dailymail | The first ever full-genome analysis of Ancient Egyptians shows they were more Turkish and European than African.
Scientists
analysed ancient DNA from Egyptian mummies dating from 1400 BC to 400
AD and discovered they shared genes with people from the Mediterranean.
They found that ancient Egyptians were closely related to ancient populations in the Levant - now modern day Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Lebanon.
They were also genetically similar to Neolithic populations from the Anatolian Peninsula and Europe.
The
groundbreaking study used recent advances in DNA sequencing techniques
to undertake a closer examination of mummy genetics than ever before.
WaPo | Perhaps the most upsetting headline I saw, though, was generated not
by Trump but by a 10-year veteran of the House Republican majority. In
an astonishing interview Saturday on NPR, this lawmaker repeatedly
demurred when asked whether Americans are entitled to the most basic
human need.
NPR’s Scott Simon, a genial interviewer, asked Rep.
Adrian Smith (R-Neb.), a member of the Ways and Means Committee and an
influential figure on agriculture policy, about Trump’s proposal to make
vast cuts to food stamps. Smith posited that the program could be cut
in ways that “do not harm the most vulnerable.”
“Well, let me ask you this bluntly: Is every American entitled to eat?” Simon queried.
Smith was stumped. “Well, they — nutrition, obviously, we know is very important. And I would hope that we can look to — ”
Simon interrupted: “Well, not just important, it’s essential for life. Is every American entitled to eat?”
Smith agreed that nutrition “is essential” but continued to ignore the question about whether Americans are entitled to eat.
Simon
tried a third time: “So is every American entitled to eat, and is food
stamps something that ought to be that ultimate guarantor?”
Once
again, the lawmaker demurred: “I think that we know that, given the
necessity of nutrition, there could be a number of ways that we could
address that.”
There was more, but it all came down to this: In
the United States, in 2017, a powerful member of Congress refuses to
grant that Americans should be able to count on eating food.
ericpetersautos | Naturally, the solution to the problem of police abusing their authority is to hold them less accountable when they do exactly that.
Leave it to “law and order” Republicans such as Texas Sen.
John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe to evolve such logic. They have put forth
the Black and Blue – whoops, Back the Blue – act (see here) which would make it harder to sue run-amok law enforcers in civil court to recover damages resulting from actions undeniably illegal – while at the same time imposing more severe
penalties on Mundanes who affront the holy person of a law enforcer
than those imposed on Mundanes who do exactly the same thing.
As regards the first:
So long as the victim – er, perp – was “engaged
in felonies or crimes of violence” (how this it to be determined in the
heat of the moment remains unclear) the law enforcer administering the wood shampoo
or “directory assistance” (beating administered with a phone book in
between the flesh and he nightstick, to keep the bruising down) or some
other such informal technique, will be immunized from subsequent civil
suit by his victim, provided the abuse suffered occurred while the
enforcer was acting in a “judicial capacity.”
Breathtaking.
It is obvious – or should be – that this only encourage
more lawless “street justice” by the enforcers of the law. It will
also encourage more generous application of the law – i.e., of
bogus/trumped-up charges (such as felony “resisting”) in the immediate
aftermath of an otherwise legally unjustifiable beatdown, to immunize
the beaters from the legal consequences of said beatdown.
This GOP act of cop suckage is even better than a
throw-away stiletto – which dirty cops used to keep on hand to leave
adjacent to the bloodied corpse of their victim, so as to justify his
aeration.
That was at least illegal.
Now they won't have to bother.
What these Republican brownshirts – and that term isn’t too strong; if anything, it is too soft – propose to do is legalize objectively criminal conduct,
the conduct to be justified by eructing that the victim was a “law
breaker” and so – presumably – deserved to have more than the legally
prescribed justice meted out to him and – critically – before he has been duly convicted of anything at all.
theintercept |A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as
TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline
with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely
with police in at least five states, according to internal documents
obtained by The Intercept. The documents provide the first detailed
picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State
Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror,
worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company
building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led
movement that sought to stop the project.
Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as “an
ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” and
compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters. One
report, dated February 27, 2017, states that since the movement
“generally followed the jihadist insurgency model while active, we can
expect the individuals who fought for and supported it to follow a
post-insurgency model after its collapse.” Drawing comparisons with
post-Soviet Afghanistan, the report warns, “While we can expect to see
the continued spread of the anti-DAPL diaspora … aggressive intelligence
preparation of the battlefield and active coordination between
intelligence and security elements are now a proven method of defeating
pipeline insurgencies.”
