nbcnewyork | An unsealed federal indictment revealed criminal charges against Sean "Diddy" Combs on Tuesday, a day after the hip-hop mogul was arrested in New York City.
The U.S. Attorney's Office accused Combs of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, among other counts. Read the full indictment below.
His attorney, Marc Agnifilo, said earlier Monday that they were "disappointed with the decision to pursue what we believe is an unjust prosecution," calling the entertainment star "an imperfect person but is not criminal."
The former music executive has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Agents with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) carried out the arrest in Manhattan on Monday, sources familiar with the matter told NBC New York. Combs was arrested in the lobby of a hotel, a representative told NBC News.
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"To his credit Mr. Combs has been nothing but cooperative with this investigation and he voluntarily relocated to New York last week in anticipation of these charges. Please reserve your judgment until you have all the facts," the statement from Agnifilo read. "These are the acts of an innocent man with nothing to hide, and he looks forward to clearing his name in court."
BREAKING NEWS: COVID-19 Vaccine Clinics across Canada have been ordered to destroy all vials of Pfizer & Moderna COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines!
— William Makis MD (@MakisMD) September 6, 2024
My urgent message to all who have access:
DO NOT RETURN OR DESTROY any Vaccine vials, they are priceless! Hide them@ABDanielleSmith#ableg pic.twitter.com/WQVt0AaAby
Fist tap Dale.
NC | The goal of the political leadership in the US, the EU, the UK, and other ostensibly liberal democracies is simple: to gain much greater, more granular control over the information being shared on the internet. As Matt Taibbi told Russell Brand in an interview last year, both the EUรงs Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Biden Administration’s proposed RESTRICT Act (which Yves dissected in April, 2023) are essentially a “wish list that has been passed around” by the transatlantic elite “for some time,” including at a 2021 gathering at the Aspen Institute.
The same goes for the UK’s Online Safety Bill, which Kier Starmer would like nothing better than to beef up. Likewise, Canada has introduced sweeping new internet regulation through its Online News Act, which includes, among other things, a link tax, and Online Streaming Act. So, too, has Australia through a censorship bill that is strikingly similar to the EU’s DSA and even includes a punitive fine of up to 2% of global profits for social media companies that do not comply.
It’s not hard to see why. With economic conditions deteriorating rapidly across the West, after decades of rampant financialisation, kakistocracy, and corporatisation, to the extent that even the United Nations is now one giant private-public partnership, the social contract is, to all intents and purposes, worthless. Even the WEF admits that corporations, its main constituency, have turbocharged inequality. Populism is on the rise just about everywhere and angry and fragmented protest movements have been growing since at least 2019.
Thanks largely to the countervailing information still available on the internet, governments are rapidly losing control of the narrative on key issues, including the war in Ukraine and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Their stock response has been to clamp down on the ability of citizens to use the internet to generate, consume and share important news, dissenting views and uncomfortable truths.
Kamala “code switching” again by using an accent to be more relatable to predominantly black audience
— Myrna ๐๐๐บ ๐ (@GigaBeers) September 3, 2024
Seriously, how low will she go for votes? pic.twitter.com/4uVNmIVNff
theatlantic | strange thing has happened on the path to marijuana legalization. Users across all ages and experience levels are noticing that a drug they once turned to for fun and relaxation now triggers existential dread and paranoia. “The density of the nugs is crazy, they’re so sticky,” a friend from college texted me recently. “I solo’d a joint from the dispensary recently and was tweaking just walking around.” (Translation for the non-pot-savvy: This strain of marijuana is not for amateurs.)
In 2022, the federal government reported that, in samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration, average levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the psychoactive compound in weed that makes you feel high—had more than tripled compared with 25 years earlier, from 5 to 16 percent. That may understate how strong weed has gotten. Walk into any dispensary in the country, legal or not, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single product advertising such a low THC level. Most strains claim to be at least 20 to 30 percent THC by weight; concentrated weed products designed for vaping can be labeled as up to 90 percent.
For the average weed smoker who wants to take a few hits without getting absolutely blitzed, this is frustrating. For some, it can be dangerous. In the past few years, reports have swelled of people, especially teens, experiencing short- and long-term “marijuana-induced psychosis,” with consequences including hospitalizations for chronic vomiting and auditory hallucinations of talking birds. Multiple studies have drawn a link between heavy use of high-potency marijuana, in particular, and the development of psychological disorders, including schizophrenia, although a causal connection hasn’t been proved.
