middleasteye | It cost Israel more than $1bn to activate its defence systems that intercepted Iran's massive drone and missile attack overnight, according to a former financial adviser to Israel's military.
"The defence tonight was on the order of 4-5bn shekels [$1-1.3bn] per
night," estimated Brigadier General Reem Aminoach in an interview with
Ynet news.
Aminoach highlighted that the staggering price tag stands in contrast
to the relatively low amount that Iran had spent to launch its assault,
which some estimates have put at less than 10 percent of what it cost
Israel to stop the attack.
Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles towards Israel on
Saturday, in response to an Israeli attack on its consulate in Syria
that killed two senior Revolutionary Guard commanders earlier this
month.
Israel said its military forces and its allies had intercepted 99
percent of the missiles, but some ballistic missiles penetrated Israeli
defences and hit the Nevatim Airbase in southern Israel.
"If we're talking about ballistic missiles that need to be brought
down with an Arrow system, cruise missiles that need to be brought down
with other missiles, and UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], which we
actually bring down mainly with fighter jets," he said.
"Then add up the costs - $3.5m for an Arrow missile, $1m for a
David's Sling, such and such costs for jets. An order of magnitude of
4-5bn shekels."
David's Sling is a weapons system meant to intercept medium to
long-range rockets and missiles. The Arrow system was designed to thwart
long-range missiles, including the types of ballistic missiles Iran
launched on Saturday and of long-range missiles launched by the Houthis
in Yemen.
LATimes | If you’ve ever heard that soothing voice or read those scholarly sentences, you’d know it’s him. Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan has a signature style.
That jowly baby face and genial manner have been fixtures among the talking heads on PBS’ “Inside Washington” since 1965. His voice can be heard on 25 major-market radio stations broadcasting “The Rowan Reports,” a daily radio commentary. He has written seven books, some of them bestsellers.
But lately, Rowan, an elegant and polished black man of 69 years who writes and speaks in the terse and precise prose common among the well-educated of his generation, has become something of an attack journalist on a self-appointed mission to bring down the current leadership of the NAACP.
His bitterly critical columns, distributed by the King Features Syndicate and published in 100 newspapers across the land, are the major reason the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People is facing its greatest crisis. NAACP Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis was forced to resign late in the summer amid allegations first raised by Rowan--that he used the organization’s money to settle a sexual discrimination suit brought by a former employee, opening the organization’s financial practices to unprecedented public scrutiny.
Rowan’s current target is NAACP Board Chairman William Gibson, who had been Chavis’ most ardent supporter. By repeatedly demanding that Gibson resign, Rowan has set himself apart from most mainstream reporters--black or white--who tend to steer clear of pointed and determined criticism of the NAACP. But Rowan relishes the combat of writing to incite change--regardless, he said, of whether his targets are white-led government institutions, such as the FBI under former director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s, or the current NAACP leadership.
During a wide-ranging interview conducted recently in the living room of his rambling northwest Washington home, Rowan defended his hard-edged columns. He called them “a service,” written with the intention of educating the public and instigating reforms within an organization he views as necessary to the interests of African Americans.
Rowan rejected the argument that he is bent on destroying the NAACP. In fact, he says, the organization absolutely has a role in the post-civil rights generation. “Take this (recent mid-term) election. The NAACP in a good and normal time would have been out there for weeks trying to get blacks out to vote,” he said. “They have been virtually paralyzed by all their money troubles and could only do a little trifling stuff.”
Once Gibson is out of office, Rowan said, and a new management team is in place, he will use his column to urge supporters to send money back into the NAACP.
“There is a group preparing for the moment when (Gibson) steps down so they can say to the nation, as I will say, ‘The time has come to rush to the rescue to the support of this organization because the United States would be a lesser place without an NAACP,’ ” Rowan said. “But no way will I ask anybody to give a nickel as long as (Gibson) is there at the head of the NAACP because I know the extent to which the meager funds of the NAACP have been abused.”
Rowan also brushed aside suggestions he was an “Uncle Tom” or tool of the mainstream media, noting his 43 years as a Life Member of the NAACP. Among the highlights: Rowan “worked closely with (then NAACP attorney) Thurgood Marshall in the days way before Brown v. Board of Education.”
It’s not easy to shock Joe Rogan but that’s exactly what happened when they played this eerily accurate prediction from 1965 on how to destroy the fabric of society.
theatlantic | Did
the decline of religion cut some people off from a crucial gateway to
civic engagement, or is religion just one part of a broader retreat from
associations and memberships in America? “It’s hard to know what the
causal story is here,” Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at NYU, told me.
