Independent | American citizens now own 40 per cent of all guns
in the world - more than the next 25 top-ranked gun ownership countries
combined - with the number only set to grow, according to new research.
According to a decade-long survey released by the Graduate
Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, not only
do Americans own the highest number of guns per capita, but also between
2006 and 2017, US gun owners acquired some 122 million new guns.
That represented more than half of the 207 million new civilian-owned
firearms around the world during that time.
“The biggest force pushing up gun ownership around the world
is civilian ownership in the United States,” said Aaron Karp, one of the
authors of the report.
Kunstler | It’s one thing to ignore the economically foundering, traditional
working-class constituency of actual US citizens who are having a
tougher time every year making a living; it’s another thing to bring in a
several-millionfold population of non-citizens to replace them.
Anyway, it’s a pretty poor strategy for success in the coming
mid-term election. The effort got a boost over the weekend from
Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Cal) who called for Trump administration
employees to be thrown out of department stores and other retail
establishments as well as restaurants. Why stop there? Why not enslave
Trump employees and supporters? Force them to work without pay in the
Chick-Fil-A regional distribution warehouses? One wonders what House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi thinks of Ms. Waters’ proposal. Other
Democratic party leaders zipped their pie-holes about it.
The trouble is that the entities waiting to replace both the useless,
careless, feckless Democrats and Republicans are chaos and violence, not
reconstituted parties with coherent political programs. The US, and
really all the so-called advanced nations on earth, are heading into an
era of scarcity and austerity that is likely to present as mortal
conflict.
wikipedia | The economic impact of illegal immigrants in the United States
is challenging to measure and politically contentious. Since it is a
challenging field to quantify, it leaves room for varying methodologies
of study, and so the definitive results of the economic impact can
change[1]
One possibility is that foreign workers entering the country
illegally can lower wages and increase overall costs of production. This
comes from the theory that when there are more illegal immigrants in
the country, there will be more immigrants looking for employment
because most illegal immigrants prefer to work.[2]
This increases competition among low-skilled local workers, and this
will push wages for the domestic low-skilled labor market down.
Simultaneously the increased supply in unskilled illegal migrants can
offset technological developments and "reduce the country's economy's
competitiveness in the international market".[3]
The opposing theory is that even though this can happen in some areas
with more low-skilled employment, on the net illegal immigration
increases the welfare of domestic workers because their additional
consumption outweighs the costs of welfare.[4]
Along the same lines it is argued that illegal immigrants work for
lower wages, then domestic residents recognize these profits and can
choose to either spend or save this new revenue,[5]
so the net outcome can be decided by the net of these two economic
forces. Studies have shown that overall in the long run illegal
immigration benefits the country in terms of its general production, but
introducing many people in the labor market can lead to income
distribution that can tend towards domestic workers and immigrant
workers on other occasions. The net short-term impacts of some aspects
of illegal immigration can be inconclusive.[6] Though this net effect changes, the number of immigrants crossing the border illegally is less unclear.
There were approximately 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the
U.S. in 2016, roughly unchanged from the prior year but well below the
12.2 million peak in 2007. There were an estimated 8 million
unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. civilian workforce in 2016, roughly
5%.[7] The Congressional Budget Office
reported in 2007 that "the tax revenues that unauthorized immigrants
generate for state and local governments do not offset the total cost of
services provided to them" but "in aggregate and over the long term,
tax revenues of all types generated by immigrants—both legal and
unauthorized—exceed the cost of the services they use."[8] Unauthorized immigrants demand goods and services[9] while an estimated 50 to 75 percent pay taxes.[10]
Due to cheaper labor, they contribute to lower prices in the industries
where they work, such as agriculture, restaurants, and construction.[9]
WaPo | OVER THE WEEKEND there was a fair bit of argument about the decision by a small restaurant in Lexington, Va., not to serve dinner
to President Trump’s press secretary. It wasn’t the first time recently
that strong political feelings have spilled into what used to be
considered the private sphere. We understand the strength of the
feelings, but we don’t think the spilling is a healthy development.
Sarah
Huckabee Sanders was dining with a few other people at the Red Hen in
Lexington Friday night. Several of the restaurant’s staff are gay and
objected to Ms. Sanders’s defense of Mr. Trump’s discriminatory policies
against transgender people. The staff also objected to the
administration’s recent actions leading to the separation of thousands of children from their parents
at the U.S.-Mexico border. Respecting her staff’s wishes, the
restaurant owner politely asked Ms. Sanders to leave, and Ms. Sanders
politely acceded. She then tweeted about the episode, turning it into a public controversy.
This followed by a few days the very public heckling of two architects of that border policy, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, at Washington restaurants. Last month a Nebraska sociology professor was found guilty of vandalism for spraying false blood at the home of a National Rifle Association lobbyist in Alexandria.
It’s
not a new tactic for protesters of one sort or another to target a
public official’s home or private life. But never-at-rest social media
have blurred the line between work hours and private time. Cellphone
cameras make it ever easier to intrude and broadcast.
thehill | Rep. Maxine Waters
(D-Calif.) on Saturday called on her supporters at a rally to confront
Trump Cabinet officials in public spaces like restaurants and department
stores to protest the administration's policies.
"I have no
sympathy for these people that are in this administration who know it is
wrong what they're doing on so many fronts but they tend to not want to
confront this president," Waters said at a Los Angeles rally on Saturday.
"For
these members of his cabinet who remain and try to defend him they're
not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they're not going to be able
to stop at a gas station, they're not going to be able to shop at a
department store, the people are going to turn on them, they're going to
protest, they're going to absolutely harass them until they decide that
they're going to tell the president 'no I can't hang with you, this is
wrong this is unconscionable and we can't keep doing this to children,'"
she continued.
