851: Captain Talking Points

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 13:58

A new advertisement that mocks Burning Man's corporate influences and was itself produced by sandwich company Quizno's (as a faux-installment of The Maze Runner movie franchise) is so meta and self-aware as to be nearly sentient. At once brilliant and sordid, this is the kind of meta-TV that David Foster Wallace warned us about, may he rest in peace. Oh, and perfectly completing the meta-mind-fuck of this whole episode, Burning Man officials are considering a lawsuit against Quizno's '-- for commodifying its culture.

As the Reno Gazette-Journal reports, Burning Man isn't very amused, perhaps because the ad strikes such a nerve. Spokesperson Jim Graham Burni says legal action is being considered because the video is theft of the event's intellectual property. "We are pretty proactive about protecting our 10 principles, one of which is decommodification," Graham said. "We get a quite a number of requests each year from companies wanting to gift participants with their product or to capture imagery or video of their products at the event, and we turn them all down."

Quizno's and Burning Man have not yet been in contact.

"We'll be coordinating with our legal team to see what action we can take," Graham said. In the past, Burning Man has sued the Girls Gone Wild filmmakers on similar grounds and won.

Related:Dust, Wind, More Dust, And Katy Perry: Photos From Burning Man 2015

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 13:31

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 02:39

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 01:59

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 23:43

Where is this topic popular?

Tap to find outThe Turkish president is calling on the United States to choose between Turkey or FETO, an acronym for what Ankara calls the 'Gulen Terror Group'.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan was addressing a crowd of thousands gathered for a so-called democracy vigil on the grounds of his presidential palace on Wednesday (August 10).

His speech was also broadcast live to a similar rally in Istanbul.

''They will either choose the coup-plotter terrorist FETO or Turkey, the democratic country,'' Erdogan said.

Erdogan was talking about US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen who Ankara believes organised last month's attempted coup.

Responding to calls from the crowd demanding the death penalty for the coup-plotters, Erdogan again said he would approve any parliamentary decision to reinstate capital punishment.

Turkey has designated Gulen's religious movement a terrorist group and wants Gulen extradited from the United States to face trial.

Washington has refused to hand him over because it says Ankara has not presented clear evidence of his involvement.

Gulen, who runs a network of charities and schools, has repeatedly denied any connection to the failed coup.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 23:39

During the summer months, for many of us a quick paddle or dip in the sea hardly seems anything out of the ordinary.

But for refugee children on the Greek Island of Lesbos, going back into the water is not always easy '' many have often suffered traumatic journeys.

One project is trying to change just that, by offering refugee kids swimming lessons.

''Their mothers had to force them in. We're here to help them get familiar with the water and we've managed to get all the children in the sea,'' Lia Stavropoulou a local lifeguard said.

Up to seventy children receive swimming lessons every day during the summer months on the island '' others are just delighted to be safe from harm and on dry land.

Syrian asylum seeker Fatima Harriri said: ''Alhamdulillah (praise be to God), I am in Greece. I am very happy. In the sea (during the trip), I am crying sometimes but now Alhamdulillah (praise be to God). If I am coming here, I remember (the journey) and literally (start to) cry.''

Around 1,500 migrants and refugees currently live on the Island of Lesbos '' around sixty percent of those are children.

While refugee arrivals from Turkey to Greece have slowed dramatically since the EU struck a deal with Ankara earlier this year, nearly 60,000 people remain stranded in Greece.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 23:32

An arrest warrant has been issued for one of Turkey's most celebrated football players '' former international striker Hakan Sukur.

A seizure of his assets has also been ordered, as part of an investigation into last month's failed coup.

Sukur, a former member of parliament, lives in America. His father has already been detained.

Prosecutors accuse Sukur of ''being a member of an armed terror group,'' a reference to the organisation of the US-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara says was behind the abortive putsch. Gulen denies the accusation.

After football, Sukur went into politics and was in 2011 elected to parliament for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AK Party. He resigned in 2013 after a corruption probe that targeted Erdogan and his innser circle, siding with the movement of Gulen.

Tens of thousands of soldiers, officials and others have been dismissed or arrested in Turkey since the failed coup.

Sukur is one of a number of people still being sought by Turkish authorities.

''One-hundred-and-sixty-two soldiers are at large, including three military attaches. We are searching for them,'' said Fikri Isik, Turkey's defence minister.

''Three military attaches are abroad. One of them is the military attach(C) in Bosnia Herzegovina. The other two are the military attaches in Greece. We know that they went to Italy.''

American officials have said that a Turkish military officer on a US-based NATO assignment is seeking asylum after being recalled by the government.

There is a fear that President Recep Tayyip is using the failed coup and purge to tighten his grip on power.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 23:27

Burkinis have been barred on the beach in Cannes, in a move the local mayor says is aimed at preventing public disorder.

The ban on full-body, head-covering swimsuits will run in the French Riviera resort until the end of August and police can fine those flouting the rules.

The restriction is being slammed as discriminatory.

''The decree is not the provocation, it's those who wear this kind of outfit. They are like uniforms,'' said David Lisnard, Cannes' Mayor.

''I think that several people, maybe they wear it in good faith, so we have to explain to them. There are just a few provocative people.''

But while officials say the move is in the interests of security, others say it will worsen religious tensions.

''It's ridiculous because I see naked people and I don't understand why I can't be dressed. We do what we want. In schools, I can respect secularism. But on beaches, it's ridiculous,'' said one woman.

The ban '' at the height of the summer season '' comes after the deadly truck attack in nearby Nice.

''I don't think wearing a burkini is illegal. Everyone has the right to go to the beach, because it's a public area,'' commented a beach-goer.

''But at the same time, if we think about womens rights, if we accept more and more things like this, it's like a regression for women.''

Under French laws, face-covering veils are already banned in public. Head scarves are also forbidden in public schools.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 23:20

More in the cross-post on the MRC's NewsBusters blog.

Despite serious legal and ethical questions being raised about the Clinton Foundation having high-level access to Hillary Clinton's State Department while accepting large foreign donations, a CNN report on Thursday revealed that the Obama Justice Department squashed an FBI investigation into the matter. So far, the broadcast networks have censored any mention of the growing scandal.

The NBC, ABC and CBS evening newscasts all ignored the news Thursday night. In sharp contrast Fox News's Special Report led with the stunning development, with anchor Bret Baier declaring: ''What you don't know apparently is just fine with the Obama Justice Department when it comes to the Clinton Foundation. It is refusing to look into a story we reported Wednesday on Fox about e-mails suggesting an inappropriate relation between the Clinton charitable foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton was in charge.''

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 22:45

Erdogan said the US would eventually have to choose between its relationship with Turkey and Fethullah Gulen, a former Erdogan ally who has been in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, the state-run Anadolu news agency reported Wednesday.

"Sooner or later the US will make a choice. Either Turkey or FETO," Erdogan said, in reference to the movement headed by Gulen.

President Obama has said that the cleric would only be extradited as a result of "a legal process," and if the extradition request is found to be justified according to the relevant laws and treaties.

Gulen has repeatedly denied involvement in the coup attempt and rejected Turkish arrest warrants issued for him.

Erdogan went on to say that the US was "in a position to make a choice" over the issue, Anadolu reported.

"We sent 85 boxes of files," he said, adding that he assumed the US would not keep the cleric any longer, but "send him back."

CNN legal analyst Danny Cevallos says that extradition from the US is generally only granted pursuant to a treaty -- one of which exists between the US and Turkey.But extradition requests are complex matters, typically complicated by "unique and knotty treaties, multilayer exceptions to rules and nebulous definitions of extraditable crimes," he wrote.

"The result is that every extradition request becomes a case-by-case analysis, guided by the moment's prevailing international political winds."

Post-coup strain on Turkey's relations with West

The Gulen issue has strained relations between Ankara and other members of the NATO alliance.

While ties with Washington threaten to cool, the Turkish leader this week visited Moscow, where he met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the first sign of rapprochement between the two leaders since Turkey shot down a Russian jet nine months ago.Turkey considers the cleric and his followers terrorists. Last weekend, at a unity rally, he likened the coup plotters to "terrorists wearing military uniforms."During that rally, he said he would sign a reintroduction of the death penalty into law if it was approved by parliament. Such a move would likely end Turkey's ambitions to join the European Union.

He likened Gulen's followers to ISIS, which has repeatedly bombed targets within Turkey, and the Kurdish separatist movement PKK, which is listed as a terror organization by the US.

Erdogan: FETO the same as ISIS, PKK

"Those who follow the Pennsylvania-based charlatan (Gulen) who sold his soul to the devil, or Daesh, which shed Muslim blood, or the PKK that also has shed blood for 30 years to divide the country and the nation, will all lose in the end," Erdogan was quoted as saying, referring to ISIS by its Arabic acronym.

In the wake of the failed takeover, the government has conducted massive arrest campaigns, detaining thousands of individuals from the military, schools and universities, health services and the media.

Erdogan's government has attempted to justify its heavy-handed actions by insinuating that the Gulen movement has infiltrated these different institutions.

The purge has come in for criticism from Western governments, further straining relations with Turkey in the wake of the attempted coup, which claimed 239 lives and injured nearly 2,200.

Meanwhile, Ankara continues to wrestle with terror threats. On Wednesday, two bomb blasts killed at least eight people and injured dozens more in southern Turkey, a senior official said.One of the explosions targeted a police bus outside Mardin State Hospital in the town of Kiziltepe, on the Turkish border with Syria.

Initial assessments indicate Kurdish militants were behind both attacks, the official said.

CNN's Tim Hume and Isil Sariyuce contributed to this report.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 22:01

Clarissa Ward '-- Charlie RoseCharlie RoseComing Soon: Natalie Portman close notice

Wednesday 08/10/2016Correspondent Clarissa Ward reports on the crisis in Aleppo, Syria.

Politics; Clarissa Ward; 'Florence Foster...World, Entertainment, PoliticsAir Date 08/10/2016Donald Trump's recent comments regarding Hillary Clinton and the Second Amendment. Correspondent Clarissa Ward reports on Aleppo. A look at...53:51Vitaly ChurkinWorld, PoliticsAir Date 06/02/2011Vitaly Churkin updates on the U.N.'s sanctions on Syria, the need for a ceasefire in Libya, and Iran.18:40Staffan de MisturaWorld, PoliticsAir Date 02/12/2016Staffan de Mistura talks about negotiations in Munich to end the conflict in Syria.23:34Republican Race '12; Jeremić; ChurkinWorld, PoliticsAir Date 06/02/2011Editors debate Romney's presidential candidacy. Churkin on the U.N.'s sanctions on Syria. Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremić .53:19Bashar JaafariWorld, PoliticsAir Date 04/11/2012Bashar Jaafari, Syria's ambassador to the United Nations, details his country's agreement to a ceasefire.36:39

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 18:10

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 16:29

Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent and Congressional staff member, has entered the US presidential race as an independent candidate.

Mr McMullin, a 40-year-old conservative, launched his bid to provide voters an alternative to the Republican Party's nominee, Donald Trump.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 16:27

At the Democratic National Convention speakers are repeating the claim, amplified ad nauseam by the left and establishment GOP opponents over the past year, that Donald Trump mocked the disability of New York Times reporter, Serge Kovaleski. This accusation has served as a very convenient tool to both smear Trump's character and to avoid having to confront him on substantive political issues. But is it true? Here is the story the media is not telling you.

It all started on November 21, 2015 when, at a rally, Trump said he remembered seeing reports of Arab Americans celebrating the 9/11 terror attacks on rooftops in New Jersey shortly after the twin towers fell. As he told George Stephanopolous in an interview the next day on ABC's ''This Week'':

TRUMP: ''There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering'...as those buildings came down. And that tells you something'...''

Stephanopolous and all of the major news outlets immediately denied the existence of any such news reports following 9/11. One paper, the Washington Post, even went so far as to write a detailed article claiming to ''fact check'' Mr. Trump. After an exhaustive review, the Post lectured that there was absolutely no evidence of Trump's claim and deemed it false.

Imagine the Washington Post's surprise when Trump uncovered one of the Washington Post's own reporters, Serge Kovaleski, supporting the claim in an article Kovaleski wrote for them on September 18, 2001. Kovaleski wrote:

In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners' plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.

Very embarrassing for the media, especially the Washington Post which had done such a great job scouring news reports after 9/11 that they missed their very own story on the subject. It was in this state of embarrassment that the media was desperate to distract from the matter. The Washington Post ended up finding Kovaleski, now writing for the New York Times, so he could do damage control. Kovaleski predictably tried to backtrack from his 2001 account saying he didn't remember the details:

''I certainly do not remember anyone saying that thousands or even hundreds of people were celebrating,'' said Serge Kovaleski, one of the reporters. ''That was not the case, as best as I can remember.''

Enter Donald Trump's rally in South Carolina soon thereafter. During the rally Trump pointed all of this out and paraphrased Kovaleski's backtracking as he impersonated a groveling reporter changing his story under pressure. While he did this, Trump moved his hands around quickly, acting flustered.

Soon thereafter, the media revealed still photos of Kovaleski with his right hand in a permanently flexed position downward announcing that he was disabled. The media then shifted from trying to defend their oversight of the 9/11 Post article and instead, with disapproving shocked outrage, accused Trump of mocking a reporter's disability. Some liberals went even further and freeze-framed a millisecond of the Trump video at the exact moment when his hand went into a flexed posture. Then they dishonestly put this screen capture side by side with a picture of Kovaleski's flexed hand. Thus, you saw the following photo spread like wildfire over social media with commentary condescendingly and horrifyingly excoriating trump as a monster:

The media's clear implication was that Trump was mocking the way Kovaleski moved his arms. People watching the clip of Trump's impersonation only knew that Kovaleski was disabled. Thus, they naturally assumed Kovaleski's disability must be similar to cerebral palsy where he has limited control of his movements and is prone to have muscle spasms or move his arms in jerky motions as Trump was doing at the rally. This is precisely the image the media wanted in people's minds. They wanted this to be the story: that Donald Trump knowingly and intentionally mocked the flailing arm motions of someone who can't control his muscles. They knew this would naturally trigger a visceral reaction of disgust from viewers and outrage amongst the disabled and all decent Americans, many of whom, to this day, think this is exactly what happened. Is it?

What the media did not choose to show you was video of Serge Kovaleski. Notice how the media only showed and still shows photos of him. This was done for a reason. As it turns out, Kovaleski's disability is a congenital condition called arthrogryposis. Arthrogryposis causes restricted movement in the joints but does not cause spasms or uncontrolled moving of the limbs like cerebral palsy does.To show the depths of the deceit, one CNN reporter explained, while displaying a still photo of him, that Kovaleski, ''suffers from a chronic condition that impairs movement of his arms.'' Again, the implication is that Kovaleski can't control his arms from moving. To the contrary, Kovaleski appears perfectly calm when giving interviews. Thus, if Trump truly wanted to mock Kovaleski's disability, he would have had to stand perfectly still with a flexed right hand and not flail his arms. don't believe me? Watch the video:

In addition, Trump used the same flailing arm movements in a South Carolina rally to impersonate a flustered Ted Cruz being asked about waterboarding. To my knowledge Cruz is not physically disabled:

Thus the true story is as follows: Donald Trump embarrassed the media by finding the 9/11 Washington Post article. The media found the reporter who tried to backtrack. Trump impersonated the reporter backtracking. Media points out the reporter is disabled, but only releases still photos of his flexed hand. Public assumes from Trump's impersonation and being told by the media that he is mocking a disabled man that the reporter must not be able to control his arms and Trump is a dirtbag who hates the disabled. In reality muscle spasms or involuntary arm movements are not part of the reporter's disability. Therefore Trump could not be mocking a disability that doesn't exist. Hear Trump respond to the claim below, which perfectly coincides with the series of events described above:

Thus, Trump's impersonations of a flustered reporter several months ago was turned into a left-wing and Establishment GOP narrative whereby Trump somehow hates the disabled. This despite the fact that Trump has given millions to charities that help the disabled including raising nearly six million dollars for Wounded Warriors just recently, a million of which was his own money. In addition, Liz Crokin, a journalist that has covered Donald trump for ten years recalls the following:

In 1988, a commercial airline refused to fly Andrew Ten, a sick Orthodox Jewish child with a rare illness, across the country to get medical care because he had to travel with an elaborate life-support system. His grief stricken parents contacted Trump for help and he didn't hesitate to send his own plane to take the child from Los Angeles to New York so he could get his treatment'...

In 2000, Maury Povich featured a little girl named Megan who struggled with Brittle Bone Disease on his show and Trump happened to be watching. Trump said the little girl's story and positive attitude touched his heart. So he contacted Maury and gifted the little girl and her family with a very generous check'...

Please keep this in mind and spread the word whenever you hear the left continually claim Trump is against disabled people at the Democratic Convention this week.

UPDATED on 7/28/16

It turns out that at the very same South Carolina rally Trump imitated Kovaleski, he also used similar arm and hand gestures to imitate a very non-disabled general who was asked about ISIS. Do you remember the media reporting this? Watch below:

Also, in addition to Kovaleski's 2001 Washington Post piece, further confirmation of Trump's recollection came out to embarrass the media. As it turns out, Trump's story was also confirmed on a local CBS station shortly after 9/11:

'...Just a couple of blocks away from that Jersey City apartment the F.B.I. raided yesterday and had evidence removed, there is another apartment building, one that investigators told me, quote, was swarming with suspects '-- suspects who I'm told were cheering on the roof when they saw the planes slam into the Trade Center. Police were called to the building by neighbors and found eight men celebrating , six of them tenants in the building.

The F.B.I. and other terrorist task force agencies arrived, and the older investigators on the task force recalled that they had been to this building before, eight years ago, when the first World Trade Center attack led them to Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, whose Jersey City mosque lies between the two buildings getting attention today. And the older investigators remember that the suspects that eventually got convicted for the first Trade Center case '... lived in the building where these same eight men were celebrating the destruction that they saw from the roof. Calling this a hot address, the task force investigators ordered everyone detained'...

Breitbart commentary:

ADDED: People are arguing falsely that the fact that only 8 suspects were apprehended contradicts the ''swarm'' claim. Read it again. An ''investigator'' told CBS about the ''swarm.'' The fact that a certain number were brought into custody does not change the fact that there was a ''swarm.'' The obvious impression is that of the ''swarm,'' only eight were brought into custody. Eight people do not swarm on all those rooftops. They ''gather.'' Look at the video of the rooftop and picture ''swarming.''

You want to get into semantics about how many people make up a swarm?

But that's not all.

You have to add up all of the contemporaneous news reports. You are Donald Trump. You are taking in all the news during that awful week. You are told by the media that ''swarms'' of Muslims in a known terrorist's neighborhood were seen on rooftops celebrating 9/11. Just two days earlier you have read this in the New York Post:

Here in New York, it was easy to get angry listening to Egyptians, Palestinians and the Arabs of nearby Paterson, N.J., celebrate as they received word of the murderous attack in New York and Washington. But Mayor Giuliani (who has been tireless and magnificent in this crisis) rightly warned New Yorker-ers that is would be wrong to take their anger our on the city's Arab and Muslim residents. Attacks on Arab-Americans in Paterson or elsewhere are utterly indefensible.

You hear radio news reports about Muslims celebrations.

MTV runs a news report about Muslim celebrations.

From all of those news reports, it is perfectly reasonable and nothing close to lying to put together a picture of ''thousands''.

FACT: Donald Trump is now 100% vindicated.

If these celebrations did not occur, the only thing Trump did wrong was to believe the same media that is now calling him a liar '-- and doing so to cover up the truth about American Muslims celebrating 9/11 and their own covering up of that fact.

Numerous times I've suggested Trump exaggerated the ''thousands'' claim, and for that I apologize.

UPDATED on 7/31 '' Angie Grover just released a new video that puts it all together. Check it out.

Addendum '' Rebuttals to Common Objections (7/31)

1.) ''You should see this guy'' is a figure of speech. Trump says it all the time whether he has personally met people or not, based on what they have said or were reported to have said. He also says ''seems like a nice guy'', ''probably a nice guy'' often when he's asked to comment on someone critical of him he isn't very familiar with in order to look like he has nothing against them personally. We've watched hours and hours of Trump's rallies. He does this all the time. ''You should see this guy,'' was referring to what the reporter wrote trying to backpedal from his story that he was about to read (and did read) to the crowd.

2.) ''Poor guy'' refers to the fact that Kovaleski was then facing the wrath of the left-wing media putting pressure on him to explain his 2001 article lending that appeared to lend credence to Trump's claims and embarrassed them. They desperately needed him to explain away his previous reporting. This is all readily apparent from the video in context. Trump explains this is what he thinks is happening, in the very video the media selectively edited, right AFTER the impersonation. He explains that Kovaleski feels he has to do this to placate his media friends. But you probably haven't seen that part have you? Hmm.

3.) When was Trump going to see the reporter on TV on video explaining his story? It never happened because the media (purposely in our opinion) never showed video of the man because they wanted people to think he is spastic. This is what they knew the audience would naturally think if they see a picture of Trump acting spastic and then plaster ''Trump mocks disabled reporter'' on top of it. The audience would assume Trump is mocking the man's spastic disability. So, Trump had no opportunity to see the reporter on TV reacting to the 9/11 story.

4.) Even if Trump HAD seen the reporter somehow on video, he would then know the reporter is not spastic, so imitating him as spastic would make no sense. If he really wanted to mock his disability he'd have to have made a fixed tight flexed right hand held close to his body. This is what the reporter looks like in realty. The reporter's condition prohibits him from moving his right arm to any great extent at all, much less flailing it around. In addition, we've shown three videos where Trump is making similar flailing motions imitating someone who can't answer a question and is flummoxed. This is his standard impression of someone caught trying to answer a question they can't answer. A new video puts it all three incidents together here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oTqFoOGiro

5.) Opponents say that Trump met Kovelski in the late 80's when he did stories on him. Trump admits he may very well have met him back then in the video of Trump wearing the red hat that I posted above. Watch it again. But Trump meets thousands of reporters a week. The number of reporters he had to have met in his life and since the 80's are astronomical. Not being able to recognize the name ''Kovaleski'' as someone he supposedly met over a decade ago is totally understandable. And again, even if he did somehow remember the man, the man was not spastic. Neither were Ted Cruz or the General he imitated in similar fashion.

Look, nobody believes Trump is a saint, but we find this particular narrative the media ran with, after they were starting to come under fire for not being truthful in immediately rejecting Trump's claims about celebrations in NJ, to be particularly egregious and felt it needed to be pointed out.

Typically if Trump does something politically incorrect he owns it and doubles down on it. Instead, Trump denies he knowingly made fun of the man's disability to this day and consistently explains he has no recollection of him. Here is an interview he did on 7/28, just a few days ago where he addresses the issue.

Start at 4:45:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdIZ_fNw02Q

Response to New Dishonest Washington Post ''Fact Check'' Article From 8/2

Please read by clicking on headline below:

UPDATE AUGUST 6 '' Full Video of Serge Kovaleski Interview:

For those liberals still in denial that the media would lie to them, here is the full interview of Kovaleski. It demonstrates that his disability does not in any way cause his arm to flail or jerk or move in any capacity. If anything, it appears to fix his arm by his body in a bent position:

UPDATE AUGUST 8 '' Trump said he saw ''THOUSANDS'' of people celebrating!

Some of those in denial are starting to nitpick that there is no evidence that ''thousands'' of people celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11 as Trump stated in his original comments. Trump exaggerating? Shocking! After using the term thousands initially, Trump did not mention ''thousands'' again to my knowledge. But he did, as we point out in the Stephanopolous interview, continue to insist that there were people celebrating in New Jersey and that it was reported on. He says to Stephanopolous:

TRUMP:''There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down '-- as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well covered at the time, George. Now, I know they don't like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.''

STEPHANOPOULOS:''As I said, the police have said it didn't happen.

Notice, Stephanopolous' response. ''The police have said it didn't happen.'' As in'...AT ALL. And this is what the media was claiming after Trump's statement. Not that there were not thousands celebrating, but that there were NO reports of ANYONE celebrating in New Jersey. This was their position for days afterwards. WaPo even got so confident that there was no evidence, they went and published a fact check article all but saying Trump was lying. This is precisely why it was so embarrassing for the media, especially WaPo when it turns out their own reporter had stated people saw celebrations on rooftops in Jersey City. It was the height of Washington Post negligence and/or complicity in hiding exculpatory evidence for Trump and they were embarrassingly and publicly called on it.

As more and more evidence came out proving that there were indeed celebrations in New Jersey on 9/11, the media, including Kovaleski, retreated into desperately clinging to Trump's original exaggeration that there were ''thousands'' of people doing so and trying to say that the exaggeration was not accurate, while never admitting Trump was correct in substance and they were wrong.

Perhaps Trump on 9/11 in 2001 was getting the TV coverage of thousands of people celebrating in the Middle East mixed up with the story he heard about people celebrating on 9/11 in Jersey City. We have no idea. But the only thing that matters for our purposes is that Trump said people celebrated in Jersey City and that it was reported at the time, and the media said, in the words of George Stephanopolous, ''It didn't happen.'' Wrong and game over for the media.

Please check out the following article:

UPDATE AUGUST 8 '' Yeah, but Trump is just mocking a generic disabled person!

This is another response we've heard to our story. And it shows that people did not read the story carefully. Our point is that Trump had no idea Kovaleski was disabled at all. Kovaleski claims (and the media just unquestioningly takes his word for it) that he covered Trump in the late 80's and/or early 90's. Trump says it's possible but he has zero recollection of him. As we point out, this is completely plausible as Trump has most likely met hundreds of thousands of reporters since then. Most people can't even recognize someone they met a year ago, much less almost 20 and most people don't meet nearly as many people as a famous celebrity does on a daily basis.

Secondly, if Trump is lying and somehow did remember Kovaleski standing there with one arm held fixed next to his chest talking calmly and seriously, it would be ridiculous for him to then deliberately try to mock him in front of millions of Americans by using spastic arm and hand movements which have nothing to do with Kovaleski's disability. Plus, Trump made similar motions impersonating a flustered Cruz and a General who didn't know how to answer a question. The common link here is that all three impersonations were of people who were flustered. None had a disability which caused arm and hand flailing. The only logical conclusion is that this is simply Trump's impersonation of someone who is ''flustered.''

Another point is the power of suggestion that the media deceptively used on the public. Every video of Trump was labeled with a prominent title of ''Trump Mocks Disabled Reporter'' or words to that effect, accompanied by the obligatory still shot of Kovaleski with a flexed wrist. Thus, every single person who viewed the video of Trump with those words was conditioned to believe that he was mocking a disabled person. From then on, even when confronted with contrary evidence, some simply cannot ''unsee'' Trump mocking a disabled person when they look at the video. They will keep saying, ''You can't tell me he didn't mock a disabled person! I saw the video!''

Fir example, take look at the drawing of this young lady with her head turned below:

Now it could be said that this drawing is of an old woman instead. But if you see the picture for the first time and it is labeled as, ''Picture of a Young Woman,'' this is what you will assume and this is what you will see; just like people saw Trump mocking a disabled reporter when the media slapped the label on the video.

As Our Lord said, ''Those who have eyes to see, let them see.'' And, to turn a phrase, there are none so blind as the willfully blind.

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Source: Washington Free Beacon

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 14:24

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 14:11

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 13:11

Sharyl Attkisson was interviewed on NewsMax TV with Steve Malzberg and discussed an event she attended where a well known DC Journalist Bureau Chief urged all of the reporters in attendance to earnestly work at taking down candidate Donald Trump.

When you consider the event being discussed, and further add the known hatred from a very specific Washington Bureau Chief, it stands to reason Attkisson is discussing Carl Bernstein.

Bernstein previously said that all reporters have a professional journalistic responsibility to destroy the candidacy of Donald Trump. Bernstein, if you didn't know, is a full-throated supporter of Hillary Clinton.

['...] Any objective observer of the news media's treatment of Trump can certainly conclude that reporters are taking a side in this election '-- and they don't have to be wearing a button that says ''I'm with her'' for this to be readily apparent. The irony is that the media's Trump bashing may wind up having the exact opposite of its intended effect.

Polls shows that journalism is one of the least respected professions in the country, and with Trump calling out media organizations for their bias, widespread slanted reporting is bound to reinforce this point '-- and to backfire.

