hotair | Via the Daily Wire,
that’s quite a claim. The president of the United States using a
foreign intelligence agency to spy on the other party’s presidential
candidate, for the obviously illicit purpose of erasing any domestic
paper trail of his actions? “Scandal of the decade” material. And yet it
falls not to the Fox News investigative team to break the story but to
legal commentator Andrew Napolitano — and not on one of Fox’s marquee
shows like O’Reilly or Tucker but on Fox & Friends and Martha
MacCallum’s program. You’d think a scoop like this would be in 50-point
font on the Fox website, but as I write this at around 4:45 ET, they’re
leading with a story about a probe of IT staffers who work for House Democrats. How come?
Sean Davis thinks this is a game of telephone gone bad inspired by the “Trump dossier,” which was compiled by a British ex-spy. Could be. It gains some plausibility from the fact that the U.S. and UK are part of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing arrangement, which of course includes the NSA and GCHQ
(Britain’s NSA). It’ll also seem a bit more credible than it might have
in light of the surprise resignation in January of Robert Hannigan as
head of the GCHQ. Hannigan stepped down three days after Trump’s
inauguration, ostensibly for personal reasons, having served just two
years on the job. With news swirling at the time about the Trump
dossier, some Brits speculated
that the real reason he resigned might have been “related to British
concerns over shared intelligence with the US in the wake of Donald
Trump becoming president.” On top of all that, the Times reported
just two weeks ago that two foreign intelligence agencies, the British
and the Dutch, had provided intelligence on meetings allegedly held last
year between Trump “associates” and Russian officials in European
cities.
rutherford | “The first and most important thing to understand about politics is
this: forget Right, Left, Center, socialism, fascism, or democracy.
Every government that exists — or ever existed, or ever will exist — is a
kleptocracy, meaning ‘rule by thieves.’ Competing ideologies merely
provide different excuses to separate the Productive Class from what
they produce. If the taxpayer/voters won’t willingly fork over to end
poverty, then maybe they’ll cough up to fight drugs or terrorism.
Conflicting ideologies, as presently constituted, are nothing more than a
cover for what’s really going on, like the colors of competing gangs.” —
Author L. Neil Smith
The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to
suck the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in
which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful,
and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government
agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict
mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.
This begs the question: if the government is overstepping its
authority, abusing its power, and disregarding the rule of law but no
one seems to notice—and no one seems to care—does it matter if the
government has become a tyrant?
Here’s my short answer: when government wrongdoing ceases to matter, America will have ceased to be.
Just consider the devastation wrought in one week in the life of our American kleptocracy:
activistpost | WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange suggested on Twitter Tuesday Hillary
Clinton and certain unnamed members of the U.S. Intelligence Community
are plotting a takeover by Vice President Mike Pence.
“Clinton stated privately this month that she is quietly pushing for a Pence takeover,” Assange tweeted. “She stated that Pence is predictable hence defeatable.”
Clinton stated privately this month that she is
quietly pushing for a Pence takeover. She stated that Pence is
predictable hence defeatable.
“Two IC officials close to Pence stated privately this month that they are planning on a Pence takeover,” he added in another tweet. “Did not state if Pence agrees.”
Two IC officials close to Pence stated privately
this month that they are planning on a Pence takeover. Did not state if
Pence agrees.
Further, he continued, “By handing unilateral power to
the CIA over its drone strikes at this time White House signals that
bullying, disloyalty & incompetence pays.”
By handing unilateral power to the CIA over its
drone strikes at this time White House signals that bullying, disloyalty
& incompetence pays
In response to shocked reactions to the tweets, Pence lambasted Assange’s suggestion of a takeover as “absurd” and “frankly offensive” in an interview with radio host Laura Ingraham
The object of this fear and loathing? An obscure essay (now available only on web archives) titled "The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement,"
written in 2001 by Eric Heubeck, a former associate of the late Paul
Weyrich at the Free Congress Foundation. Not only has his essay been
removed from Free Congress's website, but Heubeck has apparently
withdrawn from public life, as this author has not been able to contact
him.
