Twin Cities Got Its Black Desk Working These Streets?

eurweb |  *The internet is convinced that Officer Jacob Pederson of the Saint Paul Police Department is the mysterious man seen in a viral video wearing all black with an umbrella and a pink gas mask breaking out windows at a Minneapolis Auto Zone on Wednesday  just before the fire broke out and the riots started. 

Pederson is being accused of inciting the chaos that erupted in the city, as the Auto Zone was the first building to burn. 

Footage of the scene shows a protester confronting the man, who then becomes hostile and quickly attempts to flee the scene while being asked if he’s a cop.

On Thursday, Twitter user @GypsyEyedBeauty tweeted a series of screenshots allegedly from Pederson’s ex-wife, and the caption read, “Here are screenshots from his ex wife confirming this is him, along with his photo.”

Knowing He Couldn't Dance A Lick, Joe Biden STILL Thought He Was Daddy Long Legs...,

caitlinjohnstone |  I’ve been avoiding writing much about Tara Reade, for a lot of reasons. Firstly I’m a survivor of multiple rapes and it brings up a lot of ouch for me, especially since whenever I write about rape as a problem I always get a deluge of highly triggered men (and sometimes one or two highly traumatized women) calling me a man-hater and saying all kinds of nasty things to me. Secondly I’ve been trying not to spend too much time on the details of an election we all know is fake anyway between two establishment candidates we already know are deeply depraved.

But mostly I avoid the subject because it’s just so goddamn gross. It’s gross to watch liberals going around pretending they believe that Handsy Uncle Hair Sniffer would never dream of shoving his fingers into a woman without her consent. It’s gross watching the language of leftism being borrowed to defend pure, relentless victim smearing. It’s gross watching people who’ve built their political identities around pretending to care about women try to spin these allegations as Reade being dishonest for partisan reasons, when in reality that’s exactly what they themselves are doing.

Due to my experiences with and sensitivity to the subject matter, going through this stuff feels kind of like getting punched in the privates over and over again. There are smears everywhere, from the establishment narrative managers to their brainwashed rank-and-file herd. Yesterday some “KHive” asshole told me that Reade is mentally ill and talking about her experience will probably drive her to suicide, citing a baseless smear by McResistance pundit Sally Albright as his evidence. There’s a Twitter thread with thousands of shares going around right now where some liberal combed through all Reade’s old tweets highlighting typos she made and claiming they show Reade tweeting “in a Russian accent”.

It sucks because if we’re to build a healthy world we’re going to have to get rid of all the people who shouldn’t be in power, and the very first lot we should eliminate are the ones who abuse their power to assault the sexuality of other human beings. If you use your power to rape people, you will with absolute certainty use it to do other unconscionable things as well, so eliminating those who do so is the first step toward health. That’s step one, and we can’t even get there, because blind partisan hackery turns pussyhat-wearing liberals into a bunch of snarling male supremacists.

Blacks Truly Do Hate Ni**ers - But "Black Privilege" Is As Preoposterous As "Gynocracy"

wsws |  Intended as a pilot for a potential full-length series, Black & Privileged is set in a neighborhood on Chicago’s south side. Upon its July release on Netflix, the film reached the top 10 most-viewed list on the streaming platform and has been featured prominently at a number of award ceremonies focused on African-American filmmaking.

While in reality a seriously impoverished community, the fictionalized version of Englewood in Black & Privileged is a well-off neighborhood whose residents are mostly upper-middle class African-American businessmen and women. One of the film’s central characters explains, in regard to the neighborhood’s composition, “We searched through the city of Chicago for folks who not only cared about this community, but they cared about the people. And they had to understand the value of money. So yes, we have our own schools, we have our own banks, we hired our own police force.”

In Harris’s film, the lives of Englewood’s happy residents are disrupted when a nearby housing project is torn down, causing low-income blacks to turn up in the wealthy gated community. This sets off an existential crisis among the well-heeled African Americans.

“If this happens, like, everybody’s going to leave—the doctors, the lawyers, entrepreneurs like myself … They’re all gone,” warns Eldon (Hendrix), on learning the unsettling news. The prosperous, self-deluded denizens of Engelwood ludicrously choose to interpret the influx of lower-income people as a scheme hatched by the “the [white] man” to break up their idyllic community.

Black and Privileged is at its best when it skewers the self-righteousness and hypocrisy of these layers. Another main character, Dawn (Halfkenny), initially supportive of the new neighbors, quotes W.E.B. DuBois: “To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” She insists it is the community’s job to lend a “helping hand” to these poor souls. Her enthusiasm turns to panic and hostility overnight, however, when she discovers her new neighbors “standing in the middle of the street drinking 40-ouncers.” Dawn demands that her husband (Henderson) call the police on the new residents!