Trump's campaign is throwing down the gauntlet to the political class. If journalists are seen as the mouthpiece of that class, they may soon find themselves covering Trump's inauguration. (read more)

Trump today !

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 06:37

Donald Trump has been absolutely slammed by the liberal media in the last few days. He first was lambasted by the liberal lot for his comments that second amendment people could stop Hillary Clinton. The liberals then blew it way out of proportion saying that Trump was saying someone should assassinate Hillary.

They must have forgotten what Obama and Hillary said 8 years ago. Right.

Well Trump just said another ''inflammatory'' thing when he suggested, nay flat out said, that Obama had founded ISIS.

Well, once again the liberal media had a field day calling this outrageous.

But instead of listening to the political pundits, how about we go to an actual world leader on the topic.

President Putin, if you would be so kind.

I think that is pretty much all we need here. Trump's right, liberals are wrong. End of story.

(Source: Twitter)

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 18:13

Image copyrightAFPImage caption Fifteen people were wounded when Mohamed Daleel blew himself up in Ansbach Germany was warned in advance that a Syrian who blew himself up last month might carry out a "spectacular" suicide attempt if it tried to deport him, BBC Newsnight has learned.

Mohammed Daleel was due to be deported when he detonated a bomb in the Bavarian town of Ansbach on 24 July.

A 25-page psychological assessment written more than a year before mentioned his "extreme spirit".

It was sent to the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees.

It warned that attempts to deport Mr Daleel could result in a "spectacular" suicide attempt.

Ansbach: Bomber pledged allegiance to IS

Asylum seeker to suicide bomber

What is going on in Germany?

What drives individuals to commit mass killings?

Before the bombing, Mohammed Daleel left a message pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the so-called Islamic State.

The attacker tried to get into an open-air concert attended by 2,500 people, but was stopped by a security guard. Instead he detonated a rucksack filled with explosives in a local beer garden, killing himself and wounding 15 others.

Image copyrightHANDOUTImage caption Mohammed Daleel had left a letter pledging allegiance to the leader of IS Ten days before the attack, Mr Daleel had received notice from the German authorities that he was to be deported to Bulgaria.

Under the Dublin regulation, refugees are required to claim asylum in their first port of entry into the EU. Mr Daleel crossed into Bulgaria from Turkey in 2013. He later claimed he had been abused in detention in Bulgaria.

The psychological assessment of Mohammed Daleel, seen by BBC Newsnight, was written by Axel von Maltitz, a trauma therapist in the town of Lindau. Mr von Maltitz treated the 27-year-old Syrian for psychological problems until January 2016.

He believes the deportation notice triggered Mr Daleel's attack.

"That is always what he promised. That was always his reaction as answer to the information that he was to be deported.

"I warned them. That is what I wrote. 'Be careful if he has to be deported to Bulgaria'."

Image caption Axel von Maltitz believes Daleel had "very strong" PTSD Axel von Maltitz first met Mohammed Daleel in January 2015, after the Syrian had cut his wrists following an earlier deportation order.

"He had bandages around his arms because that was still quite fresh. He was highly traumatised.

"Traumatisation has very typical symptoms. He had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder severely. Very strong."

Mr Daleel claimed he was an opposition activist in Syria and that he had been imprisoned and tortured on three occasions between 2008 and 2011.

'Bad pictures'He told Mr von Maltitz he was beaten, subjected to electric shocks, and forced to witness rapes and brutal executions. He also said his wife and infant son were killed in a rocket attack on their home in Aleppo.

The 2015 deportation order was quietly dropped, and Mohammed Daleel continued living in a hostel in Ansbach while receiving treatment, first at a psychiatric ward in a local hospital, and subsequently again with Axel von Maltitz in Lindau.

Mr von Maltitz remembers: "He once said: 'I cannot close my eyes. Because the bad pictures start running the moment that my eyes are closed'."

Image caption Lindau is on the banks of Lake Constance in the very south of Germany German investigators have not ruled out the possibility that Mohammed Daleel may have had contact with jihadist groups years before he detonated his bomb. They say he was communicating with a telephone number in Saudi Arabia in the minutes before the attack.

But Manfred Hauser, deputy director of intelligence for the state of Bavaria, told Newsnight it was more likely that Mr Daleel was a "lone wolf" who was vulnerable and had recently self-radicalised.

"The internet plays a big role here," he said.

"There is a variety of jihadist propaganda easily accessible on the internet. This process happens very fast.

"It seems quite likely that people who are susceptible to mental problems are particularly receptive to Salafist or jihadist ideology."

Balance of motivationsSeveral witnesses told Newsnight that, in the months before the attack, Mr Daleel spent more and more time in his room in his hostel in Ansbach, surfing the internet on his laptop.

Axel von Maltitz, and others who knew him, said he did not seem especially concerned with religion and was rarely seen in local mosques.

Mohammed Daleel's therapy was due to resume on 1 August.

It has not been possible to verify many of the details of his story as told to his therapist: his role in the opposition, the torture, the death of his wife and child.

Nor is it clear what role, if any, the threat of deportation played in his decision to carry out the bombing.

In Germany's first IS-inspired suicide bombing, the balance of motivations, between jihadist ideology and mental health, will likely remain unknown.

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:31

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 10:55

23 Hours Ago

Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, speaks to ''Squawk Box'' about his economic plan, his stance on trade and taxes, and clarifies his controversial comments about his feuds with the Khan family and opponent Hillary Clinton.

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Thu, 11 Aug 2016 17:21

Home / News / WATCH: 10 Minutes of CNN Cutting Off Anyone Criticizing Hillary (VIDEO)August 11, 20160 Comments

Reddit users on the popular subreddit /r/The_Donald helped contribute to a new video documenting censorship of Hillary Clinton critics. The video appears to show multiple instances of CNN cutting off people criticizing Hillary. There are over 10 minutes worth of examples. If you have something to add please leave a comment. (H/T)

Share: Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.

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Thu, 11 Aug 2016 16:39

''I'm not going to speak anymore,'' replied a State Department spokeswoman, reaching a point of exasperation repelling reporters' hounding over a new batch of Hillary Clinton's emails that exposed cozy relationships between the former secretary's team and wealthy donors of her husband's foundation.

The State Department's Elizabeth Trudeau had a hard time dodging a swarm of uncomfortable questions, forcing her to comment on the ethical side of close ties of Department and the Clinton Foundation back when it was headed by the current Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Newly published emails, released by Judicial Watch, revealed the back-and-forth between top aides of Clinton and of her husband, seeking for favors and connections at the State Department in the years of the former first lady's service.

In one case, reporters wanted to know on the fate of ''an associate'' who Bill Clinton's controversial aide Doug Band asked ''to take care of,'' implying a job at the Department, and whose name was redacted from the email for some unknown reasons.

However, Trudeau refused to speak on the matter, setting a tone to her subsequent answers.

''I'm also not going to speak to specific redactions,'' she replied, stressing that she can't ''speak to specific cases.''

Yet, Trudeau tried to get away with a general response, saying that ''the department regularly hires political appointees with a range of skill sets for a broad variety of jobs'' and it is not ''unusual'' for their candidates to be recommended by a ''variety of avenues.''

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Reporters appeared to be at loss over the secrecy surrounding the mysterious person, especially with Clinton campaign now saying that he was not ''employed by the Foundation."

''This is pretty '' in fact, it's pretty non-specific since we don't know what the name is,'' one of the reporters said.

The Department's spokeswoman said she has ''no information'' and was ''unable to speak'' on the matter.

''I think we're parsing,'' she replied to AP's Matt Lee, who also seemed to be losing his cool.

Reporters also wanted Trudeau to address the ethics of her Department and Clinton Foundation after one of the emails exposed a special request from the former president's team. In a 2009 email, Band wanted a ''right hand'' of the former Secretary of State Huma Abedin to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire Gilbert Chagoury in touch with a proper person at the Department.

However, here Trudeau also tried to evade answering the uncomfortable question.

''I'm not going to speak to specific emails,'' she said again, now adding that working with ''a wide variety of outside individuals and organizations, including businesses, nonprofits, NGOs, think tanks'' was not unusual for her Department either.

The reply has prompted a harsh reaction from AP's Lee, who said:

''Can you at least try to answer Abigail's question, which was: Has the department looked into this and determined that there was no impropriety?''

Failing to receive a satisfactory answer he snapped:

''I'm sorry, are you '' am I not speaking English? Is this '' I mean, is it coming across as a foreign '' I'm not asking you if '' no one is saying it's not okay or it's bad for the department to get a broad variety of input from different people. Asking '' the question is whether or not you have determined that there was nothing improper here.''

However, it did not help him get the answer he was looking for with Trudeau generally saying: ''We feel confident that all the rules were followed.''

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Thu, 11 Aug 2016 16:37

August 11, 2016 | Clip Of House Democratic AgendaThis clip, title, and description were not created by C-SPAN.User-Created ClipAugust 11, 2016Pelosi of Republican Sex Pelosi loses her mind iin her hatred of Republicans who went on vacation as Zika kills babies

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Thu, 11 Aug 2016 08:11

Donald Trump interviewed by Greta Van Susteren last night August 10th:

Additionally, Donald Trump is specifically calling out CNN's reporter Jim Sciutto as a liar.

Reuters just announced that Secret Service never spoke to me or my campaign. Made up story by @CNN is a hoax. Totally dishonest.

'-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2016

No such meeting or conversation ever happened '' a made up story by "low ratings" @CNN.

'-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 10, 2016

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Thu, 11 Aug 2016 04:05

Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, released 296 pages of emails from the Democratic presidential nominee, including 44 that Judicial Watch says were not previously handed over to the State Department by Clinton. The emails, many of which are heavily redacted, raise questions about the Clinton Foundation's influence on the State Department and its relations during her tenure.

In one instance, top Clinton Foundation official Doug Band lobbied Clinton aides for a job for someone else in the State Department. In the email, Band tells Hillary Clinton's former aides at the department -- Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin -- that it is "important to take care of (redacted)." Band is reassured by Abedin that "Personnel has been sending him options."The emails were obtained by the group through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch against the State Department in 2015. The group did not respond to a CNN request for comment.

The Trump campaign seized at the new batch of emails, citing them as evidence of Clinton being corrupt. The prolonged investigations into her use of a private email server while at the State Department has fueled public distrust of her and plagued her presidential bid. But the Justice Department declined to press charges against Clinton for her handling of classified information related to the server earlier this year, with FBI Director James Comey saying while she was "extremely careless," it was his judgment that "no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case."In a 2009 email, Band directs Abedin and Mills to put Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire and Clinton Foundation donor, in contact with the State Department's "substance person" on Lebanon.

"We need Gilbert Chagoury to speak to the substance person re Lebanon," Band wrote. "As you know, he's a key guy there and to us and is loved in Lebanon. Very imp.""It's jeff feltman," Abedin responded, referring to Jeffrey Feltman, who was the US ambassador to Lebanon at the time. "I'm sure he knows him. I'll talk to jeff."

Feltman told CNN Wednesday that he never met with Chagoury.

"I have never met nor spoken with Mr Chagoury. I was not aware of the proposal that he speak to me until this email exchange was released, but in any case we never spoke," he said.

Judicial Watch President Tom Filton said in a press release that Clinton "hid" the 44 emails on purpose.

"No wonder Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin hid emails from the American people, the courts and Congress," he said in a press release. "They show the Clinton Foundation, Clinton donors, and operatives worked with Hillary Clinton in potential violation of the law."

Clinton defense

Clinton's campaign said the emails didn't relate to her work at the Clinton Foundation.

"Neither of these emails involve the secretary or relate to the Foundation's work," said an emailed statement from Clinton campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin. "They are communications between her aides and the President's personal aide, and indeed the recommendation was for one of the Secretary's former staffers who was not employed by the Foundation."

The Clinton campaign said Wednesday that Chagoury only wanted to offer insights on the then-upcoming Lebanese election and was not looking for any specific action from the State Department.

"The right-wing organization behind this lawsuit has been attacking the Clintons since the 1990s and no matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as secretary of state because of donations to the Clinton Foundation," Schwerin said in a statement.

Trump response

GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump sought to use the emails to paint Clinton as corrupt.

"This is yet more evidence that Hillary Clinton lacks the judgment, character, stability and temperament to be within 1,000 miles of public power," said Stephen Miller, Trump's national policy director. "She views public office as nothing more than a means to personal enrichment -- and every dollar she takes comes at the expense of the public welfare. This latest finding is an unseemly, disturbing window into a corrupt office, and yet more evidence that Hillary Clinton has been lying from the beginning -- and by any reasonable definition attempted to obstruct the investigation of the FBI."

Trump also tweeted: "When is the media going to talk about Hillary's policies that have gotten people killed, like Libya, open borders, and maybe her emails?"

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said Wednesday that if the State Department doesn't release all of the remaining Clinton emails by November it will prove the system is "rigged" -- a line Trump has used recently.

"Anything less than a full release of these public records before voting begins will only further prove that we have a rigged system that has one set of rules political elites and another for everyone else," Priebus said in a statement.

Server investigation

On Wednesday, Judicial Watch released written testimony from Mills, in which she provides further detail on how Clinton's private email server was set up to address potentially security concerns. Mills told the attorneys she spoke with a Clinton IT staffer in 2013, after learning the email account of a close Clinton confidante, Sidney Blumenthal, had been compromised by a hacker.

"As I recall, these discussions involved whether this event might affect Secretary Clinton's email," Mills said in follow-up answers to an earlier deposition given to Judicial Watch.

Mills also said she recalls speaking to the same staffer -- Bryan Pagliano -- about the company overseeing the server set up.

"As I recall, these discussions involved whether Platte River Networks would have the technical capacity and be the appropriate source from which to gather Secretary Clinton's email from the clintonemail.com system," Mills said.

Early this year as the investigation into Clinton's private email server was in full swing, several FBI field offices approached the Justice Department asking to open a case regarding the relationship between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation, according to a law enforcement official. At the time, DOJ declined because it had looked into allegations surrounding the Clinton Foundation around a year earlier and found there wasn't sufficient evidence to open a case.

In a hearing last month on Capitol Hill, FBI Director James Comey declined to say whether the Clinton Foundation was under investigation, saying: "I'm not going to comment on the existence or non-existence of any investigation."

For there to be criminal conflict of interest there would have to be evidence showing a government employee received something of value in exchange, such as a job post-employment or money. There doesn't appear to be anything so far suggesting that in the newly released, heavily redacted emails from Judicial Watch. But those emails do raise questions about whether the relationship between the State Department and Clinton Foundation was too cozy, particularly after Clinton pledged she would not be involved with the foundation when she became secretary of state, in an effort to prevent an inappropriate relationship.

In a case where there's a possible conflict of interest that's not necessarily criminal, the inspector general can look into it and take an administrative remedy if necessary. The State Department OIG has been looking into connections between the State Department and Clinton during her term as secretary of state since earlier this year, but has not said anything about the matter.

The Clinton Foundation has repeatedly said it is not being investigated.

On Tuesday, the Clinton campaign said there is nothing to suggest foul play, and Clinton had nothing to do with the newly released emails. The campaign has said in the past the Clintons don't take a salary from the foundation and all their income is disclosed.

A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

CNN's Laura Koran, Tom LoBianco and Joe Johns contributed to this report.

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Thu, 11 Aug 2016 07:03

Penn Jillette has become one of the standard bearers in the media for Libertarianism. He's been able to transform his brilliant magic career into that of a television personality quite successfully. He's also a kind and considerate person in real life and as such is friends with lots of people in the media he may disagree with. This has helped him gain exposure where other libertarians might not get it. Penn's frequently on shows like Bill Maher's Real Time, the former Piers Morgan Live, and other liberal shows explaining the libertarian beliefs of self-ownership, non-violence, and limited government to nationwide audiences.

In this clip Penn Jillette explains what Libertarianism is and the minimum things you need to believe in to be a libertarian. Penn Jillette is a big tent libertarian and wants to include as many people as possible in the movement. That's why he was so welcoming to Bill Maher when Maher admitted he only considered himself a libertarian because he was against marijuana prohibition.

Penn goes on to explain that libertarians believe in personal liberties and economic liberties at the same time we don't choose one or the other. That's why we often refer to libertarianism as the best of both parties. Penn also talked about how far libertarians will limit government by explaining that government should only be used for he would be willing to use violence for.

For example, Penn Jillette would not use government for public works projects like building libraries because the use of violence for political means is still theft. That's what separates libertarians from other small government types. We want a much smaller government than they do. Overall, Penn comes across as intelligent and welcoming as ever and makes a great case for Libertarianism.

For more on Penn Jillette see the related articles below, check out his website, and consider donating to the charities he supports.

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 22:23

It's been a busy week for former acting CIA director Michael Morell. First, over the weekend he published an op-ed in the New York Times humbly titled, "I Ran the CIA. Now I'm Endorsing Hillary Clinton." In the piece he explained that Hillary Clinton was his choice for president because of:

...her belief that America is an exceptional nation that must lead in the world for the country to remain secure and prosperous; her understanding that diplomacy can be effective only if the country is perceived as willing and able to use force if necessary...

Morell pitched his tent in Hillary's camp because of her aggressive, you might say neoconservative, foreign policy.Among his factually incorrect claims in the piece was that he supports Hillary because, "[d]uring the early debates about how we should respond to the Syrian civil war, she was a strong proponent of a more aggressive approach, one that might have prevented the Islamic State from gaining a foothold in Syria."

Those of us not so dizzied in the stratospheric heights of CIA (acting) directorship could have informed Morell that it was only as Assad was weakened by US (and allied) backed jihadists that ISIS was able to take hold in Syria and that taking Assad out earlier, as he advises, would have produced not Switzerland but another Libya. Actually worse than Libya. But the neocons never bother too much with reality. Instead they make their own reality each day.

Even more bizarre (and incidentally a peek into the mentality of the excessively politically-tuned upper echelons of the military and intelligence community) was Morell's claim that Hillary's opponent Donald Trump was a threat to US national security because he was actually a Russian spy.

As Morell put it:

Mr. Putin...recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.

There is plenty to write about Trump's faults and shortcomings, but only the most extreme conspiracy theorist would dare suggest that in some smoky pub somewhere "Agent Vlad" honed in on The Donald to serve unwittingly as an agent of the Russian empire.There is plenty more in Morell's strange NYT op-ed -- reminding us of the obstacles honest intelligence analysts must surmount to get their conclusions considered in the mix -- but anyone who thought he could not outdo his seemingly unhinged neoconservative tendencies would have to think again as yesterday he played softball with the male Barbara Walters, Charlie Rose.

There is much to Morell's bizarre interview with Charlie Rose, but cutting to the chase for the sake of brevity, is his contention that our policy in Syria should be to "punish" the Russians and Iranians for assisting the Syrian government in its fight against al-Qaeda and ISIS:

Morell: 'We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price in Syria.'

Rose: 'We make them pay the price by killing Russians?'

Morell: Yeah.

Rose: 'And killing Iranianis?'

Morell: 'Yes...You don't tell the world about it, right? You don't stand up at the Pentagon and tell the world that we did this. Right? But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran.'

Don't believe it? Watch the interview yourself:This is Hillary's unhinged world.

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 17:54

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:44

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:43

Donald Trump's comments Tuesday suggesting that "2nd Amendment people" could stop Hillary Clinton from making judicial nominations sparked outrage from opponents '-- but the campaign defended the remarks by arguing that Trump was referring to the group's considerable political power.

"Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment," Trump said during a rally in North Carolina on Tuesday.

"By the way, and if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know."

The Clinton campaign and other Trump opponents rejected Trump campaign's explanation and blamed the GOP nominee for suggesting violence as a possible means of preventing Clinton from appointing judges if she is elected president.

"This is simple '-- what Trump is saying is dangerous. A person seeking to be the President of the United States should not suggest violence in any way," Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook said in a statement.

And Sen. Chris Murphy, D-CT, responded on Twitter: "Don't treat this as a political misstep. It's an assassination threat, seriously upping the possibility of a national tragedy & crisis."

And Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., took to social media to say: "@realDonaldTrump makes death threats because he's a pathetic coward who can't handle the fact that he's losing to a girl."

She added, "Your reckless comments sound like a two-bit dictator."

One of the strongest voices condemning Trump was that of Gabby Giffords, who as a congresswoman from Arizona was shot in the head during a public event in January 2011.

"Donald Trump might astound Americans on a routine basis, but we must draw a bright red line between political speech and suggestions of violence," Giffords said in a joint statement with her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly. "What political leaders say matters to their followers."

But Trump's campaign denied that he was suggesting violence, instead saying the real estate mogul was referencing the power gun rights advocates have at the voting booth.

"It's called the power of unification '-- 2nd Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power," Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said in a statement. "And this year, they will be voting in record numbers, and it won't be for Hillary Clinton, it will be for Donald Trump."

And Trump running mate, Mike Pence, told reporters Tuesday afternoon that Trump "is clearly saying is that people who cherish that right, who believe that firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens makes our communities more safe, not less safe, should be involved in the political process and let their voice be heard."

Asked whether Trump was suggesting violence, Pence said, "of course not, no. Donald Trump is urging people around this country to act in a manner consistent with their convictions in the course of this election, and people who cherish the Second Amendment have a very clear choice in this election."

Clinton obviously has Secret Service protection, and Cathy Milhoan, director of communication for the agency said they were "aware of the comments" but had no further statement.

It's not the first time suggestions of violence have become part of the campaign. Last month, the Secret Service said it was investigating New Hampshire State Sen. Al Baldasaro, who serves as an adviser for Trump's campaign on veteran's issues, after he called for Clinton to be executed for "treason" related to her use of a private email server.

A Trump spokesperson said the candidate did not agree with those statements. Still, Baldasaro received a shout-out from the candidate at a campaign event last weekend.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 22:55

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 21:13

In a letter to Congress, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen defended the decision to allow illegal immigrants to get refunds from the agency.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) went ''On The Record'' tonight to explain that illegal immigrants who get a social security number can go back and apply for a refund through the earned income tax credit. He said this is due to President Barack Obama's executive order on illegal immigration, calling it unconstitutional and unfair.

''It's unfair to taxpayers that noncitizen illegals are gonna get this bonus that ['...] their tax money's gonna be used for,'' he said, adding that this ''points to the patent unfairness'' of Obama's action.

Jordan remarked that this is especially unfair to the legal immigrants who entered the country the right way.

Jordan pointed out that this news comes on the heels of recovered IRS emails that officials said could not be found.

''John Koskinen's got a lot of explaining to do,'' Jordan said.

Watch more above.

Stay connected with the most-trusted name in cable news through exclusive videos, show highlights and behind-the-scenes details.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 10:39

Tuesday, 9 August 2016HILLARY'S HEALTHAnonat00:21ShareNo comments:Post a Comment'¹'ºHomeView web versionAbout MeAnonView my complete profilePowered by Blogger.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 08:51

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 03:56

Interrupting Lord, Costello said, ''Well, no, no not temperament. Because what the Drudge Report is saying that is that Hillary Clinton tripped on the stairs and somehow that calls into question her physical health.''

''Yeah, I honestly have no idea what '-- I haven't checked the Drudge Report this morning, so I don't know,'' Lord replied. ''But certainly, I do remember that she did have some health problems. I thought she did fall and hit her head on something, and as I recall, this was a reason that she had to wear a particular set of glasses, you know. There was something there, a number of months ago, yes.''

''She's has totally recovered from that, though,'' Costello said, defending Clinton.

''OK, fine. But was it a health problem or not?'' Lord replied. ''Apparently yes, it was.''

Over the weekend, Drudge linked to stories of Clinton when she needed assistance in climbing stairs in 2016, her 2012 blood clot in her brain, a 2011 fall while boarding an air plane, as well as her 2009 fractured elbow when she fell on her way to the White House.

One of the accompanying photos on the Drudge Report was a Reuters image captured by Jonathan Ernst of Clinton losing her balance while touring a substance abuse recovery center in North Charleston, S.C., Feb. 24, 2016.

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Interrupting Lord, Costello said, ''Well, no, no not temperament. Because what the Drudge Report is saying that is that Hillary Clinton tripped on the stairs and somehow that calls into question her physical health.''

''Yeah, I honestly have no idea what '-- I haven't checked the Drudge Report this morning, so I don't know,'' Lord replied. ''But certainly, I do remember that she did have some health problems. I thought she did fall and hit her head on something, and as I recall, this was a reason that she had to wear a particular set of glasses, you know. There was something there, a number of months ago, yes.''

''She's has totally recovered from that, though,'' Costello said, defending Clinton.

''OK, fine. But was it a health problem or not?'' Lord replied. ''Apparently yes, it was.''

Over the weekend, Drudge linked to stories of Clinton when she needed assistance in climbing stairs in 2016, her 2012 blood clot in her brain, a 2011 fall while boarding an air plane, as well as her 2009 fractured elbow when she fell on her way to the White House.

One of the accompanying photos on the Drudge Report was a Reuters image captured by Jonathan Ernst of Clinton losing her balance while touring a substance abuse recovery center in North Charleston, S.C., Feb. 24, 2016.

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Mon, 08 Aug 2016 21:44

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Mon, 08 Aug 2016 21:44

A handwritten Delta boarding pass, issued because the airline's computer system is down, given to passenger Rob Stephenson, 42, of Ann Arbor, Michigan at London's Heathrow Airport. Rob Stephenson

Luciano Resende, 40, had been waiting for at least two hours at Heathrow as of 4:40 a.m. ET. He was attempting to make the trip back home to San Francisco via Seattle.

He said airline employees started to manually check-in customers for their their flights but progress had been slow. "I guess it has been a long time since they used the manual process," Resende told NBC News.

At Tokyo's Narita airport, passenger Brett LaBare endured a delay of more than five hours until his flight to LAX was eventually canceled because the crew exceeded their safety-related working hours limit.

"A Delta ground stop has been lifted and limited departures are resuming following a power outage in Atlanta that impacted Delta computer systems and operations worldwide," the airline said in an 8:40 a.m. ET update. "Cancellations and delays continue."

It added: "Customers heading to the airport should expect delays and cancellations. There may also be some lag time in the display of accurate flight status at delta.com, the Fly Delta App and from Delta representatives on the phone and in airport."

Last month, Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights over several days after an outage that it blamed on a faulty network router.

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Mon, 08 Aug 2016 10:37

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Would Clinton's create less misogyny? Gladwell explains why openness might create a backlash.

Source: CNNVideos You Should Watch (45 Videos)Malcolm Gladwell on backsliding after historic firstsFareed Zakaria, GPS

Does Obama's presidency mean another black President soon? Would Clinton's create less misogyny? Gladwell explains why openness might create a backlash.

Source: CNN

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 14:23

IT'S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it's because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don't know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: ''And how are you crazy?''

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we're tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody's perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don't care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we've done our homework. We haven't. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don't know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it '-- the marriage of feeling '-- has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it's been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant's demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn't that simple. What we really seek is familiarity '-- which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent's warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right '-- too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable '-- given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don't associate being loved with feeling happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

The good news is that it doesn't matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn't abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us '-- and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn't exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently '-- the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the ''not overly wrong'' person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Interactive Feature | Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, The Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.

Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not ''normal.'' We should learn to accommodate ourselves to ''wrongness,'' striving always to adopt a more forgiving, humorous and kindly perspective on its multiple examples in ourselves and in our partners.

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 14:20

Angela Merkel heeft topmannen van de grootste bedrijven in Duitsland uitgenodigd voor een bijeenkomst waar ze een beroep op het bedrijfsleven zal doen om meer vluchtelingen aan te nemen.De ondernemingen moeten onder andere stage- en traineeplekken vrijmaken voor de vluchtelingen, zo schrijft Bild dit weekend.

Onder andere bestuurders van Siemens, chemieconcern Evonik, Opel, Volkswagen en energiebedrijf RWE zijn uitgenodigd door de Duitse bondskanselier.

Bedrijven staan onder druk om te helpen vluchtelingen aan het werk te krijgen.

Tot en met juni hadden de grootste dertig beursgenoteerde bedrijven in Duitsland in totaal 54 vluchtelingen aangenomen, waarvan er 50 in dienst traden bij Deutsche Post.

Vicekanselier Sigmar Gabriel verklaarde vorige week dat deze prestatie verbleekte bij die van de Duitse mkb-bedrijven. Ondernemingen zeggen op hun beurt dat vluchtelingen kennis van de Duitse taal en opleiding missen.

