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The United States military is “not in a position” at the moment to “collaborate” with their Russian counterparts, U. S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis told reporters at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. [During the press conference Thursday, a reporter asked the secretary, “What does Russia need to stop doing in order for the U. S. to work with it?” President Donald Trump’s Pentagon chief responded: We are not in a position right now to collaborate on a military level, but our political leaders will engage and try to find common ground or a way forward where Russia, living up to its commitments, will return to a partnership of sorts here with NATO. But Russia is going to have to prove itself first and live up the commitments they have made in the agreement. Secretary Mattis also noted that “there’s very little doubt” that Russia has “either interfered or they have attempted to interfere in a number of elections” in the United States and other democracies. During his confirmation hearing held by the Senate Armed Services Committee in January, retired Gen. Mattis described Russia as one of the “principal threats” facing the United States. Nevertheless, he indicated that he supports U. S. engagement with the Kremlin. Mattis told lawmakers: When we identify other areas where we cannot cooperate, we must confront Russia’s behavior and defend ourselves if Russia chooses to act contrary to our interests. Challenges posed by Russia include alarming messages from Moscow regarding the use of nuclear weapons, treaty violations, the use of hybrid warfare tactics to destabilize other countries, and involvement in hacking and information warfare. Buttressing NATO will be fundamental to meeting these challenges, and we will need an integrated strategy that strengthens the North Atlantic Alliance and ensures that the Department of Defense is prepared to counter both traditional and emerging threats. During the press conference in Brussels, the secretary emphasized the need to negotiate with Russia “from a position of strength. ” He also accused Russia of violating international law with its “aggressive” and “destabilizing” actions. “The point about Russia is they have to live by international law just like we expect all mature nations on this planet to do,” Mattis told reporters. “We thoroughly discussed the increased threats facing our alliance,” added the U. S. secretary of defense, referring to America’s NATO partners. “And unified by the threats to our democracies, I found strong alliance resolve to address these growing threats. Russia’s aggressive actions have violated international law and are destabilizing. ” Before the press conference at the NATO headquarters in Brussels Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin urged the United States to restore communications between their respective intelligence services, adding that ”all relevantgovernments and international groups should work together. ” Echoing comments made during his confirmation hearing, Secretary Mattis described NATO on Thursday as a “fundamental bedrock for the US and all the transatlantic community,” but stressed that member states must share the fiscal burden of common defense. | 0 |
Paula Jones Calls Megyn Kelly A ‘Nasty Heifer’ After Contentious Interview With Gingrich [VIDEO]
“Woohoo, he slammed this nasty heifer!” Jones said of Gingrich in a tweet she has since deleted but is screen captured below.
Jones immediately caught flak from Twitter users for calling Kelly a name. @megmcsweeney wrong….she only believes the so called trump victims….hypocrite! | 0 |
Sean Adl-Tabatabai in News , UK // 0 Comments
Outspoken singer Morrissey recently declared that Brexit was a “magnificent” result for British democracy and a slap in the face for the New World Order.
Speaking with Australian magazine Faster Louder , Morrissey said:
“ As for Brexit, the result was magnificent, but it is not accepted by the BBC or Sky News because they object to a public that cannot be hypnotised by BBC or Sky nonsense.
These news teams are exactly the same as Fox and CNN in that they all depend on public stupidity in order to create their own myth of reality. Watch them at your peril! “
Thequietus.com reports:
“The British political class has never quite been so hopeless, but the same can be said for the USA.”
Railing against “media”, he continues: “As for Brexit, the result was magnificent, but it is not accepted by the BBC or Sky News because they object to a public that cannot be hypnotised by BBC or Sky nonsense.
These news teams are exactly the same as Fox and CNN in that they all depend on public stupidity in order to create their own myth of reality. Watch them at your peril!”
In the interview he also implies that he and The Smiths should have been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame before now, while he describes the ongoing commitment to keeping venues he plays gigs at meat-free “liberating” rather than “tiring”. | 0 |
BINDURA, Zimbabwe — Dozens of angry young men jumped off a truck in front of Agrippah Mutambara’s gate, shouting obscenities and threatening to seize his farm in the name of Zimbabwe’s president. They tried to scale the fence, scattering only when he raised and cocked his gun. Zimbabwe made international headlines when it started seizing farms in 2000. But Mr. Mutambara is not a white farmer. Far from it, he is a hero of this country’s war of liberation who served as Zimbabwe’s ambassador to three nations over two decades. But when he defected from President Robert Mugabe’s party to join the opposition a few months ago, he immediately put his farm at risk. “When it was happening to the whites, we thought we were redressing colonial wrongs,” said Mr. Mutambara, 64, who got his farm after it had been seized from a white farmer. “But now we realize it’s also coming back to us. It’s also haunting us. ” Zimbabwe is suffering one of its worst economic crises in years. Banks have run out of cash. The government is struggling to pay its workers. Public protests, including one in July that shut down the capital and a united show of force by the nation’s biggest opposition figures on Friday, have rattled Mr. Mugabe’s government. Desperately seeking loans, Zimbabwean officials have visited Washington and European capitals in recent months, swallowing years of resentment toward the West to promise economic and political reforms, including ending the tortured pattern of farm seizures. Even Mr. Mugabe, now 92 years old and increasingly frail, has pledged to compensate white farmers. But despite the promises, prized farms are at the center of heated political infighting in Zimbabwe. As the battle to succeed Mr. Mugabe intensifies, dozens of political figures who have fallen out of favor, like Mr. Mutambara, are facing the seizure of their farms. With the economy in peril and the governing party split in a scramble for power, land is being used as a vital tool in the struggle for control. “No one is safe,” said Temba Mliswa, 44, who was the chairman of the party’s chapter in Mashonaland West Province before his expulsion from the party in 2014. Mr. Mliswa got a farm belonging to a white Zimbabwean in 2005. When he took possession, Mr. Mliswa said, police officers beat the white farmer and his workers. But last year, Mr. Mliswa said, hundreds of youths sent by the party invaded the farm again, destroying property and beating his workers. They eventually left, but one of Mr. Mugabe’s ministers recently held a rally in which he threatened to take Mr. Mliswa’s farm unless he stopped criticizing the president’s party. “They use the land to control you,” Mr. Mliswa said. Zimbabwe’s political uncertainty has weakened the economy, already hit hard by a severe drought and a fall in global commodity prices. People have been hoarding cash — Zimbabwe adopted the American dollar in 2009 — and taking it out of the country, leaving bank A. T. M.s empty. Mr. Mugabe’s “Look East” campaign, which focused on attracting China as a counterweight to Western influence, has suffered from China’s economic slowdown and recent disagreements over economic policy, though billboards still laud China as Zimbabwe’s “ friend. ” With few other options left, Mr. Mugabe’s government has turned to the International Monetary Fund, an organization he vilified in the past as an instrument of colonial domination. In talks with the fund, the government has agreed to reforms in the hope that it will qualify for loans for the first time since 1999. The fund has sent positive signals about government steps in areas like curbing the size of the public work force and cleaning up the banking sector. “The reforms are in our interest, and not in order to please anybody,” said Patrick Chinamasa, the finance minister. “Whether the I. M. F. is there or not, we have to do reforms in order to restore confidence in our economy. ” But significant hurdles remain. The Zimbabwean government must clear $1. 8 billion it owes to the I. M. F. the World Bank and the African Development Bank. It must also persuade the I. M. F. where a skeptical United States holds the most votes, that it is committed to change. And of all the potential reforms, perhaps none is as sensitive as land. Resolving the issue is central to reviving the country’s economy and ties, virtually frozen for nearly a generation, with Western governments. Zimbabwe has proposed establishing land leases. Currently, even black Zimbabweans who received land seized from white farmers lack land titles, leaving them at the mercy of the authorities. Under a program financed by the European Union and the United Nations, the government has begun mapping the more than 6, 000 commercial farms that have been seized. For the first time, the government also recently held a workshop on the compensation of white farmers. “A year and a half or two years ago, nobody really talked about it,” Christian Beddies, the I. M. F. representative in Zimbabwe, said about land reform. “So if you look at it from that angle, what we are seeing is progress — really a general desire to address the issue. ” Others are skeptical. Nginya Mungai Lenneiye, a former World Bank representative in Zimbabwe who has served in the government, said Zimbabwe might set up a “credible framework” for eventual compensation that would satisfy the I. M. F. But actual compensation, he said, is another matter. “It cannot happen while Mugabe is alive,” Mr. Lenneiye said. “It will be too much a slap in his face. ” Beyond pride, settling land ownership could strip Mr. Mugabe of an important tool he has wielded over the political class. Dozens are believed to be facing threats of losing their farms, according to former governing party members and the local news media. Many were expelled from the party, in the past year because they were considered close to Joice Mujuru, a former vice president who was once regarded as Mr. Mugabe’s likely successor but was purged by Zimbabwe’s powerful first lady, Grace Mugabe. And for all the talk of compensating white farmers, politically connected Zimbabweans are continuing to grab farms. This year, a white Zimbabwean couple were expelled by police officers from their tobacco farm. The new owner was a Zimbabwean doctor living in England the news media uncovered photographs showing the doctor and his wife with Mrs. Mugabe. In 2000, two decades after Zimbabwe’s independence, the country’s best farmland remained in the hands of descendants of white settlers. Mr. Mugabe’s government forcibly removed white Zimbabweans from their farms, which were supposed to be distributed equitably to black Zimbabweans. Thousands of poor black farmers suddenly got access to land, often small plots, bringing them into the economy and spreading the profits from crops like tobacco to a much broader share of Zimbabwe’s population. But officials in the governing party received the best farms. Or, like Mr. Mutambara, the former ambassador, they were given the best tracts of a large farm, usually with the main farmhouse and farming equipment. “Contrary to what we had expected, some people because of their position in government have gone on to acquire multiple farms, huge farms,” Mr. Mutambara said. Mr. Chinamasa, the finance minister, denied that some members of the political elite were violating the government’s policy by owning more than a single farm. He said members of one family could each own a farm, creating the impression that they owned multiple farms. “We have a policy that it was one person, one piece of land,” Mr. Chinamasa said. “The policy is clear. It’s not a problem. ” But if Mr. Mugabe’s government can reward loyalists with prime land, it can also easily take it back, especially with the lack of deeds or leases. Mr. Mliswa said he had received his farm when his uncle headed the lands ministry. Once considered Mr. Mugabe’s man, the uncle was also expelled from the governing party in 2014 and now risks losing his farm, too, Mr. Mliswa said. “There was blood spilt on my farm, there was violence, which I really, really, really, really regret,” he said of the seizure of his farm from its white owner in 2005. “I apologize profusely, but it was because of the system I was involved in. I belonged to a party whose culture is violence. ” | 1 |
Here are the top 10 comments of the week on our digital platforms, as selected by our readers and the journalists who moderate nearly every comment. Some comments were edited for length and clarity. 1. My mom likes to tell a story of taking me to work with her when I was little. I couldn’t go to school, but she had a deadline that couldn’t wait. She set me up in a conference room and told me to read and color quietly until she was done. Angry at being shut up all by myself, I made a sign saying “I HAVE LICE” and taped it to the window of the conference room for all her to see. Kids are unpredictable. — Emily in Minneapolis, reacting to an article about a viral video of a BBC commentator’s two children interrupting his work. This comment received more than 350 reader recommendations. 2. When it was crack with black people, the answer was prison. Now that it’s heroin with white people, the answer is knowledge and help. I wish we could have got that right the first time. — Mike Langhurst on The Times’ Facebook page, reacting to an article about a farmer whose two children died from heroin overdoses, and whose last surviving son is in treatment for drug use. This comment received more than 1, 600 likes. 3. The U. S. cannot have its foreign policy determined by an unelected judiciary. We already have far too many cases of unelected judges nakedly substituting their own policy preferences for those of the president. The courts are NOT the appropriate forum in which to implement foreign or domestic security policy. They have no more expertise or authority in this area than the average Joe on the street. — Airish in Washington, reacting to an article about federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland overruling a revised travel ban from the Trump administration that would have limited travel between the United States and six predominantly Muslim countries. This comment received more than 150 reader recommendations and more than 90 reader responses. 4. I think it’s important to remember the facts. And the facts are that since no immigrant from these six countries has committed an act of terror in the United States. The Boston Marathon bombers were from Chechyna. The Orlando and [Charleston] terrorists were . The best protection against terrorism is strong intelligence (agencies Trump constantly undercuts) and opportunities for immigrants who do settle here to succeed in our society. What happened to our values expressed by the Statue of Liberty? Shame on us. — Ellen Dunne in Madison, Wis. This comment received almost 200 reader recommendations. 5. #ProudToBeDutch This will probably be the only time in my life I’ll do this, but I have to thank Donald Trump! While Wilders and Trump really are very different people, Wilders happily rooted for Trump, and, after [Trump’s] victory, branded himself as a similar outsider who would upset the establishment. At first this did indeed seem to give Wilders some momentum. It’s a good thing our election came two months into Trump’s presidency. I think it showed to a lot of people here what can happen if you hand over the reins to someone like that. Wilders’ decline in the polls started a couple of weeks into Trump’s presidency. — Bart van Engelen on The Times’s Facebook page, responding to an article about how Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician, did not earn a majority of votes during the Netherlands’s elections. This comment received more than 250 likes. 6. Despicable and heartless. No food for hungry people. No housing for the homeless. No health care for low income women. No money for public education. No insurance for low income people. I guess they just want the less fortunate to shrivel and die. All while wasting our dollars on false inquiries because the President digs in and can’t admit wrong. We are in trouble. — Ellen Dunne in Madison, Wis. reacting to an article about President Donald J. Trump’s proposed budget cuts across a wide swath of the federal government. This comment received more than 850 reader recommendations. 7. Programs that help “the poor” are not necessarily the same as programs that help “the forgotten man. ” It’s the people who feel like they never quite qualify for these programs for the poor who voted for Trump. Somebody else benefits, not them. At least that’s how they feel, often for good reason. — Ker in New York. This comment received more than 250 reader recommendations. 8. A devastating harbinger of things to come, but we seem to be accepting small dreams these days. Instead of doing something large and magnificent, like putting a man on the moon or leading the way forward to address climate change, we are abdicating our leadership, our scientific knowledge, and our creativity to instead kowtow to the fossil fuel industry and a way of life that is going to die anyway, and in dying, lead to deaths across many species, including perhaps our own. — Blue in Seattle, reacting to an article about large sections of the northern part of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef that died in the last year because of overheated seawater. The southern section is now at risk as well. This comment received more than 700 reader recommendations. 9. I am the mother of a daughter. She is an ice hockey goaltender. She has met a number of the women on the National Team, including Hilary Knight and the Lamoureux twins. She has skated with them at clinics and exhibitions. She worships these women. She wants to be one of them. I want to thank them for standing up for her. — Liz in New York, reacting to an article about the United States’ women’s hockey team, which plans to boycott the world championships over a pay dispute with their governing body, U. S. A. Hockey. The women contend they are paid far less than the men’s team and do not receive equal treatment. 10. I played Ponyboy in eighth grade. I was a shy punk kid in a poor town intent on turning out like every other burnout in town. With the encouragement of my math Mr. Wanko, I tried out for the play. Being a part of the group that put on that play was a pivotal moment in my life. I wouldn’t be the man I am today without that experience. — Josh Goodpaster on The Times’ Facebook page, responding to an article about the 50th anniversary of the publication of “The Outsiders. ” | 1 |
A photograph of two Amarillo, Texas, firefighters comforting children involved in a car crash is going viral. The photo shows the two men providing comfort to a little girl and boy who were passengers in a car that crashed. The children were not injured in the crash but appeared to be distraught. [“It’s not always just medical treatment we provide,” Amarillo Fire Department officials wrote in a Facebook post. “Here is a photo of firefighters Sam Berry and Jared Davis providing emotional support to two (uninjured) young children that were involved in a vehicle accident recently. ” The photograph took off on Facebook, garnering thousands of reactions, hundreds of shares, and dozens of comments. ‘I’m a firm believer that compassion is a form of medicine,’ firefighting veteran Jared Davis told KFDA CBS 10. “Every guy on the job has probably done this, we just happened to get photographed. ” Firefighter Sam Berry (seen holding the little girl with a stuffed rabbit) said “It’s just what we do. ” He then admitted it was “cool to see” the photo being shared. Facebook users responded with praise for the two Texas Panhandle firefighters. Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX and Facebook. | 0 |
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Thousands of people were sent fleeing for their lives on Monday as rebel fighters lost a large stretch of territory to government forces in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, in what could prove to be a turning point in the conflict, both militarily and psychologically. Residents described desperate scenes of people’s being killed by shells as they searched for shelter after their homes came under the heaviest bombardment yet of the nearly civil war. Years of airstrikes and shelling have destroyed entire neighborhoods of the half of the divided city, once Syria’s largest and an industrial hub. At least 4, 000 people have fled from the eastern districts to the city’s western side and have registered with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in Jibreen, a neighborhood there, Jens Laerke, the spokesman for the United Nations office of humanitarian affairs, said on Monday. As the rebels absorbed the harshest blow since they seized more than half the city four years ago, it seemed increasingly likely that President Bashar would eventually manage to take back all of Aleppo. That would give the Syrian government control of the country’s five largest cities and most of the west, leaving the rebel groups that are most focused on fighting Mr. Assad with only the northern province of Idlib and a few isolated pockets in the provinces of Aleppo and Homs and around the capital, Damascus. Throughout the day, government troops, supported by militias from Iraq and the militant group Hezbollah, advanced from the east and north into the areas of Aleppo. That included Hanano, one of the first areas to fall, in 2012, and Sakhour. militias were also involved in the fight, advancing from the west, from the neighborhood of Sheikh Maksoud, taking the district of Sheikh Fares. Kurdish militias have staked out areas of de facto autonomy in parts of the country but are not entirely aligned with either the government or the rebels. The state news media and opposition activists have portrayed them in the current fighting in Aleppo, however, as working with the government to fight rebels. The Kurdish militias have clashed previously with rebels in Aleppo, who shelled the Sheikh Maksoud area. If the government takes back the whole city, large parts of Syria will still remain outside its control, as Kurdish groups and the Islamic State hold most of the eastern half of the country. But it could effectively spell the end of the Syrian insurgent movements that sprang up against Mr. Assad after a crackdown on protests in 2011. “It’s like doomsday,” said Zaher an antigovernment activist in eastern Aleppo, who could communicate only in short bursts of text messages, as internet connections were failing. Hisham a member of a council in the eastern districts of Aleppo, said he was scrambling to find housing for families who had fled from areas that had been recaptured by the government in the past day. “The problem today, in this moment, is not water and food,” he said, at one point choking with tears. “We are threatened with slaughtering, slaughtering. ” The advances shattered a standoff that had lasted months, after government forces surrounded and besieged the parts of the city this year, closing off regular access to food, medicine and other supplies. The battle of Aleppo has followed a pattern established by the government: Encircle a area bombard it with airstrikes, barrel bombs and artillery hit not only rebels but medical clinics, schools and other civilian structures and wait for exhausted residents to run away or make a deal. That approach has worked in the old city of Homs, and in several Damascus suburbs. But eastern Aleppo is by far the biggest prize the government has tried to win in this way. In the past two weeks of fighting alone, at least 225 civilians, including at least 25 children, have been killed by government bombardments in areas. At least 27 civilians, including 11 children, have been killed by rebel shelling. Despite an outcry from the United Nations and many governments condemning indiscriminate attacks, the world has largely stood by, unable or unwilling to stop the carnage, even as Syria’s civil war has become a proxy war, with Russia and Iran backing the government and the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and others, to varying degrees, backing the rebels. “This is violence that is organized and executed by the Assad government with the willing support of the Russians and the Iranians,” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said Monday in response to the latest news from Aleppo. The Syrian authorities and their allies made several offers to allow civilians and fighters to leave eastern Aleppo under government supervision, but there were few takers. People in eastern Aleppo said they did not trust the government to keep them safe, and government officials said the rebels were not allowing people to leave. But on Monday, there appeared to be little room for compromise. Government soldiers posted a video of themselves playing the drums in celebration on the outskirts of areas, as leaflets were dropped, telling those inside to flee or face death. “We won’t have any mercy to those who confront the Syrian Arab Army,” one flier read, “but for those who will return to normal life, all the essentials of life will be secured. ” Another leaflet told rebels to abandon hopes that insurgents outside the city would break the siege. “Don’t be dumb, think about yourselves and your families,” it read. “Victory is coming for the Syrian Arab Army, think quickly because time is passing and it’s not on your side. ” Some of the thousands who chose to flee on Monday headed for the area of Sheikh Maksoud, where videos showed them scrambling over a berm others went to areas, where the state news media showed them thanking national leaders. Others moved south into areas still controlled by rebels, only to find themselves still under bombardment. Modar Shekho, a nurse, fled his house with his brother, who was killed by a shell in the chaos. Their father, too, was killed as he looked for a gravesite, several of Mr. Shekho’s colleagues said. Mr. Shekho’s friend Abdelkafi a teacher and activist, said in a text that Mr. Shekho would now have to choose between burying the dead, accepting condolences and looking for a house for his surviving relatives. “What should he do?” Mr. Hamdo said. | 1 |
Fox News is like going fishing, for baby boomer men. They see the pretty bait, but they don't see that silver hook hanging beneath the fake plastic lure. And that silver hook, is Israel. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, has taken to slapping journalists who write unflattering stories with an epithet he sees as the epitome of New York gossip: “Page Six reporter. ” Whether the New spokesman realizes it or not, the expression is perhaps less an insult than a reminder of an era when Donald J. Trump mastered the New York tabloid terrain — and his own narrative — shaping his image with a combination of bluster and gossip. He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This New of politicians, now an idiosyncratic, president, has stumbled into the most conventional of Washington traps: believing he can master an entrenched political press corps with far deeper connections to the permanent government of federal law enforcement and executive department officials than he has. Instead, President Trump has found himself subsumed and increasingly infuriated by the leaks and criticisms he has long prided himself on vanquishing. Now, goaded by Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, Mr. Trump has turned on the news media with escalating rhetoric, labeling major outlets as “the enemy of the American people. ” His latest swipe — pulling out of Washington’s nerd prom — came via Twitter on Saturday. “I will not be attending the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner this year,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Please wish everyone well and have a great evening!” He has made a sharp break from previous presidents — and from his own comfortable tango with the tabloids. “New York is extremely intense and competitive, but it is actually a much smaller pond than Washington, where you have many more players with access to many more sources,” said Howard Wolfson, who has split his career between New York and Washington, advising former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “In New York, you can create a manageable set of relationships in a smaller universe,” Mr. Wolfson said. “In Washington, that becomes a lot more complicated. ” There is another fundamental difference: During his Page Six days, Mr. Trump was, by and large, trafficking in trivia. As president, he is dealing with the most serious issues of the day. They involve the nation’s safety and prosperity, and it is the role of news organizations to cover them. If Mr. Trump’s relationship with reporters had a model back then, people close to him say, it was the gregarious, style of Edward I. Koch, the New York mayor. But his mood in Washington has turned darker, and over the last week he has executed, alongside Mr. Bannon and Mr. Spicer, what amounts to the most sustained White House campaign against the news media since Richard M. Nixon’s second term. “It’s like Nixonian times again,” said George Rush, a veteran New York gossip columnist who has covered Mr. Trump for decades. “I just thought he would have a thicker skin. ” Linda Stasi, who chronicled Mr. Trump’s marriage to Marla Maples in the 1990s for two New York papers, said she could have predicted the presidential agita. “He would plant stories and he would get mad if they didn’t come out exactly as he wanted,” she recalled of earlier dealings with Mr. Trump. “It never occurred to him that he couldn’t control everything. ” Now, Ms. Stasi said, “he is shocked that he is not in control of the press. ” Attacking the news media, which has an abysmal approval rating among Republican voters, is sound politics in the short term. But Mr. Trump’s fury is less strategic than heartfelt. He watches cable TV at night and exhorts aides like Mr. Spicer and his policy adviser Stephen Miller to be tougher, according to White House aides. His anger is compounded by his belief that he should still be able to plant and steer stories. That was a lot easier to do when he was running a real estate and branding business with an aggressive legal team that demanded that nearly everyone in his orbit sign nondisclosure agreements. For the first time in his life, Mr. Trump is on the public payroll and subject to a tangle of laws and rules no businessman — especially one accustomed to overseeing every aspect of a relatively small family business — would tolerate. To some extent, the clash with the press was inevitable. Mr. Trump may be noisier and more confrontational than many of his predecessors, but he is being lessons all presidents eventually learn — that the iron triangle of the Washington press corps, West Wing staff and federal bureaucracy is simply too powerful to bully. Mr. Trump’s relationship with the press during the 2016 campaign was rocky and paradoxical. He was, at times, accessible — frequently calling reporters to kibbitz, complain or make news. But as the resentments piled up, his staff, led by Corey Lewandowski, his first campaign manager, made a point of snubbing journalists it did not like and confining reporters to a small pen at rallies. Mr. Trump quickly realized, aides said, that his attacks on the “dishonest” news media were as popular as his hits on “crooked” Hillary Clinton. The addition of Mr. Bannon to the campaign team last summer gave the jostling hostility a sharper edge. Last month, Mr. Bannon described the relationship as “a war” in an interview with The New York Times. “I want you to quote this,” he said. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States. ” Things have deteriorated since then. The White House, on the defensive last week after a series of missteps and leaked stories, sought to shift to offense, targeting the news media as an enemy, in the absence of any more formidable foil in a city now firmly controlled by Republicans. Mr. Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs executive and Hollywood producer who made a fortune from the syndication of TV shows, described the “corporatist media” as the “opposition party” in a speech on Thursday. The next day, Mr. Spicer excluded selected news organizations, including The New York Times, Politico and CNN, from a version of his daily briefing. Then there was Mr. Trump’s attack on “fake news” during his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday, which was met with shouts of approval from the conservative faithful. Reporters back in New York, however, knew that the president’s call for an end to “sources” — meaning anonymous sources leaking damaging details of his campaign’s relationship with Russian officials — did not jibe with his onetime role as a gossipmonger, trumpeting his business dealings and romantic life in phone calls. “I’m against the people that make up stories and make up sources,” Mr. Trump said. “They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name. Let their name be put out there. Let their name be put out. ” “He used to be the one leaking!” Ms. Stasi pointed out on Friday from her office at The Daily News, where she is a columnist. “He was leaking about himself. He would call up with fake accents and pretend it wasn’t him. He would tell us 100 times: ‘Now listen, I’m going to tell you something, but it didn’t come from me. ’” Mr. Trump, who taunted his critics on Friday — “Let ’em say it to my face!” — hid his own identity to push stories in the 1980s, posing as his own man under the fake names John Miller and John Barron. Despite his dominance of social media, Mr. Trump still retains a slightly anachronistic view of the press. He prefers ink to pixels, asking staff members to print out online articles and reviewing the day’s newspapers — black Sharpie in hand — with Mr. Spicer in the Oval Office at the end of each work day. Mr. Trump reads bylines and remembers them. He also keeps obsessive track of his presence in the press. During an interview at Trump Tower last spring, the future president proudly showed off a boardroom filled entirely with stacks of magazines and newspapers featuring his visage. The publications, which covered an entire conference table, ran the spectrum from The Wall Street Journal to The Hollywood Reporter to Newsweek and Time. Framed copies of Playboy, TV Guide and Variety hung on the walls. It was a living, expanding shrine to his political rise — and a physical manifestation of his media fixation. Still, for a sophisticated consumer of news, Mr. Trump retains a brutally simple, almost Manichaean view of his coverage: good stories are good, bad stories are evil. It could prove an untenable attribute for the most scrutinized man in the world. “He loves the press he lives for it,” Howard Stern, a frequent Trump interviewer and friend, said this month. “He wants to be liked he wants to be loved. ” Being president, Mr. Stern added, is not “going to be a healthy experience. ” | 1 |
. Angelina Jolie Exposes Hollywood Satanic S&M Rituals in Leaked Video A stunning video has surfaced in which a 23-year-old Angelina Jolie reveals the true inner workings ... Print Email http://humansarefree.com/2016/11/angelina-jolie-exposes-hollywood.html A stunning video has surfaced in which a 23-year-old Angelina Jolie reveals the true inner workings of Hollywood as she describes her experiences participating in Satanic S&M rituals to close friends. In 1999 an anonymous source secretly filmed Angelina Jolie, then aged 23, speaking to two close friends about the initiation rituals she had recently taken part in while attempting to establish herself in Hollywood. In the following video (below), Angelina describes in detail the gruesome ritual celebrities must go through. During the ritual you are tied up, raped, and tortured by other members. She compares the secret society rituals to S&M, but claims there are differences.At times Angelina looks crazed and possessed while describing to her friends the experiences she had with the Satanic secret society. She explains that she killed a snake as a sacrifice and was tattooed as part of the initiation ritual. It is well known that many members of various Secret Societies get tattoos as part of the ceremony, as a way of sacrificing more blood to Satan. “My snake, I tried, I had to kill him,” Jolie said. It has long been claimed that Hollywood stars and other celebrities need to join the Luciferian secret society in order to establish their career in the cutthroat business and make it to the top, and in the secrets filmed video Angelina can be heard telling her friends that she has encouraged other celebrities to go through the initiation and join the secret society. Shocking Expose: I Was in the Illuminati I’m Going to Tell You Everything The tape also reveals that Jolie showed a recording of a ritual to one of her friends. Her friend, speaking in halting tones, describes viewing the footage, saying: “I only saw that film that she [Angelina] bought over that night. People who are, like, darker… It’s great to be able to see everybody’s sexuality, but it’s so weird when you just… I have the most amazing compromising pictures of people.“ The video has now been posted online, with the identity of her two friends redacted for their safety. Here it is: By Baxter Dmitry | 0 |
Nobody like Debbie Reynolds is ever happening at the movies again. Who’ll be as plucky? Who’ll work as hard to stay as morally pure? Who the hell is gonna be named Debbie? These days, when we talk about “showbiz,” we have to adjust for deflation, because it just doesn’t mean as much as it did when Ms. Reynolds was a star. We’ve all been happy to be at the movies. She always seemed happy to be in the movies. She never ceased to be thrilled to be herself. Ms. Reynolds, who died Wednesday, didn’t so much act as sell — she sold happiness, she sold pragmatic romance, she sold professional stardom. If you were a certain kind of female Hollywood performer in the 1950s, you pushed corniness. But over and over, Ms. Reynolds rose to the challenge of making that corniness seem like a form of patriotism. Ms. Reynolds was born in El Paso, educated in Southern California. She won a beauty pageant (Miss Burbank!) and played the bassoon and French horn in a youth orchestra — basically, she was a showgirl who could make her music. She “arrived” in 1952 in Stanley Donen’s “Singin’ in the Rain,” playing what she was at the time: a ingénue. She stayed one for most of the decade. She worked again the next year with Mr. Donen in the Marge and Gower Champion vehicle “Give a Girl a Break. ” (Compared with the other movie, this one could have been called “Singin’ in the Mud. ”) Her character was a brunette starling named Suzy Doolittle, because … of course. There’s a part for Bob Fosse, who, with Ms. Reynolds, does the singing and most of the dancing. But in their big number together, Ms. Reynolds is as much an athlete as he is an artist. She spent her career outpacing the other men she worked with — Frank Sinatra, Glenn Ford, Leslie Nielsen, James Garner, Dick Van Dyke. Even after Eddie Fisher, her first husband, outpaced her, leaving her at 26 with two kids, for Elizabeth Taylor, she kept going, never appearing to seek a part that would bring what you would call catharsis. Taylor, meanwhile, kept looking for parts to unleash a darker side. She became drama incarnate. Ms. Reynolds was, as they say, a trouper. So she did what came naturally to her: She trouped. And maybe all that shining and all that chastity were cathartic. If Taylor indulged vulgarity, Ms. Reynolds embraced virtue. She was the least ostensibly neurotic of her peers — a class that included Shirley MacLaine and Doris Day. The movie titles got a lot of that decency across. She played “The Singing Nun,” for heaven’s sake. But she also starred in the 1964 musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” a title whose adjective best explains the full Debbie Reynolds experience: maximum buoyancy. “Molly Brown” was Ms. Reynolds in full command of her . In a little over two hours, she goes from Rocky Mountain tomboy to highfalutin femme to a hero of the wrecked Titanic (yes, it was that Molly Brown). And she looks like a leprechaun for the whole thing. She practically shouts and grunts the opening number. But this was the character she committed to: a clump of dirt determined to become a diamond. Molly winds up married to a yokel played by Harve Presnell, who’s as unconscionably strapping as his voice is outrageously strong. Ms. Reynolds, however, doesn’t hit her notes. And she bangs on them harder than she does the piano she pretends to play. The fun of her stardom in this kind of movie is that you can see all of her work. She’s not afraid to pop her eyes or try about a dozen other “obvious” things, including fall flat on her back and do triple takes. Even after the ship goes down and people are on the verge of death, Ms. Reynolds’s face is wet with both water and showbiz. Who needs realism when you’ve got that twinkle? But the more or the movies got, the more suffused with social politics and method acting, the less that breeziness made sense. She works herself mad in “Divorce American Style” with Dick Van Dyke, in 1967. But the emotions don’t leave the surface. During this period, Ms. Reynolds never played parts as complex as Ms. MacLaine’s or Taylor’s. And Doris Day monopolized “sexy virgin. ” Ms. Reynolds became too good for sex, anyway. By her own admission, she wasn’t that kind of actress. She didn’t want to be. Misery wasn’t her thing. Not at work. She became a star in “Singin’ in the Rain,” a musical about how talkies put the silent movie out of business. By the late 1960s, when the movies actually started saying something, Ms. Reynolds’s twinkle started to put her out of business. In 1971, she made a fascinating train wreck called “What’s the Matter with Helen? ,” in which she and Shelley Winters more or less turn “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” into a horror film that actually predicts the onscreen, rooftop brawl, six years later, between Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine in “The Turning Point. ” “Helen” was just about the only movie Ms. Reynolds made during that decade. There wasn’t much place for many of the old stars in the new Hollywood, which was less about appearances and salesmanship and more about psychology and behavior. The classic stars were now the squares. Instead, she sought other places to practice showbiz. Her NBC sitcom, in 1970, lasted for one season, partly because she didn’t like the cigarette commercials. So Ms. Reynolds did lounge shows in Las Vegas. She worked on Broadway. She trouped. Meanwhile, the acting career of her daughter, Carrie Fisher, took off, and then so did the second act — as rehabbed addict and memoirist who chronicled her bitterness over Ms. Reynolds’s mothering and career obsession. “Postcards From the Edge” was Ms. Fisher’s roman à clef that portrayed Ms. Reynolds as a kind of nonchalant, casually narcissistic gorgon of a mother. That incarnation of Ms. Reynolds was cemented by Ms. MacLaine, her professional rival, in Mike Nichols’s 1990 movie adaptation of that book. It’s not a heartless portrayal, but it’s an ambivalent one. It gets at the glorious raconteur Ms. Reynolds clearly was, as well as how for real life she might have been, at least according to her daughter. And Ms. MacLaine used sharp, affectionate comedy to capture what feels essential about Ms. Reynolds: that the show could never go off. And you got the sense that Ms. Reynolds and Ms. Fisher came to accept over the years their very public symbiosis and that Ms. Reynolds had a flair for the dramatic after all. They were relatives. They were neighbors. They made their exits a day apart. There was a moving, human beauty in the extremity of that bond. They so couldn’t live without each other that they couldn’t die without each other, either. | 1 |
Hillary Clinton is reportedly in the process of launching a PAC that will act as a “quiet catalyst” for some of her pet causes. [The PAC is not intended to be something that the former 2016 Democratic presidential nominee will use to run for office herself one day, but it will help congressional candidates in the 2018 election, Axios reported Wednesday. A source told Axios that the PAC will primarily work with groups that began after President Trump’s election, but it will also work with existing groups that have risen in prominence as a result of the election. Clinton has already begun meeting with some of these groups, the source added. Clinton is also back on the speaking circuit, represented by the Harry Walker Agency. Although it is unknown what her speaking fees are as of May 2017, Clinton fetched up to $225, 000 a speech for a series of speeches to Goldman Sachs, and charged UCLA up to $300, 000 for a speech in 2014, When UCLA officials tried to negotiate a reduced rate as a public university, Clinton’s representatives from the Harry Walker Agency told them that $300, 000 is the “special university rate. ” Clinton is also writing a book that is set to be released in September 2017. Although it does not yet have a title, it is already available to on Amazon. Clinton said she took responsibility for her election loss in 2016 Tuesday in an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “If the election had been on Oct. 27, I would be your president,” she said. “It wasn’t a perfect campaign — there is no such thing — but I was on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey’s letter on Oct. 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off. ” Clinton also mentioned that she is now an “activist” and part of “the resistance. ” “I’m now back to being an activist citizen, and part of the resistance,” she said. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Weeks before President Trump’s inauguration, his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, discussed American sanctions against Russia, as well as areas of possible cooperation, with that country’s ambassador to the United States, according to current and former American officials. Throughout the discussions, the message Mr. Flynn conveyed to the ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak — that the Obama administration was Moscow’s adversary and that relations with Russia would change under Mr. Trump — was unambiguous and highly inappropriate, the officials said. The accounts of the conversations raise the prospect that Mr. Flynn violated a law against private citizens’ engaging in diplomacy, and directly contradict statements made by Trump advisers. They have said that Mr. Flynn spoke to Mr. Kislyak a few days after Christmas merely to arrange a phone call between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Mr. Trump after the inauguration. But current and former American officials said that conversation — which took place the day before the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia over accusations that it used cyberattacks to help sway the election in Mr. Trump’s favor — ranged far beyond the logistics of a phone call. And they said it was only one in a series of contacts between the two men that began before the election and also included talk of cooperating in the fight against the Islamic State, along with other issues. The officials said that Mr. Flynn had never made explicit promises of sanctions relief, but that he had appeared to leave the impression it would be possible. Mr. Flynn could not immediately be reached for comment about the conversations, details of which were first reported by The Washington Post. Despite Mr. Flynn’s earlier denials, his spokesman told the Post that “while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up. ” During the Christmas week conversation, he urged Mr. Kislyak to keep the Russian government from retaliating over the coming sanctions — it was an open secret in Washington that they were in the works — by telling him that whatever the Obama administration did could be undone, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing classified material. Days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Vice Mike Pence also denied that Mr. Flynn had discussed sanctions with Mr. Kislyak. He said he had personally spoken to Mr. Flynn, who assured him that the conversation was an informal chat that began with Mr. Flynn extending Christmas wishes. “They did not discuss anything having to do with the United States’ decision to expel diplomats or impose censure against Russia,” Mr. Pence said on the CBS News program “Face the Nation. ” Some officials regarded the conversation as a potential violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from negotiating with foreign governments in disputes involving the American government, according to one current and one former American official familiar with the case. Federal officials who have read the transcript of the call were surprised by Mr. Flynn’s comments, since he would have known that American eavesdroppers closely monitor such calls. They were even more surprised that Mr. Trump’s team publicly denied that the topics of conversation included sanctions. The call is the latest example of how Mr. Trump’s advisers have come under scrutiny from American counterintelligence officials. The F. B. I. is also investigating Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort Carter Page, a businessman and former foreign policy adviser to the campaign and Roger Stone, a longtime Republican operative. Prosecutions in these types of cases are rare, and the law is murky, particularly around people involved in presidential transitions. The officials who had read the transcripts acknowledged that while the conversation warranted investigation, it was unlikely, by itself, to lead to charges against a sitting national security adviser. But, at the very least, openly engaging in policy discussions with a foreign government during a presidential transition is a remarkable breach of protocol. The norm has been for the ’s team to respect the sitting president, and to limit discussions with foreign governments to pleasantries. Any policy discussions, even with allies, would ordinarily be kept as vague as possible. “It’s largely shunned, period. But one cannot rule it out with an ally like the U. K.,” said Derek Chollet, who was part of the Obama transition in 2008 and then served in senior roles at the State Department, White House and Pentagon. “But it’s way out of bounds when the said country is an adversary, and one that has been judged to have meddled in the election,” he added. “It’s just hard to imagine anyone having a substantive discussion with an adversary, particularly if it’s about trying to be reassuring. ” | 1 |
The Trump White House is weighing its options to fire Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Director Richard Cordray. [Richard Cordray directs the CFPB. legislation tasked the CFPB with regulating mortgages and other consumer loans from predatory practices. The Boston Globe reports that the White House will decide the future of the director, seen by critics as partisan, unconstitutional, and abusing his authority to regulate the consumer financial world. One lobbyist said, “They want to fire him. Their legal counsel are looking at every angle. ” Firing Cordray will not be as simple. The CFPB is an independent agency, and his term as director expires in 2018. Trump can only dismiss Cordray for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance. Sources say that the administration examines Cordray’s tenure as director to justify his termination. A Washington, D. C. circuit court ruled in October that the CFPB is, by design, unconstitutional. Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion, “The director of the CFPB possesses more unilateral authority — that is, authority to take action on one’s own, subject to no check — than any single commissioner or board member in any other independent agency in the U. S. government. ” He continued, “The CFPB’s concentration of enormous executive power in a single, unaccountable, unchecked director not only departs from settled historical practice, but also poses a far greater risk of arbitrary and abuse of power, and a far greater threat to individual liberty, than does a independent agency. ” Judge Kavanaugh’s opinion gave a blistering refutation of the CFPB, until this month when a U. S. appeals court agreed to reconsider the D. C. court’s opinion to repeal his job protection. The U. S. appeals court will start in May. Republicans believe that the CFPB has made it harder for Republicans to get credit. Other conservatives contend that accountable to the president or Congress. Reformers in Congress want Congress, not the Federal Reserve, to fund the CFPB. Senator Ben Sasse ( ) said, “The CFPB has done some things that are good, and they’ve done some things . . . that are really bad . There are counties in Nebraska where you really can’t get a mortgage, and it’s because of CFPB and larger overregulation. ” He continued, “If people in Nebraska have a problem that’s actually created by bad by the CFPB, who do they complain to? Who really has the power? He doesn’t report anywhere. ” | 0 |
WASHINGTON — It was a golden year for Rudolph W. Giuliani, a mad dash that would take him to 11 countries on four continents, and by the time 2006 was done, earn him $16 million — a princely sum compared with the $7, 000 he claimed to have in 2001, when he went through a divorce. With salaries from a law firm and a consulting firm, and most of all $10 million from 108 speeches he delivered to audiences around the world, the lucrative year of 2006 will now, along with the rest of Mr. Giuliani’s career after his tenure as New York’s mayor, be getting a new round of scrutiny if he is nominated as secretary of state by Donald J. Trump. The blitz of activity by Mr. Giuliani in 2006 — speaking to Wall Street banks oil, gold mining and pharmaceutical companies and investor groups in Japan and Singapore — is public because the next year, he began a campaign for president and had to file a financial disclosure form. But that public ledger offers the most detailed look at just how Mr. Giuliani managed to become so wealthy after he left office, with assets worth tens of millions of dollars, including homes he now owns in Palm Beach, Fla. the Hamptons and New York City. Mr. Giuliani’s speeches and travel that year and in the decade since were often related to business deals he was pursuing, or even standing agreements he had reached, like one with backers of the dissident Iranian political party known as the Mujahedeen Khalq, which until 2012 was considered a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. They offer a road map of sorts to the kinds of potential conflict of interest questions that are already emerging as Mr. Giuliani’s name is floated as a possible Trump cabinet member, particularly given that Mr. Trump repeatedly mocked Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent, for the many speeches she and her husband gave after they left public office. “When she left, she made $21. 6 million giving speeches to Wall Street banks and other special interests in less than two years — secret speeches that she does not want to reveal to the public,” Mr. Trump said in June. “Together, she and Bill made $153 million giving speeches to lobbyists, C. E. O.s and foreign governments in the years since 2001. They totally own her, and that will never change. ” In particular, Mr. Trump criticized Mrs. Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street banks. But Mr. Giuliani, in a period that ended in January 2007, earned $750, 000 in speaking fees — before the 20 percent cut taken by the speakers’ agency — for eight speeches he gave to Wall Street banks and other major financial institutions, including JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, before its collapse. As with Mrs. Clinton, there is little public record of what Mr. Giuliani said during these events. Mr. Giuliani had rules about keeping his remarks private, as a contract “addendum” to which organizations that invited him to speak had to agree makes clear. Mr. Giuliani stipulated that his remarks could not be recorded, nor could “general press or other media coverage” of the remarks be allowed without his explicit permission. He also had some elaborate demands, including that if he traveled by private plane, it be a Gulfstream IV or bigger, a plane that costs about $40, 000 for a trip within the United States. Some members of the Senate, which will hold hearings and vote on his nomination if Mr. Trump selects him, are already saying they want to learn more about Mr. Giuliani’s work in the years since he left City Hall. “I’m concerned generally about conflicts of interest on the part of prospective members of the administration, in every role,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said when asked about Mr. Giuliani’s business ventures since he left office. “And that concern is well justified in terms of the backgrounds of some of the potential nominees that have been discussed. ” Mr. Giuliani, in an interview this week, defended his activities since he left office, saying he had been open about his dealings with private companies and foreign states or political parties, including the Iranian group. “My ties to them are completely open,” Mr. Giuliani said. Mr. Giuliani certainly kept up a feverish pace. In one month alone during 2006, he gave 20 speeches. From 2001 to 2008, the year he ran for president, he was on the road as much as 200 days a year, according to Anthony V. Carbonetti, a former New York City Hall aide. “Every time I turned, he was calling me from a different country or a different city,” Mr. Carbonetti said. For most of those trips, he had a standard speech that mixed a retelling of leadership lessons outlined in his book and memories from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which ultimately earned him the nickname “America’s mayor. ” “I heard it so many times, I could have given the speech,” Mr. Carbonetti joked. One area of particularly focused travel was Asia. Mr. Giuliani formed a partnership with Sage Capital Growth, a investment firm that was exploring business opportunities in Japan. Mr. Giuliani’s disclosure form showed a $300, 000 speaking fee for one event in November 2005, the largest single fee on the form, which covered 123 speeches given over a period. Mr. Giuliani was separately retained by Mark Advent, a Las casino developer, to help him with his attempt to build a resort and casino in Singapore. Mr. Giuliani personally presented parts of the plan to Singapore’s authorities in hearings during an arduous review process. One of Mr. Giuliani’s most frequent employers as a speaker was HSM, a company that arranges “executive education” events around the world. In 2006, he made eight speeches for the company and was paid $550, 000 (his booking agent kept 20 percent of that). At least three times, in 2003, 2004 and 2006, Mr. Giuliani was to be among the featured speakers at HSM World Business Forums, along with Bill Clinton. The speeches that have drawn the greatest scrutiny are those he gave from 2012 through last year at events organized by the Mujahedeen Khalq, a dissident group of Iranians that holds a rally in France every year to draw attention to the persecution of its members by the government of Iran. Mr. Giuliani was paid for “three or four” speeches he delivered to the group, said Robert G. Torricelli, a former senator from New Jersey who served as a lawyer for the M. E. K. as the group is known, as it sought to be removed from a State Department list of terrorist organizations. Mr. Giuliani, after receiving payments from groups of Iranian immigrants who had ties to the Iranian dissidents, gave rousing speeches at these annual rallies condemning Iranian leaders and the Obama administration for negotiating with them. “The ayatollah must go,” Mr. Giuliani yelled, referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, as thousands stood and cheered him. “Gone, out, no more,” he said, adding that Mr. Khamenei and other leaders of Iran should “be put on trial for crimes against humanity for the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people that they have killed. ” Paul S. Ryan, a vice president for policy and litigation at Common Cause, a nonprofit group that examines special interest influence in politics, said there would be no legal prohibition on Mr. Giuliani’s moving from being paid by the group to a government job. But he still found it troubling. “People would reasonably question his fitness for this political appointment given that he received payments from supporters of this organization, and these are matters he would be charged with dealing with as secretary of state,” he said. Mr. Torricelli said that Mr. Giuliani had agreed to give the paid speeches because he supported the group’s message, and that he had volunteered his time to participate in negotiations in Europe to help prevent further attacks on refugees from the group who were then living in Iraq. Mr. Giuliani’s work earned him a spot on several lists of the speakers in the world, just one spot below Mr. Clinton in one ranking. In one instance in 2006, Mr. Giuliani collected $100, 000 for speaking at Oklahoma State University. His contract with the university, which is public, laid out what appeared to be his standard demands beyond a fee. Besides the requests related to air travel, his team required a sedan and an S. U. V. and an extra S. U. V. for luggage when he traveled to other countries. His room tastes were specific: a “large nonsmoking suite with a bed, on an upper floor, with a balcony and view if applicable. ” He required four more rooms on the same floor for security and staff. Eric C. Money, who led the speakers bureau at Oklahoma State University at the time Mr. Giuliani visited the campus, said Mr. Giuliani’s speech to students and faculty members in the university’s basketball arena had focused on leadership and Sept. 11. Mr. Money said the fee was high, but he did not recall hearing complaints. “That is what Bill Clinton was getting at the time,” Mr. Money said. “It was on par. I did not have sticker shock. ” In the afterglow of his fame, Mr. Giuliani could certainly ignite large rooms. Mr. Giuliani spoke at dozens of events with Zig Ziglar, a motivational speaker. Mr. Ziglar’s daughter, Julie Ziglar Norman, who traveled with her father in those years, said Mr. Giuliani was a crowd favorite, along with her father and Colin L. Powell. “I know everybody always loved what he had to say,” Ms. Ziglar said. “It was always very American. And he was just beloved. That’s the best way I can describe him. ” | 1 |
Videos Florida University Students Latest Victims Of On-Campus Racism Students at Florida Gulf Coast University were greeted by “kill n s” and a drawing of a man hanging from a tree on a classroom whiteboard. | October 27, 2016 Be Sociable, Share! The message on the whiteboard read, “Kill N—–s,” along with a drawing of a stick figure hanging from a tree with a rope around its neck.