But what’s undeniable is that nonreligious Americans are also less
civically engaged. This year, the Pew Research Center reported that
religiously unaffiliated Americans are
less likely to volunteer, less likely to feel satisfied with their
community and social life, and more likely to say they feel lonely.
“Clearly more Americans are spending Sunday mornings on their couches,
and it’s affected the quality of our collective life,” he said.
Klinenberg doesn’t blame individual Americans for these changes. He sees our civic retreat as a story about place. In his book Palaces for the People,
Klinenberg reported that Americans today have fewer shared spaces where
connections are formed. “People today say they just have fewer places
to go for collective life,” he said. “Places that used to anchor
community life, like libraries and school gyms and union halls, have
become less accessible or shuttered altogether.” Many people, having
lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no
alternative method to build a sense of community.
Imagine,
by analogy, a parallel universe where Americans suddenly gave up on
sit-down restaurants. In surveys, they named many reasonable motivations
for their abstinence: the expense, the overuse of salt and sugar and
butter, the temptation to drink alcohol. As restaurants disappeared by
the hundreds, some mourned their closure, while others said it simply
didn’t matter. After all, there were still plenty of ways for people to
feed themselves. Over time, however, Americans as a group never found
another social activity to replace their dining-out time. They saw less
of one another with each passing decade. Sociologists noted that the
demise of restaurants had correlated with a rise in aloneness, just as
the CDC noticed an increase in anxiety and depression.
I’ve
come to believe that something like this story is happening, except
with organized religion playing the role of restaurants. On an
individual basis, people can give any number of valid-sounding reasons
for not frequenting a house of worship. But a behavioral shift that is
fully understandable on the individual level has coincided with, and
even partly exacerbated, a great rewiring of our social relations.
And
America didn’t simply lose its religion without finding a communal
replacement. Just as America’s churches were depopulated, Americans
developed a new relationship with a technology that, in many ways, is
the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. As the
social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in his new book, The Anxious Generation,
to stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our
bodies, to float placelessly in a content cosmos, to skim our attention
from one piece of ephemera to the next. The internet is timeless in the
best and worst of ways—an everything store with no opening or closing
times. “In the virtual world, there is no daily, weekly, or annual
calendar that structures when people can and cannot do things,” Haidt
writes. In other words, digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.
Religious
rituals are the opposite in almost every respect. They put us in our
body, Haidt writes, many of them requiring “some kind of movement that
marks the activity as devotional.” Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate,
and Jews daven.
Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour
or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. (It’s no
surprise that people describe a scheduled break from their digital
devices as a “Sabbath.”) Finally, religious ritual often requires that
we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people, whether
in a church, mosque, synagogue, or over a dinner-table prayer. In other
words, the religious ritual is typically embodied, synchronous, deep, and collective.
realclearpolitics | Batya Ungar-Sargon, the deputy editor of Newsweek and author of the new book, Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America's Working Men and Women, speaks with RCP Washington bureau chief Carl Cannon on Thursday's edition of the RealClearPolitics radio show.
"People don't talk about it like it is an outrage," she said about the
transformation of the Democratic Party into something other than a party
for the working class. "It is such a fait accompli at this point
that we forget that it is outrageous for a party that used to represent
labor, the little guy against big corporations and the rich, completely
abandoned that constituency to cater to an over-credentialed college
elite on one hand, and the dependent poor on the other. And it is double
outrageous because that party still masquerades as the party of the
little guy, even though it is not the case anymore."
"It started with the handshake agreement between both parties that we're
going to become an economy that embraced free trade," she said. "That
was Bill Clinton's contribution to this, signing NAFTA into law and
trade agreements that resulted in the offshoring of 5 million
manufacturing jobs to China and Mexico."
"And then President Obama showed up and said repeatedly those jobs are
not coming back, and pioneered this idea that everyone was going to go
to college and become part of the knowledge industry, and that was going
to be the pathway to the American dream. And then it became the only
pathway to the American dream!"
"Joe Biden played his part by effectively opening up the border,
decriminalizing illegal border crossing, and welcoming in 11 million new
migrants to compete with working-class Americans for the jobs that
remained here," she said.
"It's true that immigration raises the GDP in the aggregate. The problem
is nobody lives in the aggregate. GDP is not equally distributed across
the nation. We know the top 20% now has 50% of the GDP at its disposal.
The very people who love to rail against the 1% are the people who have
made the largest gains in the last 50 years, and they are the consumers
of low-wage migrant labor, which is why, of course, they want more of
it. It is an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the
elites who consume that labor."
"If you bring in 11 million people and you know they are going to be
employed as cleaning people, landscapers, and in construction, you have
effectively stolen wages from the Americans who were employed in those
jobs. It is just obvious supply and demand."
