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United States of Paranoia: They See Gangs of Stalkers - The New York Times
Mike McPhate
Nobody believed him. His family told him to get help. But Timothy Trespas, an recording engineer in his early 40s, was sure he was being stalked, and not by just one person, but dozens of them. He would see the operatives, he said, disguised as ordinary people, lurking around his Midtown Manhattan neighborhood. Sometimes they bumped into him and whispered nonsense into his ear, he said. “Now you see how it works,” they would say. At first, Mr. Trespas wondered if it was all in his head. Then he encountered a large community of people on the internet who call themselves “targeted individuals,” or T. I. s, who described going through precisely the same thing. The group was organized around the conviction that its members are victims of a sprawling conspiracy to harass thousands of everyday Americans with weapons and armies of gang stalkers. The goal, as one website put it, is “to destroy every aspect of a targeted individual’s life. ” Mental health professionals say the narrative has taken hold among a group of people experiencing psychotic symptoms that have troubled the human mind since time immemorial. Except now victims are connecting on the internet, organizing and defying medical explanations for what’s happening to them. The community, conservatively estimated to exceed 10, 000 members, has proliferated since cradled by the internet and fed by genuine concerns over government surveillance. A large number appear to have delusional disorder or schizophrenia, psychiatrists say. Yet, the phenomenon remains virtually unresearched. For the few specialists who have looked closely, these individuals represent an alarming development in the history of mental illness: thousands of sick people, banded together and demanding recognition on the basis of shared paranoias. They raise money, hold awareness campaigns, host international conferences and fight for their causes in courts and legislatures. Perhaps their biggest victory came last year, when believers in Richmond, Calif. persuaded the City Council to pass a resolution banning weapons that they believe could be used for mind control. A similar lobbying effort is underway in Tucson. Dr. Lorraine Sheridan, who is of perhaps the only study of said the community poses a danger that sets it apart from other groups promoting troubling ideas, such as anorexia or suicide. On those topics, the internet abounds with medical information and treatment options. An internet search for “” however, turns up page after page of results that regard it as fact. “What’s scary for me is that there are no counter sites that try and convince targeted individuals that they are delusional,” Dr. Sheridan said. “They end up in a closed ideology echo chamber,” she said. In instructional tracts online, veterans of the movement explain the ropes to rookies: • Do not engage with the voices in your head. • If your relatives tell you you’re imagining things, they could be in on it. • “Do not visit a psychiatrist. ” The tribe cuts across all classes and professions, and includes lawyers, soldiers, artists and engineers. In Facebook forums and support groups, they commiserate over the skepticism of their loved ones and share stories of black vans that circle the block or conscripted into the campaign. They have dozens of with titles like “Tortured in America” and “My Life Changed Forever. ” In hundreds of YouTube videos they offer testimonials and try to document evidence of their stalking, even confronting unsuspecting strangers. “They wanted to basically destroy me, and they did,” a young mother in Phoenix says in one video, choking back tears. She lost custody of her daughter and was sent to a behavioral health hospital, says the woman, whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy. “But I am going to fight back for the rest of my life. ” She adds, “And guess what, I’m not crazy. ” Dr. Sheridan’s study, written with Dr. David James, a forensic psychiatrist, examined 128 cases of reported . It found all the subjects were most likely delusional. “One has to think of the T. I. phenomenon in terms of people with paranoid symptoms who have hit upon the idea as an explanation of what is happening to them,” Dr. James said. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the community is divided over the contours of the conspiracy. Some believe the financial elite is behind it. Others blame aliens, their neighbors, Freemasons or some combination. The movement’s most prominent voices, however, tend to believe the surveillance is part of a field test done in preparation for global domination. The military establishment, the theory goes, never gave up on the ambitions of MK Ultra, the C. I. A. ’s infamous program to control the mind in the 1950s and ’60s. A leading proponent of that view is an anesthesiologist from San Antonio named John Hall. In his 2009 book, “A New Breed: Satellite Terrorism in America,” Dr. Hall gave his own account of being targeted. Agents bleached his water, he wrote, and bombarded him with voices making murderous threats. The book made a splash because of the messenger: a licensed member of the medical establishment who was telling those who feel targeted that psychiatrists were misleading them. A janitor knows as much about the human mind, he wrote. Dr. Hall, 51, was invited for an interview on “Coast to Coast AM,” a radio show based in California that is said to reach millions of listeners. After that, he said, “I had probably three or 4, 000 emails from people saying: ‘It’s happening to me in this state.’ ‘It’s happening to me in Florida.’ ‘It’s happening to me in California.’ ” The similarities of the cases spoke to a campaign, he said. “If the psychiatrists want to say that this is schizophrenia or delusional disorder, that’s fine,” he said. “But every one of these victims have the same story. ” While Dr. Hall has faced scrutiny from the Texas Medical Board over his mental fitness, he retains his license. Over time, however, many others who identify as victims end up out of work. They are mocked by colleagues, tolerated by family. Friends and spouses fall away. The despair that results has led some to lash out in violence. Many in the community, for example, are convinced that Aaron Alexis, who killed 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013, was a victim. Mr. Alexis, a former sailor, left behind a document accusing the Navy of attacking his brain with “extremely low frequency” electromagnetic waves. On the side of his shotgun were etched the words “my elf weapon. ” It was unclear when Myron May’s mental distress began, but by the fall of 2014, it had become too much. He quit his job as a prosecutor in New Mexico and traveled to Florida. There, he videotaped a testimonial about how had ruined his life. “As you can see right now,” he says into the camera, “I am totally not crazy. ” Laying out his case, he describes an episode at a gas station where he believed somebody in dark glasses was mimicking his movements. “It was really creepy,” he said. “Everything I did, he did. ” Later in the video, he prays for forgiveness for his future sins. “Father,” he says, “right now I ask that you look down on all the targeted individuals across the globe. Help them to cope with this madness. ” On Nov. 20, 2014, Mr. May walked into a library at Florida State University, where he had graduated in 2005, and shot three people, leaving one paralyzed. He dared the police to kill him, then fired in their direction before being fatally shot, officials said. He was 31. The vast majority of people with psychosis never resort to violence. Still, studies suggest that a small number of those experiencing psychotic episodes — especially paranoid thoughts, accompanied by voices making commands — are more likely to act on hostile urges than people without a mental illness. Many in the T. I. community, as anyone would, have repudiated the shootings by Mr. Alexis and Mr. May. But some also harbor troubling views about their perceived oppressors. They question how people could be so cruel. Karen Stewart of Tallahassee, Fla. believes large numbers of regular people have been brainwashed by the National Security Agency into thinking that she is a traitor or terrorist. Wherever she goes, she says — to church, to the grocery store, to the doctor’s office — they are there, watching. It baffles her, she said. But worse, “It makes me angry to see how many people in this country are sociopaths. They are absolute groupthink drones,” she said. “I don’t even consider them human anymore. ” Susan Clancy, a psychologist who has researched people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens, said it could be extremely difficult to dissuade patients who have latched onto beliefs that they think explain their delusions. “I think it’s a need for meaning and a need to understand your life and the problems you’re having,” she said. “You’re not some meaningless nobody. You’re being followed by the C. I. A. ” In that way, Dr. Clancy said, the behavior shares a trait with religious belief: To abandon it would be life upending. Paula Trespas, Mr. Trespas’s mother, said she avoided debating with him. “It wasn’t something that he was making up,” she said. “He really felt the way he felt and experienced what he experienced. I got to the point where I was just finally saying to him: ‘I’m very, very sad that you have to go through this. I wish that there was something that I could do.’ ” The big hope is that society will wake up to what’s happening and put a stop to it, those who feel targeted say. In some cases, they do seek psychiatric help. In others, the delusions subside. For the rest, the prognosis isn’t good, psychiatrists say. Many contemplate suicide. Mr. Trespas, now 49, says he went so far as to prepare a rope. Sitting at a coffee shop in Brooklyn last month, he says the stalking has thankfully quieted down. But he says his harassers have also been seeding his body with Morgellons, a painful, insectlike infestation of the skin that many doctors say is psychosomatic. He is gaunt, with weary, sad eyes. It’s been eight years since it all began, he says. He can’t hold a job. His friends have drifted away. The online community has been a crucial support, he says. “But we don’t know exactly what’s happening,” he says. “Maybe we’re believing the wrong thing. I don’t know. That’s why I try to keep my mind open about who and what and why and how. ” One thing he is certain of though, he says: He’s not crazy.
21,801
Health Ranger to launch revolutionary, certified organic, non-GMO preparedness food line this Thursday
Mike Adams, NaturalNews Editor
• Slowed healing and recovery time• Increased fatigue and slowed physical recovery• Reduced fertility• Acceleration of Alzheimer's and dementia• Reduced cardiovascular performance• Liver damage• Kidney damageAre these the kind of effects you want to experience when the grid goes down and you're trying to SURVIVE?Don't be stupid. Stop buying toxic ingredients as a form of "survival" food. It's moronic. If you're trying to store some food to keep you ALIVE, don't buy foods laced with chemicals that are designed to KILL (such as pesticides and herbicides). I will be announcing a clean, certified organic, laboratory verified preparedness food line in just two days This project took six months longer than planned, but it's finally ready. In just two days, I'm going to be announcing a certified organic survival / preparedness meal pack that will blow your mind with its cleanliness, nutrition and incredibly great taste. All these organic meal packs and ingredients can be turned into delicious, nutritious, ORGANIC meals by just adding water and heat . (You can cook these on a miniature camp stove, if you want...) All current affiliates for Numanna will be able to carry and sell this new line of Health Ranger approved organic storable food (see below).Here's what's included in the pack (ALL certified organic): Mac 'n Cheese (crazy delicious, the macaroni is made with organic milled flaxseed, delivering a wholesome source of omega-3s, very filling, energy lasts for hours) Classic Chili (amazing chili that's super delicious, even without using any chemical taste enhancers) Pancake Mix (incredibly delicious, made primarily with organic wheat flour, organic milk powder and organic whole powdered eggs) Cheddar Broccoli Soup (tastes gourmet, like you'd get in a fancy restaurant, yet all organic, incredibly satisfying) Brown Sugar Oatmeal (you're going to go ape over this one, with organic oats, organic cane sugar and organic molasses solids, this will blow you away) Organic nonfat dry milk (made from Grade A pasteurized skim milk, just add water to reconstitute) Italian Pasta Marinara (organic wheat flour and organic flaxseed paste, rich tomato taste, super delicious) Pasta Primavera (a thick, creamy organic pasta with organic dehydrated vegetables, incredibly nutritious) Sweet Habanero Chili (sweet and spicy, this mind-blowing recipe is a customer favorite) Organic Black Chia Seeds (high in omega-3s and magnesium, can add to smoothies, soups, breads and more) Organic Quinoa (a complete protein, makes a delicious soup by just adding eggs and onions)All this will be announced in just two days. If you want a heads up, just subscribe to my email newsletter (link below) to be alerted before everyone else. Certified organic ingredients and NO JUNK, no GMOs, no MSG, no hydrolyzed or autolyzed anything! Want to know what's in it? Here's the actual ingredients list for our Italian Pasta Marinara :Organic Pasta (Organic Whole Durum Wheat Flour, Organic Milled Flaxseed), Organic spray dried Tomato, Organic Cornstarch, Organic Dehydrated Vegetables (Onions, Tomatoes, Green Bell Peppers), Organic Cane Sugar, Organic Garlic, Sea Salt, Organic Parsley, Organic Annatto Color, Organic Spices.And our Sweet Habanero Chili ingredients list looks like this:Organic Pre-cooked Pinto, Organic Pre-cooked Black Beans, Organic spray dried Tomato, Organic Cornstarch, Organic Pineapple Dices, Organic Dehydrated Vegetables (Onions, Red & Green Bell Peppers), Organic Chili Powder, Organic Cane Sugar, Organic Spices, Organic Garlic Powder, Sea Salt, Organic Caramel Color, Organic Onion Powder.You're going to be amazed at the incredible taste, nutrition, wholesomeness and cleanliness of this entire line of storable emergency food.Check Natural News this Thursday for details on how to order. We've got thousands in stock and ready to ship , but even then I suspect we're going to run out very quickly. All Numanna affiliates will be able to start selling this breakthrough product in about two weeks This launch is historic for the food preparedness industry. No one has ever created an organic, lab-verified line of delicious emergency foods while avoiding all the toxic ingredients and total crap used by most other companies in the industry (with very few exceptions).Here's even more great news: All distributors and affiliates of Numanna storable foods will be able to start selling this certified organic food line in about two weeks! I'm also available to be interviewed on your podcasts, videos or websites to help explain this product to your viewers. Anyone who wants to start selling this product and earning affiliate fees should contact Numanna .Watch this space for the full announcement in two days... Health Ranger Approved AquaTru Water Filter Back in Stock I've secured 500 units of the amazing AquaTru at $100 off for Natural News readers (while supplies last). Breakthrough filter removes nearly 100% of hundreds of contaminants. No plumbing needed. SHIPS TODAY .
21,802
Hannity Offers to PAY 1-Way Ticket for Obama to Kenya After Leaving White House
Kim Smith
BREAKING: Obama ATF Accused of Covering Up Political Element in Firebombing of GOP HQ “I will charter it to the country of your choice. You want to go to Canada? I’ll pay for you to go to Canada. You want to go to Kenya? I’ll pay for you to go to Kenya. Jakarta (in Indonesia), where you went to school back in the day, you can go back there,” the talk show host offered. He even said he would supply caviar and champagne on the flight. He added that he only had one stipulation, and that was that Obama could never return to America. Hannity made his offer the day after White House press secretary Josh Earnest dodged a question about whether Obama would leave the country if Trump won the presidency. “He’s working very hard to make sure that nobody has to leave the country as a result of an electoral outcome that the president doesn’t support,” Earnest told reporters on Monday. What Earnest chooses not to realize is that there are some Democrats we’d love to see leave the country should GOP nominee Donald Trump be elected president. Not to mention there are literally thousands of conservatives who would be more than happy to pitch in on this one-way ticket to get Obama and a few others — looking at you, Rosie O’Donnell — out of this country forever. That would make a couple fewer destructive liberals for conservatives to have to deal with. Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is enough of a problem , and it would be nice to know that her predecessor couldn’t do any more damage to our country, except maybe by telecommuting. Obama did not immediately respond to Hannity’s offer — at least not that we know of.
21,803
The Hard to Swallow Truth About Turkey Day
WakingTimes
Waking Times “Does anyone even know why we eat turkey every Thanksgiving? Does anyone even know why we have Thanksgiving? Is it just to eat turkey?” ~ Erin Janus Another Thanksgiving holiday is upon us, and the tradition of coming together with family to celebrate a vague connection to our heritage as conquerors of North America will be celebrated by millions of people. This year, however, Thanksgiving is all the more ironic given the circumstances unfolding at the Standing Rock Indian Revolution over the Dakota Access Pipeline where Native Americans are being brutalized by militarized police who are protecting a corporate project. So what is the true story of Thanksgiving? A brief history lesson: “The first actual proclaimed “Day of Thanksgiving” came in 1637 in a meeting between the Pequot Indians and English religious mercenaries. The Pequot were celebrating their annual Green Harvest Festival, which resembles modern-day Thanksgiving. On the eve of the festival, the English demanded that everyone comes out of their homes, puts their weapons on the ground, and surrenders by converting to Christianity. Those who obliged with these terroristic demands were either shot dead or clubbed to death. Those who stayed inside their longhouses – including women and children – were burnt to death. In all, more than 700 Pequot men, women, and children were slaughtered that day. The “victory” was celebrated by the Governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony holding a feast and trumpeted this as a “Day of Thanksgiving.” During the celebration, they cut off heads of Natives and put them on display publicly; including beheading the Wampanoag Chief and impaling his head on a pole in Plymouth which stayed on display for the next 24 years.” ~ Irwin Ozborne Beyond the historical context of Turkey Day, there is a modern aspect of this story that needs to be outed and understood. Modern meat farming has become the most horrifying and inhumane practice on planet earth. While some activists work to expose the shocking abuses that routinely take place in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO’s), the meat industry and the National Grocers Association is constantly working to avoid the public relations nightmare that publicity would certainly bring. Ag-gag laws criminalize activism with the aim of keeping consumers in the dark, and the largest meat companies have engineered a top-down system of farm control where individual farmers are under severe contracts, having no say whatsoever on how animals are housed and treated. Never the less, the issue of animal cruelty as an embedded part of our food supply is something which needs to be brought into the light of day and exposed, for there truly are much more healthier and humane ways of feeding ourselves. To this end, and to bring awareness to the ritual insanity of Thanksgiving turkey dinners, filmmaker and activist Erin Janus presents ‘Turkey Day,’ a short film about the week’s festivities. A word of warning, though, for some of the content in this video, while 100% real, is genuinely disturbing. “People will do things just cause everyone else does, and just keep doing it until it becomes tradition.” ~ Erin Janus Read more articles from Vic Bishop . About the Author Vic Bishop is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an observer of people, animals, nature, and he loves to ponder the connection and relationship between them all. A believer in always striving to becoming self-sufficient and free from the matrix, please track him down on Facebook . Like Waking Times on Facebook . Follow Waking Times on Twitter . This article ( The Hard to Swallow Truth About Turkey Day Vic Bishop Please contact WakingTimes@gmail.com for more info.
21,804
At New York City Ballet, Lacing Up Their Sneakers to Unite - The New York Times
Gia Kourlas
Justin Peck stops short of calling it a protest dance, but his newest ballet, “The Times Are Racing,” is certainly of the moment. The dancers wear sneakers, and and hoodies emblazoned with words like Unite, React, Act, Protest and Fight. (The costumes are by Humberto Leon for Opening Ceremony.) The electronic music is Dan Deacon’s suite from “America,” a 2012 album written out of his frustration with the state of the country and the world. Mr. Peck, 29, started choreographing the dance before the presidential election, but after Donald J. Trump won, he said, the ballet changed course. A few days before its Thursday premiere at New York City Ballet, Mr. Peck, the company’s resident choreographer and a soloist — this time he even included a part for himself — spoke about the work, his love of tap and how his teenage obsession with the video game Dance Dance Revolution had not been in vain. Here are edited excerpts from that conversation. How did the political landscape shape this ballet? We were working on this throughout the election. The day after the election was such an emotional and sobering moment. It felt like a turning point for the piece. Did the choreography change or become more focused after the election? It changed. It’s a less optimistic piece than it could have been. But it’s also going back to the music. It’s such a cathartic piece, and I think the choreography and the arc of the whole ballet has that feeling of exhaustion and running in a way that doesn’t need to be spelled out too much. I feel people are going to be able to interpret it in whatever way they want to. How did the sneakers come in? When I’m in sneakers, it changes my body carriage. I feel more in my own skin. I also think there’s less emphasis placed on line and accuracy and more freedom to dance with more energy and fullness and risk. I’ve done one piece with sneakers for L. A. Dance Project, and I really enjoyed working in that way and I wanted to explore it more at New York City Ballet. We have “[N. Y. Export:] Opus Jazz” and “West Side Story Suite,” and I’ve danced both. In this piece, you’re mixing tap with ballet and a little ? It’s hard to describe. I would say you could even separate the tap influences: Rhythm tap and hoofing meets Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly classical movements meets ballet, which is definitely the backbone of the piece. And that meets meets party dancing. But it’s mixed in the same way that Dan’s music is synthesized together. The ballet features a number for you and Robert Fairchild. Savion Glover is one of your heroes, right? He is! The reason I started dancing in the first place was my dad took me to see “Bring In ’da Noise, Bring In ’da Funk” when I was 9. I was so enamored with his style and his athleticism and the intricacy of his tap choreography that I started training. Is the tap the reason you cast yourself in the dance? That was a big factor. I always really loved tap as an art form, and in this piece of music there was one section that is highly percussive and intricate. I felt the only way to express that through movement was using techniques, and for me it was less about the sounds we were making and more about the physicality of the movement. It’s not on a lot of ballet dancers’ résumés to be able to tap in that way, and I knew Robbie had that ability as well. The duet also takes partial inspiration from when Robbie and I were roommates at the School of American Ballet. What happened? We were 17, and we got really into Dance Dance Revolution, the video game. We actually got a system for our dorms, and we started to play it obsessively, and we got really good and really in sync with our movement. We would play until superlate at night and then wake up the next morning with shin splints and not be able to go to class. [Laughs] I am loving this story. I wanted it to almost be like we were both following along on the same Dance Dance Revolution video game level track. [In the game, standing players hit arrows with their feet in keeping with musical and visual cues.] That’s why the movement is completely identical. I love it when you go to an arcade and you see two people who are really good at that game and they’re moving completely together. I wanted to use it as the inspiration for this duet, too. Are there characters, loosely, in this ballet? Robbie is a standout protagonist figure. For Robbie’s role, his alternate is Ashly Isaacs. I don’t know if it’s a first time, but it certainly feels like it might be one of the first that there’s been a principal role at New York City Ballet. She’s stepped in a few times, and she looks great. She’ll get to perform the ballet in the spring. Did you choose her for her tapping ability? Yeah, that definitely needs to be checked off, but also she seems very suited to the role and it’s the exact same choreography — there’s no compromise in what she does when she performs it and I thought that was really cool. It’s amazing. Do you think Savion will see the ballet? Do you know him? No. [Laughs] I think I met him once, but I don’t know if he knows who I am. I saw him perform last weekend at the Blue Note. He’s so good. He will just go for 45 minutes. This dance that Robbie and I do is, like, two minutes long, and we’re exhausted.
21,805
South Korea’s Blacklist of Artists Adds to Outrage Over Presidential Scandal - The New York Times
Choe Sang-Hun
SEOUL, South Korea — When the South Korean artist Hong produced a painting that depicted President Park as a scarecrow manipulated by evil forces, including her dictator father, her senior aides discussed how to “punish” Mr. Hong, according to a diary one of them kept. Soon after the painting’s completion in August 2014, the retaliation began as planned in the aide’s diary, which surfaced in November in the investigation into the corruption scandal that has led to Ms. Park’s impeachment trial. First, a civic group sued Mr. Hong on charges of defaming Ms. Park. Then his work was excluded from the Gwangju Biennale, South Korea’s international arts festival, an act Gwangju’s mayor later admitted was due to government pressure. The retaliation did not stop there, Mr. Hong said. “Dozens of conservative activists showed up in front of my apartment like a goon squad, shaking my photographs and calling me a ‘Communist painter,’” he said. “I received death threats on the phone. ” As it turned out, Mr. Hong was one of thousands of artists reportedly blacklisted by the government of Ms. Park, whose powers have been suspended as she faces an impeachment trial on charges of corruption and abuse of power. The blacklist is just one element in the sprawling case that has infuriated the public and prompted national introspection about South Korea’s young democracy and its authoritarian past. On Thursday, three of Ms. Park’s former aides, including one of her former culture ministers, Kim were arrested on charges of blacklisting cultural figures deemed unfriendly and barring them from support programs. So far, two versions of the blacklist have been reported by the news media, citing anonymous sources. Officials, including the special prosecutor in the case, Park have confirmed the existence of the blacklist but have not released it. A 2015 version of the list included more than 9, 000 people, according to news reports. The list contained some of South Korea’s most beloved filmmakers, actors and writers, including the director of “Oldboy,” Park and the “Snowpiercer” actor Song . Officially, Ms. Park has made promoting movies and other cultural products one of her key priorities. But secretly, her government has blackballed artists, reviving a practice of past military dictators like her father, Park and in so doing has “seriously undermined the freedom of thought and expression,” the special prosecutor’s office said. The revelations about the cultural blacklist added a new layer of notoriety to the scandal surrounding Ms. Park, and prosecutors planned to use the list to help strengthen the impeachment charges against her. When the National Assembly voted to impeach Ms. Park last month, it accused her of conspiring with her longtime confidante, Choi to solicit bribes from businesses and crack down on uncooperative officials and journalists. The special prosecutor is investigating whether Ms. Park and Kim — her former chief of staff, who was depicted as one of the dark forces in Mr. Hong’s painting — were involved in the blacklisting of artists. Both Ms. Park and Mr. Kim, her former chief of staff, have denied involvement. However, another of Ms. Park’s former culture ministers, Yoo said the list was dictated by the president’s office. On Monday, the current culture minister, Cho said, “I understand how pained artists must have felt when excluded from government support just because of their political and ideological beliefs. ” For many South Koreans, news of the blacklisting of artists reawakened memories from the nation’s dictatorial past. Ms. Park’s father, who ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1979, censored newspapers and imprisoned dissident writers and publishers. Chun a military dictator during the 1980s, banished a comedian from TV after people compared the appearances of the two men. (Both were bald.) Subsequent governments were accused of favoring scholars and civic groups when doling out research projects and subsidies. Under Ms. Park’s conservative predecessor, Lee some celebrities and journalists deemed progressive were barred from broadcasters. But the latest revelations marked the first time the existence of an extensive government blacklist was revealed since South Korea moved toward democracy in the late 1980s. “It’s an honor to be on the list,” Ko Un, one of South Korea’s poets, told the broadcaster SBS last month, when it reported on another version of the list. “This shows how disgusting the government is. ” Under Ms. Park, whose leadership style is often compared to her father’s, rumors of a blacklist have been circulating for years. The rumors intensified after two theatrical directors were mysteriously booted from government subsidy programs: one had campaigned for Ms. Park’s main opponent in the 2012 election another had produced a play spoofing Ms. Park and her father. And after the organizers of the Busan International Film Festival screened a documentary that delved into what it called Ms. Park’s botched response to the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014 in which more than 300 people died, the festival lost half of its government funding. Mr. Yoo, the former culture minister, said Mr. Kim, Ms. Park’s chief of staff at the time, began ordering the culture ministry to blacklist certain artists in 2013. Last month, a former aide to Ms. Park was indicted on charges of colluding with her in an attempt to blackmail a vice chairwoman of CJ, which runs South Korea’s biggest film studio, into retiring in 2013. The company had angered Ms. Park’s office by financing a movie about her ideological enemy, the former President Roh Mr. Yoo said in a radio interview last month. “I thought this kind of thing happened only under the past military rule,” CJ’s chairman, Sohn told a parliamentary hearing last month. Mr. Yoo said that an early version of the blacklist he saw in June 2014 included hundreds of artists. Shortly before he was replaced a month later, Mr. Yoo said he met Ms. Park to warn against the list. (Ms. Park has denied being warned.) By 2015, the list had ballooned to include more than 9, 000 visual artists, musicians, actors, film and musical directors, and writers deemed critical of Ms. Park, particularly those who took aim at her handling of the ferry disaster or who were suspected of supporting her rivals, according to the Hankook Ilbo newspaper, which published what it claimed was the list in October. Ms. Park’s office zealously pursued her opponents after the ferry disaster, according to the diary of Kim the former presidential aide who detailed the retaliation against Mr. Hong. The ferry tragedy is a central motif in Mr. Hong’s painting. During a meeting of senior presidential aides in 2014, Mr. Kim, Ms. Park’s chief of staff at the time, called for a “combative response to leftists in the cultural and art circles” and ordered the aides to “discover their networks,” according to the diary. He compared progressive teachers and journalists “to poisonous mushrooms. ” The diary also recorded instructions to punish artists who satirized Ms. Park, conduct a “loyalty check” of senior government officials, “intimidate” courts of law and “induce” scholars to write newspaper columns. “Make them afraid to challenge the president,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying in a diary entry dated July 4, 2014. He has denied giving such an order and said that the diary did not faithfully record what was actually discussed during the aides’ meetings. The author of the diary, Kim died in August, but prosecutors said they found it useful in building their case against Ms. Park. Mr. Hong, the painter, said that for poor artists, being cut off from travel and other government support programs could be crushing. In 2015, Mr. Hong was invited to show his painting at a Berlin arts festival. But no domestic logistics company would transport the work for fear of government retaliation. Mr. Hong had to travel alone and hurriedly repaint a copy of the original in Berlin. He also suspected the government was behind a tax audit of his wife’s clinic last year. “It makes me shudder that Park and her cronies tried to tame artists by holding back a pittance of government support while they themselves pocket millions,” Mr. Hong said. “They showed how depraved political power can be. ”
21,806
ITALY: African Muslim illegal alien freeloaders are demanding to have designer clothes and better food
BareNakedIslam
ITALY: African Muslim illegal alien freeloaders are demanding to have designer clothes and better food African MUSLIM illegal migrants who took the streets in protest and blocked traffic in Venice this week are now demanding real designer clothes (Armani and Hugo Boss), no knockoffs, and say they don’t like having to eat so much pasta in their meals. Breitbart (h/t Emma) Lorenzo Chinalleto, whose cooperative hosts migrants at the Hotel Byron in the Venice province, said migrants respond with displeasure when receiving clothes from Catholic charity Caritas and other charitable bodies, because the goods are unbranded. He explained: “Unfortunately they come to Italy with the asylum reception systems of northern Europe as a model. When they arrived we gave them clothes, standard clothes. “But they want brand-name clothes like Armani and Boss, and they asked for Pirelli shoes. These are their models. When they came to us, they didn’t have clothes, but they all had smartphones,” the Italian added . Forty of the migrants hosted at the Hotel Byron took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction, blocking the traffic. In a video (below) taken outside the hotel on Monday protesters can be seen shouting, in English, that they don’t want to eat pasta. The migrants originate mostly from Senegal, Nigeria, Somalia, Mali and Ghana, Il Gazzettino reported . Migrants frequently hit the headlines in Italy protesting their living conditions in the country, which has recently been hit hard by several earthquakes. In May a group of “unaccompanied minors” launched a violent protest in order to be transferred from Fondachelli Fantina, complaining that there were “too few entertainment possibilities” in the town. After they had completely destroyed the reception centre to the point where it cannot be used again, the Interior Ministry transferred the migrants to a luxury hotel. In June migrants staying in a small town in Sardinia protested for several days demanding better meals, a television set in every room, and a daily coach to take them to the island’s capital, Cagliari. Tensions in the town ran high as the migrants brandished sticks and smashed property. Regional director of the populist Sardinian Action Party, Marcello Orrù, commented on the controversy. He said: “It is intolerable for us to continue to accept these people who don’t like the welcome offered, the meals and their lodgings at the hotel for free. And who then protest to have a television in the room and a daily bus take them to Cagliari for free. “It’s too easy to accuse us of racism and xenophobia, but we refuse to accept this total and grave injustice to the Sardinian people. These boys are muscular and equipped with the latest model iPhones. “I say if they want a TV in the room and maybe even a masseuse, they must be loaded on a ship and sent back to Africa immediately. With a one-way ticket”.
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Chicago Soars Past 600 Homicides After Bloody October
Henry Wolff
Chicago Soars Past 600 Homicides After Bloody October CBS Chicago, November 1, 2016 With 78 homicides, October was the second deadliest month of 2016, and Chicago surpassed 600 homicides for the first time in more than a decade. The last time Chicago had at least 600 homicides in a single year was 2003. Homicides and non-fatal shootings have skyrocketed in 2016, with 605 homicides and more than 3,600 shooting victims through the end of October. In October, there were 78 homicides and 427 shooting victims. Only August had more homicides, when 90 people were slain in Chicago. It was the bloodiest month in the city in 20 years. The city is on pace for 726 homicides in 2016, a number not seen since the late 1990s. {snip}
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US impunity erodes world justice
Nicolas J S Davies
US impunity erodes world justice By Nicolas J S Davies Posted on October 27, 2016 by Nicolas J S Davies In the past week, Burundi and South Africa have joined Namibia in declaring their intention to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). They are likely to be followed by a parade of other African countries, jeopardizing the future of an international court that has prosecuted 39 officials from eight African countries but has failed to indict a single person who is not African. Ironically, African countries were among the first to embrace the ICC, so it is a striking turnaround that they are now the first to give up on it. But it is the United States that has played the leading role in preventing the ICC from fulfilling the universal mandate for which it was formed, to hold officials of all countries accountable for the worst crimes in the world: genocide; crimes against humanity; and war crimes—not least the crime of international aggression, which the judges at Nuremberg defined as “the supreme international crime” from which all other war crimes follow. As the ICC’s founding father, former Nuremberg prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz, lamented in 2011 , “You don’t have to be a criminologist to realize that if you want to deter a crime, you must persuade potential criminals that, if they commit crimes, they will be hauled into court and be held accountable. It is the policy of the United States to do just the opposite as far as the crime of aggression is concerned. Our government has gone to great pains to be sure that no American will be tried by any international criminal court for the supreme crime of illegal war-making.” The U.S. has not only refused to accept the jurisdiction of the ICC over its own citizens. It has gone further, pressuring other countries to sign Bilateral Immunity Agreements (BIA), in which they renounce the right to refer U.S. citizens to the ICC for war crimes committed on their territory. The U.S. has also threatened to cut off U.S. aid to countries that refuse to sign them. The BIAs violate those countries’ own commitments under the ICC statute, and the U.S. pressure to sign them has been rightly condemned as an outrageous effort to ensure impunity for U.S. war crimes. Resistance to U.S. impunity To the credit of our international neighbors, this U.S. strategy has met with substantial resistance. The European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution stating that BIAs are incompatible with E.U. membership, and urged E.U. member states and countries seeking E.U. membership not to sign them. Fifty-four countries have publicly refused to sign BIAs , and 24 have accepted cut-offs of U.S. aid as a consequence of their refusal. Of 102 countries that have signed a BIA , only 48 are members of the ICC in any case, and only 15 of those countries are on record as having ratified the BIAs in their own parliaments. Thirty-two other ICC members have apparently allowed BIAs to take effect without parliamentary ratification, but this has been challenged by their own country’s legal experts in many cases. The U.S. campaign to undermine the ICC is part of a much broader effort by the U.S. government to evade all forms of accountability under the laws that are supposed to govern international behavior in the modern world, even as it continues to masquerade as a global champion of the rule of law. The treaties that U.S. policy systematically violates today were crafted by American statesmen and diplomats, working with their foreign colleagues, to build a world where all people would enjoy some basic protections from the worst atrocities, instead of being subject only to the law of the jungle or “might makes right.” U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child and other multilateral treaties that our country ignores, violates or refuses to ratify. a billion dollars per year on public relations or, more bluntly, propaganda, including $600 million from the Pentagon budget. The work of its P.R. teams and contractors is laundered by U.S. newspapers and repeated and analyzed ad nauseam by monolithic, flag-waving TV networks. “information warfare” machine presents the United States as a global leader for democracy, human rights and the rule of law, even as it systematically and catastrophically undermines those same principles. It enables our leaders to loudly and persuasively demonize other countries and their leaders as dangerous violators of international law, even as the U.S. and its allies commit far worse crimes. similar assault on Mosul . Both attacks are killing civilians and reducing much of a city to rubble; the rationale is the same, counterterrorism; and there are many more people in the line of fire in Mosul than in east Aleppo. U.N. Charter to attack at least eight countries (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Syria), and the resulting wars have killed about two million people . ate new interventions and escalations as if we are the fire brigade not the arsonists. (By contrast, the U.S. government and the Western media are quick to accuse Russia or other countries of “aggression” even in legally murky situations, such as after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 that ousted the elected president of Ukraine.) are an integral part of U.S. war-making. Most are shrouded in secrecy, and the propaganda machine spins the atrocities that slip through into the public record as a disconnected series of aberrations, accidents and “bad apples,” instead of as the result of illegal rules of engagement and unlawful orders from higher-ups. his Nobel lecture to speak about the real role that the U.S. plays in the world and how it whitewashes its crimes. Pinter recounted a meeting at the U.S. Embassy in London in the 1980s in which a senior embassy official, Raymond Seitz, flatly denied U.S. war crimes against Nicaragua for which the U.S. was in fact convicted of aggression by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Seitz went on to serve as Assistant Secretary of State, U.S. Ambassador to the U.K., and then vice-chairman of Lehman Brothers. nducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened. “The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right-wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. “Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it. “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” If in 2016 the world seems to be more violent and chaotic than ever, it is not because the United States lacks the will to use force or project power, as both major party candidates for president and their military advisers appear to believe, but because our leaders have placed too much stock in the illegal threat and use of force and have lost faith in the rule of law, international cooperation and diplomacy. After a century of commercial dominance, and 75 years of investing disproportionately in weapons, military forces and geopolitical schemes, perhaps it is understandable that U.S. leaders have forgotten how to deal fairly and respectfully with our international neighbors. But it is no longer an option to muddle along, leaving a trail of death, ruin and chaos in our wake, counting on an elaborate propaganda machine to minimize the blowback on our country and our lives. Sooner rather than later, Americans and our leaders must knuckle down and master the very different attitudes and skills we will need to become law-abiding global citizens in a peaceful, sustainable, multipolar world. Nicolas J S Davies is the author of “Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.” He also wrote the chapters on “Obama at War” in “Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.” Commentary . Bookmark the permalink .
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Anonymous
Jamie Gorelick, call your office....
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Le prince et l’imposteur : qui est le mystérieux millionnaire d’Instagram ?
