Fiona Hill: Credulous Replacement Negroe Weaponized Against Donald Trump

pbs  |   Judy Woodruff: Ultimately, what was your assessment of Donald Trump as a person and as a president?

Fiona Hill: Well, as a person, he was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president.

And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism. So, on a personal level, that was also a pretty dangerous flaw.

When you're the president of the United States, it becomes a fatal flaw, because President Trump couldn't disassociate or disentangle himself from many of the issues that were the critical ones to address. So, when people were concerned about Russian influence in the United States election, he only thought about how that affected him, for example.

When people talked about the changes in the U.S. economic structure, he would always think, first of all, about how that might affect him and about how that might affect how people would vote for him. So, as a president, he was uniquely preoccupied with himself, not with the country.

And that, of course, made all of the problems of intelligence risks even higher, because the Russians or others from the outside could also manipulate those tendencies.

Judy Woodruff: So, if you can answer this, is the world safer or is it more dangerous because of his presidency?

Fiona Hill: Well, I think it's become more dangerous, because he was also extremely divisive, because President Trump was very focused on getting reelected, and he wasn't going to do that by appealing to all Americans.

He wanted to appeal to a particular base of people who were attracted by his personality or attracted by the things that he said he was going to do for them. And, of course, that's on different parts of the economic scale and the socioeconomic lower levels. It's the people — he said he was going to find them a job. He was going to fix the economy, so they would have jobs.

At the top end, among millionaires and billionaires, it was that he was going to protect their fortunes, from — being from those circles himself.

Judy Woodruff: What I find so striking is that you weren't so concerned about Donald Trump being controlled by Vladimir Putin, being influenced by Vladimir Putin, as you were concerned about the United States following on the same political path that you see Russia follow under Vladimir Putin.

Fiona Hill: That's absolutely right, because Russia went through a similar wrenching economic period and political periods in the 1990s.

So, Russia had its equivalent of a kind of the Great Recession, and, at the end of that decade, President Putin comes in and says, I'm going to fix everything. I'm going to make America great again, which, of course, is what President Trump said in 2016. And what Putin did was basically tie himself up into all of these politics.

He, of course, has extended his terms in office through amending the Constitution. He can essentially be president until 2036. And Donald Trump has also said that he wants to be president in perpetuity. He wouldn't accept that he had lost the 2020 election. He's saying he's going to come back, that he has a right to come back because he was never kicked out of office in the first place.

And he's been spreading lies about essentially his own role in all the events that we have seen over the last years, January 6, for example, and the storming of the Capitol.

Judy Woodruff: Do you believe our democracy is in danger as a result of this?

Fiona Hill: I do.

And I think that danger is increasing by the day, because we're constantly seeing other political figures trying to emulate Trump. We're now in a situation where lies and deceit have become the coin of governance.

Judy Woodruff: It's a disturbing conclusion in this book.

Fiona Hill, thank you very much.

Fixing America Must Be Taken Out Of The Hands Of The People Who Broke It

kunstler  |  Would it surprise you to learn that children well beneath the age of puberty are not inclined to think about sex at all? In a well-ordered society that recognizes children as different from adults, they don’t. And if something sexual comes to their attention, they are generally perplexed by it. Unless they’re born into an era when adults are busy erasing boundaries, guard-rails, and cultural inhibitions, in which case I must imagine that young children exposed to, say, pornography in a chaotic household find it traumatically sinister. So, why the gleeful celebration about sexualizing children now?

     I’ll tell you why: because we are living in a very badly-ordered society these days, a society in which anything goes and nothing matters, which is a poor principle for civilization. It’s the same principle that has people shitting all over the sidewalks of San Francisco, looting Walgreens stores in broad daylight, pushing ineffective and unsafe vaccines (and lying about it), and arresting people for thought crimes. It’s a degenerate society. Morally bankrupt. Wicked.

    You might ask, how did it get that way? The concise answer is that a broken business model for daily life and a collapsing economy have so disordered millions of minds that values are seen as having no value. The scaffold for truth, beauty, honor, dignity, courage, prudence, generosity, etc., folded some time ago, in slow-motion, so we didn’t notice.

     The keepers of our culture have replaced it with a tacky system of ritual virtue-signaling fakery that they don’t really believe in, that persists simply because the moral vacuum it stands for provokes such unbearable anxiety. The main lesson of the recent Durham Report — missed by even the most punctilious observers — is that our country does not want to fix itself, indeed the whole broken apparatus of fixing it is in the hands of the people who broke it.

     This epic negligence leaves the doors wide open for the broad range of lower-order criminal mischief we’re seeing expressed all around us. Now I will venture into shadowland.  There is a rumor floating around the Internet that this seemingly coordinated campaign to sexualize children and initiate them into marginal behaviors was started to soften up the public for forthcoming shocking revelations contained in the much-whispered-about Jeffrey Epstein archive of videos that show eminent international figures caught in compromising sexual situations that include sexual acts with children.

    I wouldn’t commit to saying there’s anything to that, but there have been an awful lot of signs and portents pointing in that direction, and so I also wouldn’t dismiss it altogether. There can be little doubt that the videos exist, or did exist — we know that Epstein’s various mansions were rigged to the eaves with cameras, and that he was an “asset” of more than one nation’s intel service trafficking in blackmail — and I’d expect that there are at least a few copies of the videos out there, just like there are many copies of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard-drive out there.

     There’s something definitely programmatic about the way the drag queens were rolled out into the kiddie korners the past year. It doesn’t feel organic, shall we say, but rather directed, like a sinister grand opera. And the effort to enlist and initiate schoolchildren into a psychodrama of hyperbolic sexual confusion looks absolutely orchestrated.