Amid one of the most racist presidential campaigns in the United States, a hateful threat with the words “kill n s” and a drawing of a person hanging from a tree were painted on a whiteboard at Florida Gulf Coast University earlier this month, but police failed to launch an investigation.
Officials believe the vandalism occurred on Oct. 12, soon after it was found by a professor at the university. President Wilson Bradshaw called the incident “deeply disturbing” In a statement released Wednesday,
“While occurrences such as this are very rare at FGCU, we strongly condemn this hateful expression which is contrary to the civil and mutually respectful culture of our campus community,” he said.
The person who made the drawing is unknown and the university police department said it could not do anything other than increase patrols in the area. “This was on a whiteboard with the proper type of pens so easily erased, therefore, no vandalism. As there is no crime, there is no hate crime,” Chief of Police Steven Moore said.
Students of color said such threats made them feel less safe in their own classrooms as it was directed at them. “The fact that it is in relation to the way I identify, yeah that’s harsh, that’s … kinda scary,” a student named Cassie told WBBH TV channel.
Attacks on Black and other people of color have skyrocketed over the past few years amid a heated national debate and unrest over police killings of unarmed Black people.
The anti-police brutality Black Lives Matter movement was countered by pro-police groups rallying under slogans such as “White lives matter” and “All lives matter” and arguing that African-Americans do not suffer from systemic racism in the country.
Earlier this month, the historic Black Ashburn Colored School in Virginia was vandalized with racist graffiti , including swastikas and “white power” slogans, as it was being renovated by a group of local students who looked to turn it into an education museum.
Anti-Black sentiment in the U.S. seems to be on the rise. Just last week, a group of white students at Texas State University stormed out of an anthropology class after the professor explained all humans were descended from Africa.
The walkout caused heated debate, with the remaining students chanting “Black lives matter,” and criticizing the racist attitudes of their classmates.
The news comes amid a presidential electoral season that saw white supremacist and neo-Nazi activists using the campaign of Republican candidate Donald Trump to become more vocal and push their racist agendas.
Nearly half of Trump’s supporters described African-Americans as more “violent” than whites, according to a Reuters poll in June. The same proportion described African-Americans as more “criminal” than whites, while 40 percent described them as more “lazy” than whites.
But racist views crossed party boundaries in the country. The same poll found that one-third of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton supporters described Black people as more “violent” and “criminal” than whites, and one-quarter described them as more “lazy” than whites.
Watch ‘Racial slur in FGCU classroom stirs student outrage’: | 0 |
The first person I wanted to call when I heard that Colombia’s government and the country’s largest leftist rebel group had reached a peace deal last week was my father. In 1999, my father, Jaime Correal Martinz, was kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. He was captured by a gang on his way home from work driven high into the mountains outside Bogotá, the capital and turned over to the rebel group, which held him for ransom for more than eight months. While my stepmother, Samantha, negotiated with the rebels and took care of my younger siblings Nicolas and Lorena in Bogotá, and I finished my sophomore year of college in the United States, my father was moved from camp to camp, hidden under the jungle canopy as military planes swarmed above. He slept in 38 different places. He wasn’t targeted for any particular reason. At the time, kidnapping for ransom was rampant in Colombia, one of the ways the rebels financed the insurgency, along with trafficking cocaine, and he was presumed to be wealthy. What would my father think of the peace deal with his kidnappers? While my father was being held, his travel company went out of business. We lost everything. And we were among the lucky ones. The conflict, involving the FARC, the military and brutal paramilitaries, is believed to have claimed more than 220, 000 lives, left 40, 000 people missing and displaced more than five million. The news that the FARC rebels have agreed, after four years of negotiations, to permanently lay down their arms, disband and join the political system is a cause for celebration for some in Colombia. It is the closest the country has ever come to ending its conflict, the longest war in the Americas. Peace in Colombia, the elusive dream of millions who have marched in the streets, seems finally within reach. President Juan Manuel Santos called the accord the door to “a new stage in our history. ” Yet on Oct. 2, when Colombians will have the final say on the peace deal by voting in a referendum, the decision will not be simple. Under the agreement, FARC fighters will receive amnesty for crimes such as drug trafficking. Those who confess to crimes like kidnapping and executions will be subject to five to eight years of restricted mobility, but no prison time. During that time, they are expected to perform social work in communities affected by the conflict. The deal faces significant political opposition, and many Colombians are furious. My father seldom mentioned his time with the FARC after he came home. Once, at the grocery store, he pointed to a package of crackers. “That’s what they gave us to eat during marches,” he said. Another time, he told me that rubber boots made a good pillow if you slipped one inside the other. Those moments offered glimpses of the distant world he had been pulled into, and how it lingered. Generally, and surely for our benefit, he made light of the kidnapping, calling it “my ” and a vacation. A decade after the fact, he told me more. I had gotten a grant from Transom. org to make a radio documentary, and we met in Bogotá. (A version of the documentary later aired on “This American Life. ”) Sitting at a friend’s kitchen table, he doodled on a notepad, smoked and talked. Yes, he was fed, even given cigarettes. No, he wasn’t kept in chains. But he was held alone for six months, confined to his or caleta, where at night he lay awake thinking, or listening in secret to a radio program that aired messages for hostages. He was also forced to trek for days over punishing terrain. Once, when the military moved into a area, he walked for 11 days straight, climbing a mountain pass in driving rain. Among the hostages on that march were the Ángulos, a couple in their late 60s who had been kidnapped outside Bogotá. At some point, he told me, Carmenza Ángulo fell behind — her feet had swelled and wouldn’t fit into her boots. As she limped along in bare feet, her husband, Gerardo, stayed by her side. A FARC fighter circled back with them. When my father’s group stopped to rest for the night, the fighter reappeared the Ángulos did not. The guerrilla had led them into the trees and, acting on orders, killed them. They were too slow. Their children paid a ransom and searched for them for years in vain, their son Héctor Ángulo told me. Eventually, Héctor returned with a team of investigators and captured guerrillas to look for their bones. My father saw the complexity of the conflict from up close: the FARC’s capacity for cruelty, but also the helplessness, if not innocence, of some young fighters. A few of his armed guards were just 13. Many fighters had been taken from their homes and forced to join as children. One of these fighters played a role in his release. On my father’s 265th day in captivity, as he languished in a camp with several hostages, gunfire erupted outside their caletas. It was the Colombian military, with around 60 soldiers. They fired machine guns, threw grenades. When the noise stopped, a soldier wearing a bandanna approached. “Guys,” my father remembered him saying, “you’re free men. ” The rebels had fled. Among the soldiers was a figure smaller than the others, in a balaclava. After the ambush, she took off her mask, and my father recognized her. She was about 17, and a FARC fighter. He had seen her washing dishes in a camp mess hall. She had escaped, risking execution by the FARC, and turned herself over to the military. If it would free her brother, who had been forced into the FARC, she would lead it to the captives, including a hostage, the journalist Guillermo Cortés. She helped free five hostages. At the time, it was one of the largest rescues in Colombia’s history. (It is not clear what happened to her, or to her brother.) After the rescue, my family immediately moved to Panama, where we had family roots. We rarely returned to Colombia, but my father kept track of the news. In the years that followed, the FARC suffered a long string of battlefield setbacks, which ultimately led it to peace talks in Oslo and Havana. Through the peace process, my father remained deeply skeptical of the guerrillas, but hopeful. Was the deal finally reached last week something that he, a victim of the FARC, could endorse? Sadly, I couldn’t call and ask. My father died in June, after a series of strokes, at 63. In the end, the conflict outlived him, if only by a couple of months. After he died, as I prepared to fly back home to New York from Panama, I opened his closet and stood amid his shirts and suits. Seventeen years before, when he was taken from us the first time, I had done the same thing. Then, somewhat miraculously, he had returned. He was reunited with his wife, Samantha, and together they washed away the dank stench of the jungle before he slipped back into his clean, old clothes. With somewhat more effort, he let go of the rancor, the outrage at what had happened, quite senselessly, to him and to our family. Like so many victims of Colombia’s conflict now, in his time, he chose peace. “Did you know Jaime wanted peace with the FARC?” Samantha texted me over the weekend, adding a little heart. That did not mean that he had forgotten. He carried what he saw in that jungle within him forever. | 1 |
The letter from FBI Director Comey announcing the reopening of the Clinton email investigation is already being blown up into more than it is.
Here is the letter via CNN’s Jake Tapper: FBI Dir Comey letter to congressional committee chairs re discovery of "new emails…pertinent to the investigation" pic.twitter.com/y4gvHiILLn
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) October 28, 2016
As Republicans cheer because they think that they have been thrown an election lifeline, read the whole letter and look at what it says. The letter does not say that Hillary Clinton did anything wrong. The letter states that emails were found that were pertinent to the email investigation while looking into an unrelated matter.
The letter FBI Director Comey reads like what it is, an update on an investigation. The FBI is dotting the Is and crossing the Ts. Comey’s letter destroys the Republican claim that there was a conspiracy to cover up Clinton’s emails. Republicans, including Donald Trump, have spent months criticizing Comey’s investigation, but it turns out that they were wrong.
It would take something unprecedented and dramatic to change the FBI’s original findings. Director Comey made it clear that the agency’s work might not be completed before the election.
The email story that Republicans and the media love, but voters have never cared about is back in the news, but it remains an empty scandal.
The FBI’s reopened investigation does open the door for Republicans to continue their bogus witch hunt if Hillary Clinton wins the White House. Unless voters want two more years of conspiracy investigations instead of action, today’s developments have made voting for Democrats in House and Senate contests more vital than ever. | 0 |
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In a conference call with reporters, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager said that FBI Director Comey’s letter is backfiring and energizing Clinton’s volunteers to work harder and her supporters are voting in even bigger numbers.
Clinton campaign chair John Podesta called Comey’s letter long on innuendo, short on facts. Podesta said the more information that comes out, the more this seems overblown. Podesta went off on Rep. Jason Chaffetz for distorting the facts and undermining his own legitimacy by claiming that the investigation was reopened. Podesta said that Comey had provided selective information that allowed partisans to distort the facts.
Podesta said there’s no evidence of wrongdoing, no charge of wrongdoing. He said if all the media reports are true, about the investigation having nothing to do with Hillary Clinton, it’s hard to see how this amounts to anything.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair called on Comey to provide answers to be public.
Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook said that the Comey letter is motivating Clinton volunteers and supporters:
Based on the anecdotes I am hearing from out team on the ground, this situation has created an urgency and intensity among our volunteers and activists that was already high because we are so close to the election. Our volunteers are rallying around Hillary They know what a fighter she is.
….
They are turning out, not only to have her back but to rally our supporters to turn out and vote, as early voting goes into full swing. We’re not just seeing this in our offices, on the ground, but also in our online, in the online space as well. I think this is; we already had momentum and wind behind our back going into yesterday. I think that this has only increased the momentum that we’re feeling among our activists on the ground.
Later Mook suggested that the Comey letter is helping the Clinton campaign by adding fuel to their early voting fire. It is likely that the Comey letter will backfire on Republicans and motivate Democrats to get out and support their nominee.
An early report from a pollster in two swing states saw no impact from the letter on voters. Hillary Clinton may end up benefiting from Comey’s actions because the FBI Director might have gotten rid of the one thing that could have beaten her.
With one written paragraph, James Comey may have destroyed Democratic complacency. | 0 |
Your lack of knowledge and cowardice is appalling! You do not now, nor have ever held a TS/SCI clearance, never undergone an SBI, and have never worked in a SCIF. If you had, you would know voters were forced to make the best choice they could, given the options. It is easy to throw around insults, comparing people to Hitler, something you would never have the courage to do face to face with a man. Your cowardice is obvious. | 0 |
Feds: 275,000 Born to Illegals in One Year, Would Fill City the Size of Orlando Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner, October 26, 2016
Moms in the United States illegally gave birth to 275,000 babies in 2014, enough birthright U.S. citizens to fill a city the size of Orlando, Florida, according to an analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
The data showed that newborns to illegals accounted for 7 percent of all births in 2014, according to the analysis from the Pew Research Center.
{snip}
The analysis also found that the growth in the birthrate of America is entirely driven by immigrants.
“While the annual number of babies born in the U.S. has fluctuated in recent years–most markedly during the Great Recession when there was a significant drop in births nationwide–the trajectory over the past four decades or so has been upward. In 2014, there were 4 million births in the U.S., compared with 3.74 million in 1970,” said Pew.
“This growth has been driven entirely by the increasing numbers of babies born to immigrant women. In 2014, immigrant women accounted for about 901,000 U.S. births, which marked a threefold increase from 1970 when immigrant women accounted for about 274,000 births. Meanwhile, the annual number of births to U.S.-born women dropped by 11 percent during that same time period, from 3.46 million in 1970 to 3.10 million in 2014,” added Pew. | 0 |
Email
March 11, 2011: A massive earthquake of 9.0 magnitude struck off the coast of Japan, triggering a devastating tsunami, which left parts of the country in utter shambles. Official reports claim that 15,891 people lost their lives, 6,152 were injured and 2,584 were reported missing.
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This was the most powerful earthquake ever recorded to have struck Japan, and the fourth most powerful in the world, since modern record keeping began in 1900. [1] This earthquake was so intense in magnitude, that it shifted Honshu, the main island of Japan by an estimated eight feet and actually shifted the Earth’s axis by between four and ten inches! Scroll Down For Videos Below
Japan is a nation containing many nuclear reactors which produce roughly 30% of the nation’s electricity. [3] The majority of operable nuclear reactors are right along the coast, in one of the most seismically active areas on the entire planet! Map which shows the locations of Japan’s, reactor sights. Notice how they are along the coast, in perhaps the most seismically active location on the entire planet.
The powerful tsunami caused complete devastation of three of the six nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi facility, the cores of which melted within the first three days. In November 2011, the Japanese Science Ministry reported that radioactive cesium had contaminated 11,580 square miles of the land surface of Japan, [4] with an additional 4,500 square miles contaminated.
The destroyed reactor sites have been dumping hundreds of tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean, every single day for the past four years and the devastating results are now becoming plainly obvious. Radioactive cesium (an alkali metal) rapidly contaminates an ecosystem and poisons the entire food chain, and this waste offshoot has been detected in Japanese foodstuffs over a 200 mile radius of the Daiichi facility. [6]
Cesium and other radioactive waste products are bioaccumulative, meaning that they accumulate in an organism at a rate faster than the organism can eliminate it. Of course the Japanese government and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) have blatantly lied about the amount of radioactive waste that has been leaking into the Pacific, however, the devastating results have been impossible to ignore.
I’ve wondered since the beginning of this disaster-which has already shown to be far worse that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Ukraine, in 1986-why the world’s top, leading scientists have not come together to figure out how to stop the leaking radiation. The reason is because no one knows how to deal with this catastrophe.
In March of 2015, it was reported in the Times of London, that Akira Ono, the chief of the Fukushima power station admitted that the technology needed to decommission the three melted-down reactors does not exist, and he has no idea how it will be developed. [7]
More recently, Naohiro Masuda, the decommissioning chief of the Fukushima Daiichi Decommissioning Company, also stated that the technology does not exist to remove the highly radioactive debris from the damaged reactors:
Ono also claimed that decommissioning the plant by 2051 may be impossible without huge leaps in technological advancement. [8] It’s also been estimated that plutonium fallout has been 70,000 times greater than atomic bomb fallout in Japan! [9]
Japan has also seen a skyrocketing of childhood Cancer rates, particularly, thyroid Cancer. [10] As of August, 2013, TEPCO admitted that between “20 trillion to 40 trillion becquerels [11] of radioactive tritium may have leaked into the sea since the disaster.” [12] Since it’s been shown over and again, that TEPCO repeatedly lied and covered up the true extent of the disaster, that number is most likely far greater.
While official sources keep claiming that there is no danger from the leaking radiation, sea life all along the west coast of the US has been dying in alarming numbers, and many fish and sea creatures tested off the west coast have shown extremely high amounts of radioactivity, that far exceeds safe limits. In actuality though, there really are no “safe” limits of radiation.
The Japan Times reported on Feb 25 th , 2015, that cesium and other radioactive waste was pouring from the reactor one site, directly into the ocean. [13] TEPCO did nothing to prevent the leak and simply ignored the problem for close to a year! [14]
There has been a massive die-off of marine life along the west coast of the US, which has scientists “baffled.” Do you mean to tell me that scientists studying this death of the Pacific haven’t taken into account the possibility that it could be caused by the hundreds of tons of nuclear waste that has been pouring into the Pacific each day for the last four years? So few dare to admit the extent of damage caused by this disaster or the fact that it is forcing us to face the possibility of our own extinction. What happens when the planet’s largest body of water is rendered lifeless on a planet made up mostly of water? What happens when the radiation accumulates in the atmosphere and is spread throughout the world by the jet stream? Massive die-off of sea lions along the west coast has left scientists “baffled.” Might it have something to do with the hundreds of tons of radioactive waste that has been pouring into the Pacific each day for four years?
In 2013, the Huffington Post reported that massive amounts of krill washed up along the west coast in a 250 mile stretch from Oregon to California. [15] Krill is an essential part of the ocean’s food chain. When marine life on the low end of the food chain dies off, the larger animals that feed on that marine life starve to death. Carcasses of dead sea lions and seals that were examined revealed high doses of radiation, [16] and yet, mainstream scientists remain “baffled.” This dead sea lion showed extremely high levels of radiation near its heart and liver. The Pacific Ocean is dying at an alarming rate, and no one seems to notice it, or, they simply put on the blinders and embrace abject denial.
It has also been widely reported that massive amounts of starfish have appeared along the west coast that have literally turned to mush. USA Today reported on this, [17] and of course they claim that no one knows why; it’s a mystery. Might it have something to do with the fact that the Pacific has become a toxic, nuclear waste dump? Of course not, that’s just crazy, paranoid, tin-foil-hat talk. The level of cognitive dissonance that ensnares the minds of most people is truly staggering to me. USA Today headline from Dec, 2013. No one knows why? Might it have something to do with the fact that the Pacific Ocean has become the world’s largest, toxic waste dump? It’s also been reported that 98% of the sea floor of the Pacific is covered with dead sea life. [18] Not surprisingly, mainstream scientists blame this massive death of the Pacific on global warming.
“In the 24 years of this study, the past two years have been the biggest amounts of this detritus by far,” said marine biologist Christine Huffard, who works at the research station off of California. “Multiple other stations throughout the Pacific have seen similarly alarming increases.” [19]
The feeble efforts of TEPCO and the Japanese government to stop the radioactive leaks, with ice walls, dams, and other paltry, makeshift remedies have been in vain. Nobody knows how to contain the radioactive leaks, so the Japanese govt. and TEPCO do the next best thing; they lie about it and downplay the dangers. Business as usual!
The head of the National Cancer Research Center in Japan, reported in Feb, 2015, that Cancer rates have skyrocketed by 6,000% and that it was being “swept under the rug.” [20] It must be global warming causing this unprecedented rise in Cancer rates eh? In Jan, 2015, Japan’s nuclear regulator approved TEPCO’s ingenious plan to simply drain waste-water into the ocean. [21]
In Nov, 2014, Ken Buesseler, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution claimed:
“My biggest concern is what’s going on in Japan today, and how that might make its way across to our coast. We know it’s still leaking because we’re measuring higher levels off Japan to this day. Even just the basic question, ‘How much radioactivity was released at Fukushima ?’ I can’t answer that today. We may never be able to because of the lack of sampling, particularly in the ocean.” [22]
An experienced, veteran sailor by the name of Ivan Macfadyen, who has sailed the Pacific taking part in races, stated in an interview that:
“It’s dead…for thousands of miles there was nothing [between US and Japan] like sailing in a dead sea…everything’s all gone. Just talking about it makes me feel like I want to cry. No birds, no fish, no sharks, no dolphins, no turtles, nothing.” [23]
This is the legacy that humanity is leaving for their posterity; a dead world. Humanity has allowed itself to be ruled by a ruthless, psychopathic gang of parasites whose greed and insatiable lust for power knows no bounds. There really is no one to blame but ourselves. The information in this article is not even a scratch in the surface of the true magnitude of this nuclear disaster. The radiation will bioaccumulate in the ocean and atmosphere for centuries to come. Mankind is staring our very extinction in the face. This is an opportunity for humanity to face the force of our own destructiveness, and to come together as one family. Unfortunately, the average person’s thoughts seem to be firmly fixated on the sports scores, who’s blowing who in the latest, celebrity scandal or the latest pop culture fad. Unfortunately, the world’s masses suffer from a serious condition known as, Rectal-Cranial Inversion!
Let us also not forget the Deepwater Horizon disaster that occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20, 2010. Massive amounts of oil leaked into the gulf, and in the subsequent cleanup attempt, the well was capped which caused a crack in the seabed, causing extreme amounts of oil to pour into the gulf, killing marine life in droves and destroying the fishing industry in that region. A highly toxic and controversial dispersant called Corexit was dumped into the sea, and the results have been catastrophic.
