The rewards of an increasingly integrated global economy
have brought forth a new global elite. Labeled ‘Davos Men’, ‘gold-collar
workers’ or . . . ‘cosmocrats’, this emerging class is empowered
by new notions of global connectedness. It includes academics,
international civil servants and executives in global companies, as well
as successful high-technology entrepreneurs. Estimated to number
about 20 million in 2000, of whom 40 percent were American, this elite
is expected to double in size by 2010. Comprising fewer than 4 percent of the American people,
these transnationalists have little need for national loyalty, view
national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see
national governments as residues from the past whose only useful
function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations. In the coming
years, one corporation executive confidently predicted, “the only people
who will care about national boundaries are politicians.” Involvement
in transnational institutions, networks and activities not only defines
the global elite but also is critical to achieving elite status within
nations. Someone whose loyalties, identities and involvements are
purely national is less likely to rise to the top in business, academia,
the media and the professions than someone who transcends these limits.
Outside politics, those who stay home stay behind. Those who move ahead
think and act internationally. As sociologist Manuel Castells has said,
“Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.”
“Why don’t they just move?” being the quintessential question of
Davos Man, aspirational or no, or has been until recently. Perhaps now
Davos Man (or, today, Person) is hearing the faint, far-off sound of blades
being sharpened, and is about to display adaptability. Or will, if the
WEF has anything to do with it. If so, that’s interesting and something
to think about. (FOX is already excited; they seem to think that the WEF is going to bring about socialism. Pas si bête.)
In this post I’m going to take a brief look at the WEF’s upcoming
2021 potlatch, dubbed “The Great Reset,” first at its ideological, and
then at its institutional characteristics. As I said, this post will be
quite superficial, since I’m not a global elites maven. Indeed, reading
the WEF site made me feel like I was trapped in a large and luxurious
conference hotel where all the signage was in a language that looked
like English, but wasn’t. So I hope readers will chime in. No yarn
diagrams, please!
BusinessInsider | Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao says Ghislaine Maxwell was rubbing elbows
with Silicon Valley's elites in 2011 — and Pao believes people
suspected Maxwell's ties to child trafficking at the time and didn't
care.
Maxwell was arrested
last week and is awaiting trial for four criminal charges related to
procuring and transporting minors for illegal sex acts. Prosecutors say
Maxwell participated in a sex trafficking operation alongside her
partner Jeffrey Epstein.
Pao, a former partner at venture capital
firm Kleiner Perkins, said Maxwell was at the firm's holiday party in
2011, more than two years after Epstein was first convicted
of soliciting sex from a 14 year old. Maxwell was Epstein's long-time
girlfriend and associate at the time but did not face any criminal
charges prior to her 2020 arrest.
"[Maxwell] was at the Kleiner
holiday party in 2011, but I had no desire to meet her much less have a
photo taken with her," Pao wrote in a tweet,
screenshotted and reposted by reporter Lachlan Markay. "We knew about
her supplying underage girls for sex, but I guess that was fine with the
'cool' people who managed the tightly controlled guest list."
Pao set her Twitter account to private Monday morning after sending
the tweet. When reached for comment by Business Insider, Pao shared two
additional tweets that she subsequently posted clarifying her remarks.
In one tweet, Pao linked to a Daily Mail report published in March 2011 in which Epstein's victims accused Maxwell of participating in the abuse.
"To
be clear, the press had described her as supplying underage girls for
sex, but she had not been charged so I guess it would be more accurate
to say we 'suspected' v 'knew,'" Pao wrote.
According to a 2011 Business Insider report,
the Kleiner Perkins holiday party that year drew esteemed guests
including former Vice President Al Gore, Apple VP of Engineering Mike
Abbott, and former HP chairman Ray Lane.
A Kleiner Perkins spokesperson declined to comment.
dailymail |Ghislaine Maxwell has a secret stash of Jeffrey Epstein's
twisted sex tapes and will use the footage as an insurance policy to
save herself, a former friend exclusively revealed to DailyMail.com.
Maxwell,
58, was arrested at her hideout in Bradford, New Hampshire last
Thursday. She was charged with six federal crimes, including enticement
of minors, sex trafficking and perjury.
The
British socialite was arguably Epstein's closest friend and she is
alleged to have acted as his madam, accused of securing underage girls
for the multi-millionaire, who reportedly kept evidence of his perverted
sex acts against the minors.
When officials raided Epstein's Manhattan
townhouse after his arrest last July, they found thousands of graphic
photos that included images of underage girls and a safe filled with
compact discs labeled 'nude girls', according to authorities.
Maxwell's
former friend explained: 'Ghislaine has always been as cunning as they
come. She wasn't going to be with Epstein all those years and not have
some insurance.
'The secret stash of
sex tapes I believe Ghislaine has squirreled away could end up being her
get out of jail card if the authorities are willing to trade. She has
copies of everything Epstein had. They could implicate some twisted
movers and shakers.'
They added: 'If Ghislaine goes down, she's going to take the whole damn lot of them with her.'
The former friend continued: 'Not only did
Epstein like to capture himself with underage girls on camera – he
wanted to make sure he had something to hold over the rich and powerful
men who took advantage of his sick largesse.'
'I'll
bet anything that once it comes out that Ghislaine has those tapes
these men will be quaking in their Italian leather boots.
'Ghislaine
made sure that she socked away thumb drives of it all. She knows where
all the bodies are buried and she'll use whatever she had to save her
own a**.'
jonathanturley | It is bad enough when you become a political rally cry for the right
as a man trying to destroy our economy or instill fear into the nation.
Now, Dr. Anthony Fauci is being called a mass murderer who, with the
cabal of Bill and Melinda Gates, are seeking to “depopulate the Earth.”
That is hardly the most deranged thing that Nation of Islam leader Louis
Farrakhan, 87, has uttered, but it may be the most dangerous. Farrakhan
is encouraging people to refuse vaccinations, a problem that is already causing world health leaders concerns in Africa. This is viewed as the new “epicenter” for the pandemic
with Africans facing a threat with the need to protect hundreds of
millions of Africans.
