Speaking of Heavily-Armed Citizens: Apocalypse Imminent in South Africa?

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.

 

Scott Free Never Was...,

WaPo |  President Trump apparently had an affair with a porn star while his model wife was home with their newborn son. No surprise there. Keeping the affair out of the newspapers before the 2016 election reportedly cost him $130,000, around a measly 0.004 percent of his claimed net worth of $3.1 billion — nothing to him. The fact that you might be unsettled by this news also means nothing to him. Trump is impervious to scandal and immune to social censure. He is insulated from consequence by power, money and fame in a way not imaginable to the ordinary person. He is the freest man alive.

Americans like to think we invented freedom, but we really only extended it to an absurd conclusion in the person of Trump. The ancients had their version of freedom, and they were as fiercely protective of it as we are of ours. For Plato, people are free when they are fully in control of themselves, with their self-mastery uninhibited by passions or appetites. Much the same for Aristotle, who saw freedom in rational, intelligent self-direction. On that foundational principle, they and the other worthies of the ancient world formed the idea of democracy as a system balancing equality and responsibility, for, as Aristotle wrote, “where absolute freedom is allowed, there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man.” How right he was.

Plenty of history came between the ancient experiments with democracy and ours. Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas, though separated by centuries, took more or less the same view: People are naturally inclined to desire goodness and truth, and whatever gets in the way of that pursuit makes us less free. In the late Middle Ages, that thread began to unravel. By the modern era, it was thoroughly frayed. 

Who Owns/Controls/Profits By Perpetual Conflict and the War Economy?

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

What Is Art Good For?

frontiersin |  Does neuroaesthetics have a problem? Sherman and Morrissey (2017) criticize the field for focusing narrowly on how art elicits pleasurable responses, and for neglecting its social relevance and impact. Neuroaesthetics, they argue, reduces the experience of art to isolated individuals' ratings in artificial lab settings, and ignores “socially-relevant outcomes of art appreciation or the social context of art creation and art appreciation.” Consequently, it fails to “capture or appreciate the social, cultural, or historical situatedness of the art-object or the person whose experience is being studied.”

There is no question that we know little about the social aspect of art behavior and its underlying psychological and neurobiological mechanisms. Because art is often a transient phenomenon created as function of a social act, as in music, dance, or performance, the features of collective settings surely modulate cognition and affect. Dance, for instance, can coordinate emotional responses to promote social cohesion (Vicary et al., 2017). Nevertheless, the precise way in which social settings influence brain activity when experiencing art remains largely unknown.

We know of no neuroaestetician who would not welcome research on the psychology and biology of art behavior in social contexts. Yet, Sherman and Morrissey (2017) portray neuroaesthetics as dismissing such research topics and promoting an a-social conception of art experience. They fault neuroaesthetics for “conflating the art with aesthetics,” for having “privileged investigating individual judgments of beauty or preference,” for construing art appreciation as a “passive reception of perceptual information from art-objects,” and for discounting “what many would consider the very essence of art: its communicative nature, its capacity to encourage personal growth (…), to challenge preconceptions (…), and to provide clarity on ambiguous concepts or ideas.”

NEOM: Vision 2030 - Trump's Mind Blown

news.com.au |  IT IS said to be unlike anything the world has seen before — and that may well be right. 

Saudi Arabia’s visionary Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 32, has offered a glimpse the $640 billion futuristic megacity that will be Saudi Arabia’s next economic powerhouse and it looks very much at odds with the image of the ultraconservative kingdom we’ve seen before.

The project, dubbed NEOM, is part of the young prince’s vision of social and economic changes geared towards a more progressive future for Saudi Arabia.

And in a promotional video for the NEOM project, women can be seen jogging in crop tops and working side-by-side with male colleagues: a far cry from the Saudi Arabia where, up until last month, women weren’t even allowed to drive a car.

NEOM is a business and industrial zone extending to neighbouring Jordan and Egypt and spanning a whopping 26,500sq km — making it 33 times bigger than New York City, and more than twice the size of greater Sydney.

