latimes | On “Sunday Night,” Kelly came out of the gate in a much more forceful
manner than she had with Trump, and asked much harder questions. But it
was a poorly planned match in which to make an impressive launch for
her series. She has to win over a wider audience than she had at Fox,
and Putin ranks as one of the world’s toughest interview subjects, a
proven master of deception.
The interview took place in St.
Petersburg over the weekend, after Kelly had moderated the St.
Petersburg International Economic Forum, “Putin’s signature event.”
Clips
were played from the event that showed Kelly asking Putin in front of
4,000 guests about Russia’s role in the hacking of the 2016 U.S.
presidential election.
Did Russia hack the U.S. election, she
asked, pointing out that U.S. intelligence agencies had found ample
evidence, “fingerprints,” that it had meddled.
“What fingerprints,
hoof prints, horn prints?,” he answered dismissively. “What are you
talking about? … It could come from your home IP address, as if your
daughter carried out the attack.”
The setup was a recipe for
failure, especially for Kelly, who was hired for $15 million to $20
million by NBC last year after leaving Fox News, the conservative news
outlet that had launched and propelled her career.
New Republic | The
wing of the Democratic Party concerned about personnel decisions made
its opinion known almost two years ago. Dan Geldon, now chief of staff
to Senator Elizabeth Warren, met with Dan Schwerin, a top adviser to
Clinton’s campaign, in January 2015. According to an email follow-up
with Podesta and others, Geldon “was intently focused on personnel
issues, laid out a detailed case against the Bob Rubin school of
Democratic policy makers.” He was also “very critical of the Obama
administration’s choices.”
The
“Bob Rubin school” is named for the former top executive at Goldman
Sachs and Citigroup and first Clinton administration Treasury secretary.
It is composed precisely of the kinds of Democrats that the Warren wing
opposes on domestic policy, particularly on financial matters. In the
Obama administration, that school won out. Froman, chief of staff to
Rubin at Treasury, gave options for Treasury secretary that ranged from
Rubin himself to Summers and Geithner, two of his key protégés. In
another 2008 email
Rubin imagined for himself a “Harry Hopkins” position in the Obama
administration, referring to Franklin Roosevelt’s top adviser.
The
Rubin school dictated the Obama administration’s light-touch policy on
bank misconduct (which resulted in no serious legal or fiduciary
consequences for the major players) and its first-term approach to the
financial crisis (which was defined by a stimulus package that even at
the time was criticized for being woefully inadequate, as well as a
premature turn to budget-cutting). These are exactly the flaws that
Geldon, Warren’s emissary, stressed. According to Schwerin, he “spoke
repeatedly about the need to have in place people with ambition and
urgency who recognize how much the middle class is hurting and are
willing to challenge the financial industry.”
wiley | Brexit and Donald Trump's election victory are symptoms of a new
nationalist populism in western Europe and the United States. This
political and ideological movement has arisen in reaction to
reconfigurations of power, wealth, and identity that are endemic to
global neoliberalism. In the United States, however, the media's
dominant “blue-collar narrative” about Trump's victory simplifies the
relationship between neoliberalism and nationalist populism by ignoring
the role of the petty bourgeoisie and the wealthy in Trump's coalition.
An anthropology of Trump requires ethnographies of communities largely
shunned by anthropologists as well as reflexivity about the unintended
role of universities in producing support for Trump.
WaPo | Every day, U.S. intelligence agencies sweep up vast quantities of
foreign communications. Sometimes, they pick up communications involving
U.S. individuals or organizations. In reports based on those
communications, intelligence agencies “mask” the identities of the
Americans, part of an effort to protect their privacy.
Senior
government officials, however, can ask spy agencies to reveal the names
of Americans or U.S. organizations in the reports if they believe that
doing so will help them better understand the underlying intelligence.
They must have a legitimate need to know, and National Security Agency
unmaskings are reviewed by the Justice Department and the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence, known as the ODNI.
Some
officials said that House Intelligence Committee members may not have
realized spy agencies would count their requests as unmaskings. These
officials said lawmakers submitted questions that intelligence officers
could answer only by revealing the identities of U.S. individuals.
