text
stringlengths 1
134k
| label
int64 0
1
|
|---|---|
Supermoon to pass Earth at closest on Monday morning
biggest and brightest moon ever seen since 1948 will occur Monday at 6:23 EST, coming some 216,000 miles from Earth.
Reports say that the moon’s orbit is “egg-shaped” and that’s why it will appear it’s biggest Monday morning, until the next time the phenomenon will happen in 2034. Image: R Singh/Flickr | 0 |
White Supremacy Elected Trump? By Paul Craig Roberts
November 10, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - The American electorates preference for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders has established two facts. One is that the majority of the American people do not believe the media presstitutes. The other is that only the progressives and liberals who inhabit the Atlantic Northeast and Pacific West coasts believe the presstitutes.
Trumps election to the presidency has confirmed these holier-than-thou souls in their strongly held belief that America is a white trash racist country. They have told us this all day long today.
From these people and from the presstitutes we hear that white supremacy elected Trump. This is their propaganda, the intention of which is to discredit a Trump administration before it is inaugerated. Funny how white supremacy elected black Obama twice previously.
Truthout has lost it completely. John Knefel declares The David Dukes of the World Prevail.
Kelly Hayes declares White Supremacy Elected Donald Trump.
William Rivers Pitt declares We have elected a fascist that Mussolini would have recognized on sight.
Hillary carried only a handful of states, the states that comprise the One Percents stomping grounds. Yet Amy Goodman of Democracy Now sees meaning in political writer John Nichols claim that as Hillary carried New York and California, she won the popular vote and should be in the White House. I remember a few days ago George Soros saying that Trump would win the popular vote, but that the electoral vote would go to Hillary, thus ridding the oligarchs of Trump.
Earth Justice promises to hold Trump accountable. Trump who promises to end the threat of nuclear war with Russia and China, thereby doing more to save animal and human life than the entirety of the Democratic Party and environmental organizations, is going to be held accountable by an organization that allegedly is beyond politics and is dedicated to preserving animals from destruction.
The ACLU, of which I am a member, has also put on notice the president-elect who has said he will save us from nuclear war. Faced with this idiocy from the ACLU, I will not renew my membership.
Feminists tell us that we are grieving, scared, and in shock, and that it is critical that we stand together and support each other.
Jeremy Ben-Ami of the J Street Jewish Community tells us that it is an incredibly sad and difficult day. For tens of millions of Americans who share a core belief in tolerance, decency and social justice, the election results are a severe shock. In this challenging moment, we turn to one another for comfort and community. During this election, J Street made unequivocally clear our conviction that Donald Trump is not fit to be president of the United States.
Van Jones, a CNN commentator, said that Trumps election is a nightmare, a deeply painful moment, a whitelash against minorities. While he bemoaned the pain inflicted upon poor little presstitute Van Jones, he didnt mind insulting the American electorate and the President-elect of the United States. After all, Van Jones sees that as his racist prerogative.
And so, the holier-than-thou crowd prefers Hillary, despite her unambigious position that she would maximize conflict with Russia and China, provoke direct military conflict between the US and Russia by imposing a no-fly zone in Syria, attack Iran and other of Israels targets, further enrich her Wall Street handlers by privatizing Social Security, and prevent any dissent from the lowly people class of her high-handed ways. If William Rivers Pitt sees Trump as a Mussolini fascist, Trump is too mild for Pitt. He prefers Hillary, a Hitler to the third power.
The progressives have totally discredited themselves just as the presstitutes have done. Their need for a bogyman to nourish their hysteria indicates serious psychological disturbance. They actually prefer the risk of Armageddon to peace among nuclear powers. As their 501(c)3s live off corporate contributions, they prefer globalist corporate profits to jobs for ordinary Americans.
These are the people who think of themselves as our instructors and our betters.
If only Trump could exile the lot of them. They are anti-American to the core.
The Working Class Won The Election
By Paul Craig Roberts
November 10, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - The US presidential election is historic, because the American people were able to defeat the oligarchs. Hillary Clinton, an agent for the Oligarchy, was defeated despite the vicious media campaign against Donald Trump. This shows that the media and the political establishments of the political parties no longer have credibility with the American people.
It remains to be seen whether Trump can select and appoint a government that will serve him and his goals to restore American jobs and to establish friendly and respectful relations with Russia, China, Syria, and Iran.
It also remains to be seen how the Oligarchy will respond to Trumps victory. Wall Street and the Federal Reserve can cause an economic crisis in order to put Trump on the defensive, and they can use the crisis to force Trump to appoint one of their own as Secretary of the Treasury. Rogue agents in the CIA and Pentagon can cause a false flag attack that would disrupt friendly relations with Russia. Trump could make a mistake and retain neoconservatives in his government.
With Trump there is at least hope. Unless Trump is obstructed by bad judgment in his appointments and by obstacles put in his way, we should expect an end to Washingtons orchestrated conflict with Russia, the removal of the US missiles on Russias border with Poland and Romania, the end of the conflict in Ukraine, and the end of Washingtons effort to overthrow the Syrian government. However, achievements such as these imply the defeat of the US Oligarchy. Although Trump defeated Hillary, the Oligarchy still exists and is still powerful.
Trump said that he no longer sees the point of NATO 25 years after the Soviet collapse. If he sticks to his view, it means a big political change in Washingtons EU vassals. The hostility toward Russia of the current EU and NATO officials would have to cease. German Chancellor Merkel would have to change her spots or be replaced. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg would have to be dismissed.
We do not know who Trump will select to serve in his government. It is likely that Trump is unfamiliar with the various possibilities and their positions on issues. It really depends on who is advising Trump and what advice they give him. Once we see his government, we will know whether we can be hopeful for the changes that now have a chance.
If the oligarchy is unable to control Trump and he is actually successful in curbing the power and budget of the military/security complex and in holding the financial sector politically accountable, Trump could be assassinated.
Trump said that he will put Hillary in prison. He should first put her on trial for treason and war crimes along with all of the neoconservatives. That would clear the decks for peace with the other two major nuclear powers over whom the neoconservatives seek hegemony. Although the neoconservatives would still have contacts in the hidden deep state, it would make it difficult for the vermin to organize false flag operations or an assassination. Rogue elements in the military/security complex could still bring off an assassination, but without neocons in the government a coverup would be more difficult.
Trump has more understanding and insight than his opponents realize. For a man such as Trump to risk acquiring so many powerful enemies and to risk his wealth and reputation, he had to have known that the peoples dissatisfaction with the ruling establishment meant he could be elected president.
We wont know what to expect until we see who are the Secretaries and Assistant Secretaries. If it is the usual crowd, we will know Trump has been captured.
A happy lasting result of the election is the complete discrediting of the US media. The media predicted an easy Hillary victory and even Democratic Party control of the US Senate. Even more important to the medias loss of influence and credibility, despite the vicious media attack on Trump throughout the presidential primaries and presidential campaign, the media had no effect outside the Northeast and West coasts, the stomping grounds of the One Percent. The rest of the country ignored the media.
I did not think the Oligarchy would allow Trump to win. However, it seems that the oligarchs were deceived by their own media propaganda. Assured that Hillary was the sure winner, they were unprepared to put into effect plans to steal the election.
Hillary is down, but not the Oligarchs. If Trump is advised to be conciliatory, to hold out his hand, and to take the establishment into his government, the American people will again be disappointed. In a country whose institutions have been so completely corrupted by the Oligarchy, it is difficult to achieve real change without bloodshed.
Trump Faces Assassination
By Paul Craig Roberts:
November 10, 2016 " Information Clearing House " - " Pravda " - The US presidential election is historic, because the American people were able to defeat the oligarchs. Hillary Clinton, an agent for the oligarchy, was defeated despite the vicious media campaign against Donald Trump. This shows that both the political establishment of both political parties and the media no longer have credibility with the American people.
It remains to be seen whether Trump can select and appoint a government that will serve him and his goals to restore American jobs and to establish friendly and respectful relations with Russia, China, Syria, and Iran.
It also remains to be seen how the oligarchy will respond to Trump's victory. Wall Street and its agent, the Federal Reserve, can cause an economic crisis in order to put Trump on the defensive. Rogue agents in the CIA and Pentagon can cause a false flag attack that would disrupt friendly relations with Russia.
Trump could make a mistake and retain neoconservatives in his government.
With Trump there is at least hope. Unless Trump is obstructed by bad judgment and obstacles put in his way, we should expect an end to Washington's orchestrated conflict with Russia, the removal of the US missiles on Russia's border with Poland and Romania, the end of the conflict in Ukraine, and the end of
Washington's effort to overthrow the Syrian government. However, achievements such as these imply the total defeat of the oligarchy. Although Trump defeated Hillary, the oligarchy still exists and is still powerful.
Trump said that he no longer sees the point of NATO 25 years after the Soviet collapse. If he sticks to his view, it means a big political change in Washington's EU vassals. The hostility toward Russia of the current EU and NATO officials would have to cease.
We do not know who Trump will select to serve in his government. It is likely that Trump is unfamiliar with the various possibilities and their positions on issues. It really depends on who is advising Trump and what advice they give him. Once we see his government, we will know whether we can be hopeful for the changes that now have a chance.
If Trump is actually successful in curbing the power and budget of the military/security complex and in holding Wall Street politically accountable, he could be assassinated.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West , How America Was Lost , and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order . Donald Trump's unexpected win ignites massive protests across the US : Anti-Trump activists launched impromptu protests criticizing the racism, sexism and xenophobia that they say the president-elect has made mainstream.
Protesters block entrance to Trump Tower, stop traffic on Lake Shore Drive : Thousands of protesters angry over Donald Trump's election victory massed outside Trump Tower in Chicago on Wednesday evening before taking to downtown streets in an angry show of opposition to the president-elect.
Demonstrators gather outside White House to protest Donald Trump: A crowd of more than 1,000 people showed up in front of the White House in the early hours of Wednesday morning . Some demonstrators reportedly began chanting F--- Donald Trump.
Anti-Trump protests erupt in major US cities : Video | 1 |
CLEVELAND — It was just after 10:30 p. m. Tuesday, a coveted time slot at any political convention. But at the Quicken Loans Arena here, there were rows and rows of empty seats as Kimberlin Brown, a soap opera actress and California avocado farmer, struggled to talk over the chatter of delegates heading for the exits. The session was supposed to last until 11 p. m. the gavel fell at 10:58. Donald J. Trump came here promising a nominating convention bursting with glitz, energy, celebrity and the highest of show business production values. Instead, at least for the first two nights, Mr. Trump struggled to stage the biggest show of his political career: his own convention. The party gathering, after an unusually contentious primary season, has been marked by a noticeable absence of energy and swaths of empty seats. The audience, whose attention often seems elsewhere, responded to a historic moment — when Mr. Trump’s son Donald Jr. cast the votes that made his father the Republican presidential nominee — with modest applause. Chants of “ ” rose in one section of the floor, only to fade away. The crowd seemed to come alive only when the subject was not Mr. Trump but Hillary Clinton, the likely Democratic nominee. “Lock her up, lock her up, lock her up!” the crowd chanted lustily as Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor whom Mr. Trump defeated for the nomination, offered an indictment of Mrs. Clinton. “This is a joyless convention,” said Mike Murphy, a senior adviser to one of Mr. Trump’s rivals, Jeb Bush. “The mood among the delegates, I’ve found, is somewhere between grim resignation and the Donner Party. ” There were fewer empty seats in the arena on Wednesday night and the energy appeared to pick up, particularly as Ted Cruz, who came in second to Mr. Trump and enjoys significant support among conservative delegates, spoke. And even before Mr. Cruz had finished speaking, Mr. Trump entered the arena, igniting a roar. Convention planners — seeking to take advantage of one of the few times the candidate will have access to unfiltered television coverage — have made what many here say are questionable programming decisions as they seek to fill four valuable nights of exposure. On Tuesday, for example, Mr. Trump’s younger daughter, Tiffany, delivered a speech, but was off the stage by 10 p. m. — the start of the coveted hour. She gave way to Kerry Woolard, the general manager of Trump Winery. Donald Trump Jr. followed with a rousing speech for his father — but he soon yielded his spot to Ms. Brown, the actress who played the devious character Sheila Carter on “The Young and the Restless. ” She was killed off the show in the 1990s, according to Variety. “You don’t put an avocado farmer on in the middle of prime time,” said Russell Schriefer, who has been involved in planning Republican conventions for 20 years, about Ms. Brown. “That’s just common sense. ” “The most critical hour on prime time is 10 p. m. to 11 p. m. — especially at 10:30 when people change the channel,” said Tammy Haddad, a former MSNBC political director. “So you had Donald Trump Jr. hitting it out of the box with a good speech, but then it’s not just a soap star, but someone who was a soap star in the ’90s. ” Mr. Trump’s best opportunity will come Thursday, when he delivers his acceptance speech. And the pomp and emotional ceremony of that night could go a long way to erase any missteps of a convention that began with his wife, Melania Trump, delivering remarks that contained passages of a speech delivered in 2008 by Michelle Obama at her husband’s nominating convention. “ percent of the convention is Donald’s speech,” said Charlie Black, a longtime Republican strategist. “They have got to get that right. If they get that right, that’s the lasting impression that gives you momentum — or doesn’t. ” Still, the way the convention has unfolded to date has fed existing concerns among many Republicans about Mr. Trump’s political skills and the depth of his support in his own party. The flat mood so far is no small matter, considering that one of the top functions of a convention is to energize delegates and party leaders before sending them home to sell the candidate. The meandering convention to date and the problems involving Ms. Trump are the latest evidence of the organization that has marked this campaign. In the best of times, conventions are celebrations, four days of speeches and receptions as a party gears up for a fall campaign. The atmosphere has suffered from the absence of political celebrities — former presidents, presidential candidates, prominent senators — whom delegates would usually be grabbing for selfies and autographs. But Mr. Trump’s difficult relations with his party means that many of the party’s leaders — former President George W. Bush the 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney and the 2008 nominee, Senator John McCain of Arizona — are not here. Their absence has also limited the options of convention planners trying to fill four nights with speeches from political figures who can pack the hall and keep television cameras trained on the podium. Inside the hall, delegates milled around and kept speaking even as prominent Republicans took the lectern — among them Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House. While they cheered two of the candidates Mr. Trump had beaten to win the nomination, Mr. Christie and Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, they greeted Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, with scattered boos. Ms. Haddad said she was particularly struck by empty seats. “People talk about the floor being a little ” she said. “Well, the hall itself is not filled out. The best seats directly across from the stage are wide open. It’s significant. When a hall is not filled, it’s hard to bring the energy up. ” The lack of enthusiasm could be seen on and off the convention floor. Some hotels reported that guests had checked out early. Bars that had hoped to be serving revelers until 4 a. m. — thanks to a new state law passed specifically for the convention — have been closing early. A Rick Springfield concert the other night drew a sparse crowd. Christian Berle, a delegate from the District of Columbia who supported Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, said he has found the convention so distasteful that he was prepared to pay the airline change fee so that he could leave early. “I mean, $400 to get out of this place seems like a cheap thing,” he said. Norm Coleman, a former senator from Minnesota, said he would head home Thursday morning. “I have a lot of family commitments,” Mr. Coleman said with a smile as he stood in a convention hall marked by patches of open space. A political convention cannot be judged only by action in the hall. Cleveland was teeming with lobbyists, many of whom chose to spend their evenings at restaurants and receptions with elected party officials rather than on the convention floor. Andrew Richner, a delegate from Michigan, said the lack of energy reflected the fact that Mr. Trump had won after overcoming a crowded field. “We’re still feeling the lingering effects of a primary process,” said Mr. Richner, who had supported Mr. Kasich, who has stayed away from the convention. “It takes some time to get over that. ” Pete Hoekstra, a former congressman from Michigan, said the lack of enthusiasm could be traced to the fact that many of the people in the hall were Republican Party regulars who were never going to embrace Mr. Trump. “It clearly hasn’t been his crowd,” Mr. Hoekstra said. | 1 |
PARIS (AP) — Polling stations opened Saturday in France’s overseas territories — one day earlier than on the mainland — for the country’s unpredictable presidential election as the 11 candidates in the race observed a ban on campaigning. [advertisement | 0 |
LONDON — Protesting Britain’s plans to leave the European Union, Scotland’s leader, Nicola Sturgeon, called on Monday for a referendum on Scottish independence as early as next year. The announcement was not unexpected, but it reflected the stark divisions in Britain as the government prepares to start the official process to exit the bloc. Citing the fact that most Scottish voters had opposed a British exit in last year’s referendum — 62 percent voted in favor of staying in the European Union, compared with 48 percent in Britain over all — Ms. Sturgeon said that London had failed to address Scotland’s desire to remain in the single market after Britain leaves. “Not only is there no U. K. agreement on the way ahead, but the U. K. government has not moved even an inch in pursuit of compromise and agreement,” Ms. Sturgeon said in a speech in Edinburgh. “Our efforts at compromise have instead been met with a brick wall of intransigence. ” Scotland rejected independence from Britain in a closely watched vote in September 2014, and public opinion on the issue remains deeply divided. For Scotland to hold another legally binding referendum, the British Parliament would have to give its approval, as would the Scottish Parliament. Ms. Sturgeon’s comments came hours before the British Parliament was expected to clear the way for Prime Minister Theresa May to invoke Article 50, the formal procedure that sets off a negotiation with the 27 other member states of the European Union. Ms. Sturgeon said her preferred time frame for a new vote would be in the autumn of 2018 or the spring of 2019, when the terms of a British exit from the bloc would be clearer. She said she would ask Scotland’s devolved legislature in Edinburgh to request approval from the British Parliament for the new referendum, known as a Section 30 order, next week. Mrs. May has accused Ms. Sturgeon and her Scottish National Party, which dominates politics in Scotland, of having an “obsession” with independence. But officials say it would be politically difficult for Mrs. May to refuse a new referendum outright. The prime minister’s office said in a statement on Monday that it had been “working closely” with Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, “recognizing the many areas of common ground” on issues like fighting terrorism and protecting workers’ rights. “The evidence clearly shows that a majority of people in Scotland do not want a second independence referendum,” the statement said. “Another referendum would be divisive and cause huge economic uncertainty at the worst possible time. The Scottish government should focus on delivering good government and public services for the people in Scotland. ” Ms. Sturgeon’s party won the 2015 election in Scotland on a manifesto that left open the door for another independence referendum should circumstances “materially change,” and she had cited a Brexit — then considered highly unlikely — as an example of such a change. The real fight might be over timing: London, officials say, would prefer that Scotland put off another vote until after Britain has left the European Union, betting that voters will feel less confident about leaving once they have been pulled out of the bloc. Ms. Sturgeon emphasized that Scotland should not be withdrawn from Europe against the will of its people. She also pointed to the weakness of the opposition Labour Party, citing predictions of a Conservative Party government in London “until 2030 or beyond. ” Since the June referendum on Britain’s future in Europe, Ms. Sturgeon has argued that Scotland should be given a special status. So far, Mrs. May has ruled out any concessions. On Monday, Ms. Sturgeon said there could be room for compromise if the prime minister were to offer a deal for Scotland, but she noted that no options had yet been offered. | 0 |
DOJ Tried Repeatedly To Kill FBI’s Clinton Foundation Investigation 11/01/2016
THE DAILY CALLER
Senior-level Justice Department officials pushed back heavily on an ongoing FBI investigation of the Clinton Foundation, according to a bombshell report from The Wall Street Journal.
The newspaper laid out numerous examples, based on law enforcement sources, of senior DOJ officials intervening to quash the probe.
Prosecutors with the U.S. attorneys office in the Eastern District of New York — which Loretta Lynch led before taking over as attorney general last year — refused to allow FBI investigators probing the Clinton family charity to review emails found on devices turned over this year by two of Clinton’s lawyers during the separate investigation into the mishandling of classified information on Clinton’s private email system.
The rationale, according to The Journal , was that the devices were covered by partial immunity and limited-use agreements that the Clinton lawyers — Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson — agreed to with the DOJ. Information recovered from the laptops could only be used in the email investigation and not in others.
As part of the immunity agreement, the FBI and Justice Department agreed to destroy Mills’ and Samuelson’s devices, a revelation that sparked outrage from congressional Republicans when it was announced earlier this month.
The Journal’s report largely confirms reporting in August from The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Richard Pollock that the FBI and several U.S. attorneys offices were conducting an unorthodox, joint investigation into the Clinton Foundation. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: FBI-US Attorneys Conducting Joint Probe Of Clinton Foundation)
CNN reported at around the same time that a Clinton Foundation probe was tabled by the Justice Department. Pollock’s report and the new piece from The Journal undermine CNN’s reporting.
While the investigation has gone forward, the Justice Department has stymied the investigation at several turns, according to The Journal.
The DOJ refused to grant the FBI the power to issue subpoenas or conduct formal interviews. It also refused to convene a grand jury to weigh evidence in the case.
More pushback occurred in August, when a senior DOJ official contacted the FBI’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, to voice his displeasure that New York field office agents were continuing the investigation even though the DOJ had declined to provide investigative support.
The official was “very pissed off” that the FBI was continuing its efforts, according to The Journal.
The call occurred on Aug. 12, a day after CNN reported details of FBI-DOJ discord over whether to investigate the Clinton Foundation. It was also a day after Pollock reported that an investigation was underway.
McCabe figures prominently in The Journal’s reporting and in the overlapping Clintonworld investigations.
It was revealed last week that McCabe’s wife, Jill, received nearly $470,000 in contributions to a Virginia state senate campaign last year from Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s super PAC.
McAuliffe is a close Clinton ally and is the subject of a separate FBI investigation.
According to The Journal, McCabe refocused the Clinton Foundation investigation a week after FBI director James Comey announced in early July that he would recommend to the Justice Department that charges not be filed against Clinton for mishandling classified information in her emails.
The charity probe would be led by the FBI’s New York office with help from the Little Rock office, according to The Journal. FBI field offices in Los Angeles and Washington were also involved in the Clinton Foundation investigation.
The Los Angeles office subpoenaed bank records related to the Clinton Foundation after obtaining information during a separate public corruption case. The office in Washington was investigating McAuliffe’s financial relationships from before he joined the Clinton Foundation as a board member.
After Comey’s announcement on the Clinton email investigation in July, McCabe decided that the Washington FBI office would focus on the separate McAuliffe matter. He recused himself from that investigation because of the donations his wife received from McAuliffe’s super PAC in 2015.
While the FBI has insisted that McCabe is not compromised in any of the investigations — the email probe, the Clinton Foundation, or the McAuliffe matter — The Journal reports that some agents believe he has issued “stand down” orders in the Clinton Foundation inquiry. U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch looks on after announcing federal action related to North Carolina, at the U.S. Department of Justice (Getty Images)
That claim came from FBI agents lower on the chain of command from senior-level officials. Still other sources denied that McCabe issued a “stand down” order. They asserted that McCabe ordered investigators to continue on their investigative path.
McCabe’s Aug. 12 phone conversation with the senior DOJ official would seem to suggest that he supported the investigation.
“Are you telling me that I need to shut down a validly predicated investigation?” McCabe asked the DOJ official, according to a Journal source who was familiar with the conversation.
“Of course not,” the official reportedly said, after a brief pause.
The new report also details a presentation that FBI officials made to the Justice Department in February to lay out the case against the Clinton Foundation.
Some of the Journal’s sources said that the DOJ’s career public integrity prosecutors did not believe that the case was strong.
“Others said that from the start, the Justice Department officials were stern, icy and dismissive of the case,” The Journal reported.
DOJ officials told the FBI at the meeting additional investigative tools — subpoenas, interviews or a grand jury — would not be authorized. | 1 |
Less than two months after arriving in the United States as a refugee from Syria, Rashid Mahmoud rejoiced at the news of American missiles pummeling a Syrian air base Thursday night, and struggled with an unexpected sentiment: praise for President Trump, who has more often seemed like an antagonist than an ally. “It was good to protect people, and I think it’s human — it’s required by humanity,” Mr. Mahmoud, 24, said in an interview on Friday in his new home city, Lowell, Mass. As for the president, he said, “I’m just supportive for yesterday, not all the time. ” Syrian refugees mostly welcomed an attack on the violent and oppressive Assad government they fled, even if they thought it was too little or too late. But they are unaccustomed to seeing Mr. Trump as any sort of advocate, and their praise for him seemed tentative. Mr. Trump had spoken out repeatedly against taking action against the Syrian leader, Bashar while praising the actions of Russia, Mr. Assad’s biggest backer in Syria’s civil war, and arguing that the United States should make common cause with Russia and Syria in fighting the Islamic State. During the campaign, Mr. Trump called for a temporary ban on all Muslim immigration, and as president he has tried to halt entry from Syria and a handful of other countries, contending that some of the refugees and other migrants could be terrorists trying to slip into the United States under false colors. Mr. Mahmoud and his family left their hometown, northwest of Aleppo, and lived for years in Turkey, before getting permission to go to the United States. Just as they were about to leave, in late January, Mr. Trump’s first pass at an immigration order put their plans on hold when courts struck down the order, they were finally able to enter the country, on Feb. 9. He heard about the president’s action on Thursday night, while in the middle of a work sheet on English verb tenses. The jubilation he felt about an action by the president was, he said, “a new emotion. ” Mohamad Chaghlil, 35, a woodworker from Damascus, said he hoped the missile attack — far too limited in his view to change the course of the war — would be the start of a major course correction by Mr. Trump. But he said he doubted it. And like some other refugees, he questioned why a poison gas attack that was attributed to the government prompted the American strike now, when earlier atrocities did not. “I don’t have full idea why he did that now,” he said. “We lose hundreds of Syrian people every day, we lost more than half a million people in Syria. So why chemical attack is worse? Dead is dead. I can’t understand, and the Syrians can’t understand. ” Mr. Chaghlil and his parents left Syria for Jordan four years ago, then began the laborious process of gaining refugee status. After his father died last July, his mother had to revise her paperwork, he said, delaying her case, so while Mr. Chaghlil came to the United States in December, she remains in Jordan. “I talk with her every morning,” he said. “She is old. She needs me, and I need her. I’m alone here and she is alone there. ” He said he worries about where American immigration policy will leave her, and still sees the president as . “I think he doesn’t care about who needs the support, and who is the murderer and who is the good person,” said Mr. Chaghlil, who was admitted to the country in December and lives in New Haven. “Maybe he felt he has to do something for politics. ” Ayham who had been upset by Mr. Trump’s attempts to bar refugees, was so enthusiastic in his support for the airstrikes that he said he would vote for Mr. Trump if he could. He said more than 150 members of his extended family have died in the violence in Syria. “He’s a national hero now,” he said of the president, adding, “100 percent. ” Mr. Asmi, 34, who arrived in Worcester, Mass. about 18 months ago, said he had stayed up all night after seeing news of the raid on Facebook, contacting elated friends and family around the world. “The Syrian people just gave up on anyone coming to their rescue,” he said through an interpreter, Amjad Bahnassi, who is the chairman of the board that runs his mosque. The attack, Mr. Asmi said, was “light at the end of the tunnel. ” For Zelekha Mahmoud, 31, news of the American missile attack allowed her to hope that the war could come to an end, and that she, her husband, and their four small children, could return home. They settled in October in Chicago, and are adjusting to their new life. They pray and socialize at an Islamic center, the children go to school, and her husband has found work at a food packaging company. But she longs for Syria. The Times is withholding her family name — Mahmoud is her middle name — because she fears for the safety of the children and four siblings still in Syria. She says she is grateful that the United States has sheltered her and her family, but she remains wary of the welcome here Mr. Trump’s travel orders at first made her fear they would be expelled. When her husband joyfully told her of the strike, “I was so happy,” she said, sitting in their apartment on Chicago’s North Side. “I feel that maybe now they will get rid of Assad so that Syria will be secure again, so we can return,” she said. Mohamad Haidar, 47, who settled with his family in San Diego a year ago, said he feared that limited American strikes might escalate the war rather than tamp it down. “If the U. S. wanted to interfere with military action it would be more beneficial to strike the presidential palace in Damascus,” said Mr. Haidar, who, with his wife and three children, fled their town southwest of Aleppo in 2012, moving at first to Indonesia. “The United States is capable of stopping the conflict in one month if they are taking it seriously. ” Unlike some others, he said he was not angered by Mr. Trump’s travel orders. “I thought as the president, it is up to him to decide to decide what is beneficial to his own country,” he said. “But I wish they took into consideration in the decision how many innocent people are suffering and hurting in Syria. ” | 1 |
Barack Obama is set to meet with top Democrats next week to discuss plans to block the incoming Trump administration’s plans to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, POLITICO has revealed. [The meeting, which will involve both House and Senate Democrats, is scheduled for 9:30 am on Wednesday on Capitol Hill and is expected to last one hour. Throughout the presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly claimed he would repeal and replace Obamacare, although has since confirmed that he would like to maintain some aspects of the program. Republicans, who will retain a majority in both the House and Senate, are expected to vote to repeal the healthcare law in the very early stages of Trump’s presidency, although they have yet to outline a replacement plan. In light of Trump’s plans, various Democrat leaders, including Bernie Sanders and Nancy Pelosi, have called for a “day of action”. “Rallies will be held across the country to vigorously oppose the Republican plan to end Medicare as we know it and throw our health care system into chaos,” a letter signed by a number of Democratic Party leaders states. Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Health, Georgia Congressman Tom Price, is a prominent critic of the Affordable Care Act. In October, he described the program as “near total collapse,” adding that Republicans were putting forward “a bold vision to bring America’s healthcare system into the 21st century. ” You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart. com | 0 |
The West’s Media Delusions November 23, 2016
Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream news media often holds itself out as the world’s gold standard, home for careful reporting and diverse opinions compared to Russia’s monolithic propaganda, but the reality is quite different, says James W Carden.
By James W Carden
In a wide ranging and necessary survey of Russian political programming , Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, himself a frequent guest on those shows, observes that:
“The charges — that Russian media are only an instrument of state propaganda directed at the domestic population to keep Russian citizens in line and at foreign audiences to sow dissent among Russia’s neighbors and within the European Union — are taken as a matter of faith with almost no proofs adduced. Anyone who questions this ‘group think’ is immediately labeled a ‘tool of Putin’ or worse.” MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
Dr. Doctorow has launched an important conversation in light of the release of yet another alarmist media report , this time by a British neoconservative group named (oddly) after a long deceased Democratic Senator from Washington State (Henry “Scoop” Jackson), which seeks to stifle debate on Russia policy in the West by smearing dissenters from the Russia-bashing conventional wisdom as “Putin’s useful idiots.”
Doctorow’s experience with the Russian media therefore serves a double use: to combat willful Western misconceptions of the Russian media landscape as well as to serve as a useful point of comparison with U.S. media outlets and their coverage of Russia.
If we take the example of the purportedly liberal cable news outlet MSNBC, we find, paradoxically, that the hard-right neoconservative stance toward Russia goes virtually unopposed. Regarding Russia, in comparison with their principal center-left cable news rival CNN, which, to its credit occasionally makes room for the minority “detente” point of view, MSNBC leaves about as much room for dissent as the Soviet-era Pravda – actually, perhaps less.
New McCarthyism
As it happens, there was a similar disparity when it came to the way the two networks covered the U.S. presidential election. While CNN went about bringing much needed balance to its coverage, albeit in the most inept way possible – by hiring paid flacks from each of the campaigns to appear alongside actual journalists, MSNBC (like Republican rival FOX News) wholly dispensed with any pretense of objectivity and served as little more than as a mouth piece for the disastrous Clinton campaign. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wisconsin, who led the “Red Scare” hearings of the 1950s.
As such, the “liberal” network found itself in the vanguard of the new McCarthyism which swept the 2016 campaign, but which has, in fact, been a feature of the American debate over Russia policy since at least the beginning of the Ukraine crisis in late 2013 – if not earlier.
Examples abound, but perhaps the most striking case of the neo-McCarthyite hysteria which MSNBC attempted to dress up as its legitimate concern over U.S. national security was a rant that Rachel Maddow unleashed on her audience in June when Maddow opened her show with a monologue dedicated to the proposition that Donald Trump was in league with Vladimir Putin.
Maddow, in her signature smarter-than-thou tone, informed readers that the “admiration” between Putin and Trump “really is mutual. I mean, look at this headline, ‘Putin praises Trump. He`s brilliant and talented person.’ ‘Putin praises bright and talented Trump.’ ‘Vladimir Putin praises outstanding and talented Trump.’ There was some controversy over how to exactly translate Putin`s remarks, but Putin took care to flatter Donald Trump publicly, exactly the way Donald Trump likes to be flattered, and that`s apparently enough for Donald Trump, that`s all he needs to hear, that`s all he needs to know, to tell him, how great Vladimir Putin is.
“Putin likes Trump, he must be smart, must be great. So, that is the very, very unusual context here, that you have a Republican presidential nominee who is very, very susceptible to flattery. It`s the most powerful thing in the world to him. If you compliment him, he will never forget it and that`s kind of all he needs to know about you.”
Maddow went on in this vein for quite a while longer (meaning: little actual content but lots of “very, very’s” and eye-rolling). But her central insight, such as it was, was little more than a regurgitation of Democratic National Committee talking points. To no one’s surprise, Maddow’s accusations were repeated almost verbatim in the press releases issued by the Clinton campaign which accused Trump of being little more than a Russian fifth columnist.
Maddow’s evidence-free, innuendo laden June rant took on an added importance because she was the messenger. After the risible, self-important sports journalist Keith Olbermann left the network in 2011, Maddow took over as the network’s house intellectual. So her words carry weight with its viewers in a way, say, Mika Brzezinki’s do not.
Nevertheless at no point at which I am aware did Maddow ever host a guest who pushed back against the still unproven charges that the Russian government had interfered in the U.S. election or that Donald Trump was, in the words of former CIA functionary Mike Morell, an “unwitting agent of the Kremlin” – never mind that as recently as Nov. 15, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker admitted he had “no proof” of Moscow’s interference in the U.S. election.
While it is unclear whether MSNBC’s Joy Reid is seen as “serious” a voice as Maddow, it is unquestionable that she has emerged as the network’s most enthusiastic practitioner of the new McCarthyism.
Days before the election Reid hosted Newsweek’s increasingly unhinged Kurt Eichenwald and former Naval officer Malcolm Nance who has repeatedly and without evidence claimed the Wikileaks-Podesta emails were fake.
Why, asked Reid, are the Russians backing Trump? As if that assertion was beyond dispute. Well, said Eichenwald, “They hate Hillary Clinton…” Oh. Reid then went on to wonder why the FBI is down-playing the intelligence community’s allegedly deep concern that Russia was interfering in the election.
Putin-Bashing
Days later, right after the election, Reid re-assembled a panel featuring Nance, the reliable Putin critic Nina Khrushcheva and Esquire’s Charles Pierce to reinforce the message that MSNBC had been pushing since the summer: that the Russian government had its hand on the scale of the U.S. election. Pierce, in particular, was apoplectic. Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Russian government photo)
That Reid’s roundtable featured Pierce made a good deal of sense. Throughout the campaign, Pierce has been determined to draw a direct link between the Trump campaign and Putin. A sample of his output helps tell the tale. On July 24, Pierce published “Donald Trump’s and Vladimir Putin’s Shared Agenda Should Alarm Anyone Concerned About Democracy” in which Pierce speculated that “Trump seems increasingly dependent on money from Russia and from the former Soviet republics within its increasingly active sphere of influence.”
In his offering of Sept. 9, Pierce protested that “It’s not ‘red-baiting’ to be concerned about Russian interference in our elections.” Pierce, perhaps moved to madness by The Nation editorial “Against Neo-McCarthyism,” sounded as though he were channeling the ghost of James Jesus Angleton, asking, “Are we supposed to believe that Donald Trump really went on RT television by accident ? That nobody on his staff knew that the Russian government’s American network picks up Larry King’s podcast?”
About a month before the election, on Oct. 11, Pierce informed readers of the once-great Esquire, “Vladimir Putin Is Determined to See Trump in the Oval Office.” Still worse, according to Pierce, “ There is little question now that Vladimir Putin is playing monkey-mischief with the 2016 presidential election, and that the Trump campaign is the primary beneficiary of that.”
All of the aforementioned is to demonstrate that the American media’s much touted pluralism is little more than a fiction when it comes to reporting on Russia. The diversity of Left-Right voices on the political spectrum that Doctorow has encountered in Moscow indicates that the widespread perception that Moscow’s political culture is monolithic compared to that of the Washington’s is, at the very least, challengeable.
James W Carden is a contributing writer for The Nation and editor of The American Committee for East-West Accord’s eastwestaccord.com. He previously served as an advisor on Russia to the Special Representative for Global Inter-governmental Affairs at the US State Department. | 1 |
Sitting on the windowsill behind Paul Simon’s desk in his Midtown office was an instrument shaped like a teardrop: a gopichand from India, with one string down the middle and two flexible bamboo sides. At an interview there, Mr. Simon demonstrated how to pluck the string and squeeze the sides to get the “boing” that’s the first sound on “Stranger to Stranger,” his 12th solo studio album and his first since 2011, which is due for release June 3. “Stranger to Stranger” is a set of songs that crack jokes and ponder questions about love, death, spirituality, baseball, economic inequality, brain chemistry and music itself. It’s the latest ambitious, tuneful installment in a career that has had far more to do with curiosity than . Along the way, Mr. Simon has sold millions of records, with Simon and Garfunkel in the 1960s and in a solo career ever since. He has racked up Grammy Awards and accolades he has also received scathing receptions for projects like his 1998 Broadway musical, “The Capeman,” although revivals concentrating on the songs rather than the storytelling were praised. “I’m a wanderer,” Mr. Simon said. “So much of this record, and the way I record, is about just going there to see: What is it? What can you learn?” At 74, Mr. Simon could be comfortably retired, savoring the continuing popularity of his older songs like “America,” which he donated to ads for the Bernie Sanders campaign, or “The Sound of Silence,” which became a hit last year for the band Disturbed. Or he could stay on the road performing his oldies just the way his original fans remember them (though he recently said any reunion with Mr. Garfunkel is “out of the question”). He could also keep trying to write new songs in the style of those oldies. Instead, Mr. Simon’s recent albums are as experimental as anything he has ever recorded. “He trusts himself and he pushes himself. That’s a very good combination,” said the composer Philip Glass, a longtime friend and occasional collaborator. “If one part of that equation isn’t there, then you’re in trouble. ” Mr. Simon has a clear imperative. “To make a pop record, if you don’t make it really interesting, nobody’s going to listen to it,” he said. On “Stranger to Stranger,” Mr. Simon is, above all, playing by ear. “The sound is what led me to everything,” he said. “The theme of this album — it’s not a lyrical theme. It’s a sound theme. This is the time that we’re living in and this is what it sounds like to me from the sources that I find interesting. In a way it’s not that different from guys that are interested in sound, like Kanye or Kendrick. ” In hindsight, Mr. Simon arguably brought a sampling mentality to songwriting long before the concept had a name or a technology. He has always incorporated nuggets he comes across, from folk songs like “Scarborough Fair” and “El Condor Pasa” to vintage gospel like the Swan Silvertones’ “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep” and imported records like the ones that led him to South African music for his “Graceland” album. “They come from different cultures, but they all have something that makes you say, ‘I’m not listening to a weird thing,’” he said. After some early recriminations — he is still resented by British folkies he heard and echoed in London in the 1960s — Mr. Simon has made sure to share credit with his sources or compensate them upfront. “But if someone hears a line, ‘I’ll be your bridge over deep water if you trust in my name,’ in ‘Oh Mary Don’t You Weep,’ that doesn’t mean they’re going to write ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’” he noted. (Among the neat arrays of photographs and memorabilia on the walls of Mr. Simon’s office, he keeps a framed copy of the string arrangement for “Bridge Over Troubled Water” its title, misheard from the demo by the arranger, is “Like a Pitcher of Water. ”) Mr. Simon still prizes the ideal of an album as two connected sides, which he considers a “natural form. ” Yet he recognizes the ways streaming and randomly shuffled playlists can provide instant gratification. “The whole listening process changed,” he said. “What’s harder is to say to somebody, I know you’ve got it, but if you give it a little while longer you might actually find a pleasure that exists in music that you haven’t experienced, because they keep cutting it shorter and shorter before you get to the pleasure. They just keep giving you shots of adrenaline, not serotonin. ” He explained: “Serotonin is the drug that puts you in the situation where you feel safe and comfortable. The drug that gives you the awe is the dopamine. And the adrenaline is the thing that keeps you going. ” When they arrive together, he said, “I think it’s so incredible, it’s an addiction, and that’s why artists keep doing it. ” “Stranger to Stranger” opens with “The Werewolf,” a jovial shuffle that gibes at the rich getting richer amid “Ignorance and national debate” it was written well before the current presidential campaign, Mr. Simon said. “Cool Papa Bell” is named after the fastest runner in the Negro Leagues, before baseball was integrated, while “The Riverbank” depicts the funeral of a veteran who committed suicide. The title song reflects on songwriting and romance: “Love endures all the carnage and the useless detours,” Mr. Simon sings. The music on “Stranger to Stranger” exults in percussion four of the album’s first six tracks don’t use guitar at all. The songs often stretch beyond pop’s typical four minutes and take startling (but in the end logical) twists. They subtly cohere, with some songs sharing rhythmic elements they also continue to expand Mr. Simon’s sonic vocabulary with unique instruments as well as with electronics, loops and samples. Mr. Simon has often been called a perfectionist, but Mark Stewart, a guitarist in Mr. Simon’s band since 1998, calls that a “ ” description. “It’s more of a sonic safari,” Mr. Stewart said. “You’re looking for the rare bird. And he’s just so consistent in his finding the bird. And of course, we’re all assembled to help. But you can’t finish a musical sentence for the guy. He’s going to stay on the trail till he finds it. ” The album’s snappiest song, “Wristband,” starts as a fictional anecdote and turns into a larger metaphor for privilege. Its narrator is a singer who goes out for a smoke, hears the stage door lock behind him and realizes he left behind his wristband as he faces a bouncer who’s “a . ” Eventually, riots ensue among “Kids that can’t afford the cool anger is a you’ll never get a wristband. ” The music for “Wristband” grew out of the sliding tones of a West African talking drum track. Mr. Simon asked Carlos Henriquez, from the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, to duplicate them on the bass, and found a stretch that felt like a montuno, a Latin dance vamp. Mr. Simon’s son Adrian pointed him toward the electronic music of an Italian producer, Digi G’Alessio, who calls himself Clap! Clap! Mr. Simon met with him while touring Europe with Sting and later visited his studio in Sardinia to choose some bubbling electronic syncopation. There are also handclaps from a flamenco group — Mr. Simon recorded the whole group together and isolated the clapping, then slowed it down digitally — along with percussion and horns from Mr. Simon’s touring band. And the whole multitracked assemblage simply jumps. The album’s sounds also include instruments invented by the composer Harry Partch — among them chromelodeon and bowls — that divide an octave into 43 steps, which are used to bend the harmonic ambience of “Insomniac’s Lullaby. ” And they include the gospel voices of the Golden Gate Quartet, recorded in 1939, and played forward and backward. Listening to the group’s vocals in reverse, Mr. Simon heard the words, “Street Angel,” giving him a song title and a character mentioned in two of the album’s songs: a homeless, schizophrenic who ends up in the hospital. “Too much dopamine, and you’re schizophrenic,” Mr. Simon said. “But just over here, and you’re a visionary. ” “Proof of Love” features a groove and intertwining guitar parts that Mr. Simon worked out with the Cameroonian guitarist Vincent Nguini, who has been part of his band since he made “Graceland” in the 1980s. Its lyrics grew out of a trip Mr. Simon made to a spiritual healer in Brazil in 2014. “I like spiritual adventures,” he said. “I half believe it and I half don’t believe it. But the half that believes it really likes it. ” At one point, Mr. Simon was asked to make music for some of the healer’s other visitors. Someone handed him a guitar and he started to play “The Sound of Silence,” approaching one person at a time. “As I walk toward people they start to weep and fall down,” he recalled. “I walk from room to room and everywhere it happens the same way. This is a big energy thing that’s going on, but I’m not controlling it. I don’t know why they’re doing this, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad. ” Mr. Simon is already on tour, mostly playing theaters, although his New York City date is on June 30 at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium in Queens, where he grew up. His band convenes Africans (Mr. Nguini and Bakithi Kumalo, from the Graceland band) contemporary classical musicians (from YMusic, Bang on a Can and the Philip Glass Ensemble) a percussionist (Jamey Haddad) who’s versed in jazz, Middle Eastern and Indian music, a saxophonist (Andy Snitzer) an accordionist adept at zydeco and blues (Joel Guzman) and a drummer from Nashville, Jim Oblon, who “knows the sound of rockabilly and ‘50s blues that I’m always trying to get,” Mr. Simon said, noting that all his influences “mesh together” live. “So all kinds of forms can coalesce in some way that breaks this feeling that we’ve been dumbed down. ” With the band, Mr. Simon also finds new grooves for older songs. “He wants to honor the story of the song, not necessarily the original arrangement,” Mr. Stewart said. “How do you honor that story now? That’s the question he asks himself, and how can he do that song for the 2, 000th time and believe it. ” Mr. Simon is well aware that he’s had an exceptionally long career. “I often think, I don’t have to do this. I’m doing the idea I had when I was 13,” he said. “Sixty years later, it’s a ’s idea. Do I still want to do it? That’s a good question. I usually ask it when I start off on each album. Then I start. I grumble, I grumble, and then some idea comes along. And I always say this after every album: I really don’t know if I want to do it again. But this time I really do mean it. ” He shrugged. “But I always mean it. ” | 1 |
As it stands now, the election has been stolen by George Soros and Hillary Clinton.
Examples of voter fraud are pouring in from across the country. George Soros and Hillary Clinton have made a mockery of our election. America is quickly descending into Stalin’s Russia. The great democratic experiment is over and our overlords (i.e. George Soros) rule America from behind the scenes. If Clinton becomes president, Soros will be the de facto president.
In the furtherance of this goal, voter fraud is rampant. Here is what is taking place in my home county. It is representative of what is happening across the country.
On Saturday, I am interviewing a Texas elector, Ken Clark, from the electoral college. He told me that when Bush was opposed by Gore, that he received enormous pressure to change his vote in the days leading up to the electors vote including being contacted at his hotel prior to the vote. This is already happening with some of the Arizona electors. It is going to happen all across the country. Massive Voter Fraud in Arizona As I have reported, and it bears repeating, a very reliable political source in Arizona has reported to me that an elector has been offered an inducement (bribe) to vote for Clinton instead of Trump. Details are still emerging and I expect to get more in the immediate few days following the election. I can say now, that the inducements included payment to a phony shell corporation in an off shore account. It should also be noted that Arizona is on the list of 16 states to be using George Soros’ voting machines. The following is an example of this impropriety at work. I received this communication last week from a relative of an employee of the Maricopa County Clerk’s office that is in charge of local elections in the Phoenix area. Dear Dave, I have a relative who works in elections for the county. What they have told me is scary beyond belief. During the primary election as you will remember, people lined up for hours to vote because our illustrious leader Helen Purcell purposely limited the amount of voting locations. My relative was a witness to the manner in which early ballots were transferred for counting. They saw an individual by themself transfer the votes. The ballots were in a cardboard box and were open? Anyone could tamper with the vote. I am telling that the same thing is going on again right here in Maricopa County. This practice which is illegal will allow the Clinton to commit massive voter fraud against Donald Trump. Some of the new voting machines have been tested and they revert to a vote for Clinton when a Republic straight line ticket is entered. Ballots that were mixed between the parties but had Trump as the choice were tagged as unreadable and if the test was real, would have been thrown out based on user error. The top people here know what is going on and they are not reporting this as of October 17, 2016. At County elections there is a very intimidating feel. Everyone is afraid to speak out. And I almost forgot that Sheriff Joe’s trial run showed the same pattern as Trump. They want him out too. Well this unbelievable account got attention from Phoenix TV station, News Channel 3. On October 26, at 605 AM, the station ran a very close version of the story described above. I was stunned as I saw the report parallel the email I received (above). However, at the end of the report, they let a Democratic Party Official, who looked like a heroin addict claim that similar problems with the voting machines were also found for Hillary Clinton. Yet, not one example was offered of this Democratic claim on the TV report, just her word in an example of very shoddy journalism. Speaking of the massive fraud going on in Maricopa County, I want to reiterate what I reported on 10/26/2016. A postal employee told me that they had already processed 2.7 million votes from early balloting. There are only 3.4 million registered voters in all of Arizona. Are we supposed to believe that 80% of Arizona’s residents are voting? Are supposed to believe that this unbelievably high percentage of Arizona voters are voting by mail in ballot? These numbers defy logic. This is a clear case of ballot stuffing. Should we be surprised by the events in Arizona? The head of Maricopa County elections, Helen Purcell, oversaw a voting fiasco in the last election,the Republican primary election. Yet, she was re-elected by the must suspicious and narrowest of margins. Also in Maricopa County, County DA, Bill Montgomery has filed an election tampering charges against George Soros for his personal donation of millions of dollars that were used to support Democratic prosecutors. In other words, when the voter fraud is unveiled and exposed for all to see, Soros will see that nobody gets prosecuted for the bad acts being committed by the Democrats in the same manner in which Comey and Lynch let Hillary Clinton avoid the per walk. The Purpose of the Polls The polls conducted by mainstream media outlets are shoddy and the include small sample sizes and a disproportionate number of Democrats that are surveyed. The purpose is to create the perception that Trump cannot win and when the voter fraud kicks in, as it is now, nobody will question the fraud because they have been falsely conditioned that Trump will lose. Further, the polls are designed to discourage Trump supporters from voting and since their man cannot win, why not just stay home and have a beer? Here is a summary of a recent independent poll in which Trump was found to be leading 67%-19% over Clinton.
When the fraud is cover and Clinton has won, Americans will have to make a choice on how to respond.
