Once Upon A Time WAP Stood For Women Against Pornography

wikipedia |  Women Against Pornography (WAP) was a radical feminist activist group based out of New York City that had an influential force in the anti-pornography movement of the late 1970s and the 1980s.

WAP was the most well known feminist anti-pornography group out of many that were active throughout the United States and the anglophone world, primarily from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. After previous failed attempts to start a broad feminist anti-pornography group in New York City, WAP was finally established in 1978. WAP quickly drew widespread support for its anti-pornography campaign, and in late 1979 held a March on Times Square that included over 5000 supporters. Through their march as well as other means of activism, WAP was able to bring in unexpected financial support from the Mayor's office, theater owners, and other parties with an interest in the gentrification of Times Square.

WAP became known because of their anti-pornography informational tours of sex shops and pornographic theaters held in Times Square. In the 1980s, WAP began to focus more on lobbying and legislative efforts against pornography, particularly in support of civil-rights-oriented antipornography legislation. They were also active in testifying before the Meese Commission and some of their advocacy of a civil-rights based anti-pornography model found its way into the final recommendations of the commission. In the late 1980s, the leadership of WAP changed their focus again, this time more on the issue of international sex trafficking, which led to the founding of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. In the 1990s WAP became less active and eventually faded out of existence in the mid '90s.

The positions of Women Against Pornography were controversial. Civil liberties advocates opposed WAP and similar groups, holding that the legislative approaches WAP advocated amounted to censorship. In addition to this, WAP faced conflict with sex-positive feminists, who held that feminist campaigns against pornography were misdirected and ultimately threatened sexual freedoms and free speech rights in a way that would be detrimental toward women and sexual minorities. WAP and sex-positive feminists were involved in conflict in the events surrounding the 1982 Barnard Conference. These events were battles in what became known as the Feminist Sex Wars of the late 1970s and 1980s.

Lacking Anything Resembling Moral Consensus We're Doomed To Political "Might Makes Right!"

benjaminstudebaker |  There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’, the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat. Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.

Catholicism has certain distinctive effects on a place. Crucially, Catholicism situates politics as subordinate to morality. In medieval Catholic states, the monarch derives authority from the pope or from divine right. This means the monarch’s legitimacy depends on the monarch having the right moral orientation. In other parts of the world, politics and morality were more heavily enmeshed. In the Byzantine Empire, the emperor was supreme in both religious and temporal matters. In the Islamic world, the caliph combined both political and religious authority. In China, different dynasties embraced and promoted the teachings of many different schools of thought at varying points. It was only in the Catholic west that politics and morality were firmly separated, with the former rendered clearly subordinate to the latter.

Because Catholicism made politics subject to religion, it became especially important for its theology to be clear. If the legitimacy of the regime depends on the regime having the right moral orientation, a moral consensus must be maintained and articulated. Any breakdown in the consensus over religion would threaten to destroy the political consensus, too. So in the Catholic world, heresy became extraordinarily taboo. The effect of this was to make Catholicism steadily more rigid over time. Its theology became enormously detailed and ornate, but it also became less flexible. Eastern rulers could adjust moral and religious emphases to suit their political needs, but Catholic rulers were in a moral straightjacket. Over time, the tensions between the Catholic moral vision and the political imperatives faced by Catholic rulers intensified. Catholic kingdoms consolidated their power, and monarchs sought to reduce their dependence on Catholicism for legitimacy. This led to state-sponsored Protestantism, as well as the promotion of secular humanism.

The trouble is that abstractions like the good, the true, or God are inherently difficult for human beings to concretely define. Attempts to capture them conceptually necessarily lead to simplification and distortion. But because Catholicism had become the dominant legitimation paradigm for medieval states, it had to articulate precise conceptualizations of irreducibly abstract ideas. This was understandable–without precision, how could we know the king really was legitimate? But the subordination of politics to morality compelled Catholics to develop a theology that was too precise to be accurate. In other words, by trying to subordinate politics to morality, Catholics were forced to subordinate morality to politics.

The excessively strong, excessively precise claims of the Catholics led to the repudiation of these claims by the Protestants and humanists. This tore apart the Catholic consensus and badly undermined political legitimacy. For a while, Protestants and humanists tried to replace Catholicism with another precise account of good/truth/God. But because precise accounts necessarily distort these abstractions, it was impossible to convince the public to embrace these substitutes with anything like the level of conviction with which Catholicism had once been embraced.

This forced post-Catholic states to make their peace with a level of moral pluralism. But post-Catholics could not have the same attitude to pluralism which the Romans or Persians or Chinese had. In these ancient empires, politics and morality were inseparably bound up with one another, and therefore as long as religious views remained compatible with the law they posed no deep problems. In the post-Catholic world, the state was still expected to justify itself in reference to morality. Without a moral consensus, the basis of the state’s authority was in jeopardy. So when post-Catholic states embraced pluralism, they had to embrace pluralism as a morality in itself, so that this morality could take on the role which Catholicism had previously played. This, ultimately, is what liberalism is–a kind of pluralism fashioned into a morality to which the state might be answerable.