Health officials will need their cooperation but
they have now heard from Farrakhan who has declared that, if they want
to live, “Do not take their medication.”
In this Fourth of July remarks, Farrakhan declared that
“They’re making money now, plotting to give seven
billion, five-hundred million people a vaccination. Dr. Fauci, Bill
Gates and Melinda — you want to depopulate the Earth. What the hell gave
you that right? Who are you to sit down with your billion to talk about
who can live, and who should die?
…
I say to my brothers and sisters in Africa, if they come up with a
vaccine, be careful. Don’t let them vaccinate you with their history of
treachery through vaccines, through medication.”
He added “That’s why your world is coming to an end quickly, because
you have sentenced billions to death, but God is now sentencing you to
the death that you are sentencing to others.”
SMH | "The explanation could only be that these agents don't come or go
anywhere. They are always here and something ignites them, maybe human
density or environmental conditions, and this is what we should look
for."
Dr Jefferson believes that the virus may be transmitted through the
sewerage system or shared toilets, not just through droplets expelled by
talking, coughing and sneezing.
Jefferson
and Professor Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based
Medicine, have called for an in-depth investigation similar to that
carried out by John Snow in 1854, which showed cholera was spreading in
London from an infected well in Soho.
Exploring why so many
outbreaks happen at food factories and meat-packing plants could uncover
major new transmission routes, they believe. It may be shared toilets
coupled with cool conditions that allow the virus to thrive.
"We're
doing a living review, extracting environmental conditions, the ecology
of these viruses which has been grossly understudied," said Dr
Jefferson.
"There
is quite a lot of evidence of huge amounts of the virus in sewage all
over the place, and an increasing amount of evidence there is faecal
transmission. There is a high concentration where sewage is four
degrees, which is the ideal temperature for it to be stabled and
presumably activated. And meat-packing plants are often at four degrees.
"These
meat-packing clusters and isolated outbreaks don't fit with respiratory
theory, they fit with people who haven't washed their hands properly.
politico | In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County,
Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new
whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status,
arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being
considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in
the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in
motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In
1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students
enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the
following year, that number fell to zero.
In Green v. Kennedy (David Kennedy was secretary of the
treasury at the time), decided in January 1970, the plaintiffs won a
preliminary injunction, which denied the “segregation academies”
tax-exempt status until further review. In the meantime, the government
was solidifying its position on such schools. Later that year, President
Richard Nixon ordered the Internal Revenue Service to enact a new
policy denying tax exemptions to all segregated schools in the United
States. Under the provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which
forbade racial segregation and discrimination, discriminatory schools
were not—by definition—“charitable” educational organizations, and
therefore they had no claims to tax-exempt status; similarly, donations
to such organizations would no longer qualify as tax-deductible
contributions.
Paul Weyrich, the late religious conservative political activist and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation, saw his opening.
In the decades following World War II, evangelicals, especially
white evangelicals in the North, had drifted toward the Republican
Party—inclined in that direction by general Cold War anxieties,
vestigial suspicions of Catholicism and well-known evangelist Billy
Graham’s very public friendship with Dwight Eisenhower and Richard
Nixon. Despite these predilections, though, evangelicals had largely
stayed out of the political arena, at least in any organized way. If he
could change that, Weyrich reasoned, their large numbers would
constitute a formidable voting bloc—one that he could easily marshal
behind conservative causes.
“The new political philosophy must be defined by us [conservatives]
in moral terms, packaged in non-religious language, and propagated
throughout the country by our new coalition,” Weyrich wrote in the
mid-1970s. “When political power is achieved, the moral majority will
have the opportunity to re-create this great nation.” Weyrich believed
that the political possibilities of such a coalition were unlimited.
“The leadership, moral philosophy, and workable vehicle are at hand just
waiting to be blended and activated,” he wrote. “If the moral majority
acts, results could well exceed our wildest dreams.”
But this hypothetical “moral majority” needed a catalyst—a standard
around which to rally. For nearly two decades, Weyrich, by his own
account, had been trying out different issues, hoping one might pique
evangelical interest: pornography, prayer in schools, the proposed Equal
Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even abortion. “I was trying to
get these people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,”
Weyrich recalled at a conference in 1990.
The Green v. Connally ruling provided a necessary first step: It captured the attention of evangelical leaders , especially
as the IRS began sending questionnaires to church-related “segregation
academies,” including Falwell’s own Lynchburg Christian School,
inquiring about their racial policies. Falwell was furious. “In some
states,” he famously complained, “It’s easier to open a massage parlor
than a Christian school.”
One such school, Bob Jones University—a fundamentalist college in
Greenville, South Carolina—was especially obdurate. The IRS had sent its
first letter to Bob Jones University in November 1970 to ascertain
whether or not it discriminated on the basis of race. The school
responded defiantly: It did not admit African Americans.
Although Bob Jones Jr., the school’s founder, argued that racial
segregation was mandated by the Bible, Falwell and Weyrich quickly
sought to shift the grounds of the debate, framing their opposition in
terms of religious freedom rather than in defense of racial segregation.
For decades, evangelical leaders had boasted that because their
educational institutions accepted no federal money (except for, of
course, not having to pay taxes) the government could not tell them how
to run their shops—whom to hire or not, whom to admit or reject. The
Civil Rights Act, however, changed that calculus.
Bob Jones University did, in fact, try to placate the IRS—in its own
way. Following initial inquiries into the school’s racial policies, Bob
Jones admitted one African-American, a worker in its radio station, as a
part-time student; he dropped out a month later. In 1975, again in an
attempt to forestall IRS action, the school admitted blacks to the
student body, but, out of fears of miscegenation, refused to admit unmarried African-Americans.
The school also stipulated that any students who engaged in interracial
dating, or who were even associated with organizations that advocated
interracial dating, would be expelled.
The IRS was not placated. On January 19, 1976, after years of
warnings—integrate or pay taxes—the agency rescinded the school’s tax
exemption.
