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.

Kamala Devi Is "Evolving" - Especially Toward Money And Power...,

Career Sugar Babies Are The Emptiest Suits And The Snuggest Sock Puppets

lamag  |  Influential California politician Willie Brown inserted himself into Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign this week, penning an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle detailing his romantic relationship with her in the 1990s. The relationship was never a secret, but the public acknowledgement ignited new criticisms of Harris. Commentators began to imply she benefitted professionally from the personal relationship, possibly even only getting to where she is today because of their liaison.

Willie Brown was a fixture in California politics for years, serving as speaker of the state assembly for 15 years, and known as something of an unofficial deal-maker and influencer. He first met Harris in 1994, when she was an assistant district attorney in Alameda County. He was 60 years old at the time, and had been estranged from his wife, Blanche Brown, since 1981.

In his capacity as speaker, Brown appointed Harris to two political positions. The first was a six-month appointment to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board; the second was a role on the Medical Assistance Commission, a body tasked with negotiating contracts to control Medi-Cal costs. At the time, Brown had a reputation for filling many openings with his personal associates and inner circle; when Harris vacated the Appeals Board gig, he replaced her with his longtime buddy Philip S. Ryan.

Harris ended the relationship–which was conducted in the open and frequently reported on at the time–in late 1995, shortly before Brown was sworn in for his first of two terms as mayor of San Francisco.

Eric Weinstein Is Peter Thiel's Sugar Baby Public Intellectual...,

art-19 |  One of the pillars of the American Dream has been that of seeing your children go to college. And, for the many families that can't afford the cost of soaring university tuitions, a new controversial institution has arisen to address the problem. That institution is Sugar Baby University, a tuition assistance campaign that attempts to allow attractive young women, and a smaller number of handsome young men, find generous older men to date in the quest to complete a new version of the American Dream by graduating debt free in an era which has made it all but impossible to discharge student debt even in personal bankruptcy since 2005.

This year, Sugar Baby University is 'graduating' it's fifth class with thousands of alumni in its network that stretches from coast to coast and includes institutions of higher education from local community colleges to research universities and ivy league colleges. If you know many young graduates, the chances have been increasing that one of them has quietly matriculated in response to the crisis of crushing debt payments. Yet despite widespread awareness of the program on campuses by students and financial aid advisors via word of mouth, the world of Universities and mainstream media news outlets have tacitly given their approval to the campaign by remaining strangely silent as tuitions have continued to climb an unbelievable average of 8-9% per year.

In this episode we do not pass judgement on Sugar Baby University, it's parent company 'Seeking Arrangement' or it's spokesperson Kimberly De La Cruz, who is our guest. Rather, we celebrate their openness to discuss the situation, and question, instead, the universities, politicians, media, and the lending industry, who have quietly created the desperate need for this program which they do not openly discuss and prefer not to address at all. 

Even With Rose-Tinted Coverage By The Media, Kamala Harris Can ONLY Hurt Biden...,

thehill |  Biden broke the cardinal rule in selecting Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate.

The selection first and foremost should “do no harm.”

Harris is not able from day one to be President of the United States.

She barely got to the U.S. Senate in 2017 when she began running for president. Before serving in the Senate, she was the attorney general of California, and before that district attorney in San Francisco. 

She has zero foreign policy experience and no economic gravitas.

At a time when even some Democrats are questioning Biden’s competence to be president in light of his advanced age and cognitive abilities — the vice-presidential running mate becomes even more important to voters. Before you even get to her policies, Harris doesn’t pass the qualifications test.

The other rule Biden violated was that a running mate should bring something to the table other than gender, race or ethnicity. The running mate should bring Electoral College appeal. Harris is from the bluest of blue states: California — a state that Trump has no shot of winning. Harris will not appeal to swing states because she is from California, and her record — and those of California Democrats generally — is abysmal on taxes, immigration, law and order, climate, energy… and the list goes on.

California is a liberal laboratory of bad governance and incompetence.

A Biden-Harris ticket is very good news for the Trump-Pence campaign. The contrast between Pence and Harris will be stark in resume, ability and record.

Cautionary Submission In The Context Of The Vulnerable World Hypothesis Predictive Panopticon Proposal

I don't believe it's controversial to state that President Donald John Trump is one of THE WHYTEST WHYDTE MEN IN AMERICA. He's like an exemplar. Whatever else one might opine about the man, he's also a low-level baller, something at least approaching billionaire, and not a No Lives Matter, Left Behind, Little Man like you and I.  That said, these 9% muhuggahs here done put DJT through the ringer and then some, seriously.  The level of sustained, public ni****ization to which he has been subject is unprecedented in U.S. history. If what has been done to Trump is any indication of what the panopticon is willing to do to a political adversary, then TRUST and BELIEVE that you and I don't have even the barest iota of a prayer.

Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein, Jim Comey and everyone who signed the Carter Page FISA application also be indicted for perjury? They signed a FISA application and made representations to the secret FISC on the basis of false information. Shouldn't representations to FISC need double verification since the accused has no opportunity to defend themselves or confront their accuser?

An average American doesn't get the option of saying I signed under penalty of perjury but I didn't know what I was signing.

What about James Clapper who lied under oath to Congress? The same crime for which Roger Stone was indicted and convicted.

And the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had no idea that they were involved in anything out of the ordinary? As long as they crossed the i's and dotted the t's this was just a routine case like hundreds of others and how could they have known the thing was a fix? Poor trusting souls, misled so badly by such bad people. 

Utter bullshit. They were only dealing with what must have been the most explosively sensitive issue ever to come before them. We're expected to believe they were innocents misled? 