Carl Cannon asked: "Do they really hate the working class, or are they
just in their politically correct bubble and don't see what they're
doing?"
"They can not stand the idea that they will lose, even if they lose in a
very obviously democratic way," Ungar-Sargon said. "They are very
comfortable when they can sit there on cable news making millions of
dollars to sneer at the working class. They're comfortable when the
working class can't clap back."
"This was really Obama's revolution, the idea that the 'smart set'
should run things. We should have an oligarchy of the credentialed. But
when the working class has their audacity to vote in their own interest
and clap back by putting somebody like Donald Trump in power, that
sneering contempt turns to hate."
tri-statedefender |Sharing their experiences with crime
reduction, The Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime wrapped up a two-day
conference at the Hyatt Centric Beale Street Memphis on Thursday, March
28.
Memphis Mayor Paul Young hosted Black leaders from 18 U.S. cities during the meeting that began Wednesday, March 27.
“People want the short-term solution.
They want to figure out how we are going to stop crime today. And then,
we want to figure out how to stop crime in the future. In order to do
that, there has to be an intense dialogue,” said Young.
In addition to Washington D.C., they
came from several states with large African-American populations, like
Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana,
North Carolina and California.
“We have a lot of violence around convenience stores and gas stations,” Mayor Tishaura Jones told Action News 5 after the conference.
“So how can we hold those business owners accountable and also bring
down crime? (We’re also finding that ) some of the things that we’re
already doing, we’re finding that other mayors are doing as well.”
Strategies were front and center in
the discussion. They included Operation GOOD in Jackson, Miss. and
Operation Scarlett in Charlotte, N.C. According to proponents, both have
paid dividends in their respective communities.
Operation GOOD is a nonprofit with
ambitious goals to curb recidivism, reduce violence and tackling blight,
for example. Operation Scarlett is an ongoing anti-luxury car theft
operation that was expanded to 11 states and 152 law enforcement
agencies. So far, 132 vehicles have been retrieved.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris and Memphis Police Department Chief Cerelyn “CJ” Davis also appeared at the event.
Russ Wiggington, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, moderated the conversation.
The Council on Criminal Justice, a
think tank devoted to criminal justice policy, began the conference with
a keynote presentation.
To allow attendants to speak freely,
no media were invited to the event. However, Young has suggested future
meetings could be open to the public and virtual. It’s a sentiment
matched by Mayor Chokwe Lumumba Jr. of Jackson, Miss.
“We’re ensuring amongst ourselves that this will not be the last
engagement, but that we will continue to lean in,” Lumumba said at a
post-conference press event.
Latest Crime Stats
Although crime rates in Memphis has dropped recently, they are still above pre-pandemic levels.
Overall, the Memphis-Shelby County
Crime Commission statistics reflect a 6.4% drop in fourth quarter of
2023, over 2022’s final period. This includes murder, burglary, robbery,
theft, weapons and drug charges. Property crimes fell 10.1% too.
However, violent crime in Memphis
bucked the trend. In addition to 398 homicides in 2023 – breaking the
2021 record – the major violent crime rate rose 7.4% in Memphis. Shelby
County saw inflated numbers too, with a 6.3% jump over 2022.
To date, there have been over 80
homicides in 2024. Memphis has the highest number of all the cities
represented during he meetings. Most have seen a decrease.
The Black Mayors Coalition on Crime
is the latest in a series of conversations Young has recently held to
address crime early in his first term.
In a bizarre segment, a transgender 'personality' who previously wanted to be a "human Ken doll" before deciding to become a 'woman', lectured JK Rowling on what being female really means, declaring that the author should "stick to what she knows." Report: https://t.co/K06cu2wjbTpic.twitter.com/fHcFCrS9sY
Joe Biden, who grew up a Muslim attending a Black church in the Puerto Rican part of Scranton, where he beat up Corn Pop while marching for trans rights on his way to a synagogue, now claims his family were “watermen in the Port of Baltimore in the 1800s”pic.twitter.com/zHHpaIYb4L
newsweek | Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was booed by members of the audience of The View after expressing regret for his endorsement of President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Boos were heard on Friday morning after the airing of a short clip from a recent Fox News
interview with the actor and professional wrestling star, who is set to
return to the ring for the first time in eight years at this weekend's
WWE WrestleMania event.
Johnson said that he was not "happy with the state of America" in the
clip and revealed that he would not be endorsing Biden in this year's
election because he feels his 2020 endorsement had caused "division."
"The
endorsement that I made years ago with Biden was one that I thought was
the best decision for me at that time," Johnson said. "Am I going to do
that again this year? That answer's no, I'm not going to do that."
"I realized what that caused back then was something that tears me up in my guts—back then and now—which is division," he added.