In the estimation of Yurica and her fellow leftists, Integration concretely articulates a plan developed by "Christian Theocrats" to seize political power and use it forcefully to dismantle the domain of liberalism (secularism, welfare, multiculturalism, affirmative action, etc.) and enforce a fundamentalist Christian order in America. In brief, Yurica sees Integration as an American, Christian version of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This is the full meaning of the smear term "Dominionism" coined by the left. As Yurica sees it, this evil plan is well on its way to victory; one can visualize her shuddering as she imagines jackbooted, goose-stepping "Theocrats" chanting "Sieg Heil!"
kansascity | Vice President Mike Pence has been pushing for Kansas Gov. Sam
Brownback to land a job in President Donald Trump’s administration,
according to sources.
Brownback would not comment on a possible
appointment during his first public appearance since reports that he is
under consideration to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for
food and agriculture, a post that is based in Rome.
Pence, a
former congressman who served as governor of Indiana, is close to
Brownback and has been advocating to find him a job in the
administration, according to several people familiar with the situation
but not authorized to speak publicly as a matter of practice. Trump has
considered Brownback for several jobs but has not yet offered one.
Brownback
said in August that Trump’s decision to choose Pence as his running
mate had helped persuade him to support Trump’s candidacy despite his
initial reservations. Brownback went onto serve on Trump’s agricultural
and Catholic advisory committees.
“Mike, I know well,” Brownback
said in August. “He’s a good man. He’s a man of faith. I have confidence
in Gov. Pence, and you know elections are about choices in
policy...What he’s shown in the picking of Pence is a willingness to get
good people around him, and you’ve got to realize that’s the way a
nation is run.”
The two men have shared staffers over the years.
Brownback’s former chief of staff, David Kensinger, served as a
consultant on Pence’s 2012 gubernatorial campaign shortly after stepping
down from his post in the Brownback administration.
The Star’s
sources say that talks between Brownback and the Trump administration
are ongoing, but the governor refused to clarify the matter Thursday.
“I’m
just not going to make any comments about any of that. I’m glad to see
the administration off to a strong start on job creation and security
issues, which is the key things they ran on, but I’m not making comments
about it,” Brownback said Thursday after handing out a humanitarian
award to a Kansas physician.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article137424678.html#storylink=cpy
motherjones | An ambitious effort by a Republican governor to drastically cut his state's taxes
is crumbling—and that's a bad omen for Donald Trump and Republicans in
Congress who are hoping to slash tax rates at the national level.
Shortly after he became governor of Kansas in 2011, Sam Brownback
went to work on rewriting the state's tax code. Together with the
Republican-dominated legislature, he eliminated the top income tax
bracket, lowered everyone else's income tax rate, and created a loophole
that allowed some business owners to pay no state income taxes at all.
Brownback sold the cuts as a way to jolt the Kansas economy to life,
promising major job growth thanks to the lower tax rates. To pass these
tax measures, Brownback worked to replace moderate Republicans in the
legislature who opposed his ideas with true-believer conservatives. He
helped knock off nine moderate Republican incumbents, and the effort
paid off when his tax reform passed in 2012.
But instead of the miracle growth that Brownback promised, the tax
cuts have left a widening crater in the state budget. State economic
growth has lagged behind the national pace, and job growth has stagnated.
Lawmakers have been left scrambling each year to pass unpleasant
spending cuts when tax revenue comes in below expected levels, leading
to contentious fights in the legislature and state courts over reduced public school funding.
When the state legislature convened last month, it faced a $320 million
budget shortfall that needed to be closed before the end of the current
fiscal year in June—and a projected additional $500 million shortfall
for the next fiscal year.
After more moderate Republicans joined the GOP-dominated legislature
following last November's election, the party has appeared more willing
to concede defeat and ditch Brownback's tax experiment. Last week, the
state House and Senate passed
a bill that would generate more than $1 billion by eradicating most of
Brownback's reforms. It would raise personal income tax rates (though
still not as high as the pre-Brownback rates) and end the loophole that
has allowed 330,000 business owners—including subsidiaries of
Wichita-based Koch Industries—to avoid paying income taxes.
chicagotribune | The federal government is projected to spend $4.091 trillion
next year, with roughly two-thirds of that going mostly toward Social
Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, poverty assistance and interest payments on the government
debt. This spending is expected to be left untouched in the budget
proposal next week.