Sometimes not asking the right questions, and searching questions too in such a high profile case as this, shows complicity just as much as if they'd been assisting.

McCabe's wife was an out-of-the-blue candidate who ran for public office (VA State Senator) in 2015, during which she reportedly received over $650,000 in support from Clinton crony, then VA Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Her candidacy was suspicious in that she had no previous political experience (she's a physician who was on record as having voted in a Republican primary!) and it was promoted over the local VA Democratic Party's recommended candidate, a well-known retired Army colonel, attorney and party activist.

And yet McCabe, during this same time, was rapidly promoted to #3 in the FBI and didn't recuse himself from the Hillary Clinton email scandal investigation until one week before the 2016 election (and months after the infamous Comey press briefing in July when he declared Clinton would not be prosecuted), after the $650,000 donation came to light.

It's obvious why there are some who would think the very generous political contribution to McCabe's wife was in fact a backdoor bribe to her husband.

turcopelier |  I will be very clear up front--I have no inside information about what John Durham is going to do. But if he is simply following the facts and the evidence, Andrew McCabe will be one of the first to fall in the probe into the failed coup to destroy the Presidency of Donald Trump. The record on this is indisputable. He lied in three separate instances--1) He lied to FBI investigators, according to Michael Horowitz, 2) He lied to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and 3) He lied to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

McCabe's record of lying starts with questions put to him by FBI investigators about leaks of sensitive FBI evidence to the media in the fall of 2016:

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe faced scorching criticism and potential criminal prosecution for changing his story about a conversation he had with a Wall Street Journal reporter. Now newly released interview transcripts show McCabe expressed remorse to internal FBI investigators when they pressed him on the about-face. 

In the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, the Journal broke news about an FBI investigation involving then-candidate Hillary Clinton, describing internal discussions among senior FBI officials.

The apparent leak drew scrutiny from the bureau’s internal investigation team, which interviewed McCabe on May 9, 2017, the day President Donald Trump fired James Comey from his post as FBI director. The agents interviewed him as part of an investigation regarding a different media leak to the online publication Circa, and also asked him about the Journal story. 

In that interview, McCabe said he did not know how the Journal story came to be. But a few months later, his story changed after he reviewed his answer. 

McCabe's actions as an Artful Liar did not result in a prosecution. The Trump Justice Department reportedly decided to take a pass on that front, conceding that McCabe might prevail by insisting he just misremembered.

But subsequent statements by McCabe before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees expose him as a terminal liar.

The September Surprise Must Happen For Trump To Win

justthenews |  A powerful Senate committee chairman has subpoenaed FBI Director Chris Wray and a former State Department official in an intensifying investigation into possible U.S. corruption in Russia and Ukraine and declared there is evidence Joe Biden's family engaged in a "glaring conflict of interest."

Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson announced the actions Monday, strongly accusing Democrats of levying false allegations against him and other GOP investigators to distract from the evidence his committee has gathered about Joe and Hunter Biden's dealings in Ukraine.

"We didn't target Joe and Hunter Biden for investigation; their previous actions had put them in the middle of it," Johnson wrote in a letter released Monday that provided a detailed timeline of Joe Biden's Ukraine policy actions and his son's hiring with the Ukraine natural gas company Burisma Holdings.

"Many in the media, in an ongoing attempt to provide cover for former Vice President Biden, continue to repeat the mantra that there is 'no evidence of wrongdoing or illegal activity' related to Hunter Biden's position on Burisma's board," the senator wrote. "I could not disagree more."

Johnson noted evidence gathered by his committee showed Joe Biden met with his son's business partner, Devon Archer, in April 2014 and within a month the vice president then visited Ukraine and both his son Hunter and the business partner were put on the Burisma board as the firm faced multiple corruption investigations.

"Isn't it obvious what message Hunter's position on Burisma's board sent to Ukrainian officials?" Johnson asked. "The answer: If you want U.S. support, don't touch Burisma. It also raised a host of questions, including: 1) How could former Vice President Biden look any Ukrainian official (or any other world leader) in the face and demand action to fight corruption? 2) Did this glaring conflict of interest affect the work and efforts of other U.S. officials who worked on anti-corruption measures?"

Hopkins Peddling Reset - MIT Truthing Herd Immunity Limiting Coronavirus Spread In The U.S.

technologyreview |  The large number of people already infected with the coronavirus in the US has begun to act as a brake on the spread of the disease in hard-hit states.

Millions of US residents have been infected by the virus that causes covid-19, and at least 160,000 are dead. One effect is that the pool of susceptible individuals has been depleted in many areas. After infection, it’s believed, people become immune (at least for months), so they don’t transmit the virus to others. This slows the pandemic down. 

“I believe the substantial epidemics in Arizona, Florida and Texas will leave enough immunity to assist in keeping COVID-19 controlled,” Trevor Bedford, a pandemic analyst at the University of Washington, said on Friday, in a series of tweets. “However, this level of immunity is not compatible with a full return to societal behavior as existed before the pandemic.”

The exact extent to which acquired immunity is slowing the rate of transmission is unknown, but major questions like school reopening and air travel may eventually hinge on the answer.

What is known is that after rising at an alarming pace starting in May, new cases of covid-19 in Sun Belt states like Florida have started to fall. Some of that may be due to social distancing behavior, but rising rates of immunity are also a factor, according to Youyang Gu, a computer scientist whose Covid-19 Projections is among 34 pandemic models tracked by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Immunity may play a significant part in the regions that are declining,” says Gu. At least until the fall, which is how far his models look forward, he says, “I don’t think there is going to be another spike” of infections in southern states. 