Nunes
served subpoenas this week to the CIA, the NSA and the FBI asking for
information about unmaskings requested by three former officials:
national security adviser Susan E. Rice, CIA director John Brennan and
U.N. ambassador Samantha Power.
On Thursday, Nunes tweeted,
“Seeing a lot of fake news from media elites and others who have no
interest in violations of Americans’ civil liberties via unmaskings.”
Democrats
on the panel say they believe the latest direction of Nunes’s
investigation is designed to deflect attention from the Russia probe. In
April, Nunes was forced to recuse himself from the committee’s probe of
Russia because of allegations he may have inappropriately disclosed
classified information. Nunes has denied any wrongdoing.
Current
and former U.S. intelligence officials say requests for unmaskings are a
routine and necessary part of their national security work. After
requests are made, spy agencies decide whether to provide the names.
Officials say few requests are rejected because most are legitimate.
Still,
senior officials know that unmaskings can be controversial and are
often reluctant to submit large numbers of requests. To protect
themselves from any allegations of abuse, spy agencies track unmasking
requests closely.
Rice and Brennan declined to comment. During an
appearance on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” in April, Rice denied
that she sought to improperly unveil the names of Trump campaign or
transition officials for political purposes. In recent congressional
testimony, Brennan also has denied that he made any improper unmaskings.
Power did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Counterpunch | We may not know all the details yet, but it seems fairly obvious from
the amount of leaks from the Trump White House that classified
information is being routinely gathered by operatives within the
government itself and deliberately leaked to the media in order to
inflict maximum damage on the administration. In other words, there are
elements operating within the intelligence community that are using
their power to incriminate a sitting president and remove him from
office. Simply put, the intel agencies have ‘gone rogue’ and now pose a
real and present danger to the republic itself. And while no one really
knows how much Obama knew about this massive domestic spying operation
that was going on right beneath his nose, we DO know that the collection
of information on private citizens greatly accelerated on his watch.
(“Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data
searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s
identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy
rules in 2011.”) It’s worth noting, that the ultimate goal of these
massive domestic-surveillance programs is to create a lock-down society
where the behavior of every citizen can be completely monitored and
controlled.
Trump may be a rotten president but, in the big scheme of things,
he’s just small potatoes. What we need to know is whether a shadow
government –staffed by the intel agents and political meatpuppets– now
controls the levers of state power, a hidden government that might be
planning to oust the president or –god help us–launch a war on Russia.
The only way to get to the bottom of this is by investigating the man
who appears to be at the very center of the action, John Brennan. If
anyone knows how the system really works, it’s Brennan.
WaPo | A racial slur. A homophobic joke. A mock beheading.
Anti-Trump comedians are having a moment — and not the good kind.
Bill
Maher used the n-word in a Friday-night interview with Sen. Ben Sasse
(R-Neb.), joining Kathy Griffin and Stephen Colbert on Over-the-Line
Mount Rushmore. (There's room for a fourth, and at the rate we're going,
it won't be long before another face is chiseled on.)
A conversation between Maher and Sasse about the senator's new book
veered wildly off-topic, as these late-night chats tend to do, and
arrived at the subject of adults dressing up for Halloween in
California.
“We don't do that quite as much,” Sasse said of grown-ups in his home state. That led to this:
MAHER: I've got to get to Nebraska more.
SASSE: You're welcome. We'd love to have you work in the fields with us.
MAHER: Work in the fields? Senator, I'm a house n----r.
Visibly uncomfortable, Sasse seemed unsure how to respond and said nothing.
“No, it's a joke,” Maher said, breaking the silence. Some audience members laughed. The interview went on.
Sasse later tweeted that he should have spoken up in protest.
