theintercept |Patrick Ryan, a congressional candidate from New York,
is leaning on his experience as a small business entrepreneur to
establish his readiness for office, but he has curiously failed to
mention the business he used to work in: domestic surveillance.
Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at
a firm called Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a
real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions,
hoping business lobbyists would pay top dollar to monitor and disrupt
the actions of activist groups across the country. At one point, the
proposal included the idea to spy on the families of high-profile
Democratic activists and plant fake documents with labor unions in a bid
to discredit them. The pitch, a joint venture with a
now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter Thiel-backed
company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011 after it
was exposed in a series of news reports.
Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data
analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for
law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from
the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about
activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents
obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter.
The candidate’s history of spying on
progressive groups has been conspicuously absent from the personal
history he has presented to voters. The biography section
of Ryan’s campaign website references only another technology
business he helped found, called Second Front Systems. That company
deploys “cutting-edge data analytics software to our troops on the front
lines,” according to the site. Ryan continues to own a 10 percent stake
in the firm, valued between $15,000 and $50,000, and has discussed his
work with the startup as part of his experience of building a business
and providing jobs.
But that business venture appears not
to have been as successful as Ryan’s domestic surveillance work — at
least not from a moneymaking perspective. His candidate ethics
disclosure, which covers money made in 2016 and 2017, does not list any
income from Second Front Systems — of which he is still a director — but it reveals that in 2016, Ryan collected $325,510 as a vice president of Dataminr.
In an hourlong presentation to local Democratic voters with Ulster Activists and Move Forward New York, Ryan stressed
his experience as a small business entrepreneur. At one moment during
the January 7 event, Ryan referenced his job at Dataminr, but did not
mention the company’s name or the type of work it engaged in. In a
question about whether taking a job in Congress would constitute a pay
cut, Ryan said yes and that he had taken work at another “another tech
company” in which he “leads the government team.” In terms of his
business career, Ryan talked at length about his efforts to employ
former veterans.
go-ogle | Deindustrialization, disinvestment in urban public infrastructure, the expanding criminal justice system, and the privatization of correctional facilities create the nexus in which the school-to-prison pipeline is the logical outgrowth. The relationship between urban public schools and the criminal justice system was fostered by a variety of forces that systematically excluded black populations from participation in economic and social development. The economization of incarceration has further influenced a political environment where crime control is the reigning logic of governance of the urban poor. Residential and school segregation spatially and socially marked the urban poor and the black population was targeted and object of social ill.
De-industrialization of inner cities in the 1940's marked a new era in racial and social disparity. Facilitated and accelerated by government subsidies, the movement of resources out of urban centers was a precondition of poor urban isolation. As manufacturing jobs shifted out into the suburbs, and later abroad, employment opportunity for inner city folks dwindled. Federal subsidies such as FHA and VA facilitated suburbanization beginning in the late 1940's, creating a mass exodus of middle-income and white households. There is an established pattern of discretionary action on behalf of banks and public institutions that excluded black folks from partaking in these opportunities to move out into the suburbs. Access to superior living conditions, better funded schools, and higher-paying work was significantly limited. White flight signaled the beginning of a systemic disinvestment in public urban institutions. With homeowners now mobilized in America's suburbs, local politicians were advocating for resources that privileged their propertied constituents. Meanwhile, in cities, high unemployment rates compounded with low performing urban schools further ossified the color line. City schools as public institutions are thus situated within a larger political economy of post-industrial urban change. In Ghetto Schooling, Jean Anyon writes:
In the years between 1945 and 1960, a number of developments coincided to lay the foundation for the isolation and alienation of the urban poor that characterize our cities-and our city schools-today. the migration to cities of southern blacks fleeing poverty, segregation, inadequate education, federally subsidized suburbanization of white families and manufacturing firms leaving these same cities, federal and state policies that did not adequately address the problems festering in urban neighborhoods, corporate disinterest, and local political patronage and corruption.
Within two decades, major American cities had drastically transformed from predominantly manufacturing to white collar industry. In the early 1940's, New York's manufacturing industry employed a little over 40 percent of the total working population. By the 1960's, the vast majority of those jobs had been displaced by employment opportunities in the corporate, real estate, banking, financial, legal, and insurance industries, as well as civil service jobs in the growing bureaucracy of New York. Under the auspices of Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses, New York was transformed from an industrial working-class city to a corporate center with a booming middle-class. Investments shifted from the funding and supporting of urban infrastructure, including city schools, to financing middle-class housing and a growing service industry. Meanwhile, in 1950's New Jersey, the dispersal of manufacturing jobs from urban centers to the suburbs (and later abroad) accelerated the pace. The relocation of the manufacturing sector outside the reach of poor urban communities of color was aided by federal subsidies worth a little over 120 billion dollars. Resources for sustaining a viable community in poor areas, many of which were predominantly black or latino, were increasingly scarce. White flight and deindustrialization shifted good jobs away from them, creating a socially isolated superfluous population without the means to access white-collar jobs.
