Nancy Pelosi's Daddy Built This...,

stockboardasset |  Earlier this month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions unveiled a plan to go after doctors and pharmacies suspected of healthcare fraud by oversubscribing opioids. America’s opioid epidemic killed 33,000 people in 2015 making it the worst drug crisis in our history. Last week, President Donald Trump declared the opioid crisis a national emergency allowing the executive branch to direct funds towards treatment facilities and supplying police officers with naloxone.

As a socio-economist on the front lines of the opioid crisis in Baltimore, Maryland. I am about to take you through an opioid experience like you’ve never seen before. We’re going to travel into the inner city of Baltimore and interview current and former addicts of opioids and heroin. Some of these individuals used heroin 15-minutes before the cameras started rolling.

These individuals have never been given the chance to tell their story until now. Baltimore’s mainstream news is not allowed to share this because it breaks the narrative that everything is awesome. It turns out that Baltimore could have the largest methadone clinic in the United States called Turning Point Clinic. Each of the interviewees are current and past patients of the clinic and speak very negatively about it. A similar description of Baltimore is heard  from each of the interviewees of a hellacious city with decades of deindustrialization, drug abuse, and violent crime. 

bitterqueen |  Nancy Pelosi's father Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. allegedly was a "constant companion" of notorious mobster Benjamin "Benny Trotta" Magliano and other underworld figures during his political years in Baltimore, MD.  D'Alesandro was a Congressman for five terms from 1938 to 1947, and Baltimore mayor for three terms from 1947 to 1959.   Magliano was identified by the FBI as one of Baltimore's "top hoodlums," and he widely was acknowledged as the representative for New York's Frankie Carbo who made his bones with Murder, Inc. and later became a made guy in the Lucchese family.  The allegations are included in D'Alesandro's recently-released FBI files which Friends of Ours has obtained pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act.

In 1947 the FBI investigated Magliano for securing a draft exemption from Selective Service for himself and prize fighters he controlled by falsely representing they had essential employment at American Ship Cleaning Company which was operated by John Cataneo.   In fact, Magliano and his boxers had no such employment, and they were convicted with Cataneo in federal court for their unpatriotic draft-dodging scam.  Peter Galiano, one of the convicted boxers, told the FBI in January 1947 that "Thomas D'Alesandro was a constant companion of John Cataneo; Benjamin Magliano . . . and [redacted]":

It was reported that these individuals had worked hard for Thomas D'Alesandro's reelection to Congress and on his campaign at that time to become Mayor of Baltimore.  It was stated that John Cataneo and Magliano during the time of this campaign were under Federal indictments for violation of the Selective Service Act and for fraud against the Government and were subsequently convicted in Federal court.  Cataneo allegedly admitted giving large sums of money toward the Democratic campaign and stated that he would receive the sanitation contracts for Baltimore if Mr. D'Alesandro was elected mayor.

At that time the FBI never investigated D'Alesandro concerning this or numerous other allegations involving hoodlum associations and public corruption.  Of course, while in Congress D'Alesandro sat on the appropriations committee and was a friend of Director J. Edgar Hoover.  For example, an FBI memo dated March 27, 1946 from E. G. Fitch to D. M. Ladd provides:

Supervisor Orrin H. Bartlett advised me that while talking to Congressman Thomas D'Alesandro, Jr. (D., Md.) on March 26, 1946, the Congressman advised Agent Bartlett he was running for Congress again in the fall 1946 election and that in 1947 he was running for the office of Mayor of Baltimore.  Congressman D'Alesandro advised Agent Bartlett that since he had been on the Appropriations Committee, he has been back of the Director and the Bureau one hundred percent, and further, that he was vitally interested in and completely satisfied with the results of the Bureau's work.

Hoover sent warm congratulations to D'Alesandro upon his November 1946 re-election to the House and then his May 1947 election as Baltimore Mayor, and after leaving Congress for City Hall D'Alesandro wrote Hoover by letter dated May 14, 1947:

Thank you very much for message congratulating me on my election as Mayor of the City of Baltimore.  I was most pleased to receive your good wishes and assure you that I will do my utmost to give the people of Baltimore an efficient and outstanding administration.  I, too, will miss you and many other friends in Washington but I am grateful for the proximity of our two cities which will afford the opportunity for frequent visits when and if time permits.  Whenever you are in Baltimore, please make it a point to visit me at City Hall. 

Meanwhile, the allegations against D'Alesandro continued to pile up.  Finally, in January 1961 President John F. Kennedy requested the G-men to address "allegations of D'Alesando's involvement with Baltimore hoodlums; with favoritism in awarding city contracts; [and] protection for political contributors and the prosecution of local cases."  President Kennedy wanted to appoint D'Alesandro to the United States Renegotiation Board which was a government watchdog against profit gouging by defense contractors.  A February 6, 1961 memo from Hoover to the Baltimore and Washington Field Offices cautiously advises:  "The White House has requested that we proceed with a special inquiry investigation but that if substantial derogatory information were developed, we should report this and discontinue any further inquiries because substantiation of any of the allegations would eliminate D'Alesandro."

Where To Now Least Supreme Alt-Whites?

theatlantic  |  The rally in Charlottesville illustrated that the umbrella of the alt-right is an effective means to mobilize a highly visible mix of old-school white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Offline, at least, this isn’t the new white nationalism; it’s the old white nationalism as the primary beneficiary of the activity generated by a looser collection of people online.  