California Covid Numbers All Wrong...,

justthenews |  Dr. Sonia Angell, California's director of the Department of Public Health, abruptly resigned on Sunday. Angell, who had been in the position for less than a year, reportedly resigned via an email sent to the California Health and Human Services Agency. 

Angell has, among others, been leading the state's battle against the novel coronavirus. More than 10,000 Californians have died of the illness, and most of the state remains on shutdown following a brief reopening period in early summer. 

"Our department has been front and center in what has become an all-of-government response of unprecedented proportions to COVID-19. In the final calculation, all of our work, in aggregate, makes the difference," Angell reportedly wrote in her resignation letter.

Angell's departure comes as the state government reckons with a data glitch that failed to log nearly 300,000 infectious disease testing records, resulting in hindered decision-making at the highest levels of the California government. 

The secretary of California Health and Human Services, Mark Ghaly, recently apologized to state residents for the error. "Bottom line, our data system failed," said Ghaly. With more than half a million reported cases of the virus, California tops the nation for positive diagnoses. The data blunder, however, has impeded state authorities' ability to determine policies moving forward, specifically the decision on whether to reopen schools for in-person learning as the new school year is set to begin.

U.K. Covid Numbers All Wrong....,

dailymail |  Thousands of coronavirus deaths are set to be wiped from the government's official count, it was claimed today.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock last month ordered an urgent review into how daily death counts are calculated in England because of a 'statistical flaw'.

Academics found Public Health England's methods meant ministers count victims as anyone who died after ever testing positive for Covid-19 — even if they were hit by a bus after beating the disease months later.

It would've meant that, technically, no-one could ever recover from the virus and all 265,000 of England's confirmed patients would eventually have had their deaths attributed to the disease. 

The blunder could see up to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749, according to reports. One of the leading experts who uncovered the flaw told MailOnline his 'best guess' was that more than 1,000 people have had their deaths wrongly recorded as caused by Covid-19.

It would've meant that, technically, no-one could ever recover from the virus and all 265,000 of England's confirmed patients would eventually have had their deaths attributed to the disease.

The blunder could see up to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749, according to reports. One of the leading experts who uncovered the flaw told MailOnline his 'best guess' was that more than 1,000 people have had their deaths wrongly recorded as caused by Covid-19.

Florida Covid Numbers All Wrong...,

turcopelier |  Florida is home to 21,933,000 people (see here). How many have succumbed to Covid since March 6, when Florida's Government started keeping tabs on the disease? 7,084.  That means 0.032% of the population have died from Covid in the last six months. To put this into perspective, the CDC reports for 2017 that 46,044 Floridians died from heart disease. I do not recall nightly news broadcasts wailing hysterically about fat Floridians eating double cheeseburgers and clogging their arteries. But less than 8,000 deaths in six months and we are supposed to put on masks and hide in our closets? Nonsense.

Let's take a closer look at Sarasota County over the last 30 days. According to the US Census, Sarasota County was inhabited by 433,742 souls as of July 1, 2019.  Here are the numbers according to the Florida Covid 19 "Dashboard." Just follow this link and click on Sarasota County. Five thousand nine hundred seventy four Sarasotans tested positive since the first of July (July 7 to be precise). That is 1.3% of the total county population. Hospitalized? 360, which represents 0.08%. How about deaths? 160. That is roughly consistent with the number of deaths recorded state-wide--0.036%.

What about neighboring Manatee County (seat of the city of Bradenton and winter home of the Pittsburgh Pirates)? Manatee has a slightly smaller population than Sarsota, weighing in with 413,655 happy inhabitants. Eight thousand nine hundred fifty six Manatee maniacs tested positive for Covid--i.e., 2.1%. More have been hospitalized--589, which represents 0.14%. The death count is 189 or 0.045%. Ever hear of the concept of "perspective?"  I am sure that the families of those whose kith and kin perished from Covid and/or co-morbidities exacerbated by Covid don't care a whit about the stats. But the truth is the disease is not spreading like wildfire. People are not flooding the hospitals.

Nick Bostrom Proposed A Preposterously Butt-Licking Design On Your Future Little Man...,

Have one AI with godlike powers monitor everyone at all times but only interfere if a little man commits a thought crime that poses an existential risk. Bostrom imagines that you little men could easily get used to living in such a world, particularly once you  realize that it doesn't make any noticeable difference. 

Many little men already believe that there is literally a conscious being who watches everything they do - and - they're cool with that. All Bostrom is suggesting is that the status quo establishment implement an unconscious mechanism that monitors everything that you little men think, express, and potentially do. 

Think about it, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, that doesn't seem like it's worse, does it?

Here's Bostrom in conversation with Chris Anderson, the head of TED. Bostrom suggests implementation of a system of mass government surveillance in which each little man is fitted with necklace-like “freedom tags” with multi-directional cameras. 

Information gathered by these “freedom tags” would be sent to “freedom centers”, where artificial intelligence monitors the data, alerting human officers if they detect signs of a possible “black ball” idea. 

We are at greater risk from societal collapse arising from poorly functioning social systems.  We are at VASTLY greater risk from our subjugation to the corporate profit seeking egregoric structure and the specific extractive interaction with the environment that this demonic construct demands. (our economizating virtual reality)  than from some sort of Pandora's box technological black ball. 

We seem spastically incapable of eliminating fission and fusion weapons while struggling to implement and benefit from superior and safer thorium fission power generation technology. Rather than using improvements in photovoltaics and batteries to raise the resilience of individuals and small communities to natural disasters, we are using them to make the overall electrical power distribution system less resilient. 

Fermi's Paradox doesn't pivot on black ball technologies, rather, it pivots on primitive status seeking within a perversely incentivized archaic material culture. Intelligent species self-destruct because they fail to achieve their own possible psychological development.  Fist tap Dorcas Dad.