Door: NU.nl

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 14:06

It was supposed be another sun-kissed step forward for actress Lindsay Lohan '' a special Mediterranean break to celebrate a milestone birthday and to start building a rare long-term relationship.

But there is nothing romantic about these disturbing new pictures from the Greek island of Mykonos, where she stayed last month hoping, at last, to put a famously troubled past behind her.

They show an angry, violent altercation between Lindsay and her fiance, Russian playboy Egor Tarabasov. She now admits that he has assaulted her several times before.

Today, in her only interview since another terrifying episode two weeks ago, this time in London, caused headlines around the world, Lohan admits that a relationship she had hoped would bring marriage and children is violent, unstable and at an end '' for the moment at least.

Actress Lindsay Lohan was involved in a tussle with her fiance Egor Tarabasov on the Greek island of Mykonos (left). He grabbed hold of her after she threw his phone out of their car (right)

The Mean Girls star, 30, held on to his phone as he grabbed her while she tried to run away on the beach - close to man flying a kite

The distressing photographs show Miss Lohan's fiance grab hold of her arms as he tries to get his phone back from her

'I realise now you can't stay in a relationship just for love,' she says.

'No woman can be hit and stay with that person if that person isn't prepared to say sorry.'

The pictures from Mykonos, which have only emerged now, show a tussle occurring after Lohan and Tarabasov argue in a black 4x4.

The 30-year-old actress hurls his mobile phone on to the sand and flees the car. He chases her, grabs her roughly from behind in an attempt to grab the handset back and twists her arm behind her back.

Lohan is reluctant to go into detail about the fight in Mykonos, saying only that she threw Egor's phone after he took hers. 'Egor drank too much and he went crazy.'

However, she does disclose the explosive truth about another fight between them just a few days ago when she ended up screaming for help on the balcony of the Knightsbridge flat they shared. The incident was filmed by a neighbour and became an internet sensation.

Lindsay was heard shouting: 'Please, please. He just strangled me. He almost killed me.'

The police were called and forced their way into the property, but no one was charged.

Lindsay left the capital and has not seen Egor since.

We meet in a hotel in Porto Cervo, Sardinia. With her long, red hair and scattering of freckles, Lohan is immediately recognisable, but nobody gives a second glance as she walks into the lobby, dressed in a designer kaftan and sunglasses.

The actress, who has starred in The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday, tries to run away (left) but her fiance holds on to her (right)

Egor grabbed hold of his fiance's arm (left) as he held on to his flip flops and put his arms around her on the beach (right)

The 23-year-old Russian continues to hold on to Miss Lohan as he tries to get his phone back from her on the beach on the Greek island

She explains the events that led to the tussle on the apartment balcony. 'Egor and I had been out for dinner. We danced, it was fun.

'When we got home I went to bed and Egor went out. A few hours later he came back and when I woke up he was standing over me. He wasn't himself, he was being very aggressive and he attacked me.'

This is the first time she has spoken openly about Tarabasov and she starts crying. She admits she feels unsafe. 'I wanted to do this interview because it's time to tell the truth,' she says. 'There have been so many lies printed about me recently. I've kept quiet for so long but now I'm scared of what Egor might do to me and to himself.'

Still in tears she continues: 'It's not the first time. That's the problem. But this time, someone saw. I didn't call anyone, I've dealt with enough police in LA. I just left the house and went to the Connaught [Hotel] for the night. I contacted my good friend [Israeli socialite] Hofit Golan who was in St Tropez. She said, 'Get on a plane, come and meet me,' so I did. I needed some time for myself.

'I've spent the past week fishing on my friend Marco Mavilla's yacht with his lovely family in Sardinia.'

Mavilla is an Italian watch and sunglasses designer. Lohan adds: 'I've been meditating and swimming in the ocean and listening to George Michael's song, Faith. The lyrics are very apt.'

Lohan has been a big name for so long, that it is easy to forget she is still only 30. The former child star made her name in films such as Freaky Friday and Mean Girls '' but her talent was overtaken by drug and alcohol problems, car-crash relationships and multiple arrests '' and it is this that she is best-known for these days.

However, recent months had seen a change in Lohan, and the more optimistic of her fans hoped that by putting Hollywood behind her and settling down away from the public eye in London, her life was starting to recover. She met and became engaged to 23-year-old businessman Tarabasov and there were even rumours she was pregnant. She jokes with me that her newly visible stomach is the result of pasta and good Mediterranean living.

The 30-year-old actress hurled her fiance's phone on to the sand and ran out of the vehicle which was parked near the beach

His phone can be seeing flying across the beach before it lands on the sand om the Greek island of Mykonos

The famous actress then gets out of the car and runs towards the beach where the phone had just landed

Now, though, she once again finds herself at the centre of a media firestorm. She is still wearing the four-carat emerald ring Tarabasov proposed with last September. 'I haven't taken it off, even after all this,' she says.

'The truth is, I wanted to make things work, but now I'm not sure that I can.'

She says that in recent days, she has contacted him to ask him to meet, to talk. Clearly, however, she holds out little hope of a reconciliation at this stage.

'I need closure,' she says. 'I genuinely fell in love with him but he broke my trust and made me feel unsafe.

'I know I'm not an angel but I've tried to fix things. It's down to him now. I had suggested we go for couples' counselling but there comes a time when I have to put myself first, my family, and also think about my career which I've worked so hard for. I also don't want to let my fans down by not being the strong woman I have become.'

Right now, she seems more vulnerable than strong, but there was a time when she was tipped for Hollywood greatness.

She rose to fame at the age of 11 when she was chosen to star in Disney's remake of The Parent Trap, and for the next few years, every film she made, including Freaky Friday and Herbie: Fully Loaded, struck box office gold.

As she grew older, though, her behaviour off-camera '' driving under the influence of alcohol, multiple stints in rehab, failing to turn up to work '' saw the roles dry up. Instead she was known as the quintessential Hollywood wild-child.

He chases her, grabs her roughly from behind in an attempt to grab the handset back and twists her arm behind her back

He could be seen sprinting out of the vehicle before finally catching up and photographs show him grabbing her arm in a bid to get his phone back

Despite several attempts to reinvigorate her career, it has now been several years since she appeared in a major film.

Instead of movies, the attention she has received has focused on her attempts to conquer her personal demons and her long list of Hollywood lovers, including Justin Timberlake, Orlando Bloom and Colin Farrell.

It probably helped that, in contrast to her famous exes, Tarabasov has nothing to do with the Hollywood high life. He is a business school graduate and the son of wealthy construction firm owner Dmitry Tarabasov, and seemed to be clean living. Lohan says they met in Mykonos last year.

'We've been together nine months, three weeks and two days, and we've lived together since the second night I met him,' she says. 'He proposed on September 27, 2015, but I waited months before saying anything publicly.'

News of their engagement was reported in April, when she was spotted wearing her engagement ring. 'We planned to marry in Lake Como next May. We should both be in Italy looking at wedding venues right now,' she says, breaking down again.

'All I wanted was to get married and settle down. I've always wanted four kids and Egor and I talked about having a family.'

Cracks began to show last month with the furious row on Mykonos.

Then came several worrying posts on social media, including a flurry of tweets Lindsay sent after Egor spent a night partying with Russian designer and socialite Dasha Pashevkina. Lindsay accused Egor of cheating on her. Jealousy has clearly been an issue '' perhaps for both of them. 'I shouldn't have said things about Dasha. I've apologised to her,' Lindsay says.

Lindsay Lohan celebrated her 30th birthday last month on the Greek island of Mykonos and hugged her Russian fiance Egor Tarabasov

Police were called in after Lindsay Lohan claimed she had been attacked by her fiance on the balcony of Knightsbridge apartment in July

The drama, break-up and sadly, the shocking violence exposed in these pictures, is all too familiar to Lindsay. Her parents Michael and Dina separated when she was a child and divorced in 2005. Lindsay caught her father cheating on her mother and has described living with her father as 'like walking on eggshells.'

She is close to her mother, a former dancer, but has a turbulent relationship with her father, a former Wall Street trader who has been jailed twice and has a history of drugs and violence.

'I've become my mother,' she says, recognising the irony of her situation. She says that she has broken off contact with her father after blaming him for telling the press she was pregnant.

'My father is known for talking to the press and selling stories. He loves the attention. In the past he's said I've done drugs, he put my number on the internet.

'Who does that? Some of the stuff he's done proves to me he doesn't care about me.'

Having lived her life so publicly, Lindsay says she is resigned to people close to her selling stories. And there have been plenty of them. She was arrested twice for drink driving and cocaine abuse and then imprisoned for 90 days in July 2010 for breaching her parole. She did 480 hours of community service. 'They made me work in a morgue, they wanted to make an example of me.' Of her time in prison, she says: 'It scared the s**t out of me, enough to make me realise you only live once.'

She publicly admitted on the Oprah Winfrey show to taking cocaine 'ten-15 times' on TV and being addicted to alcohol and 'chaos'. She says: 'I was surrounded by hangers-on and people who just wanted to party.'

Despite her recent drama, she says the hard-partying, drug- taking, alcohol-fuelled period of her life is over. She still has one vice, though '' Marlboro Lights.

She has been living in London for the past four years. 'It's hard to get away from the paparazzi in America,' she says. 'In London I walk everywhere and I'm never bothered. I love the parks and the freedom. I have a quiet life, I have facials and go shopping. I meditate every day.'

After four years away from Hollywood, she would love to start working again. She says she has several films in the pipeline, including Mean Girls 2.

'I'm not obsessed with Hollywood any more, I just want to work,' she says. 'My plan is to go there to work and then come home to London. I'm a really good actress, I know that. I've made mistakes, the important thing is I've learned from them.

'I'm just sad this has all happened now because I've worked hard to get my life flowing again.'

Egor Tarabasov did not respond to requests for a comment.

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 14:03

Over the last few days, images and video have emerged of Lindsay Lohan being assaulted by fianc(C) Egor Tarabasov on a beach trip in Mykonos, Greece.

The footage shows Tarabasov chasing the actress and forcefully twisting Lohan's arm behind her back. The pain caused can be seen across her face, and as part of the assault Lohan's swimsuit is pulled down to expose her chest.

She was attacked in daylight, with hoards of people around her on a crowded beach.

Since the disturbing images surfaced of the violence the actress has endured, Lohan has spoken out. In an interview with Daily Mail the star claims that the Russian heir has abused her multiple times.

''It's not the first time,'' she said. ''That's the problem. But this time, someone saw.''

The video follows the police recently being called to break down Lohan's door, after she screamed to neighbours that Tarabasov was trying to strangle her.

''I wanted to do this interview because it's time to tell the truth,'' she told Daily Mail.

RELATED WATCH: Van Badham Addresses Steve Price, Reads Violent Threats She's Received Since Q&A

''I realize now you can't stay in a relationship just for love.''

Referring to the incident in Mykonos, Lohan said: ''Egor drank too much and he went crazy,'' but she didn't go into any further detail.

Lohan has since called off her engagement. This comes after weeks of speculation about their relationship, after Lohan accused Tarabasov of cheating on her in a lengthy rant on Instagram.

Since these disturbing images have been released, the lack of coverage and sympathy for Lohan has been staggering. Like similiar cases of domestic violence, the incident has been swept under the rug as a private issue between the couple.

Where are the think-pieces about Lohan being a victim of domestic violence? I can't help but think our empathy doesn't seem to translate to people we don't think are deserving.

If this level of public battery has happened to someone like Hollywood sweetheart Jennifer Lawrence, just imagine the public outcry. Lohan has a known history of tepid relationships, brushes with the law, along with a fading career, so are we putting the Mean Girls actress in a separate category, as already damaged goods?

RELATED WATCH: Jessica Rowe Spectacularly Takes Down Eddie McGuire This Morn On Studio 10

By comparison, let's look at the coverage of Nigella Lawson when she was photographed being straggled by her then-husband Charles Saatchi in 2013. Not only did the story feature in every major daily for days if not weeks, it acted as a catalyst for discussion over family violence and the reasons women stay with their partners despite the abuse endured.

What we find is a stark contrast with the way the media depicts Lawson '' as near-perfect wife material '' with Lohan, who has long been the subject of media taunts and is rarely taken seriously.

Like Lawson, Lohan struggled to leave Tarabasov despite his violent actions.

''I genuinely fell in love with him but he broke my trust and made me feel unsafe,'' she said. ''No woman can be hit and stay with that person if that person isn't prepared to say sorry.''

Domestic violence comes in many forms, as do the victims. To see it in such plain sight and for the news to hardly even make a ripple, does nothing more than to normalise violence against women.

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Archived Version

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 13:43

Documents in the leak range from research papers such as ''SOMALIS IN EUROPEAN CITIES PORTFOLIO REVIEW'' to specific financials of grants.

DCLeaks previously released emails from Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe. The emails showed Breedlove upset with Obama's reluctance to address Russian aggression.

DCLeaks has been alleged to be a Russian-backed source.

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Source: The Good Men Project

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 02:46

Renton, Spud, Begbie, and Sick Boy are back to test audiences with a twenty-on-years later sequel to an iconic 90s film.

Will it succeed?

Have our boys grown at all?

And what does this say about men, good men, and grown men still finding themselves?

Teaser trailer below:

The epic quoted speech from the 1996 cult classic Trainspotting:

Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin can openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked-up brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons.

Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?

'—Š'...'—Š

Photo: YouTube still

What's your take on what you just read? Comment below or write a response and submit to us your own point of view or reaction here at our Submittable link.And thank you for sharing this!

We're all in this together.

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 01:11

The Dallas Police Department is trying to suppress all evidence it has relating to its use of a bomb robot to kill the man suspected of killing four police officers at a Black Lives Matter protest last month. It has asked the Texas attorney general to allow it to withhold information that is ''embarrassing'' and has said that much of the evidence is ''of no legitimate concern to the public.''

Dallas Police Chief David Brown said the department took the unprecedented measure of using "our bomb robot" after Micah Johnson had holed up in a parking garage and had apparently exchanged gunfire with law enforcement.

''We saw no other option than to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension to detonate where the suspect was,'' Brown said at a press conference soon after Johnson was killed. ''Other options would have exposed our officers to grave danger.''

The Dallas Police Department sent a separate letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asking him to exempt large parts of my request and the requests of 16 other journalists from ''mandatory disclosure.''Civil liberties groups weren't quite sure how to immediately respond to the move. We've seen that technology and tactics introduced in extreme circumstances gradually become the norm in policing. Perhaps the Dallas police were justified in their use of a bomb robot in this particular instance, but experts such as Ian Kerr, a professor of technology and law at the University of Ottawa, told me that the event ''changes the calculus about decisions such as when to use lethal force in hostage situations.''

Most experts I spoke with noted that it'll be important for us to both gather information about how the decision was made to use the robot in the first place, and then use that information to help inform guidelines for the use of remotely delivered lethal force in the future.

Gawker reporter Andy Cush found through a records request that the Dallas police had no formal plan of action for the use of the bomb robot, that it truly was an improvised use of the technology.

The Dallas police does have records about the aftermath of the incident, however, and is trying to cover them up. I formally asked the Dallas police department for body camera footage taken by police and onboard footage taken by the robot of the operation. Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox asked for communications that took place in the aftermath of the event, as well as documents about the purchase of the robot.

The police admitted in a response to me that it does have these videos, but told me in a letter that ''all or part of the requested information may not be disclosed at this time.'' The Dallas Police Department sent a separate letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton asking him to exempt large parts of my request and the requests of 16 other journalists from ''mandatory disclosure.''

The Dallas Police Department tells the attorney general that some of the information requested could be ''embarrassing''That the Texas Police Department would want to hide information that could later be used to find vulnerabilities in its processes or would violate the privacy of victims or officers is understandable and is indeed exempt from disclosure under law.

The problem is that the police department has lumped the formal requests of 17 different journalists into one large review request to the attorney general. Each of these journalists has requested different things, and each of them should require a separate legal review.

For example, one journalist asked for information about the network security of the link between the police's robot control center and the robot itself'--an interesting request, but one that has both future safety implications and nothing at all to do with Motherboard's requests. The Dallas Police Department tells the attorney general that some of the information requested could be ''embarrassing'' and subject to redaction under a ''common law privacy'' act, but does not state (at least in the part of the letter it released) which part of which request it believes could result in embarrassing records being released.

The department is also asking for official legal review on information that is routinely redacted without escalating the request to a higher attorney. For example, it's asked for a review of whether or not it is legally allowed to redact government credit card information, which is not at all related to my particular request and is also a no-brainer redaction that's made all the time across government agencies at the local, state, and federal level.

In lumping together all of the requests, the Dallas Police Department isn't being thorough. It's complicating 17 different requests and slowing down the potential release of simpler requests that ask for information that can't legally be redacted. Motherboard has appealed this decision and has asked for a separate legal review on our three requests.

8-5-16_MR26761_INT

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Sun, 14 Aug 2016 01:04

Shelley Ross, once one of the most powerful women in TV news, writes exclusively on resisting Roger Ailes's invitation to have a 'sexual alliance' with him, the epidemic of sexual harassment in TV news, and how to solve it.

I landed my first job in network television in the spring of 1981.

Johnny Carson had just taken The Tonight Show from 90 minutes to one hour and given the extra 30 minutes to the show that followed. The Tomorrow Show, as it was called, was renamed The Tomorrow Show Coast to Coast starring Tom Snyder'--and it was a hot mess.

NBC executives had brought in a studio audience and turned a once-intimate talk show known for revealing interviews with the likes of John Lennon and Alfred Hitchcock into a variety show with brassy gossip queen Rona Barrett as the co-host in L.A.

Tom Snyder was miserable, Rona Barrett was worse and, as the story goes, the NBC suits sat around 30 Rock trying to think of the toughest person who could control their unruly anchors who they believed were acting like petulant children. It didn't help that TheTomorrow Show's executive producer was Snyder's live-in girlfriend. She would be the first casualty.

''What about that S.O.B. who used to produce Mike Douglas?'' one executive proposed. Everyone knew who it was, but no one could remember anything but his nickname: ''The Nazi.'' Eventually they tracked down Roger Ailes at his political consulting firm and hired him. I had recently moved to Los Angeles from Florida, where I'd worked for the National Enquirer and the Miami Herald among other papers, and breaking into television had been a struggle. After knocking on doors for six months, my first big break came in the form of an ABC one-hour special hosted by David Frost that was designed to be the ''60 Minutes'' of the entertainment business.

ABC gave it the enviable time slot as the lead in to the Academy Awards which, back then, guaranteed about 70 million viewers and I would be attached to the series if it was successful.

Then this happened on the day of air, March 30, 1981: John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan, the Academy Awards were postponed, all network news divisions went to live special events programming'--except for ABC which aired our pilot against footage of James Brady lying on the sidewalk. It was a horrific night all around.

Courtesy Shelly Ross

Shelley Ross with Roger Ailes (left) and Charles Manson (right) just before the taping of his first television interview after over a decade in a maximum security ward.Needless to say, the David Frost special was not picked up. Then, destroying most job prospects, the Writers Guild went on strike over revenue streams from pay TV. The industry was going to shut down for months.

So I jumped at the opportunity to meet with Roger Ailes to discuss a New York-based job with The Tomorrow Show.

Relocating to New York was a decision that weighed heavily but I realized I had few options other than to sublet my life and ride out the strike with a secure job. At the end of our meeting, where he said he believed I had ''flashes of brilliance,'' Roger Ailes offered me a position as a segment producer and told me to contact the business affairs department at NBC.

I somehow persuaded entertainment lawyer Judith Dornstein to take a reduced fee to look over the contractual boilerplate NBC was offering $45,000-a-year segment producers. Later that night, I called Roger to officially accept the job and he invited me to lunch the next day.

Only this meeting would be different. I can't remember the restaurant, but I can recall every bit of the conversation as if it was on videotape.

''When did you first discover you were sexy?'' Roger began. My head suddenly dropped like a marionette and I could no longer make eye contact.

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I could only manage to stare at my feet as I answered, ''I am finding this conversation very embarrassing.''

I thought and hoped that would be it. He sent his signal. I sent mine back, I believed clear enough but allowing for no hurt feelings or bruised ego. Maybe he would try one more line'--then, incident over.'¨ But that's not what happened.

Roger was very persistent as he continued to explain how much he believed in loyalty and how much he believed the best expression of that loyalty comes in the form of a ''sexual alliance.''

This was not a romantic or flirtatious conversation. ''Predatory'' is not quite accurate either. Roger expressed a true philosophical conviction that this would be mutually beneficial for us both, that he was looking for a partnership and it was somewhat special that he had chosen me. So perhaps ''cultish'' needs to be in the mix.

Whatever it was, I now suspect that this is the job I turned down a decade before Laurie Luhn came along. More on her in a minute.

Later that night after our lunch, as he suggested, I phoned Roger and tried to carefully negotiate my way around his proposition. ''But I'd never date a boss, and besides, we hardly know each other. We don't know if we'd even like each other outside of the work environment,'' I said.

''Oh, if it's time you need, just say so.''

''Come on, Roger, how would that work, you'd come into my office once a week, once a month and say 'Are you ready yet?'''

He laughed at my scenario, then at some point suggested I hold off with business affairs.

This unnerved me greatly. Why couldn't I deflect this? I took a Valium and crumpled under the covers. I had already laid the groundwork to sublet my L.A. apartment, arrange for someone to look after my car, and worst of all, I had announced to my friends and family I was moving to New York to work for The Tomorrow Show.

Well, maybe I wasn't the gutsy, fearlessly independent or savvy girl I thought I was. I'd traveled around the world on assignments, been an editor at age 24 and a property owner by 25. Without any family financial support and, again, the industry strike, I felt truly vulnerable for the first time. Sometimes I think it's the law of the jungle; we must emit a scent.

The next morning, I phoned Judith Dornstein to tell her not to bother having any further conversations with business affairs. She went directly to her boss, the senior partner in the firm who phoned me, outraged. He said he would fix it and everything that happened next happened without my instructions or authorization.

The senior partner was Henry Bushkin, who had been Johnny Carson's lawyer for years. The clout he wielded at NBC was incalculable.

He phoned the NBC network lawyer, Mickey Rudin, who was better known as Frank Sinatra's attorney. Rudin phoned Ed ''The Hook'' Hookstratten, who was Tom Snyder's attorney. They all made a conference call to Roger Ailes, then back in his 30 Rock corner office.

Hookstratten began, ''Roger, we're calling because you have a little 'boy-girl' problem that's come to our attention.'' He proceeded to lay out the details. ''Hey, I'm single,'' Roger protested. I suspect the three attorneys then proceeded to explain why his marital status didn't matter.

I don't know what else was discussed, but after that conference call, Roger's goal was now to convince me to take the job.

The next day I was flown first class to New York to speak with Roger again. It was intimidating for sure and I no longer wanted to move cross-country under these circumstances. I thought I would look him in the eye and at least say, ''You don't treat women in the workplace like this.''

When I arrived at his office I had to throw out the script I had rehearsed in my mind during the flight. Before me was a man, no longer larger-than-life, who was falling on his sword.

''Please forgive me, forgive me, this must be middle age craziness. I can't believe what I did, how I spoke to you. Please come to work for me and you can be assured there's one problem we'll never have. You still are the best candidate for the job.''

We spoke at length and even though I knew he had three high-powered attorneys with a gun to his head, I believed he was genuinely sorry.

Three weeks after accepting the job at TheTomorrow Show, Roger and I traveled with Tom Snyder and an NBC crew to California State Medical facility at Vacaville where I had convinced Charles Manson to give his first ever televised interview. The interview would triple the average ratings of the show (6.9 vs. 22.2 million).

So back to Roger's expression ''sexual alliance.'' I hope this is not the phrase that's pulled into the headlines just because it sounds creepy enough to go viral. There's a lot more to this story and a lot more to Roger Ailes'--who cannot be painted with one simple brushstroke.

Sexual harassment in network (and cable) television has prevailed for decades. It has many faces, genders, and legions of enablers. No one has yet nailed the pervasiveness, the bigotry, the diminishing and oppression of over half the population in the workplace. No one has nailed the ideas lost, the creativity missing, the damage done.

As far as I know, the term ''sexual harassment'' was coined at Cornell University in 1975, as I was getting my start in journalism. At the National Enquirer in the late 1970s, I was more of a curiosity and mascot than an object of sexual harassment'--a kid sister to a great bunch of British guys who were quick to offer ''Fleet Street'' advice: ''If you want to get a story, don't use the telephone. You've got to be a door knocker. When they open the door, put your foot next to the door jamb so they can't close the door and you can keep pitching.''

But I also recall attending a Fourth of July picnic in 1977, wearing a summer dress with my hair and makeup done. Suddenly, I was picked up off the ground, whirled around and thrown into a muddy pond by a staff photographer.

I didn't realize until years later that was a hostile act for which I had to go along to get along, show I was a good sport. I doubt if the photographer understood it was a hostile act either; we were friends.

Ten years after my fateful lunch with Roger, the vague concept of sexual harassment in the workplace finally vaulted into a national dialogue. In October 1991 Diane Sawyer and I watched a 35-year-old law professor, Anita Hill, testify live under oath before the Senate Judiciary hearing that Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her.

Hill immediately found herself under attack by an all-white male committee, one senator suggesting she had a psychiatric condition in which a woman fantasizes a powerful man is in love with her. Others battered her over her decision to work for him at a second job regardless of the harassment.

I understood the reason women work with their harassers. Why should we pass up career opportunities? At the time a few of us swapped stories around the office. We were angry at how Anita Hill was treated and I wound up producing for ABC News' Primetime Live what became the network's first series of stories about sexual harassment.

Ironically, Sam Donaldson was my anchor for three important stories. He acknowledged privately to me that he had spent his early years in the newsroom snapping women's bra straps like an eighth grader.

A self-proclaimed reformed sexist, he now had his own adult daughter and a young wife working in news as we set out together to crisscross the country and tell the story of ''Tailhook,'' the annual Navy party where, in 1991, 26 women, including an Admiral's aide, were egregiously harassed, sent down a gauntlet to be groped and assaulted by Navy and Marine Corps pilots.

The day after our in-depth story aired, President George H.W. Bush accepted the resignation of his secretary of the Navy.

Now we were on a mission. Our next story together tackled rape in the Navy and how typically women who reported sex assaults were ''processed out,'' sent back home to their families, while their perps stayed on, business as usual. Sam and I succeeded in raising awareness and getting the Navy to drop a questionnaire they had been giving women nick-named, ''Were You Really Raped?''

After that, we told the story of two guys in the Marine Corps who were hazed after making the cut for the elite silent drill team. The way the team celebrated new members? They were stripped naked, hands and feet duct taped, and genitals painted with a military boot polish that contained toluene, a toxic chemical that burns the skin and is not water soluble.

They were then sent down a gauntlet where fellow team members wearing gas masks as they doused them with a human waste/dead mouse mixture that had been baking in the sun since their arrival for training five months earlier.

The hazing story was a tough sell at first to Rick Kaplan, then the executive producer of Primetime Live, who likened it to hazing in his college fraternity. Even Sam Donaldson, who had attended military school in his youth, spoke of the merits of hazing rituals and the bonding that occurs after.

I argued that just like women, men had the right to serve their country without unwanted touching of their genitals. My argument was helped as the entire event, their unforgettable screams, were captured on videotape. After that story aired, the Marine Corps instituted its first ever anti-hazing policy.

It takes a lot of courage to stand up against sexual harassment. There are career consequences for both women and men. Much of the time, harassment has too many faces to even recognize when it is happening. Whisper campaigns, false accusations, holding women executives to impossible standards not expected of men.

Fast forward to April 1993, when I was called into a veteran producer's office where he, surrounded by his senior producers, presented me with a birthday cake with a penis on top.

I was just as embarrassed as one of the seniors present, Betsy West, who had suffered the same indignity 17 years earlier during her first job in radio. How did no one tell the boss this was a bad idea? Why has no one has told executive producers that young girls on staff don't want a morning hug or an invitation to a rock concert with the boss.

Why didn't anyone intervene when it was clear that David Letterman gave special favors to the many staffers he had sex with. And who else knew'--or should have known the stories now coming out of Fox News?

My point: You can't just have one villain, not even Roger Ailes. For 30 years I have witnessed a pervasive culture populated by more than a few morally repugnant executives and those who kept their jobs by not making waves around them.