P lease Donate to The Common Sense Show
PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” US
This is the absolute best in food storage. Dave Hodges is a satisfied customer. Don’t wait until it is too late. Click Here for more information.
| 1 |
In this era of #OscarsSoWhite, the Tonys are looking pretty good. On Tuesday morning, this year’s Tony Award nominees are to be announced, and it seems clear, based on the diversity of the Broadway season and the acclaim for its performers, that the slate will be far more diverse than the list of Oscar nominees put forward this year by the movie industry. But what does that mean? Is Broadway fundamentally more diverse, in casting, employment and programming, than Hollywood? Or did the theater industry just get lucky that Broadway was having its most diverse season ever while Hollywood was having a meltdown? The answers are up for debate, but two things are obvious: The season now ending reflects a series of coinciding bets, by multiple producers unaffiliated with one another, that a diverse array of stories and performers can succeed artistically or commercially, and the system of choosing Tony nominees is far different from the Oscars’ in ways that seem to affect the mix of honorees. The Broadway season, which ends next month and features 36 new plays and musicals, has been dominated by a single smash hit, “Hamilton,” in which diversity is a central theme, intended to suggest connections between today’s America, politically and demographically, with that of the revolutionary era. The show, written by Miranda, whose parents were born in Puerto Rico, uses Hispanic and black actors to portray the founding fathers and, pointedly, a white actor to portray the oppressive King George III. “Our cast looks like America looks now,” Mr. Miranda said last summer. “That’s certainly intentional. ” The season has also featured a revival of “The Color Purple,” adapted from the Pulitzer novel about black women in Georgia “Shuffle Along, or the Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” a new exploration of a jazz musical “Eclipsed,” about captive women in Liberia “On Your Feet! ,” about the rise of the pop stars Gloria and Emilio Estefan “Spring Awakening,” a revival using deaf actors as well as an actress in a wheelchair “Allegiance,” about the internment of in the United States during World War II and “Amazing Grace,” about a British slave . Black actors won major dramatic roles previously played by white performers in revivals of three classic American plays: “The Gin Game” (James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson) “Hughie” (Forest Whitaker) and “The Crucible” (Sophie Okonedo). “A lot of Broadway producers are realizing that the more diverse your show is, the more diverse your audience is going to be — at least that’s the hope,” said Pun Bandhu, a spokesman for the Asian American Performers Action Coalition. “And ‘Hamilton’ has proven that audiences are willing to pay top dollar for a show driven by minorities, and that’s fantastic. ” But Mr. Bandhu said Broadway still tended to underrepresent Hispanic and Asian performers. And, he said, economic concerns limit progress. “Broadway, like Hollywood, is a commercial endeavor, and it’s very and when you have so few actors of color who are stars, you’re not going to get a particularly diverse season,” he said. Theater industry leaders have been watching the controversy in the film industry with a mixture of relief and trepidation — proud about the theater season now ending but also aware that next season is not shaping up to be anywhere near as diverse, and that while diverse casting has become increasingly common, the theater business has changed much less offstage. And some of the shows have struggled to find audiences — “Eclipsed,” in particular, has been hurting at the box office, despite positive reviews, presumably because of its difficult subject matter. “There was an understandable moment of ‘Good on us,’ and certainly this is the kind of season that we want to continue to support and learn from, but I don’t think we can pat ourselves on the back and say our work here is done,” said Jordan Roth, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which owns five of the 40 Broadway houses. “We still have a lot of work to do in terms of the diversity of our creative teams, and I’d like to see more diversity among our producing community. ” The members of Broadway’s lone producing team, Stephen C. Byrd and Alia (“Eclipsed”) said they see progress and challenges. Mr. Byrd said that the industry is dominated by “a very small group of people who are very circumspect and wary of newcomers. ” He added that he believes the industry is more open than Hollywood, where, he said, “you can die of hope. ” Ms. said that the industry has been working for some time to diversify its ranks, but added, “We hope in the long run we’re not the only black producers on Broadway. There’s room for other perspectives. ” Andrew Shade, the founder and editorial director of BroadwayBlack. com, an online community celebrating the work of black theater artists, noted that, particularly among creative teams, diversity has been hard to come by. “It almost doesn’t register that one could be a black lighting designer in the theater world, and I still get surprised when I see a black woman doing wig fittings,” he said. “People of color have not seen themselves succeed in those areas nearly as often. ” Theater unions have become increasingly vocal about diversity. Just this month, the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society released a statement declaring, “We believe that, despite good intentions, there are biases in place that sometimes inhibit the hiring of qualified directors and choreographers from underrepresented groups. ” And Actors’ Equity has begun a series of conversations with its nonwhite members about diversity. “We’re trying to expand our listening to actors and stage managers who are underemployed and disenfranchised to figure out what we can do,” said the union’s executive director, Mary McColl. This year’s slate of Tony nominees is expected to reflect not only the diversity of the season but also the priorities of the nominators, who differ significantly from those who nominate actors for Oscars. In Hollywood, more than 1, 000 actors choose Oscar acting nominees on Broadway, Tony nominees (in all categories) are chosen by an elite panel of fewer than 50 theater professionals, many of them drawn from the nonprofit arts and academic worlds to avoid financial conflicts of interest with the productions. (The pool of voters, who in June will pick winners from among the nominees, includes 846 people, many with financial interests in the awards process.) The Tony nominators, who also include performers, writers, directors and designers, do not discuss their options before voting, and they cast their ballots in secret. (They will meet Monday to make their choices.) But many work in organizations where diversity is a topic of conversation, and the nominators are keenly aware of how a lack of nominee diversity affected the film industry. Next season on Broadway is unlikely to be as diverse as this one. Thus far the only show scheduled with a predominantly nonwhite cast is a return appearance of “Motown. ” (Nonwhite actors have also won leading roles in a few of next season’s shows, including “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” and “The SpongeBob Musical. ”) “Broadway is having a good year, but we’ve got to look at more than one year to really talk about, ‘Has change happened? ’” said Leslie Odom Jr. who plays Aaron Burr in “Hamilton. ” “I don’t think there are five or six musicals behind ‘Hamilton’ that look like this show, or that need this many actors of color,” he said. “The kids being inspired now — they’re going to start writing now, and we’ll see their work in six or seven years. ” | 1 |
navy , RBTH Daily , spain , syria Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov in international waters off the coast of Northern Norway on Oct. 17, 2016. Source: Reuters
Madrid has decided not to allow the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov to refuel in the port of Ceuta, a Spanish enclave on the North African coast, reneging on a previous agreement with Moscow.
On Oct. 26, the warships of the Northern Fleet's aircraft carrier group led by the cruiser Admiral Kuznetsov , having passed the English Channel, were moving toward Gibraltar.
Their route and tasks, according to presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, are "in a sealed envelope marked 'Top Secret'."
As the Spanish Foreign Ministry said earlier, the ships were to arrive on Oct. 28 in the port of Ceuta (a Spanish enclave in Morocco). The permit, as Madrid noted, was issued in September.
However, when the news of the imminent arrival of the ships in Ceuta made the press, Spain came under heavy criticism from its NATO allies.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said that he would not have had anything against the refueling of Russian ships in other circumstances, but now he was extremely concerned that they could be used to attack Aleppo. Similar statements were made by politicians and military figures from the UK and the U.S.
In Spain itself, the Republican Left of Catalonia was most vocal in protesting against the arrival of the Russian ships in Ceuta. Their press service confirmed to Kommersant that members of the Congress of Deputies of Spain from the party had demanded that acting Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo and acting Defense Minister Pedro Morenesa explain why Russian ships involved in the Syrian operation were being serviced in the territory of a NATO country. 9 intriguing facts about the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier
Initially, the Ceuta authorities were confused about the situation. Since 2011, the enclave's port has been visited, according to the newspaper El Pais, by 60 Russian vessels.
"The normal criteria for accepting the visits was 'the safety of the surroundings, population and port'," The Spain Report said, citing sources in the port's administration. But under the barrage of criticism, the Spanish Foreign Ministry announced yesterday that it was reviewing "the decision following consultations."
But by the middle of the day, El Pais quoted diplomatic sources as saying permission would be revoked if it was confirmed that the ships were heading to Syria. Without waiting for the outcome, the Russian authorities themselves abandoned the idea. "We affirm that the ships will not enter the port of Ceuta, because the route has changed," the Russian Embassy in Spain said. Moscow's reaction
Speaking to Kommersant, the Embassy's press secretary Vasily Nioradze Embassy urged the media not to dramatize the situation. "Approval of such stopovers is a routine process," he said. "We send a request in advance, and the decision is made based on international law and the requirements of the host country. Now this decision was made, in other cases it will be different."
Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov chose to place a different accent on the incident: According to him, the Russian military department provided for the possibility of "a technical stopover [in Ceuta – Kommersant] of individual ships or a supply vessel from the group of ships, in agreement with the Spanish side."
However, according to him, no official request from the Defense Ministry was sent to Madrid.
"The representatives of the Spanish leadership said that due to the pressure on them from the U.S. and NATO, the entry of the Russian ships in the port of Ceuta would be inappropriate," said Konashenkov. Publicly, however, the Spanish authorities did not make such statements. Russian experts: Cruiser is on training mission
Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (TsAST), does not view the change of the Admiral Kuznetsov 's route as a disaster.
"We might as well refuel in Algeria or Malta, I’m betting on Algeria since Malta is an EU member state and it will face the same problems as Spain," he told Kommersant. Russia to establish a permanent naval base in Syria
At the same time, according to Pukhov, the arrival of the Admiral Kuznetsov in Syria is unlikely to radically change the balance of forces in the region, but it will allow Russia to increase its international prestige.
"The French use an aircraft carrier in that region, because they do not have a base, while we do have one," he said. “The purpose of the Kuznetsov 's mission is likely to be training. Pilots of deck aircraft need to train, and Syria provides an opportunity to do it in combat conditions."
TsAST expert Andrei Frolov added that the Admiral Kuznetsov 's mission has "an advertising component.""India is thinking about buying MiG-29K/KUB deck fighters for future aircraft carriers, and a demonstration of their capabilities in Syria will help it decide sooner,” he said. Subscribe to get the hand picked best stories every week Subscribe to our mailing list Facebook | 1 |
Negroes in Italy: “We Want Armani and Boss”
Andrew Anglin Daily Stormer October 28, 2016
You’ve seen Pakistanis demand better internet connections, you’ve seen Afghanis demand bigger TVs, you’ve seen North Africans demand better and more hookers – now witness Black Africans demand designer clothing.
These videos of helpless “asylum seekers” demanding luxury goods and services will never, ever get old.
Il Giornale :
When they get “standard” cloths from Caritas or the asylum seeker reception system it makes them unhappy because they are not designer clothes. They want Armani or Boss clothes, or perhaps also Pirelli shoes.
This was revealed by the president of the Sar.ha Cooperative. He has been hosting migrants at the Hotel Byron in Malcontenta (Venice region). In recent days a controversy broke out about the coop’s decision to put padlocks on the windows to prevent migrants escaping during the night. The immigrants protested in the street, also against the food which they considered to be not good. Apparently there was also something else behind it. The migrants are demanding brand-name clothes, from high-fashion designer labels. Not normal jeans: they want Armani or Boss.
“Unfortunately they come to Italy with the asylum reception systems of northern Europe as a model,” saod Lorenzo Chinellato, presidente of the Sar.ha cooperative Sar.ha, “when they arrived we gave them clothes, standard clothes. They want brand-name clothes, Armani and Boss, they asked for Pirellli shoes. These are their models. When they came to us, they didn’t have clothes, but they all had smartphones”.
Translation via Diversity Macht Frei .
In the video you can also hear the standard complaints about the food only being “pasta and rice,” with one colored person actually complaining about how there are too many refugees.
Just as all women literally believe that all men exist to serve their personal needs, all colored people believe Whites exist for the sole purpose of giving them free everything. And not just any free everything – the highest quality of free everything.
But whereas it is perfectly natural for women to believe that men exist only to serve them, as this is a part of their hardwired psychology (as well as in some simple way absolutely true – the primary male purpose in life is to protect and raise off-spring and women have to be taken care of in order to make this happen), these colored people have developed this attitude based on our pandering to them, bowing down to them, treating them as superior beings. We have presented ourselves as existing only to serve them, and they have taken us at our word. | 0 |
American Mirror October 27, 2016
For at least the second time in the last several days, cameras captured Hillary Clinton’s eyes acting strangely.
The behavior, which doctors have told The American Mirror appears to be “disconjugate gaze” — a common symptom of increased intracranial pressure, or swelling of the brain — was evident again during a rally on Wednesday in Lake Worth, Florida.
Here are several more of the instances from today:
Despite getting major coverage on The Drudge Report, no mainstream news outlet has covered the apparent issue with Clinton’s eyes.
But the several instances over the last few weeks, and as recently as last Friday , have been enough for doctors to publicly call on Clinton to undergo a full medical example and release the results.
“My rational self would say that they could have defused all this a long time ago by releasing her medical records and having her undergo the same type of neurologic exam that every high school football player in America who ‘gets his bell rung’ on Friday night must undergo before he can suit up for the game next Friday,” Dr. John R. Coppedge, a surgical specialist from Texas, told The American Mirror . A d v e r t i s e m e n t
“She needs a full neurology evaluation, neuro-opthalmology evaluation, MRI, cerebral venography and a lumbar puncture,” Dr. Gerald Gianoli, an expert in intracranial pressure, said to this news site.
“It is possible that her status could be significantly improved. But at the same time, she risks demonstrating to the public that her medical problems are more serious than she has let on in the past.”
Gianoli, who believes the condition could be the result of elevated pressure, which can cause other problems.
“It can lead to blindness, deafness, progressive vertigo/balance problems, seizures/stroke and continued problems with concentration, memory and ability to mentally focus,” he said.
“It could also lead to death if the lateral sinus thrombosis were to progress to include the opposite side.” This article was posted: Thursday, October 27, 2016 at 5:57 am Share this article | 0 |
LONDON — The United States has opened a new line of combat against the Islamic State, directing the military’s Cyber Command for the first time to mount attacks that are now being used alongside more traditional weapons. The effort reflects President Obama’s desire to bring many of the secret American cyberweapons that have been aimed elsewhere, notably at Iran, into the fight against the Islamic State — which has proved effective in using modern communications and encryption to recruit and carry out operations. The National Security Agency, which specializes in electronic surveillance, has for years listened intensely to the militants of the Islamic State, and those reports are often part of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. But the N. S. A. ’s military counterpart, Cyber Command, was focused largely on Russia, China, Iran and North Korea — where cyberattacks on the United States most frequently originate — and had run virtually no operations against what has become the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world. A review of what should be done to confront the Islamic State is on Mr. Obama’s agenda on Monday, when he is scheduled to attend a conference in Hanover, Germany, with the leaders of Britain, France, Italy and Germany. Of these efforts, the cybercampaign is the newest. It is also the one discussed in least detail by officials of many countries, and its successes or failures are the most difficult to assess from the outside. The goal of the new campaign is to disrupt the ability of the Islamic State to spread its message, attract new adherents, circulate orders from commanders and carry out functions, like paying its fighters. A benefit of the administration’s exceedingly rare public discussion of the campaign, officials said, is to rattle the Islamic State’s commanders, who have begun to realize that sophisticated hacking efforts are manipulating their data. Potential recruits may also be deterred if they come to worry about the security of their communications with the militant group. Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter is among those who have publicly discussed the new mission, but only in broad terms, and this month the deputy secretary of defense, Robert O. Work, was more colorful in describing the effort. “We are dropping cyberbombs,” Mr. Work said. “We have never done that before. ” The campaign has been conducted by a small number of “national mission teams,” newly created cyberunits loosely modeled on Special Operations forces. While officials declined to discuss the details of their operations, interviews with more than a senior and midlevel officials indicate that the effort has begun with a series of “implants” in the militants’ networks to learn the online habits of commanders. Now, the plan is to imitate them or to alter their messages, with the aim of redirecting militants to areas more vulnerable to attack by American drones or local ground forces. In other cases, officials said, the United States may complement operations to bomb warehouses full of cash by using cyberattacks to interrupt electronic transfers and misdirect payments. The fact that the administration is beginning to talk of its use of the new weapons is a dramatic change. As recently as four years ago, it would not publicly admit to developing offensive cyberweapons or confirm its role in any attacks on computer networks. That is partly because cyberattacks inside another nation raise major questions over invasion of sovereignty. But in the case of the Islamic State, officials say a decision was made that a bit of boasting might degrade the enemy’s trust in its communications, jumbling and even deterring some actions. “Our cyberoperations are disrupting their and communications,” Mr. Obama said this month, emerging from a meeting at the C. I. A. headquarters in Langley, Va. on countering the Islamic State. Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, offered broad outlines of the new campaign against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS or ISIL, during a news conference in February. “We’re trying to both physically and virtually isolate ISIL, limit their ability to conduct command and control, limit their ability to communicate with each other, limit their ability to conduct operations locally and tactically,” he said. “But I’ll be one of the first ones arguing that that’s about all we should talk about,” General Dunford said. “We want them to be surprised when we conduct cyberoperations. And, frankly, they’re going to experience some friction that’s associated with us and some friction that’s just associated with the normal course of events in dealing in the information age. ” In an interview this month in Colorado Springs, where she talked to Air Force Academy cadets, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, said that the fight against the Islamic State had to be thought of as a multifront war — and that computers were just another weapon in the arsenal. “It should not be taken out of proportion — it is not the only tool,” she said when asked about Mr. Work’s “cyberbombs” comment. In fact, some of Mr. Work’s colleagues acknowledged that they had winced when he used the term, because government lawyers have gone to extraordinary lengths to narrowly limit cyberattacks to highly precise operations with as little collateral damage as possible. But Ms. Rice said the Islamic State had “uniquely utilized cyberspace” to recruit, to communicate over encrypted apps and to coordinate its operations from Syria to Europe. Ms. Rice would not comment on reports from officials in the Pentagon that Mr. Obama had asked — quite pointedly — in the fall why the arsenal of cyberweapons that had been developed at a cost of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars was not being used in the fight against the terrorist group. Several officials said that Mr. Carter had complained that Cyber Command was too focused on traditional adversaries, and that he had set deadlines for a new array of operational cyberplans aimed at the Islamic State. Those were ultimately delivered by Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the commander of Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency. But inside Fort Meade in Maryland, home to the N. S. A. and Cyber Command, initial demands from the White House generated some resistance, according to officials involved in the debate. The N. S. A. has spent years penetrating foreign networks — the Chinese military, Russian submarine communications, Internet traffic and other targets — placing thousands of implants in those networks to allow it to listen in. But those implants can be used to manipulate data or to shut down a network. That frequently leads to a battle between the N. S. A. civilians — who know that to make use of an implant is to blow its cover — and the military operators who want to strike back. N. S. A. officials complained that once the implants were used to attack, the Islamic State militants would stop the use of a communications channel and perhaps start one that was harder to find, penetrate or . “It’s a delicate balance,” Ms. Rice said. “We still have to keep our eye on the activity, but this was a new mission, one where we have to balance the collection equities against the disruption equities. ” In Britain, the Government Communications Headquarters, the country’s equivalent to the N. S. A. has been going through a similar debate. It is a familiar one for the British: According to an legend from World War II, Winston Churchill decided to let the Nazis bomb Coventry, at a cost of hundreds of lives, rather than reveal that Britain had used its Enigma machine to crack German codes. (There is a historical dispute about whether Churchill knew the city was to be targeted.) Lisa O. Monaco, a deputy national security adviser and Mr. Obama’s top adviser for counterterrorism, has led efforts examining how to disrupt the use of social media for recruiting. She has met technology executives in Silicon Valley Austin, Tex. Boston and Washington to come up with a more integrated plan for both taking down social media posts and encouraging the development of a counternarrative. One effort has included amplifying the testimony of Islamic State recruits who have escaped and now describe the group’s brutality and question its adherence to the true tenets of Islam. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are also growing more efficient at finding and removing Islamic State posts — which they can take down without court orders because the posts are a violation of the companies’ terms of service, executives say. But Ms. Monaco suggested that the effort was just beginning. “We are not going to kill our way out of this conflict,” she said. “And we are not going to delete our way out of it, either. ” | 1 |
Just 5 Krispy Kritters. | 0 |
Происшествия
На что спорят русские? На что-то возвышенное… Засовывание инородных предметов в анус, например, или употребление залпом литра водки. Как вариант, на прыжок с балкона со второго этажа, или поход в театр в одном исподнем. Но жители острова Сахалин – они другие. С приходом холодов суровый климат оставляет сахалинцам всего несколько опций для развлечений: упиться до положения риз алкоголем и кормить диких медведей печеньем.
Наша героиня – 54-летняя жительница Охи, естественно, предпочла первое занятие. Две недели женщина, собрав команду собутыльников, занималась беспросветным пьянством. Двое мужчин и трое женщин даже не успевали отлучаться на перекур, так хотелось им выполнить алкогольный план. Даже сон чередовали, чтобы не нарушать интервал приема жизненно-необходимой жидкости.
После многочасовых споров о различиях барокко и рококо, после цитирования стихов Бунина и Ахматовой, между обсуждением инфляционных процессов и законов мироздания компания заскучала. Тогда хозяин квартиры, где происходило собрание единомышленников, достал из тайника травматический пистолет. 32-летний владелец травмата, который, не родись он на Сахалине, мог бы сделать научное открытие или найти лекарство от алкоголизма, потехи ради начал стрелять из пистолета по стенам. Одна из гостей усомнилась, что из такого оружия можно убить человека. «Да такой железякой и хомячка не прибьёшь!» — пронеслось, вероятно, в одурманенной голове. Так и завязался роковой спор.
54-летняя дама была уверена, что из травмата убить человека невозможно. В доказательство своей правоты она готова была отдать последнее – 3 тысячи рублей. Наличными! Отказаться от подобного спора и столь легкой наживы – грех и для трезвого человека. Пропитанный спиртом мужчина решил продемонстрировать боеспособность оружия, подошел к женщине, приставил пистолет к ее голове и выстрелил. Увы, отдать ему 3 000 гостья не сможет.
Когда тело погибшей начало загораживать путь в уборную, собутыльники перенесли женщину на балкон. После, не раздумывая, скинули его на улицу. Зловонный запах в интеллигентной квартире ни к чему, знаете ли. На вызов скорой, очевидно, не хватило храбрости, а на реализацию простейших манипуляций по сокрытию тела – ума. Убийство было так неумело спрятано, что даже рядовые полицейские сложили головоломку и задержали преступника. Сколько правохранителям понадобилось времени, чтобы найти тело под балконом, поднять голову вверх и предположить, что женщину могли просто взять и скинуть с балкона, следствие умалчивает. Главное – стрелок задержан. Он уже ранее был судим и его ожидает новый срок.
Алкоголь приводит к многим бедам. Но смерть из-за нелепого спора – самый глупый способ уйти из жизни. | 0 |
The illuminati card ‘Enough Is Enough’ a harbinger of things to come?
For more than two decades the infamous Illuminati Card Game, created in 1994 by Steve Jackson, has been proven to be a remarkably accurate when it comes to the prediction for future events.
Already several worldwide events had their own card prior to the evening happening.
Now The US elections are behind us and Donald Trump has been elected as the next US President, once again there are two cards which really stand out.
Both cards bear a striking resemblance to Donald Trump.
The first card ‘Charismatic Leader’ shows a man speaking to a fanatic crowd with the following text:
The increased power takes immediately effect.
The second card ‘Enough is Enough’ shows the likeness to Donald Trump with a bullet whizzing by his head with the following text:
At any time, our snipers lay you in every place. Have a nice day.
Now that Donald Trump has come so far to become the 45th president, the people in power want him stopped before he causes any more upset to their status quo. It means that he will become a target.
Some of their methods to stop Donald Trump: Sabotage, economic crisis, civil unrest, false flag operations, cyber attacks and if they have no success to stop him then it is quite possible that they play their last card: Assassination.
Very disturbing is also the warning of Baba Vanga, a Bulgarian-born prophet - who died in 1996 aged 85, and who had an alleged prediction success rate of 85 per cent.
She correctly predicted that the 44th President of the United States would be an African-American and this black President (Obama) would be the last US President.
Obama technically remains President until Donald Trump is sworn in on January 20, 2017 but if Baba Vanga’s prediction would be correct again then something will happen with Donald Trump before January 20, 2017 and Barack Obama will serve a third term with all its consequences.
Baba Vanga’s prediction and especially the second card could be a warning for an upcoming assassination attempt against Donald Trump?
UFO Sighting Hotspot
SOURCE | 0 |
A Washington Post reporter is looking for a family of illegal aliens so she can “help readers place themselves in the shoes of someone who feels no longer welcome in the United States,” according to an email obtained by Breitbart. [The request comes hot on the heels of a widely reported violent gang rape of a old in the same area for which two illegal aliens have been charged. The request from Washington Post reporter Jessica Contrera was sent to an immigration lawyer, who then shared it Tuesday, March 28, via an email list with other lawyers at the Maryland State Bar Association. “I spend my time working on stories about the lives of people who are being affected by topics unfolding in the news,” Contrera wrote. She continued: I’m reaching out because I’m hoping my next story will be focused on an undocumented family. Specifically, I’m looking for a person or family who is voluntarily choosing to leave the U. S. and return to their home country, given the political climate and the increased threat of deportation I can’t begin to imagine what a stressful and difficult decision it must be to leave your life behind, and I’m hoping that by spending time with a person or family as they prepare for their departure, I can help readers place themselves in the shoes of someone who feels no longer welcome in the United States. I’m getting in touch with you in hopes of finding out if the situation I described is something that’s happening in your area, and if you know anyone who might be leaving the country in the coming weeks. If so, I’d love to talk with you about my work and how I might best find this story. According to a confidential source privy to the mailing list, reporters from news outlets routinely query the immigration section for sympathetic clients to help build their narrative. The same source said he believes the focus on Maryland was specifically tailored to counter last week’s reporting on the Rockville high school’s alleged gang rape, which defense attorneys are already trying to spin into an attack on innocent illegal aliens. Even the New York Times reported that several liberal media outlets refused to report on the gang rape as that story unfolded, saying, “Viewers would not have heard about [the rape] if they had turned to CNN or MSNBC. ” Contrera did not respond to emails and phone calls made by Breitbart. Contrera’s strategy of seeking out anecdotes to build empathy with illegal aliens matches President Donald Trump’s description of establishment immigration reporting: that it focuses on the plight of illegal aliens before that of Americans. “The truth is, the central issue is not the needs of the 11 million illegal immigrants or however many there may be … There is only one core issue in the immigration debate, and that issue is the of the American people,” Trump told a crowd of supporters on the campaign trail in August 2016. “The mainstream media always looks for sob stories to undermine the legitimacy of immigration enforcement,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a which studies the impact of immigration on the United States. “They almost never like to tell comparable stories … of people killed by illegal immigrants, of the small contractor put out of business by those employing immigrant labor,” he told Breitbart. “Reporters themselves internalize this. ” According to her letter, Contrera is not seeking an American family to highlight the plight of the American communities most affected by mass illegal immigration. Her own publication periodically describes their economic woes, but rarely links them to the flood of labor enabled by lax federal immigration enforcement and permissive immigration policies. In September 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a long report on immigration, which included an analysis showing that immigration annually transfers roughly $500 million from Americans’ salaries and wages, over to investors and company owners. The report also shows that each unskilled immigrant costs state and local taxpayers $1, 600 per year. Asked about Contrera’s Maryland solicitation being so close in time and place to the Rockville High arrests, Krikorian said, “It makes perfect sense. The Rockville rape case is interfering with the narrative … [and progressive] reporters instinctually try to ‘balance the narrative’ with these kinds of anecdotes. ” | 1 |
Share on Facebook Physicists say they may have evidence that the universe is a computer simulation. How? They made a computer simulation of the universe. And it looks sort of like us. A long-proposed thought experiment, put forward by both philosophers and popular culture, points out that any civilization of sufficient size and intelligence would eventually create a simulation universe if such a thing were possible. A long-proposed thought experiment, put forward by both philosophers and popular culture, points out that any civilization of sufficient size and intelligence would eventually create a simulation universe if such a thing were possible. And since there would therefore be many more simulations (within simulations, within simulations) than real universes, it is therefore more likely than not that our world is artificial. Now a team of researchers at the University of Bonn in Germany led by Silas Beane say they have evidence this may be true. In a paper named ‘ Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation ’, they point out that current simulations of the universe – which do exist, but which are extremely weak and small – naturally put limits on physical laws. Technology Review explains that “the problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time.” What that basically means is that by just being a simulation, the computer would put limits on, for instance, the energy that particles can have within the program. These limits would be experienced by those living within the sim – and as it turns out, something which looks just like these limits do in fact exist. For instance, something known as the Greisen-Zatsepin-Kuzmin, or GZK cut off, is an apparent boundary of the energy that cosmic ray particles can have. This is caused by interaction with cosmic background radiation. But Beane and co’s paper argues that the pattern of this rule mirrors what you might expect from a computer simulation . Naturally, at this point the science becomes pretty tricky to wade through – and we would advise you read the paper itself to try and get the full detail of the idea. But the basic impression is an intriguing one. Like a prisoner in a pitch-black cell, we may never be able to see the ‘walls’ of our prison — but through physics we may be able to reach out and touch them. Watch What Elon Musk Says On This Subject: Related: | 0 |
On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” columnist Charles Krauthammer weighed in on the cancellation of Ann Coulter’s Berkeley speech by stating, “we’re reaching a situation where thugs are threatening violence. Basically, fascist gangs can shut down free speech. ” Krauthammer said, “[T]he danger here is, that we’re reaching a situation where thugs are threatening violence. Basically, fascist gangs can shut down free speech. ” He added, “If you can’t have the government guaranteeing the safety of speakers, then we have lost the — one of the fundamental uniting elements of our society. If there’s anything that unites us, it’s belief in the First Amendment, belief in free speech. whenever you talk about America, what makes us unique, we believe in liberty. It begins with religious liberty, and it also begins with free speech. And if you can’t get agreement on defending that, I mean, the obligation of any authority right now, is to say Ann Coulter can speak, and we will protect her. That’s why you pay your taxes. That’s why we have police. And we are not going to allow a gang of thugs, really fascist gangs — this is how it started in Europe in the 20s and the 30s, fascist gangs would literally intimidate their opponents to the point where they became dominant. I don’t think they’re going to take over. This is not Mussolini. But nonetheless, it is very disturbing that in America, somebody cannot speak because there are thugs who threaten violence. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 0 |
رسائل كلينتون والإخوان بقلم تييري ميسان شبكة فولتير | دمشق (سوريا) | 3 تشرين الثاني (نوفمبر) 2016 ελληνικά English Español français Türkçe русский Deutsch Português italiano norsk قيام مكتب التحقيقات الفدرالي بإعادة فتح التحقيق برسائل البريد الإلكتروني الخاص بهيلاري كلينتون، ليس بدافع الاهتمام بالمسائل المتعلقة بالأمن، بقدر اهتمامه بمناورات ترقى إلى الخيانة العظمى.
من الناحية الفنية، وبدلا من اللجوء إلى خادم الكتروني آمن للحكومة الاتحادية، نصًبت وزيرة الخارجية خادما الكترونيا خاصا بها في المنزل، يسمح لها باستخدام الإنترنت دون ترك أي أثر في الخادم العائد للدولة الاتحادية.
قام الفني الخاص بالسيدة كلينتون بتنظيف الخادم قبل وصول عناصر مكتب التحقيقات الفيدرالي، لذلك لم يكن من الممكن معرفة السبب وراء تنصيب هذا الجهاز في منزلها.
في مرحلة أولى، لحَظَ مكتب التحقيقات الفيدرالي أن الخادم الالكتروني الخاص لم يكن خادما آمنا لوزارة الخارجية. لهذا لم ترتكب السيدة كلينتون سوى خطأ أمنيا.
وفي مرحلة ثانية، قام مكتب التحقيقات الفدرالي بالاستيلاء على الكمبيوتر الخاص بعضو الكونغرس السابق انطوني وينر، الزوج السابق للسيدة هوما عابدين، مديرة مكتب هيلاري كلينتون. وتم العثور في ذلك الكمبيوترعلى رسائل بريد الكتروني واردة من وزيرة الخارجية.
هوما عابدين، مواطنة أميركية ترعرعت في المملكة العربية السعودية. كان والدها مديرا لمجلة أكاديمية، شغلت فيها لسنوات عديدة وظيفة أمينة التحرير، وكانت تنشر فيها آراء الأخوان المسلمين بشكل منتظم.
أما والدتها، فترأس الجمعية السعودية للنساء الأعضاء في جماعة الأخوان المسلمين، وكانت تعمل مع زوج الرئيس المصري السابق محمد مرسي.
السيدة هوماعابدين ليست العضو الوحيد في إدارة أوباما على صلة مع جماعة الأخوان المسلمين. أبونغو مالك أوباما، الأخ غير الشقيق للرئيس باراك أوباما، هو أيضاً عضو في الجماعة، وأمين صندوق العمل الدعوي للإخوان في السودان.
أخونجي آخر، مهدي الحسني، عضو في مجلس الأمن القومي، أعلى هيئة تنفيذية في الولايات المتحدة، من عام 2009 إلى عام 2012.
هذا علاوة على أخونجي ثالث، رشاد حسين، سفير الولايات المتحدة إلى المؤتمر الإسلامي. أما بقية الأخوان الذين تمكنا من التعرف على هوياتهم، فهم يشغلون وظائف أقل أهمية من سابقيهم في الإدارة الأميركية.
مع ذلك، علينا أن لاننسى السوري لؤي صافي، العضو الحالي في "التحالف الوطني السوري"، كان أيضا مستشاراً في وزارة الدفاع الأميركية.
في نيسان 2009، وقبل شهرين من خطابه في القاهرة، استقبل الرئيس أوباما سراً، وفدا من جماعة الإخوان في المكتب البيضاوي. وقد سبق له أن دعا إلى حفل توليه مقاليد الحكم، إنغريد ماتسون، رئيسة جمعية الأخوة والأخوات المسلمات في الولايات المتحدة.
من جانبها، عيًنت مؤسسة كلينتون جهاد الحداد كمسؤول عن مشروعها "المناخ"، وهو واحد من القادة العالميين لجماعة الإخوان، والذي كان حتى ذلك التاريخ مسؤولا عن برنامج تلفزيوني قرآني.
كان والد جهاد واحدا من مؤسسي جماعة الإخوان المسلمين في عام 1951 أثناء إعادة إنشائها من قبل وكالة المخابرات المركزية، والمخابرات البريطانية ام16.
غادر جهاد مؤسسة كلينتون في عام 2012، ليصبح في القاهرة الناطق الرسمي باسم محمد مرسي، مرشح جماعة الإخوان المسلمين، ومن ثم الناطق الرسمي العالمي باسم الأخوان المسلمين.
على الرغم من معرفتنا بأن جميع القادة الجهاديين في العالم ينحدرون إما من جماعة الإخوان المسلمين، أو من الطريقة الصوفية النقشبندية، إلا أننا لانزال تتملكنا الرغبة في معرفة المزيد عن العلاقة بين السيدة كلينتون والإخوان.
من مصادفات القدر أن يضم فريق منافسها دونالد ترامب، الجنرال مايكل تي فلاين، الذي حاول الاعتراض على إنشاء دولة الخلافة من قبل البيت الأبيض، واستقال من قيادة وكالة استخبارات الدفاع (وكالة الاستخبارات العسكرية) كتعزيز لاستنكاره، وأخذ يلتقي منذ ذلك التاريخ مع فرانك جافني، مقاتل صنديد من حقبة الحرب الباردة، وصار محسوبا على " المتآمرين " لأنه استنكر وجود الإخوان المسلمين داخل مؤسسات الدولة الاتحادية.
تييري ميسان ترجمة
سعيد هلال الشريفي
مصادر
سوريا | 0 |
“Atlantis,” a new musical inspired by the mogul Pharrell Williams’s childhood, is heading to the big screen. Fox has signed on to produce the movie musical, which will blend elements of Mr. Williams’s childhood in Virginia Beach with a “Romeo and story,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported news of the project on Monday. A publicist for Mr. Williams confirmed his involvement in an email on Tuesday. The Tony film and stage director Michael Mayer, whose Broadway directing credits include “Spring Awakening,” “American Idiot” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” will direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Mr. Mayer’s films include the 2004 movie “A Home at the End of the World” and a coming adaptation of Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” which will star Annette Bening, Brian Dennehy and Saoirse Ronan. Martin Hynes will write the “Atlantis” screenplay. Mr. Williams, who is best known as a producer and solo artist, was deeply involved in producing and promoting the movie “Hidden Figures,” which achieved breakout success and several Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. He will be a of “Atlantis. ” | 0 |
BAGHDAD — The Trump administration amended its visa ban on Thursday to allow emigration by the families of Iraqi interpreters who served the United States government and military forces deployed in their country. The change, recommended by the Pentagon, eased some of the anger generated in Iraq by President Trump’s executive order imposing the ban, which has stoked anxiety and confusion around much of the world since it was issued last week. The order temporarily blocked all Syrian refugees from entering the United States and suspended visas for applicants from seven countries, including Iraq. It applied to holders of Special Immigrant Visas issued to interpreters who worked for the United States during its occupation, often at great personal risk, and to their families. In a statement about the change sent to The New York Times, a United States Embassy official in Baghdad said, “The U. S. government has determined that it is in the national interest to allow Iraqi Special Immigrant Visa (S. I. V.) holders to continue to travel to the United States. ” Iraqis who have received the visas, the statement said, may use them, and the “U. S. Embassy in Baghdad will continue to process and issue S. I. V.s to applicants who are otherwise qualified. ” For the family of a Iraqi who once worked as an interpreter for American forces, the news was a joyous surprise after nearly a week of upended travel plans. An embassy official called to inform family members that they were again permitted to fly to the United States. “I’m shocked all over again,” said the former interpreter, who asked to be identified only by his first name and an initial, Munther A. to protect relatives in Iraq. The travel ban has thrown the lives of many former interpreters in Iraq into turmoil. Even with valid visas in hand, some were refused entry at American airports and others were removed from planes scheduled to fly to the United States. There was also confusion because the executive order, at least initially, barred entry to Iraqis who held American green cards. Many of them, but not all, were eventually permitted to enter the United States. The Pentagon recommended that the White House exempt from the travel ban Special Immigrant Visa holders and others who had demonstrated their commitment to American military forces. Munther A. and his family were removed from a Turkish Airlines flight in Istanbul on Saturday just as they had settled into their seats for a scheduled flight to Kennedy Airport. They were forced to fly back to Baghdad, he said. Most Iraqis holding the special visas have sold their homes, cars and other possessions in anticipation of starting a new life in the United States. Munther A. said his family had been forced to find emergency housing with friends in Baghdad. Since 2007, the State Department has issued more than 1, 700 Special Immigrant Visas to Iraqi interpreters and their family members. The embassy in Baghdad did not disclose the number of Iraqis affected by the change in the Trump administration’s visa ban. Only 19 such visas were issued to Iraqi interpreters and their families during the past three years, according to State Department figures. Mr. Trump said when he issued the executive order that it was intended to allow American officials to vet Iraqis and others more thoroughly. But the interpreters had extensive security vetting before they were permitted to accompany American forces. They spent years clearing more background security checks while applying for the special visas. Even after the phone call from the embassy, Munther A. and his family were initially turned away by airline officials in Baghdad on Thursday as they tried to board a connecting flight to Doha, Qatar. He called a telephone number provided by the embassy, he said, and the problem was resolved. “We’re getting on the flight now,” Munther A. said in a telephone interview from the Baghdad airport late Thursday afternoon. He said his daughter was in tears on Saturday because the canceled flight meant she would not be able to visit Disneyland, as her father had promised. “I told her she’s going now,” Munther A. said. Thousands of interpreters, known to the troops as “terps,” rode for years with American forces on combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were given American nicknames like Tony and Bobby and Max. They often wore scarves across their faces to mask their identities. They risked their lives as the eyes and ears of the American military in Iraq. They did far more than just interpret, guiding American soldiers and commanders through Iraqi politics, tribal disputes and social customs. Other Iraqis who assisted the American military or government in Iraq indirectly remained in limbo on Thursday. Many had received refugee visas to resettle in the United States with the assistance of the International Organization for Migration, but they were blocked by the travel ban this week. A Iraqi father of two who worked seven years for a contractor that supplied American troops said he and his family had been granted visas for relocation to Charlotte, N. C. after passing extensive security checks. They were scheduled to fly from Iraq to the United States on Thursday, said the man, who asked to be identified as Ahmed A. He was told by the International Organization for Migration this week that his flight had been canceled because of the travel ban. Having already sold his home and car and quit his job, he scrambled to find a place to live with friends in Erbil, Iraq. Ahmed A. said he had heard nothing from the International Organization for Migration as of Thursday. A spokesman for the organization in Iraq did not respond to a request for comment. There also was confusion on Thursday for Qusay Fawzi Ahmed, 38, a former military interpreter who moved to Tampa, Fla. in 2012, after receiving a special immigrant visa. On Saturday, Mr. Ahmed was awaiting a phone call from his fiancée, Marwa Nasr who was flying to New York from Iraq with a valid visa in her passport. After years of waiting, she said, she received approval to join her fiancé. Mr. Ahmed, who works at Domino’s, said he was delivering a pizza in Tampa when his fiancée called him from Kennedy Airport. She told him she had been detained and ordered to fly back to Cairo, where her flight had originated, and then to her home in Erbil. “My fiancée is a girl — she’s not going to bomb anything,” Mr. Ahmed said in a telephone interview. Ms. Din said on Thursday that she had been unable to find out when, or whether, her visa would allow her to join her fiancé in Tampa. “Is this the freedom and democracy we have heard about in the U. S. A. ?” she asked. | 1 |
The Social Security Administration paid $1 billion in benefits to those who did not have a Social Security number (SSN) according to a recent audit. [The agency’s inspector general found errors in how the government documented representative payees or individuals who are designated to receive retirement or disability benefits on behalf of those who cannot manage the benefits themselves, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The audit, released Friday, found thousands of instances where no SSN was found on file. The agency paid $1 billion to 22, 426 representative payees who “did not have an SSN” and had not kept any paper applications supporting an individual’s case to receive benefits on someone else’s behalf, according to the inspector general. “Furthermore, unless it takes corrective action, we estimate SSA will pay about $182. 5 million in benefits, annually, to representative payees who do not have an SSN or paper application supporting their selection,” the inspector general said. The agency also paid $853. 1 million in benefits since 2004 to individuals whom the agency terminated as representative payees. The inspector general said the errors occurred because the agency did not keep paper records of applications or purge terminated employees from the system. Of the audit’s sample of 100 beneficiaries, only six SSN’s were properly recorded. The inspector general also said that illegal aliens had been receiving benefits through the representative payee system. Illegal aliens without SSNs are allowed to receive government benefits if they are representing their minor children. In response to the audit, the SSA said that it switched to a new Electronic Representative Payee System last year, which “may have resulted in applications showing as terminated or not selected. ” The SSA defended its issuance of SSNs to and holders, saying, “Representative payees play a significant role in many beneficiaries’ lives. ” The agency added that the Social Security Act allows an illegal alien to serve as a payee. The “absence of an SSN is not a criterion preventing an individual from serving as payee,” the agency added. | 0 |
On Thursday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” Senator Rand Paul ( ) argued the revised American Health Care Act is “the first time that Republicans have affirmatively put their stamp of approval on a program where federal money, taxpayer money, is paid to insurance companies. ” He later characterized subsidizing insurance companies as “deplorable. ” Rand said the House Freedom Caucus “made the bill a lot less bad. ” He added, “But what I’m still concerned with is, this’ll the first time that Republicans have affirmatively put their stamp of approval on a program where federal money, taxpayer money, is paid to insurance companies. … And it boggles my mind how that became a Republican idea. ” Rand further stated, “It’s going to take a little bit of work to get me to a yes vote, but I do have an open mind. I mean, there’s not been a louder voice up here for repealing Obamacare. I really want to repeal it. I just don’t want to replace with or another federal program. The programs they put in place will be there forever. So the refundable tax credit, which is a subsidy by another name, will be there forever. And this — these buying — these pools they want to create, Republicans used to hate the idea. They hated the idea when they were called risk corridors, and there were giving money to insurance companies. They were bailouts, when it was a Democrat idea. Now that it’s a Republican idea, they keep sweetening it up. ” He later argued that the bill offers people who won’t get subsidies anymore “Santa . ” Rand also said, “I want everybody in the individual market to be protected against conditions, by getting into the group market, and let market forces work. It can work, but the current bill acknowledges that it doesn’t work, and then we just subsidize the insurance companies, which I think is deplorable. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett | 0 |
By wmw_admin on November 2, 2016 Reuters — Nov 1, 2016 Navy Day in Sevastopol. click to enlarge
The missile bunkers that dot the verdant hills along Crimea’s southern coast are known locally as Object 100. Until recently, tourists paid $50 to visit the crumbling and abandoned former Soviet sites, which served during the Cold War as a defence against naval attack from the Black Sea.
Now the bunkers are coming back online. After Russia took control of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, signs went up in the woods around the sites warning visitors against entering a “forbidden zone of the Russian Ministry of Defence.” A resident of a nearby village who said he was employed at the base last year said Russian soldiers had re-occupied the sites and blocked roads leading into the area. He was unable to say when the Russian soldiers arrived.
“It is a functioning military base with an anti-ship missile system,” the villager told a Reuters reporter who visited the area in July.
The bunkers are just one small part of a new Russian programme to militarise the Crimean peninsula. Based on recent site observations by Reuters, accounts from locals, media reports and official Russian data, Moscow has reanimated multiple Soviet-built facilities in the region, built new bases and stationed soldiers there.
Crimea sits at the southern end of a line of new and refurbished Russian military facilities that stretches north in an arc through western Russia and ends in the country’s Baltic outpost of Kaliningrad.
The military buildup is echoed in NATO countries such as Poland and the Baltic states, where U.S. forces are beefing up patrols and conducting more frequent exercises.
Spurred by years of growing mutual distrust and in particular the conflict in Ukraine, both Russia and NATO are boosting their military capabilities across eastern Europe, prompting officials such as Polish President Andrzej Duda and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to talk of a return to open hostilities.
“We have, in effect, slid into a new Cold War,” Medvedev told a security conference in Munich in February.
To be sure, the scale of the military confrontation is not the same. Disarmament deals in the past three decades have lowered the temperature of the nuclear confrontation. Absent too are the hundreds of thousands of troops who were stationed on either side of the Iron Curtain in eastern Europe during the Cold War. But elements of the conventional military standoff are now returning.
Crimea is one of the starkest examples. In a week touring the region, a Reuters reporter saw 18 sites, including naval bases, radar stations and airfields. Some were entirely new, some were old military sites that had been refurbished, and others were in the process of being refurbished.
Moscow has made no secret of its buildup in Crimea. But Reuters’ observations, combined with the other information, shed light on its scale.
Britain’s Defence Minister Michael Fallon said in September that London was concerned about military buildup in Crimea “and indeed the militarisation of the Black Sea region generally. Both Bulgaria and Romania feel very threatened.”
Crimea is now the closest Russian-controlled territory to NATO member Romania, which since May has hosted part of a U.S.-controlled international missile shield. The project is scheduled to become operational in late 2018, when work on a radar installation in Poland – the other main land-based component in the shield – is completed.
Washington says the shield is designed as a defence against Iranian missile strikes. But Russian President Vladimir Putin says the system and NATO are both threats to Russia’s security, and has promised to retaliate.
Russia’s defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment about its activities in Crimea. Nor did the regional government in Crimea. RING OF RADARS
One part of Russia’s expansion programme appears to be an attempt to re-create a chain of radar stations on rocky hilltops around Crimea. These stations offer an ideal vantage point for monitoring the Black Sea, and nearby NATO members Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania.
One of the stations – a facility with four revolving radars each encased in a large white dome – sits halfway up a mountain near the Crimean seaside town of Feodosiya. Built in Soviet times, the station had been abandoned by the Ukrainian military.
Now the Russian armed forces have moved in. In July, two green Russian military vehicles with tall antennas were parked beneath the radars. “There is a military base here, air defence system and missiles,” said a man who lives in a village about 300 metres from the base. “There are air defence systems on every cape here.”
Further around the coast, on the outskirts of the port city of Sevastopol, sits another radar station, called “Dnepr.” Built by Soviet engineers, the station was out of order for years before the Russian annexation. A Reuters reporter saw dozens of soldiers in Russian military uniforms inside the base and guarding the perimeter.
Behind three lines of perimeter fencing were two structures, each around 300 meters long, with sloping sides partially covered by black metal sheets. The structures match archive images showing the Dnepr radar system. A Russian flag flew from the roof of a building near the two radar structures.
A sentry said that a nearby lighthouse that used to be a tourist attraction was now part of a military base and off limits to the public.
Russian newspaper Izvestiya quoted a military source in May as saying Moscow will restore the Dnepr station so it can “detect launches of ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles from the Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea area.”
The Russian defence ministry did not respond to questions about the radar station. NEW SCHOOLS AND SWIMMING POOLS
The Russian military buildup seen by Reuters goes beyond what existed in Crimea when it was under the control of Kiev, according to soldiers in Crimea, local residents and Ukrainian accounts of deployments before the annexation.
At Perevalnoye, a small village at the foot of a mountain not far from Simferopol in the centre of the peninsula, Russia is transforming an abandoned Ukrainian military facility into two new bases.
Inside the fenced perimeter of one in August, stood two 500-metre-long green hangars into which military vehicles drove. Nearby, trucks rumbled between a huge concrete plant and a construction site that will become a second base.
According to documents lodged by the defence ministry on the official website for public procurement tenders, one of the two bases will be for coast guards and the other for artillery units.
The ministry documents, which were lodged from October 2014, indicate the combined projects will include dormitories for more than 1,000 soldiers, residential buildings with more than 300 apartments, an ammunition depot, hangars for more than 500 military vehicles, an artillery range and dining facilities.
A new school and a kindergarten with a pool, as well as barracks for a military orchestra, are also planned, the documents show.
The ministry did not respond to questions about the Perevalnoye base. BASES EXPANDING
Before Russia annexed Crimea, Moscow leased facilities from the Ukrainian state to house its Black Sea fleet, which has been based in Crimea for more than two centuries. Those facilities, mainly around Sevastopol, are now being expanded.
In one bay on the outskirts of the city, according to procurement documents, the Russian military is building a training centre for navy divers. There will also be a mooring area and an aircraft runway that has been unused for 20 years will be brought back into service.
From the perimeter fence, a Reuters reporter saw concrete taxiways, large cranes, and work underway to reinforce the shoreline.
The ministry did not reply to questions about the plans for that site.
Most of the expansion in Crimea is being carried out by the Russian navy and ground forces. But air capabilities are also being beefed up.
The former Belbek civilian airport has been turned into a military air base, according to a Reuters reporter who went to the base. The terminal building has been shut and the entrance to the base is now guarded by a Russian marine.
An Il-76 heavy military transport plane, with the insignia of the Russian air force, was parked on the airfield when Reuters visited.
Two other military airfields that were abandoned by the Ukrainians are also now in use again by the Russian military. At the Novofyodorovka airfield, in a coastal village to the north of Sevastopol, a Reuters reporter saw half a dozen dark-grey SU-30 fighter jets and light-grey SU-24 frontline bombers.
At the other recommissioned air base, in Djankoy, 40 km south of the de facto border separating Crimea from Ukrainian-controlled territory, Russian servicemen in blue uniform came and went throughout the day. Seven MI-24 attack helicopters were parked on the airfield.