The effects of white flight and urban disinvestment would have generational reverberations, many youth of color were effectively shut out from jobs in the high-tech industry through the lack of educational preparedness available to them. Public schools in poor urban communities did little more than warehouse children in poor conditions. The institution funneled these youth into positions of subordination in the new economuy. Urban schools prepared youth for low-wage service sector jobs through a curriculum that emphasized discipline and conformity. They also pushed insubordinate youth into the juvenile justice system. City schools just did not have the adequate resources to provide a contemporary and quality education for its poor children.
News24 | It completely makes sense for someone to be impatient when, 23 years after the dawn of democracy, he still feels excluded from our country’s economy, while some foreigners are relatively well of.
I must also quickly hint that the issues raised by some protestors that 1) foreigners are taking their jobs; 2) foreigners shut their businesses through illicit operations; and 3) foreigners promote drug and human trafficking, are simply symptoms of our real problem. Our real problem is general lack of loyalty by the rich, who are mostly white. For example, for many of our people to be unemployed, it is mainly because of the failure by business to promote broad-based black economic empowerment. For our young sisters to be slaves of prostitution, it is because of joblessness and poverty. And for many of our foreign nationals, especially Africans, to come to South Africa, it is because of the desperate conditions in their countries, which are still reeling in the effects of neo-colonialism.
In their paper Capital flight From South Africa, 1980 – 2000, (2004), Seeraj Mohamed and Kade Finnof argue that if capital flight is not addressed, it will impede the country’s “ability to deal with structural issues such as high unemployment and concentration of wealth.” According to the paper, between 1980 and 2000, capital outflows amounted to an average of 6.6% of GDP per annum. But the paper also strangely finds that during the relatively politically stable, post-Apartheid period from 1994 until 2000, capital outflows increased to an average of 9.2% of GDP per annum.
“We suggest that the higher capital flight observed in the relatively more politically and economically stable period 1994 to 2000 (compared to the pre-democracy period 1980 to 1993) is reflective of the attitudes of wealthy white South Africans about the transition to democracy rather than political and economic uncertainty”, the paper states. Such increased outflows are strange because, in a normal environment, capital outflows are understood to be choices by individuals or firms to move money offshore because of fears of political or economic instability. But the South African experience shows that racial prejudice, anger at loss of power and sheer lack of patriotism played a more significant role in these on-going outflows.
A recent leak of files linked to the Gupta family, close associates of Zuma and his family, showed the depth of the patronage network.
Many members of his cabinet and those responsible for state-owned
enterprises and ancillary services had been sponsored by the Guptas for
holidays to Dubai. It was evident that the hypocrisy would rankle the
public. Even Malusi Gigaba, the minister of finance
appointed by Zuma and a man closely associated with both the president
and the Guptas, appeared on TV to issue Zuma an ultimatum. Many
political observers noted the irony.
None of this bodes well for the fortunes of the party. The disastrous
Zuma years are over, but the ANC’s renewal is far from certain. In
addition to purging the party of corrupt individuals – many in the ranks
of the senior leadership – Cyril Ramaphosa, the new president of the
party, will have to address
the corruption of the party’s internal processes. Since Zuma’s ascent,
charges of vote rigging and the manipulation of the electoral system at
all levels – from branches to the national executive – have been rife.
Re-energising the party’s base will be an uphill battle, and some voters
may choose to punish the once mighty ANC at the polls.
Still, politics in South Africa continues to be defined by history.
The Democratic Alliance, the largest opposition party, continues to be
seen as a party that serves the interests of the minority white
population despite the fact that it is led by a young black man and has increased its black membership significantly. The rising Economic Freedom Fighters
may gain at the polls, but for the moment they remain marginal in terms
of electoral politics. The ANC is still likely to prevail at next
year’s elections, but this certainty should not deter Ramaphosa, the
country’s new leader, from enacting wide-scale party reforms.
dailymail | White South African farmers will be removed from their land after a landslide vote in parliament.
The
country's constitution is now likely to be amended to allow for the
confiscation of white-owned land without compensation, following a
motion brought by radical Marxist opposition leader Julius Malema.
It
passed by 241 votes for to 83 against after a vote on Tuesday, and the
policy was a key factor in new president Cyril Ramaphosa's platform
after he took over from Jacob Zuma in February.
Mr Malema said the time for 'reconciliation is over'. 'Now is the time for justice,' News24 reported.
'We must ensure that we restore the dignity of our people without compensating the criminals who stole our land.'
Mr Malema has a long-standing commitment
to land confiscation without compensation. In 2016 he told his
supporters he was 'not calling for the slaughter of white people - at
least for now'.
A 2017 South African government audit found white people owned 72 per cent of farmland.
Rural
affairs minister for the ruling African National Congress party said
'The ANC unequivocally supports the principle of land expropriation
without compensation'.
'There is no doubt about it, land shall be expropriated without compensation.'
