FUH WRONG WITH YOU! DORITOS?!?!?!

dailymail  | Doritos is being slammed as the new Bud Light after hiring a trans influencer as a 'brand ambassador' despite the activist appearing to promote child sexual abuse in the past.

Spanish native Samantha Hudson - whose real name is Iván González Ranedo - is a singer and activist with over 30,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel. Her partnership with Doritos Spain, run by PepsiCo Spain, was recently announced. 

Hudson, 24, has identified herself as 'anti-capitalist' and 'Marxist' in interviews, released a song critical of the Catholic Church and even said in one video that she is for 'the abolition of [and to] destroy and annihilate the traditional monogamous nuclear family.' 

As a teen, she has also tweeted about wanting to do 'thuggish things' to a minor. 

The partnership between Hudson and Doritos was quickly blasted online and many made reference to Bud Light's disastrous partnership with trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney - which saw Budweiser lose $1.4 billion in sales as a result. 

The Daily Caller posted a screenshot of a tweet she allegedly made in 2015, when Hudson was 15, writing in Spanish about the seeming assault of a minor. 

Another alleged post translates to: 'In the middle of the street in Mallorca in panties and screaming that I’m a nymphomaniac in front of a super beautiful 8-year-old girl.'

According to Newsweek, she has also been accused of mocking sexual assault victims, though Hudson herself has claimed she was sexually abused as a teenager in a 2023 interview. 

Hudson's new partnership with Doritos was announced through a 50-second video called 'Crunch Talks.' 

Social media users were quick to point out similarities to the Bud Light campaign and its impact.  

'Doritos is about to get the Bud Light treatment,' wrote one user on X, formerly Twitter. 

Another wrote: 'Just make flavored tortilla chips. You don't need to have a stance on anything other than that. It's not tricky.' 

'Why are brands like Doritos being so self-destructive? Have they learned nothing from the Budweiser snafu? Let me guess, their advertising division is headed by a DEI hire?' 

DailyMail.com has reached out to PepsiCo and Frito Lay for comment.

Legalized Marijuana Will Only Further Devastate Already Compromised American Mental Health

NYTimes  |  Ever since Justin, a 15-year-old high school freshman, tried marijuana on his birthday two years ago, he has smoked almost every day, several times a day, he said.

“If I smoke a blunt, after that blunt I’m going to be chill,” he said on a recent morning at a corner deli near his school, the Bronx Design and Construction Academy. “I’m not going to be stressing about nothing at all.”

Another boy came by and flashed two glass tubes of smokable flower. More students were smoking across the street in a doorway and on a stoop. On another corner, a smoke shop frequented by children in backpacks and uniforms opened about half an hour before the first bell.

While it has long been common for some teens to smoke marijuana, teachers and students say that more and younger students are smoking throughout the day and at school.

There is little definitive data on marijuana use among children, and what information is available can sometimes offer a contradictory picture. Disciplinary data from the city education department reflects a 10 percent increase in alcohol- and drug-related offenses this year compared to 2019. But a city survey found teen cannabis use had declined in 2021, the same year that the state legalized marijuana for recreational use, to the lowest level recorded since the question was added to the survey in 1997.

Still, two dozen students and teachers at public, private and charter schools across the city said in interviews that some classrooms were in disarray as more pupils showed up late and high.

They said that with the proliferation of unlicensed smoke shops and the availability of vape pens and edible products, cannabis has never been more accessible and inconspicuous. They relayed accounts of students taking hits of vaping pens when teachers turned their backs, of bathrooms and stairwells becoming smoking lounges and of the smell of weed wafting through school hallways.

“It really feels like this unstoppable tide that we’re futilely trying to suppress,” said America Billy, 44, who has been teaching at a public high school in Manhattan Beach, Brooklyn, for over a decade. She said it was hard to know whether a student was out of it because of a lack of sleep, family stress or drugs.

In December, a former principal, April McKoy, described in a letter how students’ cannabis use had spiraled out of control during her last two years in charge of City Polytechnic High School of Engineering, Architecture, and Technology in Brooklyn.

“It felt like more and more were using without knowing the source, impact or consequences of early marijuana use,” Ms. McKoy said in the letter, adding that students had returned after the pandemic “sad, isolated and trying to find ways to cope.”

Freshmen were selling cannabis to each other, and she said she witnessed a smoke shop sell edibles to 14-year-olds with police officers nearby. On another occasion, she sent four students to the hospital because they were sickened from contaminated edibles, she said.

The proliferation of unlicensed smoke shops, which the city says may number as many as 1,500, could be one factor driving marijuana use among children, officials said.

