NYTimes | The Oscars are here: the first Oscars since powerful men started falling to #MeToo, a Trump-era Oscars, a #TimesUp Oscars, an Oscars in the shadow of “Black Panther.” Some big chairs will be empty. Some big secrets will stalk the red carpet, newly unleashed.
In an America where the ruling party seems willing to sacrifice many things — including decency and justice — to reassert white Christian masculinity as the tentpole of the universe, the best picture category offers a contrasting vision: a flaw-free indictment of that same colonial pathology (“Get Out”), a blazing affirmation of young womanhood (“Lady Bird”) and an aching gay romance (“Call Me by Your Name”), among others.
Jordan Peele has the chance to become the first black person ever to win best director; Greta Gerwig would be only the second woman. Yance Ford, whose film “Strong Island” is up for best documentary feature, would be the first trans director to win an Oscar. Vulture reported last week that some older Academy voters refused to even watch “Get Out,” calling it “not an Oscar film,” a dismissal more air horn than dog whistle. Identity politics loom large over the 90th Academy Awards, as well they should.
TV and film are in the thick of an unprecedented sociopolitical reckoning, the first ever of such scale and ferocity, a microcosm of our ever-more-literal national culture war. But to make that reckoning stick, we have to look ahead and ask ourselves what we want of this new Hollywood, and look back to avoid repeating the past.
Hollywood is both a perfect and bizarre vanguard in the war for cultural change. Perfect because its reach is so vast, its influence so potent; bizarre because television and movies are how a great many toxic ideas embedded themselves inside of us in the first place.
WaPo | Twitter is sick. And it’s sorry for infecting you. Oh, and — do you have an aspirin?
That was the gist of Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey’s mea culpa this week. In a series of tweets
Thursday, Dorsey confessed that the company “didn’t fully predict or
understand the real-world negative consequences” of the instant, public
and global messaging it pioneered. “We aren’t proud of how people have
taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast
enough,” he said. “We’ve focused most of our efforts on removing content
against our terms, instead of building a systemic framework to help
encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking.”
Dorsey
is asking the public to help Twitter get better. It is inviting outside
experts to submit proposals for ways to define and measure the “health”
of conversation on the platform, presumably as a first step toward
improving it. As a first attempt, Dorsey has suggested four metrics
based on the work of an MIT-affiliated nonprofit: shared attention (is
there overlap in what we’re talking about?); shared reality (are we
using the same facts?); variety (are we exposed to different opinions
grounded in shared reality?); and receptivity (are we open, civil and
listening to different opinions?).
It is good to see that Twitter is finally acknowledging its ill
health. It is even better to hear it’s open to intervention. The problem
is that the service may be too far gone to recover — and it is unclear
whether this initiative is a last gasp or a real attempt to change.
The
reasoning behind this proposal is probably not just a noble commitment
to public health. Platforms such as Twitter have clearly realized that
if they don’t begin to self-correct, the government is going to do it
for them through regulations that may not be as gentle as those they
would impose on themselves. And in the long run, the flaws in their
systems represent an existential threat worth getting ahead of. Being
seen as a destroyer of democracy and a net negative to public trust
isn’t exactly great branding. A short-term cure, if painful, might offer
the inoculation that platforms such as Twitter need for long-term
survival.
medium | Anti-Trumpism
has never been about opposing Trump. It’s about killing off what
remains of the true left in America by bullying them into falling in
line with the establishment and accusing them of supporting an evil Nazi
traitor if they don’t. It’s about manufacturing support for new cold
war escalations with Russia. It’s about manufacturing support for
internet censorship to quash anti-establishment ideas. It’s about
rescuing the career of every MSM pundit who’s been proven wrong about
everything since 2015. It’s about distracting from the DNC scandal which
proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that democracy does not exist in
America in any meaningful way. It’s about pacing rank-and-file Democrats
into alignment with Bush era neoconservatives. Opposing Trump has
nothing to do with it.
No,
when it comes to actual policies that actually matter, Trump and those
who McResist him are playing for the same exact team. Same expansion of
the US war machine, same expansion of unaccountable Orwellian
surveillance networks, same increasing government opacity and
persecution of whistleblowers, same increasingly militarized police
state, same soul-crushing Walmart economy, same subversion of anything
resembling democracy, same oligarchy, same agenda. Same play, different
masks.
The
two parties are both lying to you and the entire show is fake. US
politics is a WWE performance with the audience deeply invested in the
outcome of the match, each side of the stadium screaming for their
favorite wrestler when the only determining factor is what will make
Vince McMahon the most money. It’s all a fake spectacle, and it’s
designed to screw you over.
Ignore
the political theater and watch what actually happens, and you will see
a very, very different America than the one you are told to see by
proponents of mainstream narratives. Ignore their words and watch their
actions, and oppose everyone who’s on the side of the machine.
The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and
enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the
US government. In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I
was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence —
including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates —
between the Tor Project and its main funder, a CIA spinoff now known as
the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These files show incredible
cooperation between Tor and the regime change wing of the US
government. The files are released to the public here. —Yasha Levine
surveillancevalley | I obtained the documents in 2015. By then I had already spent a
couple of years doing extensive reporting on Tor's deeply conflicted
ties to the regime change wing of the U.S. government. By following the
money, I discovered that Tor was not grassroots. I was able to show that
despite its radical anti-government cred, Tor was almost 100% funded by
three U.S. national security agencies: the Navy, the State Department
and the BBG. Tor was military contractor with its own government
contractor number — a privatized extension of the very same government
that it claimed to be fighting.
This was a shocking revelation.
For years, the Tor Project — along with other government-funded
crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by
the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government
spying online.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital
equivalent of the First Amendment. The ACLU backed it. Fight for the
Future, the hip Silicon Valley activist group, declared Tor to be
“NSA-proof.” Edward Snowden held it up as an example of the kind of
grassroots privacy technology that could defeat government surveillance
online, and told his followers to use it. Prominent award-winning
journalists from Wired, Vice, The Intercept, The Guardian and Rolling
Stone — including Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Andy Greenberg
— all helped pump up Tor's mythical anti-state rebel status. Even Daniel
Ellsberg, the legendary whistleblower, was convinced that Tor was vital
to the future of democracy. Anyone who questioned this narrative and
pointed to Tor's lavish government support was attacked, ridiculed,
smeared and hounded into silence. I know because that's what Tor
supporters tried to do to me.
But the facts wouldn't go away.
The initial evidence that I had gathered in my reporting left little
room for doubt about Tor's true nature as foreign policy weapon of the
U.S. government. But the box of FOIA documents I received from the BBG
took that evidence to a whole new level.
Why would the U.S. government fund a tool that limited its own power?
The answer, as I discovered, was that Tor didn't threaten American
power. It enhanced it.
The FOIA documents showed collaboration between the federal
government, the Tor Project and key members of the privacy and Internet
Freedom movement on a level that was hard to believe:
The documents showed Tor employees taking orders from their handlers
in the federal government, including hatching plans to deploy their
anonymity tool in countries that the U.S. was working to destabilize:
China, Iran, Vietnam, Russia. They showed discussions about the need to
influence news coverage and to control bad press. They featured monthly
updates that described meetings and trainings with the CIA, NSA, FBI,
DOJ and State Department. They also revealed plans to funnel government
funds to run "independent" Tor nodes. Most shockingly, the FOIA
documents put under question Tor's pledge that it would never put in any
backdoors into their software. (See below.)
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.”
“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.
“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.
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.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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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
...
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
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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 ...