Freedom
Front Plus party leader Pieter Groenewald said the decision to strip
white farmers of their land would cause 'unforeseen consequences that is
not in the interest of South Africa'.
The
deputy chief executive of civil rights group Afriforum said the motion
was a violation of agreements made at the end of apartheid. Fist tap Big Don.
strategic-culture |Although
AFRICOM is mandated to conduct “stability operations,” there is
evidence that the command has engaged in fomenting military coups in
Africa. In 2009, a group of Guinean army officers who attempted to
assassinate Guinea's President, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, were
operating under orders of US Special Forces assigned to the US Africa
Command (AFRICOM) and French military intelligence personnel. Camara,
himself, seized power in a December 2008 coup in following the death of
Guinea's President Lansana Conte.
Camara
had apparently signed a deal with China for that nation to take over
bauxite mining contracts from US and French companies with the promise
that China would refine bauxite into aluminum by building a factory in
Guinea. The Americans and French previously exported raw bauxite to
smelters abroad. The offer of the Chinese to smelter bauxite in Guinea,
with the promise of well-paying jobs for the impoverished nation, was
too much for France and the United States and a "hit" was ordered on
Camara, using assets in the Guinean military trained by AFRICOM in
Guinea, Germany, and the United States.
The
National Security Agency, America’s top signals intelligence
(SIGINT)-gathering agency, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars
in training intercept operators in a number of languages, including
those spoken in Africa. AFRICOM has operated a redundant and dual
linguist training program, mirroring the NSA program. AFRICOM has spent
millions needlessly duplicating the NSA in training speakers and to be
fluent in Bemba, Bete, Ebira, Fon, Gogo, Kalenjin, Kamba, Luba-Katanga,
Mbundu/Umbundu, Nyanja, Sango, Sukuma, Tsonga/Tonga, Amharic, Dinka,
Somali, Tigrinya, and Swahili. This is just one of many examples by
which AFRICOM has served as a complete waste of money in duplicative
efforts undertaken by other government agencies and elements.
The
June 4, 2017 strangling death in Bamako, Mali of US Army Green Beret
Staff Sgt. Logan Melgar by two US Navy SEALs, all deployed under
AFRICOM’s direction, was linked to Melgar’s discovery that the two Navy
personnel were pocketing official funds used by AFRICOM to pay off
informants in the West African country. The fraud was yet another
example of the culture of malfeasance present among AFRICOM’s ranks.
thenation | Governing through the counterinsurgency warfare paradigm has, since 9/11, been distilled into three core strategies.
First, bulk collect everything about everyone in the population. This
is the model of NSA’s TREASURE MAP program: “every single end device
that is connected to the Internet somewhere in the world—every
smartphone, tablet and computer” must be known. The data of everyone,
especially the neutral or passive majority, is crucial because that is
the only way to identify accurately the active minority. This has been
turned on the American population since 9/11.
Second, identify and eradicate the revolutionary minority. Total
information about the entire population is what makes it possible to
discriminate between friend and foe. Once suspicion attaches,
individuals must be treated severely to extract all possible
intelligence, with enhanced interrogation techniques if necessary; and
if they are revealed to belong to the active minority, they must be
disposed of through detention, rendition, deportation, or targeted
assassination. Unlike conventional soldiers, these minorities are
dangerous not because of their physical presence on a battlefield, but
because of their ideology and allegiances.
Third, the passive majority must be assuaged. Remember, in this new way of seeing, the population is the
battlefield. Its hearts and minds must be assured. In the digital age,
this can be achieved, first, by offering distractions and entertainment:
a rich new environment of YouTubes and NetFlix, Facebook posts and
Tweets, Amazon Prime, Second, by targeting enhanced content (such as
sermons by moderate imams) to deradicalize susceptible persons—in other
words, by deploying new digital techniques of psychological warfare and
propaganda. Third, now, with a reality-TV presidential style that turns
every new day into, in Donald Trump’s words, “a new episode of a
television show.”
These three maxims have been deployed aggressively in the war in
Iraq and Afghanistan. But in a historical development that can only be
described, tragically, as poetic justice, this counterinsurgency
paradigm has been domesticated. Gradually—and increasingly—these
strategies have come to shape the way that we, in the United States,
govern ourselves domestically. It is Americans who have become the
target of their own counterinsurgency strategies: total-information
awareness, targeted extraction of minority suspects, and the continuous
effort to prevent majority citizens from sympathizing in any way with
any minorities.
thenation |The word “bizarre” does not begin to
capture the everyday craziness of our politics in the Trump era. Here’s
the opening paragraph of a column in National Review, titled “An Epidemic of Dishonesty on the Right,” by bona fide right-winger Kevin D. Williamson:
First it was the Holocaust, now Parkland—is there any act
of depravity to which the less respectable right-wing media cannot
imagine a connection for George Soros?
