databases, thus the practice is not a valid exercise of legislative power, as the only legitimate basis for law is the consent of the governed.
In 1815, Benjamin Constant made a timely and timeless observation about the necessity of due process and its relation to the perpetuation of liberty: However imperfect due process, it has a protective faculty which cannot be removed without destroying it. It is the natural enemy and the unyielding foe of tyranny, whether popular or otherwise. As long as due process subsists, courts will put in despotism's path a resistance, more or less generous, but which always serves to contain it....There is in due process something lofty and unambiguous which forces judges to act respectably and follow a just and orderly course.
Sadly, this joint venture between the federal government and local law enforcement to deprive all Americans of their precious due process protections is not limited to those two powerful partners. As reported in Time magazine, shopping centers are getting into the unwarranted surveillance game as well, collecting images of shoppers' faces and license plates while they visit the mall: "Homeland Security is working with a number of retailers to test facial recognition software that would flag people with criminal records, ABC News reports. Shopping malls are also testing out software that will scan license plates in the parking lot and notify security if they are registered to anyone on the terrorist watch list."
What is the answer to the rapid expansion of the federal surveillance dragnet and to the disturbing trend among local government and retailers to help pull it into new corners of coverage?
Americans must exercise their natural sovereignty and demand that local law enforcement seek legislative permission before participating in any surveillance program, and the people must hold lawmakers accountable for their adherence to their oaths of office, particularly the part relating to upholding the Constitution. | 0 |
Why any Wife, Mother, Daughter, Sister or Feminist MUST Vote Trump 03.11.2016 Print version Font Size When I was younger my very dear godmother wanted a small television set for her morning-room. The color scheme of the walls and furniture was sky blue with crème accents. Naturally, she desired one to compliment the palate; unfortunately, this was 1960 and most television sets came in one color - black. As the years progressed I cannot tell you the times I heard how she sought a blue television. Of course every year new models and brighter hues became available until eventually my godmother quite nearly discovered the precise set best suited to her. However, she passed away prior to ever purchasing one. While the implication of my anecdote is obvious - you're likely to die before ever finding perfection - it seems some people in America need a gentle reminder what the dueling implications of their current search for a perfect political candidate holds for them; a fate not the least less serious than death. The foremost Women's Issue of our time is IMMIGRATION and these are the two futures awaiting us. If Clinton wins : Hillary has stated she favors a borderless world without limit and as a result the already porous Southern Border shall remain largely unguarded. To date, there are over 30 million Illegal Mexicans in the United States . They pay no income taxes and no payroll taxes of any kind yet they avail themselves of schools, roads, hospitals and welfare which are paid for by American Citizen tax dollars. If Trump wins : He has emphatically repeated a physical wall will be constructed on the Southern Border, offering job opportunities to tens of thousands of American Citizens and billions of dollars for both the national and local economies. Other employment will be created by maintaining and guarding this structure. American tax dollars will support American children, American veterans and American elderly. If Clinton wins : Illegal Mexicans present in the country with impunity, coupled with illegal driving privileges, illegal subsidies from taxpayers and dozens of other illegal "freebies" will not pause there. If Illegal Mexicans can break every other law in America why should sexual harassment, sexual deviancy and sexual assault be any different? Women should expect hundreds of thousands of additional sexual and physical assaults every year by people who have no legitimate excuse to be in the United States. In Mexico it is legal to have sex with children 12 years of age! Although often misconstrued or hidden by fellow-travelers , this is the fact in most of Mexico today. Likewise, "bride kidnapping" is not uncommon, as long as the predator-perpetrator "trades" something for the female child. And don't think Illegal Mexicans leave this "culture" at their border. In recent years have been instances in the United States when Illegal Mexicans have swapped a case of beer or other items as compensation for taking someone's daughter...and then used this "justification" in courts for being acquitted of a crime! If Trump wins : The 30 million Illegal Mexicans will dramatically be reduced. Their departure will lessen your daughter's classroom size while increasing resources for her school. You cannot have music, dramatics and sport programs when you double the class-size with non-contributing Illegal Mexicans. In very real terms, unless you are independently wealthy and can afford private instruction, the presence of Illegal Mexican children literally curtails your daughter's opportunities and minimizes her life choices. Moreover, at the same time the 30 million Illegal Mexicans begin to depart another 30 million Illegal Mexicans will never arrive due to strict border security. On average 2 to 3 million Illegal Mexicans are invading America every year. This will immediately cease with a Trump Presidency - to the benefit of your child's education and future employment prospects; not to mention your own quality of life. If Clinton wins : One of the most important things to know , and to remember when you vote, is many allegedly "hard-working" Illegals and Refugees (who have genuinely empathetic stories from their experiences) are entirely unable to function in the United States. With no disrespect, not a "slander" or a "slur," it is a fact the vast majority are illiterate in the languages of the new homelands AS WELL AS most being illiterate in their own languages! The myth these people "only want a better life" or they are "eager to work" is revealed by the truth they simply cannot work in an Industrialized Society which already has extremely high unemployment for manual labor . Illegals and Refugees lack the training, lack the skills and most importantly lack the basic ability to learn them. In Germany it is now admitted only 1 in 50 of the Refugees are employable . Thus 49 of 50 will be on Welfare, receiving Free Housing, and collecting Taxpayer Benefits into which they never paid. At least one Syrian Refugee in Germany with 4 "wives" and 23 offspring claims $390,000 per year. We all hope for the best for our children, but if your daughter is less than a doctor, lawyer, or other highly educated professional - Illegals and Refugees will directly compete with her in the workplace. And if she cannot find a job there may be no Welfare Benefits for her due to it all being taken by Illegals. If Trump wins : In Germany the past 3 years are approximately 3 million Arab Refugees . Of the 3 million, even the government admits only 60,000 will find permanent employment. This means 2,940,000 uninvited people will be draining Social Security systems from hardworking taxpayers. With Trump a similar situation need never occur in the United States; where Citizens can care for fellow Citizens. If Clinton wins : She has announced in addition to 10,000 totally unvetted Syrian Immigrants, Hillary will increase their number over 500% to nearly 80,000 combined (almost all men of fighting age, with few if any women or children). Though sympathetic, these people have no documents and even the F.B.I. admits it impossible to know who is a terrorist and who a refugee. As example, whether organized terrorists or not in the first six months of this year even the "approved" Refugees have committed over 142,000 serious crimes in Germany; many of these being assaults of grotesque sexual nature. If Trump wins : There will be 0 new Syrian Immigrants to America since none can be ascertained non-threatening to the Citizenry. However financial and material aid will be sent to care for impoverished families in places near their homeland which are best suited by culture and religion to maintain them. If Clinton wins : While there are no exact predictors, Europe is a good indicator. In many nations girls and women have been warned not to wear shorts or skirts so as not to " invite rape ." Last New Year's Eve over 1,200 German women were assaulted by over 2,000 Middle Eastern Immigrants on one night alone . At a Swedish music festival this summer 5 girls were raped by Middle Eastern Immigrants in one afternoon. Many municipalities have reported "swimming pool" sex assaults on children as young as 6 years of age. These are not exceptions or indeed uncommon, but habitual. If Trump wins : Although not all tragedies can be prevented, with care many can be avoided. The best way is pro-active deterrence. If 80,000 Syrians are welcomed by Hillary (in only her first year of office, mind you) and only 5% are rapists that is 4,000 rapes which never need have happened. Worse, as "Multi-Cultural Jurisprudence" becomes pervasive in the courts (so to circumvent Immigrant riots like those seen in Paris recently ) we will witness even the worst abusers set loose to commit more crimes. Only last week in Austria , an Iraqi Immigrant who violently raped a 10-year-old in a swimming pool changing area was released by arguing his own "Sexual Emergency" and that the parents "could not prove the rape was unwanted by the child." This is a fate which awaits our daughters in America. THESE ARE NOT PROVERBIAL ELECTION "HORROR STORIES" - THIS IS REALITY IN EUROPE TODAY ! Do I like everything Donald Trump has ever said? Far from being the case!Do I agree with much of what Donald Trump proposes? Absolutely not!Do I trust Donald Trump will fulfill every election promise? Hardly! However since he has premised his campaign on the basis of Defending Against Harmful Immigration it is likely this singular position would be the last pledge he would or even could abandon once in office. Is Donald Trump a cad? Yes. Is Donald Trump a pompous lout? Yes. Is Donald Trump noxious? Yes.Is Donald Trump the ONLY CHOICE FOR WOMEN AND FEMINISTS ? - WITHOUT ONE SINGLE DOUBT ! For those unsettled by recent complaints against him, we cannot judge whether those who have accused Trump of inappropriate acts are telling the truth or not. There are a multitude of legitimate reasons why women wait to come forward with their stories of victimization. That being said, there are also a multitude of reasons why some women come forward only weeks before a national election. Yet even assuming everything alleged of Donald Trump is true, he has at worst used foul language in the past and made some very bad passes with inept physical overtures. NO ONE says he raped them. NO ONE says he ever tried to rape them. NO ONE says he did anything but back off once he was rebuffed. To the contrary, as of this moment there are women of all ages - from girls of 5 to grandmothers of 85 - living in Europe who are verifiable victims of forcible sexual assaults and rapes on a massive scale. These are not "He said, She said" or ambiguous private situations; this is an Epidemic Against Women . And it is ENTIRELY self-caused. It happened because Europeans ALLOWED it to happen. Americans CANNOT do the same! There is only ONE ISSUE in this Presidential campaign for Women - Mass Immigration From The Third World, especially of violent men from a hostile Middle East . This can be said with complete certainty because if you are raped and murdered, a real possibility under Hillary Clinton and her European Model of Misogynist Importation, you will not be ALIVE to vote in another election. For all women interested in women, protecting daughters, caring for elders, and with a call to each Authentic Feminist who actually works toward Women's Issues (rather than being Faux Feminists preening for cameras ) there is but one candidate who can and must be supported by all. Donald Trump may provide us many excuses to doubt him, from boorish behavior to partial-birth abortion. Donald Trump may give us a million reasons to loathe him, with his dirty mouth and surly disposition. And it is true Donald Trump may be another man in the Oval Office, causing us to wait just a bit longer for a female to occupy it. Yet Donald Trump is the only candidate acceptable for Women because he alone provides a clear and unambiguous stance on the ONE WOMEN'S ISSUE which counts most- keeping women safe and alive. This is not a television program where one character is fully good and one character is fully evil yet everything somehow works out in the end no matter who wins. If Hillary Clinton is elected, despite her platitudes about Women's Rights , tens of thousands of women will suffer and many of them will die. One candidate makes you feel good about yourself, but puts all women alarmingly at risk. One candidate makes you sick to your stomach, but has female-centric policies which actually protect them. There can be no hesitation that, for our families as well as ourselves , the one who deserves our vote is Donald Trump. Time is short - share this with friends, tell every woman you know ...and get yourself to the voting booth. Guy Somerset | 0 |
WIKILEAKS : Hillary Receiving Donations from Radical Muslims in Turkey WIKILEAKS : Hillary Receiving Donations from Radical Muslims in Turkey Breaking News By Amy Moreno October 29, 2016
We have learned through Wikileaks released emails that Hillary and her team are actively disenfranchising American voters by accepting foreign donations.