Waters' call comes as the Trump administration faces
major backlash over the handling of its "zero tolerance" immigration
policy, which has resulted in the separation of immigrant families.
Protesters confronted Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, D.C., last week, yelling “shame” at Nielsen and “End Texas concentration camps.”
Demonstrators in a separate incident on Friday blasted audio of crying migrant children who had been separated from their parents outside Nielsen's home.
White
House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has also faced public
backlash for her work in the administration, recently being told by one
of the owners of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., to leave due
to her role in the administration.
“I’m not a huge fan of confrontation,” co-owner Stephanie Wilkinson told
The Washington Post. “I have a business, and I want the business to
thrive. This feels like the moment in our democracy when people have to
make uncomfortable actions and decisions to uphold their morals.”
archive | As ICE
continues to ramp up its inhumane surveillance and detention efforts, I
believe it’s important to document what’s happening, and by whom, in any
way we can.
To that end, I’ve downloaded and made available
the profiles of (almost) everyone on LinkedIn who works for ICE, 1595
people in total. While I don’t have a precise idea of what should be
done with this data set, I leave it here with the hope that researchers,
journalists and activists will find it useful.
'
You can find the full data set, including profile photos, previous employment info, schools, and more, on this GitHub repository.
Details of each user are located in the “profiles” folder as .json
files, each containing whatever information ICE workers have chosen to
make publicly available about themselves on LinkedIn.
I find
it helpful to remember that as much as internet companies use data to
spy on and exploit their users, we can at times reverse the story, and
leverage those very same online platforms as a means to investigate or
even undermine entrenched power structures. It’s a strange side effect
of our reliance on private companies and semi-public platforms to
mediate nearly all aspects of our lives. We don’t necessarily need to
wait for the next Snowden-style revelation to scrutinize the
powerful — so much is already hiding in plain sight.
Of
course, ICE has a presence on many online platforms besides LinkedIn,
each are worth investigating. For example, they publish b-roll and
propaganda videos on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service, videos which I’ve previously explored in an attempt to provide a birds-eye view of how the institution positions itself in the public narrative.
thesaker |The Saker: Now, turning to your books on Rabbinical
Phariseism, could you please summarize the main theses of your books on
this topic? What is, in your opinion, the true nature of Rabbinical
Phariseism, what are its core tenets/beliefs? What would you say to an
average person are the myths and realities about what is referred to as
“Judaism” in our society?
Hoffman: Orthodox Judaism, which is the scion of the
religion of the ancient Pharisees, is above all, self-worship, and
pride is the paramount destroyer. In the occult scheme of things, the
ideology closest to it was Hitler’s National Socialism, in that it
shares this predominant characteristic of pathological narcissism.
Christians and many other goyim (gentiles) have been deluded
into imagining that Judaism, while being somewhat flawed due to
rejecting Jesus, nonetheless manages to be an ethical religion
reflective of the prophets of the Old Testament. Hillel, the first
century A.D. Pharisee who is believed to have been a contemporary of
Jesus, and Moses Maimonides (“Rambam”), the medieval philosopher and
theologian, are most often held up as exemplars of this supposed ethical
Judaism.
The myth of the benevolence of these two can only be sustained by
ignorance. The problem is, that when a scholar begins to unearth facts
that undermine pious media legends about men like Hillel and Maimonides,
they enter “anti-Semitism” territory: if they dare to retail the truth,
their ability to earn a living and keep their good name and reputation
will be damaged, sometimes irreparably by the myth-makers who have the
power to permanently stigmatize them as “haters and anti-Semites.”
I’m beyond those fears, so I can venture to say that Hillel offered
theological grounds for the molestation of children and invented a “prozbul”
escape clause for evading the Biblical command that no loan shall be in
force more than seven years. Maimonides detested Jesus Christ with a
volcanic hatred that led him in his writings to urge the murder of
Christians when it is possible to do so without being detected. These
facts are documented in my books Judaism Discovered and Judaism’s Strange Gods.
Meanwhile, if you google “Hillel” or “Maimonides,” or you consult
Wikipedia, you’ll find them described in terms of saccharine sainthood
and humanitarian benevolence.
Orthodox Judaism, I regret to say, is a religion of lying and deceit.
Duplicity and mendacity are formally inculcated. They are not
incidental. There isn’t even a great deal of trust among Talmudists
themselves. Witness what Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, one time head of the
reconstituted Sanhedrin in Tiberias, and premier translator of the
Babylonian Talmud, has pronounced on this matter: “Rabbis are liable to
alter their words, and the accuracy of their statements is not to be
relied upon.” (The Talmud: The Steinsaltz Edition [Random
House], Vol. II, pp. 48-49). In BT Yevamot 65b permission is given to
lie “in the interests of peace,” a category so broad it is capable of
serving as an alibi for countless situations in which scoundrels wish to
conjure excuses for their falsehoods. There is also the general
permission to lie to a gentile (BT Baba Kamma 113a).
These facts are not published in major media such as the New York Times. Yet the Times
does not shy from insinuating that Shiite Islam is a religion of liars:
“…there is a precedent for lying to protect the Shiite community…part
of a Shiite historical concept called taqiyya, or religious dissembling.” (New York Times, April 14, 2012, p. A4).