Daria Donina
Dictionnaire visuel Le prince et l’imposteur : qui est le mystérieux millionnaire d’Instagram ? À la fin de l’été, deux personnages identiques sont apparus sur Instagram : de grands hommes grisonnants, riches, dépensiers, passant tous deux leur temps à voyager et à faire la fête en charmante compagnie. L’un est l’italien Gianluca Vacchi, l’autre le russe Boris Bork. L’un d’entre eux vit vraiment une vie de rêve, l’autre est un imposteur. Par Daria Donina Cette semaine, le réseau social russe a été le théâtre de débats acharnés au sujet du faux compte du « riche » retraité russe Boris Bork, lorsque le spécialiste en relations publiques moscovite Roman Zaripov a annoncéêtre derrière l’ Instagram de Boris Bork. En mars 2016, Roman Zaripov et ses amis ont décidé de faire une expérience : combien de temps et d’argent faut-il pour devenir une superstar d’Instagram ? La réponse : 50.000 roubles (moins de mille euros) et un peu de chance. Roman et Mikhaïl ont trouvé leur héros sur les réseaux sociaux : Boris Bork (le nom est imaginaire), un retraité moscovite de 65 ans. Il était « loin de l’image d’un riche » , ne vivait que de sa retraite et louait un une-pièce dans la banlieue de Moscou, mais il avait l’air « cool » , selon Zaripov. Quelques heures après le premier post sponsorisé sur le réseau social russe vk.com , Boris avait 2000 abonnés. Lorsque le nombre d’abonnés atteignit 8000, Boris fut invité par la chaîne de télévision Russie 1 à un talk-show sur « la vieillesse heureuse », et les marques de mode ont commencéà lui proposer de participer à leurs campagnes publicitaires. Bork recevait des messages privés d’hommes d’affaires lui proposant de coopérer, et même de jeunes femmes. Désormais, l’expérience est terminée, Roman a décidé qu’il était trop difficile d’investir de l’argent dans l’entourage et les accessoires de ces photos truquées. Mis à jour pour la dernière fois il y a 17 semaines, l’Instagram de Boris Bork continue d’attirer les abonnés. Il en a maintenant plus de 18.000.
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Joe Narly!
Really? That's not what God says? "Woe to the fools." ◄ Isaiah 14:13 ► You said in your heart, "I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. ◄ Revelation 19:12 ► His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself.
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Meet the New Owner of the Playboy Mansion - The New York Times
Brooks Barnes
LOS ANGELES — Last month, when the of Hostess Brands plunked down $100 million for the Playboy Mansion, the snickering was instant: Hugh Hefner’s pleasure palace had sold to the maker of snack cakes like Twinkies and Ho Hos. The buyer, J. Daren Metropoulos, heir to a fortune built on Chef Boyardee meatballs, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Bumble Bee tuna, sure seemed to fit the playboy bill. He was the kind of guy who, judging by a quick web search, could put even Mr. Hefner to shame. One photo showed the young tycoon posing with a P. B. R. tall boy on a private jet while wearing sunglasses and a trucker hat. Another found him whooping it up at the Playboy Mansion with Snoop Dogg and several Playmates. A sordid TMZ moment resurfaced — a former girlfriend, the 2002 Playmate of the Year, claimed in a 2009 lawsuit (since dismissed) that Mr. Metropoulos had assaulted her — and a close relationship with his older brother only appeared to complete the picture. As Evan Metropoulos once told a night life reporter for The New York Times, as Daren lounged nearby, “I’ve been with more chicks than any fat guy you know, except Pavarotti. ” Classy. But something didn’t quite add up. For a start, none of the usual suspects in Los Angeles knew this supposed mover and shaker. I called party promoters, paparazzi, neighbors (Daren Metropoulos has lived next door to the Playboy Mansion in Holmby Hills since 2009) and Hollywood agents who make it their business to know everyone in town with money to burn. Their repeated response: “Daren who?” Mr. Metropoulos and his family, including the patriarch, C. Dean Metropoulos, declined interview requests. So did Mr. Hefner. Two real estate agents who worked on the sale, which includes a stipulation that Mr. Hefner, 90, and his wife, Crystal Harris, 30, can continue to live in the mansion until his death, did not respond to queries, although a third agent involved, Jeff Hyland, added an interesting tidbit: The Metropouloses had tried to buy the Playboy Mansion six years earlier and failed. “The offer then was for about $75 million,” Mr. Hyland said. Adding to the mystery, the few people who did agree to speak on the record about Mr. Metropoulos (pictured on his company’s website in a pinstriped suit against a row of books) described him as a saintly homebody. “He’s not some bratty billionaire’s son in any way, shape or form,” said Andrew van der Vord, of consumer investment at Royal Bank of Canada, who helped the Metropouloses sell Pabst Brewing for $700 million in 2014. (They bought it for $250 million in 2010 Daren and Evan Metropoulos, rather controversially, served as executives.) “Daren is a quiet, unassuming guy,” Mr. van der Vord continued. “He’s very polite and considerate. There’s a really nice demeanor to him, actually. ” Bill Toler, the chief executive of Hostess, told me that Mr. Metropoulos had worked in the family food businesses since he was a teenager. “I was always impressed by the way Daren wanted to learn how to do things the right way,” Mr. Toler said. “He would go spend a day working at retail. He would delve into marketing and then go learn how the sales department operated. ” Mr. Toler added: “I assure you, his interest in the Playboy Mansion is very pure. He’s not the new Hugh Hefner. That’s just silly. ” But I still had unanswered questions. What are his interests? Sports? Art? Travel? Nobody seemed to know. A spokeswoman for the Metropoulos family did confirm that Mr. Metropoulos, who grew up in Greenwich, Conn. did not graduate from college, having dropped out after his sophomore year to work for his father. He had been studying business at the University of Connecticut. If Mr. Metropoulos, who has never married and has no children, is as ordinary as family friends insist, preferring a night at home to hanging at Chateau Marmont — and yet still has an unruly public image — he may be the perfect fit for the Playboy Mansion. Purchased by Mr. Hefner in 1971 for about $1 million, the estate (replete with a zoo license and fireworks permit) now bears little resemblance in reality to its mythic reputation. The stone house was built in 1927 for an heir to the Broadway and Bullock’s department store fortune. Located a few hundred feet off Sunset Boulevard, the property is valuable because it abuts the Los Angeles Country Club. Neighbors include the music mogul Jimmy Iovine the Google kingpin Eric Schmidt and Alexandra von Furstenberg and her husband, Dax Miller, who has become a friend to Mr. Metropoulos. (Mr. Miller did not respond to an interview request.) The Playboy Mansion’s history as a den of iniquity is true, but most of the more libidinous stories date from the distant past. These days, the parties are primarily of a corporate nature, and upkeep has been slight. A few years ago, for an article on Mr. Hefner, I was given a daytime tour of the house and grounds. It was gross. The famous grotto pools, linked in 2011 to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, reminded me of one of those fetid animal enclosures at a marine exhibit. Don’t get me started on the bathroom off the mansion’s main hall. There is a separate house that contains arcade games and has bedrooms with carpeting I could only describe as crispy. Whether hipster doofus or titan of industry — or a bit of both — Mr. Metropoulos may have plans for the Playboy Mansion that go beyond what has been reported. The official line is that Mr. Metropoulos, with a passion for architecture and history, wants to restore the estate and connect it to his adjacent compound. Mr. Metropoulos bought his current home from Mr. Hefner for $18 million in 2009 the previous occupants were Mr. Hefner’s former wife Kimberley Conrad and their two sons. “The heritage of this property transcends its celebrity, and to have the opportunity to serve as its steward would be a true privilege,” Mr. Metropoulos said in a statement last month. (The deal had not closed escrow as of Friday.) But living quietly on Charing Cross Road may not be the intention. “If there is anybody who can make Playboy more interesting, more relevant, it’s Daren,” Mr. van der Vord said. “It will be fascinating to watch what he does with that brand. ” Wait a minute. Mr. Metropoulos did not buy Playboy Enterprises, which continues to run a licensing business and publish its flagship magazine. But the struggling company has been for sale. And it would seem like a perfect fit for the Metropouloses, who specialize in taking timeworn products — albeit mostly edible ones — and dusting them off. The young Mr. Metropoulos is skilled, according to his corporate biography, in developing marketing campaigns that “connect brands with contemporary audiences and regain relevance, both in the marketplace and pop culture. ” When the family owned Chef Boyardee, Mr. Metropoulos contributed to a successful ad campaign featuring pro wrestlers. At Pabst, he promoted the company’s brews with celebrity endorsements. (Hence the Snoop Dogg party.) Whatever his plans for the mansion, Mr. Metropoulos will have to contend with the Holmby Westwood Property Owners Association. “Our antennae are up,” said Sandy Brown, the group’s president. “Any new uses — a private club, some kind of hotel — will certainly get community pushback. ” One reason for the trepidation: Mr. Metropoulos has been a hotelier before. In 2003, Dean Metropoulos spent $10. 9 million for the tattered Castle at Tarrytown in New York. Daren took a particular interest in the refurbishment, pouring himself into plans for a spa, the overhaul of a restaurant and minutiae like drapery selection, according to Gilbert Baeriswil, the hotel’s former general manager. “I remember him saying over and over, ‘I want to see more carpet samples,’” said Mr. Baeriswil, who now runs the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vt. When he found out that Mr. Metropoulos was buying the Playboy Mansion, Mr. Baeriswil said he reached out to his former boss. “I told him: ‘Wow! What a purchase! With all of those rooms, you’re going to need an innkeeper,’” Mr. Baeriswil recalled. “And he said: ‘Sounds like a great idea. Let’s put a plan together. ’”
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Dem Rep Lieu: Trump Firing Comey ’A Classic Case of Obstruction of Justice’ - Breitbart
Ian Hanchett
... @reptedlieu tells @chrislhayes: ”we have a raging fire at the white house. .. a classic case of obstruction of justice. ..” pic. twitter. On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” Representative Ted Lieu ( ) commented on the New York Times’ report that President Trump called FBI Director James Comey a “nutjob” and told Russian officials that firing Comey relieved “great pressure” by stating Trump committed “a classic case of obstruction of justice, a federal crime. ” Lieu said, “Let me say that, we no longer just have smoke. We have a raging, fire at the White House. As a former prosecutor, what the president did, in firing James Comey, and then saying he did it to relieve pressure on himself because of the FBI investigation is a classic case of obstruction of justice, a federal crime. Anybody else who did something like this would be facing a federal indictment and a criminal trial. ” Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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US-Supported Terrorists Shell Russian Embassy In Damascus
Stephen Lendman
in: War Propaganda , World News (© Omar Sanadiki / Reuters) They’ve done it before without causing casualties or damage. According the Russian Foreign Ministry, terrorists fired two mortar rounds at the embassy’s compound. One shell exploded near the diplomatic mission’s entrance, damaging the building and four vehicles. The attack came from terrorist-controlled Jobar district. On Friday, the Security Council addressed the incident, saying its “members…condemned in the strongest terms another mortar shelling of the Embassy of the Russian Federation in Damascus (Syrian Arab Republic), which caused significant material damage.” They stressed the “fundamental principle of the inviolability of diplomatic and consular premises.” Host governments are obligated “to take all appropriate steps to protect diplomatic and consular premises against any intrusion or damage, and to prevent any disturbance of the peace of these missions or impairment of their dignity, and to prevent any attack on diplomatic premises, agents and consular officers.” Not easily done when countries are attacked by foreign-supported death squads, supplied with heavy weapons to wage war. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova expressed concern over no “international reaction…but we will try to get it,” she said, including on the platform of international organizations, because we are talking about a diplomatic mission, about systematic terrorist attacks.” Russian upper house Federation Council Security and Defense Committee first deputy chairman Frants Klintesevich believes the latest shelling was conducted to disrupt Moscow’s humanitarian pause, saying it failed – nor can there be an “option of making any concessions to terrorists.” Separately, heavily US-led Western pressure got General Assembly members to vote Russia off the UN Human Rights Council – a body infested with major human rights abusers, including reelected member Saudi Arabia with over a three-fourths majority vote. Ignored was its genocidal war on Yemen, ruthless despotic rule tolerating no dissent, arbitrary arrests and imprisonments, torture and physical abuse, public beheadings and whippings, violence against women, along with other major violations of civil and human rights. Russia, Hungary and Croatia vied for two Eastern European seats. Moscow’s UN envoy Vitaly Churkin said “(i)t was a very close vote and very good countries competing, Croatia, Hungary. They are fortunate because of their size, they are not exposed to the winds of international diplomacy. Russia is very exposed. We’ve been in the UNHRC for several years, and I am sure next time we will stand and get back in.” Not easily as long as Washington maintains pressure to prevent it. US-led NATO’s undeclared war on Russia continues. Hillary’s ascension to power next year threatens to turn it red hot. Submit your review
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Cut Ties to Donald Trump, Big Donors Urge R.N.C. - The New York Times
Jonathan Martin, Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman
WASHINGTON — Several of the Republican Party’s most generous donors called on the Republican National Committee on Thursday to disavow Donald J. Trump, saying that allegations by multiple women that Mr. Trump had groped or made inappropriate sexual advances toward them threatened to inflict lasting damage on the party’s image. To an elite group of Republican contributors who have donated millions of dollars to the party’s candidates and committees in recent years, the cascade of revelations related to Mr. Trump’s sexual conduct is grounds for the committee to cut ties with the party’s beleaguered finally and fully. “At some point, you have to look in the mirror and recognize that you cannot possibly justify support for Trump to your children — especially your daughters,” said David Humphreys, a Missouri business executive who contributed more than $2. 5 million to Republicans from the 2012 campaign cycle through this spring and opposed Mr. Trump’s bid from the outset. Bruce Kovner, a New York investor and philanthropist who with his wife has given $2. 7 million to Republicans over the same period, was just as blunt. “He is a dangerous demagogue completely unsuited to the responsibilities of a United States president,” Mr. Kovner wrote in an email, referring to Mr. Trump. “Even for loyalists, there is a line beyond which the obvious moral failings of a candidate are impossible to disregard,” he wrote. “That line has been clearly breached. ” Mr. Kovner argued that the Republican National Committee should shift its attention to candidates who reflected its core values, like free markets and limited government. “I hope the R. N. C. sticks to candidates who articulate these principles!” he said. Outrage among the party’s largest financiers over Mr. Trump’s behavior has also stirred questions about the leadership of Reince Priebus, the national committee’s chairman, who has remained loyal to Mr. Trump even as dozens of Republican elected officials have abandoned his candidacy. Mr. Priebus told members of the committee on Monday that the party was enthusiastically supporting Mr. Trump, reassuring some of them. But to some leading Republican benefactors who have advocated a tougher line with Mr. Trump, the party should have distanced itself from his candidacy well before the publication of a recording last week in which he boasted profanely about committing sexual assault. “The R. N. C. long ago should have cut ties with Donald Trump,” said William E. Oberndorf, a California investor who has given more than $3 million to Republicans since 2012. “Reince should be fired and replaced with someone who has the competence and leadership skills to rebuild the R. N. C. ” Even some of Mr. Priebus’s longtime associates in his native Wisconsin appear to have reached their breaking point. “Reince Priebus has to ask, how much of his soul does he want to sell for Donald Trump at this point?” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative talk show host in Milwaukee, calling on Mr. Priebus to “man up. ” Mr. Sykes also alluded to Mr. Trump’s repeated denunciations this week of Speaker Paul D. Ryan — another Wisconsinite and a close friend of Mr. Priebus’s — who said Monday that he would no longer defend or campaign for Mr. Trump. At a event in Florida on Wednesday night, Mr. Trump told donors that he did not respect Mr. Ryan. Referring to Mr. Priebus, Mr. Sykes asked, “Is he going to allow Donald Trump to throw Paul Ryan under the bus?” For all Mr. Priebus’s public expressions of loyalty, he has been deeply shaken by revelations about Mr. Trump and the rifts within the party, seeing years of Republican organizational work potentially being undone, according to multiple people who described private conversations with Mr. Priebus on the condition of anonymity. He has said he feels adrift, fearing that Mr. Trump is headed for disaster, and told one longtime associate that he was having sleepless nights. Mr. Priebus did not respond to requests for comment. The Republican financial apparatus under Mr. Priebus, sputtering since Mr. Trump claimed the presidential nomination, is wheezing painfully in the final weeks of the race. The committee’s officials now quietly acknowledge that Mr. Trump is a thoroughly compromised candidate, party donors said, but implore potential contributors to give anyway, stressing graver concerns like control of the Supreme Court. Many donors have stopped giving, though, and some have deserted the party, including two major donors who confirmed on Thursday that they were supporting Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor who is the Libertarian candidate for president. Julian H. Robertson Jr. a billionaire hedge fund investor who has directed more than $5 million to Republicans since the 2012 election, is now backing Mr. Johnson, said Fraser P. Seitel, a spokesman for Mr. Robertson. And Jeffrey Yass, a Pennsylvania investor who has given more than $3 million to conservative candidates and committees, said in an email that he was “rooting for Johnson. ” Even some of Mr. Priebus’s allies believe that Mr. Trump is certain to be defeated and that it is time for the party to protect its image by disavowing him. “We’re headed for destruction,” said Al Hoffman, a former Republican National Committee finance chairman and a longtime Florida donor, who plans to host Senator John McCain of Arizona at his house for a this week. “I just hope we can find a group of conservatives and moderates who are rational thinkers to the party. ” But other leading Republicans believe the party has little choice but to prop up Mr. Trump, fearing that excommunicating him would be catastrophic for other Republican candidates and all but hand over control of Congress to Democrats. And in some parts of the country, Mr. Trump has been a boon to the party. “He will bring over a minimum of two state House guys and two state senators for us,” said the Pennsylvania state Republican chairman, Rob Gleason, who predicted a record presidential turnout for his party west of the Susquehanna River. While some Republican donors and elected officials have had it with Mr. Trump, another constituency dear to Mr. Priebus remains committed to the nominee: the 168 members of the national committee. In a series of emails shared this week with The New York Times, some Republican state chairmen and chairwomen and national committee members affirmed their support for Mr. Trump and saluted Mr. Priebus for standing by him. “He is our candidate,” Rosie Tripp, the Republican committeewoman from New Mexico, wrote to other members of the committee. “I am dismayed by our own Republicans who are bailing like rats off a ship. He who is without sin can cast the first stone. I am sure they are not as pure as the driven snow, either. ” Juliana Bergeron, the Republican committeewoman from New Hampshire, agreed. “There are worse things in this world,” Ms. Bergeron wrote, referring to Mr. Trump’s conduct, “and Hillary Clinton is near the top of that list. ” The views of the committee members, most of whom are party activists, not political professionals, are important because Mr. Priebus is considering running in January for another term as chairman. And when the party does not control the White House, the chairman is selected by a vote of the members. Should he seek another term, Mr. Priebus is expected to face competition from Mr. Trump’s critics as well as his loyalists. Matt Borges, the Ohio Republican Party chairman and an outspoken Trump detractor, is said to be considering the chairman’s post, as are several officials supportive of Mr. Trump. Asked about his interest in the job, Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, declined to rule out a run, saying only that he was happy in his current work as a CNN commentator.
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Watch This, America! Bone-Chilling HUMA Video
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Watch This, America! Bone-Chilling HUMA Video # Isotrop 1600 For the past 10 years, I have reported on the dangerous liaison between Hillary and Huma. Born to leaders in the jihad-terror movement, Huma lived in Saudi Arabia for 18 years. Within two years of arriving in the USA, she was a close aide to Hillary Clinton. They have been inseparable ever since. That was no accident. Tags
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ABC Faces Boycotts, Backlash after ’Last Man Standing’ Cancelled
Daniel Nussbaum
Fans of the Tim sitcom Last Man Standing have threatened a boycott of ABC after the network cancelled the series last week despite strong ratings and critical acclaim. [Last Man Standing ran for six seasons on ABC before being cancelled on Wednesday. The sitcom centered on Allen’s Mike Baxter, a marketing director for a sporting goods store and his relationship with his wife Vanessa (Nancy Travis) and his three teenage daughters (Molly Ephraim, Kaitlyn Dever, and Amanda Fuller). The show was one of the few (if not the only) on broadcast television to appeal to conservative, audiences taken together with Allen’s own political conservatism, some Last Man Standing fans have accused ABC of cancelling the show for political reasons, particularly because the series drew relatively strong ratings in its Friday night time slot. Over the weekend, fans of the show took to social media to call for a boycott of the network, while some urged other platforms like Netflix and CMT to pick it up. @starcrosswolf @ABC @AnitaWhiteee @RobertsRooms @gotspeed2burn @1Talking_Stick @mary_p7mary3 @mollyday15 @LibertyNews1776 @CB618444 . @ABCNetwork Is your goal to make money? Im not sure you know how … #BoycottABC pic. twitter. — 💞AmericanKelli 💞 (@kshw5678) May 12, 2017, @dcexaminer @slone #BoycottABC won’t be hard.. @LastManABC was only show I watched and now gone so — #ByeByeABC, — Sunshiney Days (@SunshineyDays13) May 15, 2017, #BoycottABC @LastManABC great show and family friendly! Bad move @ABC may you tank! Not everyone is liberal! It’s ok to not be! #FacistTV, — HappyLifex2 (@HappyLifex2) May 15, 2017, My favorite show ”Last Man Standing” has been cancelled by liberal ABC. I hope all 8. 1 million viewers join #BoycottABC, I am. What a shame. — Stacy Bolton (@sbolton20) May 14, 2017, Wow @ABCNetwork you are SO #liberal you were afraid to have anything pro conservative that you cancelled last man standing. #BoycottABC, — Jerad Sackuvich ® (@TheBlueRanger07) May 11, 2017, Representatives for ABC did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the reasons for the show’s cancellation. But a Deadline report this month suggested that the network, now responsible for the cost of producing the show at this point in its run, balked at the price tag. Whatever the reason, fans were not yet ready to see it go. At least a petitions have been launched on Change. org to attempt to persuade either ABC or another network to give Last Man Standing new life. The most popular petition had already gathered more than 10, 000 signatures as of Monday morning. “Last Man Standing is one of the only shows on broadcast television, and the only sitcom, that is not constantly shoving liberal ideals down the throats of the viewers. And sadly, that is likely the real reason the show has been cancelled,” wrote the petition’s creator. “The intent of this is to attempt to get ABC to renew the show. With that in mind, I will no longer be watching any ABC shows. I have cancelled the DVR settings for the other ABC shows that I regularly watch. If you want to help try to save Last Man Standing, I encourage you to do the same. ” Fans do have some precedent to be hopeful for a renewal. NBC executives this week “ ” the drama series Timeless after social media users pleaded and petitioned for the show to come back. All previous seasons of Last Man Standing are currently streaming on Netflix. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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UnReal Report: PM Modi trolls one and all with his surgical strike on black money
UnReal Mama
Tweet It seems to be PM Modi’s signature style. He will often stay silent for a prolonged period of time, absorbing criticism, ridicule and even abuse from opponents and sympathisers, and then suddenly, seemingly like a bolt from the blue, he will do something that trolls the pants off his critics. Yesterday was one such day when PM Modi once again proved to media houses that his is the prime time show with the highest TRPs when he announced via an address to the nation that his government is abolishing Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes, effective midnight. Some initial reactions to Modi’s decision to abolish Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes pic.twitter.com/YwBN3e5rCJ — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 Even as black money hoarders writhed and squirmed, PM Modi rubbed it in with his version of English. As if his decision wasn’t enough, PM Modi purposely dragged out his English address to add insult to injury to black money holders #Legend — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 For a while after the address, there were no reactions from PM Modi’s political opponents, mostly because many of them were scrambling to get rid of their cash by midnight. The means they adopted followed from their respective intellectual abilities. Some did this… JUST IN: Suresh Kalmadi spotted trying to buy 100 kilos of onion using 500 rupee notes — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 …while others decided to take advantage of the fact that government hospitals will continue to accept 500/1000 rupee notes for another three days One way for black money holders to spend some of their money is to get a heart attack and get treated in a govt hospital in the next 3 days — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 We thought we’d give people an option, but it remains to be seen how many fell for it… Attention folks. We are ready to accept 500 rupee notes from anyone who buys “Unreal Aliens” and posts snapshot :P https://t.co/gE186TXsd4 — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 Some unfortunate souls, however, were short on options. The worst affected are media anchors who desperately want to go out & spend their 500 / 1000 notes but are forced to do debates on the move — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 While Arnab Goswami predictably raved about the move, veteran journalist Rajdeep Sardesai equally predictably was busy looking for a contrarian voice… Rajdeep Sardesai moving from panelist to panelist hoping to get someone to agree with his “..or is it a foolhardy move?” — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 …and eventually found one in Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha who inexplicably brought up Panama papers like he inexplicably brings up 2002 in every debate concerning Modi. Back on Times Now, Saba Naqvi tried to evoke pathos by talking about the poor housewife or domestic help who will be inconvenienced, only to be promptly trounced by the nation’s noise. NDTV would normally have featured an interview with finance minister Arun Jaitley, and he was willing too, but… Arun Jaitley to NDTV: “Aa jaun kya interview ke liye?” NDTV: “Er, no Jaitley ji, we’re busy until midnight” — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 Meanwhile, down in Mumbai, residents heard a string of loud FMLs and curses from a posh residence near Mafatlal Park. When the man inside was done cursing, he picked up the phone to talk to PM Modi: How this surgical strike may help PM Modi fulfill another poll promise… pic.twitter.com/rWwrQIZt4f — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 At least for those in India this was just one blow. For some across the border, this was PM Modi’s second surgical strike. Somewhere in Pakistan… pic.twitter.com/vtUHaLVXML — Karthik Laxman (@karthlax) November 8, 2016 While Modi was trolling others, a beggar decided to troll a specific politician… — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 When he was done trolling everyone in the real world, PM Modi trolled some in the unreal world too… Just got payment from BJP for unreal services rendered – a bag of Rs. 500 / 1000 rupee notes and a post-it saying “LOL” — The UnReal Times (@TheUnRealTimes) November 8, 2016 When all the tamasha was done and dusted, a satisfied PM Modi caught up with BJP President Amit Shah to get a cup of tea. An awestruck Amit Shah who probably hadn’t been told about the move in advance either, asked PM Modi what his plans were… PM Modi’s next Surgical Strike pic.twitter.com/CDQ73jLTsE Tweet About UnReal Mama Ek chatur naar badee hoshiyaar, apane hee jaal me phasat jaat ham hasat jaat are ho ho ho ho ho!
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College Professors Organize National ‘Teach-In’ to Challenge ‘Trumpism’ - Breitbart
Dr. Susan Berry
Some 25 colleges and universities — many of them public — have answered a call by professors at UCLA to use their regular class time to “teach, organize, and resist” what they view as the discriminatory political agenda of Donald Trump. [Slated for Wednesday, January 18, the dubbed #J18, is taking place between the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and Trump’s inauguration. The event’s planners say: Let it be known that on #J18 and beyond, universities, colleges, and high schools refused to bear silent witness to the politics of hate and fear that in these times, these places of teaching and learning not only served as a sanctuary for its students and workers but also stood up to proclaim the power of knowledge on the frontlines of social justice. On January 18, the professors are calling upon their colleagues to “Teach, Organize, Resist,” and “affirm the role of critical thinking and academic knowledge in challenging Trumpism. ” They continue: On that day, we intend to teach about the agendas and policies of the new administration, be it the proposed dismantling of economic and environmental regulations or the threatened rollback of the rights that form the fragile scaffolding of American democracy. On that day, we intend to organize against the proposed expansion of state violence targeting people of color, undocumented people, queer communities, women, Muslims, and many others. On that day, we intend to resist the institutionalization of ideologies of separation and subordination, including white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and virulent nationalism. In addition to UCLA, universities participating in the event to date include: American University, Washington, D. C. University of California, Berkeley University of Cincinnati University of Dayton University of Minnesota New York University Princeton University Texas State University University of Kentucky Vanderbilt University and University of Washington. An editable flyer for the event states: “January 18, 2017, is a day to Teach, Organize, Resist. Transform your classrooms and commons into spaces of education that protest policies of violence, disenfranchisement, segregation, and isolationism. ” According to the “Media Resources” page of the event’s website, social media hashtags to be used for the day include: #J18, #Sanctuary Campus, #NotMyPresident, #ChallengeIneq, #UCLARave.
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Rex Tillerson to Lift Human Rights Conditions on Arms Sale to Bahrain - The New York Times
David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt
WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson has decided to lift all human rights conditions on a major sale of fighter jets and other arms to Bahrain in an effort to end a rift between the United States and a critical Middle East ally, according to administration and congressional officials involved in the debate. Mr. Tillerson’s decision comes as the Trump administration looks to bolster Sunni Arab states in the Middle East and find new ways to confront Iran in the Persian Gulf. Bahrain is a key player in that effort, and home to the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet, which patrols the strategic waterway. But the decision to drop the human rights assurances as a condition of the sale is bound to be read by Saudi Arabia and other states in the region as a sign that the new administration plans to ease its demands to protect and respect political dissidents and protesters. The conditions on the sale of 19 new American fighter jets, worth $2. 8 billion, had been imposed by the Obama administration amid continuing concerns about the tiny Sunni monarchy’s crackdown against majority Shiites. The State Department declined to comment on queries about Mr. Tillerson’s decision, which has been discussed at length with some members of Congress but not yet publicly announced. The State Department on Wednesday notified Congress of its intent to proceed with the sale without the conditions, according to Micah Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Congress now has two review periods to examine the sale and raise any objections. Mr. Tillerson will attend his first meeting of NATO on Friday in Brussels, where he may run into resistance from European allies who are trying to build a new relationship with Tehran, and who have made human rights a more central feature of their foreign policy. Human rights groups, informed by The New York Times of the decision, immediately assailed any effort by the administration to lift the conditions on the arms sales. “If they lift the conditions, they’re saying we don’t think you need to reform, and the Bahrainis have a free pass to continue cracking down,” said Sarah Margon, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group. Mr. Tillerson’s decision is likely to be welcomed by the Republican majority on Capitol Hill. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Corker, a Tennessee Republican, said in an interview on Wednesday that he applauded the move to lift the human rights restrictions. He said arms sales should be decided by American strategic needs, and not be mixed with pressure on allies to change their domestic behavior. “This type of conditionality would be unprecedented and counterproductive to maintaining security cooperation and ultimately addressing human rights issues,” Mr. Corker said. “There are more effective ways to seek changes in partner policies than publicly conditioning weapons transfers in this manner. ” Mr. Tillerson, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, has taken on much of the diplomacy with the Gulf Arab states himself, often bypassing American ambassadors and other American officials in the region. A Trump administration official said Mr. Tillerson knew many of the regional players from his time at Exxon Mobil. The decision on Bahrain also suggests that Mr. Tillerson is likely to deal similarly with Saudi Arabia, the largest and most powerful Sunni force in the region. The Obama administration deepened its rift with its Gulf allies in December over the conflict in Yemen when it blocked a transfer of precision munitions to Saudi Arabia because of concerns about civilian casualties that American officials attributed to poor targeting. But Mr. Tillerson has signaled he favors reversing that decision, and allowing Raytheon to sell the Saudis about 16, 000 guided munitions kits, which upgrade dumb bombs to smart bombs that can more accurately hit targets. The kits, if purchased over the life of the proposed contract, are valued around $350 million. Mr. Tillerson has argued that if civilian casualties are the concern, it makes no sense to deprive the Saudis of precision weaponry. The new secretary of state was criticized this month for skipping the release of his department’s annual human rights report, an event his Democratic and Republican predecessors used as a moment to pressure allies and adversaries alike by highlighting abuses. During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Tillerson declined to criticize the killings in the Philippines or repression in Saudi Arabia, saying he had to make his own assessment of the facts, and could not trust what he read in news reports. But the sale of to Bahrain was the first test of whether the Trump administration would reverse the efforts by former President Barack Obama to use America’s main leverage — military support — to force domestic political change in the tiny Gulf state. For weeks, Mr. Tillerson has been talking to members of Congress about easing the restrictions to allow the $2. 8 billion sale of fighter jets, and a separate $1 billion deal to support the existing fleet of aircraft. Obama aides had urged the Bahraini government to release political dissidents from jail and diversify its predominantly Sunni security forces. But on a trip to the country last April, Mr. Tillerson’s predecessor, John Kerry, was relatively muted in public about criticizing the country. How the Trump administration handles the politically delicate issues could prove crucial to future relations with the strategically valuable Persian Gulf nation. The Navy’s Fifth Fleet is the key to ensuring flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf, and safeguarding American interests in the highly volatile region. Mr. Tillerson is no stranger to the politics of the region. Exxon Mobil has close connections with Qatar’s national oil company, and has joined with Doha to build a liquefied natural gas terminal on the Gulf of Mexico coast that is designed for importing gas and possibly for exporting it as well. As a result, the company had a strong interest in keeping the shipping lanes in the region open — for which cooperation with Bahrain is key. At the core of the decision, however, is the Trump administration’s growing determination to find places to confront Iran for its activities in the region. In visits to Washington in the past several weeks, Gulf officials have praised President Trump for promising to get tougher with Tehran, which they regard as the great Shiite scourge of the Sunni Arab monarchies.
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November 16: Daily Contrarian Reads
David Stockman
November 16: Daily Contrarian Reads My daily contrarian reads for Wednesday, November 16th, 2016.