Fishermen have reported sea creatures being caught in the gulf that had lesions on their bodies and all sorts of other anomalies including mutated sea life, eyeless shrimp and ulcers Related Items: | 1 |
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey lied to reporters when he said he did not believe any senior member of his staff knew about the plot to block traffic to the George Washington Bridge, one of his aides told a colleague in a text message included in a federal court filing on Wednesday. “Are you listening?” the aide, Christina Genovese Renna, texted a colleague while Mr. Christie spoke at a news conference. “He just flat out lied,” Ms. Renna wrote. Then she added that if certain emails were discovered, “it could be bad. ” Ms. Renna’s text exchange, submitted as part of a filing in United States District Court in Newark, is the first piece of evidence to surface that suggests that Mr. Christie may have known more about the scheme than he has admitted. A former ally of the governor, David Wildstein, who pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy in the case, has contended that evidence exists to show that Mr. Christie knew about the plot as it was being carried out. But Ms. Renna is the first former member of Mr. Christie’s staff to accuse him of lying about the matter. Ms. Renna sent the texts on Dec. 13, 2013, as Mr. Christie was fielding questions from reporters about his knowledge of the scheme to tie up traffic three months earlier on the New Jersey side of the bridge. The filing was made by lawyers for Bill Baroni, who was Mr. Christie’s top executive appointee at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the bridge. Federal prosecutors contend that two lanes leading to the bridge were abruptly closed to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, N. J. for declining to endorse Mr. Christie’s bid for . Mr. Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly, a former deputy chief of staff to Mr. Christie, a Republican, are scheduled to stand trial in the case next month. Mr. Christie, speaking to reporters Wednesday morning after filling in as a host of a sports talk radio show in New York City, disputed Ms. Renna’s claim, according to The Associated Press. “I absolutely dispute it,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s nothing new. There’s nothing new to talk about. ” But the text messages from Ms. Renna had not come to light before Wednesday, even when she testified before a legislative committee in Trenton that was investigating the scheme. During that testimony, in May 2014, Ms. Renna said she had deleted an email at the request of Ms. Kelly, who was her superior. But Ms. Renna made no mention of the text messages, nor did she turn them over to the committee. “All available information strongly indicates that Ms. Renna deleted those texts and never turned them over to the Legislature or the U. S. Attorney’s Office,” the court filing states. It is unclear when they were deleted and whether it was before or after federal prosecutors announced on Jan. 9, 2014, that they were investigating the matter, the filing states. That was weeks after the legislative committee issued subpoenas to seven people, including Mr. Baroni and Mr. Wildstein. The day after those subpoenas were issued, Mr. Christie held a news conference and said he had been assured by his senior staff members that they had been unaware of any plot to punish Mark Sokolich, the mayor of Fort Lee. Mr. Christie said his campaign chief, Bill Stepien, had also vowed that he had no knowledge of such a plot. “Oh, yeah, I’ve spoken to Mr. Stepien, who’s the person in charge of the campaign, and he has assured me the same thing,” Mr. Christie said during the news conference. That is when Ms. Renna texted Peter Sheridan, a member of Mr. Christie’s campaign staff, suggesting that the governor was not telling the truth. “He just flat out lied about senior staff and Stepien not being involved,” she texted. Mr. Sheridan responded that Mr. Christie was “doing fine” and “holding his own up there,” according to the filing, which says that Mr. Sheridan turned over the messages. Ms. Renna replied: “Yes. But he lied. ” Kevin Marino, a lawyer for Mr. Stepien, said in a statement that any suggestion that his client was “involved in a conspiracy to close access lanes to the George Washington Bridge based on a text message exchange that has been in the government’s possession for years is categorically false and irresponsible. ” The revelation of Ms. Renna’s text messages may pose a legal problem for her, said John S. Wisniewski, a Democratic assemblyman who was a leader of the committee that investigated the matter. Mr. Wisniewski, a lawyer, said the messages should have been provided to the committee, which asked for all relevant documents. “In my opinion, there’s an issue for her in having intentionally destroyed evidence,” Mr. Wisniewski said, citing a New Jersey statute that makes it a crime for a person to destroy a record to make it unavailable to an official investigation. At the time, the committee was more concerned with Ms. Renna’s deleted email. She had received an email from Ms. Kelly, who wrote a response — “Good” — upon hearing that Mr. Sokolich was upset about the traffic jam in his town. Ms. Renna testified that Ms. Kelly called her one evening and asked her to delete that message. Ms. Renna testified that she did so — after she “protected” herself by saving a copy. Henry Klingeman, a lawyer for Ms. Renna, said she would “answer questions publicly when she testifies at the upcoming trial, not before. ” | 1 |
By: The Voice of Reason | Several schools across the nation have decided to close on Election Day over fears of possible violence in the hallways stemming from the fallout from the heated rhetoric that consumed the campaign trail. As We the People of the United States prepare for the election of the 45th President of the republic, with each passing day our country is becoming increasingly more polarized, and tensions continue to build between opposing sides. As evidence of the rising tensions, one needs to look no further than some of biggest stories of this past week, stories that were shockingly underreported by a mainstream media just as corrupt and dishonest as those they cover. Arguably the three largest stories of the week have been the Chairman of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff reminding U.S. troops of the oath they took as members of the United States military, and of their required commitment to the chain of command throughout this election season, a former member of Congress calling for an armed revolt if Hillary Clinton wins (alleging there is no way for her to “legitimately” win without massive fraud), and most recently, the last minute announcement by FBI director James Comey that the FBI has re-opened its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email scandal, at a time when people are literally inside voting booths casting their early ballots. One major national news story noticeably absent in the non-stop drip of mindless drivel coming from pundits in the mainstream media, is the very real threat of danger due to violence as a result of whoever the eventual election winner turns out to be. Thankfully, on a more local level, various officials appear to be taking the threats posed by both sides more seriously, and several states have now announced that schools will be closed for the election, specifically citing their concern for students’ safety from the potential for violence. In the video below, I explain why it’s unconscionable that our alleged “news” outlets would neglect to mention the fact that entire school districts are shutting down out of fear for student safety. We’re not talking “conspiracy theory” here either. We’re talking about actual police chiefs recognizing the danger being presented, various state officials recognizing the threats posed, the highest ranking member of our nation’s military, and now various school districts all saying the same thing: Danger ahead! If you have children, you might want to look into whether your child’s school district has decided to suspend classes yet. If they haven’t, don’t be surprised when they do. Michael Snyder Writes: Will this be the most chaotic election day in modern American history? All across the nation, schools are being closed on election day due to safety fears. Traditionally, schools have been very popular as voting locations because they can accommodate a lot of people, they usually have lots of parking, and everyone in the community knows where they are and can usually get to them fairly easily. But now there is a big movement to remove voting from schools or to shut schools down on election day so that children are not present when voting takes place. According to Fox News , “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.” Just a couple days ago , I shared with you a survey that found that 51 percent of all Americans are concerned about violence happening on election day, and all of these schools closing is just another sign of how on edge much of the population is as we approach November 8th. Many officials are being very honest about the fact that schools are being shut down on election day because they are afraid of election violence. The following comes from Fox News … Several schools across the nation have decided to close on Election Day over fears of possible violence in the hallways stemming from the fallout from the heated rhetoric that consumed the campaign trail. The fear is the ugliness of the election season could escalate into confrontations and even violence in the 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,” Ed Tolan, the Falmouth, Maine police chief, said Tuesday. His community has already called off classes on Nov. 8 and an increased police presence will be felt around town. And without a doubt, voting locations are “soft targets” that often have little or no security. We have been blessed to have had such peaceful elections in the past, but we also need to realize that times have changed. I believe that there is wisdom in what Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp told reporters … “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,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, co-chairman of the National Association of Secretaries of State election committee. “ What if someone walks in a polling location with a backpack bomb or something? If that happens at a school, then that’s certainly concerning.” All it is going to take is a single incident to change everything. Let us hope that it is not this election day when we see something like that. Another reason why polling locations are under increased scrutiny this election season is because of concerns about election fraud. This is something that Donald Trump has alluded to repeatedly on the campaign trail. For instance, just consider what he told a rally in Pennsylvania … “We don’t want to lose an election because you know what I’m talking about,” Trump told an overwhelmingly white crowd in Manheim, Pa., earlier this month. “Because you know what? That’s a big, big problem, and nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody has the guts to talk about it. So go and watch these polling places .” And of course reports are already pouring in from around the country of big problems with the voting machines. In Illinois this week, one candidate personally experienced a machine switching his votes from Republicans to Democrats… Early voting in Illinois got off to a rocky start Monday, as votes being cast for Republican candidates were transformed into votes for Democrats. Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library. “I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.” In addition, if you keep up with my work on The Economic Collapse Blog , then you already know that a number of voters down in Texas have reported that their votes were switched from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . Well, it turns out that those voting machines appear to have a link to the Clinton Foundation … According to OpenSecrets, the company who provided the alleged glitching voting machines is a subsidiary of The McCarthy Group. The McCarthy group is a major donor to the Clinton Foundation – apparently donating 200,000 dollars in 2007 – when it was the largest owner of United States voting machines. Or perhaps the 200,000 dollars went to paying Bill Clinton for speeches? Either way, it doesn’t look good. After everything that we saw in 2012 , I am convinced that there is good reason to be concerned about the integrity of our voting machines. But Democrats don’t like poll observers, because they think that having too many poll observers will intimidate their voters… “It’s un-American, but at the same time we have a long history of doing things like that ,” Ari Berman, author of the 2016 book “ Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America ,” previously told The Christian Science Monitor. “Voting was very, very dangerous. I don’t think anyone’s suggesting that we’re at the same place today. I just think the loss of the [official poll observers] is going to be really problematic.” Without a doubt, this has been the craziest election season that we have seen in decades, and I have a feeling that it is about to get even crazier. But will the end result be the election of the most corrupt politician in the history of our country ? If that is the outcome after all that we have been through, it will be exceedingly depressing indeed. THE VOICE OF REASON is the pen name of Michael DePinto, a graduate of Capital University Law School, and an attorney in Florida. Having worked in the World Trade Center, along with other family and friends, Michael was baptized by fire into the world of politics on September 11, 2001. Michael’s political journey began with tuning in religiously to whatever the talking heads on television had to say, then Michael became a “Tea-Bagging” activist as his liberal friends on the Left would say, volunteering within the Jacksonville local Tea Party, and most recently Michael was sworn in as an attorney. Today, Michael is a major contributor to www.BeforeItsNews.com , he owns and operates www.thelastgreatstand.com , where Michael provides what is often very ‘colorful’ political commentary, ripe with sarcasm, no doubt the result of Michael’s frustration as he feels we are witnessing the end of the American Empire. The topics Michael most often weighs in on are: Martial Law, FEMA Camps, Jade Helm, Economic Issues, Government Corruption, and Government Conspiracy. Submit your review | 1 |
Verdant oases have been squeezed into every corner of New York City, tucked between towering skyscrapers, carved from former military posts and abandoned railroad tracks, and even laid on top of landfills. But it is still not enough. So now the latest frontier in the quest to carve out more parkland is the city’s subterranean level — home to subways, sewage lines and rats. Plans are underway to build what its supporters say would be the world’s first underground park. An abandoned trolley terminal near the Williamsburg Bridge on the Lower East Side of Manhattan would be transformed into a green space built by a nonprofit group that has spent years experimenting with solar technology. The group proposes to illuminate the underground space with sunlight collected by panels above ground and reflected down through a series of pipes. Called the Lowline, the park below Delancey Street would feature a garden with herbs and vegetables. In a nod to the past, the group behind the park, the Underground Development Foundation, would also display parts of the original terminal — an old booth, trolley tracks, a cobblestone floor — alongside new seating and play areas. Alicia Glen, the city’s deputy mayor for housing and economic development, said the Lowline would create more public space in one of the city’s most densely populated neighborhoods and could serve as a model for other cities. The underground park proposal has already attracted the attention of city officials, urban planners and developers as far as London, Moscow, Paris and Seoul, South Korea. Besides, as Ms. Glen acknowledged, “it’s not exactly the hottest property in New York City. ” When the city called for proposals for the site, it received only one: the Lowline. “To be honest, most people don’t think of the underground as a super happy place to be,” she said. “It does take a level of imagination and optimism. ” Some people were undaunted and said they were intrigued by the idea of having a park lying right at their feet. “Sounds like a cool thing to take friends to,” said Dave Wiskus, 35, a singer and guitar player in a local rock band, Airplane Mode, as he walked his Italian greyhound up to Delancey Street. “If we’re not trying new things, we’re not New York. ” But others winced at the possibility of encountering stale air or worse — rats and other vermin — down below. Robin Malcom, 47, a construction worker who said she got enough of the underground world just riding the subway, added that she would feel confined and isolated, especially if there were another terrorist attack in the city. “I’m going to need my parks to be above ground,” she said. Dan Barasch, the executive director of the Lowline, said the park would have a ventilation system in addition to the garden to freshen the air, and security on site. The park would be kept clean and well maintained, he said, and garbage would be removed swiftly to prevent rodent infestations. The Lowline has won the support of the local community board and some advocates. But Victor Papa, president of Two Bridges Neighborhood Council, a community development and housing organization on the Lower East Side, said he remained skeptical, though he was willing to give it a chance. Mr. Papa, 71, said he did not want the park to become a magnet solely for celebrities and wealthy patrons with no stake in the community. In return for using public land, he said, the park should offer free science programs and other activities for local children, many of whom are from and immigrant families. (Mr. Barasch says there are plans to do so.) “Public property is for the common good,” Mr. Papa said. The Lowline, which would cost $80 million to build, still faces significant hurdles, and would not open until 2021 at the earliest. The New York City Economic Development Corporation, which oversees the site, has given the Underground Development Foundation until July to submit a detailed design and raise at least $10 million, among other things. City officials have yet to commit any money to the project. The park would resurrect part of the Williamsburg Bridge railway terminal, which served as a hub for trolley cars for more than four decades before it closed in 1948. On the lower level of the terminal, passengers waited to board cars that came off the bridge and turned around on tracks to go back over. “It was another step in the transit expansion between Brooklyn and Manhattan,” said Jodi Shapiro, 44, an associate curator at the New York Transit Museum, who counted 14 trolley lines that passed through the lower level over the years. After trolley service was discontinued — and the tracks over the bridge were replaced with car lanes — the underground level of the terminal was largely forgotten by the public until James Ramsey, an architectural designer, heard about the space and began poking around. Mr. Ramsey, 39, envisioned filling it with light to bring it back to life. Through friends, he met Mr. Barasch, a former marketing manager for Google. At that time, in 2009, the High Line, a freight railroad line converted to a park, had just opened on the west side of Manhattan. As the two talked about creating an underground park, people started calling it “the Lowline. ” The name stuck. To show what it could look like, they set out to raise $100, 000 on Kickstarter to pay for a exhibit in 2012. They received more than $150, 000. They converted a dark warehouse into a park, with a Japanese maple tree growing on top of a mossy hill. More than 11, 000 people visited. Last year, a second Kickstarter campaign raised $225, 000 for a demonstration lab on Essex Street a few blocks from the underground terminal. Along with a South Korean company, SunPortal, they installed a system for redirecting sunlight that they have described as “remote skylights. ” A tracking mirror installed on the roof of their building follows the sun across the sky, reflecting its rays into a curved optical lens resembling a giant periscope. The light is concentrated and reflected down through pipes to three apertures in the ceiling of the lab. A “solar canopy” made of aluminum panels distributes the light below. For cloudy days, there is a backup LED light system. The centerpiece of the lab is a lush garden with 3, 000 plants, representing more than 60 species. Ferns, mosses and mushrooms have thrived along with tomatoes, onions and garlic. Mint started taking over and had to be pruned daily (workers added it to their sandwiches). Strawberries grew ripe enough to eat. Not all survived, though. Hop plants died and a coffee plant grew so spindly it was removed. Mr. Ramsey’s favorite is a scrappy green ash tree that was found growing between two bricks on the rooftop in June and relocated below. Now standing two feet tall, it sits in the center of the garden. “This guy’s a survivor,” he said. “It’s a real New Yorker right here. ” More than 80, 000 people have visited the demonstration lab, including the mayor of Seoul. Touching the plants is allowed. Lingering is encouraged. Yoga and meditation classes are held there, along with scavenger hunts for children. An program has taught science and math lessons to 2, 000 middle school students. Mr. Barasch said the lab had shown that people were ready for an underground park. “It’s a daily struggle in New York to get a little space, a little room, a little nature,” he said. “People go crazy for a tree or a bench on their block. Every square inch is so precious in this city. ” | 1 |
1990 comic book predicted the Donald Trump campaign | 0 |
The communist government of North Korea published a “report” on Friday in which it accused the CIA and its South Korea affiliate, the Intelligence Service (IS) of planning to use a “ ” weapon to attack its “supreme leadership. ”[North Korea’s state publication, the Rodong Sinmun, also published a story Friday accusing China, and particularly state media outlets Global Times and The People’s Daily, of agitating for war against North Korea to appease the United States. “The Central Intelligence Agency of the U. S. and the Intelligence Service (IS) of South Korea, hotbed of evils in the world, hatched a vicious plot to hurt the supreme leadership of the DPRK and those acts have been put into the extremely serious phase of implementation after crossing the threshold of the DPRK,” The Korean Central News Agency said in a report published Friday, according to Reuters. “A hideous terrorists’ group, which the CIA and the IS infiltrated into the DPRK on the basis of covert and meticulous preparations to commit terrorism against the supreme leadership of the DPRK by use of substance, has been recently detected. ” The South Korean news agency Yonhap notes that the article also included threats to both countries. “We will ferret out and mercilessly destroy to the last one the terrorists of the U. S. CIA,” the article warned. “ attack will be commenced from this moment to sweep away the intelligence and organizations of the U. S. imperialists and the puppet clique. ” “Criminals going to realize such a pipe dream cannot survive on this land even a moment,” the article vowed. The article alleged that a North Korean named “Kim” had accepted money to become “a terrorist full of repugnance and revenge against the supreme leadership of the DPRK. ” This “human scum Kim” agreed to commit “assassination by use of biochemical substances including radioactive substance and nano poisonous substance. ” The report did not specify whom he was paid to assassinate. The attack resembles theories surrounding the death of Kim the brother of dictator Kim who an assassin killed in Kuala Lumpur this year using VX nerve agent, a weapon of mass destruction, according to Malaysian authorities. While police in that country have found ties between the murder suspects and the North Korean government, Pyongyang has denied involvement and denounced a U. S. conspiracy to frame the Kim government for the killing. North Korean media did not stop at antagonizing America and South Korea. The state newspaper Rodong Sinmun published a scathing editorial against its counterparts in China, directly addressing the Global Times and People’s Daily and condemning their “absurd and reckless remarks. ” “China should no longer try to test the limits of the DPRK’s patience. China had better ponder over the grave consequences to be entailed by its reckless act of chopping down the pillar of the relations,” the newspaper demanded. While belligerence against the United States is common in the pages of the Rodong Sinmun, direct challenges to China are a recent development. In February, North Korean state media accused a “neighboring country” of a nominally friendly disposition of acting as a “U. S. vassal state” as the Chinese government worked to adhere to United Nations sanctions against the country, for decades standing accused of some of the world’s most outrageous human rights atrocities. The Times had recently published a column suggesting that China would need to cooperate more closely with the United States due to the volatile nature of the North Korean regime and, perhaps the highest insult of all, suggesting North Korea is more of a threat to China than Washington. “[C]ompared to the potential impairment brought about by the US’ geopolitical containment of China, the danger of potential nuclear contamination of China’s northeast is more urgent,” the article notes. President Donald Trump has told media that he is willing to negotiate to China’s advantage on trade if such a deal results in the complete nuclear disarmament of Korea. “You want to make a great deal? Solve the problem in North Korea,” Trump said he told Chinese officials in April. “That’s worth having deficits. And that’s worth having not as good a trade deal as I would normally be able to make. ” Follow Frances Martel on Facebook and Twitter. | 1 |
Expert: Trump has Already Won Election, Democrats Stealing It by IWB · October 27, 2016 Tweet
Alex Jones talks with Micheal Snyder about what it’s looking like for Donald Trump and how he believes that Donald Trump has already won the 2016 presidential election.
Alex Jones talks with Michael Snyder about the extreme corruption and ongoing election fraud perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Trump Is Winning And That Is Why Obama Is Campaigning So Hard | 0 |
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For decades, media networks, newspapers, and journalists have vowed to keep exit polling information to themselves, until all the polls have closed. This was decided because there was the overall thought that real-time voting information, on Election Day, could sway those who had not yet cast their votes. However, that silence will be broken for the 2016 presidential election.
VoteCastr will be providing real-time voting data from eight battleground states. This information is being collected using the same techniques as the presidential campaigns.
At 3:48 p.m. ET, the voting data was given as follows: Over 83 percent of the expected voters have cast their ballots in Florida. Thus far, Hillary Clinton has 48 percent and Donald Trump has 45 percent of the state.
In Colorado, 80 percent of the votes have been counted. Currently, Clinton holds a three-point lead over her Republican opponent.
More than 66 percent of the registered voters have cast their ballots in Iowa. At this time, Trump has a narrow lead of 1 percent.
Wisconsin has turned in 62 percent of their votes. Clinton leads with 48 percent of the votes. Trump trails with 43 percent.
In Nevada, almost 69 percent of registered voters have cast their ballots. Clinton currently leads by a narrow 1 percent.
Clinton holds a 1 percent lead in Ohio. So far, 74 percent of voters have made their choice.
Over 63 percent of the votes have been collected in Pennsylvania. Trump is trailing Clinton by 3 percent.
The VoteCastr model is showing Clinton in place to win these eight battleground states. However, there is an expected surge of votes for Trump, later today. Nevertheless, if Clinton maintains her three-point lead in Florida, her victory will be solidified.
In order for Trump to take the 2016 presidential election, he would have to gain electoral votes from all the states in this report. In the last hour, Trump has not only tightened the gap in Ohio and Iowa, he has a one-point lead. Clinton leads in the remainder of these battleground states, however, her lead has narrowed from 4 to 3 percent.
Guardian Liberty Voice will continue to provide updates throughout the election.
Written by Jeanette Smith
Sources:
Slate: A New Approach to Covering Election Day
Vice News: Live Election Day Turnout Results
Image Courtesy of Vince Alongi’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License Donald Trump , election , Hillary Clinton , spot , votes | 0 |
June 2 is National Gun Violence Awareness day, which is a fancy way of saying Michael Everytown for Gun Safety’s Day to #WearOrange for gun control. [Never one to miss out on the opportunity to push a curtailment of Second Amendment rights, Barack Obama took to Twitter to show his solidarity with the gun control cause. He held an orange coffee cup and tweeted, “On this National Gun Violence Awareness Day, let your voice be heard and show your commitment to reducing gun violence. ” On this National Gun Violence Awareness Day, let your voice be heard and show your commitment to reducing gun violence. pic. twitter. — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) June 2, 2017, During his two terms in the White House, Obama’s Amendment stance drove background checks for gun sales sky high. Moreover, concealed carry surged under Obama as social unrest and the Democratic Party’s pursuit of gun control — and complete gun bans — flourished. May 2015 set a record for the most background checks of any May on record. Then June 2015 set the record the most background checks of any June on record. Then July, and August, September, November, and on and on. Every month set a record for 19 consecutive months beginning May 2015. By that point in Obama’s presidency it was clear that every gun crime would be viewed as an opportunity to propose more gun control, even if the proposed gun control had nothing to do with the crime that spurred its introduction. We saw this with the Sandy Hook Elementary attack a horrific crime wherein the criminal stole his guns then killed 26 innocents in a zone. Neither Obama nor his fellow Democrats said anything about removing the zones that forced teachers to be sitting ducks, but they did recruit Senator Joe Manchin ( ) to push universal backgrounds (even though background checks have absolutely zero to do with an attack where the guns are stolen). Now it is June 2, 2017, and Obama is back — with an orange cup — pushing gun control. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 0 |
Get short URL 0 5 0 0 According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the 2016 refugee death toll in the Mediterranean Sea has hit a record high of at least 3,800 people. "We can confirm that at least 3,800 people have been reported dead or missing in the Mediterranean Sea so far this year, making the death toll in 2016 the highest ever recorded," the UN refugee agency spokesman, William Spindler, said at a news briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva Wednesday.
In March, the EU signed a deal with Turkey aimed at stemming the tide of refugees into Europe. Since that time, deported refugees have been forced to return to Turkey or their country of origin. Although less people are migrating now, primarily due to new policies enacted by some European countries, more refugees are dying. An estimated 327,800 asylum-seekers have crossed the sea so far this year, compared with at least 1,015,078 people last year. © REUTERS/ Alaa Al-Marjani UN Refugee Agency Airlifting Over 7,000 Tents to Assist Displaced in Mosul The higher death rate might be a result, Spindler said, of the dangerous route from North Africa to Italy. Combined with bad weather, unseaworthy vessels, and cramming too many people into a boat, tragedy is inevitable.
The extremely hazardous route between Libya and Italy has become the main path for refugees fleeing their war-torn country, Spindler said, calling on European countries to consider "enhanced resettlement and humanitarian admissions, family reunification, private sponsorship, and humanitarian, student and work visas for refugees."
On Tuesday, 25 migrants were found dead among survivors in an overloaded rubber dinghy on the Mediterranean Sea, Doctors Without Borders (Medicins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) reported. ... | 0 |
RT
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), facing criticism over its classification of carcinogens, has reportedly been advising its scientific experts not to publish internal research data on its 2015 report on “probably carcinogenic” glyphosate.
The IARC urged its scientists not to publish research documents on its 2015 weedkiller glyphosate review, according to Reuters. The agency told Reuters on Tuesday that it tried to protect the study from “external interference,” as well as protect its intellectual rights, since it was “the sole owner of such materials.”
The scientists had been asked earlier to release all the documentation on the 2015 report under US freedom of information laws.
The groundbreaking review, published in March 2015 by the IARC – a semi-autonomous agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) – labeled the glyphosate herbicide as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Glyphosate is a key ingredient of Monsanto’s flagship weedkiller well-known under the trade name ‘Roundup.’ It is one of the most heavily used herbicides in the world and is designed to go along with genetically-modified “Roundup Ready” crops, also produced by Monsanto.
The IARC’s report caused problems for both the notorious agrochemical giant and the agency itself.
The report sparked a heated debate around the use of Roundup, and caused several EU countries – including France, Sweden, and the Netherlands – to object to the renewal of the glyphosate’s EU license. The vote on prolonging the glyphosate license for 15 years failed several times in June 2016, but the license was temporarily extended for 18 months during last hours before its expiration.
The controversial report has seemingly made the IARC a target for attacks from multiple directions, and raised scientific, legal, and financial questions.
Various critics, including those in the chemical industry, said the IARC’s evaluations are fuel for “unnecessary health scares,” since the IARC allegedly studies the potentially harmful substance itself, and not a “typical human” exposure to it. It remained unclear whether the critics urged a WHO body to test the potentially carcinogenic chemical on humans.
The critics also brought up other controversial statements from the IARC, over whether such things as mobile phones, coffee, red meat, and processed meat could cause cancer.
The agency defended its methods as scientifically sound and “widely respected for their scientific rigor, standardized and transparent process and…freedom from conflicts of interest.” Numerous freedom of information requests by the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), a US conservative advocacy group, have since been turned down with this reasoning.
E&E Legal told Reuters that it is pushing a legal challenge over whether the documents in question belong to the IARC or to the US federal and state institutions where some of the experts work. Basically, it’s being decided whether the IARC, as part of the WHO, is truly independent and free from “conflicts of interest.”
According to Reuters, officials from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will be questioned by a congressional committee about why American taxpayers fund the cancer agency, which faces much criticism over its allegedly faulty classification of carcinogens.
“IARC’s standards and determinations for classifying substances as carcinogenic, and therefore cancer-causing, appear inconsistent with other scientific research, and have generated much controversy and alarm,” a letter from US Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz to NIH director Francis Collins states, as quoted by Reuters.
The Oversight Committee demanded a full disclosure of NIH funding of the IARC, and even money spent in relation to the cancer agency’s activities.
IARC opponents from scientific circles vowed to provide their data on the matter. The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), which believes glyphosate is “unlikely pose a carcinogenic hazard to humans,” promised to release its raw data on the subject as part of its “commitment to open risk assessment.” The food safety watchdog made this statement in late September, and still has to deliver the promised information. | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Just before 9 a. m. on Tuesday, Grace Alt, an from Wyndmoor, Penn. stood outside Senator Bob Casey’s office door. Wearing a sash inscribed with the word “Thespian,” she was among 700 people who traveled here to ask lawmakers to oppose President Trump’s proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts. But the morning was a hectic one on Capitol Hill, and the senator, a Democrat, was busy. An aide listened as Ms. Alt and others in her group, in town for Arts Advocacy Day, asked for lawmakers to work together. This annual exercise has taken on a new urgency this year. Yes, Republican lawmakers have steadily begun to come out against shutting down the endowment, but it’s still a Congress responding to a Republican president. “A lot of the staffers understand that their Congresspeople are generally in support of the arts,” Ms. Alt said after the meeting. “It’s just whether or not they’ll actually follow through. ” To prod them in the right direction, arts advocates have had to hone their message. On Monday, clutching binders full of facts and figures, artists, teachers and nonprofit workers clustered in meeting rooms at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, discussing the best ways to ask lawmakers not only to preserve the funding, but also to increase it. Attendees worked on scenarios, acting out what would happen if they were confronted with an uninterested lawmaker. On a couch in the lobby, two women from Florida pored over the layout of Senate office buildings. They decided to bypass a visit to Senator Marco Rubio’s office. “He’s not going to support us, regardless,” one of the women said of the Florida Republican. They moved on, though the senator has not made any statement about how he views that funding cut. The activists set an attendance record for Arts Advocacy Day (also called the National Arts Action Summit) however, as they wandered the halls of government buildings, they were competing for attention during a vicious news cycle, which included a Senate confirmation hearing for a Trump nominee and an F. B. I. inquiry into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Proponents of the N. E. A. have long had their work cut out for them in stressing that the arts are sources of job creation and community enrichment in cities of all sizes. But these days, they’re also concerned with simply breaking through the rest of the noise. Anne Katz, who traveled from Madison, Wis. said that “although the politics of Wisconsin are crazy,” advocates have tried to zero in on any connection lawmakers may have to the arts. Do they play an instrument? Like concerts? “Most lawmakers perform in their spare time,” Ms. Katz said. The trick, she said, will be to push the message that the N. E. A. whose budget sits at about $148 million, is a good investment. (As the agency points out, this amount represents about . 004 percent of the federal budget.) N. E. A. grants are generally small, and most states, including Wisconsin, receive the equivalent of less than $1 per person. “We have to ask ourselves what sort of country we want to be,” Ms. Katz said. “It’s a pretty stark choice, I think. ” An appearance Tuesday by Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who is the chairwoman of a crucial Senate appropriations panel that oversees arts and humanities endowments, was met with a round of applause from a crowd that gathered in the Russell Senate Office Building. The senator emphasized the need for maintaining “cultural infrastructure. ” In a short interview during the walk to her next appointment, she pointed out that President Trump, the first president to propose completely eliminating the agency, seemed to show an appreciation for the arts as a developer. “Think about what President Trump did with his buildings when he was not President Trump,” Senator Murkowski said. “He built them so that there was a beauty to them. ” Her state has received more than $18 million in grants since 1995, but the senator wouldn’t say whether she supported keeping the endowment at its current funding level. “I don’t support the elimination of the program,” she said. “That’s for darn sure. ” Narric W. Rome, vice president of government affairs and arts education for Americans for the Arts, the group that helped organize the event, said advocates hope to do more than just save the endowment. They also hope to block deep, debilitating cuts and avoid being used as a political football during the budgeting process. “It’s not just fear of termination,” Mr. Rome said. “It’s of this false negotiation. ” The support of another influential lawmaker, Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen, a New Jersey Republican who is the House appropriations committee chairman, was encouraging to the dozens of activists who traveled here from his state. “In the overall scheme of things I think the arts programs, which have been a target for many years in preceding congresses, it’s not a heck of a lot of money and I enjoy those programs as much as any other American,” he said in a telephone meeting with constituents on Monday. “I think it’s money well spent. ” Ann Marie Miller, the director of advocacy for the ArtPride New Jersey Foundation, said the job now would be to keep in constant contact with Representative Frelinghuysen so he doesn’t change his mind. “It’s making sure that advocates keep the pressure on,” Ms. Miller said, “because we know he’ll be under pressure. ” Attendees were asked to put their political differences aside in their preparations. On Monday, as a group of about 90 New Yorkers readied themselves for visits, their group’s organizer, Tod Kniazuk, encouraged attendees to have “selective amnesia about where the representative stands on everything else, and to talk to them about the arts. ” | 1 |
Immigration laws are being ignored to an unprecedented extent… to RIG elections!
Immigration laws are being ignored to an unprecedented extent. The Democrats are worried about Russia interfering with our elections but are ignoring the law being broken and domestic interference via illegal immigrants.
Illegal Immigration Spiking Ahead Of US Election As Smugglers Promise “Amnesty” From Hillary
Agent Chris Cabrera told CBS News that they’ve been seeing a spike in immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally, thanks in part to the election.
“The smugglers are telling them if Hillary [Clinton] gets elected, that there’ll be some sort of amnesty, that they need to get here by a certain date,” | 0 |
Buzz Aldrin Is A Warning Of How Success Can Lead To Depression Buzz Aldrin Is A Warning Of How Success Can Lead To Depression Aaron Clarey
Captain Capitalism is the resident economist of the mano/androsphere. He is a misanthropic, hedonist, nihilistic, cynical type, but he keeps getting proved right every day. He is the author of " Enjoy the Decline ," " Worthless ," and " Bachelor Pad Economics ". His newest book is " The Black Man's Guide Out Of Poverty ". He also runs the advisory " Asshole Consulting ." You can read his daily rantings at his blog Captain Capitalism . November 13, 2016 Masculinity
Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong are household names because they were the first men to land on the moon. And while Neil is perhaps the more-remembered of the two because he was technically the “first” to land on the moon, Buzz is just as remembered because of his unique name (while I bet most of you don’t know who the third guy was). But technicalities of who landed where first and who had cool names aside, Buzz Aldrin will forever be one of the world’s greatest historical figures because of his unrivaled accomplishments and will die a better man than the vast majority of us.
But did you know Buzz Aldrin was an alcoholic? And after retiring he fell into a severe depression? And after his divorce his days consisted of drinking alone in his apartment, fetching KFC and booze until he entered rehab?
It’s a hard fact to believe. Where a man who seems to have everything (fame, a super-accomplished career, and least of all, the titanium-strong professionalism and self-discipline to become an astronaut), yet he ends up down, depressed, drunk, and perhaps even suicidal like any other ordinary piece of trailer trash. But while it doesn’t make sense at first, and you can’t see how this relates to you, realize there’s a VERY good and simple reason for this fall from great heights. The Buzz Aldrin Syndrome
Understand as we use the internet to accumulate the wisdom and knowledge to rocket past our contemporaries and excel in life, a problem is festering that you are unaware of. Additionally, much like Alzheimer’s, it is not prevalent today, but as humans advance more and live longer, it will become increasingly common. Therefore, we have the option to identify it today, prepare for it now, and thus avoid the pain and insanity that comes with having a problem we can’t identify
or
we can have it devastate our lives later.
It is the Buzz Aldrin Syndrome.
The Buzz Aldrin Syndrome is where a man achieves such greatness, such accomplishments in life, that he is truly unrivaled and peerless. While exhilarating at first, perhaps even earning one fame, riches, and fortune, the success also unintentionally alienates the person from the rest of society. At the time Buzz Aldrin only had three or four other astronauts who he could REALLY talk to, confide in, and relate to. The remaining 3 billion people on the planet (at the time) were just star-struck, wide-eyed sheep. Alas, Buzz Aldrin could be surrounded by scores of fans at a party, but still be completely alone mentally.
The syndrome is also exacerbated as one’s pinnacle achievements in life are likely correlated with retirement. You typically progress in your career, right up until the day you retire. However, here you leave the environment and network you’ve come accustomed, thrived in, and derived your entire agency from. Thus, in a very short period of time you go from the center of attention, the life of the party, the engine of the machine…to a retiree in California, drinking scotch, and eating KFC, longing for the days you could go back to the office again. Without the environment you derived all your worth and value from, you lose purpose in life, you lose mental stimulation, you lose your peers, and very likely sink into a crippling depression. The Perfect Storm
There are seven factors that, when combined, create the perfect storm for the Buzz Aldrin Syndrome to form. And most ROK readers either have these traits are affected by them: 1. Technological Advancements
Technology has always advanced, but in this particular case it affects us in two specific ways. Making living expenses cheaper and allowing for more and easier ways to make money.
As opposed to the 1800’s, most of a man’s life was spent toiling in the field. He didn’t have time to contemplate loftier or heavier subjects much like the purpose of life, what is man’s reason for being, etc. You had to worry about the plague, tetanus, your wife dying in labor, and whether there’d be enough crops to survive the coming winter. But today, through economics, capitalism, agricultural technology, etc., a single man can basically eat for near-free at Wal-Mart or the local grocery store.
Technology has also freed us from work. Not so much from the fact we have to work, but in terms of how much time we need to spend on it in order to survive. No more than a decade ago a young man had to work 40 hours a week, 10 for a commute, and likely for an inept baby boomer boss who was never going to let you get past the cubicle plantation. Now, with the internet not only can a man give the proverbial finger to rush hour and a commute, but his boss as well, making whatever minimalistic modicum of money he needs to survive through online entrepreneurship. In short, it has never been easier to satisfy Maslow’s first three and vital hierarchy of needs, freeing a man’s mind to pursue his own excellence, not to mention ponder his point and purpose in being here. 2. Minimalism
It is no secret that red pill men practice, or at least pursue minimalism. We know that material things do not matter, as it is the love and friendship from our fellow man, friends, family and loved ones that matter most. You know that it would be “nice” to have that Shelby Super Snake Mustang, but you’d never trade it in for a lifetime of conversations and cigars with your best friend. Additionally, we value our freedom above all else and refuse to subjugate ourselves to becoming debt slaves by buying things we plain don’t need.
Jettisoning these material desires liberates more of our finite lives from work and a commute, to once again pursue our passions, our fields, our adventures, and our lives. In simply refusing to buy a McMansion and take on a car loan, we guarantee we will live more interesting and rewarding lives than 90% of our peers. 3. Avoiding Divorce And Unwanted Children
Further saving us more time is the disproportionate number of us refusing to have children or marry (in fear of divorce). And for those of us who do marry, we are fully aware of what to look for, more or less immunizing us from divorce. 4. Knowledge of Women
To be blunt and honestly assess the good the “manosphere” and red pill community have done, we have saved the lives of MILLIONS of young men, and prevented older ones from wasting what remains of theirs. If I were to estimate it, every boy born today will save at least a decade of time that would have otherwise been wasted at nightclubs, chasing tail, dating the wrong girls, and perhaps even marrying the wrong ones.
Being a product of the 70’s, I have often talked with my Gen X peers where we estimated what we could have done had we not wasted the 80’s and 90’s chasing women we were either never going to get, or would regret catching. We could have easily had doctorates, houses built by our own hands, much better careers, not to mention better mental health as we would have avoided all the batshit insane women we sifted through. Young men today, especially those who consume the Red Pill, will easily have a decade of time on us by simply learning from our mistakes . 5. Self-Improvement
Unless you are in the VirginTOW community, you know how important self-improvement is to a man’s life. You have this one finite life on this planet, and not only is it imperative you enjoy it, but you must ensure it is a masterpiece of art in whatever endeavors you choose to excel in. This may not land you on the moon, but you will achieve greatness and excellence in some capacity or another. Music, literature, innovation, philosophy, being a good dad, something. You will not idly stand by, sitting on your ass, majoring in sociology, or collecting a welfare check as you knock up baby mama after baby momma. You will be notable and leave a positive legacy on this world. 6. Entrepreneurship or STEM
Most of you know not to major in stupid, worthless shit . You also know that for the majority of us, entrepreneurship or self-employment is the only form of employment that we can tolerate. Because of this, two things will happen in your life. One, you will save an inordinate amount of time spent trying to make a go at a career that just isn’t in demand in the real world. You will work as an engineer, a programmer, a doctor, or some REAL profession/trade, which will not only pay you a handsome wage, but make your life incredibly easier. Two, at some point in time you will come up with an idea that will either cement your success in your career or outright launch a successful entrepreneurial endeavor. This will free you from your dependence on traditional employers, ensure your financial future is sound, but it will also likely lead towards you achieving your legacy in excellence.
In the veritable sea of liberal arts majors, not one of their millions will ever make anything of themselves. They will simply waste away, doubling down on masters degrees and doctorates in their hopelessly worthless fields. Worse, they will be crippled until death with student loans and inadequate compensation as they beg and vote for other people’s money. They will die like most, unmentionable, irrelevant, and forgotten.
You will not. 7. A High Intelligence
To make all of this a reality you need the raw intellectual capacity to bring this to fruition. While no studies have been done, if you have the independent mindedness to be reading ROK, I’d estimate the average IQ of ROK readers to be 120. However, keep in mind while being highly intelligent is an asset, it is also a curse . Like ROK, you are on “the fringe.” And because of that you are not only going to receive an inordinate amount of flak from the rest of “normie” society, but relating to the rest of it, let alone finding a healthy and rewarding social life in it, is going to prove next to impossible.
When you combine these traits and conditions, you have what is arguably the perfect environment for a great life to form. You need very little to survive because you won’t waste your resources on frivolous material things in life. You also have very little liabilities or responsibilities, not only because you’re a minimalist, but are likely not going to marry or have children. The lion’s share of your time and energies can be dedicated towards achieving excellence and greatness in your life.
And if you’ve done it right, you’ll be two decades ahead of your Gen X peers since you avoided worthless degrees and leap-frogged your philosophical understanding of life. You will be accomplished, you will be successful, you will have paid a fraction of the mental toll to get there, and you will indeed be an amazing man, the world’s most interesting perhaps. You have reached the so called “finish line” much earlier and faster than Buzz Aldrin…
and that’s when your real problems start. You Weren’t Meant to Be Here
Understand that while the goal of man was to secure unlimited food, resources, and security so that he may pursue an unlimited and happy life, the human mind has no experience being here. The entire existence of humankind has been struggle, suffering, fighting, and striving for such a life, but also 99. % of the time failing . And over the course of human history the human brain has had 2 million years experience and conditioning in failure, NOT success.
This leads to an ironic and perhaps the most tragic instances in human experiences. A man finally gets what he wants. Wealth, health, success, excellence, legacy, everything. But upon attaining it he can’t enjoy it because the human mind is not programmed to. He not only realizes this rare success doesn’t result in happiness or a perpetual life-long glee that will see him to his grave, but there’s nothing left to conquer. There’s nothing left to do. The game of life is over, and like Red Dead Redemption, it gets mighty boring just riding your horse around after you conquer the game.
Worse, because of the unique characteristics required to attain this excellence any man “lucky” enough to be this successful is in one way or another ostracized from the rest of his peers. Professionally, romantically, intellectually, some way or another, to be in that . 1% you have to be a statistical freak. Alas, you get to suffer the true symptoms of The Buzz Aldrin Syndrome.
Peerlessness – While your friends are pumping out children or your colleagues are trying to get out from underneath their McMansion mortgage and impending divorce, you may be avoiding these dreaded fates, but you are also alone. No longer are these the college days where your intellectual peers in equal life-circumstances can hang out, chat, philosophize, and in numbers that seem endless. Slowly, but surely, they will get picked off like German Messerschmitts in WWII by the forces of life and you will be left alone.
Understand this has nothing to do with your pursuit of greatness or achieving excellence in life, but is outside of your control as these people fall within the bell distribution curve of averageness. They choose these lives, meaning it’s not the statistical freak leaving them, but them leaving the statistical freak (no matter how loudly they claimed in college they were going to live life “differently”). And don’t think that you can simply recoup your former social life by joining them by being average, putting on a sports jersey, ordering some Buffalo Wild wings, cheering on the local sportsball team. Your mind won’t tolerate it.
You are peerless. Get used to it.
Boredom – Without people you get bored. No matter how intelligent you are, you are still human. And humans are indeed social creatures as they derive their entire life value from others, not things. But the paradox those suffering from the Buzz Aldrin Syndrome face is that while you would like to be social with people, the vast majority of people are either too common, too stupid, or just too boring, especially when compared to being by yourself.
Go to that same Buffalo Wild wings to hear loud, drunk, divorced SWPL men in their 40’s cheer on the local swingystick team?
Or read Marcus Aurelius ?
Go to a movie where Jason Bourne discovers another mole in the CIA…again…who set up his father…again….where he drives around Europe shooting the place up….again?
Or binge on some history podcasts ?
I know! How about you go to a party where you’ll hear the same conversations from men about the sportsball game they just saw at Buffalo Wild wings, as they lament their inability to get out from underneath their mortgage, while the wives gossip about their painfully pointless government-make-work careers while talking about how great the cake is?
Or road trip out west and do some hiking in the desert?
The larger point is not only are the VAST majority of people not intellectually stimulating enough, but good luck finding enough of them who have the freedom and finances to do anything besides hit up happy hour when wifey lets them out of the house.
And then there’s…
Frustration – Being unencumbered by the daily scourge of chores, children, finances, mortgages, and commutes, your mind will be unshackled to pursue whatever intellectual pursuits it wishes to pursue. You’ll solve world problems in an afternoon that politicians are taking eons to not solve. You’ll come up with some and many viable business ideas, discarding most of them because you have not the time to put them all into execution. You’ll see the obvious solutions to making your friends’ and love ones’ lives infinitely better, but they’ll have the horse-blinders on so tight, they’ll ignore your wisdom. Or you’ll make a great scientific discovery at work, while your boss dismisses it away and threatens to fire you for having an independent thought. It is simply the real world telling you, “You don’t control everything, and matter of fact, most of this world was not meant for you.”
Obviously, you can see where depression, alcoholism, and ennui set in. You can see where the pursuit and successful attainment of excellence in life can lead to unintentional alienation and ostracization from the rest of society. And since society is where all humans – geniuses or not, successful or not – get their value, you can see the downside to zooming past the “finish line of life,” especially at increasingly earlier ages as technology and minimalism permit it.
The solution is in part to find quality people who can be life-long friends, colleagues, peers, and comrades. Perhaps even get married if you find the right girl. And no matter what, keep yourself and your mind occupied. Hobbies, interests, pursuits, etc. Inactivity is death. But ultimately, what is going to best prepare you for what’s coming is to simply know it’s coming.
Nirvana and heaven are not at the other side of that finish line. An active and rewarding social life, full of close friends and loved ones are the not the reward for success. And it certainly isn’t a life-long party until you die. It is a mentally-barren landscape much like the moon, a place Buzz has been to both literally and metaphorically. | 1 |
McClatchy reports :
A total of 83 percent of likely voters believe that Clinton did something wrong – 51 percent saying she did something illegal and 32 percent saying she something unethical but not illegal. Just 14 percent said she’s done nothing wrong.
By comparison, 79 percent think Donald Trump did something wrong, though not nearly as many think he did something illegal. Just 26 percent think he’s done something illegal, while 53 percent think he’s dome something unethical but not illegal. Just 17 percent think he’s done nothing wrong.
17% and 14% thinking that Trump and Clinton, respectively, did nothing wrong is not a meaningful difference.