Short Of Individual Autarky What Kind Of Waking-Up Can There Be?

caitlinjohnstone |  From 2021 until nuclear armageddon Biden will be sitting off to the side mumbling to himself as his brain turns to chowder while holdovers from the Obama administration orchestrate cold war escalations against China in retaliation for its 2020 “election meddling”.

~

You will never, ever hate China enough to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Playing along with bullshit narrative spin hoping it will bring your jobs back will never work. You’re just helping opaque government agencies advance their new cold war.

~

The dumbest thing about believing foreign countries attacked American democracy is believing America has any democracy to attack.

~

Thought experiment: If you looked out the window right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, how would you feel about the way you’ve been spending your mental energy lately? Be honest with yourself.

~

If we win this thing it won’t be because conspiracy analysts showed everyone a bunch of complex financial connections or because Marxists put a bunch of theory in everyone’s heads, it will be because clear, simple pointing helped everyone notice the fact that they’ve been duped.

This fight isn’t a game of addition, it’s a game of subtraction. You’re not trying to get the mainstream rank-and-file public to understand a bunch of complicated new information, you’re trying to remove the blindfold so they can see something for themselves that they kind of already suspected was the case.

Cripple public trust in the establishment narrative control apparatus and you remove the only obstacle that’s been stopping the people from using the power of their numbers to force real change. They don’t need anything new, they need to exorcise the lies that have blinded them and stop trusting in the words of liars.

Corporate Economization Is Complete Little Man - You Cannot Escape - No Lives Matter!

counterpunch  |  It is a truism to suggest that the public has now been replaced by the consumer; that the public good has been replaced by individual desire; that public space has been reduced to the private visions of the individual; that democracy has been sacrificed on the altar of economics. As Wendy Brown writes, in, Undoing the Demos, 2012, “Neoliberal reason, ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones.”. Thus, the Left’s traditional urge to build a bureaucracy that restrains predatory commerce in the interest of the public good is subverted by the growth of a corporate state designed to suppress its vestigial caring dimension.

This neoliberal attribute fatally weakens the viability of the obvious ‘Alternative’ to which Thatcher was so averse, that of democratic socialism, which thrived in post-war Western Europe as it emerged from the worldwide crisis. Those governments were driven by a mission: to embrace responsibility for the health of all of their citizens – rather than let it be controlled by black marketeers or corporate looters; to ensure that elder care, youth services and childcare be freely available – not powered by profit; to provide good, free education to all – not restricted by its expense to the privileged few; to declare that housing and adequate nutrition are a human right – not resources to be leveraged by the financially strong; to assert that homelessness has no place in an enlightened state – not accepted as a necessary alternative to the supposed evils of welfare; to declare that the mentally ill, together with the anxious and alienated, find a haven in adequate social services – not left to swell the ranks of mendicant street people; and to ensure that public order is maintained without a militarized police force supporting the criminalization of poverty, the presumption of Black and minority criminality and the thuggish treatment of those it arrests. All these beneficent outcomes must now be sought elsewhere. As Bruno Latour points out in his recent essay, ‘Are you ready to extract yourself from the Economy?’, “After a hundred years devoted to socialism limited just to the redistribution of the benefits of the economy, it might now be more a matter of inventing a socialism that contests production itself”.

Latour makes the point that in the miraculous COVID-inspired halting of production, travel and pollution, the world discovered a hitherto unsuspected superpower – the power of interruption. We have the ability, collectively, it now seems, to become globalization interrupters, neoliberalism interrupters and interrupters of all those modes of production that are destroying the habitability of the earth for humans and our neighboring species. He suggests we have an opportunity of, “Getting away from production as the overriding principle of our relationship to the world.” This constitutes a retreat from the very principle that informed the colonization of the Americas and continues to inform its despoliation.

No DISC - Only Ass-Kissing Lackeys Of The Status Quo Establishment

medium |  I wondered if maybe I had been totally wrong from the start. Maybe I deserved what I got. Maybe I had been too ambitious and competitive in the party. Late in 2018, I had a conversation with the president of the original Wake progressives. He began to discuss the work of that chapter, before there had been a Caucus, from 2004 to 2016. He explained how they had worked to organize precincts in the county, so they could get progressive chairs and vice chairs who would thus be entitled to votes in Wake’s county party meetings. He told me how they organized themselves at county conventions to ensure that progressives would be elected from Wake to have a vote in the state party. He explained similar efforts for similar offices in the party. In other words, he told me that, for twelve whole years, progressives in Wake, whom I had never met, were implementing the exact same strategy, to a tee, that I had developed and written for my own chapter in Orange.

And this was my next Weinstein moment. It was that “Eureka” moment with negative undertones, which I guess can be called a “Dysreka.” Just as Bret and Eric, years later, saw their advancements being used and pushed by someone else, I was getting the exact same confirmation about my strategy (although he had not stolen it from me). This guy who had been at it longer, whose chapter was the inspiration for the Caucus itself, told me that I had stumbled upon the exact plan I was supposed to have for my chapter.

I don’t think this elected official from Hillsborough or this gentleman from Wake have ever met each other. Nevertheless, they quickly moved to shut down threats to the establishment of the Democratic Party here in North Carolina, as soon as they detected it, in manner much like what Weinstein has described. They were manifestations of the DISC, of an autoimmune response in the Democratic Party, and they moved through indirect, defamatory manners that played upon uninformed and ignorant crowds to derail those in their paths.