The proposed megacity will be financed by the Saudi government and private investors and powered entirely by wind and solar energy. It will focus on the food, entertainment, energy and water, biotechnology and advanced manufacturing industries.

The NEOM zone would serve as another revenue stream for Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil exporter, which has struggled with slumping oil prices since 2014.

Announcing the project at a major investment conference in the capital Riyadh, Prince Mohammed said NEOM would be an example of the hi-tech future he envisioned for his notoriously conservative country.

He held up two mobile phones — one, a modern smartphone and the other, a decade-old device — to illustrate the difference between futuristic NEOM and anything else, Reuters reported.

“This project is not a place for any conventional investor,” the Prince said. “This is a place for dreamers who want to do something in the world.

What Destroyed Advanced Ancient Human Civilization? Open Thread IQ Test Continued...,

bibliotecapleyades |  As mentioned in the beginning of this book, I have been for many years interested in the work of George Gurdjieff. A series of articles written by William Patrick Patterson for Telos Magazine entitled “Gurdjieff in Egypt” and a subsequent video released by Patterson with the same title rekindled my interest in Gurdjieff’s work. In his second book, Meetings With Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff had stated that he once had seen a map of “pre-sand Egypt” in the possession of an Armenian monk. This map had stimulated Gurdjieff to go to Egypt and search for teachings about human origins in ancient wisdom schools.

Patterson had also been fascinated with Gurdjieff’s travels to Egypt and had done extensive investigations of his work. Patterson is convinced that Gurdjieff had seen an image of the Sphinx on the map of “pre-sand Egypt” and went to Egypt to investigate for himself. Of course, I contend that if the map was indeed of a “pre-sand Egypt”, it would have contained the pyramids as well as the Sphinx at ancient Giza before the current desert conditions. According to Patterson, Gurdjieff had stated that his teachings had come from a complete system of “Esoteric Christianity” that originated in ancient Egypt many thousands of years before the time of Jesus. I met Patterson at a talk he gave in Denver, Colorado in July of 1999. Both Patterson and I agreed that Gurdjieff might have come in contact with the indigenous tradition over 100 years ago, especially in his extended stay in Ethiopia. Gurdjieff adamantly maintained that the source of all modern esoteric systems had their origins in predynastic Egypt, essentially supporting our paradigms of ancient Khemit.

However, Patterson also mentioned other statements of Gurdjieff that stimulated further investigations on my part. Gurdjieff had stated in his writings and discussions that he had found inscriptions on the walls of the Temple of Horus in Edfu, which is in the south of Egypt, that mentioned the myth of Atlantis. In his articles Patterson mentioned a book by British Egyptologist E. A. Reymond, The Origins of the Egyptian Temple, in which translations of the texts of Edfu were given. Reymond called these inscriptions “The Building Texts” and claimed they were the myths of the origins of ancient temple buildings.

I found Reymond’s translations of the Edfu texts to be incoherent and poorly done and decided to discuss these texts with Abd’El Hakim in Egypt. On our tour in October of 1999, we went to the Temple of Horus at Edfu and found the inscriptions on the walls ourselves. It became apparent to us that the texts at Edfu were copies of much older texts, the temple having been built in the Ptolemaic period ca. 200 BC, and were discussing events that had taken place in ancient Khemit many thousands of years before the temple was built. Gurdjieff had stated that the texts spoke of an advanced people, whom Reymond referred to by the standard Orthodox translation of the term Neter, as “Gods” who had come from an island that had been destroyed by a flood and had brought their wisdom to the ancient Khemitians. However, Hakim’s interpretation was vastly different. I believe the texts are referring to the time of the ancient Ur Nil over 30,000 years ago when the vastness of the river had turned all of Northern Africa into a series of large islands.