     What we might be seeing is the convergence of a world-beating political scandal with an economy-killing financial crisis that will destroy the entire post-WW2 armature of money and credit. That event would usher in a period of appalling turbulence in our everyday life, severing supply chains, killing businesses, and disturbing every imaginable social arrangement as well as public order. If that comes to pass, and it’s looking likely, then that will be the last we hear about personal pronouns and trans influencers for a thousand years.

What Divides Americans Is INFINITELY STRONGER Than What "Unites" Us....,

azerbaycan  |  With the House of Representatives controlling the “power of the purse” (the budget) of the US, it has become the norm in these politically divisive days when the House is controlled by the party opposing the president, to try to humiliate him by creating a crisis.

That being said, there has been an ever-growing chorus of US politicians and officials who have called for the debt ceiling to be raised, saying if they don’t do it, it will “help China,” or sometimes even Russia. These claims are bizarre. Are they truly suggesting that the only reason to maintain basic political unity and compromise in the US is Beijing? And that this is the reason they should comply to keep the mountain of US debt and spending going? Such a statement says a lot about US politics, both past and present. First, it tells us that beyond exerting aggression and fear of foreign adversaries, there is very little to keep US politics together these days and its environment is essentially toxic. Secondly, it also tells us how the US system sustains its power as a whole.

The US is a vast and diverse nation. It has a population of over 300 million people across a territorial expanse which is the third largest in the world by some definitions. Across its 50 states, a variety of different ethnic and social backgrounds can be found. Your Baptist pastor from Alabama has nothing in common with your ambitious young middle-class banker living in New York City, and even less with your struggling African-American family in the same city. In incorporating such diversity, the political system of the US is also by constitution decentralized, delegating power into multiple branches of government dispersed across federal, state and local levels.

It is no surprise that this has produced a political system which is beset by often bitter division and intense ideological and value-based conflicts. This has been enough, as history demonstrates, to plunge the country into a civil war. The development of mass media and social networks has only made it worse. Thus, starting in the 20th century, the American elite structure has sought to maintain control over its nation by vesting itself in the politics of fear mongering, which forces a continual emphasis on “American values,” namely democracy and liberty, in the bid to maintain a basic consensus for the justification of the state itself.

When analyzed through this lens, if the US runs out of adversaries and threats, politicians genuinely might have difficulty justifying the existence or unity of the nation altogether in its current form. The US centralizes itself through fear and hysteria, because if not for those things constantly looming, Americans wouldn’t have a whole lot to agree on, be it guns, abortion, LGBTQ rights, immigration, or anything else.

With Lying And Stealing As Its National DNA - Israel Must Surely Fail...,

antiwar  |  As Israel celebrates its 75th anniversary, the state-building project it cemented into place in 1948 by expelling 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland is showing the first signs of unraveling.

The surprise is that Israel’s woes spring not, as generations of its leaders feared, from outside forces – a combined attack from Arab states or pressure from the international community – but from Israel’s own internal contradictions.

Israeli leaders created the very problems they all too obviously lack the tools to now solve. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bombardment of Gaza in recent days, killing dozens of Palestinians, should be understood in that light. It is one more indication of Israel’s internal crisis.

Once again, the Palestinians are being used in a frantic bid to shore up an increasingly fragile “Jewish” unity.

Israel’s long-term problem is underscored by the current, bitter standoff over Netanyahu’s plan for a so-called judicial overhaul. The Israeli Jewish population is split down the middle, with neither side willing to back down. Rightly, each sees the confrontation in terms of a zero-sum battle.

And behind this stands a political system in near-constant paralysis, with neither side of the divide able to gain a stable majority in the parliament. Israel is now mired in a permanent, low-level civil war.

To understand how Israel reached this point, and where it is likely to head next, one must delve deep into the country’s origin story.

Morality tale

The official narrative is that Israel was created out of necessity: to serve as a safe haven for Jews fleeing centuries of persecution and the horrors of the Nazi death camps in Europe.

The resulting ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and the erasure of hundreds of their towns and villages – what Palestinians call their Nakba, or Catastrophe – is either mystified or presented simply as a desperate act of self-defense by a long-victimized people.

This colossal act of dispossession, aided and abetted by western powers, has been reinvented for western publics as a simple morality tale, as a story of redemption.

Israel’s establishment was not only a chance for the Jewish people to gain self-determination through statehood so they would never again be persecuted. Jews would also build a state from scratch that would offer to the world a more virtuous model of how to live.

This tapped neatly, if subliminally, into a western, Christian-derived worldview that looked to the Holy Land for salvation.

Jews would restore their place as “a light unto the nations” by “redeeming” the land they had stolen from the Palestinians and offering a path by which westerners could redeem themselves too.

The Most Expensive War That Is Not A U.S. War In American History

responsiblestatecraft  |  There might be a massive new Ukraine aid budget debate on the horizon, as Uncle Sam is depleting the last one at a record pace and Pentagon stockpiles are, by all accounts, running low.

According to a new report by Defense One, some $36.4 billion of the $48.9 billion allocated for Ukraine-related military aid since February 2022 has been delivered, contracted, or “otherwise committed.” There is only $11.3 billion left, and it will “run out in four months.”

The most recent allocation ($1.2 billion last week) came under the U.S. Security Assistance Initiative, which means the additional air defense systems, artillery rounds, and ammunition that have been promised will be farmed out to U.S. defense contractors and won’t be ready for shipment right away. Alternatively, aid has come via the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which sends Ukraine weapons directly from the Pentagon’s stockpiles. According to the Department of Defense, there have been 37 such drawdowns totaling over $21 billion in weapons and supplies since August 2021 when the U.S. first responded to Russian forces massing along the border with Ukraine.