We also know that Hillary LOVES Middle Eastern countries who ABUSE WOMEN and TOSS GAY PEOPLE off buildings.
She and her husband take MILLIONS from Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Now, we can add Turkey to that list.
Hillary is a disgusting, greedy little pig.
Do you really think THIS WOMAN would fight Islamic terror?
They FUND her. | 0 |
Posted by Damon Morgan | Nov 10, 2016 | National Security Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Got the Better of Obama in Nuclear Talks
On September 28, 2015, Argentinean President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner dropped a bombshell on the floor of the UN General Assembly 70th session. Until now, her story has been swept under the rug by a news media which has always been deferential to President Obama.
Ms. Kirchner told the story of how Argentina was visited by the White House in November 2010, with a secretive and unusual request. A full English translation of her speech is available here.
During the time the event took place, Obama had just faced a stinging rebuke in midterm elections which saw a Republican takeover of the House, led by the insurgent Tea Party. The results of that election were a direct threat to Obama’s mandate. Wikipedia describes the incredible upset this way:
Republicans regained control of the chamber they had lost in the 2006 midterm elections, picking up a net total of 63 seats and erasing the gains Democrats made in 2006 and 2008. Although the sitting U.S. President’s party usually loses seats in a midterm election, the 2010 election resulted in the highest loss of a party in a House midterm election since 1938, and the largest House swing since 1948. This also happened to be the Republicans’ largest gain in House seats since 1938.
Under the shadow of this election, Obama became concerned about the possibility of being a one-term president and leaving a damaged legacy. He had not been able to accomplish any notable achievements as president, and the economy was still reeling from the aftershocks of the 2008 real estate and stock market crashes. Obama Was Desperate for a Deal with Iran
Obama had been negotiating with Iran regarding their nuclear ambitions, and the world was watching. But negotiations had bogged down, with then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisting on the need for nuclear fuel as part of the deal.
According to Kirchner, the Obama White House intended to sidestep congressional approval and media scrutiny by quietly hatching a scheme where third party nations would supply the fuel.
She told the UN Assembly that Argentina was approached by a representative of Obama’s White House, Gary Samore, who at the time served as the top adviser on nuclear issues.
“Gary Samore had explained to our Minister of Foreign Affairs, Héctor Timerman, that negotiations were underway for the Islamic Republic of Iran to cease with its uranium enrichment activities or to do it to a lesser extent but Iran claimed that it needed to enrich this Tehran nuclear reactor and this was hindering negotiations. They came to ask us, Argentines, to provide the Islamic Republic of Iran with nuclear fuel.” said Kirchner.
She went on to explain that Mr. Samore presented the following options:
The simplest and quickest one was for Argentina to provide the new nuclear fuel, as the original fuel had been designed by Argentina, who owned the intellectual property rights.
Another alternative was for Argentina to authorize Russia to supply the uranium, following the Argentine design.
The last alternative was for the United States or some other country with nuclear capacity to replace the operating core of the nuclear reactor with a new one using other non-Argentine fuel.
President Kirchner was willing to help, but the issue was politically tricky. Argentina had been the original producer of the nuclear fuel used in the Tehran reactor, and held intellectual property claims to the material. However, there was ongoing tension between Iran and Argentina due to a terrorist bombing in 1994.
The AMIA bombing was an attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA; Argentine Israelite Mutual Association) building. It occurred in Buenos Aires on 18 July 1994, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds. It was Argentina’s deadliest bombing ever. The Bombing of the AMIA Building was the Deadliest in Argentina’s History
After a long series of incompetent and corrupt investigations into the incident, in 2005 Argentine prosecutors Alberto Nisman and Marcelo Martínez Burgos formally accused the government of Iran of directing the bombing, and the Hezbollah militia of carrying it out. According to the prosecution’s claims in 2006, Argentina had been targeted by Iran after Buenos Aires’ decision to suspend a nuclear technology transfer contract to Tehran
Argentina’s justice, Israel, and the United States suspected in 2005 that Hezbollah was behind the attack, with backing from Iran. Hezbollah has denied responsibility. The Iranian government maintains its innocence, condemning the terrorist attack and calling for urgent punishment of those responsible.
After many years spent on the case, Special Prosecutor Alberto Nisman was found dead in his home, on January 18, 2015. His body was discovered just six hours before he was due to explain his findings to congress. The official cause of death was a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, but there is a haze of suspicion surrounding the case. Argentinians March in Protest of the Lack of Justice for the AMIA Bombing
To this day the bombing case remains unresolved, and Iran has refused to extradite any of the suspects involved.
President Kirchner continued with her address to the UN, explaining that she attempted to follow standard protocol and receive the White House request in writing:
You know that Argentina is a member of the select club of nuclear energy producing countries but that we occupy, nonetheless, a leading position in the field of non-proliferation. This means that non-nuclear proliferation is also a matter of governmental interest to us as well.
I said as much to my Minister of Foreign Affairs who in turn relayed this to the White House’s envoy, Gary Samore that we would accept to provide the fuel because it was in the hands of Argentina since 1987 and we also had the technique to produce it in exchange, obviously, for such request to be submitted in writing and signed. This message was conveyed and I believe that was the last time, after that communication, that our Minister of Foreign Affairs saw Gary Samore.
So, after her demand that the request for nuclear fuel be provided on the official record, the U.S. representative vanished and the issue was never mentioned to Kirchner again. This shows that it was intended to be a clandestine deal from the beginning, hidden from the American people. Former Iranian President Ahmadinejad Tours Nuclear Processing Facility
Was Obama hoping to emerge as a hero after successfully negotiating a deal with Iran? If so, that effort fell flat. Recent investigations have revealed that he attempted another scheme in 2016 which involved making a cash down payment to Iran of more than a billion dollars, in order to secure the release of American hostages and to advance nuclear talks.
When it comes to an issue as important as nuclear proliferation in radical Islamist nations, we need a president who will engage the issue with transparency, and in the interest of the American people and world community. President Trump will likely succeed where Obama has failed. | 0 |
Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida will go to Trump too. Trump will landslide the popular vote. George Soros has already said as much. The only way Shillary wins is by paying off the electoral college at which point we go to war right here at home because there is no way in hell that people will allow that nasty criminal hag to steal the election on top of everything else she has stolen.
You want demographics and statistics? Trump fills football stadiums. Hildebeast can’t fill a middle school gym. Tim Kaine gave a speech to 30 people in Florida 2 days ago. Those 30 people included the press and secret service.
Loom at twitter followers, instagram subscribers, and facebook likes. More people like the hillary for prison pages than the hillary for president pages.
She can not, would not and should not win an HONEST election. She is going to have to declare martial law her first day in office because I and millions and millions of people like me will make her every waking minute miserable for however long she thinks she will occupy our whitehouse. | 0 |
Chart Of The Day: Wealth Of the Top 0.1% Now Equals Bottom 90% | 0 |
AB-Çin ilişkilerinde ABD ve NATO’nun etkisi yazan Manlio Dinucci Uluslararası bir forumda konuşan İtalyan coğrafyacı Manlio Dinucci, ABD’nin tüm dünyaya egemen olabilmek için sahip olduğu silahların analizini bireşimleştirdi. Suriye, Rusya ve Çin’in bugün elde silah, herkesin açıkça kabul ettiği bu üstünlüğü, dünyanın bu tek kutuplu örgütlenişi tartışılır hale getirmesinden dolayı bu makale daha da önem kazanmaktadır.
Voltaire İletişim Ağı | Roma (İtalya) | 5 Kasım 2016 français Español English Deutsch Doğrudan sorunun düğüm noktasına yöneliyorum. Avrupa Birliği ve Çin arasındaki ilişkilerden, ABD’nin doğrudan ve NATO aracılığıyla Avrupa Birliği üzerinde uyguladığı nüfuzdan bağımsız olarak söz etmem mümkün değil.
Bugün, 28 AB ülkesinin 22’si (Birleşik Krallığın AB’den çıkışından sonra 27 ülkesinden 21’i), Birlik halkının % 90’nından fazlası, AB tarafından « ortak savunmanın temeli » olarak tanınan NATO’nun üyesidir. Ve NATO, ABD komutası altındadır: Avrupa’daki yüksek müttefik Komutan hala Amerika Birleşik Devletleri Başkanı tarafından atanmaktadır ve diğer tüm kilit komutanlıklar ABD’nin elindedir. Avrupa Birliği’nin askeri ve dış politikası böylece, Avrupalı büyük güçlerin üzerinde amaç birliği yaptığı, asli olarak ABD stratejisine tabi durumdadır.