Gale Brewer, a city councilwoman, said that though she had counted fewer than 10 of them in her district on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in September, there were 64 by March. Several school administrators have complained to her about merchants selling joints and infused candies as well as high-potency concentrates and vapes to students.

“We were all saying we need social workers, we need psychologists, we need mental health support in the schools,” she said. But dealing with smoke shops selling to children “was not on the list.”

Did The Kardashians Do To Poor Kanye What They Did To Bruce Jenner?

 

theatlantic  |  If you’re looking for a way to understand the right wing’s internet-poisoned, extremist trajectory, one great document is an infamous October 6 tweet from the House Judiciary GOP that read, “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” This tweet was likely intended to own the libs by adding Kanye to an informal, Avengers-style list of supposed free-speech warriors and truth tellers—a variation, perhaps, on the sort of viral meme that the Trump camp deployed during the 2016 election. (Remember the “Deplorables”?) It was written in support of the rapper Kanye West, now known as Ye, shortly after he wore a white lives matter shirt during one of his fashion shows.

This was just the beginning of a shocking two-month spiral of anti-Semitic rhetoric that has led to the undoing of Ye’s business empire and his full transformation into arguably the most openly bigoted famous person in American life. Throughout this grim unraveling—which has as its backdrop Ye’s ongoing mental-health issues—he has been thoroughly embraced by right-wing media as well as prominent white nationalists. He has also been active on the Republican political scene, most recently dining with former President Donald Trump and the white supremacist Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago.

All throughout, the @JudiciaryGOP tweet stayed up. Over the past eight weeks, people have used it as a barometer for what kind of awful behavior the GOP will accept. And so it is notable that, yesterday afternoon, it was finally deleted after Ye’s calamitous appearance on Alex Jones’s Infowars broadcast. Wearing a black face mask, Ye drank Yoo-hoo, read from the Bible, and repeatedly and enthusiastically offered his praise for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (“They did good things, too”) while spewing anti-Semitic rhetoric alongside Fuentes.

Say What You Will About Kanye - Ain't Nobody Ever Called Him A Liar

LATimes  |  While West initially struggled to be taken seriously as a rapper, his solo breakthrough came after a brutal car wreck that required his jaw to be wired shut. The impervious confidence of his song “Through the Wire” and his debut, “The College Dropout,” propelled him to 10 Grammy nominations in 2005.

When he castigated President George W. Bush’s failed response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina on live TV — “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people” — many Americans saw a brave rapper taking on the government and standing up for the Black community.

“In that moment after Katrina, his lack of social graces made him an important figure speaking truth to power,” Wasow said.

West recorded a bestselling, orchestra-driven album, “Late Registration,” with indie producer Jon Brion. West’s next LP, “Graduation,” won a 2007 sales war with 50 Cent, seen as a victory for ambitious, heartfelt hip-hop.

Yet the sudden, tragic death of his mother in 2007, after complications from cosmetic surgery, shattered his world. He seemed to blame himself for it — “When I moved to L.A., she moved to L.A. And she wound up in a place that would eat her alive,” he wrote in XXL after her death. “If I had lived in New York, she’d still be here.”

He rapped about his feelings on 2008’s “Pinocchio Story,” from the bleak and groundbreaking LP “808s & Heartbreak”: “The only one was behind me / I can’t find her no more, I can’t call her no more … The day I moved to L.A., maybe that was all my fault.”

“A single mom with a single child, they had each other’s backs no matter what,” Baker said. “That’s a little bit of where that fierce protectiveness comes from. When I found out that Donda died, my first reaction was, will he be OK?”

His boastfulness and hair-trigger temper enlivened awards shows and earned a “South Park” parody. In 2009, he rushed the stage at the MTV Video Music Awards to vent frustration over Taylor Swift beating Beyoncé for best female video. It blew up a planned tour with Lady Gaga and led Obama to insult him on that hot-mic recording. From a fellow Chicago legend, it hurt. “You know I’m your favorite,” West said afterward. “Just tell me you love me. And tell the world you love me. Don’t tell the world I’m a jackass, I’m fighting hard enough.”

West made some of his finest music in the next years, including 2010’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” and 2013’s “Yeezus,” and in 2014 married Kardashian in a fame-merging event for the ages. Yet signs of creeping antisemitism began to emerge. West said in a 2013 radio interview that “Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people. … We ain’t Jewish. We don’t get family that got money like that.” He responded to criticism by saying, “I thought I was giving a compliment. … I don’t know how being told you have money is an insult.”

Fans began to question his beliefs, and even his stability, in 2016. He wrote on Twitter that “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” and depicted him and Trump nude in bed in the video for “Famous.” He declared onstage at a California concert that, while he didn’t vote, he “would have voted for Trump.” He underlined the point by meeting with Trump in New York, claiming, “I feel it is important to have a direct line of communication with our future President if we truly want change.”