But now reports indicate that American stockpiles of HIMARS, Javelins, Stinger missiles, and 155 mm artillery rounds have been shrinking since late last year, and arms manufacturers are now scrambling to keep up.

This has led the U.S. to go out on an ammo-raising spree, gathering pledges from allies and partners. Some, like South Korea, have resisted but found a way to comply. According to the Wall Street Journal, Washington has sent Ukraine more than one million rounds of 155 mm caliber ammunition, and allies and partners have contributed more on top of that. Moreover, NATO and European partners are being pressed to send whatever they have from their own stockpiles for Ukraine’s anticipated counteroffensive.

So where does this leave us? It would seem that defense contractors need additional money and capacity to backfill the stores. Without more, Ukraine with be under-supplied for both its counteroffensive and whatever follows it. Meanwhile, American stockpiles are waning, which hurts readiness.

One congressional aide “who closely tracks the issue” told POLITICO this week that the money to draw down existing U.S. stockpiles will expire in July. According to the report, which speculated when and how big the next aid package will be, “that would mean the flow of equipment could be disrupted if Kyiv has to wait an extended period for a new tranche of funding.” Would it be included in the appropriations process, or a supplemental? “I expect there will need to be a supplemental at some point,” Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) told POLITICO. “It’s also clear that it’s taken far too long to get munitions and tanks delivered to the Ukrainians.”

But as Sam Skove points out in his Defense One report, there is the nagging issue of Republican members of Congress who have said they would not support another “blank check” to Ukraine and would expect not only greater oversight but also an articulation of a diplomatic strategy for ending the war before they would support another multi-billion-dollar package. Their position not only reflects a need for a full accounting for where the money is going, but also concern that the American economy right now cannot afford what has become the most expensive U.S.-war-that-is-not-a-U.S.-war in history.

Did You See The Patriot Missile Battery Get Destroyed By A Single Kinzhal Hypersonic Missile?

Harpers  | To what degree would Washington even be interested in a negotiated resolution to the war in Ukraine?

Russian MoD about destroyed AD Patriot in Kiev. pic.twitter.com/KxbUqA5MD6

— Spriter (@Spriter99880) May 16, 2023

After all, a good deal of evidence suggests that the administration’s real—if only semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government. The draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were designed to crash its economy. As the New York Times reported, these sanctions have

ignited questions in Washington and in European capitals over whether cascading events in Russia could lead to “regime change,” or rulership collapse, which President Biden and European leaders are careful to avoid mentioning.

By repeatedly labeling Putin a “war criminal” and a murderous dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his predecessors deployed against Noriega, Milošević, Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome.

I counted 30 Patriot PAC-3 MSE launches here.

The FY2024 costs of these per missile is about $$5,275,000

That was $158,250,000 fired in about two minutes. And as we see, the battery or something else likely got blown up. So it failed in its mission. pic.twitter.com/9rwPnHkNGu

— Fennec_Radar (@RadarFennec) May 16, 2023

Diplomacy requires an understanding of an adversary’s interests and motives and an ability to make judicious compromises. But by assuming a Manichaean view of world politics, as has become Washington’s reflexive posture, “compromise, the virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes the treason of the new,” as the foreign policy scholar Hans Morgenthau put it, “for the mutual accommodation of conflicting claims . . . amounts to surrender when the moral standards themselves are the stakes of the conflict.”

Still from the video showing the explosion pic.twitter.com/mcpI3ptpEn

— Tony (@Cyberspec1) May 16, 2023

Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until Russia is handed a decisive defeat. Echoing previous comments by Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal is to weaken Russia militarily. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is not serious about peace. For its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on Russia to induce its political collapse.

Of course, the same momentum pushing toward a war in pursuit of overweening ends catapults Washington into pursuing a war employing unlimited means, an impulse encapsulated in the formula, endlessly invoked by Washington policymakers and politicians: “Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.” As the United States and its NATO allies pour ever more sophisticated weapons onto the battlefield, Moscow will likely be compelled (from military necessity, if not from popular domestic pressure) to interdict the lines of communication that convey these weapons shipments to Ukraine’s forces, which could lead to a direct clash with NATO forces. More importantly, as Russian casualties inevitably mount, animosity toward the West will intensify. A strategy guided by “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes” vastly increases the risk of accidents and escalation.

The proxy war embraced by Washington today would have been shunned by the Washington of the Cold War. And some of the very misapprehensions that have contributed to the start of this war make it far more dangerous than Washington acknowledges. America’s NATO expansion strategy and its pursuit of nuclear primacy both emerge from its self-appointed role as “the indispensable nation.” The menace Russia perceives in that role—and therefore what it sees as being at stake in this war—further multiply the danger. Meanwhile, nuclear deterrence—which demands careful, cool, and even cooperative monitoring and adjustment between potential adversaries—has been rendered wobbly both by U.S. strategy and by the hostility and suspicion created by this heated proxy war. Rarely have what Morgenthau praised as the virtues of the old diplomacy been more needed; rarely have they been more abjured.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war aims in full. Notwithstanding its proclaimed annexation of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson administrative districts, Moscow is unlikely to establish complete control over them. Ukraine is similarly unlikely to recapture all of its pre-2014 territory lost to Moscow. Barring either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with compromise.

Reaching such an accord would be extremely difficult. Russia would need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine. For its part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas. More painfully, Kyiv would need to concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a land bridge between the peninsula and Russia. A peace settlement would need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union (to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its rules). Most important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality.

Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of recovering the “entire territory” occupied by Russia since 2014, and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the war. Make no mistake, such an accord would need to make allowances for Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its “near-abroad” (that is, its sphere of influence)—and, in so doing, would require the imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty).