---

These events and others that I could tell really hurt. The chapter I had organized was like a baby of mine or a work of art (and you guys can see some of my art here on Medium to know what I mean by that). All the work I did to make the Democratic Party more accountable, while also trying to plant seeds to make it more electable, just blew up in my face because actors who want to defend the system acted swiftly. The corruption and abuse of power in the Democratic Party exists beyond the DNC. It manifests itself through brutal patronage relationships at the grassroots level as well that allow for decentralized policing and, frankly, sabotage.

I still think the Democratic Party can fix this country, but it needs a lot of home repairs before it can do so. We need something to break the Gated Institutional Narrative (another Weinstein term) that enables this. At the moment I am mostly out of ideas, but I am attempting another run for the NC House, here in Chapel Hill.

I hope this story informs you all decently and that it motivates you to do something good and productive, even though I know something like this is likely to produce more anger. We really do not need more anger. We need people who are more excited about the utopia and less about the revolution. I also hope it inspires you to share your own encounters with the DISC.

I also hope Eric comes across this and can get a few ideas on what to do. He is a Democrat like me, however begrudgingly, and he does have a role to play in reforming it. For those of you Republicans out there, I hope you are also noticing where the DISC exists in your party and are thinking of how to counter it. Fixing America is going to be a bi-partisan job, after all.

The Golden Rule Is Capitalism's Intrinsic Incompatibility With Democracy

alternet |  The capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as the 2020 election looms.

The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists who own and operate business enterprises—employers as a group—comprise a small social minority. In contrast, employees and their families are the social majority. The employer minority clearly dominates the micro-economy inside each enterprise. In capitalist corporations, the major shareholders and the board of directors they select make all the key decisions including distribution of the enterprise’s net revenues.

Their decisions allocate large portions of those net revenues to themselves as shareholders’ dividends and top managers’ executive pay packages. Their incomes and wealth thus accumulate faster than the social averages. In privately held capitalist enterprises their owners and top managers behave similarly and enjoy a similar set of privileges. Unequally distributed income and wealth in modern societies flow chiefly from the internal organization of capitalist enterprises. The owners and their top managers then use their disproportionate wealth to shape and control the macro-economy and the politics interwoven with it.

However, universal suffrage makes it possible for employees to undo capitalism’s underlying economic inequalities by political means when, for example, majorities win elections. Employees can elect politicians whose legislative, executive, and judicial decisions effectively reverse capitalism’s economic results. Tax, minimum wage, and government spending laws can redistribute income and wealth in many different ways. If redistribution is not how majorities choose to end unacceptable levels of inequality, they can take other steps. Majorities might, for example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism would disappear.

Capitalism’s ongoing political problem has been how best to prevent employees from forming just such political majorities. During its recurring times of special difficulty (periodic crashes, wars, conflicts between monopolized and competitive industries, pandemics), capitalism’s political problem intensifies and broadens. It becomes how best to prevent employees’ political majorities from ending capitalism altogether and moving society to an alternative economic system.

To solve capitalism’s political problem, capitalists as a small social minority must craft alliances with other social groups. Those alliances must be strong enough to defuse, deter, or destroy any and all emerging employee majorities that might threaten capitalists’ interests or their systems’ survival. The smaller or weaker the capitalist minorities are, the more the key alliance they form and rely upon is with the military. In many parts of the world, capitalism is secured by a military dictatorship that targets and destroys emerging movements for anti-capitalist change among employees or among non-capitalist sectors. Even where capitalists are a relatively large, well-established minority, if their social dominance is threatened, say by a large anti-capitalist movement from below, alliance with a military dictatorship may be a last resort survival mechanism. When such alliances culminate in mergers of capitalists and the state apparatus, fascism has arrived.

During capitalism’s non-extreme moments, when not threatened by imminent social explosions, its basic political problem remains. Capitalists must block employee majorities from undoing the workings and results of the capitalist economic system and especially its characteristic distributions of income, wealth, power, and culture. To that end capitalists seek portions of the employee class to ally with, to disconnect from other, fellow employees. They usually work with and use political parties to form and sustain such alliances.

In the words of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the capitalists use their allied political party to form a “political bloc” with portions of the employee class and possible others outside the capitalist economy. That bloc must be strong enough to thwart the anti-capitalist goals of movements among the employee class. Ideally, for capitalists, their bloc should rule the society—be the hegemonic power—by controlling mass media, winning elections, producing parliamentary majorities, and disseminating an ideology in schools and beyond that justifies capitalism. Capitalist hegemony would then keep anti-capitalist impulses disorganized or unable to build a social movement into a counter-hegemonic bloc strong enough to challenge capitalism’s hegemony.

Bill Gates Is A Pampered Bubble-Boy Who Doesn't Know When To STFU!!!

gatesnotes |  A global crisis has shocked the world. It is causing a tragic number of deaths, making people afraid to leave home, and leading to economic hardship not seen in many generations. Its effects are rippling across the world. 

Obviously, I am talking about COVID-19. But in just a few decades, the same description will fit another global crisis: climate change. As awful as this pandemic is, climate change could be worse.

I realize that it’s hard to think about a problem like climate change right now. When disaster strikes, it is human nature to worry only about meeting our most immediate needs, especially when the disaster is as bad as COVID-19. But the fact that dramatically higher temperatures seem far off in the future does not make them any less of a problem—and the only way to avoid the worst possible climate outcomes is to accelerate our efforts now. Even as the world works to stop the novel coronavirus and begin recovering from it, we also need to act now to avoid a climate disaster by building and deploying innovations that will let us eliminate our greenhouse gas emissions.

You may have seen projections that, because economic activity has slowed down so much, the world will emit fewer greenhouse gases this year than last year. Although these projections are certainly true, their importance for the fight against climate change has been overstated. 