The real difference is that twice as many voters think Clinton broke the law as thing that Trump did. | 0 |
This week’s biggest political controversies exposed fault lines within the country’s major political factions, with the right fighting about civil disobedience while the left fought over the attempted murder of a Republican Congressman. [Shakespeare in the Park, On Friday night, two conservatives disrupted a New York performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that escalates the left’s campaign of imagery designed to cathartically depict the death or murder of President Donald Trump. TheRebel. tv’s Laura Loomer was arrested for running onstage during the Shakespeare in the Park production, while activist Jack Posobiec taped her demonstration and shouted at the crowd: “The blood of Steve Scalise is on your hands!” “Old Right” Several authors at conservative publications condemned Loomer and Posobiec, arguing that the two infringed on the free speech of Shakespeare in the Park and their tactics were too close to the Occupy of Black Lives Matter movement. conservatives labeled this faction the “old right,” stating that there is no moral equivalence between this disruption and the violence of protesters in dozens of recent incidents. The old right losers who are upset about what Laura did don’t realize that unlike them, we fight — and that’s why our guy won. #FreeLaura, — Cassandra Fairbanks (@CassandraRules) June 17, 2017, Which is appropriate She broke the law. To fight an injustice Just like #RosaParks https: . — Google ”CNN, 175, Sue” (@NolteNC) June 17, 2017, They’re literally shooting at us and you want to play Marquis of Queensbury. Cowardice. Fight the enemy or fuck you. — Google ”CNN, 175, Sue” (@NolteNC) June 17, 2017, Oh yeah, leftist students threatening conservatives with violence is the exact same as a 1 minute interruption of Shakespeare in the Park https: . — Scott Greer (@ScottMGreer) June 17, 2017, This is the mentality that has sat, patted itself on the back, and watched for decades as America has gone further and further Left https: . — DanRiehl (@DanRiehl) June 17, 2017, We went to one play and accomplished more for the message than the millions donated to think tanks and handed to K Street. Let that sink in, — Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) June 17, 2017, Schlichter vs. Podhoretz, One archetypical exchange in the aftermath of the Julius Caesar demonstration saw Tablet editor and “Never Trump” John Podhoretz facing off with lawyer and author Kurt Schlichter. I’d say I just learned tonight you’re a drooling, immoral, melodramatic idiot, but alas, I learned that long ago. https: . — John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) June 17, 2017, you want affirmative action for being a moron because you wore our country’s uniform? Happy to oblige. — John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) June 17, 2017, Cernovich vs. Shapiro, Even more heated was the war of words between independent author and White House reporter Mike Cernovich, responding to criticism from former Breitbart News Senior and “Never Trump” Ben Shapiro. This obnoxious stupid snowflake crap is no better than the protesters who try to block college speeches. https: . — Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 17, 2017, He doesn’t matter. None of those guys matter anymore. They don’t break news or make news. Controlled opposition for media to abuse. https: . — Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) June 17, 2017, This is total, complete horse crap. She invaded a public performance to obstruct it. She has no right to the stage. https: . — Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 17, 2017, 👇🏻This is what a coward looks like. #FreeLaura 👇🏻 https: . — Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) June 17, 2017, After trading a few intense personal insults, both men reiterated their arguments — but no longer directly to each other. They took stage for 1 minute. The left pulls fire alarms, uses pepper spray, hits people with bike locks. It’s not even close. — Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) June 17, 2017, Use free speech in ways that irritate the left. Do not impede other people’s freedom of speech. This is not difficult. — Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) June 18, 2017, At the same time, the left was infighting over a much more topic: targeted political violence. Steve Scalise, On Wednesday, a Illinois man opened fire on Republican lawmakers practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game, wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and putting him in critical condition through the weekend. The attacker — James Hodgkinson, who was killed by police returning fire — also shot Two Capitol Police officers, a congressional staffer, and a lobbyist. The Daily Caller has reported that investigators found a list of GOP lawmakers’ names on Hodgkinson’s body. Instead of universal condemnation, Hodgkinson’s attack has brought about a feud between the establishment left and the social justice left. Impulse Control, Over the weekend, several Verified progressives of varying prominence — an L. A. Times blogger, the creator of #OscarsSoWhite, a rapper with 250 YouTube subscribers, an Uproxx editor, and TV actor George Takei — argued that sympathy for Rep. Scalise should not outweigh his sinful acts as a lawmaker. In most cases, more traditional liberals scolded their more radical peers for generating bad optics. When will it be time to move Scalise’s opposition to gun control from the last graf of a story to the first? https: . — Michael Hiltzik (@hiltzikm) June 18, 2017, You can despise Scalise’s politics and also despise the fact someone thought gun violence would somehow change his or anyone’s mind. — John Haltiwanger (@jchaltiwanger) June 16, 2017, Wounded Congressman Scalise, who the GOP are so sad about, voted TWICE to not recognize the #MLK holiday. https: . — Iskandrah (@iskandrah) June 18, 2017, I ask you simply to look at Rep. Scalise’s record. Do you have sympathy for other white supremacists? — Iskandrah (@iskandrah) June 15, 2017, Was Scalise a ”human” when he voted against Marriage Equality and spoke at a white supremacy function? Or do only Dems need to be ”human?” https: . — April (@ReignOfApril) June 16, 2017, and don’t tell me the man has a family and allat shit, because so do folk with their premiums traveling on a rocket to Mars, — SUPER SIZE (@GrandeMarshall) June 14, 2017, Made the mistake of looking up Steve Scalise voting record on women and LGBT rights. Time to break out Milkshake Duck. — Donna Dickens (@MildlyAmused) June 14, 2017, I don’t have any tolerance for caveats on condemning political violence right now. You’re opening the door a crack. It needs to stay shut. — jessicashortall (@jessicashortall) June 16, 2017, Cool — I guess enough time has passed since Scalise got shot that we can go back to attacking him as a homophobic bigot. Stay classy, Sulu. https: . — Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) June 17, 2017, Why do we have to list Philando’s accolades? How come the headlines aren’t, ”Steve Scalise, a bigot who is trying to kill you, got shot”? — Brandi Geography B. (@ItsTheBrandi) June 17, 2017, Josh Barro, an editor at Business Insider, wrote a thread on how the dehumanization of the left’s political opponents is “bad for society. ” Dozens of progressives rebuked Barro in the responses, calling him misguided, “insincere,” and “white boy. ” This feels like the wrong week to do an analysis of whether Steve Scalise is a good congressman. — Josh Barro (@jbarro) June 18, 2017, On the other side of the argument, New Jersey Democratic strategist James Devine urged progressives to “hunt Republican Congressmen. ” Scarborough vs. Reid, On Saturday, MSNBC host Joy Reid called the situation “delicate” because, while “everybody is wishing the congressman well and hoping that he recovers” from an apparent assassination attempt, Reid lamented that “Scalise has a history that we’ve all been forced to sort of ignore on race. ” Joe Scarborough, one of Reid’s colleagues, appeared to attack this segment — without naming his target. CNN anchor Jake Tapper the condemnation. Rep. #Scalise was shot by a white man with a violent background, and saved by a black lesbian police officer, and yet … #AMJoy pic. twitter. — AM Joy Reid (@amjoyshow) June 17, 2017, If you are attacking Steve Scalise’s voting record right now, do yourself a favor and just stop now. I can’t even believe what I’m seeing. — Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) June 17, 2017, Who would even think for one second that it is appropriate to attack a man who is fighting for his life after an assassination attempt? — Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) June 17, 2017, Agreed. Unfathomable. https: . — Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) June 17, 2017, Pelosi vs. Pelosi, Septuagenarian Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi’s conflicting reactions to the Scalise shooting provided the clearest example of progressive id vs. progressive . On the day of the shooting, she said — in direct contradiction to virtually every other statement she has made about President Trump and Republicans — that she prayed for unity in the wake of the attack. On days like today, there are no Democrats or Republicans, only Americans united in our thoughts for the wounded. https: . — Nancy Pelosi (@NancyPelosi) June 14, 2017, Yet the very next day, in a seemingly unscripted moment, she returned to her default position of partisan blame: Somewhere in the 1990s, Republicans decided on the politics of personal destruction as they went after the Clintons and that is the provenance of it and is what has continued. Again, I feel as if we’re having a family moment that is very, very serious and we’re talking about things that we can say, the discussion — save the discussion for another day. When you have a president that says, “I can shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and nobody would care,” when you have people saying, “beat them up and I’ll pay their legal fees,” when you have all the assaults that are made on Hillary Clinton, for them to be so sanctimonious is something. The New Political Landscape, Two parties — Republicans and Democrats — still essentially rule American politics, but their constituencies are becoming more tribal and divided, even against their electoral allies. Trump voters hate Republican lawmakers, such as Sens. John McCain and Ben Sasse, for publicly attacking the president and his agenda during and after the 2016 election. Democrats are still picking up the pieces from a contentious DNC leadership race, where Obama ally Evan Perez narrowly defeated Rep. Keith Ellison. These same divisions play out in cultural institutions, such as the social justice warriors purging classical liberal professor Bret Weinstein from the Evergreen State College campus or Fox News’ internal fight over the future of its programming style. The arguments taking place now are over what are appropriate means to victory over the other side: for the right, whether to be polite or ruthless — and for the left, whether to be ruthless or violent. | 1 |
By narrating the raw aftermath of a police shooting in a widely shared Facebook Live video last year, Diamond Reynolds turned the death of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, into a nationwide call for racial justice. Now Ms. Reynolds, who was widely praised for her poise during the video, is facing legal troubles. Ms. Reynolds, of West St. Paul, Minn. was charged with felony assault last week, stemming from accusations that she attacked a woman with a hammer. The police said Ms. Reynolds, 27, was among a group of women who “jumped” a woman at 10:30 a. m. in St. Paul. She was freed on bail after a court appearance on Monday. Her lawyer, Michael Padden, said she intended to plead not guilty at her next court appearance on April 3. The woman, who is 24 but whose name was not included in the criminal complaint, told the police that while waiting at a stop sign, she saw a white S. U. V. make a to follow her. She said she drove to a parking lot and got out of her car, at which point Ms. Reynolds ran up and punched her in the head while another woman, Chnika Blair, 18, grabbed her by the hair, the police said. At one point, Ms. Reynolds struck the woman in the head with a hammer, knocking her to the ground, the police said. Ms. Reynolds then struck the car’s windshield with the hammer, smashing the window, the police said. A third woman, Dyamond Richardson, 25, got out of the car, chased the woman down and sprayed her with mace, the police said. Ms. Blair and Ms. Richardson were also arrested. The woman identified Ms. Reynolds, Ms. Blair and Ms. Richardson out of three separate photo lineups, the police said. The woman showed officers a Facebook post by Ms. Reynolds in which she threatened to “come after” her, the police said. Ms. Richardson told investigators there was an ongoing conflict between her and a friend of the unnamed woman, according to the complaint. The death of Mr. Castile, a school cafeteria worker, was one of several shootings last year that focused the nation’s attention on police treatment of . He was shot by an officer while inside a car at 9 p. m. in Falcon Heights, a small city northwest of St. Paul. The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s office said he died about 20 minutes after he was shot. The encounter was made even more chilling by Ms. Reynolds’s anguished but calm commentary during her Facebook video, which began soon after Mr. Castile was shot. As her daughter watched in the back seat, she walked viewers through her account of what happened, saying she informed officers that he had a gun and that he was reaching for his driver’s license and registration when the officer opened fire. Her account was laced with emotion — “Stay with me,” she pleaded to Mr. Castile — but she also had the wherewithal to repeatedly call the officer “sir. ” The video was viewed millions of times, serving as a window into the personal effects of violence not often seen. The officer who shot Mr. Castile, Jeronimo Yanez, was charged with manslaughter in November. He pleaded not guilty in February and his trial is scheduled to begin on May 30. Activists began calling for black men and women to stream their encounters with the police live so others could watch for mistreatment. Since the shooting, Ms. Reynolds has been rattled by insomnia and panic attacks, she told The Washington Post in November. | 0 |
The conversion of the Los Angeles Gay Pride march into the “#ResistMarch” on Sunday marked the effective end of the gay rights movement. [Once, the gay rights movement stood for tolerance: hence the rainbow flag, which is a symbol not only of pride but also of acceptance. But the message on Sunday was that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) conservatives are unwelcome in that spectrum — and are, in fact, aiding the enemy. The purpose of Gay Pride parades, in L. A. and elsewhere, has historically been to create an environment into which LGBTQ individuals could “come out of the closet” and express their sexuality without fear of persecution. But the complete transformation of the gay rights movement into a political monolith has created an environment profoundly hostile to gay conservatives. The gay rights movement has destroyed one closet, only to build another. Aside from the totalitarian, mentality of some of the movement’s leaders — which was on full display in the screeching speeches from the front of the march on Sunday — there are two other reasons for the gay rights movement’s transformation from a force for liberation into a tool for repression. One is that the movement has run out of great causes for which to fight. With the Supreme Court’s June 2015 discovery of a right to gay marriage in the U. S. Constitution, the gay rights movement has little left to achieve. It has poured energy and resources into the new cause of transgender rights, but that is a deeply complicated issue that affects a tiny percentage of Americans. The other reason the gay rights movement appears to have adopted a political approach is that its leaders seem to think that they simply do not need Republican support. Although Americans, and Republicans in particular, have been increasingly tolerant toward the LGBTQ community — with Donald Trump specifically the movement at the 2016 Republican National Convention — the gay rights movement has generally preferred to fight its cause in the courts rather than appealing to the goodwill of voters. That strategy has largely worked, and the lesson the movement and its leaders appear to have drawn is that they can dispense with Republicans as allies. But it is one thing to ignore Republicans, and quite another to declare war on them. The leaders of L. A. Pride made a conscious decision to turn their annual celebration into a Democratic Party rally, adopting the rhetoric of the “Resistance. ” There was not even a perfunctory gesture at bipartisanship. The battle lines were sharply drawn, with even “our love, and our music, and our joy” denied to people who might vote for the opposing political party. The #ResistMarch willingly cast aside the idea of standing up for LGBTQ people of all political backgrounds. In so doing, it effectively declared the gay rights movement over. Gay Pride is no longer about pride: it is about the mobilization of popular culture for partisan purposes, with LGBTQ conservatives shoved behind the closet door. Joel B. Pollak is Senior at Breitbart News. He was named one of the “most influential” people in news media in 2016. He is the of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak. This post has been corrected for typographical errors. | 0 |
Home | World | Brexit Betrayal: Britain Must Prepare For Thirty Years of Civil Unrest and Riots Brexit Betrayal: Britain Must Prepare For Thirty Years of Civil Unrest and Riots By Dark Waters 04/11/2016 07:53:14
LONDON – England – The consequence of diverting the result of a democratically held referendum vote which was given full support from parliament and won by 52% of voters for Brexit will be the undoing of Britain’s constitution.
To simply bypass the peoples vote will not be tolerated by many and there will be civil unrest in the future if Brexit is not delivered.
Mass rioting and looting in all cities will be the norm, because if there is no rule of law in our democracy, why should the people adhere to any rule of law on the streets?
In essence, civil unrest is the last bastion of justice, and to have the conclusive EU referendum vote stolen by crooked biased EU centric judges will be their final undoing.
There will be no peace, as the rioting masses converge burning everything in their path, who is to say what will happen, but when the anger envelopes the populace there is no stopping the torrent.
It is better to fight for justice than to be timid, civil unrest is a disruptive tool that when utilised correctly can bring forth real change. Change that crooked corrupt judges commandeered by rich business people cannot do.
Of course violence and looting is a terrible thing, but so is war, so is injustice, but these are necessary measures for survival, if nothing is done soon, Britain and its people will be no more. Already, we have been inundated, but if there is no Brexit, the numbers will increase tenfold, until the tiny island of Britain is nothing more than a holding prison, a junk filled morose, barren overpopulated garbage dump.
Britain fought two world wars and was on the winning side of both, this time, the Germans will take Britain without a single shot being fired, this is the central position of the EU. The European Union is an East German Soviet construct incorporating German Imperial fascist techniques to subjugate other nations through economic means.
By bribing the corrupt judges who are linked to EU centric projects, the EU is seeking to halt Brexit.
No More
Are you a fucking fool to take that? Are you going to stand by and let your nation be taken over? Or are you going to fucking stand up and fucking do something about it?
We must do what is necessary.
“It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required .” ― Winston S. Churchill Share on : | 0 |
A California tattoo removal clinic is seeing a record number of clients since the 2016 election who worry that their tattoos will prompt immigration officials to single them out as targets for deportation. [The number of customers for the tattoo removal business has doubled as some in the Latino community in San Pablo worry that immigration agents will use their tattoos as an excuse to ask about immigration status, KPIX reported. People normally come to the business to get tattoos removed for job interviews, or to get rid of an ’s name, but the clinic says deportation is a new reason. “A lot of people don’t want to be a moving target or even seen as a target,” says Nora Ruiz of the San Pablo Economic Development Corporation. “And for fear that they might be seen as a certain type of person or judged in any way, people want to get their tattoos removed. ” There is no evidence that those with tattoos are being singled out by immigration officials, but people with criminal backgrounds or gang ties could be at risk. Immigrants are also canceling their food stamps and foregoing doctor visits over fears immigration agents will use the records kept with agencies or doctor’s offices to track them down and deport them. | 0 |
BERLIN — Yorai Feinberg was going about his daily routine this month when his social media feeds and cellphone began lighting up. It was the 78th anniversary of the Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi pogrom against Jews, and the Berlin restaurant owned by Mr. Feinberg, a Israeli, had been included without his knowledge on a map of the city that a group had published on Facebook. The social media post listed the names — and addresses — of local Jewish institutions and businesses under the banner “Jews Among Us,” in bright yellow Gothic script. Mr. Feinberg soon received anonymous phone calls telling him, “I hate Jews. ” A standoff quickly developed between Facebook, the social media giant, and German authorities over what many here said was its inadequate response to the publication of the map. But Germany’s rules on what may be said or published — among the world’s toughest, with long prison terms for denying the Holocaust and inciting hatred against minorities — ensured that the post was eventually deleted. The incident is one of several examples — including threats of regulation and attempts to prosecute Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg — of how Germany has become an important test case globally for how the social network polices what may be published online, and how it should respond to inappropriate and illegal content. Such steps in Germany are part of a growing push around the world to regulate what users are allowed to post online. Mr. Feinberg did not report the incident to Facebook, convinced after previous attacks that the social network would not act, he said. “I have reported things to Facebook at least 20 times,” he explained over coffee at his restaurant in a residential neighborhood in western Berlin. “And 100 percent of the time, they have refused to take it down. Facebook doesn’t do anything. ” Others identified in the map did complain. At first, Facebook did not remove the map, saying it complied with the company’s “community standards,” or guidelines for what it deems within the bounds of free speech. But within 48 hours, after an outcry on social media, in local newspapers and from German lawmakers, Facebook relented. It deleted the group’s entire page, including the post that had listed the Jewish institutions and businesses across Berlin. “We recognize that this is a work in progress,” Richard Allen, Facebook’s director of policy in Europe, said in an interview. “It was hate speech, and it should have been taken down. ” In Germany, more than almost anywhere else in the West, lawmakers, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, are demanding that Facebook go further to police what is said on the social network — a platform that now has 1. 8 billion users worldwide. The country’s lawmakers also want other American tech giants to meet similar standards. The dispute has raised concerns over maintaining freedom of speech while protecting vulnerable minorities in a country where the legacy of World War II and decades under Communism still resonate. It is occurring amid mounting criticism of Facebook in the United States after fake news reports were shared widely on the site before the presidential election. Facebook also has been accused of allowing similar false reports to spread during elections elsewhere. Mr. Zuckerberg has denied that such reports swayed American voters. But lawmakers in the United States, Germany and beyond are pressing Facebook to clamp down on hate speech, fake news and other misinformation shared online, or face new laws, fines or other legal actions. “Facebook has a certain responsibility to uphold the laws,” said Heiko Maas, the German justice minister. In October, Mr. Maas suggested the company could be held criminally liable for users’ illegal hate speech postings if it does not swiftly remove them. Facebook rejects claims that it has not responded to the rise in hate speech in Germany and elsewhere, saying it continually updates its community standards to weed out inappropriate posts and comments. It says such material represents a small fraction of the millions of posts daily, and argues there is a fine balance between protecting freedom of expression and stamping out internet hate speech. “We’ve done more than any other service at trying to get on top of hate speech on our platform,” Mr. Allen said. Tussles with German lawmakers are nothing new for Facebook. It has routinely run afoul of the country’s strict privacy rules. In September, a local regulator blocked WhatsApp, the internet messaging service owned by Facebook, from sharing data from users in Germany with its parent company. The country’s officials also have questioned whether Facebook’s control of users’ digital information could breach antitrust rules, accusations the company denies. Facebook’s problems with hate speech posts in Germany began in summer 2015 as more than one million refugees began to enter the country. Their arrival, according to company executives and lawmakers, incited an online backlash from Germans opposed to the swell of people from Syria, Afghanistan and other countries. The number of hateful posts on Facebook increased sharply. As such content spread quickly online, senior German politicians appealed directly to Facebook to comply with the country’s laws. Even Ms. Merkel confronted Mr. Zuckerberg in New York in September 2015 about the issue. In response, Facebook updated its global community standards, which also apply in the United States, to give greater protection to minority groups, primarily to calm German concerns. Facebook also agreed to work with the government, local charities and other companies to fight online hate speech, and recently started a billboard and television campaign in Germany to answer local fears over how it deals with hate speech and privacy. Facebook hired a tech company based in Berlin to monitor and delete illegal content, including hate speech, from Germany and elsewhere, working with Facebook’s monitoring staff in Dublin. “They have gotten better and quicker at handling hate speech,” said Martin Drechsler, managing director of FSM, a nonprofit group that has worked with Facebook on the issue. Despite these steps, German officials are demanding further action. Ms. Merkel, who is seeking a fourth term in general elections next year, warned lawmakers last week that hate speech and fake news sites were influencing public opinion, raising the possibility of new regulations. And Mr. Maas, the justice minister, has repeatedly warned that he will propose legislation if Facebook cannot remove at least 70 percent of online hate speech within 24 hours by early next year. It now removes less than 50 percent, according to a study published in September by a group that monitors hate speech, a proportion that is still significantly higher than those for Twitter and YouTube, the report found. For Jun, a lawyer in Würzburg, an hour’s drive from Frankfurt, new laws governing Facebook cannot come soon enough. Mr. Jun recently filed a complaint with Munich authorities, seeking prosecution of Mr. Zuckerberg and other senior Facebook executives on charges they failed to sufficiently tackle the widespread wave of hate speech in Germany. The company denies the accusations. While his complaint may be dismissed, Mr. Jun says the roughly 450 hate speech cases that he has collected, more than half of them aimed at refugees, show that Facebook is not complying with German law. Despite its global size, he insists, the company cannot skirt its local responsibilities. “I know Facebook wants to be seen as a global giant,” Mr. Jun said. “But there’s no way around it. They have to comply with German law. ” | 1 |
French Front National firebrand, and niece of Marine Le Pen, Marion Pen has announced she is to step down from politics citing personal reasons. [Ms. Pen made her announcement on Tuesday afternoon saying she would not be seeking office for the French legislative elections set to occur next month. She told the press she wants to spend more time with her young child and escape the “whirlwind” of political life, Le Figaro reports. According to various sources, there was some conflict between Ms. Pen and her aunt Marine Le Pen who was recently defeated by independent presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron. Somewhat sympathetic to her grandfather Le Pen, Marion had difficulty keeping a low profile when was eventually kicked out of the party by Marine. Pen also came into conflict with FN Florian Philippot who she claimed had too much influence. In public, Marion supported her aunt’s candidacy for the French presidency. It is unclear how much of the perception of their personal conflict was true and how much was played up by French media to divide the two most popular politicians in the National Front. For Marion, the base of the Front National is conservative, Catholic, and traditionalist, and she has opposed gay marriage and abortion to a much greater extent than her aunt. Marion had previously marched and spoke at rallies of the family group La Manif pour Tous (“Protest for All”) who slammed Macron as the “ ” candidate. Marion has also railed against feminists in the French National Assembly over abortion and the shutting down of websites. She then slammed left wing feminists for supporting the hijab calling it an “Islamic submission tool”. It is unknown how long Marion will stay away from political life as she is currently ranked as one of the most influential MPs in the entire country. Marion is also the youngest member of the National Assembly ever elected, assuming the office at only 22 years old. Now aged just 27, Marion may still have a huge potential in future French politics. After conceding defeat on Sunday evening, Marine Le Pen announced her migration populist movement would continue on. Others have said the Front National may also be “rebranding” away from its controversial past. The new movement could even drop the ‘Front National’ name as the party looks to make huge gains in the legislative elections next month, even if it is missing one of its most prominent members. Follow Chris Tomlinson on Twitter at @TomlinsonCJ or email at ctomlinson@breitbart. com | 0 |
conscientiousness extraversion They predicted that “firstborns (versus laterborns) should be higher in conscientiousness, neuroticism, and the dominance aspect of extraversion, whereas laterborns should be higher in agreeableness and the sociability aspect of extraversion.” What they found is that firstborns tended to be more conscientious and dominant, and less sociable, but that they tended to be more agreeable and less neurotic. The problem with this finding is that the effect was so tiny that if they hadn’t looked at hundreds of thousands of people, it wouldn’t have been significant at all. But again, when it came to intelligence, firstborns did have an advantage—of one IQ point. Flawed Studies? In a 2010 article by Ph.D. student Joshua K. Hartshorne , explains that most of these studies are flawed because they dismiss important social factors like ethnicity, education, and wealth. More importantly, he says researchers don’t understand the importance of family size . If in fact oldest siblings are more intelligent (21 of the first 23 astronauts into space were firstborns), than it would be wise to know how many siblings they have. A child from a two-kid family has a 50 percent chance of being a firstborn, whereas a child from a five-kid family has only a 20 percent chance of being a firstborn. More so, families who are wealthier tend to have fewer children. More children mean that parental resources (money, time, and attention) are sparing. Interestingly so, Hartshorne claims that firstborns are most likely to marry firstborns, middle borns marry middle borns, last borns marry last borns, and only children marry only children. This furthers the belief that a personality is determined with birth order because people are more likely to be attracted to other people of similar personalities. The Conclusion The idea of birth order has always perplexed me. I could find these characteristics existed when I looked at any of my friends and the order they placed in their family but then it made me wonder: if any of the roles were switched, could I apply any of the characteristics to them then? Probably. But, when I look at my own family, me being the youngest sibling of 2, I could almost most definitely agree with the personality traits. Evolve Your Inbox & Stay Conscious Daily Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. It’s funny/sad when you meet someone who says they are the only child. Naturally and unfortunately, there is a bad connotation toward them that has clearly been infiltrated into our psyche from the perceptions our parents have. Which makes the next point so important: birth order isn’t so much about who was born first or last but about the relationship that exists between parent and child, sibling to sibling, and family dynamic as a whole. This delves into the realm of nature vs. nurture. While I believe there are some truths to this theory, I’m not really interested in trying to fit myself into a box. We are all so much more than our ‘birth order’ and we all carry so many different factors that help us deal with hardships and what we choose to do with our futures. What would it mean if a child was born to a single parent? Or if a parent passed during a second born’s life? Or if they were raised by their grandparents? In my opinion, a viable study to determine if birth order affects our IQ or personality would have to be done over a span of 50 years or so with every inhibiting and positive family factor to name for a legitimate study to determine how we are.
The Sacred Science follows eight people from around the world, with varying physical and psychological illnesses, as they embark on a one-month healing journey into the heart of the Amazon jungle.
You can watch this documentary film FREE for 10 days by clicking here.
"If “Survivor” was actually real and had stakes worth caring about, it would be what happens here, and “The Sacred Science” hopefully is merely one in a long line of exciting endeavors from this group." - Billy Okeefe, McClatchy Tribune | 1 |
0 comments Is she a loyal wife and patriot or traitorous spy? Hackers exposed her secrets then her husband’s sex scandal opened the floodgates… Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s top assistant for years, has perhaps become the most significant figure in the final weeks of the 2016 Election. Born in the United States, Abedin’s family moved to Saudi Arabia when she was two. At age 18, she returned to the United States, and, in 1996, at age 20, started interning for Hillary Clinton. From 2002-2008, she also worked for her mother’s radical Muslim magazine, the Journal for Muslim Minority Affairs. Reportedly, the Journal advocates Sharia law and denounces the right of women. Through WikiLeaks, we recently learned just how close Huma was to Hillary. Clinton aid Huma Abedin had access to Clinton email address used for classified emails https://t.co/G3DusQy1ZQ pic.twitter.com/QmoEn8DDg5
â WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 9, 2016
She obviously had access to Hillary’s emails. It makes sense, now, to conclude that Huma knew much more about the email scandal that has plagued the Clinton Campaign for some time. Justin Cooper was the Clinton aide who set up the email server. Huma: “My clinton [black]berry not working” Cooper: “We were attacked again” pic.twitter.com/KjQcbocQzz
â Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) October 28, 2016
Clearly, Huma knew that they had been hacked in the past, yet she never once reported the possible vulnerabilities to National Security?
Today, we learned that the New York Police Department, while investigating the sexting scandal of Huma’s estranged husband, former Congressman Anthony Weiner, uncovered a digital folder entitled, âLife Insurance.â Multiple news sources have reported that the folder contains 650,000 official emails from Huma and Hillary’s time at the State Department.
Did Huma create the âLife Insuranceâ folder to use as leverage, just in case her boss, Hillary Clinton, ever turned on her? Or, did Anthony Weiner create the folder, for his own bargaining options? So did Huma steal 10,000 emails and saved it on her comp just in case Clinton targeted her?
Hence: “life insurance”
â Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 30, 2016 FBI Source: Weiner singing like a bird for a deal; he knows what happens to pedophiles in prison
â Jack Posobiec đşđ¸ (@JackPosobiec) October 30, 2016
Some news outlets have wondered if Huma Abedin is actually a spy.
Given Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner’s backgrounds, all of these questions are legitimate.
Consider this revealing video, created by the hacking group, Anonymous: Anonymous said it best: âWho is Huma?â | 0 |
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The Palestine Football Association (PFA), in a first testing of Palestine's ability to fight its battle with Israel in international courts, plans to go to the world's top court for sports in a bid to force its Israeli counterpart to view Israeli settlements on the West Bank as occupied territory rather than an extension of the Jewish state.
The potential Palestinian move follows the Palestinian Authority's campaign to isolate Israel in international organizations and challenge Israel's occupation of the West Bank in the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Using soccer as a testing ground, Palestine's efforts to confront Israel in international organizations has produced mixed results. While Palestine succeeded in joining various international organizations, the PFA last year failed to muster sufficient votes to persuade world soccer body FIFA to suspend Israel. The PFA argued that the policies of the Israeli government and the Israel Football Association (IFA) violated FIFA rules as well as international law governing the status of occupied territory.
The PFA has since been unable to push FIFA towards any punitive steps against Israel. Instead, FIFA opted to monitor developments and attempt with little success to negotiate a way out of the impasse. Palestine is expected to take legal recourse if FIFA fails to take more decisive action at its next council meeting in January.
The PFA's focus since failing to get Israel suspended has been on banning six clubs that are based in Israeli settlements on the West Bank from playing in Israeli lower divisions. FIFA rules stipulate that clubs based in a recognized federation's territory cannot play in leagues of another soccer association without the permission of the home federation. The PFA rejects the notion of granting permission because it believes that it would legitimize Israeli settlements and the occupation.
MORE... Swedish soccer player sent off for loud fart during match PFA President Jibril Rajoub suggested that the PFA would take its case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) after a seven-hour meeting earlier this month of a FIFA committee headed by Tokyo Sexwale failed to resolve the issue.
Mr. Sexwale is scheduled to visit Israel later this month for a meeting with Israeli sports minister Miri Regev. The FIFA Council is scheduled to discuss the issue at its next meeting in January. The PFA is likely to prepare its case for CAS, but wait with filing it until after the January meeting.
Israel sees the Palestinian demands and threat as strengthening the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) that sees penalization as a means of forcing the Jewish state to alter its policies and ultimately withdraw from territory occupied during the 1967 Middle East war.
Condemnation of the Israeli occupation and settlements by the United Nations Security Council constitutes the legal basis for the PFA's approach as well as potential challenges in international courts.
The strength of the Palestinian position has been weakened changing [Persian] Gulf attitudes towards Israel and Saudi and United Arab Emirates pressure on Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. [Persian] Gulf states, despite paying lip service to the Palestinian cause, have become more public about their informal relations with Israel based on common opposition to expanding Iranian influence in the region.
Writing in the kingdom's controlled press, a prominent Saudi journalist went as far as calling for the establishment of diplomatic relations with Israel. The UAE last year agreed to the opening of an Israeli diplomatic mission accredited to the Abu Dhabi-based International Renewable Energy Agency rather than the UAE government. Bahrain, as part of an agreement to host next year's FIFA congress, has consented to issue visas to representatives of the IFA. Israeli nationals are barred from travelling to [Persian] Gulf countries.
At the same time, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have been pressuring Mr. Abbas to resolve his differences with Mohammed Dahlan, the controversial former Abu Dhabi-based Gaza strongman who is an archenemy of the Palestinian president. Mr. Dahlan is widely seen as a successor to 81-year old Mr. Abbas, who would be acceptable to Israel.
Israel may be able to count on some degree of tacit [Persian] Gulf support within FIFA but is likely nonetheless to ultimately have to be seen to be accepting some kind of compromise that throws a bone to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians' focus on the Israeli West Bank teams has however raised the bar for Israel. An agreement between Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and former FIFA president Sepp Blatter struck last year addresses many of the PFA's grievances but not the issue of six the West Bank teams. Their status goes to the heart of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: the legal status of territory occupied by Israel since 1967.
Under the agreement, Mr. Netanyahu proposed to give Palestinian players special identity cards and place sports liaison officials at crossings between Palestinian areas and those under Israeli control in a bid to eliminate obstacles to free movement that complicated the development of Palestinian soccer. Mr. Netanyahu further suggested to create an escort service that would facilitate players' travel between the West Bank and Gaza that are separated by Israeli territory.
Israel initially appeared to live up to its promises by granting for the first time in 15 years, a West Bank team, Hebron's Al Ahli, passage to Gaza to play a Palestine Cup final against the strip's Al Shejaia. Hopes that this signalled a new beginning were however dashed when the PFA cancelled the return match in Hebron after Israel agreed to grant passage to only 33 of the 37 players who were scheduled to travel. Implementation of the agreement has since evaporated.
The PFA, by putting the West Bank teams at the top of their agenda, has made it tougher for FIFA and Israel to work out a compromise that would not have implications for the future of Israeli-Palestinian peace making. Israeli is likely to want to avoid subjecting its policies to the scrutiny of an international court. Yet, that may be exactly what would best serve the Palestine Authority's overall strategy. | 1 |
David Icke is one of the most visible outspoken and controversial speakers and writers about the Illuminati and the New World Order control agenda.
Via: The Financial Armageddon
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Get short URL 0 2 0 0 A man in Kuwait was nearly sent to prison after his family’s pet parrot exposed -- by repeating phrases spoken between him and the housekeeper in front of his wife -- that he was having an affair with the maid.
Following the bird’s revelations, the man’s wife filed a complaint with the Hawally Police Department, accusing her husband of deception. She had long suspected that there was an improper relationship between him and the maid. Bird-en of Proof: Parrot's 'Testimony' Could Help Solve Michigan Murder Case Luckily for the husband, the case was thrown out based on lack of credible evidence, as the parrot could not testify in court. Investigators also explained that it could not be conclusively proven that the bird was mimicking a conversation it heard in person — and not just some flirty scene that had played on television.
In Kuwait, adultery is illegal and can carry a sentence of hard labor or even prison time, the India Times reports.
In 2006, a woman in Leeds was busted for infidelity after her boyfriend’s parrot began squawking “I love you Gary.” Gary, it turned out, was an ex-colleague of the woman’s. After being confronted with the parrot’s phrases the girlfriend admitted to the affair.