The View crowd responded to Johnsons remarks by loudly booing, seemingly taking co-host Joy Behar and the show's other co-hosts by surprise with their overwhelmingly negative response.
"Should I pay any attention to someone who gives an interview on Fox
where they lie every day?" Behar asked the crowd, before questioning
whether celebrities should "endorse public figures" or "keep their
politics to themselves."
Some in the audience could be heard responding "no" after Behar asked
if celebrities should make endorsements. A short time later, the crowd
made their opinions on former President Donald Trump's 2024 candidacy clear after co-host Sunny Hostin weighed in.
"I
do think we're living in a time where we have someone [Trump] running
for president that is an existential threat to democracy," Hostin said,
prompting loud cheers and applause from the audience.
"Now is the time—if you have a platform—you must be active, you must speak out," she added, drawing additional applause.
While endorsing Biden in 2020, Johnson described himself as a "political
independent and centrist" who was making his first public endorsement
due to the outcome of the election being "critical."
FT | Author JK Rowling has attacked Humza Yousaf, calling Scotland’s first minister “bumbling and illiberal” and stoking a row over the country’s contentious new hate crime law.
The creator of the Harry Potter franchise was responding to criticism from Yousaf on Thursday that posts she had made on X earlier in the week identifying transgender women as men were “offensive and upsetting”.
Rowling posted on X: “Most of Scotland is upset and offended by Yousaf’s bumbling incompetence and illiberal authoritarianism, but we aren’t lobbying to have him locked up for it.”
Rowling, a leading gender-critical feminist, used her social media profile to test whether the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act would criminalise promoting the importance of biological sex over gender identity.
The legislation, which came into effect on Monday, has triggered a row between the author and lawmakers, and thrust culture wars into the forefront of Scottish politics.
Yousaf in an interview with the BBC hit out at the author’s provocative posts on social media, insisting the law had a high threshold for criminality and was not intended to respond to those who are “upset or insulted”.
The legal difficulties in balancing the protection of vulnerable communities with the right to free speech have opened up a new line of attack for the opponents of the Scottish National party and Green coalition, with them characterising the legislation as an example of unworkable progressive policymaking.
It comes as opinion polls fail to provide a clear picture of voting intentions ahead of the general election later this year.
A YouGov poll this week predicted a UK landslide for Labour in which it would become the largest party in Scotland, winning 28 seats north of the border to the SNP’s 19. A Survation poll last week forecast that the SNP would hold 41 seats to Labour’s 14.
The act widens the existing crime of stirring up racial hatred to include other protected characteristics, such as sexuality, gender and disability, with the threat of jail terms of seven years.
Thousands of complaints have reportedly been made to the police about Rowling’s posts, as well as about a speech Yousaf gave to parliament in 2020 during which he complained about the number of senior positions of authority held by white people.
Police Scotland, which has yet to announce the number of allegations of hate crimes it has received, earlier this week decided Rowling’s posts, in which she invited the police to arrest her, were not criminal.
The force also decided against logging Rowling’s posts and Yousaf’s speech as “non-crime hate incidents”.
The police, who note such incidents when allegations do not breach the threshold of criminality, use these records to monitor trends, but opponents say this process has a chilling effect on free speech.
The police decision sparked an angry response from Murdo Fraser, a Conservative MSP, whose post last year on social media saying identifying as non-binary was as valid as “choosing to identify as a cat” did get logged.
Fraser on Wednesday accused Police Scotland of political bias. “They have taken a different approach to comments made by the SNP first minister to those made by an opposition politician,” he said. “It is hard not to conclude that Police Scotland has been captured by the SNP policy agenda.”
stanford | In a special episode recorded in front of a live audience, Dean Lloyd
Minor welcomes Chelsea Clinton, a bestselling author and an advocate for
public health and early childhood education. They discuss the
importance of accountability for scaling global health initiatives, and
the power of storytelling to counter misinformation in science and
health. They also talk about finding motivation through conscious
optimism and rebuilding public trust through support of individuals,
families, and communities. Along the way, they share memories
of Chelsea’s time as a Stanford undergraduate and their overlapping
memories of their home state of Arkansas.
