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On the eve of the major party conventions, voters are grudgingly rallying around the nominees while expressing broad misgivings about the candidates, the campaign and the direction of the country, according to the latest New York News Poll. More than a third of Republicans say they are disappointed or upset that Donald J. Trump, who crashed the party’s nominating process, will represent them in the fall campaign an equal number say he does not represent the values the party should stand for. Democrats are only marginally happier with Hillary Clinton as their party’s candidate. A quarter of Democratic voters say they are disappointed in her as the nominee an additional seven percent say they are upset. More promisingly for her, say Mrs. Clinton stands for the core values and principles of the Democratic Party. The broad discontent is reflected in the contest, which has Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton tied at 40 percent. Mr. Trump’s standing has held steady for weeks at around 40 percentage points, while Mrs. Clinton has polled in the in most public surveys. The latest News Poll was conducted after the F. B. I. rebuked her for her email practices but before Bernie Sanders, her persistent primary rival, embraced and endorsed her this week. So the dip in her standing could be temporary and reverse sharply if the Democrats, who are far more united as a party than the Republicans, pull off a successful convention in Philadelphia. In a development not seen in any modern presidential contest, more than half of all voters hold unfavorable views of the two major party candidates and large majorities say neither is honest and trustworthy. Only half of voters say Mrs. Clinton is prepared to be president, while an astonishing say that Mr. Trump is not ready for the job — including four in 10 Republicans. Peter Lieb, 54, a middle school history teacher in West Palm Beach, Fla. voted for Gov. John Kasich of Ohio in the Florida primary and said in a interview that he was only reluctantly planning to vote for Mr. Trump in November. Why Mr. Trump? “Honestly?” Mr. Lieb said. “Last man standing. ” “I am not a supporter of Donald Trump, but given the alternatives that I’m presented with, he is the best person for the task at hand,” he said. “And the task at hand in my opinion is regaining economic stability and regaining America’s stature in the world. I don’t see Hillary Clinton doing a constructive job in either. ” The nationwide poll was conducted July on cellphones and landlines among 1, 358 registered voters. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points for all voters. Preconvention polls are often erratic, and political analysts and campaign managers put more stock in polls taken after both parties have formally nominated their candidates. And national polls, while useful as a gauge of broad sentiment, are less reliable than state polls in predicting the ultimate outcome. Mrs. Clinton enjoys strong advantages in many of the swing states she will need to secure victory in the Electoral College. Mrs. Clinton still leads in averages of recent polls, though her margin has narrowed since late June. The latest News poll could be an indication of an even tighter race. Yet Mr. Trump has not led a national poll that meets The Times’s polling standards since just after he won enough delegates to secure the Republican nomination. While the race may be narrow, the gloom appears broad. Rachel Woolard, 20, of Jacksonville, Fla. supported Mr. Sanders in the primary but now says she will, with misgivings, probably vote for Mrs. Clinton. “Bernie seemed to be more transparent than her,” said Ms. Woolard, a college student. “She definitely has the stereotypical politician approach to things, so that makes her feel a little disingenuous. ” Ms. Woolard is not yet fully committed to voting for Mrs. Clinton. But she knows whom she is voting against. “I know for a fact that I’m not voting for Trump. ” Laura Schrock, 36, a homemaker and political independent in Greenwood, Del. said she will not vote for Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton. “At this point, the plan is to vote for the Libertarian candidate,” she said, referring to Gary Johnson. “I highly value being real and being very honest. And I’m just not getting that from either one. ” In a contest, Mr. Johnson has 12 percent, while Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton are tied with 36 percent. Republicans and Democrats are divided by more than political philosophy and their choice of presidential candidates. They hold very different views of the state of the nation, the News poll found. For example: ■ 86 percent of Trump supporters disapprove of the job President Obama is doing 90 percent of Clinton backers approve. ■ More than nine in 10 Trump supporters say the country is on the wrong track fewer than half of Clinton supporters agree. ■ About of Trump supporters favor building a wall along the Mexican border only 13 percent of Clinton’s backers do so. ■ Four of five Trump supporters do not like the way the nation’s values are changing only about half as many Clinton supporters agree. Voters of all persuasions share one sentiment, however. Six in 10 Republicans, Democrats and independents say they are not looking forward to the next few months of the campaign. | 1 |
A man wielding a footlong kitchen knife was shot by a police officer in the Bronx this week after the man refused to drop the weapon and could not be subdued with pepper spray, the authorities said. The man, Shamel Jones, 19, was taken into custody after the shooting on Wednesday and rushed to Lincoln Hospital, where he remained in critical condition on Thursday, the police said. He was expected to recover. Officers from the 41st Precinct responded to an emergency call for a “” police jargon for an assault, at Tiffany Street and Westchester Avenue in the Foxhurst neighborhood, said Assistant Chief Larry Nikunen, the commanding officer of the Bronx patrol borough. A woman, who had visible bruises around the eyes and on the forehead, flagged down the officers when they arrived and told them her boyfriend had beaten her, Chief Nikunen said. On a canvass with the officers, the woman pointed out the suspect a few blocks away. He fled into an apartment building on Intervale Avenue when they tried to approach him, Chief Nikunen said. The officers, three patrolmen and a lieutenant, pursued the man to the third floor, where they were let inside the apartment by another man, Chief Nikunen said. They found the suspect in the kitchen holding a knife and ordered him to drop it. When he refused, Chief Nikunen said, a lieutenant used pepper spray on him. But the suspect was not affected, the police said, and he moved toward the officers, prompting one of them to fire a single shot from his service weapon. The bullet struck the suspect on the left side of his lower back, Chief Nikunen said. After the shooting, the police released a photo of the knife and said it had a blade. Chief Nikunen said the police received a second 911 call from someone inside the apartment who backed the officers’ account of what happened. He said he did not know if that person witnessed the shooting. | 1 |
Former CIA operations officer Scott Uehlinger, of The Station Chief podcast, talked about the Susan Rice “unmasking” story with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily. [“I think it’s an issue which deeply concerns people like myself and other people, officers in the intel community,” Uehlinger said. “Even though at this point, there seems to be no evidence of breaking the law, this ‘unmasking’ of people was at best. I think it really shows that abuse of power and the fact that many people in the Obama administration were willing to violate the spirit of the laws designed to protect Americans, perhaps rather than the law itself. ” LISTEN: “As a CIA officer, we were always told by upper authority, you’re always told to — and the quote is — ‘avoid the appearance of impropriety,’” he said. “Well, this does not pass that smell test, definitely. ” Uehlinger said another thing that concerns officers in the intelligence and military communities is “the American people, average Americans like myself, are tired of seeing two sets of rules followed by the and then the people. ” “This is just part of that again. A officer would have gotten into big trouble doing anything remotely like this,” he observed. “But now, we have a lot of people saying that she should just be given a pass. ” “While I understand, you know, it’s important that the Trump administration has to move forward with its domestic agenda, but these allegations demand to be further investigated,” he urged. Kassam proposed that Democrats and their media would not allow the Trump administration to move forward with any part of its agenda until this “Russia hysteria” is cleaned up. That will be a difficult task since, as Kassam noted, the hysteria has been burning at fever pitch for months without a shred of evidence to back up the wildest allegations. Uehlinger agreed and addressed Kassam’s point that media coverage alternates between “no surveillance was conducted” and “we know everything about Trump’s Russia connections. ” “The Obama administration relaxed the rule that allowed raw intelligence that was gathered by the NSA to be shared throughout the government,” he pointed out. “First of all, to relax that, there is absolutely no operational justification for doing that. With all of the problems, with espionage, with Snowden, all these things we’ve had, to raise by an order of magnitude the access to this very sensitive information makes no operational sense at all. ” “So for someone to approve that, it’s clear they had another intent, and I believe the intent was to allow for further leakage,” he charged. “To give more people access, thus more leaks, which, in fact, would hurt the Trump administration. It seems very obvious when you put that together and combine it with the actions of Susan Rice and other people in unmasking people. That is the true purpose behind this. ” “I say this as somebody who — you have to remember, when I was a station chief overseas, this is what I was reporting on. I was in countries like Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Kosovo — countries which constantly had the offices of the prime minister or president using the intelligence services to suppress the domestic opposition. So I’ve been to this rodeo before, many a time. I saw the storm clouds gathering several weeks ago, and everything I’ve suspected has so far come to fruition,” Uehlinger said. He pronounced it “very disappointing” that such transparent abuse of government power for partisan politics would occur in the United States. “An intelligence service has to have the trust of the people and the government in order to function effectively,” he said. “With all of these scandals happening, and with the name of perhaps the CIA and other intelligence community elements in the mud, this makes the object of protecting our national security more problematic. The agencies have to have the trust of the American people, and they’re losing it, because it seems as though they’ve been weaponized — perhaps, like I said, not breaking the law but playing very close to the line. ” Kassam suggested that leaking the information might have been illegal, even if Rice was legally entitled to request information on Donald Trump’s campaign and unmask the U. S. persons monitored during surveillance of foreign intelligence targets. “That’s absolutely the case,” Uehlinger agreed. He went on to argue that the absence of hard evidence for any wrongdoing by the Trump campaign in all of these leaks was highly significant. “Since basically the Obama administration has sort of loaded this with these rule changes and all to allow for leaks the fact that there is no ‘smoking gun’ of Trump administration collusion with Russia indicates that there isn’t any. There is nothing substantial here because a juicy morsel like that would certainly have been leaked by the same people that have been leaking everything else. The fact it hasn’t been leaked out means it does not exist,” he reasoned. Kassam said some of the Russia hysteria came from imputing sinister motives to conventional business dealings, arguing that Trump’s organization made deals around the world, and it is exceedingly difficult to do business with any Russian entity that is not somehow connected to the Russian government. “That’s an excellent point. You’re absolutely right,” Uehlinger responded. “It shows these people who are doing these gambits are relying on the relative ignorance of the American public of the actual nuts and bolts of intelligence to make their point. Anyone with any background in this stuff can see it for what it is: a desperate attempt to discredit an administration because they were crushed in the past elections. ” Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. Listen to the complete audio of the interview above. | 1 |
NBC’s Megyn Kelly will sit down for a interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin and will air the exchange during this weekend’s premiere of her newsmagazine show Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly. [The former Fox News star anchor, who moved to NBC in January, announced the exclusive interview during her first live report for her new network Thursday morning. WATCH: Vladimir Putin has agreed to sit for a interview with @megynkelly following the International Economic Forum pic. twitter. — TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 1, 2017, “This will be the first time he’ll be taking questions from an American journalist since the special council was appointed in the United States to look into allegations of Russian interference in our election,” Kelly said in a brief guest appearance on NBC’s Today. Just learned this morning Vladimir Putin will sit down with me tomorrow after the forum. Exclusive interview Sunday on NBC pic. twitter. — Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) June 1, 2017, Putin has flatly denied that the Russian government was behind hacks meant to influence the outcome of the 2016 U. S. presidential election. At an international economics forum in St. Petersburg Thursday, Putin said it was possible that individual “ ” Russians had staged cyber attacks on their own to combat enemies of the country. Kelly is set to moderate a panel at the economics forum in St. Petersburg Friday, in which Putin will also participate. In April, the New York Post‘s Page Six reported that NBC News chairman Andy Lack had traveled to Russia in an attempt to score the interview with Putin, though early reports suggested the interview could go to another NBC personality like Lester Holt or Matt Lauer. Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly premieres June 4 at 7 p. m. ET. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
Which countries abstained? | 0 |
We Are Change
Project Veritas continues with it’s series of videos this time an undercover reporter exposed early clinton email witness Cindy Almodovar. In the video Cindy Almodovar who spoke with Huma Abedin about email issues that were going on admits that the FBI didn’t interview her. In December, 2010, U.S. Department of State IT Systems Administrator Cindy Almodovar reported that she met with Huma Abedin for thirty minutes regarding emails at the then unknown, but now notorious, @ clintonemail.com site. Here’s is the text from that email exchange: “From: Almodovar, Cindy T Sent: Friday, December 17, 2010 11:17 AM To: SES-IRM_Tech Cc: SES-IRM_FO-Mgt Subject: Meeting with Huma I met with Huma for about 30 minutes to go over mail issues. She gave me some examples listed below, but also, things are inconsistent. But issue #1 is of an e-mail which was sent to her twice this morning, did get received on <REDACTED> but was not delivered. See details below. I have a contact for the @clintonemail site, his name is Bryan Pagliano and he actually now works for State, but he apparently set all of this up. Huma sent several tests from her clintonemail account to Lona and myself – they were received. But there are many messages and responses not received. She sent a message this morning from her state.gov account to [email protected] 12/14, [email protected] sent a message to [email protected] and [email protected] at 10:03 pm . The subject line was blank. Huma received at Clinton address, but Lona did not receive on her state.gov account.” As a result of subsequent investigations regarding Secretary Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, the Office of Inspector General for the U.S. State Department reported the following: From the unclassified May 2016 State Department report ESP-16-03: Two staff in S/ES-IRM reported to OIG that, in late 2010, they each discussed their concerns about Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email account in separate meetings with the then-Director of S/ES-IRM. In one meeting, one staff member raised concerns that information sent and received on Secretary Clinton’s account could contain Federal records that needed to be preserved in order to satisfy Federal recordkeeping requirements. According to the staff member, the Director stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further. As previously noted, OIG found no evidence that staff in the Office of the Legal Adviser reviewed or approved Secretary Clinton’s personal system. According to the other S/ES-IRM staff member who raised concerns about the server, the Director stated that the mission of S/ES-IRM is to support the Secretary and instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again. The director referred in the OIG report is John Bentel. In 2010, he was the State Department employee who managed IT security issues for the top echelon of the department. He told FBI investigators those conversations back in 2010 never occurred. In March of 2016, Bentel refused to answer questions from Senate investigators and asserted his Fifth Amendment right 87 times during a deposition for a civil lawsuit related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.” Here’s a transcript of the exchange between Project Veritas’s journalist and Cindy Almodovar. PV Journalist: I’m working on a story. I’m interested. I want to know the truth and I want to know if you’re one of the people who came, who went to John Bentel and said they were concerned about Hillary’s private server. Almodovar: I don’t know anything about that. PV Journalist: You weren’t involved in that at all? Almodovar: You’ve got to stop this because this is like harassment. PV Journalist: This will be the last time you see me. I just want to know the truth. I’m interested. I want to know if the FBI has talked to you. Almodovar: No they haven’t. PV Journalist: They haven’t at all… …PV Journalist: I’m sure reporters and people have been coming to your door. Almodovar: No. No one has come to the door. You’re the first one. “Even though her name stands out in the emails released by the FBI, no one from the FBI ever spoke to Aldomovar,” said Project Veritas Action founder James O’Keefe. “No one interviewed her or made any attempt to get to the bottom of what information she might have about this case that is so important to national security. It made us wonder…who else the FBI neglected to talk with.” The post appeared first on We Are Change .
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NTEB Ads Privacy Policy More Differences Between The Pretribulation Rapture And The Second Coming Of Jesus Christ There are so who ignorantly assert that the doctrine of the Pretribulation Rapture of the Church was "unknown before John Nelson Darby taught it". I say "ignorant" because people make comments like these seemingly unaware that there are recorded accounts of it being taught all the way back to the 4th century AD. by Geoffrey Grider November 21, 2016 The doctrine of the Pretribulation Rapture appears over and over again, in both Old and New Testaments. Take Enoch for example.
“For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.” 1 Thessalonians 4:16,17 (KJV)
For a reason that eludes me , the Bible doctrine of the Pretribulation Rapture of the Church of Jesus Christ is a highly-despised subject in these Laodicean times we find ourselves in. Perhaps one of the reasons why it is so hated is because so many preachers stopped preaching on it years ago, because the idea of trying to live your life with a daily expectation of Jesus’ return is unpalatable to so many. Yet, the doctrine of the Pretribulation Rapture appears over and over again, in both Old and New Testaments. Take Enoch for example.
“And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years: And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” Genesis 5:23,24 (KJV) Enoch is a type of the gentile believer raptured out before the time of Jacob’s trouble
Who was Enoch? Glad you asked, Enoch was a gentile believer and follower of God. The Bible says that Enoch’s walk with the Lord was a really good one, and one day out of the clear blue, God raptured old Enoch up and out of this world, and translated him straight to the throne room of Heaven. Just a few verses later we read about the Flood of Noah, a type of the Great Tribulation which came upon the Earth. Something else about Enoch, he was also a street preacher who preached Jesus to lost people.
“And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” Jude 1:14,15 (KJV)
So, in type, we see the Pretribulation Rapture and the time of Jacob’s trouble happening thousands of years before the coming time when those events will take place in real time, and not just in typology. In the New Testament, the apostle John is taken up to Heaven in yet another type of the Rapture. On the Last Times, the Antichrist, and the End of the World
There are so who ignorantly assert that the doctrine of the Pretribulation Rapture of the Church was “unknown before John Nelson Darby taught it”. I say “ignorant” because people make comments like these seemingly unaware that there are recorded accounts of it being taught all the way back to the 4th century AD.
A sermon entitled “ On the Last Times, the Antichrist, and the End of the World “, ascribed to a man by the name of Ephraem Syrus, taught the doctrine of the Pretribulation Rapture quite plainly. Here is a snippet from that sermon:
“For all the saints and elect of God are gathered, prior to the tribulation that is to come, and are taken to the Lord lest they see the confusion that is to overwhelm the world because of our sins”
That sermon would be the last bit of light from scripture before the Roman Catholic Whore of Babylon would swallow up the Christian Church for over a thousand years. There’s a reason why that period of time used to be taught in schools as the “ dark ages “, and the time corresponding with the advent of King James Bible in 1611 as the “age of enlightenment”.
So as you can see , God has given types, examples and preaching on the Rapture for thousands of years. Now let us take a quick look at some of the major difference between the Pretribulation Rapture of the Church, and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. THE SPIRITUAL TEMPERATURE OF THE CHURCH: Jesus says plainly in Revelation 3 that the last version of the Christian Church right before the Rapture is a self-centered, self-focused, lukewarm mess of a Church that locks Jesus on the outside. (Revelation 3:14-22 KJV). This is in stark contrast to Revelation 7 which shows an on-fire dedicated group of believers who “follow the Lamb wherever He goes”. There will not be anything “lukewarm” in the time of Jacob’s trouble. SATAN STILL FREE TO ROAM AFTER THE RAPTURE: In the first three chapters of Revelation, we plainly see the Church Age. That comes to an end in Revelation 4:1,2 where John, a type of the Church, is taken to Heaven in a type of the Rapture. Match those verses with 1 Corinthians 15:50-57 and 1 Thessalonians 4:15-18 (KJV). No where there do we see Satan’s reign coming to an end, in fact, we see the appearance of Antichrist just two chapters after the Rapture in Revelation 6:1. Compare that with all the places that mention the Second Coming, which ends in Satan being bound for a thousand years. (Revelation 20:1-4 KJV). JESUS DOESN’T LAND AT THE RAPTURE: Paul tells us in both 1 Thessalonians 4 and 1 Corinthians 15, that the Body of Christ is brought UP to “meet the Lord in the air” in the Rapture. According to Revelation, the Church stays up with the Lord all the way until Revelation 19:14 (KJV). But at the Second Coming, it is all about Him landing on the ground, and bringing His saints with Him . THE RAPTURE BRINGS COMFORT, THE SECOND COMING BRINGS DISTRESS: The apostle Paul, teaching on the Rapture to first century Christians, said that the doctrine of the Pretribulation Rapture was one designed to bring comfort to the hearer. “Wherefore comfort one another with these words.” 1 Thessalonians 4:18 (KJV) . But not so with the Second Coming/Day of the Lord, not by a l ng shot. “Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! to what end is it for you? the day of the LORD is darkness, and not light. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him. Shall not the day of the LORD be darkness, and not light? even very dark, and no brightness in it?” Amos 5:18-20 (KJV) . If you’re looking for comfort there, brother, you’re in the wrong place. SECOND COMING PLAINLY TAUGHT WHILE RAPTURE WAS A ‘MYSTERY REVEALED WITH PAUL: In hundreds of places all through the Old Testament, the doctrines of the Second Coming and the Resurrection of the Dead are clearly and plainly taught as doctrine. In Job, the very first book every written, we see that clearly proclaimed. “For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body , yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.” Job 19:25-27 (KJV) . So many of the Old Testament prophets, like Daniel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zephaniah, Zechariah and Joel all teach the Second Coming. But though we see types of the Rapture with Enoch and Solomon (Song of Solomon 2:9-12 KJV), the Pretribulation Rapture as teachable doctrine remained a “mystery” until it was revealed through the apostle Paul. “Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,” 1 Corinthians 15:51 (KJV) .
I love to teach on the Pretribulation Rapture because the evidence for it flows all though the Bible, it couldn’t be more clear. So why do so many “Christians” reject this doctrine? Let me go ask Jesus, He’s currently locked outside His own church at the moment (Revelation 3:20 KJV). But He promises that if I open the door unto Him, He will come in and be happy to show me a few things.
Can’t see a Pretrib Rapture in the Bible? Maybe it’s because you got Jesus on the wrong side of the door…don’t let the Bible correctors and the “scholars” steal your Blessed Hope. Jesus is coming to get us one Day very soon, as He promised to do. Keep looking up!
“Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ;” Titus 2:13 (KJV)
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Sad little xenophobe | 0 |
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As Marco Rubio and Patrick Murphy squared off in the final debate of their Florida Senate race, the discussion turned to the Syrian civil war. Rubio, a former presidential candidate and member of the Senate intelligence committee, challenged his rival’s understanding of the factions on the ground. Murphy, a two-term congressman, reverted to a familiar line.
“It just goes back to the same point,” he said, “that Senator Rubio continues to support Donald Trump, and it is shameful that he stands there with him.”
The audience laughed, faintly, at one of nearly 20 mentions of the Republican presidential nominee during the one-hour debate. When Murphy next mentioned Trump, Rubio was quick with a rejoinder based on a famous Joe Biden rebuke of Rudy Giuliani : “A noun, a verb and Donald Trump: that’s his answer to everything.”
The race in Florida, among the most closely watched in the country, could help determine whether Republicans keep control of the Senate. | 0 |
The FBI is not happy with either Director James Comey or the Clinton family, and now former officials are starting to speak out about the issue.
Former FBI assistant director James Kallstrom told Fox News’ Judge Jeanine Pirro that he is fairly certain “something big is going to happen,” in the Clinton email investigation. He also believes that internal strife at the FBI and the agencies upset with Comey’s decision not pursue charges against Hillary Clinton also played a role in Comey’s decision to act now.
“I think there’s something happening. People are asking me what is this about. I think something big is going to happen. I don’t know what it is. It’s just my gut feeling… I think he couldn’t hold onto it any longer. OK. Because who knows? Maybe the locals would have stepped in on this. ”
On Sunday Kallstrom was a guest on a radio show where he called the Clintons a “crime family.”
“The Clintons, that’s a crime family, basically,” Kallstrom said. “It’s like organized crime. I mean the Clinton Foundation is a cesspool .”
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He also blasted Attorney General Loretta Lynch, claiming that she impeded the investigation into Clinton’s private server.
“The problem here is this investigation was never a real investigation,” he said. “That’s the problem. They never had a grand jury empanelled, and the reason they never had a grand jury empanelled, I’m sure, is Loretta Lynch would not go along with that.”
Kallstrom also gave some insight to what is happening inside the agency right now, “The agents are furious with what’s going on, I know that for a fact.”
Interestingly, over at NBC, Larry Kudlow confirmed much of what Kallstrom said over the weekend when he told Chuck Todd that the FBI was in “full revolt.”
“What I’m hearing from everybody, I mean, I have some sources in the F.B.I. and the former district attorney’s. The F.B.I. is in full revolt right now. The F.B.I. has been in full revolt since the decisions made last summer… what I’m getting at is if Comey hadn’t said what he said to Congress and the rest of the world, it would have leaked. It would have leaked. That whole building was ready to leak that they had discovered this new source with Weiner and Abedin. So, I don’t think Comey had much chance here. And I think the F.B.I. is badly divided.”
Should we dare to hope? Could we really see justice meted out on the Clinton Crime Family? I’m not ready to throw a “Hillary to Jail” party yet, but I’ll be watching what happens over the next few weeks with high hopes for justice.
By the way, Kallstrom wasn’t the only former Assistant Director of the FBI speaking out about the Clinton Family’s corruption recently.
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We all know that our national government — the one headquartered in Washington, D.C. — is called the “federal government.” The word “federal,” as well as its equivalent in other languages, is also used to describe certain other national governments, such as Mexico’s, and words such as “federation” and “confederacy” are evidently related to it. But what does the term “federal” mean?
The word comes from the Latin foedus , meaning “covenant,” and denotes a form of government that, if not wholly invented by America’s Founders, was certainly perfected by them and applied to the governance of a much larger territory than anyone else had ever managed. The proper name for the methodology of creating and sustaining a “federal” government is “federalism.” And many historians and students of political philosophy believe federalism to be among the greatest of all the American Founders’ contributions to civilization.
When the Founders first won independence from the British Empire, they drafted a document known as the “Articles of Confederation,” America’s first national constitution. The former 13 colonies, having fought together in the war for independence despite being technically separate, now wished to create a bare-bones national government that would unite them in a loose confederation — that is, a union of mostly independent states wishing to enjoy some of the advantages of political union while maintaining most of their independence. Early America was not the first such confederation; the country of Switzerland had existed (and continues to exist) as a federation among separate so-called cantons speaking four different languages and possessing very different cultures for several centuries before the American founding. And Canada, founded almost a hundred years after the United States and consisting of two major ethnic groups speaking different languages (English and French), also refers to itself as a confederation.
For a variety of reasons, the American Founders came to believe that a more robust arrangement than loose confederation was needed. Because of this, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was convened by representatives from 12 of the original 13 states. (Rhode Island did not participate.) After nearly four months of discussion and sometimes acrimonious debate, the final draft of a new U.S. Constitution contemplating a stronger national government than the Articles of Confederation had countenanced was signed and submitted to the governments of the 13 states for ratification.
This entire process, including ratification, had been undertaken by the separate states. They in effect created a national government that, in most respects, was inferior in authority to the states. Those powers delegated to the national government that the states agreed to renounce, such as the power to form treaties with foreign governments, were understood to have resided with the states as well until delegated to the newly formed federal government. The covenant implied by the term “federal” was among the formerly independent states to delegate some of their powers to an agreed-upon central authority. This covenant also bound the federal government to respect the limits on its powers clearly spelled out in the Constitution, and to otherwise defer to the states or to the people — as the 10th Amendment makes explicit.
The federal government, in other words, exists entirely by the license of the states, and its powers are derived from theirs, and not the reverse. This was (and remains) in stark contrast with most other national governments, wherein states, provinces, departments, oblasts, or other political subdivisions are created by a pre-existing strong central government. There was, for example, no interest in federalism in the founding of each of modern France’s successive revolutionary republics; the government in Paris merely divided French territory into administrative units known as departments, mostly for bureaucratic convenience. Many of Russia’s oblasts date all the way back to the czars, and the remainder were created during the Soviet period. On the other hand, some modern states, such as Mexico, India, and Argentina, are divided into states or provinces with significant autonomy, but in none of these did the national government arise as a consequence of a pact among previously independent state governments.
The intent of the Founders was that the federal government, formed by a covenant among the states, would be primarily their servant and not their master, and that it would likewise serve the people. The division of powers among the states, and between the state and federal governments, would make it much more difficult for would-be tyrants to subvert these aims and to grind the people down as in an Old World autocracy. But the history of the United States since the very early 19th century, only a few decades after its founding, has seen a steady migration of power from the states and the people into the federal government. In a wide array of concerns — from education to public lands to the regulation of food to marriage — the federal government is making itself the supreme authority, while converting the states into mere geographical administrative units expected to implement federal laws, regulations, and rulings, regardless of whether those laws, regulations, and rulings are constitutional. In this way, the doctrine and practice of federalism is being turned on its head.
Much of this has taken place, not because the states have permitted the federal government to wrest existing legal authority from the states (although this has taken place, particularly under the pretext of equal rights), but because the federal government has been allowed to usurp power where none has been enumerated in the Constitution — and then claim that states are subordinate in the exercise of such powers.
In our day, the system of federalism has been all but abandoned. Most Americans believe that all government authority comes from Washington, trickling down by the consent of elected national rulers to state and local governments. We will not be able to restore constitutional government without first restoring federalism. Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment
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Migrants granted leave to remain in Switzerland on the basis that they risk death in their homelands are using welfare money to fund holidays back home, the Basler Zeitung reports. [The Swiss newspaper notes that thousands of migrants each year are heading to Eritrea for their holidays each year despite their having supposedly fled the northeast African nation in fear of their lives. Although a large proportion of Eritreans in Switzerland have been refused asylum, authorities are powerless to deport them because their homelands are deemed to be too dangerous by the country’s refugee policy. While there are no direct flights to Eritrea, the Basler Zeitung says it found that up to fifty people a day are leaving Switzerland in order to holiday in the African country. It typically costs around 599 Swiss Francs (£475) in January or 650 Swiss Francs (£516) in high season for a return journey to Eritrea according to the German language daily, which notes that taxpayer stipends to migrants must be quite generous as the vast majority of Eritreans residing in Switzerland live on welfare. Stating it to be unlikely that more than a small handful of migrants would “abuse the asylum system” the Swiss Secretariat for Migration (SEM) told the Basler Zeitung that it’s difficult to work out the number of Eritreans who are taking holidays in their country of origin due to the lack of direct flights. Of the nearly 50, 000 applications to travel abroad filed by refugees, asylum seekers and people in Switzerland who have temporary residence permits between 2010 and 2014, 97. 5 per cent were successful. Noting that around 15, 0000 of these passes were granted to Eritreans, the Basler Zeitung asks whether the sheer volume of migrants venturing back to the northeast African country suggests it is really “a mere matter of individual cases” or whether it implies the situation is a “mass occurring phenomenon”. In September Breitbart London reported that migrants granted asylum in Germany have been using welfare payments to holiday in the countries they fled, again supposedly in fear of their lives. | 1 |
In its first new episode under the presidency of Donald J. Trump, “Saturday Night Live” opened with its vision of the most powerful man in the world — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, smirking and chiding Mr. Trump for early missteps — followed by a monologue from the show’s host, Aziz Ansari, who commented on issues of race in America and implored Mr. Trump to directly address them himself. Airing one day after Mr. Trump’s inauguration, “S. N. L. ,” which the president hosted as a candidate and has regularly attacked on Twitter, did not feature an appearance from its resident Trump impersonator, Alec Baldwin. Instead the show opened with the cast member Beck Bennett playing a Mr. Putin and boasting of helping to get Mr. Trump elected. “Today many of you are scared and marching in the streets,” the Putin character said. “You are worried that your country is in the hands of this unpredictable man. But don’t worry. It’s not. Relax. I got this. Putey’s going to make everything O. K. ” He added that Russia would take care of America because “it’s the most expensive thing we’ve ever bought. ” Addressing Mr. Trump directly, he said, “You’re not off to a great start, man. I thought you’d be better at this. However, I’m glad to see so many people showed up to your inauguration. ” The screen then showed video of a crowd of demonstrators on Saturday at the Women’s March on Washington, which was then corrected to an image of the more sparsely populated National Mall on Friday during the Trump inaugural festivities. “Today,” the Putin character said, “you went to the C. I. A. and said one million people came to see you in Washington D. C.? If you’re going to lie, don’t make it so obvious. Say you are friends with LeBron James, not that you are LeBron James. ” Mr. Ansari, the Emmy and star of the Netflix series “Master of None,” and the first performer of South Asian descent to host “S. N. L. ,” picked up on some of these themes in his monologue. “Yesterday, Trump was inaugurated,” Mr. Ansari said. “Today, an entire gender protested against him. ” Urging Americans to treat each other with respect, Mr. Ansari said that Mr. Trump’s victory had nonetheless empowered a “tiny slice of people that have gotten way too fired up. ” “I’m talking about these people that, as soon as Trump won, they’re like, ‘We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore!’ ” he said. (In doing so, he gave a fist pump that gradually became a Nazi salute.) “No, no,” Mr. Ansari added. “If you’re one of these people, please go back to pretending. ” Mr. Ansari reflected on the ascent of what he called “this new K. K. K. movement that started — this kind of casual white supremacy,” which includes people who tell him to go back to where he came from, but don’t know his heritage. (“They’re not usually geography buffs,” he said.) “My parents moved from India to South Carolina in the early ’80s,” Mr. Ansari said. “They didn’t move until nine years ago. You know where they moved? North Carolina. They love it here. They’re not leaving. ” He continued: “I think Trump should make a speech. A real speech denouncing the K. K. K. Don’t tweet about me being lame or the show. Write a speech. A real speech. ” Mr. Ansari pointed out that President George W. Bush made a speech after the Sept. 11 attacks in which he said its perpetrators did not represent Islam. “Everyone applauded — Democrats, Republicans, didn’t matter,” Mr. Ansari said. “It was not about politics. It was about basic human decency and remembering why the country was founded in the first place. ” He continued: “I was like, what the hell has happened? I’m sitting here wistfully watching old George W. Bush speeches?” In closing, Mr. Ansari acknowledged that many viewers were likely to be fearful of what the next four years held in store. “If you’re excited about Trump, great,” he said. “He’s president. Let’s hope he does a great job. If you’re scared about Trump and you’re very worried, you’re going to be O. K. too. “Because if you look at our country’s history,” he continued, “change doesn’t come from presidents. Change comes from large groups of angry people. And if Day 1 is any indication, you are part of the largest group of angry people I have ever seen. ” Other segments in the show included a musical of Kellyanne Conway, Mr. Trump’s adviser, where Kate McKinnon played her as Roxie Hart from “Chicago,” and a to President Obama in which Cecily Strong and Sasheer Zamata serenaded his picture with the title song from “To Sir, With Love. ” Mr. Trump most recently denounced his satirical portrayal on “Saturday Night Live” last week, writing in a tweet: “NBC News is bad but Saturday Night Live is the worst of NBC. Not funny, cast is terrible, always a complete hit job. Really bad television!” Whether he will comment on the show now that he is in the White House remains to be seen as of early Sunday, he had not done so. On Friday, Katie Rich, a writer for “Saturday Night Live,” was widely criticized for a tweet she posted in which she wrote that Mr. Trump’s son, Barron, would be “this country’s first homeschool shooter. ” Ms. Rich subsequently deleted the tweet and took down her personal Twitter account. | 1 |
During his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on Tuesday, federal judge Neil Gorsuch was repeatedly asked about his stand on abortion and whether he would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade High Court ruling that found women had the right to privacy in medical and reproductive matters, which in practice made abortion on demand legal in the United States. [Sen. Chuck Grassley ( ) chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is holding the hearings, asked Gorsuch about the case. “I think the case most people are thinking about right now and the case that every nominee gets asked about [is] Roe v. Wade,” Grassely asked. “Can you tell me whether Roe was decided correctly?” “It is a precedent of the United States Supreme Court,” Gorsuch said. “It was reaffirmed in Casey in 1992, and in several other cases. So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the United States Supreme Court, worthy as treatment of precedent like any other,” he added. The Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 that states can put certain restrictions on abortion as long as those restrictions don’t create “undue burden” for women seeking to have an abortion. Sen. Lindsey Graham ( . C.) asked Gorsuch if President Donald Trump ever asked him if he would overturn Roe v. Wade. “I would have walked out the door,” Gorsuch said. Sen. Dianne Feinstein ( ) asked Gorsuch if he thought Roe v. Wade amounted to a “super precedent” law, a term referring to a law that has be upheld so many times it could be difficult to undo. Gorsuch did not directly answer the question. During the past three days of questioning, Gorsuch has repeatedly said that he has to be cautious about commenting on specific issues that could come before him if he is confirmed as an associate justice on the court. Gorsuch has also said, correctly, that legal abortion is currently “the law of the land. ” “As wrong as Roe is, Judge Gorsuch is correct that it is currently the law of the land,” said Ken Klulkowski, senior legal editor for Breitbart News. “This does not mean that if given the opportunity that he would not vote to overrule Roe. ” “Judge Gorsuch’s statement is completely consistent with ’ hopes and President Trump’s campaign promise,” Klukowski said. Although Democrats are resisting Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination, none opposed his nomination to be a federal appellate judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, where he has served for ten years. | 1 |
WASHINGTON — The new bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act is dead, killed off by House Republicans who never actually read the legislation — because in fact, it never actually existed. Conservative groups moved quickly on Wednesday to shift the blame for the failure of a promise to repeal the law onto some Republicans, after a small but powerful group of House conservatives failed again to come to a meeting of the minds with the Trump administration over how best to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s signature achievement. “The left wing among House Republicans doesn’t want to compromise or keep their pledge to voters to repeal Obamacare,” David McIntosh, the president of the Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group, said in a statement. “They’ve rejected deals that would give Americans more choices for cheaper health insurance, and now they won’t even allow states the chance to scale back Obamacare’s costliest regulations. ” The accusation — echoed by other conservatives — represents a remarkable turnaround in the blame game. The group and its supporters have opposed much of the major legislation considered by Congress in recent years. Last month, a House Republican bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed to get enough support to bring it to a vote. About 30 of the most conservative members of the House rejected the bill as preserving too much of the existing law, but as they pressed to dismantle ever more provisions, they pushed away more moderate House Republicans who were leery of leaving 24 million more Americans without health insurance. The effort was left for dead, until Vice President Mike Pence and other Trump administration officials raced up to the Capitol this week to cobble together a new agreement with the most conservative Republicans, the House Freedom Caucus. The revived measure, stirring in its grave, was known informally on Capitol Hill as Zombie Trumpcare. According to several members, Mr. Pence had proposed allowing states to obtain waivers from two provisions of the Affordable Care Act. One provision requires insurers to cover a standard minimum package of benefits, including maternity care and emergency services. The other generally requires insurers to charge the same price to people of the same age who live in the same geographic area. By allowing insurers to increase the cost of premiums for sick people, the waivers would effectively gut the Affordable Care Act’s most popular provision: mandated access to insurance for people with medical conditions. But members of the House Freedom Caucus were pushing to allow states to compensate with “ pools,” where sick people could buy subsidized policies. Many congressional Republicans and President Trump viewed that option as morally and politically toxic. The proposals never made it into a bill, and members never gave the ideas a full unadulterated blessing. The entire exercise appeared to melt in the midday sun on Wednesday, as members prepared for their recess, set to begin Thursday afternoon. Conservative groups were quick to attack the more moderate members of the Republican conference, particularly a group of lawmakers known as the Tuesday Group, as the reason the plan failed. “The Tuesday Group is opposed because they do not want to repeal Obamacare,” said Michael A. Needham, the chief executive of Heritage Action for America, a conservative group that opposed the original House Republican bill but remained supportive of the Freedom Caucus’s efforts. “They do not believe in policy innovation from the states. They do not believe in the basic premises of the Republican Party. ” Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania and a leader of the Tuesday Group, agreed that making the plan less palatable to governors — who were major opponents of the plan — and trimming benefits further were not helping to win his vote. “What they were talking about was not going to get me to yes,” he said, noting that the plan was untenable to many governors, Republican senators and the vast majority of health care groups and representatives even before efforts to make it more acceptable began. “This is just another gratuitous attack from the chiefs of the purity police on an issue of great consequence,” he said. In fact, the entire effort never really had the scent of veracity. Any effort to appeal to the members of the House Freedom Caucus was always going to repel Republicans in swing districts, especially those won in November by Hillary Clinton. The objections to the House outline went far beyond the most moderate corners of the conference, and included people like Representative Christopher H. Smith, Republican of New Jersey and one of the most active members of the House, and Representative Don Young, Republican of Alaska, who objected to the way his state, with particularly high health care costs, would have fared. “The congressman isn’t one to often label himself,” said Matthew N. Shuckerow, a spokesman for Mr. Young. “He is Alaska first. ” If the most conservative House Republicans were blaming moderates, the moderates, for their part, were just as critical of the conservatives. “The Freedom Caucus continues to play Lucy with the football and keeps moving the goal posts,” said Representative Chris Collins, Republican of New York and the first member of the House to endorse Mr. Trump. “I believe they are less than genuine in trying to get to yes. ” The suggestion by Heritage Action and the Club for Growth that moderates were to blame was “ridiculous on its face,” Mr. Collins said. In reality, there was probably never time to pass the measure. House Republicans have been operating under somewhat arcane budget rules to avoid a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. At some point, Republicans hope to adopt a new budget resolution for the fiscal year that begins in October. They plan to use that budget resolution to focus on tax cuts, not on health care. As conservative members prepared to return to their districts for the spring recess, they desperately wanted to be able to tell their base voters that they were still trying to do away with the Affordable Care Act. “We are going home tomorrow without a deal,” Mr. Collins said. “The Freedom Caucus says they want to get to yes, but their actions don’t show that. The irony is, the very things they campaigned against will now be locked in because of their stubbornness. ” | 1 |
Share This Sadiq Mohammad, 20, thought it would be funny to dress up as a clown and terrorize civilians. Unbeknownst to him, he would be the one getting the scare of his life.
After hearing about the creepy clown trend sweeping the nation, a Muslim man decided to start off Halloween by donning a “killer clown” costume and attacking unsuspecting victims. However, as soon as he approached his next target, he quickly realized that not every infidel is going to take his idiocy lying down.
Just last year, a Muslim prankster thought it would be funny to use his inherently violent and historically deadly religion to terrorize innocent civilians for laughs and views on his social media accounts. In December, a group of YouTube tricksters, dubbed the Jalals, dressed in traditional Arab attire and hurled suspicious packages at random strangers , making them think they were about to be bombed. Drawing from this idea, a fellow YouTuber decided to hone in on the creepy clown trend, chasing down petrified bystanders for his own entertainment. Unfortunately for him, he got his own dose of terror when he picked on the wrong man.