 

Drugged-Up, Divorced, Ignorant, Indebted And Decadent....,

NewYorker |  Everyone’s fed up with the baby boomers. Younger progressives charge them with a form of generational hoarding—of titles and power but mostly of money. The richest generation in the history of the world, the story goes, has squandered its wealth on vanity purchases and projects while leaving younger Americans with a debased environment and crazy levels of debt. During the Presidency of Donald Trump—a boomer himself, who drew some of his strongest support from other boomers—the generation’s long-standing optimism seemed plainly misleading. Why did anyone think that things were always bound to turn out all right?

But for bleakness, scope, and entropic finality, the progressive critique of boomers has nothing on the Catholic social-conservative one, which measures the generation’s sins not just in rising debt ratios but also in the corruption of souls. In the view of an increasingly prominent cohort of Catholic intellectuals, Americans have, in the long span of the boomer generation, gone from public-spirited to narcotized, porn-addicted, and profoundly narcissistic, incapable not only of the headline acts of idealism to which boomers once aspired, such as changing the relations between the races or the sexes, but also of the mundane ones, such as raising children with discipline and care. That the arguments over the boomer legacy quickly become fundamental—that they bring up the question of national decline and the fate of liberalism—suggests that the generation has so fully suffused cultural memory that, when we say “boomer,” we might simply mean “American.”

The more nakedly selfish and frankly pornographic American that society came to seem during the Trump years, the more influence accrued to the scolds. Much of this had to do with the singular presence of Ross Douthat, a brilliant Catholic conservative intellectual and the best columnist of the time. But even the optimists were seeking a darker palette, and the Catholic conservatives were there to supply it. In 2018, Barack Obama let it be known on Facebook that he had been reading “Why Liberalism Failed,” by the Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen, whose writing is suffused with a thistle-chewing pessimism. The project of liberalizing markets and culture, Deneen argued, had made everyone feel rootless, and was behind the yearning for a strongman that helped give us Trump.

Deneen made a certain amount of sense as a despair thermometer. The latest impressions left by the boomers in that moment suggested that everything had gone terribly wrong: Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, the racism and stupidity of the Trump Administration, and the spectre of the religious grass roots in thrall to a man who had not only allegedly cheated on his wife, with a porn star, shortly after she gave birth but who had also imposed his adult children on the world, most notably a daughter obsessed with the sheen of prosperity and a son who broadcast brutality from a twitching mouth. So much seemed morally repugnant. How had we, as a liberal society, become so fond of corruption—and so gross?

The Catholic intellectual right issued a correction, as quick and snappy as a nun’s rap across the knuckles: you are looking for a different word, they said. Not “gross,” but “decadent.”

U.S. Elites Haven't Yet Provided Ole'Cornpop An Approved Roadmap For Agriculture

politico |  President Joe Biden needs the help of the powerful farm industry to reach his sky-high climate goals. But his plans for cutting agricultural emissions might not have enough teeth to take a big bite out of global warming.

Biden on Thursday pledged a drastic reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. But the White House hasn’t set any specific targets yet for agriculture, which accounts for 10 percent of all U.S. emissions, according to the EPA. Those discharges mostly stem from fertilizers, livestock and manure.

“To be realistic, the administration has to look at cutting some of the existing emissions,” said Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), who sits on the House Agriculture Committee. “We are going to have to talk about cutting emissions from farms and changing some of the practices.”

The administration has steered clear of discussing stricter environmental regulations that could scare off the largely conservative farm sector, as well as the rural lawmakers that Biden will need to advance many of his environmental goals. Farmers have been slow to wake up to the reality of climate change, though increasingly extreme weather of late has hammered farm country and forced a reckoning.

A summary of Biden’s climate pledge notes that agriculture is both a source of greenhouse gases and potentially a key piece of the solution by capturing and storing heat-trapping carbon dioxide in forests and farmland. Environmental advocates, like the left-leaning Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, say the White House needs to address both sides of that equation to make a dent in global warming.

 

Took Your mRNA Jabs Like A Good Little Sheeple, AND THEN STILL GOT COVID!!!

KHN |  Robin Hauser, a pediatrician in Tampa, Florida, got covid in February. What separates her from the vast majority of the tens of millions of other Americans who have come down with the virus is this: She got sick seven weeks after her second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

“I was shocked,” said Hauser. “I thought: ‘What the heck? How did that happen?’ I now tell everyone, including my colleagues, not to let their guard down after the vaccine.”

As more Americans every day are inoculated, a tiny but growing number are contending with the disturbing experience of getting covid despite having had one shot, or even two.

In data released Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that at least 5,800 people had fallen ill or tested positive for the coronavirus two weeks or more after they completed both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine.

A total of about 78 million Americans are now fully vaccinated.

These so-called breakthrough infections occurred among people of all ages. Just over 40% were in people age 60 or older, and 65% occurred in women. Twenty-nine percent of infected people reported no symptoms, but 7% were hospitalized and just over 1%, 74 people, died, according to the CDC.

Public health officials have said breakthrough infections were expected, since manufacturers have warned loudly and often that the vaccines are not 100% protective. The Pfizer and Moderna versions have consistently been shown to be above 90% effective, most recently for at least six months. Studies have also shown they are nearly 100% effective at ensuring that the small fraction of vaccinated patients who do contract the virus will not get severe cases or require hospitalization.