Third, the composition of the crowd in Charlottesville shows that there are more potential fracture lines in the alt-right than the optics of white supremacy. Since the 1970s, white nationalism in the United States has been a sectarian affair. White nationalists all generally agree white people should be in charge, but they have many different competing beliefs about why that is the case, and how white rule should be implemented. These differences are not trivial, and for decades they have prevented a broadly concerted campaign of action by white nationalists in America. Charlottesville was an example of how the alt-right umbrella community can muster numbers that Odinists or the KKK alone cannot.

The events scheduled for this coming Saturday—a “free speech” rally in Boston and marches scheduled in nine cities to protest Google’s firing of an employee who wrote a screed against diversity—will help clarify where all the chaotic elements that comprise the alt-right are headed in the near-term future. (The anti-Google protests are slated for Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, Seattle, New York, Washington, Austin, Boston, and Mountain View, California. On Sunday, organizers released a statement condemning violence and insisting that they are “in no way associated with any group who organized” in Charlottesville.)

Prior to Fields’s attack, Charlottesville was on track to be a clear victory for the alt-right. While attendance of 500 people is a pittance compared to most mainstream political events, it represents a marked upswing from 2016. Simply turning out that many people in one place was an unqualified win.

The fact that few participants sought to conceal their identities was a bold statement about the mainstreaming of white nationalism, which did not go unnoticed during an ominous torch-wielding event the night before the formal rally. Even after the “Unite the Right” rally itself was shut down by authorities as an unlawful assembly in the face of escalating violence, the event was seen as a show of strength.

But the terrorist attack by Fields, who attended the rally alongside a neo-Nazi group known as Vanguard America, was a game-changer. Videos posted online depicted his car accelerating down a street to target a group of pedestrians with devastating effect. The horrifying attack, recorded in graphic detail, sparked a massive national outpouring of outrage and condemnation. When “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler attempted to hold a press conference on Sunday in Charlottesville, he was chased away by a crowd of people shouting “murderer” and “shame.”

The question now is how the alt-right will process the backlash, and an early indicator will be seen in Saturday’s marches and rallies.

More Authoritah And Respeck For My Two-Piece and a Biscuit Wymyn

unz |  This past Saturday night, August 12, the media was filled to overflowing with nothing but lurid and hysterical accounts of the “violence” and the “massacre” by so-called “white nationalists” (alternately identified as “white supremacists” or “white racists”) inflicted on poor, innocent “counter demonstrators” in Charlottesville who were “protesting hate and bigotry.” That’s the narrative that showed up, including wall-to-wall coverage on Fox, overpowering everything else, and spewed forth as if handed down from Mount Olympus by assorted “wise” Republican senators, including most notably Marco Rubio, Orrin Hatch, and John McCain, whose biggest complaint was that Donald Trump somehow did not specify that the violence was exclusively caused by something that is termed the “Alt-right.”

 

Nary a word about the ultimate and real responsibility of the American Left for a continuing history of violence, nary a word about the responsibility of the so-called “resist Trump” organizations and their actions, nary a word about the uncontrolled rampaging of the Black Lives Matter movement (e.g., Ferguson, Baltimore, etc.), nary a word about the stepped up and planned confrontations by the “antifa” (self-titled “antifascists”) militants. That is, not one word about the history of virulent street action, fire bombing, trashing of private property, and, yes, attempts to kill anyone (e.g., Representative Steve Scalise) to the perceived right of, say, John McCain, anyone who might in any way say a good word about Donald Trump, or defend older American traditions and beliefs.

Continually, the networks portray what happened Saturday as simply the manifestation of extremism and bigotry from the Right. And practically the only voice that got even remotely close to a rational perspective came from, quite ironically, a black professor, Carol Swain at Vanderbilt University, who distinguished between the very legitimate desires, aspirations and fears of America’s under-attack white majority and the misapprehension that somehow those desires equal inevitably “white racism” or “white supremacy.” As Swain indicated, what has happened during the past few decades is a palpable marginalization of millions of hard working Americans, mostly white and mostly Christian, who have been sidelined and left behind by the advancing progressivist revolution (these last words are mine). They are not naturally “racists” or even “white supremacists,” but rather they seek to guarantee their own survival, and the survival of their families, their communities, and their culture. They have seen the standards, beliefs, traditions, morality and customs that they inherited and have cherished—they have seen them attacked, ridiculed, and, in many cases, banned, even criminalized.

The so-called “Alt-right” march and their demonstration in Charlottesville, then, must be seen as something of a predictable boiling over of that legitimate and simmering sentiment. Protesting the attempt to take down the historic Robert E. Lee statue was not, in this sense, the underlying reason for the Alt-right protest. Rather, it served as a much broader, if much angrier and extreme, reminder of what is and has been occurring in our society, a symbol of the continuing destruction of this nation and its history by those who zealously possess and attempt to impose a world view, a template, which is the antithesis of those beliefs and that faith that millions of us have inherited and which we hold dear and believe.

 

The attacks by nearly the entirety of the media—including notably Fox—on the “Alt-right” demonstrators as “white racists” and “white supremacists,” then, is not only misguided scattershot, but it partakes in the dominant and ideologically leftist Deep State establishment narrative which posits as absolute truth that “hate,” “bigotry,” “racism,” ad nauseum, only come from what they identity as the “far” or “extreme” right, or more recently, “Alt-right.” And those terms are all-inclusive for anyone who dissents even in the slightest from the ongoing progressivist Revolution.