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BET: Katy Perry Latest ‘White Pop Act’ to Appropriate ‘Black Urban Culture’
Jerome Hudson
Pop superstar Katy Perry has again been accused of cultural appropriation, with critics now saying the singer is stealing elements of black culture for use in her latest music. [In a searing article published on BET. com Wednesday, Keith Murphy says the singer has “become the latest white pop act looking to reinvent themselves on the back of Black urban culture. ” Murphy — pointing to what he called the “Firework” singer’s “cringeworthy” May 20 Saturday Night Live performances, one which featured Atlanta rap trio Migos — says Perry is no longer the “bubbly, witty and at times brunette who had began her professional career in 2001 as a virginal contemporary Christian music vocalist before hitting peak pop superstar levels. ” “In her place stood a static individual who was hardly recognizable,” Murphy wrote. Perry’s performance of her single “Bon Appétit” on SNL last week was heavily panned by critics online and on social media (and in the comments section on YouTube). Perry’s act was called “odd” by Spin and became the subject of several memes — many of them accusing the singer of exploiting black culture. Katy Perry looks like an out of touch teacher trying to relate to the black youth. This was hilariously terrible. pic. twitter. — IV:XX Hotep Doobs (@DOEDoobs) May 21, 2017, When you need Black culture to sell songs but you’re whiter than Strom Thurmond drinking a glass of milk watching Andy Griffith @katyperry pic. twitter. — Chris Krapek (@Chris_Krapek) May 22, 2017, When I saw Katy Perry’s performance with Migos on SNL pic. twitter. — Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) May 22, 2017, @jemelehill Katy Perry is in phase one of the ”Miley Cyrus going black” Plan!😏 — T7J4H4 (@TravarisHarpe) May 22, 2017, Even rapper Snoop Dogg joined in and roasted Perry with a meme. A post shared by snoopdogg (@snoopdogg) on May 23, 2017 at 11:22am PDT, Murphy writes: “By the end of the entire ordeal, you were left to wonder: What the hell happened to Katy Perry? And why did the pop protagonist, who first arrived on the pop music scene in 2008 feel the need to Blacken things up?” Perry’s past collaborations with black musicians, including “Snoop Dogg (“California Gurls”) Kanye West (“E. T. ”) and Juicy J (“Dark Horse”) Murphy writes, were “all done on equal, seamless footing like David Bowie’s mid ‘70s exploration of Philly soul. ” However, Murphy notes, Perry’s most recent reinvention and “the stumbling drum up to Perry’s upcoming fifth album Witness has so far been craven in its attempts to create a spark by injecting some Black girl magic. ” Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson
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What It’s Like to Apply for a Job in Donald Trump’s White House - The New York Times
Julie Hirschfeld Davis
WASHINGTON — When former Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia stepped off the elevator on the 26th floor of Trump Tower last week for his interview with Donald J. Trump, he expected a grilling by the and a phalanx of associates, something along the lines of the confrontational boardroom scenes at the sleek conference table in the television show “The Apprentice. ” What he found instead was Mr. Trump, calm and solicitous behind a desk cluttered with papers and periodicals, in a large corner office with a hodgepodge of memorabilia and décor that appeared little changed from the 1980s. Nick Ayers, an aide to Vice Mike Pence, and Stephen K. Bannon, who will serve as Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, listened from the sidelines. Mr. Trump, who offered Mr. Perdue a seat across from his desk, was in charge. “He was approaching this from a deal standpoint, and he wanted to know if he was on the right track,” said Mr. Perdue, who is being considered for secretary of agriculture and wore a tie adorned with tractors to the meeting. “He believes that we in the United States have been sort of patsies over the years in the way we’ve dealt with our foreign competitors and international trade — and I agree with him — and he wanted to know what I would do about it. ” For more than a decade, millions of Americans tuned in to watch Mr. Trump interrogate prospective employees on “The Apprentice” with a mix of arrogance and disdain. But in private over the past few weeks, a less theatrical spinoff of the spectacle has unfolded in Mr. Trump’s office in Manhattan, and occasionally at his golf resort in Bedminster, N. J. or at his getaway in Palm Beach, Fla. Mr. Trump’s interview style in the real world is direct but conversational, according to people who have sat opposite him. He did not take notes or appear to refer to a set list of questions, but he did have dossiers on his visitors and often displayed intricate knowledge of their backgrounds and experience. He rarely drank or ate. He kept his suit jacket on. In New York, he liked to show off the sweeping views of Central Park visible over his shoulder. Job seekers, who must parade before the news media in the marble and bronze lobby of Trump Tower — “It was almost like walking the red carpet in Hollywood,” said Representative Lou Barletta, Republican of Pennsylvania, who has offered himself up as a secretary of transportation or labor — said that the often asked questions and had little patience for meandering answers. “If you filibuster, he’ll cut you off,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker who was initially in the running to be Mr. Trump’s secretary of state but has since said he is not interested in a cabinet post. “He wants to know what you can do for him. ” Mr. Gingrich said Mr. Trump’s approach to putting together his administration was the same one he has used with his business. “He’s used to defining jobs, measuring capability and making a judgment: ‘Do I think you can run my golf course? Do I think you can run my hotel? Do I want your restaurant in my building? ’” Mr. Gingrich said. Mr. Trump has been more in the interviews than his predecessors were. George W. Bush rarely spoke in person to more than one finalist for each cabinet post, said Clay Johnson III, who directed his transition effort in 2000. President Obama also interviewed a single finalist for each post in most cases, usually in a discussion meant to confirm an already conclusion that the candidate would be right for the job, said Dan Pfeiffer, a senior transition official in 2008. “In some cases, he knew who he wanted and it was a question of convincing them to do it,” Mr. Pfeiffer said, citing examples like Hillary Clinton, who became Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, and Robert M. Gates, whom he persuaded to stay on as defense secretary. Mr. Obama was also adamant that the deliberations not spill out into the open, but that has not been the case with Mr. Trump. Members of Congress, generals, business executives and others mingle outside his office, waiting for an audience with the . Mr. Barletta waited more than 45 minutes for his meeting, passing the time chatting with his Republican colleague Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, who was waiting for his turn to audition for secretary of homeland security. “It was like a green room, a waiting room of people you know or you know of, all waiting their turn,” said Robert L. Johnson, the founder of the television network BET, who visited Mr. Trump at Bedminster to discuss ways the incoming president could reach out to . As Mr. Johnson was coming in, Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York whom Mr. Trump is considering for secretary of state, was going out. Mr. Trump wants a gut sense for a potential hire, people close to him said, prizing personal chemistry and an entrepreneurial spirit. But he also leans on the judgment of trusted advisers — particularly Mr. Pence and his elder daughter, Ivanka Trump — when assessing a candidate. It was Ms. Trump who reached out to Mr. Johnson, the businessman and BET founder, after she saw a statement he issued the week after her father’s victory. In it, Mr. Johnson urged black voters to participate in elections and insist that both political parties address their concerns in order to earn their support. Days later, Mr. Johnson was being led into a room at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster to meet with Mr. Trump, along with Reince Priebus, whom Mr. Trump has named chief of staff, Mr. Bannon and Ms. Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner. Mr. Trump asked what jobs he might consider taking in the administration, but Mr. Johnson said he quickly made it known he was not seeking a post. “I told him as we sat down in the room that, ‘ Trump, you shouldn’t ask voters what they have to lose, as you did in your campaign what you should have said, and what you should be talking about now is, this is what you have to gain from a Trump administration,’” Mr. Johnson said. Mr. Trump seemed to take the advice. He said, “ ‘So I should focus on the aspirational aspects,’ ” Mr. Johnson said. Mr. Trump has taken advice from other job seekers as well. During his interview with James N. Mattis, who was selected last week to be the secretary of defense, Mr. Trump questioned the retired general about whether torture works as a tool for extracting vital information from terrorism suspects. General Mattis told him it did not, a view Mr. Trump later said surprised him and gave him reason to reconsider his position on the matter. Mr. Trump, who prizes loyalty, also wanted to know precisely what the job seekers did to propel him into the White House. “He asked about what I had done to help in Georgia,” said Mr. Perdue, who told the that he and his cousin, Senator David Perdue, had repeatedly reassured campaign officials about Mr. Trump’s prospects there and encouraged them to focus their energies elsewhere. Scott Brown, a former Massachusetts senator who met with Mr. Trump last month about becoming his secretary of veterans affairs, said that Mr. Trump asked how he could help him deliver on his campaign pledges and how to ensure a “good value” for veterans receiving services from the agency or private contractors. “He made it clear that he’s a businessman and he’s going to delegate to people like me, potentially, and others,” Mr. Brown said. “He’s going to say, ‘Do your job, and do it well, and otherwise — you’re fired. ’”
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Miracle Birth in Poland: A Baby Born in 55 Days After Its Mother’s Death
Eddy Lavine
posted by Eddie A child was born in 55 days after the death of its mother. Doctors declared the woman brain-dead, but she was kept alive in this hospital in Poland till the birth of her child. The 41-year-old woman had a brain tumor. Doctors say she didn’t want to be operated on. She was afraid of the risks. She was brought to the clinic in Wroclaw in November unconscious with no brain activity. Doctors found out that the she was 17 weeks pregnant when they heard the baby’s heartbeat. The medics decided to save the child. So they had to extend the woman’s life for at least two months. Anesthesiologists, neonatologists, gynecologists and neurosurgeons were working as one team to save the baby’s life. Every day they had to fight the infections and disorders in the mother’s body. Neonatologists said that we have to support the mother until 30 weeks of pregnancy. But it’s too long for the brain-dead body, because the organism can have a lot of disorders. Gynecologists set the goal to prolong the mother’s life to at least 25 weeks of pregnancy. This is a minimum for the fetus to grow until it can be born and get a chance to live. After Cesarean section Wojtek was born. The boy weighed only 1 kilogram. His dad patiently waited for the birth for 55 days reading him fairy tales. A little boy was put in intensive care and spent three months in an incubator. A few days ago a boy and his dad were discharged from the hospital and they are finally at home. Now Wojtek weighs 3 kilograms and he is doing well. Each of the 145 days that his father spent in the hospital was very hard for him. He doesn’t want to share this unique story with strangers. He is busy taking care of his small miracle. Source:
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Donald Trump Probably Stanched His Losses, but Didn’t Seem to Gain - The New York Times
Nate Cohn
The bar was low for Donald J. Trump after the worst two weeks for a presidential campaign in recent memory, and he seemed to clear it at Sunday’s debate. Another decisive loss in a with Hillary Clinton could have led to a mass revolt from Republican officials and raised the possibility of a landslide defeat in November. It’s too soon to be sure that Mr. Trump staved off further defections from the Republican leadership. But if they abandon him, it will probably not be because of this performance. He did not do more damage beyond what was already done by a videotape that emerged on Friday, when Mr. Trump was heard bragging about groping women and getting away with it because he was a celebrity. Many commentators argued that Mr. Trump held his own Sunday night some argued he won the debate outright. And his tactics — intentionally or not — probably made it harder for the Republican establishment to abandon him. He gave a lot of red meat to the G. O. P. base, calling Mrs. Clinton a liar and calling for her imprisonment. By energizing his supporters, he made it more challenging for Republicans to rescind their support. But Mr. Trump’s performance did not seem strong enough to change the dynamics of a race that has moved sharply against him over the last few weeks. Mrs. Clinton had a considerable lead even before Friday. The Upshot’s model gives him just a 17 percent chance of winning the election, based on and polls. Mr. Trump’s challenge got considerably worse over the weekend, after the release of the videotape led dozens of Republican officials to drop their endorsements. And he didn’t seem to go out of his way Sunday to try to broaden his support. The polls suggest as much: According to the CNN poll, Mrs. Clinton won the debate, 57 to 34 percent. But 63 percent of voters said that Mr. Trump did better than expected. A YouGov poll found that Mrs. Clinton won the debate by five percentage points, but that she was more presidential by a margin of 57 to 31. Instant polls are not always especially representative of the electorate, but both findings tell two sides of the same story: Mr. Trump may have averted total calamity, but he did not do so well as to fundamentally alter the race. Mr. Trump needs something big to break his way, and soon. It is quite possible that the next set of polls will show him trailing by a large margin — by more than the or deficit he faced before the release of the videotape. It’s hard to imagine that the polls will show Mr. Trump faring any better than he was ahead of that news. Needless to say, even if his deficit remained at five or six points, he would not be well positioned to win. If the polls show him slipping farther, he will need to make a bigger turnaround over the last month than any modern presidential candidate has been able to accomplish.
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Watergate was a coverup for the JFK assassination.
IWB
The WaPo reporters Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein are compromised individuals. The Watergate Burglars “Plumbers” were CIA assets, Operation 40 counterparts… Ironic that the author Timm Amundson, doesn’t mention HRC’s inclusion on the House Judiciary Committee Impeachment Inquiry staff in 1974 . At the time of Watergate I had overall supervisory authority over the House Judiciary Committee’s Impeachment Inquiry staff that included Hillary Rodham—who was later to become First Lady in the Clinton White House. During that period I kept a private diary of the behind the scenes congressional activities. My original tape recordings of the diary and other materials related to the Nixon impeachment provided the basis for my prior book, Without Honor, and are now available for inspection in the George Washington University Library. After President Nixon’s resignation, a young lawyer, who shared an office with Hillary, confided in me that he was dismayed by her erroneous legal opinions and efforts to deny Nixon representation by counsel—as well as an unwillingness to investigate Nixon. In my diary of August 12, 1974 I noted the following: John Labovitz apologized to me for the fact that months ago he and Hillary had lied to me [to conceal rules changes and dilatory tactics]. Labovitz said, ‘That came from Yale.’ I said, ‘You mean Burke Marshall’ [Senator Ted Kennedy’s chief political strategist, with whom Hillary regularly consulted in violation of House rules.] Labovitz said, ‘Yes.’ His apology was significant to me, not because it was a revelation but because of his contrition. At that time Hillary Rodham was 27 years old. She had obtained a position on our committee staff through the political patronage of her former Yale law school professor Burke Marshall and Senator Ted Kennedy. Eventually, because of a number of her unethical practices I decided that I could not recommend her for any subsequent position of public or private trust.
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Nomi Prins
King World News
110904 Views October 30, 2016 BROADCAST King World News FOR DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PLAY OR DOWNLOAD AUDIOS: CLICK HERE Nomi Prins: Keynote speaker who just addressed the Federal Reserve, IMF and the World Bank – Nomi is a renowned journalist, author and speaker. Her latest book, All the Presidents’ Bankers, is a groundbreaking narrative about the relationships of presidents to key bankers over the past century and how they impacted domestic and foreign policy. She was also on a Federal Reserve Advisory Council . Nomi is on the advisory board of the whistle-blowing organization ExposeFacts, and a board member of the animal welfare and wildlife conservation group, Born Free USA. She has also appeared on numerous international and national media. Nomi Prins is a renowned journalist, author and speaker. Her latest book, All the Presidents’ Bankers, is a groundbreaking narrative about the relationships of presidents to key bankers over the past century and how they impacted domestic and foreign policy. To buy Nomi Prins’ new book “ All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power “ CLICK HERE or ON THE BOOK Nomi Prins: Keynote speaker who just addressed the Federal Reserve, IMF and the World Bank – Economic signals are everywhere, from magazine covers to grocery stores to military events. They reveal the story of the world economy. Central bankers have done their best to conjure forth inflation in the hopes that this will vanquish deflation but the risk is that our daily lives, and the sustainability of governments, will be affected by an ongoing battle between these two forces. There will be important consequences. Quantitative Easing is now catching people in a vice by pushing up their cost of living even as their income is still falling. This breaks the vital social contracts between citizens and their governments and sets in motion many seemingly unrelated outcomes: social unrest in emerging markets, the movement of manufacturing and jobs back to the US and the West, improvements to the value added of emerging market firms, higher food and energy prices. The rising price, but shrinking size, of a steak, a candy bar and an apartment not only cause pain at home, they also propel some nations to deploy their militaries to secure resources and protect their citizens from the ill effects of inflation and deflation alike. This is already resulting in military confrontations, incidents and near misses between American, Chinese and Russian planes, warships and submarines. The solution is growth and innovation. Luckily, anonymous individuals are balancing their hubris against the risk of failure and proceeding to build a more dynamic economy and the new social contracts that will exist tomorrow. The only question is whether governments are hostile or hospitable to these efforts. By being alert to the many signals around us anyone can better navigate through the turbulence to the treasures of the world economy instead of being continuously overwhelmed and surprised by it. All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power – Who rules America? All the Presidents’ Bankers is a groundbreaking narrative of how an elite group of men transformed the American economy and government, dictated foreign and domestic policy, and shaped world history. Culled from original presidential archival documents, All the Presidents’ Bankers delivers an explosive account of the hundred-year interdependence between the White House and Wall Street that transcends a simple analysis of money driving politics—or greed driving bankers. Prins ushers us into the intimate world of exclusive clubs, vacation spots, and Ivy League universities that binds presidents and financiers. She unravels the multi-generational blood, intermarriage, and protégé relationships that have confined national influence to a privileged cluster of people. These families and individuals recycle their power through elected office and private channels in Washington, DC. All the Presidents’ Bankers sheds new light on pivotal historic events—such as why, after the Panic of 1907, America’s dominant bankers convened to fashion the Federal Reserve System; how J. P. Morgan’s ambitions motivated President Wilson during World War I; how Chase and National City Bank chairmen worked secretly with President Roosevelt to rescue capitalism during the Great Depression while J.P. Morgan Jr. invited Roosevelt’s son yachting; and how American financiers collaborated with President Truman to construct the World Bank and IMF after World War II. Prins divulges how, through the Cold War and Vietnam era, presidents and bankers pushed America’s superpower status and expansion abroad, while promoting broadly democratic values and social welfare at home. But from the 1970s, Wall Street’s rush to secure Middle East oil profits altered the nature of political-financial alliances. Bankers’ profit motive trumped heritage and allegiance to public service, while presidents lost control over the economy—as was dramatically evident in the financial crisis of 2008. This unprecedented history of American power illuminates how the same financiers retained their authoritative position through history, swaying presidents regardless of party affiliation. All the Presidents’ Bankers explores the alarming global repercussions of a system lacking barriers between public office and private power. Prins leaves us with an ominous choice: either we break the alliances of the power elite, or they will break us. About author
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Warning: They’re All Out Today
Gerry McBride
We Use Cookies: Our policy [X] Warning: They’re All Out Today October 27, 2016 - BREAKING NEWS Share 0 Add Comment THE government has raised the warning level from orange to red with extra gardaí are being deployed across the country, and news broadcasters are urging the public to not make journeys unless they’re absolutely necessary, due to the fact that they’re all out today. Early signs that they were all out today came this morning, as remarked upon by local man Harold Fennihan as he made the school run with his two kids. “You allow for one or two of them when you’re out and about, but they were all out this morning,” said Fennihan, speaking exclusively to WWN, “Every junction, every turn, everywhere I went, there was another of them. I said it to the kids, I said look; they’re fuckin’ all out today. Turns out it wasn’t just Waterford, it was countrywide. God help us all”. No explanation is currently available as to why they’re all out today, but theories range from the changing of the seasons to a comet passing closer to Earth than expected, with others suggesting that the phenomenon is a sign that God is angry with humanity. Regardless, it is important to remain calm, and hope that they won’t be all out tomorrow.
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OZbanislam
Haaretz are full of crap.The Jewish Extremists might harm the peaceful protestors? Who were mainly Jewish women?Are you truly that hateful to Jews you still need to throw n some Anti Semitism?Must be hard for racists to report on Jewish women extending the hand of peace to Islam?If you think they are protesting Netanyahu you miss understand.They are standing against the UNESCO trying to remove Jewish sovereignty from Israel.
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US on alert for terror strikes around elections
Kaitlyn Stegall
November 4, 2016 US on alert for terror strikes around elections Following threats from Al Qaeda and ISIS, US security authorities have warned officials in New York, Texas and Virginia about possible attacks by al Qaeda or ISIS in the run-up to Election Day on Nov. 8. No specific locations were mentioned. However, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates airports, tunnels and bridges around New York City said they will continue with “high level of patrols” in the four days leading up to and after Tuesday’s vote. “The FBI, working with our federal, state and local counterparts, shares and assesses intelligence on a daily basis and will continue to work closely with law enforcement and intelligence community partners to identify and disrupt any potential threat to public safety” the Bureau said Friday. The terror alert came a day after DEBKAfile’s intelligence and counterterrorism sources reported that Islamists may be planning terrorist attacks to occur around the time of the presidential election. After checking out the information, the FBI and Homeland Security Department decided to alert the public to a possible Al Qaeda/ISIS terrorist threat.
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Election Countdown and the Russians, with Trevor Loudon
Terresa Monroe-Hamilton
We are Gulag Bound / *Resisters' Log* / Election Countdown and the Russians, with Trevor Loudon Election Countdown and the Russians, with Trevor Loudon November 5, 2016, 9:06 am by Terresa Monroe-Hamilton Leave a Comment 0 By: Cliff Kincaid | America’s Survival Trevor Loudon talks abut his film, “Enemies Within,” and Russian involvement in the November 8 election… 0 Gulag-wide Bulletins from Sovereignty Unbound We respect your privacy, time, and inbox. Track us Down @GulagBound Like the Gulag There are many important matters that Gulag Bound itself is not treating on a daily basis. For that reason we suggest The Globe & Malevolence and the sites shown under "Key Links in our Chains," below. Your Daily Intelligence Brief MattSkosh on Secret Service Agents Pay a Visit to Anti-Obama Artist Sabo Tags activism Agenda 21 anti-American revolution authoritarianism Barack Hussein Obama II candidate eligibility collectivists & propaganda communisty organizations corruption crisis strategy Democrat finance & banking fraud George Soros globalism - NWO global Marxist-fascist movement government domination of resources history illegal immigration Islam Islamism jihad jihadism Israel kleptocracy labor unions Marxism Marxofascism Marxstream media Military Mitt Romney Obamacare health control Occupy Wall Street race-baiting/racism Republican Right of Private Property Russia Sovereignty Tea Party terrorism U.S. Congress U.S. Constitution U.S. Presidency (POTUS) United Nations (UN) video violence voting youth & education Sabotage What good will it do, to protect the United States of America, or our presumed interests against the aggressiveness of China, Russia, or Islam, if, partially in fear of these threats, we lose our free and independent nation to the stealth imperialism of transnational and global governance? As America threatens to shatter, we must see how a semi-covert, global, cartel collective and their NWO in the USA ("progressive" neo-Marxists and neo-fascists corporatists, updated with 21st Century techniques and technology) intentionally perpetrate this sabotage, while we patriots try to prevent it. Have a look around our camp, as we struggle to survive. - your tour guide Archives Militarization in America About DHS militarization, see the new, breakthrough analysis from James Simpson, " Police Militarization, Abuses of Power, and the Road to Impeachment " and our earlier, "Marxist President’s Military Exercises in These U.S. Cities; Yours One?" About the trajectory of this, we must pray, communicate, keep calm, and do not become the first to engage. If it comes to it, do not even respond in kind, until after the after the first times that extreme, anti-American violence is done by them. It calls for an attitude of self sacrifice -- first cheek, second cheek, then no more. And speak out about the potential and strategic "sense" of the Obama/NWO's DHS carrying out false flag missions of violence, blaming it on American patriots, perhaps upon our militia movements. We are in a real war, right now (of which others and I have been trying to alert fellow Sovereign Citizens for years) and the prime war is for the minds, hearts, and wills of the American People. We are opposed by an anti-American insurrection using any means of power (see Gramsci, Frankfurt School) including government power, as they are granted that opportunity.
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Establishment Boasts Its Paris Climate Agreement Now a Done Deal
Warren Mass
Email The establishment has been celebrating that its Paris climate agreement has supposedly gone into effect on November 4. The pseudo-treaty, designed to regulate so-called greenhouse gas emissions, was negotiated by representatives of 195 countries at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Paris and adopted by consensus last December 12. At least 55 parties to the UNFCCC, which are responsible for at least 55 percent of the world’s carbon gas emissions, had to ratify the agreement for it to take effect. But the U.S. Senate was never given the opportunity to ratify the deal as required by the Constitution, meaning that, as far as the United States is concerned, Obama's UN agreement is legally meaningless. As of November 4, the agreement had been “ratified” by 97 of the 197 UNFCCC parties, held to be responsible for 67.5 percent of emissions, according to France’s environment minister Ségolène Royal, the outgoing president of the UN climate talks. Though the agreement is now supposed to be officially in force, its provisions will not be implemented until 2020. The Paris Agreement is the first climate deal that purports to bind all the world’s governments, rich and poor, to a commitment to cap “global warming,” which the UN and Obama allege is caused by the burning of coal, oil, and gas. A key feature of the agreement is that it will attempt to limit global warming to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial Revolution levels, and will to strive for 1.5 C. Of course, this provision presumes that annual global temperatures are determined by human activity and does not take into consideration that temperatures may be the result of natural cycles in the Earth’s climate that have always occurred, long before mankind produced industrial carbon emissions. The assertion that humans are responsible for global warming was inherent in statements such as one issued jointly by UN climate chief Patricia Espinosa and Moroccan Foreign Minister Salaheddine Mezouar: “Humanity will look back on November 4, 2016, as the day that countries of the world shut the door on inevitable climate disaster.” “The timetable is pressing because globally, greenhouse gas emissions which drive climate change and its impacts are not falling,” AFP quoted Espinosa and Mezouar as saying. The AFP report cited figures from the International Energy Agency stating that implementing the agreement’s provisions would require “investments” of $13.5 trillion in low-carbon and energy technology between now and 2030 — making up almost 40 percent of total energy sector spending. AFP also reported that presidential candidate Donald Trump has threatened to “cancel” Washington’s participation in the agreement if he is elected president on November 8. Secretary of State John Kerry signed the agreement for the United States on April 22. In an article posted by The New American on October 20 , foreign correspondent Alex Newman challenged a statement made by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon asserting that “The Kigali Amendment to the [1987] Montreal Protocol [which the U.S. Senate ratified during the Reagan administration] builds on the strong global momentum for multilateral efforts to address climate change, including the landmark Paris Agreement.” Newman pointed out that Ban’s statement omitted the fact that the U.S. Senate has not ratified the Paris Agreement. The article noted: Ironically, despite Ban’s factually challenged boasting, the U.S. government is currently prohibited by law from sending a single taxpayer dollar the UNFCCC. The “Paris Agreement” he mentioned, meanwhile, cannot possibly “enter into force” as it relates to the United States, as the U.S. Senate has not even considered the radical “climate” regime, much less ratified it by a two-thirds majority as required in the Constitution. A New York Times report noted that the Paris agreement relies on a carbon tax that would force industries to pay for the their carbon emissions, but that the framework for enforcing these penalties has barely started to emerge. The Times reported: Top energy policy makers and corporate leaders caution that it will be challenging to meet even the deal’s modest goals to reduce planet-warming emissions of greenhouse gases. Many companies have not even figured out yet how much greenhouse gas they emit, much less made plans to curb these emissions. Rapid technological advances in areas like electric cars are not enough to stop the world’s long climb in oil consumption, let alone reverse it. There are two separate but important reasons why the United States should not capitulate to UN climate mandates such as the Paris Agreement. The first, most basic reason is simply that any such international control over our economic activities is a violation of our national sovereignty. Beyond the matter of sovereignty, however, is the fact that the entire agenda aimed at reducing carbon emissions to prevent global warning is based on faulty science. In the above-cited article, Newman noted: In an August 22 piece ridiculing Obama’s Secretary of State Kerry , scientist Larry Bell, who heads the University of Houston’s graduate program in space architecture, took aim at the entire UN anti-HFC charade. Noting that the satellite data had shown no statistically significant global warming in two decades, Bell said Kerry was exploiting a “manufactured crisis” to push his agenda. Fortunately, continued Newman: … the Paris Agreement, UN Agenda 2030, and all of the other recent globalist plots are built on a foundation of quicksand. With no ratification by the U.S. Senate, the UN instruments are legally meaningless in the United States, despite Obama's rule-by-decree machinations pretending to give them legitimacy. They could be stopped tomorrow using various different strategies. And even if the Senate were to ever ratify the schemes, the federal government cannot grant itself new powers merely by ratifying a treaty, as America's founders and even the Supreme Court have made clear. Over the past few years, The New American has published many articles refuting the “global warming” hysteria (see list of related articles below for several of them). Among these is “ Earth Is Cooling, Sea Levels Not Rising, Scientists Say .” In that article, we cited statements made by a group of experts in various scientific fields at a three-day conference sponsored by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute in 2010 challenging the theory of alleged global warming caused by man-made emissions. Among the speakers at the conference was Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University. According to Professor Easterbrook, author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, the Earth is now in the beginning period of a trend of global cooling. “Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 degree Fahrenheit per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook. The cooling trend, he continued, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell for the next several decades. Easterbrook’s statements merely confirm what has been observed by scientists for centuries. There has always been climate change, with ice ages occurring during some historic periods, and warming trends during others. These changes have not been the result of human activity, but are rather part of the Earth’s natural cycles. Therefore, even if the Paris Agreement were not a violation of our sovereignty, its attempt to enforce arbitrary restrictions on UN member nations, including the United States, would be completely unwarranted, because they are based on a false underlying premise. Photo of Arc of Triumph illuminated in green with the words "Paris Agreement Is Done" in French: AP Images
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The Human Lacunae in Ken Loach’s “I, Daniel Blake”
Simon Jones
Email “But I’m desperate to work.” With these words Daniel Blake enters the consciousness of the UK taxpayer. Until he utters them, imploringly in a fictional branch of a Newcastle jobcentre office, he is simply another scrounger. To earn acknowledgment, let alone respect, he must first confirm his status as a consumer of the services on offer. It doesn’t matter. He is a carpenter by trade, shown knowledgeably inspecting the components of his labour in the film’s early scenes. He lives alone, he had a heart attack, his doctors say he cannot work. He must sign on for benefits, but is found capable of work under the benefits regime which assesses a man with a history of cardiac arrest as being suitable for production, on the basis that he can reach for his top pocket and walk fifty metres unaided. Describing the benefits system in the UK as Kafkaesque would be to miss the point. Bureaucracy was a byword for existential trauma in Kafka, not something designed by people to be deployed, en masse but in the shadows, against whole swathes of people in their jurisdiction. The benefits system as we know it in the UK assumes its beneficiaries to be immoral scroungers, perniciously ripping off the hardworking people who deign to pay tax in marginal constituencies prayed on by political image consultants who attended the ancient universities. More crucially, when the response to this film focuses on the efficiency of the system and not the devastation it wreaks on people, it affirms the distance which makes misery so profitable in today’s United Kingdom. So when Daniel Blake is denied the benefits package which should cater to people who cannot work because of ill health, he must sign up to Jobseekers allowance, a necessary condition for which is the admission that a person is liable for their productivity. Consequently he must spend as much time looking for work as he is deemed able to work – in this case thirty five hours a week. He attends a CV building workshop, run by a man as reputable and cogent as any of the political consultants who ministered Tony Blair’s ascendancy to the Northern masses, but with an accent which lets you know he’s provincial. The whole film begs us to ask who is its intended audience. The vagaries of Blake’s experience beyond this are unexceptional, to any of the audiences which might be viewing this film. Those who have to directly interact with the system are likely to face hurdles in attending a screening in enough numbers to generate the kind of social upheaval people might want to see – the cinema being a costly, far-away form of entertainment for many in the UK. As for those who, like the author, work with people affected by the system; assisting in claims, trying to maintain mental health throughout the months of assessments, writing letters and making calls to dispute the lies peddled by private companies tasked with diminishing the number of claimants? They have likely seen worse cases than that of Daniel Blake – people driven past the boundaries of mental anguish they thought possible, and left there while an appeal or a ‘mandatory reconsideration’ hangs in the balance. Instead this film seems to have hit its mark when the Times , Rupert Murdoch’s broadsheet flagship in the UK, announced that it “might change things.” Any portrayal of the benefits system which could be of use to the libertarian right, or even mainstream media, must now be so skewed as to be unrecognisable to those who have seen it. Increasingly the benefits system, and the people whose lives it lays waste to as politicians demand, at the behest of their constituents, operates behind a glass wall whose opacity just clouds the identities of the damned. As Daniel Blake is plucked from the obscurity of fiction to represent an entire system, proudly taking his singular place on behalf of the many, the others are ignored. Women like Katie – the university student and mother who spent two years trying to raise a family in a homeless hostel before moving the length of the country to an unfamiliar city in search of difference when it became obvious there was nothing but repetition where she knew. Women like Sheila, the jobcentre assistant who interprets Katie’s desperation the only way anyone can anymore: as aggression, and earns the ultimate mark of British social disdain: silent disapproval. Was this the life she envisaged as a child? What does she think when she goes home? Does she suppose she might be the crux of an evil system? Women like Ann, the kindly woman at the jobcentre who faces disciplinary action from bosses for the crime of helping a man fill in a benefits claim, even if it means transgressing silly rules. What does she think about having to stay at the jobcentre? Does she see any hope for the future? What would she think about the film’s implication that Sheila, her colleague, is all that is wrong with the world? None of these stories are explored. Katie’s moments of angst are some of the film’s most affecting – including her admirable restraint in not maiming Daniel Blake when he insists “she doesn’t have to do this,” when he walks into the brothel she works at because there is manifestly no other option. In this, Daniel’s apotheosis to everything the Right needs him to be. A man, who built things with his hands, and still has more good, old-fashioned morals than sense. Without these things he would be just another scumbag, pilfering the system of their hard-earned pennies. He even goes to the trouble of containing his grief at the death of his partner – a woman whose mental illness he tolerated for years until her apparent suicide. She is at peace now, and so are the Tories – safe in the knowledge that the UK’s premier leftist filmmaker has gifted them the fictional icon they always wanted but did not know they could have: Daniel Blake is the facsimile of masculinity, working class nostalgia and British reserve that they might see in themselves, if they needed to bother to look. Fortunately for them, they don’t – unfortunately for the rest of us, there’s only the Labour Party between now and an eternity of their rule.
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Когда за скандалами не разглядеть таланта
Ирина Солетова
Когда за скандалами не разглядеть таланта 24 ноября 2016 Происшествия Речь пойдет об американской актрисе Эмбер Херд. Большинство читателей если и вспомнят эту актрису, то благодаря тому, что она увела всемирно известного Джонни Деппа из семьи после того, как они вместе снялись в кинокартине «Ромовый дневник». К слову сказать, сама актерская игра Херд в этом фильме сразу же отошла на второй план: роль у стройной блондинки со стандартной внешностью тоже была вполне традиционная, и ничего особого при ее исполнении Эмбер не показала. Возможно, никто бы не запомнил эту девушку, и ей суждено было затеряться в стройных рядах многочисленных голливудских красавиц, если бы не умение актрисы обрастать скандалами на ровном месте. В последнее время тридцатилетняя Эмбер Херд настолько часто появлялась в новостных заголовках, что ей могли бы позавидовать многие матерые западные звезды. Сначала все мировые СМИ на разные лады расписывали роман молодой актрисы с Джонни Деппом. А когда парочка подтвердила свои отношения, журналисты получили новую почву для обмусоливания: кто же такая эта малоизвестная девушка, если сумела разбить одну из самых крепких и романтичных пар Голливуда? Вскоре после этого все вспомнили и об истории пятилетней давности, когда Эмбер открыто заявила о своей бисексуальности. Когда церемония бракосочетания Херд и Деппа наконец состоялась, можно было предположить, что девушка наконец перестанет быть одним из основных ньюсмейкеров актерской среды. Но вскоре последовал не менее громкий развод: то сама Эмбер, которая до этого встречалась с Джонни на протяжении трех лет, обвиняла актера в психологическом и физическом насилии, то ее бывший супруг заявлял, что Херд хочет на нем нажиться. В общем, примерно так оно и произошло: деньги, которые выплатил ей бывший муж, Эмбер пустила на благотворительность, но вот звездной славы поднабралась на несколько лет вперед. Эта буря тоже улеглась, но ничего не изменилось: вот она, Эмбер Херд, снова в новостных заголовках. На этот раз из-за того, что актриса отказалась раздеться во время съемок фильма «Лондонские поля». И это притом, что девушка прочитала книгу, сценарий, а после этого подписала все документы об участии в картине, ни разу не заикнувшись о необходимости пересмотреть постельные сцены. Теперь продюсеры фильма решили подать на Херд в суд, дабы взыскать с нее 10 миллионов долларов за нарушение контракта. К слову сказать, сама картина на международном кинофестивале в Торонто провалилась. То ли отсутствие постельных сцен подвело, то ли игра актрисы в целом, то ли фильм изначально не подавал особых надежд. Ну а Эмбер Херд при своей скромной фильмографии в очередной раз получила от ситуации все. Вероятно, мы еще не раз о ней услышим, а вот увидим ли когда-нибудь ее пронзительно талантливую игру – большой вопрос.
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Syrian Army crushes terrorist offensive near Damascus (VIDEO)
Jafe Arnoldski (noreply@blogger.com)
October 27, 2016 - Fort Russ News - RusVesna - translated by J. Arnoldski - The Syrian Army has beat back a powerful terrorist offensive against its positions in the city of Khan esh-Shih in Western Huta near Damascus. The terrorist gangs suffered heavy losses. As visible in the footage, SAA troops rapidly destroyed the terrorists’ armored vehicles. As a result of the battle, one enemy armored group composed of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles as well as several militant transport vehicles was destroyed. In addition, several dozen terrorists were eliminated. After repelling the terrorist offensive, the Syrian Army, supported by artillery, struck in the southeastern direction and took a number of farms near the city of Khan esh-Shih. Follow us on Facebook! Follow us on Twitter! Donate!
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Trump Administration Moves to Embrace Tax Cuts and Growth-Even if Deficits Grow - Breitbart
John Carney
The Trump administration is swiftly moving to an embrace of a tax plan that emphasizes rate cuts and economic growth over concerns about the budget deficit. [Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin reflected this in answer Monday to a question from the White House press corps. Mnuchin said the administration’s tax plan would focus on a tax cut, tax simplification, and making U. S. businesses more competitive. Asked if the plan would be revenue neutral, meaning any reductions in expected revenue from tax cuts would be offset from increases in revenue or spending cuts elesewhere, Mnuchin instead said the plan would “pay for itself” through economic growth. This is a signal that the administration may be planning to put forth a tax proposal that the Congressional Budget Office would forecast as increasing the deficit. While some Capitol Hill budget hawks reflexively oppose deficit spending, Trump has long been perceived as being more open to debt financed government spending. Many believe that tax cuts that produce economic growth can “pay for themselves,” even if official government forecasts don’t reflect that view. Budget deficits arise when the federal government issues bonds to investors instead of balancing all of its spending with taxes and fees on households and businesses. They can be increased when tax cuts reduce revenue and aren’t offset with spending cuts. They fall when the government increases the amount of money taxed relative to spending, which reduces the share of the budget funded by . Since Treasuries are dollar denominated, there is no risk that the United States government will not be able to repay its debt, as the government can always pay debt issued in the currency it controls. The only risk to the economy that deficits create is higher inflation. Despite several years of historically high deficits, all indicators say that inflation will remain quite low for decades to come. During a meeting inside the Oval Office last week, President Donald Trump said that he wants massive tax cuts, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. He ordered them to prepare a plan to slash the corporate tax rate to 15% prioritizing tax cuts over attempts not to increase the deficit, according to “a person familiar with the directive” who spoke with WSJ. Top lawmakers are scheduled to meet with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn on Tuesday to discuss the administration’s tax proposals. Trump plans to make a major announcement on tax policy on Wednesday.
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With Trump elected, World War 3 will not happen! Putin wants to restore full relations with the USA
Pakalert
November 10, 2016 at 11:09 pm order out of chaos!!! usa played again!!yous never seen that coming did yous!! a few written stories in emails and youv voted in someone with actually no single clue about human right, legislation, etc. welcome the new world order with someone with no clue policing it. they are gonna shred your rights and freedoms……wait and see!!!
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Police: Concealed Carry Permit Holder Shoots, Kills ’Active Shooter’ - Breitbart
AWR Hawkins
On Wednesday night a concealed carry permit holder shot and killed an alleged “active shooter” at Zona Caliente Sports Bar in Arlington, Texas. [The incident occurred around 6:15 pm. WFAA reported, “A man opened fire at the Zona Caliente Sports Bar … but police say a customer with a gun of his own put a stop to it. ” The man reported to police as an “active shooter” was James Jones. He allegedly walked into Zona Caliente, began arguing with the manager — Cesar Perez — and then pulled out a gun and killed Perez. At that moment a concealed carry permit holder responded by pulling his own gun and killing Jones. The unidentified permit holder had to come down from “the other end of the bar” to intervene and stop Jones. Arlington Police Department Lt. Christopher Cook said, “[The concealed permit holder] made the decision to engage the shooter, fearing there would be other loss of life. ” Police do not yet have a motive in the shooting of Perez, but they have made clear that the concealed permit holder will face no charges for the actions he took to be sure no other innocents were harmed. AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart. com.