“It’s entirely possible that this new kind of cannabis—very strong, used in these very intensive patterns—could do permanent brain damage to teenagers because that’s when the brain is developing a lot,” Keith Humphreys, a Stanford psychiatry professor and a former drug-policy adviser to the Obama administration, told me. Humphreys stressed that the share of people who have isolated psychotic episodes on weed will be “much larger” than the number of people who end up permanently altered. But even a temporary bout of psychosis is pretty bad.
One of the basic premises of the legalization movement is that marijuana, if not harmless, is pretty close to it—arguably much less dangerous than alcohol. But much of the weed being sold today is not the same stuff that people were getting locked up for selling in the 1990s and 2000s. You don’t have to be a War on Drugs apologist to be worried about the consequences of unleashing so much super-high-potency weed into the world.
The high that most adult weed smokers remember from their teenage years is most likely one produced by “mids,” as in, middle-tier weed. In the pre-legalization era, unless you had a connection with access to top-shelf strains such as Purple Haze and Sour Diesel, you probably had to settle for mids (or, one step down, “reggie,” as in regular weed) most of the time. Today, mids are hard to come by.
The simplest explanation for this is that the casual smokers who pine for the mids and reggies of their youth aren’t the industry’s top customers. Serious stoners are. According to research by Jonathan P. Caulkins, a public-policy professor at Carnegie Mellon, people who report smoking more than 25 times a month make up about a third of marijuana users but account for about two-thirds of all marijuana consumption. Such regular users tend to develop a high tolerance, and their tastes drive the industry’s cultivation decisions.
The industry is not shy about this fact. In May, I attended the National Cannabis Investment Summit in Washington D.C., where investors used the terms high-quality and potent almost interchangeably. They told me that high THC percentages do well with heavy users—the dedicated wake-and-bakers and the joint-before-bed crowd. “Thirty percent THC is the new 20 percent,” Ryan Cohen, a Michigan-based cultivator, told me. “Our target buyer is the guy who just worked 40 hours a week and wants to get high as fuck on a budget.”
Smaller producers might conceivably carve out a niche catering to those of us who prefer a milder high. But because of the way the legal weed market has developed, they’re struggling just to exist. As states have been left alone to determine what their legal weed markets will look like, limited licensing has emerged as the favored apparatus. That approach has led to legal weed markets becoming dominated by large, well-financed “multistate operators,” in industry jargon.
Across the country, MSOs are buying up licenses, acquiring smaller brands, and lobbying politicians to stick prohibitions on home-growing into their legalization bills. The result is an illusion of endless choice and a difficult climate for the little guy. Minnesota’s 15 medical dispensaries are owned by two MSOs. All 23 of Virginia’s are owned by three different MSOs. Some states have tried to lower barriers to entry, but the big chains still tend to overpower the market. (Notable exceptions are California and Colorado, which have a longer history with legal marijuana licensing, and where the markets are less dominated by mega-chains.) Despite the profusion of stores in some states and the apparent variety of strains on the shelf, most people who walk into a dispensary will choose from a limited number of suppliers that maximize for THC percentage.
LATimes | Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, continuing his rush to hand out patronage jobs while he retains his powerful post, has given high-paying appointments to his former law associate and a former Alameda County prosecutor who is Brown’s frequent companion.
Brown, exercising his power even as his speakership seems near an end, named attorney Kamala Harris to the California Medical Assistance Commission, a job that pays $72,000 a year.
Harris, a former deputy district attorney in Alameda County, was described by several people at the Capitol as Brown’s girlfriend. In March, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called her “the Speaker’s new steady.” Harris declined to be interviewed Monday and Brown’s spokeswoman did not return phone calls.
Harris accepted the appointment last week after serving six months as Brown’s appointee to the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which pays $97,088 a year. After Harris resigned from the unemployment board last week, Brown replaced her with Philip S. Ryan, a lawyer and longtime friend and business associate.
Last week, Brown also appointed Janet Gotch, wife of retiring Assemblyman Mike Gotch of San Diego, to the $95,000-a-year Integrated Waste Management Board, which oversees garbage disposal in California.
“It’s politics as usual,” said Robert M. Stern, co-director of the Center for Governmental Studies, a nonprofit group in Los Angeles. “Governors have done this in the past. This is a tradition the Speaker is carrying on. There are always outcries. People say it is wrong, and when they get in power they do the same thing.”