That November, after Kardashian was bound and robbed in a Paris hotel room, West’s paranoia spun out further. Onstage at a concert, he said, “Jay-Z, call me, bruh. You still ain’t called me. ... Jay-Z, I know you got killers. Please don’t send them at my head. Just call me. Talk to me like a man.” He ended the show early and canceled his remaining tour. Just hours later, after police responded to a welfare check call at his trainer’s home, West entered treatment at UCLA Medical Center for a “psychiatric emergency,” according to the Los Angeles Fire Department dispatch call.

I Do Not Now And Never Have Owned A Single Apple Product....,

foxnews  |  A recent software update for Apple's iPhones includes a "pregnant man" emoji as well as a number of other gender neutral cartoons.

Apple rolled out the update in mid-March according to the Wall Street Journal, adding the pregnant emoji, as well as a gender neutral "person with crown" emoji to go alongside the king and queen cartoons. Apple also added 35 other emojis. 

Apple first rolled out the pregnant man and "pregnant person" emoji in January as part of an optional update, but it came to all users with the iOS 15.4 update.

The decision to roll out the new emoji was met with criticism and mockery from many conservatives. Fox News Host Greg Gutfield praised the emoji as a step toward acceptance for men with ‘beer guts.’

"Yes, thank God finally, it's here. A beer gut emoji has arrived to Apple iPhones with its latest voluntary update," he wrote.  "This new emoji comes in five different skin tones, so someone with a massive beer gut can be any shade that he, she or they want."

If It Makes You Sick And Kills You - You May Want To Reconsider Making It Your Identity

rnz  | Days before her death a fat studies conference chaired by academic Dr Cat Pausé was parodied by American conservative figure Steven Crowder.

In a YouTube video watched more than a million times, Crowder pours scorn on Pausé's work and her field of study.

Pausé, who died aged 42 of medical causes 10 days ago, was a fat studies scholar at Massey University in Palmerston North.

Her research and activism attracted controversy and sometimes vitriol.

Shortly before she died Crowder, an American comedian, actor and former Fox News commentator, posted a video to his YouTube page where he, in his words, infiltrates a 2020 fat studies conference hosted by Massey.

Posing as a gender-queer scholar and fat pride activist with a made-up name, Crowder wrote a bogus paper and was accepted to the conference, held online, as a speaker.

A presentation about the paper included false stories of sexual assault.

At the end of his video, Crowder said being accepted without question showed the idiocy of the field.

Comments below the video on YouTube are heavily critical of Cat Pausé and that has continued after news of her death.

Pausé's friend and former Tertiary Education Union Massey representative Heather Warren is not surprised.

"A lot of Cat's research is around how fat bodies and fat people are dehumanised in our society, and the comments online further go to validate that even in death fat people are dehumanised by society and discriminated against by our society."

Warren said her Twitter post about her friend's death attracted only supportive comments, but that was not the case when public figures such as MP Deborah Russell and microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles posted to the platform.

Warren and Pausé had held discussions with Massey about how institutions could better protect academics from online abuse.

It was an issue institutions had to grapple with, because they encouraged academics to use social media to promote their research, yet had social media policies focusing on the conduct of their staff.

 

The Week The Trans Spell Was Broken

unherd |  Not very long ago, the fear of being denounced as a transphobe meant that doubts about extreme gender ideology were confined to private WhatsApp groups and quiet conversations among friends. This is very much no longer the case. Two weeks ago, the Times’s chief sports writer, Matt Dickinson, wrote on Twitter, “Are we really talking about fairness in sport in the transgender debate – or fear and prejudice?”

“Fairness” replied hundreds of women, including some from his own paper. The only replies agreeing with Dickinson were from other male sports writers, insisting that the way the trans women athletes had been treated was “horrendous and disgusting” (John Cross, Daily Mirror ) and “awful” (Martyn Ziegler, The Times) It’s sweet how males always stick together, isn’t it?

Gender ideologues complain that this shift in public tolerance is merely a conservative backlash against trans rights, but they are wrong. What we are seeing is the inevitable result of trans activists – and, most of all, Stonewall – pushing far beyond civil rights for trans people and insisting instead on unpopular and unworkable policies, such as trans women in sport, child transition and any open acknowledgement of female biology.