Still, people are usually shocked and befuddled when they become the rare breakthrough victim. After months of fear and taking precautions to avoid contracting covid, they felt safe once they got their shots.

Should Immune-Compromised Users of Autoimmune Disorder "Biologicals" Get mRNA Jabs?

NYTimes |  In a follow-up, the scientists found that 34 percent of people taking the drug were protected after a single dose of the Pfizer vaccine and only 27 percent after a single dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine. (In Britain, the current practice is to delay second doses to stretch vaccine availability.)

Likewise, another study published last month indicated that fewer than 15 percent of patients with cancers of blood or the immune system, and fewer than 40 percent of those with solid tumors, produced antibodies after receiving a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

And a study published last month in the journal JAMA reported that only 17 percent of 436 transplant recipients who got one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine had detectable antibodies three weeks later.

Despite the low odds, immunocompromised people should still get the vaccines because they may produce some immune cells that are protective, even antibodies in a subset of patients.

“These patients should probably be prioritized for optimally timed two doses,” said Dr. Tariq Ahmad, a gastroenterologist at the Royal Devon and Exeter NHS Foundation Trust who was involved in the infliximab studies.

He suggested that clinicians routinely measure antibody responses in immunocompromised people even after two vaccine doses, so as to identify those who also may need monoclonal antibodies to prevent infection or a third dose of the vaccines.

Wendy Halperin, 54, was diagnosed at age 28 with a condition called common variable immunodeficiency. She was hospitalized with Covid-19 in January and remained there for 15 days. But the coronavirus induced unusual symptoms.

“I was having trouble walking,” she recalled. “I just lost control of my limbs, like I couldn’t walk down the street.”

Because she was treated for Covid-19 with convalescent plasma, Ms. Halperin has had to wait three months to be immunized and has made an appointment for April 26. But despite her condition, her body did manage to produce some antibodies to the initial infection.

“The take home message is that everybody should try and get the vaccine,” said Dr. Amit Verma, an oncologist at Montefiore Medical Center.

Covid Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese: Why Don't We Address Systemic Obesity?

 aier |  Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, the media and politicians have insisted we rely on the “judgment calls” of their proclaimed experts to guide policy. Facile but incorrect stories about lockdowns dominated. 

In March, Dr. Fauci again incorrectly predicted that doom was upon us when Texas relaxed its pandemic rules. 

Kahneman writes: “It is wrong to blame anyone for failing to forecast accurately in an unpredictable world. However, it seems fair to blame professionals for believing they can succeed in an impossible task.” Perhaps, Kahneman is too kind. With Covid, predictions are founded on politics, not science, as Bill Maher recently pointedly and humorously explained. 

We are ignorant of our ignorance. It is time to look for new patterns in the evidence of those who have not survived.

Who Didn’t Come Back from Covid

The military was wise enough to listen to Wald. It would have been perverse to ignore the cockpit and reinforce parts of the plane that could survive bullet hits.

Policy makers, politicians, and the media have largely ignored the cockpit of good health: the human immunological system.

Maher pointed to a recent CDC study that reported the vast majority (78%) of those hospitalized or dead from Covid have been overweight or obese.

Of Americans aged 20 and over 73.6% are overweight; 42.5% are obese. (Obesity is defined as a body mass index (BMI) of over 30.) Many studies explain how obesity decreases resistance to infection. Obesity is linked to type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease, which increase the odds of hospitalization from Covid. 

The Covid survival narrative has focused attention on lockdowns, masks and vaccinations. Maher pointed out the role that obesity played: “People died because talking about obesity had become a third rail in America.” Maher continued, “the last thing you want to do is say something insensitive. We would literally rather die. Instead, we were told to lock down. Unfortunately, the killer was already in the house and her name is Little Debbie.”

Little Debbie, of course, is Maher’s reference to heavily processed foods that are ubiquitous in the American diet. 

A significant factor in the startling numbers of overweight Americans is the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in heavily processed foods. 

The total per capita consumption of all sugars in the United States is approximately 150 pounds a year. Of that, the average American consumes over 50 pounds of corn sweeteners a year.

Sugar is heavily subsidized by the US government through loans, purchases of sugar, and tariffs on imported sugar. Government incentives have created a high-fructose corn syrup industry which didn’t exist prior to the 1970s. US sugar prices can be up to twice the world price.

From 1995-2020, corn subsidies in the United States totaled $116.6 billion. The subsidized and surplus corn ends up not only as processed food but as animal feed. 

Repackaging The Dispossessive Strategies Of Imperialism As ‘Feeding The World’

counterpunch  |  We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agrifood chain. The high-tech/data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose a certain type of agriculture and food production on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in the recent report ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and new genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agrifood corporations.

Of course, those involved in this portray what they are doing as some kind of humanitarian endeavour – saving the planet with ‘climate-friendly solutions’, helping farmers or feeding the world. This is how many of them probably do genuinely regard their role inside their corporate echo chamber. But what they are really doing is repackaging the dispossessive strategies of imperialism as ‘feeding the world’.