Brown is making the appointments at a time when his 14-year hold on the speakership is tenuous at best. The Assembly will reconvene Monday with Republicans holding 41 seats to the Democrats’ 39, making it likely the GOP will oust Democrat Brown as Speaker and replace him with a Republican.
“It’s safe to say that these are not appointments we would necessarily make,” said Phil Perry, spokesman for Assembly Republican Leader Jim Brulte, the front-runner to replace Brown as Speaker.
Assembly Republicans were muted in their criticism of Brown--perhaps because Assemblyman Bill Morrow (R-Oceanside) acknowledged Monday that he hired Faye Hill, wife of imprisoned former state Sen. Frank Hill, as a $60,000-a-year aide.
Hill, a longtime lawmaker from Whittier, resigned from the Senate earlier this year after being convicted of taking a $2,500 payoff from an undercover FBI agent.
Morrow hired Faye Hill in October and said she will work in his San Juan Capistrano office as well as in his offices in Oceanside and Sacramento.
“We haven’t been keeping it a secret,” Morrow said, adding that he has received “nothing but complimentary” comments about her work. Morrow called her “amply qualified,” but also said he “can’t divorce the fact that” she gained much of her experience in politics as a result of her marriage to Hill.
The Brown appointments of Harris and Ryan fill vacant slots once held by other Brown appointees, whose terms have not expired.
Harris’ term on the medical board continues until Jan. 1, 1998.
Salary for the California Medical Assistance Commission is tied to legislators’ pay. A government commission earlier this year voted to grant legislators a 37% pay increase, from the current $52,500 a year, to $72,000, effective when the new Legislature takes office Monday.
Trump's newest allies have something very specific in common.
— Clandestine (@WarClandestine) August 26, 2024
Tulsi and RFK Jr. are the two most prominent US politicians to discuss the US-funded biolabs in Ukraine.
They have been extremely vocal about this subject, and Trump just brought them both onto his team. ๐
Perhaps… pic.twitter.com/xAxNT62iDk
anti-spiegel | The Russian Defense Ministry has again released a statement on the US biological weapons programs, reporting on the US attempts to better conceal the programs and relocate them from Ukraine to Moldova and Romania.
I have been covering the Russian Defense Ministry's publications on the Pentagon's bioweapons programs in Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian military operation, and translating all Russian statements on the subject. For the average reader, this may be very dry and uninteresting reading, but for experts, this is important information, which is why I take the trouble to translate it all.
Even if the German media ignore these Russian statements or try to ridicule them as crazy conspiracy theories and Russian propaganda, they are being followed very closely by international (mostly non-Western) experts.
Here I translate the new statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense, the slides are taken from the original. After the translation you will find a chronology of the publications.
Start of translation:
The Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation continues to analyze the activities of the United States and Ukraine in connection with violations of international treaties prohibiting chemical and biological weapons.
We have repeatedly noted that Washington has a significant interest in obtaining biomaterials from citizens of Russia, Ukraine and other post-Soviet states.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has already published information confirming the large-scale collection and transportation of biomaterials. Before the start of the military operation, the United States and its allies managed to remove at least 16,000 biosamples from Ukraine. Within the framework of the UP-8 project alone, blood samples were taken from 4,000 Ukrainian soldiers. Dangerous pathogens and their vectors were exported, more than 10,000 samples.
The biological material was transported directly, without the involvement of shell companies and intermediaries. Human blood and tissue samples were sent from the Ukrainian Public Health Center to Western research laboratories with links to the Pentagon. They were then used for military biological research, including the selection of biological agents dangerous to the population of a particular region.
According to reports, the United States is continuing to develop biological warfare agents that can specifically target different ethnic populations.
According to available information, the United States has begun to actively involve Moldova and Romania in logistical plans for the transportation of biomaterials, using organizations under its control.
This tactic helps to obscure the ultimate recipient and divert suspicion from U.S. authorities and the U.S. biological warfare program.
Note the movement pattern of the biomaterial. It has been established that the export of dangerous goods to Moldova from the Ukrainian side is carried out through the company "Biopartners", which is a subsidiary of an American company of the same name.
The company Q2 Solution, a subsidiary of one of the Pentagon's largest suppliers, is also involved in the logistics processes. We have information confirming the implementation of contracts by this company under the US Department of Defense Threat Reduction (DITRA) programs worth more than $22 million.