Days after I was officially transferred to ABC's entertainment division from news where I had served as executive producer of Primetime Live, I was just about sexually harassed out the door.

I had joined some colleagues for a drink nearby the Columbus Avenue offices, when a member of the Primetime team arrived and headed in my direction. As he got close, he gave me a big bear hug, his right hand lowering to grab and squeeze the right half of my buttocks.

''I can do this now that you're no longer my boss,'' he said. ''No you can't,'' I said as I stepped back from his grip, revealing my 6-foot-4 tall husband, David, who had been seated behind me on a low ottoman. David now stood up in my defense and stepped in to the ''greeting.''

Incredibly, this was just days after the front page arrest of Christian Slater for, as police described it, ''basically grabbing a woman's behind on the street.'' Allegedly intoxicated, Slater was handcuffed and held on charges of third degree sexual abuse at the 19th Precinct in Manhattan. My Primetime harasser later wrote a note to my husband apologizing for his behavior.

Now I am not trying to serve as the morality police. I hate that we can no longer feel safe complimenting each other, but that's a small price to pay.

Plenty of people do meet and fall in love in the workplace. Some get married, others awkwardly move on. It becomes different when the romance involves the boss'--like Disney's Bob Iger, ABC News' David Westin, and CBS' Les Moonves who all married their subordinates, as did Roger Ailes.

Fifteen years after working together, Roger, the very successful head of Fox News, and I, then executive producer of Good Morning America, were seated along with other media captains at a table for lunch with first lady Laura Bush.

We had both come a long way. For the next years, Roger and I continued occasional lunches on our own, talking about politics and our lives. He spoke a lot about his young son Zach and wondered if he should step back from Fox to capture the few years they had together before college. ''He doesn't need Mr. Mom,'' I offered.

Meanwhile Roger cheered each of my promotions, then consoled me when I was pushed out of my executive suite at ABC News after 17 great years.

During the summer of 2012, Roger phoned me to say he was recommending me for a big job'--to run CNN. (The job went to Jeff Zucker who then quickly took over the job of the man who hired him.) That same year, when Roger learned I was battling cancer, he sent me a giant basket from Rao's containing six pastas and six different sauces.

He enclosed a personal note to my husband that if he (Roger) could figure out how to cook the contents of the package, so could David. We had not worked together in 31 years. It is difficult to reconcile the two Rogers.

You only have to look at most of the women on air at Fox to believe they are, at least, partners in their own objectification. Although Roger was forced to resign in the wake of an internal investigation of harassment, he has denied any misconduct or wrongdoing.

Women continue to step forward, some using their real names like Laurie Luhn the former Fox News booker and event planner who ultimately left the company with a reported $3.15 million in corporate hush money.

She says that for 20 years, she serviced Roger sexually and arranged closed-door meetings between Roger and young female staffers in return for career advancement and a generous salary. While Roger walked away with a reported $40+ million severance, she says she wound up in a mental hospital after trying to commit suicide.

I'm not trying to pile on, nor do I know what really happened to anyone but me. I don't really want to hear details or denials anymore. After watching, dodging, and experiencing sexual harassment for 30 years, I just want it to end. Corporate sexual harassment videos and seminars haven't made a dent.

My big idea is to have something in every workplace akin to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissions after the official end of apartheid in 1994.

Back then, in the immediate aftermath of apartheid, those who were identified as victims of gross human rights violations were invited to give statements and even speak publicly about their experiences. Their perpetrators were also invited to give testimony and given a chance to request amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution.

Many believe these hearings served as a critical step in the delicate transition to a free South Africa.

I am not, of course, suggesting that workplace sexual harassment is the equivalent, morally or otherwise, of the violence, death, imprisonment, torture, and other abuses perpetrated by the white regime on black South Africans.

But surely the brilliant mechanism established by Nelson Mandela to achieve a semblance of justice and forgiveness in his newly reborn country could have a wider application.

This bold way forward is, admittedly, an ambitious template to fulfill a similar promise in the American workplace. But it's clear that executives have failed to police their own staffs, as have human resources departments.

We know they work to keep the company out of trouble by offering settlements and having victims sign non-disclosure contracts, while in too many cases the perpetrators and enablers are never asked to acknowledge misbehavior.

Fox News should take the lead in a kind of sexual harassment Truth and Reconciliation project. I'll help organize it.

It would be offered as the one chance in a lifetime to let all victims at Fox News tell their stories, either in writing or on tape, without coming under attack. At the same time, it would give perpetrators and enablers an opportunity to confess and seek forgiveness without retribution.

Sexual harassment is a national disgrace. You don't have to be held by the temples to be demeaned and displaced. Only a project like this could teach what sexual harassment really looks like, really feels like, and give the perpetrators and enablers an opportunity to get an education and fresh start at once.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 23:02

After considering several properties in North Hero, Vt., Sen. Bernie Sanders and his family have settled on a private, lakefront cottage that seems ideal for relaxing after exhausting months on the campaign trail.

The former presidential hopeful paid $575,000 for the four-bedroom home on the small Vermont island last week, listing and selling agent Franz Rosenberger of Coldwell Banker Islands Realty in South Hero confirmed to Mansion Global.

The house, which was originally listed at $598,000, has a main residence with three bedrooms and two bathrooms and a guesthouse with an additional bedroom and bathroom.

More: A Beverly Hills Mansion Once Owned by Donald Trump Lists for $30 Million

''It's a private lot with a nice gradual shoreline perfect for all the family to get together,'' Mr. Rosenberger said.

Sanders has four children and seven grandchildren, according to bio information on his website.

Mr. Rosenberger said he worked mainly with Mr. Sanders' wife, Jane O'Meara Sanders, and their children, but that the senator visited the house they ended up buying in person.

The real estate agent said that the Sanders family liked the proximity of the North Hero house to their main residence in Burlington, a 35-minute drive away, and they were particularly fond of the ''wonderful views,'' which include Vermont's Green Mountains and Lake Champlain.

More: Chelsea Clinton's $6M Former Condo in Manhattan Finds A Buyer

The property, which has 500 feet of lakefront, dates from 1920, according to the listing, but the main house was built in 1986, said Rosenberger.

He said that working with the Sanders was a pleasant experience and described them as ''incredibly nice, down-to-earth people.''

Mr. Sanders and his wife reportedly own a third home on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Sanders' press office did not respond to a request for comment.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 21:54

Clarissa Ward (born January 30, 1980) is an American television journalist who is currently a foreign correspondent for CNN.[1] She was formerly with CBS News, based in London. Before her CBS News position, Ward was a Moscow-based news correspondent for ABC News program.[2]

Early life[edit]Ward's family is from London, U.K. and New York[3]

Ward graduated from Yale University and holds an honorary doctor of letters degree from Middlebury College.[2]

Early career[edit]Ward began her career as an overnight desk assistant at Fox News in 2003. From 2004 to 2005, Ward was an assignment editor for Fox News in New York. She worked on the international desk coordinating coverage for stories such as the capture of Saddam Hussein, the Indian Ocean tsunami and the deaths of Yasir Arafat and Pope John Paul II. In 2006, Ward worked as a field producer for Fox News Channel. In that role she produced coverage of events throughout the Middle East, including the Israeli-Lebanese war, the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and subsequent military action into Gaza, the trial of Saddam Hussein and the referendum on the Iraqi constitution. Prior to October 2007, Ward was based in Beirut and worked as a correspondent for Fox News Channel in the Middle East. She covered major events in the region, including the execution of Saddam Hussein, the Baghdad surge, the Beirut Arab University riots and the Ain al Alaq bus bombings. She conducted interviews with notable figures such as Gen. David Petraeus, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh and Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. She also spent time embedded with the U.S. military in Iraq, most notably in the restive city of Baqubah.[3]

ABC News[edit]From October 2007 to October 2010, Ward was an ABC News correspondent based in Moscow. She reported from Russia for all ABC News broadcasts and platforms, including "World News with Charles Gibson", "Nightline" and "Good Morning America", as well as ABC News Radio, ABC News Now. On assignment in Russia Ward covered the Russian Presidential elections. She was in Georgia at the time of the Russian intervention into Georgia territory. Ward was transferred to Beijing to serve as the ABC News Asian Correspondent, where she covered the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. She has also covered the war in Afghanistan.[2]

CBS News[edit]Ward's CBS career started as the network's foreign news correspondent in October 2011. She was a contributor for 60 Minutes and served as a fill-in anchor on CBS This Morning beginning in January 2014.[4]

She covered many major foreign news stories including the Syrian Uprising, Chinese civil rights activistChen Guangcheng's stay at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and subsequent United States - China negotiations, and the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.

In her first 60 Minutes report in 2012, Ward and her team braved sniper-fire and aerial bombardments in the Syrian city of Aleppo to deliver one of the first reports examining the growth of Islamic extremism within the opposition. In July 2013, Ward reported on the unrest in Egypt, filming in the same area where CBS correspondent Lara Logan had been sexually assaulted a few years prior. In October 2014, Ward returned to Syria undercover to interview two Western jihadis - a young American man and a former Dutch soldier - about their paths to radicalism.

CNN[edit]On 21 September 2015 CNN announced that Ward was joining the network and reporting for all of CNN's platforms. She will remain based in London.

Awards[edit]Ward received a George Foster Peabody Award on May 21, 2012, in New York for her independent journalistic coverage inside Syria during the Syrian uprising.[5][6] In October 2014, Washington State University announced that Ward would receive the 2015 Murrow Award for International Reporting in April 2015.[7] She has also received two Emmy Awards, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, and honors from the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association.[2]

References[edit]External links[edit] Media related to Clarissa Ward at Wikimedia Commons

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 21:45

The federal government is ending its decades-old monopoly on marijuana production for medical research as the Drug Enforcement Administration announced Thursday that it was bowing to changing times.

The agency said it would begin allowing researchers and drug companies to use pot grown in places other than its well-secured facility at the University of Mississippi.

But the agency did not make the bigger plunge toward marijuana legalization that many lawmakers have been advocating. It passed on a proposal to remove cannabis from the federal government's most dangerous category of narcotics. The drug continues to be classified as more dangerous than cocaine.

Even so, the agency's shift on pot used for research purposes will have wide-reaching implications. It is aimed at increasing the amount and variety of marijuana available to scientists seeking to develop particular strains of the drug to treat ailments.

Medical researchers have long complained federal government policy on marijuana inhibits scientific breakthroughs, leaving patients to rely on anecdotal evidence of the drug's curative qualities and undermining efforts to target medical growing operations to most effectively treat illness.

For nearly 50 years, the University of Mississippi has had the sole contract for producing medical pot. Any scientist seeking to research the drug for medical purposes had to obtain a special license through several federal agencies, including the DEA.

''The demand for research-grade marijuana was relatively limited,'' the agency wrote in a document posted online Thursday that outlines its new policy, ''and the grower was able to meet such limited demand.''

But researchers said the lack of demand was the result of the agency actively working to discourage any studies that would legitimize marijuana. The DEA acknowledged Thursday that recent studies suggest some of the cannabinoids in marijuana may help treat seizures and other neurological disorders. There are more than 100 cannabinoids in the marijuana plant, and scientists are feverishly seeking to isolate the ones that may be most effective.

''DEA has concluded the best way to satisfy the current researcher demand for a variety of strains of marijuana and cannabinoid extracts is to increase the number of federally authorized marijuana growers,'' the agency wrote.

The move is notable for a law enforcement agency that has long seemed out of step with even President Obama, who has said he believes marijuana is no more harmful than alcohol. The Justice Department has allowed states to move aggressively forward with legalization for both medical and recreational use, even as the DEA continues to classify marijuana as a ''Schedule 1'' narcotic with no accepted medical use.

The pressure on the agency to further soften its position on marijuana is likely to mount in November, as a fresh round of voting begins in states weighing legalization for recreational use. Among them is California, the biggest state in the country, and one that polls suggest is poised to approve full legalization.

Advocates in California and elsewhere are hopeful that the federal prohibition on marijuana will start to crumble once large states begin permitting the sale of pot to any adult who wants to buy it. They say the disconnect between state and federal policy will become untenable when it begins to affect more than the few states that currently have no ban on the drug.

Already, legal marijuana is a multibillion-dollar industry. It is projected to grow exponentially, and as it has, the conflicting state and federal laws governing its sale have created all manner of regulatory headaches.

''I welcome the decision to lessen barriers to medical marijuana research,'' said a statement from Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.), one of the most vocal legalization proponents in Congress. ''It's outrageous that federal policy has blocked science for so long.''

But like other marijuana advocates, he expressed bewilderment that the DEA refused to move marijuana off Schedule 1. He called it ''further evidence that the DEA doesn't get it. Keeping marijuana at Schedule 1 continues an outdated, failed approach '-- leaving patients and marijuana businesses trapped between state and federal laws.''

The agency on Thursday released a 186-page rebuttal to such arguments, in which it again laid out its rationale for finding that the drug is particularly dangerous and has no accepted medical use. Key among its concerns is that there have been inadequate controlled scientific studies.

That could change, though, with its new policy increasing the availability of research-grade marijuana.

The DEA will invite growers other than the University of Mississippi to apply for licenses, but warns the number of such licenses granted will be limited and the rules for qualifying will be strict. It implied that big growers who have been selling pot legally in the states may be boxed out of the market, as the DEA will favor manufacturers that have followed its rules and have a proven track record working with controlled substances.

Other potential growers might include big agricultural and pharmaceutical companies that have been pondering entering the pot market but have sat on the sidelines, waiting for the DEA to loosen its rules. The DEA says the new policy is designed to enable companies seeking to market particular strains of marijuana as prescription drugs to start developing products.

''Under the new approach, should the state of scientific knowledge advance in the future such that a marijuana-derived drug is shown to be safe and effective for medical use, pharmaceutical firms will have a legal means of producing such drugs in the United States '-- independent of the [federal government] contracting process,'' the agency wrote.

evan.halper@latimes.com

Follow me: @evanhalper

ALSO

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UPDATES:

2:45 p.m.: This story was updated with additional background.

This story was originally published at 9:50 a.m.

Link to Article

Archived Version

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 21:42

When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1960, he vowed to visit and campaign in all 50 states. The strain of that effort, particularly in an era of slower air travel, exhausted Nixon and was in part responsible for his poor appearance '-- and performance '-- in the crucial first TV debate with JFK.

Today, with so many states falling into the solidly blue or solidly red column, there are only 10 states that are realistically in play. Not surprisingly, these ''purple'' states get the most attention in a presidential race.

In fact, throughout the 2012 election cycle, President Barack Obama and GOP nominee Mitt Romney campaigned in only 12 states. Thirty-eight states, from New York to California, had not a single campaign visit after the nominating conventions.

Elections expert David Schultz tells WhoWhatWhy's Jeff Schechtman that, with the electorate so polarized and the margin for victory in the Electoral College so thin, the outcome will probably be decided by just 10 percent of the voters in those 10 purple states.

The actual roster of swing states may change over time, according to Schultz. For instance, Indiana was safely red four years ago, but is now purple.The former swing state of Missouri is now solidly red. But the basic principle holds: the vast majority of American voters are effectively disenfranchised by the current electoral system.

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Full Text Transcript:

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to Radio Whowhatwhy. I'm Jeff Schechtman.

When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1960, he vowed to visit and campaign in all 50 states. The strain of that effort particularly in an era of slower air travel exhausted Nixon and was even in part responsible for his health in the first debate with JFK. The reality is today with our nation so divided, with red and blue states pretty much settled, that the purple states, those in play, those that make a difference, are only a handful. If all the candidates did is campaign in ten states, that would be enough to capture the election. So how healthy is it for our democracy that only ten states matter? And will either party want to do anything to change it? We're going to talk about this today with our guest David Schultz. He's a professor of political science at Hamline University and he's taught classes in American Government and Election Law for over 25 years. He's the author of Presidential Swing States. David Schultz, thanks for joining us here on Radio Whowhatwhy.

David Schultz: Thank you for having me today.

JeffSchechtman: Great to have you here. There was a time when candidates like Nixon back in 1960 thought it was important to travel the country. Nowadays, not so much.

David Schultz: Not so much anymore, you're right. From a democracy point of view, if you're hoping that there's something called consent of the government, you'd kind of think maybe we ought to travel or presidential candidates ought to travel the entire country, and visit and talk to people. But we know that's no longer the case. And just to give you an idea, back in 2012, once the conventions were over; the Republican and Democratic National Conventions were over, there were only 12 states that received any visits from the presidential candidates or their surrogates. It's a very small number. And, most of the listeners can probably guess who they are. Places like Ohio received 73 visits, Florida, 40, Virginia, 36, Iowa, 27, Colorado 23. And you work it down to a few states like Minnesota, they got one, Michigan, one, but for the most part, 38 states didn't receive a visit whatsoever. And push it further, I would argue that over the last several elections and going into 2016, the presidential election is over in 40 states already.

Jeff Schechtman: The only exception to that seems to be when candidates go to California or New York, or even Republican candidates going to Texas because they're there for fundraisers, because that's where the money is for them.

David Schultz: Correct, yes. In terms of showing up to states where they have rich donors, or good pockets of money, you're correct. But in terms of looking at campaign events, in terms of where they're actually out there asking for votes, and the critical part is post-convention. Because we will see candidates before the convention, obviously during the primaries and caucuses visiting the states, but once it gets to the post-convention in the middle of a campaign, time is of essence. You know, it is less likely that a Democrat will go, even to California or to New York, simply because they got to conserve their time. And so, that's why you'll see, for example like in my home state, right now Minnesota, Hillary Clinton came last week to visit the state, partly because it's a primary or caucus state. Ask for the money now, tie down the support now, because assuming she gets the nomination in September or October, she's not going to have time to come here. She's going to have to spend all of her time in Ohio and Florida.

Jeff Schechtman: How did we get to this point? When was the tipping point?

David Shultz: Well, there's a couple. So there's two questions there. You know, one is the how or the why, and the how or the why is the fact that in 48 out of 50 states in the United States, the state legislatures have chosen to allocate the electoral votes on a winner-take-all. And by that, in those 48 states, Maine and Nebraska being the exception, in the rest of the states, whichever candidate wins the most votes in the popular vote gets all of the electoral votes in that state. That's one, and the second issue is, and we've seen that it's over a 20-year period, a 20-25-year period, is the increasing polarization across states. And combine, sort of this winner-take-all provision with the electoral college, with what I call sort of a geographic and partisan overlay, you know, in terms of how the math puts out. That produces some very, very safe Republican states, and some very, very safe Democratic states. And this is a phenomenon that we've really seen emerge over about the last 7 or 8 elections. Maybe we can push it back and say that back in the 1960s, when Nixon ran, that we had more states that were up for grabs. But it really is, and I'd say the last quarter century or so, that we seem to be down to a finite number of states that we classify as the swing states.

Jeff Schechtman: Of course it is the electoral college system itself that lies at the core of this issue.

David Schultz: Correct. Correct. Because of the fact that we don't have a popular election for president. I mean one of the things that people often times don't realize, and we learn this in Bush vs. Gore, back in 2000, first is that it is not a direct popular vote that determines who wins the presidency. At the end of the day, it's what I call the Race to 270. It is the race to win 270 electoral votes. That's what you need to become president of the United States. And that means then we have not a national election for president, but a 50 state election where each of the 50 states is a separate contest for president. So first, the popular vote, really, I don't want to say doesn't matter, but to some extent, it really doesn't matter. And then the second thing that we learn from Florida 2000 is that we still do not have a constitutional right to vote for the president of the United States, that the electoral votes and how they are going to be allocated is ultimately under the control of the state legislature and is merely from the grace of let us say, the legislature, the governor of California, that they let us go vote to determine how the electoral votes will be allocated in California. Otherwise, the legislature could say ''we're going to come up with a new system,'' but you're right. The electoral college is the core problem here. Again, along with the fact that we have this geographic partisan overlay.

Jeff Schechtman: And it's interesting when we talk about shifting demographics, and we look at the way the population is shifting today and moving to more urban areas and hollowing out some rural areas. It's really interesting to see the way that is playing out in particular states.

David Schultz: Absolutely correct. We like to talk about red and blue states across the country and purple states, but even within particular states, there are enclaves of areas that are strongly Democrat or strongly Republican. And the number of areas in states that are, let's say, purple, is actually quite small. And we see this across the country now, where we really do have, this geographic separation. Part of, I hate to use the word, sort of great insight. I won't use the word genius because people overuse the word genius, but part of the great insight that Karl Rove had back in 2004 when he was working for George Bush, was to realize that we had this geographic separation in the United States, that increasingly people want to live with other people who share their political views. The Democrats want to live with Democrats. And Rove figured out that if we combine voter turnout results with marketing data; what cars we drive, what restaurants we eat at, what clothes we wear, combine those two together, and we could target very precisely how to get out the vote efforts and to message to potential voters. And so that shows us the degree to which we're really seeing this separation where we can say for example if I live in an urban area, and I drive a particular type of car, one can make a pretty good prediction regarding how I'm going to vote.

Jeff Schechtman: When we look at the ten states that are the purple states, the swing states, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, what do we learn about those states and about their ability to shift from one side to the other in each election.

David Schultz: There's a few things that separate them out from the rest of the states. First, these are states where neither the Democrats nor the Republicans form a majority, and that makes sense. And so, they are states where roughly we see, Democrats and Republicans in some type of parity. Maybe they're both about 30 to 40 percent of the population, roughly in that area, or how they identify themselves. Second, these are states that a large percentage of the population also identifies themselves as moderate or as independent in the sense of: they don't consider themselves affiliated with either the two major parties. A third characteristic that we find for these states is that these are states that have many political regions in them. For example, we hear of ''seven Floridas,'' you know, seven different media markets down there, or the ''multiple Ohios'' where Cleveland versus Columbus versus Cincinnati, are very different regions, creating different bases of political support for Democrats and Republicans. And so, there are some general characteristics that are out there, and then I think the other characteristic, which is pretty important too, is what's called sort of the median political voter, or median voter in a state. If we were to look at the average voter in that state, and how they line up; how liberal they are or how conservative they are, generally what happens is that the median voter in that state is to the right of recent Democratic presidential candidates or to the left of recent Republican nominees. And therefore, these are average voters who find the Democratic candidates too liberal or the Republican candidates too conservative, and therefore, there's some evidence, perhaps of swinging, or some evidence of choosing to vote or not to vote. And those become the characteristics, among a couple of others, that really define these states. It would be too easy simply to say, well, there's something unique about all these states, you know, there's something about the culture. There actually are some cultural variables for each of these swing states, but we did find some common characteristics that I just described.

Jeff Schechtman: Can we narrow it down even more? To bring it back around to Richard Nixon, it was Nixon that said on one of the tapes, ''it always comes down to Ohio, dammit!''

David Schultz: Actually, we can. Now, I like to talk about how really presidential campaigns come down to three sets of numbers, and I call them 10, 10, 270. Now, 270 refers to the fact that you need 270 electoral votes to win. 10 refers to the ten swing states. We also know, within those ten swings states, we can cut it in two different ways. That there are roughly only about ten percent of the population that swings, and they actually less swing, than is the issue of if they decide to vote or not vote. And so one way to describe it is: ten percent of the population within ten states determine who gets 270 electoral votes, and the presidency. That's one way to describe it. The other way to describe it is that within those ten swing states, we found that there are certain counties that are important. For example, in Florida, Hillsborough County, which is where Tampa and Tampa Bay are located, it seems usually whoever wins that county wins the state of Florida. By coincidence, it's also Hillsborough County in New Hampshire, and in Colorado, it is Arapahoe and Jefferson Counties, but the single most important county in the United States is Hamilton County, Ohio, where Cincinnati is located. Essentially, whoever wins Hamilton County, Ohio wins Ohio. Whoever wins Ohio wins the presidency. Now, we're not down to the point of saying, you know, whoever Harry and Louise vote for in Hamilton County, Ohio determines the presidency, but this is how micro we're getting in terms of being able to show, on one level, how the balance of power for presidential races hinges upon very small numbers of people.

Jeff Schechtman: Is there a danger for candidates and their handlers of over analyzing this data? Can you get it to the point where you focus so much, for example, on Hamilton County, Ohio, that you lose sight of other situations in the other nine swing states, and that it does skew the results because of that?

David Schultz: Yes, there's no question about it. When I wrote this book and I think the opening line of the book is to say that the presidential race is over in forty states, and you might as well stay home if you're one of those forty states. That's an exaggeration. Obviously, if you ignore your base; if Democrats or Republicans take for granted that they can win California, or Texas or in New York, then they are in danger of losing those states. And it's the same thing, if you focus solely upon just the narrow band of individuals, let's say, the Arapahoe County or the Hamilton County, Ohio, you may be losing track of that broader base, and you may be tailing your message so narrow, that you lose support of many people who you nonetheless still need to win that state, or win the presidency.

Jeff Schechtman: What about the fact that there are still aspects of the country, I know it seems hard to imagine, even in these ten states, but there are still attitudes that are shifting, there are still circumstances that are shifting, you know, we talk about Hamilton County, Ohio, you know, we can look at what happened to John Boehner or essentially congressmen from part of Hamilton County, and wonder what that means in the larger scope of the way things are changing?

David Schultz: Yes, good point. Nothing is static. And I think the 2016 presidential race actually speaks to this exceedingly well; is that if we were having this conversation, let us say, five months ago, we would have said that it looks pretty certain that the nominees for the two major parties are going to be Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Well, now, put us several months away, and it looks in that it might be Donald Trump and perhaps, well, it looks like Clinton is solidifying her lead now. A few weeks ago, Bernie Sanders was making a clear challenge to her and still might be able to break through in some places. And the point that I'm getting at is that political parties are not static; that as we see new people enter our political system, things change. For example, I talk about in the book, how there really is a generational shift going on in America in politics; that a generation of people who are born between 1924 and 1945, they're called the ''silent generation.'' They are largely, I'll say nicely, exiting the political system, being replaced by millennials; those born between 1982 and 2000. With that, a shift in political values going on. We also can see how events in the world, you know, changes in the economy can change people's perspectives or political alignments. Political scientists like to talk about a phenomena called critical realignments, where parties change like how people's political allegiances change. And I say that because while we can say, to some extent, that we've had for the last seven elections, roughly the same ten states as the critical swing states, things can happen. You know, 2016, all things being equal, we still think those are the ten swing states, but a Trump candidacy, a Clinton candidacy, perhaps another major terrorist attack could change the dynamics of politics in such a way that the exact number of swing states changes or some swing states shift comfortably into the safe, and some safe shift out. For example, looking at just simply demographics: Democrats look at the state of Texas, for example and say that as the Hispanic population continues to grow there, it becomes a greater percentage of the electorate. At some point, perhaps, Texas becomes a competitive Democratic state. Same thing with Georgia. 15 years ago, very few people thought Virginia or North Carolina were competitive for Democrats. And so, factors change and that's what we should always keep in mind.

Jeff Schechtman: It's interesting to see the way some of these swing states, which were purple states in the sense that we're talking about them, are becoming particularly polarized within the states themselves.

David Schultz: Yes. Yes.

Jeff Schechtman: Virginia being, perhaps, the penultimate example of that.

David Schultz: Yeah, there are several good ones. I would say Florida is very good, Ohio is very good in terms of examples. That's the other thing to point out here. In all those swing states, there seems to be some clear region of differences. And again if I can just use Florida, because I think it's a good example here; Florida has sort of the southeast coast, the Dade County, Miami County, with the West Palm Beach area, for example, areas heavily populated by people formerly from New York's strong liberal Democratic enclaves. On the other hand, go to the Panhandle of Florida, solidly, solidly Republican. And then the same thing we find in Ohio and a few other states too where we'll see clear areas where there are concentrations. And if we did not have the electoral college, or if the electoral college in those states didn't allocate winner take all, you might see a Florida, you might see an Ohio where Democrats win about half the electoral votes, or Republicans win about half the electoral votes, and we might even see, even in states like California, where in places like Orange County, for example, where there are enclaves of very strong Republican votes, you might see presidential candidates come out there and campaign for votes.

Jeff Schechtman: See, it's interesting to watch how all of this shifts, and it's also interesting to look at what would make a more profound difference and outcome. If we were to essentially, not that this is going to happen, but eliminate the electoral college and just determine by popular vote, or keep the electoral college, and have proportionality, as they do in Nebraska for example. Which would have a more profound effect on the outcome?