Failed Green Revolution

Since the Green Revolution, US agribusiness and financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have sought to hook farmers and nation states on corporate seeds and proprietary inputs as well as loans to construct the type of agri infrastructure that chemical-intensive farming requires.

Monsanto-Bayer and other agribusiness concerns have since the 1990s been attempting to further consolidate their grip on global agriculture and farmers’ corporate dependency with the rollout of genetically engineered seeds, commonly known as GMOs (genetically modified organisms).

In her latest report, ‘Reclaim the Seed’, Vandana Shiva says:

“In the 1980s, the chemical corporations started to look at genetic engineering and patenting of seed as new sources of super profits. They took farmers varieties from the public gene banks, tinkered with the seed through conventional breeding or genetic engineering, and took patents.”

Shiva talks about the Green Revolution and seed colonialism and the pirating of farmers seeds and knowledge. She says that 768,576 accessions of seeds were taken from farmers in Mexico alone:

“… taking the farmers seeds that embodies their creativity and knowledge of breeding. The ‘civilising mission’ of Seed Colonisation is the declaration that farmers are ‘primitive’ and the varieties they have bred are ‘primitive’, ‘inferior’, ‘low yielding’ and have to be ‘substituted’ and ‘replaced’ with superior seeds from a superior race of breeders, so called ‘modern varieties’ and ‘improved varieties’ bred for chemicals.”

It is now clear that the Green Revolution has been a failure in terms of its devastating environmental impacts, the undermining of highly productive traditional low-input agriculture and its sound ecological footing, the displacement of rural populations and the adverse impacts on village communities, nutrition, health and regional food security.

Only Bootlicking Parseltongues Even Pretend To Give A Fsck About Your "Ideas"...,

Fastcompany |  The recently released Forbes World’s Billionaires List includes some shocking figures about our tech overlords. At the start of 2020, the tech barons were collectively worth $419 billion. A year later, their wealth had soared to $651 billion—a 56% increase. The hoarding of that wealth harms us all: It distributes resources away from those who need it most and, by allowing the tech barons to influence government policy, corrodes democratic society.

Most of us will never grow our wealth by 56% in a year. But wealth begets wealth. The superrich have access to investments that yield higher returns, the corporations they run pay less and less corporate tax, and as individuals they pay less in income tax than the rest of us.

The barons’ financial advantage over the average person is extraordinary. While their median net worth is $90.2 billion, the net worth of the median white American household is $189,000, while that of Black American families is $24,000. In other words, the median Big Tech billionaire is more than 477,000 times wealthier than the median white American family, and more than 3.7 million times wealthier than the median Black family.

To get a further sense of scale, consider what these billionaires could achieve with their wealth if they decided to. Together, they could:

• End global hunger ($330 billion);
• Eradicate malaria from the face of the earth ($120 billion);
• End homelessness in America ($20 billion);
• Feed the hungry suffering in Yemen’s famine ($4 billion);
• Give everyone in the world access to clean water and sanitation for six years ($22 billion per year); and
• Vaccinate the world from COVID-19 ($25 billion).

With that done, they would still have enough for each of them to take home $2.6 billion. With their spare change, they could each afford to collect the 10 most expensive works of art in the world ($2.3 billion) or take on another pet project, such as saving 520,000 lives by providing critical vaccines to children across the world.

Some may find it unreasonable to ask the Big Tech barons to survive on just $2.6 billion each. After all, the thinking goes, the barons earned that money. But these billionaires could give away $144 billion—more than enough to eradicate malaria on our planet—and still be as rich as they were when the pandemic started in 2020.

While maintaining their 2020 level of wealth, these Big Tech billionaires could start a direct cash transfer campaign and send $1,100 checks to every American family. Or they could send $19 to every person in the world. (That would be far more impactful: 689 million people around the world live on less than $1.90 a day.) Jeff Bezos would still walk away with $113 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg with $54.7 billion.

As long as the tech barons remain in possession of extraordinary concentrations of wealth, that inequity will continue to erode our society’s democracy. At a time when Congress, independent agencies, and state attorneys general are looking to rein in the power of Big Tech, the sheer wealth of these individuals makes it hard to hold them and their corporations accountable.

Maybe It's Time We Tried Democracy Instead?

jacobin |  The enterprise of big philanthropy ultimately benefits the wealthy a great deal. Though this news is something less than earth shattering, a newly published review of scholarship surrounding elite giving in the United States and UK makes the case with particular force. Jointly authored by four academics based at different universities in Britain, “Elite philanthropy in the United States and United Kingdom in the new age of inequalities” both lends weight to the existing critiques of big philanthropy and offers some useful theoretical foundations for critics moving forward.

Today’s elites practice charitable giving largely for personal benefit and because large-scale giving inevitably yields a kind of soft power. “Elite philanthropy,” the authors write,

is rarely a “pure gift” motivated solely by altruism; rather, it represents a means of converting surplus funds into prized alternative forms of capital. . . . On this analysis, elites are drawn to philanthropy not simply as a means of virtuously “giving back” to society, as is so often claimed, but also as an unimpeachable source of the complementary capitals needed to function effectively in the field of power.