Thus, when the president condemned violence from “both sides,” it was as if Mount Vesuvius had erupted and had poured down its ash and lava all over Pompei! The Mainstream Media went literally berserk in outrage and demanded that he specify by name the “right” and “rightist violence.” And in jumped with both feet the obsequiously sickening Marco Rubio and Karl Rove, obedient to the standard Deep State mindset, urging the president to condemn “white nationalism” and “white supremacy.”

And so it went throughout that afternoon and evening…until I finally couldn’t take it any longer, and switched over to watch John Wayne in John Ford’s 1950 film masterpiece, “Rio Grande.” (It is always a gracious reward at the end to hear the Yankee band strike up “Dixie” as the Union troops pass in review!)

Certainly, the Alt-right demonstrators in Charlottesville included some extreme elements. Certainly, some would advocate a form of “supremacy,” or rather a return to a time when white people had more authority in this nation.

A Deep State Charlottesville Ukraine Connection?

ibtimes |  In 2012, the EU parliament voiced concern about "rising nationalistic sentiment in Ukraine, expressed in support of the Svoboda party".

"[Parliament] recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views go against the EU's fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic parties in the Verkhovna Rada [Ukraine's legislature] not to associate with, endorse, or form coalitions with this party."

In 2005 Tyahnybok signed an open letter to then Ukrainain president Viktor Yushchenko urging him to ban all Jewish organisations, including the Anti-Defamation League, which he claimed carried out "criminal activities [of] organised Jewry", ultimately aimed at the genocide of the Ukrainian people.

In December, US Republican senator John McCain flew to Kiev to meet the three leaders of the opposition at a rally against then president Victor Yanukovich. McCain sparked criticism when he shook hands with Tyahnybok.

In a leaked phone conversation with the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, US secretary of state Victoria Nuland revealed her wish for Tyahnybok to remain "on the outside" but to consult opposition leader Arseniy Yatsenyuk "four times a week".

Fifteen thousand Svoboda members held a torchlit ceremony in the city of Lviv in January to honour Stepan Bandera, a Nazi collaborator who led forces to ethnically cleanse western Ukraine of Poles in 1943 and 1944. Over 90,000 Poles and many Jews were killed.

"Lviv has become the epicentre of neo-fascist activity in Ukraine, with elected Svoboda officials waging a campaign to rename its airport after Bandera and successfully changing the name of Peace Street to the name of the Nachtigall Battalion, an OUN-B wing that participated directly in the Holocaust," AlterNet explained.

In Washington, the OUN-B reconstituted under the banner of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA) .

"By the mid-1980s, the Reagan administration was honeycombed with UCCA members. Reagan personally welcomed Stetsko, the Banderist leader who oversaw the massacre of 7,000 Jews in Lviv, in the White House in 1983.

"'Your struggle is our struggle,' Reagan told the former Nazi collaborator. 'Your dream is our dream'," AterNet claimed.

In 2010, Viktor Yushchenko who was president of Ukraine at the time, awarded Bandera the title National Hero of Ukraine.

"When the European parliament condemned Yushchenko's proclamation as an affront to European values, the UCCA-affiliated Ukrainian World Congress reacted with outrage, accusing the EU of another attempt to rewrite Ukrainian history during WWII," AlterNet continued.

"On its website, the UCCA dismissed historical accounts of Bandera's collaboration with the Nazis as Soviet propaganda."

Slate Hops On Top Of Charlottesville Conspiracy Theorists

slate | Over the course of the day, two similar threads held the second highest spot in that forum. One argued that “Unite the Right” organizer Jason Kessler was possibly a secret pro-Obama operative and another said that far-right rallies across the country were part of an “organized smear campaign.”

Alt-right media personality Mike Cernovich, meanwhile, claimed that the violence was being initiated by left-wing groups in order to provoke a civil war. Another prominent alt-right social media voice, Jack Posobiec, said it was part of a “deep state [plot] to remove Trump allies in the WH and accelerate their coup.”

Julian Assange compared the torch-lit rally in Charlottesville to ones that took place in Ukraine in 2014, which he and alt-right voices also claim were Soros-funded affairs meant to foment the breakdown of civil society.

Finally, former Breitbart writer Patrick Howley wrote that by pressuring the president to denounce the racist attack, “Trump’s enemies are clearly hoping to separate Trump from any and all militia groups that could take part in potential acts of civil disobedience if Trump gets impeached and the nation heads into a Civil War-type scenario.”

His old boss, Steve Bannon, is now one of the most senior officials in Donald Trump's government.

Did the Unite the White Neckbeard Sausage Festival Have Deep State Backing After All?

reddit |  Just did some digging and I found out that this little fuck was a leftist operative until when? You guessed it - November 2016.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, (fuck them, but they've done good research into him), Jason Kessler was previously involved with the Occupy Movement and was an ardent Obama supporter through both terms.

He only changed his views in November 2016 (top kek), and established his white supremacist group, "Unity & Security For America" in January 2017.

Kessler organized this rally, in a similar vein to prior free speech rallies to get as many Trump supporters there as possible, and went on to invite several neo-Nazi and KKK groups to smear everyone attending.

This is right up the alley of Scott Foval and Bob Creamer, Democratic operatives who organized "bird-dogging" at Trump rallies last year to smear regular Trump supporters as racist and violent.