Another defining theological aspect of Orthodox Judaism is its dogma that non-Jews are less than human. This is how the goyim
are viewed in the Talmud and its sacred successor texts. In certain
branches of Kabbalistic Judaism, such as the politically powerful and
prominent Chabad-Lubavitch sect, their founder, Rabbi Shneur Zalman,
formally promulgated the doctrine that goyim are not just less than human, they are non-human trash — “supernal refuse” — which is a reference to their Kabbalistic status as kelipot who possess “no redeeming qualities whatsoever.”
The Saker: My personal research has brought me to
the conclusion ever since the recognition by Christ as the Messiah
promised by the prophets of the Old Testament by one part of the first
century Jews and the rejection of Him by the other part, the latter
group began by developing an “anti-Christian scriptural toolkit” which
included, of course, the forgery of the so-called Masoretic text, the
development of the Talmud and the various commentaries, interpretations
and codification of these texts. The goal was to develop a “polemical
arsenal” so to speak. At the same time, the first kabbalistic concepts
were developed for the internal use inside
the anti-Christian communities. Would you agree with this (admittedly
summarized) description and would you then agree with my personal
conclusion that Rabbinical Phariseeism is at its core simply a religion
of “anti-Christianity”?
Hoffman: I think you’re correct up to the
Renaissance, which is the point at which members of the Roman Catholic
hierarchy including many popes, were secretly initiated into Kabbalistic
mysticism. The belt of that transmission is chronicled in detail in The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome.
Rabbinic Phariseeism is more than a religion opposed to Jesus for this
reason: in its beginnings in the time before Christ, it had existence as
a creed founded upon esoteric oral teachings that nullify the Bible
itself.
Orthodox Judaism is an anti-Biblical religion. Yes, it has a “Moses”
and a “Noah” as its patrons and it names other patriarchs too, but these
are not the Moses and Noah of the Bible. These are radically falsified
figures who bear those names. Pharisac Judaism is contemptuous of the
Biblical Noah about whom, in the Midrash, it makes scurrilous
claims. There is even contempt for Moses. About Isaiah, who said that
Israel has filthy lips, the Talmud teaches that Isaiah was justly killed
by having his mouth sawed in half for “blaspheming Israel.”
In both Left-wing New Age and Right-wing neo-Nazi circles, the heresy
of Marcion is alive and well and the Old Testament is execrated. It is
equated with the Talmud (most famously on the Right by Douglas Reed in The Controversy of Zion).
The problem with that tack is that the Old Testament is absolutely not a
book of self-worship of the Jews. It is radically different from the
Babylonian Talmud. The Bible is an antidote to self-worship. The Old
Testament excoriates Israelites in the strongest possible terms.
insightjournal | Gloria Steinem (1934-) has long been celebrated as one of the world’s
leading feminists, and so seems to have always been in the public eye,
with every aspect of her life scrutinized. A look at a less examined
chapter in her life finds that in addition to her many efforts on behalf
of women, she managed to find the time and the energy to become
involved in the craziest episode in the history of modern psychiatry,
which actually victimized thousands of women.
In the 1980s, there was a three-pronged epidemic that shook up
psychotherapy in the English-speaking world. This affair started with
the dubious idea of recovering “repressed” memories. Trauma is something
you cannot shake off, but over the past 50 years, some self-described
trauma experts have claimed that many trauma survivors have lost their
memories to dissociation or repression. The step was the more dubious
idea that the phenomenon of multiple personality is widespread, but
unrecognized.
Dissociative phenomena include such things as loss of memory
(amnesia), or temporary loss of identity. In extreme cases, individuals
have been described as suffering from identity fragmentation, or
multiple personality. For 100 years, dissociative disorders, if at all
real, were considered extremely rare. Following a wave of claims about
memories of sexual abuse, recovered during psychotherapy, there was a
meteoric rise in the number of individuals diagnosed with multiple
personality disorder (MPD). Whereas before 1980 the number of cases in
the literature was under 100, by 1995 there were tens of thousands of
such cases. The number of reported personalities in one body skyrocketed
and the record was 4,500. Ninety-five percent of the cases were
diagnosed in North America, and 95% of them were women.
In tandem, the International Society for the Study of Multiple
Personality and Dissociation (ISSMPD) was founded in 1984 by the
psychiatrist Bennet Braun. Braun attracted a number of mental health
professionals and a movement was formed. Soon dissociation was not only a
movement, but a cause.
The ISSMPD was responsible for the next stage of the epidemic. The
assumption was that MPD was the result of a massive childhood trauma. In
1988, Bennet Braun connected MPD with Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA).
Leaders of ISSMPD started educating the public about an underground
intergenerational network of Satanists, responsible for killing
thousands of children every year. Children born into Satanic families
witnessed their siblings, or other children, being sacrificed, and were
subject to other forms of abuse. The resulting trauma led to
dissociation and MPD. The therapists who were telling the world about
dissociation, trauma, and Satanism were supposedly relying on evidence
from clients who, during intensive treatment, recovered memories of
childhood abuse. Braun and his colleagues suggested that the uncovered
connections, which had been neglected or overlooked, between childhood
trauma, repressed and recovered, MPD and SRA, was a major breakthrough
in the history of psychiatry.
In 1989 Braun’s partner, the psychiatrist Richard Kluft, expressed
concern about a “hidden holocaust” perpetuated by Satanic cults. (Kluft
remains a believer and in 2014 he stated “I remain troubled about the
matter of transgenerational satanic cults”).
DailyBeast | But the Weinstein Effect seems to have spared one Jeffrey Epstein—a
65-year-old billionaire and convicted sex offender who’s palled around
with former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Kevin Spacey, Woody Allen, and other high-flying friends whose names were revealed in his “little black book”
and flight logs for his private jet. Many of them enjoyed jaunts to
Epstein’s private Caribbean island and mansions in Manhattan and Palm
Beach, Florida.