Preznit Trump - Puh-leeze Lockdown Andrew Cuomo and His Infectious Battery Hen Constituents

dailymail |  President Trump is considering quarantining New York, Connecticut and New Jersey in desperate efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

The move will restrict travel to and from the three states, which are some of the hardest-hit by the outbreak. 

'Some people would like to see New York quarantined because it's a hotspot — New York, New Jersey maybe one or two other places, certain parts of Connecticut quarantined. I'm thinking about that right now,' he said Saturday.

'We might not have to do it but there's a possibility that sometime today we'll do a quarantine - short term - two weeks for New York, probably New Jersey, certain parts of Connecticut.'

The move would help tackle the issue other states are facing where New Yorkers are fleeing the city and traveling to other states and areas, where they are potentially risking more lives and spreading the disease further afield.

'Restrict travel, because they're having problems down in Florida, a lot of New Yorkers going down. We don't want that,' he said. 

New York state Governor Andrew Cuomo hit back at the president's plans in a press conference Saturday.

'I don't even know what that means. I don't know how that could be legally enforceable,' said Cuomo. 

'And from a medical point view, I don't know what you would be accomplishing.

'But I can tell you, I don't even like the sound of it.'

SARS-CoV2 Chickens Coming Home To Roost

caitlinjohnstone |   It’s interesting how the virus which might knock down the most powerful government in the world behaves so much like that government: dominating world affairs and killing the most vulnerable members of the populations it attacks. Nations which are being smashed with US sanctions have already been watching their frail and elderly die of inadequate medical care and malnutrition, and now with the coronavirus they’re experiencing those same exact effects squared. Which is why places like Iran are being hit so uniquely hard. America is like if COVID-19 was a country.

Also interesting is watching people react to the way so many of the corporate and government policies which have been causing ordinary human beings to suffer great pains are now simply being canceled all around the world in response to the pandemic. This Slate article documents a number of the changes which have been made just in America, like how for people being thrown in jail for minor offenses, “San Antonio is one of many jurisdictions to announce that, to keep jails from being crowded with sick citizens, they’ll stop doing that. Why were they doing it in the first place?” Or how “Trump has instructed government agencies who administer loans to waive interest accrual for the duration of the crisis. But why on earth is our government charging its own citizens interest anyway?”

We’re seeing immense burdens lifted from people with an easy “Oh, that’s making the pandemic worse? Okay we’ll stop that then.” And we’re seeing people react with fully justified indignation with, “Well why were you doing that to me in the first place??”

And the answer is very simple: because until now, your suffering wasn’t exacerbating a virus which does not discriminate on the basis of class. Politicians and billionaires are just as capable of losing their lives and loved ones to this virus as anyone else, as the CEO of Universal Music Group just learned with his COVID-19 hospitalization. Simply not causing needless human suffering wasn’t enough to get them to stop crushing people; it had to actually show up on their doorstep to make a difference.

TeeRump Served Up A Double Order of Cheese Eating Kneegrows Advisors Today

Stacey Abrams Stayed Grinning, But Real Negroes Turned Their Backs On Bloomberg

independent |  Churchgoers in Alabama turned their backs on Michael Bloomberg as the billionaire former mayor of New York and presidential hopeful joined Democrats vying for the party's nomination in Selma, where memorial events have been commemorating the 55th anniversary of a landmark moment of political violence in the Civil Rights movement.

Mr Bloomberg has faced mounting criticism for a range of controversies while in office and as a company chief, from sexual harassment allegations and settlements to his continued defence for his police department's practice of racially profiling through "stop and frisk" measures, which he only publicly apologised for as he entered the presidential race.

He failed to satisfy his critics and other Democratic opponents during his first-ever debate appearance last month, when he fumbled his explanation for allowing the policy in the first place.

During a church service in Alabama on Sunday, a group of black worshippers inside the historic Brown Chapel AME Church silently stood and turned their backs on Mr Bloomberg as he delivered his remarks recognising "Bloody Sunday", when white police brutally attacked hundreds of voting rights activists marching through town at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement on 7 March 1965.

Bloomberg is the Mechanism for Blacks to Vote Their Fears and Not Our Aspirations

BAR |  Bloomberg threw his hat and billions into the race when it became clear that corporate surrogates Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg could not be depended on to halt Bernie Sanders, the purported socialist who now leads the Democratic pack. Joe Biden’s aura of electability, which was always a media-invented mirage, evaporated when he collapsed into the basement in Iowa and New Hampshire. The Black voters of South Carolina are his only hope for resurrection. But Blacks don’t back Biden for ideological reasons, or even on the strength of his service as Barack Obama’s number two. Older (and scarier) African Americans were under the impression that Biden was the Democrat best equipped to beat Trump – but it turns out he can’t even beat previously unknown Democrats.