Jason Kessler should be arrested.

Spez: He also has several prior charges including assault (as recently as this year), obstruction of justice and failure to appear.

Spez2: From u/SethEllis: https://twitter.com/JasonBKessler/status/896388650824384512

As a result of this tweet, I'm removing the section about CNN for now as it has come to my attention that it may be a different Jason Kessler. If someone can confirm it was the Kessler in question I will put back the info about CNN.

Spez3: Also removing the part where a "Jason Kessler" received money for assisting a Democrat in his Senate run. Same reason as Spez2.

Spez4: u/William-WallaceGhost has posted a video from Lee Stranahan breaking down several instances of this rally that are identical to the lead-up to the Ukrainian coup of 2013, including the Mosquito Torch March, the chants of "Blood and Soil", and the demonization of Ukrainian government supporters, orchestrated by Soros, McCain and Graham. Link

Spez5: This post is getting brigaded. Look out for posts from users spamming conspiracy theories defending Challenger Nazi.

Spez6: Apparently ZeroHedge is running this story. Link

 

Spez7: From u/pdotuts: Has Kessler been mentioned in any of the leaked emails?

Spez8: Kessler BTFO by Alex Jones: https://twitter.com/infowars/status/897269114963509249

Spez9: From u/FraudulentNews: Courtesy of James O'Keefe, a Tutorial in Bird-Dogging, Featuring Scott "Cuck" Foval and Bob "Cuck" Creamer

UPDATE: So, it looks like my post has hit a fever pitch. Reported by DailyCaller, ZeroHedge, Business Insider and InfoWars. That alone means millions of people have seen this crucial information.

Listen Little Man - No Romantic Violence Without Deep State Backing

npr |  If, underneath that fundamental search is something that's broken — I call them potholes — is there abuse or trauma or mental illness or addiction? In my case, many years ago, it was abandonment. I felt abandoned, and that led me to this community. But what happens is because there are so many marginalized young people, so many disenfranchised young people today with not a lot to believe in, with not a lot of hope, they tend to search for very simple black and white answers.

Because of the Internet, we now have this propaganda machine that is flooding the Internet with conspiracy theory propaganda from the far right — disinformation — and when a young person who feels disenchanted, or disaffected, goes online where most of them live, they're able to find that identity online.

They're able to find that community, and they're able to find that purpose that's being fed to them by savvy recruiters who understand how to target vulnerable young people. And they go for this solution because, frankly, it promises paradise. And it requires very little work except for dedicating your life to that purpose.

But I can say that they're all being fooled, because the people at the very top have an agenda. And it's a broken ideology that can never work, that in fact, is destroying people's lives more than the promise that they were given of helping the world or saving the white race.

On Charlottesville as a turning point for this country politically and philosophically

I believe that the world has now seen what we have been sweeping under the rug for many many years — thinking we were in a post-racial society. ... I think that this catalyst shows the world 1. That it's a problem, a real problem that exists in our country; 2: that white extremism should be classified as terrorism, and now that we attached the terrorism word to it, it will get more resources. It will be at the top of people's minds.

What people need to understand is that since Sept. 11, more Americans have been killed on U.S. soil by white supremacists than by any other foreign or domestic group combined by a factor of two. Yet we don't really talk about that, nor do we even call these instances of the shooting at Charleston, S.C., or what happened at Oak Creek, Wis., at the Sikh temple or even what happened in Charlottesville this weekend — as terrorism.

Why Unite the White Was a Neckbeard Sausage Festival

realitycallshow |   CK: My big question is this: Why does the alt-right movement appear to be so overwhelmingly male? Is it just that less women come out to highly-visible protests like Charlottesville, or are there just far fewer women involved in the movement than men?

TM: Judging by the analytics data of my and other Alt Right personalities’ social media accounts, I estimate the Alt Right is about 15% female.

White males are fed up of being systematically disenfranchised and discriminated against through affirmative action in all of its many manifestations. But maybe more importantly, the Alt Right is overtly patriarchal.

We expect men to take leadership positions and to put themselves on the front lines. We do not expect, or want this of women – not because we hate women, but because we don’t view it as their job. The Alt Right doesn’t expect women to put themselves in dangerous situations, and instead seeks to protect them.

CK: Do you think the media tries to minimize the presence of women at alt-right gatherings like this? (almost all the big photos circulated from Charlottesville featured men)

TM: The media tries to minimize all aspects of the Alt Right that make it look remotely reasonable. We see this when they show closeups of the few odd guys out of thousands who take it upon themselves to do Nazi salutes or wear KKK outfits.

Most of us in the Alt Right view Nazi and KKK symbolism either with distaste, or we use it ironically to trigger hysteria in the uninitiated (for entertainment purposes).

The vast majority of people in the Alt Right don’t care about Nazis, or about the KKK. We are focused on the issues that whites face today.

CK: If you agree that there are far fewer women involved, what stops them from affiliating with the alt-right? Ideological reasons, or something else?

TM: What motivates the Alt Right is the love of our people and the desire to protect them from being disenfranchised politically. Men are naturally more likely to notice trends like this and to feel it is their duty to take action to protect their people. So we put this down to biological male/female roles.

We don’t believe that male/female roles are conditioned by society to any great extent, but that they are biologically engrained in us, so we would not consider this ideological but simply a manifestation of the natural way of things.