Such a compromise, guided by the ethos of the old diplomacy, would be anathema to Washington’s ambitions and professed values. Here, again, the lessons, real and otherwise, of the Cuban Missile Crisis apply. To enhance his reputation for toughness, Kennedy and his closest advisers spread the story that they forced Moscow to back down and unilaterally withdraw its missiles in the face of steely American resolve. In fact, Kennedy—shaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the crisis that he had largely provoked—secretly acceded to Moscow’s offer to withdraw its missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washington’s withdrawing its missiles from Turkey and Italy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was therefore resolved not by steadfastness but by compromise.

But because that quid pro quo was successfully hidden from a generation of foreign policy makers and strategists, from the American public, and even from Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own vice president, JFK and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, together with the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, define a successful national security strategy. These false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis were one of the main reasons that Johnson was impelled to confront supposed Communist aggression in Vietnam, regardless of the costs and risks. The same false lessons have informed a host of Washington’s interventions and regime-change wars ever since—and now help frame the dichotomy of “appeasement” and “resistance” that defines Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine—a response that, in its embrace of Wilsonian belligerence, eschews compromise and discrimination based on power, interest, and circumstance.

Even more repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole superpower would be the conditions required to reach a comprehensive European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. That settlement, also guided by the old diplomacy, would need to resemble the vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War. It would need to resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a “common European home” and Charles de Gaulle’s vision of a European community “from the Atlantic to the Urals.” And it would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what de Gaulle labeled it): an instrument to further the primacy of a superpower across the Atlantic.

70-80 Year Olds In Cognitive Decline Are Unemployable Yet They're Exclusively Running The Country

counterpunch  |  Our government is run by second-raters. Mediocrities in the state department and national security apparatus have seized the political steering wheel, because president Joe Biden, like senator Dianne “No Show” Feinstein and many others in our extensive gerontocracy do not inspire confidence. And the results are disastrous for Americans. De-dollarization across much of the planet and the possibility of a two-front, conceivably radioactive war against China and/or Russia. You think these two developments sound far-fetched? Well, the former is already underway, and as for the latter, rabid neo-cons and jingoistic four-star generals have stepped into the vacuum at the top and on your TV screen, and these dimwits can’t imagine losing, so now we move closer than ever before, even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to igniting nuclear Armageddon.

Just picture the Ukrainian drone that struck the Kremlin May 3 and ask yourself what would have happened had a Russian drone collided with the roof of the white house? The U.S. might well have launched nuclear missiles – amirite? We denizens of planet earth are all very lucky, and especially those of us who reside in American cities, that Russian leaders were rational enough not to target western metropolises with nuclear warheads. They have made clear that they won’t be further provoked, even by preposterous U.S. media claims that the Kremlin droned itself, claims that reveal yet again two sorry facts: first, our press outlets think we are morons and second, they parrot CIA talking points.

That’s the hot war. Then there’s the economic one. Dollar boosters like Treasury secretary Janet Yellen like to note that it would be very difficult for any other country’s money to replace the greenback as the world’s reserve currency. True enough. But who says the world has to HAVE a reserve currency? What China, Russia and the Global South show, as they stop trading in dollars and dump U.S. Treasuries, is that they can conduct business in their own currencies and will do so, having witnessed Washington’s idiotic sanctions on numerous nations and thus having been terrorized by the imbecilic weaponization of the dollar. So most of the world, aside from the west, now takes steps to abandon the U.S. financially. The dollar’s reign is ending, and soon we Americans will face a radically altered and indisputably grimmer future. All thanks to the stupidity of the very pedestrian people at the top in Washington, starting back in the Clinton administration.

As for the China-Russia alliance, anyone with a brain could see that coming. But not our congressmembers. And those forewarned had not a care in the world. As long ago as 1997, senator Joe Biden proclaimed: “And then the Russians say to me ‘You keep expanding NATO, we’re going to make friends with China.’ I almost burst out laughing. I could barely contain myself, I said ‘Good luck to you guys. If China doesn’t work out, try Iran.’” Well, who’s laughing now? Not the U.S. president, who can’t even get China’s leader to answer his phone calls. Not the American people, who, according to some polls (58 percent, said a Reuters-Ipsos poll in October), worry that this administration of very unexceptional people will enrage the Russia-China colossus and thus stumble into a nuclear holocaust.

Meanwhile congress throws gasoline on this political dumpster fire with its Ukrainian Victory Resolution. In the House, Tennessee Dem Steve Cohen and South Carolina Republican Joe Wilson sponsored this bill. A companion resolution, introduced by senators – Connecticut Dem Richard Blumenthal, liberal darling and Rhode Island Dem Sheldon Whitehouse, and South Carolina Republican Lindsay “Bombs Away” Graham – now percolates through that chamber of the capitol. This very unfortunate and wildly provocative legislation mandates “the restoration of Ukraine’s 1991 borders and to bring Ukraine into NATO after the war is over,” according to Daniel Larison in Responsible Statecraft April 28.

This is called asking for trouble. Because these are precisely the points that led to Russia’s invasion in the first place. Moscow tried to negotiate over Kiev joining NATO, but Washington turned up its nose. And as far as the Russians who populate the Donbas are concerned, well, it looked like Ukraine had ethnic cleansing for them on the schedule, and the west didn’t object. So Russia invaded. In short, congress now actively touts its own recipe for nuclear World War III, since that is what the Ukrainian Victory Resolution will bring.

Google "FOP Brad Lemon Tow Lot Scandal" To Understand KCPD Refusing To Do Its Job

kansascity  |  Soon after he became Kansas City’s police chief in 2017, Rick Smith pulled officers away from a strategy credited with reducing homicides.

The effort, called the Kansas City No Violence Alliance, or KC NoVA, garnered national attention after killings dropped to a historic low of 86 in 2014, the fewest in Kansas City in more than four decades.