As the Khemitians became united, they moved from island to island, erecting temples and pyramids and creating the ancient Khemitian civilization. Once again, this became a basis for the future myth of Atlantis. Hakim was definite that the texts were not referring to a more advanced non-Khemitian people coming from outside Africa, and teaching the Khemitians how to build in stone. I propose that the ancient people followed the river from the south and the west and formed the union of the 42 tribes in the Land of Osiris, Bu Wizzer, and other ancient sites in the south, such as Edfu and Abydos.

The texts are therefore describing the Khemitian’s ascension into higher consciousness, becoming “one” with the Neters, opening their senses and creating high civilization. The texts discuss how the “Neters arrived” from different islands, and began the process of erecting large--scale edifices in stone. We did not find any references to cataclysms, but even so, the ancient Khemitians may have “island hopped” until the 42 tribes united and coalesced into a coherent civilization.

There may have been an advanced island civilization in the Atlantic (or Antarctica, as has been claimed) that perished as a result of the great cataclysm proposed around 11,500 years ago. But it may also be that there were large islands in Northern Africa as a result of the ancient Ur Nil around this same time that were populated by an advanced civilization of ancient Khemitians. The Myth of Atlantis may have referred to the entire Global Maritime Culture that existed in many parts of the world prior to 10,000 years ago, much of which was almost completely destroyed by cataclysmic events. I believe ancient Khemit should be included in that mythology.

Ancient Khemitian priests may have entertained Greek travelers with stories of cataclysms destroying island civilization as an oral history of the Global Maritime Culture that once existed, knowing full well that ancient Khemit was part of that past glory, but not revealing the complete story to the “barbarian” Greeks.

Return to La Atlantida

Return to Egipto

Wikileaks Has Made American Elite Corruption Wholly Transparent

Guardian |   The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

 Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel uncomfortable digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a crime, after all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal information has been exposed, since WikiLeaks doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way. There is also the issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real, there is a small possibility they aren’t.

With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.

Granny Goodness and Her Walmart Fascism ARE Perpetual Austerity and Inequality

truthdig  |  Thomas Frank’s writing about electoral politics and its impact on American culture has been published for decades in such venues as Harper’s Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and in his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” In his latest book, “Listen Liberal: Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?,” the journalist and political analyst tackles the question of what changed within the Democratic Party to make it become a “liberalism of the rich.”

“The Democratic Party itself has changed,” Frank told Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer during an episode of “Scheer Intelligence” earlier this year. “What’s changed about them is the social class that they answer to, that they respect, that they come from.”

The trend has gotten worse.

“Democrats look at Wall Street, and they see people like themselves,” he said in an interview with Scheer during the Democratic National Convention in July. 

On Tuesday night, Frank joined Scheer at the University of Southern California to discuss “Listen, Liberal” and his analysis of Hillary Clinton during this election cycle, from her public views on inequality in United States to her promises to tamp down greed on Wall Street. 

Frank offered critiques of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the average working-class American, the Clintons—who signed off on welfare reform that proved discriminatory—and the two-party system. He said:

Hillary has changed her position on issues many, many times over the years, and some of the things she’s done that her husband did that she had a hand in—she was a close adviser to her husband as president—have been disastrous, had catastrophic effects on people—welfare reform, for example. Every time Hillary says—and she says it a lot—that her whole life has been about protecting children, there’s an enormous counterexample, which is welfare reform, or what they called reform. They abolished the welfare system in this country, Hillary and her husband did. This is one of the cruelest things [...] It was a New Deal program that they abolished. It was a cruel thing, it was more or less an overtly racist thing, and to do that to the poorest and weakest members of society—at the time, it just turned my stomach. And it’s a little creepy that Hillary sees fit to represent herself as the great defender of poor women and children because she manifestly is not. And that’s one of many contradictions in Hillary Clinton’s record.

If you read the biographies of Hillary Clinton, if you watch a speech by Hillary Clinton, if you watch the presentation of her life story that they had at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary’s story is all about virtue. She is good with a capital G. When she gave her acceptance speech at the convention, she was wearing all white. She likes to dress in all white; she is Joan of Arc. That is how she sees herself. Her favorite saying that she quoted at the convention, it’s this Methodist thing: Do all the good you can, all the ways you can, to all the people you can, for as long as ever you can. She’s good, she’s so good, she’s so virtuous, her heart’s in the right place, and every biography of her emphasizes this intense sense of her goodness, her virtues—her overpowering, 100-proof virtue. ... She is intensely good. And yet, look at Libya, look at the welfare system in this country.