Indeed, visit any hospital, museum, or university today and you’ll inevitably find the names of ultra-wealthy patrons emblazoned somewhere prominent for all to see. Scale this up to the commanding heights of big charity and you ultimately find figures like Bill Gates — who mysteriously increased his wealth by about 60 percent in roughly the decade and a half after pledging to give it all away. Gates’s giving may not have required much generosity on his part, but it certainly yielded big returns for his public reputation and, it would seem, for his own bottom line.

Elite philanthropy, far from being merely an inadequate solution to social problems, ultimately works to entrench and perpetuate them — offering a tiny handful of elites a useful vehicle for the purchase of virtue, and the soft power that comes with it, at the expense of the many.

 

Eric Schmidt And Bill Gates Exemplars Of American Fatal Synergy

charleshughsmith |  The first question identifies the structural weak points in the system. These weak points could have any number of sources: they could be perverse incentives embedded in the system, elites caught up in their own enrichment, or even a willful blindness to the nature of the crisis threatening the system.

Here's an example in the U.S. system: corporations reap $2.4 trillion in profits annually, roughly 15% of the nation's entire output. Politicians need millions of dollars in campaign contributions to win elections. Those seeking political influence have not just billions but tens of billions. Those needing to distribute political favors will do so for mere millions.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

"I'd say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups -- of economic elites and of organized interests."

This asymmetry cannot be overcome. Indeed, the past 40 years have witnessed an increasing concentration of wealth and power in corporations and their lobbyists and a decline of political influence of the masses to near-zero. Every reform has failed to slow this momentum, which is constructed of incentives to maximize profits, gain political favors and win elections.

In a similar fashion, the Imperial Presidency has gained power at the expense of Congress for decades--a reality that scholars bemoan but the reforms allowed by the system are unable to stop. So we have endless wars of choice without a declaration of war by Congress, one of the core powers of the elected body.

An analogy to these systemic weak points is the synergies of an organism's essential organs: if any one organ fails, the organism dies even though the other organs are working just fine. In other words, any system is only as robust as its weakest essential component/process.

Whatever problems the system is incapable of resolving have the potential to bring down the system once they interact synergistically.

The second question identifies how many groups have been suppressed, silenced or ignored by those at the top of the heap. If these groups have an essential role in the system as producers, consumers and taxpayers, their demand to have a say in decisions that directly affect them is natural.

Another group with understandable frustrations at being left out of the decision-making are those in the educated upper classes whose expectations of roles in the top tier were encouraged by their families, society and training. When these expectations are not met because there are no longer enough slots in the top tier for the rapidly proliferating upper classes, the group left out in the cold has the time, education and motivation to demand a voice.

In other words, those denied access to resources, capital and agency who felt entitled to this access will not be as easily silenced as those who accept their low status and restricted access to resources, capital and agency as "the natural order of things."

All the groups that are denied a voice and access to resources, capital and agency are in effect a sealed pressure cooker atop a flame. The pressure builds and builds without any apparent consequence until it explodes.

The more that power is concentrated in the hands of the few, the greater the desperation of the groups who are locked out of power. As their desperation rises, some of these groups are willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to effect change.

The process of explosive demands for change erupting is difficult to manage once released. The system's essential subsystems may be destabilized--the equivalent of organ failure--and once destabilized, it's often no longer possible to restore the previous stability.

In this environment, the common good falls by the wayside and the system collapses.

Eric Schmidt Bet The Future On Cuomo And Cuomo Fscked It Up Beyond All Recognition

Politico  |  Embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, continuing an April tour of the state with another press-free press conference in Buffalo, got a vote of confidence Friday from one of the biggest names in tech: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Cuomo, who faces an impeachment inquiry and multiple investigations into allegations of misconduct, has been parading around the state in the days since he cut a deal with lawmakers on a state budget. 

As the governor signed one of the budget bills Friday, Schmidt joined Cuomo to help tout an effort to expand broadband access — and give the Democrat a public boost of confidence.

“Governor, your leadership in general over this pandemic has been extraordinary,” Schmidt said.

As with other events in recent weeks, Cuomo was flanked by supporters who praised his handling of the Covid-19 crisis.

“I trust Gov. Cuomo’s leadership,” Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said. “I’ve worked with him long enough to know that he truly cares about our great city … Thank you for your vision and your bold leadership toward building back a better and stronger New York."

Key context: The purpose of Friday’s event was to sign the Education, Labor and Family Assistance portion of the budget, which Cuomo was due to act on by Monday.

The participants were focused on a portion of this budget bill that requires broadband companies to charge low-income families no more than $15 per month for access. A grant funded by Schmidt’s foundation will cover costs for 50,000 students.

Another closed press event: Cuomo stopped letting reporters attend these events in December, citing concern about the spread of Covid-19.

The Buffalo event was his fourth one this week. One closed press event held at an apple orchard on Tuesday was outside. On Wednesday, his schedule said the media was prohibited from an event at Belmont Park “due to COVID restrictions” — a few hours later, the governor announced that it is now safe for more than 20,000 spectators to attend races there.