Under NoVA, law enforcement agencies used “focused deterrence” — targeting violent people and their associates and offering them a choice: change your behavior or go to jail. In exchange, they would get help finding jobs, getting an education and other assistance.

But when homicides increased again by the end of 2015, authorities went back to their separate agencies and “started chasing the bloodstain,” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said.

By 2019, the strategy was effectively abandoned.

Now, an assessment obtained by The Star offers candid insight into why: Despite the effort’s early success, the Kansas City Police Department had grown weary of the strategy and began to step away, angering other participants who wanted the program to continue.

“Instead of really steering into the problem and retooling ourselves at that moment, we kind of threw in the towel,” Baker, one of the chief architects of KC NoVA, said in December. “We kind of gave up.”

Some key figures who were part of KC NoVA’s launch were reassigned or moved on. Its effectiveness was questioned as killings rose in 2016. Significant elements of the strategy were dismantled over time.

Since then, murders have continued to increase. In 2019, the city nearly hit an all-time record.

Other cities that stuck with and adjusted their focused deterrence strategies over time eventually prevented homicides by targeting a small group of chronic offenders vulnerable to sanctions, supporters of the approach say.

Kansas City police instead announced last summer they were partnering with federal authorities on a program that has been around since 2001 and was retooled in recent years under then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. It focuses on targeting the most violent individuals, but not their associates.

That shift, Kansas City police said, was endorsed in an assessment conducted by the National Public Safety Partnership.

“Today, we are focusing the limited resources of the KCPD to the individuals who are ‘trigger pullers,’” the department said, noting it is constantly evaluating what works and what needs to change. “We don’t rule out any potential solution and will consider all options in order to reduce violent crime.”

Loss of Professional and Managerial Classes (REDUX 8/16/13 and Visioncircle)

nih | The gap between Whites and Blacks in levels of violence has animated a prolonged and controversial debate in public health and the social sciences. Our study reveals that over 60% of this gap is explained by immigration status, marriage, length of residence, verbal/reading ability, impulsivity, and neighborhood context. If we focus on odds ratios rather than raw coefficients, 70% of the gap is explained. Of all factors, neighborhood context was the most important source of the gap reduction and constitutional differences the least important.

We acknowledge the harsh and often justified criticism that tests of intelligence have endured, but we would emphasize 2 facts from our findings. First, measured verbal/reading ability, along with impulsivity/hyperactivity, predicted violence, in keeping with a long line of prior research. Second, however, neither factor accounted for much in the way of racial or ethnic disparities in violence. Whatever the ultimate validity of the constitutional difference argument, the main conclusion is that its efficacy as an explainer of race and violence is weak.

Our findings are consistent with the hypothesis that Blacks are segregated by neighborhood and thus differentially exposed to key risk and protective factors, an essential ingredient to understanding the Black–White disparity in violence. The race-related neighborhood features predicting violence are percentage professional/managerial workers, moral/legal cynicism, and the concentration of immigration. We found no systematic evidence that neighborhood- or individual-level predictors of violence interacted with race/ ethnicity. The relationships we observed thus appeared to be generally robust across racial/ ethnic groups. We also found no significant racial or ethnic disparities in trajectories of change in violence.

Similar to the arguments made by William Julius Wilson in The Truly Disadvantaged,these results imply that generic interventions to improve neighborhood conditions may reduce the racial gap in violence. Policies such as housing vouchers to aid the poor in securing residence in middle-class neighborhoods may achieve the most effective results in bringing down the long-standing racial disparities in violence. Policies to increase home ownership and hence stability of residence may also reduce disparities (see model 3, Table 2 ).

Family social conditions matter as well. Our data show that parents being married, but not family configuration per se, is a salient factor predicting both the lower probability of violence and a significant reduction in the Black–White gap in violence. The tendency in past debates on Black families has been either to pathologize female-headed households as a singular risk factor or to emphasize the presence of extended kin as a protective factor. Yet neither factor predicts violence in our data. Rather, being reared in married-parent households is the distinguishing factor for children, supporting recent work on the social influence of marriage and calls for renewed attention to the labor-market contexts that support stable marriages among the poor.

Although the original gap in violence between Whites and Latinos was smaller than that between Whites and Blacks, our analysis nonetheless explained the entire gap in violence between Whites and Latino ethnic groups. The lower rate of violence among Mexican Americans compared with Whites was explained by a combination of married parents, living in a neighborhood with a high concentration of immigrants, and individual immigrant status. The contextual effect of concentrated immigration was robust, holding up even after a host of factors, including the immigrant status of the person, were taken into account.

The limitations of our study raise issues for future research. Perhaps most important is the need to replicate the results in cities other than Chicago. The mechanisms explaining the apparent benefits to those living in areas of concentrated immigration need to be further addressed, and we look to future research to examine Black–White differences in rates of violence that remain unexplained. As with any nonexperimental research, it is also possible we left out key risk factors correlated with race or ethnicity. Still, to overturn our results any such factors would have to be correlated with neighborhood characteristics and uncorrelated with the dozen-plus individual and family background measures, an unlikely scenario. Even controlling for the criminality of parents did not diminish the effects of neighborhood characteristics. Finally, it is possible that family characteristics associated with violence, such as marital status, were themselves affected by neighborhood residence. If so, our analysis would mostly likely have underestimated the association between neighborhood conditions and violence.

We conclude that the large racial/ethnic disparities in violence found in American cities are not immutable. Indeed, they are largely social in nature and therefore amenable to change.

 

Racial Self-Destruction In America..., (REDUX Originally Posted 5/23/16)

NYTimes |  Ali-Rashid Abdullah, 67 and broad-shouldered with a neatly trimmed gray beard, is an ex-convict turned outreach worker for Cincinnati’s Human Relations Commission. He or his co-workers were at the scenes of all five of Cincinnati’s shootings with four or more casualties last year, working the crowds outside the yellow police tape, trying to defuse the potential for further gunfire.