More than 100 internal documents leaked to The Intercept by a
TigerSwan contractor, as well as a set of over 1,000 documents obtained
via public records requests, reveal that TigerSwan spearheaded a
multifaceted private security operation characterized by sweeping and
invasive surveillance of protesters.
As policing continues to be militarized and state legislatures around
the country pass laws criminalizing protest, the fact that a private
security firm retained by a Fortune 500 oil and gas company coordinated
its efforts with local, state, and federal law enforcement to undermine
the protest movement has profoundly anti-democratic implications. The
leaked materials not only highlight TigerSwan’s militaristic approach to
protecting its client’s interests but also the company’s profit-driven
imperative to portray the nonviolent water protector movement as
unpredictable and menacing enough to justify the continued need for
extraordinary security measures. Energy Transfer Partners has continued
to retain TigerSwan long after most of the anti-pipeline campers left
North Dakota, and the most recent TigerSwan reports emphasize the threat
of growing activism around other pipeline projects across the country.
The leaked documents include situation reports
prepared by TigerSwan operatives in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa,
Illinois, and Texas between September 2016 and May 2017, and delivered
to Energy Transfer Partners. They offer a daily snapshot
of the security firm’s activities, including detailed summaries of the
previous day’s surveillance targeting pipeline opponents, intelligence
on upcoming protests, and information harvested from social media. The
documents also provide extensive evidence of aerial surveillance and
radio eavesdropping, as well as infiltration of camps and activist
circles.
TigerSwan did not respond to a request for comment. Energy Transfer
Partners declined to comment, telling The Intercept in an email that it
does not “discuss details of our security efforts.”
wikipedia | The Occupy movement is an international socio-political movement against social and economic inequality
and lack of "real democracy" around the world, its primary goal being
to advance social and economic justice and new forms of democracy. The
movement has many different scopes; local groups often have different
focuses, but among the movement's prime concerns are how large corporations (and the global financial system) control the world in a way that disproportionately benefits a minority, undermines democracy, and is unstable.[12] It is part of what Manfred Steger calls the "global justice movement".[13]
The first Occupy protest to receive widespread attention was Occupy Wall Street in New York City's Zuccotti Park, which began on 17 September 2011. By 9 October, Occupy protests had taken place or were ongoing in over 951 cities across 82 countries, and over 600 communities in the United States.[14][15][16][17]
Although most active in the United States, by October 2012 there had
been Occupy protests and occupations in dozens of other countries across
every continent except Antarctica.
For its first month, overt police repression was minimal, but this
began to change by 25 October 2011 when police first attempted to
forcibly remove Occupy Oakland. By the end of 2011, authorities had cleared most of the major camps, with the last remaining high profile sites – in Washington, D.C. and London – evicted by February 2012.[22]
The Occupy movement is partly inspired by the Arab Spring,[23][24]2009 Iranian Green Movement, and the Spanish Indignants movement in the Iberian Peninsula,[25] the 2009 University of California occupations, as well as the overall global wave of anti-austerity protests. The movement commonly uses the slogan "We are the 99%", the #Occupy hashtag format, and organizes through websites such as Occupy Together.[26] According to The Washington Post, the movement, which has been described as a "democratic awakening" by Cornel West, is difficult to distill to a few demands.[27][28] On 12 October 2011, Los Angeles City Council
became one of the first governmental bodies in the United States to
adopt a resolution stating its informal support of the Occupy movement.[29] In October 2012 the Executive Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England stated the protesters were right to criticise and had persuaded bankers and politicians "to behave in a more moral way".[30]
bionicmosquito |WASHINGTON
— Supporters of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, including his
government security forces and several armed individuals, violently charged a
group of protesters outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence here on Tuesday
night in what the police characterized as “a brutal attack.”
Eleven people were injured,
including a police officer, and nine were taken to a hospital, the Metropolitan
Police chief, Peter Newsham, said at a news conference on Wednesday. Two Secret
Service agents were also assaulted in the melee, according to a federal law
enforcement official.
And the initial response?
The State Department condemned the
attack as an assault on free speech and warned Turkey that the action would not
be tolerated. “We are communicating our concern to the Turkish government in
the strongest possible terms,” said Heather Nauert, a State Department
spokeswoman.
No arrests.
Agents of a foreign government, on American soil, attacked
and beat Americans.An invasion; an
impotent response.