 

Why New York Lost Its Mind - Eric Schmidt REDUX (Originally Posted 5/11/20)

Not even gonna lie, not an Eric Schmidt fan and never have been. 

theintercept |  For a few fleeting moments during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the somber grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something resembling a smile.

“We are ready, we’re all-in,” the governor gushed. “We are New Yorkers, so we’re aggressive about it, we’re ambitious about it. … We realize that change is not only imminent, but it can actually be a friend if done the right way.”

The inspiration for these uncharacteristically good vibes was a video visit from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who joined the governor’s briefing to announce that he will be heading up a blue-ribbon commission to reimagine New York state’s post-Covid reality, with an emphasis on permanently integrating technology into every aspect of civic life.

“The first priorities of what we’re trying to do,” Schmidt said, “are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband. … We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better.” Lest there be any doubt that the former Google chair’s goals were purely benevolent, his video background featured a framed pair of golden angel wings.

Just one day earlier, Cuomo had announced a similar partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop “a smarter education system.” Calling Gates a “visionary,” Cuomo said the pandemic has created “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas … all these buildings, all these physical classrooms — why with all the technology you have?” he asked, apparently rhetorically.

It has taken some time to gel, but something resembling a coherent Pandemic Shock Doctrine is beginning to emerge. Call it the “Screen New Deal.” Far more high-tech than anything we have seen during previous disasters, the future that is being rushed into being as the bodies still pile up treats our past weeks of physical isolation not as a painful necessity to save lives, but as a living laboratory for a permanent — and highly profitable — no-touch future.

I Got A Dollar That Says Cornpop Won't Stop Supplying Police With Military Equipment

What U.S. Elites Disdain Is What Their Sockpuppets Term "Divisive"

FAIR |  New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (Twitter, 12/29/20) described a $2,000 Covid relief check as “divisive,” even though 75% of Americans (and 72% of Republicans) wanted the government to prioritize another universal payment. All too often, words such as “divisive,” “contentious” or “controversial” are used merely as media codewords meaning “ideas unpopular with the ruling elite”—what FAIR calls “not journalistically viable.”

Medicare for All is a prime example of this. At least since the issue began receiving national media attention as a result of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, a majority of Americans have supported some form of national, publicly funded healthcare system. Some polls have found nearly three in four support the idea, including a majority of Republican voters. Yet corporate media continue to disparage universal public health insurance, labeling it “divisive” (Axios, 2/14/20), “controversial” (Christian Science Monitor, 6/4/19; Time, 10/24/19; New York Times, 1/1/20) or “politically perilous” (Associated Press, 3/25/19).

In an article entitled “Medicare for All Is Divisive (in the Democratic Party),” the New York Times (3/18/19) described giving people free healthcare “immensely contentious,” framing it as a risky and enormously expensive gamble that centrists in swing districts could ill afford to take coming up to an election. The reality, of course, was the opposite: Every single Democratic incumbent in a swing district who endorsed Medicare for All won reelection in 2020. The same cannot be said for those that did not endorse it.

There can be few policies that would so directly and immediately benefit so many Americans as raising the minimum wage to $15 (though that’s still not enough to afford rent in most US states). Forty percent of the country told Reuters/Ipsos pollsters in February that they or someone close to them would be positively impacted by such a change. The same poll found that supporters of raising the minimum wage outnumbered opponents by 25 percentage points. Regardless, increasing it is often described as “divisive” (e.g., Bloomberg, 10/2/17; Politico, 3/16/21; Delaware News Journal, 3/10/21).

Cornpop's A Pathetic Mouthpiece For Elite U.S. Disdain For Russia

mtracey  |  Deliberately vague weasel-word terms like “election interference” and/or “influence” gained such purchase in the past four-to-five years for a simple reason: the deliberate vagueness allowed people in power — elected officials, pundits, Intelligence Community functionaries — to claim unspecified expertise on a supposedly emerging range of threats. 

The threats were portrayed as particularly scary because of their alleged potential to Undermine Our Democracy. Consequently, these power-wielding people acquired a potent tool in their arsenal to accuse political enemies, whether foreign or domestic, of contributing to the proliferation of new and scary threats. The accusations were so deliberately vague that it was almost impossible to ever rebut them; sometimes even retweeting a meme was sufficient to be implicated in a foreign plot to destroy the very foundations of America. If an act so trivial as clicking one’s mouse on a social media post could be spun as abetting a foreign-backed “interference” or “influence” scheme, then that created an endless number of booby-traps for you to walk into.

So there was nothing new about the suite of anti-Russia charges promulgated Thursday by the US federal government, and parroted as usual with maximum credulity across the US media ecosystem. The charges were again predicated on the idea that Russian “interference” and/or “influence” is an extremely foreboding test for the survival of US Democracy. Taking bold action, the Treasury Department levied sanctions against a bunch more Russians for their claimed nefarious behavior in carrying out this interference/influence — a fulfillment of Joe Biden’s oft-stated campaign pledge that under his watch, Russia would finally “pay a price” for allegedly engaging in such activities. Donald Trump, it was thought, had been appallingly lax in his resolve to confront this threat; now, a new sheriff is in town.