They see themselves as stop signs for young black men bound for self-destruction. They also see themselves as truth-tellers about the intersection of race and gun violence — a topic that neither the city’s mayor, who is white, nor its police chief, who is black, publicly addresses.

“White folks don’t want to say it because it’s politically incorrect, and black folks don’t know how to deal with it because it is their children pulling the trigger as well as being shot,” said Mr. Abdullah, who is black.

No one worries more about black-on-black violence than African-Americans. Surveys show that they are more fearful than whites that they will be crime victims and that they feel less safe in their neighborhoods.

Most parents Mr. Abdullah meets are desperate to protect their children but are trapped in unsafe neighborhoods, he said, “just trying to survive.” And some are in denial, refusing to believe that their sons are carrying or using pistols, even in the face of clear evidence.

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

“ ‘Not my child,’ ” he said, adopting the resentful tone of a defensive mother. “ ‘It may be his friends, but not my child, because I know how I raised my child.’ ”

His reply, he said, is blunt: “These are our children killing our children, slaughtering our children, robbing our children. It’s our responsibility first.”

African-Americans make up 44 percent of Cincinnati’s nearly 300,000 residents. But last year they accounted for 91 percent of shooting victims, and very likely the same share of suspects arrested in shootings, according to the city’s assistant police chief, Lt. Col. Paul Neudigate.

Nationally, reliable racial breakdowns exist only for victims and offenders in gun homicides, not assaults, but those show a huge disparity.

The gun homicide rate peaked in 1993, in tandem with a nationwide crack epidemic, and then plummeted over the next seven years. But blacks still die from gun attacks at six to 10 times the rate of whites, depending on whether the data is drawn from medical sources or the police. F.B.I. statistics show that African-Americans, who constitute about 13 percent of the population, make up about half of both gun homicide victims and their known or suspected attackers.

“Every time we look at the numbers, we are pretty discouraged, I have to tell you,” said Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology at the University of Maryland.

Some researchers say the single strongest predictor of gun homicide rates is the proportion of an area’s population that is black. But race, they say, is merely a proxy for poverty, joblessness and other socio-economic disadvantages that help breed violence.

 

Alissa Heinerscheid Gets That Richly Deserved Foot In Her Silly Ass...,

adage  |  Anheuser-Busch InBev has changed marketing leadership for Bud Light in the wake of controversy over the brand sending a can to transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney with her face on it.

Alissa Heinerscheid, marketing VP for the brand since June 2022, has taken a leave of absence, the brewer confirmed, and will be replaced by Todd Allen, who was most recently global marketing VP for Budweiser.

Heinerscheid did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.

The brewer has also streamlined its marketing function to reduce layers “so that our most senior marketers are more closely connected to every aspect of our brand’s activities,” a company spokesperson said in a statement, adding that “these steps will help us maintain focus on the things we do best: brewing great beer for all consumers, while always making a positive impact in our communities and on our country.”

The statement noted that “we communicated some next steps with our internal teams and wholesaler partners,” adding that “we made it clear that the safety and welfare of our employees and our partners is our top priority.”

Snopes/MSNBC Pretended That Annheuser Busch Didn't Fail With Dylan Mulvaney Promotion

Snopes-MSDNC  |   There was no evidence to support the claim of a causal link between the calls for a Bud Light boycott in April 2023 and the company's financial standing. Snopes reached out to Anheuser-Busch's but we did not hear from the company as of this writing. We will update this story when, or if, that changes.

There was no demonstrable connection between the above-outlined statistics and conservative calls to stop buying Bud Light, just one of Anheuser-Busch's many products. As with all stocks, multiple factors affect market changes, such as political climate, competition, etc. – not just consumer behavior.

Experts said that such market declines are common. For example, the value of AB InBev BUD shares was $58.05 on Feb. 10, 2023, went up to $62.08 on March 3, and then declined to $59.78, on March 7. "[Such] declines are historically not unusual," wrote Dan Hunt, senior investment strategist at Morgan Stanley. 

Similarly, Nicole Goodkind of CNN Business explained companies make more comebacks from declines than the other way around. "The 14 bull markets since 1932 have returned 175% on average, while the 14 bear markets starting in 1929 have resulted in an average loss of 39%, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices data," Goodkind wrote.

In reality, as of this writing, the financial impact of the protest remains unknown. There was no financial data to determine if, or to what extent, the calls to stop buying Bud Light had impacted Anheuser-Busch's market value. A MarketWatch piece explained:

For now, there's no hard data on the financial fallout of the Bud Light protest. But the brand, analysts say, had already become less relevant in the U.S. to both beer drinkers and to Budweiser's parent company, Belgium-based AB InBev BUD.

The MarketWatch piece said "the impact of any right-wing backlash could be eclipsed by a broader slowdown in the beer industry as inflation cuts into consumer purchases, craft beer becomes a barroom staple and brewers crank out a seemingly endless rotation of sours and hazy IPAs that more or less taste the same."

Meanwhile, a satirical and demonstrably false assertion surfaced online that another Anheuser-Busch beer, Budweiser, had lost $800 million in one day. Snopes fact-checked other satirical claims that surfaced about the alleged effects of the boycott on Anheuser-Busch, as well.

 

It Aint As Gucci As People Think...,

NYTimes  |  In the Air Force, Airman Teixeira became a low-level computer tech at Otis Air National Guard Base in Sandwich, Mass., where his mother said he worked nights, helping maintain secure networks. There, he had broad access to a secure facility where he could access a global network of classified material from the military and 17 other American intelligence agencies.