Sadiq Mohammad, the 20-year-old Muslim mind behind the YouTube channel HoodClips, donned a sinister-looking clown mask and filmed himself stalking unsuspecting onlookers on the streets of Stockton, California. As expected, most of his targets ran away in horror. However, one man decided not only to fight back but turn the terror back on Mohammad.
Guns.com reports that Mohammad was given a brutal taste of his own medicine after his intended target pulled out a firearm and pistol-whipped him in the head. The Muslim prankster leaped out of the bushes in an attempt to startle the unknown man, immediately discovering that he would be the one fearing for his life.
“Why you gonna play that s**t in Stockton, brother?” the man asks. “That s**t done-a** played out, bro,” he adds, referring to the recent spate of clown pranks. “I ought to pop your dumb a**.”
According to Daily Mail , Mohammad instantly regretted his bullying attempt, running for cover as the hooded individual graciously allowed him to retreat without further injury. Realizing that some people don’t find his joke at their expense amusing, Mohammad has now sworn to hang up his clown costume for good.
“Lesson learned is, people donât play with the clown stuff,” Mohammad told KCRA . “Like, people really will shoot anybody.”
Unfortunately, there are some who say that the man’s reaction wasn’t justified. Sacramento attorney Kresta Daly alleges that “pulling a gun was too much” since Mohammad claimed that the tactics were just part of a prank. Of course, Daly refuses to acknowledge that just because a threatening individual says that their behavior is part of a prank doesn’t mean they’re telling the truth.
Just 2 days ago, a San Diego man told police that he was stabbed multiple times by 4 people dressed up as clowns. The victim was left with gashes in his left cheek, right shoulder, and lower abdomen but is expected to make a full recovery.
Similarly, a 16-year-old was stabbed and killed by an assailant in a clown mask in Reading, Pennsylvania in September. The teen was attending a party when a fight broke out, prompting an unknown suspect in the costume to repeatedly stab him.
Mohammad is lucky to be alive after his incredibly idiotic stunt. Of course, it’s probably not going to stop him from abusing innocent civilians if it means he can make money from their misfortune. After all, it was the Islamic prophet Muhammad, after whom the YouTuber is named, who exclaimed that he has “been made victorious through terror.” | 0 |
With Railroad service expected to be disrupted for several days after a fire damaged a stretch of track in East Harlem, government officials on Wednesday questioned why a garden center under the tracks was using flammable substances. The fire on Tuesday at the Urban Garden Center on Park Avenue was caused by a fuel spill when workers were refilling a generator, fire officials said. The blaze then tore through an area filled with combustible materials, said Jim Long, a Fire Department spokesman. “Everything in there was pretty much incinerated,” he said. Firefighters removed propane tanks from the business, Mr. Long said, but it was unclear whether any had exploded in the fire. The business had not been issued any permits for the handling or storage of fuel or propane, Mr. Long said. Asked about the propane tanks in an interview on NY1, Thomas F. Prendergast, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the matter demanded investigation. “Should we have material like that stored under such a vital, critical piece of infrastructure?” he said. “That’s a question that needs to be asked and answered. ” The fire damaged the railroad’s elevated structure, causing train service to be suspended during the evening rush. On Wednesday, trains were running on a limited Saturday schedule, creating arduous delays for commuters. Full service was not likely to resume until Friday, officials said. While workers made repairs on Wednesday, trains were running on two outer tracks, and two inner tracks were closed. New York City owns the property under the tracks, and the city’s Economic Development Corporation manages a lease held by the Urban Garden Center. Tenants must adhere to “all relevant laws and regulations,” the agency’s senior vice president, Anthony Hogrebe, said in a statement. “If anything is found to have been in violation, we will take swift and appropriate action,” he said. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, a Democrat, echoed Mr. Prendergast’s concerns and called on federal safety officials to investigate the fire. Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday that he had not known that the Economic Development Corporation managed the property, but said that it was appropriate for businesses to be located under the tracks and praised the row of shops along Park Avenue, known as La Marqueta. He said the city would examine safety precautions there. “If there is anything we need to strengthen, we will,” Mr. de Blasio told reporters. At the garden center on Wednesday morning, workers loaded wooden planks and charred debris into a demolition truck to be crushed. A separate part of the garden center remained operational, with nearly a dozen chickens clucking in a coop and an array of trees and flowers crowded between bags of concrete mix and mulch. Workers declined to comment on the fire. Dwayne Thomas, an emergency medical worker who has lived in East Harlem for 10 years, said he had been wary of the garden center for some time, especially since a deadly gas explosion nearby in 2014. The explosion, which destroyed two apartment buildings and killed eight people, occurred on Park Avenue near 116th Street, a short distance from where the fire broke out on Tuesday. The Urban Garden Center was heavily damaged in that blast. “Why would you put a bunch of flammable items below a train track?” said Mr. Thomas, 55. “The whole thing is a recipe for disaster. ” Luis Diaz said he was flipping burgers at Kyle Restaurant and Grill on Park Avenue on Tuesday evening when he heard a loud explosion followed by a series of smaller blasts. He rushed outside to see plumes of black smoke billowing from the train tracks between 117th and 118th Streets. Mr. Diaz said he had gone to get a fire extinguisher but soon realized the extent of the inferno. “It was terrifying,” he said. “We were all caught by surprise. It just got worse and worse. ” The ’s Harlem, Hudson and New Haven lines were running with delays of 60 to 80 minutes on Wednesday. On Thursday, the railroad planned to run additional trains to provide about 75 percent of its usual weekday service, officials said. At Grand Central Terminal on Wednesday morning, Adam Vaughn said his typical commute had taken three hours on Tuesday night. Mr. Vaughn, who lives in the East Village and works in Stamford, Conn. was not optimistic about the days ahead. “I’m not even close to getting to work on time today,” he said. “I might work from home for the rest of the week. ” | 1 |
Several illegal immigrants attacked Border Patrol agents assigned to the Rio Grande Valley Sector during a period. [Two agents assigned to the Rio Grande Valley Station sustained minor injuries when a Guatemalan national attacked them during an arrest. The man struck one agent in the neck with his elbow and kicked the other agents, according to information obtained by Breitbart Texas from U. S. Border Patrol Supervisory Agent Marlene Castro. The agents fought with the suspect and eventually placed him under arrest. The Guatemalan is charged with assault on a federal officer. The agents sustained minor injuries during the assault. At about that same time, a Mexican national “became aggressive” with agents attempting to take him into custody. The illegal alien charged the Weslaco Border Patrol Station agents after crossing the border near Progreso Lakes, Texas. After wrestling the Mexican national to the ground, the agents placed him in handcuffs and arrested him. While the agents marched the suspect to their vehicle, the Mexican man attacked them again by attempting to strike the agents. Castro did not indicate if there were any injuries sustained by the agents. Charges against the man are pending at this time. The following morning, another aggressive Mexican national attempted to escape custody by throwing dirt at an agent assigned to the McAllen Border Patrol Station. The dirt struck the agent in the face, leaving him temporarily blinded. The Mexican alien fled. Other agents searched for the suspect and eventually took him into custody. The agent was transported to a local hospital where he was “medically cleared,” Castro stated. Charges against the Mexican national are currently pending. “Apprehension levels began to decrease as law, policy, and strategy aligned. Unfortunately, we are now seeing an increase in assaults against our agents,” Chief Patrol Agent Manuel Padilla, Jr. said in a written statement. “Attacks against agents will not be tolerated and we will work to pursue prosecution against violators. ” U. S. Customs and Border Protection records obtained by Breitbart Texas reveal an alarming trend of increasing aggression against Border Patrol agents. Late last year, Patrol Chief Mark Morgan testified before Congress that Border Patrol agents are the most assaulted of all federal law enforcement officers and agents. Since that time, records indicate a 179 percent increase in assaults on Border Patrol agents during this current fiscal year which began on October 1. The report reveals statistics through February 28. Since that time, Breitbart Texas reported multiple attacks on Border Patrol agents. During a period, multiple agents assigned to the San Diego Sector were attacked in separate incidents. One incident involved the agent’s vehicle being rammed by the vehicle of a fleeing human smuggler. A second suspect, a Mexican national who had just illegally crossed the border near Otay Mesa, California, attacked an agent with a knife. The agent subdued the suspect without receiving any injury. In the third incident, a Mexican national became aggressive and attacked the agents attempting to take him into custody. He allegedly kicked and struck the agents before being placed in handcuffs. A few days earlier, an agent came under attack by people throwing large rocks at him from the other side of the border as they attempted to apprehend an illegal border crosser. The agent fled to his vehicle and did not sustain any injuries, but the rock throwers managed to smash the windshield of his patrol vehicle. 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. | 1 |
Ken Blackwell, former Ohio secretary of state and domestic adviser to Trump’s transition team, joined Breitbart News Daily SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam on Thursday to discuss his recent on the media’s attacks on Senator Jeff Sessions after Donald Trump nominated Sessions for attorney general in his incoming administration. [“The Washington Post and L. A. Times spent more than a month working on stories that were exclusively about Senator Sessions and race. Their attempt to define him not by his last twenty years in the Senate, but by the notion that he was white, conservative, evangelical, and from the South meant, in their view, that he could not escape the label of being a racist,” said Blackwell. “They don’t use facts,” he added. “They don’t use measurable, observable behavior and activity. They, in fact, create this false image of a guy who they would like to bring down because they see him as the tip of the spear of moving us back to a system that respects the rule of law … that respects the Constitution. ” Blackwell said, “This is an political attack. This is an effort to misdefine Jeff Sessions in a way that they can destroy him. ” “This is,” he added, “pure and simple, the borking of Jeff Sessions. They did it to Judge Bork in the eighties, and they’re trying to do it now to Jeff Sessions. ” Blackwell predicted the effort will fail and Sessions will be confirmed. Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a. m. to 9:00 a. m. Eastern. | 1 |
Sky & Telescope Wed, 26 Oct 2016 20:05 UTC Astronomers have mapped atomic neutral hydrogen across the entire sky, creating an unprecedented portrait of our galaxy and some of its nearest neighbors. © HI4PI Collaboration This map depicts the radiation from neutral atomic hydrogen (HI) across the entire sky, as seen by the Parkes and Effelsberg radio telescopes. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, appears as a luminous band across the sky with the Galactic Center in the middle. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are prominently visible in orange below the Galactic plane. They are surrounded by huge clouds of gas, forcefully disrupted from their hosts by gravitational interaction with the Milky Way. The HI emissions of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) and its neighbor, Triangulum (M33), are also easy to spot as bright purple ellipses in the lower left. The gas motion is color-coded to represent the gas's motion, and the visual brightness in the image relates to how much neutral hydrogen is present. Hydrogen is the single most abundant element in the universe. The simple pairing of a proton and electron is so reactive that atomic hydrogen doesn't occur naturally on Earth — it reacts with itself or other elements to form molecules instead. But in the large, mostly empty space between stars floats a copious amount of neutral atomic hydrogen. We only know it's there when the atom's lone electron very occasionally flips from an "up" state to a "down" state, releasing a single 21-centimeter radio wave. Modern radio telescopes can easily pick up the faint signal, which multiplies thanks to the wealth of hydrogen atoms. What's hard is to map that signal across the entire sky — and that's exactly what astronomers have done in unprecedented detail. Using two of the world's largest fully steerable radio dishes, the 100-meter Effelsberg dish near Bonn, Germany, and the 64-meter Parkes dish west of Sydney, Australia, astronomers have generated a survey they've dubbed HI4PI. Pronounced "hi four pie," the survey refers to the abbreviation for neutral hydrogen (HI) and the geometrical reference to the whole sky (4PI, or 4π). Over thousands of hours on the sky, the dishes took more than a million individual observations. Thousands more hours went into processing dozens of terabytes of data, removing radio interference from broadcast stations, military radar, and other Earthbound sources, then stitching everything together into a seamless map of the hydrogen sky. The resulting image is incredible: the ultrafine detail reveals fine threads and diffuse clouds in the interstellar medium never seen before. And for astronomers studying faraway X-ray or gamma-ray sources, the map will prove essential in cleaning the window to the distant universe. The map shows not only the amount of hydrogen at each celestial location, but also the motion of hydrogen across the sky: the 21-centimeter radio signal shifts to slightly lower or higher energies as the hydrogen gas moves toward or away from us, respectively. Watch the video below to take a stepwise look through the data, seeing first the most negative velocities (infalling gas, moving toward Earth) and ending with the most positive radial velocities (receding gas from Earth's perspective). | 0 |
The Los Angeles Unified School Board (LAUSD) passed a resolution Tuesday declaring all schools “sanctuaries” for any illegal alien students and their families — even criminal aliens — who might be facing deportation. [The Los Angeles Daily News reports: The resolution, proposed by board members Monica Garcia and Ref Rodriguez, comes shortly after the arrest of Romulo an [illegal alien] who was detained by U. S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement agents as he took his daughter to school on Feb. 28 in Highland Park. ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] officials stated that was targeted based on prior criminal convictions, including a DUI conviction from 2009 and an outstanding order of removal from 2014. The arrest was caught on tape by his daughter Fatima Avelica, who recorded video on her smart phone. On the video, obtained by local Los Angeles affiliate KABC Channel 7, Fatima can be heard sobbing as she collects footage of her father’s arrest through the windshield of the family vehicle. “I’m here to ask that the (LAUSD makes) schools sanctuaries so that nobody else can pass through what I passed through and not be scared to go to school,” Avelica reportedly said at a press conference earlier on Tuesday. As a result of ’s arrest, Garcia and Rodriguez have pulled together a coalition of organizations that includes the ACLU and California Charter Schools Association, which has been dubbed the “California Schools Are Sanctuaries Coalition. ” Not only does the resolution designate every LAUSD campus as a “safe place” for illegal aliens and their families, but it goes further, as quoted by the Daily News: • schools can’t ask about a student’s or family member’s immigration status, • the district will partner with legal services organizations to create “Know Your Rights” presentations for students and their families to educate them about their rights when interacting with law enforcement and immigration agents, • district employees can refuse, to the fullest extent possible under the law, to share information with immigration agents, • the district will help with legal support for immigrant students and their families by offering referrals to reputable legal organizations, • the district will create a “rapid response network” to help students or family who have been detained by immigration officials. According to a report by KABC 7, ICE released this statement about the incident: Officers with one of U. S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Los Fugitive Operations teams took Mr. Avelica into custody Tuesday morning. Mr. Avelica was targeted for arrest because relevant databases indicate he has multiple prior criminal convictions, including a DUI in 2009, as well an outstanding order of removal dating back to 2014. After conducting surveillance to confirm his identity, the officers arrested Mr. Avelica during a vehicle stop in the 3200 block of Pasadena Avenue, approximately a half mile from the charter school described in the related social media post. No one else was detained during the vehicle stop. Mr. Avelica remains in ICE custody at this time. Ricardo Mireles, the executive director of the Highland Park charter school, told KABC 7 that “the girls’ father had a nearly DUI conviction and an incident 20 years ago where the father said he bought a car with an incorrect registration sticker, unbeknownst to him. ” Peter Greyshock, an attorney representing the family, told the Daily News, “They stepped over a line, and the ripple effect this could have on the community is frightening. ” One goal of newly formed coalition is to secure the commitment of every California school district to become “sanctuary schools” for illegal alien students and their entire families to shield them from deportation orders, which are reportedly on the rise under the Trump administration. At a time when the new administration is threatening to cut off federal funds to sanctuary entities — and schools are heavily dependent on federal matching funds — other districts may be less willing to take the risk. Tim Donnelly is a former California State Assemblyman and author who is doing a book tour for his new book: Patriot Not Politician: Win or Go Homeless. He ran for governor in 2014. FaceBook: https: . facebook. . donnelly. Twitter: @PatriotNotPol | 1 |
What Anonymous is and what it means really depends on the individual; to one person it means one thing, and to another, something else. Anonymous has even been around long enough, these days, that there is actually a generational gap developing. Protesters wearing Anonymous Guy Fawkes masks take part in a demonstration against controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), on February 25, 2012 in Nice, southeastern France. AFP PHOTO / VALERY HACHE
Think about it in this perspective: the Matrix is already 17 years old; there is an entire generation which didn’t grow up with it!
The oldest members are naturally the most die-hard ‘Anons,’ and the older the member, typically, the better the hacker – there are becoming fewer and fewer of them by the day. For the most part the oldest ‘Anons’ are of the mind that Anonymous should be an exclusive hacker collective – everyone who can’t hack is largely considered a n00b or just a fan of the movement.
Anons protesting against the government
The newest members of Anonymous tend to be social justice warriors of sorts; almost none of them are hackers, but they make up the large majority of people who now call themselves “Anonymous.” They are, for the large part, protestors, civil rights/liberties advocates or people who want to change the world, but are unsure on how to go about it. They seem to be drawn to Anonymous, not because all of the hacks occurring around the world, but because they see Anonymous publicly advocating for many of the same things they believe in.
There are a lot of things happening in this world that people do not get to vote on, or simply have no say over; there are a lot of things that tend to control/dictate peoples’ lives, for which they have no control over.
I remember a conversation last year with a friend in the movement. I was frustrated because all I want is to change and make an impact on the world, but always feel like nothing more than an ant – nothing I seem to do is even measurable in the grand scheme of life.
They responded, “Welcome to the anthill.”
Just as with any group of people in the world, or in politics, there are bound to be some fringe lunatics/extremists on both sides of the spectrum – and Anonymous is no different.
People do not seem to understand that no one in Anonymous speaks for anyone else in Anonymous. Far too often, people in Anonymous are left defending – or accused – for the actions of other people they know nothing about. People also do not seem to understand what it means when some says “Anonymous is an idea, not a group.”
What it means to be part of an “idea” can also differ depending on the purpose. But what I have come to believe this “idea” means is a freedom of expression in its purest form: Freedom from censorship; freedom for ALL knowledge to be free and available to the public/society; freedom for people to stand up and fight for whatever they believe in; freedom for everyone’s voice to matter – not just corporations/politicians/government elites. | 0 |
The paranormal world can be extremely fascinating, but also very dangerous. One must be cautions when dwelling in the shadows of the uncanny realm which could scar your soul for eternity. The thought of encountering a ghost can be exciting and scary, although there are some extreme cases of spiritual contact that can cause not only mental, but also physical damage.
Even worse than encountering a ghost, is being in contact with cursed objects. In this case we're talking about a specific statue on Oakland Cemetary, Iowa City, which is called the "Black Angel" .
This statue is said to hold a death curse, so who ever dares to touch it will die in a very short amount of time, sometimes right on the spot. It is unknown about the true origin of the curse, but there are several different stories.
There are also disturbing accounts of people dying after touching the statue.
Watch the following video to know more!
Disclose TV SOURCE | 0 |
Share on Facebook Share on Twitter It has been said a number of times over the past year, that WWIII could be on the horizon. Recent events and statements between Russia and the United States have people believing it’s closer than ever. But is this really the case? Should we be worried? advertisement - learn more Since almost everything real and important taking place is kept from the masses while we are distracted by mainstream media and pop culture, it’s tough to say what is really going on. But if we begin to look at the various things going on in the world, we can piece together some interesting things. In this case, anonymous is hinting that WWIII is inching closer. Some people even believe it has already begun. But you know what? I’m not sure we need to move into fear. First check out the video, then read on. Not All Bad News Right off the bat many start worrying about nuclear bombs, and that’s fair. But there is also an interesting fact to consider: UFOs have been shooting down nuclear threats over the last few decades. Dozens of foreign governments have released thousands of pages of UFO related documents –here is an example of the latest batch released from the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense in June 2013. Other country’s governments who have done the same include Mexico, France, Argentina, Russia and Belgium, just to name a few. advertisement - learn more The fact that governments have released and documented information that detail UFO encounters with the military, as well as supposed extraterrestrial encounters with people, tells us that they’ve had and do have a high level of interest when it comes to the topic of UFOs and extraterrestrials. Had this information remained classified, nobody would officially be able to say that governments have allocated resources to investigate this phenomenon, and it would have remained in the “conspiracy” realm. At the same time, it’s important to remember that this issue goes far beyond and well above government control. “It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief know nothing about.” – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defense Minister (source) “Everything is in a process of investigation both in the United States and in Spain, as well as the rest of the world. The nations of the world are currently working together in the investigation of the UFO phenomenon. There is an international exchange of data.” – General Carlos Castro Cavero (1979). From “UFOs and the National Security State, Volume 2″, Written by Richard Dolan “Behind the scenes, high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.” Former head of CIA, Roscoe Hillenkoetter, 1960 (source) Just last year at the Citizens Hearing on Disclosure , a United States congresswoman voiced her opinion that the US government should disclose this existence, pointing to the fact that a number of foreign governments have already done so -you can read more about that story here. War is something none of us want I’m sure we could agree on, and just because UFO’s may be shooting down nukes doesn’t mean we are OK with war. But what can we do when it comes to such large worldly events? There must be something… Consciousness! Evolve Your Inbox & Stay Conscious Daily Inspiration and all our best content, straight to your inbox. What you focus on, what your thoughts are each day, how you feel and how you treat one another is important. It has a huge impact on what plays out in our world. This has been proven numerous times when studies examine the impact of people meditating or focusing on something specific. Collective consciousness is real and it can be impacted. Here is an example of meditation helping in war zones. You are not small, you can impact millions, we can impact billions because we are all connected. Focus on the world you want and share that with others. As for physical action, again what you choose to do to be in alignment with your purpose is powerful. But we can also continue to raise awareness about what is going on in our world and make decisions and choices that opt out of the things we no longer want to see and support. Meditation, intention, being a good person, aligning with your soul purpose, being of service to others and doing things like voting with your dollar is no passive, it is powerful when you understand how our reality works.
Transcript of video: Greetings World, We are Anonymous. For the last two months, we have been consistently reporting on a possible global conflict, World War 3 between the United States and its allies in the West, and Russia and its allies in the East. The dispute on the South China Sea has severely damaged the United States relations with the Peoples Republic of China. After the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that China’s nine-dash-line claim in the South China Sea, and its land reclamation activities on islets are invalid and unlawful, the United States has been preparing to sail in the area under a so-called Freedom of Navigation principle. This has angered the Chinese. In August, the Chinese Defense Minister, Chang Wanquan told his country’s citizens to prepare for, what he described as the peoples war at sea. Mr Wanquan was referring directly to the United States planned provocation under the pretext of Freedom of Navigation. China has since vowed to take all necessary measures available to protect its sovereignty over the South China Sea, revealing that it had the right to set up an air defense zone on the sea. China has also since been positioning and testing its nuclear weapons, and planning military drills on its waters with Russia. Even the United States has confirmed that China has tested an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, which is capable of striking everywhere in the world within half an hour. Moving away from the South China Sea, we arrive in Syria. It is an open secret that the civil war in Syria is a proxy war between the United States and Russia. Russia has even intervened physically on the request of the Syrian government. The United States, unable to get any invitation, has been openly and secretly arming many rebel groups in the country, with open plans to overthrow the Syrian government. Of course, since Russia honored the invitation of the Syrian government last year, the war has been turning in favor of the Syrian government, which was falling before Russia’s intervention. As we speak now, tension is mounting between the United States and Russia. Nerves are at their highest since the Cold War era. The United States, at the moment, is sitting on tenterhooks. Many officials in the president Obama administration are frustrated and confused regarding the situation in Syria. The United States has announced that it has ended all contacts with Russia in Syria. This announcement by the United States comes as Russia, beginning on September. 22nd, intensified its military operations in Syria, with the intentions to capture the city of Aleppo for the Syrian government. Diplomatic efforts to put an end to the fighting in Syria, have collapsed. As the Aleppo operation continues, Russia has given the United States a stern warning not to take any action against the Syrian government forces. In fact, there are many Russian jet fighters stationed in Syria, ready to shoot down any United States jet fighter that attempts to strike on the Syrian government forces. These developments from Moscow are not going down easily with the United States. The United States Secretary of State, John Kerry, is said to have urged president Obama to intervene and face the consequences from Russia. He is said to have even favored a nuclear deterrent against Russia. However, it appears that before Kerry could even make this suggestion to president Obama, the Russians had already gathered intelligence on the happenings within the White House. According to Zvezda, a Russian defense ministry Television channel, the country has started preparing its citizens for a possible nuclear war with the United States – because of the mounting tensions in Syria. Russia has since moved to deploy nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in its western-most region, Kaliningrad, which borders on NATO members of Poland and Lithuania. Due to how the situation has become, some top officials at the United States defense headquarters have finally spoken. These Pentagon officials have admitted that World War 3 is imminent, and that its going to be deadly and fast. The military generals were speaking on a future-of-the-army panel in Washington. “A conventional conflict in the near future will be extremely lethal and fast, and we will not own the stopwatch,” Major General William Hix said. General Hix also stated that China and Russia’s armies are becoming increasingly technological, and that the Pentagon was getting ready for violence on the scale that the United States Army has not seen since Korea. His comments were also echoed by lieutenant Gen Joseph Anderson and Chief of Staff, Gen Mark A. Milley, who described war between nation states as almost guaranteed. The generals also said apart from the conventional battle, cyber battle, too, has become a reality against the United States, revealing that even smaller nations are launching it against the country. We are Anonymous. | 0 |
Zika: a masterpiece of public mind control
Saturday, October 29, 2016 by: Natural News Editors Tags: Zika , mind control , propaganda (NaturalNews) It's been nearly nine months since the word "Zika" flashed like a lightning bolt in the headlines of mainstream news. Before January 1, 2016, Zika was just one of many viruses that public health officials monitored. But suddenly in January of this year everything changed, as a nearly harmless virus was transformed into a worldwide threat.(Article by John P. Thomas, republished from HealthImpactNews.com )As we will see, the Zika propaganda machine was turned on in October of 2015 and it has been running wild ever since. This is a classic example of a mind control program, a public brainwashing project, or a high powered marketing campaign.Regardless of what you call it, it is clear that the mainstream news media, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Big Pharma, Big Chem, and both Republicans and Democrats have joined forces to sell a Zika eradication program to the people of the United States and to the rest of the world.This has been and continues to be one of the best orchestrated programs of propaganda in recent history. This article will discuss how the program started, how it has been developed, and where it is going. Zika is not a Threat to the Babies of the World Just to be absolutely clear from the beginning, there is no solid evidence that Zika is a threat to humanity. It is a minimally dangerous viral infection, which does not cause microcephaly.In the almost 70 years since the Zika virus was patented by the Rockefeller Foundation, [1] no one ever noticed any association between Zika infection of pregnant women and their babies being born with abnormally small heads or with defects in brain development. But in 2015, we were suddenly made aware of this supposed problem. This claim, based on nothing more than circumstantial evidence, was the beginning point for the propaganda campaign. A propaganda claim doesn't need to be true; it just needs to be repeated over and over again until people believe it is true.After half a year of fear and hysteria in the mainstream media, even officials in Brazil admit that Zika is an unlikely cause of their microcephaly .As reported in Nature News & Comment on July 23, 2016, an official from Brazil's ministry of health raises doubts to suggest Zika is not the only factor in the reported microcephaly surge in his country. The report stated: Zika virus has spread throughout Brazil, but extremely high rates of microcephaly have been reported only in the country's northeast. Although evidence suggests that Zika can cause microcephaly, the clustering pattern hints that other environmental, socio-economic or biological factors could be at play. "We suspect that something more than Zika virus is causing the high intensity and severity of cases," says Fatima Marinho, director of information and health analysis at Brazil's ministry of health. If that turns out to be true, it could change researchers' assessment of the risk that Zika poses to pregnant women and their children. [2] Despite this admission from Brazil, the Zika propaganda campaign is moving ahead without interruption. The campaign will not be stopped by contrary evidence about Zika and microcephaly. Zika is a Mild Viral Infection Most people who get Zika, will be completely unaware of being infected. For those who do get sick, it is similar in many ways to having a cold or a mild case of the flu. People experience fever, rash, joint pain, and conjunctivitis. The illness is usually mild with symptoms lasting from several days to a week. Infection is thought to provide lifelong immunity. Severe disease requiring hospitalization is uncommon. Deaths are rare. [3]The fact that almost no one dies from Zika infection made it a very unlikely candidate for the development of a vaccine. For those who actually feel sick from a Zika infection, they can receive comfort care and rest while their immune systems overcome the viral illness. Zika Press Releases Set the Stage for a Propaganda Campaign However, if Zika could be connected to some other horrible consequence, such as microcephaly or paralysis (Guillain-Barre syndrome) for example, then people would insist that we create a Zika vaccine and would insist that every person on planet Earth take it. They would be willing to give up basic individual freedoms for the benefit of society, which is always the goal of mind control programs.In 2015, a number of press releases and reports were released by the Pan American Health Organization / World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) and the CDC, to set the stage for the unfolding of a grand mind control project.The documents they published raised the red flag of alarm that a Zika epidemic was unfolding throughout South America and Mexico. The conventional media got excited about the epidemic when they saw the word "microcephaly." The prospect of large numbers of babies being born with abnormally small heads and brains was a story that would really grab the attention of their audience.The media used pictures of deformed babies to build fear in the hearts of people and to create the perception that we better watch out or Zika is going to get us and our babies! They worked really hard to instill public panic about Zika in January and February of 2016 .In the timeline that follows, you will see the word "autochthonous." Public Health agencies use the word autochthonous to say that an infection was locally generated. An autochthonous case of Zika is one that was acquired in the local area where a person lives. This is in contrast with a Zika infection that was acquired while visiting another region or country.I will list a few of the key points from some press releases to show how a foundation for the Zika campaign was built and how momentum was established to project the campaign into mainstream media. May 2015: Brazil confirms first autochthonous cases of Zika. [4] October 2015: Columbia confirms first autochthonous cases of Zika. [5] October 2015: Brazil reports unusually high number of babies with microcephaly. [6] November 2015: El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Suriname, and Venezuela report autochthonous Zika infection. [7] November 17, 2015: WHO calls upon member states to watch for the occurrence of microcephaly. [8] December 1, 2015: PAHO/WHO issued the first of dozens of reports, which chronicled the history of the growing Zika epidemic and warned of microcephaly. [9, 10] December 21, 2015: WHO reports autochthonous Zika infections in Honduras. [11] December 22, 2015: WHO reports autochthonous Zika infections in Panama. [12] December 31, 2015: US CDC reports autochthonous Zika infections in Puerto Rico, and makes note of microcephaly in Brazil. [13] Counting Babies with Microcephaly The mainstream media suddenly picked up on the Zika/microcephaly story in January of 2016 and began sensationalizing it. General concern was quickly transformed into alarm as officials in Brazil reported a steady increase in the number of microcephaly cases. As of January 30, 2016, they reported 4,783 cases of microcephaly and/or Central Nervous System (CNS) malformation suggestive of congenital infection. They compared this with 2001 — 2014 data where there was an average of 163 microcephaly cases. [14]The Brazil data about the babies was poor. We didn't know their definition of microcephaly. We didn't know how many of the mothers actually tested positive for Zika. We didn't know how the data was collected. We also didn't know why there was a strong level of insistence that the only thing that could cause these birth defects was infection with the Zika virus. Propaganda campaigns always dismissed other viewpoints other than the one being promoted. They don't want an investigation of truth or a debate about the facts – they just want belief and submission. The US Propaganda Machine Goes Public in January 2016 CDC officials begin to ponder the situation. First they say there might be an association between Zika and microcephaly, but they are far from asserting any kind of causative relationship. [15]"Good for them," I thought when I heard that report. But their apparent wisdom took a nosedive a minute later when the same CDC official went on to issue a travel warning to women to avoid traveling to Brazil and other South American countries if they are pregnant, think they might be pregnant or are thinking of becoming pregnant in the next couple years."What did the CDC just say?" There is no evidence of causation, and we don't even know there is even a problem, but women should stay home any way. "Strange," I thought as I began to remember how the conventional media, the CDC, and the WHO hyped up the African Ebola epidemic in a similar kind of propaganda campaign just 18 months earlier. The worldwide threat of Ebola Zaire completely died out long before a vaccine could be developed, which must have been a major disappointment to Big Pharma.But this time, they have a virus that is not going to die out. This time their propaganda campaign will be much more sophisticated, and it will make major steps toward the acceptance of universal mandatory vaccination for diseases such as Zika. A False International Crisis Involving Deformed Babies Justifies Action All through January and early February of 2016, the news media provided us with a non-stop litany of stories about Zika and deformed babies. In a previous article I examined some of the headlines in the propaganda campaign.The CDC was still using the word "possible association," while the news media insisted on using the word "cause." Despite the initial reserve of the CDC, the news media began to shout the message across America, "Zika is going to deform the heads of our babies while they are in the womb, and there's no vaccine to protect us!"It seems like every Zika story I saw included at least one photo of a baby with microcephaly and always stated that there is no vaccine yet. We were reminded over and over again that Zika is causing babies to be born with abnormally small heads, mental retardation, and blindness. We were warned that some babies were dying at birth because of the severity of their brain deformation. We were told that each baby born with microcephaly will cost ten million dollars or more in medical expenses during the child's life. [16] These stories created ever increasing levels of apprehension and fear as they were intended to do.As the mainstream media struggled to keep the fear level high and keep the story line flowing from week to week, they began to focus in on government efforts to save us from Zika. It didn't take long for them to find people to interview who would ask the question they wanted asked. "What is the Government Going to Do to Protect Our Babies?" This question was asked over and over again even though there was no proof that Zika infection and microcephaly were related. The question was asked so many times by the media that no politician could dare to say, "I am not going to do anything, because as far as we know Zika doesn't cause microcephaly." President Obama Responds to the Question On February 22, 2016, President Obama requested 1.9 billion dollars to study the situation and to develop a Zika vaccine. [17]Let's look at this more carefully. We are going to spend 1.9 billion dollars to develop a vaccine for a virus that almost never kills anyone and has not been proven to cause birth defects — just to be safe. Or is something else going on here?Perhaps the real story is that Big Pharma wants another cash cow vaccine and the Zika threat has been promoted in such a way that people will insist that Big Pharma develop a Zika vaccine for us. Suddenly, Big Pharma companies will be able to put on their white hats and rescue all the babies of the world. This would be such sweet deception if they could pull it off. CDC Declaration: Zika Causes Microcephaly The CDC announced in April of 2016 that Zika causes microcephaly. [18]This decision was based on a CDC analysis of available data. They did not conduct comprehensive research. They used a quacking duck kind of analysis. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck then it must be a duck. They couldn't tell if it had feathers like a duck or has a bill like a duck, but they still insisted on calling it a duck named Zika. In doing this, they ignored some of the most important criteria in their analysis.CDC researchers stated: The seventh [of Shepard's] criterion, proof in an experimental system that the agent acts in an unaltered state, is aimed at medications or chemical exposures and does not apply to infectious agents. Thus, given Shepard's criteria as a framework, criteria 1, 3, and 4 have been satisfied — evidence that is considered sufficient to identify an agent as a teratogen. [19] In other words, they used a set of seven criteria to determine whether Zika could be considered to be a cause of microcephaly. They determined that the association between Zika infection and microcephaly was causative for 3 of the 7 criteria. They suggested that additional study was needed before 3 of the other criteria could be met. They excluded the seventh criteria altogether, because it examined whether medications or chemicals might have caused microcephaly.I couldn't believe that they excluded the seventh criteria when it is clear that microcephaly is known to be caused by pesticide exposure, and could just as easily be caused by vaccinations during pregnancy as it was likely to be caused by Zika infection.These CDC scientists were only looking for causation from infectious agents. Nothing else seemed to matter. This exclusionary mindset was present since the very beginning of the Zika propaganda campaign.They ignored the effect of the Tdap vaccine given to pregnant women in Brazil in 2015. They ignored the side effects of medications. They ignored the consumption of GMO food, glyphosate, and Pyriproxyfen that were widely used in Brazil. They ignored chemical exposure from Brazil's large chemical manufacturing facilities. They ignored alcohol and drug use. They ignored the effects of extreme multi-generational nutritional deficiencies and extreme poverty. They ignored the introduction of genetically modified mosquitoes that were released in Brazil. They ignored exposure to rubella, toxoplasmosis, or cytomegalovirus. They ignored the combined effects of all these factors as well as multigenerational modifications to the local gene pool from these potential causes.I discussed these potential causes of microcephaly in my first article on Zika, published in January of 2016.There is one key point that I want to bring forward from the previous article concerning the number of babies born with microcephaly. First we heard that there were some 4,783 cases of microcephaly in Brazil. After the initial shock and panic was produced, we learned that further investigation showed that the number of confirmed cases was only 483.The mainstream media also didn't mention that the number of babies born in the United States with microcephaly in a typical year is 25,000. When adjusting for population differences between the US and Brazil, we find that the rate of microcephaly in the US is actually 40 times higher than the rate in Brazil.In other words, the US microcephaly incidence is much higher than Brazil, and our babies didn't get it from Zika. Maybe our babies got it from the various potential causes I discussed in my previous article.I should also state that the researchers who put their names on this article are all employees of the CDC. [20] I must question whether their analysis was truly objective and whether their findings were influenced by CDC ties to Big Pharma. The Zika Vaccine is in the Pipeline Based on this single poor quality analysis, it's full speed ahead for developing a Zika vaccine. There are at least four companies plus the CDC working on a Zika vaccine. We are told that it will still take several years before a Zika vaccine can be properly tested and made available in large quantities for the population of the world.Zika vaccine trials have already begun and they are already recruiting volunteers in the US. The US National Institutes of Health hopes to start phase II trials of its vaccine in early 2017. [22] Congress Tries to Protect Our Babies with Zika Funding Now that the CDC has settled the Zika-microcephaly question, it was time to get congress to fund the President's request for a Zika vaccine development program. The House and the Senate passed Zika funding bills. However, they have different ideas of how much money should be spent and how the funds should be generated. The funding process stalled at the end of June when the Senate and House could not reconcile their differences. [23]Congress went on a seven week summer vacation, and wasn't available to try to resolve their differences. This created a problem for the Zika mind control campaign, because it might mean there would be no new Zika news to report during the summer. Keeping the Propaganda Campaign Going by Killing Mosquitoes The mainstream media switched their focus from vaccine development to eradication of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is known to carry the Zika virus. If an infected mosquito bites a person, then the person might develop the infection. This is a fact that no one is disputing. The Great Mosquito Chase of 2016 The CDC continues to count the number of Zika cases in the US and Puerto Rico. The numbers continue to rise through the spring and early summer. They were looking for autochthonous cases of Zika in the US, but they could only find infected people who had traveled to Zika infected countries or who had sex with people who traveled to those countries.Finally, at the very end of July, 4 people in the Wynnewood section of Miami, Florida, were found to have Zika even though they had not traveled to a Zika infected country or had sex with a Zika infected person. [24]Public health officials at the state and federal level interpreted the presence of these cases to mean that Zika must have been transmitted to these people by mosquito bites. They ignored the possibility that the infected people might have been lying about their exposure, for example, having sexual contact with an infected person. Nevertheless, officials concluded that they must implement a strong mosquito control program to prevent Zika from spreading any further.Now that the Zika epidemic was on US home soil; the media had another fear inducing story to add to their propaganda campaign. "There are mosquitoes that are out to get you and our babies!" The Governor of Florida Goes Door to Door to Find more People with Zika On August 1st, the governor of Florida contacted the US public health system and asked them to send a specially trained squad of federal public health agents to help with the Zika emergency in Miami. These agents and Florida officials went door to door in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami and collected urine samples to identify additional cases of Zika.10 more cases were found, but all were asymptomatic – the people didn't even know they were infected. [25] Problem — They can't find a Zika Infected Mosquito 5,000 mosquitoes were tested for the presence of Zika, but all tests were negative. [26]Officials dismiss the negative infection results by saying that finding a Zika infected mosquito is like finding a needle in a haystack. [27] Aerial Mosquito Spraying Program Initiated The governor of Florida in conjunction with federal public health agents decided that they needed to do aerial spraying of pesticide. Even though the Aedes aegypti mosquito wouldn't travel more than 300 feet from its birth place in the Wynwood neighborhood where the autochthonous Zika cases were located, the officials decided to spray a ten square mile area just to be safe. [28]A spraying program that covers ten square miles would make a sensational story in the media. It would be much more alarming than a story about a neighborhood aerial spray zone. It also would expose many more people to a toxic pesticide (more about that later).The first aerial spraying took place on August 4, 2016. [29] Toxic Pesticide Used in Aerial Spraying Causes Microcephaly Officials told the public not to worry about the pesticide that was being sprayed, because it (naled) is harmless. They pointed to EPA reports, which supported their claim. [30]They didn't mention that naled was banned in Europe in 2005. They didn't mention that officials in Puerto Rico recently refused to allow the spraying of naled over their citizens. They didn't mention that naled kills many other types of insects and aquatic creatures in addition to mosquitoes. [31] Most importantly, official didn't mention that naled and the chemicals that are created when it breaks down in the environment have the potential for causing human birth defects. [32] Could Pesticide Naled Cause Microcephaly and other Life Threatening Diseases? Officials didn't mention that the pesticide that they were spraying over the densely populated minority neighborhood of Wynwood [33] was particularly dangerous for babies in the womb.This is what the JOURNAL OF PESTICIDE REFORM has to say about naled: Like all organophosphates, naled [Dibrom] is toxic to the nervous system. Symptoms of exposure include headaches, nausea, and diarrhea. Naled is more toxic when exposure occurs by breathing contaminated air than through other kinds of exposure. In laboratory tests, naled exposure caused increased aggressiveness and a deterioration of memory and learning. Naled's breakdown product dichlorvos (another organophosphate insecticide) interferes with prenatal brain development. In laboratory animals, exposure for just 3 days during pregnancy when the brain is growing quickly reduced brain size 15 percent. Dichlorvos also causes cancer, according to the International Agency for Research on Carcinogens. In laboratory tests, it caused leukemia and pancreatic cancer. Two independent studies have shown that children exposed to household "no-pest" strips containing dichlorvos have a higher incidence of brain cancer than unexposed children. [34] [Emphasis added] Naled exposure causes increased aggressiveness and a deterioration of memory and learning. These are some of the symptoms that are also found in children on the autism spectrum.One of the most toxic break down products in Naled is Dichlorvos. This chemical caused a 15% reduction in brain size in pregnant lab animals after 3 days of exposure. Another word for reduced brain size is microcephaly.So, the pesticide they are spraying could increase the rate of autism among children in the spray zone, and could cause microcephaly to occur in the babies of pregnant women.Question: If there are babies born in Miami with microcephaly in the next nine months or if the autism rate in the spray zone increases, will we blame Zika or Naled? I am sure that no one from the CDC or from a public health agency will ever point a finger at Naled. They will use the children to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Zika is to blame. Naled is also Harmful to Adults Dr. Naresh Kumar, a Professor of Public Health at the University of Miami, commented about the risks of using pesticides in aerial spraying. His statement came from CBS Miami: "All are a neurotoxin, meaning it will directly affect our nervous system." "It will affect not only the pregnant woman ... it is also equally for children who have asthma and airway disease because when you are spraying in the air, these aerosols stay in the air for at least five days." [35] The Miami Herald provided this advice to people in the pesticide spray zone. They stated: The agency [EPA] says the insecticide poses no risk for the majority of people, but those sensitive to chemicals may want to stay inside during spraying, close windows and turn off window air conditioners. Fruits and vegetables should also be washed before eating and outdoor furniture and grills covered. [36] So, if you are concerned about being exposed to the chemicals they are spraying, then you should stay inside for 5 days until the pesticide falls out of the air. You should keep your windows closed, and turn off window air conditioners. I wonder how many people were able to follow this advice in the subtropical urban climate of Miami in August.Mind control programs always try to make life difficult for those who live outside the box of normality. They want us to follow their instructions, which in this case would be to just not worry about the spraying. If you are concerned, then you can take their ridiculous suggestions, which won't really protect you from the spray. Does Zika also Cause Guillain-Barre Syndrome? Apparently the CDC suspects that Zika causes the paralytic syndrome called Guillain-Barre. If you look at the data collection forms for monitoring Zika in the US you will see another masterful stroke of mind control in the making. They are counting cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome on the same form with cases of Zika. [37]Why would the CDC try to make this connection? The CDC indicates on their Guillain-Barre Syndrome page that they are not sure what causes this syndrome. They do mention that there were some cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome associated with the swine flu vaccine in 1976, but otherwise the condition is rare with unknown etiology. [38]If they can make a case for the Zika virus being the cause of Guillain-Barre Syndrome, then they will shift attention away from the fact that many vaccines and pesticides have a harmful effect on the human nervous system and are able to produce this type of paralysis.I anticipate seeing a Guillain-Barre Syndrome research paper just like the one produced by the CDC on microcephaly. Their new paper will just substitute the phrase "Guillain-Barre Syndrome," for the word "microcephaly." They will show through statistical smoke and mirrors that the Zika virus is causative for Guillain-Barre Syndrome as well as microcephaly.If they can pull this off, then the Zika virus will be blamed for all cases of vaccine damage in which microcephaly or paralysis results. If they can pull this off, and I suspect they will, then pesticide manufacturers will also be able to blame the Zika virus for microcephaly, neurological malformation, and paralysis that results from the use of their products. The Zika virus will be the perfect scapegoat. The List of Birth Defects Being Blamed on Zika with No Evidence is Increasing Propaganda campaigns always seek to worsen the devastating effects of whatever they want us to fear. First we heard that Zika causes microcephaly. Then we heard that it might also cause Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Now we are hearing that Zika causes a whole host of other birth defects, some of which might not appear until months or even years after birth.The New York Times stated: The images [of babies with microcephaly], published Tuesday in the journal Radiology, also suggest a grim possibility: Because some of the damage was seen in brain areas that continue to develop after birth, it may be that babies born without obvious impairment will experience problems as they grow. Images of another baby girl show contracted hands and arms, the result of another common symptom. Zika seems to damage the nerves in a developing fetus so that sometimes "muscles aren't developing normally because they don't have the nerve impulses to move normally," she [Dr. Levine] said. With such a vicious and unpredictable virus, "it's key to realize that Zika is more than microcephaly, that there's a number of other abnormalities as they've shown in this paper, and its effects are going to be even more broad," said Dr. Spong, whose agency has begun a study of what will ultimately be 10,000 babies born in Zika epidemic areas including Brazil and Puerto Rico. "It's going to be essential to follow them to look at their development, to look at their ability to learn, to look at hearing problems, balance problems, behavior problems, all those issues, to make sure that we don't miss anyone." [39] Zika: The New Scapegoat for All Childhood Diseases? Can you tell where this is going? It seems to me that they are planning to put together a catalog of major injuries that results from Zika infection.It will include most if not all injuries that result from vaccines, pesticides, GMO food, pharmaceutical drugs, the high-carbohydrate low-fat standard American diet, and anything else that might lead to a successful lawsuit against Big Pharma or Big Chem. Zika might just become the standard defense for suit against corporations. "It wasn't our product that harmed this little baby, it was Zika!" Conclusion: Another Government Tool for "The Greater Good" to Strip Away Freedoms? It won't be long before the mainstream media will be showing us pictures of US babies from Florida who were born with microcephaly. The mainstream media will tug at our heartstrings and will remind us that this horror will soon become preventable when the Zika vaccine is developed.We will hear about more and more connections between Zika and other terrible health conditions experienced by children. We will be told that all this suffering and all this expense will be avoided when all the mosquitoes are killed and everyone receives the Zika vaccine.Mind control programs always talk about the greater good and how individuals must give up their individual freedoms, their rights, and even their preferences for the sake of the collective benefit. Zika will be one of the tools used by mind controllers and the ruling elite to move us toward mass vaccination and total government control over our lives.Read more at: HealthImpactNews.com [1] "Zika Virus is property of Rockefeller Foundation," Feb 7, 2016 Anonews.co [2] "Brazil asks whether Zika acts alone to cause birth defects" July 25, 2016 Nature.com [3] "First case of Zika virus reported in Puerto Rico" Dec 31, 2015 CDC.gov [4] "Epidemiological Alert – Neurological syndrome, congenital malformations, and Zika virus infection – Implications for Public Health in the Americas" Dec 1, 2015 Paho.org [5] IBID.[7] IBID.[8] "Epidemiological Alert Increase of microcephaly in the northeast of Brazil" Nov 17, 2015 Paho.org [9] "Epidemiological Alert – Neurological syndrome, congenital malformations, and Zika virus infection – Implications for Public Health in the Americas" Dec 1, 2015 Paho.org [10] "Archive by Disease – Zika virus infection" Paho.org [11] "Zika virus infection – Honduras" Dec 21, 2015 Who.int [12] "Zika virus infection – Panama" Dec 22, 2015 Who.int [13] "First case of Zika virus reported in Puerto Rico" Dec 31, 2015 CDC.gov [14] "PAHO WHO Reported increase of congenital microcephaly and other central nervous system symptoms" February 10, 2016 Paho.org [15] "Why is Zika virus spreading so quickly?" Jan 28, 2016 Youtube.com [16] "Zika virus: Miami outbreak sparks concern, demand for tests among pregnant women" Aug 3, 2016 Miamiherald.com [17] "Letter From The President — Zika Virus" Feb 22, 2016 WhiteHouse.gov [18] "Zika Virus Causes Birth Defects, Health Officials Confirm" April 13, 2016 NyTimes.com [19] "Zika Virus and Birth Defects — Reviewing the Evidence for Causality" May 19,2016 Nejm.org [20] "So What Became of the $1.9 Billion for Zika?" Aug 17, 2016 TheVaccineReaction.org [22] "NIH kicks off Phi trial for Zika vax as caseload rises in U.S" Aug 3, 2016 FiercePharma.com [23] "Zika Deal In Congress Likely To Be Delayed Until After Recess" June 23, 2016 NyTimes.com [24] "Florida health officials confirm local Zika transmission" July 29, 2016 CNN.com [25] "Gov. Scott: Florida Calls on CDC to Activate Emergency Response Team Following Confirmed Mosquito-Borne Transmissions" Aug 1, 2016 FlGov.com [26] "Florida's Mosquito Control Forces Mobilize Against Zika Threat" May 2016 KHN.org [27] "Florida confirms it is first state with locally transmitted Zika" July 29, 2016 StatNews.com [28] Zika Virus: Miami-Dade County plans to spray naled in Wynwood Aug 11, 2016 MiamiHerald.com [29] "Spraying Begins in Miami to Combat the Zika Virus" Aug 4, 2016 NyTimes.com [30] "Naled for Mosquito Control" Aug 15, 2016 EPA.gov [31] "Friday flight planned to spray for Zika mosquitoes" Aug 11, 2016 MiamiHerald.com [32] "Florida to Spray Residents Like Bugs over Zika — with a Chemical that Ironically Reduces Fetal Brain Size in Studies" Aug 3, 2016 ActivistPost.com [33] "Free 33127 ZIP Code Map, Statistics, and More for Miami, FL" UnitedStatesZipCodes.org [34] "Alternatives to Pesticides factsheet on Naled" CloudFront.net [35] "EPA: Insecticide Used To Fight Zika Is Safe" Miami.CBSLocal.com [36] "Zika Virus: Miami-Dade County plans to spray naled in Wynwood Friday" Aug 11, 2016 MiamiHerald.com [37] "Zika and Guillain-Barre Syndrome," CDC.gov [38] IBID. | 0 |
YOUTUBE BANS ‘CLINTON’S BLACK SON’ Tweet
NEW YORK –YouTube on Wednesday suspended the account of Danney Williams, the 30-year-old man who has claimed since the 1990s to be the black son of former President Bill Clinton.