What Trump will propose changing is
the rest of the budget, known as discretionary spending, which is
authorized each year by Congress. Slightly more than half of this
remaining money goes to the military, and the rest is spread across
agencies that operate things like education, diplomacy, housing,
transportation and law enforcement.
Among Trump's
expected proposals are an increase in military spending of $54 billion,
more money to start building a wall along the border between the United
States and Mexico, and the creation of new initiatives that expand
access to charter schools and other educational programs.
To
offset that new money, Trump will propose steep cuts across numerous
other agencies. Although final numbers remain in flux, his advisers have
considered cutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development's
budget by $6 billion, or 14 percent, according to a preliminary budget
document obtained by The Washington Post. That is a change that Trulia
chief economist Ralph McLaughlin said could "put nearly 8 million
Americans in both inner-city and suburban communities at risk of losing
their public housing and nearly 4 million at risk of losing their rental
subsidy."
Preliminary budget documents have also shown
that Trump advisers have also looked at cutting the Environmental
Protect Agency's staff by about 20 percent and tightening the Commerce
Department's budget by about 18 percent, which would impact climate
change research and weather satellite programs, among other things.
Trump
and his advisers have said that they believe the federal workforce is
too big, and that the federal government spends - and wastes - too much
money. They have said that Washington - the federal workers and
contractors, among others - has benefited from government largesse while
many other Americans have suffered. Federal spending, they have argued,
crowds the private sector and piles regulations and bureaucracy onto
companies.
When “the left” endlessly debates which core issues or
constituencies must be sacrificed for political gain, as if economic
justice for the poor and the working class could be separated from
social justice for women and people of color and the LGBT community and
immigrants and people with disabilities, it is no longer functioning as
the left.
When LGBT claptrap, gluten free food, political correctness and other
such niceties beat out programs to serve the basic needs of the common
people nothing "left" is left. The priority on the left must always be
the well-being of the working people. All the other nice-to-have issues
follow from and after that.
Many nominally social-democratic parties in Europe are on the same
downward trajectory as the Democrats in the U.S. for the very same
reason. Their real policies are center right. Their marketing policies
hiding the real ones are to care for this or that minority interest or
problem the majority of the people has no reason to care about. Real
wages sink but they continue to import cheep labor (real policy) under
the disguise of helping "refugees" (marketing policy) which are simply
economic migrants. (Even parts of the German "Die Linke" party are
infected with such nonsense.)
The people with real economic problems, those who have reason to fear
the future, have no one in the traditional political spectrum that even
pretends to care about them. Those are the voters now streaming to the
far right. (They will again get screwed. The far right has an economic
agenda that is totally hostile to them. But it at least promises to do
something about their fears.) Where else should they go?
bibliotecapleyades |
The years 1982-1986 marked the period Pat Robertson and radio and
televangelists urgently broadcast appeals that rallied christian followers
to accept a new political religion that would turn millions of christians
into an army of political operatives. It was the period when the militant
church raised itself from centuries of sleep and once again eyed power.
At the time, most Americans were completely unaware of the militant
agenda
being preached on a daily basis across the breadth and width of
America.
Although it was called "christianity" it can barely be recognized as
christian. It in fact was and is a wolf parading in sheep’s clothing: It
was
and is a political scheme to take over the government of the United
States
and then turn that government into an aggressor nation that will
forcibly
establish the United States as the ruling empire of the twenty-first
century. It is subversive, seditious, secretive, and dangerous.[9]
Dominionism is a natural if unintended extension of Social Darwinism and is
frequently called "christian Reconstructionism." Its doctrines are shocking
to ordinary christian believers and to most Americans.
Journalist Frederick
Clarkson, who has written extensively on the subject, warned in 1994 that Dominionism,
"seeks to replace democracy with a theocratic elite
that would govern by imposing their interpretation of ‘Biblical Law.’"
He described the
ulterior motive of Dominionism is to eliminate "…labor unions, civil rights
laws, and public schools." Clarkson then describes the creation of new
classes of citizens:
"Women would be generally relegated to hearth and home. Insufficiently christian
men would be denied citizenship, perhaps executed. So severe is this
theocracy that it would extend capital punishment [to] blasphemy,
heresy, adultery, and homosexuality." [10]
Today, Dominionists hide their agenda and have resorted to stealth; one
investigator who has engaged in internet exchanges with people who identify
themselves as religious conservatives said,
"They cut and run if I mention the word ‘Dominionism.’"