David Clarke, the sheriff of Fox News, insisted that the Florida
students’ reaction to the shooting ‘has GEORGE SOROS’ FINGERPRINTS all
over it,’ idiotic capitalization in the original and, one assumes, in
his soul. The idiots at Gateway Pundit suggested that one of
the student survivors was a fraud because—get this—he’d been interviewed
on television before about an unrelated incident.
Had I written the above in The Nation, I would not change a
word, except perhaps to add that, roughly simultaneously to all of the
above, the head of the Missouri Republican Party was blaming Soros for
the indictment of the state’s governor, Eric Greitens, who is accused of
taking surreptitious nude photos of his mistress for the purpose of
blackmail.
The desire to attach Soros’s name to virtually everything that
Trumpists seek to denounce of late is inextricably tied to the fact that
the liberal Jewish billionaire/philanthropist has been turned into a
bogeyman for anti-Semites the world over. Soros is today’s stand-in for
the time-honored anti-Jewish slanders sensationalized in Europe and
elsewhere in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. That’s why
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary practically turned Soros—whom he
blames for “destroy[ing] the lives of millions of Europeans”—into his
opposition party in that nation’s recent elections. It’s why, in
Macedonia, a group called Stop Operation Soros, or SOS, emerged to try
to defend that nation’s corrupt right-wing party. It’s why Poland’s
ruling party leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, said he believes that Soros
views cosmopolitan societies as “extremely easy to manipulate.”
Right-wing idiots have been setting fire to effigies and portraits
representing Soros in rallies from Warsaw to Tbilisi.
One of the gifts that Trump and his “alt-right” acolytes have
brought to American politics is the mainstreaming of this particular
political poison. It’s no coincidence that the most recent report by the
Anti-Defamation League
showed a nearly 60 percent spike in anti-Semitic incidents in the US in
2017. “The president’s retweeting of white supremacists and
anti-Semitic memes during the campaign and, more recently, sharing
tweets from a UK racist group—those are alarming. Those tweets and
rhetoric have emboldened and given encouragement to the worst
anti-Semites and bigots,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the
Anti-Defamation League.
slate | A new report
from the Anti-Defamation League has found that the number of
anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. spiked in 2017, increasing by an
unprecedented 57 percent from the year before.
The ADL report cited 1,986 incidents of harassment, threats,
and vandalism targeting Jews in the country. It was the most dramatic
increase since the organization started tracking these incidents in the
1970s and the second-highest number on the record.
According to the ADL, this increase resulted in part from a
near doubling of incidents on schools and college campuses. The results
may also have been influenced in part by more widespread reporting. But
the report also specifically cited the white supremacist Unite the Right
rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and it noted a “rising climate of
incivility, the emboldening of hate groups, and widening divisions in
society.”
The rise in incidents took the form of vandalism and harassment, including 163 bomb threats
against Jewish institutions. (Physical assaults against Jews actually
fell, according to the report.) Two people were arrested in 2017 for
repeated bomb threats. One, an Israeli American teenager, was arrested
in March for making more than 150 of those
threats to Jewish community centers and other Jewish institutions.
“[R]egardless of the motivation of any specific perpetrator, Jewish
communities were repeatedly traumatized by these assaults on their
institutions and threats to their safety,” the ADL wrote in the report.
“The bomb threats sowed fear and anxiety among Jews across the country.”
qz | Earlier this month, when L’Oréal Paris UK hired British beauty
blogger Amena Khan to be the face of its new hair care line, Elvive, the
cosmetics company—the largest in the world—was celebrated for choosing a
model wearing a hijab to front a hair campaign.
“How many brands are doing things like this? Not many,” Khan told Vogue UK at the time,
noting that just because you don’t see someone’s hair doesn’t mean that
they don’t take care of it. “They’re literally putting a girl in a
headscarf…in a hair campaign.” It was an important step towards
representation on the brand’s part.
But less than two weeks after that Vogue UK interview, Khan found out
that L’Oréal Paris didn’t want her voice after all. She was asked to
step down after tweets in which she condemned Israel resurfaced from
2014. Khan made the announcement personally on her Instagram:
L’Oréal Paris UK also released a statement:
We have recently been made aware of a series of tweets
posted in 2014 by Amena Khan, who was featured in a U.K. advertising
campaign. We appreciate that Amena has since apologised for the content
of these tweets and the offense they have caused. L’Oréal Paris is
committed to tolerance and respect towards all people. We agree with her
decision to step down from the campaign.
This is not the first time that L’Oréal Paris UK has severed its
relationship with a model because of personal views expressed on social
media. In September 2017, the company dropped British transgender DJ and
activist Munroe Bergdorf, who was the face of their YoursTruly True
Match campaign. Bergdorf, it seems, had expressed controversial views on
race and privilege.
“Honestly I don’t have energy to talk about the racial violence of white people any more,” she wrote
in August on Facebook. “Most of ya’ll don’t even realise or refuse to
acknowledge that your existence, privilege and success as a race is
built on the backs, blood and death of people of colour.” The post was
deleted shortly afterwards.