YouTube, citing “repeated or severe violations of our Terms of Use and/or Community Guidelines,” declared the account “cannot be restored.”
The YouTube decision blocked the nine-minute feature “BANISHED – The Untold Story of Danney Williams,” which had received 1.2 million views since Williams posted it last week. Produced by filmmaker Joel Gilbert, it drew nearly 100,000 views per day and more than 1,000 viewer comments, with the overwhelming majority expressing support for Williams and outrage at the Clintons for not being willing to allow a DNA test to determine paternity.
Sign the precedent-setting petition supporting Trump’s call for an independent prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton!
“My YouTube account has been deleted, but the same video appears in 50 other places on YouTube alone,” Williams said on his Facebook page after being notified of YouTube’s decision. “[YouTube] can’t handle the truth! Please share #BillClintonSon.”
Twitter also continues to allow Williams to post the “Banished” video on Danney Williams’ page , but the Twitter link to YouTube displays the message : “This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated. Sorry about that.” | 0 |
WASHINGTON — Several Republican senators on Monday proposed a partial replacement for the Affordable Care Act that would allow states to continue operating under the law if they choose, a proposal meant to appeal to critics and supporters of former President Barack Obama’s signature health law. But the plan was attacked by Democrats as a step back from the Affordable Care Act’s protections, and it was unlikely to win acceptance from conservative Republicans who want to get rid of the law and its tax increases as soon as possible. If anything, the proposal — by Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a medical doctor, and Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate Republican — may show how difficult it will be for Republicans to enact a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Legislation that can pass muster in the more conservative House may not win enough support in the Senate. A bill with broad appeal in the Senate may fail in the House. Under the proposal, states could stay with the Affordable Care Act, or they could receive a similar amount of federal money, which consumers could use to pay for medical care and health insurance. “We are moving the locus of repeal to state government,” Mr. Cassidy said. “States should have the right to choose. ” The proposal shares some features with House Republican proposals: It would encourage greater use of health savings accounts and eliminate the requirement for most Americans to have insurance or pay a tax penalty. But the option for states to keep the Affordable Care Act alive will rankle the most conservative Republicans who have been trying for nearly seven years to blow it up. “Obamacare is flawed, failing and not fixable, and it needs to be fully repealed,” said Representative Mark Meadows of North Carolina, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus. A stalemate between the House and Senate would leave in place Mr. Obama’s health law, but efforts by President Trump and Congress to undermine it could send health insurance markets into a tailspin. On Friday, as one of his first official acts as president, Mr. Trump signed an executive order that could allow officials to ease up on enforcement of the mandate requiring most Americans to have insurance. Supporters of the Affordable Care Act panned the proposal. “Millions of Americans would be kicked off their plans, costs and deductibles for consumers would skyrocket, and protections for people with conditions, such as cancer, would be gutted,” said the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York. Ronald F. Pollack, the executive director of Families USA, a consumer group, said the bill “falls way short of providing the protections and coverage people have under the Affordable Care Act. ” Ms. Collins said the bill would allow states to “keep the Affordable Care Act if it is working for their residents. ” But she predicted that most states would choose something different. Under the bill, states could enroll people who would otherwise be uninsured in health plans providing basic coverage. These health plans are intended to protect consumers against catastrophic medical expenses. They would cover generic versions of prescription drugs, and they would also have to cover recommended childhood immunizations without . States would contract with one or more insurers to offer this coverage. Consumers could buy “more robust coverage” if they want, Mr. Cassidy said, but they could be automatically enrolled, by default, in the health plans providing basic coverage. “A state could say, ‘All those eligible are enrolled unless they choose not to be,’” he explained. This “passive enrollment” would provide insurers with a large pool of customers, including many healthy people, without the coercion of an “individual mandate,” Mr. Cassidy said. “We think that we could cover more people than Obamacare,” Mr. Cassidy said, although he acknowledged that the effects of his bill had not been analyzed by the Congressional Budget Office, which serves as Capitol Hill’s official scorekeeper. If a state opts out of the Affordable Care Act, many of the federal insurance standards established under the law would no longer apply. The bill would repeal federal benefit mandates that “often force Americans to pay for coverage they don’t need and can’t afford,” Mr. Cassidy said. But some protections would remain in place. Parents would still be allowed to keep children on their insurance until the age of 26, and insurers could not impose annual or lifetime limits on benefits. The bill, called the Patient Freedom Act, would eliminate not only the unpopular individual mandate, but also the federal requirement for larger employers to offer coverage to employees. Mr. Cassidy said that Senators Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Johnny Isakson of Georgia, both Republicans, were also sponsors of the bill. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, and the No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, were sponsors of a similar bill that Mr. Cassidy introduced in 2015. But the legislative landscape is different now. Republicans in Congress can repeal the Affordable Care Act, with support from Mr. Trump. In the Senate, they will need help from Democrats to adopt a replacement because Republicans are eight votes shy of the 60 needed to stop a filibuster. | 1 |
Elites Have Secretly “Banked On Trump Victory 11/09/2016
SILVERISTHENEW
There’s more than one way for the establishment to yield power from this election.
The first path is obvious, direct and potentially deadly. A Hillary presidency will be surrounded by bitter people, and overt uses of power, along with war, increased taxes and thinly-veiled pay-for-play politics benefiting the billionaires who’ve bankrolled her rise to power.
The other path is less predictable, but possible just the perfect “magic formula” they need to get things flowing again.
The Brexit vote, a by-product of populist anger against economic stagnation and political angst, was secretly a win for those who wield power from the financial sector.
In the end, the disquiet of the people has proven to be the secret ingredient to stirring something up in an economy otherwise stymied by quantitative easing and dismal economic returns.
As Zero Hedge explains , it just may be, particularly in light of some of the statements that have been made by significant figures on Wall Street:
So yes, inflation is possible, it just can’t coexist with political stability, which may explain why – according to some more conspiratorial elements – a “surprising” Trump victory on Tuesday may be assured : after all, what better way to unleash political instability than to inaugurate the candidate who promises a full break with the establishment as we know it. If in the process, it leads to a surge in much needed inflation, now that QE has tried and failed, it’s a price the establishment, reeling under the weight of record global debt, is willing to pay.
One River Asset Management’s Eric Peters laying out his inflationary “revelation”: “British spenders have entirely looked through post-Brexit uncertainty,” said Mark Carney [governor of the Bank of England]. … So the Bank of England forecast its biggest inflation overshoot since 1997; expecting 2018 price gains to peak at +2.8%. What’s it tell us?
A populist uprising, compromised free trade, immigration restrictions, a 15% currency devaluation, 0.50% interest rates combined with aggressive QE is today’s magic formula for modestly exceeding a 2% inflation target 2yrs hence.
[…]we live in the 2010s, and inflationary expectations have succumbed to decades of independent central banking. Economic volatility is remarkably muted too. With it has come a long period of political stability. […] And we also know that a long period of political stability is drawing to a close.
But we can’t be sure that political volatility will increase inflation volatility. Nor can we be sure that it won’t. It all depends on time and place. And today’s time and place is something new.
Is this proof that the elite are secretly planning to make lemonade from the lemons of American discontent and the wild card candidacy of Donald Trump?
That is a difficult call to make, but it is worth noting that there is clearly an advantage to be held if this outcome does occur.
As Tumelar notes, the fix is in either way:
It’s either inflation by Trump’s victory or by WW3 started by Hillary Clinton.
A hard choice for the banksters.
Of course, the situation is much more complicated than just inflation, or any one factor. There is a great deal of speculation that the end of QE, known to be no longer effective at stimulating the economy has made a stock market collapse inevitable, subject to the Fed raises rates.
It appears that Yellen has been waiting for the outcome of the election, and one way or another, will dump the next crisis on the next president. If that proves to be Trump, he will be blamed for the downfall… meanwhile, there will be those waiting in the shadows to profit from disaster.
For his part, astute columnist Brandon Smith has consistently argued that the elite have chosen Trump and will allow him to take the presidency – only to use the unpredictability as a catalyst for order out of chaos, and the institution of great political and economic controls over the country:
The vast majority of analysts in the mainstream and in the alternative media refused to acknowledge the possibility that a successful Brexit actually works in FAVOR of the globalists, because it provides them a perfect scapegoat for a financial crisis that has been broiling for years and is now ready to burst into flames.
[…]
I argue that the globalists want Trump in office, just as they wanted the passage of the Brexit. I argue that they need conservative movements to feel as though we have won, so that they can pull the rug out from under us in the near future. I argue that we are being set up.
Again, the elites are openly telling us what is about to happen. They are telling us that if “populists” (conservatives) gain political power, the system will effectively collapse. To what extent is hard to say, but let’s assume that the situation will be ugly enough to influence the masses to reconsider the ideal of globalism as a possible solution. The elites are fond of the Hegelian dialectic and the philosophy of “order out of chaos,” after all.
Again, the reasons parallel the reasons that Brexit was able to succeed in spite of fierce establishment opposition.
The master manipulators are adaptive to any market conditions, and their influence runs deeper than the electorate of any given political season. Its agents and officers instruct the candidates and make demands, not the other way around.
In a puppeteer’s world, must we always argue for the existence of puppets on every stage?
Read more: | 0 |
ISTANBUL — For the first time in half a year, the Turkish novelist Asli Erdogan returned the other day to her Istanbul apartment, a home left ransacked when she was arrested and sent to prison in August. She discovered that many things were missing: flash drives containing her work and reviews from European literary journals, letters written to her by Kurdish prisoners, and books on Kurdish history. Left behind were the objects of another of her passions: her ballet shoes, torn apart. That is what made her cry. “Somehow the unfairness of it all hit me with the ballet shoes,” she said in a recent interview. “That was suddenly too much. ” Ms. Erdogan, 49, a who has always been more celebrated in European literary circles than in Turkish ones, is trying to put her life back together after being imprisoned under the latest crackdown on freedom of expression by the Islamist government of Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan (who is not related to the author). She was arrested and charged with supporting terrorism, not because of her novels but as a result of her affiliation, as an adviser, with a newspaper linked to the Kurdish movement that has since been shut down. She still faces a trial that could land her back in prison, and with that hanging over her, she has been living with her mother, sleeping late, not writing much and dealing with the new fame that her case has brought. Nowadays, on the streets of Istanbul, people recognize her. “It is moving. Sometimes people put their arms on me and cry,” she said. “I receive lots of love. That is a big responsibility. ” There is a downside. “I also receive negative reactions, too: curses and lectures on patriotism,” she said. That can feel harrowing in Turkey, which has a long tradition of not just locking up writers and journalists but of violence against them, wielded by vigilantes who seem to take their cues from officials who brand as traitors those writers who go beyond what the government deems acceptable language. In the 1940s, the leftist writer Sabahattin Ali was believed to have been murdered by a state agent. In 2007, the journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated by a nationalist gunman who may have been acting on the orders of the deep state. And, last year, a man outside a courtroom fired a shot at Can Dundar, a newspaper editor accused of publishing state secrets. Once, Ms. Erdogan said, she “was an outcast in literary circles” in Turkey for her existentialist writings, which appealed more to a European audience. “I have more readers in Sweden than here,” she said. Growing up in a household that valued education — her father is an engineer, her mother an economist — she attended the prestigious Bosporus University. Trained as a physicist, she began writing seriously on the side in the early 1990s while pursuing graduate studies in Switzerland. There, in a tiny room in Geneva, she wrote all night after full days in the research lab, eventually producing the story collection “The Miraculous Mandarin. ” A few years later, while studying for her doctorate in Brazil, she gave up physics for good. “One morning I woke up and didn’t go to my exams,” she said. Now, as her fame in Turkey grows, her books have been selling more, and her publisher has issued new printings. One volume of short stories, “The Stone Building and Other Places,” has become a best seller in Turkey. “The City in Crimson Cloak” is perhaps her book, and the only one that has been published in English. It is a recreation of the myth of Orpheus set in the gritty and violent back streets of Rio de Janeiro, where Ms. Erdogan once lived. She describes her writing as “sublime language plus crude metaphors” that has had only a limited appeal in Turkey, where readers tend to flock to realistic works steeped in Ottoman history or nostalgia, like the books of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s novelist. “There’s nothing realistic in my books,” she said. “I am a difficult writer. ” The darkness of her writing is a reflection of her personality. She has always lived “a life of extreme loneliness,” she said, and the prevailing theme of her work is the brokenness of human beings, what she refers to as their “wounds. ” “Asli Erdogan’s literature is dark, pessimistic,” said Sema Kaygusuz, a Turkish novelist. “The world in Erdogan’s mind is a wounded body. A body constantly bleeding, a body in anguish. She carries this body both linguistically and psychologically. She identifies with the wound. The pain the author is in is not a personal one in this sense, but it is the pain of the world. ” Even in Europe, in the earlier days of Ms. Erdogan’s writing career, her work was a tough sell, defying the expectations the outside world places on Turkish novelists. “So many publishers told me, ‘Oh your writing is great, it’s impressive, but, you see, this existentialist stuff, we have done already,’” she said. “‘But why don’t you write us about your own little village? ’” With her arrest and time in prison, Ms. Erdogan has joined many of her Turkish literary contemporaries, and forebears, in a common experience. Most of the country’s great writers have, at one time or another, run up against Turkey’s restrictions of freedom of expression. The reasons differ in different eras. Ms. Erdogan was arrested for her association with a Kurdish movement that the government now considers a terrorist group. Mr. Pamuk once faced criminal charges for “insulting Turkishness. ” Elif Shafak, another of Turkey’s internationally known novelists, once ran afoul of Turkish authorities for writing about the Armenian genocide, still denied by the Turkish government. “Every writer, every poet and every journalist in Turkey knows that words can get us into serious trouble any day, any moment,” Ms. Shafak wrote in a recent email. “When we write,” she added, “there is this ominous knowledge at the back of our minds. ” At every turn, Ms. Erdogan’s story comes back to books: the books she has already written and the ones she plans to write, the books the police seized from her apartment, the books she read while in prison. To describe the entire experience — navigating the Turkish law and prison bureaucracy — she leans on a literary reference, saying it has been “more than Kafkaesque. ” In prison, which included several days in solitary confinement sleeping, she said, on a bed that smelled of urine, she passed the time and drew comfort from books brought to her by her lawyers, or mailed to her by friends. She read volumes on world history, and novels by J. M. Coetzee, Iris Murdoch, Henry James, Marcel Proust and Kafka, and the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Celan, a favorite of hers. From the prison library, she read “Shoah,” the text to the acclaimed 1985 documentary by Claude Lanzman. So far, Ms. Erdogan said she has resisted calls to write a memoir of her time in prison, saying she is not ready. “I know I could write a best seller very easily about my prison days,” she said. She still might, although it will most likely take a long time. Sometimes, she said, it takes her six or seven years to write a hundred pages. “When I hear the right voice, and I catch it, it carries me,” she said. “If I don’t, forget it. ” | 1 |
The FBI is now “actively and aggressively” probing into Clinton Foundation corruption. The Clinton campaign is going down. The FBI seems to be sick of the DoJ’s favoritism.
Via YourNewsWire
Two separate sources have told Fox News about serious new breaks in the investigation. The fact that this is being reported on an MSM site is huge, bigger than huge.
Did you catch that? The laptops that everyone THOUGHT the FBI destroyed were NOT, in fact, destroyed. Anyone who is caught lying has voided their immunity deals. (cough, Cheryl Mills, cough) There are new, not-seen-before emails, even though Clinton said she disclosed them all. It’s goin’ down. Right now. All of those people who were prepared to take one for Team Clinton might want to reconsider. It’s hard to imagine even Teflon-coated Hillary Clinton getting out of this mess.
Watch this video and try to keep from jumping up and down with excitement:
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John Pilger did an interview with Assange and is planning to use this material for his next documentary about Wikileaks founder! We are going to report with every major info from this interview in the next few days! Assange once again made an astonishing statement, and he confirmed his statement from a couple of days ago that Wikileaks will release election day bombshell, but also added that they are doing this for a reason!
Assange offers several predictions and analyses, most quite revealing. He also hinted that he would expose the whole truth about Hillary on election day! Assange notes the most significant email in an entire load of emails may well be the one in which Hillary (2014) contacts John Podesta. This email states that “the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.” Assange notes that the backing is from “the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.”
However, he also gave his view about the election day bombshell with surprising statement:
We Are Purposely Holding The Emails Back Until Election Day So They Cannot Have Time To Replace Hillary.”
Pilger observes,”… ISIL or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation, will the election day bombshell contain similar material .” Assange did not confirm this but just answered that would be very valuable information that could change everything.
The slant of this interview is evident, but that does not make it incorrect. The challenge is to determine, logically and with the information at hand: is there sense and feasibility to Assange’s conclusions?(video below part 1 of the interview)
Assange: The Global Elites Will Not Allow Donald Trump To you can read the full article on the following link http://www.usasupreme.com/assange-trump-will-not-global-elites-winvideo/
Posted by USA Supreme on Friday, November 4, 2016 Facebook Comments | 0 |
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Greg Rosenthal – I’ve been watching ridiculous stories on the “hacked” emails of Hillary, John Podesta, et al, and I think it’s time to insert a bit of reality to the discussion. So, if you have any interest in this, here are some points to consider: 1. Anyone could have hacked Hillary.
People ask me, “Do you think it was the Russians who hacked Hillary?” I tell them that I have no idea who did it, but, “Yeah, sure, it could have been the Russians. Given the lack of security on her server, however, it could also have been the teenager down the street.”
Hillary’s server was more or less wide open. Given enough motivation and a bit of time, any reasonably technical person could have stolen those emails. In the words of one specialist, Hillary’s server was “ total amateur hour .” How that happens for a Secretary of State (or a President) is a rather serious question.
Bear in mind that this would be the right setup for purposely leaking information while still being able to claim ignorance, or at least incompetence. I have no idea whether that’s true or not, but I do have to wonder. 2. No one broke into Podesta’s computer.
John Podesta, by all available information, wasn’t hacked, as most people envision hacking. Instead, he fell for a phishing scheme . Someone pretending to be Google suckered him into giving them his password. (You didn’t really think the elite were smarter than the rest of us, did you?)
Once the phishers had Podesta’s password, the rest was simply a vacuuming operation. Then came some kind of handoff to Wikileaks, and the rest was history. And there will be fallout from this for a long time, whether or not media sellouts allow it to be reported. Lots of people are insulted and exposed in those emails. 3. Google has plenty of it.
John Podesta, if you’ve noticed, used a gmail address, meaning that Google sucked his messages up as they were being written – all of them. They also had a ton of Hillary’s “lost” emails. Google literally owned every email from these addresses and dozens of others involved:
[email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
And perhaps more importantly, they have everything from [email protected].
Please understand that Google processed those messages for profitable information immediately. If you have any doubt on this point, consider this: How long does it take them to show you ads for ski resorts after you search for ski boots?
Please don’t imagine that they don’t look at political things; those are far more valuable than your skiing habits, and Google survives by mining information. (In other words, they grab everything they can… which you agreed to in their terms of service.) Google doesn’t charge for your searches, do they? And yet they bring in billions of dollars per month.
This is a useful question: What might you do with tens of thousands of emails to and from insiders and acres of computers to sort them all? Well, that’s about what Google’s doing. 4. NSA has it all.
The NSA has almost everything. We’ve known for a decade or more that they were simply copying everything that went through AT&T facilities . Their data center in Utah was built to store and search all those communications.
William Binney , formerly a senior official at NSA, says that it was probably an intelligence worker behind the DNC leaks, and he might be right – they have it all.
The NSA, put simply, is the largest hacker collective on the planet. They can take over more or less what they want, when they want. 5. Other people have the emails.
All those “lost” emails had recipients, didn’t they? Sure they did, and all those people – and their email servers – have or had copies of everything. And yet I’m not aware of any effort to gather them all up.
This guy says hackers used his servers and that he has records… and that no one from the FBI has bothered to call him. 6. Julian Assange is a front man.
Another good thing to understand is that Julian Assange is the face of Wikileaks, but he doesn’t do all the work himself, and he’s not manning the switches. Lots of other people are doing the daily work. Julian just volunteered to stand in front. And given what’s been happening to him over the past six years or so, you have to say that he’s one seriously brave and tough guy.
One thing Julian gets solo credit for is exposing the Google-State Department connection. (Or perhaps partnership is a better term.) If you’d like the details, see this book by Assange . It’s pretty damning.
And, by the way, Google’s bosses have visited the Obama White House literally hundreds of times . And Eric Schmidt (Google’s big boss) is very close to the Hillary campaign .
Serious data protection requires a professional provider, not amateurs or hucksters. If you’re ready to be serious, Cryptohippie will let you try their service for free. One week, no credit card, no BS. Try it, then either buy or don’t. Use this link .
Greg Rosenthal is a Contributing Writer for Shift Frequency SF Source Freeman’s Perspective Oct. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
Ikea has reached a tentative settlement to pay $50 million to three American families whose young children were killed after the Swedish furniture company’s furniture fell on them, lawyers for the families said on Wednesday. The families of Curren Collas, Camden Ellis and Ted McGee, all around age 2, sued after the children were crushed to death by chests or dressers in Ikea’s Malm line. They contended that the unsafe design of the furniture rendered them “inherently unstable and easily tipped over” and that Ikea had consistently refused to meet voluntary national safety standards for the stability of chests and dressers. “These were three very preventable deaths that never needed to occur if Ikea had simply made dressers that met the voluntary national standard,” Alan M. Feldman, a partner with Feldman Shepherd, the law firm in Philadelphia that represents the families, said in a phone interview on Thursday. He was referring to the safety protocols set out by the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission. Ikea confirmed the tentative settlement in an email, Reuters reported on Thursday. In June, Ikea, the world’s largest furniture seller, announced a recall of 29 million chests and dressers in response to the deadly accidents. At least three other toddlers have been killed in accidents involving the company’s furniture. A child dies once every two weeks on average in accidents involving toppled furniture or television sets, according to the safety commission. In a 2014 report, the commission said that children were the victims in 84 percent of the 430 deaths reported between 2000 and 2013 from televisions, furniture and appliances about 65 percent of those children — or 234 — were between 1 and 3½ years old. The settlement represented progress for consumer advocates who had been working since 1989 to hold the company accountable for the deaths of young children. In a statement released on Thursday, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who had pushed for a recall of the Ikea furniture, applauded the settlement but emphasized that the danger of furniture went beyond the company’s faulty dressers. “Until we have effective standards in place, kids will continue to be at risk of injuries and death,” the statement said. Ms. Klobuchar has introduced legislation to push the commission to adopt stronger consumer safety standards for storage units. | 1 |
Tom Hayden on the Vietnam War and America’s Collective Memory Posted on Oct 26, 2016
Tom Hayden was a crucial figure in the student activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, known for participating in anti-war protests and demonstrating for civil rights. Notably, he demonstrated against the Vietnam War and was even arrested for his anti-war efforts. Hayden died on Sunday at the age of 76, but even in the last few years he continued to remind America of the importance of activism.
In a speech given last year at “Vietnam: The Power of Protest,” a conference in Washington, D.C., Hayden cited his activist history and urged Americans not to forget the powerful political movements of earlier decades. “[T]he struggle for memory and for history is a living thing,” he told the audience. “Each generation has to wrestle with the history of what came before, and ask: Whose interest does this history serve? How does it advance a legacy of social movements? How does it deny that legacy?”
Hayden then began to explain the importance of remembering the widespread political activism of the ’60s and ’70s. “We gather here to remember the power that we had at one point, the power of the peace movement, and to challenge the Pentagon now on the battlefield of memory,” he said. He continued:
There came a generation of career politicians who were afraid of association with the peace movement, who were afraid of being seen as soft, who saw that the inside track was the track of war. Our national forgetting is basically pathological. Our systems—politics, media, culture—are totally out of balance today because of our collective refusal to admit that the Vietnam War was wrong and that the peace movement was right. In the absence—in the absence of an established voice for peace in all the institutions, the neoconservatives will fill the foreign policy vacuum. Am I right? Will it not? Will it not advise both parties? I think, though, that American public opinion has shifted to a much more skeptical state of mind than earlier generations, but the spectrum of American politics and media has not.
In order to fully unify, Hayden concluded, America must remember its past. Although he noted the many successes of the anti-war and pro-civil rights movements, he argues that activists must accept that they “all walked away” when the Vietnam War ended. “We might have been united,” Hayden said, “but instead, we were relegated to wondering what might have been.”
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Watch Hayden’s full speech in the video below:
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in: News Articles , Preparedness\Survival Back in the early days, before writing about any one aspect of prepping, I had to do a lot of research. Online resources were meager so there was a lot of trial and error involved as I formulated my own preparedness strategy. Sadly, as I look back, there was considerable error. Who knew? The good news is that the school of hard prepping knocks has taught me a thing or two. This is especially true when it comes to last minute preps. Now that I am lot smarter, I thought it might be fun to put on my thinking cap and come up with a list of ten last minute preps that could be put into place if I had a modicum of warning that a storm or other disruptive event was brewing. There are two parts to this list, things to do and things to buy. Things To Do 1. Top Off Vehicles with Fuel I never let our two cars go under half a tank but even so, 100% full is always a better option than 50%. Hopefully I will get wind of the pending event soon enough to beat the crowds. 2. Do the Laundry It is not that I hate doing laundry but rather I get lazy about it. It is not unusual to have to do six loads at a time, simply due to procrastination. Given a brewing storm, you can bet the laundry will get done and while I am at it, the bedding will also get changed. 3. Inventory Prescription Drugs With my Ammo Can First Aid Kit already stocked and set aside, I will want to do a quick check on prescription meds and if necessary, get them refilled. 4. Charge All Electronic Devices Compared to six years ago, my home is overrun by electronic devices. Three Kindles, three iPads of varying ages, and four laptop computers, and two iPhones make up a motely crew of electronic devices that hold a wealth of both reference material and amusements. All can be charged using portable solar devices (which are pretty darn cheap these days), but if I am stuck indoors for any length of tine, solar is not going to help. 5. Set Out Spare Lanterns, Flashlights, and Batteries Why wait until the power is out before digging out your emergency light sources? As I say this, I am confident in the knowledge that I already have a flashlight in every room of the house as well as a portable lantern. Still, this would be a good time to check to ensure their batteries are fully charged. 6. Gather Fresh Biomass Rather than use up my back stock of charcoal and wood, I would prefer to burn the odd branches, twigs, leaves I find on the ground. They work perfectly in both my Solo Stove and EcoZoom rocket stoves . Plus, biomass is free for the taking. Things to Buy 7. Fresh Fruit and Vegetables As an experienced prepper I have a good supply of freeze-dried fruits and vegetables. But once a #10 can or pouch is opened, the 25 year shelf life is reduced to one or two years. For that reason, if a short term disruptive event is predicted, I will want to pick up fresh vegetables and fruits that require no refrigeration and can be eaten raw. The nice thing about fresh fruit and vegetables is that most last-minute disaster shoppers will be hitting the packaged and canned goods aisle. Let them. I am already well-stock with canned goods and want as much fresh stuff as I can get. 8. Wine and Spirits Not everyone consumes alcoholic beverages but here in my household, we do enjoy a nightly glass of wine or a cocktail . That said, I do not stockpile spirits to any great extent due to space considerations. My pre-event checklist would definitely include bottled beverages of the alcoholic type. 9. Paper Plates and Disposable Cups and Eating Utensils Water may be at a premium and where as I will want to use stored water for drinking and hygiene, using it for cleanup is not high on my list of priorities, Instead, I am going to want disposables. It might be a good idea to pick up extra trash bags as well. The goal is not to have to dig into long term emergency preps unless absolutely necessary, 10. Dark Chocolate You are going to be stressed so accept that. Get yourself some chocolate – okay a lot of chocolate – and ride things out while indulging in your favorite chocolate treat. If chocolate is not your thing, then perhaps some cookies or graham crackers or just this once, some seriously unhealthy packaged caramel corn. The Final Word Some of my selections may have surprised you but that’s okay. They were meant to inspire you to come up with your own last minute prepping strategy. Why not sit down right now and make up your own list and share it with the rest of us.? Just don’t forget to include the chocolate! Enjoy your next adventure through common sense and thoughtful preparation! Submit your review | 0 |
Its not a bad idea paiting their faces same as that on the clip , its very polular movie and could catch on quick . | 0 |
How they could steal Trump win next Tuesday with the Electoral College — Slattery and Shoaf November 2, 2016 at 12:26 am
How they could steal Trump win next Tuesday with the Electoral College — Slattery and Shoaf
Farren Shoaf, host of the Alternative Media on RBN, interviewed Dr. Slattery about the upcoming election. They talked about Hillary’s new scandal, how they could steal Trump win next Tuesday with the Electoral College, and how civilization itself could literally collapse if Hillary is elected. | 0 |
by Yves Smith
Yves here. I strongly suspect that Naked Capitalism readers will find a lot not to love about this proposal, but I’ll let you have at it in the comments section. I’ll start with two. The first is setting up this program as bonds, when they are most like a trust account. And why should the amount of the grant be set at birth? A lot of children suffer severe setbacks after birth, like the death of a parent or debilitating injury.
Second is that this proposal does nothing to address the expressed problem. The issue is that even though children from lower-income backgrounds might get into college, they can’t mix much/at all socially with the better off students because they don’t have the spending money to allow them to do that. But these “bonds” provide for spending money only for perceived-to-be-legitimate purposes, like the education itself. Even though going on ski trips with the other kids might be key to economic advancement, it would be politically unacceptable for a government program to pay for that sort of thing.
By Lynn Parramore, Senior Research Analyst at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. Originally published at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website
Imagine that a black child from a family of modest resources gets the opportunity to attend an elite college preparatory school. Motivated by a love of learning and strong desire to achieve, he excels in school and goes on to attend highly regarded universities, earning advanced degrees. Surely that child is well positioned to ascend the ladder of economic prosperity in America, right?
Not so fast.
The goal of broadening financial wealth to all Americans, regardless of race, gets plenty of applause across the political spectrum. But so far this goal has remained devilishly elusive. To understand why you have to know how people come by wealth in the first place. It’s popular to say that we build wealth through discipline — by hitting the books, working hard and saving money. The reality is a little different.
Past Injustice Shapes Present Reality
Darrick Hamilton knows this from personal experience. Despite his family’s modest means — not poor but hardly affluent — he attended the Brooklyn Friends School, an elite private institution where teachers emphasized social justice. Hamilton started college at Oberlin excited to seek out his path to the American Dream. But he soon found out that the path was smoother for some than for others.
All around him, white kids from affluent families were getting checks in the mail from their parents — money that could be spent on tuition, extracurricular activities, and the kind of socializing that builds professional networks. Black students of more modest means, on the other hand, were often at a disadvantage even when their parents were able to help financially. If they received money from home, things besides books demanded financial attention. The same was true if they had a job. Even when black students worked hard and saved diligently, the money was often spoken for before it was time to pay the tuition bill for the semester.
The reason has to do with the cumulative effects of centuries of gross economic disadvantages that black families have endured, from slavery to Jim Crow and beyond. The legacy of those severe headwinds is that even when an individual family is able to reach the middle class, there is still likely to be a constellation of poorer extended family members in need of various kinds of financial assistance. When they call, you help, if you can. Economists call this “wealth leakage.”
Hamilton noticed this phenomenon play out among black students at school and in the professional realm. Rather than enjoying resources from parents and grandparents, they often had to provide money for cousins, nieces, uncles, and siblings. After obtaining his Ph.D. in economics at UNC-Chapel Hill, Hamilton, who now teaches economics and urban policy at The New School in New York, focused on how poverty in the family increases the racial wealth gap for middle class black individuals.
The source of wealth building in America, he realized, is less what you save than your capacity to invest in an asset through money given by parents and grandparents. These transfers are critical to the acquisition of assets, like a home or a small business — the kinds of things that require huge down payments.
“If you’re not fortunate enough to get that down payment or have that resource at a key juncture of your life,” observes Hamilton, “you will not have that pathway towards building economic security that somebody else has. You could be a jerk. You could be a good person. It has little to do with the particular individual.”
This logic flies in the face of the long-cherished belief that education and hard work are the great equalizers in American society. Many still insist that much present day inequality is caused by bad individual decisions and not by structural problems associated with discrimination. But the vast inequality between black and white citizens suggests that there’s more going on than poor choices. In 2013, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the median household wealth was $134,230 for whites compared to a paltry $11,030 for black Americans.