The parrot also made smooching noises when it heard the name Gary. Though the girlfriend moved out, the parrot’s owner had to get rid of the bird as well, as it would not stop repeating the name of the homewrecker, and became a painful reminder. "I wasn't sorry to see the back of Suzy after what she did, but it really broke my heart to let Ziggy go," the jilted boyfriend told BBC at the time. "I love him to bits and I really miss having him around, but it was torture hearing him repeat that name over and over again." ... | 0 |
■ The “red lines” that would bring President Obama back into the political fray. ■ Donald J. Trump talked “life” with Kanye West at Trump Tower — and Kanye puts off a White House run? ■ A Hill press aide vaults to the White House. In an interview on “The Daily Show,” President Obama drew a red line on “core issues” that might lead him to speak out against his successor in the first year of his . If Mr. Trump sought to create a Muslim registry or sought to round up those brought illegally to the United States as children, “I might have to say something about that. ” “But it’s not my intention to be, I’ve said this before, the old guy at the bar who’s just kind of hanging on,” he said. “I need to take some time. ” That reluctance to speak out is beginning to anger some fellow Democrats. He also told Trevor Noah, the “Daily Show” host, “When the D. N. C. got hacked, we immediately assigned our intelligence community, our law enforcement, to investigate what had happened. ” “This was not a secret,” the president said. The rapper and music impresario Kanye West, who told an audience that he would have cast his ballot for Mr. Trump if he had bothered to vote, dropped by Trump Tower to discuss issues with the . And the moment wasn’t going to slip by Mr. Trump, who came down to the lobby to greet the “New Kanye” in front of the cameras. “Just friends, just friends. He’s a good man. Long time. Friends for a long time,” Mr. Trump told reporters about the meeting. He added: “Life. We discussed life. ” Mr. West took to Twitter after the meeting to explain. He then suggested cryptically that his own promise to run for the presidency in 2020 would be delayed — presumably so as not to challenge Mr. Trump’s second term. Some of his fans may be saying they miss the old Kanye. For congressional reporters of even a moderately long vintage, Stephen Miller was known as an eager press aide to Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, eager to talk . .. and talk . .. and talk about policy, especially his views on immigration. Mr. Miller hit it big when he left the Senate for the Trump campaign when few gave Mr. Trump much of a shot to win the Republican nomination. On Tuesday, he was named assistant to the president and senior adviser to the president for policy. Before Mr. Trump is even inaugurated, the first poll of his potential Democratic opponents in 2020 is now out. Not surprisingly, it looks a bit premature. The survey of 400 Democratic primary voters, conducted last week by Public Policy Polling, drops off precipitously from there, with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey coming in at 4 percent, Senators Al Franken of Minnesota and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York at 3 percent, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York at 2 percent, and Julián Castro, President Obama’s housing secretary, at less than 1 percent. In other words, the field is wide open — though Mr. Biden did keep his options open. “Four years is a lifetime in American politics. And I think that nominees are determined by their parties based mostly on what skill set is most needed at that time,” the departing vice president said Sunday. “And who knows where we’re going to be two years from now when people really start looking seriously at what they are going to do. ” Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, perhaps the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, discussed the post of energy secretary, but in the end, his appointment would have only let his state’s new Democratic governor appoint a successor. Mr. Manchin still may be the ’s best Democratic partner as he tries to enact his agenda. His statement after Rick Perry got the energy job: The Trump transition team announced early Tuesday that Rex W. Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of Exxon Mobil, was the ’s choice for secretary of state, despite concerns over Mr. Tillerson’s close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Those “relationships with leaders all over the world” are what has both Democrats and Republicans worried. Democratic interest groups are happily providing visual evidence. And: But the concern is bipartisan. | 1 |
LONDON — Months after Britain voted to leave the European Union, the first tangible victim of that decision has emerged and, like the bloc itself, it is something that has divided the country for years: Marmite, a sludgy and breakfast spread. Since the June referendum, many who voted for withdrawal from the European Union, a process known as Brexit, have brushed off concerns that a recession was possible or that car manufacturers and banks based in the country might leave. They have even celebrated the pound’s recent fall to a low, arguing that a weaker currency is good for exporters. But they probably never thought it would come to this. Fears that Marmite and other British classics, like the PG Tips brand of tea, might disappear from store shelves had gripped Britons after reports that the supermarket chain Tesco and the owner of those brands, the consumer goods company Unilever, were locked in a price dispute over who should bear the cost of the weakening pound. Marmite was briefly unavailable in Tesco’s online market, and store supplies dwindled. The pound has fallen drastically against other major currencies since the vote to leave the bloc, and as worries have increased that Britain would opt for a “hard Brexit” — shorthand for a strict break with the European Union — which could limit its access to the region’s single market for goods and services. But after the markets closed on Thursday, Tesco reassured the public that the crisis had been averted. In a statement, Tesco said, “We’re pleased this situation has been resolved to our satisfaction. ” In reality, consumers will most likely have to dig deeper into their pocketbooks. Graeme Pitkethly, Unilever’s chief financial officer, said during an earnings call on Thursday that “prices should start to increase to cover the cost of imported goods due to weaker sterling. ” Still, the concerns over the beloved consumer goods led to a political uproar. “Who would have thought that the first casualty of a hard Brexit would be the nation’s supplies of Marmite?” asked Pete Wishart, a member of Parliament for the Scottish National Party, which campaigned to remain in the European Union. On Twitter, Britons wryly noted that store shelves were emptied of Marmite jars, and one used jar was put up for sale on eBay for 100, 000 pounds, or about $122, 000. News bulletins on the BBC led with the possible Marmite shortage. “This is a concrete case of Brexit affecting people’s lives,” said Pinar Hosafci, a senior food analyst at Euromonitor International. “Talk of Brexit had been more political, financial and a bit abstract” before, she added. “This touches their lives. ” Among the affected brands is Colman’s Mustard, which, like Marmite, is produced in Britain. Analysts noted that although Marmite and some of the other affected brands were made in Britain, Unilever published its company results in euros, meaning that those products were still affected by a weaker pound. Imported household goods like Dove soap and Ben Jerry’s ice cream are also under the Unilever umbrella. In 2011, Tesco refused to stock Branston Pickle after another supplier, Premier Foods, tried to pass on cost increases. Analysts have predicted that food prices will start to rise across the board in the coming months as supermarkets struggle to absorb the extra cost of imported goods, which are more expensive when a currency weakens. Stores have already stopped promotions and discounts on their products, Ms. Hosafci said. But “price increases will start happening in the next four to five months, when they will need to renew their stocks. ” “Eventually, they’ll need to increase prices,” she added. “Otherwise, their businesses will no longer be profitable. ” | 0 |
BNI Store Nov 5 2016 MINNESOTASTAN: Tagging the Muslim Student Association (MSA) sign with “ISIS” is NOT a hate crime but an accurate description of what the MSA stands for The discovery of ISIS graffiti on the MSA sign at the University of Minnesota campus has the local chapter of designated terrorist group CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) calling for a hate crime investigation. CAIR-MN says that “Islamophobic” vandals spray-painted “ISIS” on the Muslim Student Association’s sign on campus. However, if you are familiar with the background of the MSA, it’s easy to understand why ISIS is an appropriate tag for them. MSA, like CAIR, is a North American affiliate of the terror-linked Muslim Brotherhood organization (original founders of al-Qaeda), whose headquarters, originally in Egypt (from which it has been banned by the al-Sisi government for its terrorist activities) now is in Qatar, a well-known state sponsor of terrorism, including the Islamic State (ISIS). FOX9 Naturally, the CAIR thugs think you are too ignorant to know this, so they perform their usual “Islamophobia” tap dance, demanding yet another time-wasting state and local hate crime investigation for some harmless graffiti which was likely painted by Muslim students themselves. “University administrators and state religious and political leaders must speak out forcefully against the rising anti-Muslim hate in our society that results in such disturbing incidents,” said a statement from CAIR-MN executive director Jaylani Hussein. “We urge campus police and other relevant law enforcement agencies to investigate this incident as a hate crime.” Hussein cited the “Islamophobic rhetoric in the presidential election campaign,” particularly from Donald Trump, as a possible contributing factor to these types of incidents. (No, it’s the abhorrent behavior of Muslims themselves that cause so many people around the world to hate Muslims) | 0 |
NAPLES, Italy — Russian attack submarines, the most in two decades, are prowling the coastlines of Scandinavia and Scotland, the Mediterranean Sea and the North Atlantic in what Western military officials say is a significantly increased presence aimed at contesting American and NATO undersea dominance. Adm. Mark Ferguson, the United States Navy’s top commander in Europe, said last fall that the intensity of Russian submarine patrols had risen by almost 50 percent over the past year, citing public remarks by the Russian Navy chief, Adm. Viktor Chirkov. Analysts say that tempo has not changed since then. The patrols are the most visible sign of a renewed interest in submarine warfare by President Vladimir V. Putin, whose government has spent billions of dollars for new classes of diesel and attack submarines that are quieter, better armed and operated by more proficient crews than in the past. The tensions are part of an expanding rivalry and military buildup, with echoes of the Cold War, between the United States and Russia. Moscow is projecting force not only in the North Atlantic but also in Syria and Ukraine and building up its nuclear arsenal and cyberwarfare capacities in what American military officials say is an attempt to prove its relevance after years of economic decline and retrenchment. Independent American military analysts see the increased Russian submarine patrols as a legitimate challenge to the United States and NATO. Even short of tensions, there is the possibility of accidents and miscalculations. But whatever the threat, the Pentagon is also using the Russian patrols as another argument for bigger budgets for submarines and warfare. American naval officials say that in the short term, the growing number of Russian submarines, with their ability to shadow Western vessels and European coastlines, will require more ships, planes and subs to monitor them. In the long term, the Defense Department has proposed $8. 1 billion over the next five years for “undersea capabilities,” including nine new attack submarines that can carry up to 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles, more than triple the capacity now. “We’re back to the great powers competition,” Adm. John M. Richardson, the chief of naval operations, said in an interview. Last week, unarmed Russian warplanes repeatedly buzzed a Navy destroyer in the Baltic Sea and at one point came within 30 feet of the warship, American officials said. Last year some of Russia’s new diesel submarines launched four cruise missiles at targets in Syria. Mr. Putin’s military modernization program also includes new intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as aircraft, tanks and air defense systems. To be sure, there is hardly parity between the Russian and American submarine fleets. Russia has about 45 attack submarines — about two dozen are and 20 are diesel — which are designed to sink other submarines or ships, collect intelligence and conduct patrols. But Western naval analysts say that only about half of those are able to deploy at any given time. Most stay closer to home and maintain an operational tempo far below a Cold War peak. The United States has 53 attack submarines, all as well as four other submarines that carry cruise missiles and Special Operations forces. At any given time, roughly a third of America’s attack submarines are at sea, either on patrols or training, with the others undergoing maintenance. American Navy officials and Western analysts say that American attack submarines, which are made for speed, endurance and stealth to deploy far from American shores, remain superior to their Russian counterparts. The Pentagon is also developing sophisticated technology to monitor encrypted communications from Russian submarines and new kinds of remotely controlled or autonomous vessels. Members of the NATO alliance, including Britain, Germany and Norway, are at the same time buying or considering buying new submarines in response to the Kremlin’s projection of force in the Baltic and Arctic. But Moscow’s recently revised national security and maritime strategies emphasize the need for Russian maritime forces to project power and to have access to the broader Atlantic Ocean as well as the Arctic. Russian submarines and spy ships now operate near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians could attack those lines in times of tension or conflict. Russia is also building an undersea unmanned drone capable of carrying a small, tactical nuclear weapon to use against harbors or coastal areas, American military and intelligence analysts said. And, like the United States, Russia operates larger submarines that carry nuclear missiles and spend months at a time hiding in the depths of the ocean. Those submarines, although lethal, do not patrol like the attack submarines do, and do not pose the same degree of concern to American Naval officials. Analysts say that Moscow’s continued investment in attack submarines is in contrast to the quality of many of Russia’s land and air forces that frayed in the War era. “In the Russian naval structure, submarines are the crown jewels for naval combat power,” said Magnus Nordenman, director of the Atlantic Council’s security initiative in Washington. “The U. S. and NATO haven’t focused on operations lately, and they’ve let that skill deteriorate. ” That has allowed for a rapid Russian resurgence, Western and American officials say, partly in response to what they say is Russia’s fear of being hemmed in. “I don’t think many people understand the visceral way Russia views NATO and the European Union as an existential threat,” Admiral Ferguson said in an interview. In Naples, at the headquarters of the United States Navy’s European operations, including the Sixth Fleet, commanders for the first time in decades are having to closely monitor Russian submarine movements through the maritime choke points separating Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom, the G. I. U. K. Gap, which during the Cold War were crucial to the defense of Europe. That stretch of ocean, hundreds of miles wide, represented the line that Soviet naval forces would have had to cross to reach the Atlantic and to stop United States forces heading across the sea to reinforce America’s European allies in time of conflict. American aircraft were stationed for decades at the Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland — in the middle of the gap — but they withdrew in 2006, years after the Cold War. The Navy after that relied on planes rotating periodically through the base. Now, the Navy is poised to spend about $20 million to upgrade hangars and support sites at Keflavik to handle its new, more advanced Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft. That money is part of the Pentagon’s new $3. 4 billion European Reassurance Initiative, a quadrupling of funds from last year to deploy heavy weapons, armored vehicles and other equipment to NATO countries in Central and Eastern Europe, to deter Russian aggression. Navy officials express concern that more Russian submarine patrols will push out beyond the Atlantic into the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Russia has one Mediterranean port now, in Tartus, Syria, but Navy officials here say Moscow wants to establish others, perhaps in Cyprus, Egypt or even Libya. “If you have a Russian nuclear attack submarine wandering around the Med, you want to track it,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russian military specialist at the Center for Naval Analyses in Washington. This month, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency christened a prototype drone sea craft packed with sensors, the Sea Hunter, which is made with the intention of hunting autonomously for submarines and mines for up to three months at a time. The allies are also holding half a dozen exercises this year, including a large drill scheduled later this spring called Dynamic Mongoose in the North Sea. The exercise is to include warships and submarines from Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and the United States. “We are not quite back in a Cold War,” said James G. Stavridis, a retired admiral and the former supreme allied commander of NATO, who is now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. “But I sure can see one from where we are standing. ” | 1 |
By April McCarthy Much of human health hinges on how well the body manufactures and uses energy. For reasons that remain unclear, cells’ ability to produce energy declines with age, prompting... | 0 |
Dallas is witnessing a surge in shootings and local police believe exchanges between rival gangs on social media fuel the incidents. [According to The Dallas Morning News, Dallas has witnessed 122 shootings in 2017 alone. The city saw only 49 such incidents at this same time last year. Police believe drugs and gangs are factors in the shootings and they think these matters become actionable following interaction on social media. Interim Police Chief David Pughes said, “We’ve seen instances in which there is a gang war that takes place on social media where one gang is challenging another gang. That ultimately ends up in a shooting at one of the places. ” A number of the incidents are taking place in the area of the city patrolled by the southeast division. Tiffinni Young is the city council member for that area and lives in Buckner Terrace. She says she “hears shots almost every night. ” Moreover, she added, “You have seniors in our district that are living in fear that they can’t come to the other side of the door. ” Pastors and other leaders in the community are worried that violence may swell to unimaginable levels in the hot months of summer if the gang problem is not addressed. The Morning News reports that the “police gang unit was nearly gutted under former Chief David Brown” and is only now being rebuilt. It is interesting to note that in January 2016, Chicago’s top cop blamed social media for a surge in shootings in that city. Chicago interim police superintendent John Escalante said, “A lot of it is gang conflicts, but [it’s] also heavily driven by social media. It is the new way … of taunting and challenging other gangs, and is the modern way of gang graffiti. ” Chicago ended 2016 with almost 4, 400 shooting victims and nearly 800 homicides. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com. | 0 |
Originally appeared at The Nation
s we approach the final months of the Obama presidency, it’s clear that the “change” in foreign policy that candidate Obama promised voters has not materialized. His pledges to end the Iraq War, to pursue a nuclear-free world, to improve relations with Russia, to act as an honest broker between Israel and Palestine, and to improve relations with the Arab world have all been left unfulfilled. That his likely successor, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, is to the right of the president on matters of national security is, in a way, an all-too-fitting monument to an era of dashed expectations.
As of this writing, more than 5,000 troops are deployed in Iraq and nearly 10,000 in Afghanistan. These deployments run parallel with the dangerously misconceived interventions in Libya and Syria and a counterproductive drone war that stretches from the Maghreb and the Arabian Peninsula to the mountains and plains of Central Asia. Worryingly, the Obama administration has given these military adventures a veneer of legality by deriving justification from the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress on September 14, 2001. These US interventions are supported by nearly 2.1 million reserve and active-duty troops, 200,000 of whom are stationed overseas at a yearly cost of $600 billion. By some estimates, the US military is currently operating in more than 160 countries.
Meanwhile, in addition to waging a new and more dangerous cold war with Russia, the administration—which views the South China Sea as a core national interest—launched the so-called “Asia pivot,” which moves US policy toward China from one largely based on shared business interests to one that seeks to contain China’s rise. The president’s much-publicized trip to Southeast Asia this year was a good indication that Washington intends to surround and isolate China by employing “bandwagoning” states like Vietnam.
It was widely assumed that Obama would pick up the pieces of the Bush years and exorcise hegemonic fantasies from the body politic. Instead, over his two terms in office, the convergence of the neoconservative and Wilsonian interventionist creeds has solidified into orthodoxy. No better evidence of this exists than the fact that the neocons who served as the instigators and defenders of George W. Bush’s foreign policy have become devoted supporters of Hillary Clinton. Robert Kagan, Max Boot, and Eliot Cohen, among others, have all voiced their preference for Clinton over the Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
This is less surprising than it might first seem. After all, the neoconservative and Wilsonian weltanschauungs are, like Marxism, teleological: History, for them, has specific and definable ends. For the neocons and Wilsonians (also commonly known, in recent decades, as liberal interventionists), humanity’s march toward democracy is not only in sight, but achievable. America’s foreign-policy orthodoxy can be summed up by the claim made by then–Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, during Bill Clinton’s presidency, that America is the one “indispensable nation” because “we stand tall. We see further into the future.”
Obama’s UN ambassador, Samantha Power, expressed well an integral element of this orthodoxy when she recently wrote that “it is now objectively the case that our national interests are increasingly affected not just by what happens between states, but also by how people are treated within states [emphasis added].”
Power’s casual disregard for the Westphalian principle of noninterference in the internal affairs of other states, now de rigueur among interventionists of both parties, is fused with a belief in American global hegemony, of which the Obama administration’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review is representative:
The United States remains the only nation able to project and sustain large-scale operations over extended distances. This unique position generates an obligation to be responsible stewards of the power and influence that history, determination, and circumstance have provided.
Clearly, change has failed to materialize. Instead, Obama remains firmly in the grip of a foreign-policy orthodoxy that he himself has dismissed as “the Washington playbook,” and which the scholar Andrew Bacevich describes as the “faith-based belief in American global primacy to be pursued regardless of how the world may be changing and heedless of costs.” In late October, The Washington Post observed that while “it is not unusual for Washington’s establishment to launch major studies in the final months of an administration,” the flurry of recommendations coming from Washington think tanks like the Center for American Progress “reflect a remarkable consensus among the foreign policy elite.” Perhaps the question that will flummox future historians most as they survey the record of the Obama years is this: How did a president who so eloquently and cogently promised a break with the past become captive to the regnant orthodoxy calling for seemingly endless interventions abroad?
As it became more and more difficult to deny that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a debacle, George W. Bush tried to justify his administration’s policies by appropriating the language of the Wilsonians in an attempt to make his actions palatable to the guardians of respectable opinion. In his second inaugural address, Bush proclaimed: “It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” By employing such language, Bush cleared the way for the convergence of the neoconservative and Wilsonian ideologies, which have now congealed into the orthodoxy holding US foreign policy hostage.
That orthodoxy is enforced by what historian William Appleman Williams has described as the “climate of assumption.” This prevailing climate is shaped by an “inside-outside” dynamic, whereby the narrative that defines any given crisis is set on the “inside,” by administration officials and sitting ambassadors, and reinforced on the “outside,” by the establishment media. What amounts to is a process of preemptive agenda-setting. In the case of policy regarding Syria, Libya, and Russia, the inside-outside dynamic has shaped a narrative that seeks to delegitimize the regimes in question, thereby obviating the need for nuance and crowding out the moral, consequential, or realist implications of any given policy decision. It is therefore exceedingly difficult, even for a chief executive with Obama’s obvious talents, to depart from this orthodoxy, because of the way it narrows the spectrum of “acceptable” policy options. * * *
The Obama administration’s counterproductive intervention in Syria stems from an interpretation of the Arab Spring, painted by administration insiders and the establishment media, as a series of peaceful, pro-democracy mass movements. Such movements were deemed deserving of US support because, according to the democratic-peace theory (a key tenet of the neoconservative/Wilsonian ideologies), the spread of democracy is de facto in US interests; as the oft-stated argument goes, democracies don’t wage war against one another.
The protests that roiled Syria in the spring of 2011 surely gave voice to elements of the population with legitimate grievances against the Assad regime. But did that necessarily mean that the overthrow of the country’s secular government would serve US national interests—or the interests of the vast majority of Syrians? That question never seems to have been asked, because the orthodoxy deemed it out of bounds. The Syrian narrative was set early on: Bashar al-Assad, an obstacle to democratization and killer of his own people, “must go.”
The pr
The narrative of illegitimacy, once established, allows for almost anything, regardless of the legality or morality of the chosen policy. Witness former CIA director David Petraeus’s call for Washington to ally with elements of Al Qaeda in Syria, or the US government’s funding of the Nour al-din al-Zinki movement, which beheaded a 12-year-old boy in July—to say nothing of the CIA’s illegal and counterproductive train-and-equip program, which has only served to prolong the Syrian conflict.
A similar dynamic played out during the Libyan crisis: Very early on, the president—driven by rumors circulated as fact in the establishment media that Libyan dictator Moammar El-Gadhafi was about to conduct a wholesale massacre in the rebel stronghold of Benghazi—declared that he “must leave.” The narrative of impending slaughter was reinforced by a spate of breathless news reports and op-eds.
Yet the basis of the administration’s case for intervention proved to be illusory. There was not then, nor is there now, a shred of evidence that Gadhafi intended to unleash a genocidal slaughter in Benghazi. And this was clear at the time: As University of Texas scholar Alan Kuperman pointed out in April 2011, “The best evidence that Khadafy did not plan genocide in Benghazi is that he did not perpetrate it in the other cities he had recaptured either fully or partially—including Zawiya, Misurata, and Ajdabiya, which together have a population greater than Benghazi.”
But no matter: Once the narrative was set, the orthodoxy dictated intervention in spite of the fact, as reported by Rolling Stone in 2011, that Gadhafi’s son Saif “tried to arrange a phone call with Hillary Clinton, thinking he could talk the Americans out of intervening. But when Saif placed the call, Clinton refused to speak to him.” NATO intervened in March 2011, and Gadhafi was dead by October, creating a vacuum that has since been filled by civil war and the rise of ISIS.
In the case of Russia, the administration’s call to oust Vladimir Putin has been tacit rather than overt. After Putin’s decision to stand for election in March 2012, the goal of isolating Russia with an eye toward regime change became default US policy. Indeed, in March 2011, the Russian politician Boris Nemtsov wrote that Vice President Joe Biden told a gathering of opposition figures in Moscow that if he were Putin, “he would not stand for president in 2012 because this would be bad for the country and for himself.”
After that, the narrative was set: Putin, returning for a third term in the Kremlin, was to be treated as an obstacle to be removed. For proof of this, one need look no further than an e-mail from Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, to a departing aide in February 2012, in which she noted that she was pleased to see the aide heading to the White House to “plan and execute our Russia strategy post-Putin.”
The push by inside and outside voices to brand Putin’s Russia as an outlaw state picked up steam in the winter of 2013–14, with the start of the Maidan revolution in Ukraine. Recall that the initial cause of the rift between the protesters and the Ukrainian government was over the latter’s failure to sign an association agreement with the European Union. And while US national-security interests weren’t even remotely at stake, that was beside the point: The agreement included trade and security provisions that would have effectively wrenched Ukraine from Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, and it was pursued regardless of the consequences, which have included the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected president and a civil war that has killed nearly 10,000 people. By the end of 2015, the United States had provided Ukraine with $2 billion in loan guarantees and nearly $760 million in security assistance—all part of a needless and costly new cold war with Russia that could one day be seen as President Obama’s principal foreign-policy legacy. * * *
In addition to the inside-outside dynamic between the administration and establishment media, Washington’s think tanks and NGOs play an important role as enforcers of orthodoxy—one that has become increasingly pronounced over the course of the Obama administration. While purporting to be nonpartisan, outfits like the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and the Brookings Institution in effect launder neoconservative policy proposals by dressing them up in the softer, more palatable language of Wilsonianism. In just the past few years, think tanks have served as incubators and champions of policies like arming Ukraine and overthrowing the government of Syria.
Often, these organizations are deeply compromised by their funders. For example, after Brookings accepted $14.8 million from the government of Qatar—which has financed Salafist terrorist groups like Syria’s Nusra Front (now the Levant Conquest Front)—the think tank published an op-ed that made the case for Syria’s radical Sunni extremist group Ahrar al-Sham, arguing against “designating [it] as a terrorist organization.”
Washi
Analysts associated with Brookings and its center in Qatar—whose co-chair is Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, a former prime minister and member of the Qatari ruling family—have repeatedly complained that the Obama administration isn’t doing enough to help the “moderate” opposition in Syria. And yet Gerd Müller, Germany’s international-development minister, told The Telegraph in 2014, “You have to ask who is arming, who is financing [ISIS] troops. The keyword there is Qatar.” Indeed, it has recently come to light that Hillary Clinton shared Müller’s concerns, noting in an August 2014 e-mail to John Podesta that the Qatari and Saudi governments “are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
This June, while Democratic Representative (and combat veteran) Tulsi Gabbard was pushing a bill to defund the CIA’s train-and-equip program in Syria, Brookings senior fellow Shadi Hamid took to Twitter to declare that “@TulsiGabbard might be one of worst/least knowledgeable foreign policy thinkers in Democratic party. Not just bad ideas, but dangerous ones.” Hamid followed this up with: “Neo-isolationist left (@tulsigabbard) & far right (Trump) have pretty similar views on how Putin’s actually not so bad: He can help on ISIS!”
In smearing Gabbard, Hamid was only echoing the sentiments of his colleague in Qatar, Charles Lister, who had previously accused Gabbard of being “the Democratic Party’s chief defender of Bashar al-#Assad.” As Brookings fellows, Hamid and Lister take their role as enforcers of the orthodoxy seriously—as well they might, since Gabbard’s legislation, if passed, would be a serious setback for the grand designs of Beltway Caesars like themselves.
In addition to plumping for further involvement in Syria, Hamid has tried to whitewash the administration’s disastrous Libya intervention, which even Obama has admitted was his “worst mistake.” Hamid, though, claims it was “successful,” arguing: “The country is better off today than it would have been had the international community allowed dictator Muammar Qaddafi to continue his rampage across the country.” Never mind that a civil war has been ravaging Libya for the past five years.
In addition to producing op-ed columns of questionable value, think tanks also influence the climate of assumption by publishing special reports that are meant to serve as guides for policy-makers. Indeed, sometimes the resemblance between government memoranda and think-tank literature is uncanny, as was the case this past June when CNAS Middle East director Ilan Goldenberg was pleased to point out the “many similarities” between the State Department’s hawkish “dissent channel” cable on Syria and a CNAS report titled “Defeating the Islamic State: A Bottom-Up Approach.” Both, needless to say, called for greater US involvement in the Syrian civil war.
In the past year, CNAS has published several notable reports that have advocated, among other things, the wider use of drones ( “The Promise of Unmanned Systems in the Asia Pacific” ); increased military spending and more overseas commitments ( “Extending American Power: Strategies to Expand U.S. Engagement in a Competitive World Order” ); directly arming the Syrian opposition ( “From the Bottom, Up: A Strategy for U.S. Military Support to Syria’s Armed Opposition” ); and yet more military spending ( “While We Can: Arresting the Erosion of America’s Military Edge” ). Even the ostensibly center-left Center for American Progress recently unveiled a report that urged the imposition of a no-fly zone over Syria, a move that Hillary Clinton herself has admitted, albeit behind closed doors, risks the possibility of a wider war and would “kill lots of Syrians.”
Meanwhile, the Atlantic Council (funded in part by the US government and NATO) has released a series of articles and reports urging greater action in Ukraine. In February 2015, in conjunction with Brookings and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, it released “Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression: What the United States and NATO Must Do,” which urged the administration to arm Kiev.
Over the past few years, the Atlantic Council has gone from espousing a sensible, if staid, transatlanticism to producing some of the most virulent specimens of the new cold-war propaganda. Examples of its prodigious output relating to Russia and the Ukraine crisis can be seen in reports like “Human Rights Abuses in Russia-Occupied Crimea” (August 2015); “Hiding in Plain Sight: Putin’s War in Ukraine” (October 2015); and “Arming for Deterrence” (July 2016). Not surprisingly, in addition to NATO and the US government, the Atlantic Council lists the Ukrainian World Congress, the Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk, the Lithuanian government, and the Latvian embassy among its many funders.
There is also the collusion between private, ostensibly nongovernmental organizations and those agencies of the US government that seek—and sometimes, in the case of Ukraine, manage to engineer—regime-change movements. The founding father of what might be called “ideological humanitarianism” is surely the financier and self-styled political philosopher George Soros, who, through his network of Open Society Foundations, seeks to influence and leverage civil-society opposition groups in countries throughout Eastern Europe.
Soros has spawned many imitators. Perhaps the most emblematic of the new techno-crusaders is eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, whose involvement in the Ukraine uprising has complemented Washington’s. According to journalist Mark Ames, “The American government—in the form of the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—played a major role in funding opposition groups prior to the revolution.” Ames also notes that a large percentage of the funding for those groups came from Omidyar.
Indeed, Omidyar’s work has been praised by none other than Samantha Power, who, in November 2013, singled him out as an heir to Soros in a speech hailing the “new philanthropists” who are working to advance the vision that “George popularized and resourced: open economy, open government, open society.” And while it’s certainly the case that the Open Society Foundations have done valuable work in the fields of public health and criminal-justice reform, particularly here in the United States, Soros’s activism takes on a decidedly less benign character abroad. A recent tranche of leaked Open Society e-mails shows that Soros was actively trying to shape the politics of post-Maidan Ukraine. In a meeting with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in March 2014, Soros urged Washington to provide “professional PR assistance to [the] Ukrainian government,” while also voicing his opinion that the neofascist group Right Sector was little more than “an FSB [Federal Security Service] plot” funded by Russia “to destabilize Ukraine.” * * *
The US government, in appointing itself the global arbiter of legitimacy, has set a series of dangerous precedents. Today, the United States reserves the right to intervene anywhere in the world, regardless of the consequences, morality, or costs in blood and treasure. In the Middle East, US interventions have created space for ISIS in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, while our alleged allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar have been among the principal benefactors of ISIS and like-minded religious extremists.
In addition to what is fast becoming a strange obsession with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the foreign-policy establishment has turned a blind eye to the ravages of the Ukrainian civil war, as well as to the fact that the main—and perhaps insuperable—obstacle to the implementation of the 2014 Minsk cease-fire agreement is the US-supported and -funded government in Kiev, which boasts a neo-Nazi as its parliamentary speaker.
As we approach November 8, it is clear that this foreign-policy orthodoxy is something the establishment takes on faith. But foreign policy should not be a faith-based business. Progressives and like-minded anti-interventionist conservatives and libertarians need to alert the American public to this dangerous state of affairs and fashion a coherent, sound, and popular alternative to the orthodoxy holding US foreign policy hostage. That may require the formation of a 21st-century peace movement, with allies inside a “peace” wing of the Democratic Party. A second Clinton administration looks increasingly likely; if that is the case, the progressive, responsible left will have to serve as a check on its interventionist impulses. This will not be easy, nor should we delude ourselves about the prospects for success.
But we must, for all our sakes, attempt it. | 1 |
A few weeks ago, in reaction to something we had written about blackness and whiteness in recent movies, my colleague Manohla Dargis and I received a note from a reader. “Since when is everything about race?” he wanted to know. Perhaps it was a rhetorical question. A flippant — though by no means inaccurate — answer would have been 1619. But a more constructive response might have been to recommend Raoul Peck’s new documentary, “I Am Not Your Negro. ” Let me do so now, for that reader (if he’s still interested) and for everybody else, too. Whatever you think about the past and future of what used to be called “race relations” — white supremacy and the resistance to it, in plainer English — this movie will make you think again, and may even change your mind. Though its principal figure, the novelist, playwright and essayist James Baldwin, is a man who has been dead for nearly 30 years, you would be to find a movie that speaks to the present moment with greater clarity and force, insisting on uncomfortable truths and drawing stark lessons from the shadows of history. To call “I Am Not Your Negro” a movie about James Baldwin would be to understate Mr. Peck’s achievement. It’s more of a posthumous collaboration, an uncanny and thrilling communion between the filmmaker — whose previous work includes both a documentary and a narrative feature about the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba — and his subject. The narration (read by Samuel L. Jackson) is entirely drawn from Baldwin’s work. Much of it comes from notes and letters written in the when Baldwin was somewhat reluctantly sketching out a book, never to be completed, about the lives and deaths of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Reflections on those men (all of whom Baldwin knew well) and their legacies are interspersed with passages from other books and essays, notably “The Devil Finds Work,” Baldwin’s 1976 meditation on race, Hollywood and the mythology of white innocence. His published and unpublished words — some of the most powerful and penetrating ever assembled on the tortured subject of American identity — accompany images from old talk shows and news reports, from classic movies and from our own decidedly present. Baldwin could not have known about Ferguson and Black Lives Matter, about the presidency of Barack Obama and the recrudescence of white nationalism in its wake, but in a sense he explained it all in advance. He understood the deep, contradictory patterns of our history, and articulated, with a passion and clarity that few others have matched, the psychological dimensions of racial conflict: the suppression of black humanity under slavery and Jim Crow and the insistence on it in politics and art the dialectic of guilt and rage, forgiveness and denial that distorts relations between black and white citizens in the North as well as the South the lengths that white people will go to wash themselves clean of their complicity in oppression. Baldwin is a double character in Mr. Peck’s film. The elegance and gravity of his formal prose, and the gravelly authority of Mr. Jackson’s voice, stand in contrast to his quicksilver presence as a lecturer and television guest. In his skinny tie and narrow suit, an omnipresent cigarette between his fingers, he imports a touch of midcentury intellectual cool into our overheated, media moment. A former child preacher, he remained a natural, if somewhat reluctant, performer — a master of the heavy sigh, the raised eyebrow and the rhetorical flourish. At one point, on “The Dick Cavett Show,” Baldwin tangles with Paul Weiss, a Yale philosophy professor who scolds him for dwelling so much on racial issues. The initial spectacle of mediocrity condescending to genius is painful, but the subsequent triumph of brilliance over credentialed ignorance is thrilling to witness. In that exchange, as in a speech for an audience of British university students, you are aware of Baldwin’s profound weariness. He must explain himself — and also his country — again and again, with what must have been sorely tested patience. When the students erupt in a standing ovation at the end of his remarks, Baldwin looks surprised, even flustered. You glimpse an aspect of his personality that was often evident in his writing: the vulnerable, bright, ambitious man thrust into a public role that was not always comfortable. “I want to be an honest man and a good writer,” he wrote early in his career, in the introductory note to his first collection of essays, “Notes of a Native Son. ” The disarming, intimate candor of that statement characterized much of what would follow, as would a reckoning with the difficulties of living up to such apparently straightforward aspirations. Without sliding into confessional bathos, his voice was always personal and frank, creating in the reader a feeling of complicity, of shared knowledge and knowing humor. “I Am Not Your Negro” reproduces and redoubles this effect. It doesn’t just make you aware of Baldwin, or hold him up as a figure to be admired from a distance. You feel entirely in his presence, hanging on his every word, following the implications of his ideas as they travel from his experience to yours. At the end of the movie, you are convinced that you know him. And, more important, that he knows you. To read Baldwin is to be read by him, to feel the glow of his affection, the sting of his scorn, the weight of his disappointment, the gift of his trust. Recounting his visits to the South, where he reported on the civil rights movement and the murderous white response to it, Baldwin modestly described himself as a witness, a watchful presence on the sidelines of tragedy and heroism, an outsider by virtue of his Northern origins, his sexuality and his alienation from the Christianity of his childhood. But he was also a prophet, able to see the truths revealed by the contingent, complicated actions of ordinary people on both sides of the conflict. This is not to say that he transcended the struggle or detached himself from it. On the contrary, he demonstrated that writing well and thinking clearly are manifestations of commitment, and that irony, skepticism and a ruthless critical spirit are necessary tools for effective moral and political action. “I Am Not Your Negro” is a thrilling introduction to his work, a remedial course in American history, and an advanced seminar in racial politics — a concise, roughly movie with the scope and impact of a or a literary doorstop. It is not an easy or a consoling movie, but it is the opposite of bitter or despairing. “I can’t be a pessimist because I’m alive,” Baldwin said. “I’m forced to be an optimist. ” | 1 |
Chart Of The Day: October Manufacturing Production----Plateaued At 2005 Levels
https://mishtalk.com/2016/11/16/industrial-production-far-worse-than-first-glance-look/#more-42115
David | 0 |
Thu, 27 Oct 2016 03:29 UTC © Chinchilla News A young pygmy elephant walking near her dead mother in Gunung Rara Forest Reserve in Malaysia's sabah state on Borneo Island. The world is hurtling towards the first mass extinction of animal life since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago, according to the most comprehensive survey of wildlife ever carried out. By 2020, the populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and other vertebrate species are on course to have fallen by more than two-thirds over a period of just 50 years, the Living Planet report found. The current rate of extinction is about 100 times faster than is considered normal - greater than during some of the previous five mass extinctions in the Earth's history. While the dinosaurs probably died out because a giant meteor hit the planet, just one species is the cause of the current problems: humans. This is one of the reasons why geologists are close to declaring a new epoch, called the Anthropocene after the Greek for human, because the fossils of so many extinct animals will one day form a noticeable, global band in the rocks of the future. The Living Planet report , produced by conservation charity WWF and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), analysed data for 3,706 species in what was described as the most comprehensive study of the state of wildlife globally. They found that between 1970 and 2012, the average decline in population was 58 per cent. And at the current rate this figure will hit 67 per cent by 2020, the year by which the world has pledged to halt the loss of wildlife. Dr Mike Barrett, director of science and policy at WWF-UK, said: "For the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, we face a global mass extinction of wildlife. "We ignore the decline of other species at our peril - for they are the barometer that reveals our impact on the world that sustains us. "Humanity's misuse of natural resources is threatening habitats, pushing irreplaceable species to the brink and threatening the stability of our climate." Some of the most iconic animals are under severe pressure for multiple different reasons with one common factor. For example, poachers have slaughtered vast numbers of African elephants with the population falling by 111,000 to 415,000 in only a decade. The giant anteater and maned wolf are under threat because the grasslands where they live in Brazil are being converted into soy fields and pasture for cattle. Chemical pollution is affecting marine life from orcas to polar bears. PCBs used in paints, pesticides and flame retardants have been linked to cancer and weakening the polar bears' penis bone to the point they can snap. And numbers of Himalayan griffons have plummeted because of a drug given to cattle which gives the majestic birds kidney failure after they eat the meat of dead animals. But Dr Barrett stressed the situation was far from hopeless. "We know how to stop this. It requires governments, businesses and citizens to rethink how we produce, consume, measure success and value the natural environment," Dr Barrett said. The UK, he added, needed a "serious plan" to increase protection for species and habitats. But it should also take steps to reduce its "global footprint" on wildlife around the world. Professor Ken Norris, ZSL's science director, said the report should spur people into action. "Human behaviour continues to drive the decline of wildlife populations globally, with particular impact on freshwater habitats," he said. "Importantly, however, these are declines - they are not yet extinctions - and this should be a wake-up call to marshal efforts to promote the recovery of these populations." Environment Secretary Andrea Leadsom has repeatedly said the Government wants this generation to be the first to leave the environment in a better state than it found it. And she said: "The Living Planet Report is a stark reminder of the scale of the challenge we face, but it also makes clear that the solutions are there if we all play our part. "The UK has a strong track record in wildlife conservation and I am committed to protecting and restoring our natural environment for future generations." Ms Leadsom added the Government planned to create a "Blue Belt of protection" around British Overseas Territories which were "home to unique marine species and habitats, which, without protection, could be lost forever". | 1 |
ANKARA (AFP) — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday urged Turks resident in Europe to have five children, telling the millions strong diaspora community “you are Europe’s future. ”[Turkey and Europe are locked in a bitter spat after Germany and the Netherlands blocked Turkish ministers from holding rallies to campaign for a ‘yes’ vote in next month’s referendum on expanding Erdogan’s powers. Erdogan has repeatedly accused EU states of behaving like Nazi Germany over what he sees as discrimination against Turks, in comments that have caused outrage across the continent. “From here I say to my citizens, I say to my brothers and sisters in Europe … Educate your children at better schools, make sure your family live in better areas, drive in the best cars, live in the best houses,” said Erdogan. “Have five children, not three. You are Europe’s future. ” “This is the best answer to the rudeness shown to you, the enmity, the wrongs,” he added in a televised speech in the city of Eskisehir, south of Istanbul. Some 2. 5 million Turkish citizens resident in Europe are eligible to vote in elections in their homeland. But millions more people living in EU states have Turkish origins. Erdogan, a father of four, has previously urged women in Turkey to have at least three children to help boost the population, in comments denounced by women’s rights activists. | 0 |
Colonial Gas Pipeline Explodes In Shelby County, Alabama - Live Stream Source: Zero Hedge
A massive plume of smoke is filling the skyline after a gas pipeline exploded in Helena, Alabama according to CBS42. Fire units are headed to the scene, according to McAdory Fire Station #2. Alagasco has stated that the fire is from a petroleum line. According to the Shelby County Sheriff's office, the blast was on the Colonial Line, with 8-9 people injured. The Sheriff adds that the blast happened during crew work.
The explosion took place near 334 Highway 13. At this time, a response team has been called in from Jefferson County as well as a tanker from the McAdory Fire Department.
Vestavia Hills Fire Department has also arrived on the scene, along with Shelby County’s Sheriff’s Department.
UAB has received five patients associated with the explosion who arrived by LifeFlight helicopter. At this time, there is no word on their condition, but CBS42 has learned that they are being treated for burns.
Helena police are stating that there was an explosion in the Shelby County Jurisdiction, and that no Helena residents are in danger.