Like with Khan, L’Oréal Paris released a statement explaining their diversity policy upon firing Bergdorf:
We support diversity and tolerance towards all people
irrespective of their race, background, gender and religion. […] We
believe that the recent comments by Munroe Bergdorf are at odds with
those values, and as such we have taken the decision to end the
partnership with her.
Beauty brands claim to celebrate diversity—but they often want to
pretend that that diversity doesn’t come with diverse political views.
rutherford | In the American police state, police have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions later.
In fact, police don’t usually need much incentive to shoot and kill members of the public.
So when police in Florida had to deal with a 19-year-old embarking on a shooting rampage inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., what did they do?
Nothing.
There were four armed police officers, including one cop who was
assigned to the school as a resource officer, on campus during that
shooting. All four cops stayed outside the school with their weapons
drawn (three of them hid behind their police cars).
Not a single one of those cops, armed with deadly weapons and trained
for exactly such a dangerous scenario, entered the school to confront
the shooter.
Seventeen people, most of them teenagers, died while the cops opted not to intervene.
According to the U.S. Supreme Court, police have no duty, moral or otherwise, to help those in trouble, protect individuals from danger, or risk their own lives to save “we the people.”
In other words, you can be outraged that cops in Florida did nothing
to stop the school shooter, but technically, it wasn’t part of their job
description.
This begs the question: if the police don’t have a duty to protect
the public, what are we paying them for? And who exactly do they serve
if not you and me?
Why do we have more than a million cops on the taxpayer-funded payroll in this country whose jobs do not entail protecting our safety, maintaining the peace in our communities, and upholding our liberties?
NYTimes | On Wednesday, one week after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., Facebook and YouTube vowed to crack down on the trolls.
Thousands of posts and videos had popped up on the sites, falsely claiming that survivors of the shooting were paid actors or part of various conspiracy theories. Facebook called the posts “abhorrent.” YouTube, which is owned by Google, said it needed to do better. Both promised to remove the content.
The companies have since aggressively pulled down many posts and videos and reduced the visibility of others. Yet on Friday, spot searches of the sites revealed that the noxious content was far from eradicated.
On Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, searches for the hashtag #crisisactor, which accused the Parkland survivors of being actors, turned up hundreds of posts perpetuating the falsehood (though some also criticized the conspiracy theory). Many of the posts had been tweaked ever so slightly — for example, videos had been renamed #propaganda rather than #hoax — to evade automated detection. And on YouTube, while many of the conspiracy videos claiming that the students were actors had been taken down, other videos that claimed the shooting had been a hoax remained rife.
Facebook faced renewed criticism on Friday after it was revealed that the company showcased a virtual reality shooting game at the Conservative Political Action Conference this week. Facebook said it was removing the game from its demonstration of its new virtual reality products.
The resilience of misinformation, despite efforts by the tech behemoths to eliminate it, has become a real-time case study of how the companies are constantly a step behind in stamping out the content. At every turn, trolls, conspiracy theorists and others have proved to be more adept at taking advantage of exactly what the sites were created to do — encourage people to post almost anything they want — than the companies are at catching them.
WaPo | The bloodshed had barely ended in Parkland, Fla., last week when the Gateway Pundit added its own unique take on the students who had quickly become media-friendly gun-control advocates.
“EXPOSED,” read its headline.
“School Shooting Survivor Turned Activist David Hogg’s Father in FBI,
Appears To Have Been Coached On Anti-Trump Lines.” It later doubled
down, asserting — without any evidence to support it — that operatives
linked to liberal billionaire George Soros had “selected anti-Trump kids to be the face” of the massacre.
The stories helped spread a debunked conspiracy theory about the
students being paid “crisis actors.” This was a few days after the site
initially claimed that the suspected shooter was “a registered Democrat.” A few hours later, it realized it had zeroed in on the wrong Nikolas Cruz but soft-pedaled its correction, merely amending its story to say he wasn’t a Democrat, as “some sources had reported” — a group that seemed to include news sites that had cited Gateway Pundit’s story.
Gateway
Pundit didn’t stop there. Reporter Lucian Wintrich, who wrote the
Parkland stories, took to Twitter to denounce the protesting students as
“little pricks.”
The
take-no-prisoners approach — not to mention the conspiratorial tone and
dubious assertions — has been the trademark of Gateway Pundit since its
founding by a former corporate executive named Jim Hoft in 2004.
Despite this, its influence has grown both among the fringe right and
more mainstream conservatives. In 2016, it championed Donald Trump’s
candidacy; Wintrich eventually received White House press credentials in
the new Trump administration.
Hoft — who declined an in-person
interview and only responded briefly to questions via email — rejected
the label often applied to his creation: far right. The term, he said,
is “used by Democrats and far left media to smear anyone who opposes the
leftist narrative.”