The reason, says Hamilton, is pretty clear: “In a capitalist system, if you lack capital, it just locks in inequality.”
Fortunately, he thinks the problem can be alleviated if we are willing to aim the attack at the source. Hamilton and his colleague William A. Darity, Jr. of Duke University are stratification economists, pioneers in an emerging subfield of social science who focus on the structural dimensions of a person’s economic position. They propose a solution to wealth inequality that may appeal across the political spectrum: Why not give every American baby seed capital so they can grow up to take part in the capitalist system? This could be done, they argue, through “Baby Bonds” that would be set up for every child born.
How Baby Bonds Work
Baby Bonds, in Hamilton’s formulation, would be funded directly out of Treasury and held in an account by the federal government, similar to Social Security. The amount a child receives would depend on the wealth position into which she is born. If she’s the offspring of Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates, she might get $500, but upwards of $50,000 if she is born at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. The average amount for a child would be around $20,000. Accounts would be guaranteed a nominal one and a half rate of return, and the payout would not take place until the child becomes an adult. At that time, you get to spend the money — but not just on anything. The funds would have to be used for a “clearly defined asset enhancing activity,” like financing a debt-free education, purchasing a business, or buying a home. (The program would need to be coupled with financial reform and regulation to mitigate predatory effects, including extraordinary tuition increases aimed at exploiting better-resourced young adult baby bond recipients).
A commission would be set up to identify exactly what kinds of activities might qualify.
“These conditions are set up to protect the resource,” says Hamilton. “In my own situation, if I had received an infusion of cash as a young adult, there would have been a lot of family needs to take care of before I could begin thinking about self-investment like purchasing a home. Specifying what the money can be spent on may not guarantee an outcome, because people still choose the investment they engage in, but it at least ensures that the investment is an asset-enhancing endeavor which can help build wealth over the long run.”
Unlike some past proposals for child savings accounts, Baby Bonds are designed so that it doesn’t matter if your parents can contribute or not. Hamilton says this is done so that however good or bad or affluent or poor your parents may be, as a citizen you get some seed capital so that you can take part in the American economic mobility system.
But wouldn’t such a program be too costly?
Not at all, says Hamilton. He notes that there are about 4 million children born every year, so if the average account is at $20,000, the whole program might cost $80 billion. If you add another $10 billion, the very highest estimate for administering the program, it comes to $90 billion maximum. That might sound like a lot, but not when you consider what the federal government already spends trying to promote asset ownership through the tax code. He cites a report on all such policies (like the mortgage interest reduction and reductions in capital gains) by CFED , a Washington-based non-profit focused on expanding economic opportunities for low-to-moderate income Americans. All told, these programs cost over $500 billion dollars . (The mortgage interest deduction alone is estimated to cost more than $405 billion for tax years 2014 through 2018 ).
Next to these figures, Baby Bonds looks like a bargain. They also have the advantage of distributing the capital where it’s needed most. Federal programs already in place tend to funnel money towards the more affluent, says Hamilton, noting that the bottom 60 percent of earners get about 5 percent of that $500 billion, while the top 10 percent get well over half. He thinks that Baby Bonds could be fully funded simply by capping the existing mortgage interest reductions.
So how would a race-blind program help to close gaps in wealth and income between black and white Americans?
Hamilton points out that about 85 percent of black households fall below the national median of the wealth distribution, so the means test for the Baby Bonds program as well as its target needs to be keenly focused on wealth.
Baby Bonds address wealth in two ways: First, because of the way black people are clustered at the poorer end of the wealth distribution, more will qualify for the program. Secondly, because the program is focused on asset-enhancing activities, they will benefit when they become adults and are able to use the funds to build the kinds of assets that have so often been out of reach historically.
A Potential Political Winner?
Inequality has been a hot topic this political season, but much of the discussion has focused on student debt. Hamilton acknowledges that this is important, but it’s not enough to close the racial wealth gap.
“It will help avoid wealth leakage for millions of people and black individuals that end up going to college,” he says. “It’s certainly the case that black students are disproportionately impacted by student debt. But this only helps those who actually end up going to college. It’s limited in its approach.”
Something more is needed. He notes that in other countries, programs similar to Baby Bonds have already been implemented, such as a child trust program set up in 2005 that gave every British citizen born on or after September 1, 2002 an investment account to build savings that would help fund their transition to adult life.
The U.K. program differed from Baby Bonds in several key ways: it was smaller in scale, parents could add to the account, and the trust was unconditional, meaning that the money could be used for anything rather than a specific set of potentially wealth-building activities. Unfortunately, the program sank under a wave of austerity in 2011 following the global recession, so it’s unclear exactly how well it worked because the children who received the accounts are not yet old enough to have used them.
Could Baby Bonds work in America? Hamilton observes that in the past, both conservatives and liberals have endorsed programs designed to give American children a stake in the future. KidSave, a program conceived by then-Senators Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, with then-Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut as co-sponsor, would have allotted each child a small deposit at birth (around $1000), with additional $500 deposits every year for five years. The money would then be invested in a limited number of mutual funds, but it couldn’t be withdrawn until retirement, when a substantial nest egg would have theoretically grown. Various versions of the plan attracted support from conservatives like Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and the Heritage Foundation.
The premise behind Baby Bonds is slightly different; it’s based on the recognition that the problem in building wealth is not savings.
“Most Americans don’t save, period,” says Hamilton. “It’s really getting access to that asset that’s going to appreciate. Homes give Americans most of their wealth, or, if not homes, some other asset. So this is moving us a bit from that narrative of how to leverage poor people to do better things by giving them incentives to saying, well, why don’t we empower them with an account so that they actually can make decisions that can lead to their mobility.”
Hamilton observes that Baby Bonds simply arm everybody with the opportunity to benefit from the markets— an idea the most die-hard free market champion might appreciate. “If conservatives really believe in the fairness of the markets,” he says, “then let’s give everybody opportunity to participate. We’re talking about babies, so this is before we start coming up with narratives about the deserving poor or the undeserving poor. We’re saying, at birth, we’re going to give everybody a chance to engage in economic mobility in America.” 0 0 0 0 0 0 | 0 |
WASHINGTON — An extraordinary breach has emerged between Donald J. Trump and the national security establishment, with Mr. Trump mocking American intelligence assessments that Russia interfered in the election on his behalf, and top Republicans vowing investigations into Kremlin activities. On Saturday, intelligence officials said it was not until the week after the election that the C. I. A. altered its formal assessment of Russia’s activities to conclude that the government of President Vladimir V. Putin was not just trying to undermine the election, but had also acted to give one candidate an advantage. Wary of being seen as politicizing their findings, C. I. A. analysts had been reluctant to come to that conclusion in the midst of the election — even as many supporters of Hillary Clinton believed it was obvious, given the leak of emails from her campaign chairman and others. One intelligence official said there were indications in early October that the Russians had shifted their focus to harm Mrs. Clinton. The C. I. A. ’s slowness in shifting its assessment, another official said, was one reason President Obama ordered a full review of “lessons learned” on the operation to influence the election. But the disclosure of the findings prompted a blistering attack against the intelligence agencies by Mr. Trump, whose transition office said in a statement on Friday night that “these are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,” adding that the election was over and that it was time to “move on. ” Mr. Trump has split on the issue with many Republicans on the congressional intelligence committees, who have said they were presented with significant evidence, in closed briefings, of a Russian campaign to meddle in the election. The rift also raises questions about how Mr. Trump will deal with the intelligence agencies he will have to rely on for analysis of China, Russia and the Middle East, as well as for covert drone and cyberactivities. At this point in a transition, a is usually delving into intelligence he has never before seen, and learning about C. I. A. and National Security Agency abilities. But Mr. Trump, who has taken intelligence briefings only sporadically, is questioning not only analytic conclusions, but also their underlying facts. “To have the of the United States simply reject the narrative that the intelligence community puts together because it conflicts with his a priori assumptions — wow,” said Michael V. Hayden, who was the director of the N. S. A. and later the C. I. A. under President George W. Bush. With the partisan emotions on both sides — Mr. Trump’s supporters see a plot to undermine his presidency, and Mrs. Clinton’s supporters see a conspiracy to keep her from the presidency — the result is an environment in which even those basic facts become the basis for dispute. Mr. Trump’s team lashed out at the agencies after The Washington Post reported that the C. I. A. believed that Russia had intervened to undercut Mrs. Clinton and lift Mr. Trump, and The New York Times reported that Russia had broken into Republican National Committee computer networks just as they had broken into Democratic ones, but had released documents only on the Democrats. For months, the has strenuously rejected all assertions that Russia was working to help him, though he did at one point invite Russia to find thousands of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. There is no evidence that the Russian meddling affected the outcome of the election or the legitimacy of the vote, but Mr. Trump and his aides want to shut the door on any such notion, including the idea that Mr. Putin schemed to put him in office. Instead, Mr. Trump casts the issue as an unknowable mystery. “It could be Russia,” he recently told Time magazine. “And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey. ” The Republicans who lead the congressional committees overseeing intelligence, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security take the opposite view. They say that Russia was behind the election meddling, but that the scope and intent of the operation need deep investigation, hearings and public reports. One question they may want to explore is why the intelligence agencies believe that the Republican networks were compromised while the F. B. I. which leads domestic cyberinvestigations, has apparently told Republicans that it has not seen evidence of that breach. Senior officials say the intelligence agencies’ conclusions are not being widely shared, even with law enforcement. “We cannot allow foreign governments to interfere in our democracy,” Representative Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican who is the chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and was considered by Mr. Trump for secretary of Homeland Security, said at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “When they do, we must respond forcefully, publicly and decisively. ” He has promised hearings, saying the Russian activity was “a call to action,” as has Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of the few senators left from the Cold War era, when the Republican Party made opposition to the Soviet Union — and later deep suspicion of Russia — the centerpiece of its foreign policy. Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said there was little doubt that the Russian government was involved in hacking the Democratic National Committee. “All of the intelligence analysts who looked at it came to the conclusion that the tradecraft was very similar to the Russians,” he said. Even one of Mr. Trump’s most enthusiastic supporters, Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, said on Friday that he had no doubt about Russia’s culpability. His complaint was with the intelligence agencies, which he said had “repeatedly” failed “to anticipate Putin’s hostile actions,” and with the Obama administration’s lack of a punitive response. Mr. Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the intelligence agencies had “ignored pleas by numerous Intelligence Committee members to take more forceful action against the Kremlin’s aggression. ” He added that the Obama administration had “suddenly awoken to the threat. ” Like many Republicans, Mr. Nunes is threading a needle. His statement puts him in opposition to the position taken by Mr. Trump and his incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who has traveled to Russia as a private citizen for RT, the news operation, and attended a dinner with Mr. Putin. Mr. Nunes’s contention that Mr. Obama was captivated by a desire to “reset” relations with Russia is also notable, because Mr. Trump has said he is trying to do the same — though he is avoiding that term, which was made popular by Mrs. Clinton in her failed effort as secretary of state in 2009. There are splits both within the intelligence agencies and the congressional committees that oversee them. Officials say the C. I. A. and the N. S. A. have not always shared their findings with the F. B. I. which they often distrust. The question of how vigorously to investigate also has a political tinge: Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, for example, are pushing hard for a broad investigation, while some Republicans are resisting. Intelligence can also get politicized, of course, and one of the running debates about the disastrously mistaken assessments of Iraq that Mr. Trump often cites is whether the intelligence itself was tainted or whether the Bush White House read it selectively to support its march to war in 2003. But what is unfolding in the argument over the Russian hacking is more complex, because tracking the origin of cyberattacks is complicated. It is made all the harder by the fact that the C. I. A. and the N. S. A. do not want to reveal human sources or technical abilities, including American software implants in Russian computer networks. This much is known: In a hacking group long associated with the F. S. B. — the successor to the old Soviet K. G. B. — got inside the Democratic National Committee’s computer systems. The intelligence gathering appeared to be fairly routine, and it was unsurprising: The Chinese, for instance, penetrated Mr. Obama’s and Mr. McCain’s presidential campaign communications in 2008. In the spring of 2016, a second group of Russian hackers, long associated with the G. R. U. a military intelligence agency, attacked the D. N. C. again, along with the private email accounts of prominent Washington figures like John D. Podesta, the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. Those emails were ultimately published — a step the Russians had never taken before in the United States, though the tactic has been used often in former Soviet states and elsewhere in Europe. That moved the issue from espionage to an “information operation” with a political motive. One person who attended a classified briefing on the intelligence said that the investigators had explained that the malware used in the cyberattack on the D. N. C. matched tools previously used by hackers with proven ties to the Russian government. That sort of “pattern analysis” is common in cyberinvestigations, though it is not conclusive. But the intelligence agencies had more: They had managed to identify the individuals from the G. R. U. who oversaw the hacking efforts. That may have come from intercepted conversations, spying efforts, or implants in computer systems that allow the tracking of emails and text messages. In briefings to Mr. Obama and on Capitol Hill, intelligence agencies have said they now believe that what began as an effort to undermine the credibility of American elections morphed over time into a much more targeted effort to harm Mrs. Clinton, whom Mr. Putin has long accused of interfering in Russian parliamentary elections in 2011. But to hedge their bets before the election, according to the briefings, the Russians also targeted the Republican National Committee, Republican operatives and prominent members of the Republican establishment, like former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. However, few of those emails have ever surfaced, save for Mr. Powell’s, which were critical of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign for trying to draw him into a defense of her use of a private computer server. A spokesman for the Republican National Committee, Sean Spicer, disputed the report in The Times that the intelligence community had concluded that the R. N. C. had been hacked. “The RNC was not ‘hacked,’” he said on Twitter. “The @nytimes was told and chose to ignore. ” On Friday night, before The Times published its report, the committee had refused to comment. | 1 |
With the media gripped by accusatory speculation regarding the identity of the source behind the Wikileaks leak of hacked Podesta and DNC emails, much of it focused on Russia, a new theory has emerged from Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, who tells Sputnik (a Russian media outlet) that the source of the leaks are not Russian hackers but a Washington insider.
Via TheAntiMedia
“The source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all. I discovered what the source was when I attended the Sam Adam’s whistleblower award in Washington. The source of these emails comes from within official circles in Washington DC. You should look to Washington not to Moscow.”
Asked about whether or not WikiLeaks have ever published information at the behest of Moscow, Murray said that “WikiLeaks has never published any material received from the Russian government or from any proxy of the Russian government. It’s simply a completely untrue claim designed to divert attention from the content of the material.”
While blasted by Washington, first by Republicans several years ago, and most recently by Democrats, the WikiLeaks revelations have often been hailed as a champion of accountability.
“I think whistleblowers have become extremely important in the West because the propaganda model — as Chomsky puts it — has been reinforced to the extent that people don’t get any true information out of the media at all. It’s worth saying that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are publishers; they publish what whistleblowers leak to them,” Mr. Murrary told Sputnik.
Yet, whistleblowers in the US continue to be subject to lengthy prison sentences. A key example is Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced on August 21, 2013 to a thirty five year sentence for providing WikiLeaks with sensitive military and diplomatic documents highlighting, among other things, US military conduct in Iraq. Murray also mentions the case of John Kiriakou, a former investigator of international terrorism with the CIA who turned whistleblower.
“The people who did the torture have suffered no comeback at all,” adds Mr. Murray.
Taking a step back and discussing the risk of geopolitical escalation between Russia and the US, Murray told Sputnik that “there is no chance whatsoever that Russia is going to ever attack the United States, that simply isn’t going to happen.”
“Just as Russia is not going to attack the United Kingdom. There never has been a chance that Russia would ever attack either of these two countries. But of course the narrative is all to do with power and funneling huge amounts of American taxpayer money into the defense industry and the security industry and these people are both from the class that benefits.”
It’s an extremely dangerous game, says Mr. Murray, and it feeds into a foreign policy that is completely mad.
“In Syria — and I should say I’m no fan of the Assad regime at all — but the idea that backing assorted groups of jihadists to tear the country apart is a better solution is crazy and it’s especially crazy when we’ve already messed up Iraq, Afghanistan and now we’re doing exactly the same thing again and you can see it doesn’t work, it only works in terms of promoting continued instability and continued spending for the military and the security services.”
Finally, Murray also believes that the public can’t get clear analysis of these issues from mainstream media, because they are part of the same money/power nexus.
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During Kathy Griffin’s press conference to discuss the firestorm surrounding her Donald Trump “beheading” photo Friday morning, the comedian was asked about an interview she gave to Vulture in December in which she said was happy to “deliver a beat down” to Trump’s youngest son, Barron Trump. [“It’s not about trying to be an offender anymore because Hillary got such a beat down. It’s his turn. So I’m happy to deliver beat down to Donald Trump — and also to Barron,” Griffin told Vulture at the Equality Now Gala on December 9. “You know a lot of comics are going to go hard for Donald, my edge is that I’ll go direct for Barron. I’m going to get in ahead of the game,” she added. . @kathygriffin admitted in December that she was going after Barron Trump. Now she’s crying misogyny at the direction of @LisaBloom. Moron. pic. twitter. — John Cardillo (@johncardillo) June 2, 2017, When asked about the quote Friday morning, Griffin’s attorney, Lisa Bloom, said it had been given “years ago,” while Griffin said it had been a part of her act, when in fact, she said it in an interview with Vulture less than one year ago. “You’re talking about something from a comedy act years ago, I think,” Bloom said. “We can have edgy comics in America. Comics can say things that are not appropriate for children. Comics can create images that are not appropriate for children … it is not the job of a comic to filter everything down to the level of an . ” Griffin later said during the press conference that she “would never want to hurt anyone, especially a child. ” TMZ reported this week that Barron Trump panicked after he saw the image on television, because he did not know who Griffin was or the context in which the photograph was taken. For more on Friday’s press conference, read Breitbart’s coverage here. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
British Airways said its flights were gradually returning to normal on Tuesday after a computer problem disabled the airline’s kiosks for several hours at a number of international airports, causing significant delays. The extent of the computer problem, which first emerged late Monday in North America, was not immediately clear. The airline said the issue had been resolved by technicians early Tuesday morning in London. It advised passengers booked on Tuesday flights to check in online or via the airline’s mobile applications before reaching the airport, to minimize further delays. “The system is now working and customers are being checked in as normal in London and overseas, although it may take longer than usual,” the airline said in a statement. “We apologize to our customers for the delay and we appreciate their patience,” it added. “Our colleagues are doing everything possible to check in customers for their journeys. ” Chicago O’Hare International Airport, San Francisco International Airport and International Airport were among those affected. Travelers said that bottled water and snacks had been distributed at some airports as frustrated customers faced long lines to check in. That did not stop customers at United States airports from expressing their frustration on Twitter. The airline responded to each Twitter post with some version of its statement to the news media. The troubles at British Airways were not the only ones to cause travel headaches on Tuesday. Dozens of flights to and from London City Airport, near the heart of the British capital’s financial district, were canceled or diverted after a small number of activists from the group Black Lives Matter staged a blocking the airport’s only runway for several hours. The protest, which began before dawn, is the latest in a series of demonstrations across Britain by the group against social injustices like police brutality and reported increases in discrimination against migrants since the country’s vote to withdraw from the European Union. In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said that officers had arrested nine protesters who had erected a structure on the runway and locked themselves to it. It was not immediately clear how the group had managed to breach the perimeter of the airport, part of which borders the Thames. The police said that those arrested would be charged with aggravated trespassing, being unlawfully in a restricted zone and breaching the airport’s bylaws. London City Airport, which serves close to 12, 000 passengers a day, announced shortly after midday that the runway had reopened and that flights were resuming. It advised passengers to check with airlines on the status of flights. This has been a difficult summer for airlines, many of which have had to contend with technical problems that lead to delays, cancellations and thousands of angry customers. Last month, Delta Air Lines canceled more than 1, 500 flights after the failure of a piece of equipment in Atlanta led to the worldwide shutdown of its computer systems. A similar malfunction affected Southwest Airlines in July, forcing it to cancel about 2, 300 flights over four days. | 1 |
Hillary Reboots ‘Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’ Playbook 10/31/2016
LIFEZETTE
Before even 24 hours had passed since the FBI director informed Congress on Friday that it was reopening the probe into Hillary Clinton’s emails, Clinton suggested the director was in cahoots with the Republican Party.
“We’ve made it very clear that, if they are going to be sending this kind of letter that is only going originally to Republican members of the House, that they need to share whatever facts they claim to have with the American people,” Clinton said on Friday, after initially being blindsided by the FBI’s announcement.
The claim wasn’t true. All you had to do is turn the page and find Democratic members of Congress who had also received the letter from the FBI. But it shows how ready Clinton is to fight anyone in the government who dares investigate or question her. It is likely a habit Clinton picked up when she was first lady, from 1993 to 2001.
Clinton’s opening salvo, though weak, is a sign of more to come. Her coming attack on the FBI and its director, James Comey, will likely begin in earnest on Monday, with her operatives using the letter to Congress as proof Clinton is the victim of a political conspiracy.
Clinton previewed her attack in Daytona Beach, Florida, on Saturday, when she said the letter was “unprecedented and deeply troubling.”
Clinton will also turn the issue into one of “transparency” — even though FBI investigations are inherently not transparent. In Daytona, she called on Comey to “explain everything right away, put it all right on the table” — a demand she knows will go unheeded.
But many of Clinton’s allies in the media are likely to demand to see the emails found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop.
It’s a strategy that could work, even with only a few days left until Election Day.
Such attacks on law enforcement worked fairly well for Clinton in 1998, when she and her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, vilified independent counsel Kenneth Starr. Starr had been tasked by Bill Clinton’s own attorney general to investigate corruption charges, but likely rued the day he ever took the job.
In 1994, Bill Clinton faced questions from many, including The New York Times, about an investment the Clintons made in a company called Whitewater Development Corp. Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, made Robert Fiske the independent counsel.
Fiske would later be replaced by Starr. Starr’s investigation would later reach into charges that President Clinton had lied in the Paula Jones sexual harassment civil trial. With explosive charges being published by the Drudge Report and Newsweek in January 1998 that Bill Clinton had seduced an intern, Monica Lewinsky, the Clintons could have been expected to admit the truth and take the punishments.
Instead, the Clinton White House and the Democrats began attacking Starr and the Republicans.
On Jan. 27, 1998, Hillary Clinton went on NBC’s “The Today Show” and goaded the press into covering the opposition rather than President Bill Clinton, who had lied about his affair with Lewinsky just one day earlier.
Matt Lauer asked if Hillary Clinton had said the fight against Starr would be the “last great battle” of the Clinton White House.
“Well, I don’t know if I’ve been that dramatic,” Hillary Clinton replied. “But I do believe that this is a battle. I mean, look at the very people who are involved in this — they have popped up in other settings. This is — the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.”
The Starr report on the Clinton scandals was released months later. But what the Clintons are really proud of that is that the Democrats actually gained seats in the 1998 midterm elections, helping to cause a backfire against the GOP.
The GOP didn’t have anywhere near the two-thirds majority in the Senate to remove Bill Clinton. In early 1999, the U.S. Senate acquitted Bill Clinton on two charges: obstruction of justice, and perjury.
It taught the Clintons the wrong lesson: to fight authorities if authorities questioned them — even authorities within the Democratic Party. Clinton will be targeting and attacking President Obama’s own FBI director as Obama leaves office. | 0 |
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Email
Petty tyranny is alive and well in the home of the Magna Carta, thanks to a sweeping 2014 crime act. According to a new report from the Manifesto Club, a British civil-liberties organization, U.K. residents are being cited and fined — under the threat of criminal prosecution for failure to comply — for such offenses as not weeding their gardens, crying too loudly in their own homes, posting signs critical of local government policies, or even feeding wild birds.
The Anti-social Behavior, Crime and Policing Act — passed at the urging of Theresa May, then home secretary and now prime minister — gave local officials the authority to issue Community Protection Notices (CPNs) to individuals 16 or older whenever officials believe that “the conduct of the individual … is having a detrimental effect, of a persistent and continuing nature, on the quality of life of those in the locality.”
An official may issue a CPN on the spot, with only minimal warning to the individual being cited, for any offense he deems worthy, including things occurring within someone’s home. The CPN may demand that the cited individual either refrain from a particular activity or take specific actions, or both; and it may impose a fine of up to $124. In addition, if an individual refuses to comply with a CPN, he may be subjected to criminal prosecution and, if convicted, fined as much as $3,100.
CPNs, noted the Manifesto Club, do “not have to go through a magistrates’ court, and the standard of proof is significantly lower” than that for civil injunctions. “CPNs therefore give council officials unprecedented powers to direct the behavior of particular individuals, backed up by the force of the criminal law.”
The group found that between October 2014 and October 2015, councils issued 3,943 CPNs and 9,546 CPN warnings. Between April 1, 2015, and December 31, 2015, there were 254 prosecutions for failure to comply with a CPN; 200 of those were successful.
A number of CPNs concerned activities taking place inside the home. Most were related to noises that could be heard in adjoining properties, including apartments. Shouting, swearing, and even crying that could be overheard were forbidden, as was “noise from televisions, sound equipment (stereo systems), radios, musical instruments, domestic appliances and power tools.”
Four councils issued CPNs prohibiting people from feeding birds in their gardens — this despite the fact that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds actually encourages people to do just that.
“Such orders,” wrote the Manifesto Club, “undermine the privacy and sanctity of the home. If you cannot cry within your own house, or feed the birds in your garden, then the home has no significant meaning as a private space which is protected from the demands of the outer world.” Moreover, “The noise restrictions specified in these orders are unrealistically low: it is rare that TVs or music cannot be overheard to some extent in adjoining properties, and a certain background noise is part and parcel of living in a flat or terraced house. It may be that some of these individuals’ behavior would qualify as a statutory nuisance, but the issued CPNs set the conditions so low as to criminalize very ordinary behavior.”
Many, if not most, of the CPNs concerned the conditions of people’s yards, or “gardens” in British parlance. While some requested the removal of waste such as sofas, others were merely for gardens that were not kept up to the standards of the official issuing the CPN. Several councils issued CPNs to individuals unfortunate enough to have Japanese knotweed, an invasive plant species, pop up in their gardens. Should those individuals fail to eradicate the weed — a lengthy and difficult process requiring deep excavation — they could end up with criminal records.
“Councils can also use the measures to stifle criticism of council policy,” the Manifesto Club found.
A man in East Lancashire was threatened with a CPN ordering him to take down “inflammatory” signs that criticized a new housing development sanctioned by the council. The signs were on his back gate and on a tree on the edge of his property. The council’s community protection coordinator said: “This notice would ultimately give the council the ability to enter the land and remove the signs.”
CPNs have been used to force people to maintain their houses in keeping with others’ tastes. One homeowner was threatened with prosecution if he did not clean his windows both inside and out. Another was cited for keeping a bicycle collection on his property.
Furthermore, CPNs can require people to take expensive remedial actions. If an individual refuses to comply, the council can have the work performed and then bill the homeowner for it. Sources of overheard noise can be seized and destroyed.
“There appears to be little respect for the rights of home ownership or the notion that your house or garden are [sic] places that you can manage as you see fit,” observed the Manifesto Club. “Now it is the complainant outsider, and not the home owner or occupier, who appears to have the weight of authority and the balance of the law on their side.”
Councils have also used CPNs to target particular individuals’ public behavior rather than going through the messy and public process of enacting general restrictions or obtaining civil injunctions. At least two councils have no laws against begging or public sleeping — one, in fact, was forced to withdraw a previous order prohibiting them because of public protest — but have used CPNs to enforce de facto bans on these activities. Some CPNs were issued to people who clearly needed help rather than prosecution, such as a homeless, mentally ill man who insisted on sleeping in the woods on hospital grounds but was harming no one.
It’s not hard to figure out why local officials love CPNs: They can make up “laws” on the spot — some councils’ CPN forms don’t specify particular offenses but allow officers to write in whatever they please — and enforce them (and collect fines) without the bother of proving their case in court.
“It is a principle of law that more specific powers should be preferred to more general ones,” argued the Manifesto Club. “In fact, we are seeing the opposite: the more general CPN power is being preferred to more specific powers. A quick-fix, all-purpose measure is being used in areas where other powers could be used, which means that the punishment of offences such as neighbor nuisance is occurring beyond the purview of formal law and procedure.”
The Manifesto Club, along with other civil-liberties organizations, is calling on the government to greatly curtail the use of CPNs. They also note that individuals can appeal CPNs in court and encourage more to do so.
The good news, the group’s Josie Appleton told CNSNews.com , is that the CPN statute hasn’t become entrenched law yet.
“I think it’s very early days,” she said. “I’m hopeful.” Please review our Comment Policy before posting a comment
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REYNOSA, Tamaulipas — More than 20 people have been killed in the raging violence in this city as two rival cartel factions continue to fight for control of lucrative drug and human trafficking routes. [As Breitbart Texas has been reporting, since last week, rival factions of the Gulf Cartel went to war in an effort to seize control of Reynosa. The fighting has led to convoys of gunmen riding in marked SUVs roaming the streets searching for their rivals. The border city of Reynosa is immediately south of McAllen, Texas. As a response to the cartel violence, the Tamaulipas government has deployed police tactical teams and has called on the Mexican Army and the Mexican Navy to help suppress cartel activity. Military helicopters with snipers on board have been used contain cartel convoys. According to the Tamaulipas government, since the violence started there have been 20 individuals killed and six injured, however, local residents claim the death toll is higher. Mexican authorities have seized armored SUV’s, grenades, various automatic weapons and other weapons. The fighting comes days after as Breitbart Texas reported, the Mexican government killed Juan Manuel “Comandante Toro” Loiza Salinas, the regional leader of the Gulf Cartel in Reynosa. The man known as El Toro had been linked not only to drug trafficking but also to human smuggling, kidnapping, extortion and other violent crimes that have terrorized this border city. After El Toro’s death, various of his commanders have been fighting to keep control of Reynosa while rival commanders linked to the faction that controls the border city of Matamoros have been making a push for control. The border city of Matamoros is immediately south of Brownsville, Texas. Editor’s Note: Breitbart Texas traveled to the Mexican States of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and in their original Spanish. This article was written by “A. C. Del Angel” from Reynosa, Tamaulipas and “J. A. Espinoza” from Matamoros, Tamaulipas. | 1 |
ISTANBUL — Standing atop a bus outside his mansion in Istanbul on Saturday night, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, victorious after putting down a coup attempt by renegade factions of the military, told his followers, “We only bow to God. ” The symbolism was stark. The informal rally harked back to his days as an populist and Islamist leader who often spoke from the tops of buses. And his message, cloaked in the language of Islam, underscored how much Turkey has changed in recent decades. Members of the military, once the guardians of the country’s secular traditions who successfully pulled off three coups last century, were being rounded up and tossed in jail, and other perceived enemies were being purged from the state bureaucracy. The Islamists, meanwhile, were dancing in the streets. That is where, Mr. Erdogan said on Sunday, they would remain. “This week is important,” he told a crowd gathered at Istanbul’s Fatih Mosque for a funeral for a person killed in the violence over the weekend. “We will not leave the public squares. This is not a affair. ” The coup attempt seems to have been decisively quashed, with nearly 6, 000 military personnel in custody. Funerals for many of the at least 265 people who died in clashes were taking place across Turkey on Sunday. Now the country is left to consider what the lasting consequences of the uprising will be. While Mr. Erdogan has fended off a coup, the most urgent question is this: Has he emerged even more powerful, or is he now a weakened leader who must accommodate his opponents? That much of the country, including those who have bitterly opposed his government, stood against a military coup as a violation of democracy has raised hopes that Mr. Erdogan will seize the moment to reach across Turkey’s many political divides and unite the country. Yet as the weekend progressed, it was becoming clearer that for Mr. Erdogan and his religiously conservative followers, the moment was a triumph of political Islam more than anything else. While secular and liberal Turks generally opposed the coup, it was Mr. Erdogan’s supporters who flooded the streets and gathered at Istanbul’s airport Saturday morning to push out the occupying army. They mostly yelled religious slogans and chants in support of Mr. Erdogan, not of democracy itself. After Mr. Erdogan’s speech on Saturday, thousands of his supporters marched down Istiklal Street in Istanbul to Taksim Square, mostly waving Turkish flags and shouting in support of their president. It felt like a rollicking street carnival. Women in head scarves filled the square, a truck played a song about Mr. Erdogan, and passing motorists honked and waved flags. That they were able to gather in public at all was significant, ample evidence that Turkey is, these days, for Mr. Erdogan and his supporters. When other groups, like gay and lesbian organizations or labor unions, try to gather in public spaces in central Istanbul, the streets are sealed off. Armored vehicles with water cannons suddenly materialize, as do police officers with tear gas canisters. “It was nice here today,” said Ali Tuysuz, 19, who was selling watermelon slices on Saturday in Taksim. “People are happy and buying watermelon. My tray was emptied three times. President Erdogan will protect the country. ” The mosques’ role in mobilizing citizens to gather in the streets as the coup was unfolding was decisive, but it nonetheless unsettled many secular Turks. They called it a historic sidestep of Turkey’s secular principles, in which religion is meant to be separate from politics. On Sunday, Turkey’s nearly 85, 000 mosques, in unison, blared from their loudspeakers a prayer traditionally recited for martyrs who have died in war and called for people to continue to rally against the plotters of the coup. “Most of the people who went out in the streets to oppose the coup d’état did not use democratic language,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the director of the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a research organization. “There are people for whom Islam plays a big role in their lives in Turkey,” he added. “And there are people for whom Islam plays no role. ” As Turks waited to see in which direction their mercurial and powerful leader would steer the country in the wake of the coup attempt, Mr. Erdogan struck some conciliatory notes on Sunday. Yet he has also raised the possibility that Turkey would reinstate the death penalty, which it had abolished as a part of its pursuit to join the European Union. “If they have guns and tanks, we have faith,” said Mr. Erdogan, who also attended a funeral of a friend who was killed, and was seen crying. “We are not after revenge. So let us think before taking each step. We will act with reason and experience. ” Nigar Goksel, a senior Turkey analyst for the International Crisis Group, said there were two possible directions. “Either Erdogan utilizes this incident to redesign institutions in Ankara to his own benefit,” she said, “or he takes the opportunity with the solidarity that was extended to him by the opposition and different segments of society to reciprocate by investing more genuinely in rule of law and legitimate forms of dissent. ” Mr. Erdogan’s history suggests the latter possibility is unlikely. Each time he has faced a challenge to his power, from street protests three years ago to a corruption investigation that went after his inner circle, he has sidelined his enemies and become more autocratic. Already, even as the government has arrested thousands of soldiers and officers who allegedly took part in the failed coup, there were signs that it was using the moment to widen a crackdown on perceived enemies. Alongside the military, the government also dismissed thousands of judges, who seemingly had no role to play in a military revolt. “Now the government has a free hand to design the bureaucracy as they like, and they will,” Mr. Unluhisarcikli said. “All in all, Turkey will become a country where power is more consolidated and dissent will be more difficult. ” As the purge of the military continued on Sunday, one of those arrested was Gen. Bekir Ercan Van, the chief of Incirlik Air Base, from which the United States military flies missions over Iraq and Syria against the Islamic State. Over the weekend, General Van approached American officials seeking asylum but was refused, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke anonymously because of the sensitive nature of the subject. The Greek prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, told Mr. Erdogan that the government would swiftly examine asylum claims by eight Turkish officers who fled to northern Greece in a helicopter and were detained on charges of illegal entry. Turkey has demanded their extradition. As the drama of the coup attempt played out Friday and into Saturday morning, it looked for a moment as if Mr. Erdogan was on the verge of being toppled from power. The president spoke to the nation via the FaceTime app on his iPhone after he narrowly escaped being captured by mutinous soldiers, who arrived in a helicopter at a seaside hotel where he was vacationing — just after he had departed. Then, around 3:30 a. m. he landed in Istanbul, after a dangerous flight undertaken while the plotters still had fighter jets in the air — the surest sign that the revolt was failing. But more than his dramatic arrival at the Istanbul airport, his confident speech on Saturday on top of the bus seemed to emphatically declare that he was back in charge. Celebrations by his supporters continued on Sunday, with jubilant crowds marching through the streets of Istanbul. “Look around you,” one of the supporters, Eytan Karatas, 37, a mechanic, said. “Look at these people. We are the real soldiers of this country, and we have a chief. ” | 1 |
Writing at The Hill, Joe Uchill reports that Deep Root Analytics, a firm contracted by the Republican National Committee, potentially exposed the personal information of nearly 200 million voters by storing the data on an unsecured server:[A data analytics contractor employed by the Republican National Committee (RNC) left databases containing information on nearly 200 million potential voters exposed to the internet without security, allowing anyone who knew where to look to download it without a password. “We take full responsibility for this situation,” said the contractor, Deep Root Analytics, in a statement. The databases were part of 25 terabytes of files contained in an Amazon cloud account that could be browsed without logging in. The account was discovered by researcher Chris Vickery of the security firm UpGuard. The files have since been secured. Read the rest of the story at The Hill. | 1 |
Wyoming’s Jackson Hole got more of the snow that skiers crave on Tuesday night, but the heavy winds that came with it knocked out power and forced the area’s famed resort to close through the weekend. “This was a very unusual event for us,” said Anna Cole, a spokeswoman for the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, where the slopes were emptied, hotel guests were relocated and the electricity remained off on Thursday. “This will probably be the longest time that we will have to close during our operating season in our history. ” In ski resort towns across the West, snow is the economic lifeblood, and winter storms are usually coveted. Jackson Hole has already gotten more than 400 inches of snow this season, Ms. Cole said, about as much as the total from last season. But the ferocious winds that accompanied Tuesday’s weather toppled 17 steel electrical poles, local officials said, blocking roadways and turning off the lights at the resort and the surrounding area. Crews are working to restore power and clear the highways, but the weather has scrambled vacation plans and closed businesses during one of the region’s busiest months. Jason Wallace, from Austin, Tex. was part of a group that rented a house near the resort and planned to ski at Jackson Hole this week. But while waiting for his connecting flight in Denver on Wednesday, he learned of the storm damage and decided to change his plans. He is skiing in Colorado instead. “I think we all were kind of lucky to make the call pretty quickly that it wasn’t going to work,” said Mr. Wallace, who hopes to return to Jackson Hole at some point. A Special Olympics event and Skijoring, described as a mix of “extreme ski and rodeo,” scheduled at the resort this week have been canceled. Jackson Hole’s last multiday closing during ski season was in 1986, Ms. Cole said, when there was a snowstorm and avalanche risk. Resort officials said they did not foresee reopening before Monday. “I don’t know that we’ve had a power outage for this length of time,” said Melissa Turley, executive director of the Teton Village Association, the government agency that oversees the area around the resort. Still, with electrical lines strewed across the roads, Ms. Turley said residents were thankful there had been no reports of injuries or damage to buildings. Local tourism agencies worked with the resort to find hotel rooms for displaced travelers. Though power remains off at the resort, the nearby town of Jackson has electricity, another ski resort and plenty of hotel rooms, said Kate Foster, a spokeswoman for the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce. Flights continued to arrive and depart at the Jackson Hole Airport, though major airlines have offered travelers the opportunity to rebook if they would prefer. American Airlines gave its customers the option to request a refund. On Thursday’s American flight from Dallas to Jackson Hole, more than half the seats were still occupied, an airline spokesman said. And in Wyoming, where local officials were weathering an economic blow during what had been a promising ski season, many still saw a silver lining. “When the mountain resort opens,” Ms. Foster said, “it’s going to be amazing skiing. ” | 1 |
In Leaked Memo, James Comey Explains Why FBI Told Congress About Reopened Clinton Probe Zero Hedge
Having been the whipping boy of Republicans everywhere since July, following his announcement the FBI would not recommend charges against Hillary Clinton, then shockingly making the "most hated list" of every Democrat with the even more stunning news the FBI had reopened its probe of Hillary Clinton, bureau director James Comey just can't seem to win.
So in an attempt to justify his actions, a "leaked" memo emerged on Friday evening courtesy of Fox News , which explains why Comey took the unusual step of deciding to inform Congress that the FBI had reopened its investigation into Clinton’s private email server. The memo reveals two main arguments: a sense of obligation to lawmakers and a concern that word of the new email discovery would leak to the media and raise questions of a coverup.
These two arguments prompted the FBI director to release his brief letter to Congress on Friday and has sent the presidential race into a tailspin less than two weeks before Election Day. It placed Comey again at the center of a highly partisan argument over whether the nation’s top law enforcement agency was unfairly influencing the campaign.
In a memo explaining his decision to FBI employees soon after he sent his letter to Congress, Comey said he felt “an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed.” He admitted that he broke with custom in alerting lawmakers that the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server was being reopened because of its political sensitivity.
He further explained to FBI employees that “Of course we don’t ordinarily tell Congress about ongoing investigations, but here I feel an obligation to do so given that I testified repeatedly in recent months that our investigation was completed . I also think it would be misleading to the American people were we not to supplement the record."
What made this case special in Comey's eyes is that Clinton is seeking the White House in an election on Nov. 8. In other words, both internal pressure to preempt leaks (from disgruntled employees?) and a sense of "obligations" is why Hillary's campaign is in full damage control mode right now.
“At the same time, however, given that we do not know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don’t want to create a misleading impression,” Comey’s letter continued. “In trying to strike that balance, in a brief letter, and in the middle of an election season, there is significant risk of being misunderstood, but I wanted you to hear directy from me about it.”
As reported previously, the bombshell revelation that newly discovered emails had prompted a new look into whether Clinton or those around her had broken the law my mishandling sensitive information rocked the race for the White House Friday. Comey informed eight Republican lawmakers that new emails had surfaced that were relevant to the investigation, and warranted a new look.
Comey announced in July that the FBI had wrapped up a year-long investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server for official business and concluded that while she was “extremely careless,” he could not recommend that the Justice Department seek an indictment. The decision was blasted by Republicans, and FoxNews.com reported earlier this month that career DOJ and FBI workers were furious.