Maybe the protestors instigated the aggression; Erdogan’s
security detail was merely acting in defense?
Hardly.The New York Times (yes, I know) has
done an extensive examination of the many videos that were taken at the time of
the attack.Here is what they found:
unz |The Washington Post and a number of
other mainstream media outlets are sensing blood in the water in the
wake of former CIA Director John Brennan’s public testimony before the
House Intelligence Committee. The Post headlined a front page featured
article with Brennan’s explosive testimony just made it harder for the GOP to protect Trump.
The article states that Brennan during the 2016 campaign “reviewed
intelligence that showed ‘contacts and interaction’ between Russian
actors and people associated with the Trump campaign.” Politico was also in on the chase in an article entitled Brennan: Russia may have successfully recruited Trump campaign aides.
The precise money quote
by Brennan that the two articles chiefly rely on is “I encountered and
am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and
interactions between Russian officials and US persons involved in the
Trump campaign that I was concerned about because of known Russian
efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind
whether or not Russia was able to gain the co-operation of those
individuals.”
Now
first of all, the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs on American citizens
and tracking the activities of known associates of a presidential
candidate should have sent warning bells off, yet Brennan clearly
persisted in following the trail. What Brennan did not describe, because
it was “classified,” was how he came upon the information in the first
place. We know from the New York Times and other sources that it came
from foreign intelligence services, including the British, Dutch and
Estonians, and there has to be a strong suspicion that the forwarding of
at least some of that information might have been sought or possibly
inspired by Brennan unofficially in the first place. But whatever the
provenance of the intelligence, it is clear that Brennan then used that
information to request an FBI investigation into a possible Russian
operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to
somehow get nominated and elected, which admittedly was a longshot at
the time. That is how Russiagate began.
theantimedia |Islamist movements in the Philippines were not unknown to the U.S. Barack Obama was actually secretly drone bombing
the country during his presidency, actions almost completely ignored by
western media. As Obama should have been well aware, drone strikes only
create more radical elements and greatly expand the problem (they also expand ISIS’ recruitment pool).
Regardless, this is where this story gets interesting. Duterte has claimed multiple times, including in his recent interview with RT,
that the CIA would want to kill him for upsetting the current world
power structure and cozying up to adversaries Russia and China.
And yet, according to Duterte, even with full knowledge of this
ISIS-linked insurgency, the U.S. decided to block an arms sale to the
Pacific nation that would most likely be used to combat these militants.
On one hand, it seems the U.S. could very well be playing a game of
chess with Duterte, perhaps even going so far as facilitating the
movement of militants that could put added pressure on his defiant
government in order to ensure that America won’t lose its military bases in the country;
using the potential ISIS threat as justification for their presence. At
the same time, this refusal to sell Duterte arms will only push Duterte
closer to Russia and China; he told Russia directly that he needs modern weaponry to combat these militants. Russia will likely have no problem filling the void. In fact, according to RT, Russia and the Philippines just signed a defense cooperation agreement following these recent developments.
This is bad news for the U.S. military establishment, which will stop at nothing in order to put a wedge between Russia and the rest of the world. In tandem with the corporate media, the demonization of Duterte
is already well under way. This should give you an idea of where this
narrative is headed, as we have seen it all too often before with other former U.S. allies who came too close to America’s Cold War rival.
Though it appears Duterte and Trump may see eye to eye, in his interview with RT
Duterte claimed there are people within the State Department and
Congress who do not share Trump’s vision, making it difficult for him to
count on the U.S. as an ally.
On the other hand, this entire operation may also be an excuse for
Duterte to launch a wider crackdown on his people under the guise of
fighting terrorism. According to multiple reports,
the fighters are not actually ISIS militants but are part of a group
known as Maute, having merely pledged their allegiance to ISIS.
Just like in Afghanistan, the Syrian war formally drew in Russia in 2015, and Brzezinski’s legacy was kept alive through Obama’s direct warning to Russia’s Vladimir Putin that he was leading Russia into another Afghanistan-style quagmire.
So where might Obama have gotten this Brzezinski-authored playbook
from, plunging Syria further into a horrifying six-year-long war that
has, again, drawn in a major nuclear power in a conflict rife with war crimes and crimes against humanity?
The answer: from Brzezinski himself. According to Obama,
Brzezinski is a personal mentor of his, an “outstanding friend” from
whom he has learned immensely. In light of this knowledge, is it any
surprise that we saw so many conflicts erupt out of nowhere during
Obama’s presidency?