Travel is not being impacted to students who get dropped off on County Road 13, according to the transportation director with Shelby County schools. | 0 |
BEIRUT, Lebanon — The United States acknowledged on Saturday that its warplanes had carried out an airstrike in Syria that resulted in the deaths of Syrian government troops. American military officials said the pilots in the attack, in the eastern province of Deir believed they were targeting the Islamic State. Russia’s defense ministry said the United States attack had killed 62 Syrian troops, wounded 100 more and opened the way for an Islamic State offensive. The episode comes at a time of escalating tensions in Syria. A partial that started on Monday continues to steadily unravel after it was declared with much fanfare by the United States and Russia. A statement by United States Central Command said that the planes stopped the attack after a warning from Russia that the strikes could be hitting Syrian troops. A senior Obama administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the strike was still being investigated, said the United States had relayed its regrets to the Syrian government through the Russians for the “unintentional loss of life of Syrian forces” fighting the Islamic State. Russia, the Syrian government’s main ally, said it would call an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting to discuss the strikes. The Syrian government insisted that the strike was not a mistake. Instead, the government said it was “a very serious and flagrant aggression” that aided the Islamic State and proved its assertion that the United States supports the jihadist group as part of an effort to oust President Bashar . “These attacks confirmed that the U. S. clearly supports the terrorism of Daesh,” SAMA television, a news outlet, said, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. The channel quoted a statement issued by the Syrian military’s general command, which said the attack exposed “false claims of fighting terrorism” by the United States. Central Command, known as Centcom, denied it would carry out such an airstrike on purpose. “Coalition forces would not intentionally strike a known Syrian military unit,” the statement said, offering at an unexpected moment one of the clearest signs yet of how far the United States has moved from three years ago. In 2013, President Obama threatened to strike Mr. Assad’s forces in retaliation for chemical attacks on suburbs that killed more than 1, 000 people. He instead struck a deal with Russia to dismantle Mr. Assad’s chemical weapons program. “Coalition forces believed they were striking a Daesh fighting position that they had been tracking for a significant amount of time before the strike,” the Centcom statement said. “The coalition airstrike was halted immediately when coalition officials were informed by Russian officials that it was possible the personnel and vehicles targeted were part of the Syrian military. ” Coalition jets have recently hit oil pipelines, fuel trucks and other parts of the Islamic State’s oil infrastructure in the vicinity of Deir according to daily statements from Centcom. Three strikes destroyed four tanker trucks and the head of an oil well on Tuesday, and strikes on Thursday destroyed eight fuel trucks and seven wellheads, the statements said. The Syrian Army Command said that American warplanes had bombed an army base on mountain at 5 p. m. allowing “a wide terrorist offensive” by the Islamic State that allowed it to seize the base. The accusation came as hostilities have increased on numerous fronts in Syria’s complex, conflict. Russia backs the Syrian government and Mr. Assad, and the United States has called for him to step down. The powers have blamed each other as the has eroded. Residents of Deir contacted on the internet said there had been clashes on Saturday between the Islamic State and government forces. The strike began in the early evening, when planes attacked a group of vehicles that American surveillance aircraft had been watching for several days, according to a Centcom official who requested anonymity because the episode was still being investigated. Military intelligence had identified the cluster of vehicles, which the official said included at least one tank, as belonging to the Islamic State, the official said. The attack went on for about 20 minutes, with the planes destroying the vehicles and gunning down dozens of people in the open desert, the official said. Shortly after this, an urgent call came into the American military command center in Qatar, the outpost in the Persian Gulf that coordinates the aerial campaign in Syria and Iraq. The call was from a Russian official who said that the American planes were bombing Syrian troops and that the strike should immediately be called off. The Centcom official said the attack was halted within minutes, but not until dozens had been killed. Russian planes would most likely have been providing air support to government forces in the province during the fighting there. Russian warplanes had also been targeting the area where the government’s clashes with the Islamic State occurred, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain. Aaron David Miller, a Middle East analyst at the Wilson Center, said the episode was certain to make “an already complex situation more byzantine. ” He said the strikes would “feed conspiracy theories that Washington is in league with ISIS,” as well as create a pretext for Mr. Assad to avoid his commitments under the deal. Mr. Miller added that the episode would create opportunities for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “to blast the U. S. on the eve of the U. N. General Assembly,” the global meeting in New York starting this week. Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, accused Russia of pulling a “stunt” by calling for an emergency Security Council meeting over the episode. There have been other signs of tension around Syria. forces and Israeli troops have fired across the boundary between southern Syria and the side of the Golan Heights. On Saturday, the Israeli military said its Iron Dome defense system had shot down a rocket fired from Syria. Government airstrikes have pounded many areas of Syria in the past 24 hours, and residents have reported deaths and casualties as well as the use of incendiary bombs. Aid deliveries that were promised to besieged areas continue to be held up. The Syrian government and the rebel fighters covered by the truce, which does not include the Islamic State or fighters linked to Al Qaeda, have blamed one another for breaking the accord. Russia has also blamed the United States for failing to separate the rebel groups it supports from an extremist group that until recently was officially linked to Al Qaeda. Abu Mohammad the head of that militant group, formerly known as the Nusra Front, called on Sunni Muslim militants to unite in Syria, Al Jazeera reported. Mr. Jolani reached out to rebel groups as they have been given a fateful choice: sever any tactical alliance with his militants, now known as the Levant Conquest Front, and lose an effective ally — or potentially face joint airstrikes from Russia and the United States under the deal they negotiated. In recent months, the Syrian opposition has accused the United States of effectively siding with Mr. Assad by teaming up with Russia and focusing only on hitting designated terrorist groups and not the government, whose warplanes have leveled areas, hospitals and civilian homes in indiscriminate strikes. | 1 |
Carleton University faces severe criticism for its latest politically correct decision to remove weight scales from its gym and workout areas to prevent the “triggering” of overweight students. [The Ottawa, Ontario, university calls the decision “in keeping with current fitness and social trends,” Fox News reported. The school’s manager of health and wellness, Bruce Marshall, claims that the move helps improve the mental and health of the school’s students. Indeed, Marshall went on to insist that scales only remind people they are fat and can have a “negative impact” on health. “We don’t believe being fixated on weight has any positive effect on your health and ” Marshall said to Canada’s The Charlatan newspaper. “The body is an amazing machine and even when we are dieting and training it will often find a homeostasis at a certain weight. ” Marshall excused his position saying that body changes can take months, so “why obsess” about weight indicators? Some students agreed with the move. One even labeled scales as “triggering. ” “Scales are very triggering,” student Samar El Faki said. “I think people are being insensitive because they simply don’t understand. They think eating disorders are a choice when they are actually a serious illness. ” Not every student agrees with the school’s move. Marko Miljusevic, a computer science student, said people should take responsibility for themselves. “We shouldn’t remove something because some people abuse it,” he said in a post on the school’s Facebook page. “If they can’t handle the number that shows up on the scale then don’t step on it. ” Doctors say that a person’s true weight is best measured in the morning after waking up and before eating breakfast. But, they also warn that fluctuations of several pounds from day to day is nothing to be concerned over. Many doctors also suggest that people trying to improve their health with diet and exercise should weigh themselves only a few times a week. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com. | 0 |
(Want to get this briefing by email? Here’s the .) Good evening. Here’s the latest. 1. We’ll get to the major stories of the day in a second, but first, as you head into your weekend, we wanted to bring you a reminder that we still live in a world of wonders. We asked our science reporters to share the most memorable stories they reported on this year. Here’s what they told us. _____ 2. President Obama warned that the American government would respond to Russia’s efforts to influence the presidential election with “a clear message. ” At a news conference, before leaving for vacation in Hawaii, he defended his restrained response to the hacking and said that he told Vladimir Putin to “cut it out” months ago. Hillary Clinton spoke out on Thursday, accusing Mr. Putin of ordering the hack “because he has a personal beef against me. ” _____ 3. The reaction to Donald Trump’s nominee for ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, above, has been highly polarized. Mr. Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer with no diplomatic experience, has long espoused views that are often at odds with United States policy. Mr. Trump has filled most top positions in his cabinet, but still has not named a Democrat. He is continuing his victory tour with a rally in Florida tonight. _____ 4. The process of evacuating residents from the last section of Aleppo broke down on Friday amid confusion and concerns over reports of summary killings. More than 8, 000 people have been taken out of the Syrian city, but many thousands are said to remain. Videos shared on social media showed the harrowing evacuation journey. _____ 5. The war in Syria has garnered international attention, but in Yemen, another conflict has been largely forgotten by the world. Our journalists went there last month to report on the devastating effects of the fighting, which has displaced more than 2. 5 million people. The United States has publicly kept its distance from the war, but Saudi pilots — who have been bombing rebels in the capital, Sana — often fly fighter jets and drop munitions. _____ 6. The United States is demanding the return of an underwater drone that has been seized by a Chinese warship in the South China Sea. The drone was carrying out scientific research when it went missing, a Defense Department official said. On Thursday, China signaled that it had installed weapons on disputed islands in the waterway. American officials are trying to determine whether the seizure was a action taken by Chinese sailors, or if it was more strategic. _____ 7. In North Carolina, the state legislature approved a sweeping package of restrictions to curb the powers Roy Cooper, a Democrat, above. One of them was quickly signed by the outgoing Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican. Protesters were removed from the House and Senate galleries after yelling and chanting, and a number of people were arrested throughout the day in acts of civil disobedience. _____ 8. There’s a special resonance to tonight’s broadcast of ”Jeopardy!” It features Cindy Stowell, who was on a winning streak, even as she battled Stage 4 colon cancer. Ms. Stowell died on Dec. 5, before her episodes began airing. Her fan base is now enormous. _____ 9. Frigid temperatures continue to hang over the northern half of the United States, and some areas are expecting snow, sleet and freezing rain. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to warm up this weekend. If you’re planning to stay inside, here’s a guide to streaming the best movies of 2016. Above, a boy in Maine. _____ 10. On the topic of being cold, here’s a look at the sport of ice swimming. Competitions take place in water that is 41 degrees or less, and the risk to the body is real. Still, the races seem to attract interest in spite of the dangers, or perhaps because of them. “I’m being honest, when it’s over, the euphoria is incredible,” said one swimmer. _____ 11. Finally, we bring you a story of good intentions — which, as we all know, sometimes fall short (specifically, in this case, six feet short). In Montreal, there was an idea to celebrate the city’s upcoming 375th anniversary by putting up a Christmas tree bigger and grander than the famous one in New York. Then everything went wrong. The tree is skinny, misshapen and widely unloved, but let’s not forget: Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree was, too. _____ Photographs may appear out of order for some readers. Viewing this version of the briefing should help. Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p. m. Eastern. And don’t miss Your Morning Briefing, posted weekdays at 6 a. m. Eastern, and Your Weekend Briefing, posted at 6 a. m. Sundays. Want to look back? Here’s last night’s briefing. What did you like? What do you want to see here? Let us know at briefing@nytimes. com. | 1 |
Wednesday, 26 October 2016 This dead fetus early voted for Hillary. Then her brain was pierced.
New York, NY - The Clinton News Network (CNN) announced today that the election is over, called for Hillary.
According to CNN television reporting, early voting by late term aborted fetuses and deceased adults, all of whom died just after voting, has assured Hillary of victory in every state.
They point out that this will be the first election where ALL the electoral college votes go to one person.
As they pointed out, they didn't even need to rely on voting fraud to validate the Royal Reign of Queen Hillary, whose first executive order will be to retroactively reduce the voting age to zero. Make Aspartame Boy's | 0 |
The thrilling Game 7 between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Golden State Warriors Sunday night drew nearly 31 million viewers, the biggest total for an N. B. A. finals game in 18 years. The matchup was rich with story lines: LeBron James’s bid to win the first championship for a Cleveland sports franchise in 52 years versus Golden State’s march toward one of the best seasons in National Basketball Association history. To the delight of ABC executives, the game was decided in the final seconds. The Cavs took the championship, 93 to 89. Viewership peaked in the final minutes, between 10:30 and 10:40 p. m. with a whopping 44. 5 million viewers, according to Nielsen. It was the sort of audience usually reserved for National Football League playoff games. By comparison, last year’s deciding Game 6 of the N. B. A. finals, also between the Warriors, of Oakland, Calif. and Cavaliers, drew 23. 3 million viewers. Sunday’s game was the finals game since Game 6 in 1998, which turned out to be Michael Jordan’s final game with the Chicago Bulls. It was also the telecast since the 2016 Academy Awards, which had 34. 4 million viewers, ABC said. It also had the highest rating in the demographic since Super Bowl 50 in February. Part of Game 7 ran opposite one of the shows in television: HBO’s “Game of Thrones. ” | 0 |
Donald J. Trump has regularly boasted about “The Art of the Deal,” his autobiography, as a business bible that demonstrates the sharp negotiating prowess he would bring to the presidency. The book, released in 1987, details his rise to the top of New York’s real estate world it helped spawn his career as a reality television star and cemented his image as a winner with a golden touch. But Tony Schwartz, the book’s ghostwriter, who spent 18 months in the 1980s interviewing and shadowing Mr. Trump, says that it is really a work of fiction. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine for its July 25 issue, Mr. Schwartz explained publicly, and for the first time, what he learned from living in Mr. Trump’s world. Here are some highlights. Mr. Schwartz, a former magazine writer who said he worked on the book because he needed the money, told the writer Jane Mayer that he painted Mr. Trump in the most positive light that he could, thinking that a sympathetic character would be better for the book’s sales than a story about a cruel tycoon. If he could do it over again, however, Mr. Schwartz said the book would be titled “The Sociopath. ” “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is,” Mr. Schwartz said. “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization. ” “He’s a living black hole!” Mr. Schwartz said he used to tell his wife after long days with Mr. Trump. He described Mr. Trump as a painful interview subject who could not handle questions that required any depth to answer and who had little recollection of his youth. When pressed, Mr. Schwartz said, Mr. Trump would grow fidgety, angry and sometimes quit despite the fact that they were ostensibly working together on the book. He had no attention span, Mr. Schwartz said. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” Mr. Schwartz said of Mr. Trump’s inability to focus. People often ask Mr. Trump why he is really running for president, and he has always responded by saying that he wants to make America great. Mr. Schwartz has a different theory, explaining the bid as part of a continuum of Mr. Trump’s need for attention. He recalled that as a young man, Mr. Trump was happy to receive publicity of any kind, luring the tabloids to chronicle his life. His turn as the host of “The Apprentice,” the NBC reality show, solidified him as a media star, and running for president was the next logical step, Mr. Schwartz said. “If he could run for emperor of the world, he would,” Mr. Schwartz said. Mr. Trump has driven many fact checkers to near madness in the last year, and Mr. Schwartz was not surprised. During the time he spent with Mr. Trump, he said, the businessman would regularly exaggerate or outright lie to get the upper hand. “Lying is second nature to him,” Mr. Schwartz told The New Yorker. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true. ” It was Mr. Schwartz who coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole,” referring to Mr. Trump’s notion of harmless lies, in “The Art of the Deal. ” He said that Mr. Trump loved the phrase. Many celebrities have ghost writers who do the bulk of the work on a book, but Mr. Schwartz said he was struck by how Mr. Trump took all of the credit but did practically none of the work. After reviewing the manuscript on which Mr. Schwartz had spent more than a year, Mr. Trump returned it with a few scribbles of a red marker, removing the names of some people he decided he did not want to criticize publicly. Although Mr. Trump claims to be the author of the best business book of all time, Howard Kaminsky, the former head of Random House, which published “The Art of the Deal,” begged to differ. “Trump didn’t write a postcard for us!” he told The New Yorker. Mr. Trump pushed back against the accusation that he had little role in the production of the book, telling the magazine, “I wrote the book. It was my book. ” As for Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Trump called him and expressed disappointment at how disloyal he had been. “Have a nice life,” Mr. Trump said, according to Mr. Schwartz, before hanging up. | 1 |
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WASHINGTON, D. C. — On Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump will host a handful of Republican congressional leaders at the White House for a dinner centered around the President’s first trip abroad. [He will also preside over an afternoon bicameral Republican leadership meeting to discuss plans for healthcare and tax reform. Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short briefed reporters late Monday on the meetings, as well as updates on the President’s legislative agenda. Short said that a “handful” of Republican House and Senate leaders would come to the White House for a dinner on Tuesday. They will discuss the President’s recent overseas trip, his first foreign trip since assuming the office of President of the United States, and will also discuss foreign policy challenges that the United States faces. For the dinner, President Trump will host Sens. Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Todd Young, Cory Gardner, and Reps. Francis Rooney, and Lee Zeldin. Tuesday afternoon, Trump will host a bicameral Republican leadership meeting in which the group will discuss a path forward on legislation. Healthcare and tax reform will be included, according to Short. He said: On healthcare we are looking forward to delivering the choice and control that Americans want in their own individual health plans. We are looking forward to delivering the affordability that Americans need and the quality that they deserve. The American people are anxious about healthcare. Obamacare is an unaffordable disaster that is collapsing around the country today. Attendees of the afternoon bicameral meeting will be Speaker Paul Ryan, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Rep. Steve Scalise, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Sen. John Cornyn. Short cited increases in health insurance premiums under Obamacare from 2013 to 2017 of 123% increase in Louisiana, 176% in North Carolina, and 203% in Alaska. On average health insurance premiums have more than doubled in the U. S. — increases of approximately $3, 000 per plan. Moving to the tax reform discussion the leaders will have on Tuesday, Short said, “In order to jumpstart the economy we need to cut taxes for both businesses and individuals. ” He cited a low average two percent rate of growth in the economy over the past eight years. Short added of plans for tax reform, “The plan will provide tax cuts by simplifying the tax code, broadening the base, and increasing growth. ” He indicated that a tax reform bill will likely come after Labor Day. While the Trump Administration continues to endeavor to make bipartisan strides on tax reform, Tuesday’s meeting will be a conversation for Republican leaders. In response to questions from reporters on whether tax reform will be revenue neutral, Short said that the goal is for tax reform to be revenue neutral, but the greater priority is to provide growth. On tax reform, the Trump Administration hopes to avoid having separate bills on tax reform from the House, Senate. and White House. Instead, through discussions on the issue, the administration hopes to see one bill that all three can pass into law. Short later told Breitbart News that the White House recognizes the urgency expressed among Americans to see tax reform and healthcare reform passed. The Trump Administration expects to see a summer focused on passing the American Health Care Act (AHCA) and the FY2018 budget. In the fall, the administration is looking to continue to make the case for FY2018 spending bills, ensure funding for border security, and pass a tax reform package. During the briefing, Short also highlighted the 36 bills that Trump has already signed into law and the executive orders that Trump has signed thus far. Short said this is a pulling back of the Obama era regulatory burden. “These bills and executive orders save our economy $18 billion dollars annually in regulatory compliance costs,” he said. Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana | 0 |
Jake Vinson In celebration of Black Friday, also known as "Retail Hellscape", let's look at a retail-oriented classic WTF, which originally ran way back in 2007 . We'll resume our regularly scheduled WTFs next week.--Remy
Christian R. was in trouble. Despite his experience across hardware and software, desktops and server clusters, thumb drives and SANs, he hadn't found any freelance work in weeks. It was clear that he'd have to figure something out to pay the bills.
In August, Christian applied at Drab's PCs, a large retail chain focused on computer hardware and software. He'd shopped there for years and had an impressive level of knowledge about their products, so he accepted a position in Technical Sales.
After a few months of working at Drab's PCs, Christian grew tired of one of his tasks — manually keying in orders from the online store. The online store worked by emailing orders to individual branches across the country, which were then printed, given to the branch manager, and then distributed to employees. The employees would then key in each order, line by line, item by item.
Entering orders was more time consuming than it had to be. Since each system had a barcode scanner, it didn't make sense to totally retype UPC codes and serial numbers. Having worked with PHP's image manipulation functions, Christian decided to take on a hobby project — a quicker interface to enter online orders.
He bought himself a barcode scanner and got to work. After a few evenings of coding, he had a working prototype. It would take in an order email, convert UPCs, serial numbers, quantities, and prices to barcodes. The barcodes were aligned on the page such that the barcode scanner could simply be dragged from the top of the page to the bottom, generating a complete, accurate order.
For a few weeks, Christian would use his application rather than typing orders in manually. Even after verifying that the order was complete and correct, he would still finish well before his coworkers. Gradually, word spread about his application, so he shared it with a few friends at his store.
His circle of users were happy, but when word of Christian's application bubbled up to management, Christian was called into his boss's office. "Let's have a competition," his boss, Warren, began. "I'll have Bill enter an order against your program," he said. "He's the fastest at this, and I want to be sure that we're doing this the most efficient way we can."
Christian and Bill started, and before Bill had fully keyed in the first item, Christian had processed an entire order. Happy with the results, Warren thanked Christian for his work and told him he'd talk to the branch manager about it.
A few days later, Christian's branch manager, Larry, called him into his office. "I saw the order entry program you made," he began. "You're lucky I haven't fired you."
"I... I'm sorry?" Christian was dumbstruck. "Did it mess up an order or something?"
"No. I just don't appreciate your interfering with the deployment of the new system." The "new system" had been coming soon since the day Christian was hired. Christian had never intended to interfere with plans made by corporate, he just wanted to make his life a little easier. He tried to defend himself, but Larry was unconvinced. His application had put him at odds with corporate.
A year passed, the following winter came, and Christian was due for a performance review. After his boss, Warren, and the branch manager, Larry, had finished Christian's performance review sheet, he was called into Larry's office to review. Christian took a deep breath before walking in.
Before Christian could even sit down, his review began. "You're not smiling enough," Larry began.
"You have the best feedback out of all of our staff, though." Warren was happy. "Customers love yo-"
"But they think you're cold and unfriendly. Why don't you smile more?" Larry interrupted.
"Really, though, your technical knowledge is great," Warren said. "And I've had more customers thank me for your hel-"
"I see here that you were almost ten minutes late on June 8th. You missed a team-building exercise!" Larry scowled and leaned forward. "Why don't you tell me about that day."
"Well, there was a car accident which caused a delay," Christian began, "and I don't really have a good direct route in anyway. Still, I was still at my desk, ready to serve customers when the doors opened, so I don't think it was that big a deal..."
"Yes, yes. Well, let's cut to the chase. We've decided you can keep your job," said Larry with an insulting smile. "Sound good?"
Christian was speechless. He looked to Warren for help, but Warren was timidly staring at the ground. He stumbled while mentioning a few improvements he'd made to the store, some thankful customers he'd served, but those comments were barely acknowledged.
"I'm not being considered for a raise then?" Christian finally asked.
"No, but you can keep your job," Larry reiterated.
"Will I be eligible for a raise next year?"
"No."
"The year after that?"
"Y... maybe."
"So, to get this straight, I have to work three years on my best behavior, be essentially the most incredible employee the store has ever had, and then, maybe I'll get a raise?"
"Well, if you put it like that..."
"Understood." Christian sighed and went back out to his desk. Two months later, he found a new position and has been there for several years now. He found out that corners were being cut across the board not only because the store didn't have a great year, but a new, expensive corporate office had been built that year.
And that new system is still coming soon, but it's seriously right around the corner. [Advertisement] Application Release Automation – build complex release pipelines all managed from one central dashboard, accessibility for the whole team. Download and learn more today! | 1 |
Virgin Atlantic have evacuated a flight from Dubai to Heathrow as a “precautionary measure” following a bomb threat. [“Our customers travelling on the VS401 from Dubai to London Heathrow have temporarily disembarked the aircraft for additional security checks,” a spokesman told the International Business Times. “This is purely as a precautionary measure as the safety of our customers and crew is our number one priority and we’re planning to have everyone on their way as quickly as possible. ” Passengers have reportedly been advised they must undergo full body scans before reembarking, although some are said to demanding a change of flight. “We were just moving and then the captain called his flight crew immediately and they all ran up the front,” a passenger told MailOnline. “Ten minutes later we were told to get off. ” They described how “the captain just came out and said Virgin take[s] the safety of passengers very seriously — following the events in Manchester, Virgin had received a bomb threat so as [a] precaution they have asked everyone to leave the plane. ” Late on Monday night, a suicide bomber targeted — including many young girls — leaving the Manchester Arena. Eyewitnesses reported “there were bodies scattered about everywhere” and police have reported 22 dead and 59 injured so far. | 0 |
From the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan as it sat alongside Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan, Vice President Mike Pence commended military troops with a message from the president, in the same speech bringing robust affirmation of the United States’ commitment to longtime ally Japan. [Pence brought the message from their President Donald Trump to the troops — “he’s proud of you” — and to thank them for their service. “The United alliance is the cornerstone of peace, prosperity, and freedom in the Asia Pacific,” said Pence. He affirmed the U. S. commitment to her longstanding relationship with Japan. The vice president spoke of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s trip to the U. S. and visit with the President: As the President and the Prime Minister made clear, the United States will strengthen its presence in the . Japan will assume a larger role and responsibility in our alliance in the years ahead. And both of our nations will continue to expand our cooperation for our common defense. Pence spoke of the U. S. commitment to article 5 of the U. S. Security Treaty, mentioning specifically U. S. defense of Japan’s claim to the Senkaku Islands. In early February, U. S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis also affirmed U. S. commitment to defend the islands in the East China Sea, according to CNN. China has laid claim to the but uninhabited islands, which they call Diaoyu, and quickly responded with such claims after Mattis’ comments. Pence spoke of the 50, 000 U. S. troops and 50, 000 civilians and family members stationed in Japan and committed America to “continue to deploy more of our most advanced military assets to the region in the years ahead. ” Pence added, “by the year 2020, this ocean will boast 60 percent of our Navy’s fleet. And the skies above already have Joint Strike Fighters flying for freedom. ” The vice president also spoke of U. S. military strikes on a military base in Syria and a strike on ISIS in Afghanistan with a warning to enemies: In just the past two weeks, the world witnessed the strength and resolve of our new President in the decisive action that he took in Syria and Afghanistan. The enemies of our freedom and this alliance would do well not to test the resolve of this President — or the capabilities of the Armed Forces of the United States of America and our allies. He continued speaking directly to activity in the South China Sea — where China has also laid claims to territory belonging to five other nations — claims rejected by the international legal system in a July 2016 verdict. Together, we will defend the order upon which the region’s progress, past and future, depends. We will protect the freedom of navigation and overflight and other lawful uses of the sea, in the South China Sea and elsewhere, and we will ensure the unimpeded flow of lawful commerce on the Seven Seas. The vice president traveled to what he called the “front lines of freedom” at the demilitarized zone of the Korean Peninsula on Monday. He reiterated a portion of the message delivered there to U. S. and Republic of Korea military troops, that when it comes to North Korea, the “era of strategic patience is over. ”. He said those troops “know what you who stand in the gap in this region already know — North Korea is the most dangerous and urgent threat to the peace and security of the Asia Pacific. ” Pence said of North Korea: For more than a generation, North Korea’s leaders have sought to develop nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles on which to deliver them. They have impoverished their people and embittered the region in their pursuit of this dangerous goal. For more than two decades, from the Agreed Framework of 1994, the Talks from year 2003 to ’09, to the strategic patience of the recent past, the United States and our allies have worked to tirelessly to peacefully dismantle North Korea’s nuclear program and alleviate the suffering of its people. But at every step of the way, North Korea answered our overtures with willful deception, with broken promises, and nuclear and missile tests — including a failed missile test they attempted just this past Sunday. The vice president expressed the U. S. desire to work with allies Japan, China and “the wider world” to wield “economic and diplomatic pressure to bear on the regime in North Korea, and we will do so until they abandon their nuclear and ballistic missile programs. ” He then pivoted to say: But as all of you know, readiness is the key. And you, the instruments of American policy, should know — all options are on the table. History will attest, the soldier “does not bear the sword in vain. ” And those who would challenge our resolve or our readiness should know: We will defeat any attack and meet any use of conventional or nuclear weapons with an overwhelming and effective American response. The vice president made clear from aboard “America’s flagship” as it sat docked in Japan, “The United States of America will always seek peace, but under President Trump, the shield stands guard and the sword stands ready. ” Follow Michelle Moons on Twitter @MichelleDiana | 1 |
Despite two separate ISIS bombing attacks on Christian churches in Egypt Sunday, the Vatican has confirmed that Pope Francis is moving forward with his plan to visit Cairo just three weeks from now. [On Monday, Archbishop Angelo Becciu, the number two of the Vatican Secretariat of State, confirmed that the Pope would still be traveling as planned to Egypt April just as Egypt’s Cabinet announced a state of emergency. “There is no doubt that the Holy Father will stick to his plan,” Becciu told the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera. “What happened causes distress and great suffering, but it cannot prevent the Pope from carrying out his mission of peace. ” On Sunday morning, jihadists set off two separate explosions in the Christian churches of Mar Girgis (Saint George) in Tanta, and Saint Mark’s Church in Alexandria, killing at least 45 people and injuring scores more. The Islamic State terror group immediately claimed responsibility for the attacks in a statement from the organization’s Amaq news agency. “Islamic State squads carried out the attacks on two churches in Tanta and Alexandria,” the statement declared. The Pope was informed of the attacks during the celebration of Palm Sunday Mass in the Vatican, Becciu said, after which the pontiff publicly denounced the bombings in his weekly Angelus address at noon. Speaking before tens of thousands in Saint Peter’s Square, Francis prayed that the Lord “convert the hearts of the people who are sowing terror, violence and death, and also the hearts of those who make and traffic weapons. ” In his interview, Archbishop Becciu said that ever since the Islamic State appeared on the scene, the Pope “wanted to distinguish between terrorist acts carried out by zealous fanatics and the religion itself. ” “He has always refused to associate Islam with terrorism,” Becciu said. “Certain deviant Islamists might be terrorists, but not the religion. And this has earned him the gratitude of the Muslims, for the honesty of his positions. Many Islamic authorities have met with the pontiff to thank him and many others have written to him with admiration for his moral authority. ” Last summer, Islamic State representatives expressed deep offense at Pope Francis’ claims that their war was not being waged for religious motives, hastening to assure the pontiff that their sole motivation is religious and sanctioned by Allah in the Qur’an. ISIS censured the Pope for his naïveté in clinging to the conviction that Muslims want peace and that acts of Islamic terror are economically, rather than religiously, motivated. “This is a war between the Muslim nation and the nations of disbelief,” the authors state in an article titled “By the Sword” found in their propaganda magazine, Dabiq. The article attacked Francis for claiming that “authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Qur’an are opposed to every form of violence,” saying that by doing this, “Francis continues to hide behind a deceptive veil of ‘good will,’ covering his actual intentions of pacifying the Muslim nation. ” Pope Francis “has struggled against reality” in his efforts to portray Islam as a religion of peace, the article insisted, before going on to urge all Muslims to take up the sword of jihad, the “greatest obligation” of a true Muslim. During his upcoming visit, Francis will meet the grand imam of Al Azhar University, Ahmed the highest authority of Sunni Islam, as well as Egyptian government officials and prelates of the Coptic Church. Follow Thomas D. Williams on Twitter Follow @tdwilliamsrome | 0 |
A few days after first grade ended, in June 1967, I boarded a train pulling out of Union Station in Chicago with my parents, younger brother and baby sister. My father, a University of Chicago Ph. D. candidate, had decided to bail out of academia and move to San Francisco, where he planned to devote himself to writing poetry and where, coincidentally, the Summer of Love was about to commence. The counterculture meant nothing to me then, but that summer in San Francisco was to be historic. Over the next few months, tens of thousands of young people across America left their own cities, parents and schools and hitchhiked to the area around the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets to tune into drugs and music, and tune out of “square” society. They converged there, having heard about free food and free love. In that summer of 1967, transformed into the epicenter of the counterculture movement. My parents were slightly older than the typical flower children, but they belonged to a cohort of creative people drawn to and that moment of cultural change. What they found changed the course of our family’s future. But for me, oblivious to what they were seeking, the journey sparked my imagination more than any other single episode in my childhood. The year we spent living in San Francisco — in a apartment a few blocks from the corner of Haight and Ashbury — left a few memories. But that trip on the passenger train called the California Zephyr was imprinted in my mind. We rode in the cheap seats. Dad was an admirer of the exemplified by the Beat poets. (In San Francisco, he would work as a night hotel clerk much like the Beats who influenced him.) Dad wouldn’t have thought of doing something as conventional and expensive as buying five tickets on an airplane or splashing out on a sleeper car. But for a a train seat is no more or less comfortable than a bed. As the train started to roll, I stuck my nose to the glass, and for three days and two nights watched half of America flicker past. The flat cornfields of Illinois and Iowa slowly graduated into the rolling hills of Nebraska. A night passed and we were glimpsing the peaks of the Rockies. For a memorable day, the train teetered along tracks perched above impossibly steep gorges, high above rushing mountain streams. Somewhere in the dark, in a place of moonlit buttes, we pulled up at a town where I thought I saw — or did I dream? — that men waited for disembarking passengers on horseback. I remember the blinding sunlight of station stops in Salt Lake City and Reno, and then again the mountains, the vistas of the Sierra Nevada, the silver rivulets of snowmelt twinkling far below, and finally pulling into the sunset of Sacramento and the fog of San Francisco. I was entranced. Who had built those lonely little farmhouses in Nebraska and who lived there? Was that a real cowboy on a horse in the desert? What was it like to fish with just a dog for company beside a log shack in the mountains? After our arrival, the scenes grow disjointed and few, but distinct: our apartment on Willard Street, a few blocks up a steep hill from Golden Gate Park, where on any given afternoon, bands that I now know were the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, along with many other hippie legends, made young people sway in a and human zoo. nearly five decades. I have two children of my own, one in high school, the other in middle school. Their childhoods don’t much resemble mine at all. For one thing, they’ve lived in one city for most of their lives. They have also seen a lot more of the world than I had at age 7. But they had not yet seen what I’d seen at that age: the American continent unspooling in real time for 72 hours, not on television or in the movies, not glimpsed from 30, 000 feet above, but at eye level. And I wanted that imagery etched into their memories the way it is in mine. Last summer, I reserved a sleeper car and roomette (a room with two seats that fold down to beds) on Amtrak’s California Zephyr. Together the berths would sleep five and set me back $2, 881. We would leave Union Station on one of the last days of June, a few days after school let out, as had I. My dad, divorced, remarried and pushing 80, was hale and hearty and game enough to come along with us, a living link to an episode in the history of “Frisco” — as he still calls it — and the Beats and the counterculture that my children know about as a footnote in their American history books. We boarded the train on a bright, breezy Chicago day, but the weather turned and the sky bloomed a threatening purple as we pulled out of Union Station and headed south and west, into the great green sea of early summer corn. As the train rocked from side to side, we made our way through all the cars toward the rear, and the sleeper cars, narrow walkways lined with utilitarian berths with metal doors. We checked out our new digs, the roomette that my son and father would share, and the bedroom with its pullout couch where my husband and I would just fit, with a for our daughter. There was a comfy chair by the window, an aluminum sink, clean white towels stowed in cabinets, and a small private toilet room that doubled as a shower. Everything was shipshape, and extremely tidy. As we stowed our bags, our car’s attendant poked her head in the doorway to introduce herself and explain that the train might be running 31 hours late. Taking in our astonishment, she shook her head and added, “Didn’t they tell you?” Iowa, she said, was practically underwater from weeks of heavy rain, and chunks of track had been washed away. My husband and I looked at each other. For days, I’d been reminding my family to approach the trip as an adventure akin to taking the Railway from Moscow to China. It appeared we were going to know what rail travel felt like. On the Zephyr, long delays are not uncommon, but are mitigated by a car with tables and soft swivel chairs from which the patient traveler may meditate on American scenery. We snagged a table as the train snaked past suburban Illinois backyards and embankments with tiger lilies and wild daisies, finally leaving the city behind and entering the farmlands. The green monotony of the dripping corn was interrupted here and there by a tractor dealership or the back side of a small town, where laundry flapped near backyard and asphalt roads angled off from the track and into a verdant oblivion. We played cards for a few hours, crossing the steaming Mississippi River in a kind of torpor. At some point, I dozed. When I opened my eyes, the vinous weeds of midsummer Iowa shrouding the tracks resembled the tropics. At sunset, we pulled into Ottumwa, Iowa, the first station stop at which we were allowed to get off the train and stretch our legs. In the last of the day’s soft pink light, we watched a conductor step out and give a dollar for a can of soda to a young disabled man who, we were told, waited for the train and that little gift every day. We ate our dinner in the dining car, with a white tablecloth, cloth napkins, real plates and silverware, consuming the first of nine surprisingly good meals, cooked up in the kitchen below. Then, as a full orange moon was rising over dark fields, we retired to our berths and tucked ourselves in. All was snug and cozy, a bit like a camper. We fell asleep to the gentle rocking of the train. Dawn cracked deep in Nebraska. The new day’s terrain was a subtle shift from Iowa and Illinois — a bit less green, more yellow, a little more rolling and much more desolate. The occasional dirt road led to the solitary farmhouse lined with old gnarled trees that looked as if they might have been planted as a shield against the howling prairie wind. We whizzed past silos, the backs of garages, irrigation lines, the occasional horse, with hardly a human in sight. We never noticed it happening, but soon the color scheme changed from cornfields and grass to almost no grass at all, and was dotted with sagebrush guarded by prairie dogs. At Wiggins, Colo. elevation 4, 500 feet, we spied our first mountaintops, almost resembling clouds on the horizon. Somewhere along this stretch of track, our little Amtrak guide to the trip told us that we had passed Hastings, Neb. the town where had been invented. The agrarian nation beyond the window frame ended abruptly on the outskirts of Denver, where acres of scaffolding and cranes, piles of concrete culvert piping and steel beams in rows testified to the building boom in the Mile High City. We rolled into Denver five hours late and were let out for 15 minutes. It was noon and already 100 degrees at that clear, cloudless altitude. We strolled the mall around the station, then reboarded. The new conductor was more of an impresario than the last one. He pronounced “ ” dramatically, and would narrate our way over the most spectacular part of the trip, the one winding through the Rockies. The train stopped shortly after we got into the mountains because of what the conductor called a “heat slowdown,” tracks so overheated they risked buckling under the train. After several hours of chugging along at less than 15 miles an hour, we finally sped on into Moffat Tunnel, the first vast tunnel hammered out of the mountains, emerging after 15 minutes, now high and deep in the Rockies alongside rushing mountain streams, banked with little shacks. Sometimes people with their dogs and fishing poles waved at us. Here, halfway across the continent, I looked at my dad and my children, playing cards, and thought about how we three generations were watching the same America pass by yet seeing, each of us, a different country. Dad grew up during World War II, and his father, a World War I veteran, was a patriot and neighborhood safety captain during Chicago’s blackout drills. His son, our father, was in open rebellion against his own parents by the 1960s over his nomadic, poetic lifestyle and opposition to the Vietnam War. I grew up in five different houses and apartments, wishing I had parents who owned a suburban and a station wagon like all my friends. And though I gave my children a fairly stable life, they are New Yorkers — little sophisticates. At this point, every seat in the observation car was taken. People were loathe to move, for fear of losing their optimal angle on the stunning scenery. Cameras came out, camaraderie prevailed and strangers shared stories. A medical student from Stockholm sitting beside me said she had boarded in Denver just to see this stretch of America and planned to get off the train that night. A woman from Florida was going across the country to visit her daughter in Seattle. “Of course you can fly, but when you fly you can’t see anything!” she said. Another rider was an Oklahoma lawyer, a devoted train buff whose grandfather had worked on the railroads. He planned to ride all the way to San Francisco and then reboard the next day and return to Chicago — a round trip he’d made many times already. Shafts of sunlight angled past the storm clouds over the Continental Divide as we approached the track’s highest point, 9, 239 feet elevation. The conductor occasionally took to the public address system to enthusiastically narrate what he called “our adventure. ” He pointed out Paul Newman’s remote and gorgeous Roundup River Ranch for disadvantaged children deep in the Rockies, told us the names of tunnels and gorges, and drew our attention to “Dead Man’s Curve,” a strip of road perched atop a cliff, at the bottom of which were half a dozen crumpled cars. Back in our sleeping berth as the moon slowly illuminated mountains and small towns, we had arrived at our 30th hour onboard, and we were not halfway to Frisco, but we had surrendered to the pace, and the delays, and had even begun to enjoy it. The kids had now played hourslong rounds of Polish Rummy with their grandfather, bantering and showing off their snark and cleverness to an appreciative audience of one. I stared out the window at the little houses and farms, imagining the lives of those inside. Lulled by the rolling out the window, I became aware of a strange sensation that I hadn’t noticed at age 7, when life lay ahead, vaster than the continent. The experience of watching that much of the world go by, foot by foot, mile by mile, gives time a physical, visceral dimension. From my seat, I could feel the past being left behind. It hardly mattered whether we were going 20 miles an hour or 70. We were going somewhere, and that was all that mattered. The next morning, we opened our eyes to a purple bowl of mountains around Salt Lake City, and by breakfast we were zipping over the vast, white salt flats. The terrain greened again as Nevada blended into the Sierras. We soon entered another vista of plunging ravines, pine forests and lakes (including Donner Lake, named after the doomed pioneer party marooned here one winter who cannibalized their dead to survive). It was there we met a park ranger who happened to be traveling from Utah to Sacramento. He named the indigenous shrubs, manzanita and ceanothus told us about the red soil and shared tidbits of Western history. By now, our conductor had a bead on an actual arrival time — we would be in San Francisco only seven hours late, a fact that made us suspect that our attendant’s dire delay warning in Chicago had been a brazen attempt to keep our expectations low. Great! Only seven hours late! We pulled into Sacramento and our first glorious California sunset, a sheet of horizontal oranges and reds silhouetting black water towers and wires. In no time at all, we were at our final stop, bidding fond farewells to the train staff who had come to know the children by name. Around midnight, we were tooling through San Francisco in a cab toward our hotel. Any sense of excitement was dulled by the late hour and the long journey, and the kids were nodding off, but as we rode through empty downtown streets in the dark, the familiar smell of eucalyptus and the soft foggy Pacific air yanked me back 50 years. The next morning brought back a nearly forgotten memory: the ubiquitous hobos and junkies who populate San Francisco’s streets, and who panhandle much more aggressively than those in New York. While we ordered at a Starbucks on Market Street, the barista caught a man filling the inner pockets of his trench coat with bottles of orange juice. We took a city bus across town to check out . The neighborhood is gentrified now in the era of Silicon Valley expensive, chic and almost touristy. Gone are the Diggers, the street theater group that gave away food and held up large, empty frames for people to step through to change their “Frame of Reference. ” We passed psychedelic murals, head shops, coffee shops, and vintage emporiums and purveyors of exotic textiles from Kathmandu. But the hippie wares now come with hefty price tags. My father recognized only one store — an old vinyl record shop. At the end of Haight Street, we arrived at the entrance of Golden Gate Park, and a small playground where my dad reminisced about my eighth birthday party — an event I don’t remember — and how he realized only once he had brought 10 children to the spot that he didn’t know how to keep track of us. He recalled the famous bands, including the Grateful Dead, that used to play on the grassy hill nearby. I had another olfactory moment that transported me back to second grade — patchouli, incense, smoke and, again, eucalyptus wafting from an encampment of young men and women lounging on blankets in the grass, strumming guitars. Of course they asked us for money. My daughter, weary from the long day and walk, and no stranger to the homeless in New York, could take it no longer. “I hate this city,” she said. Despite San Francisco’s many charms, this modern variation of the homeless flower children of the ’60s was beyond annoying to my traveler. Holding her hand, I recognized her unease. It was exactly what I’d felt about the hippies a ago, when I had wished my dad was more like the father in the Nancy Drew books I had begun to read in second grade — a lawyer in the fictional small town of River Heights. As I watched my children clambering on swings, I recalled Joan Didion’s horrifying scenes from San Francisco in her collection of essays, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” the hippie kids, the fed acid by derelict parents in what one described as “High Kindergarten. ” My parents didn’t do drugs and I did not recognize the smell wafting in the streets until someone lit up a joint in high school. Our mother was almost in sole charge of three small children, and while a poetic spirit herself, was never overly enamored of the Beat scene. She spent the San Francisco year pushing a in a stroller around hippies and up the steep hills. Eventually my parents divorced. My father now says he regrets our journey. He can’t really explain why he decided to chuck it all and head west. He remembers that, at the time, it just made sense. Our trip to that revolutionary place brought back a flood of memories of a gone world. The Summer of Love aimed at nothing less than the wholesale transformation of American society. In some ways, the flower children and their fellow travelers, like my parents, succeeded in fashioning a more tolerant America. In many other ways, they failed. But for the child on the train, the journey toward the Summer of Love, and not the destination, was what changed everything. | 1 |
Posted on November 3, 2016 by DCG | 1 Comment
Westworld was originally done in 1973. From Wikipedia , “Westworld is a 1973 science fiction Western thriller film written and directed by novelist Michael Crichton about amusement park androids that malfunction and begin killing visitors . It stars Yul Brynner as an android in a futuristic Western -themed amusement park, and Richard Benjamin and James Brolin as guests of the park.