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the escort of biological cargoes coming from Ukraine is carried out by the logistics companies Gamma Logistics and AeroTransCargo, controlled by Moldovan President Maia Sandu, as well as by medical institutions in Chisinau and Western intermediary organizations.
In the period from August 2022 to May 2024, more than 2,000 transportations of biomaterial samples were officially carried out through the territory of the Republic of Moldova.
theatlantic | Americans maintain a favorable opinion of Jews. The community remains prosperous and politically powerful. But the memory of how quickly the best of times can turn dark has infused the Jewish reactions to events of the past decade. “When lights start flashing red, the Jewish impulse is to flee,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, told me.
Back in 2016, many liberals blustered about leaving the country if Donald Trump was elected president; after he won, many Jews actually hatched contingency plans. My mother tried, in vain, to get a passport from Poland, the country of her birth. An immigration lawyer I know in Cleveland told me that he had obtained a German passport, and suggested that I call the German embassy in Washington to learn how many other American Jews had done the same.
The German government, for understandable reasons, doesn’t count Jews. But the embassy sent me a tally of passport applications submitted under laws that apply to victims of Nazi persecution and their descendants. In 2017, after Trump’s election, the number of applications nearly doubled from the year before, to 1,685, and then kept growing. In 2022, it was 2,500. These aren’t large numbers in absolute terms; still, it’s extraordinary that so many American Jews, whose applications required documenting that their families once fled Germany, now consider the country a safer haven than the United States.
I also saw signs of flight in Oakland, where at least 30 Jewish families have been approved to transfer their children to neighboring school districts—and I heard similar stories in the surrounding area. Initial data collected by an organization representing Jewish day schools, which have long struggled for enrollment, show a spike in the number of admission inquiries from families contemplating pulling their kids from public school.
After 1967, the previous moment of profound political abandonment, the American Jewish community began to entertain thoughts of its own radical reinvention. A coterie of disillusioned intellectuals, clustered around a handful of small-circulation journals and think tanks, turned sharply rightward, creating the neoconservative movement. Among activists, the energy that had once been directed toward Freedom Rides was plowed into the cause of Soviet Jewry, which became a defining political obsession of many synagogues in the 1970s and ’80s. Meanwhile, Jewish hippies turned inward, creating new spiritual movements centered on prayer and ritual.
Although not all of these movements proved equally fruitful, this history, in a way, is cause for optimism, an example of how conflict might provide the path to religious renewal and a fresh sense of solidarity. It’s also a reminder that the Golden Age was not an uninterrupted rise.
The case for pessimism, however, is more convincing. The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago. The surge of anti-Semitism is a symptom of the decay of democratic habits, a leading indicator of rising authoritarianism. When anti-Semitism takes hold, conspiracy theory hardens into conventional wisdom, embedding violence in thought and then in deadly action. A society that holds its Jews at arm’s length is likely to be more intent on hunting down scapegoats than addressing underlying defects. Although it is hardly an iron law of history, such societies are prone to decline. England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290. Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s. If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.
sentinalcolorado | The city’s heightened alert comes after 3,000 to 4,000 Venezuelan migrants and their sympathizers met up in the parking lot of the Gardens on Havana shopping center on July 28 to await election results. Most in the crowd expected the ouster of incumbent strongman Nicolรกs Maduro, who later declared himself the winner of another six-year term.
Aurora police acknowledge they were not prepared for the convergence of so many people crammed at the southern end of the strip center in front of the Target store where witnesses reported shots fired into the air. Traffic was snarled because of all the parked cars. Some stores, whose customers said they were rattled by the noise of Venezuelans honking horns and banging on pots, chose to close early. The lot was strewn with beer bottles and trash.
Police say no injuries were reported, no arrests were made and nobody was ticketed or summoned.
Still, some anti-immigrant members of the community seized the opportunity to post on social media that the gathering was a riot and that it was organized by the Venezuelan gang Tren De Aragua (TDA).
Police disputed those claims. They also debunked a Facebook post by Aurora Councilmember Danielle Jurinsky that “Thousands of these folks took over and completely shut down a part of our city. The police were totally overrun, and were forced to get out of the area for their safety.”
City officials have repeatedly disputed that account.
“Police did not leave, and were there for the entire event,” Aurora spokesperson Ryan Luby said in a statement.