“Joe Biden’s aura of electability, which was always a media-invented mirage, evaporated when he collapsed into the basement in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

Some of those Black Biden supporters will now switch to Bloomberg, believing he is the one Democrat rich enough to drown Trump in November. Blacks don’t vote their own ideological preferences in Democratic primaries. Rather, many will support whomever they perceive as the strongest opponent against the White Man’s Party, the Republicans. That invariably means the Democrat favored by corporations and their media. Thus, the duopoly system effectively negates the core political aspirations of Black America, the most left-leaning constituency in the nation. The duopoly is a trap that neutralizes independent, progressive Black politics – a mechanism to force Blacks to vote their fears, rather than their aspirations.

However, as BAR senior columnist Margaret Kimberley points out in this issue, there are threats to Black lives and rights even worse than the flaming orange racist now squatting in the White House. As three-term mayor of New York City, Bloomberg increased the frequency of his predecessor Rudolph Giuliani’s stop-and-frisks by 700 percent . Although real estate magnate Donald Trump infamously called for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, it was Mayor Bloomberg who for years delayed payment  of a $41 million settlement to the grievously wronged young Black men. And Bloomberg was the nation’s most aggressive, unrepentant ethnic cleanser, gleefully removing more Black and brown people from the city’s five boroughs than any of his predecessors. 

“The duopoly is a mechanism to force Blacks to vote their fears, rather than their aspirations.”

Stacey Abrams: Poster Child for Responsible Kneegrows for Bloomberg

wsws |  In an appearance Monday on ABC’s “The View” program, the prominent black Democrat Stacey Abrams brushed aside the right-wing, racist record of Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, telling the show’s hosts that the billionaire oligarch’s entry into the race was positive since “for once we actually know where the money is coming from.”

The former New York City mayor, who served two terms as a Republican and one as an independent, and who backed George W. Bush in 2004, has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars from his $60 billion fortune into his campaign to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for president, or at least secure enough delegates to block Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders at the party’s nominating convention in July.

Asked whether she thought it was an issue that Bloomberg was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a frontrunner spot in the primary elections, Abrams replied that this was no different than a candidate using his or her pet on the campaign trail to attract voters.

“Every person is allowed to run and should run the race that they think they should run, and Mike Bloomberg has chosen to use his finances. Other people are using their dog, their charisma, their whatever,” she said. “I think it’s an appropriate question to raise. But I don’t think it’s disqualifying for anyone to invest in fixing America.”

She was also asked about the fact that her political action committee, Fair Fight Action, had received $5 million from Bloomberg, the largest donation the group has received since it was founded in 2018. Queried as to whether the donation had any influence on her political views, she replied, “I am grateful to any person who contributes to Fair Fight. We have more than one hundred thousand contributors. His check just had a few more zeros on it.”

Bloomberg met with Abrams in Atlanta in January and gave a closed-door speech to a voting rights summit that she hosted.

The minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017 and defeated 2018 gubernatorial candidate, Abrams is widely seen as a leading pick for vice president by whichever candidate wins the Democratic nomination. She has been courted by former Vice President Joe Biden, who raised her name as a possible running mate in November.

Grifter Scum: This is Why We Cain't Have Nothing Nice in Kansas City!

kcur |  After more than two years of litigation, a leadership fight over a Kansas City jazz landmark wrapped up Wednesday morning with nearly two hours of closing arguments.

But the verdict on who will lead the Mutual Musicians Foundation is not out yet. Circuit Court Judge Charles McKenzie said Wednesday he was taking the case under advisement. 

The bench trial started in late November at the Jackson County Circuit Court in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Tuesday marked the fourth and final day of testimony. 

"Each side is pointing fingers at taking away some of the money or resources of the foundation," jazz historian Larry Kopitnik told KCUR. 

Once the union hall for the Colored Musicians Local 627, the foundation is one of only two National Historic Landmarks in Kansas City (the other one is the Liberty Memorial). These days it is known for its after-hours jam sessions on Saturdays and Sundays.

THE DRAMATIC CONCLUSION

kbia | A judge has delivered a verdict in a lawsuit over control of Kansas City's Mutual Musicians Foundation, and it's a draw.   

Once the union hall for the Colored Musicians Local 627, the foundation is one of only two National Historic Landmarks in Kansas City (the other one is the Liberty Memorial). These days it is known for its after-hours jam sessions on Saturdays and Sundays.