Sometime in the near future a high-tech, highly realistic adult amusement park called Delos features three themed “worlds” — West World (the American Old West ), Medieval World ( medieval Europe ), and Roman World (the ancient Roman city of Pompeii ). The resort’s three “worlds” are populated with lifelike androids that are practically indistinguishable from human beings, each programmed in character for their assigned historical environment. For $1,000 per day, guests may indulge in any adventure with the android population of the park, including sexual encounters and even a fight to the death. Delos’s tagline in its advertising promises, “Boy, have we got a vacation for you!”
The HBO remake premiered on October 2 nd and stars Evan Rachel Wood, Thandie Newton, Jeffrey Wright, James Marsdan, and a bunch of other actors I’ve never heard of. Their parents must be so proud…
From Fox News : HBO has been known to push the boundaries in their original programming, featuring scenes depicting incest, rape and over-the-top gore. But some say they might have finally hit gone too far when Sunday night’s episode of their new futuristic show “Westworld” featured a four-minute orgy scene with approximately 40 actors engaging in a variety of sex acts .
“HBO is a network that broadcasts ‘Sesame Street’ re-runs. And yes, parents should turn it off, stop paying for it and block it,” Dan Gainor, Vice President of Business and Culture at the Media Research Center, told FOX411. “‘Westworld’ is a disturbing reminder of the sick and demented way Hollywood views the world.”
But industry insiders said nudity and adult content is fine for cable television. “Good or bad TV, this is something that is on pay cable, and viewers who don’t like it can tune it out. It’s appropriate for the story they are telling ,” TV producer Geoff Skinner told us. He added that it’s a parent’s responsibility to monitor the programming a child watches.
“Parents like myself should never allow a child to watch this until they are old enough to understand all of the thematic and semiotics that this show is trying to achieve.”
Former television executive Scot Safon said the show does not misconstrue its adult content, and the sexual scene in question was in line with the plot of the series . In other words, viewer beware.
“It is deliberately disturbing and provocative, and it makes its intentions very well-known from the opening credits onward,” Safon shared with us. “ It is a show about ideas and it is done with tremendous artistry. I trust the artists here, and would assume that their extended orgy sequence is in line with the vision of the show .”
But branding and communications expert Scott Pinsker warned that HBO has to find a delicate balance and not push the boundaries so far it pushes away its main audience.
“HBO is in the business of distributing movies, sports and original content, but it’s primary objective is to promote the HBO brand. It’s a delicate balancing act, because many HBO viewers want to see edgy, risqué content that pushes the envelope, but if HBO goes too far, they can alienate their core audience,” Pinsker said.
He added, “Instead of censoring content, they should have internal standards of what’s appropriate for their brand, and then advise their audience accordingly, so they can decide whether or not to watch.”
HBO did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
DCG | 0 |
Oct 26, 2016 5:20 PM 0
Submitted by Joseph Jankowski via PlanetFreeWill.com,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor and architect of ObamaCare Jonathan Gruber told CNN’s Carol Costello on Wednesday that ObamaCare, which is set to see a sharp increase in premium prices next year, is going just as planned.
When asked what could be done to the Affordable Care Act in order to drive the prices of premiums down, Gruber responded by saying “the law is working as designed.”
“Look, once again, there is no sense of just what has to be fixed, the law is working as designed,” Gruber told CNN. “However, it could work better and I think the most important thing experts would agree on is that we need a larger mandate penalty.”
Johnathan Gruber made headlines in 2014 when video surfaced of him saying that the “lack of transparency” and the “stupidity of the American voter” helped ObamaCare become law.
“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” Gruber said. “And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass.”
Gruber made the comments while discussing how law was “written in a tortured way” to avoid a negative score from the Congressional Budget Office. He suggested that that ObamaCare would have been rejected if the penalties for going without health insurance were interpreted as taxes.
“If CBO scored the (individual) mandate as taxes, the bill dies,” Gruber said.
“If you had a law that made it explicit that healthy people are going to pay in and sick people are going to get subsidies, it would not have passed,” he added.
As the AP reported yesterday, the Obama Administration has confirmed that premiums will sharply rise under the ObamaCare law, with many consumers left with only one insurer to choose from.
Premiums for a midlevel benchmark plan will increase on average 25% across 39 states served by the federally run online market, according to a report from the Department of Health and Human Services.
“Consumers will be faced this year with not only big premium increases but also with a declining number of insurers participating, and that will lead to a tumultuous open enrollment period,” Larry Levitt, who tracks the health care law for the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, told the Associated Press . | 0 |
Several Clashes Reported Around Country by Jason Ditz, October 26, 2016 Share This
Fighting was reported in several areas around Yemen over the past 24 hours, with the ending of the 72-hour ceasefire leading to a substantial uptick in clashes in several areas, mostly in the northern half of the country.
Three different incidents were reported, with the largest an exchange of artillery fire east of the capital city of Sanaa, in which 15 Houthis and 5 pro-Saudi fighters were slain. 11 more were killed in fighting at a border post, and six others were killed in Baida.
The UN special envoy Ismail Ouid Cheikh Ahmed was in Yemen yesterday pushing proposals for a new peace process, though it as yet doesn’t appear that either side is willing to commit to anything, and only accepted the most recent 72-hour ceasefire because it came at the behest of US and British officials.
Saudi Arabia attacked Yemen in March of 2015, vowing to reinstall former President Hadi in power. The war has continued since, with heavy airstrikes and a naval blockade, so far resulting in a split of the country along north-south boundaries, with the pro-Saudi forces centered on Aden, a southern port and former capital of South Yemen. Last 5 posts by Jason Ditz | 0 |
LONDON — And so the politicization of dress continues. Now it is the poppy — the sartorial commemoration of soldiers who lost their lives in wartime that Britons wear in the days before Remembrance Day, Nov. 11 — that has generated controversy. An estimated 45 million poppies will be distributed in 2016, according to the BBC, worn on television and in Parliament, schools, hospitals, railway stations and offices. They range from simple paper cutout versions of the red flower that grew amid the mud and chaos of the World War I battlefields in northern France to bejeweled and silk versions with hefty prices that appear on the pages of glossy magazines or adorn celebrities during the fall awards show season. But now soccer players have been told they cannot wear the symbols on the field as England takes on Scotland. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association, the world soccer governing body known as FIFA, has said players must not wear poppies at a World Cup qualifying match between the two national teams set for Friday. “Britain is not the only country that has been suffering from the result of war,” Fatma Samoura, the organization’s new secretary general, said during a BBC interview. “The only question is why are we doing exceptions for just one country and not the rest of the world. ” Ms. Samoura added that as the rules dictated that political, religious or commercial symbols could not be displayed on uniforms, poppies had no place, either. (Professional organizations, like the English Premier League, can set their own rules.) Her statement was roundly criticized by the British establishment, including Prime Minister Theresa May, who shared that view during the prime minister’s question time last week. “I think the stance that has been taken by FIFA is utterly outrageous,” Mrs. May said. “Our football players want to recognize and respect those who have given their lives for our safety and security. I think it is absolutely right that they should be able to do so. ” Adding a jibe at FIFA, which has been plagued by allegations of corruption, Mrs. May added: “Before they start telling us what to do, they jolly well ought to sort their own house out. ” This is hardly the first occasion in which sports, politics and fashion have collided on the playing field see the furor in the United States this summer when female basketball players wore black to raise awareness of the shooting deaths of black men by the police and the fatal shooting of five Dallas police officers. And in 2011, when the FIFA rule was invoked to ban the poppy, the organization backed down, allowing English players to wear black armbands appliquéd with poppies during a game. Nor is it the first time that the poppy, a simple wardrobe accessory originally intended to encourage collective remembrance across borders, has proved socially divisive. When the symbol was introduced in 1921, the poppy represented mourning and regret. But almost a century later, as Britain moves into an era of heightened nationalism after its vote to leave the European Union, some believe the emblem’s meaning has shifted toward an institutionalized patriotism. And public figures who question and the shifting values and cultural pressures it can set off, are also coming under fire. Many Britons today believe that the poppy is charged with a kind of military triumphalism. James McClean, who plays professionally for the West Bromwich Albion soccer team in England, has refused to wear a poppy for several years, saying it represents all the conflicts the British Army has been involved in — including those in his home, Northern Ireland. Despite the swirling controversy, the soccer associations of England and Scotland have announced that their national squads will defy the ban and wear the black armbands with poppies despite the threat of possible sanctions. Thus the next round of debate about what and when personal beliefs should be publicly displayed through dress — well, kicks off. | 1 |
So, now he is not "up-to-date" on what is going on in the government and has to learn his information through the tv news sources? WTF? Really? No one believes that garbage. | 0 |
SEOUL, South Korea — The head of Samsung, one of the world’s largest conglomerates, was indicted on bribery and embezzlement charges on Tuesday, becoming one of the most prominent business tycoons ever to face trial in South Korea. The indictment of Lee the company’s de facto leader, came at the end of a special prosecutor’s investigation of a corruption scandal that has already led to the impeachment of President Park . When huge crowds took to the streets in recent months to demand that she leave office, they also called for the toppling of Mr. Lee and other corporate titans. Mr. Lee was arrested on Feb. 17, a dramatic development in South Korea’s struggle to end collusive ties between the government and the conglomerates, or chaebol, that dominate the economy. Four other senior executives of Samsung were also indicted Tuesday, but not arrested, on the same corruption charges as Mr. Lee, and three of the four resigned. Those indictments had been expected and were not seen as indications of a threat to the Lee family’s control of the business. South Koreans have grown weary of endemic corruption and the country’s traditional leniency toward tycoons accused of crimes. For decades, presidents have entered office vowing to end such favoritism, but they all eventually backtracked. Anticorruption advocates say Mr. Lee’s indictment and trial will be a test of whether the system can finally make a dent in those cozy relationships. Samsung, by far the largest of the chaebol, has long been a symbol of power and wealth in a nation that has transformed itself from an agrarian economy to one of the world’s technological powerhouses. Samsung’s market capitalization accounts for of the value of all listed companies in South Korea, and its main unit, Samsung Electronics, alone ships 20 percent of the country’s total exports. Mr. Lee was accused of giving or promising $38 million in bribes to Choi a secretive confidante of Ms. Park. In return, the prosecutor said in his indictment, Mr. Lee received political favors, most notably government support for a merger of two Samsung affiliates in 2015 that helped him inherit corporate control from his incapacitated father, Lee . Mr. Lee was also accused of committing perjury when he insisted during a parliamentary hearing that he had never bribed Ms. Choi or Ms. Park. He still claims that the “donations” Samsung paid out to Ms. Choi were coerced, suggesting that the company was extorted. Samsung has said it will try to clear Mr. Lee’s name at trial. It did not immediately comment on his indictment on Tuesday. In the South Korean system, once a suspect is formally arrested, indictment automatically follows, unless evidence emerges that proves the person’s innocence. Those cases are extremely rare. Mr. Lee, 48, a vice chairman of Samsung, has been running the company since his father had a heart attack in 2014. His indictment comes after a challenging period for the company, which issued a global recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones, the most ambitious product launched under his leadership, because they were prone to catching fire. The elder Mr. Lee was convicted of bribery and tax evasion twice but never spent a day in jail. Each time, he was pardoned by the president and returned to the company. At least six of the nation’s top 10 chaebol — which generate revenue equivalent to more than 80 percent of gross domestic product — are led by men once convicted of crimes. Ms. Park was identified as a criminal accomplice in November, when state prosecutors indicted Ms. Choi on charges of extorting tens of millions of dollars from Samsung and other chaebol by leveraging her connections with the president. But she was protected from indictment while in office. On Tuesday, the special prosecutor, Park added a bribery charge to the case against Ms. Choi, who is already on trial. He said Ms. Park could also face bribery and extortion charges once she leaves office. Ms. Park denies any wrongdoing, saying the money from Samsung was part of “donations” that businesses provided to two foundations that prosecutors said were controlled by Ms. Choi. Ms. Park’s presidential powers have been suspended since the National Assembly impeached her in December. The Constitutional Court is expected to rule in the coming weeks on whether Ms. Park should be formally ousted or reinstated and allowed to finish her term, which ends next February. In the current scandal, Samsung was accused of making payments to Ms. Choi in exchange for a crucial vote by the National Pension Service to support the 2015 merger of two Samsung affiliates. The special prosecutor says Ms. Park ordered the pension fund to support the merger on Mr. Lee’s behalf. The merger caused a loss of at least $123 million for the national pension fund, which held large stakes in the two affiliates, but it increased the stock value of the Lee family by at least $758 million, the prosecutor said. The four executives under Mr. Lee who were also indicted belonged to Samsung Electronics or to the conglomerate’s powerful, secretive Corporate Strategy Office. Critics say the office worked mainly to tighten the Lee family’s imperial control of the conglomerate and enforce the transfer of leadership. On Tuesday, Samsung said it was disbanding the office as part of its effort to make its corporate governance more transparent. | 1 |
#DeleteUber started to trend on Twitter Sunday, following a call to boycott the service by celebrities and protesters. [The protest was launched after Uber did not participate in a strike organized by taxi drivers against President Trump’s temporary ban on travel from certain Middle Eastern countries. Uber had announced in a tweet that surge prices were temporarily halted in order to attract customers while other taxi companies protested and refused to pick up people from JFK Airport. In response to the controversy, service Lyft donated $1 million to the ACLU, releasing a statement against President Trump and in support of refugees. The boycott movement launched service Lyft to the top of Apple’s App Store, while Uber was bombarded with reviews from protesters. Several celebrities also joined in with the boycott and social media movement, including actors Mark Ruffalo, Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson, America Horror Story actor Denis O’Hare, #BlackLivesMatter activist and actor Jesse Williams, and feminist comedian Lena Dunham. Hello @lyft Celebrities Spread #DeleteUber After Lyft Donates $1M to ACLU | Hollywood Reporter https: . — Mark Ruffalo (@MarkRuffalo) January 30, 2017, Thank you @lyft! @Uber deleted! Proud of this support to the @ACLU. https: . — Jesse Tyler Ferguson (@jessetyler) January 29, 2017, @lyft to donate 1 million $ to ACLU while @uber profits off the backs of detainees. Altruism is a better business model #DeleteUber, — rob corddry (@robcorddry) January 29, 2017, Wow. Just wow. This is what America is about folks. Thank you @lyft @ACLU https: . — Michelle Monaghan (@realmonaghan) January 29, 2017, @Uber @Uber_NYC @Uber_Support — Just deleted my Uber app. If they won’t stand with us, I won’t ride with them. Use @lyft @Way2rideapp, — Denis O’Hare (@denisohare) January 29, 2017, DELETING @UBER RIGHT THE FUCK NOW! !! #WeThePeople #LoveWILLwin #FuckHate #FuckOppression if you support HATE YO ASS GETS DELETED #BYEBITCH pic. twitter. — Taraji P. Henson (@TherealTaraji) January 29, 2017, The boycott is on delete #uber get #lyft or #juno just as good and they dont track u when its off either!! — John Leguizamo (@JohnLeguizamo) January 29, 2017, pic. twitter. — jesse Williams. (@iJesseWilliams) January 29, 2017, Canceling #Uber like … . #bye #nomuslimban #teamfreedomoverfear #teamstopdefendinghate … https: . — Janelle Monáe, Cindi (@JanelleMonae) January 29, 2017, When you go from living with a boyfriend to never speaking to him again pic. twitter. — Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) January 29, 2017, Am I going to miss @Uber ? pic. twitter. — Jordan Peele (@JordanPeele) January 29, 2017, I will be downloading the @Lyft app. post. haste. ( and they don’t cyber stalk you when your trip is over) https: . — Anika Noni Rose (@AnikaNoniRose) January 29, 2017, Uber attempted to remedy the situation by releasing their own statement against President Trump’s temporary suspension of immigration from certain countries, but was still repeatedly attacked by protesters who were not satisfied by the company’s response. Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington or like his page at Facebook. | 0 |
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Throughout President Obama’s time in the White House, Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Persian Gulf have watched with dismay as the kingdom’s alliance with the United States seemed to be slipping. Then came the overwhelming congressional support for Jasta, or the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which will allow relatives of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia for any suspected role in the plot. That was all the proof many Saudis needed that the alliance that has underpinned the regional order for decades was fraying — perhaps irreparably. “Jasta is a wake up call for the Saudis, that it is time to revisit the concept of the alliance with the United States,” said Khalid a Saudi political sociologist and writer. Saudis responded to the passage of the bill, after both houses of Congress voted on Wednesday to override Mr. Obama’s veto, with a mix of anger and disappointment, while many have already begun thinking about how their country will need to adjust. Passage of the law was a huge blow to the Saudis, who have long maintained strong ties in Washington though close cooperation with the American government on a range of issues, from economic and oil policy to counterterrorism to shared intelligence and military programs. Saudi diplomats, and a range of public relations companies hired by the Saudi government, lobbied hard against the bill, with Adel the Saudi foreign minister and former Saudi ambassador to Washington, leading the effort. But that failed to persuade enough lawmakers to vote against a bill promoted by the families of victims of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. That resilient association of Saudi Arabia with the attacks angers many Saudis. Their government disowned Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen, in 1994. Al Qaeda, and more recently the jihadists of the Islamic State, have frequently targeted the kingdom, killing Saudi civilians. Many question why suspicions of Saudi involvement in the Sept. 11 plot persist in the United States, despite the passage of 15 years, a congressional investigation and the release this year of the 28 pages that were believed to contain evidence of complicity by Saudi officials. None of that has produced evidence of Saudi involvement, they say. “Because the bill has been tied so strongly to and Saudi Arabia, it helps feed this perception that Saudi Arabia is somehow responsible for Islamic terrorism,” said Faisal bin Farhan, a Saudi businessman and chairman of Shamal Investments. “And that to me is more worrying than any direct effect of the law itself. ” On social media, some users suggested that the bill was part of a sinister conspiracy against the kingdom. “America failed for 15 years to prove a role for the Saudi government in the attacks, including in the congressional report and the 28 pages,” wrote Khalid . “#Jasta_Law Blackmail?” “The goal of the Jasta law is to freeze the money of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and its sources and to paralyze its movement in Yemen and Syria while releasing Iranian money to tip the balance,” wrote Hutheifa Azzam. In a statement released on Thursday, the Saudi government said the act “is of great concern to the community of nations that object to the erosion of the principle of sovereign immunity, which has governed international relations for hundreds of years. ” “The erosion of sovereign immunity,” the statement added, “will have a negative impact on all nations, including the United States. ” Saudi and gulf analysts said that the depth of the alliance gave the kingdom many ways to express its displeasure. “It is certain that the strategic alliance between the two countries is in a real crisis,” Salman Aldossary, the editor in chief of the newspaper, said in an email. “If it is true that Riyadh shall be harmed by the crisis, Washington also has interests in the region, and they will definitely be affected as well. ” Saudi Arabia has lots of money invested in the United States, and Mr. Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, warned that such investments could be withdrawn if Saudi Arabia feared that its assets were in jeopardy of seizure as part of American legal proceedings. It remains unclear if Saudi Arabia will start withdrawing those assets. The United States has a large military presence throughout the gulf, with training missions in Saudi Arabia and large bases in Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. The United States also cooperates with Saudi Arabia in military operations in Yemen and elsewhere, as well as sharing intelligence for the fight against Al Qaeda and the jihadists of the Islamic State. “This situation, if exploited, would do a great deal of harm to U. S. interests, let alone Riyadh’s effective cooperation in combating terrorism and the reflection of this on the war on terrorism as led by the U. S. ” Mr. Aldossary said. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a professor of political science in the United Arab Emirates, said that while the law appeared to be aimed only at Saudi Arabia, other countries in the region feared that it was only a matter of time before the United States decided, “Let’s go after them, too. ” While 15 of the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon and one from Egypt. “There is thinking now more than ever that maybe the United States is not the safest place for future investments,” Mr. Abdulla said. “So eventually, maybe, we’ll have to stay away from the U. S. and invest elsewhere. ” The alliance between Saudi Arabia and the United States goes back seven decades, to when King Abdulaziz, the founder of the modern Saudi state, met President Franklin Delano Roosevelt aboard the U. S. S. Quincy at the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal. Ties between the two nations have expanded enormously since then, as the United States has sought a steady supply of oil and a partner in the Arab world. Saudi Arabia has sought the security of protection from an international power. Other links have developed as well. Tens of thousands of Saudi students attended schools in the United States, the Saudi government has invested billions of dollars in American military technology and the countries’ intelligence services have shared information on terrorist threats. But tensions have endured, largely reflecting the difference in values between the nations. Many in the United States accuse the Saudi government of helping create fertile ground for terrorism by exporting what they regard as an intolerant version of Islam. Others have raised concern about human rights in a country where women cannot drive and where atheism is a crime sometimes punished with a public caning. The Saudi government watched in dismay at the United States called for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt during popular protests against him. The Saudis have tried and failed to overcome American reluctance to intervene more forcefully in the civil war in Syria. They opposed Mr. Obama’s push to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s regional rival. The Sept. 11 law has left many analysts questioning the alliance’s future. “The countries still need each other, but it does increasingly look like a marriage that is past its date,” said Michael Stephens, the head of the Royal United Services Institute Qatar. “Both sides are questioning the utility of being hitched together. ” | 1 |
When Donald J. Trump promised to turn Muslims away from American shores, they wagged their fingers. When he mimicked a journalist for his lifelong disability, they . When he mocked the mother of a valorous soldier killed in combat, they threatened to walk away from him. But Republican leaders never did. They justified his behavior, they minimized his offenses, they excused his insults. So why this? Why did a video provoke a sudden revolt by party officials against their nominee, an uprising that could very well destroy their chances of taking the White House? Because the glee with which he bragged about sexually assaulting women, by forcibly kissing them and grabbing their genitals, turned a boorish man into an outright predator. Because the voice captured on a microphone and the face caught on camera are indisputably Mr. Trump’s, breaking through to a distrustful public that doubts much news media coverage but believes powerfully in what it can see and hear for itself. Because it turns out that even the most members of the political class, the true weather vanes swinging in the wind, have their limits. After 16 months of accumulated doubts, embarrassments and indignities, they are finally fed up. As senators, representatives and party elders rescinded their endorsements of Mr. Trump in unrelenting waves on Saturday, those who had stubbornly stuck by their nominee described their rejection in almost cathartic terms, saying he had surrendered any legitimate claim to their loyalty. “He has forfeited the right to be our party’s nominee” was how Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska put it, saying she would not vote for Mr. Trump. It did not repel everyone: Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Senator Mitch McConnell did not waver from their endorsement of Mr. Trump. But the image of Republicans running for the exits, a month before a presidential election, is as extraordinary as a party’s nominee using vulgar, violent language that seemed to reduce an entire gender to sexual anatomy. And this time, no amount of spin seems sufficient to control the damage Mr. Trump has wrought. When he crossed the line in the past, there was always a ready escape hatch, a set of rationalizations offered by his but ultimately accommodating, Republican allies. He had, they said, erred in his excessive zeal to protect the country’s borders, its workers or its safety (by calling Mexican immigrants rapists or proposing to bar Muslims from the United States). Or he had, they said, simply returned a provocation with a counterpunch (by ridiculing Carly Fiorina’s face as unpresidential or skewering Rosie O’Donnell for her weight). But aboard the bus with the Hollywood flatterer Billy Bush, those strained arguments collapsed. There was no aggressor to fight back. There was no larger issue at stake. There was just lasciviousness in its purest and cruelest form. “It was just this unprovoked view of women by this man with daughters,” said Russ Schriefer, a longtime Republican strategist and ad maker who has spent his career studying the effect of images and words in campaigns. “It becomes,” he said, “indefensible. ” Authenticity is Mr. Trump’s brand. But the politically destructive force of the video lay in its power to pull back the curtain on his true self. Surrounded by sycophants on a luxury bus, Mr. Trump brags about how he aggressively tried to seduce a married woman, later ridiculing her figure as ruined by fake breasts. He then spies an attractive actress waiting for him outside the bus and regales his companions with his ability to force himself on women sexually because of his celebrity. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. After salivating over the sight of the actress, Mr. Trump descends from the bus and acts like a gentleman. It is a moment of fraudulence that resonates deeply for any women or men who fear what people might say when their backs are turned. “It’s Trump behind closed doors, in a candid moment in a nonpolitical setting, and this is the true inner Donald Trump you are hearing,” said Tad Devine, a veteran adviser and ad maker for Democratic presidential candidates. It is difficult to overstate the visceral power of the recording, which left no ambiguity about the coarseness of the words or the identity of the man who had uttered them. “He can’t say, ‘It’s not what you think it is,’ or, ‘It’s been doctored,’” Mr. Schriefer said. “It happened. ” Four years ago, Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars making the case that Mitt Romney was an unfeeling, plutocrat. But it was a grainy, secretly recorded video of him dismissing 47 percent of the country as dependent on the government that ultimately sliced through the electorate and badly undermined his campaign. “This is Romney’s 47 percent video times 10,” Mr. Devine said of Mr. Trump’s remarks. Mr. Trump’s churlish behavior toward women is well documented, including in a investigation by The New York Times. As a boss, he told female employees that they needed to lose weight. As a boyfriend, he asked women to rate his previous romantic partners on a scale of one to 10, one of them recalled. As a father, he marveled at his daughter’s body. “She’s hot, right?” a contestant in one of his beauty pageants recalled him saying. And as a husband, he was accused of rape by his first wife, Ivana, though she later backed away from that claim. But his denigration of women was perhaps never captured in such a vivid and undeniable way as it was on the video. Even women who have experienced Mr. Trump’s aggressions firsthand found the recording to be startling, clarifying and, perhaps, vindicating. Temple Taggart was a beauty contestant when, she said, Mr. Trump kissed her on the lips, without invitation, at a pageant event. It was an unwanted advance she has turned over in her head for years. Watching him relive his sexual aggressions on the video, she said in an interview on Saturday, “made me feel a lot better. ” “It was like: ‘Thank you. Now no one can say I made this up,’” she added. Mr. Trump’s overheard words, about pushing himself on women simply because he could, caused her to see the experience in a new and even harsher light. “Back then,” she said, “I was judging him with very innocent eyes. ” The depth of the revulsion unleashed since Friday afternoon revealed something else: Despite the political protocol and standards that Mr. Trump has shattered throughout his campaign, a proud party does hold something sacred. Republicans still see themselves as the party of family values, as vanguards of a civilized society that teaches boys to grow into men — to put away childish things, like raunchy descriptions of women, and to demonstrate maturity and respect. Mr. Trump was almost 60 when he made his remarks. His third wife was pregnant. As a presidential candidate, he has run not on detailed policies or a compelling record of achievement, but on the idea that he is the furthest thing from a politician. He would always call it as he saw it. He did just that on the video. But this time, his party could not tolerate his vision. | 1 |
Donate We Are All Deplorables We can't battle the bigotry stoked by Trump without a strategy to alleviate the economic misery behind it, writes Chris Hedges. By Chris Hedges / truthdig.com
My relatives in Maine are deplorables . I cannot write on their behalf. I can write in their defense. They live in towns and villages that have been ravaged by deindustrialization. The bank in Mechanic Falls, where my grandparents lived, is boarded up, along with nearly every downtown store. The paper mill closed decades ago. There is a strip club in the center of the town. The jobs, at least the good ones, are gone. Many of my relatives and their neighbors work up to 70 hours a week at three minimum-wage jobs, without benefits, to make perhaps $35,000 a year. Or they have no jobs. They cannot afford adequate health coverage under the scam of Obamacare. Alcoholism is rampant in the region. Heroin addiction is an epidemic. Labs producing the street drug methamphetamine make up a cottage industry. Suicide is common. Domestic abuse and sexual assault destroy families. Despair and rage among the population have fueled an inchoate racism, homophobia and Islamophobia and feed the latent and ever present poison of white supremacy. They also nourish the magical thinking peddled by the con artists in the Christian right, the state lotteries that fleece the poor, and an entertainment industry that night after night shows visions of an America and a lifestyle on television screens—“The Apprentice” typified this—that foster unattainable dreams of wealth and celebrity.
Those who are cast aside as human refuse often have a psychological need for illusions and scapegoats. They desperately seek the promise of divine intervention. They unplug from a reality that is too hard to bear. They see in others, especially those who are different, the obstacles to their advancement and success. We must recognize and understand the profound despair that leads to these reactions. To understand these reactions is not to condone them.
The suffering of the white underclass is real. Its members struggle with humiliation and a crippling loss of self-worth and dignity. The last thing they need, or deserve, is politically correct thought police telling them what to say and think and condemning them as mutations of human beings.
Those cast aside by the neoliberal order have an economic identity that both the liberal class and the right wing are unwilling to acknowledge. This economic identity is one the white underclass shares with other discarded people, including the undocumented workers and the people of color demonized by the carnival barkers on cable news shows. This is an economic reality the power elites invest great energy in masking.
The self-righteousness of the liberal class, which revels in imagined tolerance and enlightenment while condemning the white underclass as irredeemable, widens the divide between white low-wage workers and urban elites. Liberals have no right to pass judgment on these so-called deplorables without acknowledging their pain. They must listen to their stories, which the corporate media shut out. They must offer solutions that provide the possibility of economic stability and self-respect.
"The liberal class has no hope of defeating the rise of American fascism until it unites with the dispossessed white working class. It has no hope of being an effective force in politics until it articulates a viable socialism."
Martin Luther King Jr. understood the downward spiral of hating those who hate you. “In a real sense all life is inter-related,” he wrote in “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”“All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. …”
We cannot battle the racism, bigotry and hate crimes that will be stoked by the Donald Trump presidency without first battling for economic justice. This is not a gap between the tolerant and the intolerant. It is a gap between most of the American population and our oligarchic and corporate elites, which Trump epitomizes. It is a gap that is understood only in the light of the demand for economic justice. And when we start to speak in the language of justice first, and the language of inclusiveness second, we will begin to blunt the protofascism being embraced by many Trump supporters.
I spent two years writing a book on the Christian right called “ American Fascists : The Christian Right and the War on America.” I spent many months with dispossessed white workers in states such as Missouri, Kansas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California. I carried into the book project all the prejudices that come with being raised in the liberal church—a disdain for a magic Jesus who answers your prayers and makes you rich, a repugnance at the rejection of rationality and science and at the literal interpretation of the Bible, a horror of the sacralization of the American empire, and a revulsion against the racism, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and blind intolerance that often afflict those who retreat into a binary world of good and evil.
Those enthralled by such thinking are Christian heretics—Jesus did not come to make us rich and powerful and bless America’s empire—and potential fascists. They have fused the iconography and symbols of the American state with the iconography and symbols of the Christian religion. They believe they can create a “Christian” America. The American flag is given the same sacred value as the Christian cross. The Pledge of Allegiance has the religious power of the Lord’s Prayer. That a sleazy developer and con artist was chosen as their vehicle—81 percent of evangelicals voted for Trump—for achieving this goal is startling, to say the least. But this is not a reality-based movement. Most of those who profit from this culture of despair, many wrapped in the halo of the ministry, are, like Trump, slick, amoral trolls.
My view of the tens of millions of Americans who have fallen into the embrace of the Christian right’s magical thinking underwent a profound change as I conducted interviews for the book. During that time I did what good reporters do: I listened. And the stories I heard were heartbreaking. I grew to like many of these people. The communities they lived in, many of which I visited, looked like the towns where my family lived in Maine. They were terrified of the future, especially for their children. They struggled with feelings of worthlessness and abandonment. I fear the Christianized fascism in which they enshroud themselves, but I also see them as its pawns.
They hate a secular world they see as destroying them. They long for the apocalyptic visions of Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series . They want the cruelty and rot of “secular humanism” to be obliterated before they and their families are lifted into heaven by the rapture (an event never mentioned in the Bible).
I finished my book with a deep dislike for megachurch pastors who, like Trump, manipulate despair to achieve power and wealth. I see the Christian right as a serious threat to an open society. But I do not hate those who desperately cling to this emotional life raft, even as they spew racist venom. Their conclusion that minorities, undocumented workers or Muslims are responsible for their impoverishment is part of the retreat into fantasy. The only way we will blunt this racism and hatred and allow them to free themselves from the grip of magical thinking is by providing jobs that offer adequate incomes and economic stability and by restoring their communities and the primacy of the common good. Any other approach will fail. We will not argue or scold them out of their beliefs. These people are emotionally incapable of coping with the world as it is. If we demonize them we demonize ourselves.
Arlie Russell Hochschild ’s book “Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right” in story after story makes clear that members of the white underclass are also victims and deserve our empathy.
The liberal class has no hope of defeating the rise of American fascism until it unites with the dispossessed white working class. It has no hope of being an effective force in politics until it articulates a viable socialism. Corporate capitalism cannot be regulated, reformed or corrected. A socialist movement dedicated to demolishing the cruelty of the corporate state will do more to curb the racism of the white underclass than lessons by liberals in moral purity. Preaching multiculturalism and gender and identity politics will not save us from the rising sadism in American society. It will only fuel the anti-politics that has replaced politics.
Liberals have sprinkled academic, corporate, media and political institutions with men and women of different races and religions. This has done nothing to protect the majority of marginalized people who live in conditions that are worse than those that existed when King marched on Selma. It is boutique activism. It is about branding, not justice.
Murray Bookchin excoriated the irrelevancy of a liberal class that busied itself with “the numbing quietude of the polling booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, car[-]bumper sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative politicians, the spectator sports of public rallies and finally, the knee-bent humble pleas for small reforms—in short the mere shadows of the direct action, embattled commitment, insurgent conflicts, and social idealism that marked every revolutionary project in history.”
Human history, as Bookchin and Karl Marx understood, is defined by class struggle. America’s corporate elites successfully fused the two major political parties into a single corporate party, one that seized control of electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, universities, the arts, finance and nearly all forms of popular communication, including Hollywood, public relations and the press. There is no way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. And Trump is about to remove whatever tepid restraints are left.
Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The only route left is revolt. If this revolt is to succeed it must be expressed in the language of economic justice. A continuation of the language of multiculturalism and identity politics as our primary means of communication is self-defeating. It stokes the culture wars. It feeds the anti-politics that define the corporate state.