“There were just two airplanes here when Ukraine ruled. And look at this place now, you can see much more here,” a young soldier told Reuters at the checkpoint.
The defence ministry did not respond to questions about the air bases | 1 |
Punctuating a string of moves to shore up labor rights and expand protections for workers, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities have a federally backed right to unionize. The case arose from a petition filed by a group of graduate students at Columbia University, who are seeking to win recognition for a union that will join the United Automobile Workers and allow them a say over such issues as the quality of their health insurance and the timeliness of stipend payments. Echoing longstanding complaints from workers that they have become replaceable cogs in a globalized economic machine, the effort reflects a growing view among more highly educated employees in recent decades that they, too, are at the mercy of faceless organizations and are not being treated like professionals and aspiring professionals whose opinions are worthy of respect. “What we’re fundamentally concerned about isn’t really money,” said Paul R. Katz, one of the Columbia graduate students involved in the organizing efforts. “It’s a question of power and democracy in a space in the academy that’s increasingly corporatized, hierarchical. That’s what we’re most concerned about. ” Columbia and other universities that weighed in with the board before the ruling argued that collective bargaining would lead to a more adversarial relationship between students and the university that would undermine its educational purpose. The decision reverses a 2004 ruling by the board involving graduate student assistants at Brown University. The ruling held that the assistants could not be considered employees because they “are primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university. ” The current board disagreed, arguing that Columbia students could be deemed employees if they perform and are compensated for work that the university oversees, even if their relationship was substantially broader. The three Democratic members of the board made up the majority the lone Republican member dissented. A fifth spot on the board has been vacant since last year. Highly educated workers in other fields have also chafed at a growing sense of their own powerlessness. Recent law school graduates have lamented their rising debt and declining prospects for landing a law firm job. Many medical interns and residents have unionized in recent years, while a group of doctors at a medical center in Oregon formed a union of hospitalists in 2014. Heather Appel, the communications director for the Committee of Interns and Residents, which is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union and represents some 14, 000 residents, interns and fellows nationwide, attributed the activity in part to the doctors’ lost sense of autonomy and to growing job insecurity amid a trend of hospital mergers. At the same time, the Obama administration and its appointees have taken numerous steps to protect workers and bolster their rights in recent years, from lifting the minimum wage for workers employed by federal contractors to new rules that lower workers’ exposure to dangerous silica dust. Some of these efforts have touched professionals as well, such as a requirement that financial advisers who handle workers’ retirement accounts must act in their best interests, and expansion of the number of employees who are automatically eligible for overtime pay, which affected many postdoctoral researchers. Many universities opposed the overtime rule, arguing, as with unionization, that it would change their relationship with their students and young scholars. Despite the overall trend, the administration and its appointees have not been categorically sympathetic to labor. Last year, the labor board dismissed a petition by football players at Northwestern University who had argued that they were employees and sought to unionize. Graduate students at a number of public universities already have the right to organize under state laws. Caroline A. Adelman, a spokeswoman for Columbia, said that “Columbia — along with many of our peer institutions — disagrees with this outcome because we believe the academic relationship students have with faculty members and departments as part of their studies is not the same as between employer and employee. ” Money does not appear to be a central issue between the students and the Columbia administration, which has already raised stipends by several percent per year of late. As a sign of the changing nature of the control that universities exert over instructors, some of the Columbia students have pointed to the rise over the past several decades of adjunct faculty members, who typically teach for less pay, and have far less job security, than faculty members. Over the past five decades, the proportion of tenured and faculty at postsecondary institutions declined from about to about according to some estimates. Beyond concerns that unionization by graduate students will be highly disruptive, the universities also argued that the reach of the unions would extend beyond the purely economic aspect of the relationship between the student assistants and the university. They worry that unionization might begin to intrude on academic matters, such as class size and length, even the format of classes and exams. Joseph Ambash, a lawyer who represented Brown University in its 2004 case and wrote a brief in the current case on behalf of several Ivy League universities, cited concerns about what he called a slippery slope. “I don’t think a union is going to negotiate things such as grades,” he said. “However, when you talk about the term ‘workload,’ that goes to how many hours a week should a research assistant devote to working in the lab on research that results in a Ph. D. how many hours they devote to grading exams, who gets to be selected to be either a teaching assistant or research assistant. ” All of those examples have significant academic implications and should be controlled entirely by the university, he said. In rejecting such arguments, the board cited research that examined the impact of graduate student unions in public universities and generally concluded that the unions either had no effect on academic freedom and the relationship between students and faculty, or actually brought improvement. “We don’t observe bad effects on academic freedom, bad effects on relationships,” said Paula B. Voos, an professor at Rutgers University who was a of one of the studies cited. Professor Voos’s study, which compared students at four public universities that had graduate student labor unions with four that did not, found that on balance students at the unionized universities reported having better personal relationships and “professional support relationships” with their main faculty advisers. The majority at the labor board, an independent agency whose members are appointed by the president, expressed confidence that universities and their students could draw a proper line between largely academic issues and issues of pay and working conditions. Citing the example of New York University, which voluntarily recognized its graduate student union in 2013, it said the university’s labor agreements “incorporate a ‘management and academic rights’ clause, which would tend to allay fears that collective bargaining will attempt to dictate academic matters. ” | 1 |
0 |
|
I agree, but compare other organisms, in effect all organisms are corporate in nature. It is failure to diversify that leads to endangering any species. To diversify is survival. Corporations that rely on a fixed market die out - high button shoes, spats, buggy whips, oil lanterns etc. Maybe they need a warning, Caution! Peace is about to break out! Time to do something else!
Failure to diversify results in high irony. The Peruvian potato fed millions but caused economic ruin and starvation for the Irish. In Peru, they have 5000 varieties and nobody starves when one goes bad. Ireland had only one genetic species, and that's the point. Had the lazy Spanish stolen a few more varieties from the Incas, there'd have been far and away fewer Irish firemen to put out the Chicago fire. (One's opinion of Chicago notwithstanding.)
While I agree with you, I think the point is the economic model is lazy, it's comfortable profiting with war tools and not paying attention to humanity's real needs or goals. Is war popular with anyone not in office or engaged in the business of making war toys? No. That laziness is the real trouble. They're engaging in pressure and lobbyist campaign contribution bribery for their own benefit, certainly not the innocent public everywhere.
That's why we need to federally fund democracy, end corporate campaign contributions and for profit revolving door politics all together. Our system needs diversity, the kind all people can live with. And no, I'm not talking new world order, just the common sense of peace. | 0 |
Roman Polanski’s latest film has been added to this year’s lineup at the Cannes Film Festival, marking the first time since 2013 that the exiled director’s work will be presented at the festival. [D’après une histoire vraie (Based on a True Story) will screen out of competition at the 70th annual edition of the prestigious French film festival, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The film — starring Eva Green, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Vincent Perez — centers on a writer who must deal with an obsessive fan after the release of her latest book. Polanski’s film is among a new titles added to the official Cannes lineup Thursday, including Ruben Ostlund’s The Square, which will vie for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, with four other contenders. The announcement of the addition comes as Polanski lost a bid this month to resolve his conviction for the statutory rape of a girl in 1977. The director had attempted to return to the United States after decades of living in exile in Europe, where he fled in 1978 after his conviction. Cannes organizers could face public backlash over their decision to include Polanski’s film in January, the director stepped down from his role as president of the César Awards — the French equivalent of the Oscars — after women protested his appointment. Polanski’s last film to screen at the festival was La Venus a la Fourrure (Venus in Fur) a dramedy that screened in competition at the festival. That film also starred Seigner, Polanski’s wife. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 0 |
November 19, 2016
While ISIS, Jimmy Saville and the popularity of Kanye West have recently hurt ghouls’ solid position in the scare lists; the election of an orange-faced sociopath into the position of the world’s number one nuke holder has finally put the nail in their rotten coffins. ‘Ghosts are so 1840′ said one industry insider. ‘All that lace and self-reflection. They are now seen as more fabulous than fearful. Gwen Stefani has got 7 in her latest music video and Haunted Hill was just bought up by Sandals.’
Derek Acorah explained: ‘They need to be more Tarantino, less Lloyd-Webber. Zombies got sprinty, clowns lost the big shoes and blood-sucking vampires just took up banking’. jimiedge | 0 |
In 2008, Donald Trump sold a Palm Beach, Fla. estate for $95 million, making it the most expensive single residential property ever sold in town. Now the property is about to set another record — as Palm Beach’s most expensive . Backhoes and dump trucks have started crushing and carting away the French provincial home at 515 North County Road, along with an tennis house, a pool house and a carriage house. While such have become common in Palm Beach and other resort towns, the demolition of the estate known as Maison de l’Amitié, or House of Friendship, represents a new level of disposable wealth. Bought by Mr. Trump in 2004 for $41 million and sold in 2008 to a Russian billionaire for $95 million, the residence has since sat empty, a monument to the housing bubble and to Trump’s outsize salesmanship. The big question now is what will come next for one of Palm Beach’s biggest white elephants and whether its value can ever reach its 2008 record price. According to town planning documents, the owner of the property, a limited liability company linked to the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, plans to split the property into three parcels that will be sold. Last week, the Palm Beach Town Council approved the owner’s proposal to subdivide the property. It’s unclear when the properties will be listed. Brokers say each parcel, at around two acres, would have to sell for $35 million to $40 million for the owner to make a profit. “It’s an aggressive price,” said Gary Pohrer, a real estate agent in Palm Beach. “It’s possible. But it could take a long time. ” The history of the property is filled with financial ups and downs. It was once owned by Robert Dun Douglass, a member of the Dun Bradstreet family. The property was sold in 1930 to Harrison Williams, an electric utility tycoon said to be one of the richest men in America. After successive owners and building changes, the property was bought in 1988 for $12. 08 million by Abraham Gosman, a Massachusetts nursing home and health care magnate. Mr. Gosman built the current mansion on the property. But after his business faltered and his debts piled up from lavish spending, Mr. Gosman filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in 2003. In 2004, as part of the bankruptcy, the property went up for auction. Mr. Trump topped at least two other bidders with an offer of $41. 35 million. After the sale, he told The Palm Beach Daily News that he would turn the estate into the “ house in America,” after his home down the road. He would then sell it to “create terrific value. ” The extent of Mr. Trump’s improvements after the purchase remain unclear. Mr. Trump initially said he had “gutted the house” and made $25 million in extensive renovations. Yet in the application for demolition, filed in February, the architect for the project said that the 2005 and 2006 renovations were limited to a new kitchen, the creation of new bedrooms and bathrooms, and “some minor interior alterations of doors, frames and windows. ” Mr. Trump put the home on the market in 2006 for $125 million, making it the most expensive listing in America at the time. When no buyers emerged and Mr. Trump replaced several brokers, he trimmed the price to $120 million. In the summer of 2008, just before the real estate market crashed, Mr. Trump found his buyer: Mr. Rybolovlev, a former medical student who took his fertilizer company public in 2007 and later moved to Switzerland and Monaco. He had toured several homes in Palm Beach but hadn’t found what he wanted. “I showed him five big oceanfront homes,” said Carol Digges, a real estate broker representing Mr. Rybolovlev at the time. “But he said, ‘I want something more grand, something bigger. ’” When she showed him Maison de l’Amitié, Mr. Rybolovlev was impressed and eventually negotiated a deal. Mr. Trump maintains he sold the property for $100 million, yet people involved in the deal, as well as the sales deed, put the price at $95 million. At the time, Mr. Rybolovlev said he bought the property as an investment. “This acquisition is simply an investment,” he said in a statement and “does not represent a decision by me to live in the U. S. ” Technically, the buyer was a limited liability company, County Road Property L. L. C. which is controlled by an offshore trust benefiting members of the Rybolovlev family. Mr. Rybolovlev was named in the Panama Papers (the leaked documents that disclosed information on offshore entities of the wealthy) as having used offshore trusts to hold assets, though a spokesman said the trusts were used for “asset protection and estate planning. ” Yet according to Mr. Rybolovlev’s Elena, Mr. Rybolovlev may have had other reasons to pay a high price for the property and to use offshore trusts. When the limited liability company bought the property, the Rybolovlevs were in the midst of a bitter divorce. Mr. Rybolovlev’s accused him in a lawsuit of “secreting and transferring assets in order to avoid his obligations,” and she sought half of the Palm Beach house. Mr. Rybolovlev denied the claims, adding that the trusts were created years before the divorce. Last fall, the two reached a settlement and agreed to end all legal actions related to the divorce, including the claims over the Palm Beach property. In the eight years after the purchase, Mr. Rybolovlev quietly entertained offers on the home, according to local brokers, but none met his asking price of more than $125 million. In March, the Palm Beach Architectural Commission approved the demolition of the estate. According to brokers and neighbors, crews have been working daily at the site with an oversize backhoe and bulldozer. The limited liability company has also submitted a request to the town to subdivide the land into three parcels. The proposal calls for the largest lot, at the southern end, to be 2. 35 acres, with the potential to include a house of more than 51, 000 square feet with 10 bedrooms and 12 baths. The other two parcels would be just under two acres, able to accommodate homes of 42, 000 square feet. In Palm Beach, the biggest land prize is ocean frontage. The largest parcel would have 173 linear feet on the water, while the other two would have about 150. To receive the expected asking price, the parcels would have to sell for more than $215, 000 a linear foot of ocean frontage. Brokers say most recent sales of Palm Beach oceanfront went for about $100, 000 to $120, 000 a linear foot. Kenneth Griffin, the hedge fund manager, has spent more than $120 million in Palm Beach to buy and combine four parcels of land, which brokers say worked out to be more than $200, 000 a linear foot. Mr. Rybolovlev’s property is considered among the best on the island — close to the town center and with direct access to the beach. Some brokers say it could well top the Griffin price. “I suspect one person will buy all three parcels of land and keep it as one estate,” said Angela Koch, a Palm Beach real estate broker. “All it takes is another Ken Griffin. ” | 1 |
STOCKHOLM — With a vigorous national debate underway on whether Sweden should enter a military partnership with NATO, officials in Stockholm suddenly encountered an unsettling problem: a flood of distorted and outright false information on social media, confusing public perceptions of the issue. The claims were alarming: If Sweden, a member, signed the deal, the alliance would stockpile secret nuclear weapons on Swedish soil NATO could attack Russia from Sweden without government approval NATO soldiers, immune from prosecution, could rape Swedish women without fear of criminal charges. They were all false, but the disinformation had begun spilling into the traditional news media, and as the defense minister, Peter Hultqvist, traveled the country to promote the pact in speeches and town hall meetings, he was repeatedly grilled about the bogus stories. “People were not used to it, and they got scared, asking what can be believed, what should be believed?” said Marinette Nyh Radebo, Mr. Hultqvist’s spokeswoman. As often happens in such cases, Swedish officials were never able to pin down the source of the false reports. But they, numerous analysts and experts in American and European intelligence point to Russia as the prime suspect, noting that preventing NATO expansion is a centerpiece of the foreign policy of President Vladimir V. Putin, who invaded Georgia in 2008 largely to forestall that possibility. In Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Mr. Putin has flaunted a modernized and more muscular military. But he lacks the economic strength and overall might to openly confront NATO, the European Union or the United States. Instead, he has invested heavily in a program of “weaponized” information, using a variety of means to sow doubt and division. The goal is to weaken cohesion among member states, stir discord in their domestic politics and blunt opposition to Russia. “Moscow views world affairs as a system of special operations, and very sincerely believes that it itself is an object of Western special operations,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, who helped establish the Kremlin’s information machine before 2008. “I am sure that there are a lot of centers, some linked to the state, that are involved in inventing these kinds of fake stories. ” The planting of false stories is nothing new the Soviet Union devoted considerable resources to that during the ideological battles of the Cold War. Now, though, disinformation is regarded as an important aspect of Russian military doctrine, and it is being directed at political debates in target countries with far greater sophistication and volume than in the past. The flow of misleading and inaccurate stories is so strong that both NATO and the European Union have established special offices to identify and refute disinformation, particularly claims emanating from Russia. The Kremlin’s clandestine methods have surfaced in the United States, too, American officials say, identifying Russian intelligence as the likely source of leaked Democratic National Committee emails that embarrassed Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The Kremlin uses both conventional media — Sputnik, a news agency, and RT, a television outlet — and covert channels, as in Sweden, that are almost always untraceable. Russia exploits both approaches in a comprehensive assault, Wilhelm Unge, a spokesman for the Swedish Security Service, said this year when presenting the agency’s annual report. “We mean everything from internet trolls to propaganda and misinformation spread by media companies like RT and Sputnik,” he said. The fundamental purpose of dezinformatsiya, or Russian disinformation, experts said, is to undermine the official version of events — even the very idea that there is a true version of events — and foster a kind of policy paralysis. Disinformation most famously succeeded in early 2014 with the initial obfuscation about deploying Russian forces to seize Crimea. That summer, Russia pumped out a dizzying array of theories about the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, blaming the C. I. A. and, most outlandishly, Ukrainian fighter pilots who had mistaken the airliner for the Russian presidential aircraft. The cloud of stories helped veil the simple truth that poorly trained insurgents had accidentally downed the plane with a missile supplied by Russia. Moscow adamantly denies using disinformation to influence Western public opinion and tends to label accusations of either overt or covert threats as “Russophobia. ” “There is an impression that, like in a good orchestra, many Western countries every day accuse Russia of threatening someone,” Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said at a recent ministry briefing. Tracing individual strands of disinformation is difficult, but in Sweden and elsewhere, experts have detected a characteristic pattern that they tie to disinformation campaigns. “The dynamic is always the same: It originates somewhere in Russia, on Russia state media sites, or different websites or somewhere in that kind of context,” said Anders Lindberg, a Swedish journalist and lawyer. “Then the fake document becomes the source of a news story distributed on or websites,” he said. “Those who rely on those sites for news link to the story, and it spreads. Nobody can say where they come from, but they end up as key issues in a security policy decision. ” Although the topics may vary, the goal is the same, Mr. Lindberg and others suggested. “What the Russians are doing is building narratives they are not building facts,” he said. “The underlying narrative is, ‘Don’t trust anyone. ’” The weaponization of information is not some project devised by a Kremlin policy expert but is an integral part of Russian military doctrine — what some senior military figures call a “decisive” battlefront. “The role of nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown, and, in many cases, they have exceeded the power of force of weapons in their effectiveness,” Gen. Valery V. Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in 2013. A prime Kremlin target is Europe, where the rise of the populist right and declining support for the European Union create an ever more receptive audience for Russia’s conservative, nationalistic and authoritarian approach under Mr. Putin. Last year, the European Parliament accused Russia of “financing radical and extremist parties” in its member states, and in 2014 the Kremlin extended an $11. 7 million loan to the National Front, the party in France. “The Russians are very good at courting everyone who has a grudge with liberal democracy, and that goes from extreme right to extreme left,” said Patrik Oksanen, an editorial writer for the Swedish newspaper group MittMedia. The central idea, he said, is that “liberal democracy is corrupt, inefficient, chaotic and, ultimately, not democratic. ” Another message, largely unstated, is that European governments lack the competence to deal with the crises they face, particularly immigration and terrorism, and that their officials are all American puppets. In Germany, concerns over immigrant violence grew after a girl said she had been raped by migrants. A report on Russian state television furthered the story. Even after the police debunked the claim, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, continued to chastise Germany. In Britain, analysts said, the Kremlin’s news outlets heavily favored the campaign for the country to leave the European Union, despite their claims of objectivity. In the Czech Republic, alarming, sensational stories portraying the United States, the European Union and immigrants as villains appear daily across a cluster of about 40 websites. During NATO military exercises in early June, articles on the websites suggested that Washington controlled Europe through the alliance, with Germany as its local sheriff. Echoing the disinformation that appeared in Sweden, the reports said NATO planned to store nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe and would attack Russia from there without seeking approval from local capitals. A poll this summer by European Values, a think tank in Prague, found that 51 percent of Czechs viewed the United States’ role in Europe negatively, that only 32 percent viewed the European Union positively and that at least a quarter believed some elements of the disinformation. “The data show how public opinion is changing thanks to the disinformation on those outlets,” said Jakub Janda, the think tank’s deputy director for public and political affairs. “They try to look like a regular media outlet even if they have a hidden agenda. ” Not all Russian disinformation efforts succeed. Sputnik news websites in various Scandinavian languages failed to attract enough readers and were closed after less than a year. Both RT and Sputnik portray themselves as independent, alternative voices. Sputnik claims that it “tells the untold,” even if its daily report relies heavily on articles abridged from other sources. RT trumpets the slogan “Question More. ” Both depict the West as grim, divided, brutal, decadent, overrun with violent immigrants and unstable. “They want to give a picture of Europe as some sort of continent that is collapsing,” Mr. Hultqvist, the Swedish defense minister, said in an interview. RT often seems obsessed with the United States, portraying life there as hellish. On the day President Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention, for example, it emphasized scattered demonstrations rather than the speeches. It defends the Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, as an underdog maligned by the established news media. Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor in chief, said the channel was being singled out as a threat because it offered a different narrative from “the establishment. ” RT, she said, wants to provide “a perspective otherwise missing from the mainstream media echo chamber. ” Moscow’s targeting of the West with disinformation dates to a Cold War program the Soviets called “active measures. ” The effort involved leaking or even writing stories for sympathetic newspapers in India and hoping that they would be picked up in the West, said Professor Mark N. Kramer, a Cold War expert at Harvard. The story that AIDS was a C. I. A. project run amok spread that way, and it poisons the discussion of the disease decades later. At the time, before the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, the Kremlin was selling communism as an ideological alternative. Now, experts said, the ideological component has evaporated, but the goal of weakening adversaries remains. In Sweden recently, that has meant a series of bizarre forged letters and news articles about NATO and linked to Russia. One forgery, on Defense Ministry letterhead over Mr. Hultqvist’s signature, encouraged a major Swedish firm to sell artillery to Ukraine, a move that would be illegal in Sweden. Ms. Nyh Radebo, his spokeswoman, put an end to that story in Sweden, but at international conferences, Mr. Hultqvist still faced questions about the nonexistent sales. Russia also made at least one overt attempt to influence the debate. During a seminar in the spring, Vladimir Kozin, a senior adviser to the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, a think tank linked to the Kremlin and Russian foreign intelligence, argued against any change in Sweden’s neutral status. “Do they really need to lose their neutral status?” he said of the Swedes. “To permit fielding new U. S. military bases on their territory and to send their national troops to take part in dubious regional conflicts?” Whatever the method or message, Russia clearly wants to win any information war, as Dmitry Kiselyev, Russia’s most famous television anchor and the director of the organization that runs Sputnik, made clear recently. Speaking this summer on the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Information Bureau, Mr. Kiselyev said the age of neutral journalism was over. “If we do propaganda, then you do propaganda, too,” he said, directing his message to Western journalists. “Today, it is much more costly to kill one enemy soldier than during World War II, World War I or in the Middle Ages,” he said in an interview on the Rossiya 24 network. While the business of “persuasion” is more expensive now, too, he said, “if you can persuade a person, you don’t need to kill him. ” | 1 |
The moment was captured in a photograph, an unforgettable image that was seared in the world’s collective memory as a symbol of resilience: three firefighters raising an American flag amid the ruins of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Soon after, the flag disappeared. New York City officials tried to track it down, to no avail. Now the flag has been recovered, though the mystery has not been entirely solved. On Thursday, nearly 15 years after it first flew, the flag will again become a prominent part of Lower Manhattan when it goes on display at the National September 11 Memorial Museum. The flag’s return required a transcontinental trip: It was recovered in Washington State. On Sept. 11, 2001, three firefighters — Billy Eisengrein, George Johnson and Dan McWilliams — removed the flag and its pole from the Star of America, a yacht that had been moored at the North Cove marina on the Hudson River. Thomas E. Franklin, a photographer for The Record, a newspaper in northern New Jersey, captured the moment when it was raised at ground zero. After flying at ground zero, the flag, or so it was believed at the time, was unfurled at Yankee Stadium and on naval ships in the Middle East before returning to City Hall in 2002. But it turned out the flag — which was signed by Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayors Rudolph W. Giuliani and Michael R. Bloomberg, among others — was not the right one. The yacht’s flag measured 3 feet by 5 feet the autographed flag was 5 feet by 8 feet. The flag’s whereabouts was not known until late 2014, after the mystery was featured on the first episode of “Brad Meltzer’s Lost History,” which was broadcast on H2, a spinoff of the History Channel. “All we did was put up the version of the wanted poster,” said Mr. Meltzer, an author of thriller novels and children’s books as well as a writer for television. “We put that flag on TV. ” The episode, which uses a grainy video to show that the flag disappeared on the night of the terrorist attack, was broadcast on Oct. 31. Four days later, a man carrying a plastic bag walked into a fire station in Everett, Wash. He had seen the show and believed he had the flag. “He used the name Brian,” said Mark St. Clair, the deputy chief of operations at the Everett Police Department. “At least that’s what the firefighters recall him using. ” Brian said he was a former Marine who had been deployed in the Middle East. He was given the flag, according to the firefighters’ account provided to Mr. St. Clair, by a worker at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who had in turn been given the flag by the widow of someone killed on Sept. 11 in New York. Mr. St. Clair said it was unclear whether the firefighters knew about the flag or that it was missing. But out of respect for the flag that was turned in, they unclipped it from its halyard, folded it and told their superiors. The police began investigating. “In the beginning it was just a flag that was returned,” said Kim Gilmore, a senior historian at the History Channel. “There was a lot of work to determine if it was the ground zero flag. ” Mr. St. Clair gathered footage from cameras near the firehouse and released police sketches of Brian, based on descriptions from firefighters, to a local newspaper, but that effort did not yield results. The sketch also did not provide any leads at NOAA. On Sunday, the 15th anniversary of the attacks, the History Channel will broadcast a program on the flag’s recovery. During the show, John W. Cutter, who was a member of the New York Police Department’s criminal intelligence section and retired as a deputy chief in 2004, expresses doubts that the flag came from a widow. Flags used at burials typically do not have any rope or hardware. “This leads me to believe that he received the flag in some other fashion and is afraid to say how he got it,” Mr. Cutter said, referring to the Marine. Another figure central to the effort to verify the flag’s authenticity was Bill Schneck, a forensic materials scientist with Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory who had previously worked for the McCrone Group, a testing firm in Westmont, Ill. that specializes in particle identification. “In this case, I compared the dust on the flag to known dust samples collected by others in the days after ” Mr. Schneck said. That dust was a mixture of concrete, glass fibers, plastic, molten pieces of metal and asbestos. “It was like what you would call a fingerprint,” Mr. Schneck said. His analysis of the particles on the flag showed the same characteristics as particle types in the dust after the towers fell. Mr. Schneck also conducted an extensive photographic comparison of the flag in Washington to images of the Sept. 11 flag taken by Mr. Franklin and provided by The Record. The two flags were the same size and made from the same material, and each had a brass and a stainless steel snap and halyards with distinctive knots and wraps of black electrical tape. The History Channel enlisted Monica Rosero, who worked on the Star of America, to help with the identification. She recognized the hardware and rope and said the black tape was the handiwork of her husband Carlos Rosero, the boat’s engineer, who died in 2008. By July, the findings of the investigation “led us to believe that we had enough information that we could release that flag to someone claiming ownership,” Mr. St. Clair said. The flag was then sent back to New York. How the flag ended up across the country is a piece of the puzzle that remains unsolved. Among those who were informed that the flag had been found was Shirley B. Dreifus, who along with her husband, Spiros E. Kopelakis, owned the Star of America. “It’s truly amazing,” Ms. Dreifus, who sold the yacht in 2008, said. “In fact, ‘stunning’ is the way I put it. ” Ms. Dreifus said she was saddened that her husband, who died nearly two years ago, could not share in the news. “He called it the icon of the century,” she said. “This was the only symbol of hope that day. ” She and the Chubb insurance company, which paid a claim on the flag, donated it to the Sept. 11 museum. Joseph C. Daniels, the chief executive and president of the memorial and museum, said: “To not have that flag as a part of the museum, it always felt like there was something missing. It was a symbol of not only hope, but of strength. We needed both at the time. ” | 1 |
Eric Clanton, a former professor at Diablo Valley College, has been arrested by Berkeley Police for allegedly attacking activists with a bike lock during rallies that took place on April 15.[ Clanton was accused by users on 4chan last month as being the masked Antifa activist who beat attendees with a bike lock at the April 15 rallies in Berkeley. Now police have arrested Clanton on charges of assault with a deadly weapon. Clanton was a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, which is located is Pleasant Hill, California, a short trip away from UC Berkeley, though he is no longer listed among the school’s professors. “His work in political philosophy also centers on mass incarceration and the prison system,” Clanton’s former faculty page read. “He is currently exploring restorative justice from an perspective. ” According to Berekelyside, a local newspaper, Clanton is being held on a $200, 000 bail on suspicion of three accounts of assault with a deadly weapon. Until Wednesday night, Berkeley investigators had declined to say whether they were looking into Clanton, despite the outcry online calling for his arrest. Wednesday, officers arrested him in Oakland at 12:15 p. m. He is being held at Berkeley Jail with a bail of $200, 000, according to Alameda County sheriff’s office records online. Clanton, whose listed occupation is college professor, is scheduled for arraignment Friday. Police said they have identified three victims in the case. All three were struck in the head or neck with a bike lock, police said. Berkeley Police Captain Ed Spiller claimed that Clanton was tracked down at a location in Oakland, California, before adding that he found the video footage from the incident “shocking. ” “We’re taking every case seriously. We’re still asking people to come forward that have information. … There’s still work to be done,” Spiller added. Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart. com | 0 |
TRUMPED! LIBERAL NEWS OUTLET BLOOMBERG POLL CONCEDES TRUMP BEATING CROOKED HILLARY IN FLORIDA by IWB · October 27, 2016
by Geoffrey Grider DONALD TRUMP HAS A SLIM ADVANTAGE IN FLORIDA AS CRITICAL INDEPENDENT VOTERS NARROWLY BREAK HIS WAY IN THE MUST-WIN BATTLEGROUND STATE, A BLOOMBERG POLITICS POLL SHOWS. I can’t speak for south Florida , but as a longtime resident of north Florida I can promise you that there is a near frenzy of support for Donald Trump here. Over the past year I have seen endless amounts of Trump signs, stickers and banners. I saw a fair amount of pro-Bernie stuff as well. But pro-Hillary advertising? It’s practically non-existent, I haven’t even seen half a dozen stickers and absolutely zero lawn signs. So I find it astonishing when I turn on the “news” and hear the libs talking about Hillary’s double-digit lead over Trump. It’s not true, don’t believe it. Donald Trump is doing great and is on track to win the White House in just under two weeks. The Republican presidential nominee has 45 percent to Democrat Hillary Clinton’s 43 percent among likely voters when third-party candidates are included, the poll found . In a hypothetical two-way race, Trump has 46 percent to Clinton’s 45 percent. DONALD TRUMP RALLY IN SAINT AUGUSTINE DRAWS TENS OF THOUSANDS:
With over 4,000 people already inside the Saint Augustine Amphitheater, I took 60 seconds to do a walk-thru of just a fraction of the thousands of people in the overflow section who stood there for hours waiting to see Donald Trump. This is the type of support Trump has here in Florida. Among independents , Trump gets 43 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent in a head-to-head contest. When third-party candidates are included, Trump picks up 1 point with independents while Clinton drops to 37 percent, with Libertarian Gary Johnson taking 9 percent and the Green Party’s Jill Stein getting 5 percent. “This race may come down to the independent vote,” said pollster J. Ann Selzer, who oversaw the survey. “ Right now, they tilt for Trump . By a narrow margin, they opted for Obama over Romney in 2012.” Trump’s showing in this poll is stronger than in other recent surveys in the state. Trump is also surging ahead of HIllary in Ohio and and is rapidly closing the gap in Pennsylvania. CNN ANCHOR’S STUNNED WHEN FACT CHECKER CONFIRMS HILLARY’S CORRUPTION: | 0 |
November 1, 2016 By 21wire 4 Comments
Patrick Henningsen 21st Century Wire
The longer this soap opera drags on, it’s becoming more and more evident that the Russian government did not ‘hack’ into the DNC, and Moscow is not feeding John Podesta’s emails to Wikileaks. For those who are deeply invested in this now official conspiracy theory, this might be a hard pill to swallow.
The White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign are now married to the idea that ‘Putin is hacking the US elections.’ In response, the President is weighing his options – tougher economic sanctions, revoking diplomatic status to Russian envoys in the US, or even deploying his newly developed ‘malicious cyber-activity’ tools.
Even VP Joe Biden wants in on the action, threatening Moscow by saying,”We’re sending a message. We have the capacity to do it.”
It seems that where ever you turn nowadays, someone in Washington is issuing a threat against Russia. Are US-Russian relations really that bad, or does this trend have more to do with the defense industry and power struggles within the US?
What was previously a stance reserved for right-wing neoconservative hawks and Cold War hold-outs has now infected America’s left-wing, and is a firm plank in the Democratic Party platform, as evidenced by Hillary Clinton’s constant anti-Russian rhetoric throughout this 2016 election cycle. Along with the White House, Clinton has now transformed the Democrats into the vanguard of Washington’s new anti-Russia movement.
On July 27th, Josh Rogin from the Washington Post wrote, “The Clinton campaign has decided to escalate its rhetoric on Russia. After Trump suggested Wednesday that if Russia had indeed hacked Clinton’s private email server it should release the emails, the Clinton campaign sent out its Democratic surrogates to bash Russia and Trump in a manner traditionally reserved for Republicans.”
Anyone who was paying attention back then knew this ‘Russian hack’ talking point was purely political, but then again, who’s really paying attention these days? Certainly not the US media.
You can trace the genesis of the Democratic Party’s hardcore anti-Russian strategy back to when President Vladimir Putin made a mild passing remark about Donald Trump’s GOP primary success. From that point on, Trump’s political opponents saw this as an open target. In their words, ‘comparing one dictator to another.’
Never one to pass up an opportunity to score cheap political points, President Obama got in on the act, intensifying the Trump-Putin narrative to the level of bromance . “If you’ve made a career out of idealizing Ronald Reagan, then where were you when your own party’s nominee for president was kissing up to Vladimir Putin?” said Obama on Oct 20th at a Clinton rally in Miami.
Backed by the Obama White House, Clinton and the media felt they had a green light to keep pressing ahead with blaming Russia – not only for the controversial DNC leaks, but also for hacking into US election systems in Arizona – a charge devoid of any evidence other than innuendo and speculation. The media’s coverage on this issue was deceptive from the onset. In a leading news release, entitled, “ Russian hackers targeted Arizona election system ,” we can see how after the cock-sure headline, the first paragraph would always sound definitive:
“Hackers targeted voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona, and the FBI alerted Arizona officials in June that Russians were behind the assault on the election system in that state.”
But then by the time you advanced down the story, the report would quickly retreat into a zone of uncertainty:
“The bureau described the threat as “credible” and significant, “an eight on a scale of one to 10,” Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan (R), said Monday. As a result, Reagan shut down the state’s voter registration system for nearly a week.”
And then, down to almost nothing…
“It turned out that the hackers had not compromised the state system or even any county system. They had, however, stolen the username and password of a single election official in Gila County.”
At no point was any evidence ever given. Only ambiguous statements like, “Cyber security officials agree that this looks very much like a Russian government-directed hack.”
Are American politicians so callous as to tempt geopolitical conflict in order to further their short-term political ambitions? Better yet, has American political life really arrived in such a dark cul de sac (translated in French: ‘bottom of the bag’) where politicians in power are so insecure as to make-up and propagate wild international conspiracy theories – in the middle a national election cycle? It’s a very depressing prospect, and yet, this is exactly what we are seeing in this 2016 Presidential Election.
Behind Clinton’s wild hyperbolic rants about the Kremlin and Wikileaks, you will find the White House…
On October 7th, the Obama Administration formally accused the Russian government of stealing emails from the Democratic National Committee and other high-profile individuals including Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta – giving them to Wikileaks.
Soon, there was a queue of ‘national security’ politicians eager to hitch a ride on this bandwagon. Senator Ben Sasse (NE-R), a member of the Homeland Security Committee spouted out, “Russia must face serious consequences. Moscow orchestrated these hacks because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin believes Soviet-style aggression is worth it. The United States must upend Putin’s calculus with a strong diplomatic, political, cyber and economic response.”
According to a Washington Post report by technology editor, Ellen Nakashima , the only ‘evidence’ that seems to be available on this story is a corporate analysis of the alleged ‘Russian government hacks’– provided by a US cyber security company called Crowdstrike . No actual specifics are given, so we are meant to take private firm Crowdstrike’s word for it.
IMAGE: Crowdstrike cyber security.
The Post’s Nakashima then added:
“The administration also blamed Moscow for the hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the subsequent leak of private email addresses and cellphone numbers of Democratic lawmakers.”
An online persona calling himself Guccifer 2.0 has claimed responsibility for posting the material. Those sites and that persona are “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” the joint statement said. “… We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.”
Moscow’s press secretary’s reply: “This is some sort of nonsense,” said Dmitry Peskov.
Despite the constant repetition by Democrat media surrogates, and as CNN’s Maria Cardona said last night, no US national intelligence agency has really “confirmed” that Russia was behind the email hacks – and still no evidence , other than speculative guesswork, has been presented.
Likewise, US intelligence agencies have never actually said definitively on record that “Russia did it,” thus, leaving the door open to walk-back the accusation at a later date. Standard Washington procedure of ambiguity. This little detail doesn’t seem to matter in this hyperbolic political climate though. It seems that the White House, Hillary Clinton and media operatives like Cardona – are quite happy living in what John Kerry recent dubbed as a ‘ parallel universe .’
Still, during the final Presidential debate, Hillary Clinton proudly crowed how “ 17 US intelligence agencies ” aka the “Intelligence Community”– all agreed that Russia did it.
The announcement, albeit vague, actually originated from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
“We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election,” said Clinton. “I find that deeply disturbing.”
What’s even more disturbing is the fact that Clinton is lying in front of a national audience. The highest levels of the Kremlin? Here are Clinton’s ’17 agencies’:
Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Coast Guard Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, Energy Department, Homeland Security Department, State Department, Treasury Department, Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Marine Corps Intelligence, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency, Navy Intelligence and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
What does the Coast Guard Intelligence, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency or the Drug Enforcement Administration know about John Podesta’s emails? Answer: nothing.
The exact same thing happened following Wikileaks first trove of DNC emails back in July 2016 . The US government issued a vague accusatory statement, but would not actually name the culprit. Some might call that propaganda.
In both instances, the Obama Administration refused to present any evidence. Translated: there was no evidence. If there had been, the White House would have been shouting from the rooftops and using it as leverage to apply muscle in the UN over Washington’s flagging efforts in Syria. Both Obama Administration announcements were nothing more than dog whistles for Democrats and “journalists” working for hopelessly partisan outlets like New York Times and CNN – none of whom have bothered to press the White House for one ounce of evidence pertaining to the Party’s decree that “Russian is hacking the US election process.” If you actually look at the joint DNI-DHS statement issued on the matter, it contains no definitive statement: “… [the hacks] are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts. These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the US election process. Such activity is not new to Moscow — the Russians have used similar tactics and techniques across Europe and Eurasia, for example, to influence public opinion there. We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.” According to NSA intelligence worker-turned whistleblower William Binney , when asked about WikiLeaks and whether the Russians are ‘hacking’ US elections, he concluded that the cyber efforts against the DNC were more likely to be the work of a “ disgruntled U.S. intelligence worker. ”
Under partisan pressure from senior Democrat Senator Harry Reid , the FBI also initiated another investigation into “people linked to the Trump team with Russia.” Reid was unset about the DNC hacks and the Podesta emails and demanded the FBI do something about the Trump campaign. To date, the FBI haven’t come up with anything.
To be fair, Hillary would have every reason to believe that the Kremlin is behind the hack – because her staff read it to her from the campaign’s daily intelligence briefings, presumably, supplied from the US government’s much vaunted Intelligence Community . Of course, that’s the same Intelligence Community that briefed George W Bush about Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program, and who also briefed Colin Powell about Iraq’s imaginary “Winnebagos of Death” aka mobile anthrax labs disguised as senior double-wide camper vans. So, of course, they would know if Putin directed the DNC leaks and Podesta email hacks.
For those us who are skeptical of the great oxymoron known as ‘Washington Intelligence,’ I can almost hear the mainstream rebuttal now, “No, that was Iraq, that was Bush. We’re not like that. No, this time it’s different. This time we are sure the Russians did it!”
In 2014, Obama claimed that Kim’s notorious “Bureau 121” hacked into Sony Pictures.
This isn’t the first time that President Obama has cried wolf on a foreign ‘hack’ and then tried to sell it for political purposes. Back in December 2014, Obama claimed that North Korea had hacked Sony Pictures in Hollywood. Pentagon-CIA media proxy CNN quickly chimed in to support Washington’s conspiracy theory, floating a colorful story that Kim Jing-Un had deployed a secret underground hacking unit called ‘ Bureau 121 .’ Just like with today’s “Russian Hack” theory, no member of the mainstream press dared to question the White House’s ridiculous North Korean claim, and like the ‘Russian Hack’ claims, the only source cited for Sony hack was analysis provided by US firm Crowdstrike .
Jumping the Shark
After their Democratic Party Convention on July 27th, the Clinton campaign machine put all of its chips on their Putin narrative.
Soon after, a cadre of top Clinton national security surrogates then accused Trump of emboldening Russia in their evil plot to “destabilize and dominate the West.” Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser then accused Russia of ‘interfering’ with elections all over Europe and then accused Trump is helping Russia directly. At that point, they were in too deep to turn back. The biggest impact of @wikileaks ? Shining a spotlight on Russia’s attempt to undermine American democracy and Trump’s refusal to condemn it https://t.co/ALzpYm1Bb5
— Josh Schwerin (@JoshSchwerin) October 21, 2016
Clinton spin doctors Josh Schwerin and Michael Fallon would stoop even lower by accusing RT of having possession of the Podesta emails even before Wikileaks did. Their only ‘evidence’ seemed to be Twitter posts by RT News which Clinton held up as ‘proof’ that the Kremlin was front-running Wikileaks email dumps. The Clinton braintrust failed to note that the Podesta emails were posted on Wikileaks own website well before RT News had tweeted about them. At that point it became obvious that the Clinton campaign was panicking and hysterically grabbing for any excuse they could get their hands on. We then watched, as one RT reporter after another dismantled the Clinton campaign’s desperate claims. It was embarrassing.
They could not face the uncomfortable fact that it was WikiLeaks head Julian Assange who chose the timing of the release of the DNC and Podesta emails. Rather than attack Assange himself, who happens to be popular with millennials (the very group Clinton struggles to connect with), her operatives opted to target Russia and Trump instead.
Either way, the political strategy here is clear – to shoot the messenger . The Clinton campaign is stuck in permanent rear-guard mode, because based on the content of both the DNC Leaks, Wikileaks files, and Project Veritas video – their own Democratic Party has been discredited and exposed as a corrupt political organization.
Their other big problem is that despite all the outrage from Democrats and their mainstream media surrogates, none of the leaked content has been challenged on the basis of its authenticity. The results speak for themselves. The initial DNC leak of 20,000 emails resulted in the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz . They revealed the unthinkable: the Democratic National Committee actively worked to undermine the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in favor of the establishment choice in Hillary Clinton. Sanders never had a chance. Honest commentators called this an affront to the democratic process, while party insiders and Clinton supporters pretended to be aloof as if it never happened.
To prove this point, both President Obama and Hillary Clinton then gave Wasserman-Schultz a glowing endorsement on the way out. “For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful,” said Obama. Not surprisingly, Clinton thanked Wasserman Schultz, presumably for helping to knock her only competitor Sanders out of the Democrat primary race. “I am grateful to Debbie for getting the Democratic Party to this year’s historic convention in Philadelphia, and I know that this week’s events will be a success thanks to her hard work and leadership,” said Clinton.
The party had sold its soul to devil and no one seemed to care too much about it.
Party Meltdown
Wasserman Schultz’s replacement didn’t fair much better. DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile was installed to serve as interim chair through the remainder election, but Brazile was soon skewered by subsequent Wikileaks batches – showing how, on more than one occasion, she fed debate questions obtained from corrupt mainstream media operatives – straight to Hillary Clinton.
“ A March 12 email exchange shows Brazile stating that she received a town hall question from Roland Martin, a TV One host who co-moderated a March 13 town hall with CNN’s Jake Tapper.”
“ A March 5 email shows that she shared a question with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and communications director Jennifer Palmieri that was to be asked in a March 6 debate hosted by CNN in Flint, Mich.” (Source: Daily Caller )
Brazile’s audacious fraud also helped contribute to her party’s planned sabotage of Democrat challenger Bernie Sanders. Watch Brazile go into full meltdown when confronted here:
. Completely corrupt and still, Brazile even had to temerity to deny doing it when pressed on FOX News last week. Brazile’s reputation is so bad now that even CNN has severed ties with her – and that’s saying a lot.
In addition, it was also revealed how CNN’s head political commentator, Gloria Borger , was named by Podesta as one of a shortlist of ‘journalists’ the Clinton campaign would “work with” to gain favorable coverage. You’d think that CNN would have dropped Borger after this was revealed, but no. Amazingly, Borger is still leading CNN’s election coverage.
Clearly, CNN cannot be trusted to police itself when it comes to matters of outright collusion with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Ever-unbiased CNN's Gloria Borger refers to being in "GOP hell" and says she'll "reach out soon" to Podesta. Heart-warming #PodestaEmails13 pic.twitter.com/CQFdcJ12Q5
— 400-lb Hacker Owens (@NubianAwakening) October 21, 2016
Worse Than Watergate
Perhaps a bigger scandal which the Obama White House and Clinton campaign operatives would like to bury – is the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal confirmed the existence of an internal feud between the FBI and the Justice Department, over whether or not to pursue an investigation into Clinton issue:
“Some investigators grew frustrated, viewing FBI leadership as uninterested in probing the charity, these people said. Others involved disagreed sharply, defending FBI bosses and saying Mr. McCabe in particular was caught between an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation case. It isn’t unusual for field agents to favor a more aggressive approach than supervisors and prosecutors think is merited. But the internal debates about the Clinton Foundation show the high stakes when such disagreements occur surrounding someone who is running for president.”
There’s more. It was also revealed last week how Jill McCabe, the wife of FBI Deputy Director, Andrew McCabe , received $467,500 in campaign funds in late 2015 for her Virginia State Senate run. This unusually large donation came via a political action committee run by Virginia Gov.Terry McAuliffe – a Clinton Foundation board member. After the funds were donated, Andrew McCabe was then put in charge of the Clinton Email case. In normal times, this one scandal would be bigger than Watergate, but these are not normal times .
So why is Washington going all out to deflect to Russia , and cover-up the Clinton scandals, and the Wikileaks document dumps? One reason is because the Clinton email issue goes all the way to the top – to the President himself.
What 21WIRE reported on Oct 21st is how President Obama lied when first confronted about whether or not he knew about the existence of Hillary’s unauthorized private server. Obama told CBS News on March 7, 2015 that he only found out about Clinton’s server “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.” The President’s lie was confirmed when newly released FBI documents showed that:
“Obama used a pseudonym [[email protected]] when communicating with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by email, and at least one of those emails ended up on Clinton’s private email server.”
So, not only did Obama lie on national TV, but he also broke strict White House security protocols by carelessly exchanging private emails “off grid” with Hillary Clinton on a unsecured and unauthorized mail server – maybe to avoid the same scrutiny one would have on a government system. Who knows why he did it.
Sure, he’s not the first US President to lie, but like, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, Obama just joined that exclusive liars club – caught out lying to the American people.
On top of this, any communications made by the President of the United States are de facto labeled as “ born classified .” The same goes for any State Department communications with other foreign ministers.
COVER-UP: John Podesta and Huma Abedin on the Hillary campaign jet (Image: ABC News )
It should be well known by now after watching both Attorney Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch in action – that the Obama Justice Department (DOJ) is one of the most politicized in history. Bear that in mind when looking at the latest leg of the Hillary Email case.
On Friday, FBI Director James Comey set the election alight after announcing that the FBI would be reopening the Clinton email case – currently examining 650,000 emails found while investigating a laptop belonging to former US Congressman Anthony Weiner (estranged husband of top Clinton aid and long-time confidant Huma Abedin) who was snared in a ‘sexting’ scandal, allegedly involving a underaged female. So which DOJ person is in charge of this investigation? None other than Assistant Attorney General Peter J. Kadzik . Who is Kadzik? Zero Hedge reports:
“Oh yes. Recall our post from last week, “ Clinton Campaign Chair Had Dinner With Top DOJ Official One Day After Hillary’s Benghazi Hearing ” in which we reported that John Podesta had dinner with one of the highest ranked DOJ officials the very day after Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony? It was Peter Kadzik.”
Oh, and if that wasn’t good enough, Kadzik was also Podesta’s lawyer back in 1998 when Ken Starr was investigating Podesta over his role in helping Bill Clinton intern/mistress Monica Lewinsky land a job at the United Nations. The two were described as ‘best friends.’ FOX News confirms:
“Fantastic lawyer. Kept me out of jail,” Podesta wrote on Sept. 8, 2008 to Obama aide Cassandra Butts, according to emails hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account and posted by WikiLeaks.
To call the Clinton circle incestuous would be an understatement, and on the whole, Americans are sick of it.
Russia – The Party Scapegoat
Former Democratic Party leader Howard Dean was so incensed about the FBI reopening the case, he accused the FBI director of being in league with Russia, Tweeting: “Ironically Comey put himself on the same side as Putin.” Ironically Comey put himself on the same side as Putin.
— Howard Dean (@GovHowardDean) October 29, 2016
Another veteran party operative and lifetime Clinton defender, James Carville , was so upset by the FBI announcement that he accused “the KGB” working with Republicans to “hijack the election” during his wild rant on MSNBC .
“I think this an outrage and I think the fact that the KGB is involved in this election is an outrage and I think the American people ought to take their democracy back regardless of what the press wants to do and the excuses they want to make for Comey. That’s what I think,” said Carville.
Maybe someone can remind Carville that there is no KGB , and that the Soviet Union actually dissolved in 1991.
These are just a few scandals surrounding the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, along with the many exposés revealed through Wikileaks, and the Podesta email batches. Those are actual scandals with real tangible evidence – unlike the ‘Russians hacking the DNC and John Podesta and passing those to Wikileaks.’