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John Pilger: ‘The truth is… there was no one to vote for’ (Going Underground US election special)
The Saker
Leave a Reply Click here to get more info on formatting (1) Leave the name field empty if you want to post as Anonymous. It's preferable that you choose a name so it becomes clear who said what. E-mail address is not mandatory either. The website automatically checks for spam. Please refer to our moderation policies for more details. We check to make sure that no comment is mistakenly marked as spam. This takes time and effort, so please be patient until your comment appears. Thanks. (2) 10 replies to a comment are the maximum. (3) Here are formating examples which you can use in your writing:<b>bold text</b> results in bold text <i>italic text</i> results in italic text (You can also combine two formating tags with each other, for example to get bold-italic text.)<em>emphasized text</em> results in emphasized text <strong>strong text</strong> results in strong text <q>a quote text</q> results in a quote text (quotation marks are added automatically) <cite>a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited</cite> results in: a phrase or a block of text that needs to be cited <blockquote>a heavier version of quoting a block of text...</blockquote> results in: a heavier version of quoting a block of text that can span several lines. Use these possibilities appropriately. They are meant to help you create and follow the discussions in a better way. They can assist in grasping the content value of a comment more quickly. and last but not least:<a href=''http://link-address.com''>Name of your link</a> results in Name of your link (4) No need to use this special character in between paragraphs: ; You do not need it anymore. Just write as you like and your paragraphs will be separated. The "Live Preview" appears automatically when you start typing below the text area and it will show you how your comment will look like before you send it. (5) If you now think that this is too confusing then just ignore the code above and write as you like. Name:
21,840
Trump elected as President – risks and opportunities
The Saker
13904 Views November 09, 2016 193 Comments Analyses The Saker So it has happened: Hillary did not win! I say that instead of saying that “Trump won” because I consider the former even more important than the latter. Why? Because I have no idea whatsoever what Trump will do next. I do, however, have an excellent idea of what Hillary would have done: war with Russia. Trump most likely won’t do that. In fact, he specifically said in his acceptance speech: I want to tell the world community that while we will always put America’s interests first, we will deal fairly with everyone, with everyone — all people and all other nations. We will seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict . And Putin’s reply was immediate: We heard the statements he made as candidate for president expressing a desire to restore relations between our countries. We realise and understand that this will not be an easy road given the level to which our relations have degraded today, regrettably. But, as I have said before, it is not Russia’s fault that our relations with the United States have reached this point. Russia is ready to and seeks a return to full-format relations with the United States. Let me say again, we know that this will not be easy, but are ready to take this road, take steps on our side and do all we can to set Russian-US relations back on a stable development track. This would benefit both the Russian and American peoples and would have a positive impact on the general climate in international affairs, given the particular responsibility that Russia and the US share for maintaining global stability and security. This exchange, right there, is enough of a reason for the entire planet to rejoice at the defeat of Hillary and the victory of Trump. Will Trump now have the courage, willpower and intelligence to purge the US Executive from the Neocon cabal which has been infiltrating it for decades now? Will he have the strength to confront an extremely hostile Congress and media? Or will he try to meet them halfway and naively hope that they will not use their power, money and influence to sabotage his presidency? I don’t know. Nobody does. One of the first signs to look for will be the names and backgrounds of the folks he will appoint in his new administration. Especially his Chief of Staff and Secretary of State. I have always said that the choice for the lesser evil is morally wrong and pragmatically misguided. I still believe that. In this case, however, the greater evil was thermonuclear war with Russia and the lesser evil just might turn out to be one which will gradually give up the Empire to save the USA rather than sacrifice the USA for the needs of the Empire. In the case of Hillary vs Trump the choice was simple: war or peace. Trump can already be credited with am immense achievement: his campaign has forced the US corporate media to show its true face – the face of an evil, lying, morally corrupt propaganda machine. The American people by their vote have rewarded their media with a gigantic “f*ck you!”– a vote of no-confidence and total rejection which will forever demolish the credibility of the Empire’s propaganda machine. I am not so naive as to not realize that billionaire Donald Trump is also one of the 1%ers, a pure product of the US oligarchy. But neither am I so ignorant of history to forget that elites do turn on each other , especially when their regime is threatened. Do I need to remind anybody that Putin also came from the Soviet elites?! Ideally, the next step would be for Trump and Putin to meet, with all their key ministers, in a long, Camp David like week of negotiations in which everything, every outstanding dispute, should be put on the table and a compromise sought in each case. Paradoxically, this could be rather easy: the crisis in Europe is entirely artificial, the war in Syria has an absolutely obvious solution, and the international order can easily accommodate a United States which would “ deal fairly with everyone, with everyone — all people and all other nations ” and “ seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict “. The truth is that the USA and Russia have no objective reasons for conflict – only ideological issues resulting directly from the insane ideology of messianic imperialism of those who believe, or pretend to believe, that the USA is an “indispensable nation”. What the world wants – needs – is the USA as a *normal* nation. The worst case? Trump could turn out to be a total fraud. I personally very much doubt it, but I admit that this is possible. More likely is that he just won’t have the foresight and courage to crush the Neocons and that he will try to placate them. If he does so, they will instead crush him. It is a fact that while administrations have changed every 4 or 8 years, the regime in power has not, and that US internal and foreign policies have been amazingly consistent since the end of WWII. Will Trump finally bring not just a new administration but real “regime change”? I don’t know. Make no mistake – even if Trump does end up disappointing those who believed in him what happened today has dealt a death blow to the Empire. The “Occupy Wall Street” did not succeed in achieving anything tangible, but the notion of “rule of the 1%” did emerge from that movement and it stayed. This is a direct blow to the credibility and legitimacy of the entire socio-political order of the USA: far from being a democracy, it is a plutocracy/oligarchy – everybody pretty much accepts that today. Likewise, the election of Trump has already proved that the US media is a prostitute and that the majority of the American people hate their ruling class. Again, this is a direct blow to the credibility and legitimacy of the entire socio-political order. One by one the founding myths of the US Empire are crashing down and what remains is a system which can only rule by force. Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to say that regimes can be measured on a spectrum which ranges from regimes whose authority is their power and regimes whose power in in their authority. In the case of the USA we now clearly can see that the regime has no other authority than its power and that makes it both illegitimate and unsustainable. Finally, whether the US elites can accept this or not, the US Empire is coming to an end. With Hillary, we would have had a Titanic-like denial up to the last moment which might well have come in the shape of a thermonuclear mushroom over Washington DC. Trump, however, might use the remaining power of the USA to negotiate the US global draw-down thereby getting the best possible conditions for his country. Frankly, I am pretty sure that all the key world leaders realize that it is in their interest to make as many (reasonable) concessions to Trump as possible and work with him, rather than to deal with the people whom he just removed from power. If Trump can stick to his campaign promises he will find solid and reliable partners in Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Neither Russia nor China have anything at all to gain from a confrontation or, even less so, a conflict with the USA. Will Trump have the wisdom to realize this and use it for the benefit of the USA? Or will he continue with his anti-Chinese and anti-Iranian rhetoric? Only time will tell. The Essential Saker: from the trenches of the emerging multipolar world $27.95
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Comment on Sheriff Says Cannabis Makes People Murderers Because “Rational Thought” Leads to Violence by Isaid Dilligaf
Isaid Dilligaf
Home / Be The Change / The State / Sheriff Says Cannabis Makes People Murderers Because “Rational Thought” Leads to Violence Sheriff Says Cannabis Makes People Murderers Because “Rational Thought” Leads to Violence Claire Bernish May 10, 2016 35 Comments It isn’t gang violence. It isn’t even domestic violence. What is the leading cause of murder in Carson City? According to Sheriff Ken Furlong, it’s marijuana. “It’s against that law,” Furlong told local ABC affiliate, KOLO 8. “It does change people’s attitude and we do see people dying as a result of it, needlessly, and there’s no excuse for it. “In the last 13-15 years, all of the violence we’ve seen that has turned deadly, have [sic] been in someway related to a marijuana issue.” Before you get too excited, thinking Furlong nailed it — the fact cannabis remains a federal Schedule 1 drug and thus technically illegal in the ongoing yet utterly failed war on drugs — that isn’t all he had to say on the matter. KOLO 8 noted the 2016 deaths of 18-year-old Grant Watkins and 40-year-old Dennis Watkins, Jr. — both killed during transactions involving the sale of cannabis. “During a transaction, they set it up, ‘I’m going to sell this to you,’ then all of a sudden someone gets shot and killed,” Furlong continued. “It’s not because they were under the influence; it’s because they were doing something deadly and it turned out that way.” As Furlong explained, the threat to life isn’t due to the drug’s effects on the system, per se , but the ‘culture and crimes’ surrounding it ‘that can be overwhelming,’ as KOLO 8 paraphrased. “It’s a very cherished culture and people have very strong beliefs,” the Sheriff elaborated. “When you violate someone’s beliefs, you put them in a position where they can act out.” But Furlong’s complete lack of understanding of all things cannabis — including both medicinal and recreational aspects — didn’t stop there. According to the Sheriff, the community faces repercussions following a law enforcement drug bust — because addicts suddenly have no way to procure their … cannabis. “We’re watching very closely, not only for a spike in crime, but for people who are in critical need of medical care because of that lack of treatment, based on withdrawal from the drug,” he asserted. Yes, you read that right. Carson City’s Sheriff-in-charge firmly believes depriving people of cannabis — a plant scientifically and anecdotally proven to save lives — will lead to a crime wave and health crisis of no small proportions. But what he explained next, as paraphrased by KOLO 8, harkens back to the earliest days of cannabis prohibition and the propagandist classic, Reefer Madness: ‘Sheriff Furlong says unlike other drugs like heroin or methamphetamines that can distort your mind, people using marijuana usually have rational trains of thought which give them the ability to act out and become violent when someone takes away or violates their drug.’ At this point, if you’re having a good laugh, stunned, or shaking your head, you most certainly are not alone. Obviously, Sheriff Furlong grasps the potential perils in black market trade — but he wholly fails to recognize removing cannabis’ illegality would thus remove the risk of violence. When the State is removed from consensual business transactions, individuals are free to conduct trade as they see fit — if cannabis were abundant and legal, it would be highly unlikely people would continue killing each other over soured deals. But Furlong’s stupefying lack of knowledge concerning the effects cannabis has on the body, though certainly laughable, also should concern the residents he’s tasked with overseeing. Mischaracterizing cannabis so broadly as to believe it will warp people’s minds to a heightened frenzy where they’re likely to commit violence is downright dangerous. For one thing, this inexcusable misperception could color the training Sheriff Furlong decides to give law enforcement trainees and officers. Considering the absolutely epidemic national spate of violence inflicted by trigger-happy cops who already seem to have an irrational fear of the public, training them to further view cannabis users as likely to act out physically is nothing short of dangerous. If sheriff’s deputies conduct a raid on a residence known for cannabis transactions with the preconception the people inside could turn violent instantly, it’s arguable they would be more likely to misinterpret anything they encounter. This unnecessarily heightened fear that their life could be in peril from a cannabis-crazed maniac would have obvious influence on their decisions for whether or not to employ deadly force. Sadly, Sheriff Furlong likely isn’t alone among law enforcement in the United States. As long as the drug war remains firmly entrenched in policy and culture, dangerous misunderstandings and lack of knowledge will arguably be the greater source of violence than would the substances be were they not illegal. In the meantime, while forced to pick apart drug laws state by state, perhaps drug and cannabis education — not fear- and prohibition-based propaganda, but serious education — should be mandatory in law enforcement training. Share Google + Lannim All he did, without knowing it, was admit that the real criminals are the ones who enforce prohibition and create this culture of violence. When you suppress a legitimate market it will be replaced by a black market that is regulated by force instead of voluntary interaction. Violence begets violence, and it doesn’t get any more violent than the state. ACAB Matt Agorist EXACTLY! James Michael Considering the government never created a constitutional amendment allowing prohibition the entire drug war is treason and felonius…. EVERY killing a murder…. EVERY raid a felony home invasion…. EVERY jailing a false imprisonment…. EVERY fine extortion…… The cops and the courts are a criminal enterprise…. AKA RICO….. and meet the definition of it perfectly…. Lannim Exactly. I would say that the drug war would be just as illegitimate and criminal with an amendment, but being able to argue that it’s ALSO unconstitutional helps, considering most Americans think their rights are contingent upon what’s written on sacred documents. b4integrity The federal government is a continuing, criminal, domestic, terrorist enterprise. We need a DEA eradication program. Paschn Goddamn it does my old heart good to see folks lay things out as you did! Couple that with SCOTUS’ treason with corporate citizenship, Patriot act, Habeas corpus gone, Posse Comitatus, gone granting civil immunity to big pharma, setting up a federal committee to “review” claims made by citizens harmed by “safe” vaccines, then paying off those claims WITH TAX PAYER MONEY to protect the bottom line of the elites…. Murdering Ranchers for pointing out the FED’s treason.. Let us not forget the 2 sets of books most governments run (CAFR). Let me know when you folks have had enough SEWER NATION – IDIOT CULTURE. Centrist Force This is easy to solve. end the criminal part of this. There is no need for marijuana to be illegal. You want to end drug deals and guns get the cops out of the equation and nobody needs to play this mob games. Gregory Pius We did that in Oregon and Washington. Tax revenues are bursting the state coffers, and the police now have to find honest work (or at least overzealously enforce something else). Everybody wins. Sadly, almost all LEOs I’ve ever heard to talked to have a deeply-held conviction that legalization of cannabis will result in the loss of their job. A … kaynash We have far too many ignorant people in positions of power…..of course our press doesn’t help either, they are just as ignorant, so no one is getting educated from that source any longer. But really, a Sheriff? If you are going to criminalize people, you should have a much better understanding of what you are saying. Because thinking people in law enforcement are more than aware that it’s criminalizing drugs that is the problem….and this guy actually comes close to realizing that and then draws the totally wrong conclusions from it. dufas_duck “When you violate someone’s beliefs, you put them in a position where they can act out.” Sounds like he described the average policeman…….. Gregory Pius
21,842
Costly Drug for Fatal Muscular Disease Wins F.D.A. Approval - The New York Times
Katie Thomas
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first drug to treat patients with spinal muscular atrophy, a savage disease that, in its most severe form, kills infants before they turn 2. “This is a miracle — seriously,” Dr. Mary K. Schroth, a lung specialist in Madison, Wis. who treats children who have the disease, said of the approval, which was made last week. “This is a event, and this will change the course of this disease. ” Dr. Schroth has previously worked as a paid consultant to Biogen, which is selling the drug. The drug, called Spinraza, will not come cheap — and, by some estimates, will be among the most expensive drugs in the world. Biogen, which is licensing Spinraza from Ionis Pharmaceuticals, said this week that one dose will have a list price of $125, 000. That means the drug will cost $625, 000 to $750, 000 to cover the five or six doses needed in the first year, and about $375, 000 annually after that, to cover the necessary three doses a year. Patients will presumably take Spinraza for the rest of their lives. The pricing could put the drug in the cross hairs of lawmakers and other critics of high drug prices, and perhaps discourage insurers from covering it. High drug prices have attracted intense scrutiny in the last year, and Donald J. Trump has singled them out as an important issue. “We believe the Spinraza pricing decision is likely to invite a storm of criticism, up to and including presidential tweets,” Geoffrey C. Porges, an analyst for Leerink Partners, said in a note to investors on Thursday. Mr. Porges said the price could lead some insurers to balk or to limit the drug to patients who are the most severely affected, such as infants, even though the F. D. A. has approved Spinraza for all patients with the condition. “What you will have is a standoff with payers,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “How is this all going to play out?” The price of the drug would be comparable to some other drugs that treat rare diseases. A spokeswoman for Biogen said the company set the price after considering several factors, including the cost to the health care system and the clinical value it brought to patients. She said that the company has also consulted insurers about covering the drug, and that while the talks are in their early stages, insurers have responded positively to the drug’s effectiveness. “We are working to help ensure no patient will forgo treatment because of financial limitations or insurance status,” said the spokeswoman, Ligia Del Bianco. She said Biogen, like many companies that sell expensive drugs, had set up a program to help families navigate insurance approvals and other logistics, and will provide financial assistance. Kenneth Hobby, the president of Cure SMA, a patient advocacy group that invested $500, 000 in early academic research that led to the development of Spinraza, said more important than the list price of the drug is whether patients who need it will get it. “Are our families going to get access to the drug in the end?” he said. About 1 in 10, 000 babies are born with spinal muscular atrophy — or about 400 a year in the United States — and it is among the leading genetic causes of death in infants. People with the disease have a genetic flaw that makes them produce too little of a protein that supports motor neurons, leading muscles to atrophy. Spinraza addresses the underlying genetic cause of the disease and enables a backup gene to produce more of the necessary protein. Blake Farrell, 6, has the disease. As an infant, Blake reached developmental milestones, learning to roll over, sit up and crawl at all the right times. “She was doing everything on target,” Kacey Farrell, Blake’s mother, said recently from the family’s home in Cincinnati. But as she approached her first birthday, Blake started regressing. She struggled to sit on her own and stopped crawling. At 14 months, tests revealed that Blake had a moderate form of spinal muscular atrophy. As she got older, the muscle loss caused her bones to weaken, and she suffered fractures. She could no longer sit up in the bathtub, and had trouble swallowing food. In May of 2015, when she was 4, Blake was accepted into a clinical trial for Spinraza, also known as nusinersen. A third of the patients in the study were given a placebo, so the Farrells were not sure if she was getting the real thing. But after receiving her first few doses, which were injected into her spinal fluid, Blake started to improve. She joined her two sisters in the bathtub, sitting up on her own. One day, she even scooted across the floor. “I was just in shock,” Ms. Farrell said. “These were all things we hadn’t seen her do since she was 8 months old. ” In an analysis of 82 infants in the clinical trial that led to the approval, 40 percent of babies on the drug reached milestones such as sitting, crawling and walking. None of the babies that received a placebo did. The F. D. A. approved the drug months ahead of time and, because the drug treats a rare pediatric disease, granted Biogen a special voucher that it can use to gain priority review of a future drug that would not otherwise qualify for the program. The F. D. A. said the most common side effects were respiratory infections and constipation, and there is a warning about possible low blood platelet counts and toxicity to the kidneys. Even though trial investigators did not know which patient was receiving Spinraza, “anecdotally, it just seemed quickly obvious to us that some patients were following a very different trajectory than what we were used to seeing,” said Dr. John Brandsema of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one of the investigators. He said that while the patients who improved were the most remarkable, the drug also appears to stop the progression of the disease in other patients. “It’s hard not to use very exaggerated terms when you are talking about this, because it really is a pretty major step forward,” Dr. Brandsema said. For now, Blake receives Spinraza free because she is enrolled in an extension study of the drug. But her father, Nick Farrell, a lawyer, said cost is a concern. “That is a whole lot of money,” he said, adding that among parents of children with the disease, access is already a major topic. “The conversation has already started about, O. K. what’s the next step here?”
21,843
Boy George Defends Melania Trump from ’Mean-Spirited’ Attacks
Jerome Hudson
English pop singer and fashion icon Boy George defended Melania Trump against “ ” attacks from women who he says have harshly judged the First Lady’s former modeling career. [“I was criticizing people this morning for attacking Melania and saying horrible things,” Boy George told the Hollywood Reporter at the Dior Homme show on Saturday. “You know what? As somebody who has a past, I think it’s really wrong and of women to be so abusive,” he added, further noting that the First Lady’s Herve inauguration gown “looked amazing. ” But the artist also sounded a note of apprehension about Donald Trump’s presidency. “A leader is supposed to be compassionate and inclusive that’s a real leader,” George told THR. “Being strong isn’t necessarily the answer. It takes strength to be compassionate and to think about people you maybe don’t understand. ” George’s defense of Melania Trump comes on the heels of reports that several renowned fashion designers are lining up to dress the First Lady, after other designers had said they would not. Designer Stefano Gabbana, of fashion house Dolce Gabbana, has spent months posting photos on his Instagram of Mrs. Trump wearing clothes he designed. The photos caused controversy on social media, and Gabbana fired back at his critics who were threatening to boycott his designs. “How many stupid and ignorant people r on Instagram! !!” Gabbana wrote back in one of several comments taking aim at the negative posters. “Please if you don’t like my post unfollow me … thank you. ” In October, designer Calvin Klein said “of course” he would dress Melania Trump. “She’s beautiful,” Klein told TMZ. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson
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Rigged Voting Machine Casting Ballot for Democrat when Selecting Republican
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Rigged Voting Machine Casting Ballot for Democrat when Selecting Republican # Isotrop 0 The sad part is, whomever produced this YouTube video will be prosecuted and locked up for 5 years for exposing a crime. When it is a crime to expose criminals, we are ruled by dictators? Ask yourself, is it a coincidence that more laws have been passed during the last 6 Administrations than all the laws passed since this nation's inception. We live in a Globalist Police State. Globalism is just an Elite code word for Communism. If this doesn't prove they will do anything to steal this election, then you deserve your fate. The DNC will not surrender the Oval Office for a Square Cage. This is the Art of the Steal Op and our only course of action will be to kick the tires and light some fires. Break out your pitchforks, it's time to march on D.C.! Tags
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Report: Jared Kushner Hires Top Hollywood Publicist for White House Post
Daniel Nussbaum
President Donald Trump’s and senior advisor Jared Kushner has reportedly hired top Hollywood public relations executive Josh Raffel to take a key role at the White House. [Raffel — the communications chief for horror production company Blumhouse Productions (The Purge, Insidious) and a veteran of New York PR firm Hiltzik Strategies — will reportedly join the White House Office of American Innovation, according to Variety. The outlet notes that Raffel is among entertainment industry journalists for his “sane, sensible style, and his wit. ” The Washington Post reported in March that Kushner had been tasked with overseeing the Office of American Innovation, a new White House office that will reportedly be focused on overhauling the federal bureaucracy by taking ideas from the business world and applying them to government. The office will reportedly be staffed by former business leaders and will report directly to President Trump. Among the notable names in the business world who have already participated in meetings are Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft founder Bill Gates. “We should have excellence in government,” Kushner told the Post last month. “The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens. ” Raffel will reportedly move to Washington, D. C. to begin his new job in the coming weeks. He will be replaced at Blumhouse by former Universal Filmed Entertainment Group spokeswoman Teri Everett. Kushner has quietly become a major force in the Trump administration, as the president has entrusted the young advisor with duties ranging from negotiating a potential peace deal to maintaining a healthy diplomatic relationship with Mexico. Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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Trump Won the Election, but 3 Manhattan Buildings Will Lose His Name - The New York Times
Charles V. Bagli
Donald J. Trump will not be sworn in for two more months, but as of next week, the big gold letters spelling out his name will be removed from three large apartment buildings on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, tenants were told on Tuesday. Hundreds of tenants at the buildings at 140, 160 and 180 Riverside Boulevard, which contain a total of 1, 325 apartments, signed a petition to “Dump the TRUMP name,” last month after Mr. Trump’s provocative campaign statements had offended women, immigrants and liberals on the Upper West Side. The buildings, between 66th and 69th Streets, along Riverside Boulevard, are owned not by Mr. Trump but by Equity Residential, a publicly traded company based in Chicago, which bought them in 2005 for $809 million. Mr. Trump, a Republican, had been involved in the development known at various times as Riverside South and Trump Place. Equity Residential kept the name Trump Place on the exterior of the buildings and on their letterhead, signage and uniforms. Tenants got a hint that change was afoot in late October when doormen told residents that they were being measured for new uniforms that would no longer bear the Trump name. Then, on Tuesday, they received an email from Mary Pawlisa, a senior regional manager for Equity. It read: “This week, the Trump Place building names will change to the street addresses — 140, 160 and 180 Riverside Boulevard. The purpose of this change is to assume a neutral building identity that appeals to all current and future residents. ” Asked whether the letters on the buildings had hurt the company’s ability to lease vacant apartments, Martin McKenna, Equity Residential’s vice president for investor and public relations, said: “I don’t have a comment on that. A more neutral identity going forward is the path we’re taking. ” Equity Residential’s portfolio consists of about 80, 000 apartments in New York, Boston, Seattle, Southern California and Washington — coincidentally all areas where Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, won a majority. Mr. McKenna preferred to describe those markets as “ gateway cities. ” Linda Gottlieb, a resident who started the petition, was elated. “We won,” Ms. Gottlieb, a film and television producer, said. “We used the power of protest to say that we don’t have to accept the spread of the man’s influence into our very homes. To me, it feels like a cleansing of the place where I live. ” But in an interview on Tuesday, Sam Zell, the chairman of Equity Residential, said, “The tenants had no role in this. ” Mr. Zell said he and “Don” — as he called Mr. Trump — had talked about it a year ago. “We didn’t want anything to happen while the election was going on,” he said. According to Mr. McKenna, Equity entered a “use of name contract” with the Trump Organization, which did not require it to pay Mr. Trump to use his name. That contract has now expired. Amanda Miller, vice president of marketing for the Trump Organization, issued a statement saying the change “was mutually agreed upon. ”
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Why is the Vatican silent on UNESCO’s war on Jerusalem?
Kaitlyn Stegall
October 28, 2016 Why is the Vatican silent on UNESCO’s war on Jerusalem? There have been some political voices denouncing UNESCO’s diplomatic and cultural war on Jewish Jerusalem and its Temple Mount, where the Jewish people worshipped for hundreds of years and the focal point of every practicing Jew’s prayers. Email (will not be published) (required) Website Sow a seed to help the Jewish people Follow Endtime Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved Endtime Ministries | End of the Age | Irvin Baxter Endtime Ministries, Inc. PO Box 940729 Plano, TX 75094 Toll Free: 1.800.363.8463 DON'T JUST READ THE NEWS... understand it from a biblical perspective. Your Information will never be shared with any third party. Get a 2-year subscription, normally $29, now just $20.15. ONLY 500 deals are still available. Offer available while supplies last or it expires on December 31, 2015. close We are a small non-profit that runs a high-traffic website, a daily TV and radio program, a bi-monthly magazine, the prophecy college in Jerusalem, and more. Although we only have 35 team members, we are able to serve tens of millions of people each month; and have costs like other world-wide organizations. We have very few third-party ads and we don’t receive government funding. We survive on the goodness of God, product sales, and donations from our wonderful partners. Dear Readers, X close We have experienced tremendous growth in our web presence over the last five years. In fact, in 2010 we averaged 228,000 pageviews per month. Last year we averaged just over 2,000,000 pageviews per month. That’s an increase of 777% in five years! However, our servers and software are outdated, which causes downtime on occasion for many of you and additional work hours and finances to maintain for us at Endtime. Updating our servers and software as well as maintaining service for a year will cost us $42,000. If each person reading this gave at least $10, our bill to provide FREE broadcasting and resources to the world via our website would be covered for over a year! Learn more - Click Here ► Dear Readers,
21,848
Someone really likes Kit Kats…
Poke Staff
Next Prev Swipe left/right Someone really likes Kit Kats… Some people might take the stereo or a bag from your car, while others have more specific motives…
21,849
Russia Calls the War Party's Bluff
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License DMCA Cold War 2.0 has reached unprecedented hysterical levels. And yet a hot war is not about to break out -- before or after the November 8 US presidential election. From the Clinton (cash) machine -- supported by a neocon/neoliberalcon think tank/media complex -- to the British establishment and its corporate media mouthpieces, the Anglo-American, self-appointed "leaders of the free world" are racking up demonization of Russia and "Putinism" to pure incandescence. And yet a hot war is not about to break out -- before or after the November 8 US presidential election. So many layers of fear and loathing in fact veil no more than a bluff. Let's start with the Russian naval task force in Syria, led by the officially designated "heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser" Admiral Kuznetsov, which will be stationed in the eastern Mediterranean at least until February 2017, supporting operations against all strands of Salafi-jihadism. The Admiral Kuznetsov is fully equipped with anti-ship, air defense, artillery and anti-submarine warfare systems -- and can defend itself against a vast array of threats, unlike NATO vessels. - Advertisement - Predictably, NATO is spinning with alarm that "all of the Northern Fleet," along with the Baltic Fleet, is on the way to the Mediterranean. Wrong; it's only part of the Northern Fleet, and the Baltic Fleet ships are not going anywhere. The heart of the matter is that when the capabilities of this Russian naval task force are matched with the S-300/S-400 missile systems already deployed in Syria, Russia is now de facto rivaling the firepower of the US Sixth Fleet. To top it off, as this comprehensive military analysis makes clear, Russia has "basically made their own no-fly zone over Syria"; and a US no-fly zone, viscerally promoted by Hillary Clinton, "is now impossible to achieve." That should be more than enough to put into perspective the impotence transmuted into outright anger exhibited by the Pentagon and its neocon/neoliberalcon vassals. Add to it the outright war between the Pentagon and the CIA in the Syrian war theater, where the Pentagon backs the YPG Kurds, who are not necessarily in favor of regime change in Damascus, while the CIA backs further weaponizing of "moderate," as in al-Qaeda-linked and/or infiltrated, "rebels." Compounding the trademark Obama administration Three Stooges school of foreign policy, American threats have flown more liberally than Negan's skull-crushing bloody baton in the new season of The Walking Dead. Pentagon head Ash Carter, a certified neocon, has threatened "consequences," as in "potential" strikes against Syrian Arab Army (SAA) forces to "punish the regime" after the Pentagon itself broke the Kerry-Lavrov ceasefire. - Advertisement - President Obama took some time off weighing his options. And in the end, he backed off. So it will be up for the virtually elected -- by the whole US establishment -- Hillary Clinton to make the fateful decision. She won't be able to go for a no-fly zone -- because Russia is already doing it. And if she decides to "punish the regime," Moscow already telegraphed, via Russia's Defense Ministry spokesman Major-General Igor Konashenkov, there will definitely be "consequences" for imposing a "shadow" hot war. Sun Tzu doesn't do first-strike Washington, of course, reserves for itself a "first-strike" nuclear capability, fully supports (Donald Trump does not, and for that he's also demonized). If we allow the current hysteria to literally go nuclear, then we must consider the matter of the S-500 anti-missile system -- which effectively seals Russia's air space; Moscow won't admit it on the record because that would unleash a relentless arms race. A US intel source with close connections to the Masters of the Universe but at the same time opposed to Cold War 2.0 as "counter-productive," adds the necessary nuance: "The United States has lost the arms race, indulging in trillions of dollars of worthless and endless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and now is no longer a global power as it cannot defend itself with its obsolete missiles, THAAD, Patriot and Aegis Land Based Ballistic Defense System, against Russian ICBMs, even as the Russians have sealed their airspace. The Russians may be as much as four generations ahead of the US." Moreover, in the deep recesses of shadow war planning, the Pentagon knows, and the Russian Defense Ministry also knows, that in the event some Dr. Strangelove launched a nuclear preemptive strike against Russia, the Russian population would be protected by their defensive missile systems -- as well as nuclear bomb shelters in major cities. Warnings on Russian television have not been idle; the population would know where to go in the -- terrifying -- event of nuclear war breaking out.
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Breaking: FBI Is Re-Opening Clinton Email Server Investigation
Lily Dane
Well, well, well…take a look at this, from NBC : The FBI will re-open its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, bureau director James Comey said in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday. “In connection with an unrelated case, the FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation … I agreed that the FBI should take appropriate investigative steps designed to allow investigators to review these emails to determine whether they contain classified information, as well as to assess their importance to our investigation,” he wrote. Here’s the letter: FBI Director Comey, in letter to members of Congress, says FBI is investigating additional emails in Clinton private server case pic.twitter.com/Ue0qlhqT5w — Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) October 28, 2016 The language in the FBI letter to Congress makes it clear that new evidence has been discovered and will be reviewed — meaning FBI agents will read these emails. NBC reports that it is “…unusual for the FBI to tell Congress it is looking over newly discovered evidence in a criminal inquiry that was otherwise closed.” FBI Dir just informed me, "The FBI has learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation." Case reopened — Jason Chaffetz (@jasoninthehouse) October 28, 2016 We are two weeks away from the end of the ridiculous circus that is this (s)election. What kind if impact will a new investigation have (if any)? Clinton supporters certainly seem to defend her no matter what, and some believe she’s long been the Chosen One. Delivered by The Daily Sheeple We encourage you to share and republish our reports, analyses, breaking news and videos ( Click for details ). Contributed by Lily Dane of The Daily Sheeple . Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!”
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Swedish prosecutor sends Valerie Thighborg to London to summarize the Assange case
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Wednesday, 16 November 2016 Ms. Thighborg's presentation was interrupted due to problems with her accent A new update on the Assange case is again rising to the surface. Ms. Valerie Thighborg, who has visited Mr. Assange twice previously (reported in these pages) has returned to Ecuador's London embassy to review Mr. Assange's current interrogation. Accompanied by an additional special prosecutor in a black suit (known as Mr. Black), Miss Thighborg sat down with Mr. Assange and the Ecuadorian prosecutor to continue the current interviews. Ms. Thighborg apparently began "Darleeng . . ." but immediately changed that to "Mr. Assange." Witnesses indicated some problems with Ms. Thighborg's accent. Mr. Assange, however, seemed totally clear, slight smile on his pale features, pale hair somewhat disorderly. Ms. Thighborg's mistake in addressing Mr. Assange brought some murmuring in the room so that Mr. Black momentarily stood (hunched over) before resuming his seat at the table next to Ms. Thighborg. Ms. Thighborg then proceeded to address Mr. Assange with what sounded like: "Would you prefer I return this evening in my short white skirt which you love so much . . ." bringing several witnesses at the hearing to their feet. Ms. Thighborg then clarified with: "I meant to say would you prefer I return this evening with a short excursion clarifying why we insist you be held in this embassy under these conditions . . ." (the last word sounding like "condeeshuns"). Mr. Assange apparently mumbled for her to go ahead right then, somewhat lingering on the word "ahead. " (Analysts not sure of his meaning.) Ms. Thighborg immediately followed with a list of Mr. Assange's problems: *enemy of the "Cleentun" political party in the US due to Wikileaks exposures of the "Cleentun FrownDation." *enemy of Mr. Obama who "please darleeng don't be ridiculous" is so intent on "being the how you say lame duck magneef-ee-sense, of course he won't pardon you . . ." (At this point the hearing room at the embassy was even noisier, Mr. Black rising and sitting again, Mr. Assange still quietly pale.) *although no charges have been filed, and the case was dropped by the previous prosecutor to the current one, Ms. Ingrid Isren, "Sweeden most co-op-er-ate weeth the politically correct Amurkian and Europeen community . . . " *because most of the world wants to see you "in jail cell, darleeng, or the dangle from Breetish lamp post . . ." (Mr. Black had Ms. Thighborg by the elbow, urging her to rise, in order to remove her from the hearing, now in uproar.) A highly placed (but anonymous) spokesperson at the Embassy indicates Ms. Thighborg has not yet been escorted back to Sweden to face charges and imprisonment. She seeks Ecuador's protection at the London embassy to avoid extradition. Mr. Assange reports he has room in his small quarters to accommodate her, and "Some company would be welcome." Make joseph k winter's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)
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Daughter and Granddaughter of Black Power Icon Malcolm X Busted for Animal Cruelty, Car Theft - Breitbart
Warner Todd Huston
The daughter and granddaughter of famed black power activist Malcolm X were arrested on charges of cruelty to animals as well as car theft, La Plata, Maryland police report. [Officials say that an off duty Prince George’s County officer became suspicious of a vehicle and called the plates in over his radio, only to discover the vehicle was reported stolen in Vermont earlier in the day. The officer alerted authorities and a Charles County police officer spotted the truck. Police stopped the vehicle in a Walmart parking lot on January 25. Officers discovered Malikah Saban Shabazz and Bettih Bahiyah Shabazz inside the vehicle. Both were arrested, Fox 5 D. C. reported. What was inside the truck was unexpected. Investigators discovered seven pit bull terriers, some with injuries, stuffed into small cages inside the truck. As a result of the discovery, police charged the older of the two women with animal cruelty for the inhumane conditions inside the truck. Animal control officers removed the dogs and report they are in stable condition. Malikah Shabazz was charged with seven counts of animal cruelty and car theft. Bettih Bahiyah Shabazz was charged only with theft. The old Malikah Shabazz is the daughter of assassinated Muslim activist Malcolm X, whose real name was Malcolm Little but later changed to Malik when he converted to Islam. Bettih Bahiyah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s granddaughter, seems to have no fixed address. Malikah Shabazz has been in trouble with the law before. In 2011 she pleaded guilty to identity theft after amassing $55, 000 in debts under the name of the widow of one of Malcolm X’s past bodyguards. She was sentenced to probation in that case, the Associated Press reported. Follow Warner Todd Huston on Twitter @warnerthuston or email the author at igcolonel@hotmail. com.
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If Russia Can Rig the US Presidential Election, So Can An Insider
ActivistPost
By Vin Armani Hillary Clinton continues to blame Russia for the email leak even though it doesn’t matter who leaked the damning emails if they...
21,854
The Bad Economics Behind Monopoly
Ryan McMaken
Ryan McMaken blog/bad-economics-behind-monopoly/ A pro-tax disciple of Henry George gave us the board game we know today as Monopoly . Article by Chris Calton . 2:20
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College Students Threatened by Cops for Handing Out U.S. Constitutions
Christina Sarich
College Students Threatened by Cops for Handing Out U.S. Constitutions Nov 5, 2016 2 0 The first amendment of the US Constitution was just treated like gum on the bottom of a police officer’s shoe at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. Bullying free speech — one of the first rights we as Americans are entitled to under constitutional law — was standard operating procedure for officers who threatened students giving out copies of the document to fellow classmates. Grand Valley State University didn’t stand behind students’ rights when they were threatened for handing out the constitution and pamphlets promoting their newly created group, citing an obscure commandment from the ‘office of student life.’ Instead the school backed up threats of arrest issued by police officers. Campus Reform stated that one officer told students , “In order to do that, you gotta be approved by the office of student life,” asserting that the school policy applies to any distribution of materials, even if one is not selling something or asking for monetary contributions. Nathan Berning, a Michigan field representative from the Leadership Institute who was advising the students over the phone during the altercation, told Campus Reform that he found it “unacceptable” that a person “can’t hand out Constitutions to college students” in a country that enshrines free speech in its founding document. Instead of facing time in jail, the students politely discontinued their act of passing out materials, even though this is protected by law. Berning attests this is the third incidence lately of students being threatened for expressing their freedom of speech, even in protected ‘Free Speech Zones.’ These zones are controversial to begin with. West Virginia University recently censored their students to two small areas of campus in which they are allowed to express their thoughts. Ninety-nine percent of campus was off limits to anyone who wanted to have their way with the First Amendment. As one Huffington Post article offers , a “Free Speech Zone’ is a backwards way of saying, “Just shut up” to University students. At a recent Yale University discussion on the topic, 66 percent of attendees felt their first amendment rights were being trampled on with these euphemist ‘zones.’ A NY Times blogger on the topic called them micro-aggressions to young people and University students at large. The University of Chicago is taking a differen t tack. John Ellison, dean of students, wrote to a recent class of freshman, “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own .” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education or FIRE recently launched a national campaign asking colleges and universities to adopt the free speech policy statement produced by the Committee on Freedom of Expression at the University of Chicago. The statement guarantees “all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn,” and makes clear that “it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.” The GVSU reaction to free speech on campus is particularly alarming considering that students pay more than ever to attend institutions of ‘higher learning’ which have become nothing more than an extension of the corporation. Student loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion in the U.S., and while universities are more than eager to take students cash, they aren’t so keen on protecting their rights to free expression. Getting that highly coveted certificate of graduation has become more expensive than ever, but it isn’t just money at stake. Vote Up Christina Sarich Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and *See the Big Picture*. Her blog is Yoga for the New World . Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing The Body And Mind Through The Art Of Yoga .