For many evangelical leaders, who had been following the issue since Green v. Connally,
Bob Jones University was the final straw. As Elmer L. Rumminger,
longtime administrator at Bob Jones University, told me in an interview,
the IRS actions against his school “alerted the Christian school
community about what could happen with government interference” in the
affairs of evangelical institutions. “That was really the major issue
that got us all involved.”
WaPo | "We always think, well, we’re never going to have integrated schools
as long as we have such highly segregated neighborhoods," she says. "I
want to point out maybe we’ll never have integrated neighborhoods if we
have segregated schools."
If we found ways to integrate schools — as former District Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) controversially proposed two years ago —
that might take some of the exclusivity out of certain neighborhoods.
School quality is capitalized into housing prices, making
those neighborhoods unaffordable to many families. Imagine, for
instance, if all the public schools in the District or the Washington
region were integrated and of comparable quality. Families might pay
more to live in Northwest to be near Rock Creek Park. But you'd see
fewer home-bidding wars there just to access scarce school quality. More
to the point, homes families already paid handsomely to buy might lose
some of their value.
Politically, the two topics that most enrage
voters are threats to property values and local schools. So either of
these ideas — wielding housing policy to affect schools, or school
policy to affect housing — would be tough sells. Especially to anyone
who has secured both the desirable address and a seat in the best kindergarten in town. Parents in Upper Northwest, for instance, deeply opposed the idea of ending neighborhood schools in Washington. And Gray's proposal never came to pass.
But,
Owens says, "I feel more hopeful in studying these issues today than I
did five years ago." At least, she says, we are all now talking more
about inequality and segregation.
NYTimes | In many northern cities, the 1974 United States Supreme Court decision Milliken v. Bradley
killed any hopes of integrating the public schools. That ruling,
involving Detroit and its suburbs, said that a mandatory plan to achieve
integration by busing black children from Detroit across district lines
to mainly white suburbs was unconstitutional. The result accelerated
white flight to the suburbs, leaving the schools in urban centers even
more segregated than they had been.
Most famously, this happened in Boston, where court-ordered integration
resulted in a busing plan that wound up mainly moving children of color
around the city.
But busing had greater success in some places, particularly those where
the plans were carried out countywide, reducing the chances of white
flight. They included Louisville-Jefferson County, Raleigh-Wake County
and Charlotte-Mecklenburg County.
This week’s Retro Report video, “The Battle for Busing,” follows the
story of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg district, which became a national
model for racial integration for 30 years only to resegregate about a
decade ago, after a court ruling lifted the mandatory integration plan.
When the Charlotte busing plan began in 1971, there were whites who
threatened to go to jail before they would let their children attend
schools with blacks. The open racism voiced by whites in the Retro
Report’s archival footage is vicious and ugly; students were injured
when fistfights broke out between whites and blacks.
But by 1974, the district was being singled out in the news media as a
national model, particularly West Charlotte High, which had previously
been all black. The impact of integration was visible almost immediately
at the school. When whites arrived, the facilities were upgraded, said a
former chairman of the school board, Arthur Griffin. A gravel parking
lot was paved, and the football stadium and the gymnasium were
renovated.
Over the years, researchers like Prof. Roslyn Mickelson at the
University of North Carolina, Charlotte, conducted studies concluding
that children of any race who attended diverse schools were more likely
to succeed, in areas like graduating, avoiding crime and attending
college.
But in the end, the same federal courts that had ushered in integration helped kill it. In the late 1990s, Judge Robert D. Potter of Federal District Court
essentially said that the Charlotte district had met its constitutional
duty by successfully creating a single school system serving all
children regardless of race and that no more need be done.
In a few years’ time, West Charlotte High, which had been roughly 40
percent black and 60 percent white in the 1970s, became 88 percent black
and 1 percent white. And it wasn’t just Charlotte. Today, nearly
two-thirds of the school districts that had been ordered to desegregate
are no longer required to do so, including Seminole County, Fla. (2006);
Little Rock, Ark. (2007); and Galveston County, Tex. (2009).
The New York City system is more segregated than it was in the 1980s:
half the schools are more than 90 percent black and Hispanic. For more
about the nation’s “steady and massive resegregation,” see this Reporter’s Notebook from Retro Report.
This week’s Retro Report is the 10th in our documentary project, which was started with a grant from Christopher Buck. Retro Report
has a staff of 12 journalists and 6 contributors led by Kyra Darnton.
It is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a
thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle. The videos are
typically 10 to 12 minutes long.
I was fetching around for a way in which to try and integrate today's dismissals of both BLM and the black political mainstream, with tomorrow's refresher course on American racism and living memory history. Tomorrow is REALLY important. That said, I suspect that even here, short attention span theater predominates - such that a simple succinct six minute turn that Irami Osei Frimpong offered - will have been lost even on my audience.
For sure what has been lost is the fundamental, core living memory experience of racism that shaped my life, largely i'm guessing, because it had little to no impact on any of your lives. What I'm referring to is public school desegregation attempted in the 70's and flatly and legally and politically rejected by white Americans of all socioeconomic and political persuasions.
Kunstler entirely misses this in his haste to blame black folks for their exclusion and alienation from the American mainstream. See, I and a number of my peers, my immediate personal cohort, were among the lucky and durable ones who integrated public and private schools during the 70's, survived, got tough, and thrived, all the while learning everything there is to know about white America.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, don't get me wrong. I'm not crying about anything, I'm not playing a victim card, and I sincerely believe and exemplify the ethos "that which does not kill you". But the simple fact of the matter is, that when white Americans refused to accept integration of public schools and shifted themselves in very dramatic macro-scale fashion in response to the prospective horror of little Cindy Lou sitting next to young Tyrone in the 3rd grade, well..., that kind of set the mold for much of what has followed over the next 50 years.
kunstler | That business was the full participation of Black citizens in
American life. The main grievance now is that Black Americans are still
denied full participation due to “systemic racism.” That’s a dodge. What
actually happened is that Black America opted out and lost itself in a
quandary of its own making with the assistance of their white
dis-enablers, the well intentioned “progressives.”