Suffice to say, the Democratic Party machine has already demonstrated that it is prepared to say anything in order to deflect and divert attention away from the damning Wikileaks material, and also blame Donald Trump in the process. It should be obvious by now that in their desperation to push a highly comprised Hillary Clinton over the finish line on November 8th, the Washington establishment has concocted the story that ‘Putin is trying to influence our electoral process in the US.’ They’ve tried to lay this at the feet of Donald Trump, who Obama and Clinton claim has some secret special relationship with Vladimir Putin. The liberal mainstream media have made a meal out of this talking point, and anti-Russian war hawks on the Republican side love it too. For the White House and the Clinton campaign this seemed like the ultimate clean sweep – a perfect double entendre .
The geopolitical strategy behind this move was twofold. First, this non event would be used to advance immediate calls for sanctions against Russia. Secondly, the US could continue to lean on Russia in the UN over Syria. Previously, 21WIRE reported how Washington’s State Dept and UN delegations, led by the dynamic trio of John Kerry , Samantha Power , and John Kirby , already lied when levelling charges against Russia for war crimes in Aleppo, and again while accusing Russia and Syria of conducting an airstrike on a UN Aid Convoy in Syria. As we have already shown – that raid was most likely a ground attack carried out of US-backed ‘rebels’ Al Nusra Front, or Nour al-Din al-Zenki.
With so much at stake geopolitically, why would Washington lie about a potential World War III trigger event? If they are prepared to lie about this, what else are they prepared to lie about?
The demonization of all things Russian has definitely accelerated since late 2013 when the US engineered a coup d’etat in Kiev, Ukraine. Ever since that it’s been a go-to talking point for ginning-up and new transaltlantic arms race, as with Republican war hawks – and a convenient scapegoat for any politician requiring misdirection, like Clinton and the Democrats. When the new year rang in 2015, the newly appointed head of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, Andrew Lack, announced the new challenges facing America’s own state-run media arm that includes U.S. overseas propaganda assets including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia. Lack said , “We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram,” He was forced to resign shortly after that.
What’s clear is that when it comes to all things Russian, there is an established pattern of compulsive lying by this US Administration. The list is too long to chronicle here, although ‘ Russian-backed Rebles Shootting Down MH17 ,’ and ‘ Assad Regime Sarin Attack in Damascus in 2013 ‘ certainly comes to mind.
That said, it’s hard to imagine a lie as egregious and potentially destructive than one which accuses the Russia government, a world nuclear power and member of the UNSC, of ‘Hacking Into the US Electoral Process.’ When you examine history however, what you will find is plenty of evidence documenting exactly how the US government and the CIA have altered and flipped 100 foreign elections throughout history, the attempted assassination of over 50 foreign leaders . Knowing all this, one might find it hard to take seriously Washington’s claims that Putin and Trump are trying manipulate the 2016 Election
On Oct 9, 2016, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov laid it all on the table:
“We have witnessed a fundamental change of circumstances when it comes to the aggressive Russophobia that now lies at the heart of U.S. policy towards Russia. It’s not just a rhetorical Russophobia, but aggressive steps that really hurt our national interests and pose a threat to our security.”
Self-serving, career political operatives in Washington are playing a dangerous game. History will mark this as one of the biggest political follies of the Obama-Clinton era.
Knowing what we now know about the NSA and its ability to hack and grab any email or text message from anyone, anywhere – if Washington really wanted to know where the hacks came from, maybe they could start there. Far be it from anyone in Washington or the media to ever adopt that line of inquiry.
Still, we’re waiting for the emergence of an adult in the room in Washington – before it’s too late.
READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files
SUPPORT 21WIRE – SUBSCRIBE & BECOME A MEMBER @21WIRE.TV
Filed Under: Featured , Patrick Henningsen , Shout , US News Tagged With: CNN , Debbie Wasserman Schultz , Donna Brazile , Gloria Borger , Hillary Clinton , Media Cog , Russia , wikileaks WillDippel
Here is an article that looks at the real story behind one of the more interesting conspiracy theories about the 2016 election:
Sometimes the real story is even more fascinating than any conspiracy theory. WeAreYourGods
Wanna bet money that the Weiner laptop, on which the over 600,000 emails were stored in a folder titled “Life Insurance”, holds information linking the CF to human trafficking and typical elite pedophilia “vacations”? Ever wonder why nobody ever really goes after the Clinton Foundation from a government office? Same old blackmail scheme involving underage sex slaves that was going on during the Boys Town scandal with Lawrence King and elite politicians and business people in the 80’s. Why would they stop? Brad Dueringer
It seems the most morally depraved beings are the ones we let run things. But they have help crafting “reality” with the tribe that owns the media Analyze_This_88
Barrak Obama and Hillary Clinton are both political scam artists. It’s amazing that a US President would invent a Russian Hacking conspiracy theory in order to drive a geopolitical agenda. But then again, Bush did the same with Bin Laden and 9/11.
Clinton on the other hand is pure corruption personified. She’s should never be allowed near public office. | 1 |
. ALDI Goes Full Organic, Bans Pesticides and Rivals Whole Foods as Healthiest Grocery Store German retailer Aldi has announced that as of January 1st they will be removing 8 pesticides from al... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/aldi-goes-full-organic-bans-pesticides.html German retailer Aldi has announced that as of January 1st they will be removing 8 pesticides from all products on its U.S. stores shelves. The food chain is making a name for itself as a health-focused supermarket in recent times. With low prices AND a focus on health, Aldi is gaining a reputation as the food conscious shoppers go-to store. The pesticides being removed are: Thiamethoxam Imidacloprid Sulfoxaflor Aldi has made a name for itself in recent years for being strict about removing certain pesticides and chemicals from its products, and they are going even further in their quest for quality. They are expanding their organic food brands, removing some artificial ingredients from products and adding more gluten-free items. They have removed certified synthetic colors, partially hydrogenated oils, and MSG from their private-label products (which make up 90% of sales). They have expanded their sales of fresh and organic meat and produce, including the “Never Any!” brand of meats that contain no added antibiotics, hormones, animal by-products or other additives. The chain will also expand the SimplyNature line (which is free of more than 125 artificial ingredients) and their gluten-free liveGfree brand. Their milk was free of artificial growth hormones, but now its yogurt, sour cream, cottage cheese, and other dairy products will be as well. They have begun to offer more high-end foods like artisan cheeses, smoked salmon, quinoa, and coconut oil. There are currently 1,500 Aldi stores in the U.S and the plan to open 500 more by 2018. With such a strong focus on health, they are set to become the leader in health supermarkets. Business Insider said : "The grocery chain is expanding organic-food brands, removing some artificial ingredients from its products, and adding more gluten-free items in hopes of attracting more health-conscious shoppers." Neonics are systemic pesticides and they are one of the newest types of insecticide, used mostly in the last 20 years to control a variety of pests, especially sap-feeding insects, such as aphids on cereals, and root-feeding grubs. Reference: Organicandhealthy.org | 0 |
Mere months after coming off her second failed White House run, Hillary Clinton is apparently trying her hand at modeling. [Clinton appeared in a photo Monday on Katy Perry’s Twitter account sporting a pair of pumps the “Chained to the Rhythm” singer says were inspired by the former sec. of state. “⚡️POWER PUMP⚡️your way over to katyperrycollections. com for the last few hours of the spring 25% sale❗@HillaryClinton is wearing #TheHillary,” Perry wrote to her 97 million Twitter followers. ⚡️POWER PUMP⚡️your way over to https: . for the last few hours of the spring 25% sale❗@HillaryClinton is wearing #TheHillary pic. twitter. — Katy Perry (@katyperry) April 11, 2017, ” The Hillary” pumps, which are being sold on Perry’s website for $139, come in pink and seafoam green and include a clear heel full of golden moon and stars meant to inspire those who wear them to “step in and reach for the stars. ” It is the first public pairing between Clinton and Perry — who was a vocal Clinton celebrity consigliere during the presidential campaign — since November, when Clinton presented the pop star with a humanitarian award at the UNICEF Snowflake Ball. Last month, Clinton urged the thousands of women attending the Professional Business Women in California gathering to “resist” President Donald Trump’s “carnage. ” Last week, the former first lady said “it is fair to say … that, certainly, misogyny played a role” in her election loss. Clinton relied on Perry to court young voters throughout the presidential campaign. The pop superstar also performed in Philadelphia just days before Election Day, and again just hours before Clinton’s loss had become obvious. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson | 0 |
How to Rig an Election: James O’Keefe Expose’- Follow the Money
N.Morgan ) Project Veritas, the brain child of James O’Keefe, has released its fourth installment of the “ Rigging The Election ” series, an exposé that is described as a “ multi-part series which exposes the dark secrets at the highest levels of the DNC and Clinton presidential campaign .”
In this latest installment, O’Keefe and Project Veritas confirm the power money has amongst the network of questionable non-profits and consulting firms supporting Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
To help grease the wheels for the Project Veritas undercover reporters to gain access, a well placed donation of $20,000 “opened the door to their smoke filled rooms of illegal and dirty campaign dealings” , as O’Keefe puts it.
The previous 3 installments of this series have forced the termination or resignation of two prominent democratic operatives: Robert Creamer and Scott Foval.
In the video below, you have a front seat as the Project Veritas reporters infiltrate the seedy world of campaign contributions.
( Video has adult language ) | 0 |
Yup, if only we'd spent moar tax dollars that wouldn't have been possible. | 0 |
Fearing Election Day Trouble, Some US Schools Cancel Classes Newsmax, October 26, 2016
Rigged elections. Vigilante observers. Angry voters. The claims, threats and passions surrounding the presidential race have led communities around the U.S. to move polling places out of schools or cancel classes on Election Day.
The fear is that the ugly rhetoric of the campaign could escalate into confrontations and even violence in school hallways, endangering students.
“If anybody can sit there and say they don’t think this is a contentious election, then they aren’t paying much attention,” said Ed Tolan, police chief in Falmouth, Maine, which decided to call off classes on Election Day and put additional officers on duty Nov. 8.
{snip}
Schools are popular polling places because they have plenty of parking and are usually centrally located. It’s difficult to say how many school-based polling places have been moved this year, given how decentralized the voting process is across the country.
But state and local officials say voting has been removed or classes have been canceled on Election Day at schools in Illinois, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and elsewhere.
“There is a concern, just like at a concert, sporting event or other public gathering, that we didn’t have 15 or 20 years ago. What if someone walks in a polling location with a backpack bomb or something?” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, co-chairman of the National Association of Secretaries of State election committee. “If that happens at a school, then that’s certainly concerning.”
{snip}
Easton Superintendent John Reinhart wanted to get voting out of schools altogether but was rebuffed by county election officials. So the school board canceled classes on Election Day.
“If you take the personalities away and cast the emotion with the election aside, one has to ask the question: ‘Are our schools the best places for that activity to take place?'” he said. “I just think we’ve reached the point where we need to look at other locations.”
{snip} | 0 |
BERLIN (AP) — Thousands of people have joined rallies across Germany and other European countries to show their support for the idea of a united Europe. [The weekly protests began last year as an attempt to counter growing nationalist sentiment on the continent, often expressed in opposition to the European Union. #pulseofeurope Now almost 6000 Berliners many more pro Europeans in over 40 cities are now singing the Ode to Joy pic. twitter. — Funk (@funk67) March 12, 2017, Protesters in Berlin, Frankfurt, Cologne and dozens of other locations danced, sang and waved the EU flag — 12 stars on a blue background — during the rallies Sunday. The protests are organized on social media by a group calling itself Pulse of Europe . The group says it isn’t tied to any particular political party. Thousands are braving cold wind and rain at #pulseofeurope demo in Berlin. Pro Europe, anti populists. pic. twitter. — Wenzel Michalski (@WenzelMichalski) March 19, 2017, | 0 |
Minnesota Man Arrested, Sentenced to 6-Months in Jail for Having a Windmill On His Property Nov 14, 2016 0 0 Now the State claims the right to tell you what you can and can’t have on your own property.
Orono, MN – For more than a year, we have been following the story of a Minnesota man, Jay Nygard, who is routinely risking jail time because he refuses to remove a wind turbine from his property. Nygard has been in and out of court over the years, and despite a short-lived victory last October, he was recently back in front of a judge facing a contempt of court charge for refusing a court order to remove the turbines from his property.
He did eventually remove the turbines, leaving only the cement bases because removing them would cause structural damage to their house. This was not good enough for the local government, who ignored the advice of three different engineers and demanded that they remove the bases, despite the risk of damaging the home. This is all that remains of the windmill on Nygard’s property, a concrete footing, in the ground.
On Friday, Nygard was arrested and, according to his son, has been given six months in prison for refusing to remove the base.
According to Kahler Nygard, Jay’s son, his father even attempted to make peace with the county and compromise on a number of different issues, but they ignored his appeals.
“The choices for my dad were to potentially destroy our foundation in the house or go to jail, he even offered an olive branch saying he would add an easement to the deed saying when the house is demolished the pad must be removed, but that was ignored also, ” Kahler said in an exclusive interview with The Free Thought Project.
“The base was level with the ground and 4 feet cubed. We removed the top half of the concrete and used a metal cutting tool to remove the top half of the bolt assembly, rendering the structure unusable,” Kahler explained.
“They say that we have to remove to footing 100% and have it inspected by the city, which we have three different engineers all saying we should just leave it , one of them even does contract work for the city, ” he added.
Kahler said that although there are no ordinances against windmills, the county has a personal vendetta against his family.
Nygard has the right to do whatever he wants with his own property, but unfortunately in a democracy such as the United States, the property rights of an individual can be overridden according to the whims of politicians and the demands of uninvolved third parties.
Please share this story with your friends and family in hopes of keeping a good man, whose only “crime” was self-sustainability, out of jail.
John Vibes is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter-culture and the drug war. In addition to his writing and activist work , he organizes a number of large events including the Free Your Mind Conference , which features top caliber speakers and whistle-blowers from all over the world. You can contact him and stay connected to his work at his Facebook page. You can find his 65 chapter Book entitled “Alchemy of the Timeless Renaissance” at bookpatch.com.
This article was originally featured on The Free Thought Project Vote Up | 0 |
Kyle Bristow, Foundation for the Marketplace of Ideas, October 30, 2016
{snip} As a veteran of trolling leftists for an entire decade (the SPLC whines I have “been playing * * * [this] same kind of game for many years” and that I am “one of the Alt-Right’s most vicious attack dogs” ; the student newspaper of Michigan State University noted in 2006 that my group planned to “have more events such as chalking * * * [and] poster-hanging[s]” ; Michigan State University’s President Lou Anna Simon releases a statement in 2007 which pertinently states “In recent weeks, there have been incidents on campus that once again compel us to look at the issues of free speech and how we as a campus community engage with one another in ways that respect the views of multiple groups and individuals. * * * There are individuals who speak at campus events whose rhetoric and ideas I find reprehensible[.]” ), I have personal experience with postering campaigns, and as an attorney, I know exactly where the line is that cannot be crossed. Here are suggestions to Alt-Right activists who are interested in hanging up posters: Do not get caught. Targets for postering should be explored in advance of distribution so as to make sure that there are no security cameras in the vicinity. (Do not wear similar clothing when the venue is explored as is worn at the time of the postering in case cameras are present.) Use teams of at least three–one person hangs up posters and two people watch for interlopers. The best time to poster is between 10:00 p.m. and midnight—any earlier, and one is likely to run into Normies, and any later, one will attract unwanted attention. Tape is best to use for postering and the tape should be used along all four edges of the posters so as to prevent them from being ripped down; tacks can easily be removed to take down posters and glue should not be used because glue is too messy and time-consuming. Hanging up posters in university buildings that contain only classrooms at night is better than dormitories because one is less likely to run into people who may tear down the posters. Only hang up posters at public–not private–universities and on public bulletin boards. Public universities must comply with the U.S. Constitution–and the First and Fourteenth Amendments prohibit government actors from discriminating against viewpoint or the content of speech. Only hang up posters on public bulletin boards since an argument can be made if one is caught that this is either a public forum or limited public forum . If one hangs up a poster on a wall of a building or on a non-public bulletin board, diversity-mongers who are offended by the posters may allege that criminal vandalism or criminal trespass occurred. Do not voluntarily disclose information if caught. If someone who is not a police officer demands one’s identification, one is under no obligation to provide it. If a police officer demands one’s identification, only the identifiers on a driver’s license and identifiers that are not incriminating should be provided (name, address, phone number, birth date, etc). One should not say anything else to the police other than “I respectfully invoke my right to remain silent, I respectfully invoke my right to have an attorney present, and am I being detained?” Such language invokes rights that are outside the scope of this brief article, but anyone who has ever watched an episode of Cops would know that statements made by a criminal suspect can be used against that person in court and lying to the police during an investigation is a crime in and of itself. If one’s state is a one-party consent state for recording purposes , one should secretly record any and all interactions with law enforcement. One should immediately consult with a licensed attorney in their state who is experienced with criminal defense or civil litigation if police become involved due to one hanging up posters. Do not publish posters that target individual people. This could result in harassment-related criminal charges, a civil lawsuit, or a personal protection order being pursued by the victim. Posters that are merely generically inflammatory but which do not direct the viewers to “imminent lawless action” are constitutionally permissible. Brandenburg v. Ohio , 395 U.S. 444 (1969) .
Now go out and cause Acute Triggering Syndrome. | 1 |
One argument Trump supporters and conservatives are making is that there has been a lefward shift at Fox News. 3. TrumpTV @ShaneKPolitics Breitbart & alt-right is laying the groundwork for TrumpTV so naturally they're throwing FoxNews under the bus. — ErciTall Vote4HRC (@ercitall) October 28, 2016
As mentioned in a recent story about Megyn Kelly on The Wildfire, if TrumpTV becomes a reality, a media war will loom over who is the real “conservative” leader in cable news. Prepping the terrain would mean starting to carve out a hard right audience and yank it away from Fox News. 4. Ailes Departure Fox News 'Imploding' probably has more to do with Roger Ailes leaving than Trump. It was founded as the news arm of the GOP. (Not kidding.) — Dave Wollyung (@daveisnotfunny) October 28, 2016
Since Ailes has stepped down, there are two interim co-presidents at Fox News: Bill Shine and Jack Aberneth. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, it is believed by some that CNN's Jeff Zucker could be in line to fill Ailes' shoes, due to a merger between AT&T and Time Warner. 5. Murdoch Sons Total agree Fox News Imploding. The network has taken a left turn since the Murdoch sons took the reins. — DJ Ellis (@Djell4jc) October 28, 2016 “I think it is fair to say the Fox News Channel is imploding,” Levin said. “I think it is fair to say the Murdoch... https://t.co/QSrxbRrrpf — Jim Brown (@Menorahblog) October 28, 2016
The would-be successors to the Murdoch empire are believed to be much less conservative than their father Rupert Murdoch. 6. More Like Mainstream Media I'm glad to see Fox News imploding. It's almost as bad as the rest of the mainstream media. Especially Megyn Kelly. Good riddance. — Deplorable Carl (@CarlKenner) October 28, 2016
The news channel's mantra to be “fair and balanced” is not sitting well with all viewers. 7. Megyn Kelly, Megyn Kelly, Megyn Kelly . @FoxNews , What r the odds. #Outnumbered / #TheFive / #KellyFile , will cover "Fox News 'Imploding'" story? After all . @megynkelly , IT'S NEWS. pic.twitter.com/YQTnaTaLaj — Deplorable osPatriot (@osPatriot) October 28, 2016 TOTALLY AGREE! FOX IS LIKE THE REST OF MSM! Levin: Fox News 'Imploding' https://t.co/1YH4RXGZay MEGYN KELLY IS NOT A JOURNALIST! Remove kelly from fox news coverage election night #Trumptrain Levin: Fox News 'Imploding' https://t.co/o67t8ssK72 via @BreitbartNews | 0 |
Apple on Thursday released an early version of its next mobile operating system, which will deliver some of the most substantial changes to iPhones and iPads in years. So for those who are eager to try all the new features and are willing to be guinea pigs, there are a few important things to know about upgrading to the software. The system, iOS 10, became available as a public beta, which means intrepid iPhone and iPad owners get to sample it and give feedback while Apple and developers continue to test it and to stomp out bugs before the software is more widely released in the fall. For most consumers, there is little reason to upgrade this soon the free, official iOS upgrade is only a few months away, and operating systems generally get better with time. Yet there can be some benefits to upgrading now. Early adopters who want a head start on using some of the iOS 10 features, like a new messaging app and improved photo software, should jump in, for example. There is a communal benefit to upgrading now, too. If more early testers report bugs and give other feedback to Apple, it is less likely that major problems will remain on release. Microsoft used a similar public testing process for its operating system Windows 10, to gather information and fix problems. Though many consumers have run into hiccups with Windows 10, it has generally received positive reviews. If you are hopping on the train for iOS, here are some tips for making the experience smoother and for avoiding disaster. The first step in obtaining the iOS beta is to sign up for Apple’s testing program, which involves signing in with your Apple ID on an Apple webpage. After enrolling, you will receive an email with steps on installing the upgrade. Before installing the upgrade, it is crucial to back up your device data in case something goes wrong. Apple recommends backing up your iPhone or iPad over a wired connection to a computer running the latest version of its iTunes software. After opening iTunes, select your Apple device and hit the Back Up Now button to create a backup on the computer. If something goes awry — for example, if an important app ceases to work properly — be aware of the steps to roll back to the previous version of iOS, which are listed on Apple’s support website. You will need to erase the new software and use iTunes to restore the backup you created on your computer, which will kick you back to iOS 9. After you have safely installed the iOS 10 beta, get familiar with some of the new features. Some big changes won’t be usable yet — a smarter Siri voice assistant, for example, is awaiting developers to update their apps to work with Siri. For now, a new Messages app, which lets you send drawings and animations to other iOS 10 users, will be the biggest change. Apple also made its Photos app smarter — a feature called Memories will automatically compile multiple photos from an occasion, like your trip to Spain, into video montages. You can also test Apple’s redesigned apps for music, maps and news. A bonus for iPhone 6S or 6S Plus owners is they can use 3D Touch, the feature that triggers different actions based on how hard you press the touch screen, to try some new tricks in iOS 10. When sending a text message, pressing harder on the send arrow opens a menu where you can select an animation to embed, like neon lasers or birthday balloons. Also, when a notification pops up on the iPhone’s lock screen, you can use 3D Touch to press down on the notification and reply to the message without logging in. | 0 |
Have you ever noticed that, sometimes, a certain celebrity seems ever so slightly off? Maybe its an errant beauty mark or the fact that their eyelids have begun to blink sideways. You can feel in your heart that something’s just not right. That’s because your darling idol is dead.
Via GizModo
Yet they’re afraid that this stuff will get out, which is why they must use MIND CONTROL and MK-Ultra in order to keep their “victims” (who are majority celebrities) silenced.
Now of course you’re going to have media-controlled sites like BET refer to his TRUTH as a “conspiracy” (which it isn’t), and make it seem like cloning doesn’t exist (which it does!) And the only time they call it something a ”conspiracy” is when they’re hiding something… When they’re hiding TRUTH.
Kinda like how they refer to as the “911 Inside Job” story a “conspiracy,” when really it’s TRUTH… and THEY KNOW it’s TRUTH. But they have to keep it going as long as they can! They have to keep you under subliminal mind control so that you won’t know what’s REALLY going on, and the REAL agenda behind all this!
Tupac may be alive as well, take a look at his hologram being used at Coachella, California.
But don’t take my word for it (because many of you won’t). Here is proof from an actual celebrity who fills you in on the whole cloning biz, and exposes the Hollywood-entertainment demonic-Satanic agenda.
(By the way, in case you don’t know who that is on the picture above, that is rapper-singer-songwriter B.O.B.)
Now, B.O.B. is actually in the industry. He knows the ins-and-outs of the entertainment business, the music business, and all the demonic initiations one has to adhere to in order to even become a household name! So if I’m going to believe anyone, it’s not going to be mainstream media… it’s going to be TRUTH.
Here I will leave links of what he says about cloning, and getting the TRUTH out to all those people who are sleeping, and don’t think such a thing is even real. (HINT: If they can clone a sheep like they did in 1997, don’t you think they can clone humans as well?)
Don’t worry, though, because before they were killed, your favorite celebrity was cloned. Which means that unlike Paul McCartney (who was simply replaced with a lookalike), countless incarnations of your dearly departed could be walking among us for centuries to come.
But how do we know this? Why would anyone let this happen? And am I okay? As far as the first two are concerned, a man named Donald Marshall has the answers. The latter is anyone’s guess.
As he revealed on Facebook in 2011, Donald Marshall, a clone himself, is an otherwise normal guy who had the bad luck of finding himself in a so-called “cloning station” run by Queen Elizabeth. When Marshall was born, his family was already living in the cloning center. Yet in all his writings and interviews, he never specifies exactly why his family lived in this clandestine Illuminati palace in the first place. Details, details.
Still, Marshall’s discussions on the matter have been extensive . A Google search for “Donald Marshall cloning” brings up about 230,000 different results, many of which weren’t even written by Marshall himself. Nearly every clone-related conspiracy blog out there has discussed him or his tale, and it’s hard to find a video that makes mention of celebrity cloning without alluding to some aspect of the Donald Marshall canon.
The basics of his story (which do occasionally shift) go something like this: During his time at the cloning station, Marshall discovered that the entire operation is run by a collective consisting of the Freemasons, a group called “The Vril Society,” and of course, Scientologists. This secret society super-group is what we know today as the ever-elusive Illuminati.
Members of the Illuminati (which naturally include all the G20 world leaders) typically meet in subterranean bunkers. The very same bunkers that, according to Marshall, house what has become a highly lucrative network of celebrity cloning farms.
The cloning part of the operation didn’t actually start until some time after World War II, at which point, and as Marshall explains in his Facebook post, “The political people started bringing movie stars and musicians there to hang around with them, they can control who remembers the cloning facility and who will remain oblivious even though not remembering still damages you.”
Some of these clones are used for mere entertainment value (gladiator-style wrestling bouts, sexual perversions, Illuminati ritual sacrifices, what have you). Others are kept as precautionary measures should the clone’s original ever need a new liver. If you saw 2005 sci-fi flick The Island , you already know exactly what I’m talking about—because in a fit of hubris, The Island was produced by none other than the Illuminati themselves.
Organ harvesting is the least of your worries as a clone, though. In his original tell-all Facebook post from 2011, Marshall explained:
The royal family of England,… yes Queen Elizabeth, Phillip Duke of Edinburgh and Prince Charles are the worst of them, unbelievable depraved perverts all showing off for the celebrities that go there, Elizabeth has the children there call her “lillibet” and does ungodly things to them, some she fakes being nice to, some she is terrible to, cutting them with swords while they scream, the decent people that are there against their will are afraid to say anything against them, most have their children there as a kind of hostage, to be torn apart if they even think of informing anyone, but as they have been torturing me terribly anyway I will tell all, Vladimir Putin loves to put the fear of torture and death into people but is essentially a cowardly pervert himself.
Most of the famous people are ashamed to speak or be seen by me there very much,as they’re ashamed of the perverse and disgusting gatherings, I am a decent person and will not participate in these acts, so they use me as an example and torture me for my being a good person.
Just like with twins or Real Dolls, if you torture a person’s clone, the original will feel it and might even undergo physical damage. Each new clone decreases your mental capacity, as well, so the more clones made, the easier that person is to hurt or subdue. Two of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite pastimes.
And as all the pros know, if you really want to keep someone under your thumb, all you have to do is kill the original copy. Clones are notoriously obedient, which apparently comes in handy when you need them to churn out hit single after hit single. Don’t take my word for it, just ask Avril‘s clone—or any of the other high profile clones below.
Britney Spears Britney Spears is dead. That is, assuming the now-defunct (but accessible here) website BritneyIsDead.com isn’t lying to us.
Because back in 1998, right before dropping the now-classic rock opera Baby One More Time , Britney and Justin Timberlake got into a particularly nasty car accident that resulted in severe burns on Justin’s part and an unfortunate case of decapitation on Britney’s. (Justin is still in a coma; his clone roams free.)
Because pop stars must have heads, the label was forced to find a Britney Spears stand-in. This is where the stories begin to diverge. BritneyIsDead.com claims that the label’s producers went to the mall and found a young look-a-like named Britney Shears. This seems unlikely and leaves us with only one possibility: Donald Marshall was right.
It was time to clone Britney.
Image: YouTube Over the years, plenty of Britney clones have come and gone, which would explain her many emotional ups and downs. According to Marshall, though, at any given time there are at least two to five backup clones waiting underground for their turn in the spotlight.
Like any clone, the Britney copies are not at all happy with their lot in life. So in 2009’s “Break the Ice,” one of the songs written for Britney by Donald Marshall during his time as a pop clone lyricist, she managed to sneak in some hints at the reality of her situation. This included an accompanying animated video that depicts her blowing up an actual cloning center.
And according to Marshall, the tubes detailed in the video look “exactly” like the real tubes in the cloning center.
Image: YouTube Why Queen Elizabeth and the rest of her Illuminati cohorts would allow a menial clone to expose the secrets of their arcane operation, however, remains a mystery.
Eminem There have long been rumors that Eminem checked himself into rehab after a drug overdose in 2005. He even said a few years ago that he “nearly died” at one point. He used the word “nearly,” of course, because when one is survived by innumerable copies of one’s former self, one can never really be dead.
When Slim Shady reached worldwide phenom status in the late 90s, the Illuminati approached him (as they do with all up and coming superstars) to see how willing he would be to join their gang of ultra-powerful miscreants. Shady foolishly declined, and was thus sent off to meet his demise in a fatal car crash. Or as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Eminem went to “rehab.”
Of course, no clone is perfect. The video below, which is available for download here, goes so far as to point out the vocal disparities between the original Eminem and his counterpart.
And if that doesn’t have you convinced, this shirting hairline surely will.
Image: YouTube Or perhaps this little yellow circle:
Image: YouTube And like noted clone Al Roker, Eminem’s clone once suffered a glitch on live television and nearly gave himself away in the process.
No doubt that clone was killed immediately after the interview aired. Embarrassing!
Miley Cyrus Image: Imgur Back in 2010, as with all incurably rebellious teen sensations, Disney had Miley Cyrus killed and dumped her remains in the California desert.
There are two different possible reasons for this. One theory states that in the months before her “accident,” Miley leaked nudes, smoked salvia, and wrote in a song that she was “hot.” Which is to say, Miley Cyrus had become a national disgrace. To save its brand, Disney’s was left with only one option: Murder.
The other theory (and the one outlined in the image above) alleges that Miley Cyrus refused the sexual advances of various Disney executives (her father included). After realizing that Miley intended to remain steadfast in her decision not to partake in their blood orgies, a Disney higher-up beat her up, left her for dead, and brought in the clones.
The Miley Cyrus conspiracies actually go even deeper than the rest. This YouTube video claims to contain proof that Miley Cyrus is “a confirmed Draco Reptilian Shapeshifter Hybrid.” Note the eyelids.
Either way, whatever did replace end up replacing Miley is far more malicious than your typical clone. This Miley is mean.
So does that mean that every celebrity we see is actually a clone suffering under Queen Elizabeth’s barbarous rule? Of course not. Not even the Queen Mother has the capacity to make that many celebrity doubles. But are most celebrities Illuminati clones? Almost certainly, yes.
Honorable mentions [ Those who have not yet been killed and replaced by clones but it’s only a matter of time ]
Chloë Grace Moretz Stephen Curry James Franco Oprah’s boyfriend Steadman Steve Harvey Dr. Oz Gizmodo editor-in-chief Katie Drummond Bono Everyone you love
| 1 |
Losing your smartphone is often nearly as stressful as the threat of a terrorist attack, according to a recent report. [“A report by The Physiological Society, asked 2, 000 people to rate how stressful they found key events,” reported The Telegraph on Wednesday. “While obvious situations such as the death of a loved one, or becoming seriously ill scored highly, so did modern concerns such as identity theft, commuter delays and even going on holiday. The threat of a terror attack came 13th on the list of stressful events, just one point above losing a smartphone, and well below planning a wedding, or moving house. ” Going on holiday, receiving a promotion at work, and Brexit all came below people losing their smartphones in terms of stress levels. The report also found that London was the area most stressed about Brexit in the U. K. while Scotland was the most relaxed about commute delays. Younger people were naturally more stressed about losing their smartphone than older generations, however, the threat of “serious illness” created more stress as people grew older. “Like smartphone loss, identity theft is also a relatively modern stressor, but in this case was much more stressful for older people (55+) perhaps suggesting they are less sure what to do about it,” claimed the report. “Participants were also asked to fill in any other particularly stressful events which they felt the survey had missed out. The most common responses concerned driving: car breakdowns, suffering traffic, busy motorways, road rage, or being the passenger of a careless driver all featured. ” Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 0 |
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The rebel fighter, a former major in the Syrian Army, thought he had finally found what he was looking for: a group with strong international backing that was gearing up for an offensive against his two most hated enemies, the Syrian government and the Islamic State militant group. But within days of crossing into Syria, backed by Turkish planes, tanks and special forces troops and American warplanes, the fighter, Saadeddine Somaa, found himself fighting Kurdish militias that, like him, counted the Islamic State and the government of President Bashar among their foes. That was because the Turks, who supplied the weapons and the cash, were calling the shots, and they considered the Kurds enemy No. 1. The Kurds, for their part, consider Turkey an enemy, and so as the troops advanced, the Kurdish militias attacked. For all the hope the new offensive had inspired in Mr. Somaa and other Syrian insurgents, it showed once again how even rebels fighting against the Islamic State and Mr. Assad — both targets for defeat under stated American policy — remain dependent on backers who only partly share their goals. “Everyone is pursuing their own interests, not Syria’s,” he said in a long telephone interview from Jarabulus, the border town the force took from Islamic State, known also as ISIS or ISIL, on the first day of the offensive. “The problem is the same everywhere in Syria. ” In an ideal world, he said, groups like his — a collection of insurgent groups that oppose the government and ISIS and reject Al Qaeda — would unite in a single body, fight the government and all extremist groups, and preserve the institutions of the Syrian state for the future. But in reality, he said with a sigh, “the factions will be depending on outsiders to back them, and keep fighting and fighting each other, and this might take years. ” Mr. Somaa was identifying with insurgent groups that brand themselves as the Free Syrian Army, including many army defectors like himself. Many, but not all, of the groups have been vetted by, and receive covert support from, the C. I. A. and allied intelligence agencies. Their members range from secular to Islamist, with the United States drawing the line at groups like Ahrar and more radical groups like the former Nusra Front, affiliated with Al Qaeda. Mr. Somaa’s conundrum summed up why the new offensive has been at best a mixed bag for the C. I. A. Syrian rebels. It gives them a rare morale boost and a chance to show their countrymen they can rescue them and prove to foreign backers that, like the Kurdish groups, they can be effective partners on the ground against ISIS. But it also puts them at the center of the newest complication in an already confused battlefield, fighting among forces backed by Turkey and the United States, fellow NATO members and putative allies that are supposedly united in the fight against Mr. Assad and ISIS. The Kurdish militias are backed by the Pentagon, which considers them its most reliable ally against the Islamic State. Some Syrian Arab insurgents have already been caught on video apparently abusing Kurdish militia members, and as the operation becomes more contentious, rebels who had sought to increase their legitimacy as a Syrian force risk reinforcing criticism that they are Turkish and American proxies at best, de facto allies of ISIS at worst. Mr. Somaa blamed the Kurds for the fighting, saying they had failed to retreat from territory west of the Euphrates River that they had promised to leave just days before, as they were urged to do by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “Our main target was Daesh,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, but when the militias attacked, “we retaliated. ” He said that his group, Faylaq had taken several prisoners from among the Kurdish fighters. On Monday, in a change of tone from Mr. Biden, a top American official criticized the Turkish incursion. “We want to make clear that we find these clashes — in areas where ISIL is not located — unacceptable and a source of deep concern,” Brett McGurk, the United States special envoy against the Islamic State, said on Twitter. The offensive comes at a crucial and volatile time for the rebel groups that brand themselves as the Free Syrian Army and include many army defectors like Mr. Somaa. The rebel fighters and their supporters have been dejected for months over losses in northern Syria that their foreign backers did little to prevent, and a fear that the United States and Turkey are preparing to abandon them in pursuit of a broader deal with Russia. In this context, some rebels saw the new operation as a chance to show a bright spot in their efforts. For rebels, the operation was also a chance to show they could separate themselves from extremists, a key bone of contention in talks between the United States and Russia on steps to end the war. They widely shared pictures of themselves sleeping in the street rather than entering local homes, wanting to show that they could be trusted to take over an area without looting it or abusing the residents, as many combatants have done. But by Sunday, there were reports that Turkish airstrikes had killed 35 civilians in villages. And there was a video online showing rebels kicking prisoners from the militias. Mr. Somaa said he had not seen those abuses. But he said Kurdish militias had received United States backing to battle Islamic State, “not to occupy Arab lands. ” For Mr. Somaa and many others in the rebel force, the offensive is also a chance to reclaim their home region. He is originally from the town of Manbij, which the Kurdish militias recently seized from ISIS — with American air support. Now, the Turks and rebel leaders say they are bent on taking it from the Kurds and forcing them out of the area. The somewhat murky outlines of the rebel ground force are now coming into sharper focus. It appears to consist of about half a dozen groups that brand themselves as the Free Syrian Army, most of them recipients of aid from the United States and its allies. The flags of the groups, including those of Faylaq and Furqa Sultan Murad, could be seen in videos of the advancing columns and in the streets of Jarabulus. Another group taking part was Nooredine which has received covert aid from the United States and its allies on and off, but has also been accused of having ties to groups — and was widely condemned when a group of its fighters videotaped themselves beheading a young prisoner. The group’s leaders said they would discipline the killers, and its participation in the Jarabulus operation was an indication that it has not been completely shunned, at least by Turkey. But considerable confusion remained about the goals of the offensive. Ahmad Kanjo, a Zinki field commander, said on Friday that the rebels planned to keep fighting and advance west toward Al Bab, the largest town in the area still held by ISIS. But by Sunday, the main thrust of the operation was to push south to take territory not from ISIS but from groups that had already driven ISIS from those areas. By then Mr. Kanjo seemed unsure of what was even happening in the operation, saying he at first mistook Turkish airstrikes for American. “I don’t know who is bombing who,” he acknowledged, adding that he felt that he and his men were being used by so many different interests that they felt like a highway. “There are many different cars driving on us,” he said. | 1 |
World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder released a statement Saturday evening chiding League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt for criticizing President Donald Trump’s statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which did not specifically mention Jews. [President Trump’s statement read: “It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust. It is impossible to fully fathom the depravity and horror inflicted on innocent people by Nazi terror. “Yet, we know that in the darkest hours of humanity, light shines the brightest. As we remember those who died, we are deeply grateful to those who risked their lives to save the innocent. “In the name of the perished, I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my Presidency, and my life, to ensure that the forces of evil never again defeat the powers of good. Together, we will make love and tolerance prevalent throughout the world. ” Greenblatt, a former Obama administration official who has led opposition to Trump’s appointment of Stephen K. Bannon to a White House advisory role, tweeted on Friday: “@WhiteHouse statement on #HolocaustMemorialDay, misses that it was six million Jews who perished, not just ‘innocent people’ … Puzzling and troubling @WhiteHouse #HolocaustMemorialDay stmt has no mention of Jews. GOP and Dem. presidents have done so in the past. ” @WhiteHouse statement on #HolocaustMemorialDay, misses that it was six million Jews who perished, not just ‘innocent people’ pic. twitter. — Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 27, 2017, Puzzling and troubling @WhiteHouse #HolocaustMemorialDay stmt has no mention of Jews. GOP and Dem. presidents have done so in the past. pic. twitter. — Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 27, 2017, In response, Lauder said: “It does no honor to the millions of Jews murdered in the Holocaust to play politics with their memory. “Any fair reading of the White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day will see it appropriately commemorates the suffering and the heroism that mark that dark chapter in modern history. “There are enough real and true threats facing the Jewish people today. Our community gains nothing if we reach a point where manufactured outrages reduce public sensitivity to the real dangers we confront. ” Jews were the only group singled out for destruction by the Nazis, as Nazi ideology believed that Jews were an inferior race who had used their ideas to prevent superior races from engaging in a bloody struggle to establish the fittest. However, there were millions of other people murdered in the Holocaust, including Gypsies, gays, political dissidents, and large numbers of civilians in Eastern Europe. Though the international community observes the memory of the Holocaust in January, Jews typically observe a special Holocaust memorial day, Yom HaShoah, which occurs in spring, according to the Hebrew calendar. The World Jewish Congress describes itself as “the international organization representing Jewish communities in 100 countries to governments, parliaments and international organizations. ” Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. His new book, How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. | 0 |
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ( ) posted a mock newspaper page on Twitter implying that the U. S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Change Agreement was telling the Earth to “Drop Dead. ”[#BreakingNews on #ParisClimateAgreement pic. twitter. — Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) June 1, 2017, The caption on the image states: “Trump to Earth: Drop Dead,” which Schumer tweeted shortly after Trump made the announcement on Thursday at the White House, The Hill reported. “U. S. No Longer A Leader,” “Even Big CEOs Blast Trump,” “Global Temperatures Continue Rising,” the mock newspaper states. “Pulling out of the Paris agreement doesn’t put America first, it puts America last in recognizing science, in being a world leader and protecting our shore line, our economy and our planet,” Schumer tweeted. Schumer also released a statement on Trump’s decision: President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement is a devastating failure of historic proportions,” Schumer said. “Future generations will look back on President Trump’s decision as one of the worst policy moves made in the 21st century because of the huge damage to our economy, our environment and our geopolitical standing. But Trump said he made the decision to benefit the American people. “In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord,” Trump said. Vice President Pence opened the program in the Rose Garden by stating several campaign promises that President Trump made and has kept thus far. “Thanks to President Trump, America is back,” Pence said. “Our president is putting American jobs first. ” | 0 |
My friend and I were at a Nets game the other night, being ushered between exclusive locations by our personal concierge, when suddenly we strayed into an area full of normal fans waiting in line to buy their own food. It was weird, the way it would be weird if you were flying first class and for some inexplicable reason found yourself in coach. You would not be proud of your ungracious attitude toward the passengers crammed into seats in an cabin with no free Champagne, but neither would you want to change seats with anyone. Nothing at Barclays Center shouts “us” and “them” as emphatically as the Brooklyn Sports Entertainment Experience, the fan package my friend and I were experiencing that conjures a parallel universe of individually tailored privilege. Few people experience the Experience. For one thing, it is so intricate — requiring so much planning, such precise choreography, so many people to attend to your every need — that the arena can’t reasonably be expected to pull together more than a couple of Experiences at a time. Also, it costs $6, 189. “People always want access to things that you normally can’t buy,” said Kate Girotti, vice president of global marketing for Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment, which owns Barclays Center, the Nassau Coliseum and the Nets. “Whether it’s parking in the building with the players, a tour of the locker room or being on the court with your favorite players. ” (Packages are also offered for Islanders games and for concerts experiences are also available, for as low as $700.) We live at a time when consumers with gold cards get worse treatment than those with Super Platinum Premium Plus Cards, in which people who have all the possessions they want crave intangible luxury — novelty, exclusivity, enhanced reality and freedom from petty logistical annoyances. The Brooklyn Experience is for those sorts of people. For one night, it was also for my sort of person. (I didn’t pay for it. Seeking publicity for the program and also possibly for the Nets, who are having a bad season and suffering from low attendance, Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment offered The New York Times a look at it.) Here is what happened: Who needs public transportation when there is Gregg Casile, the Nets driver, and his spacious S. U. V. stocked with water and candy in case anyone gets hungry in the journey from my house? We clamber into the car — me, my friend Craig and a Times photographer, Hilary Swift — and glide down Atlantic Avenue. It turns out that there are three Barclays Center entrances: the democratic one, for fans with normal tickets the Calvin Klein V. I. P. one, for fans with tickets and the supersecret one around the back, for players, executives, talent, V. I. P.s and us. Gregg drives us directly into the building and onto an elevator, which by some magical means descends to a lower floor without seeming to move at all. The Nets point guard Yogi Ferrell is also riding the elevator, though he is not in his car. We are too classy to ask for his autograph. After Gregg drops us off in the players’ parking lot, we are met by a small but enthusiastic welcoming committee that includes two Brooklynettes dancers. This is not as exciting to me as it might be to some people, but we get our photographs taken with their arms around us. Girotti, who is serving as our concierge for the evening, leads us deep into the Barclays Center underbelly. The hallway is decorated with photographs of past arena performances — Leonard Cohen, Arcade Fire, Rush, you name it. It smells different down there, an aroma something like men’s cologne, and we learn that a special scent is pumped into the V. I. P. sections of the arena via the air ducts. We pass the Nets locker room but do not see any players, in part because of the positioned at the door. There are several dressing rooms reserved for visiting important people. One is for the referee another is for the lady singing the national anthem a third is for Craig and me. It has our names printed outside, its own bathroom, its own television, and a sofa in case we need to lie down at some point. Not yet. Filing into the room where the coaches traditionally meet the news media, we watch Kenny Atkinson, the Nets’ careworn head coach, explain to the assembled reporters how his team expects to defeat the visiting Boston Celtics, who are having a far superior season. It is a fair bet to say that this is not his favorite part of the day. “Obviously, we focused on our defense and tried to make some improvements,” Atkinson says of the Nets’ pregame preparations, “without forgetting our offense and trying to make some improvements there, too. ” I’ve been to lots of news conferences — and often you learn even less than we learn at this one — but it’s fun to watch from the perspective of a privileged outsider getting special access to events. Also, how great is it to attend a news conference but not have to cover it? We watched athletes mixing it up inches from our seats in their pregame . Then, it’s time to eat at our reserved table in a special restaurant not open to members of the public. It is called, and we see a theme developing here, the Calvin Klein Courtside Club. One of its features is glass walls that allow you to watch the players walk onto the court for the game. Because it’s a buffet, we eat too much, from choices that include steak, turkey, chicken, various kinds of pasta, various kinds of sushi, Nathan’s hot dogs, a sundae station and a genius V. I. P. Buffalo chicken wing dish wherein the chicken is white meat, the sauce does not make you feel sick and there are no bones. Aaron La Greca, the executive sous chef, wanders to our table — random interesting people popping up to talk to you is part of the Experience — and informs us that every game, his kitchen prepares between 200 and 250 pounds of shrimp for the hungry Barclays Center crowds. Judging by the way people are inhaling the shrimp at the buffet, that sounds entirely plausible. Somewhere in the vast network of back areas lies the Barclays Center practice court, where we and some other privileged people get to shoot baskets before the game begins. I am not filled with enthusiasm about this part of the evening — it’s been some time since I’ve been on a court in an athletic capacity — but Craig grabs a ball, gets going and immediately transforms into someone else entirely. After a few minutes, so do I. There’s something seductive and then addictive about trying to get the ball in the basket. It’s so simple and so hard, so thrilling when it works out. My enjoyment is somewhat marred by how bad I am at it, and by the arrival of some hypercompetitive preteens who, and I use this term advisedly, blow me off the court. But that is O. K. I have worked up a sweat and had a participatory sports experience and burned off all that dinner. By now, the regular fans are taking their seats, the players are coming in, and we’re standing on the court, inches from the Nets. It is exciting. The lady — it turns out to be Kissy Simmons, who played Nala in “The Lion King” — performs the national anthem. At one point the Nets shooting guard Sean Kilpatrick indicates that he has to perform his regular pregame stretching ritual under the basket, and that it would be really helpful if we would get out of the way. This is also strangely exciting, watching him do his lunges. We are seated right on the floor, next to the table reserved for the visiting Boston broadcast media and within sweating distance of the players. Our spot appears to be even better than the Calvin Klein V. I. P. section. The Celtics, whose shorts are winsomely decorated with a shamrock near the waistband, help themselves often to the gum, breath mints, lozenges and chalk at the broadcasters’ table. This sounds dumb. But from this intimate spot, I am struck by how gorgeously the athletes play, how smoothly they glide across the court, how effortless they make it all seem. It’s particularly fun to get up close to Isaiah Thomas, the freakishly talented Celtics point guard, at more than a foot shorter than some of the other guys. He is everywhere at once and is always smiling as if in some private amusement. The Nets are down by 15 points, then they miraculously rally and by halftime are only two points behind. We head to another fancy location, the Billboard Lounge, open to Nets or Islanders season ticket holders (annual fee: $500). It is dark and loud and has a vibe, even though we don’t see any billionaires or women of obviously ill repute. But we are cheered when someone offers us free drinks, a perk apparently denied to people not having Experiences. We are led up in the stands, where we find Chris Carrino, now in his 16th season as the Nets’ radio announcer. His speaking voice is like his radio voice, smooth as honey, and he is lyrical on the subject of how much he loves his job, how thrilling it is to find the precise description for what he sees in front of him. Through headphones, we get to hear snatches of his nimble broadcast. The Nets scrape and claw their way to within a point of the Celtics but are soon riding the downbound train to nowhere. Meanwhile, Brad Stevens, the Celtics coach, patrols the sidelines in front of us, shouting at his players. “Stay up! Stay up!” he says, and “Out, out, out!” and “In the middle!” and “Be smart with your hands!” and, my personal favorite, “Save your time and space!” None of it makes much sense, but neither does it sound like some secret code he’s using to impart information to his team while confounding the opponents. It sounds like stuff you might say in the heat of a game, although your teammates would not be as good as these players. In any case, it works. The Celtics win, . ■ Our faces were broadcast live on the scoreboard, with a caption identifying us by name and welcoming us to the arena as “BSE Experience V. I. P. Guests. ” That was embarrassing. However, some friends sitting high up in the stands sent a text to say how impressed they were. ■ We participated in the Toss, meaning that someone handed us and told us to throw them into the crowd. Mine just cleared the second row. That, too, was embarrassing. ■ We exited through some kind of V. I. P. passageway, and someone went to our dressing room to retrieve our stuff so we did not have to carry anything ourselves. ■ Gregg drove us home. The evening could not have been more to say the least. But as I showed myself through my front door, I had a sudden flashback to the time when Elizabeth Hurley, the British actress, airily observed that there were two types of people in the world: celebrities and civilians. I know which type I am. | 1 |
Illegal Immigrants Surging to US-Mexico Border in Race Against Election Day William La Jeunesse, Fox News, November 3, 2016
Americans aren’t the only ones motivated by Tuesday’s election. The presidential race has immigrants from around the world racing to the U.S.-Mexican border, as the cartels exploit a powerful narrative: get into the U.S. while you still can.
“Smugglers are telling them that they need to come across now while there’s a chance,” said Art Del Cueto, a Border Patrol agent in Tucson, Ariz., whose views were echoed by another agent in Texas.
“People think if one candidate wins, certain things will happen, like a giant wall being built and then they can never get through,” said Chris Cabrera, an agent in the Rio Grande Valley. “Another faction believes that if the other candidate wins, they’ll get amnesty if they’re here by a certain date.”