David Schultz: I think totally eliminating the electoral college will have a more profound effect in the sense that at that point, you might encourage candidates to campaign in more states. Now, the proportionality might also do the same thing, but I do think at the end of the day, from what I would call, a democracy argument, I think at the end of the day, most people in the United States, if you ask them ''what's the fairest way to elect the president of the United States?'' I think they would say, majority rule. And I think that's the foundation of what American democracy is about, and I think that would carry both more symbolic and real legitimacy in terms of a transformation or importance to American society, and still saying at the end of the day, that its proportionality in fifty separate races across the United States.

Jeff Schechtman: The irony that's inherent in that, and I don't want to get too inside baseball about this, is that I would argue that Republicans would probably benefit the most in a national election from eliminating the electoral college, given demographic trends and if you were to do it on a straight popular vote. But yet they would be the most opposed to this idea because it is antithetical to the Constitution, to the founding fathers, and it would be very hard get the courts to be supportive of it. So those that would benefit from it the most, arguably, would wind up being on the wrong side of the issue.

David Schultz: And you may be correct. The one caveat that I would throw in is that they would benefit correctly, you're correct, under current voting patterns, and I say current voting patterns where people of color and the poor are far less likely to vote. If we were to have a voting system for example, where we had higher percentages of, again, of the disaffected voters. And again, it's usually people of color, usually poor people voting, then it would be a system that probably would benefit Democrats. But clearly I think there's a good point to be made here; is that with the current restrictions in place, whether it's voter ID, registration laws or just simply in many situations where some people are so worried about their day to day existence in terms of getting by, they don't think about voting. This change would actually benefit Republicans. And again, in states like New York, and states like California, which are so overwhelmingly Democratic right now, that Republicans would probably benefit if they could go into those states and ask for votes.

Jeff Schechtman: Whereas Democrats would benefit from greater proportionality, I would argue.

David Schultz: That's a possibility too, because in some of those states, and again, if we look at a lot of states in the south, take places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, even though they're strong Republican states, there are urban areas within all of those places. You know, we have the Atlantis, we have New Orleans, which are overwhelmingly Democrat and so, you would see Democrats picking up quite a few electoral votes across those areas. And given the fact that there are more people living in urban areas in the United States now, and actually for a long time than in rural areas, such a proportionality would work to the benefit of many Democrats.

Jeff Schechtman: Are there new states? Do you see in the next election cycle, or the one after that, I don't want to look any further than that, but 2016 maybe going into 2020, any shift in the ten states that are in play? I mean, do you see any of these ten solidifying either red or blue, or perhaps others that will move into the purple column?

David Schultz: Okay first, I see New Mexico, which has been a swing state for quite a few election cycles, moving out of being a swing, and moving solidly into a Democratic camp. And so, that's one that moves out. We used to know that for example, that Missouri, which was a great swing state, and for over a hundred years, it was almost a perfect predictor, has moved from swing to becoming Republican. Now, if I'm looking to the future, the two, perhaps three states that I think that fit a category of entering swing, one would be Georgia. Georgia used to elect Democrats, moved Republican, but in the last election, with running former Senator Sam Nunn's daughter as a Senator, it showed that it can be competitive, perhaps as a Democratic state, you know, the demographics moving there, I see Georgia as one. I see Texas as another state, not so much in '16, but maybe 2020 or 2024 as having a growing Hispanic population, that potentially produces it as a competitive swing state. And then Indiana, which did vote for Barack Obama in 2008, and it went back to voting Republican in 2012. I see that as another possibility in terms of a shift over time. And so, those would be ''my states'' in the immediate crystal ball. Now, were there to be a Trump candidacy this year, Trump candidacy could very well affect, in lots of different ways. And so, we would want to see if it is a Trump versus a Clinton campaign, where those candidates have passionate supporters and passionate distractors. That candidacy, or that contest, could open up different states to the next two.

Jeff Schechtman: What's changing in Indiana that you think leads that to be more of a swing state?

David Schultz: One of it is that we have the western, private Indiana, which is right along the border near Chicago, a very large population of Democratic voters. And in 2008, Barack Obama specifically targeted those voters, and the Republicans weren't paying attention to it, and he targeted and mobilized them, and they turned out and voted for him to help him win. And remember, and Obama was a Senator from Illinois. And in 2012, Obama didn't target Indiana, and the Democrats lost it. But there is, between Indianapolis, a Democratic city, or a significantly strong Democratic city, and in the western part of Indiana, a large population of Democrats that are generally un-mobilized. Put those two together. If the Democrats can figure out how to, with a different candidate, mobilize and target those voters, we might see Indiana move into a possibility of being swing. But that, a lot of has to do with how successful Democrats are in terms of doing mobilization.

Jeff Schechtman: And Missouri, you don't see as a swing state anymore?

David Schultz: It doesn't appear to be anymore. That, again, for a hundred years, Missouri predictably went with the winner every time. The only election it missed was in 1956, I believe it was, where Missouri voted for Adlai Stevenson instead of going for Dwight Eisenhower. Up until, I think it's through 2000, it was a perfect predictor. And in 2004 and 2008, it started losing that prediction, and it shifted. It shifted because that state has become more conservative, and also I think because the Democrats have been nominating candidates more liberal than the average voter in that state. So the combination of the two, I think has really pushed Missouri out of the category, at least for the near future, in terms of being a swing state.

Jeff Schechtman: When you look at this, before I let you go, there is something that is really antithetical to democracy about the whole thing. I mean, you start to zero in on this, and it's fun to talk about, and it's interesting from a political perspective, but there is something about it that is kind of depressing within the context of thinking about democracy.

David Schultz: Yes. And again, if I come back to the notion of saying that democracy is about the consent of the government, it is about the fact that our most important political position, the country, should represent all of the people. When we're down to a situation where it is really only a few people in a few states that really matter in terms of who really gets the presidency. It's down to a few states for candidates' campaigns. And even between campaigns, we know that these are the states that also just proportionally get more money from the president, and more attention. This really undermines a sense of democratic legitimacy; the idea that your vote really matters, your voice really matters. And that's the disconcerting part. From a tactical point of view, that's one thing. Tactically, understanding how to run a campaign for the presidency is one thing, but this phenomena of swing states, I think undermines this broader and deeper notion, again, for lack of a better word, about what a democracy and what makes legitimate democracy.

Jeff Schechtman: And I guess the biggest beneficiary finally is potential vice presidential candidates that come from many of these swing states.

David Schultz: Well the true beneficiaries, first, are the vice presidential candidates, and two, it is the local television stations in those states, because we know that presidential elections, about 60 to 70 percent of the money that goes into a presidential race turns around and goes back into, mostly television, although some radio advertising. And so those states receive a disproportionate amount of that money in terms of advertising. And so, as I like to tell my students sometimes, I kid and say ''I'm in the wrong business. I should be selling airtime in Ohio or Florida.''

Jeff Schechtman: David Schultz, his book is Presidential Swing States: Why Only Ten Matter. David, I thank you so much for spending time with us here on Radio Whowhatwhy.

David Schultz: Thank you very much!

Jeff Schechtman: Thank you, and thank you for listening and joining us here on Radio Whowhatwhy. I hope you'll join us next week for another Radio Whowhatwhy podcast. I'm Jeff Schechtman.

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 21:38

Militairen gaan vanaf vrijdagavond helpen bij de extra controles bij Schiphol. De veiligheidsmaatregelen rond de luchthaven blijven langer van kracht.Dat heeft de driehoek, bestaande uit burgemeester, hoofdofficier van justitie en marechaussee/politie, in Haarlemmermeer besloten na overleg met de Nationaal Co¶rdinator Terrorismebestrijding en Veiligheid (NCTV) en luchthaven Schiphol.

De extra veiligheidsmaatregelen werden op 30 juli ingesteld nadat een signaal binnenkwam "dat betrekking heeft op de luchthaven". De controles zorgden de eerste dagen voor lange files richting Schiphol.

"We kunnen nog steeds niet ingaan op de aard van de informatie die wij hebben. Dit doen we om onze bronnen te beschermen en om onze informatiepositie veilig te stellen", zegt locoburgemeester van Haarlemmermeer Adam Elzakalai tegen het ANP.

Voor de driehoek is het belangrijk dat de veiligheid van reizigers en mensen op Schiphol vooropstaat. Daarom pakken wij het op deze wijze aan."

UitzonderlijkOmdat de extra controles en veiligheidsmaatregelen langer doorgaan, gaan de militairen de marechaussee helpen. Het is een uitzonderlijke maatregel dat militairen hiervoor worden ingezet.

"Deze steun zorgt ervoor dat de extra veiligheidsmaatregelen op Schiphol zo min mogelijk ten koste gaan van andere taken van de marechaussee", verduidelijkt de marechaussee.

Het gaat bijvoorbeeld om de extra grenscontroles die worden uitgevoerd vanwege de vluchtelingenstroom en de extra beveiliging vanwege de huidige dreiging op andere locaties in Nederland, zoals bij het parlement en Joodse instellingen.

De hulp van militairen op en rond Schiphol is tijdelijk, laat de marechaussee weten. "De steun wordt beindigd zodra de extra maatregelen op Schiphol niet meer nodig zijn, of zodra het Hoog Risico Beveiligingseskadron van de marechaussee op de geplande sterkte is en de marechaussee de maatregelen zelf kan uitvoeren."

Door: NU.nl/ANP

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 21:31

The new Duke of Westminster has inherited hundreds of acres of prime central London land in Mayfair and Belgravia, including Grosvenor Square. Photograph: Jonathan Brady/PA

The Duke of Westminster's death has led to calls from tax campaigners to reform the system of trusts which has allowed Britain's wealthiest families to preserve fortunes through generations by avoiding death duties.

Related:Inheritance tax: why the new Duke of Westminster will not pay billions

The 7th Duke of Westminster, 25-year-old Hugh Grosvenor, is now the heir to a legacy worth more than £9bn.

Thanks to a series of trusts, which are thought to date to the death of the 2nd Duke in 1953, Hugh and his three sisters will avoid having to pay the 40% levy ordinary families are faced with when parents die.

''For people who are really wealthy, inheritance tax has become an optional choice,'' said John Christensen, director of the Tax Justice Network. ''If you are lucky to be born into a very wealthy family you will be untaxed. For most normal people this is extraordinary and unacceptable.

''Wealth that has become concentrated in the hands of a very small minority. Without some kind of wealth tax those concentrations will simply continue to become greater and greater. I think there should be complete reform of inheritance tax.''

Pressure groups are calling on the government to publish its new central register of trusts, which names their beneficiaries and settlors. They want an obligation to publish annual accounts for those collections of assets deemed to have public interest, such as the thousands of acres of urban and rural land owned by the Grosvenor family.

Hugh Grosvenor. Photograph: John Stillwell/PARichard Murphy, the chartered accountant and political economist whose ideas have been adopted by the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, said the latest chapter in the history of the Dukes of Westminster highlighted the need for reform.

''We should require that these trusts publish their annual accounts just like a private company,'' said Murphy. ''And we need a register of trusts. The need for privacy around some trusts is understandable. But where there is public interest, where they are trading, where there are substantial assets over a a certain value, the accounts should be published.''

Despite arguing publicly for greater tax transparency, the former prime minister David Cameron intervened personally to water down proposals by the European Parliament that would have obliged not only private companies but also trusts to make the names of their beneficiaries public.

In a letter sent to the president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, in November 2013 the British prime minister argued trusts should be treated differently.

Related:Trusts keep wealth in the hands of the few. It's time to stop this tax abuse | Richard Murphy

''It is clearly important we recognise the important differences between companies and trusts,'' Cameron wrote. ''This means that the solution for addressing the potential misuse of companies, such as central public registries, may well not be appropriate generally.''

Britain's lobbying was successful. Europe's fourth money laundering directive, enacted last year, obliges member states to create central registers of trusts. But there is no requirement for the register to be available to the public, and it need only list taxable trusts.

Information on beneficiaries can only be accessed by ''competent authorities'', meaning police and tax inspectors, plus bankers, lawyers and accountants making money laundering checks.

George Hodgson, interim chief executive of the Society of Trust and Estate Practitioners, has argued for central registers to remain private because many beneficiaries are children or vulnerable adults. The inheritance tax exemptions help to protect jobs, he added.

''An awful lot of trusts are used to hold family businesses, be they farms or manufacturing businesses. Successive governments have decided that is in the best interests of the economy and therefore the public at large. Family businesses would face significant consequences if they were subject to full inheritance tax. A lot would end up being broken up and sold off.''

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 20:35

On Thursday, the world watched as Simone Manuel became the first African-American to win a gold medal in an individual swim event, and first Black woman to win an Olympic swimming medal period. As she glided through the water, I yelled, ''SWIM, SWIM, SWIM!'' as I watched her touch the wall in first place, setting a new Olympic record in the process. Full of pride, I immediately went to Twitter and Facebook to post my congrats, when I ran across an article about racism in swimming. My mind quickly shifted, as I knew there were deeper implications of what Manuel had done outside of winning an Olympic medal.

The first thought that crossed my head was the powerful scene in ''Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,'' the HBO film about the actress' life. In the scene Dandridge (played by Halle Berry), walks past a hotel swimming pool after being told she couldn't get in. Instead of being defeated, she defiantly dips her toe in the water and kicks it around. In the very next scene, however, the pool is being drained and cleaned by Black workers as Dandridge watches from her hotel room. Apparently, even dipping a toe in the water was too much for the hotel's White patrons who complained. With the film and Manuel's historic win still playing in my mind, I took to Twitter.

I woke up this morning to hundreds of notifications as the tweet has since gone viral and the world has been reintroduced to the ugly history we have faced as African-Americans in this country. According to statistics from the USA Swimming Foundation, nearly 70% of Black children are unable to swim, and many Black adults hold a petrifying fear of even entering the water. The long history of African Americans fear of water does not go unwarranted as the trauma from our ancestors is still deeply rooted in us today. Enslaved Africans traveling thousands of miles across the ocean, being deprived of food and water, while watching the bodies of their shipmates being cast away is still embedded in our DNA.

When we take a look over the past 100 years, our history with the ''fear of water'' is even more understandable. Racist product advertisements for soap'--depicting Black babies as ''dirty'' in the before picture and coming out ''clean and white'' in the after picture'--still circulate on the internet today. Images of segregated of water fountains based on belief that Black people had diseases that could be contracted if shared are still in our collective memories. Stories about Black celebrities like Dandridge and Sammy Davis Jr. swimming in hotel pools (like the New Frontier Hotel & Casino in 1952), only to have them drained after they got out still get told.

Back in the 1960s, Black Americans were systematically denied access to swimming, and many saw it as a privilege for whites that was never meant to be for us. With desegregation came the hopes that this pathology could change, but the only thing that changed was how much deeper our country would dig its heels into the racism surrounding shared water. Rather than desegregate, many public pools closed or were filled in with cement to prevent anyone from swimming. Those that remained open were hostile to African Americans. According to the Washington Post, "White people even went as far as pouring acid in the water while Black people were swimming in the pools, and staging protests and walkouts after desegregation"

Later, country clubs became the new way to keep Black Americans out of the water. As private, often expensive spaces, these clubs created a place where white children could swim freely without sharing water with Black kids. Even when African Americans had access to pools, they were built with shallow waters and weren't large enough to teach traditional swimming, and by that time, many of us no longer had the desire to break through the fear that overrode our willingness to swim.

Fast forward to today, we continue to see death by drowning at alarming rates for African Americans because many of us cannot swim. The rates at which Black children drown is three times higher than our White counterparts, according to the Centers for Disease Control. When Cullen Jones won the Olympic medal in 2008, he spoke on how swimming needs to become a requirement, especially in Black communities. Jones, who has four Olympic medals, was enrolled in swimming lessons after nearly drowning at five-years-old. This story of ''near drowning'' is heard too often in our community, and that is why Simone Manuel's win is so important.

Manuel's historic moment is the first step in a revolutionary change needed to fix the narrative about Black folks and swimming. In a country that has so long denied Black people access to water and pools, while helping perpetuate the stigma that Black women ''refuse to get their hair wet'' and ''Black folk can't swim,'' Manuel has now debunked both myths and given us the opportunity to create a new story. Our history with the racist tactics and denial of our right to be able to swim, and find an appreciation for water is torrid, ugly, deplorable, but fixable.

While we celebrate this moment, let's a take a moment to thank those for those who paved the way for Black people to claim their rightful place in the pool.

Thank you Simone Manuel for knowing that what you did was much more than just winning a gold medal. Thank you Cullen Jones for knowing that what you have done was much more than just show out on the Olympic stage. And thank you Dorothy and Sammy, for taking ownership of the privilege that your ancestors should have always had.

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 20:35

Last weekend, a harrowing scene unfolded at a private community swimming pool in McKinney, Tex. Several white adults taunted a group of black teens, telling them to ''go back to your Section 8 homes.'' Another reportedly referred to one of the teens as a ''black effer.'' The police were eventually called in, responding with aggressive and unreasonable force.

Americans were shocked by the scene, which was caught by camera phones. But I wasn't surprised.

Swimming pools have long been contested spaces where Americans express social prejudices that otherwise remain publicly unspoken. (Though the McKinney pool isn't open to the general public, it was being used by a resident to host a party with friends from outside the neighborhood, like someone might do at their own neighborhood pool.) They provide insight into the state of social relations in America, both past and present.

McKinney Police Cpl. Eric Casebolt has resigned after pulling his gun on a group of teenagers at a pool party. A witness uploaded this video of the incident to YouTube. Editor's Note: This video has been edited. (Courtesy of Brandon Brooks)

The earliest public pools were built in large northern cities during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They served mostly poor and working-class boys (both black and white), and reveal the class prejudices of the time. In 1910, for example, the proposal to build a large municipal pool in New York's Central Park generated intense opposition from the city's middle and upper classes, because it would attract large numbers of immigrant and working-class kids into their oasis of genteel recreation. ''I should consider it disastrous if the only swimming pool belonging to the city was put [in Central Park],'' one critic told the New York Times. ''It would attract all sorts of undesirable people.'' The paper agreed and recommended that municipal pools be located underneath the Manhattan and Queensboro bridges. These locations would have effectively secluded working-class swimmers, protecting the city's class-segregated social geography.

The design of pools and the social composition of swimmers changed during the 1920s and '30s, when cities across the country built large, resort-like swimming pools and allowed males and females to use them together for the first time. In northern cities such as Chicago, New York and Pittsburgh, gender integration brought about racial segregation. Public officials and white swimmers now objected to the presence of black Americans because they did not want black men interacting with white women at such visually and physically intimate spaces. And so, throughout the North, public pools became racially segregated during the interwar years.

In some cases, white swimmers imposed de facto segregation through violence and intimidation. At Pittsburgh's Highland Park Pool, for example, white swimmers attacked black swimmers '-- sometimes with rocks and clubs '-- to prevent them from entering the pool. Police officers encouraged these attacks and typically arrested the black victims, charging them with ''inciting to riot.'' In attempting to explain why black swimmers were being attacked at Highland Park Pool but not at other city pools, the Pittsburgh Courier wrote: ''The whole trouble seems to be due to the way Highland Park Pool is operated. It is the only city pool where men and women, girls and boys swim together. This brings the sex question into the pool and trouble is bound to arise between the races.''

The same type of trouble had no chance to arise at public swimming pools in the South and Mason-Dixon line cities such as St. Louis and Baltimore, because public officials mandated racial segregation, explicitly barring blacks from entering ''whites-only'' pools.

Across the country, public swimming pools were racially desegregated after World War II, but that was met with widespread opposition from whites that again exposed their social prejudices. Southern cities typically shut down their public pools rather than allow mixed-race swimming. In the North, whites generally abandoned pools that became accessible to blacks and retreated to ones located in thoroughly white neighborhoods or established private club pools, where racial discrimination was still legal.

Warren, Ohio, for example, was forced by a pending court order to desegregate its municipal pool in 1948. The local newspaper covered the first day of interracial swimming by printing a front-page photo showing a dozen children waiting to enter. The last two children in line were black; the caption read: ''Last one in the water is a monkey.'' The racial antipathy expressed in the newspaper was shared by many local whites, who stopped using the pool when they realized black residents intended to use it. Similarly, in 1962, several years after Pittsburgh's municipal pools were desegregated, a sign posted outside a city pool still used exclusively by whites read ''No dogs or niggers allowed.'' Public pools were racially desegregated, but that did not mean blacks and whites started swimming together.

Even today, there are examples that things haven't changed that much. In 2009, 65 black and Latino campers from the Creative Steps day camp in North Philadelphia arrived at the Valley Swim Club in suburban Montgomery County to play for an hour and a half. Camp director Althea Wright had paid the private club $1,950 to use the facility Monday afternoons throughout the summer. As the campers entered the water, some club members reportedly pulled their children from the pool and wondered aloud what all these black and Latino kids were doing there. A few days later, the Valley Swim Club canceled the lease agreement. When pressed to explain, the club president stated, ''there was concern [among the members] that a lot of kids would change the complexion '... and the atmosphere of the club.''

We do not see this type of behavior in other public spaces such as parks. Why do swimming pools bring out the worst in people?

Part of the answer has to do with the uniqueness of swimming pools as physical spaces. They are visually and socially intimate. Swimmers gaze upon one another's nearly naked bodies, lie in the sun next to one another, navigate through crowded water and flirt. This type of contact and interaction piques social anxieties and exposes the lack of trust and understanding between people of different social classes.

Swimming pools have also been intensely contested because they are places at which people build community and define the social boundaries of community life. Swimming pools are primary summertime gathering places, where many people come together (often for several hours), socialize, and share a common space. Swimming with others in a pool means accepting them as part of the same community precisely because the interaction is so intimate and sociable. Conversely, excluding someone or some group from a pool effectively defines them as social others'--as excluded from the community.

For these reasons, swimming pools serve as useful barometers of social relations. If we as a nation want to know how we relate to one another across social lines, how we structure our communities socially, and how we think about people who are socially different from ourselves, just look at our swimming pools. The answer will be obvious.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 20:29

Join us in working against Donald Trump and his hateful agenda. Join us in working to make possible a country built on ideals of justice, equity, and fairness.

Bend the Arc Jewish Action will be calling on members across the country to get involved with this election, through demonstrations, actions, and voter outreach.

Since the fall of 2015, Bend the Arc Jewish Action has sounded the alarm about Donald Trump's hateful anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-woman, and violent agenda.

We pushed back '' with petitions, with statements, and at rallies. At every stage our message was clear: Jews have seen this before. Sign up now to be part of this critical campaign.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 18:42

The Twitter account of Guccifer 2.0, the hacker who claimed responsibility for leaking a trove of Democratic National Committee documents, was suspended less than 24 hours after dumping fresh sensitive DNC data.

On Friday, the hacker wrote a blog post taking credit for a fresh leak from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

He published an excel spreadsheet containing the mobile phone numbers and email addresses of every Democrat in the House of Representatives, as well as passwords to DCCC files to substantiate his claim.

READ MORE: Hacker strikes again, posts congressional Democrats' passwords

The hacker, who had actively been using Twitter to publicize his leaks, has since had his account suspended.

WikiLeaks claims that the suspension was related to the publication of the DCCC documents.

Guccifer 2.0 had previously released data revealing DNC opposition research on Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton's expenses, and alarming evidence that the DNC was working with Clinton to thwart the candidacy of Bernie Sanders from the very beginning of the Democratic presidential nomination process.

Security firms hired by the Democratic Party to investigate the hacks claimed that the Russian government was behind the leak '' an allegation denied by both Guccifer 2.0, who insists he is working alone, and the Kremlin, which has called the accusations absurd.

Read more

Twitter has not yet released a statement explaining the reason for the suspension, but states in its policy document that it may suspend accounts that violate the company's rules, which include spam accounts, accounts suspected of putting security at risk, or accounts containing abusive content.

It also states that it is against its rules to ''post other people's private and confidential information, such as credit card numbers, street address, or Social Security/National Identity numbers, without their express authorization and permission''.

Earlier this month, Twitter permanently suspended the account of conservative commentator and Breitbart tech editor Milo Yiannopoulos for stirring up a barrage of hateful comments directed at Ghostbusters actress Leslie Jones.

READ MORE: #BanMilo v #FreeMilo: Yiannopoulos Twitter ban splits internet

The decision sparked much debate, with some accusing the microblogging site of ''selective'' censorship. However, many other users pointed to Twitter's wider shortcomings in tackling misogynist and racist abuse.

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 18:01

Fig. 5'-- 2016 Louisiana Democratic presidential prim­ary

Candidates' vote shares vary by as much as 36% between small and large precincts

Graph by Beth Clarkson

This graph is in complete violation of the Law of Large Numbers. For a candidate to receive this level of increased support in the large precincts, each new precinct must be so heavily weighted that it defies the average of all the other precincts that have already been added together. This is a major statistical irregularity. In the small precincts, the difference between Clinton and Sanders is approximately 10% (Clinton 48%''Sanders 38%). However, in the largest precincts the difference between the candidates is 46% (Clinton 70%''Sanders 24%.) That is a difference of 36% support between the smallest precincts and the largest precincts.

The majority of the data we examined suggests that the two candidates currently slated to accept their party's nomination in the 2016 presidential primary races, received a different number of votes than what has been officially reported.

On the Republican side, statistical analysis indicates that Donald Trump probably received more votes than what has been reported and certified. Because he was able to overcome his opposition, even with the irregularities, his selection as the presumptive Republican nominee is supported by the data.

As we stated in the opening, this is not the case on the Democratic side. The overwhelming majority of the almost two dozen states that we analyzed, demonstrate irregularities. We found suspect statistical patterns in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary in Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia. These irregularities were significant, as we demonstrate in Louisiana, sometimes as large as 36% and could change the outcome of the election.

In almost every instance the discrepancies favored Hillary Clinton. In all likelihood the current results have assigned her a greater percentage of the vote than she may have actually received, while simultaneously under-reporting Bernie Sanders' legitimate vote share.

We intend to report on the percentage that the race may be off, based on a statistical analysis of as many states as possible.

It is hard to conceive of a legitimate transfer of power following an election that has been this flawed. We recommend that many of these elections be examined, and if found to be inaccurate, decertified. Where paper ballots are available, it would be informative to count them by hand. Hand counts, historically, have also been subject to election fraud, so the protocols must establish a secure process that is open to the public, invites media scrutiny, and has strong chain-of-custody.

We understand that this is unprecedented. While the U.S. does have a long history of election fraud, we do not believe it has ever been this well-documented prior to the end of the election cycle.

Philip B. Stark, a statistics professor at UC Berkeley, who has been instrumental in designing new auditing techniques for elections agrees that, ''Closer scrutiny of elections is necessary and welcome '... that requires a paper trail, convincing evidence that the paper trail is complete and accurate, and a risk-limiting audit of the paper trail or a full manual tally to provide convincing evidence that the paper trail matches the announced result.''

Beth Clarkson adds, ''It's possible that to do a good audit would be more expensive and less transparent than a hand count.''

The lack of accuracy in our elections is truly a betrayal of our ancestors who fought and died for the democratic process. It is a betrayal of the soldiers who lost their feet to amputation in the Valley Forge winter. It is a betrayal of the women who went to prison and starved themselves to join the franchise. It is a betrayal of the civil rights workers who died for the right to register to vote. There can be no debate about whether or not the vote is accurate. We must know that it is accurate the way we know that the Earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa.

The people who win these elections will decide whether or not we go to war, how many people get what jobs, where our children attend what quality schools, the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink, and so much more. The entire identity of our nation rests on our self-image as a self-correcting democracy whose leaders are accountable to the voters that elect them. To not know with 100% confidence that those leaders are the leaders that we actually voted for is the very essence of an existential crisis. This is a state of emergency. We must move rapidly to secure the integrity of the vote.

We need to immediately implement robust audit procedures. Then, as rapidly as possible, we must join the other legitimate democracies of the world and implement a system of paper ballots, hand-counted in a secure process that is open to the public, invites media scrutiny, and has strong chain of custody protocols. In this way, we can achieve accurate, verifiable results. Each citizen of the United States, and indeed the world, deserves this from us.