Let me take you back to the mid-20th century. America had just fought and won a war against manifest evil. The nation styled itself as Leader of the Free World.
That role could not be squared with the rules of Jim Crow apartheid, so
something had to change. The civil rights campaign to undo racial
segregation under law naturally began in the courts in cases such as
Brown v. Board of Education (1954). So-called public accommodations —
hotels, theaters, restaurants, buses, bathrooms, water fountains, etc. —
remained segregated. By the early 1960s, the clamor to end all that
took to the streets under the emerging moral leadership of Martin Luther
King and his credo of non-violent civil disobedience.
Many acts of non-violent street protest were met by police using
fire-hoses, vicious dogs, and batons to terrorize the marchers. This
only shamed and horrified the rest of the nation watching on TV and
actually quickened the formation of a political consensus to end
American apartheid. That culminated in the passage of three major
federal laws: the Public Accommodations Act of 1964, the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Meanwhile, something else was going on among Black Americans: not
everybody believed in Dr. King’s non-violence, and not everybody was so
sure about full participation in American life. Altogether, Black
America remained ambivalent and anxious about all that. That full participation implied
a challenge to compete on common ground. What if it didn’t work out? An
alternate view emerged, personified first by Malcolm X, who called MLK
an “Uncle Tom,” and then by the younger generation, Stokely Carmichael,
the Black Panthers and others retailing various brands of Black Power,
Black Nationalism, and Black Separatism. It amounted, for some, in
declining that invitation to participate fully in American life. “No
thanks. We’ll go our own way.” That sentiment has prevailed ever since.
So, the outcome to all that federal legislation of the 1960s
turned out not to be the clear-cut victory (like World War Two) that
liberals and progressives so breathlessly expected. The civil rights
acts had some startling adverse consequences, too. They swept away much
of the parallel service and professional economy that Blacks had
constructed to get around all the old exclusions of everyday life. With
that went a lot of the Black middle-class, the business owners
especially. In its place, the liberal-and-progressive government
provided “public assistance” — a self-reinforcing poverty generator that
got ever worse, especially in big cities where de-industrialization
started destroying the working-class job base beginning in the 1970s. Fist tap Big Don.
gatestoneinstitute | The idea that in the United States there is "structural racism" (defined
by the Aspen Institute as "a system in which public policies,
institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work
in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity")
has led, it seems, to a form of obsessive expiation. Films have been
removed from streaming services. Gone with the Wind will now be shown with five-minute disclaimer. (One minute would not have been enough?)
The film is probably just first on a lengthening list. A reporter from Variety recently listed "10 Problematic Films That Could Use Warning Labels". They include Forrest Gump:
for a brief moment, the title character is described, in an ironic
fashion, as having been named after a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Consumer product brands, such as Uncle Ben's Rice and Aunt Jemima syrup are abruptly having their names and logos changed. Princeton
voted to expunge the name of Woodrow Wilson from its public policy
school. Demands have been made that universities and corporations show
that they are not racist by declaring their support for Black Lives
Matter. Many have bowed to the demand.
Of course there is still some racism among individuals, but the idea
that the United States today is a society where "structural racism"
exists is contradicted
by decades of political decisions to repair the damage and, as in, for
example, affirmative action programs, to favor equality for all
Americans. As Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an American author who fled her homeland
of Somalia, wrote:
"The problem is that there are people among us who don't
want to figure it out and who have an interest in avoiding workable
solutions. They have an obvious political incentive not to solve social
problems, because social problems are the basis of their power. That is
why, whenever a scholar like Roland Fryer brings new data to the table—showing
it's simply not true that the police disproportionately shoot black
people dead—the response is not to read the paper but to try to
discredit its author."
For many years, American films dealing with racial questions have
been explicitly hostile to any racial discrimination, and it would be
impossible to find a book put out by a U.S. publishing house supporting
racial discrimination, unless it dates from an era long gone. Rewriting
history by falsifying it is simply an attempt to replace history with propaganda.
Removing films and other information that do not correspond to a
predetermined vision of history has long been the practice of totalitarian
despotisms. Dictating that universities and corporations face severe
consequences if they refuse to bowdlerize the past is simply a
fascistic, tyrannical
means of coercion. Worse, the submissive attitude of so many
universities and corporations is what enables the bullying to continue.
libcom | Coexisting with this egalitarian ideology was the Civil Rights
movement's appeal to a functionalist conception of social rationality.
To the extent that it blocked individual aspirations, segregation was
seen as restricting artificially social growth and progress. Similarly,
by raising artificial barriers such as the construction of blacks'
consumer power through Jim Crow legislation and, indirectly, through low
black wages, segregation impeded, so the argument went, the free
functioning of the market. Consequently, segregation was seen not only
as detrimental to the blacks who suffered under it, but also to economic
progress as such. Needless to say, the two lines of argument were met
with approval by corporate liberals.[31]
......
Outside the South, rebellion arose from different conditions. Racial
segregation was not rigidly codified and the management sub-systems in
the black community were correspondingly more fluidly integrated within
the local administrative apparatus. Yet, structural, generational and
ideological pressures, broadly similar to those in the South, existed
within the black elite in the Northern, Western, and Midwestern cities
that had gained large black populations in the first half of the 20th
century. In non-segregated urban contexts, formal political
participation and democratized consumption had long since been achieved:
there the salient political issue was the extension of the
administrative purview of the elite within the black community. The
centrality of the administrative nexus in the "revolt of the cities" is
evident from the ideological programs it generated.