It’s not the role of women to protect the borders, the nation, or the family. So we do not expect this of women, nor do we find it strange that they are less represented in something that we view as an innately male occupation: guarding territory.

What Happened With The Charlottesville Police?

“But when the tear gas started to fly, thrown by protesters, the police themselves began to evacuate then. I asked the guy who was in charge, “Where you going?” He said, “We’re leaving. It’s too dangerous.” They had a chance to nip this thing in the bud and they chose not to.“

What Are These White Men Fighting For?

Narrative Construction: Only Morons Believe These War Drums

medium | Political IQ test: What does it mean when CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and the President’s Twitter account all agree that a foreign state poses a suddenly increased threat to America?

A) If they all agree it must be true!
B) Well I dislike some of those outlets, but I trust one of them.
C) The US intelligence community would never lie to us.
D) Hmm… this sounds an awful lot like the leadup to Iraq?

If you said anything but D, you are of course a fucking moron. The United States power establishment has an extensive history of using lies, false flags and propaganda to manipulate its hundreds of millions of citizens into supporting needless military interventionism. From the Gulf of Tonkin incident to the false Nayirah testimony to the amazing network of lies spun about Saddam Hussein to the “humanitarian” intervention in Libya to the unconscionable Bana Alabed psy-op in Syria, there is no depth to which the US war machine will not stoop in deceiving the public about the need to unload the military-industrial complex’s expensive inventory onto some third world country overseas, no limit to the evils that America’s unelected power establishment will commit in order to secure geopolitical dominance, and no end to the mass media propaganda machine’s willingness to report war propaganda as objective fact.

It is quite literally impossible to be too paranoid about these people. If you had an acquaintance who was a known compulsive liar with an extensive history of duping people into fighting one another for his own sociopathic amusement, how would you react if he handed you a gun and told you that your neighbor is getting ready to attack you?

The US government lies about war, and Phil Donahue was fired from his top-ranked show for expressing skepticism about the Iraq invasion. This fact should overlay every single segment of news media you consume which has anything to do with a potential military rival of the United States and its allies/client states. Like Dr. Gregory House’s perpetual mantra “people lie”, awareness of the US war machine’s love of deceit and manipulation is absolutely essential in forming a clear worldview.

U.S. - Venezuela - Russia - Oil

reuters |  Venezuela’s unraveling socialist government is increasingly turning to ally Russia for the cash and credit it needs to survive – and offering prized state-owned oil assets in return, sources familiar with the negotiations told Reuters. 

As Caracas struggles to contain an economic meltdown and violent street protests, Moscow is using its position as Venezuela’s lender of last resort to gain more control over the OPEC nation’s crude reserves, the largest in the world. 

Venezuela's state-owned oil firm, Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), has been secretly negotiating since at least early this year with Russia's biggest state-owned oil company, Rosneft (ROSN.MM) - offering ownership interests in up to nine of Venezuela's most productive petroleum projects, according to a top Venezuelan government official and two industry sources familiar with the talks. 

Moscow has substantial leverage in the negotiations: Cash from Russia and Rosneft has been crucial in helping the financially strapped government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro avoid a sovereign debt default or a political coup. 

Rosneft delivered Venezuela’s state-owned firm more than $1 billion in April alone in exchange for a promise of oil shipments later. On at least two occasions, the Venezuelan government has used Russian cash to avoid imminent defaults on payments to bondholders, a high-level PDVSA official told Reuters. 

Rosneft has also positioned itself as a middleman in sales of Venezuelan oil to customers worldwide. Much of it ends up at refineries in the United States – despite U.S. sanctions against Russia – because it is sold through intermediaries such as oil trading firms, according to internal PDVSA trade reports seen by Reuters and a source at the firm. 

PDVSA and the government of Venezuela did not respond to requests for comment.

The Russian government declined to comment and referred questions to the foreign ministry and the ministries of finance and defense, which did not respond to questions from Reuters. Rosneft declined to comment.

Philippino Girls Still Just $.50...,

wikipedia |  Human trafficking and the prostitution of children is a significant issue in the Philippines, often controlled by organized crime syndicates.^[1][2] Human Trafficking in the Philippines is a crime against humanity.^{[3][4][5][6][7]}

In an effort to deal with the problem, the Philippines passed R.A. 9208, the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act of 2003, a penal law against human trafficking, sex tourism, sex slavery and child prostitution.^[8] In 2006, enforcement was reported to be inconsistent.^[9]

Davao City

October 5 has become the Day of No Prostitution Campaign in Davao City. In 2005, the Philippine Information Agency reported documented cases of children as young as 10 years old forced into prostitution in Davao. Davao provinces, along with the Caraga region, have become the favorites of child traffickers posing as tourists.^[53] An undated article reported that, based on an October 1997 source, Davao is one of the top five areas for child prostitution and sex tourism.^[54] In 1998, the Tambayan Center for Abused Street Girls reported more than 1,000 teenage girls had turned to prostitution in Davao City, charging as little as 50 cents.^[55]

White Women Only $12.99?

nationalreview |  “Well, you try paying that much for a case of pop,” says the irritated proprietor of a nearby café, who is curt with whoever is on the other end of the telephone but greets customers with the perfect manners that small-town restaurateurs reliably develop. I don’t think much of that overheard remark at the time, but it turns out that the local economy runs on black-market soda the way Baghdad ran on contraband crude during the days of sanctions. 