Anita Dixon, who served as the board's vice president, often represented the organization as the spokesperson. But in August 2016, she was ousted after a heated board meeting. In a lawsuit filed in October 2016 and updated in March 2017, Dixon claimed other board members, including chairman James Hathaway, failed to comply with bylaws, took a cut from jam session entry fees, and retaliated against her. 

A counterclaim by the defendants, including Hathaway, alleged that Dixon used foundation funds for her own use, took artifacts, photographs, and other items, and left the foundation more than $8,000 in debt. 

After a bench trial, Circuit Court Judge Charles McKenzie on Friday ruled for the defendants; he denied Dixon's request for payment for damages and for the removal of the defendants as directors. 

But on the defendants' counterclaim of embezzlement and theft, McKenzie sided with Dixon. 

According to the judgment, both parties will be responsible for their own attorney fees, but the costs of the litigation would be paid by Dixon.  

Dixon's response to the verdict: "Of course, sadness."  

She added, "Essentially, we're back where we started. The judge didn't give them what I wanted. And the judge didn't give them what they wanted against me." 

Hathaway's attorney, Roy King, described the verdict as a "summary judgment," short and final. King told KCUR he's advised his client not to comment in the event that an appeal is filed within the 30-day window. 

"If it looks like there's a viable appeal, I will," said Dixon. "But, if not, I'm going to throw myself into making a difference, wherever I go, whatever I do." 

House Kneegrow Busted Unselfconsciously AssKissing and Bootlicking

nakedcapitalism | On one level, this is an illustration of America’s descent into banana republic status. Pundits and the media keep reinforcing American exceptionalist fantasies, our brand fumes of vaunted democracy, yet we can’t even run elections competently. Is is just the grifting, that introducing more tech creates more opportunities for vendor enrichment? Or is it yet more proof that a lot of people in charge really hate democracy and are at best indifferent to doing things right?

It’s not hard to see the Iowa fiasco as an illustration of an even more deeply-seated pathology: elite incompetence. Too many people with the right resumes get to fail upwards or at worst sideways. And remember, unlike our older WASP-y leaders who were a combination of people from the right clubs and self-made men, our current crop of people in charge pride themselves on being the end products of a meritocratic system, as in their claim to legitimacy stems from the claim that they are more talented (gah) than mere mortals and therefore obviously should be in the top slots because they’ll do oh so much better than everyone else.

And it’s the Democratic party, as the representative of the 10% professional managerial classes, that really owns this disease. Recall in Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal how he set forth, without irony, a conference that was treacly with the self-regard, with the way every participant was lavished with embarrassing exaggerations of their accomplishments. No one had the slightest sense of how narcissistic and pampered they seemed. And it wasn’t hard to imagine they’d all collapse in a heap if presented with a real challenge, like suddenly becoming destitute or being dumped in a remote area with neither a water bottle nor GPS.

And we keep seeing this leadership class succeed in rent extraction and not much else. Go down the list: The post-crisis failure to reform the banks or even go through the motions by incarcerating a few execs and turfing out some board members. Our grossly over-priced, underperforming health care system. Our student-impoverishing higher education system. The F-35. The botched Obamacare rollout. Our Middle-East nation-breaking, which has scored geopolitical own goals like destabilizing Europe, facilitating Russia asserting itself a geopolitical power despite having an economy the size of South Korea and in the face of our economic sanctions, and making us deservedly disliked around the world. Hillary Clinton losing to of all people Donald Trump despite spending twice as much as his campaign spend because her team was enamored of Robby Mook’s models and somehow forgot about the Electoral College. 

And if you believe, as Team Dem does, that every problem can be solved with better PR, the corollary is you never admit to failure, you never do post mortems, and you keep incompetents around who you allow to fail and fail again.

A True Revolution of Values

medium |  This piece argues for how democratic socialism is the only political scheme that centers individual rights within an industrial economy. Now that Sanders is doing well in the polls, you’ll be inundated with negative propaganda about what democratic socialism entails. Let’s settle some confusion.

What you may already know:

1. The nation’s founders fought for political independence from the British monarchy. The colonists wanted to govern themselves and not have their lives or property (including enslaved Africans) directed by some foreign parliament or the capricious desires of King George.
2. Freedom is a matter of making and enacting your own plans. If an alien power effectively makes demands on your actions, you can’t make and enact your own plans. In general, your actions should confirm who you are, not alienate you from who you think you are. If you are always enacting plans you don’t recognize as your own, you aren’t living a self-determining life; you are a living tool of someone else’s will.
3. To be free, any power that controls your actions has to be sanctioned by your own judgment or your fair participation in the process out of which you are acting.
4. Acting out into the world entails interacting with other people. One way we do this is through our recognized roles in civil society. Civil society is the system of mutually enforcing market-based interactions through which have our needs met while meeting other people’s needs. Without this organized system of need satisfaction, we’d all be at the complete mercy of nature and other people’s capricious expressions of power.