Black Power came about as a call for indigenous control of economic and political institutions in the black community.[33]
Because one of the early slogans of Black Power was a vague demand for
"community control," the emancipatory character of the rebellion was
open to considerable misinterpretation. Moreover, the diversity and
"militance" of its rhetoric encouraged extravagance in assessing the
movement's depth. It soon became clear, however, that "community
control" called not for direction of pertinent institutions — schools,
hospitals, police, retail businesses, etc. — by their black
constituents, but for administration of those institutions by alleged
representatives in the name of a black community. Given an existing
elite structure whose legitimacy had already been certified by federal
social-welfare agencies, the selection of "appropriate" representatives
was predictable. Indeed, as Robert Allen has shown,[34]
the empowerment of this elite was actively assisted by corporate-state
elements. Thus, "black liberation" quickly turned into black "equity,"
"community control" became simply "black control" and the Nixon
"blackonomics" strategy was readily able to "coopt" the most rebellious
tendency of 1960s black activism. Ironically, Black Power's supersession
of the Civil Rights program led to further consolidation of the
management elite's hegemony within the black community. The black elite
broadened its administrative control by uncritically assuming the
legitimacy of the social context within which that elite operated. Black
control was by no means equivalent to democratization.
There are now, in my view, at least seven fairly distinct camps among
Black political figures — concentrated in the Democratic Party but also
stretching into the GOP. These groupings — which come from my own
reporting and talking to experts, rather than any specific data set —
are mostly informal. But the idea is to explain some common patterns and
themes we are seeing, not necessarily to perfectly describe the
politics of any particular person or faction in the party. I should also
emphasize that these camps do not correspond exactly to rank-and-file
Black voters, although I will talk about some places where there is overlap between activists and voters.
I have tried to order the camps by size, from largest to smallest. They are:
universetoday | This movie was created using an imagery from Mars Express’ High
Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The images are normally taken looking
straight down (nadir), and the video combines topography information
from the stereo channels of HRSC to generate a three-dimensional
landscape, which was then recorded from different perspectives, as with a
movie camera, to render the flight shown in the video.
Korolev Crater is 82 kilometers (50 miles) across and at least 2 km
(1.25 miles) deep. This well-preserved crater is located the northern
lowlands of Mars, just south of a large patch of dune-filled terrain
that encircles part of the planet’s northern polar cap (known as Olympia
Undae).
That’s not snow you’re seeing, but this crater is constantly filled
with water ice, and its central mound is about 1.8 kilometers (1.1
miles) thick all year round. It’s one of the largest reservoirs of
non-polar ice on Mars.
This view reminds me of a flight I took where I flew over Meteor
Crater in Arizona USA. But for comparison, Meteor Crater is less than a
mile across (.737 miles/1.186 km) and just 560 feet (170 m) deep.
You may be thinking, how can this ice remain stable in Korolev Crater;
doesn’t water ice sublimate away in Mars thin atmosphere? Just like dry
ice does here on Earth, water ice on Mars usually goes from solid to gas
with the low atmospheric pressure. (Mars has approximately 8 millibars
while on Earth the average, atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1013.25
millibars, or about 14.7 pounds per square inch.)
tatler | The news comes following a public back and forth between the US
Department of Justice and Prince Andrew’s legal team over the royal’s
alleged lack of cooperation in the ongoing investigations into Epstein.
But one of the US prosecutors leading the enquiries, Geoffrey Berman,
has now been sacked from his role as Attorney for the Southern District
of New York by Donald Trump after refusing to stand down.
According to the Times, the US Attorney General,
William Barr, asked President Trump to remove Berman – who had also
overseen the prosecution of a number of Trump’s associates. Berman
initially responded by stating that he had ‘no intention of resigning’
after Trump ally Barr unexpectedly announced that Berman was ‘stepping
down’.
Earlier in June it was reported that the US Department
of Justice had asked the Home Office to help it question Andrew over his
links to Epstein. The Duke of York’s legal team accused the DoJ of
‘breaching their own confidentiality rules’, claiming that the royal had
‘offered his assistance as a witness’ on at least three occasions this
year.
Berman retaliated by stating that Andrew had
‘yet again sought to falsely portray himself to the public as eager and
willing to cooperate.’ He added that in fact, the Duke ‘has not given an
interview to federal authorities, has repeatedly declined our request
to schedule such an interview, and nearly four months ago informed us
unequivocally – through the very same counsel who issued today's release
– that he would not come in for such an interview… If Prince Andrew is,
in fact, serious about cooperating with the ongoing federal
investigation, our doors remain open, and we await word of when we
should expect him.’
It was subsequently reported that
Andrew would not cooperate with the Epstein investigation unless
American investigators offer him ‘an olive branch’. The Duke of York has
consistently denied any wrongdoing in regards to his links with his
former friend.
dailymail | Speaking to The Sun,
Epstein's former employer Steven Hoffenberg said the paedophile's
ex-girlfriend Maxwell 'knows everything' and will 'totally co-operate'
after her arrest.
Hoffenberg, a
convicted fraudster who employed Epstein at Towers Financial in the
1980s, said 'there's a lot of people very worried' about what Maxwell
could reveal. 'She's going to cooperate and be very important. Andrew is
definitely, definitely concerned,' Hoffenberg said.
On
Thursday, a source close to the Duke of York's legal team told
DailyMail.com that he was 'bewildered' by prosecutors' remarks that they
wanted to speak to him.
'The Duke’s
team remains bewildered given that we have twice communicated with the
DOJ in the last month and to-date, we have had no response.'
On
Thursday, Acting US Attorney Audrey Strauss said the investigation into
Epstein's decades of abuse is ongoing and that she'd 'welcome' Prince
Andrew 'coming in to provide a statement', prompting speculation that he
may among people investigators may focus their attention on next.
'We
would welcome Prince Andrew coming in to talk to us. We would like to
have the benefit of his statement. Our doors remain open. We would
welcome him coming in and giving us an opportunity to hear his
statement,' she said.
It opens the
door to questions of jurisdiction and whether or not US Attorney Strauss
may charge for alleged incidents that happened in London and not
America. Among the claims in the indictment is that Maxwell groomed one
of the victims in London. At her press conference, Strauss said some of
the sexual abuse also happened at Maxwell's house in London.
US
attorney Lisa Bloom, who represents one of Maxwell's accusers, said
'all others accused of enabling Jeffrey Epstein's predations must
immediately be brought to justice as well'.
'Maxwell's
brutal, ruthless behaviour caused my client tremendous pain,' Ms Bloom
said in a statement, adding that she and her client applauded the
socialite's 'long overdue arrest'.