Leaving aside the question of whether it’s prudent to assume that Janet Yellen is suddenly in possession of a foolproof methodology for attributing the provenance of “cyber operations” to specific foreign individuals and nation-states, it’s worth emphasizing what exactly is being alleged in the statement. The Treasury Department document reads: “Outlets operated by Russian Intelligence Services focus on divisive issues in the United States, denigrate US political candidates, and disseminate false and misleading information.” 

Noting that these same characteristics could be just as easily applied to US corporate media outlets is so blindingly self-evident as to almost be redundant. Were there not “outlets” during the 2020 election that were “focused” on “denigrating” Donald Trump? Or for that matter, Joe Biden? Do “divisive issues” not tend to be “focused on” by these same outlets as a basic precept of their core business model? Controversy = clicks/views, which equals revenue. Everyone knows this. Yet when scary Russian outlets are said to employ this same logic in their own content-production enterprises, it magically becomes dangerous enough to justify all manner of punitive government and corporate action. Including but not limited to: censorship purges, tighter regulation of online speech, and, as Biden announced Thursday, sanctions and expulsion of diplomats. “Disseminating false and misleading information”? The entire US media just got caught “disseminating” a fake story about Russians putting bounties on the heads of US soldiers in Afghanistan. If you’re truly concerned about the dissemination of “false and misleading information” having deleterious effects on the health of US political culture, your first target should be CNN.

 

Solarwinds Hack: NPR Publishes Thousands Of Words, Gives No Evidence, Yet Blames Russia...,

npr |  "This release includes bug fixes, increased stability and performance improvements."

The routine software update may be one of the most familiar and least understood parts of our digital lives. A pop-up window announces its arrival and all that is required of us is to plug everything in before bed. The next morning, rather like the shoemaker and the elves, our software is magically transformed.

Last spring, a Texas-based company called SolarWinds made one such software update available to its customers. It was supposed to provide the regular fare — bug fixes, performance enhancements — to the company's popular network management system, a software program called Orion that keeps a watchful eye on all the various components in a company's network. Customers simply had to log into the company's software development website, type a password and then wait for the update to land seamlessly onto their servers.

The routine update, it turns out, is no longer so routine.

Hackers believed to be directed by the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, used that routine software update to slip malicious code into Orion's software and then used it as a vehicle for a massive cyberattack against America. 

"Eighteen thousand [customers] was our best estimate of who may have downloaded the code between March and June of 2020," Sudhakar Ramakrishna, SolarWinds president and CEO, told NPR. "If you then take 18,000 and start sifting through it, the actual number of impacted customers is far less. We don't know the exact numbers. We are still conducting the investigation."

On Thursday, the Biden administration announced a roster of tough sanctions against Russia as part of what it characterized as the "seen and unseen" response to the SolarWinds breach. 

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You have to click through to NPR to read its TLDR chindribble agitprop and entirely evidence-free Russian attribution. However, what little we saw and could opine about wrt that event is compiled right'chere with Whitney Webb's vastly more persuaive and internally consistent attribution to the Israeli IT company acquired by Solarwinds in 2019 SAManage.

Ay-Oh-No, Maybe These Ukrainian Nazis Shouldn't Have Nuclear Weapons?

antiwar |  Today Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky seconded a statement by Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili that “it is time for concrete proposals for Ukraine and Georgia to obtain a NATO MAP and a plan to join the EU.” The two countries have been paired as partners for future NATO membership, with both being promised membership in the global military bloc at the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania in 2008.

Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, seconded Zelensky’s demand that NATO admit Ukraine as a full member, stating that only that move would prevent a Russian invasion: “The only possibility for this [to prevent alleged invasion plans] is for Ukraine to finally become a NATO member.” He also claimed that had his country been in NATO in 2014 the secession of Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea would not have occurred; neither would the now seven-year was in the Donbass. He neglectd to state whether the U.S.-engineered uprising and overthrow of an internationally-recognized government would also have occurred. Most likely not, as the populations of NATO nationsare not allowed to elect, or if elect, keep any government Washington and Brussels view with disapprobation.

The envoy then made this provocative statement:

“Ukraine has no other choice: either we are part of an alliance such as NATO and are doing our part to make this Europe stronger, or we have the only option – to arm by ourselves, and maybe think about nuclear status again. How else can we guarantee our defense?”

He also claimed there were 90,000 Russian military personnel deployed to the Donbass border and to Crimea; in his words, “We are dealing with the largest troop movement in Russia since the Second World War.” Which is arrant nonsense.

When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 a third of total Soviet nuclear weapons were in Ukraine; with 1,700 warheads in the country it had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the U.S. and Russia. In 1994 Ukraine joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon nation. It’s that decision the above-cited ambassador suggested be reversed. In fairness, this isn’t the first time the question of Ukraine developing its own nuclear weapons capacity has been broached. Over the past twenty years NATO-trained military leaders have raised the issue. But never before, and never during a crisis remotely comparable to the present one, has the issue been phrased so brutally: either place Ukraine under NATO Article 5 mutual military assistance status – and NATO acknowledges itself a nuclear alliance – or Ukraine will reassert itself as a nuclear power.