On February 7, 2014, the BBC published a transcript
of a bugged phone conversation between Assistant Secretary of State
Victoria Nuland and the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. In
that phone call, the representatives were discussing who they wanted to
place in the Ukrainian government following a coup that ousted
Russian-aligned president Viktor Yanukovych.
Lo and behold, Brzezinski himself advocated taking over Ukraine in his 1998 book, The Grand Chessboard, stating Ukraine was “a
new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard…a geopolitical pivot
because its very existence as an independent country (means) Russia
ceases to be a Eurasian empire.” Brzezinski warned against allowing Russia to control Ukraine because “Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”
Following Obama, Donald Trump came into office with a completely different mentality, willing to work with Russia and the Syrian government in combatting ISIS. Unsurprisingly, Brzezinski did not support Trump’s bid for the presidency and believed Trump’s foreign policy ideas lacked coherence.
All that being said, just last year Brzezinski appeared to have changed
his stance on global affairs and instead began to advocate a “global
realignment” — a redistribution of global power — in light of the fact
that the U.S. is no longer the global imperial power it once was.
However, he still seemed to indicate that without America’s global
leadership role, the result would be “global chaos,” so it seemed
unlikely his change in perception was rooted in any actual meaningful
change on the geopolitical chessboard.
Brzezinski died safely in a hospital bed, unlike the millions of
displaced and murdered civilians who were pawns in Brzezinski’s twisted,
geopolitical chess games of blood and lunacy. His legacy is one of
militant jihadism, the formation of al-Qaeda, the most devastating attack on U.S. soil by a foreign entity in our recent history,
and the complete denigration of Russia as an everlasting adversary with
which peace cannot — and should not — ever be attained.
TomDispatch | I’ve been intermittently interviewing witnesses and victims,
perpetrators and survivors of almost unspeakable atrocities. I can’t
count the number of massacre survivors and rape victims and tortured
women and mutilated men I’ve spoken with, sometimes decades -- but sometimes just days
-- after they were brutalized. In almost every case, what occurred in
only a matter of minutes irreparably altered their lives.
I’ve also spent countless hours talking with another class of
atrocity survivors: witnesses who did little else but watch and
perpetrators who beat, tortured, or killed innocents in the service of
one government or another. In almost every case, what occurred in just a
matter of minutes irreparably altered their lives, too.
Sometimes, it seemed as if the survivors coped with the trauma far
better than the perpetrators. I remember an American veteran of the
Vietnam War I once interviewed. He had a million stories, all of them
punctuated with a big, bold laugh. Jovial is the word I often use to
describe him. We talked for hours, but I finally got down to business
and he quickly grew quiet. Then, jovial he was not. I asked him about a
massacre I had good reason to believe he had seen, maybe even taken
part in. He told me he couldn’t recall it, but that he didn’t doubt it
happened. (It wasn’t the first time I’d heard such a response.) While
he had endless war stories, when it came to the darkest corner of the
conflict, he said, his memories had been reduced to one episode.
As was standard operating procedure, his unit burned villages as a
matter of course. In one of these “villes,” a woman ran up to him,
bitter and enraged, no doubt complaining that her home and all her
possessions were going up in flames. After shoving her away several
times, he drew up the butt of his rifle and slammed it straight into the
center of her face. It was an explosion of blood, he told me, followed
by shrieks and sobs. Mr. Jovial walked away laughing.
That’s it, all he could remember, he assured me. He recalled it
because he couldn’t forget it. At the time, the act was meaningless to
him. Decades later, he relived it every day -- her shattered nose, the
blood, the screams. He asked himself over and over again: How could I
have done that? How could I have walked away laughing? I suggested
that he was incredibly young and poorly trained and scared and immersed
in a culture of violence, but none of these answers satisfied him. It
was clear enough that he was never going to solve that riddle, just as
he was never going to forget that woman and what he did to her.
Today, TomDispatch regular
and former State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren takes on
these same issues, plumbing the depths of “moral injury” -- what, that
is, can happen to soldiers when the values they’re taught as civilians
are shattered on the shoals of war. Van Buren learned something of this
firsthand in Iraq and grapples with it in his new World War II novel, Hooper’s War.
“Van Buren doesn’t provide simple answers, and readers are left with
the understanding that decisions made in battle can be both right and
wrong at the same time,” saysKirkus Reviews
of this “complex” alternate history. Given America’s penchant for
ceaseless conflict, his book, like his piece today, raises questions
that remain tragically relevant.