It works like this: Once a month, the debit-card accounts of those receiving what we still call food stamps are credited with a few hundred dollars — about $500 for a family of four, on average — which are immediately converted into a unit of exchange, in this case cases of soda. On the day when accounts are credited, local establishments accepting EBT cards — and all across the Big White Ghetto, “We Accept Food Stamps” is the new E pluribus unum – are swamped with locals using their public benefits to buy cases and cases — reports put the number at 30 to 40 cases for some buyers — of soda. Those cases of soda then either go on to another retailer, who buys them at 50 cents on the dollar, in effect laundering those $500 in monthly benefits into $250 in cash — a considerably worse rate than your typical organized-crime money launderer offers — or else they go into the local black-market economy, where they can be used as currency in such ventures as the dealing of unauthorized prescription painkillers — by “pillbillies,” as they are known at the sympathetic establishments in Florida that do so much business with Kentucky and West Virginia that the relevant interstate bus service is nicknamed the “OxyContin Express.” A woman who is intimately familiar with the local drug economy suggests that the exchange rate between sexual favors and cases of pop — some dealers will accept either — is about 1:1, meaning that the value of a woman in the local prescription-drug economy is about $12.99 at Walmart prices. 

Last year, 18 big-city mayors, Mike Bloomberg and Rahm Emanuel among them, sent the federal government a letter asking that soda be removed from the list of items eligible to be used for EBT purchases. Mayor Bloomberg delivered his standard sermon about obesity, nutrition, and the multiplex horrors of sugary drinks. But none of those mayors gets what’s really going on with sugar water and food stamps. Take soda off the list and there will be another fungible commodity to take its place. It’s possible that a great many cans of soda used as currency go a long time without ever being cracked — in a town this small, those selling soda to EBT users and those buying it back at half price are bound to be some of the same people, the soda merely changing hands ceremonially to mark the real exchange of value, pillbilly wampum.

Dutertism: I Will Kill You If You Destroy My Country And The Youth Of My Land

WaPo |  A further, related point needs to be made: Duterte has been careful to lay out a case to the public and his subordinates for a “just war” through the use of dossiers containing lists of officials and others he insists are drug lords, which he waves around during speeches. Some of these are explicitly identified; others are mentioned obliquely, suggesting that he is giving them a chance to mend their ways. And always, he warns: If you do not surrender or stop, do not be surprised by what happens to you.

This method provides an alibi not only for himself but also for all officialdom. Here is political will in spades: assuming responsibility, reiterating the justness of his war, assuring everyone implicated that the president has their backs. Whether shocked or awed by the outcome, the country is assured of one thing: their collective innocence in what has transpired. And so the country can applaud the liquidations with a clear conscience.

The day after Tillerson left, having dispensed with the looming expectation of foreign criticism, Duterte was triumphant and uncompromising. Addressing the police during their anniversary celebrations, he said: “Find me a law … that says it is illegal to say those words, ‘I will kill you if you destroy my country and the youth of my land.’ “

rappler |   Early this month, he threatened to expose Inquirer's majority owners, the Prieto-Rufino families. Two weeks later, on July 17, the Prietos sold their stake to business tycoon Ramon Ang, a close associate of the President. (READ: Meet Ramon Ang, Filipino billionaire and Dutert's friend)

In targeting Rappler, he cited Article 16, Section 11 of the Constitution. "The ownership and management of mass media shall be limited to citizens of the Philippines, or to corporations, cooperatives or associations, wholly-owned and managed by such citizens,"reads the charter.

Rappler has debunked this claim on foreign ownership, which was first circulated by Duterte's online defenders. (READ: Debunking lies about Rappler)

Rappler is 100% Filipino-owned even if the company uses Philippine Depositary Receipts (PDRs) to allow foreign partners to have commercial interests.

Omidyar Network and North Base Media, groups composed of international journalists and investors, have economic interests but own no part of Rappler.

 

PDRs are financial tools that individuals or entities can use to have a stake in a company they believe in. Their involvement is limited to potential commercial benefits. They neither get voting rights on the Board nor have a say in the management or day-to-day operations of the company.

Damore Attacked Human Resources - Human Resources Cried - Damore Got Fried

Damore wasn't fired because of facts, his screed wasn't factually weighty. Nothing calling itself "evolutionary psychology" is even remotely scientific - it's just institutionally permitted/promoted Bee Deeism. I would certainly expect anyone having spent any time hereabouts to know better by now. Oh well..., I've come to expect very little of these humans and they seldom disappoint. Quillette grinding its alt-right red-pill axe with a hodge-podge of "evolutionary psychologists"doesn't make any of it legit, but it's like polishing and waxing the red-pill before it's bottled.

Google's executives didn't fire Damore because they disagreed with his "facts" or his "science". Like so many overpaid Thomas Friedmans, these silicon valley phuktards mostly agree with Damore's gamma male gas. Wrong as it is, and like a turd that wouldn't flush, Damore's screed floated around Google for more than a month, proof positive that most of its content hadn't bothered any Google executives at all.

Not having taken action for a month, why did Google all of a sudden clumsily spasm and blow this silly nerd-turd into a headline-grabbing shit-storm?

Simple. 

Damore publicly questioned the competence of Google's senior leadership. 