Why Hillary Clinton Is Such An Effective Perpetual Liar

thefederalist |  Why is Hillary Clinton likely to be our next president, rather than the next inmate at FCI Aliceville? A big part of the answer involves a corrupt, compromised, politicized federal government that protects powerful lawbreakers like Hillary from being imprisoned or even prosecuted. If you or I had committed even one-tenth of the crimes Clinton committed in her tenure as secretary of State alone, we’d be watching the sun rise through a set of bars for the next few decades.

As it stands, Hillary will likely be watching the sun rise and set over Pennsylvania Avenue for the next four to eight years. You can thank your government for that. Another part, though—maybe the larger part, and surely the more practically consequential part—is that Hillary Clinton, and the Clinton political machine itself, is really, really good at lying. There is really a kind of genius to it all—a conniving, narrow-eyed genius, to be sure, but one which requires a considerable amount of talent and investment.

The Hillary Lie Machine Meets Her Email Scandal Consider, for example, what we know about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal alone, and the skill it must take to avoid prison time for it. We know that Hillary Clinton’s secret e-mail server was highly illegal because it processed and stored classified government information on an unsecure system. We know that much of this classified information originated with Clinton herself.

We know that she ordered at least one aide to break the law on her behalf by sending classified information over an unsecure system. We know she has lied repeatedly about transmitting classified information on her server, at press conferences and once, incredibly, under sworn testimony. We know that, although she insisted otherwise, Clinton deleted thousands of work-related e-mails. We know that one of her aides destroyed Clinton’s mobile devices with a hammer, preventing a full forensic analysis of her e-mail usage. We know that Clinton has lied about the FBI’s own assessment of her previous lies. And so forth.

Given this staggering level of criminal behavior, one might ask: how has Clinton been able to defend herself? The answer is: lying. For much more than a year Clinton has lied repeatedly and ceaselessly about her e-mail woes. She has lied about the classified information on the server, she has lied about her recordkeeping, she has lied about the very lies she has previously told, she has lied so frequently that it is entirely possible she has come to believe some of her own lies.

Therein lies the unrivaled brilliance of the Clinton Lie Machine: it’s the relentlessness of it all, the utter refusal to tell the truth, the determination to lie long after other self-respecting people would have given up and just admitted the facts.

Nasty Underage Interweb Cooty/Pooty Flasher Mad at the FBI Too!!!

NYPost |  Anthony Weiner’s alleged underage sexting gal is “upset” with the director of the FBI after she found out her case had been tied to the use of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

“The FBI asked for me to speak to the media as little as possible. I have tried to stay quiet, but [FBI Director James] Comey has upset me,” the 15-year-old North Carolina girl told BuzzFeed.

“The last thing that I wanted was to have this become political propaganda,” she added.

The girl, whose name is not being released because of her age, said she had an hours-long interview Friday with the FBI.

The randy former congressman allegedly sent her a slew of naughty messages, even asking her to undress on Skype.

Her father said he had voted early for Hillary Clinton but was regretting his decision.

“With the recent developments with my daughter, I can say that I would likely not have voted for either of these clowns if I had it to do over again,” he said.

“How do you not know who works for you? How could you have so many sleazeballs close to you?”

Have You Deuterostems Blasphemed and Cast Down Deep Time...?

theatlantic |  Late one summer night in 1949, the British archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes went out into her small back garden in north London, and lay down. She sensed the bedrock covered by its thin layer of soil, and felt the hard ground pressing her flesh against her bones. Shimmering through the leaves and out beyond the black lines of her neighbors’ chimney pots were the stars, beacons “whose light left them long before there were eyes on this planet to receive it,” as she put it in A Land (1951), her classic book of imaginative nature writing.