Counterpunch | Garrow’s mammoth biography is a tour de force when it comes
to personal critique, professional appraisal, and epic research and
documentation. His mastery of the smallest details in Obama’s life and
career and his ability to place those facts within a narrative that
keeps the reader’s attention (no small feat at 1078 pages!) is
remarkable. Rising Star falls short, however, on ideological
appraisal. In early 1996, the brilliant left Black political scientist
Adolph Reed, Jr. captured the stark moral and political limits of what
would become the state and then national Obama phenomenon and indeed the
Obama presidency. Writing of an unnamed Obama, Reed observed that:
“In Chicago…we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of
foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth
Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and
vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate
seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds.
His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the
rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens,
small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation
of process over program – the point where identity politics converges
with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.”
Garrow very incompletely quotes Reed’s reflection only to dismiss it
as “an academic’s way of calling Barack an Uncle Tom.” That is an
unfortunate judgement. Reed’s assessment was richly born-out by Obama’s
subsequent political career. Like his politcio-ideological
soul-brothers Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (and perhaps now Emmanuel
Macron), Obama’s public life has been a wretched monument to the dark
power of the neoliberal corporate-financial and imperial agendas behind
the progressive pretense of façade of telegenic and silver-tongued
professional class politicos.
Reed’s prescient verdict more than 12 years before Obama became
president brings more insight to the Obama tragedy than Jager’s
reflection five years into Obama’s presidency. Obama’s nauseating taste
for supposedly (and deceptively) non-ideological “get things done”
“pragmatism,” “compromise,” and “playing it safe” – for “accepting the
world as it is instead of trying to change it” (Jager) – was not simply
or merely a personality quirk or psychological flaw. It was also and far
more significantly a longstanding way for “liberal” Democratic
presidents and other politicos to appear “tough-minded” and stoutly
determined to “getting things done” while they subordinate the
fake-populist and progressive-sounding values they mouth to get elected
to the harsh “deep state” facts of U.S. ruling class, imperial, and
“national security” power. A “pragmatic,” supposedly non-ideological
concern for policy effectiveness – “what can be accomplished in the real
world” – has long given “liberal” presidents a manly way to justify
governing in accord with the wishes of the nation’s ruling class and
power elite.
nakedcapitalism | Seeking to make sense of the $65 million figure, some have pointed to the former President’s prior book sales and Clintonesque celebrity status. Since 2001, 1995’s Dreams from My Father and 2006’s The Audacity of Hope—both
of which were published by Crown, a division of Random House (now PRH)
owned by the German multimedia conglomerate Bertelsmann—have sold
roughly 4.7 million copies, undoubtedly yielding substantial profits.
But according to industry insiders the former First Lady’s
contribution is a far greater gamble. And despite the President’s
successful publishing record the size of the contract remains something
of a mystery. At $20 per book, sales of the two books combined would
have to exceed 3.25 million copies to match the cost of the advance, and
that doesn’t include necessary overhead such as the costs of materials,
distribution, and marketing. As one insider stated, “no one expected it
to go this high, [with the books selling for] almost double what we
might have imagined…”
At this point, a brief review of the relationship between the Obama
administration and the companies behind the deal may shed light on the
logic underlying this extraordinary bid.
Since the merger of Penguin and Random House
in 2013, PRH has been owned jointly by Bertelsmann and the British
education and publishing multinational Pearson, PLC. A leading producer
of education and testing materials, Pearson has profited substantially
from one of President Obama’s major legislative initiatives—Race to the
Top (RTTT).
Much like its Bush-era predecessor, No Child Left Behind, RTTT
provides competitive funding to K-12 schools based on a range of
criteria intended to stimulate higher teacher and student performance.
Among the standards for receiving funding under RTTT is the adoption of
Common Core (CC) testing, which, in effect, incentivized school
districts to hand federal grant money over to private firms that create
CC tests.
Backed by the powerful Gates Foundation
and pushed heavily by President Obama and then Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan, RTTT was met with widespread criticism among parents,
teachers, and education scholars for its punitive and test-centric
approach to education reform. In July of 2011, outrage over the
initiative culminated in a widely publicized march
held outside the White House, attendees of which included some of the
country’s leading educators, such as Jonathan Kozol and Diane Ravitch.