[11]
Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy
Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy
at Cornell University wrote,
"In March 1986, I was on a speaking tour in
Iowa and received a copy of the following memo [Pat] Robertson had
distributed to the Iowa Republican County Caucus titled, "How to
Participate in a Political Party."
It read:
"Rule the world for God.
"Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push
an ideology.
"Hide your strength.
"Don’t flaunt your christianity.
"christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control
political parties and so it is very important that mature christians
have a majority of leadership positions whenever possible, God
willing."
[12]
Dominionists have gained extensive control of
the Republican Party and the apparatus of government throughout the United
States; they continue to operate secretly.
Their agenda to undermine all government social
programs that assist the poor, the sick, and the elderly is ingeniously
disguised under false labels that confuse voters. Nevertheless, as we shall
see, Dominionism maintains the necessity of laissez-faire economics,
requiring that people "look to God and not to government for help."
[13]
It is estimated that thirty-five million Americans who call themselves
christian, adhere to Dominionism in the United States, but most of these
people appear to be ignorant of the heretical nature of their beliefs and
the seditious nature of their political goals. So successfully have the
televangelists and churches inculcated the idea of the existence of an
outside "enemy," which is attacking christianity, that millions of people
have perceived themselves rightfully overthrowing an imaginary evil
anti-christian conspiratorial secular society.
When one examines the progress of its agenda, one sees that Dominionism has
met its time table: the complete takeover of the American government was
predicted to occur by 2004.[14]
Unless the American people reject the GOP’s
control of the government, Americans may find themselves living in a
theocracy that has already spelled out its intentions to change every aspect
of American life including its cultural life, its Constitution and its laws.
Born in christian Reconstructionism, which was founded by the late
R. J. Rushdoony, the framers of the new cult included,
Rushdoony
his son-in-law Gary North
Pat Robertson
Herb Titus, the former Dean of
Robertson’s Regent University School of Public Policy (formerly CBN
University)
Charles Colson, Robertson’s political
strategist
Tim LaHaye
Gary Bauer
the late Francis Schaeffer
Paul Crouch, the founder of TBN, the
world’s largest television network,
...plus a virtual army of likeminded television
and radio evangelists and news talk show hosts.
Dominionism started with the Gospels and turned the concept of the invisible
and spiritual "Kingdom of God" into a literal political empire that could be
taken by force, starting with the United States of America.
Discarding the original message of Jesus
and forgetting that Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world," the
framers of Dominionism boldly presented a Gospel whose purpose was to
inspire christians to enter politics and execute world domination so that Jesus could return to an earth prepared for his earthly rule by his
faithful "regents."
religionandpolitics | Much has been made of the fact that Pence at one time described himself as an “evangelical Catholic.” However, Pence has become reticent about the shift in his faith identity, according to Craig Fehrman, who wrote a 2013 profile of him for Indianapolis Monthly.
Instead, he prefers to call himself an “ordinary Christian.” Pence “was
torn between his family’s faith and background and a new more exciting
faith,” Ferhman explained.
Pence continued to call himself a Catholic until the mid-1990s, when
he began attending an evangelical megachurch in Indianapolis. In her story about Pence’s evolving faith, Michelle Boorstein of The Washington Post
noted that it was during this period when “white evangelicals and
conservative Catholics in the United States started to realize they had a
lot more in common than their more denominationally tribal parents
realized.” Together, Catholics and evangelical Christians worked to
protect “traditional marriage” and enforce greater abortion
restrictions.
Pence earned a law degree from Indiana University in 1986 and entered
private practice. After running unsuccessfully for Congress in 1988 and
1990, he became the president of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation,
part of a Koch brothers-backed network, which bills itself as promoting
“the best thought on governmental, economic and educational issues” by
“exalt[ing] the truths of the Declaration of Independence, especially as
they apply to the interrelated freedoms of religion, property, and
speech.” It was during his four-year tenure there, which coincided with
this fuller embrace of evangelical Christianity, that Pence first began
promoting “traditional family” ideologies and policies in earnest.