We encourage you to download and read the full report.

lulu Fries'dat (lead author) is an Edward R. Murrow award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker. She received a Best Documentary award for her first feature-length documentary (producer/director) Holler Back '-- [not] Voting in an American Town, a film that explores systemic issues in our elections that discourage voter participation. Clips are available for viewing here. Her networknews experience includes editing assignments for CBS Evening News,Nightline, Sunday Morning, The Today Show, and Good MorningAmerica. She produced and edited profiles of Democratic candidates for MSNBC, and has done long-format documentary work with NBC News and CNBC. She was on the editing team of Gideon's Army, an Emmy-nominated documentary that follows the personal stories of public defenders in the Deep South. Her full bio is available here. Follow her on twitter @luluFriesdat.

Anselmo Sampietro (lead statistician) holds a Master of Statistics degree from the University of Bologna, Italy and has also studied at the University of Technology Sydney, in Australia and the University of Warsaw, in Poland. He currently leads a team of data analysts for a company based in London, UK. He collaborated (through ) with General Fusion, a Canadian start-up that is developing clean and reliable nuclear fusion reactors, to build a statistical model predicting plasma performance. He has specialized in the use of statistical analysis software R, the analytic tool used throughout this article.

Fritz Scheuren (collaborator) is a Senior Fellow and Vice President at NORC in the Center for Excellence in Survey Research. Scheuren has an unparalleled record of work on complex substantive tasks related to sampling and to the analysis of data from government agencies and private sector institutions. Scheuren also serves on the Statistics Faculty at The George Washington University. At GWU, he created a successful survey sampling certificate program which he still teaches. Most of his over 450 applied and theoretical papers, presentations, monographs, and books are on sampling aspects of data collection primarily in a survey context. Scheuren served at the 100th President of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and chaired the ASA Sections on Survey Research Methods. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS.)

Election Justice USA '' the paper was assisted in its research and development by Election Justice USA, a national non-partisan organization of seasoned election integrity experts, statisticians, attorneys, journalists and activists, whose mission is to make sure each American's right to vote can be exercised without issue in accurate and honest elections.

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Archived Version

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 17:42

Dallas knows how to find and recruit an Oswald. Just start the ball rolling downhill, sit back and let momentum do the dirty work.

Marina Oswald via Wikipedia

Dallas knows a thing or two about assassination conspiracies. We know that the more important conspirator is usually the political climate, not the shooter.

Properly stoked with hate, violence and dehumanizing vilification, the climate will find its shooter. A Lee Harvey Oswald will step forward to kill JFK or a Yigal Amir will volunteer to murder Yitzhak Rabin, as Thomas L. Friedman argued forcefully two days ago on The New York Times op-ed page.

More than 30 years ago I interviewed the late Stanley Marcus, then recently retired as head of the Dallas-based Neiman Marcus retail store chain. He had lived through the years of extremism in Dallas preceding the 1963 assassination here of JFK by Oswald.

When I interviewed him in the mid-1980s, the popular belief was that Oswald had acted as a cog in some larger as-yet unearthed conspiracy. That basic concept was an almost unshakeable shibboleth, a cultural assumption fervently held by many if not most Americans. What Marcus wanted to get across to me was that the reality was far worse than a conspiracy, less neatly satisfying, much more broadly incriminating.

After all, if JFK's murder was a classic conspiracy, then the only thing Dallas needed to do was prove it wasn't in on it. But Marcus, who had played the role of community conscience throughout a long and illustrious career, wasn't about to let his hometown off that easy.

''Following the assassination,'' he told me, ''there was a great desire on the part of the leadership to cope with the situation. The word, cope, was the way to describe it. And everyone was saying, 'Well, it could have happened anywhere.'

''Of course, that was true,'' Marcus said. ''But it did happen here, and it happened partially because of the atmosphere that attracted that kind of fanatic nut. And when a community doesn't do anything to express disapprobation, it is logical that it will attract more and more of them.''

Marcus gave me verbal portraits of events in Dallas preceding the assassination that feel, as I reread them now, like mirror-images of the dark raucous scenes published by The New York Times last week in a video called, ''Unfiltered: Voices from Trump's Crowds.''

Marcus was with U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in Dallas on October 24, 1963, almost one month to the day before JFK was murdered here. In the mid-1980s when I wrote about my interview with Marcus, I said, ''To this day, his eyes widen when he calls the scene to mind.''

In 1963 he and Stevenson were getting into a car when they were surrounded by a mob. ''I pushed him into the car,'' Marcus remembered, ''and they surrounded us. They were rocking the car.''

In the months before the Stevenson incident, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife, Lady Bird, were attacked and spat upon by a Dallas mob. Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright declined invitations to come to Dallas, telling friends he feared violence.

The climate of extremism was in no sense limited to public events. Even though he was a recognized leader in the community, Marcus told me he had found social life difficult in the period before Kennedy was killed.

''I found it very difficult to go to a dinner party without getting into violent discussions. If you disagreed, you were automatically labeled a communist.''

As for what stirred this cauldron of hate, Marcus awarded a good share of the blame to local media, especially The Dallas Morning News, holding the newspaper responsible in large part for the atmosphere that preceded the assassination and for the assassination itself:

''I have always charged that The Dallas Morning News then was as responsible and as answerable as any single institution, because they never repudiated it.'' (For more about the political climate in Dallas and the role former Morning News Publisher Ted Dealey played in ratcheting up the heat, see the book Dallas 1963, by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis. For a sample, check out our excerpt from 2013, "How the Morning News Helped Dallas Become the City of Hate.")

EXPANDThe climate at Trump's rallies today feels like a mirror image of Dallas in the early 1960s.

Kathy Tran

And there it is, really '-- the key ingredient, the fulcrum on which history bends one way or the other. The repudiation. It's that John McCain moment in 2008 when he drew boos and jeers from what had been an enthusiastic crowd by telling a woman that Barack Obama was not a dangerous alien.

''No, ma'am,'' McCain said. ''He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about."

Would that have been enough here in 1963? We can't know. But if Marcus was right, if the local climate of intolerance and extremism was the tuning fork that resonated with the mad internal orchestra inside Oswald regardless of political ideology, then what might have happened if someone had forcefully sounded another conflicting note? Nothing? How do we know that?

What we do know now in our own time is that the madmen who attack us in bars and movie theaters or on the streets of downtown all sing a very similar predictable almost ritualized tune. Just for the sake of argument, let's forget about their claims to politics '-- almost always a garbled and self-contradicting inarticulate mish-mash anyway.

Instead of listening, let's just look at them for a moment. We see the fake-soldier garb, the stockpiled weapons, the stealth, the wholesale slaughter of strangers. In fact, if we keep looking and look a little deeper, into personality, we see strong similarities '-- the churning unresolved turmoil loosely gathered under some pseudo-philosophical umbrella. We imagine them stooped and muttering, filled with explosive wrath.

These people are from central casting. It's not possible '-- not for me anyway '' to look at this plague of public shootings and not see ritual, one acted out in public at an accelerating tempo, in which the same kind of loosely moored soul steps forward each and every time, as Oswald did to shoot Kennedy, as Amir did to kill Rabin, because they have seen it all on television before and have heard the call.

And each time it happens, we make the same foolishly self-exculpatory mistake. We look for some hard-edged conspiracy to explain what happened.

We are relieved a little, are we not, when ISIS takes credit, even though we know ISIS would take credit for a tsunami if it killed the right people. If there is a conspiracy, after all, then that will mean that we didn't do it.

And that, by the way, is the thing we know here in Dallas, the inconvenient truth. We are all conspirators when we fail to repudiate the climate that sends up the drumbeat call to violence.

I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of personality profiles of Trump. I can't read them anymore. I'd rather read the personality profile of a tree stump.

We know what he is. He ducks and dodges, smirks and winks, brags about how much he wants to beat people up, tells jokes about the gun lobby and stopping Hillary Clinton. Mainly he pokes, stabs, waves and cheers the crowd on with that shrug and Mussolini look-away, that gesture that means, ''You know what to do.''

He's from central casting, too. Is there anything surprising or even terribly interesting about the man? He had to happen, did he not? Given the rise of right-wing extremism that began more than eight years ago with the first Obama candidacy, some kind of Trump or another had to wander into the spotlight and start wriggling around in it like a fat baby.

The increase in extremist rhetoric at his rallies and now these ever more transparent exhortations to violence: I don't believe there was ever a way to avoid any of it. It was always there in the belly of the beast, waiting to be vomited up.

What's missing is the repudiation. What's missing is the John McCain line (notably from McCain, more's the pity): No, sir. She's a decent family woman and citizen. We just happen to disagree on trade policy.

That's the fulcrum, the point of resistance that will bend the future to the good. Or not.

Marcus knew that if leadership does not effectively repudiate a climate of extremism, then eventually that climate will discover and recruit its Oswald. The climate alone will send him or her on the climate's mission. Nobody needs a meeting or a secret code. It's all right there in front of all of us, as we speak, happening in real time.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 16:20

That takes some chutzpah, to skate yet attack those who gave you the pass. Tell that to the people, like the Iranian nuclear scientist, whose names were exposed in her emails. Oh right, you can't, Iran executed him.

Via NY Post:

Bill Clinton is accusing the FBI director of serving up ''the biggest load of bull I've ever heard'' '-- marking the first significant public comments from the husband of the Democratic nominee on the scandal that's plagued his wife's campaign for over a year.

''First of all, the FBI director said, when he testified before Congress, he had to amend his previous day's statement that she had never received any emails marked classified,'' Clinton told journalists at an Asian American Journalists Association meeting in Las Vegas on Friday, making a strong defense for Hillary Clinton.

He added, ''They saw two little notes with a 'C' on it '-- this is the biggest load of bull I've ever heard '-- that were about telephone calls that she needed to make. The State Department typically puts a little 'C' on it to discourage people from discussing it in public in the event the secretary of state, whoever it is, doesn't make a telephone call. Does that sound threatening to the national security to you?''

Keep reading'...

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 15:06

Washington, D.C. '' A new Department of Defense Inspector General's report, released last week, has left Americans stunned at the jaw-dropping lack of accountability and oversight. The glaring report revealed the Pentagon couldn't account for $6.5 trillion dollars worth of Army general fund transactions and data, according to a report by the Fiscal Times.

The Pentagon, which has been notoriously lax in its accounting practices, has never completed an audit, would reveal how the agency has specifically spent the trillions of dollars allocated for wars, equipment, personnel, housing, healthcare and procurements allotted to them by Congress.

Beginning in 1996 all federal agencies were mandated by law to conduct regular financial audits. However, the Pentagon has NEVER complied with that federal law. In 20 years, it has never accounted for the trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds it has spent, in part because ''fudging'' the numbers has become standard operating procedure at the Department of Defense, as revealed in a 2013 Reuters investigation by Scot Paltrow.

According to the report by the Fiscal Times:

''An increasingly impatient Congress has demanded that the Army achieve ''audit readiness'' for the first time by Sept. 30, 2017, so that lawmakers can get a better handle on military spending. But Pentagon watchdogs think that may be mission impossible, and for good reason'...

The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), the behemoth Indianapolis-based agency that provides finance and accounting services for the Pentagon's civilian and military members, could not provide adequate documentation for $6.5 trillion worth of year-end adjustments to Army general fund transactions and data.

The DFAS has the sole responsibility for paying all DOD military and personnel, retirees and annuitants, along with Pentagon contractors and vendors. The agency is also in charge of electronic government initiatives, including within the Executive Office of the President, the Department of Energy and the Departing of Veterans Affairs.''

While there is nothing in the IG's report specifying that the money has been stolen, the mere fact that the Pentagon can't account for how it spent the money reveals a potentially far greater problem than simple theft alone.

For every transaction, a so-called ''journal voucher'' that provides serial numbers, transaction dates and the amount of the expenditure is supposed to be produced. The report specifies that the agency has done such a poor job in providing documentation of their transactions, that there is no way to actually know how $6.5 trillion dollars has been spent. Essentially, the government has no way of knowing how the Pentagon has spent the trillions of taxpayer dollars allocated by Congress for national defense.

In turn, employees of the DFAS were routinely told by superiors to take ''unsubstantiated change actions'' commonly referred to as ''plugging'' the numbers. These ''plugs'' '' which amounted to falsifying financial records '' were then used to create the appearance that the military's financial data matched that of the U.S. Treasury Department's numbers when discrepancies in the financial data couldn't be accounted for, according to the Reuters investigation.

According to that Reuters investigation:

''For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollars.

Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense's accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio DFAS'.... Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy's books with the U.S. Treasury's'.... And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from.''

While many of the problems occurred due to bookkeeping errors rather than actual financial losses, the DFAS has failed to provide the necessary tracking information essential to performing an accurate audit of Pentagon spending and obligations, according to the IG's report.

''Army and Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis personnel did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter adjustments and $6.5 trillion in year-end adjustments made to Army General Fund data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation,'' wrote Lorin T. Venable, the assistant inspector general for financial management and reporting. ''We conducted this audit in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards.''

The Pentagon has a chronic failure to keep track of its money '' how much it has, how much it pays out and how much is wasted or stolen. Adding to the appearance of impropriety is the fact that thousands of documents that should be on file have been removed and disappeared without any reasonable explanation.

DFAS ''did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System . . . removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during Q3 FY 2015. As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and year-end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail,'' according to the IG's report stated.

The accounting errors and manipulated numbers, though obviously problems in their own right, highlight a far greater problem for the Defense Department than only bad recording keeping and wasteful spending habits. In reality, they are a representation of the poor decision-making, and lack of oversight and accountability that plague our nation's government as a whole.

While the Department of Defense can't account for $6.5 trillion dollars of taxpayer funds, in 2014 there were 47 million people, including over 15 million children, living in poverty in the U.S. '' %15 of the U.S. population, which is the largest total number in poverty since records began being kept 52 years ago.

Please share this story if you are appalled by the fact that there are Americans that are homeless and hungry, including U.S. combat veterans '-- while the government is unable to account for $6.5 trillion dollars of taxpayer money.

We got money for wars, but can't feed the poor '' Tupac Shakur

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 14:45

Activist and actor George Clooney defends his big-ticket fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in an interview with Chuck Todd that aired April 17 on "Meet the Press." (NBC News)

Editor's note, May 4, 2016: We originally published this item on April 17 and rated it Mostly True. Since then, readers have contacted us to consider other evidence about the Democratic Party's fundraising processes, especially state parties sending money back to the Democratic National Committee. We have updated and rerated this fact-check based on new information, changing the rating from Mostly True to Half True. You can read an archived version ofthe original report here.

You had to pay '-- or collect '-- as much as $353,000 per couple to attend recent fundraisers for Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, including one hosted at the home of actor George Clooney. After the affair drew protesters who support Bernie Sanders, Chuck Todd, host of NBC's Meet the Press, asked Clooney what happened when he encountered them.

Clooney said he was accused of being a corporate shill, which is "one of the funnier things you could say about me." Then he told Todd, "The overwhelming amount of money that we're raising, and it is a lot, but the overwhelming amount of the money that we're raising is not going to Hillary to run for president, it's going to the down-ticket.

"It's going to the congressmen and senators to try to take back Congress. And the reason that's important (is) ... we need to take the Senate back because we need to confirm the Supreme Court justice, because that fifth vote on the Supreme Court can overturn Citizens United and get this obscene, ridiculous amount of money out so I never have to do a fundraiser again. And that's why I'm doing it."

Here, we're fact-checking Clooney's claim, "The overwhelming amount of money that we're raising, and it is a lot, but the overwhelming amount of the money that we're raising is not going to Hillary to run for president '... It's going to the congressmen and senators to try to take back Congress."

What we found is that Clooney is technically accurate about most of the money not going to Clinton's campaign, but it's not necessarily going to "congressmen and senators."

Clooney is right about the direct support for Clinton's presidential campaign. Federal law says individuals can't give more than $2,700 to a presidential candidate's primary campaign. Another $2,700 can be collected for the general election. It doesn't matter whether you give it directly or a friend collects it from you on the candidate's behalf, the limit is there.

Where the rest of those big-dollar donations end up is a bit of a maze. We'll try to walk you through it.

In this case, the Clinton California fundraisers were held on behalf of the Hillary Victory Fund, which distributes the money to Clinton's campaign committee, Hillary for America. But it also distributes money to the Democratic National Committee and the state parties.

A donor can also give up to $33,400 a year to the DNC and $10,000 a year to each of the state parties for use in getting its candidates elected to federal office. If you do the math, with 32 state parties included in the Victory Fund, that's $356,100.

The state parties generally are tasked with helping elect Democrats at the state level, and the DNC does the same at the national level.

The way the donations are divided is explained at the bottom of the Hillary Victory Fund page on the Clinton website. The first $2,700 goes to Clinton, the next $33,400 goes to the DNC and the rest goes to state parties.

How does this translate into total donations for each group?

If you look at the money going out, which is available through campaign finance reports, it looks like Clinton is getting most of the money.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics by the end of 2015, the Hillary Victory Fund had given $4.4 million to Clinton, $2.3 million to the DNC, and $2.2 to state political parties. That makes Clinton's share through 2015 almost exactly 50 percent.

In the first quarter of this year, Clinton's share was 63 percent of the money that was officially spent on campaigns. Politico reported that the fund also spent $6.7 million for "online ads that mostly looked like Clinton campaign ads, as well as $5.5 million on direct marketing."

The Clinton campaign gets the lion's share of the money collected by the Victory Fund, said Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin, because most of the donors give much smaller amounts, and everything up to $2,700 per person is earmarked to go to Hillary for America first.

It's when a donor exceeds that limit that the excess spills over to benefit the national and state Democratic committees.

Or '-- in the case of the state parties '-- that's how it appears on paper.

Federal Election Commission records show that in most cases, the money given to the state parties has been immediately redirected to the DNC. The money isn't staying with the states at all.

On May 2, Politico published a story reporting that 88 percent of the state money was immediately passed along to the DNC. In some cases, the state parties didn't even know the money had gone in and out of their accounts until after the fact.

The Hillary Victory Fund sent $214,100 to Minnesota, for example, and that state party didn't keep a dime. It was routed to the DNC, which otherwise wouldn't have been able to accept the money "since it came from donors who had mostly had already maxed out to the national party committee," Politico reported.

We contacted the DNC and the Clinton campaign to try to understand what was compelling the states to immediately send funds back to the DNC. We couldn't get straight answers.

The Clinton campaign provided a copy of the agreement with the state parties, but it contains no language requiring such a transfer. Although DNC spokesman Luis Miranda said that the terms of the agreement called for states to send the money to the DNC for election infrastructure, Clinton spokesman Schwerin was emphatic that the state committees were free to keep whatever money they wanted.

However, a Feb. 20Washington Poststory on Clinton's fundraising efforts says the executive director of Utah's Democratic party said state party officials understood they were supposed to send back money to DNC headquarters.

So if money is going back to the DNC, what's it being spent on?

The overarching response of both the Clinton campaign and the DNC was that the money being diverted to the DNC was, in fact, being used to help local Democrats get elected. Those candidates need voter information, research, media monitoring, organizing capacity and other infrastructure services provided by the DNC to run a successful campaign, and that's how the money was being used.

However, such services also benefit the Clinton campaign.

"The process Hillary Victory is using has been common practice for a number of years," said Bob Biersack, senior fellow at the Center for Responsive Politics. "The states always agree because they have no choice. Transferring the money back to the national party is a condition of participating. They do it in hopes of getting some good will from the national party down the road."

As for the degree to which the system really helps House and Senate candidates, Biersack said there isn't a precise answer.

He noted that the party's congressional committees aren't party to the deal. "If the goal was to support those campaigns, surely the national organizations most responsible would be participants. Traditionally the DNC and RNC are taken over by their presidential nominees during the election year, and the first priority for every spending decision is how it relates to the presidential race," he said. "If that campaign were to become significantly less competitive, then the national party might well move to other races, but it would happen in that sequence and in those conditions."

One final important note: Spokesmen for both the Clinton campaign and the DNC said many millions raised for the state parties have not been distributed yet, but will be soon.

Our ruling

Clooney said, "The overwhelming amount of the money that we're raising, is not going to Hillary to run for president. ... It's going to the congressmen and senators to try to take back Congress."

Clooney is correct that most of the big-dollar donations in question are not going to Clinton's campaign for president. By law, they can't.

Whether the money is "going to the congressmen and senators to try to take back Congress" is a much different story.

Most of the money appears to be winding up at the DNC, not state parties, as individual donors may have expected. The national party says that money is being used on campaign infrastructure that will benefit House and Senate candidates.

But it will benefit Clinton, too.

Clooney's claim is partially accurate but leaves out important details. We rate it Half True.

https://www.sharethefacts.co/share/4b455cd6-50e1-47a5-9314-36a64b25cdc6

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 14:30

Editor's Note: Stand Alone PostAs another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

The following is an exclusive walk through, an assessment of what I assess as the clinical reality of NYC824 AKA the regime's construction of a h bomb in order to remove Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, cover up the looting of the American Treasury and to start World War IV.

These are my conclusions in what this series of events can be explained by and melded with the actions of the Dick Allgire led remote viewers who first brought to attention that a city was going to be nuclear vaporized, and then was walked back, after the viewing of the riots at the RNC and DNC conventions did not match the attacking of horses and fire bombs which Mr. Allgire saw.

It is not secret that the Lame Cherry by God's Grace engaged in changing this time line in order to save the horses which the police rode.I conclude that the smell of pot which Dick Allgire reported, was weed which was laced with a zombie drug as in ISIS to get these leftists to riot violently. The Lame Cherry changed the time line and lessened the effect.The Allgire viewers though were taking credit though still as of August 9th for a hit, but their hit was something anyone could have stated as it was published weeks before that protestors would be at the RNCa and DNC.

The time line was changed and this spooked the remote viewers who were trending for a massive city destruction, which hinted at America.

On August 9th, was the first time I was able to listen to the different sessions on the Rense program as I being poor, I do not have unlimited bandwidth. I am thankful for that, as in listening to Dev and Dick the viewers, I was able to assess the situation and comprehend what I was dealing with, because as posted here, I was perplexed in I could not get a read on on what Dick Allgire was talking about in a city being destroyed in my July inquiry.I found a trend for Uncle Gordy's nuclear bombs in 4 US cities and a main event of a Mt. Hood eruption, but nothing of a city, until what Allgire was promoting began to have a following online, and then inquiry pointed to NYC824.

To explain the Remote Viewers, they are a collective led by a rather arrogant person, whose main pony is Dick Allgire, who is the main catalyst. The rest of the viewers are part of the symbiotic sympathetic empowerment wave which slides into Allgire's flow and find their own situations to back what Allgire has been streamed to from his perspective.What the control is not factoring in, is there are deceptive demonic forces and others who spike and influence the time lines and this is what I conclude was taking place.

There is a seer group in Europe who reported the nuclear destruction of New York City by air, in twin type warheads. Target in inquiry recently was 2018. The cartel in the lords and priests knew this date as nothing happens in the pur without their direction. The cartel took this event and moved it up by taking action.The control of the Remote Viewers bases all his data on CNN headlines which the viewers sense as themselves in the future, which is their absolute, which the Lame Cherry proved in save ponies and non fire bombs to be capable of changing events within the events.

Allgire and his symphatics are seeing events on CNN, but not MAIN EVENT. Main event is what the Lame Cherry locked onto in NYC824 which was generated through deception by moving up the event.

Slow down at this juncture to get this point understood, for I conclude that Dick Allgire in seeing a European city and Dev seeing a Mideastern city being destroyed in August, are CNN reality, but are not MAIN EVENT. NYC824 is the main event which is not reported, but is the catalyst which sets off the retaliation for NYC824 and counter strikes.

Logic leads me to conclude that NYC824 is designed to bring a response against Syria and that is what Dev was witnessing. Dick in my inquire was seeing Italy and that is the counter strike. All events interconnected, but in sequence. All correct if the time lines this time are not changed.

I believe at this moment that those behind this are attempting to mask their designs from my inquiry. I believe that NYC824 will be placed as stated in New York City, but it will not be detonated. The events in construct then will fall to new measures to remove Hillary Clinton, in logic, and still proceed with blaming "ISIS" in order to deal with Syria and in order to progress the forming Neo Roman empire which has been the Obama regime's main direct all along.

At this horizon point, I have changed the time line, but it is too far out that it could change again to the original construct. As I type this, I have not the time or energy to inquire as to proper direction in stopping the Dev and Dick views or altering them.

Main construct is Donald Trump in the White House, more difficult now with the chiggers attached to him from election theft. The Trump time line is the obertime in this, and into this is the supreme time line of Christ's return. I will not interfere with those prime directives.

I must by God's Grace attain the virtue of the Christian Epic, but I am not God in being capable of knowing all the variables..

I move on from this, but explain in these posts for all of you to settle down. I am aware of the situation and will pluck the necessary strings of resonance to make this play by God's Will. You have to understand that if I am successful, this New York City time line resets to occur again. For those who think I should "care", my answer is the people of Serbia never asked for their country to be fire bombed by Clinton and the people of Syria never asked for genocide while Paul Ryan and John McCain were rubber stamping Obama Clinton mass murder, and I care about that, because those peoples never asked for it.As I have never received the big donation from the rich sitting in all their wealth why I am surrounded by death and suffering, I do not see much reason to care about New York when 5 million New Yorkers who spend thousands of bucks on their lifestyles, never bothered with my tears.

What my interest is the sequence. NYC824, then Syria, then north Italy.....all regime generated and in tactical objectives, nuclear salting Syria and nuclear contaminating north Italy closes off Russian southern Invasion routes.Inquiry points to Padova.

Resets and shifts of time lines. I comprehend the logical construction of these horizon points for tactical objectives. Onshore offshore, now it is to the currents of the matrix.

Nuff Said

agtG

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 14:20

This is about distance, and detachment, and a kind of historic decoupling between the top and the bottom in the West that did not, in more moderate recent times, exist.

Recently I spoke with an acquaintance of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, and the conversation quickly turned, as conversations about Ms. Merkel now always do, to her decisions on immigration. Last summer when Europe was engulfed with increasing waves of migrants and refugees from Muslim countries, Ms. Merkel, moving unilaterally, announced that...

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 14:18

Brazil's Ministry of Health has launched an investigation into the cluster of babies born with brain defects linked to the Zika virus, after an expected ''explosion'' of cases across the country did not occur.

The bulk of the cases of congenital Zika syndrome '' fetal brain defects that sometimes cause microcephaly, or abnormally small skulls '' remain clustered in the northeast region of the country where the phenomenon was first identified last October, the ministry says.

And that has epidemiologists and infectious disease experts asking what is going on: Is it Zika and another virus working together that damages the fetal brains? Is it Zika and an environmental factor? Or something about the women themselves whose fetuses are affected?

The research in Brazil won't have conclusions for months, but will have implications across the Americas, where the Brazilian experience and the rapid spread of Zika has caused governments to take protective measures and even warn women to delay getting pregnant.

''We can see there is a kind of cluster in [part of] the northeast region with high prevalence and high severity, of miscarriage and congenital malformation that is really severe,'' said Fatima Marinho, co-ordinator of epidemiological analysis and information at the ministry.

''But we didn't find this in other states '' even the [adjacent] states didn't see the same situation as in the epicentre.'... We were preparing for an explosion and it didn't come.

''So we started to think that in this central area maybe more than Zika is causing this intensity and severity.''

EXPLAINER: Zika virus: All we know (and don't know) so far about the disease

A central theory the ministry is now exploring is whether co-infection with other viruses, such as dengue or chikungunya, is the factor. For example, does a mother's previous (or simultaneous) infection with dengue, which is also ubiquitous in Brazil, mean that the Zika virus affects a fetus differently? Or is it other viruses?

''This is an area that was under attack by viruses: Some parts even had measles,'' during the period when the bulk of the congenital Zika babies were conceived, Dr. Marinho said.

The ministry is also looking at social determinants, she said, because initial analysis makes it clear the women with affected fetuses have a clear ''profile.'' Some 77 per cent of them are black or mixed-race (the national figure is 52 per cent), and the great majority are poor. That's surprising, she said, given that dengue, for example, carried by the same mosquito, infects people across social classes. Most of the mothers are young (between 14 and 24) whereas typically birth defects affect older women.

The World Health Organization is supporting research into co-factors. ''Even though a causal link between Zika virus and congenital malformations has been conclusively demonstrated as published in international peer-reviewed scientific publications, other factors that may aggravate these conditions also require investigation,'' said Sylvain Aldighieri, incident manager for Zika with the Pan American branch of the WHO.