Authorities say that Mr. Teixeira eventually leaked dozens of documents containing potentially harmful details about the war in Ukraine and other sensitive national security topics. 

That a 21-year-old with so little authority could have access to a such a vast trove of top secret information might surprise the general public, but people who have worked in the intelligence world say untold thousands of troops and government civilians have access to top secret materials, including many young, inexperienced workers the military relies on to process the monumental amount of intelligence it collects.

Those workers can log onto the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System — essentially a highly classified version of Google — and in milliseconds pull up briefings on Ukraine, China or nearly any other sensitive subject that the U.S. government collects intelligence on.

Though his motivations may be different, Mr. Teixeira is remarkably similar to two other high-profile leakers in recent years, Chelsea Manning and Reality Winner, said Javed Ali, a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official who held intelligence roles at the F.B.I., the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security.

Ms. Manning was a 23-year-old Army intelligence analyst who was convicted in 2013 of giving more than 700,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks. Ms. Winner was a 26-year-old former Air Force linguist working as a military contractor who in 2017 printed out a classified report on Russian hacking, hid it in her pantyhose, and gave it to The Intercept.

Unlike Ms. Manning and Ms. Winner, who came to be seen as whistle-blowers motivated by ideology, Airman Teixeira did not appear to be driven by government policies, according to people who knew him online.

But all three were relatively young and had security clearances that were the classified intelligence equivalent of having the keys to dad’s red convertible.

“Clearly their relatively young age is a common factor, and I would hope the intelligence community is thinking about that,” said Bennett Miller, a retired Air Force intelligence analyst. “The problem is that the community needs these people. It can’t work without them.”

The words “top secret” may conjure images of pristine vaults and retinal scanners, Mr. Miller said, but in reality, while some highly classified material is siloed in special access programs, most of the rest is accessible to thousands of ordinary people who have security clearances. And security can be surprisingly lax.

Often, these systems are basically just a bunch of computers on a desk and there is “nothing really stopping anyone from printing something and carrying it out,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “It ain’t as Gucci as people think.”

SMDH...., Airman Teixeira - You Gone Learn Today!!!

 NYTimes  |  The F.B.I. on Thursday was preparing to enter the home of a 21-year-old member of the intelligence wing of the Massachusetts Air National Guard who is linked to an online group at the center of a trove of leaked classified U.S. intelligence documents that have upended relations with American allies and exposed weaknesses in the Ukrainian military.

The national guardsman, who was first identified by The New York Times as Jack Teixeira, oversaw an online group named Thug Shaker Central, where about 20 to 30 people, mostly young men and teenagers, came together over a shared love of guns, racist online memes and video games.

On Thursday, an armored vehicle and about a dozen uniformed officers, most wearing tactical gear and holding weapons, were outside the cordoned-off home.

Two U.S. officials confirmed that investigators want to talk to Airman Teixeira about the leak the government documents to the private online group. One official said he might have information relevant to the investigation.

Starting months ago, the authorities say, one of the users of the online group uploaded hundreds of pages of intelligence briefings into the small chat group, lecturing its members, who had bonded during the isolation of the pandemic, on the importance of staying abreast of world events.

The New York Times spoke with four members of the Thug Shaker Central chat group, where Airman Teixeira served as group administrator.

While the gaming friends would not identify the group’s leader by name, a trail of digital evidence compiled by The Times leads to Airman Teixeira.

Here’s what else to know:

• The Times has been able to link Airman Teixeira to other members of the Thug Shaker Central group through his online gaming profile and other records. Details of the interior of Airman Teixeira’s childhood home — posted on social media in family photographs — also match details on the margins of some of the photographs of the leaked secret documents.

• Members of Thug Shaker Central who spoke to The Times said that the documents they discussed online were meant to be purely informative, and started to get wider attention only after one of the teenage members took a few dozen of them and posted them to a public online forum. The person who leaked, they said, was no whistle-blower, and the secret documents were never meant to leave their small corner of the internet.

• On Thursday, President Biden told reporters that the United States was “getting close” to finding answers about the leak. Senior law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, expect an arrest in the case over the next day or two.

• The leaked documents reveal sensitive material — maps of Ukrainian air defenses and a review of South Korea’s secret plans to deliver ammunition to Ukraine — but it is the immediate relevance of the intelligence that most worries White House and Pentagon officials: Some of the documents appear to be barely 40 days old.

Alissa Gordon Heinerscheid YKYDFU When You Take Down Your Linkedin Profile....,

ICE COLD PISSY LAGER PRETTY MUCH SELLS ITSELF DUMB ASS!!!  

WHAT KIND OF CATEGORICAL FUCKTARD INCOMPETENT MUST YOU BE TO FUCK UP A GIG AS EASY AS THIS ONE????

NYPost  |  In 2018, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, who oversees assets worth $8.6 trillion and has been called the “face of ESG,” wrote a now-infamous letter to CEOs titled “A Sense of Purpose” that pushed a “new model of governance” in line with ESG values.

“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose,” Fink wrote. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s VP of Marketing, doubles down on her extreme woke strategy to promote the “declining” American beer brand to “young people”, while smearing her former customers as “fratty and out of touch”.

How’s that working out for you, lady? @budlight pic.twitter.com/zNYKbMnZnu

— Old Row (@OldRowOfficial) April 9, 2023

Fink also let it be known “that if a company doesn’t engage with the community and have a sense of purpose “it will ultimately lose the license to operate from key stakeholders.”

In December, Florida pulled $2 billion worth of state assets managed by BlackRock. “I think it’s undemocratic of major asset managers to use their power to influence societal outcomes,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at the time.