Pence then became the host of a talk radio show—“Rush Limbaugh on decaf,”
is how he described his radio persona—as well as a local Sunday TV
show. Pence maintained ties, however, with his former organization. In
1996, he published in the foundation’s journal an essay
in which he lambasted the Republican Party’s move away from
“traditional Pro-Family conservatives.” His evidence was the 1996 RNC
speakers’ line-up, which included “pro-choice women, AIDS activists, and
proponents of Affirmative Action.” He lamented that the GOP had
abandoned the combative posture epitomized by Pat Buchanan’s “culture war”
speech at the 1992 convention. Pence even included a bit of unintended
foreshadowing of the rise of Trump. He wrote that not only did the 1996
RNC’s retreat from conservatism make for bad politics, it made for bad
TV; “ratings were dismal,” he noted.
In 2000, Pence was elected to the House of Representatives. There he
became a leader among movement conservatives committed to rolling back
federal intervention in education and healthcare, business and
environmental regulations. Until just last week, he called climate change “a myth”
based on faulty science. In the House, he voted to block policies that
would curb greenhouse gases. In 2002, he took to the House floor to call for science textbooks
to “be changed” to reflect that evolution “taught for 77 years in the
classrooms of America as fact” is just a “theory,” and that “other
theories of the origin of species,” notably “intelligent design,” should
also be included alongside evolution.
nybooks | As for the underlying mechanisms, we now have a general idea of how
they might work because of another strange inversion of reasoning, due
to Alan Turing, the creator of the computer, who saw how a mindless
machine could do arithmetic perfectly without knowing what it was doing.
This can be applied to all kinds of calculation and procedural control,
in natural as well as in artificial systems, so that their competence
does not depend on comprehension. Dennett’s claim is that when we put
these two insights together, we see that
all
the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of
uncomprehending competences compounded over time into ever more
competent—and hence comprehending—systems. This is indeed a
strange inversion, overthrowing the pre-Darwinian mind-first vision of
Creation with a mind-last vision of the eventual evolution of us, intelligent designers at long last.
And he adds:
Turing
himself is one of the twigs on the Tree of Life, and his artifacts,
concrete and abstract, are indirectly products of the blind Darwinian
processes in the same way spider webs and beaver dams are….
An
essential, culminating stage of this process is cultural evolution,
much of which, Dennett believes, is as uncomprehending as biological
evolution. He quotes Peter Godfrey-Smith’s definition, from which it is
clear that the concept of evolution can apply more widely:
Evolution
by natural selection is change in a population due to (i) variation in
the characteristics of members of the population, (ii) which causes
different rates of reproduction, and (iii) which is heritable.
In the biological case, variation is caused by mutations in DNA,
and it is heritable through reproduction, sexual or otherwise. But the
same pattern applies to variation in behavior that is not genetically
caused, and that is heritable only in the sense that other members of
the population can copy it, whether it be a game, a word, a
superstition, or a mode of dress.
This is the
territory of what Richard Dawkins memorably christened “memes,” and
Dennett shows that the concept is genuinely useful in describing the
formation and evolution of culture. He defines “memes” thus:
They are a kind of way of behaving
(roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered, taught, shunned,
denounced, brandished, ridiculed, parodied, censored, hallowed.
They
include such things as the meme for wearing your baseball cap backward
or for building an arch of a certain shape; but the best examples of
memes are words. A word, like a virus, needs a host to reproduce, and it
will survive only if it is eventually transmitted to other hosts,
people who learn it by imitation:
Like a virus, it is designed (by evolution, mainly) to provoke and enhance its own replication, and every token it generates is one of its offspring. The set of tokens descended from an ancestor token form a type, which is thus like a species.
pnas | Emotional
states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional
feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately
programmed in subcortical areas of the
brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of
consciousness, such
as those related to the perception of
external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of
their content,
arise from one system in the brain. In
this view, what differs in emotional and nonemotional states are the
kinds of inputs
that are processed by a general cortical
network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences.
Although subcortical
circuits are not directly responsible for
conscious feelings, they provide nonconscious inputs that coalesce with
other kinds
of neural signals in the cognitive
assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for
this proposal, we
defend a modified version of what is known
as the higher-order theory of consciousness.