Chelsea Clinton is vice chair of the Clinton Foundation and
the Clinton Health Access Initiative, working to improve lives, inspire
emerging leaders, and increase awareness around public health issues. At
the foundation, she is active in the early child initiative Too Small
to Fail, which supports families with resources to promote early brain
and language development; and the Clinton Global Initiative University, a
global program that empowers student leaders to turn their ideas into
action. A longtime public health advocate, Chelsea uses her platform at
the Clinton Health Access Initiative to address vaccine hesitancy,
childhood obesity, and health equity. In addition to her foundation
work, Chelsea also teaches at Columbia University’s Mailman School of
Public Health and has written several books for young readers, including
the #1 New York Times bestseller She Persisted: 13 American Women Who Changed the World. She is also the co-author of The Book of Gutsy Women and Grandma’s Gardens with Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and of Governing Global Health: Who Runs the World and Why? with Devi Sridhar. Chelsea’s podcast, In Fact with Chelsea Clinton,
premiered in 2021, and she is a co-founder of HiddenLight
Productions. Chelsea holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford, a master
of public health degree from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health,
and both a master of philosophy degree and a doctorate in international
relations from Oxford University.
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) April 1, 2024
WashingtonTimes | President Biden stoked more outrage over his decision to honor Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31, which was also Easter, by issuing a head-scratching denial Monday as the White House blamed the political backlash on “misinformation.”
As he left the 144th annual White House
Easter Egg Roll, Mr. Biden was quizzed by reporters about House Speaker
Mike Johnson’s denunciation of the transgender proclamation as
“outrageous and abhorrent.”
“Speaker Johnson called it ‘outrageous’ that Easter Sunday was Transgender Day of Visibility. What do you say to Speaker Johnson?” asked a reporter, according to the White House pool report.
Mr. Biden replied: “He’s thoroughly uninformed.”
When pressed for details, the president responded: “I didn’t do that.”
He offered no further explanation, but critics pointed to his proclamation on the White House
website honoring Transgender Day of Visibility, which has been held on
March 31 since it was created by a transgender activist in 2009.
Also falling this year on March 31 was Easter, the holiest day on the Christian calendar. The date varies from year to year.
“I, Joseph R. Biden … do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility,” said the White House proclamation issued Friday and signed by Mr. Biden.
“I
call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices
of transgender people throughout our nation and to work toward
eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity,” Mr.
Biden said in the proclamation.
Mr. Johnson posted the proclamation on X with the comment: “This you, @JoeBiden?”
Conservative media critic Stephen L. Miller asked on X: “Did anyone in the press pool then show him his own statement?”
Rep.
Wesley Hunt, Texas Republican, asked on X: “Is the Biden Administration
backtracking after the political backlash they’ve received in the last
24 hours?”Hours later, White House
press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre accused critics of promoting
“misinformation.” She said it was “unsurprising that politicians are
seeking to divide and weaken our country with cruel, hateful and
dishonest rhetoric.”
“It
is dishonest what we have heard the past 24 hours. It is untrue what we
heard over the weekend,” she said at the press briefing.
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said Monday that “President Biden is right.”
“He did nothing in conflict with the ‘tenets’ of Easter,
which he celebrated yesterday,” Mr. Bates told The Washington Times.
“Nor did he choose the date of March 31 for Transgender Day of
Visibility, which has been set since 2009.”
Mr.
Biden has issued proclamations marking Transgender Day of Visibility
since taking office in 2021, but his decision to do so this year with Easter falling on March 31 struck conservative Christians as tone-deaf at best and a slap in the face to Christianity at worst.
Easter is the Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, or March 21.
“This
is a direct assault on Christianity. It’s evident the left is
determined to undermine our religion and traditions,” Rep. Diana
Harshbarger, Tennessee Republican, said Saturday on X. “This isn’t just
blatant disregard, it’s intentional.”
The Trump campaign called the transgender proclamation “appalling and insulting.”
“We call on Joe Biden’s failing campaign and the White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe [Easter Sunday] is for one celebration only — the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” said Trump national press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Mr.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden issued a statement Sunday sending “our
warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday.”
“Easter
reminds us of hope and the promise of Christ’s resurrection,” they
said. “As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’ sacrifice.”
Other
Democratic officials, including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, issued
proclamations this year declaring March 31 as Transgender Day of
Visibility, or TDOV.
After
Democrats on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved a TDOV
declaration, CatholicVote President Brian Burch accused them of choosing
“to mock Christianity on its holiest day of the year.”
He said the 15-year-old transgender event should have been moved to avoid conflicting with Easter.
“They
may claim that this holiday is always on March 31, but it is a fake and
arbitrary observance which was invented in 2009 compared with the
2,000-year history of Easter,”
Mr. Burch told The Washington Times. “This would never be tolerated
with any other religious tradition, and that’s the point. Christianity
is their target.”
MSN | K Rowling has challenged Scotland’s police to arrest her under the SNP’s new hate crime law after stating that a series of high-profile trans women are men.
The
Harry Potter author, who lives in Edinburgh, wrote on X, formerly
Twitter: “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the
accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.
“I’m currently out of
the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under
the terms of the new Act, I look forward to being arrested when I
return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.”