Despite extensive outcry, including calls for Duncan’s resignation
in 2014 from the National Education Association and the American
Federation of Teachers, two groups that many regard as traditional
Democratic constituencies, President Obama continued to voice support
for Duncan and RTTT. When Duncan finally resigned in late-2015, Obama praised Duncan’s record,
while not-so-subtly infantilizing his critics: “Arne has done more to
bring our educational system—sometimes kicking and screaming—into the 21st century than anybody else.”
But if RTTT was a failure in the eyes of the country’s educators, it
was a remarkable success for the testing companies. Between 2010, when
RTTT first took effect, and 2014 demand for tests in the U.S. grew from $1.6 to $2.5 billion. Few firms benefitted from the rise of standardized testing in the United States as much as Pearson. According to an analysis by CNBC from 2010 to 2014 Pearson received more contracts than any other company in the industry—27 out of 128 in total.
HuffPo |Duterte called his critics “whores” and said Thursday that he was being “sarcastic” when he made the rape comments.
His spokesman had said earlier that he was using “heightened bravado”
to boost morale among the soldiers who are enforcing newly instituted
martial law on Mindinao in a crackdown on Islamic militants.
Duterte directed his fury at Chelsea Clinton. “When your father was screwing Lewinsky and the rest of the young girls there
in the office of the president, on the table ... on the sofa, did you
raise any” criticism? Duterte asked in a speech Thursday, according to
The Associated Press. Chelsea Clinton was a teenager during the Lewinsky
scandal in 1998.
The
comments were similar to ones Duterte made Wednesday. But some passages
were so crude that the words were later muted on a government video of
his speech that day, AP reported.
Clinton has not responded on Twitter.
Duterte
also accused U.S. soldiers of raping women in the Philippines and
Japan. “You Americans, like Chelsea, be careful because you live in a glass house,” he said, The New Zealand Herald reported.
pjmedia | Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)
said Friday that intelligence community sources have told him that he
was incidentally surveilled and perhaps unmasked by the Obama
administration.
"I
have reason to believe that a conversation that I had was picked up with
some foreign leader or some foreign person and somebody requested that
my conversation be unmasked," Graham told Fox News onFriday.
"All
I can say is there are 1,950 collections on American citizens talking
to people that were foreign agents being surveilled either by the CIA ,
the FBI or the NSA," he told Fox News anchor Shannon Bream on "America's
Newsroom."
"Here is the
concern. Did the people in the Obama administration listen to these
conversations -- was there a politicizing of the intelligence gathering
processes?" Graham asked. "Of the 1,950 incidental collections on
American citizens, how many of them involved presidential candidates,
members of Congress from either party -- and if these conversations were
unmasked, who made the request?"
Graham’s claim comes less than a month after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.,
sent a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee asking if his name
“or the names of other members of Congress, or individuals from our
staffs or campaigns, were included in queries or searches of databases
of the intelligence community, or if their identities were unmasked in
any intelligence reports or products.”
Graham and Paul ran as part of
a crowded Republican primary field, with neither managing to win a
state and both struggling to garner support.
The South Carolina senator is now keenly interested in everything having to do with unmasking.
"I
want to know everything there is about unmasking -- how it works and
who requested unmasking in conversations between foreign people and
American members of Congress," he said.
He added that he sent a letter to the NSA, FBI, and CIA requesting information regarding any collection pertaining to him.
"Now
if you got a reason to believe any member of Congress is committing a
crime, then you go get a warrant to follow us around like you would any
other citizen," Graham said. "But I meet with foreign leaders
all the time and I would be upset if ANY executive branch agency
listened in on MY conversations because I'm in another branch of
government."
MyceliumRunning |“I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature.
Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with
information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react
to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the
host environment in mind.
The mycelium stays in constant
molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse
enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.”
The mycelium is the part of the mushroom you usually do not see.
Most of it is found distributed throughout
the soil, consisting of a mass of branching, thread-like structures
(known as hyphae) which absorb nutrients and decompose organic
materials.
The mycelium can be exceedingly small or may form a
colony of massive proportions.