Now, it is the democrats turn to rage at Comey and the FBI, although Comey likely did not have much choice: had he kept the information secret, it certainly would have leaked as we predicted; as such his best recourse was to come clean, although many have speculated about the cryptic nature of the disclosure.
Needless to say, all Comey would need to do to regain the Demcorats' trust and favor is to announce in just a few days that nothing material has been found and that the second probe is also over. | 0 |
Suppose you’re at a conference. The panels and keynotes and forums have broken up, and you head off to get a drink with a handful of attendees. Are you on the record? Suki Kim, a New York Times author, found herself in such a situation when she attended a book festival in Brisbane, Australia, over the weekend. After listening to a controversial keynote address on racial and cultural identity, Kim and a few other authors retreated to a small room in the hotel for what was billed by the conference hosts as an “ ” private conversation over cocktails. But four days later, Kim found herself quoted in The New York Times, in a piece in which she criticized another prominent author by name, lamenting that his and other books by white males on topics similar to her book’s tended to be better received. Kim was outraged, and still is, that the Times reporter Rod Nordland, who she acknowledges speaking with at the event, would quote her for an article. Nordland is the Times Kabul bureau chief and is himself a recent author of a book on Afghanistan. That’s the basis on which he was invited to the book festival, and to the smaller reception: he wrote a book. Kim says she knew Nordland was a journalist (she considers herself a journalist as well) but she says she had no idea they were having an conversation for a story. They were at a book festival, after all, one exclusively for authors, and Nordland never mentioned he planned to write an article for The Times. That’s Kim’s version of events. But the more interesting fact is that’s Nordland’s version too. I spoke to both of them by phone after Kim wrote to the public editor’s office Tuesday, angry that she had been quoted by name in the story. “This is so unethical. It’s not acceptable what he did,” Kim said from Seoul, South Korea. “I would never talk about another writer in public. It’s so ungenerous and tacky. ” Nordland agrees about the circumstances of their meeting: it was authors only, in a hotel room, with eight to 10 people. But Nordland insists that because Kim knew he was a journalist, she should have had an expectation that the conversation was on the record. He also says that at the time of their conversation, he didn’t have any plans to write a story about the conference. “I don’t consider that kind of stuff off limits,” Nordland told me from London. “I’ve been in many social situations and someone might say, ‘By the way, that’s off the record.’ She didn’t say that. ” Nordland also notes that Kim made similar comments the previous day at a larger forum, during which she complained that white males who do investigative journalism for a book are generally taken more seriously than women of color (she is ). But Kim says that she didn’t mention any male authors by name at the more public event. A review of the Facebook Live video of the event confirms her version. I found Kim’s argument and perspective compelling and asked Phil Corbett, the editor who oversees issues of ethics and standards for the newsroom whether Nordland had complied with newsroom policy in this circumstance. Here’s his reply: That seems like a stretch to me in this case. I believe Kim did have an expectation of privacy at this “” “private” gathering — as the literature promoting the event described it. She was discussing books with a man she knew was an author and journalist, just like her. And there was no mention of any story. Kim is insisting, unsuccessfully, that the quote be removed. Disagreements between sources quoted in stories arise with some regularity in newsrooms. They are difficult to sort out and take any action on because it quickly turns into one person’s recollection against another’s. What’s unusual about this case is the agreement over the circumstances — Nordland acknowledges he didn’t ask to quote Kim or mention any story. That strikes me as outside the bounds of good journalistic practice. If Nordland didn’t know until the next day that he intended to write a story, he should have gone back to Kim and asked whether she was willing to be quoted. Or he should have quoted what she said the previous day at the event captured on video for the general public — the version that didn’t attack an individual author. I believe editors should speak to Nordland and make clear that his approach did not meet Times standards and was not good journalistic practice. I also believe a note should be attached to the piece saying that a portion of Kim’s remarks were inappropriately obtained at a private event. Unfortunately for Kim, at this point in the publication cycle it probably makes no sense to remove the passage. That’s too bad, because Kim had every expectation of privacy, and didn’t get it. | 1 |
Bev Harris of Black Box Voting has unearthed the most devious and diabolical plot to rig the 2016 U.S. Elections.
More reason as to why non-participation is the best way to fight a broken system. This evidence shows how your actual vote has little value.
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A $250 million Hollywood blockbuster detailing Ireland’s heroic victory over New Zealand has been greenlit.
A joint production between Disney and RTÉ, the national broadcaster is set to sell off the Fair City set for scrap in a bid to raise the necessary funding to recreate the 40-29 victory for an epic 9 hour film, with several sequels already rumoured.
Tipped to win ‘all the Oscars’ by Irish rugby fans who have just learned of the movie’s existence, tickets to the movie’s premier in the Aviva stadium have sold out, with some tickets selling online for 6-figure sums.
“This project really appealed me right after learning of the final whistle, and I couldn’t pass up the chance to play the entire Irish squad myself,” actor Daniel Day Lewis explained at the press launch announcing the beginning of production.
However, it is unclear when the movie will make its way to cinemas as Day Lewis is famed for his extensive preparation for roles.
“Daniel is expected to join Blackrock’s junior cup team this year before progressing with his junior cert studies, then he will be captaining the senior cup side. So it may be several years before he feels he can boss a game like Sexton and Murray,” explained joint directors of the movie Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.
Such is the unconfined joy created by the 40-29 victory many of the fans in attendance in Chicago are cashing in on the famous win.
“My mate Dave is doing a one man show called ‘I Was There’, he’s sold out 40 dates in Vicar Street,” explained Dublin woman Andrea Hooley, “I’ve had 8 proposals of marriage from old boyfriends after I posted a picture of myself at the game on Facebook, I won’t take any of them up on the offer but I could probably get a holiday out of one of them”.
We Beat Them, We Actually Fucking Beat Them is slated for release sometime in the next few years. | 0 |
Today’s questions come from the #AskAzzmador Twitter hashtag.
Dear Azzy,
Do you think by Donald Trump name dropping George Soros, yet again, it will force the window of understanding for people?
-Zanting
Dear Zanting,
It certainly can’t hurt. Soros is already one of the most reviled people on Earth, and everything he does is absolutely emblematic of The International Jew. He is the Jew’s Jew. The Jew to whom other Jews aspire to be.
No amount of sunlight on Soros is too much. Whether the person shedding said light is Jew-wise or not. Every time he and other major players in World Jewry are exposed more people sudd3nly see the pattern. And as we all know, once you’ve seen (((the pattern))), it is near impossible to ever ignore it again.
Azzy Q. How much more Jewy can Soros be? A. None. None more Jewy.
Dear Azzy,
Asking for a friend. My friend’s sister is a slutbag. Are the muzzies on point with the family honor thing?
-Alt Right Capybara
Dear Alt Right Capybara,
My condolences to your friend and his family for having to suffer the humiliation and discomfort that come with having a slut in the family. For at least 40 years now sluttery has been a widespread epidemic, and has grown worse with each passing year.
The causes of this plague are many. They include easy access to birth control, the breakdown of the nuclear family, the celebration of every form of degeneracy, the “free love movement” ushered in by stinky hippies who, for the most part, no one would want to have sex with unless they were out of their minds on multiple controlled substances, feminism, the loss of moral authority in our religious institutions, and many, many more reasons, which can all be vaguely but accurately summed up by saying “The Jews.” So empowered. So inspiring. Thank God we gave them the vote.
To answer your question, no, the muzzies are not on point. We can’t just go around throwing acid in the faces of sluts, as much as we might feel justified in doing so. It’s bad optics, and besides, we’re White, which means that when we have problems, we solve them, instead of chimping out and burning bitches down, whether literally or figuratively.
What we have to address is the core problems with our society that causes women to become sluts in the first place.
The patriarchy must be restored. When men ran things, sluts were viewed as the vile whores they truly are, and were relegated to the filthy corners of society where no one wants to be.
We have to end no-fault divorce. This is just a way to let a slut-in-hiding marry some poor guy, take him to the cleaners, then slut around on his dime when she’s supposed to be raising the kids.
We have to stop making sluts role models for our kids. Just look at the sluts who came out of kid’s TV programming: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus. I’m sure there are many more. And the news media is full of sluts. Megyn Kelly, for example. Just the role model for your little girls goyim. Buy tickets please.
We have to shame these sluts for their behavior. It’s a tried and true tactic, and the proof that it works is in the shrieking and bellowing of SJW sluts when you slut-shame them.
Above all else, we have to marginalize slutty behavior again. That’s the only thing that will really work. And that means we have to keep doing what we’ve been doing, which is push the Overton Window farther and farther to the right until some semblance of sanity and morality is restored to our culture, and slutty behavior is no longer rewarded.
Azzy
To submit questions to “Dear Azzy” you can post them in the Daily Stormer Forums here , in the Twitter hashtag #AskAzzmador , or for longer or more personal questions feel free to leave me a private message. | 0 |
For people in the market for a used car, the “certified ” designation has long been the gold standard, an indication that a qualified mechanic has vouched for the car and that a buyer can expect a vehicle that is — hopefully — almost as good as new. But the Takata airbag recall, which is the biggest in history, has upended all of that. Now the certified designation — known in the auto trade as C. P. O. — will no longer necessarily have the same meaning. For one thing, last month the Federal Trade Commission made it easier for cars to be billed as “certified,” even if they were under recall and hadn’t been fixed yet. And just as significantly, Ford — with the F. T. C. settlement for cover — told its dealers this week that they could sell recalled vehicles and certify them too, so long as they did not advertise them as “safe” and required buyers to sign forms acknowledging that they were aware of the problem. Against this backdrop, one dealer in Florida has refused to sell recalled vehicles that he cannot get fixed, letting 100 or so pile up on a lot miles from his main showroom. He even sued a rival who he believes is selling recalled cars without disclosing that they have not been fixed yet. How did the market get so confusing all of a sudden? For starters, the Takata airbag recall is unprecedented in its scope, with over 60 million airbags affected, but also in its complexity. Dealers can’t simply fix everything at once, because there are not enough replacement parts. As a result, the airbags most likely to cause harm are first in line for repair, and the lines for existing recalls and others to come may extend for at least a few more years. Given that situation, the Federal Trade Commission told General Motors and two dealers in December that it was just fine to advertise used vehicles as certified even if their airbags were under recall and had not been fixed. Just disclose it, the agency said (in a complaint that has sent jaws dropping throughout the auto industry). Until early this week, every major car company had said that they forbade their dealers from selling certified used vehicles with any open recalls, including ones for Takata airbags. On Monday, however, Ford broke ranks, issuing an update to dealers on its “enhanced” recall process and giving them permission to certify used vehicles that had open recalls after all. There are conditions for the dealers, including these: They must note the recall in two different places and have buyers initial a form. When parts arrive, they have to contact buyers to schedule a replacement. And no advertisements may make claims about “safety” or “safety inspections. ” So does Ford believe there is no competitive advantage to be gained from fixing all recalled cars before selling them? “It’s very difficult to answer that,” Sara Tatchio, a Ford spokeswoman, said. “We absolutely put safety first and fix everything we can. ” All the chaos, conflict and changing policies leave consumers in a frustrating position, trying to sort out who’s still selling cars that federal regulators have ordered to be fixed and just how much any seller is disclosing. While federal law prevents dealers from selling new cars with an open recall, no federal law forbids them from selling used ones that way, even if some state consumer protection laws might help an injured owner’s case. In the complex ecosystem of and with wholesalers and sellers of various sorts, this has created a number of challenges and a wide range of responses, including some prominent companies that have changed their policies 180 degrees. Whatever policies they set, automakers have only so much control, given that people who work at dealerships occasionally go rogue. Moreover, dealers sometimes certify a car as clean and put it up for sale — and then it’s recalled right after that. If the dealer does not catch it and pull the car out of the sales inventory, it is violating the automaker’s rules (and could attract the attention of the F. T. C. ). Buyers who wonder how safe it is to drive with a recalled Takata airbag and check the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website will learn the following: “The vast majority of Takata airbags will perform as expected. ” Oh, but: “Lives have been lost due to this defect. ” Reaction in the industry to Ford’s move was somewhat muted. Audi, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mazda and Subaru said they had no plans to follow Ford’s move. Toyota’s response was a bit more squishy. “We are not going to speculate on what impact the F. T. C. ruling may or may not have on Toyota’s current policy,” Aaron Fowles, a Toyota spokesman, said via email. “But there have been no changes to date. ” The chain CarMax has taken a similar approach to Ford’s. While it too had a recent with the F. T. C. over disclosure issues, the company says that it is transparent as possible, from its online listings to its interactions. But why sell cars with open recalls at all, thus putting the onus on consumers to sort out the repair? In a statement on its website, CarMax, which cannot repair recalled vehicles itself, states that “customers are in the best position to act on recall information. ” How can that be? Well, CarMax explains that dealers who are authorized to do recall repairs are more likely to repair cars quickly when working with an individual. If CarMax showed up with dozens of cars, those dealers might shun it because it competes with that dealer’s operation. Does this sound like an extremely useful conspiracy theory designed to dump all the hassle on consumers, who have the least knowledge of how the system works? Would CarMax at least call out said manufacturers by name, to help get to the bottom of this? No, it would not. “Some manufacturers have provided guidance to their dealers that they should remediate recalls for dealer customers first,” a CarMax spokeswoman, Catherine M. Gryp, said in an email message. “Across the country, we have been put in the back of the line for recall repairs. ” AutoNation took a different approach, at least at first. In 2015, its chief executive, Mike Jackson, told Automotive News that the recall situation was “a dysfunctional nightmare that the industry should be ashamed of. ” The company pledged to sell no cars with open recalls, period. By last year, it was costing the company dearly, to the tune of 6 cents per share of its earnings in the third quarter. In November, it gave up and began selling some cars with open recalls (and full disclosures). The lack of Takata airbag replacements, the F. T. C. ’s decision and other anticipated regulatory rollbacks proved to be too much. “We are proud of the efforts we made, but sometimes the system beats you down,” Marc Cannon, the company’s chief marketing officer, said. Sounds kind of like what it feels like to be a consumer in the middle of all this. If you’re about to start shopping for a used car, begin at safercar. gov. There, you can look up cars — even the vehicle identification number of a specific car you’re considering — to see what recalls are in effect. A report from Carfax can help you figure out whether a recalled car has been fixed. But don’t stop there. Ask the dealer about any open recalls, as well as any proof they might have that they have gotten the recall fixed. Trust, but verify. (Actually? Don’t trust too much, and verify twice.) Worried about a car that you already have? You should be, both about future Takata recalls and others that we don’t know about yet. Rosemary Shahan of the Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety suggests registering your vehicle both with your car’s manufacturer and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration so that you get a notice if your airbag or anything else comes up for recall. Run the vehicle identification number through some checks yourself from time to time too, just to make sure you’re not missing anything. You might also hope that more dealers act out in the same way as Earl Stewart of Lake Park, Fla. He refuses to sell used cars with open recalls, but he doesn’t want to turn away people who are trading in cars with recalled Takata airbags that they have not been able to get fixed yet. This policy isn’t just good customer service if he can’t take their trade, they might not buy another vehicle from him at the same time that they turn their old one in. As a result, however, he has 100 or so cars sitting in a lot waiting for repair. And when he sent secret shoppers into competing dealers to see how much disclosure they were doing about recalled cars they were selling, he was outraged at what he found. “Maybe this is unique to South Florida, but they are all extremely devious and proactively trying to sell recalled cars by saying there is no recall,” Mr. Stewart said. So he filed a lawsuit to try to swing others over to his way of doing things. “I don’t want the money — I just want to stop the practice,” he said. “We’re going to keep filing suits until they throw the towel in. ” | 1 |
Code for blog Syria: Tortured by war Will there be peace for Syria? Will the country live in peace? When is it peace in Syria? What will be happening in the country after the war? The Syrians can hardly believe the hell, in which they have been living for years, will ever end.
AP | 0 |
CNN cut away from a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday morning, seconds after Sen. Lindsey Graham ( ) raised concerns that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had hired a former Clinton Foundation attorney to assist with the probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. [Graham was questioning Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was sitting in for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Democrats have long accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia, though no evidence has emerged. There is also speculation that Special Counsel Mueller will probe allegations of obstruction of justice against President Donald Trump. Earlier this week, reports emerged that Mueller had hired attorneys for his investigative team who had donated to Hillary Clinton in the past, and one in particular who had represented the Clinton Foundation in its effort to block Freedom of Information Act requests for on Clinton’s private server. Graham: Is giving political donations a reason to disqualify somebody for serving in the Special Counsel’s office? Rosenstein: No, Senator, it is not a disqualification. It is not. Graham: As a matter of fact, many states, the judges and prosecutors are actually elected. Donations are a part of that system, is that correct? Rosenstein: Yes, that’s true. Graham: Would it be a disqualification for somebody in the Special Counsel’s office who had represented Mrs. Clinton in the past to serve? Rosenstein: You know, Senator, it would depend on facts and circumstances. As a general matter, I think the answer is no. Graham: Isn’t that much closer to a conflict of interest? Rosenstein: I don’t want to answer a hypothetical, Senator. Everybody needs to make a determination based on the facts and circumstances of the individual case. Graham: How would you get it before the Special Counsel? What process could a member of the Senate use to inform the Special Counsel that you’d have a concern about hiring someone that represented Clinton? Rosenstein: We have a process within the Department of Justice, Senator, so I would encourage you, if you have those concerns, to raise them with [former] Director Mueller or to raise them with me, and I’ll make sure — Graham: So should I do it to you or to him? Rosenstein: Well, you could do it to both. Graham: Okay. That’s fair enough. Rosenstein: And we have career — Graham: And I don’t know if I’ll do that, but I’ve read some things that were — I don’t think donations are disqualifying at all, but if you represented the Clinton Foundation or Clinton herself, that would be disturbing to me, but I’ll take care of that. CNN cut back to the studio shortly after that, while Graham was still questioning Rosenstein. Earlier, Graham had asked Rosenstein whether there was “any reason, for cause, to fire Mr. Mueller. ” Rosenstein had said he did not know of any reason. 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. | 1 |
Donald J. Trump and his allies struggled on Sunday to move beyond the revelation that he might have been able to legally avoid nearly two decades of federal income taxation, putting new pressure on the candidate just as he tries to recover from a lackluster debate performance. Mr. Trump’s campaign lurched between refusing to acknowledge that the 1995 tax records, portions of which were published on Saturday night by The New York Times, were bona fide, to insisting that his not having paid taxes was evidence of his unrivaled business prowess. The Times report, based on documents obtained by the newspaper, showed that Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, declared a $916 million loss on his 1995 income tax returns, which could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any federal income taxes for up to 18 years. At a rally in Lancaster County, Pa. that began shortly before the article was published, Mr. Trump seemed jarred by the pending revelation, shifting from topic to topic mocking his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, for having had pneumonia and insinuating that she might have cheated on her husband. The performance capped a bruising week for Mr. Trump, who went from a widely panned debate performance against Mrs. Clinton on Sept. 26 to repeatedly mocking Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe who is Hispanic, including with a string of Twitter posts around 5 a. m. on Friday. That Twitter storm raised new questions about Mr. Trump’s temperament, for which Mrs. Clinton has often criticized him. Mr. Trump is now limping into the final five weeks of a race in which he has lost the momentum, some of his allies acknowledged. “This is the most important week of his campaign,” said Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and an adviser to Mr. Trump. Mr. Gingrich was critical of the taxes article but said the candidate must prepare seriously for the second presidential debate, on Oct. 9. Mr. Trump, he said, will have to decide whether he cares enough about the presidency to change his style. To regain footing and try to turn attention back on Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump plans to use a speech on Monday in Colorado to call attention to how both Clintons became very wealthy after leaving the White House, said Jason Miller, a campaign spokesman. On Sunday, Mr. Trump’s advisers sought to play down questions about the tax returns. “The man’s a genius,” Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former New York mayor and a close adviser to Mr. Trump, said on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union. ” “He knows how to operate the tax code for the people that he’s serving. ” In this case, Mr. Giuliani added, Mr. Trump had simply acted as any responsible American businessman would to save money for his enterprises. Mr. Trump’s investors, he added, could have brought legal action against Mr. Trump had he not taken advantage of the tax law’s provisions to avoid taxation. But in an ABC News interview, Mr. Giuliani, sounding increasingly frayed, offered a remark that focused explicitly on Mrs. Clinton’s gender. “Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the F. B. I. checking out her emails?” he asked. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, another adviser to Mr. Trump, argued that rather than demonstrating any kind of malfeasance, the tax records published by The Times showed Mr. Trump to be singularly qualified to overhaul the federal tax code. Not only that, Mr. Christie said, but the documents supporting the report illustrated Mr. Trump’s success in what the governor characterized as the weak economic climate of the early 1990s. “This is a guy who, when lots of businesses went out of business in the early 1990s, he fought and clawed back to build another fortune, to create tens of thousands of more jobs,” Mr. Christie said on “Fox News Sunday. ” “This is actually a very, very good story for Donald Trump,” he added. Mr. Trump’s tax returns — which he has repeatedly refused to release, in defiance of what has become the norm for presidential candidates over the last four decades — have been a lingering battle in his contest with Mrs. Clinton, who has released her returns regularly throughout her political career. Mrs. Clinton seized on the Times report, using Twitter on Sunday to release a “Trump ‘Smart’ Tax Calculator” to show how much users would pay in taxes “if you paid the same as ‘billionaire’ Donald Trump. ” The answer — at different income levels reaching into the tens of millions of dollars — came up as zero. The Times report has refocused attention on Mr. Trump’s finances as the campaign moves into its final phase, giving Democrats a new opportunity to discredit the Republican nominee and forcing his surrogates to quickly try to change the conversation. Mr. Trump’s campaign did not contest or confirm the report, but a lawyer for the candidate said in a statement that the publication of the tax records was illegal. Writing on Twitter on Sunday morning, Mr. Trump reiterated part of his campaign’s statement, boasting that he understood “our complex tax laws better than anyone who has ever run for president” and that he had created far more jobs than Mrs. Clinton. Supporters of Mrs. Clinton used the Times report not only to draw attention to Mr. Trump’s refusal to release his returns, but also to portray him as an unreliable businessman and the embodiment of a system “rigged” in favor of the wealthy, a line that Mr. Trump has favored on the campaign trail. “He crashes businesses into bankruptcy, leaving scores of businesses unpaid — people really hurting with the losses his companies have suffered — but he walks away unscathed,” Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, said on “Fox News Sunday. ” “It appears he walks away with a golden ticket that allows him under the tax code to avoid taxes for decades. ” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who battled for the Democratic nomination with Mrs. Clinton, said that far from making Mr. Trump a genius, the tax disclosure illustrated the unfair advantage given to wealthy Americans. “The rich are getting richer,” Mr. Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week. ” “Almost everybody else is getting poorer. And yet billionaires like Donald Trump are able to manipulate the tax system so that they avoid paying federal income tax. ” | 1 |
October 27, 2016
Won’t you take pity on this poor, innocent little child?
This image of a “16-year-old” migrant crying – which is currently plastered on the front page of The Guardian – is nothing short of laughable.
“A 16-year-old from Ethiopia cries while he awaits registration at a processing centre in the makeshift refugee camp near Calais,” the photo’s caption reads. The image is placed under a headline reading: “Councils resist pressure to take children from Calais.”
This crying “child” is supposed to make Brits feel guilty and demand their government allow “children” like him into their nation.
The image is not a fake, nor is it being used satirically. It comes from the Associated Press’ Emilio Morenatti , you can see four pictures of the man for sale on their website .
The “child migrant” is clearly in his 40’s, yet their editors evidently believe their readers are so incredibly stupid they’ll actually believe they’re looking at a 16-year-old boy.
A look at Emilio’s twitter shows one person appears to have actually bought the lie: @morenatti2004 Imposible no hacernos mirar y luego, un nudo en la garganta. pic.twitter.com/A7zvz5440q
— Luján Artola Paulos (@rowley_bel) October 25, 2016
“Impossible not make us look, then, a lump in the throat,” the tweet reads.
Incidentally, Ethiopia is not even a war zone, so I’m not sure how this 45-year-old man can even be considered a “refugee.” 42 | 0 |
NTEB Ads Privacy Policy Naval Air Forces ‘Doomsday Plane’ Circled Over Denver For Hours, Spraying Chemtrails Over Metro Area The 'doomsday plane' aircraft – usually launched at the outbreak of a nuclear attack - was spotted circling by thousands of US citizens on the ground. The unbranded plane travelled across several states and changed directions numerous times, prompting a Twitter frenzy of conspiracy theories. by Geoffrey Grider November 19, 2016 A TOP-SECRET United States aircraft known as the ‘Doomsday Plane’ was spotted in the skies over America circling the Denver metro area
The aircraft – usually launched at the outbreak of a nuclear attack – was spotted circling by thousands of US citizens on the ground. The unbranded plane travelled across several states and changed directions numerous times, prompting a Twitter frenzy of conspiracy theories .
These were only intensified after a spokeswoman for the Naval Air Forces confirmed the plane was in fact their own E-6B Mercury, also known as the Doomsday Plane. Mysterious U.S.A.F ‘Doomsday Plane’ Circling Over Denver Metro Area:
Not only was the mysterious ‘Doomsday Plane’ circling over the Denver metro area for hours, it also seemed to be spraying chemtrails out the back as it circled.
Local news outlet Denver7 tracked flight IRON99 as it traveled from the west coast to Oklahoma. The plane eventually landed at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma city after an hour loitering above Denver.
The news station’s initial attempts to find where the plane originated proved fruitless as officials from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM), North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and a dozen Air Force Bases could not confirm the flight.
The next day, however, the Navy confirmed that the mysterious aircraft was in fact one of its E-6B Mercury planes, known as the ‘Doomsday plane’ , and was simply returning to its homebase. These planes, created by Boeing at a cost of $141.7 million per unit, have the capability to launch nuclear missiles and communicate with nuclear submarines.
The overall mission of the E-6B is to provide “command, control and communications abilities between the National Command Authority (NCA) and U.S. strategic and non-strategic forces.”
A nd if you think all that is creepy , which it is, just remember what it was circling over… The Secrets of the Denver International Airport
The most amazing thing about the Denver International Airport (DIA) is not that it is filled to the brim with very freaky occultic symbols everywhere you look, it’s that it is everywhere you look. Instead of trying to hide them, or be clever about it, these works of darkness are on bold display, daring you to figure them out. And there is no question of any kind that all these symbols do indeed tell a story that is yet to be realized. The story of an evil, tragic holocaust. Do I have your attention?
The satanic nature of the Masons is well-known , and we shall not go into that here in this article. (if you would like to learn about Freemasonry, click here for an excellent introduction.) But what I would like to call your attention to is what is written right under the Masons logo. It reads “New World Airport Commission.” Not only does it sound like a name created by conspiracy theorists, the other startling fact is that the ‘New World Airport Commission’ doesn’t seem to exist. Anywhere.
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BEIJING — When Wang Ge, a business school student, wakes up, she often asks herself, “What would Ivanka do?” That would be Ivanka Trump, the eldest daughter of President Trump, a woman Ms. Wang has never met but worships. In the United States, Ms. Trump has become a controversial figure, battling persistent questions about business conflicts and criticism for not doing more to moderate her father’s policies toward women. But in China, Ms. Trump is widely adored. Her lavish lifestyle and business acumen resonate with many young professionals who are hungry for fame and fortune in a society that often equates material wealth with success. Ms. Wang keeps photos of Ms. Trump on her iPad. She counsels friends to read Ms. Trump’s tips (“Find strength in others” and “Be an optimist”). And she models her day on Ms. Trump’s, waking at 6 a. m. to increase productivity and setting aside at least a to read. “She’s pretty, she has her own career, she’s hardworking and she has a beautiful family,” said Ms. Wang, 26, a student at Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing. “She inspires me. ” While Mr. Trump, who meets President Xi Jinping of China in Florida on Thursday, has bluntly assailed China on issues like trade and North Korea, Ms. Trump has helped soften her father’s volcanic image. She is called a “goddess” on social media. A video of her daughter singing in Chinese went viral, attracting tens of millions of viewers. Working mothers have latched onto Ms. Trump’s brand of feminism, even if most lack her financial resources, and entrepreneurs have studied her speeches for clues on making successful pitches. Xinhua, the official news agency, weighed in last week, describing Ms. Trump as having an “elegant and poised style. ” “A lot of people think Ivanka is the real president,” said Li Moya, 31, who runs an app for renting venue space in Beijing. “We think she has the brains, not her father. ” Young Chinese women working in sectors like technology and finance have been especially taken by Ms. Trump, whom they see as an elegant symbol of power and ambition. They say they have sought to mimic her tenacity and confidence as they confront chauvinism and stereotypes in the workplace and in family life. Many are also impressed by Ms. Trump’s decision to start her own fashion brand rather than simply focus on the family real estate business. “She’s very independent,” said Wang Jiabao, 28, a reality television producer in Beijing. “She represents what we’re looking for — to marry into a decent family, to look good, and to also have your own career. ” Some also believe Ms. Trump embodies Confucian values, pointing to her decision to convert to Judaism for her husband and her steadfast defense of her father, both seen as illustrations of a devotion to family. In China’s urban centers, Ms. Trump’s tips on leading a balanced life (“Don’t sleep with your BlackBerry next to your bed,” says one) have found a large audience. On messaging apps, young professionals trade translations of her guides, while working mothers share her advice on carving out time for loved ones. Chinese companies have also tried to profit from Ms. Trump’s popularity, filing hundreds of trademark applications using her name — Yi Wan Ka in Chinese — on products and services such as shoes, spa treatments, plastic surgery and pottery. Still, Ms. Trump has her critics. Some are skeptical of her father’s policies and disturbed by her decision to join his administration, in which she serves as assistant to the president. Others believe that as a child of privilege she is a poor role model for everyday Chinese people. “She’s trying too hard and pretending too much,” said Shi Yixuan, 22, an administrative staff member at Peking University in Beijing. But many women see recognizable Chinese attributes. “Underneath her image are very traditional values,” said Dai Linjia, a communications consultant. “Her family is almost like a dynasty. ” While her father has threatened a trade war with China and criticized China’s efforts to build outposts in the South China Sea, Ms. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, have embarked on a charm offensive with the country. It helps that her daughter, Arabella, speaks Chinese, which she began learning from her Chinese nanny. Ms. Trump and Arabella attended a Lunar New Year festival at the Chinese Embassy in Washington in February, an event broadcast on China’s news. On Tuesday, two days before her father was to meet Mr. Xi, Ms. Trump posted a photo of her younger son, Theodore, playing with wooden blocks emblazoned with Chinese characters. Analysts said Ms. Trump’s popularity could help ease the relationship between China and the United States at a tense time. “Her father is a regular critic of China, so Ivanka’s moves sort of compensate for that,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “The Chinese government will see there are both ugly and positive messages coming out of the U. S. ” Many younger Chinese will be watching this week’s meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi for signs of Ms. Trump. Ms. Wang, the business school student, said she hoped that Ms. Trump could help improve China’s standing in the United States. “She’s a very good role model,” she said. “I think she can help the two countries grow closer. ” | 1 |
Russia Today reports:
RT Arabic’s crew in Aleppo reports 36 cases of suffocation.
“A couple of hours ago we received some 35 patients, all mildly hurt. Their symptoms match those that appear when a person is poisoned by chlorine gas,” doctor Yazan Sarmani told Ruptly at Al Razi hospital in Aleppo.
“The victims are soldiers but there are also civilians among them. They all suffered from chlorine gas [poisoning], that is why they showed intensive lacrimation and breathing difficulties. We took care of them, administered oxygen and gave them medicine. Some of them had to be hospitalized,” he added.
Al-Mayadeen earlier reported that all the victims of the attack are civilians.
“The symptoms the victims showed were the same, but of different severity: watery eyes, frothing at the mouth, vomiting, nausea. All were either lightly or mildly hurt,” doctor Zahir Hamdi Hadzhu, a medical examiner from Aleppo, also told RT Arabic over the phone. “We asked some victims what they smelled… Their responses were the same: after the fall of the shell they [smelled] the odor which is often met at swimming pools.”
“The symptoms and the smell indicate that chlorine gas was used. The final confirmation will be available after lab tests,” he said, adding that there may be more than 40 victims of the gas attack, as patients keep coming in.
Militants reportedly used the poisonous gas in an attack on the Assad Military Academy in the Assad Suburb in western Aleppo, as a part of a broader offensive against government positions in the city which was launched on Friday.
Victims at the hospital described the gas attack to Ruptly video agency.
“They fired at us from mortars and attacked our positions with armored vehicles. We were circled. Shells were falling like rain. They also fired some poisonous substance at us. Then we were brought here,” a man wearing army camouflage said.
“The whole world should now see what is going on in the south-western part of Aleppo where the terrorists are using the chemical weapons again,” says political analyst Bassam Abdullah. “We should know that we are in front of terrorist groups, not moderate opposition, which are not respecting international law. Every day and night they are attacking the western part of Aleppo, while at the same time, the Syrian Army with the Russians… opened aid exits for civilians from the eastern part to go outside. We know that terrorists are preventing anyone to leave the eastern part of Aleppo.”
It is not yet confirmed what gas was used in the attack, but Al Mayadeen claims that fighting near the academy continues.
The head of the political office of the Aleppo-based rebel group Fastaqim denied the report of gas being used in the attack, according to Reuters.
According to RT reporter Murad Gazdiev, who is in Aleppo, nine people were killed and 50 more injured in militant shelling on Sunday morning.
“As part of this rebel offensive in Aleppo we are also hearing that they are utilizing suicide bombers. Four apparent infiltrators blew themselves up inside Aleppo city,” Gazdiev said.
He added that 10 other similar cases are said to have occurred at the frontline with “armored personnel carriers, trucks packed with explosives blowing their way through the Syrian defenses.”
Rebels launched a major offensive against government forces in Aleppo this week, attempting to break the siege on the eastern part of the city which they now control. Rebels from various groups are taking part in the assault, including those fighting under the FSA (Free Syrian Army) banner and Islamist militants.
Last week, Russian and Syrian government forces halted strikes on the rebel-held positions in the city, hoping the initiative would lead to a long-awaited ceasefire. But according to military intelligence, militants used this period to transfer reinforcements to the area of Khan Tuman in the south and Kafr Hamra in the north of Aleppo, amounting to about 8 thousand fighters.