Rowling
posted pictures of 10 high-profile trans people on Twitter and mocked
their claims to be women. They included Isla Bryson, who was initially sent to a women’s prison after being convicted of two rapes.
nakedcapitalism | Philip K. Dick’s 1956 novella The Minority Report created “precrime,” the clairvoyant foreknowledge of criminal activity as forecast by mutant “precogs.”The
book was a dystopian nightmare, but a 2015 Fox television series
transforms the story into one in which a precog works with a cop and
shows that data is actually effective at predicting future crime.
Canada just tried to enact a precrime law along the lines of the 2015
show, but it was panned about as much as the television series.
Ottawa’s now-tabled online harms bill included a provision to impose house arrest on someone who is feared to commit a hate crime in the future. From The Globe and Mail:
The person could be made to wear an electronic tag, if
the attorney-general requests it, or ordered by a judge to remain at
home, the bill says. Mr. Virani, who is Attorney-General as well as
Justice Minister, said it is important that any peace bond be
“calibrated carefully,” saying it would have to meet a high threshold to
apply.
But he said the new power, which would require the attorney-general’s
approval as well as a judge’s, could prove “very, very important” to
restrain the behaviour of someone with a track record of hateful
behaviour who may be targeting certain people or groups…
People found guilty of posting hate speech could have to pay victims
up to $20,000 in compensation. But experts including internet law
professor Michael Geist have said even a threat of a civil complaint –
with a lower burden of proof than a court of law – and a fine could have
a chilling effect on freedom of expression.
While the Canadian bill is shelved for now, it wouldn’t be surprising
to see it resurface after some future hate crime. I wonder if this is
where burgeoning “anti-hate” programs across the US are headed. The
Canadian bill would have also allowed “people to file complaints to the
Canadian Human Rights Commission over what they perceive as hate speech
online – including, for example, off-colour jokes by comedians.”
There are now programs in multiple US states to do just that –
encourage people to snitch on anyone doing anything perceived as
“hateful.”
The 2021 federal COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act began to dole out money to states to help them respond to hate incidents. Oregon now has its Bias Response Hotline to track “bias incidents.” In December of 2022, New York launched
its Hate and Bias Prevention Unit. Maryland, too, has its system – its
hate incidents examples include “offensive jokes” and “malicious
complaints of smell or noise.”
Maryland also has its Emmett Till Alert System
that sends out three levels of alerts for specific acts of hate. For
now, they only go to black lawmakers, civil rights activists, the media
and other approved outlets, but expansion to the general populace is
under consideration.
California vs. Hate, a multilingual statewide hotline and website
that encourages people to report all acts of “hate,” is coming up on its
one-year anniversary, reportedly
receiving a mere 823 calls from 79% of California’s 58 counties during
its first nine months of operation. It looks like the program is rolling
out even more social media graphics in a bid to get more reports:
jonathanturley | House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer has sent a seven-page
letter (below) to invite President Joe Biden to testify in the
Republican impeachment inquiry. The letter is the latest, and best,
reduction of the glaring contradictions in the President’s past
statements on his family’s well-documented influence peddling operation.
President Biden is not expected to testify. However, the media should
be interested in his answering the questions presented by the Committee.
It is now clear that the President lied during his campaign and during
his presidency on his lack of knowledge of his son’s business activities
as well as his denial of any money gained from China. Yet, the White
House responded, again, with mockery — a sense of impunity that only
exists due to an enabling media.
Chairman Comer reduces the past testimony and evidence acquired by
the Committee in the corruption scandal. In the last hearing, Democratic
members simply refused to acknowledge that evidence. There was a
bizarre disconnect as members mocked the witnesses for not supplying
evidence of the President’s knowledge or involvement. They then did so
and the members declared that there was no evidence.
Various members also misrepresented my earlier testimony during the
hearing on the basis for the impeachment inquiry. Members like Rep.
Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) stated that I joined other witnesses in stating
there was nothing that could remotely be impeachable in these
allegations. That is demonstrably untrue. My testimony stated the opposite.
I refused to pre-judge the evidence, but stated that there was ample
basis for the inquiry and laid out various impeachable offenses that
could be brought if ultimately supported by evidence. I also discussed those potential offenses in columns.
The purpose of the hearing was not to declare an impeachment on the
first day of the inquiry. Unlike the two prior impeachments by many of
these same Democratic members, this impeachment inquiry sought to create
a record of evidence and testimony to support any action that the House
might take.