This third issue caused the Labour Party to have one of its regular internal breakdowns, as its politicians – and leader – became unable to answer the question, what is a woman? And not only could they not answer the question, they couldn’t think of a way to not answer the question, hemming and hawing about it being a “gotcha” question. Yes, it is, interviewers replied, and what we’re trying to get is an answer that a three-year old could provide. Last month, Angela Rayner came up with a solution: “I think we should be taking it off social media and taking it away from commentators,” she intoned solemnly. Ah yes, censorship from the left. That always plays so well! Oddly, only a month earlier Rayner had been loudly insisting that the next leader of the Labour party will be a woman. Presumably that kind of woman-chat is permitted by Rayner, just not what a woman actually is.

The Tories have certainly not been spared from all this. On 30 March, at 2:48am, the Tory MP Jamie Wallis posted on Twitter to say that he’d been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and would like to be trans. Suddenly, his long history of dodginess – from running companies that attracted more than 800 complaints, to being affiliated with a sugar daddy website, to fleeing the site of a car crash – was instantly forgotten and his honesty and courage were trumpeted to parliament’s rafters by, among others, the Prime Minister. It was strikingly reminiscent of that time, in 2015, when Glamour magazine named Caitlyn Jenner Woman of the Year, two months after she was involved in a car accident in which a woman, Kim Howe, died. The district attorney ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Jenner, but Glamour decided they had all the evidence they needed to cite her as the year’s best woman. At least Caitlyn bothered to make an effort: in the sobering light of day, Wallis tweeted, “I remain the same person I was yesterday, and so will continue to use he/him/his pronouns.” So no change at all, then, other than the identity of being trans. Or wanting to be, anyway.

 

Dudes Out'Chere Getting Knocked Up Like Hotcakes - So - Pregnant PEOPLE Not Pregnant Women

WaPo  | Pregnant people who are vaccinated against the coronavirus are nearly twice as likely to get covid-19 as those who are not pregnant, according to a new study that offers the broadest evidence to date of the odds of infections among vaccinated patients with different medical circumstances.

The analysis, based on medical records of nearly 14 million U.S. patients since coronavirus immunization became available, found that pregnant people who are vaccinated have the greatest risk of developing covid among a dozen medical states, including being an organ transplant recipient and having cancer.

The findings come on top of research showing that people who are pregnant or gave birth recently and became infected are especially prone to getting seriously ill from covid-19. And covid has been found to increase the risk of pregnancy complications, such as premature births.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been urging people to get coronavirus shots before or during pregnancy, seeking to dispel fear — widespread in some communities, without scientific basis — that those vaccinations could be harmful. As of March, nearly 70 percent of people who were pregnant had been vaccinated before or during their pregnancy, according to federal data, though disparities persist among racial and ethnic groups.

The new study goes beyond what has previously been understood, suggesting that even pregnant people who are fully vaccinated tend to have less protection from the virus than many other patients with significant medical problems.

“If you are fully vaccinated, that’s magnificent,” said a lead author of the study, David R. Little, a physician who is a researcher at Epic, a Wisconsin company that maintains electronic patient records for nearly 1,000 hospitals and more than 20,000 clinics across the country. “But if you are fully vaccinated and become pregnant, you remain at higher risk of acquiring covid.”

Little said the findings buttress CDC recommendations that additional precautions against the virus should be taken during pregnancy, such as wearing masks and maintaining safe distances. He said the study also suggests that health-care workers should “be on the lookout” for symptoms and encourage testing to detect the virus early, when it is easier to treat.

The data also raises scientific questions that warrant further research into how best to protect pregnant individuals and their babies from infection, according to public health leaders and specialists in pregnancy.

Corporate Government Mommies And Daddies Aren't Going To Save You

ianwelsh  |  In face of a failed society, trust in leaders is insane. Crazed. They’ve obviously run society off a cliff, and they either are OK with that or are incompetent, or both. (And the smart ones are selling you that everything is OK while they sprint for the lifeboats: aka. New Zealand.)

For over 10 years now I’ve been telling Americans to get out. Oh, it’s not that America’s the only developed nation heading for failed state, for all intents and purposes there are no exceptions, not even Sainted New Zealand, but America’s one of the leaders (Britain’s another) and I have a lot of American readers. If you’re going to have everything go sideways into a propeller, better later than sooner.

But most Americans won’t or can’t get out, and Musk and Bezo’s dreams of escape to space aren’t going to happen for humanity en-masse: not in time.

We’re all in a big ship, it’s going down. Some areas are already underwater, others will be soon and the entire thing is going to sink.

And we have no lifeboats. We could, perhaps,  have built some, if we’d started 30 to 40 years ago with massive investments, but we didn’t, and if our leaders were that able, they’d have been able to save the ship, since that’s when they had to act.

But this article isn’t about “we are fucked”, it’s about “too many of us refuse to admit it and that it means we need radical change.”