LibertyBlitzKrieg |What Sorkin is suggesting is more of the same, although
perhaps with worse consequences. If banks take action where policymakers
do not or cannot, they are essentially putting themselves above the
law. And if banks start playing that role, where does it end?
What if, for example, banks and credit card companies
decided to stop processing payments for any retail purchase of
cigarettes? After all, cigarettes are demonstrably bad for all
consumers, and secondhand smoke can harm innocent people. Should banks
step in to help protect society at large?
Or what if banks decided to stop processing payments for
abortion clinics because they believed the practice was immoral? Is it
fair for financial institutions to make abortion effectively illegal?
What if President Trump called on financial firms to cut off access to
environmental groups he believed were delaying projects that could bring
jobs to local economies? Maybe banks should freeze Colin Kaepernick’s
checking account until he stops kneeling during the national anthem?
Many of these examples are extreme, but you get my point.
Just because banks can be used to have a dramatic impact on our society
doesn’t mean they should be.
Even in today’s world replete with plutocrat public relations
masquerading as journalism, it’s rare to encounter an article
simultaneously pandering, authoritarian, childish and dumb.
Nevertheless, I found one, and it was unsurprisingly published in The New York Times.
reuters | Bank of America Corp on Saturday became the latest financial heavyweight
to take aim at gunmakers, saying it would ask clients who make assault
rifles how they can help end mass shootings like last week’s massacre at
a Florida high school.
Bank of America, the second-biggest U.S. bank by assets, said its
request to makers of the military-style weapons was in line with those
taken by other financial industry companies to help prevent deadly gun
rampages.
“An immediate step we’re taking is to engage the limited number of
clients we have that manufacture assault weapons for non-military use to
understand what they can contribute to this shared responsibility,” the
Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank said in a statement.
dailymail | The Florida Gun Show had never seen a crowd as big as the one it saw this weekend, according to organizers.
Almost
7,000 people showed up to The Florida Gun Show in Tampa this weekend,
nearly two weeks after a gunman killed 17 teachers and students at a
high school in the state.
'Some of the
people attending are afraid that future legislation will impact their
gun ownership rights,' manager George Fernandez told WTSP.
Indeed,
the gun business becomes more profitable after mass shootings, as gun
owners become afraid of public backlash causing restrictions to their
Second Amendment rights.
theconservativetreehouse | Unauthorized FISA-702(16)(17) results were passed on to Christopher
Steele, likely by Nellie Ohr. Steele would then wash the intelligence
product, repackage it into what became known as his “Dossier”, and pass
it back to the FBI ‘small group’ as evidence for use in their
counterintelligence operation which began in July 2016 [ intentionally
without congressional oversight {Go Deep}].
Evidence of this laundry process is found in a significant “search
query” result that was actually a mistake. The faulty intelligence
mistake was the travel history of Michael Cohen, a long-time Trump
lawyer. The FISA search turned up a Michael Cohen traveling to Prague.
It was the wrong Michael Cohen.
However, that mistaken result was passed on to Chris Steele and it made
its way into the dossier. Absent of a FISA search, there’s no other way
Christopher Steele could identify a random “Michael Cohen” traveling to
Prague.
The Cohen mistake created a trail from Chris Steele to the FISA database. {Go Deep}
All of the unauthorized FISA-702 search queries, “To From”(16) and/or
“About”(17), of the NSA/FBI database were returning results. Those
results were “raw intelligence”.
That raw intelligence needed “unmasking”, that’s where the Department
of State (DoS) comes in. The U.N. Ambassador is part of the DoS.
Samantha Power stated she wasn’t doing the daily “unmasking” identified
by the House Intelligence Committee investigation {Go Deep}.
Someone, or a group of people, within the State Department, were doing
unmasking requests – presumably using Ms. Power’s authority.
The assembled but highly compartmentalized reports from the DOJ-NSD,
FBI-Counterintelligence, Department of State, Office of National
Intelligence (Clapper) and CIA (Brennan), was then constructed to become
part of President Obama’s Daily Intelligence Briefing. That’s where
National Security Adviser Susan Rice comes in and her frequent unmasking
of the assembled intelligence product. {Go Deep}
The Obama PDB was then redistributed internally to more than three dozen administration officials
who POTUS Obama allowed to access his PDB. This includes the heads of
DOJ, DOJ-NSD, FBI, FBI-counterintel, CIA, DoS, ODNI, NSA and Pentagon.
The distribution of the PDB was how each disparate member of the
administration, the larger intelligence apparatus, knew of the ongoing
big picture without having to assemble together for direct discussion
therein. That’s Lisa Monaco and “Operation Latitude”:
constitution | In the days following Trump’s earth-shattering election, I started
receiving calls from contacts in the Obama government. High-echelon
staffers at State, Justice, the FBI especially, as well as the DNC and
Obama White House were telling me of a “whitewash” in full swing. They
were sick and tired of carrying water for what they said was “a totally
corrupt president and Democratic Party.” The FBI sources I had were
particularly angry with James Comey and told me he “was in the DNC bag.”