Resmi belgelerde açıkça dile getirilen bu strateji, SSCB’nin dağılması sonucunda küresel durumun değiştiği tarihsel anda çizilmiştir. Beyaz Saray 1991 yılında, National Security Strategy of the United States ’te şu beyanda bulunur: « Amerika Birleşik Devletleri, her boyutuyla –siyasi, ekonomik ve askeri- gerçekten de küresel olan bir güce, menzile ve etkiye sahip tek Devlettir. Amerikan liderliğinin yerini alabilecek hiçbir güç yoktur ». 1992’de, Defense Planning Guidance ’ta Pentagon şu görüşlerin altını çiziyor: « Birinci hedefimiz, herhangi bir gücün, bir küresel gücün ortaya çıkması için yeterli kaynaklara sahip bir bölgeye egemen olmasını engellemektir. Bu bölgeler, Batı Avrupa, eski Sovyetler Birliği toprakları ve Güney-Batı Asya’dır ». 2001’de, Quadrennial Defense Review ’ün ABD/NATO’nun, Rusya ve Çin’e karşı bir numaralı jeostratejik öneme sahip bir alan olan Afganistan savaşından bir hafta önce yayınlanan bir raporunda, Pentagon şunları söylüyor: « Bölgede mükemmel bir kaynak temeline sahip askeri bir rakibin ortaya çıkması muhtemeldir. Silahlı kuvvetlerimizin, ABD’nin, Devlet ve devlet dışı oluşumlar da dahil olmak üzere, rakip bir Devletin rejimini değiştirmek ya da ABD’nin hedefleri gerçekleşinceye kadar yabancı ülke topraklarını işgal etmek üzere, herhangi bir rakibe iradesini dayatma yeteneğini koruması gerekmektedir ».
Bu strateji temelinde, ABD komutası altındaki NATO doğu cephesinde taarruzunu başlattı: Yugoslav Federasyonunu savaş yoluyla yıktıktan sonra, 1999’dan günümüze kadar, eski Yugoslavya’dan üç ve üç de eski SSCB’den olmak üzere, her seferinde Rusya’nın daha da yakınına, nükleer olanlar da dahil askeri üs ve güçlerini kaydırarak, eski Varşova Paktının tüm Devletlerini ilhak etmiş ve pek yakında daha da başkalarını ilhak edecektir (Gürcistan ve daha şimdiden somut olarak NATO içerisinde olan Ukrayna’dan başlayarak). Aynı zamanda, doğu cephesiyle sıkı sıkıya bağlı güney cephesinde ABD komutası altındaki NATO, savaş yoluyla Libya Devletini ortadan kaldırdı ve aynı şeyi de Suriye’de yapmayı denedi.
ABD ve NATO, Ukrayna krizini patlattılar ve Rusya’yı « Avrupa’nın güvenliğini istikrarsızlaştırmakla » suçlayarak, Avrupa’yı, ABD çıkarlarına zarar veren Rusya-AB arasındaki ekonomik ve siyasi ilişkileri bozmak için, özellikle Washington’un arzuladığı (yaptırım ve karşı yaptırımların darbe vurduğu Avrupa ekonomilerinin zararına) yeni bir Soğuk Savaşa sürüklediler. ABD silahlı kuvvetlerinin, Çin karşıtı bir işlev içerisinde Asya-Pasifik bölgesinde artarak yerleşmesi de yine aynı strateji kapsamında gerçekleşiyor. U.S. Navy 2020 yılında, deniz ve hava güçlerinin %60’ını bu bölgede yoğunlaştıracağını duyurdu.
ABD stratejisi, ABD Pasifik Komutanlığının başı Amiral Harris’in önemini altını çizdiği Güney Çin Denizine yoğunlaşmış durumdadır: Burası dünya petrol ihracatının %25’i ve doğal gaz ihracatının %50’si, yıllık 5 000 milyar dolardan daha fazla bir değere sahip yıllık değere sahip deniz ticaretinin geçiş yaptığı yerdir. ABD bu denizyolunu, Amiral Harris’in « burada, ABD’deki yaşam sistemimiz için temel olan seyrüsefer özgürlüğü » adına, Çin’i « Güney Çin Denizi’nde, Rusya’nın Kırım’da yaptıklarıyla benzer saldırgan eylemlerde bulunmakla suçlayarak » denetimi altına almak istiyor. Bu amaçla U.S. Navy, Güney Çin Denizinde « devriye » görevi yapmaktadır. ABD’nin dümen suyundan en büyük Avrupa güçleri de geliyor: Fransa geçtiğimiz Temmuz ayında Avrupa Birliğinden « Çin’in gayrimeşru olarak talepte bulunduğu bu sularda düzenli ve görünür bir varlığı sağlamak için, Güney Çin Denizi’ndeki deniz devriyelerinin eşgüdümünü » yapmasını talep etti. Ve Amerika Birleşik Devletleri Güney Kore’ye « füze savunma » ama Rusya’ya karşı Romanya’da yerleştirilen ve yakında Polonya’ya da da konuşlandırılacak olan, aynı zamanda nükleer füzeler fırlatma yeteneğine sahip sistemleri yerleştirirken, NATO Genel Sekreteri Jens Stoltenberg, 6 Ekim’de Brüksel’de, « Seul ile NATO içerisindeki işbirliğini güçlendirmek » üzere Güney Kore Dışişleri Bakanı Yun Byung-se’yi kabul etti.
Bu olgular ve diğerleri de, Avrupa ve Asya’da aynı stratejinin uygulandığını ortaya koymaktadır. Bu, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri ve diğer Batılı güçlerin, yeni devletsel ve toplumsal öznelerin ortaya çıktığı güçlü değişim içerisindeki bir dünyada, ekonomik, siyasi ve askeri üstünlüklerini koruma girişimidir. Çin-Rusya stratejik mutabakatının meyvesi olan Şanghay İşbirliği Örgütü, dünyanın en büyük bütünleşik ekonomik alanı olabilecek kaynak ve istihdam kapasitesine sahiptir. Şanghay İşbirliği Örgütü ve BRİCS ülkeleri, mali kurumlarıyla, 70 yıldır ABD’ye ve Batının en büyük güçlerine borçlu ülkelere verilen tefeci borçları ve diğer finansal enstrümanlar aracılığıyla dünya ekonomisine hükmetme imkanı veren Dünya Bankası ve Uluslararası Para Fonunun büyük bölümüyle yerini alabilecek durumdadır. Yeni kurumlar aynı zamanda, hakim uluslararası döviz olarak kullanılan parayı basarak kendi borçlarını başka ülkelerin sırtına yükleme imkanını ABD’den alarak, ticari alışverişlerde dolardan çıkış sürecini de gerçekleştirebilir.
Gün geçtikçe daha da sallantıda olan üstünlüklerini muhafaza edebilmek için ABD sadece silah gücünü kullanmakla yetinmiyor, ama çoğu zaman kelimenin asıl anlamındakilerden daha da etkili silahlardan da yararlanıyor.
Birinci silah: AB ile olan « Transatlantik Ticaret ve Yatırım Ortaklığı » (TTIP) ve sadece ekonomik değil ama jeopolitik ve jeostratejik amaca sahip « Trans-Pasifik Ortaklığı » (TPP) gibi sözüm ona « serbest ticaret anlaşmaları »dır. Hillary Clinton bu yüzden, siyasi ve askeri konuları entegre eden bir « ekonomik NATO » önerisinde bulunarak, ABD-AB ortaklığını « Transatlantik ittifakımızın en büyük stratejik hedefi » olarak niteliyor. Proje açıktır: yine ABD komutası altında olmak üzere, Çin ve Rusya arasındaki işbirliğini temel alan ve yükselmekte olan Avrasya alanına, İran’a ve kendini Batının egemenliği altında görmek istemeyen diğer tüm ülkelere karşı siyasi, ekonomik ve askeri bir ABD-AB bloğu oluşturmak. Çıkar farklılıkları ve Avrupa’daki geniş kapsamlı muhalefet yüzünden TTIP müzakereleri zorlukla ilerlediği için, şimdilik, Kanada ile Amerika asındaki NAFTA’ya dahil olduğu için bir kamufle TTIP olan Kanada ve AB arasındaki « Kapsamlı Ekonomik ve Ticaret Anlaşması » (CETA) ile engelin çevresinden dolaşılmaktadır. CETA muhtemelen önümüzdeki 27 Ekim’de, Kanada Başbakanı Trudeau’nun Brüksel ziyareti sırasında AB tarafından imzalanacak.
İkinci silah: Her ülkenin çeşitli ölçülerde sahip olduğu zayıf noktalara dayanarak, içeriden huzursuzluk çıkarmak amacıyla hedef ülkelere sızılmasıdır: rüşvet, para hırsı, siyasi ikbal avcılığı, yerel iktidar grupları tarafından kışkırtılan ayrılıkçılık, dinsel fanatizm, geniş kitlelerin siyasi demagoji karşısında savunmasızlığı. Aynı zamanda, bazı durumlarda, kendi hükümetlerinin icraatına yönelik halkın memnuniyetsizliğine de dayanarak. Sızmada kullanılan enstrümanlar: gerçekte ABD Dışişleri Bakanlığı ve CİA’nin uzantıları olan sözde « sivil toplum kuruluşları »dır. Doğu Avrupa’da « renkli devrimleri » örgütleyen ve Çin’de ulusal azınlıkların yaşadığı diğer bölgeleri de kışkırtmaya yönelik olan, Hong-Kong’taki sözüm ona « Umbrella Revolution » ile aynı operasyonu gerçekleştirme girişiminde bulunan, devasa ekonomik imkanlara sahip kuruluşlardır bunlar. Aynı örgütler Latin Amerika’da, Brezilya’nın demokratik kurumlarını alaşağı etme ilk hedefiyle Brics ülkelerini içeriden mayınlamaktadır. Aynı stratejinin enstrümanları, aynı zamanda dışarıdan da saldırıya uğrayan Devletlerin topyekun ortadan kaldırılmasına hizmet eden, Libya ve Suriye’ye sızdırılanlar gibi kaos ortamı yaratmak üzere silahlı terörist gruplardır.