Now, the Committee has laid out the considerable evidence showing that the President had lied, knowingly and repeatedly.
mid.ru | White House spokesman John Kirby’s statement, made in Washington
shortly after the attack, raised eyebrows even at home, not only outside
the United States. At first, he said he needed “more time, and we need
to learn more information” on the Crocus City Hall attack for the pieces
of the puzzle to fall into place. Finally, one would think, someone
sees reason – we need to wait for at least some preliminary examination
results, for interrogations and investigative actions. But no, after
just a couple of hours, the pieces must have clicked together. The White
House and the State Department declared that Ukraine had no role in the
attack. What grounds or what information did they have to draw this
conclusion? This was absolutely unclear. One thing was clear though.
They started finding excuses for the Kiev regime in order to get
themselves off the hook. Everyone is perfectly aware that there is no
independent Kiev regime without Western financial support or military
aid.
When asked
whether the United States knew about the attack in advance, Mr Kirby
referred the reporter to the State Department. Think about it, this is
important. To answer the question of who was behind the terrorist attack
in Russia, it only took the State Department and the White House a
couple hours. They immediately said who was responsible. But when the
White House was asked whether the Biden administration or the US
intelligence community had officially transferred relevant materials to
Moscow, they couldn’t answer that question. They referred the
journalists to other agencies. How can this be? This is their area of
responsibility and competence. Why were they not ready to answer for
their own actions, while being quick to write a “prescription” for a
case they had absolutely no knowledge of, given that they had no facts
on hand (at least, the United States never said they had any).
Let me remind
you that on March 7, the US Embassy urged its citizens to avoid
shopping malls. The embassies of other NATO countries did the same,
which indicated that their intelligence services had some information
about possible attacks.
The apparent
synchronicity between the condolences extended by the Western
governments and Washington’s statements has not gone unnoticed: US
satellites published them (mostly on social media) only after getting a
clear go-ahead from their Big Brother. A few NATO countries stood out
though. Sweden, a newcomer to NATO, confined itself to a brief comment
that they were “following the developments” in the first hours after the
attack. Only when they caught on to the general tone of other comments
did Stockholm express its condolences in a manner more befitting the
situation. In the same vein, Moldovan officials managed to get out a few
meager words only after harsh condemnation by opposition politicians
and the Russian-speaking diaspora. Moldovan nationals could have been
there – not only Moldovans by passport, but by ethnic origins or
kinship. But the authorities in Chisinau could not find a few words of
sympathy.
Lithuanian
Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis published a totally outrageous
post in response to the attack: “Let's not lose focus.” It isn’t “focus”
that they can lose. They do not want to lose the aim. But then that
should have been the way to say it. Ireland, Canada and New Zealand
tried to remain silent, delaying their response as long as they could.
As I said,
the Zelensky regime was the only one that accused Russia of involvement
in the Crocus attack. Later they said they were misunderstood and they
didn’t mean what they said. No, we got it perfectly right. We saw and we
saved every video, audio, and screenshots of messages posted online or
shown on television during those hours. We saw officials representing
the Kiev regime, and others, who call themselves Ukrainian journalists
(in fact, they are not even propagandists, but simply troubadours of
terror), spend hours ranting about Russia’s guilt and the country’s
leaders’ role in the terrorist attack, under headlines like “Moscow is
killing its own citizens.”
As a
reminder, American liberal Democrats have been financing the terrorist
activities of the Kiev crime ring for a long time, not a year or two, or
even five. It began under the Obama Administration, when Joe Biden, who
is now President of the United States, was Vice President. In ten
years, Ukraine has been transformed by the West into a centre for the
spread of terrorism. However, ignoring this “dancing on the graves”
organised by Ukrainian propagandists, people from all continents are
extending their heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of the
victims, wishing a speedy recovery to the injured and strongly
condemning this terrible attack against innocent civilians.
We are
thankful to everyone worldwide who responded with compassion to the
tragic terrorist attack at Crocus City Hall. Heads of state and
government, heads of government agencies, international organisations,
non-profit organisations, religious groups, and concerned citizens have
all shown their sympathy in the face of this terrible tragedy. In
moments like these, the true nature of a person is revealed. However, we
cannot overlook the monstrous and misanthropic remarks made by
Ukrainian professional propagators of terrorism. The actions and
statements of the Kiev regime adepts underscore their moral decline and
ugly Nazi nature. Unfortunately, the mainstream Western media fail to
shed light on this dark side of modern blatant neo-Nazism in Ukraine,
which is rooted in hatred towards all things Russian. They are not
ridiculed in caricatures, nor are they held accountable by international
human rights organisations, or subjected to “cancel culture” for their
reprehensible statements and actions. Instead, they are rewarded with
even more financial support. But for what purpose? As George W. Bush
once remarked, to enable them to kill even more Russians. It appears
that the representatives of the White House and the current Biden
administration have embraced this notion, deeming it a beneficial
arrangement.