Take any executive, question his/her competence and the wisdom of his/her policies in a public forum - and see how long your employment lasts. Questioning the authority of "top people", the "thought-leadership" is the totality of why Damore got fired. Danielle Brown was a failure at Intel. She is guaranteed to be an even more epic failure at Google. What specifically in her background qualifies her to effectively integrate ANY of these hardcore nerd-herds?

Damore had the temerity to point out that Google is failing by its own metrics.  Google's "diversity policy" is guaranteed to fail, not because of biology as he pseudo-scientifically tried to claim, but because Human Resources and Danielle Brown is a waste of time, money, and conversation - and his screed brought ill-timed light and heat to this inconvenient truth. 

Executives are overpaid bureaucrats. Top, thought-leading bureaucrats aren't hired to provide answers.  They exist to provide the answers. When their authority 'work' is questioned, you've questioned their raison d'etre. By positing competing beliefs, Damore effectively attacked the institutional authority installed at Google, and by extension - as we know from Assange's article - the institutional authority that runs elite American governance itself!!!

Top people, thought-leadership, clusters like cliques in a high school. These overpaid pompous jackasses also behave exactly like cliques in a high school.  Gossip, pettiness, insecurity, vindictiveness, and group think are normative qualities at the pinnacle of the elite corporate psychopathocracy. Everything else is foolish peasant conversation....,

Google Is Not What It Seems

wikileaks |  There was nothing politically hapless about Eric Schmidt. I had been too eager to see a politically unambitious Silicon Valley engineer, a relic of the good old days of computer science graduate culture on the West Coast. But that is not the sort of person who attends the Bilderberg conference four years running, who pays regular visits to the White House, or who delivers “fireside chats” at the World Economic Forum in Davos.43 Schmidt’s emergence as Google’s “foreign minister”—making pomp and ceremony state visits across geopolitical fault lines—had not come out of nowhere; it had been presaged by years of assimilation within US establishment networks of reputation and influence.   

 

On a personal level, Schmidt and Cohen are perfectly likable people. But Google's chairman is a classic “head of industry” player, with all of the ideological baggage that comes with that role.44 Schmidt fits exactly where he is: the point where the centrist, liberal, and imperialist tendencies meet in American political life. By all appearances, Google's bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the “benevolent superpower.” They will tell you that open-mindedness is a virtue, but all perspectives that challenge the exceptionalist drive at the heart of American foreign policy will remain invisible to them. This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil.” They believe that they are doing good. And that is a problem.

Google is "different". Google is "visionary". Google is "the future". Google is "more than just a company". Google "gives back to the community". Google is "a force for good".

Even when Google airs its corporate ambivalence publicly, it does little to dislodge these items of faith.45 The company’s reputation is seemingly unassailable. Google’s colorful, playful logo is imprinted on human retinas just under six billion times each day, 2.1 trillion times a year—an opportunity for respondent conditioning enjoyed by no other company in history.46 Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the US intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its “don’t be evil” doublespeak. A few symbolic open letters to the White House later and it seems all is forgiven. Even anti-surveillance campaigners cannot help themselves, at once condemning government spying but trying to alter Google’s invasive surveillance practices using appeasement strategies.47

Nobody wants to acknowledge that Google has grown big and bad. But it has. Schmidt’s tenure as CEO saw Google integrate with the shadiest of US power structures as it expanded into a geographically invasive megacorporation. But Google has always been comfortable with this proximity. Long before company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin hired Schmidt in 2001, their initial research upon which Google was based had been partly funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).48 And even as Schmidt’s Google developed an image as the overly friendly giant of global tech, it was building a close relationship with the intelligence community.

In 2003 the US National Security Agency (NSA) had already started systematically violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) under its director General Michael Hayden.49 These were the days of the “Total Information Awareness” program.50 Before PRISM was ever dreamed of, under orders from the Bush White House the NSA was already aiming to “collect it all, sniff it all, know it all, process it all, exploit it all.”51 During the same period, Google—whose publicly declared corporate mission is to collect and “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”52—was accepting NSA money to the tune of $2 million to provide the agency with search tools for its rapidly accreting hoard of stolen knowledge.53

In 2004, after taking over Keyhole, a mapping tech startup cofunded by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the CIA, Google developed the technology into Google Maps, an enterprise version of which it has since shopped to the Pentagon and associated federal and state agencies on multimillion-dollar contracts.54 In 2008, Google helped launch an NGA spy satellite, the GeoEye-1, into space. Google shares the photographs from the satellite with the US military and intelligence communities.55 In 2010, NGA awarded Google a $27 million contract for “geospatial visualization services.”56

In 2010, after the Chinese government was accused of hacking Google, the company entered into a “formal information-sharing” relationship with the NSA, which was said to allow NSA analysts to “evaluate vulnerabilities” in Google’s hardware and software.57 Although the exact contours of the deal have never been disclosed, the NSA brought in other government agencies to help, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

Censorship is for Losers...,

NYTimes |  Silicon Valley’s politics have long skewed left, with a free-market’s philosophy and a dash of libertarianism. But that goes only so far, with recent episodes putting the tech industry under the microscope for how it penalizes people for expressing dissenting opinions. Mr. Damore’s firing has now plunged the nation’s technology capital into some of the same debates that have engulfed the rest of the country.

Such fractures have been building in Silicon Valley for some time, reaching even into its highest echelons. The tensions became evident last year with the rise of Donald J. Trump, when a handful of people from the industry who publicly supported the then-presidential candidate faced blowback for their political decisions.