Here is what you may not know:

95 percent of the workforce are employees, and the US Founders were not thinking about employees as citizens when they designed our Constitution.

Except for the plantation economy, colonial life was pre-industrial. The US revolutionaries assumed that universal self-employment for citizens was a viable aspiration. When 18th century political economists like Adam Smith write about the virtues of factory life, they are writing about a ten person factory. (Really, Adam Smith’s famous pin factory was ten people.) The cotton gin and the large steam mills hadn’t yet been invented. There was also a functionally infinite amount of land to be stolen from Native Americans for expansion.

Neither our Constitution nor our conception of rights were designed for a nation of employees as citizens. John Locke wasn’t thinking about employees, and Thomas Jefferson wasn’t thinking of employees as citizens. The US Constitution was not designed for a society that is almost entirely based on wage labor any more than it was designed to address vaping.

 

If No Travel Ban and No Compulsory Expulsions - We've Been Targetted for Die-Off

Fist tap Dale

CDC |  Situation Summary

CDC is closely monitoring an outbreak of respiratory illness caused by a novel (new) coronavirus (termed “2019-nCoV”) that was first detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China and which continues to expand. Chinese health officials have reported more than a thousand infections with 2019-nCoV in China, including outside of Hubei Province. Infections with 2019-nCoV also are being reported in a growing number of international locations, including the United States, where 5 cases in travelers from Wuhan have been confirmed in four states (AZ, CA, IL, WA) as of January 26, 2020.

Source and Spread of the Virus

Chinese health authorities were the first to post the full genome of the 2019-nCoV in GenBankexternal icon, the NIH genetic sequence database, and in the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAIDexternal icon) portal, an action which has facilitated detection of this virus. On January 24, 2020, CDC posted in GenBank the full genome of the 2019-nCoV virus detected in the first U.S. patient from Washington state. The virus genetic sequence from the patient in Washington is nearly identical to the sequences posted from China. The available sequences suggest a likely single, recent emergence from a virus related to bat coronaviruses and the SARS coronavirus. The available sequence information does not provide any information about severity of associated illness or transmissibility of the virus.

Early on, many of the patients in the outbreak in Wuhan, China reportedly had some link to a large seafood and animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread. However, a growing number of patients reportedly have not had exposure to animal markets, and there is evidence that person-to-person spread is occurring. At this time, it’s unclear how easily or sustainably this virus is spreading between people. Learn what is known about the spread of newly emerged coronaviruses.

Illness Severity

Both MERS and SARS have been known to cause severe illness in people. The complete clinical picture with regard to 2019-nCoV is still not fully clear. Reported illnesses have ranged from infected people with little to no symptoms to people being severely ill and dying. Learn more about the symptoms associated with 2019-nCoV.

There are ongoing investigations to learn more. This is a rapidly evolving situation and information will be updated as it becomes available.

On This Page

• Situation Summary
• Source and Spread of the Virus
• Illness Severity
• Risk Assessment
• What to Expect
• CDC Response
• CDC Recommends
• Other Available Resources

Confirmed 2019-nCoV Cases Globally

Risk Assessment

Outbreaks of novel virus infections among people are always of public health concern. The risk from these outbreaks depends on characteristics of the virus, including whether and how well it spreads between people, the severity of resulting illness, and the medical or other measures available to control the impact of the virus (for example, vaccine or treatment medications).

Investigations are ongoing to learn more, but person-to-person spread of 2019-nCoV is occurring. Chinese officials report that sustained person-to-person spread in the community is occurring in China. Person-to-person spread in the United States has not yet been detected, but it’s likely to occur to some extent. It’s important to note that person-to-person spread can happen on a continuum. Some viruses are highly contagious (like measles), while other viruses are less so. It’s important to know this in order to better assess the risk posed by this virus. While CDC considers this is a very serious public health threat, based on current information, the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is considered low at this time. Nevertheless, CDC is taking proactive preparedness precautions.

What to Expect

More cases are likely to be identified in the coming days, including more cases in the United States. Given what has occurred previously with MERS and SARS, it’s likely that person-to-person spread will continue to occur. It would not be surprising if person-to-person spread in the United States were to occur. Cases in healthcare settings, like hospitals, may also occur.

Hegemonic Han N+1 and N-1 Equals PHUK EVERYONE and Must Not be Tolerated...,

nature |  A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025, and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns.

Some scientists outside China worry about pathogens escaping, and the addition of a biological dimension to geopolitical tensions between China and other nations. But Chinese microbiologists are celebrating their entrance to the elite cadre empowered to wrestle with the world’s greatest biological threats.