We are accustomed to the idea of geology and astronomy speaking the secrets of ‘deep time,’ the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it. Hawkes’s lyrical meditation mingles the intimate and the eternal, the biological and the inanimate, the domestic with a sense of deep time that is very much of its time. The state of the topsoil was a matter of genuine concern in a country wearied by wartime rationing, while land itself rises into focus just as Britain is rethinking its place in the world. But in lying down in her garden, Hawkes also lies on the far side of a fundamental boundary. A Land was written at the cusp of the Holocene; we, on the other hand, read it in the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene, or era of the human, denotes how industrial civilization has changed the Earth in ways that are comparable with deep-time processes. The planet’s carbon and nitrogen cycles, ocean chemistry and biodiversity—each one the product of millions of years of slow evolution—have been radically and permanently disrupted by human activity. The development of agriculture 10,000 years ago, and the Industrial Revolution in the middle of the 19th century, have both been proposed as start dates for the Anthropocene. But a consensus has gathered around the Great Acceleration—the sudden and dramatic jump in consumption that began around 1950, followed by a huge rise in global population, an explosion in the use of plastics, and the collapse of agricultural diversity.

Cosmpolitan Elitism Can Neither Rule or Replace Americanism...,

NewYorker |  Summers still supports trade agreements, including nafta. The problem, he said, is that few people understand the benefits: the jobs created by exporting goods; trade’s role in strengthening other economies, thereby reducing immigration flows from countries like Mexico. The “popularization of politics,” he said, keeps leaders from pursuing controversial but important policies. If the Marshall Plan had been focus-grouped, it never would have happened. Globalization creates what Summers called a “trilemma” among global integration, public goods like environmental protection or high wages, and national sovereignty. It’s become clear that Democratic élites, including him, underestimated the power of nationalism, because they didn’t feel it strongly themselves.

Summers described the current Democratic Party as “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The Republicans, he went on, combined “social conservatism and an agenda of helping rich people.” These alignments left neither party in synch with Americans like Mark Frisbie: “All these regular people who thought they are kind of the soul of the country—they feel like there was nobody who seemed to be thinking a lot about them.” In 2004, the political scientist Samuel Huntington published his final book, “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.” He used the term “cosmopolitan élites” to describe Americans who are at home in the fluid world of transnational corporations, dual citizenship, blended identities, and multicultural education. Such people dominate our universities, tech companies, publishers, nonprofits, entertainment studios, and news media. They congregate in cities and on the coasts. Lately, they have become particularly obsessed with the food they eat. The locavore movement, whatever its benefits to health and agriculture, is an inward-looking form of activism. When you visit a farm-to-table restaurant and order the wild-nettle sformato for thirty dollars, the line between social consciousness and self-gratification disappears. Buying synthetic-nitrate-free lunch meat at Whole Foods is also a way to isolate yourself from contamination by the packaged food sold at Kmart and from the overweight, downwardly mobile people who shop there. The people who buy food at Kmart know it.

Two decades ago, the conservative social scientist Charles Murray co-wrote “The Bell Curve,” which argued that inherited I.Q., ethnicity, and professional success are strongly connected, thereby dooming government efforts to educate poor Americans into the middle class. The book generated great controversy, including charges of racism, and some of its methodology was exposed as flawed. In a more recent book, “Coming Apart,” Murray focusses on the widening divide between a self-segregated white upper class and an emerging white lower class. He concludes that “the trends signify damage to the heart of American community and the way in which the great majority of Americans pursue satisfying lives.”

Murray lives in Burkittsville, Maryland, an hour and a quarter’s drive from Washington, D.C. It’s a virtually all-white town where elements of the working class have fallen on hard times. “The energy coming out of the new lower class really only needed a voice, because they are so pissed off at people like you and me,” he said. “We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them—‘flyover country.’ The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan. And you can also talk about evangelical Christians in the most disparaging terms—you will get no pushback from that. They’re aware of this kind of condescension. And they also haven’t been doing real well.”