Meanwhile, in Venezuela, Maduro’s claim to victory over opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzรกlez remains contested, and his government has arrested thousands of protestors and otherwise cracked down on dissent.
Several Latin American countries, as well as the United States and European Union have held off on recognizing election results and demanded detailed data from Venezuelan polling stations to analyze the outcome.
By Thursday afternoon, leaders of Brazil and Colombia were calling for a new election with safeguards against ballot tampering and miscounts. In Washington, U.S. President Joe Biden expressed support for new elections in comments to reporters that the White House later appeared to back away from.
Another convergence of Venezuelans is expected this Saturday now that opposition leader Marรญa Corina Machado has called for her supporters to “take to the streets” worldwide to rally in support of her party’s claim that Gonzรกlez beat Maduro in a landslide.
“Let’s shout together for the world to support our victory and recognize truth and popular sovereignty,” she has said.
Venezuelans are still weighing where to gather Saturday in metro Denver, which has seen an influx of about 40,000 migrants in the last few years.
Some solo and others with young children have wound their way to North American and Colorado to flee poverty and violence back home. Most don’t have immigration papers, and several have told the Sentinel they’re torn between a desire to rally against what they see as a tyrant’s stolen election and their fear of being arrested here for protesting, then deported at a time of extreme upheaval back home.
Aurora’s Global Fest, the city’s biggest annual festival, will take place this weekend on the Aurora Municipal Center’s Great Lawn, the site of many political demonstrations in the last several years.
The city’s police posted on social media earlier this week that it is “actively monitoring the situation due to recent events” and “will provide communication and updates to our community if we learn of any large gatherings planned for or taking place in Aurora.”
Ireland Illegal Immigration Video Fist tap Dale
But that was the lowest point ever recorded. It was a really, I mean, I was very proud of those numbers. And then you see what happened with these people, Kamala and Joe, you see what happened. They just let it go. I remain in Mexico policies. I had all these different policies that were so good. Guys like Tom Holman and Brandon Judd from Border Patrol. These are all people that they’ve been on television. They say it’s the best numbers we’ve ever had. We had so many different checks, catch and release in Mexico, not the United, we had catch and release in the United States. We had it in Mexico. We had so many things.
(19:16)
We had things where if many people come in there, they have contagious
diseases. We had everything passed. If you have a contagious disease,
I’m sorry, but we cannot allow you into the country. So we were setting
literally records. And all I was doing is showing that. And I used it
sometimes. And in this case, I’m glad I used it. I can tell you that.
But there were fantastic numbers. But I’m going to sleep with that chart
always. I’ll be sleeping with that chart. That chart was very
important, very important for a lot of reasons.
Elon Musk (19:54):
Would it be accurate to say that you’re supportive of legal immigration, but we obviously need to shut down illegal immigration, and especially unvetted illegal immigration?
Donald Trump (20:06):
Yes.
Elon Musk (20:06):
And that’s not the same as saying that everyone who’s an illegal immigrant is bad. In fact, I think most people who are illegal immigrants are actually good. But you can’t tell a difference unless there’s a solid vetting of who comes across the border.
Donald Trump (20:19):
100%.
Elon Musk (20:20):
Does that actually represent your position?
Donald Trump (20:22):
I say it very simply. They have to come in legally. They have to be checked.
Elon Musk (20:27):
Yeah.
Donald Trump (20:27):
Because look, Kamala was the Border Czar. Now she’s denying it. Everything that I do, she’s saying she was strong on the border, we’re going to be strong. Well, she doesn’t have to say it. She could close it up right now. They could do things right now. It is horrible. No tax on tips. And all of a sudden she’s making a speech, she’s saying, “There will be no tax on tips.” I said that months ago. And by the way, they had just the opposite. They had not only tax on tips, but they hired 88,000 IRS agents. And many of them were assigned to go get waitresses and caddies and all of this on tips. They have a policy. They had a policy, they were really going to go after you and we’re really harassing people horribly. And then all of a sudden for politics, she comes out with what I said, which I think is terrible.