Those two competing narratives–triggered by the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, respectively–are driving immigration numbers the Border Patrol hasn’t seen in years in some sectors.
“We are overwhelmed,” said a veteran agent in McAllen, Texas. “We are seeing 800 to 1,000 apprehensions every night.”
In fiscal 2016, the Border Patrol apprehended 117,200 immigrants from Central America, almost one-third of all apprehensions border-wide–and 5,000 more than during the so-called surge of 2014. The agency also apprehended 5,000 Haitians, up from just 700 last year. The number of immigrants claiming to be from Africa and Asia also is up.
{snip}
The poverty and violence plaguing many of these countries helps push immigrants north, Beeson said. Pull factors include available and good-paying jobs in the U.S. and immigration policy that provides work permits and freedom for immigrants while the courts adjudicate their ‘asylum’ claim.
“When you stop somebody, you ask their name and the first thing they tell you is–‘I’m here for asylum, I can’t go home because they’ll kill me.’ . . . When it takes a good five or six minutes just to get their name out of them, they have a rehearsed story,” said Cabrera. “Once they get those papers saying they can pass through our checkpoint, we’ll never see them again.”
Del Cueto said the agents are “not getting any backing” from D.C. and “we need to start enforcing every single immigration law we have on the books.”
Del Cueto and Cabrera belong to the National Border Patrol Council, which represents the Border Patrol’s 18,000 field agents who are prohibited from talking openly to the media. | 0 |
Gatorade, the brightly colored sports drink marketed by professional sports figures in advertising targeted at amateur athletes, is introducing an organic version. PepsiCo Inc. the maker of Gatorade, said the new product, which will be sold in select markets beginning this fall, would have seven ingredients: water, organic cane sugar, citric acid, organic natural flavor, sea salt, sodium citrate and potassium chloride. The new line, called G Organic, will come in lemon, strawberry and mixed berry flavors. “As athletes continue to evolve, we’re committed to introducing new product innovations to meet their varying needs,” the company said in a statement on its website. Gatorade controls 70 percent of the sports drink market, according to Beverage Digest, but by producing an organic brand, it hopes to cash in on a growing demand for foods considered to be more natural and free of additives, pesticides and artificial ingredients seen as harmful. Gatorade has already been responsive to these concerns. In 2013, it stopped adding brominated vegetable oil, which was used to prevent flavorings from separating, after an online petition by consumers. Studies suggested the oil caused possible side effects, such as neurological disorders. The organic products industry in 2015 recorded its largest dollar gain ever — $4. 2 billion — for total sales of $43. 3 billion, according to the Organic Trade Association. Sales increased by nearly 11 percent, the fourth consecutive year of gains, the group said. A Gatorade representative did not respond to an email for comment about the specific timing of the new product line’s introduction, how it differs from its current products or whether the company was concerned about tinkering with a formula. (New Coke, anyone?) Adam Fleck, a beverage analyst at Morningstar Inc. told Bloomberg News: “In as much as they can focus on the potential to change ingredients without changing the taste, that’s sort of a . But you have to be very careful about alienating your current customers in a bid to attract lapsed customers or new customers. ” Brett O’Brien, Gatorade’s senior vice president and general manager, said the company was responding to a consumer demand. “We heard pretty loud through the locker rooms, through our work with nutritionists, that there is an interest and a desire among athletes to go organic,” he told Bloomberg News. Lindsay Moyer, a senior nutritionist with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which promotes a food system that is healthier and more nutritious, was skeptical about the changes. Gatorade’s G Organic discontinues using the artificial food dyes found in nearly every one of its other drinks, which is “a step forward,” she said, adding, “G Organic is still a sugary drink — essentially, liquid candy — and organic sugar is no healthier than sugar. ” Each 16. bottle of G Organic has seven teaspoons of added sugar, which is more than the daily limit recommended by the American Heart Association, she wrote in an email. Ms. Moyer said marketing for Gatorade and similar products had consumers believing they need a sports drink after every soccer or tennis game. “But unless people are doing prolonged, strenuous exercise — like a marathon or triathlon — they don’t need G Organic or any other sugary drink,” she wrote. “For most people, the best ‘sports drink’ is water. ” Gatorade, which is known for its drinks with catchy names, like Arctic Blitz and Icy Charge, has long marketed itself as a way for athletes to replenish electrolytes shed in competitions and workouts. It was developed by J. Robert Cade, a nephrologist in Florida, who concocted the drink in 1965 to rehydrate athletes. The company has also reaped the publicity benefits of football players dumping a large cooler of the drink and ice over their coach’s head — in what is known as a Gatorade shower — to celebrate Super Bowl victories. While the company has controlled a sizable piece of the sports drink market, consumers are increasingly seeking to rely less on ingredients made in factories and replace them with more wholesome alternatives that grow in the ground or on trees. Organic soft drinks were predicted to rise from 2012 to 2017 at a compound annual growth rate of 4 percent, reaching a market value of $665. 7 million, according to a 2013 analysis by the Canadian government of the American marketplace. Organic fruit and vegetable juices were expected to drive this growth. “Sugary sodas and fruit juice beverages will continue to forfeit shelf space to drinks that promise energy, nutrition and satiety, all while being formulated with fewer, simpler ingredients, and less calories from sugars,” Food Business News predicted in a trends report in January. | 1 |
We Are Change
In this video Luke Rudkowski breaks down the latest election news and fears of attacks on election day. As Trump and Hillary face off there are many distractions by the government that needed to be addressed. To be smart and prepared check out http://foodforliberty.com/wearechange… for Healthy Emergency Storable Food with GMO-Free ingredients
Support WeAreChange by Subscribing to our channel HERE http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c…
Visit our main site for more breaking news http://wearechange.org/
Patreon https://www.patreon.com/WeAreChange?a…
SnapChat: LukeWeAreChange
Facebook: https://facebook.com/LukeWeAreChange
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange
Instagram: http://instagram.com/lukewearechange
Rep WeAreChange Merch Proudly: http://wearechange.org/store
OH YEAH since we are not corporate or government WHORES help us out http://wearechange.org/donate
We take BITCOIN too
12HdLgeeuA87t2JU8m4tbRo247Yj5u2TVP
Buy the new We Are Change t-shirt because you will enjoy shredding the Clinton News Network in public!
The post PREPARE FOR THE “CREDIBLE” THREATS ON ELECTION DAY appeared first on We Are Change .
| 0 |
After finishing, having roared through the last 50 meters of the freestyle at a sprinter’s pace, Katie Ledecky turned around to see the scoreboard. It told her what she surely already knew: she had won gold, her first of the Rio Games, and she had crushed her own world record. “To see the 56 up there feels really good,” Ledecky said, referring to her time, 3 minutes 56. 46 seconds. Her previous record was 3:58. 37. Jazz Carlin of Britain won silver in 4:01. 23, and Ledecky’s teammate Leah Smith was third in 4:01. 92. It was the 12th world record Ledecky has set since the 2012 London Olympics. She skipped the 3:57s altogether, but that was her plan. She said a 3:56 had been her goal for the past three years. She needed only 28. 92 seconds to cover the final 50 meters, a burst that is not supposed to happen in this event. “I just let it all out,” she said. Only two women have gone under four minutes: Ledecky and Italy’s Federica Pellegrini, who twice accomplished the feat in 2009 while wearing the buoyant suits that since have been banned. Ledecky, a rising freshman at Stanford, was the first to surpass 3:59 when she set the previous mark, a 3:58. 37 at the 2014 Pan Pacific Championships. She now owns the 10 fastest performances in the 400. Ledecky’s victory is the first gold medal of these Olympics for American swimmers, and it came the day after she made her Olympic sprint debut, anchoring the U. S. freestyle relay that earned the silver medal and set an American record. Ledecky, who will defend her Olympic title in the 800 freestyle later this week, increased her stroke rate for the race. Her coach, Bruce Gemmell, had to remind Ledecky to slow her tempo for the race to avoid, in her words, “spinning my wheels. ” A few minutes after Ledecky’s victory, the United States men’s 4x100 relay won gold. The foursome of Caeleb Dressel, Michael Phelps, Ryan Held and Nathan Adrian beat France and the favorites, Australia. Bob Bowman, the men’s coach, credited Ledecky with an assist. “When you see an otherworldly swim like that the guys know they have to step up,” Bowman said. “How can you not be inspired when you see something like that?” | 0 |
Weeks of provocative and outlandish behavior have hurt Donald J. Trump’s standing in two new national polls of registered voters, which showed the presumptive Republican presidential nominee falling further behind Hillary Clinton. A Washington News survey had Mrs. Clinton with a lead: 51 percent to 39 percent. A Wall Street News poll had Mrs. Clinton with a smaller advantage of five percentage points. Both polls, released on Sunday, showed Mr. Trump in worse shape than he had been a month ago, as voters in the latest polls expressed doubts about his preparedness and qualifications to lead the nation. Nearly two in three Americans say they think Mr. Trump is unqualified to be president and are anxious about the idea of him in the White House, the poll found. In contrast, 61 percent think Mrs. Clinton is qualified. Mr. Trump is coming off two particularly damaging weeks for his campaign — a period in which he personally attacked a judge hearing a lawsuit against Trump University, gloated about predicting attacks like the Orlando massacre that left 49 dead, and fired his embattled campaign manager. Despite his woes, not all the results of the new polls were heartening for Mrs. Clinton. The survey found that her lead essentially disappears when candidates from the Green Party and Libertarian Party are included. She essentially tied Mr. Trump, with 39 percent to his 38 percent. Together, candidates grabbed 16 percent of the support. Senior aides to both candidates spoke on Sunday morning news shows, and their words left little doubt about the intensity that the race is taking on now that the nominating fights have ended. Robby Mook, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign manager, said on Fox News Sunday, “Donald Trump is probably one of the most reckless, unfit candidates to ever seek the presidency. ” Mrs. Clinton, he said, is “probably one of the most prepared. ” Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chairman, insisted that he and Mr. Trump had built an operation that was able to take on Mrs. Clinton, addressing concerns from Republicans that their infrastructure is inadequate. “Our campaign is organized,” Mr. Manafort told NBC’s “Meet the Press. ” ”We’re ready, we’re going to have a good convention, and we’re confident that we are not behind the Clinton campaign,” Mr. Manafort added. | 0 |
After nearly a year of causing hysteria, mass travel cancellations and unnecessary abortions it finally daunts to “journalists” and “experts” that the Zika virus is harmless. It can cause a very minor flue – two days of a low fever and uncomfortable feeling for a quarter of those infected – that is all. It does not cause, as was claimed by sensationalists in the media and various self-serving “scientists”, birth defects like microcephaly.
We told you so.
In February we wrote: The Zika Virus Is Harmless – Who Then Benefits From This Media Panic? .
The piece refereed to a Congressional Research Service report and various sound scientific papers. It concluded:
There is absolutely no sane reason for the scary headlines and the panic they cause.The virus is harmless. It is possible, but seems for now very unlikely, that it affects some unborn children. There is absolutely no reason to be concerned about it.
The artificial media panic continued and huge amounts of money were poured into dangerous insecticides to kill mosquitoes (and important pollinators) that did not do any harm. Indeed, generous use of some of these insecticides likely were the very cause of a blip in microencephaly cases in northeastern Brazil.
In March we wrote: Reading About Zika May Hurt Your Brain .
We listed 35 sensational “news” headlines about potential catastrophes related to a Zika epidemic. The common factor of those panic creating media wave – all those headlines included the miraculous little word may . The pieces were pure speculations with some quoting this or that “expert” who was hunting for research funds or lobbying for some pharmaceutical or pesticide conglomerate.
In June we added: Zika Virus Does Not Cause Birth Defects – Fighting It Probably Does .
New serious research found what some people in Brazil had suspected from the very start of the small and strictly locally limited jump in microencephaly cases in Brazil:
[D]octors in the Zika affected areas in Brazil pointed out that the real cause of somewhat increased microcephaly in the region was probably the insecticide pyriproxyfen, used to kill mosquito larvae in drinking water:
The Brazilian doctors noted that the areas of northeast Brazil that had witnessed the greatest number of microcephaly cases match with areas where pyriproxyfen is added to drinking water in an effort to combat Zika-carrying mosquitoes . Pyriproxyfen is reported to cause malformations in mosquito larvae, and has been added to drinking water in the region for the past 18 months.
Pyriproxyfen is produced by a Sumitomo Chemical – an important Japanese poison giant. It was therefore unsurprising that the New York Times and others called the Brazilian doctors’ report a “conspiracy theory” and trotted out some “experts” to debunk it.
…
But [s]cientist at the New England Complex Systems Institute also researched the pyriproxyfen thesis. They found :
Pyriproxifen is an analog of juvenile hormone, which corresponds in mammals to regulatory molecules including retinoic acid, a vitamin A metabolite, with which it has cross-reactivity and whose application during development causes microcephaly .
…
[T]ests of pyriproxyfen by the manufacturer, Sumitomo, widely quoted as giving no evidence for developmental toxicity, actually found some evidence for such an effect , including low brain mass and arhinencephaly—incomplete formation of the anterior cerebral hemispheres—in rat pups. Finally, the pyriproxyfen use in Brazil is unprecedented—it has never before been applied to a water supply on such a scale.
…
Given this combination of information we strongly recommend that the use of pyriproxyfen in Brazil be suspended pending further investigation.
Today the Washington Post finally admits that the Zika virus does not cause birth defects:
[T]o the great bewilderment of scientists, the epidemic has not produced the wave of fetal deformities so widely feared when the images of misshapen infants first emerged from Brazil.Instead, Zika has left a puzzling and distinctly uneven pattern of damage across the Americas. According to the latest U.N. figures, of the 2,175 babies born in the past year with undersize heads or other congenital neurological damage linked to Zika, more than 75 percent have been clustered in a single region: northeastern Brazil.
The wide areas where the flue virus occurred outside of the small area in Brazil saw no increase in birth defect numbers. The number of (naturally occurring) microcephality cases stayed constant despite a very large increase in (harmless) Zika virus infections. The numbers in Brazil also turned out to be partially inflated because of a lack of standard diagnosis criteria and unreliable statistics. A factor we had pointed to in our very first piece.
The WaPo piece today muses about several “possible” causes for the local increase in cases in northeastern Brazil that indeed happened. It quotes some of the very “experts”, like from the pharmaceutical industry influenced CDC, that were wrong on the issue since the very first panic headline. It strenuously avoids to even mention the most likely cause – the excessive local use of an insecticide that is supposed to cause birth defects – in developing mosquitoes. Thus the reporting is still void of journalistic ethics and irresponsible in its conclusions.
It did not take much effort to get this right. An hour or two of skimming through publicly available sources of good standing, some basic higher education and sound reasoning was enough. But instead of doing such basic inquiries “journalists” and media “served” panic and speculations by biased “experts”. Keep this story in mind for the next sensationalist onslaught of panic headline. There surely will be some “interests” behind those; just don’t expect unbiased facts and basic logic reasoning.
Source: Moon of Alabama
Via: Global Research
Yet, Millions of GMO Mosquitoes set to be released in Brazil & Columbia… Scientists are planning to release an army of millions of modified mosquitoes in areas of Brazil and Colombia.
They say the unusual approach is an attempt to provide “revolutionary protection” against mosquito-borne diseases such as Zika and chikungunya.
The mosquitoes are infected with a bug called Wolbachia which reduces their ability to spread viruses to people.
The $18m dollar project is funded by an international team of donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation…
Source: BBC
Related: 6 Weird Things About Zika That Don’t Add Up — Must Watch! Depopulation: Zika Virus Funded By Bill Gates Zika Virus For Sale Online Courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation FDA Approves Genetically Modified Mosquitoes to Combat Zika in Florida Zika Mosquitoes Same As GM Mosquitoes Released Off The Coast Of Florida Feds Going Door-To-Door In Florida Asking For Urine Samples Amid Zika Outbreak Is the Zika virus an offshoot of a secret U.S. Army ‘entomological warfare’ program? Zika ‘scarier than thought’: Top US officials push govt for $1.9bn emergency funding Zika Virus – The Latest Actor in the Fake Pandemic Play? Zika: Who Launched The Fake-Epidemic Story In Brazil? Zika Fear Falters as False Flag Fraud Fizzles GM Mosquitoes With Possible Link To Zika Virus Awaiting Release In Florida Zika Virus Outbreak May Be Result of Bioweapon – Ex-Russian Surgeon General Zika Freakout: The Hoax And The Covert Op Continue Eugenics WMD: Zika Virus Prompts Disturbing New Call For ‘No Child Policy’ | 1 |
News
Fox News is planning to replace Megyn Kelly with Justice Jeanine Pirro due to sagging ratings and an epic fail to bolster them with an attempt to take down Newt Gingrich.
As the most recent viewership numbers show, Kelly’s program indicates a decided downward shift from Bill O’Reilly’s lead-in program, and then, even more damning for Kelly, is how the ratings jump back up for the Sean Hannity program, even though Hannity should, given the later time slot, have the smaller audience.
It would appear that stance took a considerable toll on Kelly’s ratings.
Watch David Zublick from America Talks Radio break the news:
Finally a good move by Fox News, it was about time. Megyn Kelly OUT, Jeanine Pirro IN… FOX Finally Does The Right Thing Share this: | 0 |
“WE ARE THE FUTURE.” — Kevin MacDonald
This is an amazing victory. The stars were aligned. First, the very long shot of Trump being nominated. Then he gets to run against the most corrupt, least charismatic candidate in history (I think Joe Biden would have beaten Trump, and maybe even Bernie Sanders) at a time when Americans naturally want change after 8 years of Obama.
Fundamentally, it is a victory of White Americans over the oligarchic, hostile elites what have run this country for decades. Trump accomplished a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and won without the support or with only lukewarm and vacillating support from much of the GOP elite.
In May of 2015 I was very despondent about our prospects. It just didn’t seem like we could break through the elite consensus dominating all the high ground—and all the moral high ground—of the U.S., including the media (print, television, and the Hollywood movie industry), the academic world, politics, Wall St., and the CEOs of major corporations. We were systematically shut out and it was obvious that the powers that be were not going to let the Alt Right get a seat at the table. Then Trump announced, it was hard to take it seriously, but his comments on immigration, American nationalism, political correctness and trade certainly struck a chord. My immediate reaction (July 10, 2015), however, was that he had two things going for him that were absolutely unique — he is a celebrity and he is very, very rich (“ How it could happen “). Such a person is in a position to be heard; he can’t be shut out of the media, and he doesn’t need the money of the corrupt donor class. In fact, the media, eager for ratings, gave him countless opportunities to get his message out. Anyone on the Alt Right could have said the exact same things, but we would be speaking into our closets.
Even back in July of 2015, it was obvious Trump was not your usual GOP candidate:
[Trump] certainly did not fall in my estimation when he attacked two prominent operatives of the Republican Party/Israel Lobby nexus hostile to his candidacy, Charles Krauthammer and Jonah Goldberg. Then there’s the Twitter incident : “I promise you that I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz — I mean Jon Stewart @TheDailyShow,” tweeted Trump , adding, “Who, by the way, is totally overrated.” It is, of course, considered “anti-Semitic” to ever call attention to the fact that someone is Jewish because of the absolutely outrageous suggestion that the Jewish identity of someone like Stewart/Leibowitz might influence his opinions. As we all know, Jews are just like everybody else.
And it quickly turned out that he understood the anger in White America far better than anyone else and he was willing to say what they wanted to hear — most of all the White working class (72-23!), but also White women(53-43), and his deficit among White educated women was only 51-45 ( CBS exit polls ). Looks like quite a few college-educated women ignored what they heard in their gender studies courses and those mandatory credits in Black Studies.
While obviously a lot of work needs to be done, this is a glorious day.
The following is an expanded version of my article in Radix Journal’s series on the meaning of Trump.
The Alt Right has gravitated to Trump’s candidacy, and for good reason. Much of what the Alt Right wants will be difficult or impossible to bring about even with a president who is entirely on board with the idea that America should start thinking about the interests of its traditional White majority. But win or lose, Trump has already had a huge effect on American politics in a way that benefits the Alt Right, and his victory will be even more so: Trump has made statements on immigration that have been banned from polite society for 50 years — deport illegals, seal the border, end birthright citizenship, place a moratorium on Muslim immigration, and make immigration serve actual labor needs rather than a moral imperative (ideally with guest workers not given citizenship). He has deplored Angela Merkel’s policies in Germany and has made statements indicating he opposes the transformation of Western societies via immigration and multiculturalism (“ Paris isn’t Paris anymore .”) Trump’s victory will encourage and energize the right in Europe. It is Brexit on steroids — a scream by voters to stop the way things are going. To stop the destruction of their traditional ways of life. If nothing else, it is throwing a monkey wrench into the system. Tear it down! We can’t keep going on like this! Voters want an end to meaningless wars, an end to importing people who hate us and will never assimilate to our way of life. Trump has unmasked the neocons. The neocons have dominated the intellectual and foreign policy establishment of the Republican Party since the 1980s. From the beginning of Trump’s candidacy, neocons have been leading the #NeverTrump movement, despite the catastrophic effects of a Hillary Clinton presidency on the GOP. A Clinton presidency would ensure a liberal/left voting majority into the foreseeable future given that she would amnesty millions of illegals and dramatically raise total numbers of immigrants and refugees. Clinton Supreme Court appointments would likely gut the First Amendment by enabling “hate speech” laws and they would gut the Second Amendment as well. No one on the right, from traditional “limited government” conservatives to the Alt Right, would want this, and it’s difficult to believe that the Jewish identities and pro-Israel commitments of the most important neocons are lost on non-Jewish Republicans. The treason of the neocons will be long remembered in GOP circles and will compromise their influence in the future.
I notice on Twitter that Bill Kristol says that the #NeverTrumpers should be magnanimous in losing, but I would be shocked if neocons were given any role in the GOP. This is Trump’s party now. It is incredibly heartening that he wants a good relationship with Russia at a time when neocons and NATO have been clamoring for confrontation and aggression. It is incredibly heartening that he supports the legitimate Assad government in Syria. I have no doubt that he will act in concert with Russia to end the rebellion and bring peace and stability to the region. Trump has highlighted the chasm between the overwhelmingly White Republican voting base and the GOP donor class intent on globalist policies of mass immigration, free trade, and a bellicose pro-Israel, anti-Russian foreign policy. The pre-Trump GOP was dominated by a neocon foreign policy establishment and a pro-Chamber of Commerce, pro-big business economic policy. This party did not represent the interests of GOP voters and can’t be resurrected. Even if Trump had lost, his energized supporters would be a new and important force within the GOP. His victory will ensure that the GOP will be a populist party for the foreseeable future. Trump has unmasked the media. The media have always been liberal, but this time around, even much of the usual pro-Republican media has been hostile to Trump, and a survey by the Media Research Center found an astounding 91% of media coverage hostile to his candidacy. Who can forget the hostility from mainstream conservative media like National Review , The Weekly Standard , and other neocon outlets? This feeds into the narrative that there has been a unified establishment from the far left to the neoconservative right that has opposed Trump’s populist policies favoring the middle class and the traditional White majority.
The media is a pillar of the establishment, and it is heartening indeed that people ignored the deluge of talk of Trump being a racist, a bigot, and a misogynist. The media is a huge loser in Trump’s victory.
As we have commented many times, the media is under very powerful Jewish influence. Trump’s victory is a blow to the entire Jewish power structure. I have written 6 articles on Jewish hostility toward Trump, much of this hostility bordering on the clinically paranoid. Jews understand that they do indeed have a great deal of power in the U.S. and throughout the West and that they have used that power to destroy the traditional homogeneity of these societies and to do all they can to make Whites minorities in societies they have dominated for hundreds and, in the case of Europe, many thousands of years. We are a long way from really putting a dent in that power structure, but Trump’s victory is a great first step. Trump has put the Alt Right on the map. There have been numerous articles and commentary on the Alt Right because of Trump’s candidacy. The Alt Right has been the only identifiable intellectual perspective supporting Trump, although we understand that he is not one of us and would not attempt to do much what we would like to see in our ideal world. We are the only intellectual perspective that takes race seriously and accepts the social science research not only on race but on the disastrous costs of imposed multiculturalism for White majorities and the horrifying future awaiting Whites if indeed they do become hated, despised minorities. Traditional conservative intellectuals simply cannot explain what is happening with their usual intellectual toolkit. They can’t explain the anger and the very legitimate fears of the White majority. They can’t understand the racialization of politics. We understand it and are able to analyze it in very sophisticated ways that are entirely within the scientific mainstream.
Much of the media coverage of the Alt Right was motivated by attempting to tar Trump as a “racist,” and after the election, win or lose, the media will likely attempt to put the toothpaste back in the tube by ceasing coverage. However, a Trump victory makes that all but impossible. Our increased visibility has meant a very large surge in support for the Alt Right. Meeting attendance is way up, and readership on Alt Right sites is skyrocketing. The future is bright, and a very large amount of the credit for that has to go to Donald Trump.
We are the future. | 1 |
Potentially the Worst VP in American History A look at Tim Kaine's track record and agendas. November 4, 2016 Discover The Networks
During his years as a student at Harvard Law School in the early 1980s, Tim Kaine took a year off from his legal studies in order to work with Jesuit missionaries in Honduras. During the nine months he spent there, Kaine developed a keen interest in the teachings of local priests who were adherents of liberation theology , which is essentially Marxism dressed up as Christianity. Kaine himself embraced liberation theology and later claimed that it had “changed” him and “deepened” him. After completing his legal education, Kaine joined a civil litigation firm and practiced law for 17 years. He also launched a career in local politics in the mid-1990s, and eventually went on to serve as governor of Virginia (2006-10) and as a U.S. senator (2013-present). This past July, Hillary Clinton named Kaine as her vice presidential running mate.
Over the course of his political career, Kaine has developed some noteworthy ties to a number of Islamist individuals and organizations: In his role as Virginia's governor in 2007, Kaine appointed Esam Omeish, president of the Muslim Brotherhood -affiliated Muslim American Society (MAS), to Virginia’s Immigration Commission. Omeish had previously served as president of the National Muslim Students Association and as a board member of the Islamic Society of North America , both of which have deep ties to the Brotherhood. Omeish had also been a board chairman of the Islamic Center of Passaic County , a New Jersey mosque with significant terrorist connections. And he had been a vice president and board member of the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center , a Virginia mosque whose imams have included, among others, an Al-Qaeda operative and a supporter of suicide bombings. Prior to his appointment by Kaine, Omeish had described the Muslim Brotherhood as a “moderate” organization; he had praised the former Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin as “our beloved Sheikh”; and he had pledged to lend his assistance to those Palestinians who understood that “the jihad way is the way to liberate your land.” In May 2007, Kaine was the keynote speaker at the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation's “Standing for Justice Dinner.” In 2010, Kaine agreed to attend the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center's annual fundraising banquet. In September 2011, Kaine spoke at an event that presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to U.S. Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Barzinji , who was closely associated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad , Hamas, and the extremist International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT). In 2011-12, Kaine’s U.S. Senate campaign received $4,300 from officials of the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations , plus another $3,500 from IIIT's president-of-finance , Hisham Al-Talib .
In early 2015, Kaine objected strenuously when Republican House Speaker John Boehner invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to the U.S. Congress about the gravity of the growing Iranian nuclear threat and his (Netanyahu's) “ profound disagreement ” with the negotiated deal that the Obama Administration was pursuing with Iran. Kaine joined seven other Senate Democrats in boycotting Netanyahu’s speech. That summer, Kaine declared himself a “ strong supporter ” of the final agreement, which allowed the Islamist regime in Tehran to enrich uranium, build advanced centrifuges, purchase ballistic missiles, fund terrorism, and be guaranteed of having a near-zero breakout time to the development of a nuclear bomb approximately a decade down the road. In May 2015, Kaine was one of fourteen U.S. senators who wrote a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to allow 65,000 people from war-torn, terrorism-ravaged Syria into the United States as refugees, despite many people's concern that terrorists could potentially infiltrate the refugee program. Later that same year, Kaine opposed a bill passed by the House of Representatives that would have required more careful vetting of Syrians and Iraqis before they could be admitted to the United States as refugees. “These refugees are people who are terrorized, not terrorists,” Kaine said in a November 2015 interview wherein he claimed that “the refugee vetting process is one of the safest areas that we have.” In a speech on the Senate floor the following month, Kaine said: “I look at this refugee crisis as a test … about whether we, like [the biblical] Job, will be true to our principles or whether we’ll abandon them.” He also urged his fellow legislators to emulate the example of the 17th-century “Indians down near Jamestown Island” who had helped starving English settlers to survive by offering “an extension of a hand to strangers in a strange land.” Kaine ranks among the most left-wing political figures in the United States today. He is the only person with a 0% Lifetime Rating from the American Conservative Union, which has graded Members of Congress on their voting records each year since 1971. Similarly, ConservativeReview.com gives Kaine a 0% rating. In short, Tim Kaine is essentially a political mirror image of Hillary Clinton. Mrs. Clinton picked him as her running mate because she saw him as someone who could effectively help her implement a radical leftist agenda. | 1 |
— Jay Clemons (@ATL_JayClemons) October 27, 2016
According to #PodestaEmails20 released this morning by WikiLeaks, Center for American Progress president and member of Clinton 2016 transition team , Neera Tanden, thought the person/people who told Hillary it was OK to use a private email and server should be subject to rather harsh punishment with this question to John Podesta: Neera: Who told Hillary she could use a private email & have they been drawn & quartered?
— Kerri (@irrekset) October 27, 2016
Tanden certainly makes Hillary’s shady email setup sound like a bigger deal than the Clinton campaign lets on.
In another email, Tanden wondered why the Hillary campaign wasn’t more forthcoming about Clinton’s email shenanigans. Tanden then surmised, according to the WikiLeaks email, that they were hoping to “get away with it”: Neera on CF scheming and coverups:
“i guess I know the answerthey wanted to get away with it” https://t.co/SLSsYm1Xqj #PodestaEmails20
— Tom Kawczynski (@tomkawczynski) October 27, 2016 Tanden on Mills, Reines, and Kendall covering up #EmailGate : “they wanted to get away with it” https://t.co/TDII0lGwfK pic.twitter.com/022vFnStnd
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 27, 2016
Shocker! | 0 |
BERLIN — A Moroccan woman who took a piece of her dead husband’s intestine on a flight to their home in Austria was carrying the sample because she suspected that he had been poisoned and she wanted European doctors to examine it, her lawyer said on Tuesday. The woman, 35, who has not been publicly identified, packed the piece in her checked baggage on a flight to the southern Austrian city of Graz, where she and her husband, 40, had been living for eight years, said the lawyer, Anton Karner. Mr. Karner said his client had been acting on the advice of a doctor in Marrakesh who shared her suspicion that her husband had been poisoned at a meal the couple ate while visiting his relatives. The Moroccan doctor extracted the piece of intestine, Mr. Karner said, and apparently helped pack it in formaldehyde and in thick plastic containers. Gerald Höfler, who leads the pathology institute in Graz where the intestine is being examined, described the packaging as very professional. “I would imagine that it was done by a pathologist,” he said. “It was absolutely secure, triple wrapped, according to European Union norms. ” Dr. Höfler said the results of the examination would probably not be known until next week. The unusual cargo was found by customs officials on Sept. 8 after they searched the woman’s bag as part of standard random checks when she landed in Graz, said Johannes Pasquali, a spokesman for the Austrian Finance Ministry, which oversees the country’s customs operations. The story was first reported over the weekend by Kleine Zeitung, the main local newspaper in Graz. Leo Josefus, a spokesman for the police in the state of Styria, of which Graz is the capital, said customs officials had first turned to the police for guidance. Officers determined that the woman had violated no Austrian laws by bringing the sample into the country, and the intestine was then sent to Dr. Höfler’s clinic. Mr. Karner, who declined to name his client, said she suspected poisoning after the family meal because some members of her husband’s family had opposed their marriage. | 0 |
Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, told reporters Monday that he could not yet accept an invitation from his American counterpart Donald Trump to the White House because he is unsure of whether he has the time to make it. [While he did not reject the invitation, either, he said he was “tied up” and could not “make any definite promise. ” “I’m supposed to go to Russia, I’m also supposed to go to Israel,” Duterte noted. If Duterte accepts the invitation, it is unclear whether the State Department would grant him a visa to enter the United States. He has joked in the past that he refuses to even try to enter the country because “I will just be insulted there” and “they won’t give me a visa. ” In October, he claimed to have once attempted to enter the United States when he was in college and was denied a visa, threatening to impose visa restrictions on U. S. citizens in revenge. Duterte is facing a case before the International Criminal Court for allegedly using “death squads” to curb violence as mayor of his native Davao City, a position he held for 22 years before assuming the presidency. He has claimed to have personally participated in these death squads, wandering the city at night and shooting people dead. President Trump invited Duterte to the White House during a telephone conversation this weekend, a move that baffled observers who have noted Duterte’s consistent rhetoric since taking office in June 2016, as well as his record of supporting extrajudicial killings vigilante justice against drug criminals. The two world leaders reportedly engaged in a “very friendly conversation” in which Trump offered to host Duterte in the White House. “President Trump also invited President Duterte to the White House to discuss the importance of the United alliance, which is now heading in a very positive direction,” the White House said in a statement. The statement added that the two “discussed the fact that the Philippine government is fighting very hard to rid its country of drugs, a scourge that affects many countries throughout the world. ” While not endorsing Duterte’s war on drugs, the statement did not condemn Duterte’s efforts to rid the country of a methamphetamine (“shabu”) epidemic and the thousands of deaths occurring since he took office. Speaking to reporters Monday, Duterte echoed the warmth of the White House statement, adding that he had also mentioned growing tensions with North Korea. “Our greatest chance there of getting some dialogue with America and North Korea would be through the intercession of China,” he said. Duterte’s civil exchanges with Trump stand in stark contrast to his relationship with the Obama administration. Duterte repeatedly referred to President Barack Obama as a “son of a whore,” told him to “go to hell,” and vowed to sever ties between the United States and the Philippines. “I’ve realigned myself in your ideological flow and maybe I will also go to Russia to talk to (President Vladimir) Putin and tell him that there are three of us against the world — China, Philippines and Russia. It’s the only way,” he said in October. On Monday, Duterte denied that those comments were a “distancing. ” “It was not a distancing but it was rather a rift between me maybe and the State Department and Mr. Obama, who spoke openly against me,” he claimed. “Things have changed, the new leadership wants to make friends. Well, things have changed, because the new leadership, he (Trump) wants to make friends and he says that we are friends. So, why do you have to pick a fight?” he added. Duterte has presented a favorable disposition towards President Trump since the latter assumed office. In March, Duterte said in public remarks that he was “okay with President Trump and I can assure him also of our friendship and cooperation. ” “But for the previous president, I was an evil man,” he added at the time. “That crazy man was planning to jail me. This other one [Trump] he said, ‘you’re right. ’” In the same remarks, he condemned the European Union for issuing a statement demanding Duterte cease to endorse police brutality against drug suspects, asking of the EU, “why do you have to fuck with us?” media outlets and commentators have condemned the White House invitation extended to Duterte. President Obama met with his Filipino counterpart in September at a regional summit despite claiming to have refused to do so, shaking his hand after Duterte had publicly referred to him as a “son of a whore. ” “It was not a long interaction,” Obama claimed. An anonymous official in the Trump White House similarly rejected the idea that meeting the head of state in person was an endorsement. “It’s not a ‘thank you,’ it’s a meeting,” the official told Reuters. | 1 |
Madeleine Albright Gets in Costume in Time for Halloween
Look who's pretending they're a humanitarian Originally appeared at The Libertarian Institute
Last week, The Washington Post reported that the Beltway’s foreign policy elite is salivating at the prospect of a more hawkish Hillary Clinton administration.
Apparently, the Obama administration’s reluctance to intervene directly in Syria is driving the liberal interventionalists and the neocons crazy. The out-of-power imperialists of the left and right, though, have been biding their time and doing what they do best: writing reports that only the foreign policy elite read inside the imperial city. Absurdly, or maybe the better word is frighteningly, the foreign policy elite’s reports and studies “call for more-aggressive American action to constrain Iran, rein in the chaos in the Middle East and check Russia in Europe.” The idea that Washington could bring order to the chaos it helped create in the greater Middle East is lunacy.
Come November 9, the nation better start preparing itself for more of the same with the almost guaranteed ascension of President Clinton the Second: perpetual, wealth-sapping, rights-eviscerating war.
But what was particularly striking about the article was the appearance of former Secretary of State and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright discussing the need for more muscular American intervention in Syria.
“The immediate thing is to do something to alleviate the horrors that are being visited on the population,” said former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who is leading a bipartisan and international team looking at U.S. strategy in the Middle East for the Atlantic Council.
“We do think there needs to be more American action — not ground forces but some additional help in terms of the military aspect.”
Just in time for Halloween, Secretary Albright wants to dress up like a humanitarian. But fortunately we know that Secretary Albright believes that the lives of innocent children are okay to sacrifice in the pursuit of a U.S-led international order.* Back in 1996, Albright showed what’s truly under that humanitarian costume during an interview with 60 Minutes on the toll of U.N. Security Council sanctions on Iraq:
Lesley Stahl on sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?
Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it.
These are the kinds of people ready to assume the commanding heights of the U.S. national security apparatus soon after Inauguration Day. They make the hard choices you don’t want to make, and the price is worth it.
* NOTE: For a good analysis of exactly how many Iraqi children under five years old died because of U.N. Security Council sanctions on Iraq, see Matt Welch’s Reason piece from 2002, “ The Politics of Dead Children .” Did you enjoy this article? - Consider helping us! Russia Insider depends on your donations: the more you give, the more we can do. $1 $10 Other amount
If you wish you make a tax-deductible contribution of $1,000 or more, please visit our Support page for instructions Click here for our commenting guidelines On fire | 0 |
In an interview with Breitbart News, the creator of the now famous Planned Parenthood videos says attending this year’s March for Life is like coming full circle. [“I am really looking forward to seeing the new administration deliver on the promises they made, that we’re going to defund Planned Parenthood and stop forcing taxpayers to subsidize the biggest abortion business in our country,” the journalist says. Following more than a year of being targeted by Planned Parenthood for his undercover videos revealing their alleged practice of selling the body parts of babies aborted in their clinics for a profit, Daleiden says being at March for Life 2017 with a new, administration in office “means a lot. ” “It’s cool coming full circle to see Vice President Pence speaking here — it’s historic for a sitting vice president to be speaking at the March for Life — and for this vice president in particular,” he explains. “None of us would be talking about defunding Planned Parenthood had it not been for Congressman Mike Pence 10 years ago raising this issue and talking about it when nobody else was at the time. ” “I’m personally looking forward to a new Department of Justice, hoping that Planned Parenthood is finally going to be held accountable to the law for their numerous barbaric crimes against women, children, and families,” he adds. “I’m looking forward to seeing a Congress and a administration working together on enacting the significant policy changes that the majority of Americans tell us they want when it comes to abortion policy and increased protections for our unborn brothers and sisters. ” | 0 |
Trending Articles: Trending Articles: Must Read of the Day – Dennis Kucinich’s Extraordinary Warning on D.C.’s Think Tank Warmongers Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg
WAR is a racket. It always has been.
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
Former Congressman Dennis Kucinich has just penned an extremely powerful warning about the warmongers in Washington D.C. Who funds them, what their motives are, and why it is imperative for the American people to stop them.
Read it and share it with everyone you know.
Washington, DC, may be the only place in the world where people openly flaunt their pseudo-intellectuality by banding together, declaring themselves “think tanks,” and raising money from external interests, including foreign governments, to compile reports that advance policies inimical to the real-life concerns of the American people.
As a former member of the House of Representatives, I remember 16 years of congressional hearings where pedigreed experts came to advocate wars in testimony based on circular, rococo thinking devoid of depth, reality, and truth. I remember other hearings where the Pentagon was unable to reconcile over $1 trillion in accounts, lost track of $12 billion in cash sent to Iraq, and rigged a missile-defense test so that an interceptor could easily home in on a target. War is first and foremost a profitable racket.
How else to explain that in the past 15 years this city’s so called bipartisan foreign policy elite has promoted wars in Iraq and Libya, and interventions in Syria and Yemen, which have opened Pandora’s box to a trusting world, to the tune of trillions of dollars, a windfall for military contractors. DC’s think “tanks” should rightly be included in the taxonomy of armored war vehicles and not as gathering places for refugees from academia.
According to the front page of this past Friday’s Washington Post, the bipartisan foreign-policy elite recommends the next president show less restraint than President Obama. Acting at the urging of “liberal” hawks brandishing humanitarian intervention, read war, the Obama administration attacked Libya along with allied powers working through NATO.
The think tankers fell in line with the Iraq invasion. Not being in the tank, I did my own analysis of the call for war in October of 2002, based on readily accessible information, and easily concluded that there was no justification for war. I distributed it widely in Congress and led 125 Democrats in voting against the Iraq war resolution. There was no money to be made from a conclusion that war was uncalled for, so, against millions protesting in the United States and worldwide, our government launched into an abyss, with a lot of armchair generals waving combat pennants. The marching band and chowder society of DC think tanks learned nothing from the Iraq and Libya experience.
The only winners were arms dealers, oil companies, and jihadists. Immediately after the fall of Libya, the black flag of Al Qaeda was raised over a municipal building in Benghazi, Gadhafi’s murder was soon to follow, with Secretary Clinton quipping with a laugh, “We came, we saw, he died.” President Obama apparently learned from this misadventure, but not the Washington policy establishment, which is spoiling for more war.
The self-identified liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) is now calling for Syria to be bombed, and estimates America’s current military adventures will be tidied up by 2025, a tardy twist on “mission accomplished.” CAP, according to a report in The Nation, has received funding from war contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who make the bombers that CAP wants to rain hellfire on Syria.
The Brookings Institute has taken tens of millions from foreign governments , notably Qatar, a key player in the military campaign to oust Assad. Retired four-star Marine general John Allen is now a Brookings senior fellow . Charles Lister is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute , which has received funding from Saudi Arabia , the major financial force providing billions in arms to upend Assad and install a Sunni caliphate stretching across Iraq and Syria. Foreign-government money is driving our foreign policy.
As the drumbeat for an expanded war gets louder, Allen and Lister jointly signed an op-ed in the Sunday Washington Post, calling for an attack on Syria. The Brookings Institute, in a report to Congress , admitted it received $250,000 from the US Central Command, Centcom, where General Allen shared leadership duties with General David Petraeus. Pentagon money to think tanks that endorse war? This is academic integrity, DC-style.
And why is Central Command, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of transportation, and the US Department of Health and Human Services giving money to Brookings?
Former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who famously told Colin Powell , “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it,” predictably says of this current moment , “We do think there needs to be more American action.” A former Bush administration top adviser is also calling for the United States to launch a cruise missile attack on Syria.
The American people are fed up with war, but a concerted effort is being made through fearmongering, propaganda, and lies to prepare our country for a dangerous confrontation, with Russia in Syria.
The demonization of Russia is a calculated plan to resurrect a raison d’être for stone-cold warriors trying to escape from the dustbin of history by evoking the specter of Russian world domination.
It’s infectious. Earlier this year the BBC broadcast a fictional show that contemplated WWIII, beginning with a Russian invasion of Latvia (where 26 percent of the population is ethnic Russian and 34 percent of Latvians speak Russian at home).
The imaginary WWIII scenario conjures Russia’s targeting London for a nuclear strike. No wonder that by the summer of 2016 a poll showed two-thirds of UK citizens approved the new British PM’s launching a nuclear strike in retaliation. So much for learning the lessons detailed in the Chilcot report.
As this year’s presidential election comes to a conclusion, the Washington ideologues are regurgitating the same bipartisan consensus that has kept America at war since 9/11 and made the world a decidedly more dangerous place.
The DC think tanks provide cover for the political establishment, a political safety net, with a fictive analytical framework providing a moral rationale for intervention, capitol casuistry. I’m fed up with the DC policy elite who cash in on war while presenting themselves as experts, at the cost of other people’s lives, our national fortune, and the sacred honor of our country.
Any report advocating war that comes from any alleged think tank ought to be accompanied by a list of the think tank’s sponsors and donors and a statement of the lobbying connections of the report’s authors.
It is our patriotic duty to expose why the DC foreign-policy establishment and its sponsors have not learned from their failures and instead are repeating them, with the acquiescence of the political class and sleepwalkers with press passes.
It is also time for a new peace movement in America, one that includes progressives and libertarians alike, both in and out of Congress, to organize on campuses, in cities, and towns across America, to serve as an effective counterbalance to the Demuplican war party, its think tanks, and its media cheerleaders. The work begins now, not after the Inauguration. We must not accept war as inevitable, and those leaders who would lead us in that direction, whether in Congress or the White House, must face visible opposition.
Thank you Mr. Kucinich, I couldn’t agree more. | 1 |
Email
Over the course of the last six decades, only one Supreme Court appointee of a president representing the party of the American Left has veered ever so slightly from the progressive party line on any case of significance. That individual, Byron "Whizzer" White, was named to the Court by John F. Kennedy back in 1962. Among those few cases where White departed from his voting pattern, there is not a single instance where his deviation involved a deciding vote.
On the other hand, the list of "Republican" Supreme Court appointees over the same period, constituting a majority on the Court, consisted of far more individuals who "surprise" us by aligning themselves with the Left wing on crucial cases. The list of such chronic crossovers on key cases are Earl Warren, Potter Stewart, John Harlan, John Brennan, Lewis Powell, Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun, Sandra Day O'Connor, John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, and John Roberts.
By contrast, very few justices tended to adhere to the Constitution, or "conservative” line: William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito. Even within this latter group of four, there have been far more frequent "defections" than among any of the eleven Democrat-appointed Justices that served during the same period. In fact, each and every conservative has tended to stray to the Left with more frequency than the one Democrat "maverick", White, who did not stray from progressive ideology when his was a deciding vote.
For example, Republican-appointed O'Connor and Kennedy seemed to intentionally take turns giving the Left a deciding vote, with one of the duo often authoring a scathing "dissent". Each of the two allowed their fellow conservative justice to maintain a “centrist” image, while at the same time gifting the liberal branch with wins in virtually all significant cases.
Below is an incomplete, abbreviated list of “decrees” rendered by the High Court, some with the decisive assistance of these pseudo-conservatives. These unconstitutional opinions relied on contrived “rights” and tortured reasoning which defied common sense: Roe v. Wade, which created a so-called “right” to abort babies while ignoring the infant’s natural right to life Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, striking two provisions of a Texas law put in place for the safety of women and babies and to prevent the fostering of horrific clinics like that of convicted triple murderer Kermit Gosnell Various decisions removing restrictions on pornography and calling it “free speech” The Kelo eminent domain case, stealing private property for unconstitutional purposes The strike-down of Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) The banning of all state and local sodomy laws The legalization of American flag burning Overturning the will of the people and their state referendums, as in California's Proposition 8 Welfare for illegal aliens The wild expansion of federal authority under the pretext that virtually all commerce is "interstate"
The conventional explanations for these discrepancies are in outcomes. Liberal leaning presidents choose nominees based on progressive ideology, whereas conservative presidents give more weight to judicial competence. The record shows that Democratic Senators have let progressive politics be their guide in the confirmation process, thereby tending to be obstructionist when a given candidate appears to emphasize the original intent of the Framers. However, Republicans tend to simply defer to the will of the given Democrat presidents and ignore the conservative principles they fervently claimed when they were running for office. As a result, both parties are actually working in tandem toward the same progressive agenda. This explains why politicians will not fulfill their responsibility to rein in the High Court when it clearly violates the Constitution or encroaches on state and local areas of responsibility.
In ex-FBI agent Dan Smoot's 1962 investigative report, “The Invisible Government” , Smoot convincingly details how the same individuals have traditionally chosen most presidential nominees for both parties and how the "Democratic Socialist" agenda of the hard Left guides their choices. It is this liberal ideology that has facilitated the appointment of out-of-control activist judges.
Of the two 2016 major party presidential candidates on the ballot November 8 th , one was chosen using the illegitimate process detailed in “The Invisible Government”. More than half of Americans believe the process was “rigged”, just as the ex-FBI agent described in his report.
However, the opposing nominee did not appear to have been the first choice of the Republican Party’s ostensibly conservative establishment. By a wide margin, the voters selected Trump as their candidate in the Republican primaries (formerly a non-political outsider) much to the outward frustration of the establishment . It seemed that Trump was a departure from the counterfeit-conservative politicians with which Republican voters had become accustomed to being saddled, at least in the recent past .
Trump later announced a slate of potential High Court nominees, whom he stated he’d selected specifically to break the mold of the stealth progressives typically appointed by Republican presidents. He vowed that his list of Supreme Court candidates (vetted and approved by the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society) would base their decisions on the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution.
It is clear that an activist, nefarious Supreme Court has facilitated America's drift to the Left and away from both freedom and moral decency. It has moved far away from the objectives of the Framers who made clear their intentions for the High Court were to only call the balls and strikes, not usurp Congress, the States, and the People by legislating from the bench.
According to the Federalist Papers , the unelected federal judiciary is to constitute, by far, the weakest and most restricted of the three branches. The Framers never intended federal courts to have authority to strike any and everything produced by the States, Congress, or the Executive branch as "unconstitutional" with no checks and balances or reciprocal powers at their disposal. Nullification was Thomas Jefferson’s default “rightful remedy” for overreach. Read more on nullification at the Tenth Amendment Center.com .
Jefferson long ago expressed fears that the Supreme Court monster might consume its creator, the States, when in 1820 he wrote, “ The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots…When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity. The exemption of the judges from that is quite dangerous enough. I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves…” Jefferson went on to write in a separate letter that same year, “The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working underground to undermine our Constitution from a co-ordinate of a general and special government to a general supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet… I will say, that against this every man should raise his voice, and more, should uplift his arm.”
Since that time, our High Courts have become a refuge for radical progressives who routinely practice judicial overreach. They violate the Constitution by erroneously "passing" horrendous and insupportable "legislation" from the bench, while usurping the authority of Congress and the People.
With an America teetering precariously on the brink in a descent into authoritarianism, erosion of religious liberty, cultural decadence, the unregulated murder and mutilation of the unborn, violation of borders, terrorism, economic collapse, civil unrest verging on civil war, disrespect and violence against law enforcement, breached national security, and military vulnerability, at the very least it behooves Americans to right the ship of the Supreme Court.
One of the two major party presidential candidates will appoint a new Supreme Court justice immediately, and up to five more justices during their term, each of whom could serve as many as thirty or more years. It is crucial that We the People consider where each candidate stands on these appointments before we cast our vote.