Counterpunch | I was very impressed by this comment from Yasser Louati,
talking to Amy Goodman about the election of the revolting anti-worker
neoliberal investment banker Emmanuel Macron as President of France two
weeks ago: “France does not need an umpteenth new president; it needs a
new republic, a new constitution, a new organizing of institutions.”
Much the same can be said about the United States. Political
institutions that claim to be “democratic” while offering voters a
binary choice between regressive and dissembling neoliberal shills like
the Clintons, Obama, Emanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and Angela Merkel
on one hand and neo-fascistic white nationalists like Marine Le Pen,
Geert Wilders, Frauke Petry and Donald Trump on the other hand do, not
deserve our respect.
The United States doesn’t need a new and 46th president as
much as it needs a democracy, a new constitution, a new organizing of
institutions – including its absurdly archaic and plutocratic election
and party systems, which don’t even include direct popular election of the U.S. presidency for crying out loud.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to the end of his life with the
belief that the real faults in American life lay not so much in “men” as
in the oppressive institutions and social structures that reigned over
them. He wrote that “the radical reconstruction of society itself” was “the real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters. He had no interest, of course, in running for the White House of all things.
The Orange-Tinted Royal Brute who currently befouls the Oval Office
is an offense to humanity. Perhaps he will be forced or voted out of
office in coming months and years. In the meantime, there’s “the fierce
urgency of now” (King). We need to be building great social and
political movements for King’s project and Louatti’s recommendation now.
The environmental clock telling us to undertake a radical and
eco-socialist “reorganizing of institutions” is ticking with each new
carbon-cooked planetary day.
The U.S. ruling class is divided and befuddled like no time in recent
memory. Good. Let us build the organizations that might carry out the
great popular and democratic revolution required to save the social and
ecological commons and thus preserve chances for a decent and
democratic future. Given capitalism’s systemically inherent war on livable ecology – emerging now as the biggest issue of our or any time–
the formation of such a new and united Left popular and institutional
presence has become a matter of life and death for the species. “The
uncomfortable truth,” Istvan Meszaros
rightly argued sixteen years ago, “is that if there is no future for a
radical mass movement in our time, there can be no future for humanity
itself.”
tomdispatch | Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz has said of the upcoming Concert for Valor:
“The post-9/11 years
have brought us the longest period of sustained warfare in our nation’s
history. The less than one percent of Americans who volunteered to
serve during this time have afforded the rest of us remarkable freedoms
-- but that freedom comes with a responsibility to understand their
sacrifice, to honor them, and to appreciate the skills and experience
they offer when they return home.”
It was crafty of Schultz to redirect that famed 1% label from the
ultra rich, represented by CEOs like him, onto our “heroes.” At the
concert, I hope Schultz has a chance to get more specific about those
“remarkable freedoms.” Will he mention that the U.S. has the highest per capitaprison
population on the planet? Does he include among those remarkable
freedoms the guarantee that dogs, Tasers, tear gas, and riot police will
be sent after you if you stay out past dark protesting the killing of an unarmed Black teenager by a representative of this country’s increasingly militarized police? Will the freedom to be too big to fail and so to have the right to melt down the economy and walk away without going to prison -- as Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Chase, did -- be mentioned? Do these remarkable freedoms include having every American phone call and email recorded and stored away by the NSA?
And what about that term “hero”? Many veterans reject it, and not
just out of Gary Cooperesque modesty either. Most veterans who have seen
combat, watched babies get torn apart, or their comrades die in their
arms, or the most powerful army on Earth spend trillions of dollars
fighting some of the poorest people in the world for 13 years feel
anything but heroic. But that certainly doesn’t stop the use of the
term. So why do we use it? As journalist Cara Hoffman points out at Salon:
“‘[H]ero’ refers to a
character, a protagonist, something in fiction, not to a person, and
using this word can hurt the very people it’s meant to laud. While meant
to create a sense of honor, it can also buy silence, prevent discourse,
and benefit those in power more than those navigating the new terrain
of home after combat. If you are a hero, part of your character is stoic
sacrifice, silence. This makes it difficult for others to see you as
flawed, human, vulnerable, or exploited.”
We use the term hero in part because it makes us feel good and in
part because it shuts soldiers up (which, believe me, makes the rest of
us feel better). Labeled as a hero, it’s also hard to think twice about
putting your weapons down. Thank yous to heroes discourage dissent,
which is one reason military bureaucrats feed off the term.