Is this the largest organism in the
world? This 2,400-acre (9.7 km2) site in eastern Oregon had a
contiguous growth of mycelium before logging roads cut through
it.
Estimated at 1,665 football fields in size and 2,200 years
old, this one fungus has killed the forest above it several
times over, and in so doing has built deeper soil layers that
allow the growth of ever-larger stands of trees.
Mushroom-forming forest fungi are unique in that their mycelial
mats can achieve such massive proportions. - Paul Stamets
Mycelium
Running
The mycelium has extraordinary
properties suitable for bioremediation.
It is capable of degrading
pesticides and plastics, and has been shown to break down petroleum
in a matter of weeks:
This, however, is only the physio-chemical
dimension of the mycelium.
According to Paul Stamets, it also has
information/consciousness associated properties:
“I see the mycelium as the Earth's
natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to
communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day
exchange information with these sentient cellular networks.
Because these externalized neurological nets sense any
impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches,
they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the
movements of all organisms through the landscape.”
- Paul Stamets
Mycelium Running
The notion that fungi may participate in
some form of planetary interspecies communication and/or
consciousness through their mycelium may seam a bit 'far out,' but
consider that mushrooms have been used to expand consciousness for
countless millennia.
Even beyond the well-known psychedelic
(literally "soul showing") properties of some species (particularly
Lion's Mane) are their
neuritogenic properties; that is, their
ability to promote new neural cell growth and the enhancement of
communication between them. The resemblance between the filamentous
structures within the brain (axons; dendrites) and the fungi within
the soil (mycelium) may therefore be more than accidental.
Our relationship to fungi is in fact closer than most think.
According to David McLaughlin, professor of plant biology at the
University of Minnesota in the College of Biological Sciences, human
cells are surprisingly similar to fungal cells.
In a 2006 Science
Daily article the topic is explored further:
In 1998 scientists discovered that
fungi split from animals about 1.538 billion years ago, whereas
plants split from animals about 1.547 billion years ago.
This
means fungi split from animals 9 million years after plants did,
in which case fungi are actually more closely related to animals
than to plants. The fact that fungi had motile cells propelled
by flagella that are more like those in animals than those in
plants, supports that.
nautil.us | Perhaps Arthur C. Clarke was being uncharacteristically unambitious. He
once pointed out that any sufficiently advanced technology is going to
be indistinguishable from magic. If you dropped in on a bunch of
Paleolithic farmers with your iPhone and a pair of sneakers, you’d
undoubtedly seem pretty magical. But the contrast is only middling: The
farmers would still recognize you as basically like them, and before
long they’d be taking selfies. But what if life has moved so far on that
it doesn’t just appear magical, but appears like physics?
After all, if the cosmos holds other life, and if some of that life has
evolved beyond our own waypoints of complexity and technology, we should
be considering some very extreme possibilities. Today’s futurists and
believers in a machine “singularity” predict that life and its
technological baggage might end up so beyond our ken that we wouldn’t
even realize we were staring at it. That’s quite a claim, yet it would
neatly explain why we have yet to see advanced intelligence in the
cosmos around us, despite the sheer number of planets it could have
arisen on—the so-called Fermi Paradox.
For example, if machines continue to grow exponentially in speed and
sophistication, they will one day be able to decode the staggering
complexity of the living world, from its atoms and molecules all the way
up to entire planetary biomes. Presumably life doesn’t have to be made
of atoms and molecules, but could be assembled from any set of building
blocks with the requisite complexity. If so, a civilization could then
transcribe itself and its entire physical realm into new forms. Indeed,
perhaps our universe is one of the new forms into which some other
civilization transcribed its world.
These possibilities might
seem wholly untestable, because part of the conceit is that sufficiently
advanced life will not just be unrecognizable as such, but will blend
completely into the fabric of what we’ve thought of as nature. But
viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few
cosmic phenomena that—at crazy as it sounds—might fit the requirements.