When Jefferson argued in 1823 against the erroneous Marbury v Madison Supreme Court opinion in a letter to Judge William Johnson, he wrote “True, there must be an ultimate arbiter somewhere; but the ultimate arbiter is the people.”
*Article by Charles Lewis Don't forget to Like Freedom Outpost on Facebook , Google Plus , & Twitter . You can also get Freedom Outpost delivered to your Amazon Kindle device here . | 1 |
DePaul University reportedly banned “Gay Lives Matter” posters which were designed to advertise a lecture from a gay journalist on radical Islam which took place on campus Wednesday night. [Here’s the call for protests of my talk tonight at @DePaulU ”Dictatorships and Radical Islam: Enemies of LGBTQ Rights.” Notice missing word? pic. twitter. — Jamie Kirchick (@jkirchick) May 10, 2017, According to The College Fix, students at DePaul University planning to advertise for a lecture event featuring journalist Jamie Kirchick were reportedly rejected by campus administrators, who said that the posters were an effort to “ ” the approach of the Black Lives Matter movement and “pits two marginalized groups against each other. ” On Wednesday evening, Kirchick, who is gay, spoke about the radical elements of Islam that threaten members of the LGBTQ community in a lecture titled, “Dictatorships and Radical Islam: The Enemies of Gay Rights. ” “This is a disappointing decision by the university to prohibit our poster,” said Matt Lamb, a leader of the Turning Point USA group that helped bring Kirchick to campus. “The event by our DePaul chapter is calling attention to the harms that big government, authoritarian regimes pose to LGBT citizen’s most basic human rights. ” DePaul’s Turning Point USA President Jason Plotzke expressed his confusion over the university’s decision to reject their poster, arguing that their design had no intention of undermining the Black Lives Matter movement. “We do not see how the branding of Black Lives Matter is exclusive from all other lives and we cannot make a similar statement in a different movement,” Plotzke said. “Sure, it is related and based off the BLM slogan, but with no intent to undermine the movement. We are not even using the poster to push an entire movement, but rather a specific event. We, as students in an academic setting, should be allowed to market our events as we see fit. ” Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart. com | 0 |
Religious minorities in the United States are far more likely to have attended college or a vocational school than members of the Christian majority, according to a review of census and survey data from 151 countries released on Tuesday that found wide gaps in education among followers of the world’s major religions. The review was based on data from 2010 and was conducted by the Pew Research Center, which also found an education gap between men and women within religious groups. The researchers said the educational differences among the faiths were rooted in immigration policies that favor the educated, as well as in political, economic and historical factors. There were 267 million Christians in the United States when the data was collected, but only 36 percent of them had a postsecondary education, including college or a vocational school, the researchers said. That made them the religious group in the country. Jews in the United States were more than twice as likely as Christians to have a postsecondary degree, and Hindus were almost three times as likely, Pew said. Buddhists, Muslims and those who said they were religiously unaffiliated were also more likely to have a college degree than those who identified themselves as Christians. Conrad Hackett, the lead researcher, said that Christians in the United States were among the Christians on the planet but that only 20 percent of Christians worldwide had a postsecondary degree. Those in North America had 12. 7 years of schooling on average, higher than the average of 9. 3 years among Christians globally. “There are other countries where Christians are more likely to have a postsecondary degree, but the United States stacks up quite well in that regard,” Mr. Hackett said. “It’s just that these minority populations are really quite exceptional. ” That is largely a byproduct of immigration policies that favor highly educated and highly skilled applicants who have the financial means to set up life in a new country, he said. percent of Hindus in the United States and 64 percent of Muslims were born overseas, compared with 14 percent of Christians, according to the report. The opposite was true in most European countries, however, where Muslim communities have grown in recent years largely as a result of the arrival of refugees or migrants. The largest gap was in Germany, where Muslims had, on average, 4. 2 years less education than . In some smaller European countries — including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal and Slovakia — Muslims were more highly educated than partly as a result of immigration systems that favored highly skilled applicants, the report said. The study also found a connection between education levels and the number of people who described themselves as having no religious faith, Mr. Hackett said. In the United States, the religious tended to be less educated than the nonreligious, he said. “The higher the level of education in a country, the larger the share of people with no religion tends to be,” he said. “Atheists and agnostics, or people with no religion in particular, have higher education levels than the religiously affiliated do in the U. S. ” Worldwide, Jews were the most highly educated major religious group, with an average of 13. 4 years of schooling, while Hindus and Muslims were the least educated, with an average of 5. 6 years each, according to the report. The report said that Buddhists attended school for an average of 7. 9 years, Christians for an average of 9. 3 years, and the religiously unaffiliated for an average of 8. 8 years. The gender gap was widest among Hindus, with women receiving 2. 7 years less education on average than men, and Muslims, whose women received 1. 5 years less education. Buddhist women received 1. 1 years less education than men, Christian women received 0. 4 years less, and unaffiliated women received 0. 8 years less. There was no educational gender gap among Jews, the researchers said. Geography is a major factor in determining the level of educational attainment for all religious groups and helps explain the wide gap between Hindus and Jews, Pew said. Most Jews live in two wealthy countries with generally high education levels: the United States and Israel. The vast majority of Hindus — 98 percent — live in three developing countries with weak education systems: India, Nepal and Bangladesh. Hindus living outside those three countries enjoy high rates of educational attainment 87 percent of Hindus living in North America have college degrees. Geography also explains differences in educational attainment within religious groups. For example, Muslims in the wealthy countries of Europe and North America have more years of schooling than Muslims in the Middle East, Asia or Africa, the report said. The same holds true for Christians, the world’s most widely dispersed faith, with 2. 2 billion adherents spread across every inhabited continent. Christians in Europe and North America had higher education levels than those in poorer countries, but the group also had high education levels as a whole. The study found that 67 percent of them had some secondary or postsecondary education in 2010, and 91 percent had received a formal education at some level. The study includes data from 151 countries, which Pew said represented 95 percent of the 3. 6 billion people in the world who were over the age of 25 in 2010. It did not measure the quality of people’s education, focusing instead on the number of years they were enrolled in school. | 1 |
Tweet (Image via intoday.in)
Just as the Indian economy is facing the evil of black money , Facebook and Twitter have seen the menace of fake and anonymous accounts growing in the past few years. As per the latest data, Facebook has approximately 71 million active Indian users out of which 15 million are anonymous/fake while Twitter has 22 million active Indian users out of which 7 million are anonymous/fake, posing a big threat to the idea of troll-less (white) social media.
Announcing this historic move, the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter issued a joint statement: “All anonymous / fake accounts with more than 500 friends / 1000 followers will be suspended at 12 midnight of 9th November. These friends/ followers along with content can be transferred to the original account till 31st December 2016.”
Here are some of the highlights of the historic speech: 1. No content can be posted / tweeted / shared / re-tweeted from the anonymous/fake account after 12 am of 9th Nov. 2. The content of the anonymous account can be transferred by submitting an original DP/ original name. The last date for the same is 31st Dec. 3. In case of an emergency post (like trolling a politician / cricketer / film celebrity), user can login using his original login details and post for the next 72 hours. 4. All users with less than 100 followers will continue to exist and be spared from suspension. 5. A daily withdrawal cap of 2000 tweets/day has been put which will be later increased to 4000 tweets/day
“Your content and followers will remain yours. No need to panic. You have 50 days to submit the proof,” assured Zuckerberg.
The decision elicited mixed reviews: some predicted that social media will see a downfall in the coming few days while others welcomed the move considering its effects in the long run. | 0 |
On the morning of May 18, 2014, Violeta Lagunes was perplexed by a series of strange messages that appeared in her Gmail inbox. It was Election Day to choose the leadership of Mexico’s Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN, and Lagunes, a former federal congresswoman, was holding a strategy meeting in her office in Puebla city. The emails seemed harmless, at least at first. One appeared to come from the account of a trusted colleague. It asked her to download and review a document. Lagunes clicked on the link, but it seemed to be broken, so she wrote back to her colleague and asked him to send it again. Elsewhere in her inbox was an email from Google warning her that someone had tried to log in to her account. Meanwhile, she began to receive phone calls from PAN allies, who claimed that they had received emails from Lagunes’s account that she did not remember sending. Now Lagunes was worried. Around 1 o’clock, she called the colleague who appeared to have emailed her. She reached him at a restaurant, where he was finishing lunch with other campaign allies. “I did not send you an email,” he insisted. A consultant with the campaign — who asked to remain anonymous in order to preserve his relationships with other candidates — overheard the conversation. He knew of other campaign workers who had been receiving similar messages: emails with vague subject lines, asking the recipient to review a document or click a link. The campaign, he realized, had been hacked. In the vote for party leader, Lagunes and her allies in Puebla — a drive southeast from Mexico City — were supporting the challenger, a senator who promised to return the party to its conservative roots. But the incumbent was backed by Puebla’s powerful governor, Rafael Moreno Valle. One of Mexico’s rising political stars, Moreno Valle is close to Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto, and has forged an alliance between PAN and Nieto’s centrist Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, long the dominant force in Mexican politics. Since winning the governorship in 2010, Moreno Valle’s opponents say, his ambitions have grown, and he has resorted to increasingly harsh measures to keep Puebla state — including members of his own party — under control. “In the beginning, the governor was and respectful,” Rafael Micalco, a former leader of PAN in Puebla state, told me. “When he became governor, he transformed. Now he controls the party through threats. ” This race to retain control of the party leadership in 2014 was a crucial test for the governor, who was rumored to be considering a run for Mexico’s presidency in 2018. (This past September, Moreno Valle publicly announced his intent to run.) Clashes between the two camps were especially intense in Puebla, where backers of the challenger, Ernesto Cordero, claimed that the governor was using public money to support the incumbent, Gustavo Madero, though the governor’s office has denied these charges. Shortly before the election, Madero’s campaign manager said that Cordero’s side was trying to undermine the legitimacy of the process. “Their strategy is clear from the outset,” he said in an interview with a Mexican magazine. “’u2009‘If I win, good. If not, I was cheated. ’’u2009” After Lagunes’s call on Election Day, her colleagues rushed from the restaurant back to their local headquarters, a hotel conference room that they had nicknamed “the bunker. ” All morning, they had been trying to reach their field network, a group of 40 Cordero canvassers who were working to get out the vote in Puebla state. But the field network seemed to have gone dark. Few of the canvassers were even answering their phones. Hackers, the team concluded, must have found the list of the canvassers’ names and phone numbers — widely circulated by email within the campaign — and begun to intimidate them. “The day before,” the consultant told me, the field network was “motivated and eager to do this work. After the hack, it was very hard to reach them. The few who did answer said that they had received phone calls saying that their lives were at stake. They were worried that if they went out, they or their families would get hurt. ” According to another worker on Cordero’s campaign, who also requested anonymity, citing fear of reprisal, the message to the canvassers was simple and direct: “We know who you are. If you don’t want any trouble, shut down your cellphone and stop your activity. ” The worker added: “It’s an authoritarian regime. ” Madero won the election, with 57 percent of the 162, 792 votes cast over all. In Puebla, his margin was substantially larger, roughly 74 percent. Cordero’s team decided not to contest the result. They had suspicions about how they were hacked. But it would be another year before any evidence emerged. Their political enemies, leaked documents seemed to show, had built a spying operation using software made by an Italian firm called Hacking Team — just one of many private companies that, largely below public notice, have sprung up to aid governments in surveilling the private lives of individual citizens. The industry claims that its products comply with local laws and are used to fight crime and terror. But in many countries around the world, these tools have proved to be equally adept at political espionage. On average, an American office worker sends and receives roughly 120 emails per day, a number that grows with each passing year. The ubiquity and utility of email has turned it into a record of our lives, rich with mundane and potentially embarrassing details, stored in a perpetual archive, accessible from anywhere on earth and protected, in some cases, by nothing more than a single password. In the case of Violeta Lagunes, her email login represented a point of vulnerability, a seam where the digital walls protecting her campaign were at the mercy of her human judgment — specifically, whether she could determine if a message from an apparently reputable source was real or fake. Nearly two years later, John Podesta, chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, was faced with a similar judgment call. An email warned him that someone in Ukraine had tried to access his Gmail account and asked him to click on a button and reset his password. His senior adviser forwarded the email to one of the campaign’s technology experts. “This is a legitimate email,” he replied, in what the expert later would clarify was a simple typing error on his part he meant to say it was not legitimate. “The gmail one is REAL,” the senior adviser wrote to Podesta and another aide. And so, like Lagunes, Podesta fell into a trap. The button appeared to lead to an official Google page, but it was in fact a meticulously personalized fake, with a domain address linked to a remote cluster of atolls in the South Pacific. The details were designed to trick Podesta into entering his password. This technique is known as “spear phishing. ” It is an especially potent weapon against companies and political organizations because it needs to succeed only one time, against one target. After that, attackers can use the trusted identity of the first compromised account to more easily lure colleagues into opening infected attachments or clicking on malicious links. Not only will a working email password yield years of intraoffice chatter, invoices, bills and confidential memos it can often be leveraged into control of other personal accounts — Twitter, Facebook, Amazon — and even access to company servers and internet domains. The Podesta and Lagunes episodes are far from the only cases in which hackers have used information from stolen emails as a weapon against an entire institution. The 2009 “Climategate” incident, which exposed troves of emails from prominent climate researchers, began when hackers remotely broke into servers at a British university with the help of illicitly obtained passwords. The 2014 hack of internal Sony files, which American officials attributed to the North Korean government, began with a series of emails that attackers then used to dig deeper into Sony’s servers. Each hack yielded the most private thoughts and deeds from the members of each respective organization: their blunt insults, their quashed dissents, their plans, their smarmy flattery, all chronicled in time down to the hundredth of the second when the author clicked “send. ” In an earlier era, the hackers might have had to engage in riskier behavior, like bribery or burglary. Now, in many cases, all they had to do was send along a link. The White House, C. I. A. and F. B. I. have all claimed that, based on classified evidence, they can trace the hacks of Podesta’s email account (and other hacks of people close to the Clinton campaign) back to the Russian government. But with the rise of private firms like Hacking Team, penetrating the email accounts of political opponents does not require the kind of money and expertise available to major powers. A website called Insider Surveillance lists more than a dozen companies selling ethical malware, including Hacking Team and the German firms FinFisher and Trovicor. Compared with conventional arms, surveillance software is subject to few trade controls a recent attempt by the United States to regulate it under a pact called the Wassenaar Arrangement failed. “The technology is morally neutral,” says Joel Brenner, a former inspector general of the National Security Agency. “The same program that you use to monitor your babysitter might be used by Bashar Assad or Abdel Fattah to keep track of whomever they don’t like. ” Hacking Team has fewer than 50 employees, but it has customers all over the world. According to internal documents, its espionage tool, which is called the Remote Control System, or R. C. S. can be licensed for as little as $200, 000 a year — well within the budget of a provincial strongman. After it has been surreptitiously installed on a target’s computer or phone, the Remote Control System can invisibly eavesdrop on everything: text messages, emails, phone and Skype calls, location data and so on. Whereas the N. S. A. ’s programs grab data in transit from switching rooms and undersea cables, the R. C. S. acquires it at the source, right off a target’s device, before it can be encrypted. It carries out an invisible, digitized equivalent of a . The United States government is almost certainly the world’s most formidable repository of hacking talent, but its most powerful cyberweapons are generally reserved for intelligence agencies and the military. This might explain why, according to company documents, at least two federal agencies have been Hacking Team clients: the F. B. I. beginning in 2011, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, beginning in 2012. The F. B. I. contract paid Hacking Team more than $700, 000 the D. E. A. appears to have used the software to go after targets in Colombia. Documents show that the company has also sold its software to some of the world’s most repressive governments. Some, like those of Honduras, Ethiopia, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are Western allies. Other countries, like Uzbekistan and Turkey, have a more troubled relationship. A few are openly hostile to the West. Between 2012 and 2014, Hacking Team was paid nearly one million euros by the government of Sudan, a United state sponsor of terrorism. Even more notable, in light of recent events, is the relationship that Hacking Team carried on with the F. S. B. one of Russia’s main intelligence agencies. As with Puebla, Hacking Team used a middleman, a research agency called Kvant, to handle its sales to Russia. Between 2012 and 2014, the agency paid Hacking Team 451, 000 euros to license the Remote Control System. Hacking Team claims that it draws the line at customers who commit “gross abuses” and that it sells exclusively to governments operating within the laws of their own countries. In at least one case, David Vincenzetti, Hacking Team’s founder and chief executive, told a salesman to hold off on a potential Mexican client. “We sell to official, governmental LEAs” — agencies — “and security agencies ONLY,” Vincenzetti wrote in an email. But at other times, a more casual attitude prevailed inside the company. “If one sells sandwiches to Sudan, he is not subject, as far as my knowledge goes, to the law,” one Hacking Team lawyer wrote in an internal email. “Hacking Team should be treated like a sandwich vendor. ” When asked about its arrangements in various countries, the company responded that it “does not comment on confidential business dealings. ” Its American spokesman, Eric Rabe, did tell me that neither Russia nor Sudan is a current Hacking Team customer. (The relationships, Rabe wrote, ended in 2014, Russia because “the Putin government evolved from one considered friendly to the West to a more hostile regime” and Sudan “because of concerns about the country’s ability to use the system in accordance with the H. T. contract. ”) Separately, the company confirmed that the state of Puebla was, in fact, a former client. Until recently, most of what was known about the world of private surveillance companies was a matter of hearsay and speculation. Industry players kept a low profile, operating discreetly from rented offices and meeting potential customers in person a few times a year at carefully screened trade shows. This is why it was so notable when, in July 2015, an unusual tweet appeared in Hacking Team’s Twitter feed. “Since we have nothing to hide,” it read, “we’re publishing all our emails, files and source code. ” Then came another tweet, with links to a downloadable file called Hacked Team. The file was huge, 420 gigabytes of material scraped from Hacking Team’s internal servers. Inside were 33 folders containing the company’s contracts, payroll documents, invoices, legal memos, records and a cache of email correspondence from the chief executive on down. Hacking Team had itself been hacked. WikiLeaks pounced on the breach and quickly uploaded the emails into a searchable database. Anyone with an internet connection could now read the chief executive joking about how his company was in the business of selling “the evilest technology on earth. ” You could browse Hacking Team’s source code, including one line using “bomb_blueprints. pdf” as a placeholder for files that might be found on a target’s device. On Reddit, an online peanut gallery formed around the online habits of one Hacking Team engineer and his own notably weak passwords — HTPassword! P4ssword, Passw0rd. But the most damaging exposures in the leak by far were Hacking Team’s client list and the names of some of the clients’ targets. In South Korea, newspapers focused on evidence suggesting that Hacking Team’s software had helped the nation’s intelligence service rig an election after the leak, one agent who had reportedly used the system there committed suicide. In Ecuador, a magazine found an email with seven phone numbers that the government appeared to have targeted with the R. C. S. Three belonged to lawmakers a fourth to the mayor of Quito all four were members of the opposition party. With the source code for the Remote Control System now public, the company and its clients had to stop using it temporarily. By the end of the year, though, Hacking Team had updated its product and was trying to rebuild its reputation. I was curious whether a company that profited from online breaches could recover from its own. Eric Rabe, the American spokesman, sounded eager to meet me for coffee in Philadelphia. A grandfather and former anchor, he exudes credibility. “If you disagree with someone on the internet,” he said, of the Hacked Team files, with a wave of his hand, “there’s no need to have a debate. Just go destroy them. ” A couple of months later, I went to Milan to visit Hacking Team’s headquarters, a stately gray apartment building with boxes of limp flowers adorning a few of its sooty sills. Waiting to demonstrate the company’s software were Rabe Philippe Vinci, a company vice president and Alessandro Scarafile, a young engineer. Scarafile had gathered a Dell desktop computer and three smartphones: iPhone, BlackBerry and Android. The screen from his own laptop, which represented the console of a client intelligence agency, was projected on the wall. Several icons represented the various streams of data that could potentially be acquired by gaining control of the target’s computer: images from cameras, sound from mikes, screenshots, detailed records of applications opened and bitcoins transferred, a continuous log of location with latitude and longitude, and logs of address books, calendars, phone calls, Skype calls and passwords, as well as websites visited. A key logger recorded every key that was pressed. It was a lot to keep track of. Two other views, called “line of events” and “line of actions,” assembled the information into chronological order. Scarafile, who was playing both the customer and the target, or “bad guy,” turned on the Dell. Judging by the background on the desktop, a gothic scene framed by castlelike silhouettes, our target seemed to be planning a terrorist attack from Transylvania. There are three methods, Scarafile explained, for getting the Remote Control System onto a target’s device. Customers can gain physical access to the device and then infect it with a USB stick or memory card. They can beam the R. C. S. in over a network. Or they can send the customer an email and get him to click on an infected attachment — usually a file from a program like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. Scarafile did not mention a fourth method, one described by Hacking Team’s critics and referred to in its internal emails: the installation of the R. C. S. through a more elaborate process called “network injection,” which is said to involve pinpointing the target’s exact location on the internet, observing the person as he orders up, say, a YouTube cat video, and then serving up a doctored version of the same page, one with the desired cat video playing in the foreground — YouTube logo and all — as the R. C. S. discreetly rolls in past the digital gates. Whatever the method of infection, the malicious code, known as an “agent,” then communicates with its masters anonymously, its dispatches routed through a series of dedicated servers scattered around the world. Even if the target gets suspicious and figures out that something is wrong, this chain of servers makes it nearly impossible for him to figure out exactly who is using Hacking Team’s product to spy on him. For the demo, Scarafile opted for the third method, which he referred to as “a bit of social engineering. ” Using the customer’s computer, he sent the target an email with a Word file attached. Then he returned to the target’s computer and on it, just as Lagunes had clicked on the link in her inbox. “From now on,” he said, “this system is currently infected, or monitored, by the Remote Control System. ” It would remain so even if the suspect turned off his machine or logged out. On the timeline, the target appeared as a stubbly lout in an undershirt, named “Jimmy Page . .. head of the terrorist cell. ” Using Jimmy Page’s Dell, Scarafile logged into Page’s Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. He opened up Skype, perused Page’s criminal colleagues (Don Corleone, Harry Potter, Keyser Soze) and left one of them a voice mail message from Page’s phone. Accessing a USB drive attached to the infected computer, Scarafile opened an encrypted file that turned out to contain an order to “kill David Vincenzetti. ” R. C. S. captured it all, including periodic snapshots of Scarafile, as Page, at work. “I don’t like the words ‘inject’ and ‘infect,’’u2009” Vinci, the vice president, said. “R. C. S. is deploying the agent into the device of the target because you want to monitor some of his activities. Exactly the way that law enforcement is listening to some of your phone calls, right?” Rabe had told me that Vincenzetti was “a fighter,” and his combative side was apparent from a collage of magazine clippings and printouts taped to the wall beside his desk — a sort of mood board, like those used in the advertising industry to gather inspiration before the unveiling of a new brand. Vincenzetti’s mood board, though, wasn’t about sneakers or cola. It was about the global struggle for power, which he seemed to envision as one big conflict, a battle between the good guys and the bad guys. On the good side was a photo of the bell that aspiring Navy SEALs can ring should they want to quit the program during Hell Week, and a quote from another entrepreneur that “business is war. ” On the bad side, Vincenzetti had taped up a satellite image showing one of the hottest zones of international tension, the artificial islands rising in the South China Sea, a line of terrestrial pawns advancing China’s sphere of influence. Beside it was a chart about Iran, depicting how the country could continue to advance its nuclear program despite the recent deal. “I think the Iran deal is just terrible,” Vincenzetti said, and then added, sarcastically, “Oh, it’s such a very peaceful expansion. Very peaceful. ” “That is not an official company position,” Rabe interjected. Vincenzetti, now 48, is a familiar type — a ferociously competitive, driven entrepreneur whose existence is organized around his work. He has a wife, who was born in Morocco, and no children. His small, eyes can make him seem sleepily blasé. On the morning we met at Hacking Team’s offices, he wore jeans, a cardigan and a striped shirt, unbuttoned to midchest. He seemed more comfortable on his feet than sitting down. As we talked in a conference room, he periodically leapt to his feet and stalked around the table, considering in turn the espresso machine, the view from the window, a case of bottled water. “If I wanted to break into this room, how would I do it?” he asked. “There is a door, and there are two windows. ” He pressed his hands against the glass panes. “The perimeter is the first thing you must secure,” he continued. Securing data was what he did earlier in his career. Now he had moved on. “If you cannot break into a bank, you cannot protect a bank. So when you are in security, really there is no difference between thinking offensively and defensively. ” In the Vincenzetti’s parents, a salesman and a schoolteacher, bought him a Commodore 64, one of the earliest personal computers. He soon created a clone, a Tron game and a adventure game. As a student at the University of Milan in the ’90s, he became fascinated by cryptography he corresponded with programmers around the world about new cryptographic theories and wrote code for email encryption. In his senior year, he was appointed to administer the university’s internal network, a post that was usually reserved for a graduate student. Vincenzetti remembers these early days as a time when “everything was free and no one was trying to harm you. We were wide open and accessible. All the best were called hackers, and I was a hacker. ” Vincenzetti left university early and founded three companies, all of them focused on defensive cybersecurity. After he founded Hacking Team in 2003, he tried to sell his services to Italian police agencies but found them skeptical that Mafiosi and other criminals would ever bother to encrypt their communications. In Italy, the police were also used to getting whatever they needed through wiretaps, arranged with varying degrees of formality through their contacts at telecommunications firms. But after the 2004 Madrid train bombings, which were coordinated via cellphones and the internet, police officers and intelligence agents not just in Italy but all across Europe became interested in contracting with vendors, part of an emerging arms race over encryption. The growth of Skype made it easy for users to encrypt their communications, and the authorities were eager to pay for countermeasures like the Remote Control System. Singapore, Hacking Team’s first client, signed on in 2008. The company’s Middle Eastern business took off in 2011, a boom that coincided with the beginning of the Arab Spring. By then, Hacking Team had entered a growth phase, its business driven in part by demand among governments for surveillance tools. According to two former employees, the company held talks with Col. Muammar ’s chief security officer, who wanted to build a countrywide scheme that could be embedded in every Libyan cellphone. (Rabe would not confirm or deny that this meeting occurred, and added: “The company often receives requests to provide services that it does not have available or would sell. ”) The United Nations, which prohibits the export of “electronic weaponry” to Sudan, has investigated Hacking Team’s activities there. Nineteen members of the Italian Parliament signed a petition raising the question of whether the Egyptian government might have used the R. C. S. to track Giulio Regeni, a Italian student who appears to have been under government surveillance and whose mutilated body turned up on the side of a road in Egypt last year. Hacking Team’s software has not been connected to the case, but the company has done business with the current Egyptian regime. As part of the controversy, the Italian government temporarily revoked Hacking Team’s global export license, so that for several months the company had to file a separate application for each of its customers outside the European Union. (When I brought up the Regeni case with Rabe, he called the dead student “this Italian national who got himself killed in Egypt. ” He cited Hacking Team’s official policy — the company neither knows nor desires to know the identities of the people its customers choose to target. “There is no evidence that Hacking Team’s software had anything to do with Regeni’s demise,” Rabe said.) All Hacking Team customers sign contracts agreeing to comply with local laws. The company says that it vets potential customers and studies reports from journalists and groups, looking for “objective evidence or credible concerns” that its products are being abused. But when it comes to Hacking Team’s own interactions with customers, leaked documents suggest that employees have sometimes turned a blind eye. In the case of the Puebla government and other Latin American customers, Hacking Team employees appeared to ignore warnings suggesting that the Remote Control System was being used to gather intelligence on the political opposition. On multiple occasions, customers emailed Hacking Team attachments with content, including polling data, party registration forms and invitations addressed to and signed by elected officials. Rather than ask what these files had to do with fighting crime and drug trafficking, Hacking Team members simply emailed them back, as requested, with an embedded “exploit,” turning the document into a surveillance tool to be used against whomever it was sent on to. Asked about these cases, Rabe replied that customers “are not supposed to be using it for political purposes, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that an Italian computer programmer,” i. e. a support technician, “would have seen these files and known what was going on. . .. I think that’s a stretch, that an Italian software guy could know that an individual is a dissident. ” Hacking Team’s most persistent critic is Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. Before the Hacked Team leak, Citizen Lab documented cases in which Hacking Team software turned up on the devices of activists in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, as well as an journalist in Alexandria, Va. Ronald Deibert, Citizen Lab’s director, told me that Hacking Team “is a company that appears to have no internal controls on abuse of its products. ” When I asked Vincenzetti about this, he said that Citizen Lab was motivated by money, noting that the group won a grant a week after publishing a report on Hacking Team’s sales to Ethiopia. “Their identity,” he said, “is: ‘I am the defender of free speech, I am the defender of liberty and democracy.’ O. K. So am I. So is every rational guy. ” If Citizen Lab really cared about good and evil, he said, it would be fighting China and Iran. Almost immediately after the Hacked Team documents went online, they were being pored over by R3D, a Mexico group. Luis Fernando García, R3D’s director, says that intimidation and online surveillance have increased under Peña Nieto’s presidency, and he took notice when Citizen Lab, in 2014, released a report that traced a chain of servers associated with Hacking Team that routed data through Hong Kong, London, Amsterdam and Atlanta before terminating somewhere inside Mexico. Exactly who was on the receiving end of the traffic and what they were doing with it was unknown at the time, but now R3D’s team recognized that this could be their chance to find out. Shortly thereafter, R3D published three invoices from the Hacked Team cache showing that one state government — that of Jalisco, on the Pacific Coast — had paid the company nearly half a million euros for the Remote Control System. Soon other documents were found in the leak to implicate several more states, including Puebla, though most of the states denied ever using the software. (Jalisco later admitted to purchasing the system, which it claimed was for its prosecutor’s office.) The story failed to get much traction in the Mexican press, except in Puebla, after R3D connected with Lado B, a small collective there. The site’s name translates to “B Side,” as in the back of a hit single — symbolizing its dedication to telling stories that would otherwise go untold. Lado B’s editor, Ernesto Aroche, was not surprised that Puebla’s government had been using the Remote Control System. In Moreno Valle’s six years as governor there, he has spent lavishly on new surveillance systems, including multiple “security arches,” structures that scrutinize traffic with video cameras and and whose cost had raised some questions in the local press. Beginning in 2013, Aroche began noticing solicitations on the website for hidden cameras and other spying equipment. When he filed a request about them, the government’s form response indicated that these orders had never been filled, but Aroche was skeptical, given the mounting evidence that Moreno Valle’s administration had begun using its security apparatus for political purposes. There were periodic of homes belonging to dissident politicians and journalists, with the burglars sometimes taking little besides their victims’ laptops. Politicians would answer calls from unknown numbers, only to hear their own taped conversations played back to them. Another journalist, Fernando Maldonado, received an unmarked envelope full of what were purportedly transcripts of 400 private phone calls made by Puebla politicians. As Aroche and R3D sifted through the Hacked Team file dump, they discovered that the files on Puebla had more detail than those dealing with Hacking Team’s other Mexican accounts. The Puebla client often wrote emails asking for help with infecting a particular document with a malicious virus. Some of these came from an account — soporteuiamx@gmail. com — that also appears in many of Hacking Team’s internal support tickets. One of those tickets documents a client’s request for help in infecting an attachment: an invitation to attend an event for a Mexican political organization, signed by Violeta Lagunes and addressed to another party colleague opposed to the governor. Aroche interviewed politicians and journalists who were on the receiving end of the infected emails contained in the Hacked Team trove. According to a 2015 article that Lado B published in conjunction with a politics website, the Puebla group sent Hacking Team at least 47 requests to infect specific files that it would then forward on to their targets. Almost all of those files had to do with political issues. Going through the Hacked Team materials, Aroche found the name of a Puebla government employee who seemed to be working within the spying operation. “Before, we had been talking about ghosts,” Aroche told me. “Now, we could prove it. We started putting names on the actors. ” More than a year later, there have been no political repercussions for the governor or his allies in Puebla. I met Aroche this fall at the Lado B offices, a small room facing a courtyard in a crumbling stone building from Puebla’s colonial days. The only suggestion of Lado B’s presence was a small sticker on the window. Inside, Aroche was thumbing through an envelope of documents that he had wrung out of the state government. Two redacted contracts signed by Puebla officials showed an arrangement between the state government and a company called Sym Servicios Integrales, which Aroche’s reporting had identified as an intermediary for Hacking Team. The details of what had been purchased were redacted. “These contracts demonstrate that the Puebla government had a commercial relationship with this company,” Aroche said. “I’m sorry if they’re a little bit stained — I dropped some coffee on them. ” (Sym Servicios Integrales says it “never sold H. T. technology to the state of Puebla. ”) In a brief written statement from Sagrario Conde Valerio, a spokeswoman, the government of Puebla denied allegations of spying and claimed that “no relationship exists nor has ever existed between the government of Puebla and the company ‘Hacking Team. ’’u2009” The government declined to respond further to a list of questions. But a former official from Moreno Valle’s administration claimed to me that more than $1 million was being diverted from the state budget each year to fund the unit. Documents from the Hacked Team archive indicate that Hacking Team received an order from the government of Puebla for 415, 000 euros in the spring of 2013, and that Hacking Team booked hotel rooms for three of its associates who traveled to Puebla in May of that year. Some of the R. C. S. training, I was told, took place in a green building on a residential street. When I visited the purported site this fall, lettering above the door said that the building was once a school. Now it had bars across the door and mirrored windows. Neighbors told me it had been abandoned for several months. “People would come and go,” one woman said. “They were very secretive. They would drop off equipment, take away equipment. Then one day, about a year ago, they came and took everything away and left. ” Another neighbor said that he often saw a car parked in front of the house and a man with a limp entering and leaving — a former Mexican intelligence agent, according to someone who was present during the Hacking Team training. Mexico is Hacking Team’s biggest export market, accounting for nearly six million euros in sales, according to leaked documents. Ostensibly, the Remote Control System is intended for fighting criminals and drug traffickers there. (“There have been reports that the software was used in the apprehension of Chapo Guzman,” Rabe told me, referring to the Mexican drug lord. “I can’t confirm it. ”) The files indicate that at least seven other Mexican state governments were Hacking Team clients, but because they did not use email to the same extent as Puebla, their activities are harder to track. Multiple former Hacking Team employees told me that abuses of the software were not limited to Puebla. One former employee described having the system set up inside a mayor’s office. Katitza Rodríguez, director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that Mexican law allows for interception of communication, like the wiretapping of phone lines, but it does not grant precise legal authority to use new, powerful invasive tools like those created by Hacking Team. And she argues that it is much more dangerous in Mexico than in other Western countries, where checks and balances are stronger. “This is much more intrusive than the interception of a phone call,” she said. “They are not only listening they are taking over your laptop. Mexico needs to have a full debate in Congress about what legal safeguards are needed for this kind of surveillance or if the government should be using it at all. ” The Hacked Team files indicate that in Hacking Team opened an American subsidiary and leased office space in Reston, Va. a drive from the C. I. A. ’s headquarters. The company drew up a “U. S. action plan,” calling for a significant North American expansion, with new hires and rounds of pitches to the Department of Justice, the United States military and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Hacking Team was also targeting another potentially lucrative market: American state and local governments. It pitched the R. C. S. to agencies in San Bernardino, Calif. Washington New York Fort Lauderdale and Orlando. In a risk assessment commissioned by the company, lawyers advised that such sales were probably legal, so long as the product was provided “at a distance” from actual investigations and used “in the normal course of government operations. ” American expansion by companies like Hacking Team may not face much resistance from the federal government, which is becoming more accepting of electronic surveillance as part of normal police work. Last year, the Justice Department successfully changed the rules of criminal procedure, making it easier for federal agents to hack into multiple computers with a single warrant. Senator Steve Daines of Montana, who tried to block the change, complained that it gives “unlimited power for unlimited hacking. ” In a 2014 address, now referred to in cybersecurity circles as his “Going Dark” speech, the F. B. I. ’s director, James Comey, argued that the encryption built into Apple products posed a threat to public safety — enabling not only terrorism but also drug trafficking, child abuse and . Instead of “a safe that can’t be cracked,” Comey wanted technology companies to lend him the combination. “The law hasn’t kept pace with technology, and this disconnect has created a significant problem,” Comey said. “We call it ‘going dark. ’’u2009” As the United States government has argued for weaker protections around personal communications, American businesses have been spreading more powerful surveillance tools around the world. Many foreign agencies already buy products from SS8 — a company backed by the storied firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers — as well as from the Harris Corporation, a $13 billion company based in Florida and traded on the New York Stock Exchange. At least 25 American police departments have used Harris’s Stingray device, which mimics cellphone towers and can intercept cellphone calls within 200 meters. All known sales of Stingrays to local law enforcement have been authorized by the F. B. I. which has since fought in court to keep those sales secret. In Baltimore alone, Stingrays have been used more than 4, 000 times, in routine drug investigations. Much less is known about another Harris product, the advanced Hailstorm, which is also sold to local police departments. Hailstorm is reportedly capable of implanting malware that can take control of a targeted phone, much like Hacking Team’s R. C. S. The Hacked Team documents that offer the most revealing view of the company’s ethos happen to be the most public ones. For years, as often as two or three times a day, Vincenzetti sent mass emails to hundreds of his business contacts. The recipients included numerous members of the United States military and intelligence community, as well as government employees from the city of Cincinnati and the Internal Revenue Service. In these messages, Vincenzetti often addresses this audience collectively as “gents. ” The news he cites is a reminder of how the geopolitical winds have been blowing in favor of Hacking Team and other allies of law and order. In Vincenzetti’s world, the system is always, as George Tenet famously said about . 11 intelligence, “blinking red”: the imploding Middle East a restive, Russia battalions of jihadis roaming around Europe with their encrypted thumb drives and expertise. Against this backdrop of danger, concerns about human rights are naïve at best. Vincenzetti’s emails vividly exploit this sense of danger and alarm. He writes about shadowy gangs of Iranian hackers using the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag to inject malware into French laptops. He celebrates the conviction of Ross Ulbricht, a. k. a. the Dread Pirate Roberts, creator of the Silk Road website. After the arrests of two Uzbek men in Brooklyn for telling informants that they wanted to join up with ISIS, Vincenzetti writes of “a very serious terrorist plot on American soil foiled. ” He went on to tap out this sales pitch: The following day, he gave a few more hints: The tone of Vincenzetti’s sales patter was strangely upbeat, especially considering his dire forecasts. It was almost as if he were in the business of selling microwave ovens or sandwiches, not tools through which the private lives of criminals (and whoever else) could be fully laid bare. Vincenzetti’s unstated equation — privacy is secrecy, and secrecy is terrorism — is less controversial than it might appear. A supportive echo can be heard in many public statements from American officials, which Vincenzetti often cut and pasted into his mass emails. The former attorney general Eric Holder called for “investigative and prosecutorial tools that allow us to be . ” When Comey warned that “encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place,” Vincenzetti forwarded it along approvingly, with the tagline: “We DO have an answer to many if not all of his concerns. ” And when, in May 2015, Comey warned of a “threat” that had “morphed” into “a chaotic spider web,” Vincenzetti sent word to his “gents” as well. One month later, an anonymous hack revealed Hacking Team’s own invisible spider web, and one year later, during the to Election Day, came the internal emails of the Democratic Party. By then it was clear that tools for digital burglary had spread well beyond the hands of regular police officers. Comey had argued for weaker safes Vincenzetti was selling longer crowbars. They could be used to chase Jimmy Page, arrest Chapo Guzman, fight crime, smear a political opponent or just keep tabs on someone, anyone. To be hidden is to be a terrorist — this was the heart of his pitch. Any digital redoubt that could resist being pried open was a public risk and a private opportunity. | 1 |
CENTER CONWAY, N. H. — The Saco River flows lazily here, from New Hampshire into Maine, ridged with sandy banks and lush forests, luring eager families in canoes and rowdy flotillas of young adults. But after a hot, dry summer, a canoe trip to Fryeburg, Me. from Center Conway, N. H. this month was interrupted, time and again, by the scrape of boat on sandy riverbed, and the grudging acceptance that the only way to get the canoe across certain stretches of shallow river would be to drag it. The low river is one of countless signs of dry weather that has settled over much of New England. Conditions are even worse south of the Saco, with the United States Drought Monitor observing “extreme drought” conditions in much of the eastern half of Massachusetts, southeastern New Hampshire and the southern part of Maine. Some private wells have dried up. Farmers face millions of dollars in lost crops, and federal agricultural officials have declared much of New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut a natural disaster area. Parts of rivers have withered into a series of ponds or wide stretches of stone, harming the ecosystems that depend on them. Bears and other wild animals are venturing into human habitats in search of food because there is little in their own. “We are not used to this in New England,” said Maggie Hassan, the Democratic governor of New Hampshire. Officials in her state and in Massachusetts have issued dire warnings, urging an end to outdoor watering. Many cities and towns have issued restrictions, although not all are mandatory. Some rain is forecast this week, but the dry summer has taken its toll. A trip through the affected area shows how the region is coping with a dry spell that climatologists say is not expected to fully abate before the end of the year. KINGSTON, N. H. — One day in August, Roxy Moore, 70, went to the faucet to make coffee, and the water trickled to nothing. Her well had gone dry for the first time in the 33 years she had lived here. Ms. Moore said she did not have the money to dig a new one. So she has lived without running water for more than a month, subsisting on the good will of friends and neighbors. She has perfected a series of small rituals to help her get by. “You get up. You boil water in the microwave to take your sink bath. You sometimes want to save that water to use it to flush it in the toilet,” said Ms. Moore, who keeps antibacterial hand wipes by the sink and gives her laundry to her nephew. “It is what it is,” she said. “You’ve got to learn to live this way until God gives us rain. ” Kingston, a town of about 6, 000 in this parched stretch of southeastern New Hampshire, has no public water supply. Residents who rely on private wells are strongly encouraged to conserve, but the town’s selectmen, in a state that places a premium on individual rights, have not instituted a mandatory ban. The town has a spigot outside the fire station for families who no longer have running water. No one is tracking how many people use it, but over an hour on Wednesday night, three people came. Harry Fairbrother, 53, an engineer, filled a tank that he hooks up to his home. Samuel Mauro, 33, a toy salesman, filled up a few water jugs. And Sherri Todd, 63, a cancer survivor with three jobs, filled up plastic buckets for the toilet, and big plastic bottles for drinking. “Tomorrow will be three weeks” without water, Ms. Todd said, running her hands through her hair. “I just came from my friend’s house to shower, it felt so good. ” GREENLAND, N. H. — Allen Smith is a dairy farmer, who names some of his cows after pasta shapes and has a propensity for saying, “Heck yeah!” But months of drought are weighing on the farm, already reeling from the low price of milk. Mr. Smith, 55, typically feeds roughly 160 cows with hay and corn from his fields. The corn has grown, but his hayfields — so dry “it sounds like you’re walking in potato chips,” he said — have produced a small fraction of what he needs to get through the winter, and he guesses he will need to spend $300 or $400 per day on feed. “The expense of that is just astronomical,” said Mr. Smith, who said he would consider selling some cows if he had to. Nineteen of New Hampshire’s 120 dairy farms have already gone out of business this year, mostly because of low milk prices, and the drought has made it harder for those that survive. “I know that there are several more farms that are kind of on the edge of the cliff right now,” the state’s agriculture commissioner, Lorraine Merrill, said. IPSWICH, Mass. — Joyce Kippin has two passions: water conservation and gardening. Ms. Kippin, 75, is a retired microbiologist who ran the water system in this old coastal town from 1988 to 2008. She is the president of the Ipswich Garden Club, and when the town banned outdoor watering this summer, Ms. Kippin had a problem. “I am in conflict as to whether I water my garden, or, if I’m a responsible citizen, conserve water,” Ms. Kippin said, but she decided she had to set an example. “I had to let my garden go,” Ms. Kippin said. Last summer, Ms. Kippin had blankets of Susans, billowing hydrangeas and an tumble of tall flowers along the edge of the lawn. This year, most of those flowers are crunchy dead heads. Her cherry tree is dying. There are no azaleas to speak of. “Most importantly was my rare, South African, rhododendron that I’ve had in the ground for 45 years,” Ms. Kippin said. It died. ON THE IPSWICH RIVER — This waterway, a haven for fishing and paddling, and a crucial artery for drinking water that flows through the drought hot spot in northeastern Massachusetts, seems distinctly unlike a river, in parts. There is no flow over the dam near downtown Ipswich, and much of the riverbed below is exposed, a ribbon of dry rocks and brittle plants mottled with standing pools. “The river’s now just a series of ponds and puddles,” said Wayne Castonguay, the executive director of the Ipswich River Watershed Association, which measured record low flows in the river all summer. “It’s been absolutely devastating,” he said. “Virtually all the larger fish in the river have died. ” He added that he had counted 1, 000 dead fish in a tributary this summer. Upriver, a popular canoeing area is now a pool of standing water — though outfitters say paddling is still possible on some stretches — with exposed, sandy riverbanks and empty shells of mussels that have long since died. “For people, there’s less water to use and the water is of poorer quality,” Mr. Castonguay said, adding that better conservation might have kept the river flowing. ACTON, Mass. — Take a drive through a lush Boston suburb like this one, and something looks different from other years. Some leaves are dropping earlier than usual, and those on some trees, like birch and beech, are turning to dull colors, not their usual brilliant hues. “It shouldn’t be that ” Bob Allen, an arborist, said. “It should be more of a vibrant . ” Mr. Allen is in charge of vegetation management at Eversource, the local power company, whose crews are looking for trees as they trim branches around power lines. He pulled over next to a sweet birch tree, and looked at its pale green leaves, ringed with dry brown. “These leaves are showing a scorching effect from the drought,” he said. “They haven’t really been able to be their full self this year, because of lack of water. ” Fall foliage is a boon to New England’s tourism economy, and while many trees are free of any hint of trouble with foliage brings economic anxiety. And trees are more likely to topple during storms, Mr. Allen said. SUDBURY, Mass. — At Siena Farms, on rich river valley soil west of Boston, many shelling peas and fava beans have not survived. Beets dried out while they were still the size of Tic Tacs. Two surface ponds dried up, and farm managers held daily discussions about what to water and what to let go. “This year was three months, basically all summer long with no rain, and it caught us off guard,” said Chris Kurth, the owner, during an interview at a farmer’s market in Boston. “All told, we’re looking at about a 50 percent crop loss. ” In August, farmers in the state reported $13. 6 million in lost crops since April that number has most likely grown. Mr. Kurth, like many farmers in New England, does not always have to irrigate. Over the summer in nearby Lincoln, Mass. volunteers at Mass Audubon’s Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary took to the fields with buckets to nourish some plants. Last week, Matt Celona, the crops manager, worried that the carrots would not size up. “It would be sort of shocking to go into winter without carrots,” said Mr. Celona, who managed to go most of the summer without irrigation thanks to intensive soil management techniques. Some crops, however, have done fairly well, and both farms’ vibrant stands belie the challenge: At the Drumlin Farm, spinach, watermelon and winter squash did well, while tomatoes did well at Siena Farms. Some fields at Siena Farms sit empty because there is no way to irrigate and there is uncertainty about the forecast. Mr. Kurth is planning to scale back his planting next year, and he has taken the unusual step of asking his regular customers to contribute more to help the farm if they can. “Plants have an amazing ability to survive in extreme conditions and not just give up and die,” Mr. Kurth said. “Hopefully, us farmers have the same strength in us. ” | 1 |
Media giant Time Inc. has announced it will lay off as many as 300 workers in an attempt to cut costs and restructure the company — a move that CEO Richard Battista has described as “difficult but necessary. ”[The decision comes amidst falling levels of circulation of some of the company’s key magazines such as Time, Fortune and Sports Illustrated. As part of the savings, the company will now focus on investing in growing digital markets such as video and paid subscriptions. “We are taking a holistic approach to for the whole company,” Battista told CNN. “In commencing that work, we are looking for ways to be more efficient as a company and ways to find more cost savings. ” “As I’ve mentioned many times, Time Inc. is a company in rapid transformation in an industry undergoing dynamic change,” Battista wrote in a memo to employees, adding that the company would always “try to minimize any employee headcount reductions. ” The company’s stock price has also fallen by approximately 30 percent in recent months amid uncertainty over whether the company would be sold. However, Time Inc. announced in April that it had decided not to sell itself after it failed to find a buyer who would meet its $1. 8 billion asking price. You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart. com | 0 |
The Fall of the Saudis, the Battle after ISIS ‹ › Ian Greenhalgh is a photographer and historian with a particular interest in military history and the real causes of conflicts. His studies in history and background in the media industry have given him a keen insight into the use of mass media as a creator of conflict in the modern world. His favored areas of study include state sponsored terrorism, media manufactured reality and the role of intelligence services in manipulation of populations and the perception of events. Iraqi Army Discovers US-Made Missiles in ISIS’s Military Base in Mosul By Ian Greenhalgh on November 2, 2016 Iraqi Army Discovers US-Made Missiles in ISIS’s Military Base in Mosul Iraqi Army Discovers US-Made Missiles in ISIS’s Military Base in Mosul
Iraqi army and popular forces have discovered a number of US-made missiles from a military position of the ISIS (ISIL, IS, Daesh) in the Southern part of Mosul, informed local sources disclosed after the first group of pro-government troops opened their way into Southern Mosul on Monday.
“Several US-made missiles were found in al-Shoura region to the South of Mosul,” a local source said on Monday.
The Iraqi army and popular forces had found US-made missiles in Anbar province several times before.
Provincial officials confirmed that the US-made weapons were sent by the US-led anti-ISIL coalition airplane for the ISIL terrorists in Anbar province.
Meantime, Iraqi security officials announced that the ISIL has sent US-made military equipment to Tal Afar region in the last two days to stand strong against Iraqi popular forces’ impending attack to capture the region.
“The ISIL terrorists have sent US-made TOW anti-tank missiles to Tal Afar and it is quite evident that they are preparing for a long-term war,” the Arabic-language media quoted an Iraqi security official as saying on Monday.
In late August 2015, a senior Iraqi intelligence official revealed that the US helicopters drop weapons and other aids for the ISIL terrorists in the Western province of al-Anbar.
“The fighters present at the forefront of fighting against the ISIL always see US helicopters flying over the ISIL-controlled areas and dropping weapons and urgent aids for them,” the official who called for anonymity told FNA. Yet, he said the helicopters could have also been sent from Turkey or Israel.
He added that in addition to dropping aids, the helicopters transfer the ISIL ringleaders and wounded members from the battleground to some hospitals in Syria or other countries which support the terrorist group.