Even President Trump was among the deviant philanthropist’s admirers. “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York
in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes
beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger
side. No doubt about it—Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
Jeffery’s
“social life,” according to police and a score of lawsuits, involved a
pedophile ring of dozens of underage girls, whom he groomed and then
loaned out to powerful friends. But aside from a minor conviction in
Florida—for which he served a mere 13 months—Epstein has emerged
remarkably unscathed. New York authorities have never charged him with
any crime, and he still drops into his Upper East Side mansion, where women have been photographed coming and going, according to tabloid reports. His sex offender registration lists his primary address as St. Thomas.
The
mysterious financier’s sick world was unmasked in March 2005, when the
stepmother of one 14-year-old victim phoned police and said a wealthy
man had molested her child. She’d received a call from a schoolmate’s
mom, who overheard her own daughter discussing “how [the victim] had met
with a 45-year-old man and had sex with him and was paid for it,” a
police report said. Around that time, a teacher found $300 in the girl’s
purse.
Palm Beach detectives would soon unearth five girls who claimed that
Epstein had lured them into a ring of sexual abuse. By the time Epstein
inked his plea agreement, the feds had identified 40 victims. Police
said Epstein was enlisting his employees and other young women to
recruit underage girls—many of them underprivileged or from broken homes—for massages at his home. One recruiter told police that Epstein advised her, “The younger, the better.”
npr | New genetic tools are making it easier and cheaper to engineer
viruses and bacteria, and a report commissioned by the Department of
Defense has now ranked the top threats posed by the rapidly advancing
field of "synthetic biology."
One of the biggest concerns is
the ability to recreate known viruses from scratch in the lab. That
means a lab could make a deadly virus that is normally kept under lock
and key, such as smallpox.
"Right
now, recreating pretty much any virus can be done relatively easily. It
requires a certain amount of expertise and resources and knowledge,"
says Michael Imperiale, a microbiologist at the University of Michigan who chaired the committee convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to assess the state of synthetic biology and offer advice to defense officials.
As an example of what's possible, Imperiale pointed to the recent and controversial creation of horsepox, a cousin of smallpox, in a Canadian laboratory. "These things can now be done," he said.
Another
top danger listed in the report, which was released Tuesday, is making
existing bacteria or viruses more dangerous. That could happen, by, say,
giving them antibiotic resistance or altering them so that they produce
toxins or evade vaccines.
And one scenario pondered by the experts is the creation
of microbes that would produce harmful biochemicals in humans while
living on the skin or in the gut. This possibility, the report notes,
"is of high concern because its novelty challenges potential mitigation
options." Public health officials might not even recognize that they
were witnessing a biological attack if the dangerous material was
delivered to victims in such an unusual way.
All in all, the
committee examined about a dozen different synthetic biology
technologies that could be potentially misused. For each, they
considered how likely it was to be usable as a weapon, how much
expertise or resources would be needed, and how well governments would
be able to recognize and manage an attack.
genomeweb | Based on network analyses spanning transcriptomic, genomic, and
proteomic features of brain viromes in aging individuals with or without
late-onset Alzheimer's disease (AD), a team led by researchers at the
Icahn School of Medicine and Arizona State University has proposed
potential ties between human herpesvirus (HHV) infection, amyloid
precursor protein (APP) metabolism, and AD.
"This study represents
a significant advancement in our understanding of the plausibility of
the pathogen hypothesis of Alzheimer's," corresponding author Joel
Dudley, a genetics, genomic sciences, and multi-scale biology researcher
affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine and the ASU-Banner
Neurodegenerative Disease Research Center, said in a statement.
As they reported online today in Neuron,
Dudley and his colleagues sequenced RNA in hundreds of postmortem brain
samples, representing unaffected controls and preclinical AD cases,
meaning symptom-free individuals with AD neuropathology. Their data
revealed a dramatic over-representation of HHV-7 and HHV-6A strains in
the preclinical AD endophenotype.
The team shored up this apparent
association using data for individuals from additional cohorts of
clinical AD cases and controls without AD pathology or symptoms. Network
analyses based on whole-exome sequencing, liquid chromatography tandem
mass spectrometry, and immunohistochemistry data, along with mouse model
experiments, suggested that this association may stem from interactions
between viral abundance, transcriptional regulators, and other
modulators of APP metabolism.
Studies stretching back several
decades have raised the possibility that microbial infections and the
immune response mounted against them might contribute to the onset or
progression of neurodegenerative conditions such as AD, the authors
noted. Even so, they wrote, such research has been "suggestive of a
viral contribution to AD, though findings offer little insight into
potential mechanisms, and a consistent association with specific viral
species has not emerged."
townhall | What's the latest? Kids in cages, separated from their moms! Oh no!
That only happens to every other criminal ever. Well, every American
criminal ever. Illegal alien criminals, who drag their kids through
scorching deserts to break the law because their own countries are The
Term That May Not Be Spoken But Trump Spoke It (which itself created a
mini outrage a while ago) are, I guess, supposed to be a special kind of
criminal that doesn’t get separated from his/her/xer kids upon arrest.
Wait, does that sound right? Why would they be treated differently…I
don’t think…STOP!
Don’t think! Get outraged! Let your feelings run
free, feelings generated by pictures of kids in cages (under Obama, but
shhhhhh!), by super selective Bible readings on MSNBC, and by pious Fredocons whining about how we’re better than that and oh well I never!