Much progress has
been made in conceptualizing consciousness in recent years. This work
has focused on the question of how
we come to be aware of our sensory world, and
has suggested that perceptual consciousness emerges via cognitive
processing
in cortical circuits that assemble conscious
experiences in real-time. Emotional states of consciousness, on the
other hand,
have traditionally been viewed as involving
innately programmed experiences that arise from subcortical circuits.
Our thesis is that the brain
mechanisms that give rise to conscious emotional feelings are not
fundamentally different from
those that give rise to perceptual conscious
experiences. Both, we propose, involve higher-order representations
(HORs) of
lower-order information by cortically based
general networks of cognition (GNC). Thus, subcortical circuits are not
responsible
for feelings, but instead provide
lower-order, nonconscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of
neural signals in the
cognitive assembly of conscious emotional
experiences by cortical circuits (the distinction between cortical and
subcortical
circuits is defined in SI Appendix, Box 1). Our theory goes beyond traditional higher-order theory (HOT), arguing that self-centered higher-order states are essential
for emotional experiences.
physorg | Geneticists
from the Universities of Manchester and Bath are celebrating the
discovery of the elusive 'greenbeard gene' that helps explain why
organisms are more likely to cooperate with some individuals than other.
The renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "greenbeard gene" in his 1976 best seller The Selfish Gene.
The greenbeard is a special type of gene that, said Dawkins, could
solve the conundrum of how organisms identify and direct selfless
behaviour to towards other selfless individuals.
The existence of greenbeard genes once seemed improbable, but work published in Nature Communications by the team of geneticists has identified a gene that causes a whole range of 'beard colours' in a social microbe.
The microbes - 'slime moulds' - live as single celled organisms,
but clump together to form a slug like creature when they run out of
food. The newly formed slug can move to help them find new sources of
food, but this depends on successful cooperation.
With funding from the Wellcome Trust, NERC and the BBSRC the research
team found that slime mould cells are able to decide who they
collaborate with. By sequencing their genomes, they discovered that
partnership choices are based on a greenbeard gene.
The gene encodes a molecule that sits on the surface of a slime mould
cell, and is able to bind to the same molecule in another slime mould
cell.
Greenbeard genes stand out because they harbour enormous diversity,
with most slime mould strains having a unique version of the gene.
The team discovered that individuals prefer to partner with those
that have similar versions of the gene, and the slugs formed with
preferred partners do better than those with non-preferred partners.
This demonstrates, according to the team, that there is a whole range
'beard colours' that function to identify compatible partners for
cooperation.
BI | In early 2017, the day came: Horton made her final loan payment.
In just over three years, she had put a grand total of
$220,561.21 toward becoming debt-free. Though it took longer than
her original goal of just one year, Horton's dedication to
repayment is nothing to scoff at.
"You have to stick with it," she said. "You have to be willing to
make some very drastic sacrifices, and you have to be creative in
the ways that you produce extra income."
Now that her loans are a thing of the past, Horton wants to
continue buying and renting out properties; she has her sights
set on finding real estate in downtown Chicago. Horton is also
writing a book, and she hopes to one day speak to high school and
college students about how to take on loans and responsibly pay
them back.
While everyone's situation is different — not everybody can move
back home, and not everybody will have a small rental property
gifted to them — Horton's willingness to ditch an expensive city
like DC to move back to the Midwest, cut down living costs, and
increase her earning power by purchasing more real estate helped
her pay off a mountain of debt in just three years, when it may
otherwise have taken a decade or more
To anyone who feels overwhelmed by the prospect of taking on
student loans — or paying back any debt they've incurred — Horton
has a simple message: "I just want them to feel empowered that
they can pay if off. If I can do it, anybody can."
statnews | A little-noticed bill moving through Congress
would allow companies to require employees to undergo genetic testing or
risk paying a penalty of thousands of dollars, and would let
employers see that genetic and other health information.
Giving employers such power is now prohibited by
legislation including the 2008 genetic privacy and nondiscrimination law
known as GINA. The new bill gets around that landmark law by stating
explicitly that GINA and other protections do not apply when genetic
tests are part of a “workplace wellness” program.