The Syrian government has been recently accused of using chemical weapons, including chlorine gas, in its attacks on militants. Several reports by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the UN’s joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM) claimed that Syrian Arab Air Force helicopters used chemical weapons in a number of cases in 2014 and 2015. Moscow, however, dismissed these accusations, pointing to the lack solid proof and substantiated evidence that it was in fact the Syrian Army that conducted the attacks in question. The use of chlorine as a weapon is prohibited under the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined in 2013, after a Russian diplomatic effort. In January of that year, OPCW confirmed the destruction of all chemical weapons declared by the Syrian Arab Republic. | 0 |
Thanks to an aggressive push by streaming services like Netflix and Seeso, there have never been more new hours of comedians telling jokes than right now. Netflix’s deals with Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle (who will post two filmed concerts on Tuesday) have received most of the attention, but what makes this golden age of specials particularly exciting is the amount of new work from young comics on the rise. Here’s a look at some recent noteworthy releases. The first time Jerrod Carmichael appears onscreen performing, he’s not walking onstage, as in most specials, but already there. It’s a tight of his face. After starting a sentence, he pauses to reconsider, then continues tentatively, gently posing a question in a way that makes you think he doesn’t know the answer: “Are we going to be O. K.?” Staged by a fellow comic, Bo Burnham, who beautifully directed this special in the Masonic Hall in Manhattan, it’s a startlingly intimate opening that anticipates the quietly searching, introspective jokes that follow. The recent presidential election shadows this hour, particularly in its melancholy mood. Mr. Carmichael is a deeply political comic, but his contrarian perspective is clarified as much by the way he probes his psyche as by his examination of the issues. His apathy is a central theme. In a culture in which so many on social media trumpet their moral rightness, Mr. Carmichael, who has an acclaimed NBC sitcom, “The Carmichael Show,” invites the audience, sometimes explicitly, to judge his wrongness. He explains his indifference to global warming or inability to support the troops with conviction. In his delivery, he presents confessions of embarrassing thoughts, transgressions that are not cheap provocations so much as the activity of a free and fearless mind. Explaining that Jay Z means more to him than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. he says plainly: “I know every Jay Z lyric. I only know, like, four bars of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. ” Is Katherine Ryan the new Joan Rivers? The British news media has been saying that about Ms. Ryan, a Canadian comic in her early 30s who became famous in Britain through and appearances. She doesn’t shy away from the association. “They say I’m Joan Rivers, but older,” she says in a typical zing of a punch line. Like Ms. Rivers, she does crowd work and racial humor. And she also does raunchy jokes in an register that evokes Sarah Silverman. In general, Ms. Ryan is more likely to remind you of other performers than lay a claim to her own style. She has charming moments but could use an editor her impressions of Bill Cosby and Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons” are unpersuasive. One reason Rivers was so singular is that, while she desperately wanted laughs, her instinct was to challenge rather than pander to her audience. Here is where Ms. Ryan parts ways with Rivers. When she tells a joke about how out of shape Americans are, she’s giving British fans exactly what they want. Cristela Alonzo, a comic, walked into a bar down South. “I asked the bartender for an Old Fashioned, so he took away my voting rights,” she says, pivoting to the next joke. “I’m kidding. I’m Latina. I didn’t vote. ” Ms. Alonzo, who had a ABC sitcom, is a dynamic stage presence, addressing audience members as if they’re old friends while effortlessly projecting to the last row. In between jokes, she flashes a bewildered smile, as if she can’t believe what she just said. In this set, her nostalgic portrait of her late mother is genuinely moving, but her funniest material, about the challenges of being poor, brings to mind the best of Roseanne Barr. Her finest set piece investigates her childhood fantasy about the band New Kids on the Block, which, she recalls, involved her working as a maid on their tour bus. “Even in my fantasy,” she marveled, “I can’t give Latinos better jobs. ” Midway through his impressively polished debut special, Fahim Anwar — one of a growing number of gifted Muslim comics working clubs (Hasan Minhaj and Mo Amer are two others to keep a close eye on) — paused to boast with mock swagger that he was now part of the most feared minorities in the United States. An American of Afghan descent, Mr. Anwar conceded that remain in the competition. “In a dark alley, you might be more afraid of him than me,” he said of black men, “but on public transportation, I feel like I win that one. ” While he has some material about his background, Mr. Anwar does not linger on it. His jokes cover familiar territory (movie clichés, auditioning) but what makes him one of the most exciting young today, and one with breakout potential, is his outlandish physicality and showmanship. He starts jokes as a stationary observational comic, but finishes them with cartoonish voices, expressive eyes (he can telegraph a in darting pupils) and deliriously silly dance moves. The current he most evokes is Sebastian Maniscalco, another kinetic comic specializing in character work. Mr. Anwar even has an alter ego, an arrogant comic named Lance Cantstopolis, who is a mix of Borat and Tony Clifton. He shows up at the end of the special for a second, but I would not be surprised if this cartoonish character finds his own vehicle before too long. Carmen Lynch has such a mellow, meandering, deadpan delivery that it’s easy to underestimate how many punch lines she packs into a minute. Tall with a lopsided grin, she has a casual, style that masks a sneakily dark sensibility and precision writing. This approach has allowed her to kill regularly in short sets around New York for years. Her first album is punchy and quick, shifting with alacrity from bits about family to dating. Her attitude is wry laced with hints of melancholy. “I think money makes you happy,” she said in a typical quick setup. “I cried in a Mercedes once, and it wasn’t that bad. ” It’s only when her jokes don’t get exactly the response she wants that she pulls the emotional heartstrings: “Please laugh at all my jokes,” she said. “I have a heart murmur. ” | 1 |
Bud Selig, the folksy former commissioner of Major League Baseball who presided over an unprecedented period of expansion, innovation and turmoil in the sport, was elected to the Hall of Fame on Sunday by the hall’s restructured veterans committee along with John Schuerholz, the World general manager with the Atlanta Braves and the Kansas City Royals. “To say this is a great day in my life would be an understatement,” Selig said on a conference call Sunday. “I’ve looked forward to this day for a long time and I’m really honored to say the least. ” Selig was named on 15 ballots and Schuerholz on all 16 from a new version of the veterans’ committee created to consider not only older players but also candidates who are not eligible for election through the traditional process, a vote by baseball writers. The group, the Today’s Game Era Committee, is made up of eight Hall of Fame inductees, five M. L. B. executives and three writers and historians. Inductees needed a minimum of 12 votes at baseball’s winter meetings outside of Washington. Selig and Schuerholz will be inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N. Y. in July. George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees from 1973 until his death in 2010, was also on the ballot but received fewer than five votes, failing to be elected for the third time. Also on the ballot were the former players Mark McGwire, Albert Belle, Harold Baines, Orel Hershiser and Will Clark. Davey Johnson and Lou Piniella were also considered for their careers as managers. McGwire, who hit 583 home runs but admitted to using steroids during his playing career, also received fewer than five votes. Selig, the original owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, led baseball from 1992 through 2014, one of the most dynamic and controversial periods in its history, in which the sport grew into a $10 industry. He governed, in part, through his ability to build consensus among the owners, perhaps his greatest skill. “We were a sport resistant to change,” Selig said. “I believe in those years that is the most change in baseball history. ” Selig, 82, was the acting commissioner during the worst strike in baseball history, a work stoppage that wiped out the 1994 World Series, and the steroid era that so badly tarnished the image of the game. But baseball has now gone 22 years without a work stoppage, and, after great upheaval and acrimony, it has instituted a stringent drug policy. “Yes, it was terribly painful, broke my heart,” he said of the 1994 strike. “But it served as a great lesson and we took it. The same thing with the steroid thing. Yes it was painful, yes it had its ups and downs. But we solved that problem. We now have the toughest testing program in American sports. ” Selig is credited with introducing popular innovations including the playoff system, realignment, interleague play and television replay of umpires’ decisions, as well as with the creation of baseball’s lucrative internet presence, M. L. B. Advanced Media. More than anything, Selig was a tireless supporter of and midmarket teams, pushing through policies that redistributed millions of dollars from the larger market teams to the smaller ones. That, combined with the increased number of playoff spots, gave clubs from cities like Detroit, Houston, Kansas City and Tampa Bay entrée into the World Series in recent years. “What I inherited in ’92 was a system that was archaic and hadn’t been changed since what I call the Ebetts Field and Polo Grounds days,” he said. “I am proudest of that. It was painful and took a lot of time, but it saved a lot of clubs who would tell you they wouldn’t be in business. ” Another of Selig’s legacies — tethering the result of the Game to advantage in the World Series — was rescinded in the latest version of baseball’s collective bargaining agreement with its players’ union. Selig was also an advocate for recognizing baseball’s role as a social institution. In 1997, he was instrumental in honoring Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947, by having all teams retire Robinson’s No. 42. Once a minority owner of the Milwaukee Braves, Selig brought baseball back to Wisconsin in 1970 when he bought the Seattle Pilots, renamed them the Brewers and moved them into Milwaukee’s County Stadium. He succeeded Fay Vincent, of whom he had been critical as an owner, as the acting commissioner of baseball in 1992, then assumed the role permanently in 1998. Schuerholz, 76, was the general manager of the Royals from 1981 until 1990 and presided over their 1985 World Series championship. He moved to Atlanta in 1990 to rebuild the Braves, and within a year he had constructed a team that would go on to win 14 consecutive National League East titles (not including the strike year of 1994) five National League pennants and the 1995 World Series. Results of the regular annual election, the baseball writers’ vote on recently retired candidates, will be announced on Jan. 18. | 1 |
Wilbur L. Ross, the billionaire investor expected to be nominated as the next commerce secretary, has made his fortune through the tricky business of buying deeply troubled companies. With wealth estimated at $2. 9 billion, Mr. Ross, who turns 79 on Monday, would join a cabinet that is already expected to include one of the superwealthy in Betsy DeVos, the nominee for secretary of education, and that may soon have others. In choosing Mr. Ross to be the face of American business for the rest of the world, Donald J. Trump is turning not to a cautious corporate chieftain, but to a speculator. Like his presumptive boss, Mr. Ross has been considered either a hero or a villain during his career. There is not a lot in between. In 2002, he won praise from workers when he bought the shuttered steel mills of LTV, a bankrupt company in Cleveland. Four years later, Mr. Ross was pilloried after an explosion at the Sago Mine in West Virginia, which his company had bought a few weeks earlier, killed 12 miners. The stark contrasts reflect the nature of the world in which Mr. Ross operates: distressed investing. He made his name scouring the landscape for businesses left for dead that he could sink money into and then profit from when they were resurrected. It is a business that requires nerves of steel and a strong stomach. The chances of failure — along with headlines about collapsed businesses and lost jobs — are balanced against the opportunity for a big reward if a turnaround strategy works. Some businesses where he has invested, like textile mills, have struggled. But other investments have salvaged industry and jobs while providing a lucrative payday. His bet was in the steel industry more than a decade ago, a time when few wanted anything to do with it. Mr. Ross cobbled together the ailing assets of LTV and Bethlehem Steel into a new company called International Steel Group, which was sold in 2004 to Mittal Steel for $4. 5 billion. “There were no outsiders who were willing to step forward and make an investment,” said Ron Bloom, an investment banker who negotiated with Mr. Ross for the United Steelworkers. “He went where angels feared to tread. ” Like his investing, the politics of Mr. Ross, a former Democrat, do not always stick to orthodox points of view. Mr. Ross has expressed strong conservative beliefs on some issues — favoring big tax cuts for businesses, for example, and a repeal of President Obama’s health law. Yet Mr. Ross has also suggested that he is receptive to some of the views favored by American labor unions and by Mr. Trump. “The president has a huge amount of fire in terms of abrogating treaties, and he can do a lot without reference to Congress,” Mr. Ross said in an interview the day after the election. Mr. Ross, a member of Mr. Trump’s economic team during the campaign, said he expected the new president to do a lot on trade and regulation through executive action. “He is serious about suspending any new regulations,” said Mr. Ross, who held one of Mr. Trump’s first . A spokesman for Mr. Trump, Jason Miller, said: “Though Trump has not yet announced his pick for this position, it goes without saying that Mr. Ross has been a fantastic advocate for the ’s plan to bring back jobs, eliminate the trade deficit and make good deals for America’s workers. ” The nomination of Mr. Ross would be the capstone to a career on Wall Street that has spanned decades and has made him one of the most visible and successful of a breed of investor known as “vultures” because of their penchant for going after nearly dead businesses. Mr. Ross, by contrast, has often preferred to see himself as another kind of bird — the mythical phoenix, helping businesses rise from the ashes. To some degree, Mr. Ross helped Mr. Trump do that when some of his casinos in Atlantic City fell on hard times. Mr. Ross and Carl C. Icahn, another billionaire investor and supporter of Mr. Trump, were both bondholders in the Trump Taj Mahal casino when it was teetering on financial collapse in 1990. Instead of pushing the casino into an immediate bankruptcy, Mr. Ross and Mr. Icahn worked with Mr. Trump and others to structure a more orderly bankruptcy filing in 1991. The negotiated restructuring helped Mr. Trump salvage his name and brand at a time when he arguably did not have many friends on Wall Street. The low point of Mr. Ross’s career was the deadly mine disaster in West Virginia. Although he helped set up a charitable fund for the families of the victims, and his company contributed more than $1 million to them as well, some in organized labor remain bitter about Mr. Ross and his firm. Still, that episode has not deterred some unions from doing business with him when it was in their interest. In 2012, Mr. Ross was one of the wealthy investors who gave a $50 million cash infusion to Amalgamated Bank, one of the nation’s largest lenders, which was struggling to stay in business after the financial crisis. An affiliate of the Service Employees International Union, which controlled the ailing Amalgamated Bank, did not hesitate to take Mr. Ross’s money. “Wilbur Ross’s investment firm has been an investor in the bank and held a seat on our board for nearly five years,” said Loren Riegelhaupt, a spokesman for Amalgamated Bank. “While we appreciate his financial acumen, his relationship to the bank has never impacted our core progressive principles: providing quality financial services to our clients while advancing the values we believe in. ” Mr. Ross sold his firm in 2006 to Invesco, an investment company, for about $375 million. Since then, he has pulled back on the daily operations of the business. While remaining as chairman of the firm, Mr. Ross has spent more time in recent years at his Palm Beach, Fla. home, not far from Mr. Trump’s estate. Mr. Ross was born in Weehawken, N. J. and has been married three times. His second wife, Betsy McCaughey, a Republican, served as New York’s lieutenant governor from 1995 to 1998. The experience, Mr. Ross would later tell New York magazine, “gave one a very view of politics. ” Ms. McCaughey, too, was named to Mr. Trump’s economic team during the campaign. Some suggest Mr. Ross’s business ties may pose potential conflicts of interest. But the sale of his company, W. L. Ross, may make it easier for Mr. Ross to separate himself from its interests, which include businesses in Europe, China and India. His remaining financial interests in the firm’s funds could be put in a blind trust, and he could easily resign from the five corporate boards on which he sits. Still, those overseas deals could raise questions about his relationships with foreign leaders and businesspeople from China and Russia. He is vice chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, the biggest bank in that European island nation, and he is credited with helping the bank to recover from a severe crisis in 2013. But Mr. Ross’s investment in the bank also makes him a de facto business partner with Viktor F. Vekselberg, one of Russia’s most prominent businesspeople and a man with ties to the Kremlin. Mr. Ross has complained about China’s having taken jobs from Americans — a message similar to the one Mr. Trump repeated throughout his campaign. Yet for all the commentary, Mr. Ross has been a frequent visitor in the past two decades and has made inroads in that country’s energy industry. Mr. Ross linked up with the most powerful player in the country’s power generation business, China Huaneng Group, in 2008. The company had been run for years by the eldest son of Li Peng, the former prime minister who was the godfather of the country’s electricity industry. | 1 |
ARJUN WALIA OCTOBER 18, 2016 Tensions between the United States, their allies, and Russia continue to rise. It seems, as always, that we are on the brink of global war. The Western military industrial complex continues to take over the Middle East and arm ISIS and other terrorist groups, as well as establish and solidify their military presence throughout the world. The sheer number of United States military bases around the globe is astonishing.
For more, unbiased information on the current state of affairs between the United States and Russia, I recommend visiting theantimedia.org.
Mainstream media outlets continue to spread propaganda , and have been doing so for years, claiming that there are terrorists, that they threaten national security, and that we must go after them. At the same time, an inflated sense of patriotism is encouraged in American citizens, so they believe their soldiers are fighting for freedom, despite doing the precise opposite.
A great quote by Edward Bernays, who was known as the father of public relations, comes to mind here:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society . Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. ( source )
A number of politicians and academics from around the world have been trying to create awareness on this issue for decades, and although we’ve come a long way, our relatively slow progress demonstrates the stranglehold mainstream media has on the minds of the masses.
“The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
– Mark Twain ( source )
Below, you’ll find 15 quotes on false flag terrorism and the secret government. False flag terrorism refers to the idea that terrorist attacks are created, perpetuated, and/or funded by Western governments and their allies in order to justify the infiltration of other countries for ulterior motives. Quotes on False Flag Terrorism and the Secret Government
1. The Dalia Lama
“Of course, war and the large military establishments are the greatest sources of violence in the world. Whether their purpose is defensive or offensive, these vast powerful organizations exist solely to kill human beings. We should think carefully about the reality of war. Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous – an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.”
“Modern warfare waged primarily with different forms of fire, but we are so conditioned to see it as thrilling that we talk about this or that marvelous weapon as a remarkable piece of technology without remembering that, if it is actually used, it will burn living people. War also strongly resembles a fire in the way it spreads. If one area gets weak, the commanding officer sends in reinforcements. This is throwing live people onto a fire. But because we have been brainwashed to think this way, we do not consider the suffering of individual soldiers. No soldiers want to be wounded or die. None of his loved ones wants any harm to come to him. If one soldier is killed, or maimed for life, at least another five or ten people – his relatives and friends – suffer as well. We should all be horrified by the extent of this tragedy, but we are too confused.”
“But no matter how malevolent or evil are the many murderous dictators who can currently oppress their nations and cause international problems, it is obvious that they cannot harm others or destroy countless human lives if they don’t have a military organisation accepted and condoned by society.” ( source )
2. Dr. Michel Chossudovsky, Canadian economist, the University of Ottawa’s Emeritus Professor of Economics
“We are dealing with a criminal undertaking at a global level . . . and there is an ongoing war, it is led by the United States, it may be carried out by a number of proxy countries, which are obeying orders from Washington . . . The global war on terrorism is a US undertaking, which is fake, it’s based on fake premises. It tells us that somehow America and the Western world are going after a fictitious enemy, the Islamic state, when in fact the Islamic state is fully supported and financed by the Western military alliance and America’s allies in the Persian Gulf. . . . They say Muslims are terrorists, but it just so happens that terrorists are Made in America. They’re not the product of Muslim society, and that should be abundantly clear to everyone on this floor. . . . The global war on terrorism is a fabrication, a big lie and a crime against humanity.”
“Al Qaeda and the Al Qaeda affiliated organizations, including the Islamic State, are not independent organizations, they are sponsored, and they are sponsored by the United States and its allies. It is documented that prior to 2011, there was a process of recruitment of mujahideen to fight in Syria, and this was coordinated by NATO and the Turkish high command. This report is confirmed by Israeli news sources and unequivocally, we are dealing with a state-sponsorship of terrorism, the recruitment of mercenaries, the training and the financing of terrorism.” ( source )( source )
3. Paul Hellyer
“It is ironic that the U.S. would begin a devastating war, allegedly in search of weapons of mass destruction, when the most worrisome developments in this field are occurring in your own backyard. It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy, when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which both the Congress and the Commander in Chief have been kept deliberately in the dark.” ( source )
4. John C. Calhoun, The 7th Vice President of the United States
“A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many, and various, and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks.” ( source )
5. Robin Cook, Former British Foreign Secretary
“The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda, and any informed intelligence officer knows this. But, there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an intensified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive TV watchers to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the United States.” ( source )
6. John F. Hylan, Mayor of New York City from 1918-1925
“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation . . . The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties . . . [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.” ( source )( source )
7. Senator Daniel K. Inouye, highest ranking Asian-American politician in United States history
“There exists a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of the national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” ( source )
8. David Steele, the second-highest ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence and a former CIA clandestine services officer
“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.” ( source )
9. Theodore Roosevelt. former President of the United States
“Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people.
From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare, they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.
To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.” ( source )
10. Benjamin Disraeli, First British MP
“The world is governed by very different personages to what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” ( Coningsby, Book 4, Chap. 15 , Page 131)
11. Senator William Jenner
“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means … We have a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state … It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government … This ruthless power-seeking elite is a disease of our century… This group … is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.” ( source )
12. Woodrow Wilson, former President of the United States
“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” ( source )
13. Eric H. May, a former U.S. Army military intelligence and public affairs officer
“The easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out. As I’ll detail below, this is exactly how government perpetrators in the US and UK handled the 9/11 and 7/7 “terror” attacks, which were in reality government attacks blamed on ‘terrorists.’ ” ( source )
14. Professor Lance deHaven-Smith, Professor Emeritus of Public Administration and Policy, Florida State University
“SCADs [which refers to State Crimes Against Democracy] involve high-level government officials, often in combination with private interests, that engage in covert activities for political advantages and power.” ( source )( source )
15. President John F. Kennedy
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. . . .
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.” ( source ) Share: | 0 |
Donald Trump says construction of the U. S. border wall will begin immediately after he takes office Jan. 20. [“On the ‘fence’ — it’s not a fence. It’s a wall. You just misreported it. We’re going to build a wall,” Trump said during a Wednesday press conference at Trump Tower in New York City. “I could wait about a year and a half until we finish our negotiations with Mexico, which will start immediately after we get into office. But I don’t want to wait. Mike Pence is leading an effort to get final approvals through various agencies and through Congress for the wall to begin. ” “I don’t feel like waiting a year or year and a half. We’re going to start building,” Trump added. “Mexico, in some form, and there are many different forms, will reimburse us. And they will reimburse us for the cost of the wall,” he continued. “That will happen, whether it’s a tax or whether it’s a payment. Probably less likely that it’s a payment. But it will happen. ” “So remember this: I would say, ‘We’re going to build a wall.’ And people would go crazy. And then I would say, ‘Who’s going to pay for the wall?’ And people would all scream out — 25, 000, 30, 000 people ’cause nobody has ever had crowds like Trump has had, you know that. You don’t like to report that … But I said, ‘Who’s going to pay for that wall?’ And they will scream out: ‘Mexico,’” Trump said. “I want to get the wall started,” he said. “I don’t want to wait about a year and a half until I make my deal with Mexico. ” The government of Mexico is “terrific,” Trump said, adding he doesn’t “blame them for taking advantage of the United States. I wish our politicians were so smart. Mexico has taken advantage of the United States. ” Last April, Trump issued a memo explaining to Mexico he would tax remittances flowing out of the U. S. economy — or the Mexican government could issue a payment of up to $10 billion for the wall. “Mexico has taken advantage of us in another way as well: gangs, drug traffickers, and cartels have freely exploited our open borders and committed vast numbers of crimes inside the United States,” he wrote. “The United States has borne the extraordinary daily cost of this criminal activity, including the cost of trials and incarcerations. Not to mention the even greater human cost. ” “We have the moral high ground here and all the leverage,” Trump said. Mexicans send roughly $20 billion in remittances back to Mexico every year, according to the World Bank, much of it from the U. S. American taxpayers are also forced to pay for the welfare and schooling of millions of Mexican citizens and their children while enduring the costs of crime (gang activity, drug trafficking) and stagnant wages that unchecked immigration brings while this money is taken out of the U. S. economy every year. After Trump’s election, remittances from Mexicans soared to $2. 4 billion in a single month as immigrant workers and illegal aliens scrambled to send American cash back home. In December, Trump transition team officials also demanded Obama’s Department of Homeland Security report on “all assets available for border wall and barrier construction,” along with aerial surveillance, according to Reuters. | 1 |
Los street artist provocateur Sabo is back again, this time to skewer North Korean leader Kim with a series of mock posters promoting a fictional line of “Trump’s North Korean BBQ. ”[The mock posters — which have popped up around the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles — feature the North Korean dictator’s head superimposed onto a roasted pig’s body, and with an apple placed in his mouth. Alongside the image is an insert of a smiling Trump. The taglines for the mock include “The finest in ” “The world’s greatest really,” and “Cooked up by five star chef James Mattis. ” A telephone number displayed on one of the billboards apparently connects to an art gallery in Beverly Hills. The posters’ appearance in Los Angeles comes as hostilities between the United States and North Korea have hit renewed heights in recent weeks. NBC News reported that the National Security Council presented military options to President Trump — including the possible assassination of the North Korean dictator — to deal with the country’s increasingly defiant nuclear program ahead of Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last week. Sabo has previously featured images of Trump in his street art. In November, just after Trump’s victory in the presidential election, the street artist peppered Los bus benches with fake for Sotheby’s real estate sales, in a campaign lampooning numerous celebrities’ pledges to move out of the country if Trump were elected. Most recently, the artist trolled the Academy Awards by erecting posters outside the Dolby Theater in Hollywood that blasted the film industry’s “unwatchable movies. ” Sabo has also skewered Hillary Clinton, at one time placing an image of the former Democratic presidential candidate inside a washing machine as part of a “money laundering” series, alongside an image of actor Leonardo DiCaprio. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum | 1 |
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Could we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th? Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation. If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before. Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton. And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton . If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country.
At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day…
A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that.
More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square.
But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence. On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax…
Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex- Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first.
And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized. One came in January, and the other happened in June …
This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day.
We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well. Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina. On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika.
There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days. A recent Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece…
On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?”
Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt.
On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope.
There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets. Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating.
Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge.
For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election…
Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president.
Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?”
And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious. The following comes from USA Today …
“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election.
Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another.
Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together. In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 .
If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies. The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then.
And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are. This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month …
As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be.
But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome .
Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House.
Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it.
Take a look at the future of America: The Beginning of the End and then prepare shares | 0 |
Bangalore car driver drives 200 km in search of U-turn to reach home Posted on Tweet
In another bizarre tale of Bangalore’s ever increasing traffic woes, more than hundred car drivers reportedly reached Mysore while searching for a u-turn to reach home. The drivers had started from their offices on outer ring road and had to take a u-turn to reach their homes on the other side of the road but the Bangalore Traffic police made some unexpected changes due to which the car drivers kept on driving, finally finding a u-turn near Mysore.
“U-turns and one ways! At one point, I even asked a few passersby to help me lift the car and place it on the other side of the road. But some of them rushed and sat inside my car as they had been waiting to cross the road for the last 6 days and finally saw some hope,” said a frustrated driver after reaching Mysore. “I could see my home on the right side 5 minutes after starting from office, but then I never found a u-turn. When I did find one, the Google maps lady asked me to keep going straight and I missed it!” he further lamented.
Even Google Maps isn’t able to understand the sudden changes by Bangalore traffic police. “Our users have been banging their cars into dividers. When our map says take a u-turn, there never is one. That’s the magic of Bangalore Traffic police,” said a developer working on Google maps.
Meanwhile, Bangalore Traffic police has termed this as “suspense driving”, in which the driver is always alert. “U-turns should be a suspense and we are going to make this game even more interesting,” said a policeman.
(Reported by Citizen Satirist Manish Paul . He blogs here ) | 0 |
The investigation into the 1964 murders of three civil rights volunteers by a group of Klansmen, an inquiry that became known as the “Mississippi Burning” case, has come to a close, the Mississippi attorney general announced Monday. The murders of Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, committed on a remote Mississippi road 52 years ago on Tuesday, prompted an intense federal investigation. That investigation, plus a in more recent years, led to eight trial convictions and one guilty plea over five decades. One of the masterminds of the murders, a Klansman named Edgar Ray Killen, was convicted by state prosecutors in 2005. “I am convinced that during the last 52 years, investigators have done everything possible under the law to find those responsible and hold them accountable,” said Jim Hood, the state attorney general, at a news conference. “However, we have determined that there is no likelihood of any additional convictions. Absent any new information presented to the F. B. I. or my office, this case will be closed. ” The most recent round of investigations — the third push by federal agents since 1964 — began after the passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act in 2008, which set up an office within the United States Justice Department to investigate unsolved murders from the civil rights era. “The department’s focus during this third investigation,” said Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, “homed in on determining whether sufficient admissible evidence existed to support further state prosecution against any surviving person for involvement in the murders. ” A report released by the Justice Department on Monday, which described the history of the case and recent investigative efforts, included the names of five people believed to have been involved in the killings who were still alive in 2010 when federal agents began the case. Mr. Killen is serving a sentence for the killings two others died shortly after the investigation began. The report describes two other men as “still potentially culpable for state offenses related to the murders. ” Neither is believed to have been at the scene, but are thought by authorities to have been involved in the conspiracy. Agents interviewed or attempted to interview old sources and tracked down new ones, including Klansmen who had been active in the 1960s, relatives of those involved, jailhouse confidants and Mr. Killen himself. But the deaths of so many original witnesses and sources, the inadmissibility in court of key testimony, the faulty memories of elderly men and an enduring reluctance among some to speak to the authorities made the likelihood of successful prosecutions remote. “Obviously, the willingness of surviving witnesses to cooperate fully rather than minimizing their knowledge with false denials or feigned memory problems is a factor to consider,” the report read. Still, it concluded that the deaths of the three young men “have been thoroughly and aggressively investigated and reinvestigated and have thus received some measure of vindication. ” | 1 |
Interviews James Clapper, Director of US National Intelligence Agency, speaks at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York City on October 25, 2016. (AFP photo)
James Clapper, the US director of national intelligence, has warned that the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria could prompt Russia to shoot down US planes. This comes as Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for the 2016 US presidential election, has called for establishing a no-fly zone in the Arab country. Russia has recently deployed mobile S-400 and S-300 missile batteries to western Syria, which are ready to shoot down cruise missiles and aircraft.
Gordon Duff, a senior editor with the Veterans Today, told Press TV that James Clapper who spoke out against former secretary of state’s emphasis on a no-fly zone over Syria is responsible, because the American officials obtain their intelligence on the Syrian conflict from the spy chief.
“The public position of the United States vis-à-vis Syria was established based on intelligence supplied exclusively by James Clapper,” Duff noted, adding, “He (Clapper) is the one that talks about the gas, he’s the one who talks about the barrel bombs, [and] everything that’s been disproven.”
He said, “Every crazy scheme that the US comes up with to blame Syria for killing its own people or the Russians for slaughtering people in hospitals, it all comes from James Clapper, the director of the National Intelligence Agency, who fed that information to Secretary Clinton, who fed that information to President [Barack] Obama.”
“Clinton said that she favored a no-fly zone only if acceptable for both Russia and Damascus and after negotiations,” which is a very different story than the one said by the spy chief for political purposes, Duff said.
Duff added that the imposition of “no-fly zone obviously is going to help no one but al-Nusra [Front] and ISIS (Daesh)” terrorists.
Damascus and Moscow carry out airstrikes against terrorist groups who wreak havoc in the Arab country, but the US and its allies push for imposing a no-fly zone on Syria to pursue their agenda in the war-ridden state.
Since March 2011, Syria has been gripped with foreign-backed militancy, which has left hundreds of thousands of people dead or wounded and millions of others homeless. Loading ... | 0 |
‘Chairman Cash’ – John Podesta is Paid $7,000 a Month by Foundation Run by Banker With Ties to Financial Crisis Posted on Home » Headlines » World News » ‘Chairman Cash’ – John Podesta is Paid $7,000 a Month by Foundation Run by Banker With Ties to Financial Crisis
“Chairman cash.” A new meme has just been born…
Submitted by Michael Krieger :
Last Friday, I published a post titled, John Podesta’s Sister-in-Law Lobbied For Raytheon While Hillary Was Secretary of State , which understandably got totally buried in the madness surrounding the latest FBI news. Here’s the first paragraph of that post:
The Podesta family seems particularly adept at earning extraordinary sums of money via selling out the American public. Earlier this year, I highlighted how John Podesta’s brother Tony was paid $140,000 per month by the medieval monarchy of Saudi Arabia. After all, who cares about women’s rights when the pay is good?
Indeed, it’s not just relatives of Podesta who know how to rake in the cash. John is no slouch either, as Politico explained in an article published earlier today.
Here are a few excerpts:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, last year signed a $7,000-a-month contract with the foundation of a major Clinton donor who made a fortune selling a type of mortgage that some critics say contributed to the housing collapse, hacked emails show.
In February of last year, as Podesta was working to lay the groundwork for Clinton’s soon-to-launch campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he signed the contract with the Sandler Foundation, which was started by Herb Sandler and his late wife Marion Sandler.
The contract — a copy of which was included in emails illegally obtained from Podesta’s Gmail account and disseminated Monday by WikiLeaks — is still active, according to Herb Sandler, who said that it calls for Podesta to provide advice on grant-making and other foundation functions.
It’s unusual for the full-time chairman of a general-election presidential campaign to maintain an active side deal with a major donor to that campaign — let alone to raise money from that donor for the campaign.
The WikiLeaks cache shows that Podesta provided Sandler with philanthropic advice and assortments of cheeses and pastas as gifts on the holidays, while Sandler offered all manner of political observations and once tried to get Podesta to arrange for former President Bill Clinton to write a blurb for a book written by one of Sandler’s friends.
Lobster risotto?
But Sandler brushed aside any concerns about potential conflicts of interest.
“I have never asked for anything of any political person — zero requests ever,” Sandler said. “If they’re responsive, it’s because they regard me as thoughtful, and a major contributor to Democratic causes,” Sandler said, adding that Podesta “knows that he doesn’t get bullshit from me. He knows I have no hidden agenda. He knows that my values are similar to his and that we care about people and not the billionaires, even though I ended up by some crazy thing to be one.”
Neither Podesta nor the Clinton campaign responded to questions about the contract.
Herb Sandler’s Clinton-related giving picked up last December after a visit from Podesta.
The campaign’s finance director Dennis Cheng responded “Great!!,” calling Podesta “#ChairmanCash.”
“Chairman cash.” A new meme has just been born.
The very next day, Sandler gave $1.5 million to Priorities USA Action, to which he has now given a total of $3 million, FEC records show.
The family’s fortune comes from the savings and loan institution that Herb and Marion Sandler ran for decades, a bank that became World Savings. It would end up making boatloads of cash from a type of adjustable rate mortgage that other lenders would later adopt, securitize and sell in a way that some have blamed for contributing to the housing bubble that burst in 2008. Not long before the burst and subsequent recession, the Sandlers sold the bank for $25.5 billion to Wachovia, earning $2.6 billion off the sale and donating most of their net worth to their foundation. Wachovia was later acquired by Wells Fargo.
The Sandlers met Podesta when they helped seed the Center for American Progress, the think tank he started in 2003 as a sort of Democratic administration in exile during George W. Bush’s presidency. Tax filings show that the Sandler Foundation has donated more than $37 million over the years to CAP, which worked to support President Barack Obama’s administration but has always been seen as more aligned with Clinton.
Center for American Progress…where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, in last week’s post, Dennis Kucinich’s Extraordinary Warning on D.C.’s Think Tank Warmongers , we learned:
The self-identified liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) is now calling for Syria to be bombed, and estimates America’s current military adventures will be tidied up by 2025, a tardy twist on “mission accomplished.” CAP, according to a report in The Nation, has received funding from war contractors Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who make the bombers that CAP wants to rain hellfire on Syria.
Remember peasants, war is ok if “liberals” do it. Now back to Politico …
The WikiLeaks emails reveal that Podesta and his team at the Center for American Progress discussed how to push back on scrutiny of the Sandlers related to the 2008 housing collapse. That included an October 2008 “Saturday Night Live” sketch in which an actor playing Herb Sandler thanked members of Congress “for helping block congressional oversight of our corrupt activity.”
Podesta wrote to his colleagues that he’d talked to Herb Sandler, and “they are obviosly [sic] upset. Weird that snl should pick them out.”
After doing some research, a subordinate replied that “it appears default rates on their stuff was high (herb says not more so than others) and the losses were key to almsot wachovia failure — athough herb emphasizes that they were only one of the institutions problems.”
Sandler told POLITICO that any suggestion that his bank’s products contributed to the collapse were “a bunch of bullshit,” pointing out that their bank used a risk-averse approach to their loans, which had among the lowest default rate in the industry.
But Scott Walter, president of Capital Research Center, a conservative nonprofit that monitors the giving of major liberal donors including Sandler, argued that Podesta’s newly revealed contractual relationship with Sandler stood in stark contrast to Clinton’s efforts to cast herself as tough on the financial industry.
“This is another instance where the Clinton campaign has been revealed to have surprising links to some of the most dubious parts of the finance industry,” Walter said.
The Sandlers’ philanthropy increasingly has focused on fighting financial inequality and the role of big money in politics — a subject about which Herb Sandler and Podesta emailed frequently, according to WikiLeaks.
Interesting considering he is big money in politics, and seems to have no problem endlessly cheerleading the chosen candidate of America’s oligarchs.
Sandler explained to POLITICO that during the process of working to launch the center, he realized “we had been picking his brain ad nauseum” for years without paying Podesta as a consultant — a scenario Sandler called “very unfair.” That led to the consulting contract, which Sandler cast as “a ripoff” for Podesta. “I’d pay a lot more for that advice,” Sandler said, calling Podesta “one the most intelligent, decent, thoughtful human beings I’d ever met.”
In March, as Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign against Bernie Sanders grew increasingly bitter, Sandler emailed Podesta just to check up.
“How are you?” Sandler wrote. “MIss you.”
Call me crazy, but if he was really so focused on solving income inequality why wasn’t he supporting Bernie Sanders?
But hey. | 0 |
A straw poll conducted by The Washington Times at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) found overwhelming support for Donald Trump and his administration’s agenda amongst attendees. [The poll found that 86 percent of respondents “strongly or somewhat approve” of the job that Donald Trump is doing, compared to just 12 percent who somewhat or strongly disapprove of his work so far. Two percent said they were unsure. When asked which issue was the most important to them, 46 percent of respondents pointed to the economy — encompassing jobs, taxes, and government spending — as the most important issue. Meanwhile, 29 percent said that issues of national security and fighting radical Islam remained their number one issue, while 13 percent said that changing social attitudes on issues such as abortion, protecting the family, and religious freedom are their personal priority. However, just 44 percent of respondents said that the country is now going in the right direction, while 47 per cent believe it remains on the wrong track. A total of 1, 447 CPAC attendees participated in the poll, all of whom are likely to have conservative leanings due to the nature of the conference. The poll was completed both by hand and via email. You can follow Ben Kew on Facebook, on Twitter at @ben_kew, or email him at bkew@breitbart. com | 1 |
.@tombrokaw: The Democrats have a lot of reconstruction to do of their own party https: . Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” former NBC “Nightly News” anchor Tom Brokaw advised Democrats to pick and choose their fights, including their obstruction efforts of Supreme Court justice nominee Neil Gorsuch. “A lot of young people come up to me and say, ‘I’m just outraged by what’s going on,’” Brokaw said. “I say, ‘Rage is not a policy.’ That’s my advice to them. You’ve got to figure out what you want to do. For example, there’s going to be a big pushback about Judge Gorsuch from the Democrats. They’re going to make that one of the testing places for them. The fact is, this man has a very distinct background in the judicial world. He has a doctorate from Oxford. I have friends in the federal judiciary that don’t agree with his philosophy but say there is not a better judge in the federal circuit right now. So why pick that as a fight because who are you going to get next and what issues are you going to raise given the reality of where the Democrats are at this moment. ” According to Brokaw, Democrats have their own internal problems and not putting the effort to rebuilding their own party will be to their detriment. “They’re playing by the Republican playbook, frankly, for the last eight years,” he added. “And the other thing is, Democrats have a lot of reconstruction to do of their own party and that’s what they ought to be thinking about and that’s what they should be getting — they ought to be out in the middle of America saying what do we need to know from you rather than sitting in Washington, reelecting Nancy Pelosi after they lost the House three different times. ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive … . ” — 1 Corinthians 15:3 — 8 (ESV). Christians all over the world are celebrating Easter as the Sunday anniversary of Jesus Christ being resurrected from the dead. A week that began with the triumphant entry on Palm Sunday then took a historic turn on Good Friday, when Jesus of Nazareth was publicly executed. After hours of torture and beatings, he was nailed to a cross, which was an agonizing form of death penalty (from which we get the English word “excruciating”). To confirm he had died before removing his body from the cross, a Roman soldier thrust a spear deep into his abdomen, ensuring that there was no chance Jesus was still alive. His followers scattered and hid. Yet beginning a couple days later on Sunday, they began yelling in the streets that Jesus was alive. They claimed to have seen them with their own eyes. They boldly preached that message all over the known world, even as it cost them their lives. It is the most central tenet of the Christian faith. For almost 2, 000 years between then and now, on this day, it is still customary in many parts of the world to hear someone say to a friend, or a stranger, or a room full of people, “He is risen!” To which the customary reply is, “He is risen, indeed!” How can the radical shift of behavior from the disciples of a dead man be explained? What exactly do Christians believe happened on that day in question in A. D. 30, and how does the Bible describe the account? From the Gospel according to Luke: But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. While they were perplexed about this, behold, two men stood by them in dazzling apparel. And as they were frightened and bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise. ” And they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb they told all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women with them who told these things to the apostles, but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter rose and ran to the tomb, stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves and he went home marveling at what had happened. That very day two of them were going to a village named Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking with each other about all these things that had happened. While they were talking and discussing together, Jesus himself drew near and went with them. But their eyes were kept from recognizing him. And he said to them, “What is this conversation that you are holding with each other as you walk?” And they stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, “Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?” And he said to them, “What things?” And they said to him, “Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us. They were at the tomb early in the morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive. Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see. And he said to them, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets had spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself. So they drew near to the village to which they were going. He acted as if he were going farther, but they urged him strongly, saying, “Stay with us, for it is toward evening and the day is now far spent. ” So he went in to stay with them. When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him. And he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?” And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem. And they found the eleven and those who were with them gathered together, saying, “The Lord has risen indeed, and has appeared to Simon!” Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread. As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, “Peace to you!” But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have. ” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it before them. Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. ” Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. ” Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God. — Luke 24:1 — 50 (ESV). Happy Easter! “There in the ground his body lay, light of the world by darkness slain then bursting forth in glorious day, up from the grave he rose again! And as he stands in victory, sin’s curse has lost its grip on me for I am his, and he is mine — bought with the precious blood of Christ. ” — “In Christ Alone” (2001) Ken Klukowski is senior legal editor for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @kenklukowski. | 1 |
New emails show Huma scheming for Hillary
Assange promises that WikiLeaks will release proof that Hillary has rigged the elections.
Yesterday, WikiLeaks sent out an alarming tweet that “Hillary Clinton strategist Bob Beckel called for WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange to be assassinated”:
The tweet contains a video snippet of Beckel on FoxNews, saying:
“The way to deal with this is pretty simple — you get Special Ops (Operations) forces. I mean, a dead man can’t leak stuff. This guy’s [Assange] a traitor, treasonous, and and he’s broken every law of the United States. The guy ought to be — and I’m not for the death penalty, so if I’m not for the death penalty, the only way to do it is illegally shoot the son of a bitch .”
Blog and news sites, including big names like ZeroHedge and Pamela Geller , are reporting Beckel’s vile remarks as contemporaneous, in the context of WikiLeaks’ current exposés of Hillary and the DNC.
Not so.
Beckel actually made those remarks 5 years ago in December 2011. Here’s a longer FoxNews video, wherein Beckel was part of a panel discussing how the U.S. should deal with Assange and WikiLeaks for their release of the State Department’s diplomatic cables. Beckel’s “shoot the son of a bitch” remarks begin at the 0:57 mark:
That it was 5 years ago that Beckel had called for assassinating Julian Assange doesn’t make it less reprehensible. It’s also ridiculous for Beckel to call Assange “a traitor” and “treasonous,” because Assange is Australian, not a U.S. citizen.
So who is Bob Beckel?
According to Wikipedia , 67-year-old Bob Beckel is a political analyst-pundit who began his professional life as a Democratic administration official and Democratic Party operative. He was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State (1977) and Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs (1978) in the Carter administration; the campaign manager for Walter Mondale’s 1984 presidential campaign; founder of the consulting & lobbying firm Bob Beckel & Associates (1984); campaign manager of a Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in Idaho (2002); USA Today columnist (2005-2015); FoxNews “ token angry liberal ” co-host (2011-2015); and since October 2015, CNN commentator on the 2016 election.
Wikipedia makes no mention of Beckel being a Hillary Clinton strategist, nor have I found confirmation that he is a Hillary strategist, other than what the WikiLeaks tweet claims. But all that doesn’t mean he isn’t a Hillary Clinton strategist, given Beckel’s history as a Democratic Party operative.