One
Epstein accuser, Michelle Licata, has previously voiced hopes that
prosecutors looking into Epstein were 'going to start digging into his
life... and start pulling out this spider web of people that were
related to it', according to the New York Post.
Former
federal prosecutor Jessica Roth told Bloomberg: 'There is no way for
prosecutors to present a case against her without going into all the
evidence they had against Epstein, because the charges here are
intertwined.
'The original indictment
against Jeffrey Epstein made it clear that he didn’t act alone and that
the government had evidence that other people were also involved.'
Celebrating
Maxwell's arrest, Prince Andrew's accuser, Roberts said last night:
'Thank you to the FBI, Southern District of New York and anyone involved
in the arrest of this insidious creature. Hope the judge throws the
book at her. So so so happy- she’s finally where she belongs.'
kmbc | Mayor Quinton Lucas is calling on a special session of the Missouri General Assembly to address violent crime in Kansas City.
On
Friday, Lucas released a letter she sent to Missouri Gov. Mike Parson
calling the situation in Kansas City a ‘crisis point.’ In the letter, he
asks Parson to call for a special session of the assembly to allow
state senators and representatives to vote on legislation to enhance
witness protection funding in Missouri.
“We need state legislative action on several items we have previously
discussed to address our problem,” Lucas said in the letter. “While we
will continue to pursue a broad set of social services and other tools
to address violent crime now and in the future, specific action from
Jefferson City can help us apprehend and incarcerate murderers currently
walking the streets of Kansas City and protect witnesses in our
neighborhoods who are frequently scared to speak.”
Lucas
said additional help is also needed to provide more tools for law
enforcement and prosecutors to “interrupt conspiracies to commit murder
and other violent acts, particularly offenses committed by felons using
deadly weapons.”
“Kansas City is too fine a city, and Missouri too
fine a state to allow violent criminality to define our way of life,”
Lucas wrote. “We will persevere through these challenges, but our
children, our law enforcement community, and all Kansas Citians need
change quickly."
bloomberg | Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime friend of Jeffrey Epstein arrested
Thursday for helping him sexually abuse underage girls, could wind up in
the same jail where he committed suicide last year.
Maxwell,
58, was arrested early Thursday morning in New Hampshire and is set for
an afternoon hearing in federal court there. Federal prosecutors in
Manhattan, who are handling the case, are opposing bail and seeking to
have her held in custody before trial.
“We will be seeking detention,” Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey
Strauss in Manhattan said in a press conference announcing charges.
Prosecutors said Maxwell helped Epstein entice girls as young as 14 into
sex from 1994 through 1997, then lied about it under oath in 2016.
Prosecutors warn that Maxwell has a “strong incentive” to flee if
she’s not detained because she faces years in prison. “That risk is only
amplified by the defendant’s extensive international ties, her
citizenship in two foreign countries, her wealth, and her lack of
meaningful ties to the United States,”
they wrote in a detention memo. “In short, Maxwell has three passports,
large sums of money, extensive international connections, and
absolutely no reason to stay” in the U.S.
Back to New York
Unless
the judge in New Hampshire releases her on bail, Maxwell will either be
held overnight in a local jail there or transported immediately back to
New York, said Jack Donson, a consultant who formerly worked for the
federal Bureau of Prisons. In New York, she would likely be transferred
to one of two federal lockups, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in
Lower Manhattan or the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Newsweek | "I oppose the destruction of evidence that may contain smoking gun
proof that my false accuser made up her story," Dershowitz said. "I want
all the evidence preserved because I have absolutely nothing to hide. I
did nothing wrong. The evidence to be destroyed may also contain proof
of wrongdoing by others. It should be preserved for appeal and for
history. Destroying evidence risks destroying truth."
Upon
returning from a trip to France in 2019, Epstein was arrested.
Indictment documents alleged that Epstein had "sexually exploited and
abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and
Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations." Epstein also allegedly
"created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually
exploit." Investigators also reported finding incriminating photographs
of underaged naked girls inside a safe in Epstein's Manhattan home.
Giuffre
claimed that she had been brought into Epstein's circle by Epstein's
lover Ghislaine Maxwell. While involved with Epstein, Giuffre alleged
that she had been involved in sexual relations with Prince Andrew while
she was 17 years old at Epstein's behest.
Prince Andrew denied the allegations, saying in a 2019 statement that he
"deplores the exploitation of any human being and the suggestion he
would condone, participate in or encourage and such behavior is
abhorrent."
Epstein pleaded not guilty to the charges. While awaiting trial, Epstein
died by hanging in his prison cell. After it was discovered that prison
guards had failed to perform safety checks on Epstein, some believed
that Epstein had actually been murdered. However, the coroner officially
ruled Epstein's death a suicide.
nuclearwarsimulator | The goal of this project is to build a realistic simulation and
visualization of large-scale nuclear conflicts with a focus on
humanitarian consequences. There are currently over 13000 nuclear
weapons on this planet of which over 9000 are in military stockpiles.
This software should help you answer the question: what will happen if
Russia and United States or India and Pakistan use their arsenals?
There
are a lot of interlocking systems and processes in a nuclear conflict:
the command and control system, locations and movement of forces,
weapons delivery systems and humanitarian consequences. By simulating
the most relevant of these systems you should be able to tell a credible
story about how nuclear conflicts play out and what are the
consequences.
The simulation is developed in Unity and will be distributed as a stand-alone application.
Currently implemented features:
visualise and calculate effects of nuclear weapons (thermal
radiation, overpressure, fallout and mass fires) on a high-density
population grid (similar to Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP)
visualisation
of overpressure, thermal radiation, radiation dose from fallout, areas
affected by mass fires, population density and casualties density
(prompt radiation is not considered)
effects from hundreds to thousands of explosions can be calculated and visualised in seconds
design and place nuclear forces to recreate current, past or future arsenals using an intuitive UI
create attack plans and conflict scenarios and share them with others
place yourself, your family and your friends inside the simulation and calculate the probability of your survival
simulate
the dynamics and timing of the conflict and effects of a first strike
using a damage model based on CEP and overpressure
simple production cost model: how many weapons can a country build if it wants to?