There are American soldiers stationed around the globe who think
about filing conscientious objector status (as I once did), and I
sometimes hear from some of them. They often grasp the way in which the
militarized acts of imperial America are helping to create
the very enemies they are then being told to kill. They understand that
the trillions of dollars being wasted on war will never be spent on
education, health care, or the development of clean energy here at
home. They know that they are fighting for American control over the
flow of fossil fuels on this planet, the burning of which is warming our
world and threatening human existence.
themarshallproject | When police officers return to work after a military deployment, they
cannot be automatically required to sit for a mental health evaluation —
the federal Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act
prohibits it. Because of the Americans With Disabilities Act, police
departments can’t reject a job candidate for simply having a PTSD
diagnosis.
The only time most of America’s law enforcement officers,
military veterans or not, are required to sit for a mental health
analysis is when they first apply to join a police force, and the rigor
of the screening varies widely. Fewer than half of the nation’s smallest
police departments conduct pre-employment psychological testing at all,
according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Many other departments offer “screenings” in name only — in some
cases simply a computerized test with no face-to-face interview — says
Stephen Curran, a Maryland police psychologist who has researched the
transition from the military to policing.
Where there is systematic testing of would-be police, military veterans are more likely to show signs of trauma.
Matthew Guller, a police psychologist, is managing partner of a
New Jersey firm, The Institute for Forensic Psychology, that works with
about 470 law enforcement agencies across the Northeast, screening for
impairment.
Of nearly 4,000 police applicants evaluated by Guller’s firm from
2014 through October of 2016, those with military experience were
failed at a rate higher than applicants who had no military history —
8.5 percent compared to 4.8 percent.
The higher rates of trauma are exacerbated by the fact that
service members suffering PTSD often aren’t diagnosed and keep quiet
about their suffering. Although up to 20 percent of those deployed to
Iraq and Afghanistan have PTSD, only half get treated, according to a
2012 National Academy of Sciences study. Veterans are 21 percent more likely to kill themselves than adults who never enlisted, according to an August report by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
PTSD and traumatic brain injuries have been called the “signature
injuries” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Experts say trauma is
cumulative, so the transition from one potentially violent profession,
the military, into another, policing, can compound the risk.
Officers with a history of mental health problems — even those
who have been treated and are now healthy — can pose a two-fold problem
for departments who hire them. First, their history can become a
liability if the department is sued. Second, it can be used to attack their credibility on the stand if they’re called to testify.
qz | Harvey’s recent comments regarding Asian men can’t be as easily
dismissed. Essentially, Harvey told his audience that he couldn’t
imagine any way an Asian man could ever be deemed attractive—causing a
social media eruption by playing into long-standing stereotypes of Asian
males as emasculated and nonsexual.
And the reaction rapidly expanded beyond the internet. Prominent Asians, from The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng to Star Trek icon George Takei to Fresh Off the Boat author Eddie Huang, denounced Harvey—the latter in a massively shared op-ed for the New York Times. All of New York’s leading Asian American politicians sent a joint letter to Endemol Shine, who produce Harvey’s show, demanding an immediate public apology for his “offensive, classless comments.”
Within hours, the internet hive mindhad posted a staggering array of undeniably hot Asian guys, such as those on this expertly curated list by Huffington Post relationship editor Brittany Wong: “21 Fine-As-Hell Asian Men Who Will Make You Swoon And Then Some.”
This is hardly the first time lists like this have popped up—they’re
generated any time a celebrity or media organization invokes the
stereotypical image of the Asian male. Wong’s is very similar to this BuzzFeed post
published back in 2014. Some of the names and faces have changed, but
the commonalities are clear: Almost all of these men are tall,
shirtless, and have the muscles of a Greek god training for the Iron Man
triathlon.
And as a not-so-undeniably-hot Asian guy—a medium-aged divorced dad
with a one-pack, a molded-not-sculpted face and hair that’s backed
gingerly away from my forehead like it’s afraid of my eyebrows—I find
these galleries a little awkward. Highlighting a handful of insanely
gorgeous genetic-lottery winners doesn’t exactly contradict the
assertion that average Asian men like me are, in the eyes, minds, and
hearts of the West, inherently unappealing.
In fact, these hyper-hot galleries underscore the fact that these guys are exceptions to the rule;
that by reaching an optimal standard of Western masculine beauty, these
Asian men have managed to overcome their racialized lack of appeal.
unz |As the world has witnessed the oppression and
ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, many people have risen in protest. In
response, the Israeli government and certain of its advocates have
conducted a campaign to crack down on this activism, running roughshod
over civil liberties (and the English language) in the process.