(21:14)
And I think it’s also hitting them very hard. These people are fake. Now
they’re also saying they did a good job in the border. We had the worst
numbers in the history of the world, not of our country. There’s never
been a country in history that has had a catastrophe like this. We’ve
had, I believe, and I think you believe this too, you hear 12 million,
13, I believe it’s over 20 million people came into our country. Many
coming from jails, from prisons, from mental institutions, or a bigger
version of that is insane asylums. And many are terrorists. And I’ll
tell you what, they’re coming not just from South America, they’re
coming from Africa. They’re coming from all over the world. They’re
coming from Asia. They’re coming from the Middle East. They’re coming
from countries that are stupidly and horribly bombing Israel, October
7th. They’re coming from all over the world. And you look at, it’s so
sad, October 7th, because it should have never happened.
Elon Musk (22:10):
Yeah. Sure.
Slate | Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is reportedly under serious consideration to become vice president and presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ running mate. And, in a certain sense, there are good reasons for this: Democrats badly want (some would argue need) to win Pennsylvania. Shapiro is, by all accounts, quite popular in the state he runs. He won the governorship handily in 2022 against Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, proponent of Christian nationalist ideas—which Shapiro proved unafraid to tackle head-on. Shapiro is Jewish and has spoken strongly about and against antisemitism, which will surely be a theme in the 2024 presidential election. Republican candidate Donald Trump wonders aloud how any Jew could vote for a Democrat even as his son hosts a fundraiser with pundit Tucker Carlson, promoter of antisemitic conspiracy theories. Republicans reportedly see Shapiro as a threat, while progressive Pennsylvania state Sen. Nikil Saval touted his “strong willingness to build coalitions with people that he also disagrees with, and to change his views and policies through that act of coalition-building.”
jewishinsider | The decision by Vice President Kamala Harris to choose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate is raising questions among some Jewish leaders about whether a pressure campaign led by anti-Israel activists to thwart Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s nomination ultimately played a part in influencing the selection process.
Harris formally announced her pick in a text message to supporters of her campaign on Tuesday morning. “Tim is a battle-tested leader who has an incredible track record of getting things done for Minnesota families,” she said. “I know that he will bring that same principled leadership to our campaign, and to the office of the vice president.”
The selection comes amid Democratic concerns over anti-Israel protests at the party’s convention in Chicago this month. Harris will appear with Walz at a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Tuesday evening.
In recent weeks, Shapiro had faced mounting resistance from an outspoken coalition of far-left organizers who expressed vehement opposition to Shapiro over his staunch support for Israel and his criticism of extreme anti-Israel campus protesters, among other issues.
The campaign drew allegations of antisemitism for targeting Shapiro, an observant Jew whose positions on Israel were largely aligned with other contenders who emerged on the vice presidential short list, including Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Walz, the latter of whom had been favored by progressives. The rhetoric used by the left-wing campaign, including tagging Shapiro as “Genocide Josh,” also faced criticism for singling out the only Jewish candidate under serious consideration.
For some observers who had been cautiously excited by the possibility of a Jewish running mate — the first since 2000 — the organized campaign was a dismaying confirmation of concerns that Shapiro’s rise as a vice presidential prospect could be derailed amid a recent surge of antisemitism in the wake of Hamas Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza.
“There are all kinds of legitimate factors that go into a vice-presidential pick, but there was an obvious and concerted anti-Shapiro effort that tapped into the antisemitic fervor coursing through our country,” said Nathan Diament, the executive director of public policy for the Orthodox Union. “Irrespective of the reasons Ms. Harris had,” he told Jewish Insider, Shapiro’s far-left opponents “will surely declare victory.”
With that in mind, Diament cautioned that Harris “will have to take other steps to undermine those extremists to show their claims are false.”
Brett Goldman, a founder of Democratic Jewish Outreach Pennsylvania and a political consultant in Philadelphia, said in an interview with JI that he viewed the Shapiro snub as a sign that Harris “is succumbing to pressure from the left” — whose relative electoral power, he suggested, has been overstated.
But despite his disappointment, Goldman clarified that his group would still back Harris’ campaign. “It’s unfortunate, and it sucks that it’s not Josh,” he said, describing the effort to block Shapiro as “based in” antisemitism and anti-Zionism. “But we still have an election to win.”
Jared Solomon, a Jewish state representative in Philadelphia now running for attorney general, a role previously held by Shapiro, said he regarded the popular Pennsylvania governor as “by far the best pick” for vice president, citing how he “brings faith into the conversation in an approachable, inclusive way.”