That’s the thing – when you’re caught in an outrage monsoon,
you aren’t supposed to think. You are supposed to be infuriated,
aroused, and activated, like a ravenous running zombie hungering for the
virtue signaling lobe of the human brain. You are not supposed to ask
questions that interrupt the narrative, like why would this particular
subset of criminal get special privileges? Don’t we separate families
every day when mommy (or daddy) commits a crime? Why don’t they just not
come here?
Facts are the enemy when it comes to liberal policies,
so they don’t want you messing with the message by bringing them up.
Instead, they want you outraged, and your mind clouded with ginned-up
anger, ready to do their bidding.
Someone, oh someone, please think of the children!
But not about how their illegal alien parents put them in that
position. Because if you start thinking too much, the truth starts to
become clear. Liberals want illegal aliens in the country because they
want to replace intransigent American citizens like you with pliable
foreigners who won’t be so darn uppity. So, they don’t want illegal
aliens to be treated like the criminals they are (because entering the
country illegally is a crime) because they want to let them stay here –
this is all about reinstating catch and release. So, they create a fake
outrage about how these criminals are – oh no! – being treated like any
other criminal so, they hope, you will demand we go back to catching and
releasing them. Before the zero tolerance policy, we caught them and
released them on their promise to show up at their hearing, which of
course they never, ever did, thereby swelling the ranks of Replacement
Americans, which liberals hope to someday amnesty (assisted by the GOP
establishment saps) and turn into Democrat voters.
NYTimes | The family
detention centers the Obama administration has been operating in Texas
and Pennsylvania have been an expedient way to handle the soaring
numbers of Central Americans, many of them young children, who have
arrived at the Southern border since 2014. They give a sense that
Homeland Security has the border situation under control, and they
supposedly send a message to other would-be refugees not to come.
But
these privately run, unlicensed lockups are no place for children. Or
mothers. Their existence belies President Obama’s oft-professed concern
for the humane treatment of people fleeing crime and violence in
Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador.
And the centers stand on dubious legal ground. Last year, a district judge ruled
that the administration was violating a 1997 court-ordered settlement,
called the Flores agreement, that governs the treatment of underage
migrants who seek asylum or enter the country illegally. The judge said
the children were being held for too long, and ordered the
administration to release them as quickly as possible to the care of
relatives or other guardians as their cases move through the immigration
courts.
The administration appealed,
saying that the agreement applied only to children who had crossed the
border alone, not those who were accompanied by parents or other adult
relatives. On July 6, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit disagreed,
upholding the district ruling that Flores covers all children,
accompanied or not. But it said the administration could still detain
their parents.
Which leaves things pretty much where
they were — unsettled, unsatisfactory, unfit for a country that aspires
(or once did, anyway) to be an example to the world in its welcome for
desperate refugees. The administration hasn’t said whether it will
appeal, but it’s hard to imagine that it will use the appeals court
ruling to break up families — sending children to foster care, maybe,
while continuing to hold their mothers behind bars. On a separate issue
not addressed by the Ninth Circuit ruling, plaintiffs have accused the
administration of subjecting children to miserable conditions at Border
Patrol stations.
If the Obama
administration took its principles to heart, it would be closing its
family prisons and abandoning its emphasis on border crackdowns in favor
of greater efforts to connect Central Americans with pro bono lawyers
and to provide family- and community-based alternatives to detention.
Much money and effort have been spent to deter and detain them, to speed
them through court, to hunt down those who are later found to be
deportable.
It would be far better to
to score a humanitarian victory by reuniting children and families,
especially since data show that Central Americans with asylum claims are
far more likely to show up in court — and win their cases — when they have lawyers.
npr | "To be clear, I'm not arguing that this is at all representative of
Vietnam veterans — this is a tiny, tiny percentage of returning
veterans," Belew says. "But it is a large and instrumental number of
people within the White Power movement — and they play really important
roles in changing the course of movement action."
In her new book, Bring the War Home,
Belew argues that as disparate racist groups came together, the
movement's goal shifted from one of "vigilante activism" to something
more wide-reaching: "It's aimed at unseating the federal government. ...
It's aimed at undermining infrastructure and currency to foment race
war."
The Vietnam War narrative works first of all to unite people who had
previously not been able to be in a room together and to have a shared
sense of mission. So, for instance, Klansmen and neo-Nazis after World
War II had a very difficult time aligning, because Klansmen tended to
see neo-Nazis as enemies ... the people they were confronting in World
War II. But after Vietnam they see common cause around their betrayal by
the government and around the failed project of the Vietnam War. So
that's one function.
Another function of the Vietnam War is to
provide a narrative that shapes the violence itself, and this is partly
material in that veterans who are trained in Vietnam War boot camps come
back and create boot camps to train other White Power activists. People
who didn't serve in Vietnam War combat even use U.S. Army training
manuals and other kind of paramilitary infrastructure to shape White
Power violence and they even choose Vietnam War issue weapons, uniforms
and material and even obtain stolen military weapons to foment activism.
On the White Power movement turning on the state
The
turn on the state happened in 1983. It happened at the Aryan Nations
World Congress, which was a meeting of many different factions of the
White Power movement and the thing that's important about this turn on
the state is that it's openly anti-state for the first time in the 20th
century. Prior Klan mobilizations had really been organized about
maintaining the status quo or maintaining what historians would call
"systemic power," which is to say, state power and all of the other
kinds of power that are bound up in state power.
thenation | The belief expressed here is that the majority of Americans are soft
and insulated, ignorant of a long-running war, and that revolutionary
racist terror is the only remedy for an American society suffering from a
terminal cancer of liberalism and tolerance. This conviction may seem
obscure and The Turner Diaries mere fiction, but as the historian Kathleen Belew demonstrates in her compelling new book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America, it has been at the core of decades of white-supremacist organizing and violence.