The mechanism of this crackdown is the redefinition of “antisemitism”[1] to include criticism of Israel, and the insertion of this definition into the bodies of law of various countries.
Where
most people would consider “antisemitism” to mean bigotry against
Jewish people (and rightly consider it abhorrent), for two decades a
campaign has been underway to replace that definition with an
Israel-centric definition. That definition can then be used to block
speech and activism in support of Palestinian human rights as “hate.”
Various groups are applying this definition in law enforcement
evaluations of possible crimes.
Proponents
of this Israel-centric definition have promoted it step by step in
various arenas, from the U.S. State Department and European governments
to local governments around the U.S. and universities.
While
this effort has taken place over the last two decades, it is
snowballing rapidly at this time. The definition is increasingly being
used to curtail free speech and academic freedom, as well as political
activism.
Furthermore,
such politicizing of an important word may reduce its effectiveness
when real antisemitism occurs, doing a disservice to victims of true
bigotry.
As
of this writing, the U.S. Congress has endorsed the distorted
definition, the governments of the UK and Austria have officially
adopted it (in December and April, respectively), various U.S. State
legislatures are considering it, and numerous universities are using it
to delineate permissible discourse. Many representatives and heads of
other states around the world have embraced the new meaning, even if
they have yet to officially implement it.
This
article will examine the often interconnected, incremental actions that
got us where we are, the current state of affairs, and the public
relations and lobbying efforts that are promoting this twisting of the
definition of “antisemitism” — often under cover of misleadingly named
“anti-racism” movements.
jerusalempost | In 1946 there were only 543,000 Jews in Palestine. Between 1954 and
1964, according to the Immigrant Absorption Ministry, around 250,000
Jews came to Israel from Morocco. You’d think the musical impact of
that community, almost a third of the country’s population at the time,
would be immediate and that by 2017 European-origin Israelis would no
longer be whining about it. But they still are whining, because for some
of them Israel cannot have diversity, it cannot have Ethiopian
culture, or Russian culture, or Moroccan or Iranian or even Arabic
culture. These Israelis have waged a jihad against everything
non-Western since 1948, and they have lost.
To those Israelis
who dreamed of Israel being a “villa in the jungle,” a kind of Denmark
in the Middle East, or a kind of Rhodesia, everything that was
non-European was “primitive.” Journalist Ari Shavit asked fellow writer
Amos Elon if Israel had this “primitiveness” in a 2004 interview and
Elon agreed; the “primitiveness” comes from the Arab countries, he
said. What he meant was Jews from those countries.
This colonial
mentality of a subset of Israeli society cannot accept that Israel is
not a Western country, that it has major influences from non-European
peoples and cultures. It is a hybrid civilization, with Western
currents in it but a foundation that is rooted in the Middle East.
Jewish civilization has always had that hybridity. Since the time of
the Hasmoneans fighting the Greeks and the war with Rome, or the
expulsion from Spain at the hands of Catholic Europeans, Jewish history
has been East struggling with the West.
Some Jewish thinkers cannot accept this. Richard Cohen in his 2014 book Israel: Is it Good for the Jews
predicted what would happen when Israel’s “fighting intellectual,
rifle in one hand and a volume of Kierkegaard in the other,” became a
minority and “Jews from Islamic lands” became the majority. Cohen
didn’t realize Israel was never a country of “Jews holding Kierkegaard
in one hand.” This was a myth invented among American Jews about
Israel, in order to convince themselves Israel was like a miniature
version of the Upper West Side in New York, only with tanks and a flag.
Why
the fear of “Jews from Islamic lands,” who are presented as barbarians
by Israel’s European-rooted writers and their fellow travelers abroad?
The same “Western values” that welcome Syrian refugees in Europe
despise Syrian Jews in Israel? The same people who value the diversity
Moroccan immigrants bring to Paris despise Moroccan Jews in Israel.
Because
Israel’s Europhile cultural minority is rooted in a different time,
the era of Rhodesia and the Old South, when non-Europeans were still
openly called primitives. They cannot accept that Israel is not a
Western state and that the revolution of Zionism has overthrown
Europeanism in “their” Levant. They cannot accept the hybrid culture of
Israel. This is why they imagine that only when Israelis are not
“welcomed” in Europe will Israelis end the occupation of the West Bank.