Üçüncü silah: küresel medyatik kanallar aracılığıyla yürütülen ve Pentagon tarafından « önceden belirlenen hedeflere hizmet edecek davranışlara sürüklemek ya da bunları pekiştirmek için, yabancı kamuoyu, örgüt ve hükümetlerinin duyarlılık ve motivasyonlarını belirlenen haberler aracılığıyla etkilemeye yönelik planlı harekatlar » olarak tanımlanan « PsyOp »’lar (Psikolojik Operasyonlar). Kamuoyunu savaşın tırmanışına hazırlayan bu operasyonlar aracılığıyla, aynı zamanda onları « insan haklarını ihlal etmekle » suçlayarak, Rusya’yı Avrupa’daki ve Çin’i ise Asya’daki gerilimlerin sorumlusu olarak gösterdiler.
Manlio Dinucci ve eşi Carla, 1965 yılında Mao Tse Tung’un doğduğu evin önünde. Son bir tespit: Altmışlı yıllarda Pekin’de eşiyle birlikte Çin’in bir numaralı dergisinin İtalyanca olarak yayınlanmasına katkıda bulunan biri olarak, Çin’in –sömürgeci, yarı-sömürgeci ve yarı-feodal durum koalisyonundan henüz on beş yıl önce özgürleştirilen- Batı tarafından tamamen tecrit edildiği ve ne Batı, ne de Birleşmiş Milletler tarafından egemen Devlet olarak tanınmadığı bir dönemde, derinden eğitici bir deneyim yaşadım. Bu dönemden geriye bende iz bırakan, Komünist Partinin önderliği altında tamamen yeni ekonomik ve kültürel temeller üzerinde bir toplum inşa etme inancında olan, o dönemlerde 600 milyon nüfuslu bu halkın direniş ve bilinç kapasitesi oldu. Bu kapasitenin bugün de, devasa gücüllüklerini daha da geliştirmekte olan çağdaş Çin’in, insanlığın geleceği için verilen nihai mücadeleye katkıda bulunarak, yeni emperyalist hakimiyet planlarına direnebilmesi için de aynı şekilde gerekli olduğunu düşünüyorum. Bu kavga, artık daha fazla savaşların olmadığı, toplumsal adalete ayrılmaz bir şekilde bağlı olan barışın zafer kazandığı bir dünya uğruna verilmektedir.
Manlio Dinucci Çeviri
Osman Soysal | 0 |
Russian analysis shows western-backed terrorists using chemical weapons against civilians In yet another blow to the credibility of the Western corporate media and the anti-Syria propaganda blitz By Brandon Tuberville 9:50 AM EST
Although the 1070 Apartment Complex was liberated by the Syrian government a few days ago, the terrorists have been repeatedly shelling the area with indiscriminate missiles in order to kill civilians attempting to flee terrorist control as well as firing missiles at Syrian military personnel. Many of these missiles have been filled with poisonous gas which the Russian Center has identified as being chlorine and white phosphorous.
Dozens of people have been injured as a result of the chemical munitions and have been hospitalized for treatment. Chlorine and white phosphorous both cause extremely painful deaths.
While the United States government has repeatedly accused the Syrian military of using chemical weapons against terrorists and even civilians, not one shred of evidence has been produced to back up these claims.
However, not only have a number of internationally recognized experts demonstrated clearly that the terrorists have used chemical weapons against both civilians and Syrian military soldiers, the terrorist forces have admitted as much by videotaping themselves testing the weapons and threatening to use them against those who oppose them.
Notably, all of these substances were banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention on January 13, 1993.
The Russian center has established a mobile analysis center in Aleppo in order to test samples quickly but the samples will soon be sent to the Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Center in Moscow. This center is accredited by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
In yet another blow to the credibility of the Western corporate media and the anti-Syria propaganda blitz it has maintained since early 2011, experts from the Russian Center For Radiological, Chemical, and Biological Defense have recently announced that analysis of the shells fired by terrorists at the 1070 Apartment Complex in Aleppo contained chemical weapons.
This new revelation brings Western propaganda crashing to ground in regards to the claims that it is Assad’s government using chemical weapons and that the terrorists have no access to them.
“Rapid sample analysis shows that the toxic substances in the militants’ artillery ammunition were chlorine and white phosphorus,” an analyst from the center said. | 0 |
The stock market reached yet another new high on Wednesday, the latest development to make a mockery of what savvy economic commentators thought they knew about the world. Consider how things looked one year ago. The world economy seemed hopelessly trapped in a cycle of low growth and inflation. Markets recoiled at the mere possibility that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates. Populist political insurgencies seemed to threaten yet more financial market chaos. Now, interest rates and inflation forecasts have risen substantially from last winter’s lows financial markets are shrugging off — or even rallying at the possibility of — imminent Fed rate increases and it is all taking place during Donald J. Trump’s presidency. An economy that seemed locked in some form of “secular stagnation” or “new normal” is at long last showing some signs of being in something closer to an “old normal. ” The United States manufacturing sector is showing strength, and the broader mix of market and economic data from around the world in the last few months also points to a world where a vicious economic cycle isn’t looking quite as scary and may even be ending. There can be no assurance that this pattern will continue, and there are some things to worry about on the horizon, not least that the Trump administration could follow through on some of its threats to disrupt global trade and diplomatic relations. interest rates remain low by historical standards across most of the world, suggesting that global bond investors aren’t fully buying into a return to stronger, more consistent growth. But the pivot since Election Day is huge. The Standard Poor’s 500 index is up 12 percent since Nov. 8, the London FTSE 100 index reached a new high Wednesday, and other global markets have grown nicely in that span. Treasury bonds now yield 2. 45 percent, up from 1. 85 percent on Election Day, suggesting investors believe higher growth and inflation are more probable than had seemed likely just four months ago. Much of the buoyant optimism on Wall Street is driven by investors’ expectations of corporate tax cuts and deregulation under the Trump administration. But there is also some real improvement in the economic data underneath the shifts, reflecting economic forces that have been underway for years. And this resetting of expectations is evident in market data beyond the always erratic stock market. On Wednesday, that took the form of a new survey of manufacturing supply managers that showed the factory sector is expanding at a breakneck pace. As recently as August, that same index from the Institute for Supply Management was contracting. Those numbers followed positive readings on retail sales, industrial production and the job market. For years, a theory that the major world economies were stuck in a pit of “secular stagnation” had gained hold — the idea that low economic growth, low inflation, low interest rates and weak productivity growth were all reinforcing one another in a vicious cycle. There’s hardly enough evidence to toss that theory aside, but there are many reasons to think things are now looking up. For example, bond market prices now suggest that investors foresee consumer price inflation in the United States at 2. 03 percent a year over the coming decade — consistent with the 2 percent inflation the Fed aims for. It only recently reached that level, however, after being as low as 1. 2 percent in February 2016. And it’s not just the United States. Similar measures of inflation expectations have risen in Germany, Britain and other advanced economies. For a window into the changing of investors, consider some news around the Fed this week. Tuesday afternoon, William C. Dudley, the president of the New York Fed, said in an interview that it would be fair to assume that the central bank would raise interest rates sooner rather than later, given the improving economy. “There’s no question that animal spirits have been unleashed a bit post the election,” Mr. Dudley told CNN. Fed watchers interpreted that to mean that an increase could be on the way in just three months after the last increase in December. Yet that did nothing to slow the 1. 4 percent gain in the Standard Poor’s 500 on Wednesday, and may even have contributed to it, as a sign of the Fed’s confidence in the economy. A year ago, hints that the Fed would move quickly with rates would have sent markets into a tailspin. As 2016 began, Fed leaders were expecting to raise rates four times in that year, plans that helped send the stock market plummeting and measures of economic pessimism soaring. Then they backed off and only raised rates once. Since a stock market rally began on Election Day, there has been plenty of discussion about a Trump effect. And no doubt a big part of the improvement has resulted from expectations that the new president’s policies will help corporate bottom lines (and that some of the risks of his trade agenda won’t materialize). But it’s worth keeping in mind that a Trump bump arrives as the economy is closing in on its full productive capacity. It is getting to the point where a cycle of rising wages and higher inflation necessitates higher interest rates. That, in turn, reflects policies from the Obama administration and the Fed that long predate Mr. Trump’s election. Conventional economic theory predicts that if a government tries to increase deficits at a time of full employment, the results will be some mix of higher inflation and higher interest rates, crowding out investment. So if tax cuts, more military spending and other Trumpian policies add to deficits at a time the economy is already running at full blast, rising prices and rising rates are exactly what we would expect to see. | 1 |
The arrival of new media, like The Duran and so many others, are helping to educate a public increasingly sick and tired of illegal war. By Adam Garrie The Duran October 28, 2016
In many ways, George Bush and Tony Blair’s war on Iraq feels like yesterday. Colin Powell’s jewel case of lies before the UN, Tony Blair’s Parliamentary debate during which he listened neither to reason nor to warnings, the ‘shock, and awe’ of bombs being dropped on Iraq’s great cities, Bush’s ‘mission accomplished’ farce and the war which continued for years after, one which still is ongoing; all of it feels surreally fresh.
Almost 14 years later, the lessons of Iraq are well known: illegally invade a sovereign country which threatens no one and expect hell, instability, blood, torture and terror as a consequence. The lessons were not remembered by Hillary Clinton who along with David Cameron and Nicholas Sarkozy dragged a hesitant Barack Obama into a war in Libya, a war whose outcome is even more disastrous than the war in Iraq.
The wider public, however, have learned the lessons. Both in Europe and in America, the general public are fed up of war. Some are too naïve or too arrogant to openly associate themselves with those of us who warned of the dangers a war on Iraq would unleash. But they too have learned the lessons. It is one of the reasons Donald Trump continually states his opposition to the war in Iraq which then Senator Hillary Clinton voted for.
This is why the mainstream media are in fits of hysterics trying to do the bidding of their war monger masters in attempting to convince the public to support doing to Assad what was illegally done to Saddam and Gaddafi.Since 2003 not only have the lessons of Iraq been instructive to erstwhile war supporters in the west, the media landscape has also changed significantly. Television channels like RT did not exist in 2003 but now they present rational claims from not just the west but around the world, against the calls for war.