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FAKE NEWS: Media Attempts to Malign Melania and Her Marriage on Trip Abroad - Breitbart
Penny Starr
It started with a Detroit Free Press reporter tweeting that when President Donald Trump attempts to hold Melania’s hand as they arrived in Tel Aviv, the first lady “slaps away” her husband’s hand. [It appears First Lady Melania Trump slaps away Pres. Trump’s hand as he reaches to hold it while on tarmac in Israel pic. twitter. — Niraj Warikoo (@nwarikoo) May 22, 2017, Despite repeated views of the video in which that conclusion seems doubtful at best and impossible at worst, the media eagerly reposted the video, with many including a narrative based on it that calls into question the Trumps’ relationship. — Marie Claire: “ Yikes. Speculation around Donald Trump and Melania Trump’s marriage is about to get a whole lot more intense. In a video of the pair walking away from Air Force One after landing in Tel Aviv, Melania Trump can be seen slapping her husband’s hand away when he reaches out to hold hers. ” — Slate: One imagines that many world leaders throughout history — especially those named Bill Clinton — have made public appearances with their spouses while their relationships, in private, were less than serene. Still, you rarely see tension break through in the way it appears to have done in the video above of Donald and Melania Trump’s arrival in Tel Aviv Monday. To use a few technical terms commonly thrown around in the world of geopolitical analysis: Yikes! Ouch! No bueno! Melania Trump, of course, does not live in the White House, ostensibly because she is staying with Barron Trump while he finishes his school year in New York City. — Vibe, “No action has encapsulated the essence of the presidency of Donald Trump quite like his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, slapping his hand away during their recent visit to Tel Aviv. ” — Albany New York Times Union: Headline: “Does Melania Trump hate her husband (with video)?” Kristi Gustafson Barlette says in her article: Many suggest the reason Melania and Barron aren’t relocating from their penthouse in New York City to Washington, D. C. has more to do with the First Lady’s feelings for her husband than her desire to keep the couple’s son in his school. And then today there’s the video circulating with the headline that Melania slapped Donald’s hand away when he tried taking it on the tarmac in Israel. — UK Express, The First Lady slapped away the President’s hand, in front of the world’s media, as they were greeted by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and wife, Sara, who walked side by side as they left. With Mr. Netanyahu and his partner holding hands as they strolled down the red carpet, President Trump offered the same gesture to his wife. However, the First Lady appears to bat away his hand as they continue their journey away from Air Force One. — Cosmo: “Almost immediately after arriving at Tel Aviv’s airport to kick off their trip to Israel, cameras caught Melania Trump swatting away the president’s hand after he repeatedly reached out to hold hers. The moment can be seen about four seconds into the above video. ”
21,857
Get Over It
No Author
Ready Nutrition October 27, 2016 At our house, back to school means back to kids bringing home germs. When the leaves start turning, I start reaching for my cough drops, feeling that all too familiar tickle in my throat. If I can, I try to drink tons of water, wash my hands like crazy, and keep the bug from taking hold. But once I know I’m past the point of no return, the following things can help cut the duration of my cold and get me back to my busy life. Do you know how to tell the difference between a cold and a flu virus? Sleep Helps You Heal You probably know this already: one of you body’s first ways of signaling that all is not right internally is to make you very tired and sluggish. Don’t fight this feeling! Take a day or two off of work , if need be. Sleeping early and often during a cold can significantly cut the duration and intensity of a common cold. Sleeping allows your body to rest and recuperate—taking 10 hours of rest now could save you days down the line. Chances are you’ll pass out right away, but if you have trouble getting good sleep (particularly if your cold symptoms include coughing and congestion) put yourself in a dark, cool room with a white noise machine and a high-quality humidifier. Avoid catchall cold medications that are high in alcohol. Even though these drugs might seem like they’re helping you pass out, what you need is good quality, REM sleep. Alcohol can disrupt your natural, restorative sleep patterns and leave you feeling groggy. If you’re certain you need some assistance with sleeping, some people swear by melatonin as a natural sleep aid. Exercise (Even If You Don’t Feel Like It) So, you’ve succumbed to a cold, you’ve slept a solid 8 hours and you’re still feeling under the weather. You should definitely skip your workout today, right? Wrong! Even though the LAST thing you probably feel like doing is slogging through your exercise routine, you don’t want to flake out altogether. Movement and respiration actually speed up the healing process (doctors believe working out causes immune cells to respond to and attack viruses at a faster rate). But instead of doing your normal intensity workout, try doing light cardio such as walking or even speed walking. Listen to your body—if it feels like you can do more, push yourself a little. If you fell like you want to die, dial it back. And of course, it’s not polite to spread germs at the gym, so taking a walk outdoors or at least avoiding a community treadmill is much appreciated.
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Trump Gets an Opening from Russia, but the Path Is Risky - The New York Times
David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Michael R. Gordon
WASHINGTON — Donald J. Trump, who has pledged to reset relations with Russia, may have been tossed a lifeline by President Vladimir V. Putin on Friday. The Russian leader, skilled at keeping several steps ahead of his adversaries, announced that he would not retaliate against the Obama administration for imposing new sanctions and expelling Russian diplomats from the United States. That clears the way for Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin to declare that they are starting anew — just what both men have publicly called for. By Friday afternoon, Mr. Trump took to Twitter to embrace Mr. Putin. For effect, Mr. Trump “pinned” the post to the top of his Twitter feed, ensuring that it will remain the first message seen on his page. In a rapid demonstration of digital glasnost, within minutes the Russian Embassy in Washington had retweeted it. “Putin is going out of his way to not take Obama seriously,” said Rolf who spent decades in the C. I. A. tracking Russia while Mr. Putin was rising in the K. G. B. Instead, he said, “he is making a gesture, presumably with the hope and expectation that Donald Trump will respond in kind. ” Now the question is whether the mutual admiration pact opens new chapters in a range of areas in which the longtime adversaries are at odds, including Syria, Ukraine, Crimea, the Middle East, the future of NATO and the development of nuclear weapons. But moving too far, or too fast, in Moscow’s direction creates enormous risks for Mr. Trump. From Capitol Hill to Europe, people are already worried that Mr. Trump will simply do Mr. Putin’s bidding. Certainly no one is more suspicious of Mr. Putin and his intentions to undermine the West, and American leadership, than the Republican Party establishment. Senator John McCain of Arizona, one of the few left in the Senate who fought on the front lines of the Cold War, plans to hold the first hearing, on Thursday, on Russia’s effort to manipulate the election. And, like the Obama White House, many of those Republicans see Mr. Putin’s gesture — including inviting the children of American diplomats to enjoy the Christmas trees at the Kremlin — as a ploy. There is little chance the Republican inquiries can be derailed. So while Republicans in Congress are investigating, Mr. Trump plans to be investing in a new relationship. In recent days, he has told associates he sees little upside to what he considers needless fights with Russia, and he has long said he sees potential in maintaining a working relationship with Mr. Putin. Mr. Trump has often said there are benefits to cooperating with Russia in fighting the Islamic State in Syria, even though Russia has directed little of its firepower against the terrorist group. Later on Friday, Mr. Trump praised Fox News, apparently for its coverage of Russia. For his part, Mr. Putin is counting the days until Mr. Trump is in the Oval Office. Despite a failing economy, the Russian president has been pursuing for the past four years what most Western analysts see as a plan to reassert Russian power throughout the region. First came the annexation of Crimea and the shadow war in eastern Ukraine. Then came the deployment of forces to the border of NATO countries, as Moscow, working to fracture the power structures in Germany and France and promote parties, sent a reinvigorated military force on patrol of the coasts of the Baltics and Western European nations. Now the question is whether Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin can work a trade: a relaxation of tensions in return for an easing of the sanctions that have helped cripple the Russian economy since the United States and its allies imposed them. Mr. Trump seemed open to backing away from those sanctions in an interview with The New York Times in March, when he questioned whether anyone, other than the Obama administration, saw much use in them. His nominee for secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, has also been critical, not surprising because they have put a huge crimp in Exxon Mobil’s hopes for oil and gas exploration. Syria could be the first area of cooperation. For months, Mr. Trump has talked about working hand in glove with Moscow against the Islamic State and other jihadist groups. That seemed a fanciful notion while Russia was painting all of the Syrian opposition with the same brush and bombing the moderate Syrian opposition more than the Islamic State. But if a shaky agreement announced on Thursday holds, it could focus Russian military action for the first time exclusively on the Islamic State and the Islamist group Jabhat Fateh formerly known as the Nusra Front. “The agreement potentially sets the table for Trump in Syria,” said Andrew J. Tabler, an expert on Syria at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Still, Mr. Tabler and other Syria specialists said the opportunity came with a number of important caveats. First, the needs to hold so that a more enduring political solution to the Syria crisis can be pursued. That will require restraint on the part of the government of President Bashar the Syrian opposition, the Iranians and the Russians. Second, unless a political settlement is achieved that eventually eases Mr. Assad out of power, Syria may continue to be a magnet for extremists and insurgency, perpetuating the very problem that Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump say they are trying to solve. While the Obama administration was not included in the discussions, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, extended a hand to Mr. Trump, who has never objected to Moscow’s growing influence in the Middle East. “I would like to express my hope that after the administration of Donald Trump assumes its duties, it will also join the efforts in order to channel this work into one direction basing on friendly and collective cooperation,” Mr. Lavrov said during a meeting Thursday with Mr. Putin. A Trump administration could become involved in future diplomatic talks, from which Secretary of State John Kerry was excluded in recent months. It could “coordinate” with the Russians militarily, something Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, has resisted. Syria is just the beginning. The fragile Baltic members of NATO — Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania — are looking at large military buildups meant to intimidate them. The Ukrainians have seen their lights turn off mysteriously and tracked it to Russian hackers. The British and French report that Russian practice bomber runs and submarine missions just off their shores, something they have not seen since Soviet days. The French and the Germans say they already see signs of hacking and “influence operations” in their own elections, scheduled for next year. Each has political movements with echoes of the one that brought Mr. Trump to power and that could eat away at the European Union and the NATO alliance. The most difficult problem may be what to do about the oldest form of War II competition: nuclear weapons. Emerging from his briefings, Mr. Trump has expressed surprise in recent weeks about the size and abilities of Russia’s arsenal and has largely blamed New START, the arms control treaty that Mr. Obama negotiated. Though modest, the treaty reduced deployed nuclear arsenals to 1, 550 weapons on each side, down from tens of thousands at the height of the Cold War. But Mr. Trump declared last week that he was perfectly happy to renew the arms race if need be, a declaration that was jarringly out of tune with his calls for a friendlier relationship with Russia. It is not clear if Mr. Trump has been briefed on the “nuclear modernization” program on which the Obama administration and Congress have spent billions, or seen the Pentagon’s proposals for the $1 trillion revamp of the delivery systems — submarines, missiles and bombers — to make them stealthier and more survivable. If he signs on, that race could become serious, and seriously expensive.
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How to Navigate New Airline Carry-On Rules - The New York Times
Stephanie Rosenbloom
It’s the first year that United Airlines will be offering “basic economy” fares — the lowest prices on a particular flight, but with notable restrictions such as: You don’t receive a seat assignment until (and sitting next to your traveling companions is not guaranteed) you’re the last to board and you’re not allowed to bring on a bag (which means no use of the overhead bins). On the list of things travelers care about, overhead storage is second only to legroom, according to interviews conducted in December by Morning Consult, a media and technology company. Even so, 45 percent of fliers said they would buy a “basic economy” fare. And those travelers aren’t necessarily strapped for cash: Some 39 percent of fliers earning $100, 000 or more told Morning Consult that they were likely to purchase a basic economy ticket. Are there loopholes to get around those restrictive baggage and boarding rules? Will more major airlines begin restricting access to their overhead bin space? And while we’re talking about space, which size will actually make it past the gate agent and onto the plane? Let’s begin with United’s new fares. If you buy one of United’s “basic economy” fares, you can bring along a personal item like a laptop bag or backpack that is 9 inches by 10 inches by 17 inches or less, but not luggage (hence why you’re not given access to the overhead bins). But there are ways around those rules. In fact, there are three ways to bring on luggage and use the overhead bins even if you purchase a “basic economy” fare: 1. If you’re a Premier member of the airline’s MileagePlus loyalty program. 2. If you’re the primary card member of a qualifying MileagePlus credit card. 3. If you’re a Star Alliance Gold member (a frequent flier in the Star Alliance network of nearly 30 airlines). Any of the above will also prevent you from having to board last as well. While United is the first major airline based in the United States to essentially start charging for its overhead bin space, charging for bags is old hat on airlines. Frontier charges about $30 to $60 for a bag. Allegiant charges about $15 to $50 per bag. Spirit Airlines and Wizz Air also charge for luggage. There are ways to pay less though. Take Frontier. It charges for bags, but the airline also offers packages like “the Works” and “the Perks” that include a bag as well as extras (albeit they’re givens on many major airlines) such as seat selection and priority boarding. Remember, too, that it’s generally cheaper to pay for your bag online rather than at the airport. On Frontier, a bag costs up to 50 percent less if you pay online instead of at the ticket counter or the gate. Whether other major United States carriers join United and introduce new rules for their overhead bin space remains to be seen, but it will not be surprising if they eventually do, given that the airlines tend to copy one another if a new practice is successful. Indeed, the latest segmentation of economy fares into seats and premium seats began with Delta Air Lines and has since been adopted by American Airlines and United. If travelers take to United’s basic economy fares, expect the practice to become more widespread. There is no universal bag size. Each airline has its own rules. And baggage allowances may vary across routes and cabin classes. In 2015, the International Air Transport Association, an industry group that represents about 260 airlines, created guidelines for bags: 21. 5 x 13. 5 x 7. 5 inches. But following a media hullabaloo, the guidelines were not widely adopted. Major airlines — American, Delta, United, JetBlue Airways, Cathay Pacific — have set their maximum size for economy passengers at 22 x 14 x 9 inches. Some airlines have stricter rules or slightly different measurements (or a maximum of linear inches). For example, the maximum size for economy passengers on KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is 21. 5 x 13. 5 x 10 inches and Qatar Airways is 20 x 15 x 10 inches. Other airlines allow larger bags, most likely to the dismay of the Association of Flight which has advocated for fewer and smaller bags “to reduce risks of injury and conflict onboard the aircraft. ” For instance, British Airways allows bags up to 22 x 18 x 10 inches. Southwest Airlines allows bags up to 24 x 16 x 10 inches. If you fly multiple airlines and want to travel the world with only one bag, you’ll want to buy one that’s as small as possible. Soft bags that can squish into the overhead are easier to get on board. If you are loyal to an airline with a generous baggage policy, you can get away with a hard, larger bag. Ryanair passengers who want to be assured that their bag will make it on board can buy one of the airline’s approved bags sold on its website (wheelies are $69 or $99). Shopping for a new bag? There are two things to keep in mind. First, an airline can change its policy so if you’re buying a bigger bag you might not want to spend a mint. (For example, beginning April 4, the maximum dimensions of the personal item travelers on Spirit Airlines are allowed to bring on board will be 18 x 14 x 8 inches — a change from the current maximum size of 16 x 14 x 12 inches.) Second, Consumer Reports, a nonprofit, independent organization, gives some good advice: Measure a bag before buying it. Why? Many bags sold as “ compliant” are not necessarily so. In 2015, Consumer Reports said it was made aware of this by customer reviews on Amazon and eBags. com that said that the bags they bought were larger than the manufacturers advertised. To see just how common that was, Consumer Reports bought 11 pieces of luggage from 11 brands that were marketed as luggage and then measured them using a laser level. The results? Nine out of the 11 bags were larger than the manufacturer claimed. So invest in a tape measure. And when you measure a bag, be sure to include the wheels and handle in your measurements. Be ruthless. After all, the airlines will be. The Sweethome, a product recommendation website owned by The New York Times Company, has additional information on the best travel backpacks and the best luggage.
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Looming Transition Ignites Deadly Clashes in Congo - The New York Times
Jeffrey Gettleman
KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The bodies were still smoking Tuesday morning, hours after the sun had risen and the killers had driven off. They were charred beyond recognition, arms held up in agony, every piece of skin burned away. “It was the government who did this,” said Félix Tshisekedi, the son of one of Congo’s most popular opposition figures. “I have no doubt. ” A dirty war is shaping up on the streets of Kinshasa, Congo’s capital. In the past two days, at least 25 people from opposing sides of the political divide have been killed by machetes, gunshots, grenades or fire. The burst of violence has paralyzed one of Africa’s biggest cities and could be a harbinger of more bloodshed to come. An expression gaining currency here is “Toyebi indako. ” In Lingala, Kinshasa’s most widely spoken language, it means: I know your house. A crashing economy, Congo’s history of brutality, inescapable poverty and a huge unemployed youth population are all fueling the unrest. As one Western diplomat said on Tuesday, there is a lot of tinder lying around. But the spark is relatively straightforward: a presidential election. Or more precisely, the absence of one. According to the Congolese constitution, President Joseph Kabila, who has been in power for the past 15 years, is required to step down in December. But Mr. Kabila has shown no signs of doing that. There are no firm plans — or even a date — for the next election. Millions of new voters must be registered, funds need to be raised and an election calendar has to be agreed upon, but none of this has happened. So the questions spread. Is Mr. Kabila trying to delay the election as long as possible? Is he ever going to leave? On Monday, thousands of opposition supporters protested in a Kinshasa slum. The demonstration spun out of control when young men rampaged through different neighborhoods, burning down stores, ransacking banks and killing several police officers. The protesters seemed to reserve a special hatred for offices belonging to Mr. Kabila’s political party. At one, they punched a hole through a solid brick wall, set fire to a giant picture of Mr. Kabila’s face and then helped themselves to desks, chairs, computers and TVs. The revenge came about 18 hours later. According to witnesses, an army truck full of uniformed soldiers zoomed up to the headquarters of the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, a leading opposition party. The soldiers fired grenades into the building and sprayed it with gunfire. By Tuesday morning, the bodies of three men lay on doors that had been ripped off their hinges to serve as stretchers. The three worked as volunteer guards at the opposition headquarters and had been inside the building when it was hit by the grenades. Beyond them lay the other victims, face up, in the rubble. Two other opposition headquarters were attacked, and all witnesses accused the army, though Congo’s government spokesman, Lambert Mende, vigorously denied its involvement. “The army’s not stupid,” he said. “What are they going to do, kill people while they’re wearing their uniforms?” In recent years, human rights groups have documented many instances of Congolese government soldiers killing and raping civilians. Mr. Mende said the government was committed to finding a solution to the election impasse and that it hoped a process called the “dialogue” — which opposition leaders called the “monologue” — would produce a compromise. Mr. Mende said that Mr. Kabila did not intend to stay in power but that he could not simply come out and say that. “When a president here in our country says ‘I won’t run again,’ even if he will be there for three months or one year, it will be three months or one year of anarchy,” Mr. Mende said. “It’s our culture. We need to have a chief plainly in charge. ” Étienne Tshisekedi, who at 83 is considered the grandfather of the opposition, said he would agree to delay the election under one condition: Mr. Kabila leaves in December. “If he doesn’t,” he said, “we will call on the people to take power themselves. ”
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Doctors confirm use of chemical weapons in Aleppo fightings
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Doctors confirm use of chemical weapons in Aleppo fightings 31.10.2016 | Source: AP photo One person was killed and 30 were injured as terrorists attacked western Aleppo . Al-Mayadeen satellite channel said that the terrorists used shells filled with chemical agents in the attack that took place on October 30.The terrorists attacked the area of the city known as El Hamdaniyah, where a government-controlled military academy is located. Both civilians and servicemen suffered from chemical poisoning. Later, the head of the forensic medical examination in the province of Aleppo, Zahir Hamdu Haju said that the symptoms of the victims suggested that the militants used chlorine .The victims had similar symptoms, such as tearing, foaming at the mouth vomiting and nausea. The people said that they could smell chlorine in the air during the attack, RT reports. UN special envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura, expressed indignation at the actions of the so-called opposition."Credible reports from the site of the attack indicate that dozens of civilians in western Aleppo were killed, including several children, and hundreds of people were injured due to relentless and indiscriminate attacks by armed opposition groups," the official said. Pravda.Ru Read article on the Russian version of Pravda.Ru Russia says who can settle Aleppo conflict
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Posthoorn Interview no. 4: Tom 'Brexit prepper', the SAD truth
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Topics: Scotland , Beer , Winter , The Netherlands , experiment , Brexit prepper Thursday, 27 October 2016 Tom, from Scotland, has lived in The Netherlands since 1972 and has a Dutch wife. The reporter of the world famous weekly newspaper The Posthoorn (chosen by 75% of their readers as their favorite alternative cat litter) heard on the grapevine that Tom, the Netherlands' first Brexit prepper, was very sad. It was time to find out how bad sad Tom was. The reporter approaches the local pub of Tom. Ten flat beers are standing outside in the autumn sun, but Tom is nowhere to be seen. His wife is there with friends, waving her sixth Calvados: "Sadly, he is not joining us today. He is somewhere inside, doing an experiment, ask the bar personnel." Igo inside greeted by personnel who call me 'the cat litter reporter'. It seems Tom is in the beer cellar doing an experiment. How sad can you get? This reporter carefully goes down in the beer cellar, as it is very dark. A lonely candle shows Tom sitting on the floor having a beer. "It is S.A.D." he says sadly. Why is he so sad? "Not sad, but S.A.D." Tom says. "It is 'Seasonal Affective Disorder'. I have to get used that in winter after 3.00 PM there is no daylight in Scotland. You know in your head it is midafternoon, but outside it is already very dark. You want to go home and watch the 9 o'clock news, but you still have 6 hours to go! Why the Dracula story was set in Transylvania beats me, he could have increased his evil doings between 3 AM and 9 PM tenfold and spent less time in his coffin here in Scotland. And what are the chances of garlic growing in these short days. Now I have to take vitamin D while I prefer vitamin B, if you know what I mean." How is his course ''to Skype' going? Tom looks defiant: "Not very good, I must admit. The first time I started up the app I thought it was an app for a mirror. Handy. I could see my nose hairs sticking out; I got the scissors out and clipped them. The next time I opened the app I could see my hair was too long, so I went to the hairdresser. It also shows up every wrinkle. I wonder is Skype sponsored by Botox? It depresses me. Maybe if I take my teeth out I will finally make a successful 'duck face', which seems to be de rigueur these days, for my profile photo." The reporter invites Tom for a drink in the bar. A bit difficult as Tom takes a beer from outside and they are already paid for. "Sometimes they steal one of my beers, how much worse can it get. I do not prep only for myself, but for all the Brexit preppers out there. The world is a darker place these days." Make Marion Morris's day - give this story five thumbs-up (there's no need to register , the thumbs are just down there!)
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Gold Stocks’ Winter Rally
The Doc
Home » Gold » Gold Miners » Gold Stocks’ Winter Rally The gold miners’ stocks have certainly had a wild ride this year. After initially skyrocketing out of deep secular lows into a mighty new bull market, they recently suffered a massive correction climaxing in an extreme plummet. This coincided with gold stocks’ major seasonal low in October. That heralds their strongest seasonal rally of the year heading into and through winter, a very bullish omen for coming months. Buy 2017 Silver Pandas at the Best Price Online Submitted by Adam Hamilton, Zeal: Gold-stock performance is highly seasonal , which certainly sounds odd. The gold miners produce and sell their metal at relatively-constant rates year-round, so the temporal journey through calendar months should be irrelevant. Based on these miners’ revenues, there’s no reason investors should favor them more at certain times of the year than others. Yet history proves that’s exactly what happens in this sector. Seasonality is the tendency for prices to exhibit recurring patterns at certain times during the calendar year. While seasonality doesn’t drive price action, it quantifies annually-repeating behavior driven by sentiment, technicals, and fundamentals. We humans are creatures of habit and herd, which naturally colors our trading decisions. The calendar year’s passage affects the timing and intensity of buying and selling. Gold stocks exhibit strong seasonality because their price action mirrors that of their dominant primary driver, gold. Gold’s seasonality isn’t driven by supply fluctuations like grown commodities experience, as its mined supply remains pretty steady all year long. Instead gold’s major seasonality is demand-driven , with global investment demand varying dramatically depending on the time within the calendar year. This gold seasonality is fueled by well-known income-cycle and cultural drivers of outsized gold demand from around the world. And the biggest seasonal surge of all is just now getting underway heading into winter. As the Indian-wedding-season gold-jewelry buying that fuels this metal’s big autumn rally winds down, the Western holiday season is ramping up. The holiday spirit puts everyone in the mood to spend money. Men splurge on vast amounts of gold jewelry for Christmas gifts for their wives, girlfriends, daughters, and mothers. The holidays are also a big engagement season, with Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve being two of the biggest proposal nights of the year. Between a quarter and a third of the entire annual sales of jewelry stores come in November and December! And jewelry historically dominates overall gold demand. According to the World Gold Council, jewelry accounted for 58% of total global gold demand in 2014 and 57% in 2015. That works out to about 4/7ths of annual gold demand. The first half of 2016 proved a historic exception, as gold investment demand trumped jewelry demand for two consecutive quarters for the first time ever . Nevertheless jewelry demand still ran 40% even in H1’16’s young investment-driven gold bull. This outsized Western jewelry buying heading into winter shifts to pure investment demand after year-end. That’s when Western investors figure out how much surplus income they earned during the prior year after bonuses and taxes. Some of this is plowed into gold in January, driving it higher. Finally the big winter gold rally climaxes in late February on major Chinese New Year gold buying flaring up over there. So during its bull-market years, gold has always tended to enjoy major winter rallies driven by these sequential episodes of outsized demand. Naturally the gold stocks follow gold higher, amplifying its gains due to their great profits leverage to the gold price. Today gold stocks are once again just heading into their strongest seasonal rally of the year driven by this robust winter gold demand . That’s super-bullish. Since it’s gold’s own demand-driven seasonality that fuels the gold stocks’ seasonality, that’s logically the best place to start to understand what’s likely coming. Price action is very different between bull and bear years, and gold is absolutely in a new bull market . Between the 6.1-year secular low it suffered in mid-December and early July, gold powered 29.9% higher easily exceeding that +20% new-bull threshold. Gold’s last mighty bull market ran from April 2001 to August 2011, where it soared 638.2% higher! And while gold consolidated high in 2012, that was technically a bull year too since gold just slid 18.8% at worst from its bull-market peak. Gold didn’t enter formal bear-market territory at -20% until April 2013, thanks to the crazy stock-market levitation driven by extreme distortions from the Fed’s QE3 bond monetizations. So the modern bull-year seasonality relevant to this new bull year of 2016 ran from 2001 to 2012 , before the Fed-induced bear-market years between 2013 to 2015. This first chart distills down gold’s bull-year seasonal tendencies by averaging gold prices indexed within each calendar year. This methodology is essential because it renders price percentage moves perfectly comparable despite differing prevailing gold prices. Gold’s close on the final day of each preceding year is recast at a level of 100, with all the following year’s daily gold closes indexed off that. An indexed level of 110 simply means gold is up 10% year-to-date at that point. Each calendar year’s individually-indexed gold prices are then averaged together to arrive at this gold-bull seasonality. Gold has always had a strong tendency to enjoy major winter rallies . During its last bull-market years from 2001 to 2012, gold’s major winter rally started on average in late October . Technically gold’s major seasonal bottom averaged being carved on that month’s 16th trading day, which happened to be October 24th this year. From there gold surges into its strongest seasonal rally of the year. Between late October and late February in its last bull years, gold blasted 10.1% higher on average! These big winter-rally seasonal gains are much larger than the 4.3% and 7.5% averages seen in gold’s other major seasonal rallies in spring and autumn! That makes late October one of the best times of the year to deploy capital into gold. That Western holiday gold-jewelry buying fuels such outsized demand that November has long proved gold’s best calendar month of the year with average bull-year gains of 4.0%. While this bullish gold seasonality really moderates in December with an average 0.8% bull-year gain, it soon accelerates again in January on that surplus-income gold investment buying. The 2.7% average gain gold enjoyed in January during those bull years between 2001 to 2012 makes for this metal’s third best month of the calendar year. This winter-rally span is when gold enjoys its peak seasonal tailwinds . Unfortunately the great majority of speculators and investors remain wary of deploying into gold to ride its strong seasonal winter rally. Just like last year, the former are terrified of the next Fed rate hike once again arriving in mid-December. Gold-futures speculators in particular have spent recent years fooling themselves into believing Fed rates hikes are gold’s mortal nemesis, despite history proving that totally false . The record is crystal-clear, gold actually thrives during Fed-rate-hike cycles! Before today’s there have been 11 since 1971, and gold has averaged impressive 26.9% gains across the exact spans of all these Fed-rate-hike cycles. In the majority 6 of these where gold actually rallied, its average gains were a staggering 61.0%! In the other 5 where gold retreated, its average losses were an asymmetrically-light 13.9%. Gold blasted higher during Fed-rate-hike cycles when they started with gold relatively low and unfolded at a gradual pace. Gold not only entered today’s current farce of a rate-hike cycle at major secular lows, the Fed under uber-dove Janet Yellen has never been slower in raising rates. With at least an entire year between hikes, it’s hard to imagine any more gradual. This snail-like rate-hike setup is very bullish for gold . During its last rate-hike cycle between June 2004 to June 2006, the FOMC hiked at 17 consecutive meetings for a total of 425 basis points! That more than quintupled the federal-funds rate to 5.25%, an inconceivably-high level today. Even though that was an extremely-aggressive rate-hike cycle, gold still managed to power 49.6% higher over that exact span! Rate hikes are no threat to gold’s strong winter seasonals. Meanwhile investors remain distracted by the Fed’s ludicrous stock-market levitation, which is retarding gold investment demand. When stock markets remain near record highs and drenched in complacency, investors aren’t interested in prudently diversifying into gold. Since gold tends to move counter to the stock markets , investment demand only surges when stocks weaken. That’s what ignited 2016’s gold bull. As the Fed’s surreal stock-market levitation cracked early this year, American stock investors flocked to gold via shares in the flagship GLD SPDR Gold Shares gold ETF. When they buy its shares faster than gold itself is being bought, this ETF’s managers must issue sufficient new shares to offset all this excess demand and maintain gold tracking. The proceeds from these GLD-share sales are used to buy gold bullion. Thus GLD holdings builds show stock-market capital migrating into gold . In Q1’16, GLD’s enormous 176.9-metric-ton build represented an incredible 80.6% of total worldwide demand growth in gold year-over-year. In Q2’16, GLD’s 130.8t build accounted for a colossal 93.6% of the total global increase in gold demand! The reason gold’s bull stalled in Q3’16 is because GLD’s holdings actually suffered a 2.1t draw. When these lofty Fed-levitated stock markets inevitably roll over again, differential GLD-share buying will surge again for prudent portfolio diversification into gold. That will really add to gold’s strong winter seasonals, amplifying its rally in the coming months. And gold’s strongest seasonal rally doesn’t even need to be kick started by GLD demand resuming, as it relies on November’s strong holiday gold-jewelry demand. So neither speculators’ Fed-rate-hike fears nor investors’ current apathy towards gold thanks to near-record stock markets are likely to short circuit gold’s strong winter rally this year. And if gold’s bull-market seasonals again prevail, that’s super-bullish for gold stocks in the coming months. They also enjoy strong winter seasonals thanks to gold’s, because gold miners’ profitability and thus stock prices leverage gold’s price action. This next chart applies this same bull-market-seasonality methodology to the leading benchmark HUI NYSE Arca Gold BUGS Index. Naturally gold-stock seasonals closely mirror gold’s, so the miners are also just entering their strongest seasonal rally of the year . On average in those last bull-market years from 2001 to 2012, the HUI powered a whopping 15.9% higher between late October and late February! Gold stocks’ strong 15.9% average winter rally bests their 13.7% and 15.0% rallies heading into spring and autumn. On average gold stocks’ major seasonal bottoming heading into their winter rally arrives on October’s 15th trading day, which translates into October 21st this year. Like their primary driver gold, gold stocks tend to rally strongly in November, moderate in December, and then surge again in January and February. And given the sentimental, technical, and fundamental setups for gold stocks entering this year’s winter rally, the usual seasonal tailwinds are likely to help propel them much farther than usual . Just like gold and because of it, gold stocks entered a mighty new bull market early this year as well. Between mid-January and early August, they skyrocketed 182.2% higher in just 6.5 months! It was a wildly-profitable run. That left gold stocks overbought in the middle of summer, their weakest time of the year seasonally. So as I warned in early July, gold stocks’ record summer surge soon rolled over into a major correction. That quickly ballooned to massive proportions exceeding 20%, the threshold for new bear markets in general stocks. Then gold stocks started grinding higher again in September, but were slammed by gold futures in October. Early this month the HUI plummeted 10.1% in a single trading day, one of its worst losses ever, after gold-stock stops were run. That was sparked by cascading forced stop-loss selling in gold futures as gold slipped below $1300. By the time the dust settled, the gold stocks’ total correction per the HUI had mushroomed to a staggering 30.9% in 2.2 months! Such an enormous selloff naturally spawned great bearishness. So the gold stocks are now entering their seasonally-strongest period of the year universally despised and very low technically . These are screaming buy signals within ongoing bull markets, greatly upping the odds gold stocks’ next major upleg is just getting underway. Add the winter rally’s strong seasonal tailwinds to exceptionally-bullish sentiment and technicals, and gold stocks’ coming gains should prove exceptional. The gold miners’ fundamentals also powerfully line up with the winter seasonal strength this year, really boosting the bullish outlook. These companies’ third-quarter operating results will be fully released by mid-November. And they are highly likely to reveal more big gains in operating profits despite gold’s recent weakness. Improving gold-mining fundamentals will entice in more investors, magnifying seasonal gains. Gold averaged $1185 in Q1’16 and $1259 in Q2’16. That 6.3% quarter-on-quarter gain in average gold prices led to enormous surges in operating profitability of the elite gold miners. They are represented by the leading gold-stock ETFs, the GDX VanEck Vectors Gold Miners ETF for the majors and its sister GDXJ VanEck Vectors Junior Gold Miners ETF for the juniors. These ETFs’ component stocks are excellent. Each quarter I analyze the operating performances of the individual gold stocks included in these top ETFs. Their cash flows generated from operations are a great proxy for current profitability. In Q2’16 on that 6.3% average-gold-price increase, the top 34 component companies of GDX saw their operating cash flows surge 32.3% higher quarter-on-quarter. And GDXJ’s skyrocketed an incredible 51.1% higher QoQ! Q3’16’s average gold price climbed another 6.0% QoQ from Q2 to $1334, despite gold’s big recent pullback. So those elite gold miners of GDX and GDXJ are very likely to soon report another major surge in operating profitability! It wouldn’t surprise me to again see big gains approaching Q2’s, which would certainly spark great trader interest. Improving fundamentals aligning with seasonals portends big upside. If the gold stocks were entering this winter-rally period drenched in greed after a powerful upleg, the seasonal tailwinds probably couldn’t overcome the healthy correction tendency. If the gold miners’ fundamentals were deteriorating, that would likely prove too much heavy lifting for seasonals. But with the strong winter-rally seasonals aligning with very bullish sentiment, technicals, and fundamentals, gold stocks should surge. This last chart breaks down gold-stock seasonality into more-granular monthly forum. Each calendar month between 2001 to 2012 is individually indexed to 100 as of the previous month’s final close, and then all like calendar months’ indexes are averaged together. While this November-to-February winter-rally period doesn’t encompass most of gold stocks’ strongest months, it does enjoy the most-consistent gains . On average in bull-market years, November enjoys the third-best gold-stock gains of the calendar year at 6.3% in HUI terms. That’s not far off the best months of May and August, which have averaged rallies of 6.9% and 6.7%. But unlike the flat-or-lower months surrounding those other strong months, November is followed by December’s 2.3%, January’s 2.7%, and February’s 3.5% average bull-market-year gains. This unparalleled consistency is what makes gold stocks’ winter-rally seasonals so impressively strong. Continuing to march higher on balance ultimately yields better upside than the two-steps-higher-one-step-back action throughout the rest of the calendar year. There are no significant gold-stock selloffs in seasonal-average terms at all between November and February, which facilitates exceptional winter gains. Of course the standard seasonality caveat applies that these are mere tendencies , not primary drivers of gold or gold stocks. Seasonal tailwinds can be easily drowned out by bearish sentiment, technicals, and fundamentals. May and August this year are perfect cases in point. Instead of rallying 6.9% and 6.7% in line with seasonal averages in 2016, the HUI plunged 13.8% and 19.2% in May and August to shred seasonals! Seasonality doesn’t always work, especially when it doesn’t align with the primary drivers of sentiment, technicals, or fundamentals in that order. Gold stocks entered both May and August this year up at very-overbought levels, at new bull-market highs stretched far above the HUI’s 200-day moving average. After rocketing 31.0% higher in April and surging up 11.2% in July, performance mean reversions were due. Gold stocks’ resulting massive correction in August bucked the seasonal trends. While September saw a 4.3% HUI gain in line with normal +4.8% bull-market seasonality, early October’s plummet on stops being run was extremely excessive compared to normal October pullbacks. Thus gold stocks are unloved and oversold heading into this year’s winter-rally span, which is a super-bullish omen for outsized seasonal gains . The serious gold-stock upside coming as bullish sentiment, technicals, and fundamentals align with seasonal tailwinds can certainly be played with those popular GDX and GDXJ ETFs. But because they hold so many gold stocks, their gains can only pace the HUI at best. A carefully hand-picked portfolio of elite individual stocks with superior fundamentals will really amplify sector gains, dwarfing the ETFs’ performances. At Zeal we’ve spent literally tens of thousands of hours researching individual gold stocks and markets, so we can better decide what to trade and when. This has resulted in 851 stock trades recommended in real-time for our newsletter subscribers since 2001. Their average annualized realized gains including all losers are running way up at +24.1% as of the end of Q3! Why not put our expertise to work for you? We’ve been super-aggressively adding gold-stock and silver-stock trades since that anomalous gold-stock plummet in early October. These new trades are already detailed in our popular weekly newsletter, and coming soon in our monthly one. Both draw on our vast experience, knowledge, wisdom, and ongoing research to explain what’s going on in the markets, why, and how to trade them with specific stocks. Subscribe today! For just $10 an issue, you can learn to think, trade, and thrive like a contrarian. The bottom line is gold stocks are just entering their seasonally-strongest period of the year. Their big winter rally is fueled by gold’s own, which is driven first by outsized demand from holiday jewelry buying and later new-year investment buying. So both the metal and its miners’ stocks have strong tendencies to rally between late October and late February in bull-market years. It’s the best calendar span to own gold stocks. And this year’s coming winter rally looks exceptionally bullish because the seasonal tailwinds won’t be overpowered by bearish sentiment, technicals, or fundamentals. All of these primary drivers are bullish today and closely aligned with the strong seasonals, making for a powerful united force to propel gold stocks dramatically higher. Speculators and investors alike should be fully deployed for the coming months. Adam Hamilton, CPA On Sale At SD Bullion… This Week Only…
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With Their Leaders at a Loss, Marine Veterans Fight Abusers - The New York Times
Dave Philipps
As a Marine infantry sergeant, James LaPorta once led an intelligence team in Afghanistan. Now, as a private citizen, he is doggedly tracking the moves of an online group that has been secretly compiling and sharing nude photos of hundreds of women in the Marine Corps. With top generals admitting before Congress that they are unsure how to protect members of the Marine Corps from nameless, faceless “predators,” Mr. LaPorta is among an unlikely scattering of young veterans who have decided to take that assignment upon themselves. He and his comrades in online vigilance have been gathering intelligence and making counterstrikes, tracking the members of illicit groups, including Marines United, as they try to hide, and stripping away the anonymity that has allowed the group to thrive. They are also feeding information back to Marine Corps investigators. “The Marines’ response is to be careful and slow, but the people they are after move very fast,” Mr. LaPorta said. “If you want to catch them, you have to move at their speed. ” Indeed, Marine Corps leaders have resorted to traditional moves, commissioning a task force and mounting a meticulous investigation. But the commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Robert B. Neller, frankly admitted to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the scandal was a cultural problem he was to address. “There is a risk I cannot protect people on social media,” General Neller said. It is certainly not easy: Marines United, which consists of thousands of and veteran Marines, has hopped from Facebook page to Facebook page, changing its name each time it gets shut down, while still trading illicit photos and taunting federal investigators. “The Marine Corps thought because they shut a Facebook page down, the group was dead,” said Mr. LaPorta, 30, who left the Marines in 2014. “We had to show them it was just metastasizing into other back rooms. ” Mr. LaPorta and other veterans trying to fight groups like Marines United have been deluged with online harassment themselves. Other Marines have called them traitors and threatened them with violence, but they have pressed on in what they see as a battle for the future of the Corps. “The Marine Corps can’t do this alone. The internet is too huge,” Mr. LaPorta said. “We need to police ourselves. ” They say the fight is up to them in part because trying to get Marine Corps leaders, who are often near retirement, to recognize and address the power of social media in the military is as slow and frustrating as teaching an aging parent to set up a new laptop. “There is a disconnect between the upper echelon and a digital millennial generation,” said Thomas Brennan, 31, a former Marine sergeant who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and revealed the existence of Marines United this month. Mr. Brennan said he was frustrated by what he saw as a slow and outdated response, as commanders convene a task force made up largely of older, Marines and put out new social media policies that will be ignored or ridiculed online. He added that the military’s response so far had been ineffective, noting that he had given investigators dozens of names and files on Marines United nearly two months ago but was not aware of the authorities’ having taken any action. “I almost feel like they didn’t want to admit this stuff existed,” Mr. Brennan said. “And when we forced them to, they were caught off guard. ” A Marine Corps spokesman said he could not comment on the ongoing investigation. Earlier this week, Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, announced that investigators had identified 700 Marines and 150 Marines in the Reserve who were involved in the Marines United group. For several years, the Marine Corps has known of web pages where Marines shared racist and sexist memes, as well as photos of female Marines posted without their consent. Despite a number of public reports, the Corps has failed to crack down on the sites. For several years, and veteran Marines in a group called Just the Tip of the Spear have been posting illegal and offensive material on Facebook, Instagram and other sites. Like Marines United, they have posted nude photos of servicewomen without their permission. In some cases, they have also posted the women’s telephone numbers and other private information. When women complained, the site’s followers often harassed them more. Shawn Wylde, a Marine captain who served in a support battalion in Iraq, reported the site to Marine law enforcement as soon as he saw what was happening in 2013. “I got nothing, not even a call back,” said Mr. Wylde, 36, who was discharged in 2012 and has since built an online company that does $8 million in annual sales. “I got angry that the Marine Corps was doing nothing. ” Mr. Wylde runs a Marines Facebook page called Silkies, named after the ubiquitous green Marine Corps workout shorts: a page he uses, in part, to steer business to his company. He has become, by his own description, “pretty good at online marketing,” which gave him a fresh idea for how to tackle the problem. When news emerged this month that the Marines were still engaged in the same type of online harassment, Mr. Wylde decided to fight Just the Tip of the Spear on his own by tracking down the anonymous members and unmasking them one by one by posting their names on the Silkies Facebook page. With $10, 000 of his own money, he bought targeted ads on Facebook on Monday to appear on the pages of young Marines, especially young female Marines. The ads featured a meme of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis denouncing the shadowy groups and asking everyone to send information on the anonymous ringleaders to Mr. Wylde, so he could out them. “It’s clear the leadership doesn’t understand how social media works,” Mr. Wylde said. “But I do, so I figured I had to do something. ” Mr. Wylde is an unlikely crusader for decency. In 2013, he pleaded guilty to defrauding the government of nearly $100, 000 in unearned housing and veterans benefits, and served four months in a federal prison. But he said he was newly motivated by the disrespect the groups continued to show toward women in the Marines. “I served with a lot of great women in Iraq. One was actually killed by an I. E. D. ,” he said, referring to an improvised explosive device. “These guys harassed a woman who was a friend of mine. I wanted it to end, and it didn’t look like anyone was going to do anything. ” He added: “The main point here is to make a cultural change, not get them prosecuted. That would be great, though. ” Within hours, Mr. Wylde said, his ads began bringing in tips. Several women wrote in with information on men who they said were running Just the Tip of the Spear. Two of the tipsters claimed to be the wives of key members of the group. Some of the men are still active Marines. One of the founders of Just the Tip of the Spear was named Marine of the Year by The Marine Corps Times, according to Mr. Wylde. He has given the men’s names to the Marine Corps but said the Corps had not responded. The New York Times tried to contact several of the men named, but none replied. Some female veterans close to the men said that some were veterans who spent most of their time online and had been unable to transition from their military life. Since Mr. Wylde began his efforts on Monday, many of the Marines he has accused have shut down their social media accounts. The group has also lost at least two corporate partnerships. And one of the founders, apparently unnerved and unaccustomed to public scrutiny, has publicly challenged Mr. Wylde to a fight. All week, as Mr. Wylde has continued his crusade against anonymous trolls, his Silkies site has been flooded with messages of support, many of them from women who were targets of the group. “You are restoring my faith in my brothers,” one female Marine veteran wrote. “I’ve seen so many of those troll pages, I was starting to believe maybe that’s what our brothers really thought of us. ”
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7 Things You Need to Know About the JFK Assassination
EdJenner
Tuesday marked the 53rd anniversary of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Since then, innumerable conspiracy theories have propped up attempting to explain the Democratic president’s untimely death.