Analysts disagree about how much emissions will go down this year, but the International Energy Agency puts the reduction around 8 percent. In real terms, that means we will release the equivalent of around 47 billion tons of carbon, instead of 51 billion.

That’s a meaningful reduction, and we would be in great shape if we could continue that rate of decrease every year. Unfortunately, we can’t. 

Consider what it’s taking to achieve this 8 percent reduction. More than 600,000 people have died, and tens of millions are out of work. This April, car traffic was half what it was in April 2019. For months, air traffic virtually came to a halt.

The Antithesis Of A Grassroots Movement - The Great Reset's Demands Are Getting Worse and Worse...,

off-guardian  |  If you don’t like being forced to wear masks (and/or visors), or being placed under house arrest or (for some reason) under a curfew, or indeed, having to take hormone treatments…well don’t worry. Because the World Economic Forum has the solution – immunity passports.

This is not a new idea, it’s been floating around for months, but now the WEF is actually pushing an app that…

uses blockchain technology to store encrypted data from individual blood tests, allowing users to prove that they have tested negative for COVID-19.

It goes on to say that using this kind of app is the only solution to getting everything back to (the old) normal:

CovidPass could also allow hotels, cinemas, theatres, sporting and concert venues to reopen safely.

If you think this all sounds like something from a dystopian novel, well you’re right. But there’s a silver lining. The app which uses your medical history to decide if you’re allowed to travel will be real environmentally friendly:

CovidPass commits to mandatory carbon offsetting for each flight passenger, to preserve the environmental benefits of reduced air travel during the crisis.

So there’s that, at least.

*

It’s not hard to see the pattern taking shape here. Increasingly strict social controls on what you can wear, where you can go, when you can go there and so on and so on…and then the proposed solution.

A brief test and a little app that tracks your movement, or labels you nice and clean, a brand new vaccination for anybody who wants it (and most of the people who don’t) and then we can get back to normal.

It is manipulative blackmail of the worst kind, and it appears to be working.

The Civil Rights Movement Was A Grassroots Illumination Of National Disgrace. BLM....?

Counterpunch |  Why did Richard Nixon win? 

Many historians point to his invention of a diabolical “Southern Strategy,” which employed racially charged issues such as law and order and welfare fraud to win racist votes in the eleven Confederate states. 

This story is wrong, too. While Nixon used racism, of course, he did not invent the Southern Strategy. Southern slaveholders invented it at the founding of the republic, and it has become a regular feature of American politics.

For example, the former Confederate states were part of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition. Southern support did not come for free. Franklin Roosevelt’s programs were confined in what historian Ira Katznelson has called the “southern cage.” That is why the Social Security Act did not apply to agricultural and domestic workers, the only jobs many African Americans in the south could get. This was FDR’s Southern Strategy.

In 1980, after the Republican National Convention, nominee Ronald Reagan chose to begin his campaign in Neshoba County, Mississippi. This small county is known for only one thing, the 1964 Ku Klux Klan murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. It was one of the worst atrocities of the civil rights era. When Reagan told the crowd, “I believe in states’ rights,” everyone knew what he meant. That was his 1980 Southern Strategy.

On July 26 of this year, Republican U.S. Senator Tom Cotton told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette he thought slavery was a “necessary evil.” Why? He was getting an early start on his 2024 Southern Strategy.

The outcome of the 1968 election had been decided four years earlier. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Congress realigned the American political parties. They kicked the Confederacy out of the New Deal coalition by passing the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and Medicaid in 1964 and 1965.

The southern states had nowhere to go except the Republican Party, which is what they proceeded to do. In 1968, Democrat Humphrey won only one of the eleven Confederate states. The rest split between Nixon and third-party candidate George Wallace, a former Alabama governor and a raw segregationist. Polls showed if Wallace had not run, his votes would have gone to Nixon by a two-to-one margin. Nixon’s electoral vote margin over Humphrey would have been even larger than it was.

Except when Jimmy Carter won one term due to the Watergate scandal. Republicans owned the White House for the next twenty-four years. And since 1964, no Democratic presidential candidate has won the majority of white votes in the South or nationwide.

Freedom, God, and Donald Trump

thedailybeast |  The City Council had never considered whether or not to approve the rally because that had never been a question. There had only been the formality of approving the necessary road closures. The council did so again on June 15 even though a survey showed that 60 percent of Sturgis residents favored canceling this year's rally.

Sturgis officials sought to calm rally opponents by saying the city was seeking to reduce the turnout by curtailing the usual advertising. The official Sturgis website nonetheless listed various exciting events for anyone tempted to attend. There was this: 

“JOIN US AUGUST 10TH, 2020 FOR THE 18TH ANNUAL MAYOR’S RIDE!! The City of Sturgis is excited to be hosting the 18th Annual Sturgis Mayor’s Ride during the 80th Annual City of Sturgis Motorcycle Rally! This ride has been a special part of the City of Sturgis Motorcycle Rally; not only for the amazing beauty of the Black Hills but that it brings people together from all over the word [world].”

The ultimate justification offered by the mayor and other city officials was that the hordes of bikers were going to come anyway. They noted that Rod Woodruff, owner of the Buffalo Chip campground and concert venue, had announced his intention to be open for a 39th consecutive rally. The campground’s Facebook page had this posting with a message from a Hollywood actor:

“Hey there, Tom Berenger here. Have you heard? Well, my friend Rod Woodruff at the Buffalo Chip let me know that Sturgis 2020, the 80th anniversary, is ON! I don’t know about you, but I’m packin’ her up here. I hope to see ya out there. God bless America. And God bless the Buffalo Chip.”