And one of the big reasons for this is the need for daddy. One of the big hurdles to radicalization is that it means you can’t trust your leaders at all. That they have fucked up, betrayed, or both. That they are bad, evil people who not only aren’t acting in your interest, but are your enemies.

I’ve been pounding this issue for a couple  years, and some regular readers are probably sick of it. I am.

But it matters. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, who your enemies are, you can’t protect yourself from them. If you don’t accept, psychologically and intellectually, that your leaders are your enemies, you can’t properly take action on your own, with friends, family and other groups because at some level you’re still thinking that government or corporations will come thru and take care of.

All your life government and corporations have taken care of you. They’ve often been abusive parents, but they have made sure there’s food available to buy, streets to walk and drive on, laws, jobs, etc, etc… They run almost everything and you’re dependent on them for almost everything just like  you were dependent on your parents and teachers when you were a child.

Bad parents still feed and house you. They’re monsters, but monsters who kept you alive. Children love their abusive parents even as they fear and hate them, and the same screwed up psychology pertains to business and government leaders and those they lead.

An entire life’s conditioning works against radicalization in anyone for whom the system has even slightly worked.

But the fact of the matter is that if we want to handle climate change and environmental collapse and all our other problems (handle doesn’t mean stop, but many problems are essentially trivial and can be fixed any time our leadership wants to, like health care or spam calls) means we need radical change. We need to change our system completely and we need to entirely get rid of our current leadership class, who have proved their incompetence and ill will.

That’s radical. That’s a leap.

American Youth Senses The Darkness Just Around That Signpost Up Ahead...,

hks.harvard  | More than half of young Americans feel democracy in the country is under threat, and over a third think they may see a second U.S. civil war within their lifetimes, according to the 42nd Harvard Youth Poll, released by Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics (IOP) on Wednesday. 

The poll also found approval of President Biden has plummeted, and a majority of respondents are unhappy with how the president and Congress are doing their jobs. In addition, many of the respondents feel strongly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and are worried about the threat of climate change. Half of all respondents also said they struggled with feelings of hopelessness and depression. 

The Harvard Youth Poll—which is conducted twice a year, in fall and spring, and has run for over 20 years—captured responses on these topics and others from 2,109 people between the ages of 18 and 29, from across the country. Students from the Harvard Public Opinion Project (HPOP) organized the survey, under the supervision of John Della Volpe, director of polling at the IOP. 

“After turning out in record numbers in 2020, young Americans are sounding the alarm. When they look at the America they will soon inherit, they see a democracy and climate in peril—and Washington as more interested in confrontation than compromise,” Della Volpe said. “Despite this, they seem as determined as ever to fight for the change they seek.”

Jing-Jing Shen, a Harvard College undergraduate and the HPOP student chair, said, “Right now, young Americans are confronting worries on many fronts. Concerns about our collective future—with regard to democracy, climate change, and mental health—also feel very personal.” Shen noted, however, that “young people have come to even more deeply value their communities and connections with others” in this challenging time.

The survey found a striking lack of confidence in U.S. democracy among young Americans. Only 7% view the United States as a “healthy democracy,” and 52% believe that democracy is either “in trouble” or “failing.” This concern is echoed in the fact that 35% of respondents anticipate a second civil war during their lifetimes, and 25% believe that at least one state will secede.

Soft White Underbelly: Hidden Realms Of American Squalor

WaPo |  “I’m just one guy with a camera,” Laita said. He monetized his YouTube channels days ago.

Laita will give between $20 and $40 to people who are willing to tell their stories, he said. Those who are more at risk of being exposed, such as pimps, drug dealers or prostitutes, sometimes want more, costing him up to $100.

On any given day, up to eight people line up willing to share a personal history that Laita uses only his gut to check, he said.

“I am certain that not every dollar I’ve given to somebody on the street has been spent on a blanket or a tent or shoes. What I’m doing is not foolproof,” he said, considering his work to be a tool for awareness and education.

Compensating his subjects shows a sign of respect for their time and the intimate details they’re willing to share, said Amy Turk, chief executive for Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles, the main service provider for women who live on Skid Row.

The line of exploitation can be a thin one to balance if not done well, and it can be “emotionally dangerous to have someone reveal so much deep complexity about their life and walk away,” she said.

Turk, a licensed clinical social worker, said the best way for someone to get involved is to find an organization that’s aligned with their desire to help and that matches their skills with a need.

“It’s about understanding that something has happened to them,” she said, adding that some people on her staff have heard of Laita’s channel and saw a video of a woman the organization has assisted in the past. “Sounds like [that’s] what Mark is tapping into.”

Stephany Powell, executive director for the Van Nuys, Calif.-based nonprofit Journey Out, which helps women who have survived sexual exploitation, watched Kelly’s story after the video popped up on her Facebook feed. She was instantly concerned for Kelly’s safety because of her identity being known and the amount of money raised for her.