Tucker: "I have no clue at all how Nancy Pelosi is just so rich or how her stock picks are, like, way better than Warren Buffett's. How does that happen?"
sputnik | Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) raised eyebrows
recently with the revelation the former US House Speaker placed a big
bet on a little-known San Francisco tech startup. A disclosure made last
week showed the powerful Democratic Party politician purchased $5
million in stock of the privately-held company Databricks, a cloud data
company. The stake is one of dozens Pelosi holds in US tech companies,
some obscure and some well-known such as Tesla and Microsoft. The
lawmaker has reportedly invested more than $120 million in stock
purchases since entering federal government in 1987. Her net worth is
thought to be over $100 million, although her current salary as a US
congresswoman is just over $220,000. Pelosi has never been convicted of
criminal wrongdoing in her investment activity, although her portfolio’s
impressive return of 65% last year might suggest the legislator is more
informed than average traders. US stock indices grew an average of 26%
in 2023.
“From an ethical perspective, I believe it is extremely harmful for
politicians to trade individual stocks,” said Chris Josephs, the founder
of a stock trading service, to US media. “There are numerous jobs out
there that don’t allow employees [to conduct] trading, yet our most
powerful Americans can.” Pelosi opposed attempts to ban lawmakers from
buying and selling stocks in 2021 under the claim such activity could be
viewed as insider trading. “We are a free-market economy,” she said at
the time. “They [Congress members] should be able to participate in
that.” Former director of the US Office of Government Ethics Walter
Shaub slammed the argument as “ridiculous.” “She might as well have said
‘let them eat cake,’” said Shaub, referring to famous comments by the
French queen Marie Antoinette. “Sure, it’s a free-market economy. But
your average schmuck doesn’t get confidential briefings from government
experts chock full of nonpublic information directly related to the
price of stocks.”
Late last week it was announced that an activist involved in
pro-Palestine protests at the California lawmaker’s home had been
arrested on felony vandalism charges. Cynthia Papermaster, 77, is
reportedly being held on a $50,000 bond. “We want to see a permanent and
immediate ceasefire,” said Papermaster in an interview recently. “We
can’t control what the Israelis do, but we can control what our own
government does, or at least that’s the aspiration.” Pelosi called for
the anti-war activists to be investigated by the FBI in an appearance on
US television after the incident earlier this year. Pelosi first
claimed the demonstrators were being paid by China, then later clarified
she believed Russia was behind the act of civil disobedience. The
former House speaker joins the ranks of opponents of US civil rights
with her comments; detractors frequently claimed racial justice protests
in the 1960s and 70s were fomented by Russia to sow discord in the
United States.
strategic culture | Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to
the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources
in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of
investigation.
December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA
mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to
sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the
middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign
behind the lines.”
January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets
Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an
empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for
asymmetric war.
February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and
International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty
surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive
signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.
February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.
Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been
in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter
alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State
factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or
another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the
dots.
Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in
Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to
be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).
Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in
place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.
March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.
March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.
March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies
simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling
their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two
days.
March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman
performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion
targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before
the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus
was massive, so the op is postponed.
March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.
ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms
The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to
previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir
Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a
dash for the border.
And that brings us to the Tajik connection.
There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the
ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on
Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand
rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a
concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a
weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.
The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were
accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective
use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away,
almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the
border to Ukraine.
All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty
counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all –
quite literally.
A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish
intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat
Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told
the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the
op.
And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.
The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah
Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the
Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in
Pakistan.
Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen
Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad
al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the
government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a
crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those
classic inter-jihadi squabbles.
Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent
attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another
vector of the “nasty surprises”.
Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired
citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty
motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens
worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually
indistinguishable from ISIS.
Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the
classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by
the CIA and the Pentagon.
Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed
ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by
Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.
The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon
Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando.
Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.
The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never
features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom.
Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the
500 thousand ruble reward.
After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat
– the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have
been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not
identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then
Afghanistan.
That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have
been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the
client.
The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs
Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror
galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s.
Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the
past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.
Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with
assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these
connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus
outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR
routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat
rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.
One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of
the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine,
Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.
The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by
pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by
ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under
the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.
The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi
of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile;
adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides
him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor
become disposable.
Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the
Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware
of what he was carrying,
As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a
gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring
ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then
to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project
ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS
goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the
Taliban.
Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).
The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking
most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established,
there will be hell to pay.
But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are
not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western
intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with
Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.
The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists
from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in
terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will
be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of
managing these networks.
But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems
to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial
middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.
Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators”
chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority –
Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a
multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for
centuries.
In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the
Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment –
whatever and wherever it takes.
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