There must be a reason why WikiLeaks sent out its tweet of Beckel’s 5-year-old call to assassinate Assange. Perhaps Assange has received death threats and does not want the same fate that befell DNC staffer and WikiLeaks informant Seth Rich. (See “ WikiLeaks ’ Julian Assange: murdered DNC staffer was source of leaked DNC emails ”)
H/t maziel | 0 |
Japanese polling firms found solid support for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Florida this past weekend to spend time with his American counterpart, President Donald Trump, though politicians condemned expanding U. S. ties. [The newswire service Kyodo published a poll following Abe’s return to Japan finding that 70 percent of Japanese respondents were “satisfied” with Abe’s visit to the White House and Trump’s estate in Florida, . The New York Times adds that the Kyodo poll found approval of Abe’s work as prime minister generally to be 62 percent, a slight uptick from a month earlier. The Japanese broadcaster NHK found similar results. NHK’s polls found that 68 percent of Japanese respondents either “somewhat” or “highly” approved of Abe’s time in the United States. Only 27 percent said they either “somewhat” or “highly” disapprove of the visit. percent said they approved of the job that Abe’s cabinet is doing, three percent more than those who said so in January. Abe arrived from Tokyo on Friday and engaged in a meeting with President Trump at the White House, followed by a press conference. The two then flew to Florida, where they spent much of the weekend playing golf and getting to know each other. Abe had reportedly suggested the game to Trump, noting that his grandfather, Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, once played a round of golf with Dwight Eisenhower. The two first ladies, Melania Trump and Akie Abe, also spent Saturday together, visiting Florida’s Morikami Museum. Trump and Abe discussed their relationship in two press conferences, as well, with Trump telling reporters, “The United States of America stands behind Japan, its great ally, 100 percent. ” “President Trump has just made it clear in our leaders’ summit that the United States is with Japan 100 percent at all times, and he is standing next to me right now in order to demonstrate that will,” Abe said. The two also condemned a North Korean missile launch seemingly timed to correspond with their meeting. While most in Japan appear pleased with the bilateral meeting, opposition members have used the meeting to condemn Abe for not opposing Trump policies openly — or, in some cases, merely for being too supportive of the United States. The leader of the mainstream opposition Democratic Party, for example, condemned Abe for not issuing a statement opposing President Trump’s executive order limiting immigration from countries: “With the harsh attention focused on the issue, the sight of the Japanese prime minister happily enjoying golf is not something we can be proud of. ” Japanese Communist Party leader Kazuo Shii, meanwhile, accused Abe of “kowtowing to Trump” by not addressing the refugee issue. Shii’s comments echoed protests from Chinese Communist Party newspaper the People’s Daily, which published an editorial accusing Abe of “fetishizing” the relationship with the United States. Should Abe have chosen to criticize the executive order, he would have likely triggered similar condemnation for Japan’s refugee policy. Japan accepted 0. 26 percent of foreigners applying for refugee status in 2016: 28 people, none from Islamic Syria or Iraq, but from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Africa. In 2015, the nation accepted 27 refugees. Upon being accepted, the government pays for Japanese lessons for refugees. Challenged on these small refugee application rates in 2015, Abe argued that Japan is not yet fit to accept refugees because of the many social problems facing native Japanese people. “I would say that before accepting immigrants or refugees, we need to have more activities by women, elderly people and we must raise our birth rate. There are many things that we should do before accepting immigrants,” he said in a speech announcing a new aid package for the Middle East. | 1 |
The praise from a German friend was the first sign that I had gone native. “You see?” he said to his American wife, pointing to the sink where, without thinking, I was rinsing out the plastic yogurt cup I’d just emptied, unwrapping its cardboard sleeve and separating the foil from the lip of the container. “That is how to recycle!” What may sound like a lot of extra fuss over trash has become second nature among Germans, the world’s recycling champions. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Germans happily sort 65 percent of their waste into an array of bins to be collected for reuse or incineration. South Koreans come in second, recycling 59 percent of their refuse. The United States recycles 35 percent that’s only slightly above the average for the developed countries that belong to the organization, but it is miles ahead of Turkey, where 99 percent of all trash ends up in a landfill. Of course, even in Germany, you’ll find recycling rebels. Instead of sorting, they just throw it all in a big can marked General Waste, and they scoff at their dutiful neighbors who lug out trash in separate bags bound for bins. Plastics and packaging are supposed to go in the yellow container the blue one is for paper and cardboard. Glass waste gets two bins: white for the clear stuff, and green for colored glass. Then there’s a brown bin for organic waste, which goes for composting. Since 2015, every community in Germany has been required by law to collect compost, for use in biogas plants or organic fertilizer Germans generate 10 million tons of the stuff each year. Other Western European nations are almost as zealous as the Germans. Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden all recycle at least half of their municipal waste, according to the European Environment Agency. One key to Germany’s success is that the collection bins are everywhere — train cars and station platforms, town squares and public parks, schools, even soccer stadiums. Most are labeled in English as well as German, to help foreigners figure out what goes where. And if that wasn’t enough, ordinary Germans are rarely shy about intercepting strangers on the verge of dropping a paper cup or empty soda bottle into the General Waste bin with a cry of, “Stop! That doesn’t go in there!” | 1 |
When the two men plunged into the unforgiving wilderness of the Adirondacks, they had scant experience and supplies better suited to boys running away from home than to convicted killers fleeing a prison: pepperoni sticks, toilet paper, a cache of black pepper, an electric shaver and 40 granola bars, all packed in a cloth guitar case. But they managed to avoid capture for three weeks in the rugged northernmost reaches of New York State. Navigating by the stars and using evasion tactics gleaned from Vietnam War movies, they pillaged peanut butter and pasta — as well as moonshine and marijuana — from remote hunting cabins. They stole sleep by the hour and tracked their pursuers’ movements via news reports on a purloined transistor radio. In the end, feet worn bloody by flight, they argued and went their separate ways before their bids for freedom ended — one in capture, one in death. The escape of David Sweat and Richard W. Matt in June 2015 from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, N. Y. captivated the nation. And much of the tale has since been told: how they patiently planned their escape how they manipulated the affections of a female prison employee how they broke out of the prison, one of the state’s toughest. But little has been disclosed about what it was actually like for the two hunted men during their slog in the deep woods between the prison and the Canadian border. The survivor, Mr. Sweat, has told their story in novelistic detail — it reads like a new twist on a grand wilderness adventure — to investigators from the New York State Police, the state inspector general’s office and the state prison agency in a series of interviews that began from his hospital bed the day he was captured. It is contained in more than 500 pages of transcripts. It is the drama as seen from the vantage point of the hunted, the police and dogs always just one step behind, hopscotching from rural roads to rutted mountainsides, dragging themselves through swamps and up and down steep inclines. The men cobbled together their supplies from what was available inside the prison — “You plan for the worst, hope for the best,” Mr. Sweat said — amassing a supply of black pepper he later used to throw dogs off his scent, along with a shaver so they would not look like bearded fugitives. Much of the time the two men spent cold, wet, shivering nights sleeping on the ground or in elevated hunting blinds, platforms hidden high in the trees from which hunters stalk and shoot their prey, a perch from which Mr. Sweat said in one instance he could identify the search area by watching helicopters and planes above. But they also spent some time in cabins used by hunters, at least some of which belong to state corrections officers who work in the prisons like Clinton, Mr. Sweat said. It was in one cabin that they found the moonshine and marijuana, which, along with a propane heater and an ample supply of food, would allow them to stay for two nights. In another officer’s camp, they found a shotgun, which they took, and uniform jackets belonging to the corrections officers, which they apparently did not. “I found their weed and everything,” Mr. Sweat, 36, told his interrogators, referring to the first cabin. “I was laughing my ass — because I like to smoke weed every once in a while. It mellows me out, keeps me calm. ” A senior investigator with the State Police asked if they had smoked any that night. “Yes, we got high as hell for like two nights,” he said, adding that they also drank the moonshine. “So you know we’d drink, get high and hang out because there ain’t nobody coming up here during the week. ” The two convicted killers practically played house. “We’d turn the heaters on and we’d cook,” Mr. Sweat recalled. “We made pasta and everything else because they had pasta there, because we didn’t care — it was the C. O. s,’” he said, using the shorthand for corrections officers, noting they were unlikely to report the because of the marijuana. The transcripts of the interviews were obtained under the state’s Freedom of Information Law. They reveal Mr. Sweat as an enthusiastic raconteur, eager to regale his questioners with his backwoods accomplishments and his skills of improvisation. He was also quick to vent his apparent frustration with what he characterized as his sluggish, foolhardy and sometimes drunken fellow escapee, Mr. Matt. “I got in an argument with him because every place we’d go, he’d get drunk,” Mr. Sweat complained. “And he would drink when we were moving. I’m like, ‘Dude, you can’t be drunk when we’re moving you’ve got to be sober. ’” The two men found the transistor radio and a refrigerator full of beer at another cabin, Mr. Sweat told the investigators. And in addition to helping them keep track of where the authorities were searching for them, the radio also provided some measure of entertainment and satisfaction. “It was actually kind of a running joke between him and me because on the radio they’re like, ‘Oh they’re not woodsmen, this and that,’” Mr. Sweat said. “And we’d laugh about it. It’s funny … we’re not woodsmen and we’ve been in the woods for weeks. ” Then he gloated. “They can’t catch us. But we’re not woodsmen. ” Mr. Sweat said Mr. Matt, 49, had reckless ideas — shooting troopers, carjacking on the rural roads or sticking people up in their homes and taking their money and cars. After two weeks, Mr. Matt began to wear on him. With their hunters in hot pursuit, Mr. Sweat left him behind. “I said, you know what, I hate to do it to him, but I kept my part of the deal, I got him out,” he said, “and I bolted on him. ” On June 26, a drunken Mr. Matt was confronted by a United States Border Patrol tactical unit, and, the authorities say, pointed a shotgun at one of its members. A federal agent shot him twice in the head and once in the neck. Two days later, Mr. Sweat was walking on a rural road just a mile and a half from the Canadian border when a sergeant in a State Police car approached him. Mr. Sweat believed the sergeant was confused because Mr. Sweat had shaved the night before as part of his plan for not looking like a haggard convict on the run. Mr. Sweat started to cross a field of alfalfa, heading for the tree line on the opposite side. The sergeant tried to call Mr. Sweat back to the road, saying, “Come here. ” But Mr. Sweat responded with, “No, I’m good,” and kept walking. He started moving faster. The sergeant swore at him. “He started running behind me,” Mr. Sweat recalled. “I took off. The next thing he says: ‘I’m going to shoot you. If you don’t stop, I’m going to shoot you.’ I said: ‘I ain’t got no weapons. I don’t have no weapons. ’” Mr. Sweat said he held his hands up so the trooper could see he was unarmed, but he kept running. The tree line got closer. He dropped the bag he was carrying. The sergeant got down on one knee, carefully set up his shot and fired. “He hit me twice and it was — the first one hit me in the shoulder the top,” Mr. Sweat said. “It killed this whole arm. I couldn’t move it. And the other one was on the other side. I thought, ‘Man, I’m going to hit the ground,’ and just started spitting blood up. He hit my lung. ” After Mr. Sweat recovered, he pleaded guilty to escape and promotion of prison contraband and was sentenced to three and a half to seven years in prison, on top of his sentence for the 2002 killing of a Broome County sheriff’s deputy. He is currently in the Special Housing Unit at Five Points Correctional Facility in Romulus, N. Y. the state’s newest prison. Portions of Mr. Sweat’s account could not be corroborated, with Mr. Matt, the only other witness to many of the events, dead. And while a report this summer by the state inspector general, Catherine detailing the prison lapses that led to the escape in some measure relied on Mr. Sweat’s account of the breakout itself, it acknowledged that questions would arise about his motivation and credibility. But the report noted that information he provided under oath had been corroborated, wherever possible, by other evidence, adding, “In instances where no independent corroboration exists, the inspector general has found Sweat’s account credible and consistent with other known facts. ” | 1 |
This undated handout photo received from the Antarctic Ocean Alliance on October 28, 2016 shows a Adelie penguin on pack ice in the Ross Sea in Antarctica. © AFP
International leaders have joined hands to create the world’s largest marine park in the Antarctic Ocean. The European Union and 24 countries have reached a momentous agreement to open the Ross Sea Park.
The deal was sealed in Hobart, Australia after prolonged negotiations run by the United Nation’s Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources.
The Ross Sea marine park will cover an area of 1.55 million square kilometers and is to be protected from commercial fishing for 35 years.
The preserved area covers more than 12 percent of the Southern Ocean and is home to more than 10,000 species. Scientists and activists consider the deal a historic milestone after decades of global efforts in marine preservation.
The Ross Sea is seen as one of the world's most ecologically important oceans for its unique qualities. Scientists believe that the marine park can be a platform for a deeper understanding of climate change impacts.
The 25-member commission comprised of Russia, China, the US and the EU had to have unanimous support for the decision. Loading ... | 0 |
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Brandon Smith – When people unfamiliar with the liberty movement stumble onto the undeniable fact of the “conspiracy” of globalism they tend to look for easy answers to understand what it is and why it exists. Most people today have been conditioned to perceive events from a misinterpreted standpoint of “Occam’s Razor” — they wrongly assume that the simplest explanation is probably the right one.
In fact, this is not what Occam’s Razor states. Instead, to summarize, it states that the simplest explanation GIVEN THE EVIDENCE at hand is probably the right explanation.
It has been well known and documented for decades that the push for globalism is a deliberate and focused effort on the part of a select “elite;” international financiers, central bankers, political leaders and the numerous members of exclusive think tanks. They often openly admit their goals for total globalization in their own publications, perhaps believing that the uneducated commoners would never read them anyway. Carroll Quigley, mentor to Bill Clinton and member of the Council on Foreign Relations, is often quoted with open admissions to the general scheme: “The powers of financial capitalism had (a) far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the systems was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland; a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank… sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.” – Carroll Quigley, Tragedy And Hope
The people behind the effort to enforce globalism are tied together by a particular ideology, perhaps even a cult-like religion, in which they envision a world order as described in Plato’s Republic. They believe that they are “chosen” either by fate, destiny or genetics to rule as philosopher kings over the rest of us. They believe that they are the wisest and most capable that humanity has to offer, and that through evolutionary means, they can create chaos and order out of thin air and mold society at will.
This mentality is evident in the systems that they build and exploit. For example, central banking in general is nothing more than a mechanism for driving nations into debt, currency devaluation, and ultimately, enslavement through widespread economic extortion. The end game for central banks is, I believe, the triggering of historic financial crisis, which can then be used by the elites as leverage to promote complete global centralization as the only viable solution.
This process of destabilizing economies and societies is not directed by the heads of the various central banks. Instead, it is directed by even more central global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements, as outlined in revealing mainstream articles like Ruling The World Of Money published by Harpers Magazine.
We also find through the words of globalists that the campaign for a “new world order” is not meant to be voluntary. “… When the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the new world order … and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.” – HG Welles, Fabian Socialist and author of The New World Order “In short, the ‘house of world order’ will have to be built from the bottom up rather than f rom the top down. It will look like a great ‘booming, buzzing confusion,’ to use William James’ famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.” – Richard Gardner, member of the Trilateral Commission, published in the April, 1974 issue of Foreign Affairs
“The New World Order cannot happen without U.S. participation, as we are the single most significant component. Yes, there will be a New World Order, and it will force the United States to change its perceptions.” – Henry Kissinger, World Action Council, April 19, 1994
I could quote globalists all day long, but I think you get the general idea. While some people see globalism as a “natural offshoot” of free markets or the inevitable outcome of economic progress, the reality is that the simplest explanation (given the evidence at hand) is that globalism is an outright war waged against the ideal of sovereign peoples and nations. It is a guerrilla war, or fourth generation warfare, waged by a small group of elites against the rest of us.
A significant element of this war concerns the nature of borders. Borders of nations, states and even towns and villages, are not just lines on a map or invisible barriers in the dirt. This is what the elites and the mainstream media would like us to believe. Instead, borders when applied correctly represent principles; or at least, that is supposed to be their function.
Human beings are natural community builders; we are constantly seeking out others of like-mind and like-purpose because we understand subconsciously that groups of individuals working together can (often but not always) accomplish more. That said, human beings also have a natural tendency to value individual freedom and the right to voluntary association. We do not like to be forced to associate with people or groups that do not hold similar values.
Cultures erect borders because, frankly, people have the right to vet those who wish to join and participate in their endeavors. People also have a right to discriminate against anyone who does not share their core values; or, in other words, we have the right to refuse association with other groups and ideologies that are destructive to our own.
Interestingly, globalists and their mouthpieces will argue that by refusing to associate with those who might undermine our values, it is WE who are violating THEIR rights. See how that works?
Globalists exploit the word “isolationism” to shame sovereignty champions in the eyes of the public, but there is no shame in isolation when such principles as freedom of speech and expression or the right to self defense are on the line. There is also nothing wrong with isolating a prosperous economic model from unsuccessful economic models. Forcing a decentralized free market economy to adopt feudal administration through central banking and government will eventually destroy that model. Forcing a free market economy into fiscal interdependency with socialist economies will also most likely undermine that culture. Just as importing millions of people with differing values to feed on a nation after it has had socialism thrust upon it is a recipe for collapse.
The point is, some values and social structures are mutually exclusive; no matter how hard you try, certain cultures can never be homogenized with other cultures. You can only eliminate one culture to make room for the other in a border-less world. This is what globalists seek to achieve. It is the greater purpose behind open border policies and globalization – to annihilate ideological competition so that humanity thinks it has no other option but the elitist religion. The ultimate end game of globalists is not to control governments (governments are nothing more than a tool). Rather, their end game is to obtain total psychological influence and eventually consent from the masses.
Variety and choice have to be removed from our environment in order for globalism to work, which is a nice way to say that many people will have to die and many principles will have to be erased from the public consciousness. The elites assert that their concept of a single world culture is the pinnacle principle of mankind, and that there is no longer any need for borders because no other principle is superior to theirs. As long as borders as a concept continue to exist there is always the chance of separate and different ideals rising to compete with the globalist philosophy. This is unacceptable to the elites.
This has led not so subtle propaganda meme that cultures that value sovereignty over globalism are somehow seething cauldrons of potential evil. Today, with the rising tide of anti-globalist movements, the argument in the mainstream is that “populists” (conservatives) are of a lower and uneducated class and are a dangerous element set to topple the “peace and prosperity” afforded by globalist hands. In other words, we are treated like children scrawling with our finger paints across a finely crafted Mona Lisa. Once again, Carroll Quigley promotes (or predicts) this propaganda decades in advance when he discusses the need for “working within the system” for change instead of fighting against it: “For example, I’ve talked about the lower middle class as the backbone of fascism in the future. I think this may happen. The party members of the Nazi Party in Germany were consistently lower middle class. I think that the right-wing movements in this country are pretty generally in this group.” – Carroll Quigley, from Dissent: Do We Need It?
The problem is that these people refuse to confront the fruits of globalization that can be observed so far. Globalists have had free reign over most of the world’s governments for at least a century, if not longer. As a consequence of their influences, we have had two World Wars, the Great Depression, the Great Recession which is still ongoing, too many regional conflicts and genocides to count and the systematic oppression of free agent entrepreneurs, inventors and ideas to the point that we are now suffering from social and financial stagnation.
The globalists have long been in power, yet, the existence of borders is blamed for the storm of crises we have endured for the past hundred years? Liberty champions are called “deplorable” populists and fascists while globalists dodge blame like slimy slithering eels?
This is the best card the globalists have up their sleeve, and it is the reason why I continue to argue that they plan to allow conservative movements to gain a measure of political power in the next year, only to pull the plug on international fiscal life support and blame us for the resulting tragedy.
There is no modicum of evidence to support the notion that globalization, interdependencey and centralization actually work. One need only examine the economic and immigration nightmare present in the EU to understand this. So, the globalists will now argue that the world is actually not centralized ENOUGH. That’s right; they will claim we need more globalization, not less, to solve the world’s ailments.
In the meantime, principles of sovereignty have to be historically demonized — the concept of separate cultures built on separate beliefs has to be psychologically equated with evil by future generations. Otherwise, the globalists will never be able to successfully establish a global system without borders.
Imagine, for a moment, an era not far away in which the principle of sovereignty is considered so abhorrent, so racist, so violent and poisonous that any individual would be shamed or even punished by the collective for entertaining the notion. Imagine a world in which sovereignty and conservatism are held up to the next generation as the new “original sins;” dangerous ideas that almost brought about the extinction of man.
This mental prison is where globalists want to take us. We can break free, but this would require a complete reversal of the way in which we participate in society. Meaning, we need a rebellion of voluntary associations. A push for decentralization instead of globalization. Thousands upon thousands of voluntary groups focusing on localization, self reliance and true production. We must act to build a system that is based on redundancy instead of fragile interdependencey. We need to go back to an age of many borders, not less borders, until every individual is himself free to participate in whatever social group or endeavor he believes is best for him, as well as free to defend against people that seek to sabotage him; a voluntary tribal society devoid of forced associations.
Of course, this effort would require unimaginable sacrifice and a fight that would probably last a generation. To suggest otherwise would be a lie. I can’t possibly convince anyone that a potential future based on a hypothetical model is worth that sacrifice. I have no idea whether it is or is not. I can only point out that the globalist dominated world we live in today is clearly doomed. We can argue about what comes next after we have removed our heads from the guillotine. SF Source Alt_Market Oct. 2016 Share this: | 0 |
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday seemed sharply divided during an extended argument over a challenge to President Obama’s plan that would shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and allow them to work in the country legally. A deadlock seemed a real possibility, one that would leave in place an appeals court ruling that blocks the plan and deny Mr. Obama the chance to revive it while he remains in office. A tie vote would set no Supreme Court precedent and therefore would allow a renewed challenge to the plan once the court is back at full strength. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. ’s questions were deeply skeptical of the administration’s position. They appeared to signal that he would not join the court’s four more liberal members in dismissing the case on the ground that the challengers had not suffered injuries giving them standing to sue. A ruling based on standing would be a victory for the administration. The case, brought by Texas and 25 other states, could still produce a significant ruling on presidential power and immigration policy in the midst of an election campaign in which both issues have been prominent. A loss for Mr. Obama would vindicate Republican accusations that he has acted lawlessly in exceeding the limits of presidential power and has not done enough to secure the nation’s borders. A victory for him would uphold one of the central legacies of his presidency and affect the lives of countless immigrants. Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. the government’s top appellate lawyer, opened the arguments with a vigorous defense of Mr. Obama’s authority to set priorities for immigration enforcement. He was quickly challenged by Chief Justice Roberts. “Could the president grant deferred removal to every unlawfully present alien in the United States right now?” the chief justice asked skeptically. Mr. Verrilli said there were statutory constraints that would prevent the president from doing so. Mr. Verrilli also argued that Texas had not suffered the sort of direct and concrete injury that gave it standing to sue. The chief justice said the administration had given Texas an impossible choice, “a real . ” Texas says it has standing to sue because it would be costly for the state to give driver’s licenses to immigrants affected by the federal policy. Mr. Verrilli said the state could simply change its law to deny driver’s licenses to the immigrants. “You would sue them instantly,” Chief Justice Roberts responded, meaning that the federal government would file a lawsuit challenging Texas’ unequal treatment of immigrants affected by the program. Mr. Verrilli said that was probably so but that such a suit might not succeed. The answer did not seem to satisfy Chief Justice Roberts, who suggested that the choice between incurring a budget shortfall and facing a lawsuit from the federal government was enough to establish standing. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, on the other hand, twice suggested that Texas could have filed a different kind of lawsuit, one in which its standing would not be in question. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that “nearly 11 million unauthorized aliens are here in the shadows. ” “They’re here whether we want them or not,” she said. But Justice Kennedy questioned whether the president can defer deportations for millions of people without specific congressional authorization. “It’s as if the president is defining the policy and the Congress is executing it,” Justice Kennedy said. “That’s just upside down. ” The case, United States v. Texas, No. concerns a program intended to allow more than four million unauthorized immigrants who are the parents of citizens or of lawful permanent residents to apply for a program sparing them from deportation and providing them work permits. The program, announced in November 2014, was called Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents, or DAPA. Mr. Verrilli told the justices that it addressed “a pressing humanitarian concern in avoiding the breakup of families that contain U. S. citizen children. ” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked if the president could simply open the nation’s borders. Mr. Verrilli said that was “a million miles from where we are now. ” That comment prompted Justice Kennedy to jump in. “Well, it’s four million people from where we are now,” he said, referring to the number of immigrants affected by Mr. Obama’s plan. “What we’re doing is defining the limits of discretion,” Justice Kennedy said of the court’s role in determining the lawfulness of the plan. “And it seems to me that that is a legislative, not an executive act. ” Scott A. Keller, Texas’ solicitor general, said Mr. Obama’s plan was unprecedented and unlawful. He faced skeptical questions from the court’s more liberal members about whether his state had standing. Justice Sotomayor wondered why it would cost more to issue more driver’s licenses. “Why can’t you just let people wait on line?” she asked. A different line, for one of the coveted red tickets that allow members of the public into the Supreme Court for the oral arguments, stretched around the block on Monday. Some people had been camping in front of the court since Friday night, eager for a chance to witness history. Groups of young people walked up and down the sidewalk holding banners and chanting mantras like “Sí se puede,” Spanish for “Yes we can. ” Thomas Pittman, a retired firefighter and a deacon at Shiloh Baptist Church in Trenton, said he was interested in the effects the case might have on the presidential race. “I think it’s going to have a major impact on the election, due to the fact that Trump wants to deport people and close our borders down,” he said, referring to the Republican Donald J. Trump. Mr. Obama has said he took action after years of frustration with Republicans in Congress who had repeatedly refused to support bipartisan Senate legislation to update immigration laws. A coalition of 26 states, led by Texas, promptly challenged the plan, accusing the president of ignoring administrative procedures for changing rules and of abusing the power of his office by sidestepping Congress. If the Supreme Court upholds Mr. Obama’s actions, the White House has vowed to move quickly to set up the program and begin enrolling immigrants before his successor takes over early next year. Democratic presidential candidates have said they would continue the program, but most of the Republicans in the race have vowed to dismantle it and redouble immigration enforcement. Mr. Keller, Texas’ lawyer, acknowledged that the president has wide authority over whom to deport. “In this case,” he said, “given that they are removing 400, 000 people a year, we admit that they could do forbearance from removal. But what they can’t do is grant authorization to be in the country. ” He said the states’ quarrel was with what he called a blanket grant of “lawful presence” to millions of immigrants, entitling them to various benefits. Mr. Verrilli, the administration’s lawyer, said the term “lawful presence” had been misunderstood. Chief Justice Roberts asked him whether he was slicing things a little too fine. “Lawfully present does not mean you’re legally present?” the chief justice asked. “Correct,” Mr. Verrilli responded. Justice Alito said that response was mystifying. “I’m just talking about the English language,” he said. “I just don’t understand it. ” But Justice Elena Kagan said the term “lawful presence” was a red herring, suggesting that the administration could “have done the exact same thing without using that phrase. ” | 1 |
The Salk Institute has successfully implanted a hybrid into a sow and observed its successful development over the course of a month. [Infant “pluripotent” cells — that is, those that have the potential to develop into any adult cell — were placed inside pig embryos and successfully combined into an embryonic hybrid. Once that was accomplished, scientists from the Salk Institute implanted the experiment into the womb of a mature sow and observed the embryo’s maturation over the course of a month. Lead Researcher Izpisua Belmonte wanted to “know whether human cells can contribute at all to address the ‘yes or no’ question,” regarding the potential for growing human organs from pigs. She’s concluded that the study was “long enough for us to try to understand how the human and pig cells mix together early on without raising ethical concerns about mature chimeric animals. ” Despite the success of the experiment, the resulting cells were very weak. Still, it was an “important first step” that brings Belmonte and his peers closer to the “ultimate goal” to “grow functional and transplantable tissue or organs. ” And while he believes “we are still far away from that,” they do have a lead: “Now that we know the answer is yes, our next challenge is to improve efficiency and guide the human cells into forming a particular organ in pigs. ” To do so, they will need to edit the pig genome itself, to make it a better host for the development of human cellular structures. Pigs are already our best candidates for such work — their organs are extremely similar to our own. With a lack of human donors on the proverbial table, the research could provide our best hope yet for manufacturing human organs for transplant. It might be the only way to save the people who die every day waiting for an organ transplant. There are, of course, a multitude of ethical concerns in the creation of hybrids. The Salk Institute has been forced to rely on private donations to fund the experiment, because such experiments remain ineligible for government funding. All told, the research has created 186 surviving chimeric embryos, each with about 1 in 100, 000 human cells. The human cells also seemed to slow the overall growth rate. University of North Carolina stem cell expert Ke Cheng says that the overwhelming predominance of pig tissue would very likely cause human bodies to resist the creations in their current form. And while there are “other steps to take,” he’s called the development “very intriguing. ” This isn’t the first experiment, nor will it be the last. Recently, human glial brain cells were implanted in mice. The mice solved mazes and memory tests twice as fast as their unmodified competitors. It’s a new scientific frontier, with as many hard questions — both moral and methodological — as it has potential answers. Follow Nate Church @Get2Church on Twitter for the latest news in gaming and technology, and snarky opinions on both. | 1 |
With headlines swirling and lawmakers meeting behind closed doors, it’s not difficult to conclude there is trouble in the Trump White House. [But a deeper dive reveals that lots of people who would not consider themselves Trump supporters admit there is no evidence of any wrongdoing by the Trump campaign regarding alleged collusion with Russians. Here’s a list of some of those who fall into the “no evidence” column: “The last time we spoke, Senator, I asked you if you had actually seen evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, and you said to me — and I’m quoting you now — you said, ‘not at this time.’ Has anything changed since we spoke last?” asked CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “Well, not — no, it hasn’t,” Feinstein said. “But I just want to be precise, Senator. In all of the — you’ve had access from the intelligence committee, from the Judiciary committee, all of the access you’ve had to very sensitive information, so far you’ve not seen any evidence of collusion, is that right?” Blitzer pressed. “Well, evidence that would establish that there’s collusion. There are all kinds of rumors around. There are newspaper stories, but that’s not necessarily evidence,” Feinstein admitted. “But just to be clear, there has been no actual evidence yet,” Sam Stein of the Huffington Post asked. “No, it has not been,” Waters said. “What I have found appalling is the number of leaks that have taken place over the last several months,” Brennan said at the SALT conference in Las Vegas, the annual gathering of managers and other financiers. “This needs to be stopped. ” “The damage that was done is what was leaked in the aftermath, what was put in the media. The real damage to national security is the leaks,” Brennan said. Brennan said. “These individuals who still stay within the government and are leaking this stuff to the press need to be brought to task. ” “Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told MSNBC’S Andrea Mitchell on Friday that there could be evidence of collusion between Russia and President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign,” CNN reported. But, “There was no evidence that rose to that level, at that time, that found its way in to the intelligence community assessment, which we had pretty high confidence in,” Clapper said of collusion between Trump campaign aides and Russians, referring also to the U. S. intelligence assessment that Russia tried to influence the presidential election in favor of Trump. “That’s not to say there wasn’t evidence, but not that met that threshold,” Clapper said. Reuters ran a story on Thursday with the headline “Exclusive: Trump campaign had at least 18 undisclosed contacts with Russians sources” But buried in the story is the real headline: “In January, the Trump White House initially denied any contacts with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. The White House and advisers to the campaign have since confirmed four meetings between Kislyak and Trump advisers during that time. The people who described the contacts to Reuters said they had seen no evidence of wrongdoing or collusion between the campaign and Russia in the communications reviewed so far. ” | 1 |
America is at the end of her rope. Never before in the history of the country have the forces between good and evil been so clearly delineated.
There are great changes going on in America right now. They are happening so quickly that nobody can keep up with what is happening.
Disinformation abounds everywhere. War and rumors of war, all false. Coup’s and and counter coups. Much of what is written on these topics are totally false and unintelligent speculation. Later today, I am going to bring out what I have known for three days and they don’t match much of the idle speculation. Stay tuned, soon all will be revealed.
Anonymous speaks so eloquently about the choices that lie ahead for all of us. The following video should be viewed by all.
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The Chicago editorial board is now asking that every college and university in the state be transformed into ‘sanctuary campuses’ for shielding illegal immigrants from federal law. [In a piece, “Make colleges a sanctuary from deportation threat,” asks that every college and university in Illinois risk losing federal funding for the cause: Universities have an obligation to stand up for their students — all of them. Almost all of these young people on college campuses who fear deportation were brought to this country as babies or small children. They are Americans in every way except for that official citizenship paper. They are the Dreamers. This is their home, the only one they have ever known. To our thinking, all Illinois universities and colleges, public and private, should declare themselves places of sanctuary, just as cities such as Chicago and New York and counties such as Cook have done. They would send a signal to Trump, who campaigned on an indiscriminate promise to get tough on undocumented immigrants, that Americans are better than that — at least when it comes to Dreamers. The Times cited “ on immigration” who have been Donald Trump’s leading advisors on the issue — Sen. Jeff Sessions ( ) Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, and former Breitbart Executive Chairman Steve Bannon — that could become a detriment to individuals living in the country illegally. The Times’ editors also go on to make a accusation against the forthcoming Trump administration, claiming that international students are also under threat: And it’s not just undocumented immigrants who are afraid. International students from the Middle East worry Trump’s administration will make it more difficult for them to continue studying in the U. S. They, too, want to know universities’ administrations will advocate for them. Schools should spell out policies and protections, stating them clearly to students, campus police, faculty and staff. It’s not asking too much. Trump’s longtime solution for the illegal immigration issue has been to deport criminal illegal aliens first, then focus on enforcing so that remaining migrants must return through the country’s naturalization process. The Times thinks otherwise, requesting that illegal immigrants be allowed to not only stay in the country, but they should be given ‘sanctuary’ on every university campus in the state: Whether or not administrators label a university a “sanctuary” campus is not the central issue here. The word is largely symbolic. The American Council on Education points out that it has no clear meaning. Policy is what counts. “Sanctuary” has become an incendiary term that riles some conservatives. Sanctuary cities and counties across America have incurred the wrath of Republicans in Congress. Part of Trump’s action plan is to eliminate all federal funding to sanctuary cities. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has vowed that Chicago will continue to be a sanctuary city despite Trump’s promise. Other cities also are refusing to back down. Universities and colleges implementing sanctuary campus policies do so at the risk of being stripped of federal funds once Trump’s administration takes control of the matter. Most recently, students at Southern Illinois University (SIU) have demanded that all illegal immigrants residing in the region be given “sanctuary” status on the campus, as Breitbart Texas reported. Students with the Graduate and Professional Student Council and the Undergraduate Student Government are demanding that university officials “begin immediately” crafting a campus policy that would offer comprehensive sanctuary to the Illinois illegal immigrant population from federal immigration laws. John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder. | 1 |
0 comments
Incredible. Just when you start to think that there is nothing more Obama could say to become more a dirt bag than he’s already proven himself to be, he goes and pulls something OFF THE CHARTS stupid!
In his efforts to push Hillary into the White House he spoke at a recent rally for her. What he had to say, was an insult to American men.
See for yourself!
He says he wants to be honest? He lacks the integrity to do so. So basically when men don’t vote for Hillary, it’s not because they are intelligent enough to recognize she is a corrupt snake whose greed and hunger for money and power will leave our country hanging by a string. It’s not because they have a mind to think for themselves and decide whether she’s the person for the job or not.
Nope…according to Obama, it’s because American men are racist.
Infuriating..isn’t it?
It’s just too much stupid, and we all know we shouldn’t engage with it because it will drag us down to its’ level and destroy us with experience in stupidity…but still.
Sometimes I wish we could mute the stupid. Just long enough to regain our sanity back to endure through it.
What an idiot. | 0 |
Plantas nómadas y robots parásito muestran cómo cambiar nuestra relación con el medio ambiente Publicado: 26 oct 2016 19:58 GMT
Un artista mexicano crea criaturas robóticas que roban energía eléctrica para hacer música y se alimentan de bacterias de ríos contaminados. El proyecto 'Plantas Nómadas' evidencia el modo en el que nos relacionamos con el medio ambiente Proyecto Plantas Nómadas Síguenos en Facebook
Una oruga creada con tubos aparece colgada en cables de luz, hace ruido, convive con otras orugas como ella y sus cantos "forman parte del paisaje urbano". Una mosca vuela con vibradores de celulares y una araña de alambres y juguetes viejos toma desechos de la basura para construir nuevos seres como ella.
Estos 'Parásitos Urbanos' creados con desechos tecnológicos pretenden hacernos reflexionar sobre las consecuencias de cómo usamos y gestionamos nuestros residuos.
De alguna manera, explica su creador a RT , son "organismos de vida artificial" que surgen de la basura y vienen a la ciudad para "parasitarla".
"Las preguntas que me hago tienen que ver con el impacto de la tecnología en la vida cotidiana en nuestro entorno", dice Gilberto Esparza, artista mexicano formado en la Universidad de Guanajuato, en la región del Bajío, cruzada por el contaminado río Lerma. Plantas nómadas
Después de los parásitos urbanos, Esparza creó otro ser, simbionte entre plantas, bacterias y una máquina, que camina solitario y lento al lado de ríos contaminados para alimentarse de ellos y limpiar el agua.
"Utilizamos el agua como vehículo de deshechos", afirma Esparza.
La intervención tenía que ver con el tema del agua, y su intención era realizar una reflexión acerca de cómo convivir con el agua para revertir la contaminación.
"Cómo hace la planta nómada para sobrevivir, entender, reconocer cuál es el entorno y aprovecharlo", se pregunta.
El artista explica que la planta nómada se integra al ecosistema y tiene la posibilidad de sobrevivir. Eso hace una simbiosis con su entorno. En el agua hay bacterias, las recoge y las lleva a pilas biológicas, contenedores internos, donde se desarrollan y empiezan a alimentarse. Luego invita a las bacterias que están en el agua. Las bacterias, en sus procesos metabólicos, generan electricidad.
El agua limpia es llevada a otro contenedor dentro del robot y de ahí es tomada para hacer crecer plantas extintas en lugares contaminados. Finalmente, las plantas aportan energía al robot; esa es su estrategia para sobrevivir. Una planta nómada explora en un río contaminado. Proyecto Plantas Nómadas
"Si lo proyectas a una ciudad, si comenzamos a cambiar nuestras estrategias, manera de relacionarnos, obviamente eso va a impactar de manera positiva en el entorno", opina.
"No es que su pretensión sea limpiar el río, sino que su actitud ante el río hace que el río se sane. Lo que busco con estos proyectos es reflexionar acerca de eso", explica el artista.
Esparza hizo un cómic en el que se ve esa etapa del robot, viviendo en el río. Al final, el agua se ve limpia y queda abierta la pregunta si fue porque los humanos lograron entender cómo relacionarse con el agua o porque se extinguió la especie de la planta nómada, que ya no tuvo de dónde alimentarse. Un parásito urbano "interviene" la ciudad Proyecto Parásitos Urbanos No son la solución, sino la reflexión
La intención profunda de este trabajo con robots, explica Esparza, es entender a través de estos desarrollos que tenemos que cambiar nuestra relación con el medio ambiente en lugar de resolverlo desde la tecnología, de tal forma que los desperdicios ya no serían una basura, sino energía y materiales.
El último proyecto de esparza se llama 'Plantas Autofotosintéticas', y pretende trasladar la idea de 'Plantas Nómadas' a una ciudad.
La nueva planta funciona a modo de maqueta para explicar cómo podría ser a nivel sistémico el funcionamiento de una ciudad en el futuro y plantear el reciclaje de sus aguas para que tenga un consumo externo mínimo y para que se pueda autosustentar. Gilberto Esparza lleva diez años trabajando con robots para reflexionar sobre la problemática medioambiental. Plantas Nómadas
"La verdadera forma de poder terminar con estos problemas de contaminación no es tanto generando nuevas tecnologías que hagan un parche que traten de estar limpiando lo que ensuciamos" explica.
Después trabajará con un instrumento sonoro con celdas microbianas con el que pretende traducir la actividad biológica electroquímica a sonidos.
Su intención es hacer "que suenen ríos contaminados"; después dará un disco con los resultados para que cada río se exprese.