It seemed the whistleblowers had had enough.
They told me it was demanded by the head of their departments, Kerry
at State, Lynch at Justice, Clapper the DNI, Brazile at the DNC, Comey
at the FBI and the president (Jarrett was the point person) that all
documents “unflattering” to the Obama administration or Hillary Clinton
State Department and campaign be destroyed. Unflattering was
“Obama-speak” for incriminating. There is a law specifically against the
destruction of government documents because the taxpayer owns them.
This was a government-wide expansion of the destruction of Hillary
campaign and Hillary State Department emails and evidence that had
started years prior, of course, in a conspiracy to obfuscate the illegal
activities of her continuing criminal enterprises.
These are the specifics my sources confirm:
**The data collection was NOT LIMITED to Trump servers or the
nonsensical “Russia Investigation,” but rather included data collection
from all servers and internal/external email accounts; cell phone and
landline conversations in their entirety; all text messages; as well as
“hum int,” following Trump campaign team members around as they
conducted their duties or personal chores. KGB-like surveillance. A
source told me, “We were conducting so much human and “sig-int”
surveillance on Trump and associates, al-Qaeda and ISIS were receiving
less attention from our operatives and agents than the man running for
president.”
**The data collection on Trump, his family, Bannon, Conway, Manafort,
Lewandowski, their families and everyone else associated with the Trump
campaign WAS NOT INCIDENTAL. It was purposeful and targeted. It was not
reverse-targeted and it was not investigating Trump activities with
Russians. “During the late days of the campaign, we knew Ms. Conway’s
life better than her husband did,” one source opined.
**The data collection and human intelligence (following Trump family
and associates around) was not initially collected as part of a
domestic-to-foreign warrant looking into the supposed collusion of Trump
with the Russians. The surveillance of the entire Trump staff was a
domestic, criminal plot to ensure Trump never became president. Source:
“Everybody in U.S. Intelligence knew that this was highly illegal. It
was framed to us that Trump was trying to hurt America; that he was
treasonous. We all innately knew who was being treasonous. And there was
never a foreign component to this. It was always domestic.”
**The widespread, illegal surveillance and wiretapping of Trump and
his campaign didn’t begin in October, 2016. Nor did it begin in early
2016. IT BEGAN ALMOST IMMEDIATELY when Trump announced in the summer of
2015. This wasn’t just “oppo research.” This was Bill & Hillary
going to Obama as the head of the DNC and entering into a conspiracy
with Obama, Jarrett, Rice, Rhodes and even Kerry to DESTROY TRUMP. They
then involved Brennan, Clapper and lastly Comey, the first two being all
too happy to do whatever was necessary to destroy Trump. Source:
“Remember, all these activities started before Trump was nominated;
right after he declared. So the “Russia” issue hadn’t even been dreamed
up by the Democrats yet. In terms of roles played, Clapper and Brennan
were the” wet men.”
**There were no warrants obtained for any of this outside of the
Russian FISA warrant, after-the-fact and these surveillance activities
were designed not to look into any relationship between Trump campaign
officials with Russia but to eliminate Trump as an opponent so Hillary
could skate to the presidency. This, of course, is highly illegal. I
consider it treason. Source: “Jarrett and the administration tried to
get warrants after the fact. After the surveillance program had already
started many months prior. They were backdating it to protect Obama and
his staff of radical operatives.”
**The nefarious ongoing activities also involved the mass, agency and
government-wide destruction of computers, laptops, cellphones,
documents, emails, files, texts and the shredding and/or “Bleachbiting”
of anything that could incriminate the Obama cell. As Dr. Evelyn Farkas
so breathlessly warned, it was crucial to get the info out before the
incoming Trump staff could save the new president from this
felony-ridden invasion of privacy.
**By placing Obama/Clinton loyalists, willing to break any law in
order to destroy or delegitimize Trump, in positions just under the
directorships of the FBI, NSA, CIA, DIA and other IC agencies, Obama
thought, after he left office, he’d be able to manipulate them to hurt
the incoming Trump staff, undermining everything he did. This is why
Trump had such a hard time initially and there were all these anti-Trump
leaks. Source: “Even once Lynch, Clapper and Brennan were gone from our
government, Obama and Jarrett had so sneakily placed their people,
people who were real Marxist radicals, real Trump-haters, so deep into
the underlying Directorships at the CIA, DNI and FBI, that the
undermining could continue after Obama left the White House. It was like
a ticking time bomb lying in wait for President Trump.”
**The Obama crew coordinated the entire conspiracy from beginning to
end. It was only in October last year that they saw the diabolical
opportunity to turn their wiretapping and surveillance crimes into a
“Russian investigation” of Trump. “Obama saw the opportunity to switch
the blame onto a fabricated fantasy of Trump collusion with Russia. It
was classic disinformation,” my source told me.