Meticulously researched and powerfully argued, Belew’s
book isn’t only a definitive history of white-racist violence in
late-20th-century America, but also a rigorous meditation on the
relationship between American militarism abroad and extremism at home,
with distressing implications for the United States in 2018 and beyond.
Two fundamental insights underpin the book: first, that there exists a
profound relationship between America’s military violence and domestic
right-wing paramilitary organizations, and, second, that the character
of that relationship underwent a decisive change in the late 1970s and
early ’80s.
Cities are aggressively deploying law enforcement to target people
simply for the crime of existing while having nowhere to live. In 2016
alone, Los Angeles police arrested 14,000 people experiencing
homelessness for everyday activities such as sitting on sidewalks.
But the greatest cost of these laws is borne by already vulnerable
people who are ticketed, arrested and jailed because they are
experiencing homelessness.
Fines and court fees quickly add up to hundreds or thousands of dollars. A Sacramento man, for example, found himself facing $100,000 in fines for convictions for panhandling and sleeping outside.
These costs are impossible to pay, since the “crimes” were committed by
dint of being unable to afford keeping a roof over his head in the
first place.
theconversation |Are you optimistic or pessimistic about possibilities for exit from violence?
R.C: On the micro level, I am optimistic.
Face-to-face, humans are not good at violence. They bluster and threaten
and curse, but most small-scale violence – whether in quarrels or in
protest demonstrations – ends in stalemate.
Physical damage happens when one side achieves emotional domination,
confronting a weak or momentarily passive victim whom they can attack
without resistance. When both sides mirror each other, maintaining a
steady face and voice, replying without escalating, threats dissipate.
Prospects are good that more people will learn techniques of keeping
anger and fear from escalating, and thus cooling down the possibility of
violence. Knowledge of the social psychology of interpersonal conflict
is now spreading – in business corporations, in schools, hopefully among
police and the people who encounter them. On the micro-level we may get
a more peaceful everyday life.
This will not come because the world has solved the structural
problems that cause the malaise and desubjectivation that Wieviorka has
described. Causes for anger remain, but we can make the situational
eye-of-the-needle into violence even narrower.
On the macro level, I am more pessimistic. In asymmetric war between
rich states and embittered insurgents, the cat-and-mouse game continues.
Rich states devise more and more electronic surveillance tools and more
precise remote-controlled weaponry.
Insurgents respond with electronic hacking and hiding in the civilian
population awaiting the moment to commit atrocities against other
civilians; anonymous attacks and counter-measures make life more
unpleasant for all of us. The politics of would-be charismatic leaders
and routinising bureaucrats keeps stirring up political disputes.
International crises are repetitive because they are de-escalated only
after they become too costly to continue, and crises reappear because
perceptions of the evil done by the enemy stirs up cries for
intervention and revenge. Perhaps my macro-analysis is too pessimistic.
In any case, it is a reason why I focus on micro-analysis, with its
elements of optimism.
Physorg | A: The commercial
realm offers an interesting perspective. Businesses can act swiftly and
unilaterally, without the need for coalition building required by
legislative bodies. In crisis communication, one concept we look at when
determining strategy is "locus of control." If the organization itself
is at fault, then it bears more responsibility for righting the
perceived wrong than if the situation was caused by an external actor.
And of course, there's a big spectrum in between.
Rosanne Barr's highly successful television program was canceled just
a few hours after she posted a series of racist tweets. There was
nothing illegal about her statements, but the network made a business
decision that the continued revenue would not be worth the reputational
damage that might result from appearing to support her positions, even
tacitly. In this case, the locus of control for the crisis was clearly
Barr herself, and the network decided to sever ties immediately to
distance themselves.
Distancing is harder to accomplish when the locus of control clearly
rests within the organization itself, such as when a company creates an
ad campaign that many find objectionable. The cosmetics subscription box
service Ipsy recently came under fire when its online ad video,
intended to celebrate Pride Month, was instead seen by many as using
transphobic language. The company removed the ad and apologized, but not
before it had arguably worsened the situation by, allegedly, spending
the first couple of days deleting negative comments and responses from
trans customers. The marketplace of ideas moves very quickly these days,
but consequences tend to come more swiftly when the cause is an
employee or third party.
Q: Let's flip this. Can this scenario also be used as a powerful force?
A: I think the continued effects of the #MeToo movement remain an
excellent example of how powerful a force this kind of response can be
when it crosses over from online into offline domains, and develops
capacities as well as signaling. Actress Asia Argento, one of Harvey
Weinstein's accusers, made a formidable statement at this year's Cannes
(Film Festival) warning that powerful people will no longer be able to
get away with workplace sexual misconduct as they have in the past. And
Netflix canceled the U.K. press tour for the latest season of "Arrested
Development" after a cast interview with "The New York Times" went awry.
Actress Jessica Walter received massive social media encouragement for
describing, in tears, the verbal abuse she had suffered on set from
co-star Jeffrey Tambor—who had been fired from the Amazon series
"Transparent" for sexual harassment claims. Her male co-stars, on the
other hand, were excoriated for minimizing her pain and rushing to the
support of Tambor.
Nothing that happened in the interview crossed into the realm of
illegality, and Netflix operates on a subscription model that shields it
from the risks of advertising-driven network television. And yet, even
they took some steps to limit their exposure on this issue.