The shelling of the Donbass will be mild in comparison to what an armed conflict between a nuclear Ukraine and nuclear Russia would portend.

Imagine Mexico Be Like "Hey U.S. Withdraw Your Military From San Diego!"

thesaker  |  A terrible war is about to erupt on Russia's border with the Ukraine—or not—but there is some likelihood of a significant number of people getting killed before project Ukraine is finally over. Given that around 13 thousand people have been killed over the past seven years—the civil war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has gone on for that long!—this is no laughing matter. But people get desensitized to the mostly low-level warfare that has killed over ten thousand people. Just over the past couple of weeks a grandfather was shot by a Ukrainian sniper while feeding his chickens and a young boy was killed by a bomb precision-dropped on him from a Ukrainian drone.

But what's about to happen now is forecasted to be on a different scale: the Ukrainians are moving heavy armor and troops up to the line of separation while the Russians are moving theirs up to their side of the Ukrainian border, a position from which they can blast any and all Ukrainian troops straight out of the gene pool without so much as setting foot on Ukrainian territory—should they wish to do so. The Russians can justify their military involvement by the need to defend their own citizens: over the past seven years half a million residents in eastern Ukraine have applied for and been granted Russian citizenship. But how exactly can Russia defend its citizens while they are stuck in the crossfire between Russian and Ukrainian forces?

The rationale of defending its citizens led to conflict in the briefly Georgian region of South Ossetia, which started on August 8, 2008 and lasted barely a week, leaving Georgia effectively demilitarized. Russia rolled in, Georgia's troops ran off, Russia confiscated some of the more dangerous war toys and rolled out. Georgia's paper warriors and their NATO consultants and Israeli trainers were left wiping each others' tears. Any suggestion of arming and equipping the Georgians since then is met with groaning and eye-rolling. Is the upcoming event in eastern Ukraine going to be similar to the swift and relatively painless defanging of Georgia in 2008? Given that the two situations are quite different, it seems foolish to think that the approach to resolving them would be the same.

Is it different this time and is World War III is about to er upt with eastern Ukraine being used as a trigger for this conflagration? Do the various statements made at various times by Vladimir Putin provide a solid enough basis for us to guess at what will happen next? Is there a third, typically, infuriatingly Russian approach to resolving this situation, where Russia wins, nobody dies and everyone in the West is left scratching their heads?  Fist tap Dale.

How Does A Jewish President Govern A Nakedly Nazi Ukraine?

forward |  The election of America’s first African-American president certainly didn’t end racism in the U.S. The same goes for Ukraine.

Poroshenko came to power as a result of an uprising that ousted his corrupt predecessor. Five years later, Zelensky was brought in as a rejection of Poroshenko. Zelensky, too, will soon be issued a verdict. And that can cut both ways.

It’s clear Zelensky must crack down on corruption, bringing much-needed justice to Ukraine. He’s already promised to work on steps such as stripping immunity from members of parliament. If he succeeds, an entire generation of Ukrainians will be raised under a Jewish president who finally managed to shed the country’s corrupt past, take it on a democratic Western trajectory, and deliver on the promises of Maidan. If he succeeds, it’ll be a tremendous victory for Ukraine and Judaism, especially at a time when anti-Semitism is surging globally.

The flip side is that Zelensky’s election will fuel Ukraine’s deepest anti-Semitic stereotype: the Jewish yoke.

The core tragedy of Ukraine, as seen by the darker strains of ultranationalism, is that it isn’t controlled y Ukrainians (i.e. ethnic Ukrainians). Instead, the country has always languished under the yoke of Poles, Russians, and especially Jews. This infestation is what prevented – and continues to prevent – the nation from achieving greatness. The solution is, of course, obvious.

Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytskyi’s 1648 uprising led to the torture and slaughter of tens of thousands of Jews in the name of cleansing Ukraine. So did the uprising of nationalist Symon Petliura in the early 20th century. So did the campaigns of WWII-era paramilitaries who had collaborated with the Nazis as well as butchered Jews of their own accord.

Indeed, if you’re an American Jew with Ukrainian roots, chances are your ancestors fled to the U.S. on the heels of an initiative to ‘shed the Jewish yoke’.

Today, as Ukraine continues to suffer economic misery, talk of the yoke has risen.

In 2017, member of parliament Nadiya Savchenko exploded in anti-Semitic tirade on live television. “Good question,” replied Savchenko to a caller who asked about the yoke. “Yes, our government has non-Ukrainian blood, shall we say. What should be done about it? We must think and take action.”

In a follow-up interview, Savchenko claimed 80% of those running Ukraine are Jews.

Savchenko isn’t alone. There have been numerous instances of similar rhetoric hurled by politicians, especially since Groysman became prime minister.

Now, for better or worse, that blood-stained stereotype has gained some credibility. Ukraine is about to be run by Zelensky – a Jewish president backed by Jewish oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskyi – and Groysman, a Jewish prime minister. For ultranationalists, every failure can now be cast at the feet of the Jewish trio. As one of Ukraine’s chief rabbis pointed out, this could have dangerous repercussions.