In hindsight, the internet had not fully blossomed by 2003, much though it felt that it had done at the time. Today many news and analysis websites put the failing newspapers to shame. They are an instantaneous source of valuable information.
Wikileaks did not exist in 2003, but since its inception in 2006, it has blown the lid on the sadistic things governments do, how they do them and the sinister motives behind them. One cannot dismiss oppositional viewpoints as conspiratorial when one reads the documents which speak the truth in black and white.
But most importantly yet surprisingly least talked about, is the fact that Syrians have the internet, they have cameras, they have websites and they are using them. In 2003, the western media attempted to demonize the proud and highly educated Iraqi people either as gangs of Saddamite stooges or as opposed unpatriotic invalids without minds. Because of the poor education system in countries like America, many believed this without ‘questioning more’.
Today, though, no matter what the mainstream media say, the voices of the Syrian people cannot be drowned out.
Indeed, The Duran frequently publishes pieces by Afra’a Dagher , an actual Syrian as opposed to Samantha Power who pretends to speak for Syrians against their wishes. There are videos on youtube, statements in English from Syrian journalists, experts, and the legitimate government. This are being read and circulated on social media. The mainstream media monopoly is over.
It is often viewed as a platitude to say that ideas and the dissemination of ideas can change the world. But the aggregate effect of opposition media like RT, Wikileaks, online expert opinion and analysis and the power of social media may well have saved Syria from the fate of Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya. Tags: | 0 |
One Response to OPEN your EYES..See PAST the Puppet Show Darzak October 29, 2016 at 12:42 pm
I couldn’t watch this for more than 5 minutes.. The guy’s delivery is so rambling and slow. He needs to think about his discussion beforehand and perhaps refer to some notes. I’m sure this 35 minutes of info could have been presented clearly in less than 10. If I’m wrong here, and he was just slow out of the gate, please reply and I’ll go back and watch the rest upon your recommendation. | 0 |
Lori Scialabba, the Acting Director at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) in the Department of Homeland Security, “announced her coming retirement from federal service” on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the department has confirmed to Breitbart News. [Scialabba was number one on the list of eight Obama holdover bureaucrats identified by Breitbart News that President Trump “can fire or remove at Homeland Security. ” According to a source within the Department of Homeland Security, Scialabba sent the following message to her colleagues at USCIS about her resignation on Tuesday: Dear Colleagues, After almost 33 years of public service, I will be retiring from the federal government at the end of March. I consider myself very fortunate to have worked with USCIS for over 10 years, first as the associate director of the Refugee, Asylum and International Operations Directorate, and then serving as your deputy director for nearly six years. While the decision to leave USCIS was difficult, the opportunity presented was right for me. I have accepted a position in the private sector and look forward to the new challenge. I come from a strong public service background and I’ve been lucky to work in agencies with a meaningful mission. The work USCIS performs is of great importance, and has been an extraordinary part of my life. My entire career has been dedicated to the fascinating and complicated subject of immigration law, policy, and operations and I have enjoyed the challenge and reward of serving in the federal government. I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere appreciation to all of you. During my time at USCIS, I have remained impressed by the quality and dedication of the workforce. You work tirelessly to fulfill our mission in a professional, compassionate manner while ensuring the integrity of the immigration system and the security of our nation. I am very proud of everything you have accomplished and very proud to have been the deputy director of USCIS. Best wishes, Lori Scialabba, Acting Director, “I can confirm the text you sent [above] is not a resignation letter — it is from an email dated March 7 from the acting director which informed agency employees of her decision to retire from federal service at the end of March after almost 33 years of public service,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security tells Breitbart News. Scialabba made headlines during her brief tenure with the Trump administration when she openly defied the president. “One week after President Donald Trump fulfilled a campaign promise by curbing the arrival of refugees from several countries, a senior bureaucrat at the Department of Homeland Security countermanded his presidential directive,” Breitbart News reported on February 22: The acting director of U. S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of Homeland Security, Lori Scialabba, sent out a February 2 memo directing her employees to continue processing documents for refugees from the countries named by Donald Trump. The seven remaining Obama holdover bureaucrats on that list of eight who President Trump “can fire or remove at Homeland Security” include the following: 2. David Grannis, Principal Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis in the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security. 3. Tracy Renaud, Acting Deputy Director, Management Directorate, USCIS, DHS, 4. Daniel Renaud, Associate Director, Field Operations Directorate, USCIS, DHS, 5. Joanna Ruppel, Acting Associate Director, Refugee, Asylum and International Operations, USCIS, DHS, 6. Mark Borkowski, Assistant Commissioner for Technology Innovation and Acquisition, Customs and Border Patrol, DHS, 7. Seth M. Stodder, Assistant Secretary for Border, Immigration and Trade Policy, Office of Policy, Department of Homeland Security, 8. Mary E. Giovagnoli, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Border, Immigration and Trade Policy, Department of Homeland Security, “I would bet that Scialabba will be joining a law team that will be filing lawsuits against Trump,” a source within the Department of Homeland Security tells Breitbart News. | 1 |
[Photo: Jorge Lascar’s photo of the Great Wall of China] =By= Vasily Kashin Editor's Note The relationship between China and the United States has a very long history. Regardless of whatever might that the U.S. has had at a given point, the sheer power to accomplish the amazing cannot be denied – starting with the most incredible “border fence” of all time, The Great Wall of China. China has been seen as a provider of labor for centuries, from imported labor to build yet another great project, this one in the US, the transcontinental railroad, to an in situ labor force for the world. China was feared because of the number of soldiers they could use to flood and control the US, to a subservient labor force, and now as a head to head competitor for dominance of the world.
U.S.- Chinese relations are “the most important bilateral relations in the 21st century,” as Chinese politicians and scholars like to emphasize. Gradually, they have become a central, if not the main, narrative in world politics. Various things, ranging from Russia’s foreign policy to the situation in regions that are distant from Asia, depend on the future vector of these relations. Now, however, relations between China and the United States are going through hard times, prompting the question: How far will their disagreements go? In answering this question, it is worth recalling why the U.S. and China began to cooperate years ago, what objectives they pursued, and what results they have achieved. Fighting Communism P rerequisites for cooperation between the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the United States emerged even before the CPC took power in China in 1949. There is information that Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong sought to establish cooperation, even though limited, with the United States when he was still at his “revolutionary base” in Yan’an. During World War II, Chinese communists had regular contacts with U.S. political and military officials in China. In 1944, the U.S. established the Army Observation Group, commonly known as the Dixie Mission, in Yan’an. Such an approach to the United States was natural for the Chinese Communist Party, regardless of how radical its doctrines were at that time. Mao was, above all, a Chinese nationalist who saw communism as a way to restore the greatness of his country. His dependence on the Soviet Union irked him (and he shook off this dependence as soon as he could). This is why his desire to conduct a multivector policy was logical and inevitable.
Many experienced American Sinologists, both military and civilian, reasonably spoke of certain prospects for cooperation with Chinese communists already at that time. The regime established by the president of the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek, was weak, corrupt and inefficient. Its stability was in doubt, and it systematically misused American economic and military aid. At the same time, U.S. experts were well aware of Mao’s desire to get out of Moscow’s shadow. A group of renowned State Department officers, known as China Hands, praised merits of Chinese communists, their effective organization, discipline and non-corruptness, as well as their willingness to make bargains with the United States.
Their point of view was supported by some prominent military leaders in the U.S., including General Joseph Stilwell. But they were opposed by a group of anti-communist dogmatists led by Patrick Hurley, U.S. ambassador to China in the last years of World War II, who completely fell under the influence of the Chinese president’s family. One would think that after the communist victory on the mainland in 1949 and the expulsion of Kuomintang supporters to Taiwan, a choice in favor of cooperation with Mao was obvious. But that did not happen. After the communist victory in China, the U.S. government made no sober analysis of the new situation. The United States was seized by panic, which fueled McCarthyism. This panic blended well with effective lobbying efforts by Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling, who assigned a key role to contacts with conservative religious groups in the U.S. (both were Methodists).
The result was a sweeping personnel purge, paradoxical for a developed democratic country, which involved security agencies, and the establishment of an atmosphere of suspicion and self-censorship in the field of foreign policy. The China Hands and scholars, intelligence officers and journalists who were close to the group became targets of harassment. Sometimes, even their forecasts that had become true were used as grounds for accusation. For example, John Davies, a political attaché to Stilwell and one of the organizers of the Dixie Mission, predicted that communists would win in the Chinese Civil War. He was accused of sympathizing with them and fired from the State Department. After the dismissal, Davies went to Peru where he ran a furniture business.
Even interference by the judicial authorities was not enough to remedy the situation and protect victims of the ideological campaign. Another prominent diplomat and Sinologist, John Service, who met with Mao in Yan’an, was fired from the State Department but was later reinstated by the Supreme Court. Yet he was assigned to head the U.S. Consulate in Liverpool without holding a diplomatic rank.
Developments in Washington’s China policy in the 1950s, influenced by the so-called “China lobby” formed by Chiang Kai-shek, shaped Sino-American relations until the end of the 1960s. The U.S. policy in the Far East was dogmatized and privatized by a small group of professional ideologists and lobbyists. Chiang successfully sold Americans a myth about a “communist threat” until the 1970s, and many people in the United States were interested in buying it. Expressing alternative points of view was dangerous. Those times have a strong association with modern Russian-American relations.