The official cautioned that such assistance further prolongs the conflicts in Anbar, adding that when the Iraqi army and popular forces purge the terrorists from Anbar province, the US helicopters will transfer the ISIL ringleaders to other regions to prevent the Iraqi forces’ access to ISIL secrets.
Also in March 2015, a group of Iraqi popular forces known as Al-Hashad Al-Shabi shot down the US Army helicopter that was carrying weapons for the ISIL in the Western parts of Al-Baghdadi region in Al-Anbar province.
Meantime in February 2015, a senior lawmaker disclosed that Iraq’s army had shot down two British planes as they were carrying weapons for the ISIL terrorists in Al-Anbar province.
“The Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee has access to the photos of both planes that are British and have crashed while they were carrying weapons for the ISIL,” al-Zameli said. Related Posts: | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Republicans seized her microphone. And gave her a megaphone. Silenced on the Senate floor for condemning a peer, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, emerged on Wednesday in a coveted role: the avatar of liberal resistance in the age of President Trump. Late on Tuesday, Senate Republicans voted to halt the remarks of Ms. Warren, already a lodestar of the left, after she criticized a colleague, Senator Jeff Sessions, the nominee for attorney general, by reading a letter from Coretta Scott King. Instantly, the decision — led by Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, who invoked a rarely enforced rule prohibiting senators from impugning the motives and conduct of a peer — amplified Ms. Warren’s message and further inflamed the angry Senate debate over Mr. Sessions’ nomination. He was confirmed on Wednesday. For Ms. Warren’s supporters, it was the latest and most visceral example of a woman muzzled by men who seemed unwilling to listen. Critics saw something else: a senator who has rankled members of both parties with her nose for the spotlight lobbing a salvo in the next presidential race. “A lot of that’s about 2020 politics,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, grumbled on MSNBC. Mr. McConnell’s subsequent explanation for his maneuver seemed destined for a future Warren campaign ad: “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted. ” After an unsuccessful effort to draft her for the 2016 presidential race, Ms. Warren is considered a very early for 2020, should she run. Mr. McConnell’s coda has already been repurposed as a sort of rallying cry. Across social media, Ms. Warren’s allies and supporters posted with the hashtag #shepersisted, calling to mind some Democrats’ embrace of the term “nasty woman” after Mr. Trump deployed it to describe Hillary Clinton during a debate. Appearing with Mrs. Clinton in New Hampshire in October, Ms. Warren reminded Mr. Trump that “nasty women vote. ” After the vote to bar Ms. Warren from speaking further about Mr. Sessions, other senators, including Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Tom Udall of New Mexico, read Mrs. King’s letter without facing any objection, prompting some activists to raise charges of sexism. Ms. Warren has long displayed an instinct for capitalizing on highly visible fights. After she was barred from speaking on the Senate floor, she began reading the 1986 letter from Mrs. King on Facebook. By Wednesday evening, the video had attracted more than nine million views. In the letter, Mrs. King, the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. took aim at Mr. Sessions’s record on civil rights as a United States attorney in Alabama, saying he had used “the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens. ” She called on the Senate not to confirm Mr. Sessions to a federal judgeship, and his nomination to that post was ultimately rejected. On Wednesday morning, in a conference room in the Capitol — the vote prohibited Ms. Warren from speaking about the nomination only from the Senate floor — Ms. Warren addressed civil rights leaders, recounting her long night. “What hit me the hardest was, it is about silence,” she said. “It’s about trying to shut people up. It’s about saying, ‘No, no, no, just go ahead and vote. ’” She went on. “This is going to be hard,” she said. “We don’t have the tools. There’s going to be a lot that we will lose. But I guarantee, the one thing we will not lose, we will not lose our voices. ” As Democrats strain to navigate the early days of the Trump presidency, weighing the merits of the blanket opposition that many in their base seem to crave, the latest rancor appeared to raise the likelihood of further confrontation in the Senate chamber. Some groups seemed comfortable with that. “What the public needs to see from Democrats right now is more backbone and more standing on principle,” said Adam Green, a of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “Elizabeth Warren continues to be the model for good behavior. ” The timing is fortunate for Ms. Warren, whose fiery denunciations of corporate greed have long made her a Democratic celebrity. Her new book deal was announced this week. Its title: “This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America’s Middle Class. ” Shortly after Mr. McConnell’s objection on Tuesday, Ms. Warren called a favorite TV anchor, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, and spoke live on the air. On Wednesday, Republicans betrayed no regret for their move, accusing Ms. Warren of ignoring repeated warnings to avoid violating the Senate rule, known as Rule XIX. She had also read a letter from Edward M. Kennedy, who represented Massachusetts in the Senate, disparaging Mr. Sessions. “You don’t insult — whether it be from a letter, or from a message from God, or on golden tablets,” said Senator John McCain of Arizona. “That’s the rules of the Senate. They want to complain about it, complain about it. ” Democrats and their allies resumed their protest against Mr. Sessions on Wednesday with renewed swagger, despite their long odds of blocking his confirmation. “If Mr. McConnell or anybody else wants to deny me the right to debate Jeff Sessions’s qualifications, go for it,” Mr. Sanders said from the Senate floor hours before the vote. Since the election, Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren have been among the lawmakers jockeying to be leading messengers for Democratic politics under the Trump administration. There have been bumps. Last month, Ms. Warren faced rare criticism from liberals after voting in a Senate committee to approve Ben Carson as Mr. Trump’s secretary of housing and urban development, infuriating voters who had hoped for uniform opposition to Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Defending herself on Facebook at the time, Ms. Warren wrote that she appreciated the feedback. “Unlike the new administration,” she said, “I don’t believe in ignoring or silencing people who disagree with the choices I make or the votes I take. ” This week, it seemed, all had been forgiven. MoveOn. org, the liberal political group, said it had collected about $300, 000 in contributions for Ms. Warren since Tuesday night. And by midafternoon, a email from Ms. Warren had arrived in the inboxes of her supporters. “I’m still banned from speaking on the Senate floor — but there’s still time for you to make your voice heard,” the email read, with a link to a page for contributions. She signed off with a familiar message: “Keep fighting. ” | 1 |
How Voting Machines Are Programmed In Order To Steal Elections (11/1/2016) Dear friends and readers,
PCR's new book, THE NEOCONSERVATIVE THREAT TO WORLD ORDER, is now available: In Print and Digital Format by Clarity Press Quarterly Call to Donations
To remind, this is our quarterly request for donations. If you want the information and analysis that this site provides to continue, you must support the site. As the alternative is the presstitutes or Ministry of Propaganda, it is a good decision to support this site . Quarterly Call to Donations Dear friends, It is time for my quarterly request for donations. As we agreed, my columns and this site will continue as long as your support is forthcoming. If you wish to fully escape The Matrix and see reality as it really is, you are brave and I am honored to have you as readers and supporters. If reality is too much for you, then I should cease putting myself at risk. PCR http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/inbound/we87dn9 Thank you for your donations
Many thanks to those who donated. I appreciate the commitment that readers have to this website. I match your commitment with my own. PCR Latest Book PCR's new book, HOW AMERICA WAS LOST, is now available: In Print by Clarity Press and In Ebook Format by Atwell Publishing US Public Lacks Confidence in Elections
Eric Zuesse Notes That the Democratic Party, once the Party of the People, is now the Party of the Rich, and that the US Public Lacks Confidence in Elections
Poverty Rose in 96% of U.S. House Districts, During Obama’s Presidency
On November 3rd, Morning Consult’s Jon Reid bannered, “Poverty on the Rise in Nearly All House Districts” and he reported that, “A Brookings Institution study, released less than a week before the election, shows that the number of people living in poverty has increased in 96 percent of congressional districts between 2000 and 2010-2014.”
That finding fits along with others, such as that the economic ‘recovery’ after Barack Obama came into the White House in 2009, went virtually entirely to the very rich.
According to the top experts on wealth-inequality in the United States, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, American wealth-inequality soared faster during 2003-2013 than ever since the period 1923-1928, right before the Great Crash of 1929. Their study “Wealth Inequality in the United States Since 1913”, published in the May 2016 Quarterly Journal of Economics, reported that ever since the remilitarization of the U.S. from the 2003 invasion of Iraq onward (and continuing under Obama, with boosts to NATO, and invasions such as of Libya in 2011), the percentage of total wealth owned by the richest .1% of American families (those families whose net worth was $111 million or higher) rose from 15% of the total in 2003, to 22% of the total in 2013, and this means that the percentage going to the lower 99.9% declined from 85% down to 78% during that time.
America’s soaring inequality during the George W. Bush Presidency continued unaffected by the 2009 change of Presidential Administrations.
In fact: whereas Bush’s stock-market plunge in 2006-2008 hit the richest the hardest, Obama’s coming into office restored their lost wealth rapidly, while the wealth of the bottom 90% of the U.S. population flatlined throughout his Presidency. The Obama economic recovery was no recovery at all for the bottom 90% of Americans.
Not just wealth but personal income also soared for the super-rich under Obama. The “Share of income earned by top 0.1% wealth holders” soared throughout Obama’s Presidency, at least up through 2012, which is the latest figure shown there for that. So: at least the bottom 90% of U.S. families have experienced none of the Obama economic recovery; what ‘recovery’ from the ‘recession’ there is, went only to the very rich.
Findings such as those are consistent with, and might help to explain, the finding in the new Brookings study, that 96% of House districts have experienced increased poverty under Obama. The nation’s poor have gotten political rhetoric, but not much else, and the middle class also have received no net benefit, under Obama.
U.S. Near Bottom in Public ‘Confidence in Elections’ Only Mexico Scores Lower Among OECD Countries
Here are the figures, as emailed by Gallup on November 2nd, and soon to be published as part of the “Gallup World Poll 2016”:
Confidence in Elections Among OECD Countries
Finland 89% | 1 |
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian civil war, and the intense new ground battle in the divided city of Aleppo, is often seen as a contest between a chaotic array of rebel groups and the government of President Bashar . But the reality is that Mr. Assad’s side is increasingly just as fragmented as its opponents, a panoply of forces aligned partly along sectarian lines but with approaches and interests. There are Iraqi Shiite militiamen cheering for clerics who liken the enemy to foes from battles. There are Iranian Revolutionary Guards fighting on behalf of a Shiite theocracy. There are Afghan refugees hoping to gain citizenship in Iran, and Hezbollah militants whose leaders have long vowed to fight “wherever needed. ” The Syrians themselves are in a few elite units from an army steeped in a nominally socialist, Arab nationalist ideology, exhausted after five years of war, as well as militias that pay better salaries. And, yes, overhead there are the Russian pilots who have relentlessly bombed the eastern side of Aleppo — trained to see the battle as supporting a secular government against Islamist extremist terrorists. “The government’s fighting force today consists of a dizzying array of militias aligned with various factions, domestic and foreign sponsors, and local warlords,” said one analyst, Tobias Schneider, in recently summing up the situation. The battle for eastern Aleppo, where the United Nations says some 275, 000 people are besieged, has raised tensions between the United States and Russia to their highest levels in years, but the Cold War rivals do not wield clear control over their nominal proxies. The competing interests on both sides and lack of clear leadership on either one is part of why the fighting has proved so hard to stop: Mr. Assad is desperate to retain power, Moscow is seeking to increase its clout at the global geopolitical table, and Iran is exercising its regional muscle. While Washington and Moscow say preservation of Syrian state institutions is a priority, a look at the fight for Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, shows that those structures are already atrophying. At least one elite Syrian Army unit has been filmed seizing positions in Aleppo, but the bulk of the force is made up militiamen trained and financed by Iran, the Shiite theocracy that is the Syrian government’s closest ally, according to experts, diplomats, regional officials and fighters battling for and against the government. “Aleppo is Shiite, and she wants her people,” goes a song overlaid onto a video posted online of an Iraqi cleric visiting Iraqi Shiite militia fighters on the front lines south of Aleppo. The message ignores the fact that the mainstream Shiite sect that accounts for the bulk of the Iraqi militias makes up less than 1 percent of Syria’s population. The government’s Aleppo offensive has moved aggressively in the past week, worsening an epic humanitarian crisis. Syrian or Russian airstrikes have hit seven hospitals and killed hundreds of civilians, in what Moscow and Damascus describe as preparation for a final battle for the city. The Syrian military has dropped leaflets urging rebels to surrender and civilians to leave, but the United Nations says that forces have not allowed access to the escape routes, and that residents are afraid of arrest if they head to the government side. ground forces have taken bites out of rebel territory from several directions, but have faced tough resistance in street fighting from insurgents who in many cases are defending their own neighborhoods. To the north, the Quds Brigade, made up mostly of Palestinians living in Aleppo, seized the Handarat Palestinian refugee camp, lost it to rebels, and seized it again. To the south, Iraqi militias and other fighters have battled rebels for crucial territory close to a water pumping center. Syrian Army forces, meanwhile, seized a neighborhood in central Aleppo near the ancient citadel. As rebel groups called for a general mobilization, residents on their side have stockpiled equipment for digging wells, fuel for generators and seeds to grow food, in preparation for a lengthy siege. There is no precedent in the Syrian war for ground forces’ quickly rolling into an area that rebels have held for years. The disjointed forces, many with no local connections, are not strong enough to take fortified urban rebel positions in a frontal assault. Rather, airstrikes, artillery and starvation sieges have typically been used to force rebels to surrender in exchange for safe passage — a process that has taken months or years in places far smaller and less strategically vital than Aleppo. But it could go quicker if forces managed to take control of the water distribution plant and shut off water to the rebel side, or if thousands of Russian soldiers and veterans now working for private security contractors joined the ground battle. The Russian newspaper RBK, citing a security service source, said that private Russian military companies had 1, 000 to 2, 500 employees in Aleppo and in one other Syrian city, Latakia, under the de facto command of Russian military intelligence officers. Russian special forces are also on the ground in Syria. The messy mosaic of ground fighters on both sides has challenged Washington’s tangled allegiances. The United States is effectively allied with Iraqi Shiite militias to thwart the Islamic State in Iraq, but in Syria, some of those same militias are fighting on the side of the Assad government, which the United States opposes, and against a mix of rebel groups, some of them backed by the Obama administration. The front lines around Aleppo, as seen on video and described by witnesses, in some ways resemble those around Tikrit and Falluja in Iraq: In both countries, Shiite militia flags fly alongside, or sometimes instead of, those of a shaky national army and government. In Iraq, militias have often acted as the tip of the spear, the first ground forces to enter after Iraqi government — and sometimes American — airstrikes. Similar scenes unfolded in northern Aleppo Province in February: After heavy Russian and Syrian airstrikes drove most people from villages, fighters from the Iraqi militia Harakat — the Noble Ones — Hezbollah and others fought rebel holdouts. Afterward, Syrian troops planted flags. The forces now mobilized around Aleppo include several thousand fighters from Iraqi Shiite militias known as the Popular Mobilization committees, which formed to fight the Islamic State in Iraq after it swept into large parts of that country in 2014. South of Aleppo, Iraqi clerics have given rousing speeches to militiamen in fatigues urging them to fight in the name of faith and Islamic law. The Nujabaa fighters and their supporters have circulated an Arabic hashtag on social media, #AleppoOurNextVictoryInSyria. Also fighting are Iranian troops and recruits from Iran’s sizable Afghan refugee population. The Iranian government has been increasingly open about the fact that these are not only advisers, as they were long portrayed. At least 400 Iranians and Afghans from Iran have died “defending the shrines” in Iraq and Syria, as the government describes it. In June, at least a dozen members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps — some of them — died in battles near Aleppo, and around that time some regular Iranian Army troops headed for Syria. Around Aleppo, sectarian battle cries can be heard on both sides. Some Sunni insurgents use slurs against the Shiites who lead their archenemy — Iran — and against the Alawites, the sect Mr. Assad belongs to. And some foreign Shiite militiamen call their enemies by the names of foes from the battle of Karbala that split Sunnis from Shiites. There is more cultural affinity between Russia and senior Syrian Army officers — steeped in secular Baathist ideology and often trained in the Soviet Union — than between Syria’s formal military and Iran and Hezbollah. But militarily, they are all interdependent. Mr. Assad needs the ground forces provided by Iran and Hezbollah, which in turn need Russian air power. At the same time, Iranian and Hezbollah officials have said that their fighters provide intelligence from the ground for targeting airstrikes. Before the war began in 2011, Syria had one of the largest and most professional armies in the region. But it has been eroded by tens of thousands of casualties, by untold numbers of men fleeing the country to avoid conscription, and by the practice of keeping many soldiers from the nation’s Sunni majority away from the front lines amid questions about loyalty. Some Syrian officers and government officials grumble about Iran and Hezbollah impinging on their sovereignty, complaining that their fighters earn more than the Syrians and blow past road checkpoints with the flash of a badge. Damascus residents complain about the foreign fighters with semiautomatic rifles making stands in neighborhoods once visited by tourists from all over the world, like the shrine of Sayeda Zeinab, and the Christian quarters of the Old City. In turn, both Russians and the foreign Shiite fighters have complained about a lack of discipline among Syrian conscripts. But while many Syrian soldiers are weary after years of war, the foreign militia ranks seem to have buoyant morale. The leader of the Iraqi Harakat for example, can be seen in a video the group posted on Facebook telling his men to keep up the battle against extremists backed by the United States, the “Zionist entity” and “arrogant, colonial forces,” then offering “the secret of our victory. ” “We are with God,” he said. “He won us the big victories. ” On the video’s soundtrack, a singer then declared that when they see the militia’s fighters, “The people of Aleppo are happy. ” | 1 |
Isabel Rose, the telegenic heiress to one of New York’s real estate dynasties, has always had an ability to make her family squirm. In 2005 she published a novel, “The J. A. P. Chronicles,” in which she took aim at the set whence she came. (In a mostly positive review, Kirkus Reviews called the novel’s characters “shallow, mean, ruthless and resentful. ”) Ms. Rose, 48, is a fixture on the New York cabaret scene, performing an act at nightspots like Joe’s Pub and 54 Below. A 2014 video for her single “Trouble in Paradise” showed her cavorting around in a romper from Patricia Field, flanked by a trio of drag queen backup singers, as she sang about how she wouldn’t wind up as anyone’s trophy wife. But recently, Ms. Rose has been in the news for something with considerably larger stakes: the gender transition of her child, Sadie (formerly Samuel). On Feb. 24, shortly after President Trump signed an executive order that rolled back federal protections for transgender students, Medium published an open letter by Ms. Rose that was addressed to Ivanka Trump. In it, Ms. Rose asked Ms. Trump to take a stand on behalf of parents like herself. She pointed out their similarities. “We are both from prominent New York real estate families, we both attended private schools and went on to earn degrees from Ivy League colleges, and we both married smart Jewish men and now have young children,” Ms. Rose wrote. Then, she issued a directive: “Ivanka, put yourself in my Jimmy Choos for a minute. What would you do if you were me? Because I know exactly what I would do if I were you: I would take my father aside and explain that failing to protect innocent children’s rights to use the bathroom of their choice is wrong and unfair and . ” Within hours, the letter went viral, generating hundreds of comments that ranged from profoundly supportive to utterly horrified. It was reposted on the website of Harper’s Bazaar. CNN commissioned a piece, in which Ms. Rose gently picked apart some of the more stinging commentary that had come her way, noting that there is a subtle but essential difference between giving a child permission to express who they are and engaging as a parent in “indulgent behavior. ” At gay and transgender benefits around town, Ms. Rose arrived in her Isabel Marant trousers and the Row blazers, and was greeted almost like a folk hero — a Jessica Chastain who had spoken truth to power and put her social position at risk on behalf of a cause that needs powerful allies. Ms. Rose didn’t hear directly from Ms. Trump, but Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo called and congratulated Ms. Rose on the letter. Earlier this week, Ms. Rose even met with Mr. Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos. Ms. Rose said she pleaded for protections. Darting around Lower Manhattan, Ms. Rose was amiable and about what she has been through. At a benefit for the Family Equality Council, one of the hosts began talking about how miraculous having children is. “Except when they’re unbelievably annoying,” Ms. Rose interjected. She noted that what is most remarkable about her family is how unremarkable they are that change (or what she calls the “reversal of expectations”) is simply the most reliable fact of life. “I don’t understand the tendency to catastrophize,” she said. “I see it and the only conclusion I draw is that it produces adrenaline. It makes people excited. ” Friends marvel at what they view to be her bravery, as she proudly and unapologetically offered her unconditional love and support to Sadie. The sight of that child, happy and free, is pretty good evidence Ms. Rose has done something right. But in a country where transgender people are routinely killed, it’s not always this simple. Even for Ms. Rose — a person with wealth and privilege — there are relatives who have not always been comfortable with the choices she made. Not to mention people on the right, who are excoriating her for what they believe is the ultimate act of indulgence. Then, questions remain about how she will balance the public demands of being an activist with the private responsibilities of being a parent. How does she talk honestly about her child without opening her up to danger, and without making her into a representative she is not yet ready to be? Ms. Rose also has ambitions and desires of her own. Those can sometimes be hard to separate from the brand of activism she has chosen to pursue. She is, after all, a person who proudly calls herself “the second cousin twice removed of a drag queen” — a woman who requires no orchestra to break into song. And that comes with attendant complications too. In 2002, Ms. Rose was the star and a writer of an independent film called “Anything but Love,” which centered on an aspiring cabaret singer named Billie Golden who lives in Queens, watches Eartha Kitt enviously through the window of the supper club she works and fends off her the opprobrium of a mother who says: “You live your life as if you’re in some kind of technorama musical. ” “Technicolor,” she corrects. Of course, in real life, Ms. Rose did not grow up in Queens but on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Her father, Elihu, is a real estate scion and retired professor of military history at New York University who serves as the chairman of the Park Avenue Armory. His family manages rental buildings all over Manhattan as well as in Queens, and much of their fortune has gone back to local cultural organizations such as the New York Public Library, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Natural History and Lincoln Center, all of which have areas named after them. Even at Central Synagogue — the congregation frequented by prominent families like the Lauders and Tisches — they loomed large, from the checks they wrote, to their seders. As parents to Isabel, Mr. Rose and his wife, Susan, were determined to be completely supportive. “That’s how it is with all of our children,” Susan said in a phone interview this week. “There was never any other way. ” Still, there was no question, that Isabel — despite her diplomas from Yale (summa cum laude) and Bennington (master’s degree in writing) — was an unusual family member. She is a performer. And performers can be a lot, even ones with Ivy League degrees. Roses, apparently, are quiet. “We don’t like publicness,” Susan said. In 1998, Ms. Rose married an investment banker at the Plaza, then split with him a year after their daughter, Lily Ezrow, was born. In a case of art imitating life, much of this struggle informed “Anything but Love,” in which the showgirl heroine leaves a flush financial type at the altar and runs off with her lowly accompanist. And, in fact, there was a guy whom she both married and divorced soon after that. “Sometimes we have to learn good judgment by experiencing the repercussions of bad judgment,” Ms. Rose said. Then came the novel, “The J. A. P. Chronicles,” which she subsequently adapted as an Off Broadway show with one actress playing all six roles. Guess who? In 2008, Ms. Rose connected with Jeffrey Fagen, a tattooed Penn graduate who spent years trying to be Robert Smith and now runs a clothing company called Panda Diplomacy. First came a chat on JDate, in which Mr. Fagen recalled spotting her years before at the Williamstown Theater Festival. After that were drinks at Art Bar in the West Village. On the fourth date, he asked her to marry him. She got pregnant and said yes, trading the Plaza for the Park in West Chelsea, where she and Mr. Fagen performed a rendition of the “Grease” anthem “We Go Together” and were united in holy matrimony by Rabbi Angela Warnick Buchdahl of Central Synagogue, whom Mr. Fagen affectionately describes as the “only Korean woman rabbi in the world. ” After the ceremony, Ms. Rose practically went into palpitations as a “senior member” of her clan said he was getting up to go to the bathroom, and she realized he was about to unzip at a urinal shaped like a male appendage. “It was just like, ‘Nooooooooo,’” said Ms. Rose, reaching her arm out, like a movie character in slow motion. As fervent gay rights activists, Ms. Rose and Mr. Fagen joked to friends that evening that they were going to raise their baby gay but would “love him all just the same” if he turned out straight. “What we weren’t predicting was door No. 3,” Mr. Fagen said. It wasn’t just that their son, Samuel, wanted to play mermaids at age 2, which led Ms. Rose online to numerous articles that described this as a typical predictor of “gender dysphoria,” the mental state typically used to describe . It was also Samuel’s refusal to smile for photographs with Lily and the violent tantrums that transpired while getting suited up for a relative’s bar mitzvah. “I’m a girl, Mommy,” Ms. Rose recalled being told, over and over. Friends didn’t really know at first what the exact nature of the problem was. They simply saw a child, according to Mr. Fagen’s close friend Mitch Epner, who was “totally withdrawn. ” When Ms. Rose began to express the belief that Samuel might be transgender, friends doubted her. (More than a few also wondered privately: Why does the dramatic stuff always happen to her? “Isn’t that the question,” she said. “I don’t know. ”) Even Mr. Fagen did a certain amount of blaming his wife, which she found surprising given that he was, as she described it, “a rocker with a master’s degree in poetry. ” “All I can tell you is that I went through all the permutations people go through,” he said. So Ms. Rose took the role, becoming the confidante her husband wasn’t ready to be. On vacation in Palm Beach, Fla. she took Samuel, then around 4, to the Lilly Pulitzer shop and watched with curiosity as pink poplin turned a depressed child turn into a happy nymph. Back in New York, they watched David Bowie videos and went to the set of Ms. Rose’s video, where the first introductions to drag queens like Hedda Lettuce were made. Ms. Rose hoped to show her son there were many ways one could be a boy, from wearing metallic face paint to putting on green wigs and high heels. Unfortunately, this didn’t really work with Samuel, who was alarmed by Ms. Rose’s compatriots and utterly uninterested in Bowie. Nor did it assuage the concerns of friends and relatives who argued at the time that Ms. Rose was “indulging” her child and pushing ever closer to the great trans abyss. Throughout, Ms. Rose waded through confusing studies and heard troubling statistics about trans people attempting suicide. Attending another bar mitzvah, in Huntington, N. Y. in March 2014, the concern became more immediate. Before the reception, the family was in their hotel room and Ms. Rose went to take a nap. When she woke up, Samuel was in front of the mirror crying and Mr. Fagen was on his knee, asking what was wrong. The response: “I want to burn my face off. ” “Until that moment, I never really understood the profound discomfort,” Mr. Fagen said. “How does any child that young learn to hate themselves so much? After that it was, whatever it takes. ” The first person they were going to have to come out to was Ms. Rose’s eldest daughter, Lily, who was then 12 and had been somewhat in the dark about all of this. But thanks to an iPhone and the miracles of family sharing plans, she learned the extent of their dilemma without even being told. “My mom and I have the same photo stream,” Lily, now 15, said one day after school a few weeks ago, while seated across from Ms. Rose in the den of the family’s apartment underneath a giant Marilyn Minter portrait of a high heel. “I was going through the pictures and I saw some of my clothes, but it wasn’t me. So I was a little confused. ” Maybe angry too. “I was in middle school,” she said. “You want to be normal and fit in. So I had to take a step back and say, you know what, this is not about me. ” Together, the family embarked on extensive counseling at the Gender Family Project at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, where children and their siblings and parents attend sessions together and then split off into peer support groups. One early concern for Ms. Rose and Mr. Fagen was how to embrace their child’s transition and not have her become a Real Housewife in miniature. When the girl formerly known as Samuel suggested that the new name be Jasmine, a line was drawn. At this point, Mr. Fagen was arguing that if parents get to name their son at birth, they ought also to be able to pick the second one five years later when she emerges as their transgender daughter. Then his child approached with the name Sadie, and Ms. Rose was able to broker a peace offering. As Sadie’s hair grew out, Ms. Rose felt it was time to clear things up quickly and definitively. First, she placed a photo on Facebook of Sadie attending her first ballet class and allowed people to talk among themselves. Then, she took her daughter to Central Synagogue, where Rabbi Buchdahl announced that the two were coming up to the bimah to sing. As Ms. Rose saw it, this was a good way to say: “Yes. Done. ” But it also was embraced by the synagogue’s leadership, who thought standing behind the family sent a powerful message about what religious institutions can be. “I don’t want the religious right to be able to speak for God with a monolithic voice,” Rabbi Buchdahl said. “I understand that there will be interpretations of certain sacred texts that make this challenging for some people to accept, but I think it’s important that we interpret the revelations with the moral compass of our day. And my understanding of our sacred texts is of a God who loves children, in all the ways they are made. ” Sometimes, people ask whether Sadie’s “transitioning” means she has already begun surgery or taking hormones. Mr. Fagen patiently explains that those issues are years away, and that for now what has changed are “wardrobe and pronouns. ” Given the confidence Ms. Rose showed at temple and on Facebook, perhaps the letter she published on Medium shouldn’t have come as a surprise. But it did to Susan and Elihu Rose. “Well, that was crazy,” Susan said, chuckling. “Eli and I were down in D. C. We came home from the Smithsonian museum of history, we were totally pooped, and I said: ‘My God. Look at this amazing letter.’ I didn’t know Isabel was writing it. I didn’t know anything about it. Then Eli said, ‘Oh my God,’ and he mentioned that he knew someone who knew Ivanka and maybe they could pass it to her. The next morning I sent it out to friends, especially friends with marginalized children who might be gay or transgender. I think it’s just an inspiration. ” Lily had a more complicated reaction. She asked her mother if she realized she had outed Sadie. While the administration at Sadie’s elementary school accepted her last year with the awareness that she is transgender, there hasn’t been an explicit conversation with members of her class. Mr. Fagen, asked whether he worries about his wife’s openness with the world, and all the publicity about their daughter, said: “Absolutely. Every day. ” “That’s why you sometimes have to tie my string to the chair,” Ms. Rose said. Which was keenly though it doesn’t really answer the question of what might happen should Sadie decide as an adult that she wants her medical history to be private. How will she feel about what is for the world a mere Google search away? Alternatively, if she decides she does want to talk about it publicly, will she feel the power of her story has been blunted by all of the adults who saw fit to tell it before she could? But that’s later. For now, Sadie is merely a girl who loves science, likes math, thinks English is O. K. and hates history. She wants her mother to come home earlier, she wants her dog to sit still and let her pull its tail, and she wants to appear in the family photo with everyone this afternoon. And that didn’t used to be the case. Also, a cupcake would be nice. From Billy’s. | 1 |
Monday on Fox News Channel’s “FOX Friends” President George W Bush former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said tearing down monuments and statues to historical figures who owned slaves is “sanitizing history. ” Partial transcript as follows: KILMEADE: As an woman, do you see yourself in this constitution? Do you think that, when we look at nine of our first twelve presidents as slave owners, should we start taking their statues down and say, we’re embarrassed by you?” RICE: I’m a firm believer keep your history before you. So I don’t actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners. I want us to look at the names and recognize what they did and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history. When you start wiping out history, sanitizing history to make you feel better, it’s a bad thing. But let me say one thing about our constitution, that constitution originally counted my answers as of a man. In 1952 my father had trouble registering to vote in Birmingham, Alabama. In 2005, I stood in the Ben Franklin room, one of our founders, I took an oath of office to the same constitution, and it was administered by Jewish woman Supreme Court justice. That is the story of America. The long road to freedom has indeed been long. It has sometimes been violent. It had many martyrs but ultimately has been Americans claiming those institutions for themselves and expanding the definition of ‘We the People.’ KILMEADE: Does it make you think less, should we think less of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson because they were slave owners? RICE: They were people of their times. I wish they had been like John Adams who did not believe in slavery. I wish they had been like Alexander Hamilton, who was an immigrant, by the way, a child of questionable parentage from the Caribbean. I wish all of them had been like that. Jefferson in particular, a lot of contradictions in Jefferson. They were people from their time. We should celebrate the from the Jeffersons, Washingtons, slave owners, look where we are now. Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN | 0 |
The founder of the world’s largest hedge fund says that populism is likely to to play a bigger role in the economy than monetary or fiscal policies over the next year. [Ray Dalio, who runs the $150 billion dollar hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, published a lengthy paper on Wednesday that analyzes the role of populism in today’s world and in history. Populism is now at its highest level since the 1930s, according to the paper, “Populism: The Phenomenon. ” “We believe that populism’s role in shaping economic conditions will probably be more powerful than classic monetary and fiscal policies (as well as a big influence on fiscal policies),” Dalio and three Bridgewater colleagues write. Bridgewater is the world’s largest hedge fund. The paper introduces a “Developed World Populism Index,” which Dalio says measures the strength of populism over time. It’s a weighted index of the vote share of parties or candidates in national elections for major developed countries since 1900. The index shows that populism is now at its highest level since the early 1930s. Contemporary populism includes supporters of Donald Trump, UKIP in the UK, AfD in Germany, National Front in France, Podemos in Spain and Five Star Movement in Italy. The bulk of the study focuses on the history of populism, focussing on 14 leaders from the past in 10 different countries. Current populists aren’t examined in detail because “the stories of the ones in power or possibly coming to power are still being written,” Dalio writes. “Populism is a political and social phenomenon that arises from the common man, typically not being fed up with 1) wealth and opportunity gaps, 2) perceived cultural threats from those with different values in the country and from outsiders, the “establishment elites” in positions of power, and 4) government not working effectively for them,” according to Dalio. “In other words, populism is a rebellion of the common man against the elites and, to some extend, against the system. ” Dalio has changed his view on Trump a few times. In the weeks after the election, Dalio said his view of Trump was “broadly positive. ” Speaking in Davos, Switzerland in January, he said that he believed there was “an optimistic possibility” that Trump’s policies would stimulate the U. S. economy. More recently, however, he has been fretting over possible downsides of Trump’s populism. And now? “We have more questions than answers about him and are using these other cases to assess him against by seeing if he follows a more archetypical path [of populists past] or if he deviates from it significantly,” Dalio writes. | 0 |
A man in Boston rolled several student loans into one, and his balance doubled overnight, with no explanation. Near Chicago, a former graduate student who had a financial windfall sent in a $10, 000 check to pay off his loans — and the payment was promptly lost. The same thing happened to a woman in Maryland, who uncovered the problem three years later, after her loan had grown by $11, 000. And in New York City, a homeless man, who should qualify for reduced monthly payments, has been pleading for a break on his loan payments but says that no one is listening. Sound familiar? State and federal lawsuits filed this week accused Navient, the largest collector of student loan payments in the nation, of the kind of sloppiness and misleading tactics that emerged in the mortgage market in the years after the financial crisis. The company, which is fighting the lawsuits, has denied wrongdoing. “Navient has a superior track record of helping student loan borrowers succeed in repayment,” Patricia Nash Christel, a company spokeswoman, said in a written statement. “We will vigorously defend against these false allegations. ” The accusations against Navient, by the nation’s consumer watchdog agency and attorneys general in two states, are aggravating a student loan crisis that has swept the United States. Student loan debt has surged to $1. 4 trillion, eclipsing the totals for auto loans and credit cards, and burdening a generation with a mountain of debt just as its members try to find their financial footing. In recent years, the Obama administration has significantly expanded programs that allow people with federal student loans to cap their monthly payments at a fixed portion of their income. More than 80 percent of America’s outstanding student debt is in the form of federal loans, and most of the borrowers carrying that debt are eligible for such payment plans, but enrolling in the programs can be complicated. Navient, which services the loans of roughly 12 million current and former students across the country, is responsible for keeping track of monthly payments on more than $300 billion in loans. It also has tremendous power — and leeway — in shepherding struggling borrowers through the process of either capping their monthly payments based on income or finding other ways of reducing those payments. Guiding these borrowers takes time and training. Navient, the lawsuits say, steered clients toward options that were simpler for the company. Anna Nepomuceno, 40, who lives in Tacoma, Wash. has been trying for years to get help from Navient. Around a decade ago, her partner, Andrew Brittell, 46, took out multiple loans totaling tens of thousands of dollars to attend DeVry, a school. Mr. Brittell now works in the billing department of a telecommunications company and takes home around $3, 000 a month after taxes, barely covering the basic living expenses for their family of five. Mr. Brittell’s federal loans would probably qualify him for an repayment plan, and he has repeatedly applied to Navient to participate in such a program. The company has repeatedly lost his paperwork, Ms. Nepomuceno said — and each time, Navient suggested that Mr. Brittell instead apply for yet another loan forbearance, a program that suspends payments while interest continues to accrue. Several of Mr. Brittell’s loans have been in forbearance for more than five years, Ms. Nepomuceno said. He has made no payments on them, and the balance due has ballooned to more than $90, 000. Mr. Brittel “will put in the paperwork, and then they’ll tell us that it never went through, or that they lost it, and we should go on forbearance,” she said, adding: “This has happened over and over again. It’s like a vicious cycle. ” Navient declined to comment on individual customers’ cases. But Mr. Brittell’s story is not unique, according to the suits filed this week, including one by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a government agency created under the 2010 financial reform laws that increased regulation of the financial industry. Lina Vitakauskas, who lives in the Chicago area, thought that repayment was something that only younger students could take advantage of. It’s not most federal borrowers are eligible for a plan, but navigating the thicket of different options that are available, each with their own eligibility requirements, can be daunting. It took more than six years, Ms. Vitakauskas, 43, said, to get her monthly payments lowered. In the meantime, her loan balance — money she took out to earn a graduate degree in English — grew to more than $100, 000, nearly double what she originally borrowed. “I just felt like I was treading water,” she said. Half of Navient’s borrowers who were struggling and met the criteria for repayment plans would qualify for a $0 monthly payment, the consumer bureau found in its analysis. But since 2010, Navient has enrolled some 1. 5 million borrowers in at least two consecutive forbearances lasting 12 months or longer. Many of those borrowers would have been better off with an plan, the bureau said. Adam S. Minsky, a lawyer in Boston, has worked with hundreds of clients trying to resolve problems with Navient. “They’re not providing blatant misinformation, but they’re not providing the borrower with the full spectrum of what their rights and options are,” Mr. Minsky said. “That in itself is a form of misrepresentation. ” More than half of Navient’s customers who did manage to enroll in plans fell out of them because they did not complete the annual renewal paperwork — a key step that Navient failed to prominently alert borrowers to, the lawsuits say. Navient also routinely lost or misapplied its customers’ payments, according to the suits. In December 2012, Rahat Khan of Rockville, Md. tried to make a dent in the loans she had taken out to finance her daughter’s education, going online to pay $38, 000 she had borrowed against her house. Relieved, Ms. Khan, 62, thought she was done. But in 2015, she started to get collection calls on the student loan that she thought had been paid. “What loan, I remember asking,” she said. Swollen with interest and late fees, the loan had grown by $11, 419. “I went through circles and circles,” said Ms. Khan, whose credit was tarnished because of the loan. It took Kathleen Hyland, a lawyer in Baltimore, to straighten it out. Scott Kenemore, 39, who lives in Evanston Ill. had no such help. Mr. Kenemore, a writer, sent Navient a check in August 2015 to pay off a balance of around $10, 000 remaining on his graduate school student loans. Navient lost it, so he made a payment by phone instead. Then Navient apparently found the check — and tried to deposit it. Repeatedly. “I had to close my bank account over it, because Navient would just not stop and their customer service was absolutely useless,” Mr. Kenemore said. The roots of suits filed against Navient this week stretch back years. From October 2012 to March 2013, the consumer bureau logged more than 600 complaints about Sallie Mae, from which Navient split off in 2014, accounting for nearly half of all the complaints about student lenders during that period. That number grew rapidly: The agency’s database now holds more than 11, 000 complaints against Sallie Mae and Navient. “Complaints reported to C. F. P. B. represent fewer than of 1 percent of Navient customers and have been consistent with or below the market share of the loans we service,” said Ms. Christel, of Navient. Unless Navient agrees to settle, the lawsuits are likely to take years. The consumer bureau, and the attorneys general, said they were seeking restitution and a change in the company’s practices. “Every single one of the borrowers who is having their loan serviced by Navient or one of Navient’s companies is a borrower that’s impacted,” said Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general, who filed one of the state cases. “If you’re looking to put a price tag on that, it’s billions of dollars. ” | 1 |
Published on Oct 30, 2016 by Ukraine War Awareness October 29, 2016, a village in the Pervomaisk District in Separatist-Held Lugansk was bombed with collateral damage on Private Property as well as Gas and Electricity. Residents report the shooting coming from Government-Held Zolote, a region captured by UAF in March, 2016, and report no Separatist Positions in their vicinity. Lugansk Reparation Team quickly arrived to restore Gas and Electricity distribution throughout Pervomaisk. Share this: | 0 |
On December 5, 2011, Neil McCabe published a piece in Human Events, titled, “Claim: Clinton Collected $50K Per Month From MF Global,” which said that controversial Clinton-backed public relations and consulting firm Teneo had been paid $50,000 a month by former MF Global CEO Jon Corzine to “improve his image and to enhance his connections with Clinton’s political family” months before the firm went bankrupt.
MF Global’s bankruptcy was a result of gross mismanagement and Cozine himself narrowly avoided prosecution for financial fraud when it was revealed that MF Global customer money had at one point gone missing during the company’s final days. No criminal charges were filed, but MF Global paid $132 million earlier this year in a civil settlement with MF Global customers.
Teneo’s seemingly seedy behavior has long been a problem for the Clintons, and its alleged involvement in the MF Global scandal rippled across Clinton world. As revealed by an email chain published by Wikileaks, the Teneo-MF Global story was emailed to Chelsea Clinton the same days as publication, December 5, 2011.
Responding a day later , Chelsea told those in the email chain, which apparently included John Podesta, that this was not the first time Teneo had been a problem:
John, Bruce, Terry, Victoria, Jennifer – fyi re: below. I’ve asked that it make my father’s clips (it wld historically not as I understand it).
On another note, I was in London Sunday and did a Foundation event Sunday evening and two people separately voiced concerns directly to me about Teneo , neither of whom I know well (one of whom is a friend of one of Marc’s old colleagues, ie we know only tangentially) and Sara Latham (whom Victoria and Jennifer, I do know well – she worked for my Dad in the WH and lives in London) voiced serious concerns to Bari – including telling her Ilya has called Members of the House and Members of Parliament, “on behalf of President Clinton,” for Teneo clients (eg for Andrew Liveris and Dow who’s coming this month to London), without my father’s knowledge and inelegantly and ineffectually at best and at worse has now precipitating people in London making comparisons between my father and Tony Blair’s profit motivations. Which would horrify my father.
Sara also told Bari she started working for Teneo, as Teneo, more than a year ago and then recently stopped because she was so upset, partly because of what Doug and Declan asked her to do/ pretend was happening for their clients at Davos- that’s all I know. I am hoping to connect directly with Sara this week, if only to connect her belatedly into Victoria and Jennifer. I’m speaking at an innovations in governance conference today here in Oxford and flying back later this afternoon. I will raise all of this and more with my father this evening. Wanted to update you all in the meanwhile about my augmented concerns post London and the below.
“Doug and Declan” are Doug Band and Declan Kelly, founding members of Teneo and longtime associates of the Clinton family.
Chelsea Clinton is telling those on the thread in response to a press clip of the Human Events piece that she has been told by other people that Teneo is trading on her father’s name for dubious purposes.
In response to Chelsea’s email, John Podesta emailed Clinton lawyer Cheryl Mills saying “We need to move to a resolution of this quickly.”
Mills responded with a document that restructured Teneo, which Mills explained, “essentially creates a full-time Personal office of the President headed by a new CEO/COS. That person — who is unaffiliated with any of the entities or Teneo — b/cs the decisionmaker on the allocation of the President’s time and management and implementation of the President’s desires with respect to each activity. Doug and Justin advise that person but do not make final decisions or have final implementation authority on any matters – which is consistent with what Doug has said he seeks – the ability to recommend but for others to be accountable for making the ultimate decisions.”
While Chelsea was concerned with Teneo using Bill Clinton, other evidence demonstrates it was a two-way street. Teneo helped Bill Clinton make millions of dollars from speeches with corporations. They also helped raised large amounts of money for the Clinton Foundation and employed other associates of the Clintons.
Like most Clinton operations, it’s never quite clear where the public service ends and the private gains begin.