“It will offer more opportunities for Chinese researchers, and our contribution on the BSL‑4-level pathogens will benefit the world,” says George Gao, director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology and Immunology in Beijing. There are already two BSL-4 labs in Taiwan, but the National Bio-safety Laboratory, Wuhan, would be the first on the Chinese mainland.

The lab was certified as meeting the standards and criteria of BSL-4 by the China National Accreditation Service for Conformity Assessment (CNAS) in January. The CNAS examined the lab’s infrastructure, equipment and management, says a CNAS representative, paving the way for the Ministry of Health to give its approval. A representative from the ministry says it will move slowly and cautiously; if the assessment goes smoothly, it could approve the laboratory by the end of June.

BSL-4 is the highest level of biocontainment: its criteria include filtering air and treating water and waste before they leave the laboratory, and stipulating that researchers change clothes and shower before and after using lab facilities. Such labs are often controversial. The first BSL-4 lab in Japan was built in 1981, but operated with lower-risk pathogens until 2015, when safety concerns were finally overcome.

The expansion of BSL-4-lab networks in the United States and Europe over the past 15 years — with more than a dozen now in operation or under construction in each region — also met with resistance, including questions about the need for so many facilities.

The Wuhan lab cost 300 million yuan (US$44 million), and to allay safety concerns it was built far above the flood plain and with the capacity to withstand a magnitude-7 earthquake, although the area has no history of strong earthquakes. It will focus on the control of emerging diseases, store purified viruses and act as a World Health Organization ‘reference laboratory’ linked to similar labs around the world. “It will be a key node in the global biosafety-lab network,” says lab director Yuan Zhiming.

Don't Forget, Valodya IS the Defender of Christendom...,

sicsempertyrannis |  The tape was filmed in several Christian churches in Aleppo where these two men (Soleimani and al-Muhandis) are described from the pulpit and in the street as "heroic martyr victims of criminal American state terrorism." Pompeo likes to describe Soleimani as the instigator of "massacre" and "genocide" in Syria. Strangely (irony) the Syriac, Armenian Uniate and Presbyterian ministers of the Gospel in this tape do not see him and al-Muhandis that way. They see them as men who helped to defend Aleppo and its minority populations from the wrath of Sunni jihadi Salafists like ISIS and the AQ affiliates in Syria. They see them and Lebanese Hizbullah as having helped save these Christians by fighting alongside the Syrian Army, Russia and other allies like the Druze and Christian militias.

It should be remembered that the US was intent on and may still be intent on replacing the multi-confessional government of Syria with the forces of medieval tyranny. Everyone who really knows anything about the Syrian Civil War knows that the essential character of the New Syrian Army, so beloved by McCain, Graham and the other Ziocons was always jihadi and it was always fully supported by Wahhabi Saudi Arabia as a project in establishing Sunni triumphalism. They and the self proclaimed jihadis of HTS (AQ) are still supported in Idlib and western Aleppo provinces both by the Saudis and the present Islamist and neo-Ottoman government of Turkey.

Well pilgrims, there are Christmas trees in the newly re-built Christian churches of Aleppo and these, my brothers and sisters in Christ remember who stood by them in "the last ditch." 

"Currently there are at least 600 churches and 500,000–1,000,000 Christians in Iran." wiki below. Are they dhimmis? Yes, but they are there. There are no churches in Saudi Arabia, not a single one and Christianity is a banned religion. These are our allies?

You Talk About Identity Politics When That's All You've Got to Sell...,

wsws |  What are the stakes that people imagine to be bound up with demonstrating that capitalism in this country emerged from slavery and racism, which are treated as two different labels for the same pathology? Ultimately, it’s a race reductionist argument. What the Afro-pessimist types or black nationalist types get out of it is an insistence that we can’t ever talk about anything except race. And that's partly because talking about race is the things they have to sell.

If you follow through the logic of disparities discourse, and watch the studies and follow the citations, what you get is a sort of bold announcement of findings, but finding that anybody who has been reading a newspaper over the last 50 or 70 years would assume from the outset: blacks have it worse, and women have it worse, and so on.

It’s in part an expression of a generic pathology of sociology, the most banal expression of academic life. You follow the safe path. You replicate the findings. But it’s not just supposed to be a matter of finding a disparity in and of itself, like differences in the number of days of sunshine in a year. It’s supposed to be a promise that in finding or confirming the disparity in this or that domain that it will bring some kind of mediation of the problem. But the work never calls for that.