''I totally agree some co-factors are likely involved,'' said Ernesto Marques, a professor of infectious disease and microbiology at the University of Pittsburgh and scientific director of a program called Cura Zika. But it isn't the cluster that convinces him: ''It's because not every woman exposed during pregnancy has a baby with the congenital effects.''

RELATED: The Globe in Brazil: Zika's ground zero

But not all epidemiologists concur: ''I think it's too early to say there is a disparity in the rate of microcephaly,'' said Laura Rodrigues, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who has been working on Brazil's Zika epidemic since it was first identified. The epidemic is nearly a year behind in its spread in some other countries and perhaps other parts of Brazil, she said. ''So maybe haven't got to the peak. But that's not to say we shouldn't think about co-factors.''

Because the virus produces no symptoms in up to 80 per cent of people who get it, and only mild symptoms in many others, few people confirm Zika infection with laboratory tests, and so statistics of Zika cases are always estimates. The virus currently infecting Brazilians is a new, Asian strain of Zika, which was identified more than 60 years ago but never associated with congenital problems, or known to be sexually transmissible, as this strain is.

After Brazil, the next country that was expected to see the wave of congenital Zika was Colombia, which has the second-largest number of reported Zika cases. But of more than 12,000 pregnant Colombian women with Zika, only 21 have had fetuses or babies with the brain defects.

Dr. Marinho, with the ministry, said this reinforces her suspicions about the role of co-infection or other factors in Brazil. Dr. Marques said Colombia is only seeing the babies of women who were infected late in their pregnancies so far (because the virus season is about six months behind, further to the north) and the evidence is that the likelihood of damage by Zika is higher earlier in gestation '' so those babies may yet come.

But Dr. Rodrigues had another explanation. ''Now we know that in places where Zika comes the rate of abortion shoots up,'' she said. ''The feminist groups that will send pills by post to women '... as a way of making up for the unfairness of the restrictive abortion laws, report an enormous increase in requests from Brazil and Latin America. I wouldn't be surprised if when we look at cohorts in other counties, pregnancies disappear, and we can't say if it was spontaneous or medical abortion.''

OPINION: Picard: The risk of Zika is real, but not worthy of the hysterics

Researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine on July 28 that in Latin American countries where the new strain of Zika is spreading and abortion is illegal, there has been a huge spike in the number of requests to Women on Web, a Dutch-based organization which proves women with online consultations and then mails the drugs to induce a medical abortion. The increase over the rate of requests last year ranges from 38 per cent to 108 per cent in Brazil. (Brazilian authorities are now intercepting all deliveries to Brazilian women, the group said.)

On July 15, Adriana Melo, a fetal medicine specialist in the state of Paraiba who was the first to find Zika in the brains of affected babies, released research in which she and her co-authors report finding proteins of bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV), a cattle disease, in the brains of three fetuses with microcephaly from Paraiba whose brains also tested positive for RNA from the Zika virus. BVDV is known to cause serious birth defects in cows, but not to infect people. The findings were posted on BioArchive, a U.S.-based website for scientists to quickly share research findings on urgent matters, before peer review and publication. Their hypothesis is that Zika infection may weaken physiological barriers, so the cow virus that would not normally affect a human fetus can cause damage.

However other researchers are expressing skepticism of this theory '' and Dr. Melo and her colleagues acknowledged the possibility that the BVDV they found was the result of sample contamination, because the virus is often found in fetal bovine serum, which is a reagent (a substance used in chemical analysis) frequently used in laboratories.

Dr. Marinho is at pains to make clear that the health ministry does not doubt that Zika is the primary cause of the fetal brain damage. (Brazilian doctors were quick to persuade the ministry of the link last year, but had a much longer job to convince the World Health Organization, which declared an emergency over microcephaly only in February.) Then conspiracy theories tore through the public in Brazil and beyond '' that microcephaly was actually caused by a pesticide, or vaccines, or genetically modified mosquitoes '' and she does not want to revive that debate.

''We know here Zika caused neurological damage '' we have no doubt '' but the question is how can we explain this situation in the epicentre that was not reproduced in other areas '' in Colombia, and in other states in Brazil. A lot of pregnant women were infected and there were few cases of microcephaly or congenital malformation '' it must be more than Zika itself,'' she said. ''We could be wrong of course but it is the responsibility of the Ministry of Health to investigate all possibilities.''

Beneath all of these theories lies a fundamental problem with data. Until this crisis, Brazil had very weak reporting of microcephaly, with rates in some areas reported as 1,000 times lower than in Europe even though researchers have every reason to believe that it occurred at roughly the same rates.

With the emergency declared, health workers suddenly erred in the wrong direction, overreporting microcephaly. Almost none of the women with affected babies had a serologically confirmed Zika diagnosis. Beyond that, Dr. Melo and her colleagues realized many of the worst-affected babies had completely normal looking skulls, and it was not until they showed neurological problems that they were reported as Zika-affected. She told The Globe in February that it was impossible to know how many had slipped through the net and were as yet undiagnosed. In addition, an unknown number of affected pregnancies ended in miscarriage.

''The current epidemiological info is very fragile, so how do we know, for example, that we didn't have an explosion of cases in Rio in 2014 and we didn't pick it up?'' asked Dr. Marques.

The Asian strain of Zika hit French Polynesia in 2013 and researchers have gone back to retrospectively diagnose 17 cases of babies born with microcephaly in a total population of 275,000 people '' but researchers hotly debate how useful that information is for indicating the likelihood of co-factors, since it's retrospective and based on modelling. In addition, while Zika was not known to be related to fetal development problems at the time, abortion is legal in French Polynesia and women who were told their babies had brain defects could have terminated their pregnancies.

Brazil has 1,749 cases of confirmed congenital Zika syndrome so far, with 106 stillbirths and deaths. Dr. Marinho said it will be months before the ministry has solid data to confirm that the cases are clustered and there are co-factors involved, let alone what they are, and meanwhile congenital Zika remains a real threat: Paraiba is now seeing a second wave of cases. ''But this could be good news, for other areas of Brazil, and other countries,'' she said.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Eduardo Marques, a professor of infectious disease and microbiologist. In fact, his name is Ernesto Marques. This is a corrected version.

Report Typo/ErrorFollow Stephanie Nolen on Twitter: @snolen

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 12:08

One UK police force has made misogyny a hate crime to try to tackle sexist abuse, but how does it work?

Martha was followed on to a tram by a man who was staring at her breasts. She didn't report the incident but the police hope she would now.

Video Journalist: Kathleen Hawkins

Producer: Georgina Pearce

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 11:53

Posted August 12th, 2016 @ 1:00pm in #trump#clinton

Here's the set-up:

1. The mainstream media knows they are smarter than Donald Trump. They see evidence of this truth all the time, although much of that evidence is confirmation bias.

Then'...

2. Trump does something smart '' accusing Obama and Clinton of being ''founders'' of ISIS. This is a clever way to get the world to debate Clinton and Obama's ineffectiveness during a time when ISIS expanded. In other words, it is brilliant media manipulation, and it worked.

3. CNN and other Clinton supporters interpret Trump's statement about ISIS as absurd and uninformed because they can't imagine a scenario in which Trump does something brilliant. Trump being brilliant isn't one of the options, as far as they know.

The reality of Trump's clever persuasion is crystal-clear to anyone who thinks Trump is smart. Trump was clearly joking about the ''founder'' part to get people squawking, and it worked. Total success. Brilliant technique.

Now the media has a big problem. They can't admit that they were extraordinarily dumb in this situation and Trump was brilliant. That reality is invisible to them because it doesn't fit their worldview.

So'...cognitive dissonance happens.

This is a textbook set-up for cognitive dissonance. The facts we observe (Trump is smart, the media is gullible) is opposite of the media's worldview in which they are smart and Trump is uninformed. So what do they do?

They act as if Trump is the dumb one in this situation. Because that fits their worldview.

And'...they'...fact-check his claim.

Meanwhile, the unhypnotized laugh themselves into a stupor watching this spectacle of cognitive dissonance. Humor aside, it is a marvelous and incredible thing to behold.

One of my smartest friends just emailed me to say he thinks Trump really believes that Obama and Clinton ''founded'' ISIS. My friend has a very high IQ and he's well-informed. But cognitive dissonance isn't influenced by intelligence. He believes whatever fits his worldview. Just like the rest of us.

The fun part is that we can see cognitive dissonance when it happens to others '' such as with my friend, and CNN '' but we can't see it when it happens to us. So don't get too smug about this. You're probably next.

I think this story will end up in psychology textbooks. You rarely see such a clean example of cognitive dissonance in public.

Oh, and Trump hates babies, and he also wants a 2nd amendment supporter to assassinate his opponent. As long as the media is being dumbasses, they might as well fact-check that stuff too.

I have never been so entertained.

'--

If you think Obama and Clinton were not founders of ISIS, you might like my book.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 10:43

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''Clock Boy''Ahmed Mohamed told reporters Monday he lost the ability to create and has ''no schedule'' until he returns to Qatar for school. The teen was greeted by hordes of reporters upon his return to Texas on June 27, gushing over his supposed stateside summer plans.Breitbart Texas reported:

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''The teen and his family have been living in Qatar for the past nine months where he accepted a fully-funded education scholarship from the Qatar Foundation. He told reporters he came back for a summer internship with Twitter.

Ahmed also said Facebook, NASA, and even, MIT, the prestigious university he nixed in favor of attending the Qatari school, contacted him over social media, asking him to visit while he is stateside this summer.''

While it is unknown if any of these plans ever took place, numerous local news outlets have since reported the family returned merely to visit relatives living in Irving and, it appears, to file a federal lawsuit.

On August 8, Breitbart Texas reported that the Mohameds held a press conference led by their latest personal injury attorneys, Hutchison & Stoy, who filed a federal lawsuit against the City of Irving and the Irving public school district. The suit alleges a violation of the teen's civil rights and discrimination based on race and religion over the handling of Ahmed's September 14, 2015 detainment and three-day school suspension after bringing a homemade, makeshift clock to class that initially was mistaken for a hoax bomb.

Somber, Ahmed told reporters: ''The reality of it is I've lost my home, I lost my creativity, because before I used to love building things but now I can't. There is nothing I can do.'' He added his materials to build with was in storage or the trash and then, insisted he cannot create again because he does not know what parts he needs to use.

In contrast, the teen spoke live on Facebook with The Dallas Morning News in a low-risk interview on June 28 in what the reporter described as the Mohamed home. Ahmed touched on being jet-lagged and expressed he had become accustomed to media attention. During that live interview the teen said: ''I want to help change Texas for a better state, and I hope that not just for Texas, but the entire world.''

Ahmed added: ''People sometimes don't want to admit their mistakes, and sometimes the best thing to do is to help them change.'' It was unclear at the time if he meant his alleged mistakes or those purportedly made by the people of the state he says he loves.

On Monday, Susan Hutchison downplayed Ahmed's experiences of meeting the President at Astronomy Night and ''some famous people,'' never mentioning the all-expense paid Middle East travels, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) banquet, or even the VIP Google trip. Instead, Hutchison broached the fleeting nature of whirlwind adventures and spoke to the alleged hardships the teen faced since moving to Qatar. For some time, Ahmed insisted he was homesick for Texas and his hope was to move back.

Breitbart Texas reported:

''In mid-October, though, the budding clockmaker tweeted: 'I am coming home, tell the world I am coming home,' only it was not Texas he meant. It was Sudan. In addition to sponsored trips to Qatar and Saudi Arabia, Ahmed traveled to the family's ancestral homeland of Sudan where he met with the country's genocidal dictator Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.''

In November, then family personal injury attorney, Kelly Hollingsworth demanded $15 million plus apologies from the City of Irving and the Irving ISD in two ''demand letters.'' They alleged the Mohameds moved to the Middle East because ''threats and fear drove his family from Texas.''

Monday, Hutchison said the remedy to this matter is ''money.'' They are ''suing for justice,'' although the petition contains no dollar amount '-- leaving a jury to decide. Hutchison also accused Irving schools of ''paranoia'' towards Muslims. She characterized nearly 15-year-old Ahmed as ''a little boy'' and alleged he endured ''horrible, hateful, mean, terrible things'' people say. Ahmed added he worries for his safety in Texas and claims he cannot go outdoors without covering up for fear of facing death.

Yet, he wants to return to Texas.

In response to a reporter asking if he could go back in time and change anything from last year, Ahmed said he would ''bring MLK [Martin Luther King, Jr.] back.'' Just weeks before on Facebook with the Dallas newspaper, Ahmed answered he would have taken his clock to the White House for Astronomy Day.

That clock finally saw the light of day. After Monday's press conference, Ahmed showed it to news media. It never traveled with him to the meet the President or to the Qatari school the teen attends. For months, the Mohamed family claimed they could not retrieve the clock project from the clutches of local law enforcement even though the Irving Police Department notified the family to pick it up as recently as the Friday of the September incident.

Follow Merrill Hope, a member of the original Breitbart Texas team, on Twitter @OutOfTheBoxMom.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 10:20

Hillary's health is declining, as anyone who has looked at her can see. The question is: What condition does she have? A board certified Anesthesiologist has written a memo of Hillary's health. Feel free to pass it along to doctors and to analytics and criticize it.

Hillary Clinton's Probable Diagnosis(Download the PDF here, share with doctors for their opinion.)

Intro:Hillary Clinton (HRC) has suffered a variety of health issues. Unfortunately, she has declined to make her medical records public. In July of 2015 her personal physician released a letter asserting her ''excellent physical condition.'' Unfortunately, multiple later episodes recorded on video strongly suggest that the content of the letter is incorrect. This discussion is designed to sort through the known facts and propose a possible medical explanation for these events. In keeping with Occam's Razor, a single explanation that covers everything is preferred.

History of Hillary's Health:In 2009, HRC fell and broke her elbow. Little else was made public.[i]On December 17, 2012, while Secretary of State, HRC fell and suffered a concussion.[ii] Later, a transverse sinus thrombosis was diagnosed, resulting in chronic anticoagulation therapy. [iii] Her post-concussion syndrome was declared ''recovered'' in about six months.[iv] The original fall was publicly attributed to dehydration following gastroenteritis.An email from Huma Abedin (HRC's closest advisor) on January 26, 2013, says that HRC ''is often confused.''[v]Photos show being assisted up what appears to be the steps of a residential porch. This apparently happened in February of 2016. On August 4, 2016, Reuters and Getty published the photos.[vi]At a rally on May 2, 2016, HRC demonstrates classic PD hand posturing.[vii] She has no lectern in front, so she starts with her right hand pressed against her chest. At the 18:02 mark, she starts gesturing with her right hand, which is in a very unnatural position that is common in PD.On July 21, 2016 HRC was filmed talking to reporters at close range when several spoke at once. Without warning, she started a bizarre head-bobbing episode that must be seen rather than described. After several cycles, she regained control and declared that the reporters ''must try the iced chai.''[viii]On July 28, 2016, during the balloon drop, HRC suddenly looks up with a frozen wide-mouth and wide-eyed stare. After a couple of seconds she regains control and a more normal expression.[ix]On August 5, HRC declared that she had ''short circuited''[x] a response to Chris Wallace in an interview that aired July 31 on Fox News Sunday.[xi]August 6, 2016, at a campaign rally, HRC freezes with wide eyes in response to protestors. A large black male who commonly accompanies her leans in and tells her ''It's OK. We're not going anywhere. Keep talking'...'' Shortly after, she laughs strangely and then says ''OK. Here we are. We'll keep talking.''[xii]Several recent photos show HRC with an inappropriately exaggerated wide-mouthed smile and extreme wide-open eyes. Several videos show her laughing inappropriately and for extended periods. Numerous events have been interrupted by prolonged episodes of coughing unrelated to any infectious cause.This discussion will not argue that the black male is carrying a diazepam injector, since there is a plausible argument that it is actually a small flashlight, and is seen in other video to be such. We will also not discuss the circular area on her tongue. It appears to be the site of a mass excision. Benign explanations that do not bear on chronic health issues may easily be proffered.Discussion:The HRC campaign meme is that ''there's nothing to see here.''But numerous trained observers have noted multiple other, more subtle bits that strongly support the argument below.

After the 2012 fall, HRC had post-concussion syndrome (PCS). She should have declared herself unable to fulfill her duties as Secretary of State. Her resignation from the position shortly thereafter may have satisfied this need without public medical discussion. If no other questionable medical signs had appeared, this discussion would end here. But the other events and signs point to a single cause for the fall, and it is not the public explanation. Further, HRC's statement early in her tenure as Secretary of State that she would serve only four years can be read in the context of a progressive disease that was known as she assumed the post.

It is the premise of this discussion the HRC is most likely suffering from Parkinson's Disease (PD).It explains every one of the items listed above. Further, since it is a diagnosis primarily made by observation, the video record is sufficient to create a high degree of certainty.

The 2009 fall where HRC broke her elbow suggests that she had working protective reflexes, and her arm took the brunt of the fall. But three years later, she had a catastrophic fall where her reflexes were unable to help her. It is notable that this fall took place at home, where she would have been unstressed and in a familiar setting. Failing reflexes are common in PD. Poor balance is also common in PD, and a fall without working protective reflexes is a prescription for head injury. Her subsequent concerns with transverse sinus thrombosis are plausibly related to the fall. Her need for fresnel lens glasses also fits with post-concussion syndrome.

Huma Abedin's email comment can be referring to PCS as well, since it was during the six-month period of rehab. One must, however, be cautious not to overlook persistent cognitive problems that PCS can have. (Editorial note: The reader will note that this discussion is giving the benefit of the doubt to as many HRC memes as can reasonably earn it.)

2016 starts a spate of new data. The photos of HRC being helped up the steps is consistent with a fall similar to 2012, but with a security detail close enough to catch her before she fell to the ground. This matches the loss of reflexes and balance with PD.

On July 21 a video of HRC is posted that has many observers calling a ''seizure.''We should note the setting. She is answering questions, and then multiple reporters call out at the same time. Such a shock is often too much stress for a PD patient, and the patient suffers an ''on/off'' episode. Higher control turns off and an unpredictable dyskinesia takes over. Shortly she switches back ''on'' and regains control. Her mind froze during the ''off'' state, but was aware, so she is able to speak again, but inappropriately.

It should be noted that such dyskinesias are sufficiently common with long term treatment that they have a name: Parkinson's Disease LevoDopa Induced Dyskinesia (PD LID).

A week later, during the balloon drop at the Convention, HRC suddenly ''freezes.'' This is an ''off'' moment manifested by bradykinesia, another PD problem. The particular form is a brief oculogyric crisis, complete with head arched back, fixed gaze, and wide open mouth. Again, this is common in PD. We should compare it to HRC's facial expressions on ''Live with Kelly and Michael'' on November 19, 2015.[xiii] At 6:30 in that video, we also see a PD tremor and posture in her left hand when it comes to rest momentarily. In most videos her hands are in constant motion or clasped against some object. These are strategies to suppress a tremor.

HRC's description of her false answers to Chris Wallace as a ''short circuit'' is extremely unusual.It comes from the field of electronics, in which HRC has never been involved. The Urban Dictionary definition is electrical, and there is no popular or slang usage. But one semi-technical description of PD calls it ''short-circuiting'' brain circuits.[xiv] Did she hear this during a doctor's explanation of her disease? It would not be unusual to parrot such a phrase if she has PD.

Days later, HRC ''freezes'' again at a campaign rally. This ''off'' state is like the others, triggered by a startle/stress reaction. But what is more telling is that the security detail gives her specific instructions in an attempt to get her to turn ''on'' again. She then parrots those exact words as she restarts. This is another PD sign.

The numerous episodes of prolonged coughing are another tell. Swallowing disorders are very common in PD. They can lead to aspiration pneumonia, the most common cause of death in PD. But before that they lead to chronic difficulty swallowing saliva. It gets onto the vocal cords, leading to coughing in an attempt to clear them. The high frequency of these episodes strongly suggests a major swallowing disorder.

Multiple episodes of inappropriate and extended laughter have also been documented. This, again, is common in PD.

We do not have video evidence of the ''pill rolling'' tremor that is common in PD. But that is not a major concern for our thesis. Treatment with levodopa can reduce it. Also, PD sufferers develop a variety of techniques to hide it. Since it is a tremor at rest, keeping the hands in motion suppresses it. Grasping objects such as a lectern can also hide it. As long as the hands are busy, it is usually not visible.

Summary:

HRC probably has PD.She has had clinical symptoms for a minimum of 4 years, and probably much longer, given that the fall leading to her head injury required a significant progression of the disease. All of her bizarre physical actions since that time fit nicely into the spectrum of signs that we expect in PD. And since PD explains all of them, we have a high probability of a correct diagnosis. It has almost certainly been treated with levodopa. Some of her symptoms may be related to this drug treatment.

It is most curious that all of the bizarre physical signs seem to be in 2016 videos. HRC was a public figure in 2015, with a lot of campaign work underway. Yet all of the oddities seem to be within the last several months. This suggests a significant progression of her PD. We also know that her contact with the public has been rigidly controlled. She has not done news conferences during the campaign. These would be highly stressful to a PD sufferer and would elicit many PD signs.

PD is a chronic disease with a downhill prognosis. HRC's instability and frequent cough suggest that her PD is advanced. This is not a good outlook for someone running for the Presidency. The office of the President is one of the highest stress jobs in the world. Stress sets off PD episodes, which render the sufferer incapable of proper response.

At this point, a bit of speculation seems appropriate. HRC talks about her yoga sessions. But no one we know of has ever documented one. It is possible that this is cover for sessions designed to teach her coping mechanisms for PD or for rest breaks. Exhaustion makes PD worse.

HRC's coughing suggests that her swallowing disorder is advanced, placing her closer to an aspiration pneumonia that would disable or kill her. That's bad enough, but PD has one more, even more dangerous step in its progression.

As PD continues, cognitive problems can develop. In time, they become full-blown dementia. The United States cannot survive if its President is mentally impaired.

Conclusion:

It is not appropriate for a physician to make a diagnosis at a distance. But since the evidence in the public record so strongly suggests that HRC has moderate to advanced PD, it is imperative that HRC release her complete medical record to an impartial panel of physicians for review. It is not necessary for the public at large to see them. Such a panel should be secure in its deliberations and should present a summary to the public. If she has PD, the panel would know and it would be made public. If not, then the air would clear.

Note on authorship:

The author of this document is a board-certified Anesthesiologist with 36 years of experience. That brings with it the ability to understand medical discussions, but not the expertise to evaluate PD signs and symptoms.

The first subject matter expert is a close friend of the author. This person is a brilliant businessman who was forced to sell his interest in eight successful businesses because early onset PD made him unable to continue in the daily duties of business. He is well versed in PD and sees its ravages in himself.

The second subject matter expert is the author's brother. He is an RN who spent two years working 12-hour shifts caring for PD patients in a nursing home. This saturation experience allows him to pick up PD signs automatically. He notes that he called HRC's PD and levodopa therapy when he watched the famous ''What difference does it make?'' exchange. Her mannerisms and behavior were classic and stereotypical.

Of interest is that during a teleconference, the author called the others to look at HRC's left hand during the ''Live With Kelly and Michael'' video. The clip was played, and neither of the others even saw her hand. They were both riveted to her eyes, and both exclaimed that her eyes were ''classic PD.'' The clip had to be played a second and third time before they could even take their gaze away from her eyes. They did finally see her hand and agree that it was also demonstrating PD.

[i] http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2009/06/18/hillary-clinton-faces-surgery-for-broken-elbow/

[ii] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/hillary-clinton-treated-concussion-fall-article-1.1220947

[iii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/hillary-clintons-blood-clot-most-likely-in-a-leg-experts-say/2012/12/31/d2c853ea-5376-11e2-bf3e-76c0a789346f_story.html

[iv] http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/05/hillary-clinton-took-6-months-to-get-over-concussion-bill-says-of-timeline/

[v] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3320900/Newly-released-email-shows-aide-Huma-Abedin-warned-colleagues-Hillary-confused-needed-hand-holding-calls-foreign-leaders.html

[vi] http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/08/07/hillary-clinton-needs-help-getting-stairs/

[vii] https://youtu.be/jkOUwIHUIgo

[viii] http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/283066-clinton-acts-startled-when-reporters-ask-about-warren-as

[ix] http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/video-news/watch-hillary-clintons-amazing-reaction-to-the-dnc-balloon-drop-34922354.html

[x] http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/05/politics/hillary-clinton-attacks-donald-trump-journalism/

[xi] http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/07/31/full_interview_hillary_clinton_on_fox_news_sunday.html

[xii] http://thelastgreatstand.com/2016/08/07/hillary-clinton-freezes-fear-secret-agents-says-keep-talking-video/

[xiii] https://youtu.be/OKUi0sd1Ocg

[xiv] Rodgers, R, PhD, Road to Recovery from Parkinson's Disease, ISBN 978-0-9819767-5-4, 2013, p. 94.

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Sat, 13 Aug 2016 05:38

N/C

George Cottrell (right) was arrested as be got off a flight with Nigel Farage by FBI agentsGeorge Cottrell was handcuffed and taken away by US police as he disembarked a plane with the former UKIP boss in Chicago.

The 22-year-old, who runs Mr Farage's private office, has been charged with 21 offences including attempted extortion, money laundering and fraud on the dark web and is currently awaiting trial.

Related articlesHe stands accused of offering to launder money for drug traffickers after advertising his services on the secretive section of the internet, which is popular with hackers, paedophiles and terrorists as it allows users to remain untraceable by hiding the location of the users' computer.

Cottrell, whose former glamour model mother Fiona Cottrell reportedly used to date Prince Charles, was caught out after allegedly offering his services to undercover FBI agents posing as drug traffickers.

He was arrested last month as he was returning from the Republican Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, with Mr Farage.

N/C

George Cottrell faces 21 charges relating to extortion and money laundering on the dark webUS court documents allege Cottrell was offering money laundering services on the dark web using the alias 'Bill'.

Undercover FBI agents contacted him in 2014 and Cottrell offered to launder their cash for a fee in return for ''complete anonymity and security'' via his offshore accounts, according to the court papers.

He allegedly met with the agents in Las Vegas where he offered his services for a fee of £15,500, the documents allege.

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George Cottrell's mother, Fiona, is rumoured to have previously dated Prince CharlesCottrell then reportedly attempted to blackmail what he thought were druglords to the tune of £62,000 in the form of online currency Bitcoin, claiming he would go to the authorities if they refused to pay.

But the court documents claim he had a ''serious, years-long gambling problem, which inherently suggests a strong possibility of irrational risk taking''.

US officers believed Cottrell posed ''a serious flight risk'' and have therefore remanded him in custody.

Nigel Farage knew nothing of Cottrell's alleged offences and was given no information about his aide's arrest and travelled the final leg of his journey from Chicago to Heathrow alone.

An FBI spokesman in Ohio confirmed that George Swinten Cottrell was arrested on July 22 and was due to be extradited to Phoenix, Arizona.

A Ukip spokesman said: ''George was an unpaid and enthusiastic volunteer for the party over the period of the referendum.

''We are unaware of the details of the allegations excepting that they date from a time before he was directly involved in the party.''

Cottrell's mother was the Penthouse 'pet of the month' in October 1973, under the pseudonym Frances Cannon, describing herself as ''daughter of a landowner''.

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 21:40

I wrote a dead man's switch to update some of my online accounts after I die.

What It IsThe basic idea is that if I pass away unexpectedly, I'd want my online friends to know, rather than for my accounts to go silent without any explanation at all. I wrote a program to take notice of whether or not I seem to still be alive, and once it's determined that I've died, it'll follow instructions that I've left in place for it. It'll do this over the course of a few days. Well, I won't tell you when it'll stop, that'd be taking some of the surprise out of it.

Two things caused me to do this. First, I wrote a lifestream. Essentially, I already wrote a computer program (a cron job, technically) that takes note of nearly everything I do online already. It was a handy thing to have, and it seemed like it could do just a little bit more with hardly any effort.

Second, I read the books Daemon and Freedom'. A character in those books also wrote a program (a daemon in his case) to watch over its creator's life, and then to take certain actions upon its creator's death. The idea got under my skin, and I just had to write a similar program of my own.

How It WorksThis section will get technical, but it'll be of interest for those who also want to write their own.

Everything is in Python. The lifestream I have uses feedparser to read in and process each of the feeds affected by my online activity (sometimes called user "activity feeds"). It stores certain information in a yaml file. Here's an excerpt from the file itself.