“I would say to the critics, specifically on his position regarding Israel, I would be hard-pressed to see much daylight between Josh and the other contenders,” he told JI. “I believe that he, like the others, thinks the United States is a friend of Israel” and “like the others, believes in a two-state solution.”
The anti-Shapiro campaign, Solomon added, “begs the question: Why is he, unlike the other candidates, facing so much pushback?”
To hear Eric Weinstein's entire "shut it down, the goyim know" drunken rant, - in which he repudiates everything he's professed about the DISC as well as placing himself squarely in the Epstein psy-op camp - go to the 3 hour 30 minute mark on the spotify podcast with Rogan.
Guardian | A prominent member of the progressive “Squad” in Congress, Cori Bush, has lost her Democratic primary in St Louis after pro-Israel pressure groups spent millions of dollars to unseat her over criticisms of Israel’s war in Gaza.
St Louis prosecutor Wesley Bell defeated Missouri’s first Black female member of Congress with about 51% of the vote. Bush took about 46%.
Bell’s win marks a second major victory for the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) after it played a leading role in unseating New York congressman Jamaal Bowman, another progressive Democrat who criticised the scale of Palestinian civilians deaths in Gaza, in a June primary.
Aipac pumped $8.5m into the race in Missouri’s first congressional district to support Bell through its campaign funding arm, the United Democracy Project (UDP), after Bush angered some pro-Israel groups as one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire after the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel.
Much of the UDP’s money comes from billionaires who fund hardline pro-Israel causes and Republicans in other races, including some who have given to Donald Trump’s campaign.
Bush condemned Hamas for the killing of 1,139 people, mostly Israelis, and for abducting hundreds of others in October. But she also infuriated some Jewish and pro-Israel groups by describing Israel’s subsequent attack on Gaza and large scale killing of civilians as “collective punishment against Palestinians” and a war crime.
During the campaign, the UDP flooded St Louis with advertising hostile to Bush – although, as in other congressional races targeted by pro-Israel groups, it rarely mentioned the war in Gaza that has claimed nearly 40,000 Palestinian lives, mostly civilians, or her call for a ceasefire.
Instead, the campaign focused on Bush’s voting record in Congress, particularly her failure to support Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar infrastructure bill in 2021 and her support for the “defund the police” campaign. Bush struggled to get her message across that the UDP is misrepresenting both situations.
The UDP accounted for more than half of all the money spent on the race outside the campaigns themselves.
Bell has denied being recruited by pro-Israel groups to run against Bush, but suspicion lingered after he abandoned a challenge for the US Senate and entered the congressional race not long after Jewish organisations in St Louis began to seek a candidate to take on Bush after accusing her of “intentionally fuelling antisemitism”.
Bell is expected to win what is one of the safest Democratic congressional seats in November’s general election.
I see this as a class proxy war gone insane:
The wealthy want wage pressure on those below them in society. One way to do this is to import people from different cultures, and replace workers with others. This results in a low trust society: low trust in policing, media coverage, justice, the puppeticians and even the functioning of democracy.
This wage pressure is leading working people to not have children, because children are expensive and hard to combine with one or more precarious jobs. Instead the imported people, who have better family networks, and who have no compunctions in demanding welfare support, produce the next generation of children, making the above 37% estimate an underestimate. Many of these children with foreign born parents are brought up thinking their parents ways are better than their new country’s.
Children with native ancestry find themselves surrounded by children from other countries, and either give up (British White boys have among the lowest educational results), or try to fit in by adopting foreign religions or expressions (e.g. Inshallah is common parlance among young French kids these days). The “DEI History curriculum” doesn’t encourage them to strive either. To quote Battlestar Galactica, “All this has happened before, and will happen again”: the US is not Native American, Australia is not Aborigine, and Israel is not Palestinian.
Pensions are a red-herring, brought out to divide the public and particularly to keep the old (voting) electorate on board. Why? Because Western companies could have been automating since the 1970s, just like the Chinese are doing. Xiaomi is building a factory that requires no people to pump out 60 high end cellphones a minute. Instead our ruling classes decided they could better line their pockets by outsourcing, investing in stock buybacks instead of technology, allowing in many uneducated people to do the “menial labour” & playing financial games.
So I lay the blame for this crisis solely on the ruling classes. The entire thing is short-termist self-destructive insanity, but I guess that’s what happens when economies contract and the people at the top can’t stop living in the manner to which they have grown accustomed.
yahoo | Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City on Dec. 4, waived his ...