Q. You make important points about the way social problems are approached. As an example, we have a scourge of police violence in this country. Over 1,000 Americans are killed each year by police. And the common knowledge, so to speak, is that this is a racial problem. The reality is that the largest number of those killed are white, but blacks are disproportionately killed. But if the position is that this is simply a racial problem, there is no real solution on offer. We have a militarized police force operating under conditions of extreme social inequality, with lots of guns on the streets, with soldiers coming back from serving in neocolonial wars abroad becoming police officers. And all of this is excised in the racialist argument, which if taken at face value, boils down to allegations about racial attitudes among police.

A. Cedric Johnson [3] has made good points on this and I’ve spoken with him at considerable length about the criminal justice system. To overdraw the point, a black Yale graduate who works on Wall Street is no doubt several times more likely to be jacked up by the police on the platform of Metro North than his white counterpart, out of mistaken identity. And that mistaken identity is what we might call racism. But it’s a shorthand. He’s still less likely to be jacked up by the police than the broke white guy in northeast Philadelphia or west Baltimore.

The point of this stress on policing is containing those working-class and poor populations and protecting property holders downtown, and in making shows of force in doing so. I mean the emergence of, or the intensification of, militarized policing in the 1990s and 2000s was directly connected with an increased focus on urban redevelopment directed toward turning central cities into havens for play and leisure. To do this you have to accomplish a couple of things, as Saskia Sassen pointed out almost 30 years ago, in the reconfiguration of the urban political economy in ways that create a basis for upscale consumption, and an industrial reserve army who will work for little enough to make that culture of upscale consumption profitable. Then you have to have the police to protect all of this. It’s really like a tourist economy.

So that’s kind of natural enough and you don’t need to have a devil theory like the crack epidemic to explain it—all of this pointless back-and-forth about how the cultural and political authorities are responding to the opioid crisis compared to how they responded to the crack epidemic. I mean, it’s all beside the point.

Silly Kneegrows: I KNOW You Don't Believe Nike "Just Did It" For You!?!?

theconservativetreehouse |  From a pure economic/financial perspective this Nike  branding campaign doesn’t make sense…. unless, you realize a much bigger picture. A hidden bigger picture.

On its face, it just seems absurd. Why would any major corporation intentionally stake out a branding position that is adverse to their financial interests?

I’ve spoken to some very excellent business actuaries on this late today; and one specific conversation finally helped to make it all make sense.  During that conversation a good ally shared: “a multinational corporation would never make a branding decision adverse to their financial interests. Unless there is a hidden risk unrelated to what is visible on the surface.” ….

''BINGO, there it is, the lightbulb went on.

A hidden risk that likely has nothing whatsoever to do with Colin Kaepernick.

The bigger risk to Nike has nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, U.S. Consumers, or Antifa-like political advocacy. The bigger financial risk to the Nike Corporation has everything to do with geopolitics and a reset of international trade agreements.

Here’s the hidden aspect with research to back it up.  Nike Inc. has hitched its massive corporate existence to a 10-year business plan that is dependent on the continuance of recently negotiated manufacturing contracts.

The Nike political branding position is reconciled when you look at the bigger picture and see where the real financial risk aligns. The Nike economic decision is to align with China, and by extension North Korea, for a position of mutual benefit. It is all about the proverbial $$$$ and Nike’s best financial play is to mitigate risk and assist Communist China in their trade strategy.

China is willing to subsidize Nike (lower production costs), and replace any dropped revenue, in exchange for mutually beneficial political opposition against Trump and by extension his policies that are a risk to Beijing. As a result there is minimal financial risk to the Nike Corporation.

And with the current multinational Wall Street agenda now being confronted, we should not expect this approach to stop at Nike.

Black Political Agenda: Defund Israel/Deport All Replacement Negroes

Affirmative action is based on a view of equal protection that compensates for historical and present prejudice and lack of opportunity. It is premised on the notion that some of us start behind the eight ball and need an extra boost to achieve basic access. Favorable treatment for blacks is controversial because it appears to be applied in zero sum contexts. If you favor a black person, you have to disfavor a white one and that's the seasoning upon which Mr. Blum's cases are all based. It is not the definition of equal that causes the controversy. it is the adverse effect on whites, or in this case, proxy white replacement negroes. 

In the case of Harvard University, it would be trivial to favor blacks while protecting replacement negroes serving as proxies for poor whites. You see, kibutzim Blum pretends to be unaware of the historic legacy of Blacks in America - thus his elite racist bootlicking antics. Blum could of course trivially solve the zero sum angle he seeks to exploit by going after the 30% + alumni legacy admissions. Blum lacks the historical perspective, ethical fiber, and testicular fortitude to go after any elite affirmative action, well, because, these selfsame racist elites are the folks who pay his bills.