NYTimes | It’s a new year and I’ve got a new gym membership. I went the other morning. It was 8 degrees outside. And every woman in there was wearing skintight, Saran-wrap-thin yoga pants. Many were dressed in the latest fashion — leggings with patterns of translucent mesh cut out of them, like sporty doilies. “Finally,” these women must have thought, “pants that properly ventilate my outer calves without letting a single molecule of air reach anywhere else below my belly button.”
Don’t get me wrong. I have yoga pants — three pairs. But for some reason none of them cover my ankles, and as I said, it was 8 degrees outside. So I wore sweatpants.
I got on the elliptical. A few women gave me funny looks. Maybe they felt sorry for me, or maybe they were concerned that my loose pants were going to get tangled in the machine’s gears. Men didn’t look at me at all.
At this moment of cultural crisis, when the injustices and indignities of female life have suddenly become news, an important question hit me: Whatever happened to sweatpants?
Remember sweatpants? Women used to wear them, not so long ago. You probably still have a pair, in velour or terry cloth, with the name of a college or sports team emblazoned down the leg.
No one looks good in sweatpants. But that’s not the point. They’re basically just towels with waistbands. They exist for two activities: lounging and exercising — two activities that you used to be able to do without looking like a model in a P90X infomercial.
It’s not good manners for women to tell other women how to dress; that’s the job of male fashion photographers. Women who criticize other women for dressing hot are seen as criticizing women themselves — a sad conflation if you think about it, rooted in the idea that who we are is how we look. It’s impossible to have once been a teenage girl and not, at some very deep level, feel that.
But yoga pants make it worse. Seriously, you can’t go into a room of 15 fellow women contorting themselves into ridiculous positions at 7 in the morning without first donning skintight pants? What is it about yoga in particular that seems to require this? Are practitioners really worried that a normal-width pant leg is going to throttle them mid-lotus pose?
We aren’t wearing these workout clothes because they’re cooler or more comfortable. (You think the selling point of Lululemon’s Reveal Tight Precision pants is really the way their moth-eaten design provides a “much-needed dose of airflow”?) We’re wearing them because they’re sexy.
NPR | Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens was indicted on one count of felony
invasion of privacy and taken into custody in St. Louis in connection
with reports of an extramarital affair that surfaced last month.
During
that affair, Greitens is alleged to have taken a semi-nude photo of the
woman and then threatened to blackmail her by publishing it if she
revealed their relationship.
As reported by the Two-Way in January, Greitens, a Republican, confirmed that he had an extramarital affair before he was elected in 2016, but he denied the allegations of blackmail.
"As I have said before, I made a personal mistake before I was Governor," Greitens said in a statement Thursday posted on Facebook. "I did not commit a crime."
"Missouri
law says that ... taking the picture alone is a misdemeanor. What
pushes this to the level of a felony was the fact that he put that photo
on a computer, and therefore it makes it sort of a low level felony.
We
know about this incident because the ex-husband of the woman who had
the affair recorded the conversation and talked about it with the
media."
In the wake of the public exposure of the affair last
month, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner opened an
investigation leading to this indictment by a St. Louis grand jury.
The
name of the woman who had an affair with Greitens has not been
disclosed and is referred to only as "K.S." in the indictment.
It
alleges that Greitens "knowingly photographed K.S. in a state of full
or partial nudity without the knowledge or consent of K.S. and in a
place where a person would have a reasonable expectation of privacy, and
the defendant subsequently transmitted the image contained in the
photograph in a manner that allowed access to that image via a
computer."
In a statement, Gardener said it was essential for residents of St. Louis and Missouri to have confidence in their leaders.
BostonGlobe | Warren’s constituents in Massachusetts probably don’t realize how
common it is for white people in the South to grow up with stories of
distant and heroic Indian ancestors. (And some black Southerners, too:
NFL running back Emmitt Smith realized he wasn’t part Cherokee on an episode of NBC’s “Who Do You Think You Are.”)
Cherokees married outside their tribe more than other Native Americans —
a method of survival in the 17th and 18th centuries — so many people do
have distant ties to the group. Their exogamy has allowed thousands of
families like mine to claim ancestry, livening up their family trees
without ever having to reckon with the genocidal tendencies of some of
their forebears.
Nagle and many other Cherokees find this casual
appropriation of Native identity deeply offensive. But part of why the
stories have such staying power for my family, despite a lack of
evidence, is because my family is so sincerely proud of having any
connection to Native Americans. My granny and my grandfather greatly
admired the tribes that live in Oklahoma, and a group of Comanches sang
at my grandfather’s funeral, after the military bugler played taps in
honor of his service in World War II.
Warren’s speech last week
was well received by the Native Americans in attendance, who generously
accepted her assertion that her mother was Native American, despite a
lack of documentation.
“Who are we to say what she is?” said
Ricardo Ortiz, a member of the Pueblo of San Felipe tribe in New Mexico.
“If she knows what’s in her blood, and believes it, who are we to
criticize?”
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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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 ...