The Buffalo Chip is the area’s biggest, a biker mecca. It is also just outside the city limits and an incorporated town unto itself. Sturgis could do nothing to regulate it.

“We’re just celebrating good old American freedom,” Woodruff told The Daily Beast on Wednesday.

He said he had unfolded the world’s largest American flag on July 3, so Trump could see it while flying over on the way to the event at nearby Mount Rushmore. 

Durham And Barr Better BombThese Beezies Like They Were In Beirut!!!

realclearinvestigations |  While much speculation inside the Beltway says U.S. Attorney John Durham will punt the results of his so-called Spygate investigation past the election to avoid charges of political interference, sources who have worked with Durham on past public corruption cases doubt he'll bend to political pressure — and they expect him to drop bombshells before Labor Day.

Durham’s boss, Attorney General Bill Barr, also pushed back on the notion his hand-picked investigator would defer action. Under Democratic questioning on Capitol Hill last week, he refused to rule out a pre-election release.

"Under oath, do you commit to not releasing any report by Mr. Durham before the November election?” Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (D-Fla.) asked Barr, citing longstanding Justice Department policy not to announce new developments in politically sensitive cases before an election.

“No,” the attorney general curtly replied.

Justice Department policy prohibits prosecutors from taking overt steps in politically charged cases typically within 60 days of an election. Accordingly, Durham would have to make a move by the Friday before Labor Day, or Sept. 4. 

A low-profile prosecutor, Durham has kept a tight lid on his investigation into the origins of the specious Russiagate investigation of Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign, leading to rampant speculation about who he might prosecute and whether he would take action ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election. 

That could well be of historic consequence, since his probe involves both the Trump administration and high-level officials in the previous administration, including Trump's presumptive Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe Biden. Recently declassified FBI notes show Biden offered input into the investigation of Trump adviser Michael Flynn in early January 2017. Another declassified document reveals that Biden was among those who requested Flynn’s identity be “unmasked” in foreign intelligence intercepts around that same time.

If Durham announces criminal indictments or plea agreements involving former officials operating under the Obama-Biden administration, or releases a report documenting widespread corruption, independent voters could sour on Biden and sympathize with Trump.  On the other hand, kicking the ball past the election could dispirit Trump’s base.

Ah Yes…, By Its Loud Squeal, We Know A Bad Piglet Got Caught Under The Gate

justsecurity |  Dear U.S. Attorney Durham:

On May 13, 2019, Attorney General William Barr appointed you to review the origins of the 2016 Justice Department investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 elections. At some point, this review turned into a criminal investigation of the Justice Department’s investigation into Russia’s efforts to undermine our democracy.

The need for your appointment was hard to understand at the time it was made, since the Justice Department’s independent Inspector General was already conducting a similar investigation that began in March 2018 into the same issues.  On December 9, 2019, the Inspector General issued his report and concluded that the 2016 Russia investigation had had a legitimate purpose and that there was no evidence of political bias against President Trump in how the investigation had been initiated or undertaken.

We are now in the closing stages of the 2020 presidential campaign.

Longstanding Department policies issued by the past three Attorneys General who served during an election year make plain that Department actions should not be taken in an election year that could influence or affect an election.  George J. Terwilliger III, who served as deputy attorney general under Attorney General William Barr in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, said in 2016, “There’s a longstanding policy of not doing anything that could influence an election.”

I strongly urge you to follow this policy and not to issue any report, or bring any indictments, resulting from your investigation in these closing weeks of the 2020 presidential election.

Any public action by the Justice Department in this pre-election period that is associated with your investigation – which by its very nature involves actions taken during the Obama-Biden Administration – is bound to be used by President Trump for partisan political purposes to promote his re-election effort against Vice President Biden.

In testifying during his Senate confirmation hearings, Mr. Barr was asked whether there are “policies in place that try to insulate the investigations and the decisions of the Department of Justice and FBI from getting involved in elections?” Barr said yes and explained that the party in power has “their hands on the levers of the law enforcement apparatus of the country, and you do not want it used against the opposing political party.” But that is precisely what would occur here if a report is issued on your investigation of the Russia investigation or if indictments are brought at this critical stage of the presidential election.

You should not permit your long and distinguished career in the Justice Department to be permanently tainted, or your personal integrity to be irreparably impugned, by what would plainly be an effort to use your investigation to influence or affect the 2020 presidential election.

Russia! Russia! Russia! Still Evidently A Thing....,

NYTimes |  Russia continues to use a network of proxy websites to spread pro-Kremlin disinformation and propaganda in the United States and other parts of the West, according to a State Department report released on Wednesday.

The report is one of the most detailed explanations yet from the Trump administration on how Russia disseminates disinformation, but it largely avoids discussing how Moscow is trying to influence the current campaign. Even as Democrats on Capitol Hill have urged the American government to declassify more information on Russia’s efforts to interfere with the election, President Trump has repeatedly told officials such disclosures are unwelcome.

Most of the report focuses on an ecosystem of websites, many of them fringe or conspiracy minded, that Russia has used or directed to spread propaganda on a variety of topics. Those include an online journal called the Strategic Culture Foundation and other sites, like the Canada-based Global Research. The document builds on information disclosed last week by American officials about Russian intelligence’s control of various propaganda sites.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who announced the release of the report on Wednesday, said the State Department would offer rewards of up to $10 million for information to help identify any person who, acting at the direction of a foreign government, tries to hack into election or campaign infrastructure.

The report was prepared by the department’s Global Engagement Center, whose mandate is only to examine propaganda efforts outside the United States.