"El problema, y por eso no lo hemos logrado, es que nuestra lógica gira en torno a la economía y no a qué es lo que necesitamos" opina el artista. Todo sobre este tema | 0 |
Former Clinton aide Jennifer Palmieri has blasted President Trump for being “preoccupied” with allegations of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign and called him “obsessed” with proving he is a legitimate president. Palmieri leveled these criticisms despite her role in the Clinton team’s constant efforts to delegitimize the president by making claims about alleged Russian interference in the election. [Palmieri, who served as the communications director for the Clinton campaign, told the New York Times in a weekend article that Trump’s tweeting after his firing of FBI Director James Comey shows he is “more preoccupied” with the Russia controversy than once thought. “What we’ve really learned is either he’s worried about Russia because he’s got a significant vulnerability or he’s worried about Russia because it undermines his electoral win,” Palmieri said. “He’s clearly been more preoccupied with it than we understood. ” Later in the article, Palmieri expressed shock about Trump’s frequent references to his win in November. “It is remarkable,” she said. “Has there been a president ever who’s been that obsessed about proving that he’s legitimate?” Yet Palmieri’s remarks, and the Times’ reporting, ignores the role Palmieri — as well as others on the Clinton campaign team — have played in trying to delegitimize Trump’s election. The recent book on the failed Clinton campaign, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, documents that the narrative of how Russia was partly to blame for Clinton’s loss was formulated within 24 hours of Clinton’s concession. That narrative has been peddled by Clinton aides and media outlets ever since. Just last week, Clinton campaign chair, John Podesta, tweeted out a video claiming to “connect the dots” between Russia and Trump. Palmieri retweeted the rambling minute video complete with meandering spider diagrams: Watch this: https: . — Jennifer Palmieri (@jmpalmieri) May 12, 2017, On Friday, the Washington Post published an by Podesta, which called for the firing of Trump’s top aides who refuse to speak “truth to power,” and called for “a special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in our election, possible collusion by the Trump campaign, and Trump’s ongoing attempts to interfere in the investigation. ” That was tweeted twice by Palmieri, the second time with the caption “So good, had to retweet again. ” In March, Palmieri wrote a piece for the Washington Post, ominously titled “The Clinton campaign warned you about Russia. But nobody listened to us”: Now that Trump is president, though, the stakes are higher, because the Russian plot succeeded. The lessons we campaign officials learned in trying to turn the Russia story against Trump can help other Democrats (and all Americans) figure out how to treat this interference no longer as a matter of electoral politics but as the threat to the republic that it really is. At an event in New York in May, Clinton herself blamed Russia for her election woes. While saying she took responsibility for her election defeat, she then blamed that defeat on alleged Russian interference in the election, as well as Comey’s actions related to the FBI’s investigation into her private email use. “I was on the way to winning until the combination of Jim Comey’s letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me but got scared off,” she said. At that event, she also described herself as “part of the resistance” — not something that someone who believed the occupant of the White House is legitimate would normally say. Adam Shaw is a Politics Reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter: @AdamShawNY. | 1 |
One way to regard the refugees in the news these frenzied past few days is as potential Americans, individuals and families escaping bad situations who imagine themselves building new lives here. What these particular refugees could become in this country, and how they could contribute to our society and culture, is a question stuck in suspended animation. But we do have the power to look to the past. And in the literary realm it’s unquestionable that refugees, once here, often make major contributions. Through the 20th century and into this one, those fleeing political persecution or war have produced important works that we think of now as at least partly American, from fiction about the harrowing experiences of exile and dislocation to political treatises by thinkers who want to understand why their homelands fell apart. This is a sampling of 25 of those works. Bertolt Brecht, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui” (1941) Country of origin: GermanyReason for leaving: Fled Nazi Germany for Denmark in 1933, and then came to the United States in 1941 when war broke out. Brecht always intended his satire about the ruthless ascension of a Chicago mobster to be performed on an American stage. He is mocking Adolf Hitler, each dopey and villainous character having a Nazi counterpart in real life. The character of the populist bully, who has a penchant for both public speaking and private was central in Brecht’s mind during his wartime exile. Hans Augusto Rey and Margret Rey, “Curious George” (1941) Country of origin: GermanyReason for Leaving: German Jews who escaped from their native Hamburg to Brazil and then France, only to leave again for the United States in 1940 just as the Nazis invaded. The mischievous monkey who had a canny way of getting in and out of trouble originated in the minds of Hans Augusto and Margret Rey. They conceived of the character while themselves trying to outrun the Nazis, finally escaping from France on homemade bicycles and carrying the manuscript with the first mention of George (then called “Zozo”) along with them. Karl Polanyi, “The Great Transformation” (1944) Country of origin: AustriaReason for Leaving: With Hitler’s rise, prominent socialists like Polanyi were imperiled, so he left for England in 1933 and then arrived in Vermont in 1940. After settling down to teach at Bennington College, Polanyi published his major work, which looked at how the Industrial Revolution was so disruptive that it created the conditions for both Communism and fascism. But capitalism, he argued, did not happen spontaneously. It required an enormous amount of government planning in order to function. “ was planned,” was his counterintuitive summation. Thomas Mann, “Doctor Faustus” (1947) Country of origin: GermanyReason for leaving: An opponent of Hitler’s rise, Mann left for Switzerland in 1933 and eventually emigrated to the United States in 1939. Mann, in his California exile, took the Faust legend and placed it in the context of the rise and fall of Nazi Germany. His main character, a composer, strikes a deal with a Mephistophelean figure to give him creative glory. But madness is the which becomes an allegory for where Germany is headed. Theodor Adorno, “The Authoritarian Personality” (1950) Country of origin: GermanyReasons for leaving: After being dismissed from his teaching position in 1932 by the Nazis, Adorno left to study at Oxford and then moved to the United States in 1938. Adorno wanted to understand what kind of personality type was susceptible to fascism. He found his answer, via Freud, in a harsh parenting style that led to the kind of person who would crave the approval and guidance of an authoritarian. Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951) Country of origin: GermanyReasons for leaving: In 1933, Arendt, a German Jew, left her country and eventually settled in Paris, where she helped Jewish refugees. Once the Vichy regime took over, she herself was interned as an “enemy alien,” but managed to emigrate and settle in New York in 1941. Like Adorno and the other German Jewish emigrants of her generation, Arendt was fixated on the question of why democratic institutions collapse and authoritarianism rises. In her major political work, she dissected both Nazism and Stalinism as instantiations of a new type of politics, one that utilized terror and fear to subjugate populations and gain their acquiescence. Leo Strauss, “Natural Right and History” (1953) Country of origin: GermanyReasons for leaving: Already teaching in England when the Nazis came to power, Strauss was prevented from returning and moved to the United States in 1937. In six lectures given from his perch at the University of Chicago, Strauss laid out his argument about what he saw as modernity’s nihilistic rejection of classical philosophy. The immutable truths of Plato and Aristotle needed to be appreciated again. Once we follow the thought of these ancient philosophers we will see more clearly what should distinguish right and wrong in ethics and politics. Vladimir Nabokov, “Lolita” (1955) Country of origin: RussiaReasons for leaving: Born to Russian nobility, Nabokov and his family fled the Bolshevik Revolution, living in a succession of European countries. He eventually moved to America in 1940, where he took up work as an entomologist at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, among other jobs. In his most famous and controversial novel, Nabokov took up the story of Humbert Humbert, a man obsessed with a young girl, his nymphet, Lolita. In what is essentially the tale of a sordid road trip, Nabokov has Humbert traveling the country in possession of his illicit love interest. The book is filled with Nabokov’s own observations about an America that still felt foreign and exciting to him. Isabel Allende, “The House of the Spirits” (1982) Country of origin: ChileReasons for leaving: Allende fled to Venezuela in 1973 after the coup that brought down Salvador Allende, the socialist leader and her father’s cousin. She moved to California in the late 1980s. Drawing on the circumstances of her own exile, Allende used her debut novel to tell a multigenerational saga that takes place in an unnamed country very much like Chile. We see the destruction of democracy and the rise of a cruel dictator who tries to eliminate all opposition. “I wanted to show that life goes in a circle, events are intertwined, and that history repeats itself, there is no beginning and no end,” Allende said about her sprawling, narrative. Czeslaw Milosz, “Bells in Winter” (1985) Country of origin: PolandReason for leaving: After surviving World War II in Poland and initially joining the postwar Communist government, Milosz defected in 1951, eventually emigrating to the United States in 1960. The Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner produced a quietly meditative work in 1985 that pointed toward the mysterious quality of existence, the inability to fully understand our own natures. “Life was impossible, but was endured,” he writes in “Recess,” capturing the exile’s lament, the alienation of deracination, of living an arm’s length away from oneself. Joseph Brodsky, “Less Than One” (1986) Country of origin: Soviet UnionReason for leaving: Put on trial and into psychiatric institutions for his dissident beliefs, Brodsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. Brodsky was interested in the poet’s role in society, and these essays, which deal with politics, literature and his own personal experience of exile, all get at this question. For him, poetry was “the most democratic art,” as he says in an essay about the West Indian poet Derek Walcott. It’s the poet’s embrace of individuality that makes him a necessary counterpoint — an important thorn — to the state. Nuruddin Farah, “Maps” (1986) Country of origin: SomaliaReasons for leaving: Exiled from Somalia in the for writing about life under the harsh rule of the dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. In the first novel of his trilogy, “Blood in the Sun,” Farrah writes about a young man, an orphan, obsessed with his own origins. Growing up dislocated in the big city of Mogadishu and tormented by the need to avenge his father’s death, the boy reflects all the struggles of national identity in a country torn from the traditional past and thrust into a violent future. Ariel Dorfman, “Death and the Maiden” (1990) Country of origin: ChileReasons for leaving: A cultural adviser to the deposed socialist leader Salvador Allende, Dorfman was forced to flee the country in 1973. In his revenge fantasy of a play, Dorfman dramatized the confrontation between a woman who was tortured by a Latin American regime and the thug who supposedly did the torturing. She puts him on trial through a long night. Is this really the man who tortured her with electricity to the strains of Schubert, or is she making a paranoid mistake? In this confusion lies Dorfman’s own feelings about the evasive quality of redemption. Reinaldo Arenas, “Before Night Falls” (1992) Country of origin: CubaReasons for leaving: Imprisoned for his writing, he was able to emigrate to America as part of the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. Published after his suicide in 1990, Arenas’s memoir tell his whole life story, from his impoverished youth all the way to his decision to kill himself. It’s also a tale of political disillusion and the pain of exile. Arenas was a true believer in Castro, but after being locked up for being gay he begins a process of losing more of himself, until he is left without a homeland. Cristina Garcia, “Dreaming in Cuban” (1992) Country of origin: CubaReasons for leaving: Her family was among the first wave of people to escape from Cuba in 1961 shortly after Fidel Castro took power. Garcia’s first novel looked at three generations of women exiled from Cuba, all with complex feelings about the country, from love and nostalgia to revulsion. For the daughter of a revolutionary, now living in New York, her memories are of being raped by one of Castro’s young followers. “She wants no part of Cuba,” Garcia writes of this young woman, “no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all. ” Henry Kissinger, “Diplomacy” (1994) Country of origin: GermanyReasons for leaving: A German Jew, he fled with his family in 1938. The former secretary of state tried to sum up in this book his realist foreign policy approach, taking a historical tour from Europe in the 17th century all the way up to his years working for Presidents Nixon and Ford. Realpolitik here is the attempt to achieve stability through a careful balancing of world powers. Scarred by his own experience growing up in Nazi Germany, Kissinger has always been alive to the fragility of democracy, a feeling that has guided his approach, one that abhors idealism. Loung Ung, “First They Killed My Father” (2001) Country of origin: CambodiaReasons for leaving: Escaped from Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, ending up in Vermont. Ung’s memoir of life near the edge of the “killing fields” is a harrowing attempt at a collective document. “If you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too,” she writes. Her father was killed, and she was starved and near death by the time she managed to enter a Vietnamese refugee camp. It’s a story that is told straightforwardly. When Ung asks her father why the Khmer Rouge are acting so violently, he answers simply, “Because they are destroyers of things. ” Madeleine Albright, “Madam Secretary” (2003) Country of origin: CzechoslovakiaReasons for leaving: Hitler’s takeover of parts of Czechoslovakia forced her family, supporters of the early Czech democrat Edvard Benes, to go into exile and finally emigrate to the United States in 1948. Albright recounts her years as secretary of state during the Clinton presidency and the unlikely path she took as a Czech refugee, whose family fled both Hitler and later Communism. She also grapples with an unexpected twist in her family story. Late in life, Albright discovered that her parents were Jewish. They had converted to Catholicism and never revealed this secret to her, or that her grandparents had perished as Jews in a Nazi concentration camp. Dinaw Mengestu, “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” (2007) Country of origin: EthiopiaReasons for leaving: His family fled Ethiopia’s Communist revolution in 1980, when he was 2, and they found their way to Peoria, Ill. In his first novel, Mengestu captured the world of immigrants and refugees in Washington, D. C. as they gather at a Logan Circle grocery store and reminisce about homes they can’t go back to. “How was I supposed to live in America,” says Sepha Stephanos, the book’s protagonist and the store’s owner, “when I had never really left Ethiopia?” Ishmael Beah, “A Long Way Gone” (2007) Country of origin: Sierra LeoneReasons for leaving: Forced to become a child soldier at the age of 12, Beah eventually escaped Freetown in 1997 with the help of Unicef and ended up in New York City. Beah’s memoir offers a rare chance to see war from the eyes of a child soldier, brainwashed and kept obedient with drugs and guns. But the bleakness of this account is also tempered with the redemption that comes at the end. He gets out. And the very act of reading as he tells the story of his past is indication that a nightmare like this can end. Masha Gessen, “The Man Without a Face” (2012) Country of origin: Soviet UnionReasons for leaving: Gessen’s family was Jewish and denied religious freedom in the Soviet Union (or the right to freely emigrate). In 1981 her family was granted permission to leave. Gessen, a child of the Soviet Union, offers up a portrait of Vladimir Putin as a man formed by his many years in the K. G. B. She finds the roots of his illiberalism, his secrecy, his disregard for democratic norms. It’s an authoritarianism she fears others have been blind to, projecting onto him the leader they hope he will be. Vaddey Ratner, “In the Shadow of the Banyan” (2012) Country of origin: CambodiaReasons for leaving: Ratner and her mother escaped the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979 after enduring four years of forced labor, starvation and near execution. They immigrated to rural Missouri. Ratner’s first novel hews closely to her own traumatic biography. A child of only 5 when Pol Pot’s army began terrorizing the country, she tells the story from that perspective, focusing on both the beauty and the horror as it appears to innocent eyes hardly able to comprehend beyond the everyday sensations of panic and wonder. Gary Shteyngart, “Little Failure” (2014) Country of origin: Soviet UnionReasons for leaving: Like other Soviet Jews, Shteyngart and his family felt discriminated against in the Soviet Union and were allowed to emigrate in 1979. Shteyngart’s mother must have meant it in an endearing way when she called her son “Little Failure. ” He certainly embraced the moniker. Here the hilarious writer turns to memoir to tell his own story of arriving in America as an awkward young boy. Through the trials and tribulations of Hebrew school and the thick pot smoke of Oberlin, Shteyngart survived and has become our chronicler of absurdity as only an immigrant with a funny name can see it. Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The Sympathizer” (2015) Country of origin: VietnamReasons for leaving: Nguyen’s family escaped Vietnam in 1975 and lived in a Pennsylvania refugee camp before settling in Harrisburg. The great contribution of Nguyen’s Pulitzer first novel is that it introduces a Vietnamese voice into a conversation that has been . As the narrator, annoyed that American soldiers and politicians have monopolized the story of the Vietnam War, explains, “this was the first war where the losers would write history instead of the victors. ” This novel, applying fresh eyes to a war now known only through clichés, offers that corrective. Vu Tran, “Dragonfish” (2015) Country of origin: VietnamReasons for leaving: Born in Saigon in 1975, five months after the city fell to the North Vietnamese, Tran left by boat in 1980 with his mother and sister, spending five days at sea. Tran’s novel, his first, does not engage in any nostalgia about the lost home. That place carries only memories of trauma and war. He forces his characters, including a Vietnamese woman in California who mysteriously disappears, to grapple with that past. It’s the only way to get anywhere near embracing their new American realities. | 1 |
DETROIT — First the Obama administration bailed out much of the American auto industry, pulling it out of a tailspin. Then it reshaped the business, with regulations and policies intended to increase fuel economy, improve safety and add jobs. Now, under Donald J. Trump, the industry is bracing for another wholesale makeover. Perhaps no industry could be affected in more ways by the new administration than the auto business. That became all the more apparent this week, with Mr. Trump’s selection of Scott Pruitt — the Oklahoma attorney general who is a skeptic and close ally of the oil and gas industry — to run the Environmental Protection Agency. The changes under the Trump administration could include possible tariffs that will raise prices on imported vehicles and parts, fewer subsidies for electric cars and policies that discourage automakers from moving products from American factories to Mexico. And any scaling back of goals by the Trump administration, if Mr. Pruitt’s climate change skepticism and embrace of fossil fuels translates to policy, could also influence the types of vehicles the industry plans to build in coming years — and where it builds them. Bigger models like sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks are less than cars but more profitable for automakers. And their steeper price tags can help pay for the higher labor costs of making them in the United States. In a move that underscored the new psychology since Mr. Trump’s election, Ford Motor — which had been a target of his criticism — in decided to keep building a Lincoln S. U. V. in Kentucky rather than Mexico. And yet, for a industry that routinely makes billion dollar bets on new factories and products, the uncertainty is unnerving. “Our membership is just perplexed right now,” said Gloria Bergquist, vice president for public affairs for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents a dozen carmakers, including General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen and Toyota, on safety and environmental issues. “This is all uncharted territory. ” Mr. Trump’s campaign was studded with promises that could upend the status quo, including some to relax policies intended to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement. He has yet to detail any coming changes. But pursuing policies similar to those he promoted in his campaign could change the entire manufacturing industry by penalizing companies for investing overseas or by stifling global trade. Mr. Trump has yet to specify changes he might make to Nafta or other industrial policies. But his cabinet appointments, particularly the selection for commerce secretary of the billionaire investor Wilbur L. Ross Jr. who has suggested that he is receptive to some of the antitrade views favored by Mr. Trump, indicate that the incoming president may take an aggressive approach to modifying trade deals and other tenets of the outgoing Obama administration. One industry analyst, Ron Harbour of the consulting firm Oliver Wyman, said many voters in Rust Belt states like Michigan and Ohio backed Mr. Trump primarily because of his promises to restore manufacturing jobs in the United States. “So there probably will be pressure to do something,” Mr. Harbour said. “And if he doesn’t do anything, they probably are not going to be too thrilled. ” Mr. Trump will inherit an auto industry that is far healthier than when President Obama took office and industry officials could push back strongly on disruptive changes. But auto executives generally support Mr. Trump’s choice of a former labor secretary in the George W. Bush administration, Elaine Chao — who is also the wife of the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — to head the Transportation Department. The department oversees and safety rules that affect the types of vehicles that automakers produce. “We all have a common interest, and that is to maximize the rate of innovation in the technologies that save lives, avoid crashes and improve fuel economy,” the auto alliance said in response to Ms. Chao’s appointment. No change would be more consequential to the auto industry than applying steep tariffs on imports from Mexico and elsewhere. Companies could be forced to radically change how and where they get commodity parts, the production of which has been migrating to nations for decades. Consumers could see a change in the types of cars available. Despite Mr. Trump’s campaign rhetoric, the American automotive industry and auto jobs have been buoyant since the Obama administration’s bailout. Since 2010, vehicle production has doubled in the United States, and hundreds of thousands of workers have been hired. Last year, a record 17. 4 million cars and trucks were sold in the United States, and analysts forecast strong demand for several years. “You have record levels of production and record levels of demand,” said Mike Jackson of the research firm IHS Markit. “There is every reason for the industry to emphasize that it’s in a very strong position. ” Still, the industry is anticipating changes from Mr. Trump. Ford, the nation’s automaker after General Motors, uncharacteristically made public a decision to keep production of the Lincoln S. U. V. in Kentucky, after Mr. Trump had singled out the company for its growing investments in Mexico. Ford, like G. M. Fiat Chrysler and nearly every foreign automaker, has a huge stake in protecting the interlocking network of factories and parts suppliers made possible by Nafta. Plants in Mexico are crucial to meeting surging demand for new vehicles in the United States. Beyond that, automakers have already committed big investments to new plants in Mexico to take advantage of its cheaper labor and trade agreements. While Mr. Trump has yet to specify how he would renegotiate Nafta, his emphasis has been on increasing American jobs and discouraging automakers from using foreign plants to supply the American market. His proposal to put tariffs of as much as 35 percent on vehicles imported from Mexico has stunned auto executives who have built their business models on open borders for cars, trucks and the thousands of parts in them. “A tariff like that would be imposed on the entire auto sector, and that could have a huge impact on the U. S. economy,” said Mark Fields, chief executive of Ford. Imported vehicles are an integral part of the American market and account for more than 40 percent of its annual volume. Last year, about eight million cars, trucks and sport utilities sold in the United States were built elsewhere, primarily in Mexico, Canada, Japan and Korea. Nearly all of them enter the market free of tariffs that would increase sticker prices significantly. Increasing the price of an imported vehicle with tariffs could reduce overall vehicle sales and exert economic pressure on manufacturers as well as on freight haulers, dealerships and independent service centers. And if Mr. Trump chooses to impose tariffs on auto parts produced abroad and shipped to plants in the United States, the impact will spread further. Last year, auto parts worth $143 billion were imported into the United States, about 35 percent of them from Mexico, compared with $81 billion in parts that were exported, according to the Commerce Department. Many big suppliers, however, are global and make parts in every region of the world. The parts industry’s largest American trade group, the Motor Equipment Manufacturers Association, said its member companies employed more than 734, 000 workers in the United States, and generated another 2. 9 million jobs in related businesses. The industry is acutely sensitive to changes in trade policies that could have a ripple effect on its ability to ship parts in and out of the country. And like automakers, parts manufacturers are anxious to know what Mr. Trump has in store for them. “Now that the election is over, we can begin to explore what to expect in the months to come,” the trade group’s president, Steve Handschuh, wrote in a letter to its members, adding that he was eager “to express our priorities” to the Trump transition team. In addition to Mr. Trump’s focus on trade issues, the industry is expecting policies that diverge from the Obama administration’s enthusiastic support of electric cars, including the $7, 500 tax credits that encouraged consumers to buy them, and for the testing and development of vehicles. In a Nov. 10 letter to the Trump transition team, the auto alliance asked for clarity on policy changes as soon as possible. “Auto manufacturing is a highly business, and because of that we rely on certainty,” Ms. Bergquist wrote. Yet the industry has proved to be adaptable to shifts in government, whether by building more vehicles to meet new regulations, or increasing investments in Mexico because of Nafta. It is also more focused on than politics. In its letter, the auto alliance laid out several goals — including repeating its position that the government its timetable for automakers to achieve fleetwide fuel economy of 54. 5 miles a gallon. But while the letter was perceived as tailored to Mr. Trump’s agenda, Ms. Bergquist said it was composed before the election and would have been sent to an incoming Clinton administration had the outcome been different. “Our position was the same, no matter who won,” she said. | 1 |
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The latest jobs report released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday morning was trumpeted as reflective of an improving economy. The Wall Street Journal said the report “signal[ed] solid momentum in the labor market just days before American voters elect a new president,” while Jeffry Bartash, writing for MarketWatch, said it “shows the seven-year-old economic recovery still has plenty of life despite a slowdown in growth earlier in the year.”
A hard look behind the headline numbers — 161,000 new jobs created in October and the unemployment rate at 4.9 percent — reveals a weak economy falling behind the numbers posted last year. First of all, that 161,000 number was below the 173,000 jobs estimated and predicted by Wall Street observers. Second, it was far below September’s jobs growth of 191,000. Third, it brought the average monthly job growth for the year to just 181,000, compared to 229,000 per month for all of 2015.
Additional data points proved the point: Big-picture numbers showed that the number of long-term employed (those jobless for 27 weeks of more) remained unchanged at two million, while the number of people employed part time for economic reasons (which the BLS calls “involuntary part-time workers") was also unchanged. And so was the labor force participation rate, which remains stuck at 63 percent. In other words, of those available for work, 37 percent aren’t working.
Putting that last number in perspective, at the beginning of Obama’s first term, January 2009, just over 80 million Americans were not in the labor force. Today that number, reported by the BLS, is nearly 95 million. In other words, during the so-called “recovery” from the Great Recession, funded with massive government stimuli and bank bailouts that pushed the national debt toward $20 trillion, there are still more than 14 million people who were formerly in the labor force but who are no longer counted by the BLS.
An even closer look reveals that, in October, 90,000 part-time jobs were created, while 103,000 full-time jobs were lost. The total number of employed people dropped by 43,000 last month while the number of unemployed people dropped even further, by 152,000.
Taken all together, the BLS report’s headlines showed a weak economy struggling to keep up with last year. Behind those headlines, however, it shows a weak economy getting weaker.
If Hillary Clinton wins on Tuesday, and if she is able to pass her economic agenda, the economy will be further burdened with higher taxes on the job creators, with the money spent on public works projects. On the other hand, if Trump wins, and if he is able to pass his economic agenda, tax rates will drop sharply, the Trans-Pacific Partnership will be stalled, and millions of American taxpayer dollars currently flowing to the United Nations to support its global-warming agenda will stay in Washington.
If the American economy can be likened to a race horse increasingly weighed down with taxes, mandates, and regulations, it will stumble under Clinton but might enjoy a renaissance under Trump.
An Ivy League graduate and former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . | 0 |
Here's something interesting from The Unz Review... Recipient Name Recipient Email =>
‘Make America Great Again’ was the slogan of Donald Trump’s election, but the immediate impact of his victory is to make the US less of a power in the world for two reasons: American prestige and influence will be damaged by a general belief internationally that the US has just elected a dangerous buffoon as its leader. The perception is pervasive, but is not very deeply rooted and likely be temporary, stemming as it does from Trump’s demagogic rants during the election campaign. Those about relations with foreign countries were particularly vague and least likely to provide a guide to future policy.
More damaging in the long term for America’s status as superpower is the likelihood that the US is now a more deeply divided society than ever. Trump won the election by demonising and threatening individuals and communities – Mexicans, Muslims, Latinos – and his confrontational style of politics is not going to disappear. Verbal violence produces a permanently over-heated political atmosphere in which physical violence becomes an option. At the same time, the election campaign was focused almost exclusively on American domestic politics with voters showing little interest in events abroad. This is unlikely to change.
Governments around the world can see this for themselves, though this will not stop them badgering their diplomats in Washington and New York for an inkling as to how far Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks were more than outrageous attempts to dominate the news agenda for a few hours. Fortunately, his pronouncements were so woolly that they can be easily jettisoned between now and his inauguration. Real foreign policy positions will only emerge with the formation of a Trump cabinet when it becomes clear who will be in charge.
But, if future policies remain unknowable, super-charged American nationalism combined with economic populism and isolationism are likely to set the general tone. Trump has invariably portrayed Americans as the victims of the foul machinations of foreign countries who previously faced no real resistance from an incompetent self-serving American elite.
This sort of aggressive nationalism is not unique to Trump. All over the world nationalism is having a spectacular rebirth in countries from Turkey to the Philippines. It has become a successful vehicle for protest in Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Eastern Europe. Though Trump is frequently portrayed as a peculiarly American phenomenon, his populist nationalism has a striking amount in common with that of the Brexit campaigners in Britain or even the chauvinism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. Much of this can be discounted as patriotic bombast, but in all cases there is a menacing undercurrent of racism and demonisation, whether it is directed against illegal immigrants in the US, asylum seekers in the Britain or Kurds in south east Turkey.
In reality, Trump made very few proposals for radical change in US foreign policy during the election campaign, aside from saying that he would throw out the agreement with Iran on its nuclear programme – though his staff is now being much less categorical about this, saying only that the deal must be properly enforced. Nobody really knows if Trump will deal any differently from Obama with the swathe of countries between Pakistan and Nigeria where there are at least seven wars raging – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and South Sudan – as well as four serious insurgencies.
The most serious wars in which the US is already militarily involved are in Iraq and Syria and here Trump’s comments during the campaign suggest that he will focus on destroying Isis, recognise the danger of becoming militarily over-involved and look for some sort of cooperation with Russia as the next biggest player in the conflict. This is similar to what is already happening.
Hillary Clinton’s intentions in Syria, though never fully formulated, always sounded more interventionist than Trump’s. One of her senior advisers openly proposed giving less priority to the assault on Isis and more to getting rid of President Bashar al-Assad. To this end, a third force of pro-US militant moderates was to be raised that would fight and ultimately defeat both Isis and Assad. Probably this fantasy would never have come to pass, but the fact that it was ever given currency underlines the extent to which Clinton was at one with the most dead-in-the-water conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment in Washington.
President Obama developed a much more acute sense of what the US could and could not do in the Middle East and beyond, without provoking crises exceeding its political and military strength. Its power may be less than before the failed US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan following 9/11, but it is still far greater than any other country’s. Currently, it is the US which is successfully coordinating the offensive against Isis’s last strongholds in Mosul and Raqqa by a multitude of fractious parties in Iraq and Syria. It was never clear how seriously one should have taken Clinton’s proposals for “safe zones” and trying to fight Isis and Assad at the same time, but her judgements on events in the Middle East since the Iraq invasion of 2003 all suggested a flawed idea of what was feasible.
Trump’s instincts generally seem less well-informed but often shrewd, and his priories have nothing to do with the Middle East. Past US leaders have felt the same way, but they usually end up by being dragged into its crises one way or other, and how they perform then becomes the test of their real quality as a leader. The region has been the political graveyard for three of the last five US presidents: Jimmy Carter was destroyed by the consequences of the Iranian revolution; Ronald Reagan was gravely weakened by the Iran-Contra scandal; and George W Bush’s years in office will be remembered chiefly for the calamities brought on by his invasion of Iraq. Barack Obama was luckier and more sensible, but he wholly underestimated the rise of Isis until it captured Mosul in 2014. (Reprinted from The Independent by permission of author or representative) | 0 |
BALTIMORE — As a black man and a lifelong resident of this city, Ray Kelly has been stopped by the police more times than he can count. And as a community organizer who tried to document police bias after the death of Freddie Gray, Mr. Kelly, 45, had always expected that a federal investigation would uncover a pattern of racial discrimination. Even so, the scathing report that the Justice Department unveiled here on Wednesday — a indictment of how Baltimore police officers have for years violated the Constitution and federal law by systematically stopping, searching (in some cases ) and harassing black residents — gave him a jolt. “Hearing the actual numbers, like on the traffic stops, is blowing my mind,” Mr. Kelly said. Release of the report, at a packed City Hall news conference here, was another wrenching moment of in this majority black city. Even as Mayor Stephanie and the police commissioner, Kevin Davis, accepted the findings — both vowed to turn the Baltimore Police Department into a ‘‘model for the nation’’ — there was relief, but also rage and skepticism among black residents here who wondered if anything would change. “Mere words by officials mean little when it’s people on the ground who are living with these material conditions every day,’’ said the Rev. Heber Brown III, a Baptist pastor who was among a small group of community leaders who met privately last year with Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch. “From the streets to the suites, everybody is skeptical and furious. ’’ In one stark statistic after another, the department’s report helped validate the experiences of Mr. Brown, Mr. Kelly and countless others in poor neighborhoods who regard the police as an occupying force. Many wanted to know what took so long. “It’s like a huge taste of ‘too little, too late,’” said Brandon Scott, 32, a member of the Baltimore City Council, who said he ran for office to correct police abuses that have been going on since before he was born. In Baltimore, a city that is 63 percent black, the Justice Department found that 91 percent of those arrested on discretionary offenses like “failure to obey” or “trespassing” were . Blacks make up 60 percent of Baltimore’s drivers but account for 82 percent of traffic stops. Of the 410 pedestrians who were stopped at least 10 times in the five and a half years of data reviewed, 95 percent were black. “Seeing it all collected and pulled together really hit me in the solar plexus,’’ said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who lived here for 15 years while teaching law at the University of Maryland. But what most infuriates her, she said, is that city leaders — including a series of black mayors — have ignored the problem for decades. “ have not been silent about this,’’ she said. “It’s so rampant, it’s so widespread, this kind of harassment of the community in a city that’s majority that you really have to ask yourself, Why did it take this?” The report is a first step toward a negotiated settlement, known as a consent decree, in which police training and practices will be overhauled under court supervision. The city has already entered into an ‘‘agreement in principle,’’ the mayor said, adding, “We have a very long journey ahead of us. ’’ Mr. Davis, who described himself as “very, very concerned” by the findings, said he had already fired six officers who had engaged in misconduct uncovered by Justice Department investigators. “Those who choose to wear this uniform and choose to blatantly disregard someone’s rights absolutely should be uncomfortable,” he said, “because we are not going to tolerate it. ” The report took 14 months the mayor invited the Justice Department in after the April 2015 death of Mr. Gray, a black man who sustained a fatal spinal cord injury in police custody, set off riots. As the inquiry has progressed, she said, Baltimore has worked closely with the department to change police practices. City officials have revised 26 policies, she said, including the one governing use of force, and officials are engaged in ‘‘active discussion’’ about giving residents a role in determining how officers are punished — a central demand of civil rights advocates. The city has also retrofitted its transport vans — officials say Mr. Gray was injured while riding unbuckled in a van — and has begun issuing body cameras to officers. But none of the steps can substitute for the wholesale change in culture that people here agree is required. Mr. Brown could barely contain his rage as he cited one anecdote from the report — about a teenage boy who reported having been in front of his girlfriend. The officer denied the teenager during a drug arrest, and the charges were later dropped for lack of evidence. After the teenager filed a complaint, he told investigators that he was again by the same officer who, he said, then grabbed his genitals. “What that officer did is not just violate a body, but he injured a spirit, a soul, a psyche,’’ Mr. Brown said. “And that young boy will not easily forget what happened to him, in public with his girlfriend. It’s hard to really put gravity and weight to that type of offense. ’’ Tensions over race and policing here date to at least 1980, when the N. A. A. C. P. called for a federal investigation into police brutality, and they continued with a strategy known as “ policing,” which was singled out by the Justice Department. “People say, ‘driving while black, walking while black,’” Mr. Scott, the city councilman, said. “When you’re talking about zero tolerance, it’s breathing while black. ” Baltimore is now among nearly two dozen cities that the Obama administration has investigated after they were accused of widespread unconstitutional policing. Once Baltimore reaches a settlement, an overhaul of the Police Department will take years and will cost millions Ms. and her aides put the price tag at $5 million to $10 million a year for five to 10 years. Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department official who supervised a similar inquiry in Ferguson, Mo. said reports like the one issued Wednesday were a required step toward community healing. “I’ve often thought of the reports as a necessary cathartic moment, maybe an act of witness, where you give voice to people who wouldn’t otherwise have a voice,” Mr. Smith said. Mr. Kelly, the head of the No Boundaries Coalition, an advocacy group in the West Baltimore neighborhood where Mr. Gray grew up, agreed. After Mr. Gray died, his organization convened hearings and conducted dozens of interviews for a report, “The People’s Findings,” that he submitted to the Justice Department. He was among those providing testimony. “You are just hoping that you don’t get arrested for loitering or something crazy like that, and you get 23 hours in central booking for something that never even makes it to a courtroom,” he said. “That’s been routine my whole life. I can’t remember a time when that wasn’t the way it was. ” | 1 |
”I do think there are tears in the statue (of Liberty) at the moment” says @madeleine in response to the travel ban. https: . Tuesday on CNN’s “New Day,” former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared there were “tears in the eyes” of the Statue of Liberty with regards to President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries. “[T]he Statue of Liberty’s message is in fact, one of open arms and welcoming people,” Albright said. “And I do think that there are tears in the eyes of the statue at the moment. And I do think that the whole aspect of this, in terms of deciding that our safety and security depends on keeping people out rather than welcoming people and understanding what this country is about. So I think it’s just flat . ” Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor | 1 |
In the realm of international trade, it is a truism seemingly as consistent as gravity: Jobs and investment flow from north to south, while manufactured goods travel the other way around. Factories in the United States and Canada shutter as work shifts to Mexico and Central America, where human hands do it more cheaply. So the established order of trade was by all appearances turned upside down on Tuesday, as General Motors agreed to cease manufacturing an automobile engine at a factory in Mexico while moving jobs to a plant in Canada. One might reflexively assume that this turn effectively validates a central promise made repeatedly by Donald J. Trump, the Republican presidential aspirant. Loudly and frequently, Mr. Trump has vowed to yank jobs back to America from Mexico, using shame, executive fiat and his uniquely Trumpian form of threats to make it happen. Here was apparent proof that such a goal was doable. Except life turns out to be more complicated than that. The General Motors deal does indeed signal that work can today wind up transferred seemingly anywhere — never mind the pathway of north to south. In an era of increasingly sophisticated manufacturing that relies more on computers and robotics than hands, centers of innovation like Canada and the United States will exert a greater pull than before. This plays well to Mr. Trump’s premise that a robust era of American job growth awaits, if only the nation selects a president with the audacity to set aside the niceties of trade agreements and begin acting like a superpower, dictating the terms of commerce. And it speaks to one group of voters that has embraced him — dispossessed factory workers prone to blaming globalization for lost jobs, declining wages and financial anxiety. But consider this deal more of a caveat added to the dominant narrative than some revolutionary twist to the story of globalization. “You can bring some jobs back, but they will likely be more of a drip than a big flow,” said Jared Bernstein, a former White House economic adviser in the Obama administration, and now a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. “Trump has a very nostalgic view of globalization, circa 1950. ” “Broadly speaking, the trends that have hurt communities here in terms of trade and trade deficits are very much ongoing, and if that gets turned around, it’s not going to be about bringing all the old jobs back,” he said. “It’s going to be about forging new sectors like advanced manufacturing. ” Which is to say, sectors where a handful of highly skilled people with degrees and technical prowess earn a good deal of money. And workers — the ones who lost jobs to China and Mexico and are now embracing Mr. Trump — continue to be left behind. Far from representing a reversal of course, the G. M. deal then underscores how multinationals are their approach to making things. They are increasingly differentiating between more manufacturing — tasks like stitching bluejeans and snapping together cellphone cases — and more advanced, pursuits that rely on automation and software. Given that products fetch a higher price, it is presumably worth paying a premium to the limited numbers of humans involved in their creation — and especially since this buys proximity to the minds that dream up lucrative new visions. The Canadian plant getting the jobs sits near Waterloo, the birthplace of the BlackBerry, which is something like Canada’s Silicon Valley. The union in Canada won something — jobs retrieved from Mexico. But it also relented on a major objective sought by G. M.: Workers gave up the fight to retain pensions that pay out fixed amounts. They accepted newfangled plans that see benefits fluctuate with the markets. Far from proof that Canadian workers have somehow recaptured the upper hand in jockeying for the spoils of globalization, this deal is just the latest evidence that companies have effectively used international factories to permanently tilt the power dynamics in their favor. For decades, global automakers have been on the march for lower costs. In the United States, they shifted factories from union strongholds like Michigan and Wisconsin to Southern states like South Carolina and Alabama, where union ranks were weak and local rules limited labor organizing. Then, they kept moving south, to Mexico, exploiting a series of trade deals — not least the North American Free Trade Agreement. A quarter century ago, the presidential candidate, Ross Perot, spoke of a “giant sucking sound” in warning that factory work was being vacuumed up by Mexico, with American communities abandoned. For workers in Canada and Mexico, the impacts were evident. They had to satisfy the demands of auto manufacturers locked in an increasingly global competition. They had to make concessions. Otherwise, the car companies could employ their demonstrated power to leave them behind, moving the work to places where labor was cheaper and more pliable. The G. M. deal affirms this reality. Labor paid a price for gaining jobs in Canada — downgraded retirement. Above all, the deal underscores the potency of markets in shaping what happens in commercial life, a force far more powerful than demagogues making dubious promises about tearing up trade deals. Canada’s unions are relatively strong, and the nation’s currency is relatively weak, making goods cheaper in the global marketplace. G. M. was willing to pay for access to highly skilled working hands, provided it got a break on its pension contributions. These factors coalesced into a negotiated result. The jobs did not come back to Canada because of the sort of edict Mr. Trump has promised to unleash, somehow compelling global companies to stop making things in Mexico and resume making them in the United States. “The central Trump fallacy here is that the president can tell multinational companies what to do,” said Mr. Bernstein, the former Obama administration economic adviser. “That’s completely wrong, I’ve seen that firsthand. President Obama was constantly exhorting companies to create more jobs, and they’ll only do so if they want to,” he added. “Simply calling multinational C. E. O.s from the Oval Office and yelling at them isn’t going to do anything. ” If Mr. Trump really did seek to dictate to General Motors (or any company) where it can make its wares, that would risk undermining the company’s competitiveness. If, under threat of political action, a company had to buy steel from an American producer instead of China, that could make its cars more expensive than competing models from Honda or Hyundai. If they had to use American workers for final assembly instead of Mexicans, that could damage their business and undercut sales for many suppliers, from glassmakers in Ohio to auto parts manufacturers in Indiana. “Then,” said Chad P. Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, “those jobs that came back from Mexico aren’t going to be any jobs at all. ” | 1 |
5 best fictional news stories on demonetization woes to be selected for Sahitya Acedemy Award Posted on Tweet (Image via intoday.in)
Sahitya Academy has decided to award 5 writers with a cash prize of 1 lakh rupees and a plaque each for their outstanding articles about the struggles of Indian citizens against the backdrop of a wicked demonetization. The cash prize will be transferred to their accounts to avoid any inconvenience.
Soon after the news of demonetization broke, thousands of people thronged ATMs in various cities to withdraw cash, and an equal number of articles, depicting their ordeal, were published on select media outlets. Talented writers across the nation gave wings to their imagination and produced heart-wrenching stories of middle and lower middle class families during an emergency-like situation inflicted on them by a fascist government.
Experts believe the decision of Sahitya Academy, to encourage budding writers in their creative pursuits, is a move in the right direction to revive literary fiction in India.
We had a chance to interact with one of the writers whose story has been shortlisted by the committee, and we asked him about his story.
“It’s a murder mystery,” he replied nonchalantly, “The story is about a man who kills someone at the ATM for 2500 rupees.”
“Wow, that’s something different from what we have read so far. Can you reveal some of the details?” we asked.
“Ok, see this story is about a man who has to pay his rent on 14th…”
“But isn’t he already too late?”
“He pays his rent on 14th. Do you have any problem with that? Now don’t interrupt me when I am narrating the story. So, he has to pay a rent of 5000 rupees, and at the same time Modi bans all 500 and 1000 rupee notes…”
“But Modi announced this on 8th and he pays his rent on 14th. So he had 7 days to withdraw the cash.”
“He was out of station.”
“But there are ATMs in other…ok, please continue.”
“So, he logs into his account to transfer the fund to his landlord’s account, but he cannot remember his password because of the situation created by Modi. He clicks forgot password option but his mobile runs out of battery.”
“Wow, that’s interesting.”
We grabbed a handful of popcorn as the story took an interesting twist.
“He rushes to the nearest ATM and withdraws 2500 rupees, but he needs another 2500,” he paused for dramatic effect and said, “He kills a man standing in the queue.”
“In front of so many people! Cannot they see him?”
“No, because he is wearing a mask. Now he enters the ATM again and withdraws another 2500 rupees.”
“But PIN…”
“Haha, the PIN is his year of birth.”
“You mean the murderer’s or the victim’s?”
“The victim’s of course because that’s his card.”
“Oh ok, but how did the murderer know his year of birth.”
“Because in the same year Sachin Tendulkar made his international debut. Got it?”
“Umm, ok. But don’t you think he could just kill the landlord instead of killing a random person?”
“No, because he is getting married to his landlord’s daughter.”
“Ok so, how is this murder solved?”
“Ok so, here’s how it goes. No one knows who did it. Police is clueless…but the ATM card is not.”
“Oh…my…God, we completely forgot about the ATM card.”
“Yes, now the card takes revenge on behalf of its owner.”
“Like how the dog did in Teri Meherbaniyan?”
“Kind of, but the dog in Teri Meherbaniyan addresses the issue in an aggressive manner but the ATM card in my story opts for a subtle approach. The card has a camera on it and it clicks photographs of the killer, which it later sends to the police.”
“How…I mean, ok. So, does he get caught in the end?”
“For that you have to read the entire story.”
“Is there anything left?”
“Yes the final paragraph. So what do you think?”
“Brilliant! No wonder they selected your story. I mean, we got to know about Sahitya Academy Award only last year when a few recipients returned…but I am sure, it’s a huge recognition.”
“Do you think I have a chance of winning it?”
“Absolutely. Keep up the good work. Bharat tere tukde honge ,” we concluded the interview on a happy note. | 0 |
Email
Let's talk sense about the election. Nothing is to be gained by refusing to face the hard facts. What are those facts?
First of all, neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump has the qualifications, the track record or the personal character to be President of the United States.
Most of us could probably think of a number of people who would be better in the White House. But here, as elsewhere in life, we can only make our choices among the alternatives actually available.
Those of us who have been disgusted by some of the things that Donald Trump has said and done need to face the fact that he is not running against Mother Teresa. His sins have been matched and exceeded by Hillary Clinton and her husband.
As for accomplishments, Trump has none in politics, and business accomplishments do not automatically transfer into government.
Hillary Clinton has been in politics for decades. But does she have even a single serious accomplishment to show for it? In the Senate, she accomplished nothing, and as Secretary of State far worse than nothing.
Secretary Clinton carried out the foreign policy that destroyed two governments of countries which posed no threat whatever to America or to American interests in the Middle East. Each country is now moving in the direction of one of our two most dangerous enemies, Iran and Russia.
Egypt is now planning joint military exercises with Russian forces. Libya has already seen the rise of Islamic terrorists who killed the American ambassador whom the Clinton State Department refused to provide the security he asked for repeatedly.
So much for track records. As for personal character, would you want either of them living next door to your family?
Donald Trump seems to think that it is OK for the government to seize someone else's home and turn the property over to him, so that he can build something — without having to pay what it would cost him to buy the home. We can't even discuss what he has said about women in a family newspaper. Add an almost childish egomania and you have a 70-year-old adolescent.
Hillary Clinton is fundamentally very similar. But, having spent decades in the political limelight, she is far more experienced at concealing her ruthless and cunning contempt for anything and anybody that gets in the way of her personal enrichment and power. That includes contempt for the law.
Long before her e-mails became an issue, Mrs. Clinton was evading subpoenas for records she had somehow "lost" in the White House when she was first lady. Both she and her husband perfected the tactic of stalling and stalling, until enough time had passed that they could say that an issue was now "old news" and that it was time to "move on."
The issue before the voters, however, is not which of the two is the worse person. The issue is which is more dangerous to the future of America. Nor is this just a question of what will happen in the next four years.
Whoever becomes President of the United States can appoint Supreme Court justices able to destroy the Constitution by "interpreting" its protections of freedom out of existence — not just for the next four years, but thereafter.
Hillary Clinton is already on record as wanting a Supreme Court that will overturn recent decisions protecting free speech and upholding the right to bear arms. Everything in her past shows a contempt for law that makes her a very credible threat to dismantle the Constitution, whenever it gets in the way of her agenda.
All it takes is a Senate controlled by fellow Democrats to let a President Clinton's judicial nominees be confirmed automatically, no matter how little regard for the Constitution those nominees have demonstrated.
Donald Trump shows no such ideological agenda and has no such automatic support from Congressional Republicans as to have them rubber stamp either his judicial nominees or whatever other agenda he has. More than that, Trump can be impeached if he oversteps the bounds, without either the Republicans or the media screaming loud protests.
Trump seems to pose much less danger — which, unfortunately, is the most we can expect this particular election year.
Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305. His website is www.tsowell.com. To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com .
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