These incidents both happened months after the most recent wave of
the movement began last October. That suggests this is not an ephemeral
phenomenon that can be dismissed as mere online outrage, but a lasting
shift in our collective consciousness and expectations, even without any
kind of formal organization.
What's changing is who has power, and who is willing to use it. We
just need to try to thoughtfully adapt our structures and systems
alongside these changes, to reduce the risk of institutionalizing hasty
decisions.
commondreams |In
fact, the Great Western Narrative has been developed and refined over
centuries to preserve a tiny elite’s privileges and expand its power.
The role of journalists like me was to keep feeding these illusions to
readers so they would remain fearful, passive and deferential to this
elite. It is not that journalists lie – or at least, not most of them –
it is that they are as deeply wedded to the Great Western Narrative as
everyone else.
Once
one is prepared to step through the door, to discard the old script,
the new narrative takes its hold because it is so helpful. It actually
explains the world, and human behaviour, as it is experienced
everywhere. It has genuine predictive power. And most importantly, it
reveals a truth understood by all figures of spiritual and intellectual
enlightenment throughout human history: that human beings are equally
human, whether they are Americans, Europeans, Israelis, Palestinians,
Syrians, Russians, Venezuelans, or Iranians, whether they are North or
South Koreans.
The
term “human” is not meant simply as a description of us as a species, or
a biological entity. It also describes who we are, what drives us, what
makes us cry, what makes us laugh, what makes us angry, what elicits
compassion. And the truth is that we are all essentially the same. The
same things upset us, the same things amuse us. The same things inspire
us, the same things outrage us. We want dignity, freedom, safety for us
and our loved ones, and appreciate beauty and truth. We fear oppression,
injustice, insecurity.
Hierarchies of virtue
The
Great Western Narrative tells us something entirely different. It
divides the world into a hierarchy of “peoples”, with different, even
conflicting, virtues and vices. Some humans – westerners – are more
rational, more caring, more sensitive, more fully human. And other
humans – the rest – are more primitive, more emotional, more violent. In
this system of classification, we are the Good Guys and they are the
Bad Guys; we are Order, they are Chaos. They need a firm hand from us to
control them and stop them doing too much damage to themselves and to
our civilised part of the world.
The Great Western Narrative isn’t really new. It is simply a reformulation for a different era of the “white man’s burden”.
The
reason the Great Western Narrative persists is because it is useful – to
those in power. Humans may be essentially the same in our natures and
in our drives, but we are very definitely divided by power and its
modern corollary, wealth. A tiny number have it, and the vast majority
do not. The Great Western Narrative is there to perpetuate power by
legitimising it, by making its unbalanced and unjust distribution seem
natural and immutable.
Once
kings told us they had blue blood and a divine right. Today, we need a
different kind of narrative, but one designed to achieve the same end.
Just as kings and barons once owned everything, now a tiny corporate
elite rule the world. They have to justify that to themselves and to us.
The
king and the barons had their courtiers, the clergy and a wider circle
of hanger-ons who most of the time benefited enough from the system not
to disrupt it. The role of the clergy in particular was to sanction the
gross imbalance of power, to argue that it was God’s will. Today, the
media function like the clergy of old. God may be dead, as Nietzsche
observed, but the corporate media has taken his place. In the
unquestioned premises of every article, we are told who should rule and
who should be ruled, who are the Good Guys and who the Bad.
To
make this system more palatable, more democratic, to make us believe
that there is equality of opportunity and that wealth trickles down, the
western elite has had to allow a large domestic middle class to emerge,
like the courtiers of old. The spoils from the rape and pillage of
distant societies are shared sparingly with this class. Their
consciences are rarely pricked because the corporate media’s function is
to ensure they know little about the rest of the world and care even
less, believing those foreigners to be less deserving, less human.
Nothing more than statistics
If
western readers, for example, understood that a Palestinian is no
different from an Israeli – apart from in opportunities and income –
then they might feel sympathy for a grieving Palestinian family just as
they do for an Israeli one. But the Great Western Narrative is there
precisely to ensure readers won’t feel the same about the two cases.
That is why Palestinian deaths are invariably reported as nothing more
than statistics – because Palestinians die in large numbers, like cattle
in an abbatoir. Israelis, by contrast, die much more rarely and their
deaths are recorded individually. They are dignified with names, life
stories and pictures.
theconservativetreehouse |We must look into the way-back machine. To that end we previously presented the entirety of:
A March 2014 Final Report from the National Center For Border Security – HERE
A June 2014 (Declassified) Intelligence Report on UAC’s and Central America – HERE
A June 2014 Congressional Research Report analyzing the prior four
years of Central American UAC’s (Unaccompanied Alien Children) – HERE
A July 2014 internal White House and Dept. Of Homeland Security communique outlining the UAC crisis. – HERE
A January 2014 DHS and HHS Summary of UAC directives to include Contract Needs – HERE
April 2009 – After a Mid-East trip to Egypt to deliver his Cairo speech, President Barack Obama travels to South America for the “Summit of the Americas“.
The summit included thirty-four South American countries. Obama wanted
to promote his point that relations in North and South America can be
heavily improved, especially after age old ideals on immigration and
commerce are dropped. Hugo Chavez warmly embraced Obama and provided a
gift, a book titled “The Open Veins of Latin America“. (link)
December 2009 – November 2010 –
100% of all political effort was leveraged to create and institute the
ACA or ObamaCare. All media oxygen is focused on ObamaCare 24/7.
November 2010 – President Obama is “shellacked” in Mid-Term elections. Loses control of the House of Representatives to Republicans. Biggest electoral defeat since 1918.