“If she’s vulnerable enough to be trafficked, she might be vulnerable enough for a guy to befriend her,” she said.

People are growing more aware about human trafficking, and Kelly seemed like a likable person whom people perceived as undeserving of what had allegedly happened to her, Powell said, contemplating why Kelly’s story resonated with so many people compared with others on Laita’s channel.

The retired Los Angeles Police Department sergeant said she’s heard stories like Kelly’s too often in her years of service and now as leader of Journey Out.

“A lot of times it is not unusual for victims to not depict themselves as victims or how some people think victims should present themselves,” she said.

Money isn’t curative for the type of trauma someone like Kelly experienced, Powell said. She needs assistance with finding housing, securing employment and attending counseling to help her cope with pain. People like Kelly need a community that consists of professionals and former sex-trafficking survivors to pull her forward, she said.

“You can give her that $30,000. If she blows through it, then what?” Powell asked.

Welcome To Blackness: The Social Contract Between Government And The People Has Unraveled

consentfactory |  Things couldn’t be going better for the Resistance if they had scripted it themselves.

Actually, they did kind of script it themselves. Not the murder of poor George Floyd, of course. Racist police have been murdering Black people for as long as there have been racist police. No, the Resistance didn’t manufacture racism. They just spent the majority of the last four years creating and promoting an official narrative which casts most Americans as “white supremacists” who literally elected Hitler president, and who want to turn the country into a racist dictatorship.

According to this official narrative, which has been relentlessly disseminated by the corporate media, the neoliberal intelligentsia, the culture industry, and countless hysterical, Trump-hating loonies, the Russians put Donald Trump in office with those DNC emails they never hacked and some division-sowing Facebook ads that supposedly hypnotized Black Americans into refusing to come out and vote for Clinton. Putin purportedly ordered this personally, as part of his plot to “destroy democracy.” The plan was always for President Hitler to embolden his white-supremacist followers into launching the “RaHoWa,” or the “Boogaloo,” after which Trump would declare martial law, dissolve the legislature, and pronounce himself Führer. Then they would start rounding up and murdering the Jews, and the Blacks, and Mexicans, and other minorities, according to this twisted liberal fantasy.

I’ve been covering the roll-out and dissemination of this official narrative since 2016, and have documented much of it in my essays, so I won’t reiterate all that here. Let’s just say, I’m not exaggerating, much. After four years of more or less constant conditioning, millions of Americans believe this fairy tale, despite the fact that there is absolutely zero evidence whatsoever to support it. Which is not exactly a mystery or anything. It would be rather surprising if they didn’t believe it. We’re talking about the most formidable official propaganda machine in the history of official propaganda machines.

And now the propaganda is paying off. The protesting and rioting that typically follows the murder of an unarmed Black person by the cops has mushroomed into “an international uprising” cheered on by the corporate media, corporations, and the liberal establishment, who don’t normally tend to support such uprisings, but they’ve all had a sudden change of heart, or spiritual or political awakening, and are down for some serious property damage, and looting, and preventative self-defense, if that’s what it takes to bring about justice, and to restore America to the peaceful, prosperous, non-white-supremacist paradise it was until the Russians put Donald Trump in office.

In any event, the Resistance media have now dropped their breathless coverage of the non-existent Corona-Holocaust to breathlessly cover the “revolution.” The American police, who just last week were national heroes for risking their lives to beat up, arrest, and generally intimidate mask-less “lockdown violators” are now the fascist foot soldiers of the Trumpian Reich. The Nike corporation produced a commercial urging people to smash the windows of their Nike stores and steal their sneakers. Liberal journalists took to Twitter, calling on rioters to “burn that shit down!” … until the rioters reached their gated community and started burning down their local Starbucks. Hollywood celebrities are masking up and going full-black bloc, and doing legal support. Chelsea Clinton is teaching children about David and the Racist Goliath. John Cusack’s bicycle was attacked by the pigs. I haven’t checked on Rob Reiner yet, but I assume he is assembling Molotov cocktails in the basement of a Resistance safe house somewhere in Hollywood Hills.

Look, I’m not saying the neoliberal Resistance orchestrated or staged these riots, or “denying the agency” of the folks in the streets. Whatever else is happening out there, a lot of very angry Black people are taking their frustration out on the cops, and on anyone and anything else that represents racism and injustice to them.

This happens in America from time to time. America is still a racist society. Most African-Americans are descended from slaves. Legal racial discrimination was not abolished until the 1960s, which isn’t that long ago in historical terms. I was born in the segregated American South, with the segregated schools, and all the rest of it. I don’t remember it — I was born in 1961 — but I do remember the years right after it. The South didn’t magically change overnight in July of 1964. Nor did the North’s variety of racism, which, yes, is subtler, but no less racist.