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Mainstream Presidential Polls Fuel Illusion That Voters Are Stuck With Only Two Choices
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Mainstream Presidential Polls Fuel Illusion That Voters Are Stuck With Only Two Choices By Meleiza Figueroa go digital / CC BY-SA 2.0 Editor’s note: Meleiza Figueroa is the press director for the Jill Stein-Ajamu Baraka campaign and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a longtime activist and organizer in California. Corporate media are focused on Donald Trump’s accusations of “oversampling” on the part of Democrats against Republicans. He’s half right, because polls do oversample declared Democrats by up to 14 percent in polls that compose the RealClearPolitics average . The deeper story is that mainstream polls skew against youth and independents, who are undersampled in most polls up to a whopping 30 percent. A recent CNN poll sampled few people under the age of 50. Not one major poll lists alternative-party identification in the breakdown of its sample. The first problem with sampling involves definitions. Most polls sample “likely voters,” with a bit of expansion to count for a smattering of “registered voters.” So who are “likely voters”? Voters who (1) consistently vote—which automatically excludes people ages 18 to 22, who have no voting history, (2) identify with either of the two major parties and (3) say that they intend to vote in the next election. “Registered voter” polls don’t count first-time voters not yet registered to vote, so forget about the opinions of those college students who are signed up in enthusiastic campus get-out-the-vote drives. The questions asked in the polls reinforce established, dualistic views of the political spectrum. The presidential-preference questions in polls that deign to include Green Party nominee Jill Stein and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson don’t ask “Who is the candidate you want to vote for?” or “Which candidate is most aligned with your positions and values?” Nearly all the polls frame the presidential question as “If the election were held tomorrow, who would you vote for?” In a media landscape where we are told—through unbalanced news coverage , controlled debates and ceaseless cultural propaganda, down to the red and blue cups at 7-Eleven stores during election season—that only the Democratic and Republican candidates are considered viable, most people will, of course, hold their noses and vote for the lesser of two evils. It’s telling that the very next follow-up question reads, “If the election were ONLY held between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, who would you vote for?” You might as well reword the questions to (1) “Which candidate do you think will win?” and (2) “Which of these two candidates do you hate the least?” Neither of these questions address the issue of who people want to be their next president. The rest of the questionnaires wipe alternative candidates off the map completely. Third-party candidates are treated as if they don’t exist—while the approval ratings for the two parties in government and Congress as a whole are hovering around historic lows . What we can glean from the polls is that it’s clear people want change, but what kind of change they want is of no concern to the pollsters. We did get a sample of the earth-shaking hunger for change during the 2016 primaries when the votes for Bernie Sanders turned the polling orthodoxy upside down. The most famous example was Sanders’ 21-point, poll-defying upset in the Michigan primary . The wild cards in this case were—you guessed it— independent and young voters , who turned out in droves in Michigan, Wisconsin, New Hampshire and other open-primary states to deliver a giant middle finger to the establishment candidate. No one really knows how large the “Bernie or Bust” crowd is, but what we do know is that the floodgates opened during the tragic circus of the Democratic National Convention, and progressive Berniecrats began to burn Green. #Demexit became a trending hashtag on social media, and a recent nationwide survey of Sanders delegates found that 33 percent intend to vote for Stein . Everywhere the Stein-Baraka campaign goes, we find an ever-growing base of support—not just among former Sanders supporters, but also among those “unlikely” voters who are underrepresented in polls: young people, Independents and people of color. These are all the demographics, when broken out in mainstream polls, that go about 4 percent to 10 percent higher for Stein. These voters compose a potentially game-changing, awakening “sleeping giant” that has the establishment working overtime to impose a media blackout on a third-party alternative. The corporate media have shown themselves willing to lock out alternative parties. In fact, a recent video of a CNN focus-group taping caught them in the act. When a fair number of participants identified their preferences as Johnson or Stein, the scene was promptly reshot to exclude these choices, portraying these voters as “undecided.” In this election year—when the largest voting block of registered voters are independents , and many people (especially millennials, lower-income voters and people of color) are fed up with the two-party system—the means of taking a temperature check on the state of our democracy denies a voice to those who choose to reject the establishment duopoly. Only 9 percent of Americans chose Clinton and Trump to be the major-party nominees, which puts a whole lot of people in a big margin of error. A voter revolt could be happening right under our noses, but the establishment and their pollster apparatchiks don’t want you to notice. They want to maintain the illusion that voters are stuck with only two choices, a trap that the majority of Americans who want another major party are trying to escape.
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In New York, Bringing Broadband to Everyone by 2018 - The New York Times
Nick Corasaniti
HALCOTT, N. Y. — It’s about 15 miles from here to a dairy testing facility in Roxbury, or about one hour and 20 minutes round trip if you know these dusty mountain back roads like Chris DiBenedetto, a dairy farmer. He has been going back and forth for years, ferrying a sample of fresh milk for a federally mandated drug test before he can start processing each batch. But what stressed him the most were the valuable daylight farming hours lost to the journey, while he was stuck in his car or waiting for the results. Now, Mr. DiBenedetto gives a sample to a driver heading that way to do the letting the new fiber wiring hanging over his old route do the simple document delivery for him via email. The dairy farmer in this speck of a town about 140 miles north of New York City was one of the first beneficiaries of an ambitious initiative to extend broadband to every household in the state by 2018 — no matter how rural or the address — which would make New York the first state to reach that internet milestone. For years, this town was like many isolated spots in New York and across the country, left sitting on the shoulders of the digital highway unable to access the broadband speeds that so many businesses and households count on. But now under a program, towns like Halcott, with fewer than 300 residents, are getting wired, giving residents faster access to the internet and opening new opportunities for businesses. Two Stones Farm, a small goat farm here, has created an online store to offer more products, including artisanal cheese. “I look at it this way: It’s very much like electricity was at one time,” said Alan White, 54, who owns Two Stones Farm with his wife. “Electricity would have never come to our valley if it was based strictly on population. It’s not a luxury. It’s a necessity that we need to operate. ” For those used to having broadband at their disposal, it is hard to imagine not being able to Skype for a job interview, send messages on LinkedIn or Facebook, download an eTextbook, upload a homework project or on Netflix. But about 12. 6 million American households lack access to broadband, according to a study last year by the Federal Communications Commission, which has classified broadband as a type of utility, similar to telephones. The problem is worse in poorer and rural areas: At least 30 percent of people in Mississippi and Arkansas do not have access to broadband, and sparsely populated states like Montana have similar access rates. While President Trump’s pledge to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure has focused largely on roads, bridges and airports, the need to expand the broadband network is just as dire. The United States ranks 15th in broadband connectivity, behind countries such as South Korea and Canada, according to a 2011 study from the Organisation for Economic and Development. The challenge in the United States is that it has vast tracts of sparsely populated regions where the cost of laying new fiber and cable wiring for broadband significantly outweighs the profits — 39 percent of Americans living in rural areas lack broadband access, compared with 4 percent of those living in cities, according to the F. C. C. Under Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s “Broadband for All” initiative, New York’s program is one of the most aggressive broadband expansions in the country, and is designed to help stem any losses a private company incurs through what is known as a reverse auction process. Using data from the Federal Communications Commission to identify both unserved and underserved areas, the program divides the state into census blocks. The state then auctions off grant money for each census block, awarding the financing to the private company that seeks the lowest state subsidy. The system has attracted different providers, including major telecommunication companies like Fairpoint and Frontier, as well as smaller utilities like Middleburgh Telephone Company, known as Midtel, and Margaretville Telephone Company. Along the roads winding through Delaware County in the Catskills, Midtel trucks are following a path similar to one they took years ago, threading fiber optic cables for broadband across the valley. “All the served, underserved and unserved areas don’t end up in a nice row,” said Jim Becker, the president of the company, which has existed for more than a century and is still overseen by his grandmother, Marge Becker. “Sometimes you have to build through somewhat of a served area to get to an unserved, and vice versa. ” Turning on broadband can transform lives in rural places. Here in Halcott, a hamlet in the Catskills, the broadband has allowed Mr. DiBenedetto to broaden his business online — a yogurt company in Brooklyn recently contacted him about a single source contract. His daughter, Elena, was able to help out on the farm while getting a master’s degree online. “In today’s world, access to internet is essential to building strong communities, growing the economy and supporting our everyday lives,” Governor Cuomo said. “New York is leading the nation with the largest state broadband investment program in history — ensuring internet access for all residents, especially those in rural areas, and empowering students, entrepreneurs and businesses to thrive in our global economy. ” So far, the state’s partnerships with private companies have worked relatively well and have enabled the program to make steady progress. But that has not always been the case when local governments have relied on private companies to upgrade internet networks. Though it was not a part of Mr. Cuomo’s plan, Mayor Bill de Blasio was forced to sue Verizon this month after the company failed to build out its promised network to every home in New York City. And while widening the broadband infrastructure is an essential step toward bridging the digital divide, simply ensuring access does not address the issue of affordability, especially since the F. C. C. is considering slashing parts of a federal program, known as Lifeline, that is meant to help provide affordable broadband to residents. Under New York’s program, providers must offer 100 mbps speed — fast enough to download a movie in high definition in 90 seconds — for $60 a month. “That’s pretty amazing,” said Gigi Sohn, a former senior adviser at the F. C. C. acknowledging that it was a reasonable price given that prices elsewhere could be much higher. “But if you’re really poor, can you afford it? I don’t know. If you are a poor rural person living in Appalachia, that’s a big bite out of your budget. ” But many rural businesses in New York have jumped at the chance for faster internet. About an hour from Halcott lies the Beaverkill Valley Inn, a historic hotel sitting on the banks of the Beaver Kill river, a spot in Lew Beach, N. Y. There’s no cellphone service, so for years the inn and its guests shared a satellite internet connection. “We were competing with our guests’ need and our own need to do business,” said Kathy Bryant, one of the inn’s managers. She noted that despite a sprawling property well suited for corporate retreats and meetings, the inn was unable to attract such business because of its limited internet. After years of pleading with local officials and telecommunications providers for a broadband connection, the inn was connected to internet by the Margaretville Telephone Company last August. Today, flush with retreats, weddings and guests spending an extra day or so “working from home,” the inn just had the most successful year in its history. “Now, we just reassure them that they can still unplug while they’re up here,” Ms. Bryant said with a laugh.
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Comedian Mike Epps Accused of ’Animal Cruelty’ After Bringing Kangaroo Onstage
Jerome Hudson
Comedian Mike Epps has been accused of mistreating an animal after cameras caught the Hangover star dancing onstage alongside a harnessed kangaroo Friday night during a Festival of Laughs comedy tour show in Detroit. [In a viral video, the animal is seen swinging its arm at Epps before the comedian runs off the stage. Treatment of the kangaroo spurred accusations of “animal cruelty” from some audience members, who watched the spectacle play out inside the Joe Louis Arena. Whyyyy did they bring the kangaroo on stage at Mike Epps show 😩😭. I love Detroit pic. twitter. — Amber ♍ (@_AmNico) April 1, 2017, i commented on Mike Epps picture of him with that poor kangaroo on stage and said that it’s animal cruelty to have had it on stage and … — yajara (@yeeeezyyyy) April 2, 2017, I didn’t think Mike Epps playing with that kangaroo last night was funny at all. That kangaroo look miserable and ready to snap. — P (@Pariss_Franceee) April 1, 2017, . @TheRealMikeEpps I’m a FAN ‼ But have 2 Say Animals Should Not Be used for entertainment #Born2BWild~ this is just cruel Entertainment 😞 pic. twitter. — Anika (@anikasleem) April 3, 2017, @TheRealMikeEpps That was the cruelest comedy act clip I’ve seen. You must be so proud of yourself. Terrorising animals on stage is NOT entertainment, — Lynda (@lynda_perth) April 3, 2017, @TheRealMikeEpps Nah, ur a ”man” that makes money tormenting animals. If that’s what you’ve gotta do for a laugh, your in the wrong game. — Nick Wright (@itsnik3) April 3, 2017, Epps defended the stunt in a social media message that has been deleted. A video, captured and published by The Shade Room, shows the comedian feeding a banana to a Kangaroo. “Yeh look how nice Iam 2 him! Theses guys are license zoo keepers ! #iloveanimals,” Epps wrote on Instagram. He later posted an apology note to his social media account, and said he would be donating to a kangaroo conservation charity. According to TMZ, the kangaroo that appeared onstage Friday night belongs to traveling zoo animal handler Javon Stacks. Stacks told the gossip outlet that the animal was not harmed in any way during Friday night’s performance. However, according to a report from the outlet, the U. S. Department of Agriculture is investigating the incident to determine whether the kangaroo handler was in control of the animal at all times, a requirement under the federal Animal Welfare Act. Epps was recently tapped to play the lead role in the forthcoming Lee bio drama, Richard Pryor: Is It Something I Said? The film, which the Weinstein Company will produce, will reportedly star Eddie Murphy, Kate Hudson, and Oprah Winfrey. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter: @JeromeEHudson
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Fans Asked George Takei To Tweet Something Positive About Trump. He Did, And It’s Perfect
Natalie Dickinson
Comments Legendary Star Trek actor turned LGBT activist George Takei has been very vocal this election season. He joins much of America in being so utterly appalled by Republican nominee Donald Trump that he cannot stay silent as Trump unravels our democracy further and further with each passing day, and has a perfect response to those asking him to stop being so negative: People have asked me to tweet something positive about Trump. Okay, so be it: I am POSITIVE that Trump is a national disgrace. — George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) October 28, 2016 There is nothing positive to be said about Trump, except that the revelations of his long record of sexual assault is creating a national conversation about the abuse of women at the hands of powerful rich white men. Otherwise, Trump has been a walking manifestation of the ugliest parts of America, exposing our dirty laundry for all the world to see. Perhaps its what we needed to exorcise those demons – but it cannot be denied that it will take years to recover from the wounds this election has opened.
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Renuncian a llevar a su hijo a la escuela porque quieren educarlo en Forocoches
Xavi Puig
Renuncian a llevar a su hijo a la escuela porque quieren educarlo en Forocoches SEGÚN LOS PADRES, ESTE FORO ES EL PRIMER PASO PARA LICENCIARSE EN LA UNIVERSIDAD DE LA CALLE Xunta de Galicia Luis Fedra y María Ramos, residentes en Vigo, han decidido renunciar a que sus tres hijos sean educados por la vía tradicional. “No queremos que vayan a la escuela, preferimos educarlos en Forocoches”, explica Luis. Los niños han dejado de ir a clases esta semana y ya tienen sus cuentas de usuario en este foro de Internet, que se encuentra entre las 40 webs más visitadas de España. “La universidad de la calle hoy en día es este foro: sus hilos de discusión recorren los temas más relevantes de la actualidad y de la sociedad de la España de hoy y de siempre”, defienden los padres. Según dicen, una criatura educada conjuntamente por la comunidad de Forocoches recibirá la formación necesaria “para vivir en un país como España, con todas sus particularidades”. La escuela, insisten, “crea una burbuja irreal y luego los críos crecen y no entienden nada de lo que ocurre en la vida real, en la calle”. “La Lei de Apoio á Familia fomenta el vacío legal del estudio alternativo”, reconoce un portavoz de la Xunta de Galicia, que pasa la pelota al Ministerio de Educación. Mientras la discusión se atranque en disputas administrativas, Luis y María se encargarán de que sus tres retoños lean y estudien temas de Forocoches como “Ford Fiesta síntomas raros”, “Los mejores chicles del siglo” o “Que te la chupen con aparatos sí o no???”. Según han explicado algunos usuarios registrados de Forocoches, “los pequeños shurmanos han empezado nerviosos y no se han atrevido a comentar mucho, pero es normal porque es su primer día. Aquí hay mucho troll y ya irán viendo el panorama, pero vamos, peor que en el cole no va a ser”, en palabras de “pollamalaga93”. Los padres se muestran optimistas también tras el estreno de los niños en el foro. “Carlitos, que siempre ha sacado buenas notas en Historia, ya ha creado su primer hilo de discusión: ‘Te UNIRIAS al EJERCITO si MARRUECOS nos INVADIERA?’. Le han contestado más de cien personas”, certifica la madre con orgullo.
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Fox Losing More Advertisers After Sexual Harassment Claims Against O’Reilly - The New York Times
Emily Steel and Michael S. Schmidt
Pressure mounted on Tuesday for Fox News to take action against its host, Bill O’Reilly, as a series of prominent companies pulled advertising from his show and a leading women’s rights group called for his ouster. Following an investigation by The New York Times over the weekend that revealed multiple settlements over allegations of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior by Mr. O’Reilly, the network faced a major advertising revolt as more than a dozen marketers said that they were withdrawing their ads from “The O’Reilly Factor. ” Escalating the tension, the National Organization for Women called for Mr. O’Reilly to be fired and said an independent investigation should be conducted into the culture at Fox News. “Fox News is too big and too influential to simply let this go,” Terry O’Neill, the president of NOW, said in a statement. And inside Fox News, three women who work in the newsroom said that the continued support of Mr. O’Reilly by Fox News and its parent company, 21st Century Fox, led them to question whether the company was committed to maintaining a work environment “based on trust and respect,” as executives had promised last summer after the network’s founding chairman, Roger E. Ailes, was ousted. The employees requested anonymity because they feared retaliation for speaking publicly. The erosion of advertising support, along with pressure from advocacy groups, heightened the sense of uncertainty at Fox News, which for months has been trying to move beyond the sexual harassment scandal that led to the dismissal of Mr. Ailes. It also raised questions about how long 21st Century Fox will stand behind Mr. O’Reilly. Fox News signaled that it was trying to contain the controversy and working to restore relations with the network’s advertisers, noting that companies had reallocated their spending from Mr. O’Reilly’s program to other network shows. “We value our partners and are working with them to address their current concerns about ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’” Paul Rittenberg, the executive vice president for advertising sales at Fox News, said in a statement. “At this time, the ad buys of those clients have been into other FNC programs. ” If more advertisers leave the program, Fox News and 21st Century Fox may have to respond. Mr. O’Reilly, 67, is the network’s most visible star, leading a prime time programming slate that draws ratings with its conservative commentary. “The O’Reilly Factor,” which draws almost 4 million viewers a night, generated more than $446 million in advertising revenue from 2014 through 2016, according to the research firm Kantar Media. A spokesman for Mr. O’Reilly, Mark Fabiani, declined to comment on Tuesday. Mr. O’Reilly has said that the accusations against him are without merit and that his fame has made him a target “for those who would harm me and my employer, the Fox News Channel. ” He did not address the issue on either his Monday night or Tuesday night broadcasts. Mr. O’Reilly’s contract, which was set to expire this year, has been extended by 21st Century Fox, people familiar with the deal said. When the company agreed to the extension, it was aware of multiple settlements that had been reached with women who had complained about his behavior, and it structured the deal to include more leverage over his behavior, according to people familiar with the matter. Mr. O’Reilly earns about $18 million a year. The advertising boycott and the public outcry echo what happened to the radio host Don Imus a decade ago over racially and sexually charged statements he made about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. After a series of advertisers suspended their ads from his radio and television program, and NOW called for his ouster, NBCUniversal canceled the simulcast of his show on MSNBC. And at Fox News, the former host Glenn Beck left the network in 2011 after hundreds of advertisers refused to allow their ads on his program. On Tuesday, multiple advocacy groups started campaigns targeting advertisers of “The O’Reilly Factor. ” The Women’s March group posted a message on Twitter, encouraging people to use the term “#DropOReilly” to tell advertisers to pull their ads from the program and also encouraged people to share their own experiences with sexual harassment. The advocacy group Color of Change also started a campaign focusing on the advertisers of the show. “Their money and support is keeping him on the air,” said Rashad Robinson, executive director of the organization. “It is rewarding his actions. It is rewarding the damage he has done to people in their lives and their careers. ” “In essence, these corporations are the ones whose money is paying the settlements,” Mr. Robinson added. Among the companies pulling their ads from Mr. O’Reilly’s show are the car companies Hyundai, BMW of North America, Mitsubishi and Lexus the pharmaceutical and health care companies Bayer, GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi Consumer HealthCare and Allstate, the insurance company. The decisions came after The Times investigation found that five women who had accused Mr. O’Reilly of sexual harassment or inappropriate behavior received settlements totaling about $13 million. “Mitsubishi Motors takes these allegations very seriously, and we have decided that we will pull our advertising at the present time,” Alex Fedorak, a company spokesman, said in a statement. Mitsubishi spent about $2. 1 million for ads on the “The O’Reilly Factor” in 2016, making it the show’s advertiser, according to iSpot. tv, the TV ad analytics firm. Some advertisers have said they will continue to run ads on his show. Cheryl Reed, a spokeswoman for Angie’s List, said, “Just as we trust members to make their own hiring decisions, we trust them to make their own media consumption decisions. ” The weight loss company Jenny Craig was noncommittal, saying: “As an organization, Jenny Craig condemns any and all forms of sexual harassment. As a matter of corporate policy, we do not publicly comment on our advertising strategy. ” An ad for Jenny Craig appeared during Mr. O’Reilly’s show on Monday night. The broader legal troubles for Fox News continued on Tuesday. Monica Douglas, a black Fox News employee, joined a lawsuit that was filed last week against Fox News by two other women, asserting that they were subjected to racial harassment at the network. The suit was filed in State Supreme Court in the Bronx. Fox News dismissed the executive named in the suit, Judith Slater, the longtime controller, on Feb. 28. It said in a statement “there is no place for conduct like this at Fox News, which is why Ms. Slater was fired. ” On Monday, Julie Roginsky, a current Fox News contributor, filed a lawsuit against Mr. Ailes, Fox News and Bill Shine, one of the network’s asserting that she faced retaliation for rebuffing Mr. Ailes’s sexual advances. Mr. Ailes has denied all the sexual harassment accusations against him.
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Can Trump Help California Dodge Jerry Brown’s Bullet Train? - Breitbart
Assemblyman Tim Donnelly
The State of California issued the first tranche of taxable construction bonds last Thursday for the High Speed Rail Project, making it clear that it is determined to go ahead with the unpopular project despite numerous obstacles, including federal funding roadblocks thrown up by President Donald Trump. [According to a Bloomberg News report, California officials have made a show of faith by moving forward with the $1. 25 billion offering, despite challenges including a lawsuit filed in Sacramento’s Superior Court. According to a Los Angeles Times story, “[t]he suit was brought by John Tos, a farmer Kings County the city of Atherton and several opposition groups,” and focuses chiefly on AB 1889, a bill that alters the way bond money can be spent. Attorneys for the plaintiffs, who oppose the train, state that “the bond act never gave the legislature the authority to alter it. ” The project is roundly vilified by pundits and talk radio hosts up and down the state — every major California GOP politician has denounced it, with the exception of Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin — and now many residents who originally voted for it, no longer support what they see as Brown’s “boondoggle. ” But none of that has stopped Jerry Brown from making his legacy project the state’s top priority. “California can well afford it, and it will make our state a much better place,” Gov. Jerry Brown said in February in a recorded news conference to which his press office referred in response to questions from news organizations. “I know we’re going up against a very red tide here of opposition. This thing is a project, and one way or another we’re going to get it. ” Brown is coming off a rough couple of months, as California’s crumbling infrastructure became front page news — highlighting the apparent folly of building a very expensive train with money the state doesn’t have — while raising gas taxes that will hit the working poor the hardest. Proceeding with the controversial project comes at considerable risk to California’s perennially shaky finances. If the lawsuit is successful in freezing the original bond funds, that would be a major setback. At issue in the suit is the diversion of $713 million of Proposition 1A Bond Funds — specifically designated for the High Speed Rail — to act as matching funds for a $2 Billion project to electrify and retrofit a Silicon Valley commuter rail known as Caltrain. On top of that, if Trump freezes all federal funds, both rail projects will struggle even more. CalTrain officials were banking on a $647 million matching grant from the Federal Transit Administration — which Trump has “deferred” indefinitely. If the federal spigot is turned off, California taxpayers might be forced to foot the entire bill, essentially killing the projects by delaying them — which can force the return of matching funds already spent. The Washington Post reports that President Trump weighed in on the issue in a note to Congress last month, stating that “localities should fund these localized projects. ” Some political observers believe that Trump’s denial of funds is just playing politics. Christopher Leinberger, chair of George Washington University’s Center for Real Estate and Urban Analysis, told the Post that the cuts suggest Trump is “playing to the base,” because he received much less support in urban areas than in “drivable suburban locations. ” “This is about pure politics,” Leinberger said. Rep. Jeff Denham ( ) who chairs a key House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee, disagrees. Denham, who lobbied Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to deny the grant on the basis that the new Caltrain cars did not meet the definition of rail, urged Brown to find a different source of state funding for Caltrain, then reapply for the matching federal grants, cautioning that overcommitment puts other priorities at risk. “If you’re going to continue to obligate state dollars that you do not have, then you’re in jeopardy of at some point the federal government calling for those notes to be due, which could then put public safety dollars at risk, other transportation dollars at risk or education dollars at risk,” said Denham according to Bloomberg, who sits on the transportation and infrastructure committee. Brown, who met with Chao last month to discuss the grant, said of Denham in a phone interview with the Post: “That’s called blackmail. ” Californians “voted for a bond issue” for rail “but envisioned other projects” using the cash, the governor said in the interview. “To go against it is the rawest, stupidest form of politics. ” 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
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Public Support for the Euro
Yves Smith
by Yves Smith By Felix Roth, Associated Research Fellow, University of Göttingen, Lars Jonung, Senior Professor, Knut Wicksell Centre for Financial Studies, Lund University, and Felicitas Nowak-Lehmann, Senior Researcher at CEGE and IAI, University of Goettingen. Originally published at VoxEU The euro as a common currency has recently been the subject of harsh criticism by economists from both sides of the Atlantic, including claims that citizens in some Eurozone countries are turning against the it. This column argues that, in fact, the euro currently enjoys comfortable popular support in each of the 12 original member states of the Eurozone and that potential upcoming referenda in any of these countries do not appear to pose a threat to the currency. In contrast, popular support for the euro has declined sharply in non-Eurozone EU member states since the recent crisis, with the UK standing out as the country with the most negative view. Recently the euro as a common currency has been the subject of strong criticism by economists from both sides of the Atlantic (e.g. Stiglitz 2016, Sinn 2014). This criticism has been inspired by the financial and economic crisis in some Eurozone countries and by the slow recovery in the region after the Global Crisis of 2008. Scholars claim that a majority of citizens have turned against the euro in large member states of the Eurozone, such as Germany (Stiglitz 2016: 314) and Italy (Guiso et al. 2016: 292, Sinn in Kaiser 2016a). In the wake of the vote for Brexit in the UK referendum in June this year, it is argued that knock-on effects in the form of potential upcoming referenda on the euro in the Eurozone (e.g. in Italy) might lead to its break-up (Feldstein 2016, Stiglitz in Martin 2016, Stiglitz in Kaiser 2016b). In addition, it has been postulated that animosity amongst EU member states is at a high (Alesina 2015: 78). This suggests a rising threat to the European project, including the common currency. These claims concerning the standing of the euro raise the question: How does the public in EU member states actually look upon the common currency at this stage? We are able to provide an answer based on survey data on the popularity of the single currency, which are available from its creation, as polled by TNS-opinion (European Commission 2016). These data are provided through the Eurobarometer (EB). The euro is a unique currency in the sense that similar time series evidence does not exist for any other currency. Our answer draws upon our previous contribution to this site (Roth et al. 2012), where we explored Eurobarometer survey data on public support for the common currency from 1990 to 2012. There we concluded that in the first four years of the crisis (2008-2012), public support for the euro declined only marginally. Now the question is: What has happened in the most recent years regarding public support for the euro? Support for the Common Currency Within the Original Eurozone We present an up-to-date picture of the evolution of public support for the euro until May 2016, adopting our approach in Roth et al. (2016). First, we focus on the original 12 Eurozone member states (Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain – the EZ12) that adopted the euro as a physical entity in January 2002. Figure 1 shows average net support (in per cent) for the single currency in the EZ12 countries over a 27-year period from 1990 to 2016. Figure 1 Average net support (in %) for the single currency in the EZ12 countries, 1990-2016 Note : The y-axis displays net support in percent. Since the figure depicts net-support, all values above 0 indicate that a majority of the respondents support the single currency. The dashed lines distinguish the introduction of the euro as a book keeping entity in January 1999, the actual circulation of the euro in January 2002 and the start of the financial crisis in September 2008. Data for EB45 were not available. Population-weights are applied. Net-support is measured as the number of ‘For’ responses minus ‘Against’ responses and is constructed according to the equation: Net-support = (For – Against)/(For + Against + Don’t Know). Source : Figure 1 is an updated version of Figure 1 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016; 948). Figure 1 leads us to the following conclusions: Over the 27-year time period, a majority of citizens within the EZ12 has supported the single currency (with average net support exceeding 15% at all times). Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, a large majority of EZ12 citizens has supported the euro (with average net support exceeding 30%). In the 8th year (in May 2016) since the start of the financial crisis, average net support of 42% has surpassed the pre-crisis level of 40% in March-May 2008. Figure 1 gives the aggregate picture. How has support for the euro evolved in the individual members of the EZ12? Figure 2 provides an answer. Figure 2 Net support for the single currency in EZ12 countries, 1990-2016 (%) Source : Figure 2 is an updated version of Figure A1 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 957). Figure 2 suggests that: Since the introduction of the euro in 1999, aside from short periods in Finland and Greece before the crisis, a majority of citizens in each member state of the EZ12 supported the euro, even in times of crisis. From 2008 to 2016, significant increases in support in Greece, Portugal and Germany (26, 23 and 10 percentage points, respectively) have levelled out the fall in net support in other EZ12 countries, ranging from 11 percentage points in Ireland to 5 percentage points in Finland. Over the 27-year time period (1990-2016), Italy has always had a pro-euro majority, with the minimum net level of 17% in November 2013, clearly above the majority threshold of 0%. Support for the Euro Among the New Members of the Eurozone How has support for the euro evolved in the new member states that joined the euro after its physical introduction in January 2002, that is, in Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Slovakia and Slovenia? After adopting the euro, aside from short periods in Cyprus, a majority of citizens in each country has supported the euro. Figure 3 Net support for the euro across seven EZ countries that joined the euro in the period 2004-16 (%) Source : Figure 3 is an updated version of Figure A3 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 958). Support for the Euro Outside the Eurozone In our 2012 column, we highlighted the distinct fall in public support for the euro in EU member states outside the Eurozone (Roth et al. 2012). What has happened since then? Figure 4, displaying the evolution of net support for the euro outside the Eurozone from 1990-2016, gives an answer. Figure 4 Net support for the single currency in non-EZ countries, 1990-2016 (%) Source : Figure 4 is an updated version of Figure A2 until 5/2016 (by EB’s 82-85) in Roth et al. (2016: 958). Figure 4 suggests: Outside the Eurozone, net support for the euro has declined in a pronounced manner. Whereas in Bulgaria, Czech Republic and Poland a majority of citizens supported the euro in the years preceding the crisis, a majority in those countries has turned against the euro after the crisis. The decline in support, ranging from 65 to 30 percentage points, is strong. In contrast, in Romania and Hungary, in spite of a fall of 35 and 28 percentage points, respectively, a majority of euro support still exists. In Denmark and Sweden, the majority has turned away from euro support after the crisis. Just before the crisis, there was for brief periods a majority for the euro. The UK is an exceptional case. For the 26 years from 1991 to 2016, a majority of citizens was always against the single currency. During the crisis, net support for the euro reached levels as low as -66% (in November 2012). Given the persistent rejection of the euro, the Brexit vote should not come as a surprise but rather as reflecting a long-running critical view towards the European project. Therefore, any knock-on effects of the Brexit vote in the form of a break-up of the Eurozone via potential upcoming referenda in the Eurozone are not likely to emerge. On the contrary, recent survey data from July 2016 by the French polling institute, Ifop, suggest an enduring majority support for the euro in the Eurozone (Fourquet et al. 2016: 52). Conclusions Our updated analysis of public support for the common currency over a quarter of a century, from 1990-2016, brings out four major conclusions. First, in contrast to recent claims, a majority of citizens support the euro in each member state of the original Eurozone, including in Germany and Italy. This was the case even during the peak of the recent crisis. Second, in contrast to some critical euro voices, we do not believe, on basis of Eurobarometer data, that any knock-on effects of the Brexit vote in any potential upcoming referenda on EU issues would pose an imminent threat to the euro. Third, taking into account our earlier findings, which identify the unemployment rate as a key driver of public support for the euro in times of crisis (Roth et al. 2016), a strong job recovery in the Eurozone is likely to increase public support for the euro. Fourth, popular support for the common currency has fallen sharply after the recent crisis in EU member states that have not adopted the euro. Here the negative sentiment is strongest in the UK. We suggest the following bottom line: with the exception of short periods in Finland and Greece before the crisis, the evidence points towards majority support for the euro in each original Eurozone member state (including Italy and Germany) before, during and after the crisis. So far, the euro has clear backing from the public. It has adopted the common currency as its own currency. See original post for references 0 0 0 0 0 0
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UK Involvement In US’ Secret Drone War Revealed
Activist Post
By Whitney Webb The US’ secret drone war has largely been shrouded in mystery since its inception. Despite its secrecy there is no denying that...