“The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties have created, within the academy, a cultural Left,” Richard Rorty wrote. “Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the ‘politics of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or‘of recognition.’ This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.”
Our enemy is not the white working poor any more than it is African-Americans, undocumented workers, Muslims, Latinos or members of the GBLT community. The oligarchs and corporations, many of them proponents of political correctness, are our enemy. If we shed our self-righteousness and hubris, if we speak to the pain and suffering of the working poor, we will unmask the toxins of bigotry and racism. We will turn the rage of an abandoned working class, no matter what its members’ color, race or religious creed, against those who deserve it. © 2016 TruthDig
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com . Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning , What Every Person Should Know About War , and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle . 4.0 · | 1 |
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) website content devoted to criminal gangs operating in the United States includes staggering figures about these groups’ presence and criminal activities across the country. [“Some 33, 000 violent street gangs, motorcycle gangs, and prison gangs with about 1. 4 million members are criminally active in the U. S. and Puerto Rico today,” the FBI reports. “Many are sophisticated and well organized all use violence to control neighborhoods and boost their illegal activities, which include robbery, drug and gun trafficking, prostitution and human trafficking, and fraud. ” “Many gang members continue to commit crimes even after being sent to jail,” the FBI reports. The 1. 4 million figure for the number of gang members is as big or bigger than four of the Top 10 largest cities in the U. S. — San Antonio, Texas, 1. 3 million San Diego, California, 1. 3 million Dallas, Texas, 1. 1 million and San Jose, California, 945, 942. The FBI has numerous entities working to combat the gang problem, including the Safe Streets Task Forces, the National Gang Intelligence Center, and Transnational Task Forces. The NGIC, established by Congress in 2005, “integrates gang intelligence from across federal, state, and local law enforcement on the growth, migration, criminal activity, and association of gangs that pose a significant threat to the U. S. ” That intelligence reveals that the “Mara Salvatrucha ( ) and 18th Street gangs continue to expand their influence in the United States, while transnational (operating across national borders) gangs are present in almost every state and continue to grow their memberships, now targeting younger recruits more than ever before. ” The FBI’s transnational task forces operate in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, according to the FBI website. President Donald Trump said in April that his administration is cracking down on violent gangs operating in the U. S. “They are getting the hell out or they are going to prison,” Trump said in an interview with Fox and Friends. Trump praised Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly for enforcing the laws. “I will tell you we have gotten tremendous criminals out of this country,” Trump said. “So many towns and cities are thanking me because we have gotten rid of a burden that you would not believe,” he said. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced in April the expansion of the Texas Task Force (TAG) and the creation of a technical operations center in response to a sharp increase in rape and murder in the Houston area by violent gangs. Abbott and Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw singled out and its connection to human smuggling, drug trafficking, murder, and rape during the announcement. “This recent wave of senseless violence cannot continue,” Abbott told reporters at a press conference attended by Breitbart Texas. “Government’s foremost responsibility is to keep our citizens safe and secure,” Abbott said. “Texas will take action and use all lawful means to put an end to this lawlessness. ” | 0 |
BREAKING: Since Donald Trump Won The Presidency Ford Shifts Truck Production From Mexico To Ohio 3 Shares Comments
Ford’s heavy duty pickup trucks which used to be built in Mexico started rolling off an assembly line in Ohio this week.
That’s good news for the 1,000 Ford workers in Ohio, who might have otherwise been out of work.
It’s also good publicity for Ford ( F ), which has been under fire for investing so much in Mexico. In April, the automaker said it would invest $2.5 billion in transmission plants in the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Guanajuato, creating about 3,800 jobs there.
Ford’s south-of-the-border strategy has drawn heavy criticism from groups such as the United Auto Workers union and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The Avon Lake, Ohio, plant produced its first batch of Ford’s full-size F-650 and F-750 pick up trucks on Wednesday.
“Our investment…reinforces our commitment to building vehicles in America,” said Joe Hinrichs, Ford president, The Americas. “Working with our partners in the UAW, we found a way to make the costs competitive enough to bring production of a whole new generation of work trucks to Ohio.”
The move comes at a delicate time for Ford.
The United Auto Workers union is in negotiations with the automaker as well as General Motors ( GM ) and Fiat Chrysler ( FCAM ) on new labor deals to replace those that expire next month. And promises by the automakers to keep production and jobs at U.S. plants is a major focus of the union.
The union is particularly worried about the plan Ford announced in July to shift production of the C-Max and Focus out of a Wayne, Mich., plant in 2018. The automaker hasn’t said where that work will go, but employees fear those cars will be built in Mexico. It’s also not clear whether any other cars will be made at the Wayne plant instead, in order to protect about 4,000 jobs.
“We’re actively pursuing other alternatives for the Wayne plant that will be discussed with our UAW friends. We haven’t decided what will go there,” said Ford spokeswoman Kristina Adamski.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently said that if he’s elected he would take steps to make it more expensive for manufacturers to shift work to Mexico and then export the items back to the United States.
“How does that help us?” Trump said about the Ford investment in Mexico while campaigning in Michigan this week. “Mexico is becoming the new China.” | 0 |
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, on Thursday stepped into the raging debate about globalization. In a letter he posted publicly, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed alarm that what was once considered normal — seeking global connection — was now seen by people and governments around the world as something undesirable. He pledged that he would push Facebook, which has more than 1. 8 billion users worldwide, in a direction that would help convince individuals and governments that “progress now requires humanity coming together not just as cities or nations, but also as a global community. ” The letter comes close to a political statement by a chief executive who, as the leader of a global company, is essentially arguing against a tide of isolationism that is rising across the world. Mr. Zuckerberg, 32, chose to make the statement as an update to his original founder’s letter, which was published in 2012 when Facebook went public. In that letter, he wrote that the social network “was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. ” In an interview this week at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Mr. Zuckerberg said that when he started Facebook, “the idea of connecting the world was not controversial. ” “The default assumption was that the world was just incrementally moving in that direction,” he said. “Now, that’s actually a real question. ” Mr. Zuckerberg released his missive amid a fierce debate over the merits of globalization. In the United States, President Trump has displayed a deep streak of nationalism. Last year, Britain voted to quit the European Union. Those moves and others have been taken as signs of how globalization has caused strains — making it more difficult for companies to navigate a new world order. Against that backdrop, the timing of the letter is notable. While other technology executives, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, regularly update their founder letters each year — often tied to financial results — it is the first time Mr. Zuckerberg has refreshed Facebook’s mission statement since the company’s initial public offering. Mr. Zuckerberg said his reasons for writing the updated letter began to take shape before last year’s presidential election, spurred by broader trends. He said he recognized that more people were feeling left behind by globalization, and by societal and technological changes. As a result, he wanted to focus different parts of Facebook in a way that helped people better come together. “We have to build a global community that works for everyone,” he said. “I really don’t have much doubt that this is the right direction to go in the long term. ” Mr. Zuckerberg said he planned to reorient Facebook, which turned 13 this month, around these new realities. His letter is filled with abstract ideas, including the notion of “social infrastructure” and how to create stronger online communities, with few detailed steps about how to realize those goals. One top priority is building inclusive online communities that are supportive, safe and informed environments, to help strengthen bonds in the offline world as well. Mr. Zuckerberg also stressed the idea of using Facebook to create this “social infrastructure” — essentially a digital means of connecting people around shared interests — mirroring social groups in the physical world like churches, governments and unions. That may encourage connections among people that transcend national and international barriers, he said. While Mr. Zuckerberg mentioned several concrete steps that Facebook has taken toward some of these goals, he gave few other specifics. He did not address how his vision might conflict with those of political leaders around the world, nor did he mention how emphasizing global connections benefited Facebook’s finances. Getting to this point did not come easily. Since going public, Facebook has been on a growth tear, becoming one of the world’s biggest and most valuable public entities. Yet the power that Facebook has amassed has raised hackles globally. The social network is blocked in China, has stumbled in India and is facing a thicket of regulatory questions in Europe. More recently, Mr. Trump’s election prompted an outcry over whether Facebook influenced the American electorate with false stories on its site. The company has scrambled to contain the fallout, undertaking several experiments to better sort through what people see on its site. A key moment for Mr. Zuckerberg’s shift in thinking about how to be a global company happened six months ago. In September, Facebook censored an iconic photograph that featured a naked girl fleeing napalm bombs during the Vietnam War. Mr. Zuckerberg said the image, titled “The Terror of War,” was rightly censored by Facebook at the time because the company’s content policies did not allow child nudity. Facebook users disagreed, arguing that the photograph was not titillating but rather illustrated the perils of modern warfare. The social network eventually allowed the image to be posted on its site, noting that it had inherent news value. Mr. Zuckerberg said the episode made him realize how ineffective Facebook’s content policy was at a global scale, given that cultural norms vary greatly by country. He said Facebook needed to get to a place in which users could perhaps choose their own content policies based on local laws and preferences, a marked departure from the company’s blanket global approach of the past decade or more. “I don’t think that we, sitting here in California, are best positioned to know what the norms in communities around the world should be,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “At some point, you just need a more dynamic system where people can just express that themselves. ” Mr. Zuckerberg spent much of his letter focused on the importance of personal relationships. He pointed to “very meaningful groups” — Facebook groups that people frequently engage in and return to — that are often centered on topics like parenting, sports or other shared interests. When people find an interest they are passionate about and form such a group, they are some of the most tightly connected relationships on Facebook, he said. To foster more of these groups in a safe way, Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook needed to change some of the ways that it operated. That includes improving community safety with product updates similar to Facebook’s “safety check,” a tool that lets people mark themselves safe during catastrophes. Mr. Zuckerberg said that governments regularly called Facebook to confirm that Safety Check was activated during crises like the massacre at a nightclub in Florida last year. Mr. Zuckerberg also emphasized Facebook’s role in keeping communities which will necessitate tackling misinformation and highly polarized news. He alluded to Facebook’s shifting role as a distributor of news, saying the social network is “not just technology or media. ” Facebook’s goal, Mr. Zuckerberg said, was not to usurp traditional institutions like governments, religious groups and other communities that share interests. (When asked if he wanted to run for president of the United States, he laughed and declined.) Instead, he said, creating tightly knit online groups would make these traditional institutions stronger. It also would not hurt that such groups and connections could well make Facebook more essential to people, which in turn may increase the company’s profits. “There’s a social infrastructure that needs to get built to deal with modern problems in order for humanity to get to the next level,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “I just think it would be good if more people thought about things like this. ” | 1 |
Apparently he wrote off a three pack of underwear as $6, when they were likely more around $1 … back in 1986. But hey, it can be done.
And it’s legal.
Not that the Clintons have ever really worried about being legal but still.
Underwear?
— BJ (@Betz63KS) October 27, 2016
Still trying to figure out how this could be legit. @dcexaminer glad to see someone wrote about this. The rich thinking the poor want their dirty old underwear. so disgusting
Interesting how Democrat pretend to care about the poor while they write off their UNDERWEAR to avoid paying taxes.
Classy. | 0 |
From the city and county to the White House, the Kochs have American City County Exchange, State Policy Network and American Legislative Exchange Council. Corporations are rolling up into global behemoths working with the International Chamber of Commerce which dictates what goes on in the G7, G20, Davos...summits, submits guidance for TISA, TPP, TTIP and works in tandem with the UN where oligarchs from rich countries continue to increase the wealth and control over the poor. The mergers and consolidations of ever increasing size and influence being performed without regard for the vast majority of mankind, benefits an ever smaller group of special interests which seem to desire to dictate our lives now and generations to come. This is what Eric Arthur Blair wrote about as Ingsoc, better known at the just prior to the 20th century as liberal imperialism, a projection of what is to come based on what he understood had already been performed and proposed as the real global final solution. | 0 |
Breitbart News has surpassed 3 million Facebook likes, further cementing its place as one of the most dominant news forces on social media as the company continues to expand its readership and popularity. [The news comes after it emerged from Alexa rankings this week that Breitbart is now the 45th most trafficked website in the United States, overtaking sites such as The Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Fox News, and The Huffington Post. Over the course of 2016, Breitbart attracted over two billion page views, almost double that of the previous year. Breitbart’s success on social media has been well documented, with the site becoming the biggest publisher of political news on social media last year. Follow Breitbart News on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. | 0 |
You can be forgiven if it’s hard to remember just how dark the economic future looked exactly eight years ago. The mind, after all, has a way of blocking out memories of trauma. December 2008 was a month in which employers in the United States eliminated 695, 000 jobs the unemployment rate rose by half a percentage point on the way toward double digits and entire industries, notably banks and the automobile sector, stood on the brink of collapse and were saved only through billions in federal bailouts. Thursday, the Obama White House Council of Economic Advisers released its eighth and final “Economic Report of the President,” an annual analysis of the state of the United States economy. It has a bit of a valedictory tone, which is to be expected given the contrast between where things stand today and when the administration began — and the desire of White House aides to put a positive spin on the Obama legacy. But if you read carefully, you can also find in this document a road map to what has gone wrong in the Obama economy: where progress toward higher standards of living has been fleeting, or nonexistent, or has gone in reverse. In particular, a section that begins on Page 57 lays out “four continued structural challenges” that can be read as, in effect, the unfinished business that the president will turn over to his successor. Weak productivity growth is the first. For reasons that economists aren’t entirely sure about, the rate at which American workers are becoming more productive has slowed. From 1995 to 2005, output per hour worked rose 3 percent a year, which has slowed to 1. 3 percent a year since then. Simply as a mechanical matter, this is a big part of the reason that overall economic growth has been slow. Over time, it implies that economic will increase more slowly. That said, there are a range of theories around why this has happened and what, if any, policy tools might fix it. One possibility is that the march of technological progress has slowed, and that government has few tools that might help. Another possibility is that the recession and slow recovery have created a dearth of investment, and that government policy to increase overall demand in the economy could also trigger more investments. Finally, many conservatives argue that excessive regulation is the culprit, and that loosening a range of restrictions will unleash more innovation and investment by businesses. Income inequality is the second weak spot the White House economists identify, arguing that the Obama administration has made progress in spreading the gains from a growing economy more widely but not enough. The report argues that policies like a higher minimum wage, laws more favorable to labor unions, and fewer regulatory barriers to people working in their preferred fields would help push more of the benefits of growth to American workers, building on a thread of research that has gained favor in both the Obama Council of Economic Advisers and liberal think tanks in recent years. If Hillary Clinton had won the election, this approach to thinking about inequality would most likely have formed a central role in her economic agenda. Labor force participation is one of the biggest asterisks on President Obama’s economic record, as the new report acknowledges. The drop in the unemployment rate from a recent high of 10 percent to 4. 6 percent was helped along by millions of people stepping away from the labor force entirely. The council notes that part of that is a result of people hitting retirement age, but also that there has been an enormous decline in the percentage of men working, which goes back decades. In 1953, 3 percent of men were neither working nor looking for work that’s now 12 percent. The Obama administration argues that the way to bring people back into the labor market is to strengthen the “connective tissue” in how the job market works, for example by modernizing the unemployment insurance system raising the minimum wage and expanding tax credits for work and increasing access to paid leave and child care. Donald J. Trump made low labor force participation a hallmark of his campaign for the presidency, but proposes different strategies to solving it he emphasizes a trade policy and infrastructure spending that might offer opportunities for the men who have left the labor force. Economic sustainability is the final, and most subtle, item on the unfinished business list. The White House is essentially arguing that there is a great deal of work to be done to make the United States economy more resilient when the next downturn hits. One step would be to change laws so that “automatic stabilizers” like unemployment insurance can expand automatically during downturns, essentially baking into the system some automatic fiscal stimulus. The economists argue that more work to reduce the growth of health care cost could improve the prospects for the economy over the longer term, and that reducing carbon emissions is essential for economic sustainability. One thing the report doesn’t quite say, but which fits in the theme of sustainability, is that the nature of this expansion — heavily reliant on a loose monetary policy from the Federal Reserve — has left the United States particularly vulnerable should a new downturn arise. Indeed, many of the more pessimistic scenarios for the economy involve a recession that happens because the central bank doesn’t have the usual tools available to combat a minor shock. There’s no doubt that the United States economy is on better footing than it was when Mr. Obama took office — but that’s also a little misleading, like comparing the health of a patient a month after a catastrophic car wreck with eight years later. Mr. Trump, in other words, will inherit a patient whose trauma has been fixed — but who has quite a few problems still to be addressed. | 1 |
Mexico has announced the extradition of Mexican Drug Lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera. [A prepared statement issued on Thursday afternoon from Mexico’s Foreign Relations Ministry announced the extradition that took place on Thursday. Known as “El Chapo” Guzman has been the leader of the famed Sinaloa Cartel — a criminal organization responsible for most of the drug trafficking in the country. Guzman is facing multiple charges in U. S. federal district courts in Texas, California, and Washington, D. C. that include money laundering, drug trafficking, conspiracy, and murder. A statement from the Department of Justice revealed that Guzman is already in the custody of U. S. law enforcement and is expected to make an initial appearance in the near future in connection with six federal indictments. Guzman had been trying to fight the extradition from Mexico by having his legal team file multiple appeals and injunctions however various Mexican judges struck down each of the motions until the extradition was announced in May. As Breitbart Texas had reported, Mexico’s SRE had notified Guzman about an extradition agreement with the U. S. so the drug lord could face the pending charges in federal court. As part of the agreement, U. S prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty. The death penalty issue comes after the Western District of Texas filed murder charges against Guzman for his alleged role as the leader of the Sinaloa Cartel. The murder was part of a drug dispute where cartel gunmen kidnapped and murdered a U. S. citizen and two relatives. The victims of that hit were Rafael Morales Valencia, Jaime Morales Valencia, and Guadalupe Morales Arreola, who were believed to be tied to the rival Juarez Cartel. The three men were kidnapped on May 7, 2010, during a wedding. Their bodies were found on May 10, 2010. At the time of the murders, Ciudad Juarez was going through a violent turf war between the Sinaloa and the Juarez Cartels. As Breitbart Texas has reported, Guzman became a major headline in July 2015 when he was able to escape a maximum security prison through a tunnel. After the escape, Mexican authorities arrested 23 prison guards and employees for their alleged complicity in the escape. Guzman had originally been captured in 1993 and was sent to Mexico’s Altiplano prison from where he escaped once before by hiding in a laundry cart. Guzman has been listed by Forbes magazine as a billionaire in their ranking of the world’s richest. In a press release issued Thursday evening, the DOJ expressed “gratitude to the Government of Mexico for their extensive cooperation and assistance in securing the extradition of Guzman Loera to the United States. ” Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. This article has been updated to reflect additional information. | 0 |
http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2016/10/26/1010359-65-us-journalists-at-a-private-dinner-with-hillary-clintons-team-and-john-podesta/
I just heard an NPR presstitute declare that Texas, a traditional sure thing for Republicans was up for grabs in the presidential election. Little wonder if this report on Zero Hedge is correct. Apparently, the voting machines are already at work stealing the election for Killary.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-25/texas-rigged-first-reports-voting-machines-switching-votes-hillary-texas
From my long experience in journalism, I know the American public is not very sharp. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to believe that Americans, whose jobs, careers, and the same for their children and grandchildren, have been sold out by the elites who Hillary represents would actually vote for her. It makes no sense. If this were the case, how did Trump get the Republican nomination despite the vicious presstitute campaign against him?
It seems obvious that the majority of Americans who have been suffering terribly at the hands of the One Percent who own Hillary lock, stock, and barrel, will not vote for the people who have ruined their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren.
Furthermore, if Trump’s election is as impossible as the presstitutes tell us—Hillary’s win is 93% certain according to the latest presstitute pronouncement—the vicious 24/7 attacks on Trump would be pointless. Wouldn’t they? Why the constant, frenetic, vicious attacks on a person who has no chance? Trump takes aim at those rigging the system
There are reports that a company associated with Hillary backer George Soros is supplying the voting machines to 16 states , including states that determine election outcomes. I do not know that these reports are correct. However, I do know for a fact that the oligarchic interests that rule America are opposed to Trump being elected President for the simple reason that they are unsure that they would be able to control him.
It is hard to believe that dispossessed Americans will vote for Hillary, the representative of those who have dispossessed them, when Trump says he will re-empower the dispossessed. Hillary has denigrated ordinary Americans who, she says, she is so removed from by her wealth that she doesn’t even know who they are. Clearly, Hillary, paid $675,000 by Goldman Sachs for three 20-minute speeches, is not a representative of the people. She represents the One Percent whose policies have flushed the prospects of ordinary Americans down the toilet.
What is really disturbing is the pretense by the presstitute scum that Trump’s lewd admiration for female charms is deemed more important than the prospect of nuclear war. At no time during the presidential primaries or during the current presidential campaign has it been mentioned that Russia is being assaulted daily by propaganda, threatened by military buildups, and being convinced that the United States and its European vassals are planning an attack. Architects of “Regime Change” Wars
A threatened Russia, made insecure by inexplicable hostility and Western propaganda, is a danger manufactured by the neoconservative supporters of Hillary Clinton.
If the American people are really so unbelievably stupid that they think lewd remarks about women are more important than avoiding nuclear war, the American people are too stupid to exist. They will deserve the mushroom clouds that will wipe them and everyone else off the face of the earth.
Donald Trump is the only candidate in the primaries and the general election who has said that he sees no point in conflict with Russia when Putin has shown nothing but desire to work things out to mutual advantage.
In contrast, Hillary has declared the thrice-elected president of Russia to be “the new Hitler” and has threatened Russia with military action. Hillary talks openly about regime change in Russia.
Surely, in a free media at least one person in the print and TV media would raise this most important of all points. But where have you seen it?
Only in my columns and a few others in the alternative media.
In other words, we are about to have an election in which the important issue has played no role. And yet allegedly we are the exceptional, indispensable people, a people’s democracy protected by a free press.
In truth, this mythical description of America is merely a cloak for the rule of the Oligarchs. And the Oligarchs are risking life on earth for their continual supremacy.
Also see:
The Saker explains how Vladimir Putin wrest the sovereignty of Russia away from the Anglo-Zionist Empire. He hopes that Donald Trump can rescue America. His article is republished with his permission.
Can Trump Save America Like Putin Saved Russia? | 1 |
The large number of “privately educated white men” amongst Britain’s judiciary is a “serious constitutional issue” according to a report by senior lawyers, which calls for dramatic measures to increase the proportion of women and ethnic minorities. [Asserting that Britain’s judiciary has a “diversity deficit” law reform group Justice called for “systemic structural changes” to the selection process including “targets with teeth” so as to “deliver sufficient diversity to the bench”. As well as describing diversity as an “intrinsic good” the report said the “lack of female and visible [black and ethnic minority] senior judges threatens to erode the public’s confidence in the judiciary” warning it could be perceived to be “unfair” that in the Crown Court “those tried are disproportionately yet the judges are overwhelmingly white”. The group said “positive action” must be taken to increase the share of women and ethnic minorities in the judiciary, stating: “‘Merit’ can all too easily become a vehicle for unconscious bias. ” Justice director Andrea Coomber said: “We realise that some of the measures recommended in this report will be unpopular with some, but if the issue of lack of diversity is to be genuinely addressed then those at the most senior levels must accept that difficult and perhaps unpopular decisions will have to be taken to deliver a more diverse judiciary. ” Noting the majority of supreme court judges will be replaced over the next three years, Coomber said there is now an “unprecedented opportunity” to “change swiftly the demographic composition of [Britain’s] senior judiciary”. Justice recommends setting ambitious “targets with teeth” for courts deemed to lack sufficient numbers of women or ethnic minorities, the “teeth” meaning that there would be obligations to monitor and report on progress. The report said: “If there is persistent failure to meet targets over the next decade, strong consideration should be given to introducing quotas. “Structural change — not tinkering — is required if the complexion of the bench is to really change. ” | 0 |
Written by Daniel McAdams Wednesday November 9, 2016 There is much to discuss and digest about yesterday's "surprise" victory of Donald Trump in the presidential race. The role of the media is a big one. Regardless of what one thinks of Trump or his policies, the mainstream media clearly saw itself as part of the campaign -- on Clinton's side -- rather than as mere observers and reporters of the campaign. What are our hopes and fears as we face a Trump Administration? Plus, we look at some of the different initiatives across the country dealing with guns, the drug war, soda pop, and more. All in today's election roundup Liberty Report: Copyright © 2016 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are given. | 0 |
What began as a small protest over the Texas bathroom bill grew to a “Queer Dance Freakout” on the street in front of the historic Texas Governor’s Mansion. The troupe protested a bill in the Texas Legislature that would require men and women to use bathrooms and dressing rooms designated to the sex on their birth certificate. [The protest surrounds Senate Bill 6, the “Texas Privacy Act,” filed by State Senator Lois Kolkhorst ( ). Breitbart Texas reported on the bill in January when the senator the legislation. The law, if passed, would enhance the penalties for “a litany of crimes committed in a bathroom against any individual, regardless of their sex or gender identity,” Breitbart Texas’ Lana Shadwick wrote. “The Texas Privacy Act is a thoughtful solution to a sensitive issue. It preserves an expected level of privacy for our public schools and buildings,” Kolkhorst said in a written statement. “At the same time, it also allows for schools and universities to make personal accommodations for those requesting an alternate setting. Senate Bill 6 also allows Texas businesses to determine their own policy without government interference. ” A Facebook event page invited protesters to the mansion, stating, “Everything is freakier in Tex@$$. Come move your body outside the governor’s mansion to show we are not going to take the transphobic and homophobic laws Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick and their adminstration [sic] have got in the pipeline. ” Social media lit up as the geared up. AUSTIN — About 75 people are participating in a “queer dance freakout” in front of the governor’s mansion to protest bathroom bill. #txlegepic. twitter. — Brian M. Rosenthal (@brianmrosenthal) February 24, 2017, Twitter user @pzriddle did not attend but tweeted out his favorite protest sign: I didn’t make if to the Queer Dance Freakout at @GregAbbott_TX‘s Mansion, but I love the idea and this sign. pic. twitter. — Prentiss Riddle (@pzriddle) February 24, 2017, This Twitter usern @forensicaudit12n was not happy with the protesters. They Tweeted: “OUTRAGE!! Left Holds A “Queer Dance Freakout” To Intimidate TX Governor. ” OUTRAGE!! Left Holds A “Queer Dance Freakout” To Intimidate TX Governor (VIDEO) https: . pic. twitter. — Forensic Auditing (@forensicaudit2) February 24, 2017, Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller expressed his feelings about the protest on Facebook. “The sad thing is that these folks think their activities will help kill the bathroom safety bill, Miller posted. “In reality, their actions demonstrate just why such a bill is needed and will only increase its chance of passage. ” As the afternoon protest continued into the night, the crowd grew to about 200 people. The Austin Chronicle posted live video from the “Feakout” dance. Queer dance freakout 30 mins ago at the Texas governor’s mansion. #abbott #sb6 #lgbtqia #flushthebill pic. twitter. — Stu (@itstrulyreal) February 24, 2017, Bob Price serves as associate editor and senior political news contributor for Breitbart Texas. He is a founding member of the Breitbart Texas team. Follow him on Twitter @BobPriceBBTX. | 0 |
A bill to curtail the number of Americans being replaced by foreign guest workers through the visa “would have zero impact” on the program, according to an expert on the issue. [Reps. Derek Kilmer ( ) and Doug Collins ( ) have reintroduced the “Keeping American Jobs Act” which they claim will tackle abuses of the foreign guest worker visa. “The Keeping American Jobs Act protects American workers by preventing bad actors from abusing the system in order to offshore jobs,” Collins told Live Mint. “Companies have the opportunity to bring workers from overseas on visas in the event that qualified Americans aren’t available, but we can’t allow the law to be exploited to displace American workers and send their jobs abroad,” Collins continued. But, NumbersUSA’s Director of Government Relations Rosemary Jenks said the congressmen are “misunderstanding” what the visa program actually does, as far as Americans being replaced by cheaper, foreign workers. “This doesn’t have any impact on outsourcing jobs,” Jenks told Breitbart Texas. “ ’s are coming here. This shows a misunderstanding of the entire program. has nothing to do with moving jobs abroad. ” Some 85, 000 foreign workers are allotted jobs in the U. S. every year under the visa program, often leaving Americans to train their replacements. Jenks told Breitbart Texas that this bill is not actually reform at all, and instead is “just another case of Members of Congress being sadly confused. ” “This is pathetic,” Jenks said. They need to actually understand what the program is. This would have zero impact. ” The bill states that it would “prevent the transfer of knowledge from United States workers for the purpose of facilitating their jobs being moved abroad. ” Nonetheless, while U. S. jobs have been shipped overseas in order for companies to pay less for workers, that issue is entirely unrelated to the abuses of the visa. The visa remains incredibly unpopular with American voters. As Breitbart Texas reported, only 30 percent of Americans say companies bringing in foreign workers to fill jobs is necessary. Additionally, some 44 percent said those foreign workers take jobs away. The vast majority of Americans also said the number of visas allotted every year to companies should either be decreased or kept at the current levels. The use of the visa was panned by President Donald Trump on the campaign trail last year, often holding rallies with fired Disney and tech industry employees who were forced to train their replacements. However, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer has said the abuses are not a reform priority for the Trump Administration this year, as Breitbart Texas reported. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 0 |
The Media Lost All of Its Political Power Last Night -- Thank You, Donald Trump! By: John Nolte November 9, 2016
The morally dark Obama-era is over and utterly and totally repudiated. The Clintons have finally and forever been staked in their mercenary black hearts. Our smug, supremacist overlords in the Elite Establishment of both Parties, these rotting, rent-seeking parasites, are now vanquished. But nothing is grander, nothing is more glorious, nothing is more satisfying, nothing is sweeter, nothing is more validating, nothing is better for America than the death of the mainstream media's political power.
The elite national political media is done as a force, moral or otherwise, in this country. Done. Buried. Exposed. Over. Out. And using a slow-acting poison called hubris, it was death by suicide. So smug. So sure of themselves. So sanctimonious. So snark-filled. So utterly incapable of anything close to self-reflection.
The self-induced poison took effect over a number of years and through five steps.
Here they are.
1. Pimping for ObamaCare
The national political media didn’t just cheerlead for ObamaCare, they LIED to us. Willfully and with malicious intent, they all lied to us. The outlawing of almost every existing insurance plan was right there in the bill, right there in black and white. But the media didn't care. They wanted to give their Precious Obama a win and in order to do that, they jumped on board the "You Can Keep Your Insurance" propaganda express. Worse, those of us who did tell the truth were branded as liars and racists, not only by the pundits but by those godforsaken fact-checkers.
Then Utopia met reality.
Then the lies were exposed.
And the result is that up to and including last night, at both the local and national level, ObamaCare has decimated the Democrat Party. But nowhere near as bad as it has decimated the middle class.
The media's role in this is unforgivable and destroyed whatever remained of their moral authority. From here on, they could only get more sweaty, desperate, and dangerous.
2. Casting off Every Journalistic Ethic to Destroy Trump
Openly, proudly, and belligerently, in order to hijack a presidential election, we were treated to the Pompous Announcement that Trump was such a threat to humanity, it was now time for journalists throughout the land to cast off every standard that makes journalism journalism, starting with objectivity.
Even former good guys like CNN's Jake Tapper morphed into an unrecognizable LyingSnarkVirtueSignalingMachines -- another rotting cog in the Narrative Wheel, a mindless member of a self-deluded, government-worshiping cult that wouldn’t piss on Middle America if we were on fire.
Professional sobriety was cast off because this one was in the bag, baby! And who could miss the historic opportunity to self-righteously point-and-laugh at the hideous rubes as they were finally and forever being buried alive under a Brave New World.
3. Grind Donald Trump To Dust
While there is no question Trump deserved a few of the kitchen sinks hurled his way, never in my 50 years have I seen such a coordinated, desperate, dishonest, and poisonous campaign to disqualify a human being through the dark art of stripping him and his supporters of all their humanity.
4. Embracing Confirmation Bias
The longer the general election rolled on, the smaller the bubble of self-delusion became.
Inconvenient polls were sneered at and Voxsplained away.
Exit polls could only means ONE thing, even though it was pretty clear they might mean another.
My personal favorite was the late editorials where, based on no counted votes whatsoever, we were trolled with the news that it was Hillary, not Trump, who would emerge victorious with the "hidden vote!" Oh, the delicious irony of that. Oh, how lovely it would be to rub that in the rubes' faces on Election Night.
By the time the votes were actually being counted, I was about 60% sure Hillary would win. The New York Times, however, was 92% sure. ABCNBCCBSAPBSNPRCNNWashingtonPostPolitico were 100% sure.
But even I understood that state and local polls were more erratic than ever, that Hillary did seem legitimately freaked about the upper Midwest, that the best pollster in the country had Trump up +2, that Trump never lost his fervent base, that the right track/wrong track numbers had been upside down for a decade, that there was still a larger-than-usual number of undecideds, that this thing that was Real might not be enough to win, but it was still Real.
No, no, we were told, it's all smoke and mirrors, all gold-leafed Trump Steaks. Look at Obama's approval ratings! Look at the Hispanic vote! Look at this squirrel and that squirrel and the other squirrel over there. Sit down, son, don’t you understand that I'm a data machine? It's science, rube. Don't you Vox, racist?
And then the worst thing imaginable happened….
5. The Media Lost the Election
The hate, the lies, the removal of the mask of objectivity, the pushing of every single chip into the middle of the table -- that can actually work … IF YOU WIN.
But the media didn’t win.
In the most spectacular fashion, with their pants down and their bare ass hanging out for the world to see, they lost.
And with that loss went EVERYTHING.
And now the media is exposed in front of the whole world as a Swaggering Potemkin Bully that no longer has the power to sway public opinion, even when they throw absolutely everything they have at one man, and do so with much of the Republican Party on their side.
Not only has the media forever been exposed as brazenly dishonest and laughably out of touch, worse than all that, they are exposed as WEAK, a force no one need ever fear or kowtow to again.
Without that sheen of fear, without that threat of intimidation, like a vanquished bully, so goes all their power.
F*** you, mainstream media.
--
The delicious irony of all this is that the last desperate gasp of the political media did actually prove their precious Barack Obama correct about one thing…
The moral arc of history does indeed bend towards justice.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC Tags | 1 |
Visitors to the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo were screaming, panicked. Somehow, a boy had slipped through the exhibit’s barrier on Saturday afternoon and was now being dragged around like a toy by a hulking silverback gorilla. In videos of the encounter posted to Twitter, a woman can be heard calling to the sobbing child: “Mommy loves you! I’m right here!” After about 10 excruciating minutes, witnesses said, zoo workers shot and killed the animal, named Harambe. The boy, who was hurt but not severely, was taken to a hospital and released on Saturday night, zoo officials said. “It was pure panic,” said Brittany Nicely, 29, who was there with her two children. Ms. Nicely said that out of the corner of her eye she spotted the boy on the wrong side of wooden and wire barriers along the edge of the enclosure. She reached for him, she said, but not in time, and he fell about 10 feet into a shallow moat. Harambe, a teenage western lowland gorilla, then grabbed the child, but his intentions were not clear. At times, he stood over the boy in what appeared to be a protective posture. But then he darted across the water, dragging the child roughly behind him. “He wasn’t throwing him around,” Ms. Nicely said. “He wasn’t mauling him to death, which is what I thought was going to happen. ” The gorilla could have easily crushed the boy at any moment, however, if only by carelessness, she said. Cincinnati Fire Department personnel responding to the scene witnessed the gorilla “violently dragging and throwing the child,” according to an incident report. The department said a zoo employee shot Harambe as the boy was positioned between his legs with a single round from a long rifle. The zoo said in a statement that the decision to use lethal force had been a difficult one. A tranquilizer would have taken several minutes to neutralize the animal, prolonging the risk. The dart could also agitate the animal, the zoo said, and cause a violent reaction. “The zoo security team’s quick response saved the child’s life,” the zoo’s director, Thane Maynard, said. “We are all devastated that this tragic accident resulted in the death of a critically endangered gorilla. This is a huge loss for the zoo family and the gorilla population worldwide. ” The breach raised concerns about the apparent ease with which the boy was able to get into the arms of such a powerful animal. The zoo said in a Facebook post on Sunday that the Gorilla World exhibit met safety guidelines and had experienced no other breach since its opening in 1978. “The barrier that we have in place has been effective for 38 years,” Mr. Maynard said. “Nevertheless, we will study this incident as we work toward continuous improvement for the safety of our visitors and animals. ” Mr. Maynard did not return messages seeking additional comment. The incident also led hundreds of people on social media to question the mother’s culpability, but Ms. Nicely said it would be unfair to judge the mother too harshly. “I don’t feel like it was neglectful,” she said. “She had three other kids that she was with. She had a baby in her arms. It was literally the blink of an eye. ” She added: “I saw it, and I couldn’t even prevent it. It happened so fast. ” Western lowland gorillas are threatened by habitat destruction, disease and poachers, with fewer than 175, 000 left in the wild in Africa, according to the zoo. The zoo described Harambe, who was born in captivity, as an intelligent and curious animal who was on his way to becoming a group leader. On Friday, the day before his death, the zoo celebrated his 17th birthday. On Sunday, visitors left flowers at a gorilla statue inside the zoo. | 0 |
As violence against protestors at the construction site of the North Dakota Access Pipeline escalates, social media outlets like Facebook show millions what is actually going on.
Arrests at the recently erected frontline camp in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline have begun and they are anything but non-violent. Police and military have moved in on Indigenous water protectors and their allies.
Law enforcement seem to have been interfering with cell signal, making it difficult for protestors to keep Facebook and other social media outlets updated on what is happening. Yet the social media users who were able to post videos and livefeeds have been able to spread awareness about the ongoing fight against the build of the Dakota Pipeline, a pipeline that could endanger the clean drinking water supply for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
According to eyewitnesses, buses filled with law enforcement have been traveling toward the frontline. The indigenous water protectors and their allies are prepared to stand their ground even though crackdowns by law enforcement are getting more and more violent while the protesters have continued to use nonviolent tactics in their civil disobedience.
The Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners warned that demonstrators occupying land in the pipeline’s path must leave or face prosecution. This new frontline camp sits slightly north of the main protest camp on federal land near Cannon Ball.
Amidst potential arrests, violence, and legal charges, members of tribes from across the United States are standing with Standing Rock, ready to give their lives to the cause. While the protest is a fight to save tribal lands and fresh drinking water, it is also a fight to preserve indigenous rights, wants, and needs.
Meanwhile, Morton County sheriff’s office has been leading police response to the demonstration and it has also been conducting mass arrests like the one that just took place over the weekend. The sherif department announced that the use of dogs by private security guards against protesters last month may have been illegal.
The scare tactics used by law enforcement to get protesters out of the pipeline’s way are not working the way police forces had envisioned. Although protesters have been violently hurt by police use of force and violence, they are prepared.
Tribal leaders, led by Standing Rock Sioux tribe Chairman Dave Archambault II called on the Department of Justice to look into the use of an unnecessary amount of force by state and local law enforcement. He believes that the state has militarized the reservation.
With the rising amount of support through social media platforms, word about what is going on in North Dakota is beginning to get out to the public. Yet, with cellular service blacked out in the area, supporters are having trouble sharing what is going on. Violence against protesters was recorded on live-streams that were shared by thousands of people, highlighting what law enforcement is doing to protesters. Photos show bloody activists bit by dogs, shot with rubber bullets, and more. There have been canon attacks by police and military tanks have been brought out to disperse road blocks.
Although mainstream media is choosing to black out what is happening, social media is telling a story of people coming together to fight for water, land, and indigenous rights. What is happening at Standing Rock is history in the making.
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