The U.S. and its allies paid a high price for this policy—they paid with their political interests, territories, economic losses and thousands of lives. China, which turned into an implacable enemy of the Western world, fought against UN forces in Korea and played an important role in France’s defeat in Indochina and, later, in the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Even the obvious breakup in Sino-Soviet relations in 1960 did not lead to immediate changes in the U.S. position. Only the disappointing course of the Cold War and the bogging down in the Vietnam trap made the United States seek a dialogue with Beijing in the late 1960s. The long-overdue and forced moves by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, which resolutely cancelled out the previous 20 years of America’s East Asia policy, brought about a major, albeit belated, victory for the U.S. in the Cold War. A Rapprochement Against Russia
China’s becoming a U.S. partner in the anti-Soviet coalition was the worst foreign-policy disaster for Moscow over the entire period of its global rivalry with the United States. The Soviet Union and its Communist Party saw their influence on many left-wing and national liberation movements in the Third World waning, and faced a new active and influential opponent, which later won a seat on the UN Security Council. Moscow had to deploy a large military force of hundreds of thousands of people in the Siberian and Far Eastern taiga and provide them with housing and infrastructure, which overstrained the Soviet economy. China played a key role in arming Afghan mujahideen, who fought against Soviet troops, with simple and effective Soviet-designed small arms and light weapons. Soviet aviation in Afghanistan suffered the greatest losses not from the much-touted American Stinger man-portable air defense system but from DShKM heavy machine guns, manufactured in China under the Soviet license.
However, the years 1988 and 1989 brought about major changes that eliminated basic prerequisites for the U.S.-China partnership on the old, anti-Soviet basis. The Cold War was over; Soviet troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan, and Vietnam began to pull out its troops from Cambodia; and the Soviet Union and China finally normalized their relations during Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing in 1989. At the same time, the suppression of the protests in Tiananmen Square by the Chinese leadership clearly demonstrated that the Chinese communists did not intend to follow in the footsteps of their Soviet and Eastern European colleagues and launch democratic reforms.
Sino-U.S. relations entered a period of crisis. After the 1989 crackdown, the West imposed economic and technological sanctions on China, some of which (for example, the arms embargo) have not been lifted by the U.S. and its allies to this day. Some Congress members called for a full revision of relations with Beijing or, at least, for their linkage to human rights in China. In 1993, President Clinton signed an order to extend most-favored nation trade privileges to China but tied it to progress on human rights issues. However, the order was never fulfilled.
The two countries preserved and developed their mutual relations on the basis of two major factors—economic and ideological. By 1990, their mutual trade had reached $20 billion and had been growing by tens of percentage points a year. Foreign direct investment in China stood at $6.6 billion a year. Obviously, international companies saw China as a promising huge market and an advantageous area for production location.
The Chinese government gave serious consideration to the influence of U.S. businesses on politics and paid special attention to ties with business circles. If necessary, it made large-scale one-time purchases of U.S. products, such as civilian aircraft, executive cars, or industrial equipment. By the time the Soviet Union broke up, there were many active and interested supporters of cooperation with China in the United States, who expressed their opinions to Congress and the president. Anticipating Regeneration
From an ideological point of view, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, authoritarian communist regimes ceased to be perceived as serious opponents. The transformation and, later, complete regeneration or fall of these regimes and their transition to liberal democracy was believed to be predetermined. Back in the 1980s, the Chinese reforms evoked widespread hope in the U.S. that the communist system in China would gradually disintegrate and that even at that moment it was on the verge of collapse and rebirth (President Ronald Reagan liked to refer to that country as “so-called Communist China”).
The events of 1989 only slightly shook this confidence but they did not undermine it. Moreover, it was believed that the Chinese authorities were aware of the inevitability of changes in favor of a liberal model and that they only sought to make it controllable. For ideological reasons, Washington traditionally ignored clear and unambiguous wordings of Chinese Communist Party documents about the inadmissibility of “liberal rebirth,” the increased control over the media and public life, changes in the defense policy and other “inconvenient facts.” President Bill Clinton wrote in his book My Life in 1998 about his Chinese counterpart: “The more time I spent with Jiang, the more I liked him. […] Even though I didn’t always agree with him, I became convinced that he believed he was changing China as fast as he could, and in the right direction.”
The spread of the Internet in the 1990s was accompanied by over-inflated, romantic expectations and this strengthened the illusion of an inevitable and imminent rebirth of the Chinese regime. It was believed that the Chinese Communist Party’s power was incompatible with the free movement of information in the global network. Mainstream views on an inevitable regeneration of the Chinese state were set out, for example, in Clinton’s speech in Congress in March 2000, in which he advocated granting China permanent normal trade relations status.
“In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem,” the U.S. president said. “In the past year, the number of Internet addresses in China has more than quadrupled from 2 million to 9 million. […] Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet—good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall. […] In the knowledge economy, economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.”
Today, it is an established fact that the Chinese government has created an effective system of control over the Internet and, moreover, it successfully uses new information technologies in its own interests. Clinton in 2000 mentioned a cell phone as one of the instruments of liberalization. In 2015, the Xinhua News Agency published an interesting article saying that the Political Work Department of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army began to download special applications to Chinese soldiers’ smartphones with ideological materials—texts by Mao and classics of Marxism-Leninism and tests.
China is one of the strongest powers in the world in computer espionage, computer security and the use of the Internet for resolving political tasks. New technologies have not undermined the system; rather, they have strengthened it and expanded capabilities for propaganda and control.
The United States has never, not for a single moment, been ready to put up with the existence of China the way it is, with its one-party political system led by the CPC. From the late 1960s and until the first achievements of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, Washington’s China policy was based on the need to restore balance with the Soviet Union at all costs after a series of major setbacks. Later, especially after the collapse of communism in Europe, this policy was based on a holistic dogmatic worldview, which prevailed in the U.S. and which suggested that the Chinese regime was to undergo (or already was undergoing) a transformation and establish a liberal capitalist order—simply as an inevitable consequence of its economic development and modernization.
Until this transformation was over, it was planned to contain China in areas where its actions would interfere with U.S. interests. It was believed that this containment would not take too much effort, as China would become transformed long before it could pose a serious problem.
China’s efforts to restore and build up its military power came under close scrutiny since the second half of the 1990s. In 2000, U.S. Congress asked the Pentagon to provide annual reports on China’s military power. Yet, until the late 2000s, the West was largely derisive about China’s military buildup efforts. It thought China was incapable of creating a high-tech industry and powerful armed forces within a reasonable time. Also, the West underestimated the future rate of China’s economic expansion to Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, the growth of China’s political influence, and the enlargement of the area of its interests.
The Chinese leadership was well aware of this situation and supported Washington’s illusions in every way. Beijing had different political rhetoric for domestic and foreign consumption. The country strictly abided by Deng Xiaoping’s temporarily passive foreign policy (“conceal your true potential”) and kept a low profile in world affairs. Liberal economists and political analysts that advocated cautious reforms and cooperation with the West were favored by the government. Beijing redoubled efforts to build a network of ties with major American businesses and politicians. Sometimes these efforts were ridiculous. According to testimony given by Clinton’s election campaign fundraiser Johnny Chung and published in the late 1990s, General Ji Shengde, the head of China’s military intelligence, met with Chung in Macau in August 1996 and provided him with $300,000 for Clinton’s re-election campaign.
Naturally, China did undergo a major social and political transformation, but over time the vector of this transformation began to veer off from the American expectations. The Chinese transformation has nothing to do with what was happening in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s-1990s. Rather, it is similar to what happened in Western Europe in the 19th century, or in Russia and Japan in the late 19th/mid-20th century. The industrialization and economic breakthrough inevitably led to a generation gap, changes in the age-old way of life and family values, economic inequality, and radicalism. Gradually, internal conflicts came to a head, and society felt the need for a “strong hand.” These tendencies were coupled with euphoria over the country’s economic and industrial progress, the rise of nationalism, the feeling of exceptionalism, and interest in one’s roots.
One can definitely speak of a symbiosis of the state bureaucracy and big business, which needs to move into international markets, severe social stratification and conflicts caused by it, and the domination of leftist and nationalist ideas in public discussions, although there is a small pro-Western liberal group of “public intellectuals,” who do not have broad support. Internal problems are coupled with a desire for national revenge for the shock and humiliation experienced by the Chinese nation in the period from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. China’s modern ideology and culture are largely built on the comprehension and experience of this trauma. Xi Jinping even delivered his policy speech about “the Chinese dream,” understood as the rejuvenation and rebirth of the Chinese nation, when he visited a National Museum of China exhibition devoted to China’s recovery from the “century of humiliation.”
The militarization of politics and the growing popularity of radical ideas is another indication that the political development of China, where more than 80 percent of the population lived in villages in 1980, is now at a stage where major European countries and Japan were 100 to 150 years ago. Political reforms conducted in such conditions can and, most likely, should be accompanied by the introduction of individual democratic institutions, but in terms of content they will be a far cry from those of Western liberal democracies of today, just as elective institutions in present-day Iran are.
Mankind’s historical experience shows that a country can exist in such a state and even quickly develop technologically for an indefinitely long time, for decades, at least. European empires and the Empire of Japan ceased to exist not as a result of a smooth and natural regeneration but after world wars which led to the disintegration of states or foreign occupation for losing nations, or to a catastrophic overstrain for the winners. In the nuclear age, the threat of such wars has decreased. In addition, the maintenance of the nuclear shield upon its completion does not cost much (spending on the Strategic Missile Forces in Russia is less than ten percent of the national defense budget). This factor allows the country to ensure its military invulnerability, while avoiding economic overstrain and pursuing a reasonable (that is, not Soviet) defense policy.
The destabilization of the ruling regime is quite possible in such circumstances, but it is hard to see how it can lead to the establishment of liberal democracy. There is information indicating that there is a great potential of discontent in Chinese society, but the demand for equality and social justice, as well as nationalism, matters much more to the population than political liberties. In a hypothetical “post-revolutionary” China, the People’s Liberation Army command, functionaries of the present CPC, and the management of state-owned companies will be much stronger than progressive professors and high-profile journalists of the business media.
Meanwhile, China has already become an economic superpower and a great military power. The China factor has completely changed the system of relations between suppliers and buyers of natural resources, certainly not in favor of the latter. The emergence of the new market and source of investment and technologies as an alternative to the West has instilled more confidence in the ruling regimes of developing countries that export resources and cheap labor. Some countries already can be viewed as China’s “clients,” for example, Cambodia and Laos in Southeast Asia. Partnership with China has strengthened the position of Thailand’s military government leaders who carried out a coup in the country, condemned by the United States.