Fink has denied that ESG is political, but key staff managing his ESG operations worked in the Obama administration and donate to Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

In his first veto, President Joe Biden last month rejected a GOP-backed bill that sought to block ESG investing — especially in pension funds where, critics say, American retirement funds will be sacrificed to a radical left-wing agenda.

Protesters in Paris targeted BlackRock’s office there this week due to the company’s role in managing and privatizing pensions, which are at the heart of the French government’s recent retirement-age reforms.

ESG and CEI proponents say that adhering to socially conscious values when investing and managing a company will make the world a better place. Not everyone agrees.

Derek Kreifels is the co-founder and CEO of State Financial Officers Foundation, one of several financial officers fighting ESG on a national level.

He calls ESG itself a “highly subjective political score infiltrating all walks of life, forcing progressive policies on everyday Americans [and] resulting in higher prices at the pump and at the store.”

The Corporate Equality Index is an ominous cog in ESG’s wheel, Kreifels told The Post.

“The problem with measures like CEI, and its big brother ESG, is that it introduces an incentive structure outside of the bounds of business, often in ways contradictory to fiduciary duty,” Kreifels said. “Whether Anheuser-Busch was trying to cash in on Dylan Mulvaney’s TikTok following or chasing higher CEI ratings for inclusivity, the backlash has been significant, and the stockholders to whom the company is obligated will feel the pinch.”

 

 

Any Man Who Must Say "I Am The King" Is No True King...,

caityjohnstone  |  The illusory truth effect is a cognitive bias which causes people to mistake something they have heard many times for an established fact, because the way the human brain receives and interprets information tends to draw little or no distinction between repetition and truth. Propagandists and empire managers often take advantage of this glitch in our wetware, which is what’s happening when you see them repeating key phrases over and over again that they want people to believe.

John Kirby really wants everyone to know that America is in charge of the world. This is from one single press conference. pic.twitter.com/HeE9uGEwrW

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 21, 2023

We saw another repetition of this line recently at an online conference hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, in which the US ambassador to China asserted that Beijing must accept the US as the “leader” of the region China happens to occupy.

US empire managers are of course getting very assertive about the narrative that they are the world’s “leader” because that self-appointed “leadership” is being challenged by China, and the nations which support it with increasing openness like Russia. Most of the major international news stories of our day are either directly or indirectly related to this dynamic, wherein the US is struggling to secure unipolar planetary domination by thwarting China’s rise and undermining its partners.

The message they’re putting out is, “This is our world. We’re in charge. Anyone who claims otherwise is freakish and abnormal, and must be opposed.”

"They claim ownership over the entire planet while pretending that they do not seek confrontation with the nations they try to subjugate, and interpret any refusal to be subjugated as an unprovoked act of aggression."https://t.co/J7H09Q8PsD

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) March 2, 2023

Why do they say the US is the “leader” of the world instead of its “ruler”, anyway? I’m unclear on the difference as practically applied. Is it meant to give us the impression that the US rules the world by democratic vote? That this is something the rest of the world consented to? Because I sure as hell don’t remember voting for it, and we’ve all seen what happens to governments which don’t comply with US “leadership”.

I’m not one of those who believe a multipolar world will be a wonderful thing, I just recognize that it beats the hell out of the alternative, that being increasingly reckless nuclear brinkmanship to maintain global control. The US has been in charge long enough to make it clear that the world order it dominates can only be maintained by nonstop violence and aggression, with more and more of that violence and aggression being directed toward major nuclear-armed powers. The facts are in and the case is closed: US unipolar hegemony is unsustainable.

The problem is that the US empire itself does not know this. This horrifying trajectory we’re on toward an Atomic Age world war is the result of the empire’s doctrine that it must maintain unipolar control at all costs crashing into the rise of a multipolar world order.

 

Americanism Failed When America Failed To Integrate Its Public Schools

theconversation  |   Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia, wants a “national divorce.” In her view, another Civil War is inevitable unless red and blue states form separate countries.

She has plenty of company on the right, where a host of others – 52% of Trump voters, Donald Trump himself and prominent Texas Republicans – have endorsed various forms of secession in recent years. Roughly 40% of Biden voters have fantasized about a national divorce as well. Some on the left urge a domestic breakup so that a new egalitarian nation might be, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “brought forth on this continent.”

The American Civil War was a national trauma precipitated by the secession of 11 Southern states over slavery. It is, therefore, understandable that many pundits and commentators would weigh in about the legality, feasibility and wisdom of secessionwhen others clamor for divorce.

But all this secession talk misses a key point that every troubled couple knows. Just as there are ways to withdraw from a marriage before any formal divorce, there are also ways to exit a nation before officially seceding.

I have studied secession for 20 years, and I think that it is not just a “what if?” scenario anymore. In “We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776,” my co-author and I go beyond narrow discussions of secession and the Civil War to frame secession as an extreme end point on a scale that includes various acts of exit that have already taken place across the U.S.

Separatist ideas come from the Left, too.

“Cal-exit,” a plan for California to leave the union after 2016, was the most acute recent attempt at secession.

And separatist acts have reshaped life and law in many states. Since 2012, 21 states have legalized marijuana, which is federally illegal. Sanctuary cities and states have emerged since 2016 to combat aggressive federal immigration laws and policies. Some prosecutors and judges refuse to prosecute women and medical providers for newly illegal abortions in some states.

Estimates vary, but some Americans are increasingly opting out of hypermodern, hyperpolarized life entirely. “Intentional communities,” rural, sustainable, cooperative communes like East Wind in the Ozarks, are, as The New York Times reported in 2020, proliferating “across the country.”

In many ways, America is already broken apart. When secession is portrayed in its strictest sense, as a group of people declaring independence and taking a portion of a nation as they depart, the discussion is myopic, and current acts of exit hide in plain sight. When it comes to secession, the question is not just “What if?” but “What now?”