Some more details can be found in the screenshots-section. Technical
details on the models and databases being used here will be added soon.
Follow me on twitter to stay updated.
nbcnewyork | Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite and heiress who became a
confidante of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and was later
implicated in his alleged sexual crimes, has been arrested by the FBI.
She was arrested in Bradford, New Hampshire around 8:30 a.m. Thursday
on charges she conspired with Epstein to sexually abuse minors, and is
expected to appear in a federal court later today.
The six-count indictment in Manhattan federal court alleges that
Maxwell helped Epstein groom girls as young as 14 years old, going back
as far as 1994. She faces up to 35 years in prison.
"This case against Ghislaine Maxwell is the prequel to the earlier
case we brought against Jeffrey Epstein," Acting Manhattan U.S. Attorney
Audrey Strauss said at a news conference on the indictment. The FBI
said that it had been tracking her movements for some time, though she
was not indicted until June 29.
mashable | “We have better topographic data from Pluto than we do from Venus,”
says Darby Dyer, the current chair of NASA’s Venus Exploration Advisory
Group, with a frustrated chuckle. “NASA and the majority of planetary
scientists have bought into the notion that Mars is the most likely
place to have water and evidence of life. Overturning that paradigm is a
tough battle, but we’re fighting it.”
Dyer is 62; the days when Venus was thought to be a swamp planet are
within her living memory. She also remembers being in grad school at MIT
in the 1980s, on the day Ronald Reagan canceled a NASA mission that was
going to take an orbital radar to Venus.
“There were people crying in the corridors,” she says. “Ph.D.s whose
whole theses vanished in an instant.” The Venus community gathered its
energy and pushed back enough to create one final mission, planned for
1986, which was delayed by the Challenger shuttle explosion until 1989.
That was Magellan.
Still, even with that Magellan data and our limited Earth-based
spectroscopy, what wonders and mysteries we’ve been able to uncover.
There are the strange dark patches, large enough to affect the planet’s weather, which may be where those microorganisms are hanging out. A 2020 study says that Venus’ volcanoes are still active, erupting as we speak.
And it’s only been four years since a groundbreaking study
that suggested we might have been right all along about Venus being
covered in liquid water; we just got the wrong era. Turns out Venus had
oceans between 4 billion and 1 billion years ago — way longer than
liquid water existed on Mars, and more than enough time for it to
develop life.
“If you had water for 3 billion years, life probably arose on Venus
before it did on Earth,” says Dyar. “Maybe they had trilobites in those
oceans; maybe they got as far as whales.”
We may raise CO2 in the atmosphere to the point where it threatens
the threads of human civilization, but only a growing sun can boil the
oceans and burn the land, creating enough CO2 to dominate the atmosphere
for a full-on runaway greenhouse effect.
But! It’s also possible that Venus was slammed by multiple impacts,
including a possible former moon, which might explain why the whole
place is spinning upside-down and so slowly. You know what would help us
figure it out? More data.
Right now we don’t even know what Venus’ core is made of, or whether
it has tectonic plates like Earth, or whether there’s evidence of old
oceans to be found in the atmosphere, or exactly what kind of organisms
have clung to it like mushrooms thriving in the radioactive ruin of Chernobyl’s old reactor.
It won’t be dinosaurs, but life on Venus may well have, uh, found a way.
yanisvaroufakis |You said that “either we unite
with progressives around the planet in a shared struggle for justice, or
we surrender to the forces of nationalism and free-market
fundamentalism”, how could reuniting progressives help in any way?and
what is your plan beside the website?
Let me give you a simple example: During every recent crisis,
bankers banded together and forced governments to apply socialism – for
them! The price was austerity and hardship for almost everyone else.
This led to discontent. Discontent then breeds fascism, xenophobia,
nativism, ultra-nationalism. The representatives of this misanthropic
type of politics unite across borders (look at the love in between
Trump, Bolsonaro, Modi, Le Pen, Salvini etc.). Is it not the time for
progressives to band together in the interests of the majority in every
country, on every continent?
This is what our Progressive International is about. How are we
organising this, besides a website? In two ways. First, by putting
together a global plan for shared, green prosperity. (We must be
able to answer questions such as “How much should we spend on fighting
climate change? Where will the money come from? How will we redistribute
wealth from the few to the many and from the Global North to the Global
South?”) Secondly, by organising global actions in support of local
causes (e.g. a global campaign in support of a few striking women
workers in, say, India). To accomplish these hugely hard, but essential,
tasks the Progressive International has put together a Council,
comprising leading activists from around the world, and a Cabinet,
consisting of a few dedicated organisers working on our campaigns on a
day-to-day basis. Our next meeting will take place on 18th September in Iceland, under the aegis of Katrin Jacobsdottir, the country’s Prime Minister.
What should be the role of the
state in all of this, specially after the Covid 19 and critics to
capitalism and private sectors which was not able to cope with the
crisis?
The state’s role is crucial. Even politicians inspired by
small-government libertarianism have had to call for governments to step
in and, effectively, save everyone. The question is not whether the
state has a role. The question is: On whose behalf is the state acting?
nakedcapitalism | The
racial categories of white and black were developed around 1600.
Probably a little after by wealthy Americans who used it to keep divided
Black slaves, poor often indentured Whites, and the often enslaved
Indians. These people were
not disposable because they were useful as workers, but who often
worked and even socialized frequently. As a group they had potentially
considerable political power during the 1600s. This was deliberately
dealt with. The Blacks were brutally suppress with
(the category of Black indentured was eliminated. There was no Southern
style chattel slavery for Blacks at first). The Whites were placated
with some very modest reforms. The Indians (labeled as savages) were
just driven off at gunpoint. This is also where
the Southern Slave Patrols started to terrorize and keep down the slave
population as well as keep down any poor whites. Where they started
asking for people’s papers.