So I have no illusions about racism in America. But I’m not really talking about racism in America. I’m talking about how racism in America has been cynically instrumentalized, not by the Russians, but by the so-called Resistance, in order to delegitimize Trump and, more importantly, everyone who voted for him, as a bunch of white supremacists and racists.

Fomenting racial division has been the Resistance’s strategy from the beginning. A quote attributed to Joseph Goebbels, “accuse the other side of that which you are guilty,” is particularly apropos in this case. From the moment Trump won the Republican nomination, the corporate media and the rest of the Resistance have been telling us the man is literally Hitler, and that his plan is to foment racial hatred among his “white supremacist base,” and eventually stage some “Reichstag” event, declare martial law and pronounce himself dictator. They’ve been telling us this story over and over, on television, in the liberal press, on social media, in books, movies, and everywhere else they could possibly tell it.

So, before you go out and join the “uprising,” take a look at the headlines today, turn on CNN or MSNBC, and think about that for just a minute. I don’t mean to spoil the party, but they’ve preparing you for this for the last four years.

Why Have Transgenders Been Glamorized?

coreysdigs |  How do you build an industry? How do you market it and provide support backing up your marketing? How do you exploit a community, while creating a glamorized trend throughout society, stemming from chaos and confusion? How do you grow your margins and take it all the way to the bank? How do you do all of this, and still sleep at night? The exploitation and manufacturing of the transgender “industry” kicked off in the 1950s with a mix of social and medical engineering, with a moving target on children. The manufacturing of this industry goes far beyond anyone’s wildest imagination, and if you dare question it, it is discrimination. The real discriminators are those exploiting a community who truly suffer from trauma, depression, and an attempted suicide rate of 40 percent. They are the ones who should be angrier than anyone about the atrocities these people have committed. They are now exploiting your children, and they have taken this to dangerous extremes.  

Why are transgender people being glamorized, the idea of switching genders pushed upon children, and it’s all prohibited from being discussed or debated? The remaking of a population by creating mass confusion and chaos while dishing out puberty blockers as though it’s the next best Botox treatment, has avalanched into dangerous territory. Faster than one could daringly speak the incorrect pronoun, gender clinics are popping up across this country, surgeons are sharpening their scalpels, and money is pouring into this agenda. With the suicide rate of transgenders being nineteen times greater than the general population and a large percent of transitioned transgenders wishing they hadn’t done so, one wonders how this destructive agenda got its kickstart and who’s really benefiting from it. Certainly not those dealing with gender dysphoria.

Part one will take you through the timeline and origins of the social engineering used to create this industry. Part two will cover the medical engineering behind this, and the danger to children. Part three will get into those funding this agenda and those profiting from it. Part four will show how they have manufactured a reality, who’s assisted, and how it must be stopped.

180 Degree Reversal: I'm Now With Jeff Sessions On The Danger Of SkunkWeed!!!

Independent |  What is really needed in dealing with cannabis is a “tobacco moment”, as with cigarettes 50 years ago, when a majority of people became convinced that smoking might give them cancer and kill them. Since then the number of cigarette smokers in Britain has fallen by two-thirds. 

A depressing aspect of the present debate about cannabis is that so many proponents of legalisation or decriminalisation have clearly not taken on board that the causal link between cannabis and psychosis has been scientifically proven over the past ten years, just as the connection between cancer and cigarettes was proved in the late 1940s and 1950s.

The proofs have emerged in a series of scientific studies that reach the same grim conclusion: taking cannabis significantly increases the risk of schizophrenia. One study in The Lancet Psychiatry concludes that “the risk of individuals having a psychotic disorder showed a roughly three times increase in users of skunk-like cannabis, compared with those who never used cannabis”.  

As 94 per cent of cannabis seized by the police today is super-strength skunk, compared to 51 per cent in 2005, almost all those who take the drug today will be vulnerable to this three-fold increase in the likelihood that they will develop psychosis. 

Mental health professionals have long had no doubts about the danger. Five years ago, I asked Sir Robin Murray, professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, about them. He said that studies showed that “if the risk of schizophrenia for the general population is about one per cent, the evidence is that, if you take ordinary cannabis, it is two per cent; if you smoke regularly you might push it up to four per cent; and if you smoke ‘skunk’ every day you push it up to eight per cent”. 