Ivy League "affirmative action" began shortly after World War II. It was stimulated by the GI Bill, which made college possible for veterans who never would have dreamed of going to college, let alone to an Ivy League university. The GI Bill demonstrated there was untapped national talent out in flyover. They found public high school students in the South, Midwest, and Far West with school records rivaling the best of the prep schools. Even when some public high school scores were slightly lower than preppy competitors, admissions committees sometimes chose the provincial public high school student over the privileged alumni legacy. They recognized high achievement in the face of educational and cultural disadvantage.

As a consequence, Harvard and its Ivy sisters began recruiting a few good men out beyond the inbred Lovecraftian prep schools and elite academies of New England and the Atlantic Coast. The Ivies understood that there was more promise in the lesser academic record than in the marginally better academic record. Moreover, they wanted a more diverse student body. 

This was the original affirmative action”. It transformed the Ivies into truly national and meritocratic institutions instead of elite regional colleges for those with wealth, privilege, and pedigree. Only when the same principles of national diversity and meritocratic selection—based on recognition of high achievement and the overcoming of disadvantages—came to include black student admissions,  did we experience white backlash and resentment.

NYTimes |  At the heart of the case is whether Harvard’s admissions staff hold Asian-Americans to higher standards than applicants of other racial or ethnic groups, and whether they use subjective measures, like personal scores, to cap the number of Asian students accepted to the school.

“Harvard today engages in the same kind of discrimination and stereotyping that it used to justify quotas on Jewish applicants in the 1920s and 1930s,” Students for Fair Admissions said in a court filing.

Harvard, which admitted less than 5 percent of its applicants this year, said that its own analysis did not find discrimination.

A trial in the case has been scheduled for October.

WaPo Making Up New Concepts of Tribalism to Claim "Trump Voters Are Wayciss"

WaPo |  You remember the photo, taken in early August, of two men at an Ohio Trump rally whose matching T-shirts read, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.” (Now you can buy them online for $14.) It was a gibe that spoke to our moment. The Republican brand — as with presidential nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney — used to be pointedly anti-Russian; Romney called Moscow our chief global enemy. In the Trump era, though, you can be a Republican Russophile for whom Vladi­mir Putin is a defender of conservative values. American politics, it has become plain, is driven less by ideological commitments than by partisan identities — less by what we think than by what we are. Identity precedes ideology.

“The Democratic Party today is divided over whether it wants to focus on the economy or identity,” the veteran strategist and pollster Stanley B. Greenberg, a man of the economy-first school, has said. But once you come to grips with the potency of partisan-identity politics, the binary falls away. So does the assumption that the great majority of Republicans who support Trump are drawn to his noxious views. (That’s the good news in the bad news.) Among candidates who led in the Republican primaries, after all, his percentage of the vote was the lowest in nearly half a century. Identity groups come to rally behind their leaders, and partisan identification wouldn’t be so stable if it didn’t allow for a great deal of ideological flexibility. That’s why rank-and-file Republicans could go from “We need to stand up to Putin!” to “Why wouldn’t we want to get along with Putin?” in the time it takes to say: Rubio’s out, Trump’s in.

What’s true of partisan allegiance is true of ideological allegiance. In research published earlier this year, political scientist Lilliana Mason conducted a national survey that determined where people stood on various hot-button issues: same-sex marriage, abortion, gun control, immigration, the Affordable Care Act, the deficit. Then they were asked how they felt about spending time with liberals or conservatives. About becoming friends with one. About marrying one.

Useless Elderly Ass-Whooping Victim Confused About John Mccain

twitchy  |  Seems Democrats are coming out of the woodwork to say and write positive things about the late Senator John McCain, which would be so nice if they didn’t contradict the way most of them spoke about the good senator while he was still alive.

Take for example Rep. John Lewis:

Senator John McCain was a warrior for peace. He will be deeply missed by people all around the world.

— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) August 26, 2018

Warrior for peace.

Nice.

So wait, does this mean Lewis has stopped comparing John McCain to George Wallace? Because that’s what John said a decade ago … 

Asking for a friend.

Rep. Lewis: Sen. McCain was a "warrior for peace" — pretty much the opposite of how he portrayed him to the public in '08 pic.twitter.com/gqvNuhaR9h

— Peter J. Hasson (@peterjhasson) August 26, 2018

Pretty much.

Yikes.

It's almost as though we've so devalued the charge of racism and bigotry that people can no longer recognize it even when it's legitimate. 🤔 https://t.co/8FYPEuUL6W

— The Meturgeman (@DraftRyan2016) August 27, 2018

It’s almost as though Democrats call anyone and everyone they see as a threat a racist and then when they become a convenient ally in any way they’re magically not racist anymore.