For example, only about 5 percent of the
mass-energy of the universe consists of ordinary matter: the protons,
neutrons, and electrons that we’re composed of. A much larger 27 percent
is thought to be unseen, still mysterious stuff. Astronomical evidence
for this dark, gravitating matter is convincing, albeit still not
without question. Vast halos of dark matter seem to lurk around
galaxies, providing mass that helps hold things together via gravity. On
even larger scales, the web-like topography traced by luminous gas and
stars also hints at unseen mass.
Cosmologists usually assume that
dark matter has no microstructure. They think it consists of subatomic
particles that interact only via gravity and the weak nuclear force and
therefore slump into tenuous, featureless swathes. They have arguments
to support this point of view, but of course we don’t really know for
sure. Some astronomers, noting subtle mismatches between observations
and models, have suggested that dark matter has a richer inner life. At
least some component may comprise particles that interact with one
another via long-range forces. It may seem dark to us, but have its own
version of light that our eyes cannot see.
In that case, dark matter could contain real complexity, and perhaps
it is where all technologically advanced life ends up or where most life
has always been. What better way to escape the nasty vagaries of
supernova and gamma-ray bursts than to adopt a form that is immune to
electromagnetic radiation? Upload your world to the huge amount of real
estate on the dark side and be done with it.
If you’re a
civilization that has learned how to encode living systems in different
substrates, all you need to do is build a normal-matter-to-dark-matter
data-transfer system: a dark-matter 3D printer. Perhaps the mismatch of
astronomical models and observations is evidence not just of
self-interacting dark matter, but of dark matter that is being
artificially manipulated.
cbsnews | With no formal training in science or engineering, Robert Bigelow
created an aerospace company with scientists and engineers that's
achieved what no one else in the industry has done. His expandable
spacecraft are the first and only alternative to the metal structures
that have housed every astronaut in space for over half a century.
For
Bigelow, it all began with growing up in a time of nuclear tests. As a
young boy, he would watch the skies over Nevada light up with the bursts
of atomic bombs.
Robert Bigelow: Witnessing those explosions in
the 50s and 60s, you weren't aware of the ultimate ramifications of
those kinds of things but there was a real strong feeling of energy and a
secretiveness and so forth and it was cool.
Armstrong: "That's one small step for man…"
Later, he watched Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon, a moment in history he said still inspires him.
Robert Bigelow: The approach wasn't lightening fast…
But
on this canyon road just outside Las Vegas, Robert Bigelow's story
takes a turn that some may find, to put it lightly, improbable. He told
us this is where his grandparents had a close encounter with a UFO.
Robert
Bigelow: It really sped up and came right into their face and filled up
the entire windshield of the car. And it took off at a right angle and
shot off into the distance.
Back in February, the Republican congressman from Wisconsin told
CNN’s Alysyn Camerota that white terrorists of the far-right variety
did not pose the same level of danger to Americans as so-called
“Islamist” or “jihadist” terrorists. Why? “I don’t know, but I would
just tell you there’s a difference,” proclaimed Duffy, who went on to
dismiss as a “one-off” the attack on a mosque in Quebec by a Trump-supporting white nationalist, in which six Muslim worshippers were killed.
One-off? Seriously? Has Duffy been reading the news in recent days?
On May 20, Richard Collins III, a black, 23-year-old U.S. Army second
lieutenant, was murdered
while visiting the University of Maryland by a member of a Facebook
group called “Alt-Reich: Nation.” According to University of Maryland
police chief David Mitchell, the group promotes “despicable” prejudice
against minorities “and especially African-Americans.”
On May 26, 53-year-old U.S. Army veteran Rick Best and 23-year-old recent university graduate Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche were murdered, while 21-year-old poet Micah David-Cole Fletcher was severely injured, by a knife-wielding white supremacist
when the three of them tried to prevent him from harassing a Muslim
woman in a headscarf on their commuter train in Portland, Oregon.
Why isn’t Duffy back on CNN decrying the threat posed by such vile
domestic terrorists? Why aren’t the Republican political and media
establishments loudly alerting voters to the white-skinned far-right
menace in their midst?
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:
Rejuvenation Pills
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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
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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
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"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
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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
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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
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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 ...