When my Irish great whatever grandfather stepped off the Coffin Ship around 1850, he was barely considered human, never mind white, and about on par with the black community. This was true for decades as were the “Irish need not
apply signs” and the creation of the Paddy Wagons. Would you consider him having White Privilege?
It was only after the development of political
power over multiple generations that the Irish-Americans were given the
status of being both human and white, which only really happened during
the early 20th century. Similarly with the Italians,
Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, Greeks, and so on.
Then there are the
Jews. The Italians only finally became real whites after the Second
World War although I do not think that they were quite as abused
as the Irish. Going up to an individual in these
groups at anytime before the 1960s and saying that they have White
Privilege would have had them laugh at you in your very face. Today,
they have been giving the category of White with its very real privilege
of being treated like a human being, so long as
you are not poor. But in the past?
During the Antebellum South and after
Reconstruction when a poor white farmer or laborer even got friendly
with a black person, the local wealthy white landowner and his hired
goons would often beat up the offending white man. After Reconstruction,
the allied white and black reformists in the South were literally
extirpated via guns and the rope. If they were lucky and in the
government, they were merely deposed, and run out of town by armed white
supremacists during actual coups. Much like the American
led coups in the Americas and elsewhere.
When a leader, especially a black one, becomes
successful in his leadership and starts to bring up class and poverty,
to suggest crossing class and race as well as mentioning our common
humanity they often wind up dead like MLK and Fred
Hampton. Working just on racism is much less dangerous.
Actually in the South and Southwest during the 19th
century Blacks, Hispanics, and the very, very occasional White who were
too successful as business owners were sometimes lynched for just that
reason. To destroy the opposition.
There are a number of ways to destroy reformists
movements besides murder especially those that threaten the power and
money of the elites. Hell, you can find elite co-option, police and goon
squad assassinations in the labor movement,
equal rights movement, even in feminism (no murders, but plenty of
false arrests and beatings). All of these movements were captured by
elitists who expunged first the non-whites, then the socialists, then
the working class from what became their movement.
Any economic benefits from these “reforms” only accrued to the Upper
Class Whites.
Why do cries of racism become so strident and the
very real problem of racism become something that must be solves right
now, today when cries of poverty and want are also raised. Every single
time? Do you think that the current debates
about racism just happened right after Bernie Sanders near success and
the rise of an actual American Left fifty years after it was destroyed
is a coincidence? Really?
If this was really and truly about racism or even
poverty, why are the Native Americans, trapped on their Reservations
with the highest poverty, drug use, rape and murder statistics of any
group of Americans, bar none, not mentioned. They
have the most police brutality as well and some of the reservations,
due to legal loopholes, are happy hunting grounds for rapists coming
from outside of some of the reservations. Their leaders usually do not
have political power and wealth and they are isolated
and beaten down at least compared to the national political leadership.
So just under three million people are ignored and targeted.]
People are finally taking some notice of the
shrinking middle class and of the increasing homeless population. If you
wanted, I can take to some of the skosh less then fifteen thousand
homeless in San Francisco. Or the over one hundred
thousand throughout the state. At least half of whom are White. Are
there any real protest over them? We can look at the millions wasted
every year by San Francisco with cushy jobs being created, but not much
progress. However, there are fine demonstrations
on racism, which is good because racism and also police brutality with
no mention of the increasing poverty in this country. Even now large
sums of cash are used to “deal” with the problems, nationally. Problems
that always get worse.
So cui bono? At least half of any negative
statistic one could name, with the possible exception of prison, which
IIRC only one-third are White. Unemployment, poverty, drug use, police
brutality and police murders. Poor and struggling people
are much easier to manipulate, aren’t they?
However, when there are protests about those issues
it very often morphs into one about just racism. Let’s tear down some
statues. Yah! When ever there is smart, hardworking, talented, and
dedicated reformist or a successful non-profit
making progress dealing with those issues, including racism, money from
somewhere drops from the sky like manna. So long as small concessions
are made. Or a slick person applies for a job there. Always has money
somehow and eventually takes over or at least
co-opts the organization. Or cushy jobs are offered elsewhere to
certain people. In the old days like the 1960s and before, if that
didn’t work s*** would happen, sometimes fatally. Sometimes nothing
needs be done because often college educated are already
brainwashed into uselessness by Neoliberal propaganda. The wealth and
power of the Haves remain protected.
As an aside, Social Darwinism and Eugenics were
created and spread by very wealthy people and foundations in the United
States. Much like racism. If one doubts this, I can recommend some books
I have. A good start would be War Against
the Weak by Edwin Black.
So, in two part harmony, the Black Misleadership
Class starts it latest performance along with the Backup of the White
Misleadership Class (what else should I label Pelosi, Schumer, and
McConnell? Or the leaders of the entire state of California?).
Racism, the horror! And the police, oh my! Screaming, shouting (a
whisper about poverty, homelessness, hunger, unemployment.) Perhaps
Obama pops out and says some soaring nonsense or some very poor white
fool is interviewed. A fantastic tempest in a teapot
with nothing every actually getting done.
Then some Alt-Right creeps pop out and start saying
you are White or not, and that’s all that matters! There is no American
nationalism, only White Nationalism. White Power! Join us! (and don’t
forget the Jews!) Finally, lies like the 1619
Project or propaganda like White Fragility are published.
Yes, racism does exist, and as a percentage of all
the ills of our American nation, Blacks get it the worse excepting the
Native Americans, of course. White Privilege is a real thing. But just
as the categories of White and Black, of racism
were deliberately created in the 17th century, for benefiting the
powers that be, I wonder about Identity Politics and Cancelling. That
blend of Nazi racialism and Maoist thought control. I wonder how racism
and its pernicious child Identity Politics has been
created, nurtured, fed a steady diet of hate, and then used as a weapon
upon those who would care about everyone regardless of there supposed
identity. I also wonder what would happen if I approached the man
sleeping on cardboard, perhaps in the usually three
month rainy season, or that family living in their car/van/RV on some
out of the way road, that the do have White Privilege, which the do and
usually means being treated as a human being. I also wonder about my
nose.
Rejuvenation Pills
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immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...