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William J. Smith
I hadn’t thought of that, but you are absolutely right. This does need to come to an end. I know the Republican party is like a pit bull and won’t let this go. As much as it disturbs me to say it. I hope that Hillary and the President will consider this before he leaves. BTW…I’m going to miss President Obama and the world class leadership he brought to America.
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PICTURES – Trump Visits Western Wall, Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem - Breitbart
Aaron Klein
JERUSALEM — President Donald Trump on Monday visited the Western Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem as part of his tour here in Israel. [The church, believed to be the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection, is one of the holiest sites in Christianity. Trump met outside the church with leaders of local Christian denominations before going inside for a private tour closed to the news media. Afterwards, Trump went to the nearby Western Wall where he became the first sitting U. S. president to visit the Jewish holy site. The Western Wall is part of an ancient retaining wall erected around the Jewish Temple. The Temple Mount, site of the first and second Jewish Temples, is considered the holiest site in Judaism. Trump toured the holy sites after a red carpet ceremony at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv and a meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin at the president’s residence in Jerusalem. Trump is headed next to a private social dinner with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On Tuesday, Trump’s schedule includes a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem and then a ceremony at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. Trump will then give a speech at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem before departing the country for the Vatican. Trump is here in Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day, a national holiday that marks Israel’s reunification of Jerusalem after the 1967 Six Day War and the establishment of Israeli sovereignty over the eastern sections of the city, which include the Old City, Western Wall and Temple Mount. Many will be watching to see if Trump uses the visit to announce that he is moving the U. S. embassy from the beach in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, although reports put that as unlikely. Israel officially annexed Jerusalem in 1980 in a move not recognized by the international community because the Palestinians claim eastern sections of the city for a future Palestinian capital despite their never having had a state or entity in those areas. Current U. S. law does not officially recognize Israeli control over the eastern sections of the city, going so far as to prevent American citizens born in Jerusalem from listing “Israel” as their country of birth. All eyes will be on Trump to see if he makes any declarations regarding Israel’s status in Jerusalem. Aaron Klein is Breitbart’s Jerusalem bureau chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk radio program, “Aaron Klein Investigative Radio. ” Follow him on Twitter @AaronKleinShow. Follow him on Facebook.
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Anonymous Bomb Threats Rattle Jewish Centers Across Eastern U.S. - The New York Times
Mitch Smith
The morning rush at the Jewish community center in Columbia, S. C. had subsided when the phone rang on Monday. The caller, an woman, “in a loud screaming voice kept saying there’s a bomb,” said Barry A. Abels, the center’s executive director. At roughly the same time, a woman dialed the Jewish community center in Rockville, Md. nearly 500 miles away, and said there was a bomb. Not long after, a man called a Jewish organization in Wilmington, Del. He, too, warned of a bomb. Similar threats, which turned out to be unfounded, were reported all over the Eastern United States on Monday, at as many as 16 Jewish community facilities, one advocacy group estimated. Time and time again, the police responded, buildings were evacuated and, after tense waits, the centers and schools reopened. Federal law enforcement officials did not definitively link the threats, but the episodes rattled nerves, and raised deep concern and little doubt that the phone calls had been orchestrated. “My personal take is it’s a statement of where we are in this country,” said Michael Feinstein, the chief executive of the Bender Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington, in Rockville. “There’s some thought amongst some people that hate speech and hate crimes are O. K. and is O. K. and I think that is reflective of sort of the political discourse that we’ve had in this country. ” Mr. Feinstein said about 300 people had been in the Rockville center when the threat was made, including about 200 preschoolers. After the threat in Delaware, parents were called to pick up preschool and day school students. In South Carolina, Mr. Abels said staff members and patrons attending exercise classes had to leave. About three hours later, he said, the authorities said it was safe to return, leaving many to wonder what had happened. “It could be anything from hate groups to a terrorist situation,” Mr. Abels said. “I think it’s probably more on the hate group side, because it was just a scare. ” He said he believed it was “designed to be psychologically disorienting and scary and just disruptive. ” Jerry Silverman, the president and chief executive of the Jewish Federations of North America, said the threats were part of a disturbing trend toward normalizing hate speech. It was less than three years ago that a former Ku Klux Klan leader killed three people outside Jewish facilities in Overland Park, Kan. And in November, after the presidential election, the League posted a warning about a reported uptick in hate speech and . Some members of the a fringe movement that embraces elements of racist and positions, perceived the victory of Donald J. Trump as validation for their cause and have become increasingly visible in recent months. Mr. Trump, who has a Jewish daughter and has disavowed the . Mr. Silverman said Monday’s cases were part of a broader “coordinated effort” to intimidate Jews. He said that Jewish organizations nationwide had instituted emergency protocols, and that leaders were communicating with one another on Monday as the threats were reported. “We’ve seen this at Jewish community centers over the last year,” Mr. Silverman said. “We’ve seen it at Jewish day schools. We’ve seen it at synagogues. ” “It’s all about training and preparedness,” he added. Law enforcement agencies in Nashville Jacksonville, Fla. and Tenafly, N. J. were among those confirming on Monday that they had responded to and cleared bomb threats at Jewish centers. An F. B. I. spokeswoman said the bureau was “aware of bomb threats” and had been in touch with the local police. “We understand there were similar threats around the country,” said Tzipora Cohen, of the Jewish Community Center in Tenafly. “I guess these are the times we live in. ”
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Democrats Urge Obama to Pardon 750,000 Illegal Immigrants Before Trump Takes Power
EdJenner
House Democrats are pushing President Obama to pardon illegal immigrants temporarily protected from deportation by a 2012 executive order.
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German Ministry Wants Migrants Returned to Africa: Report
Henry Wolff
German Ministry Wants Migrants Returned to Africa: Report Reuters, November 6, 2016 The German Interior Ministry wants to stop migrants ever reaching Europe’s Mediterranean coast by picking them up at sea and returning them to Africa, the Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported on Sunday. In what would be a huge shift for a country with one of the most generous asylum policies, the ministry says the European Union should adopt an Australian-style system under which migrants intercepted at sea are sent for processing at camps in third countries. “The elimination of the prospect of reaching the European coast could convince migrants to avoid embarking on the life-threatening and costly journey in the first place,” the paper quoted a ministry spokeswoman as saying. “The goal must be to remove the basis for people-smuggling organizations and to save migrants from the life-threatening journey.” The ministry’s proposal calls for migrants picked up in the Mediterranean–most of whom set off from conflict-torn Libya–to be sent to Tunisia, Egypt or other north African states to apply for asylum from there. If their asylum applications are accepted, the migrants could then be transported safely to Europe. {snip}
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Report: Pro-Common Core Jeb Bush Former Staffer No Longer Candidate for Assistant U.S. Education Secretary
Dr. Susan Berry
The Core New Mexico education secretary who once served as a staffer in former Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration in Florida is no longer a candidate for assistant secretary of the U. S. Education Department, reports Politico. [Hanna Skandera’s name was pulled from consideration for the position, the report says, because about a dozen Senate Republicans “were skeptical that they could ever vote yes” to confirm her, due to her support for the highly unpopular Common Core standards. Skandera was deputy education commissioner under Jeb Bush and also a senior policy adviser and deputy chief of staff at the education department under former U. S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who served under President George W. Bush. Like Jeb Bush, Skandera is a proponent of the Common Core standards. She is head of the governing board of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) one of the two federally funded test consortia that developed assessments aligned with Common Core. President Donald Trump campaigned on getting rid of the Common Core standards, and a network of grassroots citizens across the country are vehemently opposed to the federalized program that was introduced in President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. Emmett McGroarty, a senior fellow at American Principles Project, released the following statement: We applaud the Administration and the Senate for scuttling the nomination of Hanna Skandera due to her past support for Common Core standards and testing. Parents, students, and teachers detest Common Core because it locks children into an inferior education. As President Trump has said, Common Core “is a total disaster. ” We urge the Administration to look for appointees committed to achieving the President’s vision that “education has to be at a local level. We cannot have the bureaucrats in Washington telling you how to manage your child’s education. ” Though U. S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has funded and served organizations that promote Common Core — including Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education — since her nomination, she has denied she supports the controversial standards. DeVos, nevertheless, has surrounded herself with advisers and staff who have ties to Bush’s foundation, as well as to Indiana, where Common Core was repealed, but then simply “rebranded. ” The secretary recently said the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) “essentially does away with the notion of a Common Core,” a statement many grassroots parent activists still battling against the Core in their states have rejected. Upon DeVos’s nomination, KOB4 in Albuquerque reported Skandera praised Trump’s pick, saying that while she did not know her well, she believed DeVos’s policies would not change Common Core in New Mexico. Breitbart News reached out to the press office at the U. S. Education Department to confirm the report but received no response.
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Daily Mail forced to lie down in darkened room after confirmation Prince Harry’s girlfriend is mixed-race
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Tuesday 8 November 2016 Daily Mail forced to lie down in darkened room after confirmation Prince Harry’s girlfriend is mixed-race The Daily Mail has been forced to go and lie down in a darkened room for a while after learning that Prince Harry’s new girlfriend is one of those ‘brown ones’. Doctors were called after the newspaper reported feeling faint at reading the Kensington Palace statement confirming the relationship. The Daily Mail explained, “I know we’ve been reporting the relationship for days, but we’d hoped against hope it wasn’t really true. “Sure, we’ve trawled her entire career and social feeds going back years to find video clips and photos that might make her look unsuitable as a girlfriend for a member of our royal family, all without ever saying it’s just because she’s a brown foreigner – but you kinda knew that, right? “I mean, we can’t just say we don’t like her because she’s brown and foreign. Otherwise, we’d probably find our editor Paul Dacre being reported to himself in his other role at the Press Complaints Commission. That wouldn’t be good for anyone. “But now it’s bloody well confirmed she’s definitely going out with him, and.. well… oh hear, I’m coming over all faint again. “Do you realise that any child they might have would be 6th in line to the throne?! Can you imagine, a BROWN king!!” At that point the doctors asked us to leave so they could administer an emergency sedative.
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Geoengineering Watch Global Alert News, October 29, 2016
Dane Wigington
geoengineeringwatch.org Defections from the ranks of the power structure continue to build. A group of CDC (Center for Disease Control) whistleblowers is now putting pressure on CDC management to start telling the truth about the systemic corruption and public deception that this government organization represents. Yet more truth-tellers will likely come forward as the CDC ship goes down. A Harvard University publication states this about climate engineering: "it can help us combat the worst effects of climate change." How blatant can the betrayal from academia become? Massive geoengineering aerosol spraying operations around the globe continue decimate Eath's climate and life support systems. A former NASA engineer (now working with Geoengineering Watch) gives an extremely alarming report on our disintegrating ozone layer (primarily caused by climate engineering). Madagascar is starving due to geoengineering induced record droughts. Rapidly rising sea levels are chewing away at Africa's coastlines. Sea ice at both poles is at record low levels, and US generals say they can win WWlll with Russia. Where does this road lead? The latest installment of Global Alert News is below. Credibility is absolutely essential in the fight to expose and halt climate engineering , as well as the fight for the greater good. We must all abandon preconceptions and ideology in exchange for verifiable front-line facts. Anything short of this is completely counterproductive to the causes we claim to be fighting for. We must all stand on a foundation of facts, and make our voices heard . DW Very dedicated activists help to sound the alarm at yet another event. This one took place at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds on October 21st, 22nd, and 23rd. My most sincere gratitude to Brian Schuler, Jamie Lee and Melanie Moran for their efforts at this event. Leave a Reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Name * Website Comment You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""><abbr title=""><acronym title=""><b><blockquote cite=""><cite><code><del datetime=""><em><i><q cite=""><strike><strong> VISITORS
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Large Sections of Australia’s Great Reef Are Now Dead, Scientists Find - The New York Times
Damien Cave and Justin Gillis
SYDNEY, Australia — The Great Barrier Reef in Australia has long been one of the world’s most magnificent natural wonders, so enormous it can be seen from space, so beautiful it can move visitors to tears. But the reef, and the profusion of sea creatures living near it, are in profound trouble. Huge sections of the Great Barrier Reef, stretching across hundreds of miles of its most pristine northern sector, were recently found to be dead, killed last year by overheated seawater. More southerly sections around the middle of the reef that barely escaped then are bleaching now, a potential precursor to another that could rob some of the reef’s most visited areas of color and life. “We didn’t expect to see this level of destruction to the Great Barrier Reef for another 30 years,” said Terry P. Hughes, director of a center for coral reef studies at James Cook University in Australia and the lead author of a paper on the reef that is being published Thursday as the cover article of the journal Nature. “In the north, I saw hundreds of reefs — literally of the reefs were dying and are now dead. ” The damage to the Great Barrier Reef, one of the world’s largest living structures, is part of a global calamity that has been unfolding intermittently for nearly two decades and seems to be intensifying. In the paper, dozens of scientists described the recent disaster as the third worldwide mass bleaching of coral reefs since 1998, but by far the most widespread and damaging. The state of coral reefs is a telling sign of the health of the seas. Their distress and death are yet another marker of the ravages of global climate change. If most of the world’s coral reefs die, as scientists fear is increasingly likely, some of the richest and most colorful life in the ocean could be lost, along with huge sums from reef tourism. In poorer countries, lives are at stake: Hundreds of millions of people get their protein primarily from reef fish, and the loss of that food supply could become a humanitarian crisis. With this latest global bleaching in its third year, reef scientists say they have no doubt as to the responsible party. They warned decades ago that the coral reefs would be at risk if human society kept burning fossil fuels at a runaway pace, releasing greenhouse gases that warm the ocean. Emissions continued to rise, and now the background ocean temperature is high enough that any temporary spike poses a critical risk to reefs. “Climate change is not a future threat,” Professor Hughes said. “On the Great Barrier Reef, it’s been happening for 18 years. ” Corals require warm water to thrive, but they are exquisitely sensitive to extra heat. Just two or three degrees Fahrenheit of excess warming can sometimes kill the tiny creatures. Globally, the ocean has warmed by about 1. 5 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century, by a conservative calculation, and a bit more in the tropics, home to many reefs. An additional kick was supplied by an El Niño weather pattern that peaked in 2016 and temporarily warmed much of the surface of the planet, causing the hottest year in a historical record dating to 1880. It was obvious last year that the corals on many reefs were likely to die, but now formal scientific assessments are coming in. The paper in Nature documents vast coral bleaching in 2016 along a section of the reef north of Cairns, a city on Australia’s eastern coast. Bleaching indicates that corals are under heat stress, but they do not always die and cooler water can help them recover. Subsequent surveys of the Great Barrier Reef, conducted late last year after the deadline for inclusion in the Nature paper, documented that extensive patches of reef had in fact died, and would not be likely to recover soon, if at all. Professor Hughes led those surveys. He said that he and his students cried when he showed them maps of the damage, which he had calculated in part by flying low in small planes and helicopters. His aerial surveys, combined with underwater measurements, found that 67 percent of the corals had died in a long stretch north of Port Douglas, and in patches, the mortality reached 83 percent. By luck, a storm stirred the waters in the central and southern parts of the reef at a critical moment, cooling them, and mortality there was much lower — about 6 percent in a stretch off Townsville, and even lower in the southernmost part of the reef. But an Australian government study released last week found that over all, last year brought “the highest sea surface temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef on record. ” Only 9 percent of the reef has avoided bleaching since 1998, Professor Hughes said, and now, the less remote, more heavily visited stretch from Cairns south is in trouble again. Water temperatures there remain so high that another round of mass bleaching is underway, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority confirmed last week. Professor Hughes said he hoped the this time would not be as serious as last year’s, but “ bleaching is in Australia. ” The central and southern part of the reef had already been badly damaged by human activities like dredging and pollution. The Australian government has tried to combat these local threats with its Reef 2050 plan, restricting port development, dredging and agricultural runoff, among other risks. But Professor Hughes’s research found that, given the high temperatures, these national efforts to improve water quality were not enough. “The reefs in muddy water were just as fried as those in pristine water,” Professor Hughes said. “That’s not good news in terms of what you can do locally to prevent bleaching — the answer to that is not very much at all. You have to address climate change directly. ” With the election of Donald J. Trump as the American president, a recent global deal to tackle the problem, known as the Paris Agreement, seems to be in peril. Australia’s conservative government also continues to support fossil fuel development, including what many scientists and conservationists see as the reef’s most immediate threat — a proposed coal mine, expected to be among the world’s largest, to be built inland from the reef by the Adani Group, a conglomerate based in India. “The fact is, Australia is the largest coal exporter in the world, and the last thing we should be doing to our greatest national asset is making the situation worse,” said Imogen Zethoven, campaign director for the Australian Marine Conservation Society. Australia relies on the Great Barrier Reef for about 70, 000 jobs and billions of dollars annually in tourism revenue, and it is not yet clear how that economy will be affected by the reef’s deterioration. Even in areas, large patches of the Great Barrier Reef survived, and guides will most likely take tourists there, avoiding the dead zones. The global reef crisis does not necessarily mean extinction for coral species. The corals may save themselves, as many other creatures are attempting to do, by moving toward the poles as the Earth warms, establishing new reefs in cooler water. But the changes humans are causing are so rapid, by geological standards, that it is not entirely clear that coral species will be able to keep up. And even if the corals do survive, that does not mean individual reefs will continue to thrive where they do now. Coral reefs are sensitive systems, built by unusual animals. The corals themselves are tiny polyps that act like farmers, capturing colorful plants called algae that convert sunlight into food. The coral polyps form colonies and build a limestone scaffolding on which to live — a reef. But when the water near a reef gets too hot, the algae begin producing toxins, and the corals expel them in turning ghostly white. If water temperatures drop soon enough, the corals can grow new algae and survive, but if not, they may succumb to starvation or disease. Even when the corals die, some reefs eventually recover. If water temperatures stay moderate, the damaged sections of the Great Barrier Reef may be covered with corals again in as few as 10 or 15 years. But the temperature of the ocean is now high enough that global mass bleaching events seem to be growing more frequent. If they become routine, many of the world’s coral reefs may never be able to themselves. Within a decade, certain kinds of branching and plate coral could be extinct, reef scientists say, along with a variety of small fish that rely on them for protection from predators. “I don’t think the Great Barrier Reef will ever again be as great as it used to be — at least not in our lifetimes,” said C. Mark Eakin, a reef expert with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in Silver Spring, Md. Dr. Eakin was an author of the new paper and heads a program called Coral Reef Watch, producing predictive maps to warn when coral bleaching is imminent. Even though last year’s El Niño has ended, water temperatures are high enough that his maps are showing continued hot water across millions of square miles of the ocean. Kim M. Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who was not involved in the writing of the new paper, described it and the more recent findings as accurate, and depressing. She said she saw extensive coral devastation last year off Kiritimati Island, part of the Republic of Kiribati several thousand miles from Australia and a place she visits regularly in her research. With the international effort to fight climate change at risk of losing momentum, “ocean temperatures continue to march upward,” Dr. Cobb said. “The idea that we’re going to have 20 or 30 years before we reach the next bleaching and mortality event for the corals is basically a fantasy. ”
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Palestinian UN Envoy Threatens Donald Trump If He Keeps Promise To Move Embassy To Jerusalem
Geoffrey Grider
Palestinian UN Envoy Threatens Donald Trump If He Keeps Promise To Move Embassy To Jerusalem The Palestinian ambassador to the UN on Friday warned President-elect Donald Trump that if he dares to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the Palestinians would “make life miserable” for the United States at the United Nations. 14, 2016 The Palestinian ambassador to the UN on Friday warned President-elect Donald Trump that if he dares to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the Palestinians would “make life miserable” for the United States at the United Nations. “Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.” Zechariah 12:2 (KJV) EDITOR’S NOTE: Donald Trump’s campaign promise to move the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is t he whole reason why I supported him in the first place. From a Bible prophecy perspective the implications and ramifications of such a move are off the charts. We warned from the very start that this move could easily trigger the Psalm 83 War. And right on cue, here comes the Palestinians protesting it already. Things are about to get very, very interesting…to say the least. “If people attack us by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, which is a violation of Security Council resolutions, it is a violation of Resolution 181 of the UN general assembly that was drafted by the U.S. … it means they are showing belligerency towards us. … If they do that nobody should blame us for unleashing all of the weapons that we have in the UN to defend ourselves and we have a lot of weapons in the UN,” Riyad Mansour said . Mansour conceded that such a move could not be passed as a Security Council resolution because of the U.S. veto. Nevertheless, he warned Trump, “Maybe I can’t have resolutions in the Security Council but I can make their lives miserable everyday with precipitating a veto on my admission as a member state.” Mansour warned that he would “reopen the whole Pandora’s Box” of verdicts in the International Criminal Court of Justice on the issue of Israel’s security fence and the settlements. He added that “it is illegal to defy Security Council resolutions that the U.S. is party to that the unilateral action by Israel annexing East Jerusalem is illegal and it is null and void. If the U.S. administration wants to defy international law they are doing something illegal.”
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Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards: GOP ’Should Triple’ Our Funding - Breitbart
Pam Key
Thursday on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show‎,” while discussing Republicans’ plan to defund Planned Parenthood, Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards called on the GOP to “triple the funding for Planned Parenthood. ” Richards said, “If there were more members of Congress who could get pregnant, we wouldn’t be arguing about birth control. ” She continued, “I actually think if you’re concerned about preventing unintended pregnancy and the need for abortion in this country, you should triple the funding for Planned Parenthood. That’s the work we do. ” She added, “I think it’s important to understand, it’s not only that they want to end access to Planned Parenthood, they want to end access to care for a lot of folks in this country. And I believe it’s going to cause a healthcare crisis. ” Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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Report: Donald Trump Will Exit Paris Climate Change Agreement
Charlie Spiering
President Donald Trump has decided to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, according to a report from Axios reporter Jonathan Swan citing two sources with knowledge of the decision. [The news was confirmed by several mainstream media outlets. On Twitter, Trump indicated that an announcement was coming soon. “I will be announcing my decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days,” he wrote. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” The decision wreaks havoc on former President Barack Obama’s legacy as president, despite pleas from world leaders for the United States to show leadership on climate change and remain in the agreement, Trump’s decision fulfills a key campaign promise to supporters of his run for president, widely supported by Republican members of congress who felt that the treaty unfairly jeopardized the American economy. Opponents of the climate deal were concerned after White House economic advisor Gary Cohn told reporters that the president was “evolving on the issue” during his trip overseas. His daughter Ivanka and Jared Kushner reportedly channelled support for the deal behind the scenes at the White House, encouraging climate change activists that Trump might change his mind. Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO, also supported remaining in the treaty. On May 9th, Obama defended his climate change legacy, calling the agreement “the one that will define the contours of this century more dramatically perhaps than any other. ” In October 2016, Obama described the deal as “the best possible shot to save the one planet we’ve got. ” New York and Washington elites agreed, downplaying the future of coal as an energy source and urging more federal subsidies for wind and solar investments. Trump’s EPA Secretary Scott Pruitt and White House senior advisor Stephen K. Bannon urged the president to keep his campaign promise to kill the agreement and put American energy and job growth first.
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Yates Admits Defying Executive Order Partly ’as a Policy Matter’ - Breitbart
Joel B. Pollak
Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, testifying in the Senate on Monday, attempted to defend her decision to defy President Donald Trump’s executive order suspending travel from several countries in January. [Yates told the Senate Judiciary Committee that her decision was made “not purely as a policy matter,” but suggested that she had been guided by “statements” that were made “contemporaneously or prior” to the order. She did not specify which statements she meant, but several of the judges who have blocked the executive order — and its less ambitious successor — have referred to statements made by Trump on the campaign trail about a “Muslim ban. ” Under questioning, Yates admitted that “people of goodwill can make different decisions about this” — having just argued, moments before, that the conclusion of the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel was so wrong that it had to be overruled. Sen. John Cornyn ( ) was the first to question Yates: Cornyn: Ms. Yates, this is the first time that you’ve appeared before Congress since you left the Department of Justice, and I just wanted to ask you a question about your decision to refuse to defend the president’s executive order. In the letter that you sent to Congress, you point out that the executive order itself was drafted in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel, and you point out that the Office of Legal Counsel reviewed it to determine whether, in its view, the proposed executive order was lawful on its face, and properly drafted. Is it true that the Office of Legal Counsel did conclude it was lawful on its face, and properly drafted? Yates: Yes, they did. The Office of — Cornyn: And you overruled them? Yates: I did. The Office of Legal — Cornyn: What is your authority to overrule the office of legal counsel whether it comes to a legal determination? Yates: The Office of Legal Counsel has a narrow function and that is to look at the face of an executive order to determine purely on its face whether there is some set of circumstances under which at least some part of the executive order may be lawful. And, importantly, they do not look beyond the face of the executive order, for example, at statements that are made contemporaneously or prior to the execution of the E. O. that may bear on its intent and purpose. That office does not look at those factors. And in determining the constitutionality of this executive order, that was an important analysis to engage in, and one that I did. Cornyn: Well, Ms. Yates, I thought the Department of Justice had a tradition of defending a presidential action in court if there are reasonable arguments in its favor regardless whether they may prove to be ultimately persuasive — which, of course, is up to the courts to decide and not you, correct? Yates: It is correct, but not often times, but not always, the Civil Division of the Department of Justice will defend an president or an action of Congress if there is a reasonable argument to be made. But in this instance, all arguments have to be based on truth. Because we’re the Department of Justice. We’re not just a law firm. We’re the Department of Justice. Cornyn: You distinguish “the truth” from “lawful”? Yates: Yes, because in this instance, in looking at what the intent was of the executive order, which was derived, in part, from an analysis of facts outside the face of the order, that is part of what led to our conclusion that it was not lawful, yes. Cornyn: Well, Mrs. Yates, you had a distinguished career for 27 years at the Department of Justice. And I voted for your confirmation because I believe you had a distinguished career. And I have to tell you that I find it enormously disappointing that you somehow vetoed the decision of the Office of Legal Counsel with regard to the lawfulness of the president’s order, and decided instead that you would countermand the executive order of the President of the United States because you happen to disagree with it as a policy matter. I just have to say that. Yates: I appreciate that, Senator. And let me make one thing clear. It was not purely as a policy matter. And in fact, I remember my confirmation hearing. And in an exchange that I had with you, and others of your colleagues, where you specifically asked me in that hearing that if the president asked me to do something that was unlawful or unconstitutional, and one of your colleagues — or even that would reflect poorly on the Department of Justice, would I say no? And I looked at this. I made a determination that I believed that it was unlawful. I also thought that it was inconsistent with the principles of the Department of Justice. And I said no. And that’s what I promised you I would do. And That’s what I did. Sen. Dick Durbin ( ) rode to Yates’s rescue, citing three federal courts that had agreed with Yates, blocking the executive order on the grounds that it was improperly motivated by religious discrimination. Durbin did not mention, however, that a federal judge in Boston had declined to block the executive order, ruling that the president was well within his authority, and that the order satisfied the legal standard of “rational basis” review: Here, the President has exercised his broad authority under 8 U. S. C. § 1182( f) to suspend entry of certain aliens purportedly in order to ensure that resources are available to review screening procedures and that adequate standards are in place to protect against terrorist attacks. Under questioning from Sen. Ted Cruz ( ) Yates said that the statute authorizing Trump’s executive order was superseded by a later statute prohibiting religious discrimination, and that the fundamental issue was the constitutionality of the order. Cruz replied that the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) had reviewed the executive order for its lawfulness. Yates said she was not convinced that the order was lawful, and she had to look “outside the face of the document. ” “It was appropriate for us to look at the intent behind the president’s actions,” Yates said. Later, however, she allowed: “People of goodwill can make different decisions about this. ” How that squared with her earlier argument that arguments in favor of the executive order were not based on truth, she did not explain. Sen. John Kennedy ( ) asked her to clarify, and Yates said that she would have had to argue that the intent had not been discriminatory, which she did not believe that she could do. Sen. Kennedy then asked whether she would have declined to defend an act of Congress that used exactly the same language, and she said yes. She cited the previous example of the Department of Justice declining to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. Sen. Kennedy pointed out that that had been a political decision. “Who appointed you to the United States Supreme Court?” Kennedy asked. BOOMSen Kennedy to #SallyYates: “Who appointed you to the Supreme Court?” Then, watch Sally look for help @ end! pic. twitter. — BostonBobblehead (@DBloom451) May 8, 2017, Yates also did not explain why she had chosen to veto the executive order, rather than resigning. President Trump later fired her. Update: websites and social media are celebrating Yates’s exchange with Cruz, as if she “schooled” him. Yates cited the provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which has never been interpreted to overrule the president’s broad authority under 8 U. S. C. 1182( f) to determine immigration policy — a statute that Yates failed to name when Cruz asked her about it, yet which is central to the executive order. 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.
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Fukushima Radiation Has Contaminated The Entire Pacific Ocean – And It’s Going To Get Worse
Eddy Lavine
posted by Eddie The nuclear disaster has contaminated the world’s largest ocean in only five years and it’s still leaking 300 tons of radioactive waste every day. What was the most dangerous nuclear disaster in world history? Most people would say the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine, but they’d be wrong. In 2011, an earthquake, believed to be an aftershock of the 2010 earthquake in Chile, created a tsunami that caused a meltdown at the TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan. Three nuclear reactors melted down and what happened next was the largest release of radiation into the water in the history of the world. Over the next three months, radioactive chemicals, some in even greater quantities than Chernobyl , leaked into the Pacific Ocean. However, the numbers may actually be much higher as Japanese official estimates have been proven by several scientists to be flawed in recent years. If that weren’t bad enough, Fukushima continues to leak an astounding 300 tons of radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean every day . It will continue do so indefinitely as the source of the leak cannot be sealed as it is inaccessible to both humans and robots due to extremely high temperatures. It should come as no surprise, then, that Fukushima has contaminated the entire Pacific Ocean in just five years. This could easily be the worst environmental disaster in human history and it is almost never talked about by politicians, establishment scientists, or the news. It is interesting to note that TEPCO is a subsidiary of General Electric (also known as GE), one of the largest companies in the world, which has considerable control over numerous news corporations and politicians alike. Could this possibly explain the lack of news coverage Fukushima has received in the last five years? There is also evidence that GE knew about the poor condition of the Fukushima reactors for decades and did nothing. This led 1,400 Japanese citizens to sue GE for their role in the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Even if we can’t see the radiation itself, some parts of North America’s western coast have been feeling the effects for years. Not long after Fukushima, fish in Canada began bleeding from their gills, mouths, and eyeballs. This “disease” has been ignored by the government and has decimated native fish populations, including the North Pacific herring. Elsewhere in Western Canada, independent scientists have measured a 300% increase in the level of radiation. According to them, the amount of radiation in the Pacific Ocean is increasing every year. Why is this being ignored by the mainstream media? It might have something to do with the fact that the US and Canadian governments have banned their citizens from talking about Fukushima so “people don’t panic.” Further south in Oregon, USA, starfish began losing legs and then disintegrating entirely when Fukushima radiation arrived there in 2013. Now, they are dying in record amounts, putting the entire oceanic ecosystem in that area at risk. However, government officials say Fukushima is not to blame even though radiation in Oregon tuna tripled after Fukushima . In 2014, radiation on California beaches increased by 500 percent. In response, government officials said that the radiation was coming from a mysterious “unknown” source and was nothing to worry about. However, Fukushima is having a bigger impact than just the West coast of North America. Scientists are now saying that the Pacific Ocean is already radioactive and is currently at least 5-10 times more radioactive than when the US government dropped numerous nuclear bombs in the Pacific during and after World War II. If we don’t start talking about Fukushima soon, we could all be in for a very unpleasant surprise. What are your thoughts on this news? Please share, like, and comment on this article! source:
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At Wells Fargo, Complaints About Fraudulent Accounts Since 2005 - The New York Times
Stacy Cowley
In 2005, the year John G. Stumpf became president of Wells Fargo, Julie Tishkoff, then an administrative assistant at the bank, wrote to the company’s human resources department about what she had seen: employees opening sham accounts, forging customer signatures and sending out unsolicited credit cards. She kept complaining for four years, and she was not alone. For years similar or identical complaints from Wells Fargo workers flowed in to the bank’s internal ethics hotline, its human resources department, and individual managers and supervisors. In at least two cases in 2011, employees wrote letters directly to Mr. Stumpf — who became the company’s chief executive in 2007, and its board chairman in 2010 — to describe the illegal activities they had witnessed. Since the ethics scandal erupted in public last month, Mr. Stumpf has testified twice in front of Congress that he and other senior managers only realized in 2013 that they had a big problem on their hands — two years after the bank had started firing people over the issue. Now, regulators, lawmakers, current and former employees, and others are asking: How was it that this drumbeat of complaints did not set off loud alarm bells earlier? And why have the brunt of the firings fallen on workers, not on the managers and executives who shaped the company’s aggressive sales culture? “It appears that there were activities going on that indicate you may have known much earlier” than 2013, Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, said while questioning Mr. Stumpf in a House Financial Services Committee hearing last month. Ms. Waters pointed to court filings from 2008 from employees who tried to blow whistles, and to a Wells Fargo sales quality manual that was updated in 2007 — just months after Mr. Stumpf became chief executive, and with his executive guidance — to remind employees that they needed to obtain a customer’s consent before opening an account. Ms. Tishkoff was fired in 2009. At least two of her supervisors were aware of her complaints and ignored them, according to a wrongful termination lawsuit she filed against Wells Fargo in 2011. Those supervisors remain with the bank and are now regional presidents, responsible for overseeing thousands of workers at hundreds of branches. And since Sept. 8, when Wells Fargo said it would pay $185 million in fines for opening as many as two million customer accounts and credit cards without authorization, dozens of former employees have stepped forward to tell stories like Ms. Tishkoff’s — describing the company’s toxic sales culture and their own thwarted efforts to use the bank’s internal channels to draw attention to the scope of the problem. “Everybody knew there was fraud going on, and the people trying to flag it were the ones who got in trouble,” said Ricky M. Hansen Jr. a former branch manager in Scottsdale, Ariz. who was fired after contacting both human resources and the ethics hotline about illegal accounts he had seen being opened. Wells Fargo says that it investigates all complaints of impropriety from its ethics hotline or other channels. But it added that until 2013, it handled each complaint about account fraud individually. It was not until three years ago that the company realized it had a broader problem, according to Mary Eshet, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman. At that point, Wells Fargo began an internal investigation. By then, though, the issue had caught the attention of prosecutors and regulators. In May 2015, the Los Angeles city attorney filed a sweeping lawsuit against Wells Fargo over its creation of unauthorized accounts. Last month, the bank settled that case and two related actions brought by federal regulators. Ms. Eshet cited the steps the company took in response to the scandal, including its move this month to drop the aggressive sales goals that employees said created pressure to act unethically. “We have made fundamental changes to help ensure team members are not being pressured to sell products, customers are receiving the right solutions for their financial needs, our culture is upheld at all times and that customer satisfaction is high,” Ms. Eshet said. But former employees whose cases are detailed in lawsuits against the bank say that many of the managers at the branch level and above who heard their ethics complaints did nothing and are still there. Between 2011 and this year, Wells Fargo terminated the employment of 5, 300 workers for creating as many as two million unauthorized bank and credit card accounts around 10 percent of those worked at the branch manager level or above, according to the bank, but only one — an area president — had a management role. In 2009, Yesenia Guitron, a banker in the Northern California town of St. Helena, filed reports to her branch manager, to her branch manager’s boss and to Wells Fargo’s ethics hotline about a colleague who she said was opening and closing accounts without customer permission. Those and other fraudulent acts continued despite her complaints, and were openly tolerated by the branch’s management, Ms. Guitron told Wells Fargo’s human resources department. In 2010, Ms. Guitron was called into her boss’s office and told she was being fired for insubordination. Ms. Guitron filed a wrongful termination lawsuit, submitting into the public record thousands of pages of documents and testimony from multiple branch workers about the unethical acts they said they witnessed. The court sided with Wells Fargo and dismissed the case in 2012. Ms. Guitron had an “objectively reasonable” belief that the bank had acted fraudulently, but Wells Fargo still had grounds to fire her because she fell short of her sales goals, the judge ruled. Pam Rubio, the manager of the branch where Ms. Guitron worked, is now a private banker at Wells Fargo, managing money for wealthy clients. Also still with the bank is Greg Morgan, the regional manager whom Ms. Guitron approached about the problems at her branch. He was promoted last year and is now Wells Fargo’s regional president of the San Francisco market. (Neither Ms. Rubio nor Mr. Morgan responded to requests for comment.) “We agree with the judge’s finding that her claims of retaliation had no merit,” Wells Fargo said in a written statement. Wells Fargo said that Ms. Tishkoff was terminated “for falsifying expense reports” and that the bank “does not tolerate retaliation against team members who report their concerns. ” Ms. Tishkoff’s side of the story is that she accidentally submitted several expense items twice and that the company used that as a premise to fire her. The case was settled in 2012, according to Ms. Tishkoff’s lawyer, who said the terms of the deal prevented her from speaking publicly about it. As outrage over the bank’s actions has grown, frustrated former employees have said the bank should have heeded what they have said were widespread warnings and taken action much earlier — a fact Mr. Stumpf acknowledged at a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee. “We should have done more sooner,” he said. That answer does not satisfy Mr. Hansen, the former branch manager in Scottsdale, who said he was fired for speaking up. Mr. Hansen started at Wells Fargo in 2008 and worked his way up to a management job. A number of his region’s top performers openly cheated, he said, but in 2011, while stationed away from his branch to cover for a colleague, he came on a particularly egregious case: The branch’s bankers were inventing fake businesses and opening accounts in their names, he said. “I called H. R. and said, ‘What do I do? ’” Mr. Hansen recalled. “And they said, ‘Go to the ethics hotline. ’” “They said that if we knew about fraud going on and did not report it, we could be terminated for that,” he said. Mr. Hansen said he called the ethics line. The investigator asked for specifics, such as the account numbers and the names of the bankers who opened them. Mr. Hansen said he pulled up the accounts to gather that information. One month later, he was fired for improperly looking up account information. “They said, ‘Are you aware that what you did was an ethics violation? ’” Mr. Hansen recalled. Incensed, Mr. Hansen sent an email in 2011 to Mr. Stumpf and several human resources executives describing what he had witnessed. The company responded by offering to rehire him in a reduced role, making $30, 000 less than he had before. He took the job because he needed one, he said, but quit two years later from the stress of working in what he considered to be an unethical place. Rasheeda Kamar, a former branch manager in New Milford, N. J. also sent Mr. Stumpf a letter in 2011, the day she learned she was going to be fired for falling short of her branch’s sales goals. Bankers were reaching those goals artificially, she warned him: “Funds are moved to new accounts to ‘show’ growth when in actuality there is no net gain to the company’s deposit base. ” Her letter, like Mr. Hansen’s, was sent two years before Mr. Stumpf says he became aware that such activity was prevalent. Ms. Kamar said she felt vindicated last month, when Wells Fargo admitted that thousands of its workers had acted illegally — until she read a quotation from Mr. Stumpf blaming the bank’s employees, not its corporate culture, for the fiasco. “I thought, ‘How dare he? ’” she said in an interview. “They knew, and they turned a blind eye. ” She forwarded her 2011 email to Mr. Stumpf to Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who quoted it to Mr. Stumpf when the Senate Banking Committee grilled him. “I don’t remember that one,” Mr. Stumpf replied.