Breitbart | Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has threatened to expand a
60-day state of emergency in southern Mindanao to the whole country
should the Maute group, a terrorist organization that has pledged
allegiance to the Islamic State (ISIS), expand its killing spree beyond
the island.
Duterte, who arrived home from an abbreviated trip to Russia
Wednesday, elaborated on the implications of martial law on the island.
The president suspended the writ of habeas corpus and announced that
police would no longer require a warrant on the island to arrest anyone
suspected of being a member of the terrorist group.
“Checkpoints will be allowed. Searches will be allowed. Arrest without a warrant will be allowed in Mindanao,” Duterte explained. “And
I do not need to secure any search warrant or a warrant of arrest. If
you are identified positively on the other side, you can be arrested and
detained.”
“Anyone caught possessing a gun and confronting us with violence, my
orders are shoot to kill. I will not hesitate to do it,” he vowed. “If I
think that you should die, you will die. If you fight us, you will die.
If there is an open defiance, you will die.”
“Anyone now holding a gun, confronting government with violence, my
orders are spare no one, let us solve the problems of Mindanao once and
for all. Do not force my hands into it,” he added. Duterte added that he
was mulling an order to allow civilians to use their legally purchased
guns against Maute terrorists and carry them publicly to deter violence.
Duterte added the rare warning that he would not allow police to
abuse human rights with impunity. “I will assure you I am not willing to
allow abuses. Government is still running, the Congress is functioning,
and the courts are open for citizens to seek grievance,” he assured residents. Fist tap Big Don.
KansasCity | Announcements of foiled terrorist plots make for lurid reading.
Schemes to carry out a Presidents Day
jihadist attack on a train station in Kansas City. Bomb a Sept. 11
memorial event. Blow up a 1,000-pound bomb at Fort Riley. Detonate a
weapon of mass destruction at a Wichita airport — the failed plans all
show imagination.
But how much of it was real?
Often not much, according to a review
of several recent terrorism cases investigated by the FBI in Kansas and
Missouri. The most sensational plots invoking the name of the Islamic
State or al-Qaida here were largely the invention of FBI agents carrying
out elaborate sting operations on individuals identified through social
media as being potentially dangerous.
In fact, in terrorism investigations in Wichita, at Fort Riley and last week in Kansas City,
the alleged terrorists reportedly were unknowingly following the
directions of undercover FBI agents who supplied fake bombs and came up
with key elements of the plans.
Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article135871988.html#storylink=cpy
Newsweek | Power, for Vladimir Putin, has always been closely linked to
terrorism. Back in 1999, as an unknown and untried prime minister, he
first showed Russians his steely character after a series of unexplained
bombings demolished four apartment buildings and killed more than 300
people. Putin, in his trademark brand of clipped tough-talk, announced
that the those responsible would be “rubbed out, even if they’re in the
outhouse,” and launched a renewed war against the breakaway republic of
Chechnya. The resulting wave of approval, stoked by fear of terrorism,
carried Putin to the presidency months later.
Eighteen years on
and Putin has fulfilled his promise by rubbing out many thousands of
extremists—with his army in Chechnya and all over the North Caucasus,
via Federal Security Service assassins in Turkey and Yemen, and most
recently from the air and by the hand of special forces in Syria. What’s
more, he has expanded the definition of extremists to
include not just Islamist militants but also Ukrainian filmmakers and
gay activists who share digitally altered images of Putin in garish
makeup on social media. Nonetheless, as the deadly bombing in St.
Petersburg’s metro on April 2 showed, neither violence nor repression
has put an end to terrorist attacks in Russia.
mishtalk | Despite accelerating progress towards fully autonomous cars and
trucks, many people still do not accept the obvious fact it’s going to
happen soon.
People who believe in this utopia do not understand
capitalism. We own cars because consumers chose what they wanted and
backed that up with their hard earned cash.
It is already far cheaper to ride the bus or carpool. Few choose that
because sharing has its downsides. Fleets of driverless cars are really
just a more modular bus service. Some will use this, but most will
prefer ownership.
Ass Backwards
The above line of thinking is ass backwards.
Capitalism is precisely why driverless is coming. Corporations are
betting their money and resources. The government is not resisting. The
trucking industry will save hundreds of millions of dollars. People who
believe driverless is not coming are the ones who do not understand
capitalism!
Fully autonomous vehicles are not some pie in the sky prediction by
Al Gore. Real companies (hundreds of them) all working on driverless. A
bet against them is a foolish bet against capitalism.
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