The bill, HR 1313, was approved by a House
committee on Wednesday, with all 22 Republicans supporting it and all 17
Democrats opposed. It has been overshadowed by the debate over the
House GOP proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act,
but the genetic testing bill is expected to be folded into a second
ACA-related measure containing a grab-bag of provisions that do not
affect federal spending, as the main bill does.
“What this bill would do is completely take away
the protections of existing laws,” said Jennifer Mathis, director of
policy and legal advocacy at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, a
civil rights group. In particular, privacy and other protections for
genetic and health information in GINA and the 1990 Americans with
Disabilities Act “would be pretty much eviscerated,” she said.
Employers say they need the changes because those
two landmark laws are “not aligned in a consistent manner” with laws
about workplace wellness programs, as an employer group said in
congressional testimony last week.
We now know that the CIA maintained a special program (UMBRAGE) to mimic Russia-based hackers and create false trails back to fictitious "Russian hackers." A number of highly experienced analysts who reviewed the supposed "Russian hacks" had suggested the "evidence" smelled of false trails-- not just bread crumbs, but bread crumbs heavy-handedly stenciled "this is Russian malware."
The body count from Vault 7 has not yet been tallied, but it wouldn't surprise me if former President Obama and his team eventually end up as political casualties. Non-partisan observers are noting all this over-reach occurred on Obama's watch, and it hasn't gone unnoticed that one of Obama's last executive orders stripped away the last shreds of oversight of what could be "shared" (or invented) between the Security Agencies.
Indeed, the entire leadership of the Democratic Party seems to have placed all their chips on the increasingly unviable claim that the CIA is the squeaky clean defender of America.
Vault 7 is not just political theater--it highlights the core questions facing the nation: what is left to defend if civil liberties and democratically elected oversight have been reduced to Potemkin-village travesties?
If there are no limits on CIA powers and surveillance, then what is left of civil liberties and democracy? Answer: nothing.
The battle raging in the Deep State isn't just a bureaucratic battle--it's a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation. Citizens who define America's interests as civil liberties and democracy should be deeply troubled by the Establishment's surrender of these in favor of a National Security State with essentially no limits.
Americans tasked with defending America's "interests" globally should be asking if a CIA/NSA et al. with unlimited power is detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally, and toxic to its influence.
The answer is obvious: a CIA with unlimited power and the backing of a corrupt Establishment and media is more than detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally--it is disastrous and potentially fatal to America's interests, standing and influence.
WaPo | We learn, for example, from Tuesday’s spectacular WikiLeaks dump that
among the CIA’s various and nefarious cybertools is the capacity to
simulate intrusion by a foreign power, the equivalent of planting phony
fingerprints on a smoking gun.
Who are you going to believe now?
I can assure you that some enterprising Trumpite will use this
revelation to claim that the whole storyline pointing to Russian
interference in the U.S. election was a fabrication. And who was behind that ? There is no end to this hall of mirrors. My rule, therefore, is: Stay away.
Hard
to do with Washington caught up in one of its periodic conspiracy
frenzies. Actually, two. One, anti-Trump, is that he and his campaign
colluded with Russian intelligence. The other, anti-Obama-CIA-“deep
state,” is that Obama wiretapped Trump Tower to ensnare candidate Trump.
The
odd thing is that, as of today, there is no evidence for either charge.
That won’t, of course, stop the launch of multiple all-consuming
investigations.
(1) Collusion:
James Clapper,
Obama’s director of national intelligence, who has been deeply and
publicly at odds with Trump, unequivocally states that he has seen zero evidence of any Trump campaign collusion with Russia. Nor has anyone else.
(2) Wiretap:
The other storyline is simply fantastical. Congressional Republicans have uniformly run away from Trump’s Obama-wiretap accusation. Clapper denies it. FBI Director James Comey denies it. Not a single member of Trump’s own administration is willing to say it’s true.
Loopier still is to demand that Congress find the truth
when the president could just pick up the phone and instruct the FBI,
CIA and DNI to declare on the record whether this ever occurred. And if
there really was an October 2016 FISA court order to wiretap Trump, the president could unilaterally declassify the information yesterday.
The
bugging story is less plausible than a zombie invasion. Nevertheless,
one could spin a milder — and more plausible — scenario of executive
abuse. It goes like this:
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