The post Clinton Network Concerned About Teneo’s Consulting Behavior appeared first on Shadowproof .
| 1 |
This morning’s key headlines from GenerationalDynamics. com, Prime Minister of Poland Beata Szydlo and Maj. Gen. Jaroslaw Mika, commander of Poland’s 11th Armored Cavalry Division, conduct a review of U. S. and Polish troops during an official ceremony in Zagan, Poland (DVIDS) People across Poland are celebrating “Operation Resolve,” the arrival to Poland the largest U. S. military deployment to Europe in decades. The deployment includes about 4, 000 troops and also 2, 400 pieces of military equipment, including tanks and Humvees. The deployment is a reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula. Other countries in eastern Europe are concerned that they will be the next victim of a Russian invasion, and it’s hoped that the presence of US troops will deter Russia. Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said, Welcome to Poland … The presence of American soldiers in Poland is another step in our strategy to ensure safety and security for Poland and the region … It’s a great day today when we can welcome, here in Zagan, American soldiers who represent the best, the greatest army in the world. Poland’s Defense Minister Antoni Macierewicz said: We have waited for you for a very long time. We waited for decades, sometimes feeling we had been left alone, sometimes almost losing hope, sometimes feeling that we were the only ones who protected civilization from aggression that came from the east. The American troops will be part of a Nato contingent that will include troops from Britain and Canada. The troops will be rotated every nine months through Poland, the Baltic countries, Bulgaria and Romania in order to provide a technical workaround to a promise made to Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union that Nato would not permanently base large numbers of forces east of Germany. Deutsche Welle and CNN and AFP, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin is always calling everyone he dislikes “Nazis” and “Fascists,” but he does not like to admit that Russians were also “Nazis and Fascists” prior Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Hitler and Josef Stalin had signed a treaty (the Molotov — Ribbentrop Pact) in 1939 where they split up Poland between them. The agreement also divided Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Romania between the Nazis and the Communists. It was only in 1941, when the Nazis invaded Russia, that Stalin finally learned being a Nazi is not a good thing. Even so, after Hitler was defeated, Stalin’s Soviet forces occupied Poland and other east European countries for decades. These events are far ancient history to today’s young generations in America and Western Europe, but they are still very raw memories to the people of Poland and other East European countries. They have seen Russia invade and annex parts of Georgia and Ukraine, and they have no doubts that Russia would invade their countries, as has happened in the past. Putin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the U. S. troops in Poland would be “a threat to Russia’s national security. ” It is hard to believe that 5, 000 American troops would be a threat to Russia’s security, inasmuch as Russia has something like 330, 000 troops along its western border. Furthermore, Russia has Iskander cruise missiles in Kaliningrad that can be made nuclear. The US deployment is being described as a “tripwire” force, designed to prevent Russia from getting away with an easy invasion of some other country, as they did with Georgia and Ukraine. It’s thought that Russia would not be willing to risk a larger war by attacking an American force of any size. Russian military expert Vladimir Kozin says that another reasons for the deployment is that outgoing President Obama wants to box in Donald Trump: According to the German military, some 900 railroad cars will be needed to deliver all this equipment to the deployment sites. But what is the reason? First, [US President Barack] Obama wants to play a mean trick on Donald Trump who won the election. It is worth mentioning that there’s one other possible theory why Obama did this in the last few days of his administration: It is possible that Trump asked Obama to do it before leaving office, so that he wouldn’t have to do it. Kozin said that the deployment is unprecedented since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that the US is forcing Europe to accept it: Finally, the US wants to maintain tensions around the world and particularly in Europe. They want to turn the region into another tinderbox ready to ignite. This number one priority … The US and NATO plan to increase aerial, missile defense and intelligence activities with the use of heavy military equipment. In order to justify sanctions, the situation needs to be tense all the time. Europe is becoming a prisoner of this new Cold War initiated by Obama. Sputnik News (Moscow) and Deutsche Welle ( ) and Sky News, Related Articles, KEYS: Generational Dynamics, Poland, Beata Szydlo, Jaroslaw Mika, Antoni Macierewicz, Operation Resolve, Ukraine, Crimea, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Molotov — Ribbentrop Pact, Dmitry Peskov, Kaliningrad, Vladimir Kozin Permanent web link to this article Receive daily World View columns by | 1 |
source Add To The Conversation Using Facebook Comments | 0 |
President Trump, who promised to work for free, donated his salary for the first quarter of the year on Monday to the National Park Service, which, like other government agencies, faces major cuts in the president’s first budget proposal. At the daily White House briefing, Sean Spicer, the president’s press secretary, presented a check signed by Mr. Trump for $78, 333. 32 to Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, who oversees the park service. “I’m thrilled,” Mr. Zinke said. Presidents are paid $400, 000 a year, not counting benefits that come with the job, including housing in a fairly spacious residence. But Mr. Trump, perhaps the wealthiest person ever to hold the presidency, made a point during the campaign of saying he did not need taxpayers to compensate him. His daughter Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, who together are worth as much as $740 million, are working on his staff without taking salaries. The White House had previously said that Mr. Trump would donate his salary to charity at the end of the year and suggested he would even allow reporters to decide the beneficiary. “He kindly asked that you all help determine where that goes,” Mr. Spicer said last month. “The way that we can avoid scrutiny is let the press corps determine where it should go. ” Mr. Spicer did not explain on Monday why the plan had changed, but said the White House Counsel’s Office presented a series of alternatives to the president and he chose the National Park Service. “The park service has cared for our parks since 1916, and the president is personally proud to contribute the first quarter of his salary to the important mission of the park service, which is preserving our country’s national security,” Mr. Spicer said. But in picking a government agency, Mr. Trump chose one with a large backlog of deferred maintenance that could be deferred even longer under his budget. Mr. Trump proposed a cut of $1. 5 billion, or 12 percent, from the Interior Department, which oversees the park service and other agencies. The proposal did not specify how much of that would come out of the park service budget. He also chose an agency with which he has had a fraught relationship. Mr. Trump was angry when a park service employee using an agency Twitter account reposted information comparing the size of his Inauguration Day crowd unfavorably with that of former President Barack Obama in 2009. Mr. Trump was livid and called the acting director of the park service the day after his inauguration to complain about the post and to ask for further photographic evidence about the size of his crowd. Mr. Trump made his pledge a regular talking point on the campaign trail, pointing to his personal wealth as a way of demonstrating his independence. “I won’t take even one dollar,” Mr. Trump declared in 2015. “I am totally giving up my salary if I become president. ” The trick, according to the Constitution, was that he could not refuse his pay. So he opted to donate the salary instead, much as John F. Kennedy and Herbert Hoover did. | 0 |
Thieves attempting to steal money from an ATM machine in Washington state botched their planned burglary when they accidentally set the cash they intended to steal on fire, police said.[ Police and fire departments arrived on the scene Tuesday morning in response to reports of a fire at Coastal Community Bank on 19th Ave SE in Everett, KCPQ reported. When they arrived, they found that the fire was coming from the ATM. Everett Police shared a photo on Twitter of the burnt ATM: Fire thwarts ATM thieves using torch at bank (10500 19th Ave SE). Detectives investigating — More to follow. pic. twitter. — Everett Police WA (@EverettPolice) May 30, 2017, Aaron Snell of the Everett Police Department said the suspects mistakenly set the money on fire while using a blowtorch to access the cashbox inside the ATM. John Dickson, the executive VP and COO of Coastal Community Bank, said the suspects did not escape with any money and that the bank experienced another by masked thieves trying to access the cash deposit box a few weeks ago. “They attempted to get into the ATM and it looks like they used a blowtorch, which caught the currency on fire and created a little fire damage,” said Dickson. Police identified two suspects from surveillance footage of the incident that shows one of the men trying to urinate on the fire to put it out. The suspects in question are Eli Steen and Jason Kovar, both 31, of Everett, police say. Police say they could arrest Steen and Kovar on charges of burglary and arson because they have “probable cause” and are also looking to question them to see if they are connected to other commercial burglaries that took place in Snohomish County. The Seattle Times reports that the damage to the ATM, cash, and the building is estimated to be $35, 000. | 0 |
ATLANTIC CITY — The Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel is now closed, its windows clouded over by sea salt. Only a faint outline of the gold letters spelling out remains visible on the exterior of what was once this city’s premier casino. Not far away, the Trump Marina Hotel Casino was sold at a major loss five years ago and is now known as the Golden Nugget. At the nearly deserted eastern end of the boardwalk, the Trump Taj Mahal, now under new ownership, is all that remains of the casino empire Donald J. Trump assembled here more than a ago. Years of neglect show: The carpets are frayed and chandeliers dangle above the few customers there to play the penny slot machines. On the presidential campaign trail, Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, often boasts of his success in Atlantic City, of how he outwitted the Wall Street firms that financed his casinos and rode the value of his name to riches. A central argument of his candidacy is that he would bring the same business prowess to the Oval Office, doing for America what he did for his companies. “Atlantic City fueled a lot of growth for me,” Mr. Trump said in an interview in May, summing up his history here. “The money I took out of there was incredible. ” His audacious personality and opulent properties brought attention — and countless players — to Atlantic City as it sought to overtake Las Vegas as the country’s gambling capital. But a close examination of regulatory reviews, court records and security filings by The New York Times leaves little doubt that Mr. Trump’s casino business was a protracted failure. Though he now says his casinos were overtaken by the same tidal wave that eventually slammed this seaside city’s gambling industry, in reality he was failing in Atlantic City long before Atlantic City itself was failing. But even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen. In three interviews with The Times since late April, Mr. Trump acknowledged in general terms that high debt and lagging revenues had plagued his casinos. He did not recall details about some issues, but did not question The Times’s findings. He repeatedly emphasized that what really mattered about his time in Atlantic City was that he had made a lot of money there. Mr. Trump assembled his casino empire by borrowing money at such high interest rates — after telling regulators he would not — that the businesses had almost no chance to succeed. His casino companies made four trips to bankruptcy court, each time persuading bondholders to accept less money rather than be wiped out. But the companies repeatedly added more expensive debt and returned to the court for protection from lenders. After narrowly escaping financial ruin in the early 1990s by delaying payments on his debts, Mr. Trump avoided a second potential crisis by taking his casinos public and shifting the risk to stockholders. And he never was able to draw in enough gamblers to support all of the borrowing. During a decade when other casinos here thrived, Mr. Trump’s lagged, posting huge losses year after year. Stock and bondholders lost more than $1. 5 billion. All the while, Mr. Trump received copious amounts for himself, with the help of a compliant board. In one instance, The Times found, Mr. Trump pulled more than $1 million from his failing public company, describing the transaction in securities filings in ways that may have been illegal, according to legal experts. Mr. Trump now says that he left Atlantic City at the perfect time. The record, however, shows that he struggled to hang on to his casinos years after the city had peaked, and failed only because his investors no longer wanted him in a management role. There are those here who fondly remember Mr. Trump’s showmanship, the thousands he employed in a struggling city, and the tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue his casinos generated. “He was a great person for the company,” said Scott C. Butera, the president of Mr. Trump’s company at the time of its 2004 bankruptcy. “With his oversight, his brand and marketing, he’s really adept. ” Many others were glad to see him go. “He put a number of local contractors and suppliers out of business when he didn’t pay them,” said Steven P. Perskie, who was New Jersey’s top casino regulator in the early 1990s. “So when he left Atlantic City, it wasn’t, ‘Sorry to see you go.’ It was, ‘How fast can you get the hell out of here? ’” Donald Trump darted beneath the 70 minarets and nine carved elephants that lined the roof, through the lobby and across the casino floor, seemingly oblivious to the spectators’ cries of “Donald, Donald,” and the gamblers clutching bricks of $100 bills at the blackjack tables. It was April 1990, and Mr. Trump was officially opening his third gambling resort in Atlantic City, the biggest project of his career: the $1 billion Trump Taj Mahal. “It’s truly going to be an incredible place,” he told reporters. “We’re calling it the eighth wonder of the world. ” The Taj was certainly of outsize proportions: Its tower was New Jersey’s tallest building, and the casino was the world’s largest. In a remarkably short time, Mr. Trump had become a commanding figure in Atlantic City, with his casinos accounting for nearly a third of its gambling revenues and employing more than 8, 000 people. Trump Plaza came first. In the early 1980s, Mr. Trump gained control of a prime spot on the boardwalk. Unable to get financing to build a casino, he forged a partnership with Harrah’s Entertainment, a national gambling operator. Harrah’s agreed to provide Mr. Trump, who did not put any additional money into the deal, with $220 million in financing to build the project, to pay him a $24 million construction management fee and to give him half the profits. The Harrah’s at Trump Plaza opened in 1984. From the start, the partners were at odds over its marketing and whose name should be paramount. “It wasn’t a partnership,” said Philip G. Satre, the retired chairman of Harrah’s. “We were a big company with an institutional approach to running a business, and he was a real estate entrepreneur who kind of shot from the hip. ” Then Mr. Trump bought Hilton’s nearly completed casino in the marina district for $320 million, calling it Trump Castle. His company issued $352 million in bonds to finish construction and open the casino, and tacked on an additional $32 million. That casino opened in 1985 and competed directly against his partner’s first casino, Harrah’s Marina. The following year, Harrah’s scuttled its partnership with Mr. Trump and sold him its stake in Trump Plaza for more than $220 million. Next Mr. Trump went after the biggest casino of all, the Taj Mahal, which Resorts International, builder of Atlantic City’s first casino, was erecting. After buying a controlling interest in Resorts from the estate of its founder, Mr. Trump battled the talk show host Merv Griffin for control of the company. In the end, Mr. Griffin got the company, while Mr. Trump won the Taj Mahal. Even before the Taj opened, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission was concerned about the casino’s viability given its rapidly escalating costs and considered revoking its operating license. Regulators closely monitored the financial performance of the Trump casinos and the developer’s empire. Mr. Trump told the commission in 1988 that he could rein in expenses, because conventional lenders were lining up to give him money at low interest rates. He said he abhorred junk bonds, which were then popular, because they carried a bigger risk of default and thus came with higher interest rates. Within months, he reversed course, issuing $675 million worth of junk bonds, with a 14 percent interest rate, to finish construction and get the Taj open. In recent interviews, Mr. Trump has said that with each financing he routinely took money out of the casinos to invest in Manhattan real estate. Total debt on the Taj exceeded $820 million. Less than two weeks before the casino opened, Marvin B. Roffman, a casino analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott, an investment firm based in Philadelphia, told The Wall Street Journal that the Taj would need to reap $1. 3 million a day just to make its interest payments, a sum no casino had ever achieved. “The market just isn’t there,” Mr. Roffman told The Journal. Mr. Trump retaliated, demanding that Janney Montgomery Scott fire Mr. Roffman. It did. “It was doomed way before the start,” said W. Bucky Howard, who was promoted by Mr. Trump to president of the Taj five days after it opened, in a recent interview. “I told him it was going to fail. The Taj was underfunded. ” Almost immediately, Mr. Trump had trouble making the debt payments on the Taj and his other casinos. It was also clear that the Taj was cannibalizing the Castle and the Plaza, whose combined gambling revenues dropped by $58 million the year it opened. After more than tripling as new casinos opened through the 1980s, gambling revenues in Atlantic City flattened in 1990, rising by just 1. 35 percent, as gamblers grew more cautious in light of a national recession. All were hurt, recalled Mr. Perskie, the casino regulator, but none were in the catastrophic financial shape of Mr. Trump’s. At the same time, Mr. Trump’s real estate empire in Manhattan, where the recession cut property values, was also failing. In an August 1990 report, New Jersey regulators noted the “sheer volume of debt” on Mr. Trump’s holdings: $3. 4 billion, including $1. 3 billion on the casinos and $832. 5 million in loans personally guaranteed by Mr. Trump. Regulators warned then that “the possibility of a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization was not out of the question. ” The Taj Mahal missed its November debt payment. The Castle was also late. By December 1990, when Mr. Trump needed to make an $18. 4 million interest payment, his father, Fred C. Trump, sent a lawyer to the Castle to buy $3. 3 million in chips, to provide him with an infusion of cash. The younger Mr. Trump made the payment, but the Casino Control Commission fined the Castle $65, 000 for what had amounted to an illegal loan. As all of his ventures neared collapse, Mr. Trump’s lenders insisted that he submit a business plan, appoint a chief financial officer for the Trump Organization and sell, among other things, the Trump Shuttle airline, his yacht and his stake in New York City’s Plaza Hotel, which also filed for bankruptcy protection. They also put him on a $ budget for personal and household expenses. Just over a year after it opened, the Taj Mahal was in bankruptcy court, followed in 1992 by both the Plaza and the Castle. In the plan that was worked out, Mr. Trump ceded to the lenders a 50 percent stake in the businesses in return for lower interest rates. The lenders agreed to defer certain principal and interest payments and hold off on personal claims against Mr. Trump for five years. But there was little or no reduction in the enormous debts that would plague his gambling empire far into the future. Mr. Trump now says he looks back on the period as his golden era in the casino business. “Early on, I took a lot of money out of the casinos with the financings and the things we do,” he said in a recent interview. “Atlantic City was a very good cash cow for me for a long time. ” Others were hurt. “He helped expand Atlantic City, but he just did not put the equity into the projects he should have to keep them solvent,” said H. Steven Norton, a casino consultant and a former casino executive at Resorts International. “When he went bankrupt, he not only cost bondholders money, but he hurt a lot of small businesses that helped him construct the Taj Mahal. ” Beth Rosser of West Chester, Pa. is still bitter over what happened to her father, whose company Triad Building Specialties nearly collapsed when Mr. Trump took the Taj into bankruptcy. It took three years to recover any money owed for his work on the casino, she said, and her father received only 30 cents on the dollar. “Trump crawled his way to the top on the back of little guys, one of them being my father,” said Ms. Rosser, who runs Triad today. “He had no regard for thousands of men and women who worked on those projects. He says he’ll make America great again, but his past shows the complete opposite of that. ” Donald Trump has said that his brushes with financial disaster in the early 1990s reminded him of a lesson his father had taught him: Do not leave yourself on the hook for loans. “My father knew, like I knew, you don’t personally guarantee,” Mr. Trump is quoted saying in “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” by Timothy L. O’Brien, a former reporter for The Times. “I’ve told people I didn’t follow my own advice. ” His agreements with lenders and the two casino bankruptcies in those years still left Mr. Trump personally responsible for more than $100 million in debt, and his agreements had only delayed the day of reckoning to June 30, 1995. He dealt with that danger by first shifting much of his personal debt onto his casinos, then onto a new group: shareholders. Step 1 came in 1993, when his company sold more junk bonds, adding another $100 million in debt to the Trump Plaza casino. More than half of the new money went to pay off Mr. Trump’s unrelated personal loans. Then, in June 1995, with the risk of being forced into bankruptcy just weeks away, Mr. Trump shifted ownership of the Plaza casino to a new, publicly traded company: Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts. In the initial public offering, 10 million shares were sold at $14. At the same time, the company also sold another $155 million in junk bonds, at a 15. 5 percent interest rate. Becoming a public company burdened Mr. Trump with the responsibility of putting shareholders’ interests first. But Mr. Trump, the largest shareholder and chairman of the board, could generally meet that obligation by obtaining approval from his board of directors and disclosing financial details in securities filings. The board’s three outside members were widely seen as bowing to his wishes. A week after the initial public offering, the new company began using some of the almost $300 million it had raised to clear Mr. Trump’s personal debts. During his financial pinch two years earlier, Chemical Bank had forced Mr. Trump to give up his ownership of the Trump Regency, a hotel next to the Trump Plaza. He held an option to buy it back for $60 million, which included debt on the hotel and $35. 9 million that he personally owed the bank from his purchase of a Manhattan property. The new company exercised that option, in effect transferring Mr. Trump’s debt to its own balance sheet. In 1996, the public company issued more stock and sold $1. 1 billion in junk bonds. The money was used in part to pay off $330 million in bonds on the Plaza that had been guaranteed by a company Mr. Trump controlled, as well as almost $30 million that Mr. Trump personally owed to two banks. The company also bought the Trump Taj Mahal and Trump Castle — soon renamed the Trump Marina — shifting more of Mr. Trump’s debt to shareholders. Mr. Trump celebrated his 50th birthday that June at the Taj Mahal, with the Beach Boys onstage. A flurry of news articles said he was “back” some even quoted Mr. Roffman, the analyst whom Mr. Trump had gotten fired, giving Mr. Trump credit for turning things around. (Mr. Roffman had won a $750, 000 arbitration award from Janney Montgomery for his dismissal and settled a lawsuit against Mr. Trump for an undisclosed sum.) But some analysts — and the stock market — saw the $525 million that the public company had paid for the Castle as too much. The stock began a long slide, falling from about $35 a share before the sale, to $12 months later. Shareholders sued, alleging that the Castle’s purchase price, which included roughly $175 million in cash to Mr. Trump’s private holding company, had been a “gross and unjustified” sweetheart deal for Mr. Trump. (He later settled the suit.) Another crucial deadline came in 1998. Mr. Trump personally owed $13. 5 million to Donaldson, Lufkin Jenrette, the investment bank that had underwritten the initial public offering in 1995 under the terms of that loan, he was in danger of defaulting, because the stock price of Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts had fallen so low. A default would have made him lose control of the company. Instead, the casino company lent him the money to pay back the bankers. A shareholder sued, accusing the board of directors of breaching its fiduciary responsibility. “T. H. C. R. is a casino and entertainment company,” the lawsuit, filed in 1999, said. “It is not in the business of loaning money. The company desperately needed (and needs) cash to shore up its deteriorating financial condition. ” (The suit was dropped in 2000, shortly after Mr. Trump paid the company back.) Indeed, the company posted losses of $66 million in 1996, $42 million in 1997 and $40 million in 1998. Those losses would continue. Still, Mr. Trump made money, receiving $1 million a year for what was essentially a job. In 1996, he was paid a $5 million bonus. The public company lent him $3 million to cover costs he had incurred while exploring whether to open a casino in Indiana, then forgave the loan when the stock met price targets. The casino company leased office space in Trump Tower in Manhattan, and Mr. Trump’s other businesses were paid to entertain its “ customers. ” It was later alleged in a lawsuit that at least part of the money was paid for performers, including Celine Dion, Tony Bennett and Billy Joel, who had appeared at Mr. Trump’s resort in Palm Beach, Fla. In its response, Mr. Trump’s company did not challenge that allegation. Trump casinos reported paying about $300, 000 a year in “pilot costs” to transport high rollers in Mr. Trump’s jet. The company never disclosed in securities filings just how much the jet was used for casino purposes. The public company’s collapse began in 1999. Just three years after spending about $60 million to buy back the former Trump Regency Hotel and pumping in millions for renovations, the company closed it. The company spent another $26 million to demolish the building, taking a $125 million . In 2000, Mr. Trump fired the chief executive and installed himself in the role, promising he would turn things around. The share price was by then hovering near $3. “Stock price is always a concern,” Mr. Trump told The Associated Press at the time. “I was focused very much on my Manhattan real estate over the last number of years. Now, I’m going to be focused much more in Atlantic City. ” Though he has acknowledged mistakes in piling crippling debt on Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts, Donald Trump has steadfastly maintained that his resorts were the and casinos in Atlantic City. “The casinos have done very well from a business standpoint,” he told Playboy magazine in 2004. “People agree that they’re well run, they look good and customers love them. ” In reality, the revenue at Mr. Trump’s casinos had consistently lagged behind their competitors’ for a decade before larger forces ravaged the industry. Beginning in 1997, his share of the Atlantic City gambling market began to slip from its peak of 30 percent. Revenues at other Atlantic City casinos rose 18 percent from 1997 through 2002 Mr. Trump’s fell by 1 percent. Competition grew more intense in 2003, when the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa opened. The $1. 1 billion, resort redefined the concept of an Atlantic City luxury casino. Revenues at Trump casinos dropped another 6 percent in a little more than a year. Had Mr. Trump’s revenues grown at the rate of other Atlantic City casinos, his company could have made its interest payments and possibly registered a profit. But with sagging revenues and high costs, his casinos had too little money for renovations and improvements, which are vital for hotels to attract guests. The public company never logged a profitable year. “There’s something not right when every single one of your projects doesn’t work out,” said Mr. Roffman, the casino analyst. In a recent interview, Mr. Trump attributed his declining market share in those years to the fact that his three casinos were competing with one another, a tacit acknowledgment that he overbuilt. “That was the bad news,” he said. “The good news is that I saved a lot of money in terms of dealing with costs. ” The year the Borgata opened, Mr. Trump was already asking his bondholders to accept less money, in preparation for a third casino bankruptcy. Yet, at the same time, he managed to pull more money out of the company for himself, The Times found. Since taking Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts public, Mr. Trump had been bound by a “contribution agreement” that required him to engage in the gambling businesses only through his own company and banned him from personally owning more than 5 percent of the stock in any other casino company. So when he bought 10 percent of the shares in Riviera Hotel and Casino, a company based in Las Vegas, Mr. Trump was required to grant an option to purchase the shares to his public corporation. However, when Mr. Trump sold the Riviera shares in April 2004, the company, which was entitled to the proceeds, simply canceled the option, without explanation. The company’s description of the sale did not disclose Mr. Trump’s profit or how he had sold the shares. But in its securities filings, Riviera reported that Mr. Trump had sold the shares in a privately negotiated sale for $10 a share, well above the going price. That would have generated a gain of more than $1 million. Asked to review the transaction by The Times, James D. Cox, a professor at Duke University Law School who specializes in corporate and securities law, said such “material omissions of fact” in the filings by the Trump company could have resulted in criminal charges “if it is knowing and willful,” though such charges are rare. “I think the biggest thing is, it understates his compensation,” Mr. Cox said. At the time, the company was also asking its lenders for a break, and headed toward another bankruptcy. “Basically, that sounds like a fraudulent conveyance,” said David Skeel, a bankruptcy law professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “The company is throwing away money,” Professor Skeel said. “It’s the equivalent of giving big bonuses to your executives right before you file for bankruptcy. ” But lawyers involved in the bankruptcy case said the transaction had apparently gone unnoticed. In a recent interview, Mr. Trump said that he did not recall the transaction or why the board had canceled its option. Months later, in November 2004, the company filed for bankruptcy protection, the third such trip for Trump casinos. This time bondholders took a $500 million loss. Mr. Trump, who stepped down as chief executive but remained chairman of the board, agreed to invest $55 million of his own money in the company, perhaps his first cash investment. He still received $2 million a year under a “services agreement,” which included the use of his name. Shares sometimes traded below a dollar, but Mr. Trump said the problems had been fixed. “For the first time ever, this will be a deleveraged company,” Mr. Trump told The Las Vegas Sun in 2005. Not everyone agreed. Mr. Trump’s longtime investment bankers at Donaldson, Lufkin Jenrette had backed out of a deal with Mr. Trump to invest in the company shortly before the bankruptcy was filed. Suing for $26 million in fees, the bankers said in court papers that the casinos would be back in bankruptcy court within five years because Mr. Trump’s revenue projections were too rosy and the company was still carrying too much debt. “The Trump name does not connote amenities and service in the casino industry,” lawyers for the investment bank said. “Rather,” the Trump name is associated with “the failure to pay one’s debts, a company that has lost money every year, and properties in need of significant deferred maintenance and lagging behind their competitors. ” (The dispute was later settled.) When Donald Trump has been pressed on his casinos’ performance during his presidential campaign, he has repeatedly said he left Atlantic City at the right time. “Atlantic City is a disaster, and I did great in Atlantic City,” he said during a Republican Party debate last September, according to a transcript. “I knew when to get out. My timing was great. And I got a lot of credit for it. ” That would suggest Mr. Trump willingly left sometime around 2006, the year that revenues peaked in Atlantic City and that Pennsylvania allowed its first casino to open, a development that marked the start of a rapid downward spiral in the city. The was exacerbated by the recession that began in 2008. But in early 2009, as Trump casinos lurched toward bankruptcy for the fourth time, Mr. Trump was still trying to hang on. At loggerheads with board members who had been selected by bondholders after the 2004 bankruptcy, he offered to buy all or a part of the casino company bearing his name. He was rebuffed, and he quit the board soon after. Testifying in bankruptcy court in Camden, N. J. Mr. Trump argued that the company could not use his name, since shortly before filing the bankruptcy it had stopped paying him the $166, 000 a month he received under the services agreement. He testified that his brand was worth $3 billion. He also testified that he was personally negotiating the settlement of a lawsuit in Florida that would yield more than $100 million for the company. And contradicting what he had said after the prior bankruptcy, he testified that the company’s debt load was still too high. “This time, the debt is being cut by a lot, and the company is really poised,” he said. There were odd moments on the stand. Mr. Trump, for example, vastly understated his role, saying he “became very much less involved with the company” during years when he was actually chairman of the board and chief executive, and “was on the board in a very minority position” during years when he had been chairman. As in previous cases, others warned that Mr. Trump’s promises should not be trusted. This time it was Carl C. Icahn, the activist investor who had a major stake in the company. (The two men now describe themselves as friends and Mr. Icahn supports Mr. Trump’s candidacy.) Mr. Icahn’s team argued that the remaining debt was still unsupportable, that the Trump name was replaceable, and that a windfall from the Florida lawsuit was wishful thinking. Under Mr. Trump, the company had a long history of making rosy revenue projections and never meeting them, Mr. Icahn’s lawyer argued. But a judge approved the Trump plan and noted that Mr. Trump and his supporters had established “that the Trump brand is worth millions of dollars” to the casinos. This time, bondholders gave up about $1. 3 billion in exchange for control of the company. For the first time, Mr. Trump had no official role at the company he had founded, and he owned no more than 10 percent. In a recent interview, Mr. Trump acknowledged that he left Atlantic City when he did because he failed in his effort to buy back the casinos. But he said the timing worked out well for him, in the end. “In 2009 they were worth a hell of a lot more than they are now,” he said. “Sometimes you’re better off lucky than good. ” Trump Marina was soon sold for $38 million, less than 10 percent of what the company paid Mr. Trump for it in 1996. The Plaza was shuttered. The Florida lawsuit that Mr. Trump had valued at more than $100 million produced nothing for the company. Mr. Trump and his daughter Ivanka sued the company, saying their brand was being tarnished by the ramshackle appearance of the Taj Mahal. Mr. Trump continued to earn money from the casinos. In 2011, the casinos reported leasing a Trump helicopter for $390, 000 and spending $236, 000 for “Trump labeled merchandise,” including $197, 000 for Trump Ice bottled water. In retrospect, David Hanlon, a veteran casino executive who ran Merv Griffin’s Atlantic City operations at the time of the Resorts battle, said, Mr. Trump succeeded in repeatedly convincing investors, bankers and Wall Street that “his name had real value. ” “They were so in love with him that they came back a second, third and fourth time,” Mr. Hanlon said. “They let him strip out assets. It was awful to watch. It was astonishing. I have to give Trump credit for using his celebrity time and time again. ” In 2014, the casino company filed for bankruptcy protection for the fifth time. The chief executive cited the debt level after the 2009 bankruptcy as the primary reason. For a time, Mr. Trump lent a glamorous sheen to the faded resort city. But some of his former investors no longer see the value. “People underestimated Donald Trump’s ability to pillage the company,” said Sebastian Pignatello, a private investor who at one time held stock in the Trump casinos worth more than $500, 000. “He drove these companies into bankruptcy by his mismanagement, the debt and his pillaging. ” | 1 |
Duterte Calls US Admin ‘Monkeys’ for Halting Arms Sales November 02, 2016 Duterte Calls US Admin 'Monkeys' for Halting Arms Sales
(MANILA) - Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte chided the United States on Wednesday for halting the planned sale of 26,000 rifles to his country, calling those behind the decision "fools" and "monkeys" and indicating he might turn to Russia and China instead. Duterte's tirades against the former colonial power are routine during his speeches and he said on Wednesday he once believed in Washington, but had since lost respect for what is the Philippines' biggest ally. The U.S. State Department halted the sale of the assault rifles to the Philippine police after U.S. Senator Ben Cardin said he would oppose it, Senate aides told Reuters on Monday. Aides said Cardin, the top Democrat on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was reluctant for the United States to provide the weapons given concern about human rights violations in the Philippines during Duterte's bloody, four-month-old war on drugs.
"Look at these monkeys, the 26,000 firearms we wanted to buy, they don't want to sell," Dutertesaid during a televised speech.
"Son of a b***h, we have many home-made guns here. These American fools."
More than 2,300 people have been killed in police operations or by suspected vigilantes as part of Duterte's anti-narcotics campaign, which was the lynchpin of his election campaign.
Duterte has vented his anger at the United States for raising concerns about the extra-judicial killings.
"That's why I was rude at them, because they were rude at me," he said.
According to procedures in Washington, the State Department informs Congress when international weapons sales are in the works. Aides said the State Department had been informed Cardin would oppose the deal during the prenotification process, thus halting the sale.
U.S. State Department officials did not comment.
The Philippine police chief, Ronald dela Rosa, on Tuesday expressed disappointment that police would not get the M4 rifles, which he said were reliable.
Duterte reiterated that Russia and China had shown willingness to sell arms to the Philippines, but he would wait to see if his military wanted to continue using U.S. weapons.
"Russia, they are inviting us. China also. China is open, anything you want, they sent me brochure saying we select there, we'll give you.
"But I am holding off because I was asking the military if they have any problem. Because if you have, if you want to stick to America, fine.
"But, look closely and balance the situation, they are rude to us." Article by Doc Burkhart , Vice-President, General Manager and co-host of TRUNEWS with Rick Wiles Got a news tip? Email us at Help support the ministry of TRUNEWS with your one-time or monthly gift of financial support. DONATE NOW ! DOWNLOAD THE TRUNEWS MOBILE APP! CLICK HERE! Donate Today! Support TRUNEWS to help build a global news network that provides a credible source for world news
We believe Christians need and deserve their own global news network to keep the worldwide Church informed, and to offer Christians a positive alternative to the anti-Christian bigotry of the mainstream news media Top Stories | 0 |
‘US undermining Daesh fight to get footing in Syria’ ‘US undermining Daesh fight to get footing in Syria’ By 0 166
The Pentagon’s plan to launch an offensive against the Daesh (ISIL) terrorist group in Syria is only aimed at undermining a successful attempt by the Syrian government and its allies to defeat the terror group, says James Petras, an American political commentator.
US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter told NBC News on Wednesday that the Pentagon is planning a ground offensive to oust Daesh from the Syrian city of Raqqah, the terror group’s stronghold in the country.
Carter, who was in Iraq earlier this week amid the ongoing battle to retake the city of Mosul from Daesh, said the Raqqah offensive would begin when Iraq’s second largest city is cleared.
He claimed that US forces won’t be directly involved in any of the operations.
“This is a ploy to have the US in northern Syria,” Petras said, arguing that the US was seeking to undermine international efforts to defeat Daesh in a bid to reinforce its own foothold in the conflict-ridden country.
“I… | 0 |
Zimbabwe Headed for Hyperinflation…Again Posted on Home » Headlines » Finance News » Zimbabwe Headed for Hyperinflation…Again
We’re sure this time will be different…
From Simon Black, Sovereign Man :
Some people just don’t learn.
After becoming the most famous case of hyperinflation in modern history roughly ten years ago, Zimbabwe is about to have another go at conjuring paper money out of thin air.
I’m sure this time will be different.
You know the story. Starting in the late 1990s, the Zimbabwe government’s policies under Robert Mugabe began to have some devastating effects.
He confiscated private property from established (mostly white) farmers and redistributed the land in very tiny tracts to his supporters, most of whom had no experience in farming.
Unsurprisingly, Zimbabwe’s once-booming agriculture exports collapsed almost overnight.
This destructive, authoritative control pervaded across nearly all industries, and by the early 2000s, the economy was in dire straits.
Unemployment and inflation skyrocketed.
In 2001 alone, retail prices doubled. But that was just the beginning.
Inflation rose so quickly that the government was having to constantly print new denominations of currency– thousand Zimbabwe dollar notes, then ten thousand Zim dollar notes… then million dollar notes… even trillion dollar notes.
By 2007, the hyperinflation was so bad that prices were doubling roughly every day.
My friends here in Zimbabwe tell me stories of going out for drinks at a bar; they’d drink a few beers for an hour or so, after which the bartender would inform them that the price of a beer had just increased by 50%.
People learned very quickly to spend money as soon as possible, and long lines formed at grocery stores as an entire nation desperately tried to turn their paper currency into something useful.
Even a simple loaf of bread became a store of value.
One friend told me how he would buy a loaf of bread in the morning with his spare change, and then sell it in the afternoon so that he would have enough money to pay the bus fare back home.
Some economists estimate that Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation peaked at more than 500 BILLION percent– an incomprehensible figure unless you’ve lived through it.
In 2009 it all ended. The government stopping printing money, and Zimbabwe became a ‘hard currency’ economy.
US dollars, euros, pounds, South African rand, and even Chinese renminbi have been circulating here ever since; merchants and consumers basically use whatever currency they can to engage in transactions.
Essentially there is no Zimbabwe dollar anymore.
But that hasn’t solved any of the country’s problems.
In the late 1990s, Zimbabwe’s GDP was roughly $30 billion. Today it’s just $13.5 billion, than $1,000 per capita.
Independent agencies estimate the unemployment rate here at over 80%, and the average worker makes just a few dollars per day.
It’s not hard to understand why. Taxes, fees, and absolutely insane regulations abound in Zimbabwe.
And even at age 92, Robert Mugabe still maintains dictatorial power and a tight (albeit arthritic) grip over the economy.
To give you an example, the mere possession of a radio in your car (if you’re lucky enough to be able to afford a vehicle) requires an annual fee of $50.
The same applies if you have a television set in your home.
Many imports have been banned outright (leading to major shortages given that domestic production is practically nonexistent).
And whatever few goods are allowed to be imported typically come with a tax bill of 100%.
A friend of mine is in the farming business here in Zimbabwe; every time he tries to invest and improve production, he’s punished with a string of exorbitant taxes on capital and equipment.
And it’s not just the taxes and fees… it’s the mountains of paperwork and bureaucracy that are required across dozens of offices and agencies.
This is literally the exact opposite of what any government should do, especially one that’s experiencing such a prolonged depression.
But apparently these politicians have memories like goldfish. Because their grand solution now is to go back to the roaring 2000s and start printing money again.
They’re calling them “bond notes”, and as you can imagine, the government has already promised that they’ll exercise restraint and print these new bond notes in very limited quantities.
Of course, that’s the same thing they said 15 years ago.
And it’s the same thing that every government and central bank says when they embark on an initiative to print money.
This is such typical thinking, and sadly not limited to Zimbabwe
People in power across the world, including in North America and Europe, rely on this incredibly limited playbook.
They think they can engineer prosperity by going into debt and conjuring money out of thin air.
They think they can legislate and regulate their way to a quality healthcare or education system.
And when the majority of their initiatives fail, or even have the exact opposite effect as intended, they don’t learn from their mistakes.
They simply print more money, pass more laws, and go deeper into debt. Do you have a Plan B?
If you live, work, bank, invest, own a business, and hold your assets all in just one country, you are putting all of your eggs in one basket.
You’re making a high-stakes bet that everything is going to be ok in that one country — forever.
All it would take is for the economy to tank, a natural disaster to hit, or the political system to go into turmoil and you could lose everything—your money, your assets, and possibly even your freedom.
2017 Gold Pandas and 2017 Silver Pandas Are Now Available! Secure Your 2017 Panda Coins Today at SD Bullion! | 1 |
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe says a bill that would have prohibited his state from entering into contracts with Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers “would harm tens of thousands of Virginians,” reports ABC7. [As expected, McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would have allowed Virginia to redirect Medicaid funding from abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood to other federally qualified healthcare centers (FQHCs) that are more numerous and provide more comprehensive care. During a veto event outside the executive mansion Tuesday, McAuliffe said the mansion was the “brick wall” protecting women’s health care, says a report at Richmond . “It’s important for women to have access to quality health care,” the governor said. “This is what matters to Virginia families today. ” ”We are here today because I’m going to veto senate bill 2264.” — @TerryMcAuliffe #IStandWithPP pic. twitter. — (@PPMW_ACT) February 21, 2017, In his remarks, McAuliffe also likened North Carolina’s bathroom privacy law to the bill he vetoed as another example of discrimination that could harm Virginia’s business interests. “Discrimination breeds hatred and we will not tolerate that in the commonwealth of Virginia,” he said. “We treat everyone equally, with dignity and respect. ” Planned Parenthood tweeted its celebration of McAuliffe’s veto of the bill: It’s a great day to have @GovernorVA as a Planned Parenthood supporter. #HB2264 has been vetoed! pic. twitter. — PPAVirginia (@PPAVirginia) February 21, 2017, The legislation was sponsored by Del. Benjamin L. Cline (R) and passed the state Senate last week on a vote. “This important legislation would have prioritized taxpayer dollars toward providers of more comprehensive health care services, and the governor’s veto undermines those efforts to improve health care in rural and underserved areas,” Cline said in a statement. Democrat leaders, however, defended Planned Parenthood. “Attacks on Planned Parenthood do nothing to advance health care,” said Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring (D). “They take us in the wrong direction. ” Lt. Gov. Ralph S. Northam (D) who is making a bid for governor, took the “war on women” approach by saying lawmakers, “most of whom are men,” should let women decide what to do with their bodies. Nevertheless, Olivia Gans Turner, president of the Virginia Society for Human Life, said in vetoing the bill, McAuliffe placed “the abortion lobby” before “the women and unborn children of the commonwealth. ” A similar bill prohibiting Medicaid funds to any abortion provider passed the Virginia state legislature last year. In a strong show of support for Planned Parenthood, McAuliffe went to the abortion business’s facility in Richmond itself to veto the legislation. The Virginia Bureau of Watchdog. org reported that Planned Parenthood contributed more than $1. 7 million to McAuliffe’s gubernatorial campaign in 2013. Abortion industry lobbying organization NARAL donated $56, 000 to his campaign, as well. Federally qualified healthcare centers (FQHCs) provide many more services to families than Planned Parenthood does. Nationally, there are 13, 000 FQHCs — a figure that outnumbers Planned Parenthood facilities 20 to 1. Despite the overwhelming number of FQHCs, however, Democrats who are often supported by the abortion lobby claim that by redirecting funding away from Planned Parenthood, states are preventing individuals from accessing health care. | 0 |
Despite the e-mail FBI probes currently ongoing, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton holds a 6-point lead over her rival Donald Trump. On October 31, 2016, at approximately 4:00 P.m. EDT, NBC announced, “James Comey, FBI Director, released a statement about the Democratic nominee having several emails on a nonsecure server.”
The timing of the FBI probe, while Clinton holds a 6-point lead over Trump, remains coincidental. According to NBC: “A recent poll tracking the election asked voters whether or not the release of Comey’s letter was a publicity stunt to distract them or an attempt to address an actual problem. Due to the timing of the letter’s release, about 56 percent of voters believe the letter was to deter voters from voting for the Democratic nominee and remains unaffected.”
Voters have spoken out about the need for the FBI to probe Clinton, as she poses a threat to Trump as she holds a national 6-point lead.
Update: CNN Politics
A Poll conducted by CNN Politics shows that Clinton has a 5-point lead over North Carolina; a state Trump needs to win.
Written By Jhayla D. Tyson
Edited by Cathy Milne
Sources:
CNN Politics: New Polls Show Tight Clinton-Trump Race Nationally, Battlegrounds
NBC News : Poll: Clinton Maintains National Lead Over Trump Despite FBI Letter
Featured Image Courtesy of Michael Kovac’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License clinton , Doanld Trump , fbi , Hillary Clinton , probe | 0 |
Thu, 31 Mar 1994 21:37 UTC 'Magic trick!' Washington — The White House has portrayed the commodities market trading that netted First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton almost $100,000 in a two-year period as a case of an ordinary small investor who took her chances and came up a winner with shrewd judgment and a little guidance from an experienced friend. But experts and officials in the volatile futures trading industry said Wednesday that what she did would be highly unusual for the average small investor to pull off successfully . And many commodities trading firms would never have allowed such an investor to try it. For one thing, the experts said, her activities involved exposure to possible losses in the unpredictable market for farm commodities futures that substantially exceeded the available capital--losses that potentially could have been greater than her family's net worth if the market had turned sharply against her. Normally, commodities specialists said, an inexperienced investor with such limited assets would not be allowed to run the risks Mrs. Clinton did unless she had the backing of--and perhaps financial guarantees from--a wealthy backer. At the time she made her huge profits, starting with an initial capital investment of just $1,000, Bill Clinton was a rising political star in Arkansas but he and his wife had only modest assets. They did not even own their own home. Yet Mrs. Clinton took surprisingly large positions in cattle futures, earning one-day profits as high as $30,000 . Had the market moved the other way, she could have lost huge amounts virtually overnight, according to market specialists. The White House has insisted that Mrs. Clinton risked her own money, made all decisions herself about when to buy and sell and bore full responsibility for any losses. They have said that she got advice from prominent Arkansas lawyer James B. Blair, but also consulted other advisers and studied the market through the Wall Street Journal . Futures market analysts and officials who have examined the records of her activities, however, question whether a responsible broker would have allowed her to trade the way she did without some kind of financial protection. One commodity trader with 30 years' experience who reviewed the records of Mrs. Clinton's market activity said that her account is highly unusual, both in the frequency and size of trades and in the small amount of capital behind them . "There's no way in the world that Hillary Clinton should have been trading 50 (cattle futures) contracts. That's 2 million pounds of beef. The risk posture is just not consistent with (the Clintons') income and net worth," said this trader, who works for one of the nation's biggest brokerage houses. "We would not let either one of them (the Clintons) trade commodities. In the late 1970s, we required a couple hundred thousand dollars in liquid net worth before we let them in the door to trade commodities . This is not for the faint of heart," the broker said. Another commodities trader, Phil Tiger of Smith Barney Shearson, described the First Lady's successful trading as "unusual and fortuitous, and her timing was perfect." He said that she entered the market just at a point of rocketing growth and rode it until she had made a small fortune. "It surprised me she stuck it out as long as she did. Most novices just take their profits and get out," Tiger said. But other market experts noted that s hortly after Mrs. Clinton ceased trading, her broker, Robert L. (Red) Bone, and the brokerage company, Ray E. Friedman & Co., were disciplined by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for "serious and repeated" violations of exchange rules on margin requirements and record-keeping functions at their Springdale, Ark., office. Margin is the amount of cash a trader must put up versus the amount of borrowed money used to make the investment. Bone was suspended from trading for three years. The brokerage was fined $250,000. White House officials have said that Mrs. Clinton was unaware of allegations that her brokerage was allocating successful trades to clients or that Bone had previously been suspended for trading violations. Elliot Bercovitz, vice president for strategic planning at Lind-Waldock Inc., of Chicago, one of the nation's leading commodities trading firms, said that it was possible at the time to turn a small stake into $100,000 with savvy trading in the booming market in cattle futures. But one transaction caught his and a number of other brokers' attention: the very first trade in October, 1978, when her account balance went from her initial $1,000 investment to $6,300 in one day. There is no documentation for what was traded at what price, but some brokers said that she could not possibly have had enough in her account to cover the large position in cattle futures that she would have had to take to make that much profit that quickly. " There are holes in these records ," said John Damgard, president of the Futures Industry Assn. and a former official in the Richard Nixon Administration who examined the Clinton trading records. "They show the original $1,000 and next day $6,000. How does that compute? "Her $1,000 wouldn't margin the cattle position on that day, necessary to create the profit on the next day. Maybe there was more than $1,000 up front, maybe there were some guarantees." "Most firms weren't taking small individual investors like Hillary Clinton. This is a professional's business. But somehow, Hillary Clinton made $100,000 very quickly , and I would be remiss as president of the FIA to allow the general public to believe this is commonplace," Damgard said. Neither Blair nor Bone was authorized to trade on Mrs. Clinton's behalf, White House officials said. Blair offered "advice but no guarantees," said a senior White House official familiar with Mrs. Clinton's trading who asked not to be named. "He wasn't backing her trades and he wasn't custodian of her account," the official said. On Wednesday, Blair and Bone did not respond to telephone calls from The Times . The White House official familiar with Mrs. Clinton's trading said that the initial $6,300 profit was based on a single futures trade but that the First Lady could not locate the documentation for it. From that first trade, Mrs. Clinton traded aggressively, staking out ever-larger positions and booking profits of more than 3 to 1 over losses. When the market began to go sour in May and June, Mrs. Clinton switched from betting on rising cattle prices--taking a "long" position--to betting that the market would fall, or selling "short." In June, she took a very large short position in cattle futures, selling them three weeks later in mid-July for a quick profit of almost $25,000. Her boldness astounded market observers who have reviewed her record. "That was a very large and aggressive position. . . . This is heavy-duty trading by someone who was not averse to taking risk," said Bercovitz. After that series of trades, Mrs. Clinton stopped trading, took a check for $60,000 from Friedman & Co. and never re-entered the market in any substantial way. "She got the money and walked away," Bercovitz said. "You've got to give her credit." Other brokers question how she could have taken such risks without the means to cover potential losses. " It would take a person of enormous wealth to take on 50 contracts of cattle, as she did ," said a trader involved in similar transactions at the time. "If they lost, where would the Clintons come up with $100,000 to pay for it? They didn't have it." Comment: She may have had an 'in' with people setting cattle prices. As for collateral, the Clintons were in the business of collecting secrets and trading political favors (also known as blackmailing). They never had any problem getting rich with other people's money. | 1 |
Comments
The alt-right’s nastiest bad-boy, Milo Yiannopoulos, has been circulating a false rumor on Facebook about Michael Moore’s longtime support for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, claiming that Michael Moore in Trumpland was a pro-Trump movie. His ill-conceived lie has propelled the progressive filmmaker’s ‘October Surprise’ movie straight to the very top of the iTunes charts with almost 8 million views today, prompting the famed filmmaker to embark on a tweetstorm mocking the Trump supporters for helping shine the spotlight on his film. Righties've doctored clip from my film 2 make it look pro-Trump. 7.9M views! Sending millions 2 iTunes! TrumpLand #1 pic.twitter.com/LHqPO07Va6
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) October 26, 2016
Even the Trumps were fooled by the Breitbart writer’s bald lies, as Donald Trump Jr. himself tweeted out links to Moore’s movie, which the New York Times reviewers said was not actually an attack on Trump but is really, “a paean to his opponent in the presidential contest, Hillary Clinton.” Hey everyone – Trump, Jr. & right wing thinks my movie called "TrumpLand" is pro-Trump! Haha. Pls don't tell them otherwise! #satire #irony pic.twitter.com/difR93uzTg
— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) October 26, 2016
Snopes had already busted Milo’s gross misrepresentation, which used audio from Moore’s movie without context or follow through to make it appear as if Moore had endorsed Trump – a charge which Moore has loudly debunked.
First of all, I make it very clear: I wrote a chapter in my very first book 20 years ago [1996’s Downsize This! ] called “My Forbidden Love for Hillary.” There’s nothing to come around on. I was for Hillary before Hillary was for Hillary. I didn’t go to convert Trump people. I did not want the racists or the crazies in there or we would have never gotten the show done. But we went to union halls and guys that I grew up with — people who normally vote Democrat who are thinking of voting for Trump. That is a huge chunk of the population, especially where I’m from. So I wasn’t there so much to convert them away. I don’t think a lot of them necessarily decided for sure that they were going to vote for him. But I want them to think about the damage they could do by being a legal terrorist on November 8th.
That didn’t stop Milo from broadcasting this video containing a clip from Moore’s movie which has gotten over 6 million views, but without publishing the entire narrative which explained how a vote for Trump might feel good in the short term like Brexiteers imagined their votes might feel this past summer. Moore’s point is that Trump’s populist rhetoric sounds good, but his economic ideas and 19th century tariffs would be terribly damaging to American business, and ultimately to workers.
If you keep watching the movie immediately after the part that Milo cited, then you would actually hear this dire warning by Michael Moore about the abject danger of electing the Republican candidate who’d like to end the First Amendment, destroy America’s economy and bring Jim Crow out of the dark past of the deep south and parade him around the entire United States. This is how Moore described the severe buyer’s remorse felt by Brexit voters:
[Voting for Trump will feel good] for a day. Maybe a week. Possibly a month. And then. Like the Brits, who wanted to send a message, so they voted to leave Europe only to find out that if you vote to leave Europe you, actually have to leave Europe. And now they regret it. All the Ohioans, Pennsylvanians, Michiganders and Wisconsinites of Middle England, right, they all voted to leave and now they regret it.
And over 4 million of them signed a petition to have a do-over, they want another election, but It’s not going to happen. Because you used the ballot as an anger management tool. And now you’re fucked. And the rest of Europe. They’re like, Bye Felicia. So when the rightfully angry people of Ohio and Michigan and Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin find out after a few months in office that President Trump wasn’t going to do a damn thing for them, it will be too late to do anything about it.
But I get it. You wanted to send a message. You had righteous anger. And justifiable anger. Well, message sent. Goodnight America. You’ve just elected the last president of the United States.
Once again a simple fact check shows that a widely conservative writer is lying to his audience by taking video out of context to make an argument that is entirely divorced from the actual facts. Michael Moore would never endorse a candidate like Donald Trump or his Republican friends that share his values and lie to America’s working people about their multi-decade campaign to deliver more money to the top 1% of American households at the expense of 99% of our country’s population. | 1 |
“I must break you. ” I didn’t think I’d spend most of the new season of “The Walking Dead” thinking about “Rocky IV,” but here we are. On Sunday we got another extended seminar in the art of prisoner breaking, Savior style. This time it was Daryl’s turn, and unlike the zombie fighting, ax fetching and son threatening Rick faced, Daryl’s program involved a steady diet of dog food sandwiches, terribly cheery pop songs and the occasional beating. Despite all of that and his emotional agony about provoking Glenn’s murder, Daryl was not willing to subjugate himself to the Saviors. Which is to say, we learned he was tough. Of course, we already knew that. The creators of “The Walking Dead” often talk about wanting to put the audience inside the show — they used it to defend the Glenn Dumpster shenanigans, the gimmickry of the Negan cliffhanger, the appalling violence in the season premiere. After that one, Scott M. Gimple, the showrunner, spoke on “The Talking Dead” about “looking for a way to break the audience” so they would believe Rick would do Negan’s bidding. While Daryl stayed strong on Sunday, the show definitely broke me with all the dog food and sound torture, though perhaps not in the way it intended. If you put us through a wringer without showing us anything revelatory about the character in question, it just gets annoying and worse: boring. So allow me to say “I’m Negan,” or whomever I need to be in order to avoid more “breaking” episodes. Sunday’s hour was broadly intended to introduce us to life in the Sanctuary, the Savior stronghold with a general atmosphere signaled by the title of the montage song: “Town Called Malice” by the Jam. We saw Dwight, the former Savior escapee turned conflicted cuckold, enjoying a spoils sandwich as Negan’s other minions drank and fought. The ballad of Dwight was the other main thread of the evening. You’ll recall that we — along with Daryl — met him, Sherry and Tina last season during their flight from Negan, with Tina’s insulin in tow. Tina met her end when she flopped onto a pair of walkers. After evading a Savior search party, with Daryl’s help, Dwight and his wife, Sherry, betrayed him, taking his motorcycle and precious crossbow. On Sunday Negan filled in the blanks, explaining to Daryl, at great length, that the couple eventually returned to the Sanctuary and were punished for their crimes: Negan took Dwight’s wife for himself and fried his face for good measure, cowing him into productive subordination. “Now look at him,” Negan told Daryl. “One of my top guys, and we are totally cool. ” That’s what he thinks, maybe. We already knew that Dwight wasn’t thrilled by the trappings of the Sanctuary because he said as much last year. “People will do anything for safety,” he told Daryl the first time he met him. We now know what “anything” entails — lots of kneeling, bullying and being bullied, and, for the most luckless residents, tending or serving on the colony’s wall of walkers. Dwight didn’t look any happier about any of that on Sunday, spending most of the episode emotionally ambiguous at best. Sent to recover another escapee, he offers a halfhearted defense of the Saviors — “we were losing now we’re not” — before shooting the man in the back. And his hostility toward Daryl came across as a combination of and projected Daryl’s inner strength a rebuke to the moral compromises Dwight made for his sandwich privileges. “I ain’t never gonna kneel,” Daryl said. “Yeah I said that, too,” Dwight said. By the end, Daryl gave Dwight a pass for his choices. But could a day be coming when the one borrows some of Daryl’s strength and makes a move? • For the record, that unnervingly upbeat tune of torture was a previously unreleased song called “Easy Street. ” (You may know the vocalist, Petra Haden, from bands like That Dog or the Decemberists.) It’s now available on iTunes, in case you hate your neighbors. • Remember the Polaroid we saw a Savior taking at the end of the premiere? So does Daryl, now that Dwight has given it to him. Playing “Crying” in that scene was a bit on the nose, as they say, though it feels churlish to note it. I didn’t love this episode, but Norman Reedus gave a moving performance throughout. • As zombie attacks go, I enjoyed the bit. • That said, are we supposed to think the motorcycle just falling over caused all that damage? And what are we to make of the shooting? Was it a mercy killing? Or did Dwight shoot the escapee in the back in order to preserve him for the wall? It wasn’t clear to me. • What did you think? What’s next for Daryl? Will he and Dwight team up? Which song, played incessantly, would break you? (This is mine.) Please feel free to weigh in the comments. | 1 |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.