At Facebook, Peter Thiel, an investor and member of the social network’s board of directors, was told he would receive a negative evaluation of his board performance for supporting Mr. Trump by a peer, Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix. And Palmer Luckey, a founder of Oculus VR, a virtual reality start-up owned by Facebook, was pressured to leave the company after it was revealed that he had secretly funded a pro-Trump organization.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said on Twitter that “censorship is for losers” and offered to hire Mr. Damore. Steven Pinker, a Harvard University cognitive scientist, said on Twitter that Google’s actions could increase support for Mr. Trump in the tech industry.

“Google drives a big sector of tech into the arms of Trump: fires employee who wrote memo about women in tech jobs,” Dr. Pinker wrote.

One of the most outspoken supporters of Mr. Trump in Silicon Valley has been Mr. Thiel, a founder of PayPal, who has since faced derision from other people working in tech for his political stance. In a sign of how deep that ill feeling runs, Netflix’s Mr. Hastings warned Mr. Thiel last August, a few weeks after Mr. Trump had accepted the Republican nomination for president, that he would face consequences for backing Mr. Trump.

Mr. Thiel, also one of the original investors in Facebook, had given a prime-time speech supporting Mr. Trump at the Republican convention. In contrast, Mr. Hastings, a supporter of Hillary Clinton, said earlier last year that Mr. Trump, if elected, “would destroy much of what is great about America.”

Mr. Hastings, the chairman of a committee that evaluates Facebook’s board members, told Mr. Thiel in an email dated Aug. 14 that the advocacy would reflect badly on Mr. Thiel during a review of Facebook directors scheduled for the next day.

“I see our board being about great judgment, particularly in unlikely disaster where we have to pick new leaders,” Mr. Hastings wrote in the email to Mr. Thiel, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. "I’m so mystified by your endorsement of Trump for our President, that for me it moves from ‘different judgment’ to ‘bad judgment.’ Some diversity in views is healthy, but catastrophically bad judgment (in my view) is not what anyone wants in a fellow board member.”

Mr. Thiel and Mr. Hastings declined to comment through their spokesmen; neither challenged the authenticity of the email. Both of the men remain on Facebook’s board.

Another prominent Trump supporter affiliated with Facebook, Mr. Luckey, did not last at the company.

The Establishment Defeated the Black Panthers - Can It Defeat The Alt-Right?

breitbart |  To young people and the politically disengaged, debate in the public square today appears topsy-turvy. The regressive Left loudly insists that it stands for equality and racial justice while praising acts of racial violence and forcing white people to sit at the back of the bus (or, more accurately, the back of the campus — or in another campus altogether). It defends absurd feminist positions with no basis in fact and ridicules and demeans people on the basis of their skin colour, sexual orientation and gender.

Meanwhile, the alt-right openly crack jokes about the Holocaust, loudly — albeit almost entirely satirically — expresses its horror at “race-mixing,” and denounces the “degeneracy” of homosexuals… while inviting Jewish gays and mixed-race Breitbart reporters to their secret dinner parties. What gives?

If you’re this far down the article, you’ll know some of the answers already. For the meme brigade, it’s just about having fun. They have no real problem with race-mixing, homosexuality, or even diverse societies: it’s just fun to watch the mayhem and outrage that erupts when those secular shibboleths are openly mocked. These younger mischief-makers instinctively understand who the authoritarians are and why and how to poke fun at them.

The intellectuals are animated by a similar thrill: after being taken for granted for centuries, they’re the ones who get to pick apart some of the Enlightenment’s dead dogmas. The 1488ers just hate everyone; fortunately they keep mostly to themselves.

The really interesting members of the alt-right though, and the most numerous, are the natural conservatives. They are perhaps psychologically inclined to be unsettled by threats to western culture from mass immigration and maybe by non-straight relationships. Yet, unlike the 1488ers, the presence of such doesn’t send them into fits of rage. They want to build their homogeneous communities, sure — but they don’t want to commit any pogroms along the way. Indeed, they would prefer non-violent solutions.

They’re also aware that there are millions of people who don’t share their inclinations. These are the instinctive liberals, the second half of Haidt’s psychological map of western polities — the people who are comfortable with diversity, promiscuity, homosexuality, and all other features of the cultural consensus.

Natural conservatives know that a zero-sum battle with this group would end in stalemate or defeat. Their goal is a new consensus, where liberals compromise or at least allow conservative areas of their countries to reject the status quo on race, immigration and gender. Others, especially neoreactionaries, seek exit: a peaceful separation from liberal cultures.

Should the liberal tribe (and let’s not deny it any longer – that’s both the Democratic and GOP Establishments these days) do business with them? Well, the risk otherwise is that the 1488ers start persuading people that their solution to natural conservatives’ problems is the only viable one. The bulk of their demands, after all, are not so audacious: they want their own communities, populated by their own people, and governed by their own values.

In short, they want what every people fighting for self-determination in history have ever wanted, and what progressives are always telling us people should be allowed — unless those people are white. This hypocrisy is what has led so many Trump voters — groups who have in many cases not voted since the 1970s or 80s — to come out of the woodwork and stand up for their values and culture.

The Establishment need to read their Haidt and realise that this group isn’t going away. There will be no “progress” that erases the natural affinities of conservatives. We can no longer pretend that divides over free trade and the minutiae of healthcare reform really represent both sides of the political spectrum in America. The alt-right is here, and here to stay.