China is now the world’s third military and military-industrial power after the U.S. and Russia. Moreover, in some key aspects of military power, China is already ahead of Russia and has incomparably greater reserves for building up its military potential. China’s foreign policy began to change in 2013, becoming increasingly active and offensive, especially on strategic issues that are important to China (the South China Sea). In 2015, the country built its first overseas military base. Deng’s passive foreign policy is slowly receding into the past.
Meanwhile, prospects for China’s “transformation” are becoming increasingly dim. The country’s economic development model began to change in the late 2000s, but those changes were slow and often belated. After Xi came to power, economic changes began to be accompanied by more obvious changes in the political model, which involved sweeping anti-corruption purges in the government and the army, unprecedented centralization of power, the establishment of strict control over the media and society, and policy tightening with regard to Western organizations operating in the country. Giving Up Illusions
In March 2015, The Wall Street Journal published an article, “The Coming Chinese Crackup,” by U.S. Sinologist David Shambaugh, which can be viewed as a landmark in the American comprehension of the situation in China. The author debunks and rejects the theory of China’s “transformation.” He insists that the Xi-led regime is moving in the wrong direction, in contrast to the times of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, when the desired transformation did take place. Shambaugh concludes that the collapse of the regime is the only possible outcome for it. “Its demise is likely to be protracted, messy and violent,” he writes, adding that the endgame of Chinese communist rule “has progressed further than many think.” To substantiate his conclusions, the author draws parallels with the Soviet Union, which seems strange considering that the Soviet Union and present-day China are absolute opposites in terms of culture, politics and economy. The only things they had in common were “the absence of democracy” and the word “communist” in the names of their ruling parties.
Anyway, the belief that China will inevitably, gradually and relatively painlessly transform into a loyal member of the U.S.-led world order has been relegated to the periphery of the discussion. The incumbent regime has been given an unambiguous assessment, and its collapse (preferably, an early one) has been predicted. However, no one knows when this will happen.
Doubts about the possibility of China’s rapid transformation began to take root back in the late 1990s-early 2000s, but the 9/11 events temporarily shifted the focus of U.S. policy towards the Middle East. China received a strategic respite, which lasted until the Obama administration proclaimed a “pivot to Asia.” Some Chinese analysts expected that the events in Ukraine would give China another respite, but the South China Sea situation has shown that they were wrong. The Ukrainian situation has stabilized and left the global agenda, whereas the situation in the Western Pacific is attracting more and more attention.
The scope of China’s containment is broadening, while the scope of U.S.-China cooperation is gradually narrowing. Of course, it is easy not to see this if one cites high volumes of U.S.-Chinese trade or the great enthusiasm for American popular culture among the Chinese. Usually, these factors are mentioned to show that U.S.-China relations are very close and productive, while elements of rivalry in these relations are secondary. Both arguments, economic and cultural, have been disproved so many times by history that it is strange that they are still in use.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Japan’s main trading partners were the United States, the British Empire, China, and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia)—precisely the countries that Japan later attacked. Japan owed its rise to its long (until the 1920s) economic and industrial partnership with Britain; even the Japanese battleships that destroyed the Russian fleet at the Battle of Tsushima were built in British shipyards. In contrast, Germany and Italy, Japan’s allies during World War II, did not play a significant role in Japan’s trade in prewar years. The British Empire and France were major trading partners of Germany before both world wars. Germany was the largest economic partner of Russia before the First World War; it accounted for half of Russia’s imports and was its major source of technologies and investment.
The present U.S. soft power is a mere apology for the soft power of France in the 18th-early 19th century. There were times when the aristocracies of many European countries spoke French. For years, France was the only trendsetter in fashion and arts, and traces of those times can still be seen today in the Russian language. As we know, this universal love of France did not save it. Russian francophone aristocrats brought Bashkir cavalry regiments to Paris. The First World War was fought among European empires, whose ruling dynasties and leading families were connected by ties of blood. Great Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who masterminded the attack on Pearl Harbor, was quite an Americanophile, because he studied in the United States and worked there for many years. Many educated Japanese in those times were strongly influenced by English and American culture.
Confrontation between the two giants of the contemporary world will grow slowly, of course. Conflicts among European empires before World War I grew slowly, too. The United States and China will continue to develop their mutual trade and cooperation in various fields. Over a century ago, more than two decades passed from the formation of the Franco-Russian alliance of 1891 to an open clash among the great powers in WWI. During all those years, numerous statements kept emphasizing that a direct conflict among the great powers was impossible in “our civilized age of trade, investment and progress.”
Vassily Kashin is Ph.D. in Political Science, is a senior research fellow at the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies at the National Research University—Higher School of Economics. He is also a leading research fellow at the Institute of the Russian Far East.
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The economy will keep growing just enough to put more Americans back to work, but without overheating to generate excessive inflation. American workers will see gradual pay raises that keep compensation rising faster than inflation. Interest rates will rise gradually, while staying low by historical standards. And that’s all before accounting for any major stimulative policies that may emerge from the Trump administration and Congress. That was the view of the economy sketched by the Federal Reserve chairwoman, Janet Yellen, at her first news conference of 2017 on Wednesday. In short, the Fed believes that after nearly eight years of trying to nurse the economy back to health, its work is nearly done. The general sense of rosiness isn’t really anything new — for years, Ms. Yellen and her predecessor, Ben Bernanke, have forecast that the economy will steadily converge toward a state of being neither too hot nor too cold. Two things have changed. First, that day now feels imminent, with the unemployment rate at 4. 7 percent and inflation closing on the 2 percent the Fed thinks best. That is a key reason the Fed raised its interest rate target Wednesday. Second, markets now believe the Fed’s message that higher rates are on the way bond markets suggest that the Fed will actually follow through with its intentions on gradual interest rate rises. You couldn’t say that a year ago. “The simple message is: The economy is doing well,” Ms. Yellen told reporters. The overwhelming message was of gradualism — both on the rate of economic improvement and the Fed’s own efforts to wind down its era of low interest rates. She suggested no urgency toward a tightening of the money supply that might suggest a readiness to accelerate interest rate increases. Ms. Yellen evinced little fear that the Fed is behind the curve, suggesting that two more interest rate increases are on the way over the remainder of 2017. This will, if these plans stay in force, remain the slowest cycle of interest rate increases in modern history. She also displayed little of the fear of setback that has been pervasive at the Fed for years. The central bank has spent the last eight years trying to help the recovery along with a series of monetary interventions more than any other institution in Washington, it owns the recovery. That has also meant that the Fed has acted with haste to signs of softening. In the winter of 2016, for example, barely a year ago, the central bank backed off plans for more rate increases after a steep stock market and a rise of economic pessimism. After years of persistently undershooting its 2 percent goal for inflation, the Fed explicitly, if subtly, raised the possibility on Wednesday of erring in the other direction. The central bank’s policy committee said it would be monitoring “actual and expected inflation developments relative to its symmetric inflation goal. ” In this context, “symmetric” implies that it aims for 2 percent inflation and would be equally displeased by inflation that was too high or too low. That implies that the Fed is not inclined to overreact to the possibility that inflation could drift slightly — and in the Fed’s view temporarily — above 2 percent in the coming months. After the announcement, the interest rates on Treasury bonds actually fell. That implies that markets were ready for signals of even more aggressive rate rises. And the clearest signal that the Fed is in territory was in how Ms. Yellen talked about the possibility of new tax cuts or infrastructure spending that might arrive in the months ahead. There has been “no reassessment” of those odds, she said. Presumably if that happens, the Fed would indeed raise interest rates more quickly, but Ms. Yellen shows no desire to get ahead of what the rest of the government is doing. Given the vagueness and uncertainty around those plans, that maintains options for officials at the Fed. If policies along those lines materialize, they can plug them into their models and accelerate the pace of rate increases if Congress is bogged down in stalemate, they won’t. It has been a long time coming, and Ms. Yellen went out of her way to avoid mounting a metaphorical “Mission Accomplished” banner. But in the substance of her policies, it is evident that the Fed feels it has mostly accomplished its job. | 1 |
Страна: Саудовская Аравия Как отмечает в своей новой статье постоянный обозреватель НВО Генри Каменс, конфликт в Йемене нанес серьезный удар не только по кошельку саудовского королевского семейства, но и существенно подорвал авторитет Саудовской Аравии в мире. Мировому сообществу и прежде всего региональным игрокам стало ясно, что Аль-Сауды не способны проводить военные операции где бы то ни было без «нянек» из Вашингтона. В этой связи Саудовская Аравия всеми силами пытается втянуть Вашингтон в йеменский конфликт, и инцидент с обстрелом американского эсминца Мэйсон, который сразу же свалили на хуситов, является самым ярким тому подтверждением. В ситуации, когда руководство в Вашингтоне меняется, Аль-Сауды стараются подбросить как можно больше дров в огонь, чтобы новая администрация не имела другого выхода, кроме как расхлебывать навалившиеся на неё проблемы. Автор отмечает, что атаки на американский эсминец в свое время послужили поводом для начал Вьетнамской войны, о чем саудовцы прекрасно помнят. Именно поэтому в ближайшее время можно ожидать новых инцидентов с участием американских военных как в самом Йемене, так и в его территориальных водах. С полной версией статьи вы можете ознакомиться здесь . Популярные статьи | 0 |
By Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 29, 2016
Russian media is claiming it was one of their Kornet missiles that was used but the video shows otherwise. This claim, stupid as it is, is telling as well. The video, as have so many others, proves that America is resupplying ISIS with arms against Iraq. These arms are being brought through Kurdish controlled territory, past a Turkish base and into Mosul.
Nobody pays any attention to the truth here which makes us wonder more than a bit why no one but VT writes about such things.
The US claims the Abrams M1 main battle tank was hit from behind with a 9M133 Kornet anti-tank missile at the Qurayyah crossroads south of Mosul, said the IS-affiliated Amaq news agency. However, a Kornet is not wireguided as was the missile that hit the tank.