If you don’t know the correct answer, you are too stupid to be alive

PCR |  Hillary is running against locker room talk and the Russians

Russia’s very able Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, said that the US presidential campaign is “simply some sort of a global shame” unworthy of the American people. She certainly hit the nail on the head. https://www.rt.com/news/363245-us-election-shame-zakharova/ 

Hitlery’s criminal record had to be suppressed by the Obama regime in order to move the oligarchs’ candidate in the direction of the White House. So here we are on the verge of nuclear war with Russia and China, and the important issue before the American people is Trump’s lewd comments with Billy Bush about sexually attractive women.

I mean really. Men’s talk about women is like their fish and hunting stories. It has to be taken with a grain of salt. But this aside, why is lewd talk about women more important than military conflict with Russia, which could mean nuclear war and the end of life on earth?

Trump has declared that he sees no point in conflict with Russia and that he sees no point in NATO a quarter century after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Is Trump’s lewd talk about women worse than Hitlery’s provocative talk about Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Hitlery calls “the new Hitler”? What kind of utter fool would throw gratuitous insults at the President of a country that can wipe the US and all of Western Europe off of the face of the earth in a few minutes?

Would you rather face a situation in which a few women were groped, or be vaporized in nuclear war? If you don’t know the correct answer, you are too stupid to be alive.

Sweet Current Example of a Limited Hangout

Hope you cats remember what a limited hangout is....,

 

electoralsystemincrisis |  In Electoral System in Crisis, is a 39-page independent in-depth examination of the accuracy and security of U.S. electronic voting equipment. This research has been invited for publication in the Journal of the International Association of Official Statistics (IAOS). Due to the unusual time constraints of the election cycle, and the right of the public to have access to this information, the authors are taking the unusual step of publishing ahead of time online. The full report is now available online at the website of the lead author; and will be posted in a number of locations including the forum of The American Association for Public Opinion Research, and the forum of Social Research Methods. Below is an exerpt of our findings. We encourage everyone to download and read the full report.

The majority of the data we examined suggests that the two candidates currently slated to accept their party’s nomination in the 2016 presidential primary races, received a different number of votes than what has been officially reported.

On the Republican side, statistical analysis indicates that Donald Trump probably received more votes than what has been reported and certified. Because he was able to overcome his opposition, even with the irregularities, his selection as the presumptive Republican nominee is supported by the data.

As we stated in the opening, this is not the case on the Democratic side. The overwhelming majority of the almost two dozen states that we analyzed, demonstrate irregularities. We found suspect statistical patterns in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. These irregularities were significant, as we demonstrate in Louisiana, sometimes as large as 36% and could change the outcome of the election.

In almost every instance the discrepancies favored Hillary Clinton. In all likelihood the current results have assigned her a greater percentage of the vote than she may have actually received, while simultaneously under-reporting Bernie Sanders’ legitimate vote share.

We intend to report on the percentage that the race may be off, based on a statistical analysis of as many states as possible.

Apokalips Character Assassinates Assange For Granny Goodness

reddit |  I have been looking into the San Fransisco address listed in the Wikileaks Final Report and found something possibly big, who may be behind the Assange Pedophile attacks a corporation called Premise Data Corporation (self.WikiLeaks)

This address was searched with the association of the business name of toddandclare.com, but that isn't who actually resides there. Who really resides there is a company known as Premise Data Corporation, some sort of private intelligence corporation. I found this due to a Yahoo page after I Ducked(I use DuckDuckGo, I call searches Ducks). Curious, I went onto the Premise site, that lists a different address: 185 Berry Street, Suite 6850 San Fransisco CA, 94107. As you can see it is VERY close to the other address listed in the CA Business registry here(just search for the business name). Image of the record itself I was poking around the site itself and noticed a familiar name on their board of directors: Larry Summers, Lawrence Summers as he is known sometimes. This is the same Larry Summers that is part of the Center for American Progress where “loyal Soldier” Neera Tanden works. There was also a strange autoreply with the subject Larry Summers in the Podesta Leak 8-11-2015

Now this may be nothing but I find it quite strange that a website/company that is attacking Julian Assange just so happens to share an address of record with a corporation that happens to have 2 people that are connected w/ the Clinton Campaign, Larry Summers and Neera Tanden. Suspicious at a minimum but given recent events I am starting to think there may be more of a connection, maybe someone here can help out as well. 