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European Media Jihad Against Geert Wilders
Robert Spencer
European Media Jihad Against Geert Wilders As they lose their grip, the political and media elites are getting desperate. November 4, 2016 Robert Spencer The mainstream media in Western Europe and North America isn’t even pretending to be an objective news source anymore; instead, “journalists” are working openly to quell what looks increasingly, on both sides of the Atlantic, like a popular revolution against the hegemony of the self-appointed political and media aristocracy that seems hell-bent on driving Western civilization over the cliff. And so it’s time for another round of their Two-Minutes Hate against Dutch politician and freedom fighter Geert Wilders. Wilders has yet again gone on trial in the Netherlands for “hate speech,” and this time the case against him is especially flimsy: as Europe is roiled by the criminal activity of Muslim migrants, he is being accused of “hate speech” for saying that the massive influx of immigrants from Morocco (from which most of the Muslim migrants in the Netherlands come) has to be stopped. This trial could very easily backfire on the Dutch inquisitors, and make Wilders more popular than ever with the people of the Netherlands and Europe in general, as they are increasingly fed up with the political and media elites’ forcing them to accept a massive influx of Muslim migrants that ensures a future only of civil strife, bloodshed, and Sharia oppression. Consequently, those elites are trying desperately to shore up their position. Wilders chanted “No more Moroccans” at a rally. The horror! To any sane person, this means “Stop the influx of Moroccan immigrants who only inflate crime rates and welfare rolls.” To the media, which at this point is quite insane, insofar as insanity means an inability or refusal to accept reality, this means “Genocide!” And so, in this Deutsche Welle (DW) piece by freelance “journalist” Teri Schultz, we’re told that European Parliament lawmaker Cecile Kyenge, who was born in Congo, had “numerous racial slurs - not to mention, bananas, literally - thrown at her, along with suggestions she go back to ‘her country.’” Does this have anything to do with the crime and civil strife that are the foundations for Wilders’ position? Of course not, but Wilders, Schultz tells us, is (of course) “far-right,” that all-purpose and meaningless semaphore that serves only to signal to right-thinking Deutsche Welle readers that Wilders is, as far as the media elites are concerned, unsavory, and must be opposed and shunned, his positions left unexamined. Schultz contacted me to serve as the villain of her piece, being sure to tell her hapless readers that I am “known for extreme anti-Islam views,” to make sure that if any of them are foolish enough to find themselves agreeing with me, they will immediately reverse themselves and get their minds right. The term “extreme” also, since the Western governing class unanimously refers to jihad terrorists as “extremists,” also implies that I am a terrorist. After the article came out, I challenged Schultz on this; she replied: “I don’t think even you would consider your views ‘mainstream’, do you?” I responded: “Absolutely yes. My views were the broad mainstream in the Western world from 632 AD until the 1960s. What changed? Not Islamic teaching.” To that she said: “Okay. You’d have to argue it with another expert, which I am not. But thanks again for contributing.” Indeed, she is just a mouthpiece for the views the political and media elites want us to hold. In any case, Schultz’s article merely reveals the desperation of the ruling class and the self-appointed opinion-shapers. They can call those of us who wish to defend the people and culture of Europe and North America “far-right” and “extreme” every day (and they do), but the public can see with their eyes what is happening. Wilders’ popularity isn’t growing because he is a charming fellow (which is, of course, not to say that he isn’t). It’s growing because he speaks the truths that the political and media elites are in a frenzy to obscure. And it’s only going to get worse for them: the Brexit vote and the Trump candidacy (whether he wins or loses) shows that their hegemony is beginning to be challenged. Those challenges will continue, and grow. They will before too long be decisively voted out and repudiated.
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Ambush Kills 8 Police Officers in Egypt - The New York Times
Declan Walsh
CAIRO — Unidentified gunmen sprayed bullets on a police minibus as it passed through a Cairo district early on Sunday, killing eight plainclothes officers in an ambush that was later claimed by the Islamic State. It was the deadliest attack on Egypt’s security forces in the capital in months, and a sharp reminder of the continuing threat from Islamist insurgents while President Abdel Fattah is under increasing scrutiny for his harsh crackdown on political dissent. Although the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility could not be independently verified, its format and language were consistent with earlier statements from the group. The Islamic State also claims to have downed a Russian passenger jet that crashed into the Sinai Desert in October, killing 224 people. The Egyptian Interior Ministry said in a statement that four assailants had fired on the unmarked police minibus as it passed through Helwan, an industrial center on the southern edge of greater Cairo. The police officers were on routine security duties, the ministry said. Images on social media showed the bloodied bodies of the officers, dressed in shirts and jeans, slumped in and around a white vehicle that was raked with bullet holes. In a statement circulated on social media, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, said that “soldiers of the caliphate” had carried out the attack in retaliation for the imprisonment of “pure women” in Egyptian jails — a common justification for violence by Egyptian militants. The group identified one of the dead officers and said the attackers had taken guns from the police before escaping unhindered. Hours later, Egyptian security officials said they had tracked the assailants to a hilly area on the edge of Helwan, which they said had been sealed off as they conducted a search. Islamist insurgents based in Sinai have been fighting the Egyptian government for years, but the scale and frequency of attacks increased after the military ousted the elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, in July 2013. Fighting has been mostly confined to Sinai, where the Egyptian military has a heavy presence and which is mostly sealed off to the news media. But violence has occasionally spilled over into Cairo, usually in gun attacks and small bombings. In November, four police officers at a checkpoint in Cairo were killed in a gun attack that was also claimed by the Islamic State. By lunchtime on Sunday, a funeral was underway for the slain officers, who were honored with coffins at a service attended by the interior minister, Maj. Gen. Magdi and a row of police commanders. Fears over the spread of the Islamic State, which is based in Syria and Iraq but also has a muscular presence in Libya, have helped ensure Western support for Mr. Sisi even as he faces renewed criticism for a harsh, crackdown on political dissent in Egypt. More than 1, 200 people were arrested last month after public protests over the transfer of two Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia. Almost 600 of them have been formally charged, according to rights groups. Mr. Sisi’s popularity has also been damaged by public anger at repeated episodes of police brutality, often over trivial matters, that have resulted in the deaths of ordinary citizens. Spontaneous street protests erupted twice in recent months after officers shot and killed people in separate arguments over a taxi fare and a cup of tea. The Interior Ministry, which controls the police, was criticized by Egypt’s only media union after two journalists were arrested during a police raid on the union’s headquarters on May 1. The furor over the arrests, which built steadily during the week, was to be debated in the Egyptian Parliament on Sunday, the state Al Ahram newspaper reported on its website. Most newspapers did not publish blackened front pages on Sunday to protest the arrests, as the union had said they would.
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The Modern Love Podcast: Ruth Negga Reads ‘My Touchstone and a Heart of Gold’ - The New York Times
The New York Times
In this week’s podcast, the actress Ruth Negga (“Loving”) reads “My Touchstone and a Heart of Gold,” the story of a woman who realizes that loving her means loving her tortoise, too. You can listen to her reading using the player above, or find the episode on iTunes and Google Play Music. The author, Caroline Leavitt, is a novelist. Her book “Is This Tomorrow and Pictures of You” was a New York Times best seller. You can find her on Twitter. Ms. Negga’s latest movie, “Loving,” was released last week. The film tells the story of Richard and Mildred Loving, whose Supreme Court case led to the unanimous decision that marital laws were unconstitutional.
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Central Park, Bucolic but Aging, Is in a Quest for $300 Million - The New York Times
Robin Pogrebin
Belvedere Castle in Central Park looks indestructible, a fortress of stone presiding over the Great Lawn. But the leaks like a sieve. “Rain pours into the building,” Douglas Blonsky, the president and chief executive of the Central Park Conservancy, the park’s private custodian, said on a recent tour. The Conservatory Garden on Fifth Avenue still blooms with flowers, but the cracked paving hasn’t been touched since the 1930s, and its elegant geyser fountain requires constant repairs on plumbing that dates to the Robert Moses era. The Ravine near 104th Street, with its rushing waterfall, has pools clogged with sediment and needs dredging. Central Park this summer may seem a bucolic oasis, and it is widely considered one of the nation’s most successful urban parks. Yet beneath the surface, experts say, it is suffering the debilitating effects of time and modern use, and it will decay further unless its historic structures and landscapes are restored. On Thursday, the Central Park Conservancy is set to announce an ambitious $300 million and improvement effort. The conservancy’s plan, “Forever Green: Ensuring the Future of Central Park,” might sound excessive, an effort by rich New Yorkers to spruce up their backyard when other neighborhoods are in dire need of better open spaces. Only four years ago the conservancy received $100 million from the hedge fund manager John A. Paulson. But others argue that the park has been a victim of its own success. As it has been improved over the years, the number of annual visitors has mushroomed to 42 million, from 12 million in 1981. “It’s being trampled to death — visitation now is heavier than ever in its history,” said Adrian Benepe, the former New York City parks commissioner who is now the director of city park development at the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. “This is America’s great work of art of the 19th century because it set a standard for what a great urban park should be that has been copied all around the world. ” Some have said that Central Park’s success in securing private support only highlights the need of parks all over the city for public dollars. “It’s a reminder that the city should be investing more of its budget in parks,” said Daniel L. Squadron, a Democratic state senator. “The fact that some conservancies are able to solve it doesn’t reduce the need to do more. ” But others counter that the private support of Central Park enables the city to spend public dollars in other boroughs. “It frees up the city to put its capital dollars into other parks,” Mr. Benepe said. To this end, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a plan in 2014 to spend $285 million over four years to improve parks in poor neighborhoods and last year struck a deal with eight of the largest park conservancies to donate expertise, workers’ time and cash to those areas. “Central Park really has happened without tax payer debt service,” said Tupper Thomas, the executive director of New Yorkers for Parks, an advocacy organization. “They’ve set the precedent that you can give money to parks privately. ” Ethan Carr, a landscape historian and preservationist, said the park requires ongoing repair. “There were decades of deferred maintenance,” said Mr. Carr, who edited the eighth volume of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, the social reformer who designed Central Park with the English architect Calvert Vaux. “That’s a tremendous burden of upkeep, and the conservancy has taken that on. ” The conservancy has served as the steward of Central Park since 1980 and today has an annual budget of $65 million for operating and capital expenses, 25 percent of which comes from the city through a management agreement that was renewed in 2013. (The conservancy must raise the remaining 75 percent privately.) It has already raised $112 million toward its $300 million goal, which includes a $25 million gift from the Thompson Family Foundation that will fund the restoration of Belvedere Castle and the park’s Children’s District, including the Dairy, Kinderberg, and Chess and Checkers House. The intention of the park’s designers went well beyond pastoral scenery to promoting a civilized, improved life for citizens. The Dairy at the southern end, for example, was constructed in 1870 as a place where farmers could bring children fresh milk. Today the structure needs new doors, windows, and stairs floors sag and the loggia could use a paint job. The Naumburg Bandshell, a site of free concerts, needs a new facade, stage and upgraded infrastructure. The new campaign also aims to return arches, bridges and waterways to the original vision of Olmsted and Vaux, much of it inspired by woodlands in the Adirondacks and the Catskills, as depicted in art from the period, like Asher Brown Durand’s painting “Kindred Spirits. ” The designers “wanted the North Woods to be the Adirondacks for people of New York City who couldn’t afford to go to the Adirondacks,” Mr. Blonsky said. Olmsted and Vaux were also meticulous managers of the park, though they found themselves ousted by Boss Tweed and frustrated by having to put the park back in order when they returned after his tenure. “The natural underwood has been grubbed up,” Olmsted wrote at the time, “the trees, to a height of 10 to 15 feet, trimmed to bare poles. ” “Forever Green” hopes to rebuild the landings surrounding the boat pond, some of which disappeared 100 years ago and were redone in the ’70s in a different style “We even brought the pitch pine back,” Mr. Blonsky said, referring to a type of tree. The landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh said the conservancy’s efforts represent a growing recognition of the importance of city parks by the private sector. “Private philanthropy is making extraordinary contributions to support and build urban parks at an unprecedented scale across the nation,” he said. Mr. Paulson, whose 2012 gift amounted to the largest monetary donation in the history of New York City’s — and possibly the nation’s — park system, said that of all his philanthropic activities, his investment in the conservancy “has had the highest impact by positively affecting more people per dollar invested than any other organization. ” Mr. Blonsky said that Mr. Paulson’s gift had been “transformative,” enabling the conservancy to start on many infrastructure projects and leverage other funds. Part of the goal of “Forever Green” is to make the park more . (The conservancy already turns fallen leaves into compost and recycles its garbage.) Ultimately, all the refurbishment may not be visible to the eye, like redoing a shore edge replacing the invasive Japanese knotweed with varied plant material or caring for the many species of trees, including willow, locust, dawn redwood, maple, oak and London plane. But parks all over the world will be learning from these efforts. The conservancy has long made a point of training park users and managers. Three years ago, the conservancy formalized this effort by establishing an educational arm: the Institute for Urban Parks, which is exploring a partnership with organizations like the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Despite having started at the conservancy 31 years ago — as a landscape architect — and having logged about six miles a day walking the park, Mr. Blonsky seems to retain a child’s sense of wonder about the place. “You’d never know you’re in the middle of Manhattan,” he said, as he trudged up a dirt path. “That’s the beauty of the park. It was all done to look like it was God’s work. ”
21,894
Why Letting Go, for Trump, Is No Small or Simple Task - The New York Times
Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman
WASHINGTON — President Trump is a man seriously susceptible to snagging himself in the nettles of obsession. In the last three weeks, no compulsion has so consumed his psyche, and his Twitter account, as the deeply held and shallowly sourced belief that President Barack Obama tapped his phones. So why can’t he just let go? First, aides say that Mr. Trump, who often says, “I’m, like, a really smart person” in public, is driven by a need to prove his legitimacy as president to the many critics who deem him an unworthy victor forever undercut by Hillary Clinton’s win in the popular vote. “The Russia investigation is being used by his political opponents to delegitimize his entire presidency and to delegitimize his agenda,” said Sam Nunberg, a longtime Trump political adviser who remains close with West Wing aides. “He will fight back, and he does it better than anybody in this White House. And that includes all those Republican National Committee guys he hired to defend him. ” Second, fighting back — in this case, against Mr. Obama, the F. B. I. director and members of his own party who say his claim about phone taps is false — is an important part of the president’s . The two most influential role models in Mr. Trump’s youth were men who preached the twin philosophies of relentless and the waging of total war against anyone perceived as a threat. Mr. Trump, according to one longtime adviser, is perpetually playing a soundtrack in his head consisting of advice from his father, Fred, a real estate developer who laid the weight of the family’s success on his son’s shoulders. Mr. Trump’s other mentor was the caustic and conniving lawyer Roy Cohn, who counseled Mr. Trump never to give in or concede error. Mr. Trump’s fixation on Mr. Obama and an F. B. I. investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election echoes his actions in New York decades ago, when he engaged in bitter personal battles with the mayor, Edward I. Koch, and the city fathers of Atlantic City. The battles were often to the detriment of Mr. Trump’s real estate and gambling businesses, according to Tim O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation,” a 2005 biography that documented his early years.’ ”“I don’t think there’s anything new here in his behavior,’’ said Mr. O’Brien, now the executive editor of Bloomberg View. “He’s been doing this kind of thing for the last 45 years. ’’” ’“He’s deeply, deeply insecure about how he’s perceived in the world, about whether or not he’s competent and deserves what he’s gotten,” he added. “There’s an unquenchable thirst for validation and love. That’s why he can never stay quiet, even when it would be wise strategically or emotionally to hold back. ” During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump fixated on almost every slight, especially in the news media, and singled out reporters for criticism at his rallies. A day after he was sworn in as the 45th president, he woke up furious that websites were running pictures showing that his inaugural crowd was demonstrably smaller than Mr. Obama’s 2009 throng. He instructed his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to convene the press in the White House for a over “biased” reporting on crowd size, which delighted the new president but struck nearly everyone else as a bizarre overreaction. Mr. Trump’s Twitter message on March 4 amounted to a declaration that he would be no one’s victim. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process,” the president wrote in an unspellchecked outburst, one of several that morning. “This is . Bad (or sick) guy!” Toughness, more than any other attribute, is what Mr. Trump has sought to project during his short and successful political career — and he believes his behavior makes him look tougher, no matter what the press thinks. As a presidential candidate, he wanted to look dour, and vetoed any campaign imagery that so much as hinted at weakness, aides said. Which is why every snapshot — down to the scowl attached to his Twitter account — features a sourpuss. “Like Churchill,” is what Mr. Trump would tell staffers when asked what look he was going for. Third, diversion is an important motive. Mr. Trump was able to change the subject by attacking Mr. Obama and floating unsubstantiated theories. At the time of his tweetstorm, he was trying to divert attention from a fresh embarrassment: Attorney General Jeff Sessions had failed to disclose, during confirmation hearings, that he had had contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. “With almost every barbed, unscripted tweet, he deletes some story his administration wants to tell,” said David Axelrod, one of Mr. Obama’s top advisers. “He reacts to every affront, real or imagined, in Pavlovian fashion. He beats every perceived slight to death and, even when he’s won the point, continues beating. ” Finally, Mr. Trump hasn’t let up because no one can stop him. Within the White House, aides describe a nearly paralytic inability to tell Mr. Trump that he has erred or gone too far on Twitter. On the day Mr. Trump fired off his message about Mr. Obama “tapping” his phones, his chief of staff, Reince Priebus — initially seen by some establishment Republicans as the best bulwark against Mr. Trump’s behavior — told people the White House was convinced that there was something there. The problem is that the two advisers who aren’t related to him but are powerful enough to try to change Mr. Trump’s behavior are mostly disinclined to do so. His chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, a rhetorical bomb thrower himself, counseled Mr. Trump to moderate his behavior at the end of the campaign — but he remains the West Wing adviser who most closely shares the president’s views on surveillance. One of the only other people whom Mr. Trump views as a peer is his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, but he prefers to spend his capital on economic issues and climate change. In a recent meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Cohn was speaking when Mr. Trump interrupted him. “Let me finish,’’ Mr. Cohn interjected, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction. Mr. Trump, unaccustomed to ceding the floor, let him make his point.
21,895
Federation of Greek Women: statement on the visit of Obama
Tom Winter (noreply@blogger.com)
November 20, 2016 - Fort Russ News - - 902.gr , translated by Tom Winter - "Behind the fiestas and the photo ops, Mr Obama, you came unwanted and you left unwanted" said the statement of the Federation of Greek Women on the visit of the US President. The statement criticizes the fact that Barack Obama "pronounced benedictions to our "left" prime minister for "reforms that bled the Greek people" and notes that "the US has a major share of responsibility for the massacre, not only of our own people, but also the peoples of the world." Details of the Communication: Mr. Obama came to Greece reading beautiful words ... He came equipped with "mirrors for the natives" with shameless and cheap flattery for the sacrifices of the Greek people and with an Ode to Democracy 'made in Greece' dripping from his lips. The outgoing US president had good words for our "left" prime minister for the "reforms" that bled the Greek people, apparently recognizing in Mr. Tsipras a kindred spirit (albeit at a lower level). He certainly avoided telling us that the "democracy," he so often mentioned has proved most convenient for exploiters of our toil. It is the "democracy" soaked through in child poverty and misery. It is the "democracy" of refugees and wars, the "democracy" of imperialist interventions from Ukraine to the Middle East and Africa. It is the "democracy" of the employers' terrorism, labor flexibility, one job for each two and three employees. It is the "democracy" that has many living on crumbs or the soup kitchens, while a trillion. euro of capital is concentrated in Greece on our slaving, and still looking to find where to invest to give more profits to monopoly groups. It is the "democracy" that supports an alliance of wolves and a mutual extermination system. This is the "democracy" concealed in the pat words of Mr. Obama And, of course, he shoved under the carpet what the Greek people know well, but that our Greek Prime Minister preferred to "forget:" that the US has a major share of responsibility for the massacre, not only of our own people, but also people of all the world, rapidly now extending to every corner of the globe. No family woman should fall into their snare! We, the women of the radical women's movement do not want, and can not be fooled by, the supposed gifts that the former "President of the World" came to offer us. We are the first to know that the famous egalitarianism of "democracy" he praised us for does not mean equality of standing! Instead, it is the most deceptive wrapping of our occupational and social inequity. We, the women of daily toil not accept the lure of supposedly "democratic" and "peaceful" declarations serving only the imperialist plans in our region and creating an immediate danger to our lives and future. We, the women who participate in associations and groups of IAHS have had enough fine words from wherever they come from. We will not succumb to the deadly lullaby of false hope and insidious complacency. We constantly exhibit with our participation in the daily struggle our desire for a life without exploitation and oppression, without wars, and without their attendant refugees. Behind the fiestas and the photo ops, you came unwanted and you left unwanted, Mr. Obama! Follow us on Facebook! Follow us on Twitter! Donate!
21,896
Election Night Orgy Shifts Positions So Everyone Can See Results Come In - The Onion - America's Finest News Source
null
Trump Raises Concern Over Members Of Urban Communities Voting More Than Zero Times ATKINSON, NH—Warning supporters that the troubling practice could affect the outcome of the election, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump expressed strong concern Friday that members of urban communities were voting more than zero times, sources reported. Nation Puts 2016 Election Into Perspective By Reminding Itself Some Species Of Sea Turtles Get Eaten By Birds Just Seconds After They Hatch WASHINGTON—Saying they felt anxious and overwhelmed just days before heading to the polls to decide a historically fraught presidential race, Americans throughout the country reportedly took a moment Thursday to put the 2016 election into perspective by reminding themselves that some species of sea turtles are eaten by birds just seconds after they hatch. Report: Election Day Most Americans’ Only Time In 2016 Being In Same Room With Person Supporting Other Candidate WASHINGTON—According to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, Election Day 2016 will, for the majority of Americans, mark the only time this year they will occupy the same room as a person who supports a different presidential candidate. Most Hotly Contested Down-Ballot Measures Of 2016 As Americans head to the polls, they will be presented with a number of issues to vote on besides choosing their representatives. The Onion gives voters an advance look at which measures will be included on the ballots in which states. New Heavy-Duty Voting Machine Allows Americans To Take Out Frustration On It Before Casting Ballot WASHINGTON—Saying the circumstances of this year’s presidential race made the upgrade necessary, election commissions throughout the country were reportedly working to install new heavy-duty voting machines this week that will allow Americans to physically take out their frustrations on the devices before casting their votes. Clinton Staff Readies EMP Launch To Disable All Nation’s Electronic Devices NEW YORK—In an effort to prepare for any new revelations that might emerge about her emails during her tenure as secretary of state, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton reportedly told her staff Tuesday to ready the launch of several electromagnetic pulses to disable all of the nation’s electronic devices. End Of Section
21,897
Campuses Cautiously Train Freshmen Against Subtle Insults - The New York Times
Stephanie Saul
WORCESTER, Mass. — A freshman tentatively raises her hand and takes the microphone. “I’m really scared to ask this,” she begins. “When I, as a white female, listen to music that uses the N word, and I’m in the car, or, especially when I’m with all white friends, is it O. K. to sing along?” The answer, from Sheree Marlowe, the new chief diversity officer at Clark University, is an unequivocal “no. ” The exchange was included in Ms. Marlowe’s presentation to recently arriving students focusing on subtle “microaggressions,” part of a new campus vocabulary that also includes “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings. ” Microaggressions, Ms. Marlowe said, are comments, snubs or insults that communicate derogatory or negative messages that might not be intended to cause harm but are targeted at people based on their membership in a marginalized group. Among her other tips: Don’t ask an Asian student you don’t know for help on your math homework or randomly ask a black student if he plays basketball. Both questions make assumptions based on stereotypes. And don’t say “you guys. ” It could be interpreted as leaving out women, said Ms. Marlowe, who realized it was offensive only when someone confronted her for saying it during a presentation. Clark, a private liberal arts college that has long prided itself on diversity and inclusion, is far from the only university stepping up discussions of racism and diversity in orientation programs this year. Once devoted to ice cream socials, tutorials on campus technology systems and advice on choosing classes, orientation for new students is changing significantly, with the issue taking on renewed urgency this year as universities increasingly try to address recent racial and ethnic tensions on campuses as well as an onslaught of sexual assault complaints. In addition to diversity sessions, many campuses train students on exactly what constitutes sexual consent as well as how to intervene when they see fellow students drinking excessively or poised to engage in nonconsensual sexual behavior. A bystander intervention presentation for arriving freshmen at Wesleyan University last Thursday — “We Speak We Stand” — featured students acting out fictional episodes of campus sexual violence, harassment and problematic drinking, with examples of how to intervene. “Each of you has the power to bring to light sexual violence in our community,” one student told the group. Fresh on the minds of university officials are last year’s highly publicized episodes involving racist taunts at the University of Missouri — which appear to have contributed to a precipitous decline in enrollment there this fall. “That closes your doors,” said Archie Ervin, the vice president for institute diversity at Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education. “If you have sustained enrollment drops and disproportionately students such as the state legislature can’t make up the gap. ” At the University of officials have put together a diversity presentation as a pilot program this year for 1, 000 freshmen — whom some colleges refer to with the term students. That program, expected to cost $150, 000 to $200, 000, follows incidents on campus last year. In one, a racist note was slipped under a black student’s door, prompting Patrick Sims, the university’s vice provost for diversity and climate, to post an emotional video on YouTube titled “Enough Is Enough. ” Lori Berquam, the university’s dean of students, said in an interview that the sessions would try to address the fact that some students in Wisconsin, a predominantly white state, had little exposure to people of other races until they got to Madison. “It would not be for a student to join us from the state of Wisconsin having had zero people of color in their high school,” Dr. Berquam said. In August, the University of Wisconsin system, which includes the Madison flagship and 25 other campuses, said it would ask the State Legislature for $6 million in funding to improve what it called the “university experience” for students. The request includes money for Fluent, a program described as a systemwide cultural training for faculty and staff members and students. But that budget request has provoked controversy. “If only the taxpayers and families had a safe space that might protect them from wasteful U. W. System spending on political correctness,” State Senator Stephen L. Nass, a Republican, said in a statement issued by his office, urging his fellow lawmakers to vote against the appropriation. Mr. Nass’s objection to spending money on diversity training reflects a rising resistance to what is considered campus political correctness. At some universities, alumni and students have objected to a variety of campus measures, including diversity training “safe spaces,” places where students from marginalized groups can gather to discuss their experiences and “trigger warnings,” disclaimers about possibly upsetting material in lesson plans. Some graduates have curtailed donations, and students have suggested that diversity training smacks of some sort of Communist program. The backlash was exemplified recently in a widely publicized letter sent to new freshmen at the University of Chicago by the dean of students, John Ellison. He warned that the university did not “support trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own. ” Still, the push to respond to complaints about subtle cultural insensitivity, as well as more overt racist behavior, continues on campuses across the country. About 75 chief diversity officers have been hired by colleges and universities in the past 18 months, according to Dr. Ervin’s organization. Ms. Marlowe, a lawyer who most recently was diversity officer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, was also recruited by two other colleges this year before settling at Clark, a manicured campus of about 3, 000 students an hour west of Boston in this heavily city. Her presentation on Aug. 27 aimed to help students identify microaggressions and to teach them how to intervene when they observe one. Microaggressions can be verbal, nonverbal or environmental, she said. “What’s an environmental microaggression?” Ms. Marlowe asked the auditorium of about 525 new students. She gave an example. “On your first day of class, you enter the chemistry building and all of the pictures on the wall are scientists who are white and male,” she said. “If you’re a female, or you just don’t identify as a white male, that space automatically shows that you’re not represented. ” A nonverbal microaggression could be when a white woman clutches her purse as a black or Latino person approaches. Another subset of microaggression is known as the microinvalidation, which includes comments suggesting that race plays a minor role in life’s outcomes, like “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough. ” For Clark students like Noelia Martinez, a Massachusetts resident who was born in Puerto Rico to Dominican parents, the session was an epiphany. “It helped me understand what I’ve been going through all of my life, basically,” she said, describing how she had endured stinging comments such as “You’re a really good student for a Hispanic. ” But Ms. Martinez, a sophomore transfer student, also realized that she, too, was guilty of microaggressions, because she frequently uses the phrase “you guys,” she said. “This helped me see that I’m a microaggressor, too. ” The presentation elicited a lively session, during which students asked about the N word, discrimination against white people and men, and the definition of “Asian. ” Ms. Marlowe said she questioned the validity of the concept of reverse racism, arguing that racism is a system in which a dominant race benefits from the oppression of others. But some students appeared slightly confused. “When you use the term ‘ ’ as a white woman, are you saying that you can choose your race?” one white male student asked. “I’ll give you an example,” Ms. Marlowe said. “I went to a conference. I was talking to this man. I thought he was black. I was talking about diversity and social justice. ” “He said, ‘I’m Cuban,’” Ms. Marlowe told the crowd. “I assumed he was black because he was the same skin complexion as me, and the same type of hair. ” But, Ms. Marlowe said, while it is sometimes difficult to identify a person’s racial or ethnic background based on appearance, she does not believe that gives license to people like Rachel A. Dolezal, the white woman who claimed to be while working for the N. A. A. C. P. in Spokane, Wash. “You can’t say you’re black if you’re not, historically. ” The student still seemed confused. “Maybe we can unpack it afterward,” Ms. Marlowe told the student. “You want to come see me afterward?”
21,898
Professor Wants Children to Learn ’Queer Theory’ in Elementary School - Breitbart
Tom Ciccotta
A professor at the University of Arizona who conducts research on science education is arguing that students should be taught “queer theory” in elementary school. [Kristin Gunckel, a professor at the University of Arizona, argued on behalf of introducing “queer theory” into American elementary school curriculum in a recent lecture that took place last month. “Queer theory,” according to Gunckel, examines why heterosexuality is portrayed as the “only normal and natural form” for human beings. “It challenges categorical thinking and specifically aims to disrupt the binary,” she wrote. “Queer theory examines how the social construction of sexuality is normalized so that heterosexuality is portrayed as the only normal and natural form of being human. ” “Queering science education means exploding binary gender and sexuality constructions, collapsing heteronormativity, and opening spaces within science education for the marginalized identities,” she adds. Heteronormativity is defined as “denoting or relating to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as the normal or preferred sexual orientation. In an academic research paper, Gunckel wrote that “school science plays a strong role in silencing queer identities and limiting science knowledge and learning. ” “In elementary school, it means not hiding sexuality from children. At all levels, it means providing space within the curriculum for students to see themselves and their families. Queering science education means making the invisible visible,” Gunckel wrote. Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about economics and higher education for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart. com
21,899
Links 11/12/16
Yves Smith
What Does Trump’s Victory Mean For NATO? NPR. Charles flags the close, which is an unusually pointed admission of the basis of our imperialist project. Brexit Turkey is swiftly heading towards a regime of terror Bangkok Post (furzy) Trump Transition. I am trying, and hope you will help in comments, in pulling the noise out of the signal regarding what Trump will actually do when he becomes President and whether it will succeed, “success” consisting first of it being implemented and second, making him and his Administration appear to be legitimate (as in keeping campaign promises, delivering tangible benefits to voters or powerful interest groups he needs on board). Despite all the changes in messaging over the course of his campaign, Trump was consistent on immigration, trade and lack of infrastructure investment, and depicted all three as ways to improve conditions for workers. And political scientist Tom Ferguson says that the data shows that the propensity to vote for Trump was highly correlated with voters giving negative answers to questions like whether the economy or the job situation had gotten better. Trump and Sanders found power lying in the street by virtue of both parities abandoning high employment levels and wage growth as major policy goals. But if Trump is to deliver on his promise of delivering on those goals, he is at odds with much of his own party, which is keen to keep workers weak and preserve free trade (the corporate Republicans, particularly ones whose constituents include globalized businesses like autos, for the obvious patronage reasons; libertarians, out of ideology). Given that trade policy and immigration enforcement are areas in which the President has considerable latitude, whether and how he engages in these fights will be early tests of whether he intends to and is able to execute. Finally bear in mind that Trump not only has a thin bench staff wise, but also intellectually. Many of his sources of advice are ideologues who like the Brexiters in the UK, may cheerily recommend changes which might sound ducky (to them) without having the foggiest clue that the operational implications are nightmarish. For instance, I’m told the Trump transition team on policy is apparently planning on recommending that the US exit Nafta and the WTO on the first day of the Trump presidency. Pray tell, have they looked into what this means for US customs, and for US exporters dealing with foreign customs? In other words, the right wing think tank types that the Trump team is relying on runs the risk of being as clueless about issues of organizational capacity as the Greeks were who thought they had a trump card (pun intended) in a Grexit (for those new to Naked Capitalism, we had an extensive series of posts on this topic, see here , here and here for some examples). So for instance, see this BBC story: Trump likes main Obamacare provisions ‘very much’ , specifically, covering pre-existing conditions and letting children up to age 26. The story describes how the Republicans might oppose Trump: Complicating the matter is that a “revise and reform” effort may not fly with Mr Trump’s ardent supporters and the cadre of arch-conservative politicians in Congress, who want to tear up the law “root and branch”. Mr Trump often broke with Republican orthodoxy while campaigning and didn’t pay a political price. He may learn that as president he won’t get far without his party establishment’s help. In WSJ Interview, Trump Says He Is Willing to Keep Parts of Health Law Wall Street Journal. Note the heavy emphasis on job creation. This had been the Democratic party lode star through the Carter era. He also defines Pence’s job, which is to help on health care and sell Trump policies to Congress. This is similar to the role Joe Biden played. And he rejected the Administration “find those moderate Syrians” strategy.