The footage of the incident was published on Monday. Authenticity of the video could not be immediately verified.
Related Posts: No Related Posts The views expressed herein are the views of the author exclusively and not necessarily the views of VT, VT authors, affiliates, advertisers, sponsors, partners, technicians, or the Veterans Today Network and its assigns. LEGAL NOTICE - COMMENT POLICY Posted by Gordon Duff, Senior Editor on October 29, 2016, With 171 Reads Filed under WarZone . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. FaceBook Comments
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Greg Hunter – Recently, I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Jim Sinclair and Bill Holter at JSMineset.com. They wanted to get my take on the state of journalism, or the propaganda mainstream media. They also wanted to get a read on what many of my guests have been saying over the past several months about what is coming for the economy.
I also got to turn the tables about half way through the interview (38:33) and ask questions of two of the smartest guys in the world on finance, markets and precious metals.
Interviewing Jim Sinclair and Bill Holter on anything to do with the economy is like interviewing Batman and Superman of the investment world. They have very dire views of what is going to happen in America and the world on November 9 th , the day after the Presidential election. They think we are finally going to get the “Houston we have a problem” moment and are warning that everyone should stock up and prepare for a very rough ride. Please keep in mind, this interview was conducted a few days before the FBI reopened its case on the Clinton email scandal.
Jim Sinclair and Bill Holter offer interviews like this to their JSMineset.com subscribers only. They were kind enough to allow me to post this interview for all to listen to on the USAWatchdog.com site and YouTube channel.
Join Greg Hunter as he is interviewed by Jim Sinclair and Bill Holter of JSMineset.com. SF Source USA Watchdog Nov. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
. We Found It! The Interview That George Soros Desperately Tried to Bury George Soros tried to bury this video… and for good reason. In the interview Soros exclaims: “I am... http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/we-found-it-interview-that-george-soros.html George Soros tried to bury this video… and for good reason. In the interview Soros exclaims: “I am basically there to make money. I cannot, and do not, look at the social consequences of what I do.” The 13 minute video chronicles how Soros uses his money to further his neo-liberal cause, and more importantly fatten his bank account. When asked, “Do you believe in God?” Soros answered, “No!” Towards the end of the interview, a 60 Minutes commentator notes that “George Soros, in a way, is Donald Trump without the humility.” References: YouTube , TheDuran | 0 |
By Lasha Darkmoon on November 1, 2016 Tom Leonard — Darkmoon.me Oct 31, 2016 with pictures, captions, and comments by Lasha Darkmoon Hillary Clinton faced an upset in her run for the White House two days ago after the FBI announced a fresh probe into her emails. Investigators will examine new messages to see whether she sent classified information on a private server. Just ten days before Americans go to the polls, the Democrat candidate’s bid to become the first woman US president may be derailed if it is decided she should face criminal charges. ‘I AM INNOCENT!’ Recent Polls suggest Mrs Clinton will trounce Republican rival Donald Trump, who has been struggling to fight allegations about groping women. But Mrs Clinton will now be forced on the defensive herself in the final days of their vicious election battle. LD : The latest news is that Hillary’s 12-point lead has been “ wiped out ” within the last 24 hours, with Hillary now just one point ahead of Trump. This could of course change at any moment, with rapid fluctuations, depending on the volatility of the situation. FBI director James Comey had recommended earlier this year that the Department of Justice not press charges over emails sent by Mrs Clinton when she was secretary of state under Barack Obama. But he said ‘recent developments’ had prompted him to take another look. The agency has obtained new emails from an unrelated case that ‘appear pertinent’ to the investigation, said Mr Comey. A jubilant Mr Trump hailed the dramatic development of a re-opened investigation as ‘bigger than Watergate’, a reference to the corruption scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. ‘Bigger than Watergate’ The controversy has weighed heavily on the campaign, challenging Mrs Clinton’s key contention that – unlike her opponent – she would be a safe pair of hands in the White House. Mr Comey announced in July that the FBI’s 12-month investigation into Mrs Clinton’s controversial email traffic while secretary of state was over. She was criticised for using a private email server rather than the official system to transmit classified information, but escaped prosecution. In a harshly-worded criticism of her ‘extreme carelessness’ and ‘gross negligence’, Mr Comey said it was possible that hostile foreign governments had gained access to her poorly-protected account. He also flatly contradicted various Clinton claims although – in explaining why he had not recommended prosecuting her – he accepted there was no evidence she had intentionally jeopardised state secrets. The scandal has been brandished by Republicans as evidence of Mrs Clinton’s dishonesty and incompetence. Mr Comey informed Congress by letter that his agency had obtained new emails. They will be reviewed to see if they are significant and if new action against Mrs Clinton is required. Mr Comey did not give a timeframe for how long this investigation will take. The original FBI probe found that of 30,000 emails Mrs Clinton handed over to the State Department, 110 contained information that was classified at the time she sent or received them. However, another 33,000 emails went missing. They were presumed to have been permanently deleted but newly released FBI notes suggested they still exist in several locations and could be recovered. It is unclear whether any of these are involved in the new FBI inquiry. Law enforcement officials said the newly discovered emails were taken from the electronic devices of senior Clinton aide Huma Abedin and her disgraced husband Anthony Weiner during an investigation in the latter’s ‘sexting’ of girls. Anthony Weiner, Huma Abedin. Click to enlarge Note by LD : Huma Abedin is an American Muslim of Indo-Pakistani descent. Weiner is a disgraced Jewish politician who has been involved in a series of sex scandals. When Huma found out about her husband’s sleazy sexual activities, she was forced to divorce him. This was in August 2016. The unlikely couple had been married for just over six years. As for Huma, her relationship with Hillary Clinton has been an extraordinarily close one for almost 20 years, so much so that there have been sensational rumors of a lesbian liaison . The view for popular consumption is that Hillary is Huma’s “mentor” and “mother figure”. Hillary once compared Huma to her own daughter Chelsea. “I have one daughter,” she said. “But if I had a second daughter, it would be Huma.” Huma’s real mother, noting that Hillary had now replaced her in her daughter’s affections, once told Hillary jokingly, “I’m jealous of you!” (See here ) John Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono ( pictured ), claims to have had a lesbian affair with Hillary in the 1970s. “We met many times,” Yoko boasts, “and became very intimate ! ” (LD) TOM LEONARD continues : Weiner, a former Democrat congressman for New York, became embroiled in a series of scandals over exchanging sexually explicit text messages with a string of women. He separated from Miss Abedin, vice chairman of the Clinton campaign, in August. It is understood the FBI is investigating Weiner after it was revealed that he had been sexting a high school student who was 15 at the time. Mr Trump reacted with delight to Mrs Clinton’s 11th-hour election nightmare. Addressing a jubilant crowd in New Hampshire, Trump said: ‘ Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale we’ve never seen before. We must not let her take her criminal scheme into the Oval Office.’ Mr Trump had previously criticised the FBI and Department of Justice for not bringing charges against his election opponent. His running mate, Mike Pence, called on the FBI to immediately release all the emails pertinent to the investigation, adding: ‘The American people have a right to know.’ The Republican vice presidential candidate told a rally in Pennsylvania, that he and Donald Trump ‘commend the FBI for having the courage to reopen the case’. Chants of ‘Lock her up!’ came even before Mr Pence referenced the FBI investigation. Mrs Clinton ignored shouted questions from reporters about the new FBI investigation as she walked off her plane in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. House Speaker Paul Ryan, the most senior Republican in Congress, said she had betrayed Americans’ trust for handling ‘the nation’s most important secrets. HOT NEWS! (just sent in by our Far Eastern correspondent ‘FM’) LATEST! . . . 4-minute VIDEO | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The fallout over the potential for Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphones to catch fire is intensifying. On Friday, the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission urged owners of the smartphone to power down their Galaxy Note 7 devices and stop using them altogether. “C. P. S. C. and Samsung are working cooperatively to formally announce an official recall of the devices as soon as possible,” the agency said in a statement. “C. P. S. C. is working quickly to determine whether a replacement Galaxy Note 7 is an acceptable remedy for Samsung or their phone carriers to provide to consumers. ” The C. P. S. C. is the main consumer product safety agency in the United States, with broad oversight over toys, tractors, appliances and electronics. This year, the C. P. S. C. recalled hoverboards that contained batteries those batteries exploded or caught fire in dozens of cases. The commission’s statement is the latest blow to Samsung and the Galaxy Note 7, which became available only two weeks ago. This month, Samsung said it would recall 2. 5 million of the devices because of an issue with the batteries in the phones, which can catch fire and explode. The problem had affected 35 devices globally as of last week. Samsung said it was voluntarily recalling the phones and “conducting a thorough inspection with our suppliers to identify possible affected batteries in the market. ” Air safety regulators worldwide have since advised passengers not to charge or turn on the smartphones inside an aircraft. Three Australian airlines have banned them. On Thursday, the Federal Aviation Administration also said it “strongly” advised passengers onboard planes not to use the Galaxy Note 7. In a statement on Friday, Tim Baxter, president of Samsung Electronics America said, “We are asking users to power down their Galaxy Note 7s and exchange them now. ” The recall comes at a tricky time for Samsung. The Galaxy is one of the South Korean company’s most visible consumer product lines, and its smartphones compete with the Apple iPhone for with consumers. This week, Apple unveiled its newest smartphones, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, which will ship later this month. It was unclear if Samsung would provide refunds for Galaxy Note 7 customers who did not want a replacement provided by the company. All four major wireless carriers in the United States — Verizon, ATT, and Sprint — have halted sales of the Galaxy Note 7 and have been given instructions to help owners make an exchange, Samsung said. While the recall of the Galaxy Note 7 is Samsung’s largest voluntary recall, it is not the biggest on record. In 2007, Nokia announced a recall of 46 million cellphone batteries. In 2006, Dell recalled 4. 1 million batteries for notebook computers. Maria Rerecich, director of electronics testing for Consumer Reports, said the number of people affected by Samsung’s recall was small but showed “a serious potential safety hazard. ” | 1 |
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