Additional Premise Team Members for research

Edit 1 Guess who has a pic w/ Hillary Clinton, the founder of the company

Edit 2: Given this new information can some amazing people(Who don't have work early) look further into the companies that share this address, maybe compare them with the Guccifer 2.0 leaks, I think there were donation lists in there. I will be chomping at the bit and researching as much as possible at work tomorrow as well.

Edit 3(Oct 19 1149 GMT): Wikileaks tweeted our story!. Also I have been inundated with PM's giving new information for me to look into, I promise I read every PM and will look into everything possible and make a new post if I find more good info.

Hitlery...,

thedailybell |  It is fairly clear to anyone who pays attention that the Clintons are part of a larger corrupt system that is dedicated to removing or diminishing nation-states in order to create stronger global governance.

Part of this system involves putting into place destructive mechanisms that undermine the military, politics and even the media.

It is this last point that is important to note here. Hillary’s political campaign has forced the worst kind of biased and inaccurate reporting out into the open.

The most “prestigious” publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times as well as the country pre-eminent thought magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic regularly issue article that almost anyone capable of reading can debunk.

We would argue this is not by accident. The other day (here) we made the point that it seemed Hillary’s elite backers were desperate to ensure her election. We hypothesized that her ability to lead the US into war was seen as most valuable.

It is fairly clear that the world’s economic system is worsening and that central banking actions are undermining whatever shards of solvency are still apparent. Consider this thesis as viable and then accept that it is being buttressed by reports such as the one just issued by Gallup (here) showing that Americans hold mass media in lower respect than ever.

We would argue that these two results are not unrelated. American mainstream media is being torn down on purpose along with the political process to further raze democracy and weaken the West’s functionality generally.

Enough to Make Goebbels Blush

christianmerc |  Given the extraordinary access a "free press" has been given to the president, members of congress and the judiciary, it is all designed to allow the people, the voters, the ones who actually decide who the office holders will be, information that could not be gained individually.  It is their duty to provide the voters with information that might make a candidate unsuitable to hold office; to expose lies and report the truth, regardless of who the other contender for the office might be.  The press is, right now, acting as voters, as imposing themselves into the election and making a determination for the rest of society.  That is not their Constitutional role and despite the great contempt the Constitution seems to evoke among these "elites," it is still a duty, a responsibility, to reveal the flaws and inadequacies of any given candidate for any given office from dog catcher to president and while they fully understand their responsibility when it comes to Trump, they seem at a complete loss when it comes to Hillary Clinton. 

I personally am not all that interested in this election; it is a disgrace, a disappointment to consider either candidate as the best we have to offer; as serious representatives of the American people, but that is not my call and I recognize it. I believe the American people are as disserved by these candidates as they are disserved by the people reporting on the election. 

If there is anything to be said about any of it, it is that we always get what we deserve and our lack of principle, our lack of interest in the political process has led to this debacle.  We are the laughing stock of the world and deservedly so.

Governing the Deplorables

Granny Goodness - sick and contagious with pneumonia hugs little girl on the street

theamericanconservative |  On the day she is said to have been diagnosed with “pneumonia,” Mrs. Clinton delivered a notorious speech in which she denounced “xenophobes,” among others, as fit for a “basket of deplorables.” People who are for open borders and globalism have a habit of dismissing their opponents as xenophobes — that is, people who fear (and therefore loathe) foreigners.