January 2011 – Emphasis, and political strategy changes. “Comprehensive Immigration Reform“, ie. “amnesty”
becomes the mainstay approach toward retention of political power.
Throughout a contentious Republican primary season, to assist their
ideological traveler, the U.S. media kept the issue on the front burner.
May 2011 – President Obama travels to the Rio Grande sector of the border to push for his immigration platform (ie. Amnesty). He proclaims the border is safe and secure and famously attacks his opposition for wanting an “alligator moat”.
November 2012 – Election year
campaign(s). Using wedge issues like “War on Women”, and “Immigration /
Amnesty”, candidate Obama promises to push congress for “amnesty”, under
the guise of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform”, if elected. President
Obama wins reelection.
December 2012 – Immediately following reelection President Barack Obama signs an Executive Order creating the “Deferred Action Program“, or DACA. Allowing millions of illegal aliens to avoid deportation. (link)
According to their own documents and research, this Deferred Action
Program is what the Central American communities are using as the reason
for attempted immigration. In both the border control study and the DHS intelligence report the DACA program is mentioned by the people apprehended at the border in 2013 and 2014.
Counterpunch | I was stunned the other day to see an opinion piece by Stephen Kinzer in The Boston Globe
in which he was portraying the violent anti-government protests in
Nicaragua as some kind of revolutionary insurrection. What is
surprising about Kinzer’s position is that he is the individual who
wrote the wonderfulbook, All The Shah’s Men– one of the essential readings about the CIA-backed coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953.
What is happening in Nicaragua right now looks a lot like what
happened in Iran during this coup, and yet, Kinzer somehow does not see
this. In this way, Kinzer typifies the utter confusion of so many in
this country — including those who should know better, such as many
self-described leftists — about what is happening in Nicaragua and in
Latin America generally.
Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the Hemisphere, was so
before the Sandinistas took power in 1979, and was still so when they
took power again in 2006. When the Sandinistas took power the first
time, they inherited an economy wrecked and pillaged by Somoza, a
country still left in shambles by the 1972 earthquake because Somoza
siphoned off the aid money for himself instead of rebuilding, and a
country further destroyed by Somoza who aerially bombed neighborhoods in
Managua to cling to power. When the Sandinistas took power the second
time, they inherited a country still struggling to recover from a decade
of the brutal Contra war and by the accompanying economic embargo.
And yet, there are some who argue that, somehow, the Sandinistas have
failed by not building socialism in one country upon such a weak
foundation, in a country with few natural resources and in the face of
hostility from a much more powerful enemy in the United States. Never
mind that such critics generally believe that socialism in one country
is unachievable even in good conditions. In short, the Sandinistas are
criticized for not achieving the impossible.
nakedcapitalism | And yet… and yet… what’s most troubling is not what’s changed but what hasn’t, which includeswhat
poverty feels like in the body, the psyche, and the soul. In the body,
it mostly results in the development of chronic or untreated ailments in
a world in which nutrition is poor and, even if available, unbalanced.
Asthma is one example that can be found now, as then, in nearly every family living in poor rural areas and inner cities such as the one in which I grew up.
In the psyche, poverty begets fear, anxiety, tension, and worry,
constant worry. In the soul, poverty, which feels like the loss of you
know not what, is always there like a cold fist to remind you that
tomorrow will be the same as today. Such effects are not outgrown like a
child’s dress but linger for a lifetime in a country where the severest
kinds of poverty are again on the rise (and was just scathingly denounced
by the U.N.’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights),
where each tax bill, each favor to the 1%, passes a kind of life
sentence on the poor. And that is the definition of hopelessness.
Americans who barely made it through the recent recession now find themselves in conditions (in supposed good times) that seem to be worsening. In poor neighborhoods and rural areas,
even when people listen to the pundits of cable TV chatter on about
economic inequality, the words bleed together, because without the means
to make real change, the present is forever. At best, such discussions
feel like ateardrop in an ocean of words. Among
professionals, pundits, and academics barely hidden contempt for those
defined as lower or working class often tinges such discussions.
If media talk shows were ever to invite the real experts on, those
who actually live in neighborhoods of need, so they could tell uswhat their daily lives are actually like, perhaps impoverishment would be understood more concretely and provoke action.It’s
often said that poverty’s always been with us and so is here to stay.
However, there have been better safety nets in the relatively recent
American past. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s,
though failing in many ways, still succeeded in lifting people out of
impoverished lives. Union jobs paid fairly decent wages before they
began to be undermined during the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
Better wages and union jobs aided people in finding better places to
live.
During the past few decades, however, with huge sums being poured into this country’s never-ending wars, unions weakening or collapsing, wages being pushed down, and workers losing jobs, then homes, so much of that safety net is gone. If Donald Trump and his crew of millionaires and billionaires continue with their evisceration of the rest of the safety net, then food stamps, welfare aid directed at children’s health, and women’s reproductive rights,
among other things, will disappear as well. Add to that the utter
disregard the Trump administration has shown for people of color and its
special mean-spiritedness toward immigrants, whether Mexican or Muslim
— and for growing numbers of non-millionaires and non-billionaires the
future is already starting to look like the worst, not the best, of
times.
It seems that those who foster ideologies that deny decent lives to
millions believe that people will take it forever. History, however,
suggests another possibility and in it perhaps lies some consolation.
Namely, that when misery reaches its nadir, it seeks change. Enough is
enough was the implicit cry that helped form unions, spur the civil
rights movement, launch the migrant grape boycotts, and inspire the drive for women’s liberation.
In the meantime, the poor remain missing in action in our American world, but not in my mind. Not in me.
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