The report states that the Strategic Culture Foundation is directed by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the S.V.R., and stands as “a prime example of longstanding Russian tactics to conceal direct state involvement in disinformation and propaganda outlets.” The organization publishes a wide variety of fringe voices and conspiracy theories in English, while trying to obscure its Russian government sponsorship.

Once You See The Deep State Government Criminal Enterprise You Cannot Unsee It

George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton go back a long way.  George H.W.Bush headed the CIA and Bill Clinton was Gov.of Arkansas when the drug smuggling operation with the Nicaraguan Contras occurred. Mena Airport in Arkansas was a valued node on that drug trafficking network.

• Foreign aid money laundering is part of the deal – it’s like a grub stake courtesy of the US tax payer.
• Congress appropriates money
• Money goes out as foreign aid
• Foreign aid dispersed to companies that employ family and friends (Hunter Biden)
• Family of Congress critters invested in companies that received the foreign aid.
• Biden and company pulled the scam in Ukraine, Clinton’s did it in Haiti, Panama Papers etc….

shadowproof |  According to documents filed by former NSA Director Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA was speculating in commodities linked to China and Russia while receiving asymmetric information on the countries as part of his job. The use of asymmetric or non-public information for financial gain is a crime known as insider trading.

The shares Alexander bought and sold while head of the NSA include those connected to the secretive and politically sensitive potash market. The potash market is largely controlled by Russia and Belarus and one of the largest consumers of potash is China. With Russia and China – two countries the NSA targets for intelligence – as major players it is not hard to see how information coming across Director Alexander’s desk could be useful in getting an information edge on other speculators. Did he use his edge to profit?

Alexander also bought and sold shares in other commodities where asymmetric information on Russia and China could have been beneficial.

On the same day he sold the potash company shares, Alexander also sold shares in the Aluminum Corp. of China Ltd., a state-owned company headquartered in Beijing and currently the world’s second-largest producer of aluminum. U.S. government investigators have indicated that the company, known as Chinalco, has received insider information about its American competitors from computer hackers working for the Chinese military. That hacker group has been under NSA surveillance for years, and the Justice Department in May indicted five of its members…
U.S. officials have long insisted that the information that intelligence agencies steal from foreign corporations and governments is only used to make political and strategic decisions and isn’t shared with U.S. companies. But whether that spying could benefit individual U.S. officials who are privy to the secrets being collected, and what mechanisms are in place to ensure officials don’t personally benefit from insider knowledge, haven’t been widely discussed.

And who knows if these were the only times Alexander was in a position to have non-public information while trading? The NSA comes across quite a bit of information that could be advantageous if someone was looking to make some financial trades. Did Alexander ever use that non-public information to trade in the financial markets?

Also troubling is former NSA Director Alexander’s attempts to seemingly privatize knowledge and relationships gleaned from his government service. Alexander has filed technology patents related to network intrusion and was recently forced to back off having an employee at his new company, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc, that still currently works for the NSA.

Alexander appears to be having some nice private benefits from his public service.

Talk About Q-Anon For Ten Minutes Without Mentioning L'Affaire Epstein Until The Final Minute?

 wbur | At least 14 Republican candidates with links to QAnon have made their way into runoffs or onto the ballot this November.

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory and loosely organized network centered around the belief that the U.S. is controlled by a cabal of child sex trafficking, Democratic elites hell-bent on bringing down President Trump.

Q and others in the collective make it clear they believe the news media is false. Kaplan says they often use the phrase “we are the news now” and claim “they're identifying what's really going on as opposed to the media lying to you,” he says.

Similar to many evangelicals, QAnon supports seem to believe the world is on the cusp of a great awakening. Adrian Hon, a game designer, says QAnon reminds him of an immersive multiplayer game and he's worried people could recreate the playbook.

Kaplan says people have compared QAnon to larping — a real-life role-playing game — because the group “puts what's going on, in some ways, in your hands.”

“You can do the research, you can feel involved, you feel like you can explain and figure out what's really going on behind the scenes and can make sense of ... what seems like chaos going around the world,” he says.

Another Example Of Government Crony Self-Dealing And Insider Profiteering

My Name's Buck, And I Used To Like To F**k....,

justice.gov |  A federal grand jury today returned a superseding indictment charging Edward Buck with four additional felonies, including that he allegedly enticed victims – including a man who died at his West Hollywood apartment after he administered drugs to him – to travel interstate to engage in prostitution.

Buck, 65, was arrested in September 2019 after being charged in United States District Court with providing methamphetamine to a man who died after receiving the drug intravenously. Since that time, federal authorities have continued to investigate Buck for additional crimes.

The four additional counts charged today – bringing the total number of charges in this case to nine counts – include one count alleging that Buck knowingly enticed 26-year-old Gemmel Moore to travel to the Los Angeles area to engage in prostitution. Buck allegedly provided methamphetamine to Moore, who overdosed on the drug and died on July 27, 2017.

Buck also is charged with another count of enticing another man to travel with the intent of engaging in prostitution.

The superseding indictment also charges Buck with one count of knowingly and intentionally distributing methamphetamine, and one count of using his residence for the purpose of distributing narcotics such as methamphetamine, and the sedatives gamma hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) and clonazepam.

Last year, a federal grand jury returned a five-count indictment charging that Buck “engaged in a pattern of soliciting men to consume drugs that Buck provided and perform sexual acts at Buck’s apartment,” which is a practice described as “party and play.” Buck allegedly solicited victims on social media platforms, including a gay dating website, and used a recruiter to scout and proposition men.

Once the men were at his apartment, Buck allegedly prepared syringes containing methamphetamine, sometimes personally injecting the victims with or without their consent, according to the indictment. Buck also allegedly injected victims with more narcotics than they expected and sometimes injected victims while they were unconscious.