Anybody wondering what happens to this 8 per cent of the skunk-smoking population should visit any mental hospital in Britain or speak to somebody who has done so. Dr Humphrey Needham-Bennett, medical director and consultant psychiatrist of Cygnet Hospital, Godden Green in Sevenoaks, explained to me that among his patients “cannabis use is so common that I assume that people use or used it. It’s quite surprising when people say ‘no, I don’t use drugs’.” 

The connection between schizophrenia and cannabis was long suspected by specialists but it retained its reputation as a relatively benign drug, its image softened by the afterglow of its association with cultural and sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s.

Both Gaming And Pocket Rectangles Are Process Addictions

WaPo |  For many people, leisure time now means screen time. Mom’s on social media, Dad’s surfing the Web, sister is texting friends, and brother is playing a multiplayer shooting game like Fortnite.

But are they addicted? In June, the World Health Organization announced that “gaming disorder” would be included in its disease classification manual, reigniting debates over whether an activity engaged in by so many could be classified as a disorder.

Experts were quick to point out that only 1 to 3 percent of gamers are likely to fit the diagnostic criteria, such as lack of control over gaming, giving gaming priority over other activities and allowing gaming to significantly impair such important areas of life as social relationships.

Those low numbers may give the impression that most people don’t have anything to worry about. Not true. Nearly all teens, as well as most adults, have been profoundly affected by the increasing predominance of electronic devices in our lives. Many people suspect that today’s teens spend much more time with screens and much less time with their peers face-to-face than did earlier generations, and my analysis of numerous large surveys of teens of various ages shows this to be true: The number of 17- and 18-year-olds who get together with their friends every day, for example, dropped by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2016. Teens are also sleeping less, with sleep deprivation spiking after 2010. Similar to the language in the WHO’s addiction criteria, they are prioritizing time on their electronic devices over other activities (and no, it’s not because they are studying more: Teens actually spend less time on homework than students did in the 1990s). Regardless of any questions around addiction, how teens spend their free time has fundamentally shifted.

If teens were doing well, this might be fine. But they are not: Clinical-level depression, self-harm behavior (such as cutting), the number of suicide attempts and the suicide rate for teens all rose sharply after 2010, when smartphones became common and the iPad was introduced. Teens who spend excessive amounts of time online are more likely to be sleep deprived, unhappy and depressed. Nor are the effects small: For example, teens who spent five or more hours a day using electronic devices were 66 percent more likely than those who spent just one hour to have at least one risk factor for suicide, such as depression or a previous suicide attempt.

It's Nothing Like A Broken Leg

Guardian |  When I am well, I am happy and popular. It is tough to type these words when I feel none of it. And sometimes when I am most well I am… boring. Boring is how I want to be all of the time. This is what I have been working towards, for 12 years now.

When friends decades older tell me off for saying that I am old, at 28, what I mean is: I haven’t achieved all the things I could have done without this illness. I should have written a book by now. I should have done so many things! All the time, I feel I am playing catch-up. Always. I worry, and most of the literature tells me, that I will have this problem for life. That it will go on, after the hashtags and the documentaries and the book deals and Princes Harry and William – while the NHS circles closer to the drain.

Maybe it’s cute now, in my 20s. But it won’t be cute later, when I am older and wearing tracksuits from 20 years ago and not in an ironic hipster way but because I no longer wash or engage with the world, and it’s like: my God, did you not get yourself together already?

When I left appointments and saw the long-term patients, walking around in hospital-issue pyjamas, dead-eyed (the kind of image of the mentally ill that has become anathema to refer to as part of the conversation, but which in some cases is accurate), four emotions rushed in: empathy, sympathy, recognition, terror. It’s one of those things you can’t really talk about with authenticity unless you’ve seen it, not really: the aurora borealis, Prince playing live and the inpatient wards.

Maybe my prognosis will look up, maybe I’ll leave it all behind. I’ve noticed a recent thing is for people to declare themselves “proud” of their mental illness. I guess I don’t understand this. It does not define me.

It’s not something that, when stable, I feel ashamed of, or that I hide. But I am not proud of it. I’d rather I didn’t have it – so I wasn’t exhausted, so I wasn’t bitter about it – despite the fact that I know some people, in all parts of the world, are infinitely worse off.

I want it gone, so that I am not dealing with it all the time, or worrying about others having to deal with it all the time. So I don’t have to read another article, or poster, about how I just need to ask for help. So that when a campaigner on Twitter says, “To anyone feeling ashamed of being depressed: there is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s illness. Like asthma or measles”, I don’t have to grit my teeth and say, actually, I am not OK, and mental illness couldn’t be less like measles. So that when someone else moans about being bored with everyone talking about mental health, and a different campaigner replies, “People with mental illness aren’t bored with it!” I don’t have to say, no, I am: I am bored with this Conversation. Because more than talking about it, I want to get better. I want to live.