A reader has sent in an essay by Georgetown professor Jason Brennan, in which he argues that we can avoid stupid decisions like the Brexit vote if we institute an “epistocracy,” system through which smart people who know things rule. Excerpt:

In an epistocracy, political power is to some degree apportioned according to knowledge. An epistocracy might retain the major institutions we see in republican democracy, such as parties, mass elections, constitutional review, and the like. But in an epistocracy, not everyone has equal basic political power. An epistocracy might grant some people additional voting power, or might restrict the right to vote only to those that could pass a very basic test of political knowledge.

A literacy test as a requirement of holding the franchise? How could that possibly go wrong? More:

Any such system will be subject to abuse, and will suffer from significant government failures. But that’s true of democracy too. The interesting question is whether epistocracy, warts and all, would perform better than democracy, warts and all.

All across the West, we’re seeing the rise of angry, resentful, nationalist, xenophobic and racist movements, movements made up mostly of low-information voters. Perhaps it’s time to put aside the childish and magical theory that democracy is intrinsically just, and start asking the serious question of whether there are better alternatives. The stakes are high.

behold the pale horse...,

lewrockwell |  The concept of the Deep State originated in Turkey, which is appropriate since it’s the heir to the totally corrupt Byzantine and Ottoman empires. And in the best Byzantine manner, the Deep State has insinuated itself throughout the fabric of what once was America. Its tendrils reach from Washington down to every part of civil society. Like a metastasized cancer, it can no longer be easily eradicated.

I used to joke that there was nothing wrong with Washington that 10 megatons on the capital couldn’t cure. But I don’t say that anymore. Partially because it’s too dangerous, but mainly because it’s now untrue. What’s now needed is 10 megatons on the capital and four more bursts in a quadrant 10 miles out.

In many ways, Washington models itself after another city with a Deep State, ancient Rome. Here’s how a Victorian freethinker, Winwood Reade, accurately described it:

Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.

The Deep State controls the political and economic essence of the U.S. This is much more than observing that there’s no real difference between the left and right wings of the Demopublican Party. It’s well known by anyone with any sense (that is, by everybody except the average voter) that although the Republicans say they believe in economic freedom (but don’t), they definitely don’t believe in social freedom. And the Democrats say they believe in social freedom (but don’t), but they definitely don’t believe in economic freedom.

Who Is Part of the Deep State?

The American Deep State is a real, but informal, structure that has arisen to not just profit from, but control, the State.

The Deep State has a life of its own, like the government itself. It’s composed of top-echelon employees of a dozen Praetorian agencies, like the FBI, CIA, and NSA…top generals, admirals, and other military operatives…long-term congressmen and senators…and directors of important regulatory agencies.

But Deep State is much broader than just the government. It includes the heads of major corporations, all of whom are heavily involved in selling to the State and enabling it. That absolutely includes Silicon Valley, although those guys at least have a sense of humor, evidenced by their “Don’t Be Evil” motto. It also includes all the top people in the Fed, and the heads of all the major banks, brokers, and insurers. Add the presidents and many professors at top universities, which act as Deep State recruiting centers…all the top media figures, of course…and many regulars at things like Bohemian Grove and the Council on Foreign Relations. They epitomize the status quo, held together by power, money, and propaganda.

Altogether, I’ll guess these people number a thousand or so. You might analogize the structure of the Deep State with a huge pack of dogs. The people I’ve just described are the top dogs.

forced farm labor to distract from forced food hunger in venezuela

CNN |  A new decree by Venezuela's government could make its citizens work on farms to tackle the country's severe food shortages.

That "effectively amounts to forced labor," according to Amnesty International, which derided the decree as "unlawful."

In a vaguely-worded decree, Venezuelan officials indicated that public and private sector employees could be forced to work in the country's fields for at least 60-day periods, which may be extended "if circumstances merit."

"Trying to tackle Venezuela's severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to fix a broken leg with a band aid," Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas' Director at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

President Nicolas Maduro is using his executive powers to declare a state of economic emergency. By using a decree, he can legally circumvent Venezuela's opposition-led National Assembly -- the Congress -- which is staunchly against all of Maduro's actions.

According to the decree from July 22, workers would still be paid their normal salary by the government and they can't be fired from their actual job.