- etag : 2KJcCROqtyI4nqaQEg34109rfx4 feed : "http://my.dlma.com/feed/" latest_entry : 1326088652 modified : 1326090583.0 name : mydlma style : journal url : "http://my.dlma.com"The most relevant item in the file is that there's a field called, "latest_entry", and the data for that field is a timestamp. The latest "latest_entry" would then be the most recent time I've been observed doing anything online.

Given that, all I had to do was write a new script that watched the latest "latest_entry", and when it became too long ago, it would assume that something bad had happened to me. (Which would be wrong, of course, if I was merely vacationing in Bora-Bora, and didn't have internet access for a couple of weeks.)

This new script would do something like the following:

Continue to step 2 if David hasn't done anything online for a few days. Otherwise keep waiting.Decide which posts to make at which times, and make note that those posts themselves don't now make it look like David's still alive and that the switch should deactivate.Once the script thinks I've been offline for too long, it writes a cookie to file, and then goes from watching mode to posting mode.

In posting mode, the script looks over its entire payload of messages to deploy. I used the filesystem to maintain the payload, much like dokuwiki does. (Others might think that a database would be preferable. Sure, that'd be fine, too.) My payload files encode data into the filename, too. The filename is composed like so: [delay_to_post]-[service_to_post_to]-[extra_info].txt. That way, when I display a listing of the directory, I can see an ordered list of which messages go when.

Message DeliveryMessages that go to blogging services like WordPress or Habari use the AtomPub API. Messages that go to other services generally use OAuth 2.0 for authentication, then use a custom API to deliver the message.

Once a message has been successfully delivered to its service, it gets moved or renamed in such a way that it's no longer a candidate to get delivered again.

Development ProcessThe script runs as a cronjob, and usually just updates a status file. If it runs into a problem, it sends an email. (Fat lot of good that'll do if I'm already dead. But while I'm still alive, I'd like it to let me know if it's not happy.)

While I'm alive, I might still add posts to post later. When I add those new messages to post after my passing, I need to ensure that I didn't do anything wrong. (For example, the Habari payload is contained in an XML CDATA section, but the WordPress payload is plain XML, so I can't write any malformed messages.)

That's why as a part of routine maintenance, my dead man's switch also does payload data validation.

During script refactoring, I may want it to display certain diagnostic info directly to stdout. For that case, the script has optional debug, test, verbose and validate flags.

RisksThere's always the false positive, where it thinks I've died, but the rumour was greatly exaggerated. I'm actually looking forward to a few false positives, because they'll remind me that the dead man's switch is actually still running.

Another serious risk is that my dead man's switch relies on the successful continuous operation of my lifesteam script. There's an element to that lifestream script that degrades over time. Hopefully, I'll get around to mitigating that risk.

And yet another risk to my dead man's switch is continuously changing APIs. As I upgrade my Wordpress and Habari blogs, will they still accept AtomPub like they did when I wrote the switch in 2012? Will Twitter and Plurk still use the same OAuth protocol and API calls? Heck, will Dreamhost not upgrade Python to a version that's incompatible with my script?

Will I still have active accounts at the time of my passing? Will it then be illegal to continue to function online after you're dead? (Some bozo might die before me and do something stupid after he passes.)

There's a lot that could go wrong. But if these things don't go wrong, and my dead man's switch works correctly, that'd be pretty neat.

Have I got things to say to you!

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 18:28

The diving pool on Wednesday. Photo via Adam Pretty/GettyOn Wednesday a Rio spokesman said the green diving pool, ''should go back to classic blue colour during the day.'' On Friday the still-green diving pool'--set to host the women's three meter springboard prelims in fewer than four hours'--was closed:

On Tuesday Rio organizers blamed the color change on a ''proliferation of algae,'' before explaining on Wednesday that they'd ran out of a necessary chemical, which dropped the total alkalinity of the pool. But given that they had around 36 hours with nobody using the pool'--there were no diving events scheduled for Thursday'--and couldn't get rid of the green color, it remains to be seen whether they actually know what the problem is. Great Britain diver Jack Laugher, for one, speculates that dye from the advertising boards surrounding the pool are leeching into the water.

In the meantime there's another, probably related, problem:

Staff Writer at Deadspin

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 18:26

SEATTLE '-- Amazon surprised a lot of people when its Echo, a $180 so-called smart speaker, became a hit, giving them a novel way to play music, turn on the lights in their homes and set thermostats with voice commands.

Amazon, though, has much bigger plans for the technology behind Echo. It wants the Alexa Voice Service, which powers Echo, to be an ingredient in devices around the home and beyond, even if they aren't made by Amazon.

The vision of an omnipresent intelligent assistant is one Amazon shares, in one form or another, with most other big technology companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft. Along with a handful of start-ups, these companies see their intelligent assistants as powerful new ways for users to interact with devices and internet services '-- just as smartphone touch screens were.

Many technology specialists think that people will be O.K. with a single intelligent assistant in their lives but that most won't have the patience to regularly use two or three of them, each with its individual quirks. As a result, each company is racing to weave its assistant into as many devices and services as possible.

Nucleus, the Anywhere Intercom

Video by Nucleus

Amazon, for example, wants Alexa to be a part of products like Nucleus, a smart-intercom system with a touch screen and a camera that went on sale last week for $249 (or $199 each if you buy two or three at once). Nucleus owners can have Alexa play music and read a weather forecast through the device. In a phone interview, Jonathan Frankel, the chief executive of Nucleus, said that adding Alexa to Nucleus was a no-brainer because it made the device far more useful.

''We're taking $180 worth of utility and adding it into a $200 device,'' he said.

So far, a handful of smaller companies have released or promised to release products with Alexa built into them. There's Triby, a portable speaker; CoWatch, a smartwatch; and Pebble Core, a wireless wearable device by the maker of the Pebble smartwatch.

Ford Motor is working with Amazon to integrate Alexa into its vehicles so drivers can control smart-home features like lights, thermostats and security systems from their cars.

Over 10,000 developers have registered to integrate Alexa into their products, Amazon said. It won't say how many Echo units it has sold, except to say that millions of devices with Alexa in them have been purchased.

John MacFarlane, the chief executive of Sonos, another well-known device maker, hinted in a blog post this year that Sonos was working on a way to play music through its speakers using Alexa voice control.

In an interview this spring, David Limp, Amazon's senior vice president for devices, said that the company wanted there to be as many Alexa-linked ''endpoints'' around the home as possible and that Amazon did not really care who made those devices. Amazon has expanded its lineup of devices that use Alexa with its Echo Dot, a miniature version of the Echo speaker, and Amazon Tap, a portable Bluetooth speaker.

''The longer-term vision is a little bit like the 'Star Trek' computer,'' Mr. Limp said. ''Captain Kirk or Picard could sit on the bridge and ask anything and get the right answer.''

But while Amazon has made a lot of progress in this regard, it may have a hard time extending Alexa's reach outside the home because of its weaknesses in mobile technology, analysts say.

The success of Echo has been described as a redemption of sorts for Amazon after it suffered a brutal defeat in the smartphone market with its Fire Phone, which the company stopped selling after poor sales '-- a misstep that has left Amazon vulnerable.

Apple and Google have clear advantages over Amazon because of their dominant positions in the mobile market. And they are pushing their versions of Alexa '-- Siri and Google's assistant '-- as ways to control other devices throughout the home.

Apple has a technology called HomeKit that allows people to control thermostats, light switches and other devices with Siri from Apple devices. Google has announced plans for an Echo-like home speaker called Google Home.

As intelligent assistants improve in quality, Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research, thinks people will want these virtual helpers to follow them all day like a companion. ''What you want from an assistant is that they are always available to you everywhere,'' he said.

While Amazon could eventually give people access to Alexa's functions through apps on smartphones (a couple of apps from independent developers do this already), Mr. Dawson is skeptical that Amazon will be able to make them work as well as assistants more deeply integrated into smartphones by Apple and Google.

''They're basically absent on smartphones, which are devices we take everywhere we go,'' he said.

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 18:24

At least two people died and several remained missing after a natural gas explosion and fire leveled an apartment building late Wednesday in the Washington suburb of Silver Spring, Md., fire officials said.

Assistant Chief Russ Hamill of the Montgomery County Police told reporters Thursday that two bodies were found in the ruins and that the scene would be handled as a ''death investigation.'' The identity of one of the bodies has led some to speculate, especially following the revelations about murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich this week.

Immediately after the explosion, journalists and observers began to ask questions.

Hamill said 34 people, including three firefighters, were taken to the hospital. Many of the injuries were sustained by people jumping out of windows, according to Montgomery County Fire Chief Scott Goldstein, WJLA-TV reported.

''People were dropping children and jumping out of other windows,'' he said. ''Everybody was getting out of the building as rapidly as possible.''

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One source CTN spoke with said that 5 to 7 people are still considered to be missing, and it is believed that a long-time DNC staffer may be among the group.

The Internet immediately lit up with the reports.

''No bodies have been identified at this time,'' the police chief told surrounding media. ''It is very likely that DC staffers, including political types, live in this building.''

Eyes have turned to mysterious deaths surrounding DNC employees lately, with Julian Assange of Wikileaks offering a cash reward for Seth Rich, who was murdered in a northwest DC neighborhood early last month. Assange even went as far to say that Rich may have been Wikileaks' source within the Democratic Party.

This story is developing, and CTN will bring you more news as it breaks'...

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 16:34

When the European Central Bank introduced a negative interest rate on lenders' deposits two years ago, few thought things would ever go this far.

This week, a German cooperative savings bank in the Bavarian village of Gmund am Tegernsee -- population 5,767 -- said it'll start charging retail customers to hold their cash. From September, for savings in excess of 100,000 euros ($111,710), the community's Raiffeisen bank will take back 0.4 percent. That's a direct pass through of the current level of the ECB's negative deposit rate.

''With our business clients there's been a negative rate for quite some time, so why should it be any different for private individuals with big balances?,'' Josef Paul, a board member of the bank, said by phone on Thursday. ''As it looks today, charges on deposits won't be extended to customers with lower amounts'' than 100,000 euros, he said.

Raiffeisen Gmund am Tegernsee may be a tiny bank that's only introducing penalties to well-off customers -- it says fewer than 140 will be affected -- but in principle the ECB's negative deposit rate was meant to encourage spending and investment in the euro area's sluggish economy, not to tax thrifty Bavarians. A spokesman for the Frankfurt-based central bank declined to comment.

For a QuickTake explainer on negative interest rates, click here

Indeed, introducing the sub-zero policy in June 2014 with a cut to the deposit rate to minus 0.1 percent, ECB President Mario Draghi said the move was ''for the banks, not for the people.'' Should banks decide to transmit the reduction to savers then that's their decision. ''It's not us,'' he said.

Since then, the ECB has chopped its deposit rate -- what banks pay to park excess funds overnight -- three more times. So far, policy makers have said there haven't been any serious negative side-effects, such as customers withdrawing their cash and stashing it elsewhere. In that time, amid a moderate recovery, bank lending has returned to growth.

The risk for ECB policy makers now is that negative rates begin filtering through to the real economy while growth and investment is still sluggish, bringing the downsides of the policy without the upsides. Euro-area growth slowed in the second quarter, data released Friday show, leaving it vulnerable to any fallout from the U.K.'s vote to leave the European Union.

In that environment, lenders in Europe regularly complain -- and the ECB has acknowledged -- that negative rates depress their profitability. Some are already charging corporate clients with large deposits. The Bundesbank estimated last year that the low-rate environment would cut the pretax profit of German banks by 25 percent by 2019.

Retail TabooBut only two weeks ago, ECB board member Benoit Coeure said retail customers were staying with their banks because of signs they wouldn't be charged for their savings any time soon.

''Deposits of both households and non-financial corporations have been growing over the past two years, at a similar pace to the period before we entered negative interest-rate territory,'' he said in a speech on July 28. ''Rates on retail deposits seem to have a zero lower bound.''

Whether Coeure is essentially right -- that Gmund am Tegernsee's Raiffeisen is a rare case and on a broader scale the rates for ordinary depositors won't go below zero -- may depend on how lenders in Germany and elsewhere respond to the taboo on charging retail clients.

Michael Kemmer, head of the Association of German Banks, said in a statement on Thursday that he doesn't expect others to follow suit.

''It's up to each bank whether and how to charge for deposits,'' he said. ''The competition between banks and saving banks in Germany is much too strong.''

Gallo: ECB Policy Shouldn't Be Sole Target of Criticism

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.LEARN MORE

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 13:56

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 13:08

As time passes by, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton becomes a woman that is being gradually less and less understood by the citizens, and with the amount of infamy she has surrounding her, people will constantly inquire about her every day actions.

VIA Top Right News

American Free Press released an announcement of Thorn's death, and said his latest book had been ''selling off the shelves'' at AFP recently.

Co-authors Roger Stone and Robert Morrow dedicated their new book, ''The Clintons' War on Women'' to Thorn in late 2015.

Thorn is the 4th suspicious death related to Hillary Clinton and/or the Democrat National Committee in the past 60 days, and the 2nd in the past week alone

Shawn Lucas, a Bernie Sanders supporter who served the DNC with legal papers in a lawsuit alleging fraud, was found dead from ''undetermined'' causes in Virginia. Last month, 27 year-old DNC staffer Seth Conrad Rich was murdered while jogging in a safe Washington DC neighborhood. And former UN official John Ashe ''accidentally'' crushed his own throat and died a week before he was scheduled to testify against the Clintons and Democrat Party.

Talk show host Russell Scott said on August 3 that Thorn had been a guest on his show twice and was scheduled to be back on the show in September as the post-Labor Day election season was heating up.

Scott claimed that Thorne told him last year, as the 2016 campaign began: ''Russell, if I'm ever found dead, it was murder. I would never kill myself.''

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:20

In 2015, then-Twitter CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered employees to filter out abusive and hateful replies to President Barack Obama during a Q&A session, sources tell BuzzFeed News.

According to these sources, the May 2015 #AskPOTUS town hall came out of Twitter senior leadership's frustration with the fact that platforms like Reddit had become home to celebrity Q&As.

According to a former senior Twitter employee, Costolo ordered employees to deploy an algorithm (which was built in-house by feeding it thousands of examples of abuse and harassing tweets) that would filter out abusive language directed at Obama. Another source said the media partnerships team also manually censored tweets, noting that Twitter's public quality-filtering algorithms were inconsistent. Two sources told BuzzFeed News that this decision was kept from senior company employees for fear they would object to the decision.

According to sources, the decision upset some senior employees inside the company who strictly followed Twitter's long-standing commitment to unfettered free speech.

In its early years, Twitter took numerous public stands against censorship, even fighting a secret government order to provide user information for WikiLeaks. In 2011, Twitter senior executives published a blog post titled ''The Tweets Must Flow.''

''There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam,'' the post read. ''However, we make efforts to keep these exceptions narrow so they may serve to prove a broader and more important rule '-- we strive not to remove Tweets on the basis of their content.'' Not long after the post, Twitter executives began publicly touting that ''Twitter is the free speech wing of the free speech party.''

A different source alleges that Twitter did the same thing during a Q&A with Caitlyn Jenner.

''This was another example of trying to woo celebs and show that you can have civilized conversations without the hate even if you're a high-profile person,'' the source said. ''But it's another example of a double standard '-- we'll protect our celebrities, while the average user is out there subject to all kinds of horrible things.''

A month after the Obama Q&A, Costolo stepped down as CEO, retaining a seat on Twitter's board. In an exit interview with TheGuardian on his last day, he defended Twitter's commitment to free speech. ''I will say directly that I think regulation is a threat to free speech,'' he said.

Costolo did not respond to requests for comment.

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Source: Russia Beyond The Headlines

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:15

In his radical novel ''What is to be Done?'' 19th-century Russian revolutionary democrat and philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky set out a utopian vision of a socialist society that was "beyond" capitalism. In many ways Chernyshevsky's work was a description of the kind of horizontal community that has now become so commonplace in the cities of the developed world as the ''hipster economy'' takes root '' but is this ultimately a viable model?

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Nikolai Chernyshevsky in youth. Source: TASS

Nikolai Chernyshevsky's 1863 work What Is To Be Done? has always been difficult to evaluate as a novel '' owing to its dense, at times nonsensical prose and the endless pontification of its characters, it has been brushed away as artless. Only Ayn Rand's novels, written in the following century, matched Chernyshevsky in their combination of utter artlessness with an intense saturation of ideas about a new social paradigm, an unheard-of, and as yet utopian, way that human beings could to relate to one another.

But if we abandon the idea of What Is To Be Done? as a treatise or a manifest, and look purely at the relationships constructed between the characters in the fictional part of the work, we see described a type of community whose pragmatic, horizontal relationships, deliberately devoid of coercion, would naturally emerge only in the 21st century. Most importantly, they emerge not because of the utopian ideologies that Chernyshevsky inspired, but in spite of them.

The novel itself tells the story of Vera Pavlovna, a young woman struggling to escape a passionless life that her scheming, greedy mother is trying to impose on by marrying her off to their landlord. Seeking independence, she enters into a marriage of her own arrangement with a revolutionary-minded medical student, Lopukhov, and starts a successful business as a seamstress. This plot line, however melodramatic, serves as Chernyshevsky's venue for the characters to manifest their revolutionary ideals. But the plot itself, despite its shortcomings, is revealing on another level.

Vera Pavlovna '' a woman far ahead of her timeSomehow, by some miraculous force of will that, again, only Ayn Rand would match, with the ''rational egotism'' in her artistically meritless characters, Chernyshevsky's Vera Pavlovna manages to construct a hipster paradise based solely on voluntary association and alternative economy in the middle of the 19th century. Her pragmatic community begins with her own arranged marriage in which, according her own, alternative, protocol, neither member had any claim upon the other '' to the point where one's entry into the quarters of another was strictly formalized.

This formalization is, on the face of it, ridiculous: Even the love triangle that ensues was rationalized as the manifestation of social theory, which is never how human relations actually work. But the actual economics of the micro-community that Pavlovna created, ideology aside, were far ahead of their times and, in spite of what Chernyshevsky intended, had strikingly little to do with socialism.

At the heart of what made Pavlovna's world work was effective prioritization. Putting aside the grand purpose of revolution, which, according Chernyshevsky, necessitated the characters' economic independence, the most interesting aspect of this economic model is that Pavlovna figured out which trivial luxuries were important to her, regardless of whether they were incongruent with what someone of her class or status should require, or even, heaven forbid, if they were relevant to the higher revolutionary cause.

If she needed to take a hot-water bath every morning and required cream with her tea, then the next step was finding a way to monetize her skills. To accommodate those requirements, she began work as a private seamstress, quickly creating a network of clients and suppliers who shared similar principles: The revolutionary cause apart, a peculiarly pragmatic attitude emerged towards problem-solving within a collective. Not only were the coercive requirements of family and class tradition, law, and religion eschewed, but this principle of simply getting things done transcended even the ideological context that Chernyshevsky imposed upon his characters.

A horizontal community with a hint of anarchismThese economic principles of intentional community provided room for a great deal of pluralism, and they are strikingly visible today. If, a decade ago, regular use of a taxi was a luxury that indicated a certain level of income, the emergence of Uber (exactly the kind of alternative economic network that simplifies infrastructure and optimizes cost, much like Vera Pavlovna was able to do with her sewing cooperatives) turned this into a regular whim of the so-called ''creative class,'' some of whose members may well match the classic, lower-class proletariat in terms of income, but correspond, with regard to certain elements in their consumption patterns, to the upper middle class.

Pushed out of the traditional economy, whether due to stagnation or boredom, urban localvores are forming tiny cheese production enterprises with their own, simplified network of suppliers and clients, often relying on little but Facebook. On a more global scale, there is Bitcoin, the alternative, digital currency. What all of these economic communities have in common '' and what they share with the kind of economic community Pavlovna inhabited '' is that they are neither socialist nor capitalist, nor, indeed, constrained by any sort of economic ideology. If anything, the closest defining principle to the way humans associate within such collectives is horizontal rather than vertical, and, perhaps, anarchic rather than anything else.

The problem of a lack of structureLibertarians may claim that such communities have no need for government itself '' and this is why, paradoxically, the self-styled libertarian Ayn Rand was inspired by Chernyshevsky '' but this is not necessarily true. Such communities coexist with government, but they cannot become a replacement. For one thing, the very idea of unrestrained horizontal relations '' whether in business or the personal sphere '' creates a great degree of vulnerability.

On the one hand, there is no coercion where there is nothing binding people aside from mutual interest. But neither is there any guarantee against total isolation for those who cannot integrate themselves into such a paradigm '' especially for the elderly or those socially disenfranchised. Which is why, to a great extent, the type of communities described can never be bridled by ideology or, especially, be created by force as part of government policy. Their realm is freedom and spontaneity '' but never for everyone.

These new communities lack customary, traditionally-acceptable binding mechanisms; ''what is normal'' loses meaning, leaving behind only ''what works,'' which is an ever-changing, unpredictable criterion. And, once again, the most forward-thinking alter-globalists, the owners of artisanal food trucks and Facebook-based boutiques are pressed with the same question: ''What is to be done?''

First published in Russian by Year of literature website

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Source: Russia Beyond The Headlines

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:14

Ukraine's President expects the U.S. and EU leaders to join the conversation.

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Ukrainian President Poroshenko has ordered the country's Foreign Ministry to initiate phone conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and other foreign leaders. Source: Reuters

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has ordered the country's Foreign Ministry to initiate phone conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, US Vice President Joe Biden and European Council President Donald Tusk, the president's press service said.

Poroshenko ordered to organize the phone calls after the Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized the Ukranian authorities for "turning to terrorism" in the wake of the announcement by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) about prevented terrorist attacks in Crimea.

"The Foreign Ministry has to organize phone conversations with the leadership of Germany and France in a trilateral Normandy format and invite for the conversation US Vice President Joe Biden, European Council President Donald Tusk and initiate a conversation with Russian President Putin," the statement from Poroshenko office said.

Poroshenko has also ordered Foreign Minister Pavel Klimkin to ask the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine to increase the number of monitors on the border with Crimea and to instruct the chief of Ukraine's mission to the United Nations to hold consultations in the UN Security Council.

Earlier on Aug. 11, Poroshenko ordered all units on the border with Crimea and on the contact line in Donbass to be at the highest level of combat readiness.

Russia's Federal Security Service said on Aug. 10 that it has foiled terrorist attacks in Crimea plotted by Ukraine's Defense Ministry's main intelligence directorate.

A group of saboteurs was spotted on Aug. 7 near the city of Armyansk, close to the border with Ukraine. Two Russian servicemen died in an operation to detain the saboteurs. The aborted terror attempts were designed to target Crimea's critical infrastructure and life support facilities, the FSB said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the attempted act of sabotage in Crimea as criminal.

Source: Tass.com

Read more: Russia to start forming air assault regiment in Crimea in 2017>>>

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Source: Real Science

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:14

Jill bumps up sea level rise by 50X, and then claims she can stop it with windmills. Progressives make the Monty Python witch burners seem like Nobel Prize winners.

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Source: The Intercept

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:11

The Kansas City Federal Reserve's annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, attracts central bankers, economists and the global elite. The past two years, some new faces came to Jackson Hole: low-wage workers who object to the Fed raising interest rates when too many at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder still struggle.

This year, somebody appears to be ensuring that ordinary people won't disrupt the party.

The Fed Up campaign, a coalition that brought the workers to Jackson Hole in 2014 and 2015, has filed a formal complaint with the departments of Justice and the Interior, along with the National Park Service, because their hotel reservations for this year's conference were mysteriously canceled.

Despite paying in advance for spots at the 385-room Jackson Lake Lodge, the Grand Teton Lodge Company told the campaign July 26 that their reservations would not be honored, citing a ''computer glitch.'' Grand Teton operates the lodge, a publicly owned facility, under a contract with the National Park Service.

Thirty-nine members of the coalition planned to attend this year, but the lodge said computer glitch resulted in overbooking its rooms by 18. Instead of spacing that out among all Jackson Lake lodge guests, the company cancelled all 13 of the Fed Up campaign's rooms. So nearly three-quarters of the cancelled reservations belonged to the Fed Up group, even though they were told when they booked that 100 rooms were still available at the lodge.

''There is no legitimate explanation for the company's decision,'' wrote Fed Up campaign chair Ady Barkan in the complaint, which alleges possible violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the First Amendment right to peaceable assembly. ''This is egregious and disparate treatment.''

The coalition's reservations were made in the names of staffers for three of its member organizations '' the Center for Popular Democracy, the Economic Policy Institute, and the Center for Economic and Policy Research '' using work email addresses.

In an email statement, Alex Klein, vice president and general manager of Grand Teton Lodge Company, said: ''This summer we encountered an error with our booking system that resulted in our Jackson Lake Lodge property being oversold by 18 rooms for three peak nights in August. We worked proactively and diligently with guests to relocate them to our nearby Flagg Ranch property, and offered to keep them on a wait list for available rooms should there be cancellations at the Jackson Lake Lodge. We regret inconveniencing any of our guests.''

The Jackson Hole symposium takes place from August 25-27. The event typically features a highly anticipated speech by the Federal Reserve chair '' Janet Yellen is expected this year.

In 2014 and 2015, Fed Up brought unemployed workers and local activists to Jackson Hole to highlight how the economy has left behind communities of color and to urge the Fed to hear their voices. Last year, they held an alternative conference in Jackson Hole lodge conference rooms, featuring economists like Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.

This year, Fed Up planned to hold a teach-in outside of the lodge, and secured permits for a protest. They still expect 120 members, their largest contingent ever, to attend the proceedings, but they will have to stay in alternative accommodations that are a 20- to 30-minute drive away, separate from symposium guests and the press.

The majority of Fed Up members planning to attend the conference are African-American and Latino, which is why the campaign wants the Justice Department to investigate the matter as a violation of laws ensuring nondiscriminatory treatment in public accommodations. They also want to know if the Kansas City Federal Reserve was at all involved with the decision.

Kansas City Federal Reserve President Esther George has consistently drawn criticism from the Fed Up coalition for wanting to raise interest rates and slow down the economy.

The lodge's general manager told Fed Up that their reservations were pulled because they were booked in a group of 13, making it easier to cancel them. This, the campaign believes, also violates First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly.

''I recognize that our presence is not desired by either the company or the organizers of the symposium,'' Barkan wrote. ''But the physical and virtual segregation of Federal Reserve decision-makers far away from the voices and opinions of working class people of color is precisely what the Fed Up coalition is trying to dismantle.''

The incident comes at a sensitive time for the Federal Reserve, which has already been criticized by 127 members of Congress for a lack of diversity among its leadership, which is disproportionately white, male, and either current or former executives of large corporations and financial institutions. Activists believe this homogeneity in race, gender, and background drives central bank decisions that cater to the wealthy and neglect communities of color.

Barkan's letter to Justice and the Interior concludes: ''Once again, the voices and faces of working class people of color have been marginalized '... and an opaque, inaccessible, and incredibly powerful quasi-governmental institution has received a bit more insulation from the opinions of the people over whose lives it has so much power.''

The Intercept has reached out for comment to the Justice Department, the Interior Department, and the National Park Service, but did not immediately hear back.

Top photo: National Park Rangers stand silhouetted inside the lobby of Jackson Lake Lodge during the Jackson Hole economic symposium in August 2015.

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Source: The Last Refuge

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:09

Against the backdrop of Hillary Clinton cancelling campaign events, Thursday morning candidate Donald Trump held two rather extensive interviews with CNBC's Squawkbox show and also the insufferable Salem Communications corporate neo-con radio host, Hugh Hewitt:

First the CNBC interview:

Next up, Hugh Hewitt:

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Source: Real Science

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:08

The average maximum temperature anomaly in the US during July was just about average.

The percent of US HCN stations to reach 100 degrees was well below average.

The percent of days above 100 degrees was also below average.

Climate experts tell us this is the hottest year ever.

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Source: The Last Refuge

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:08

Trying to get a straight answer out of the State Department about Hillary Clinton's emails is always a frustrating exercise. However, the traditional group of newly minted fraternity and sorority journalistas thought they'd give it a go. Predictably, it didn't work out.

The millenials sighed for the eleventy-fifth time and went back to their iPhone quest for the latest Pokemon capture. Then something odd happened:

Spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau is being obtuse about the 44 newly-released emails which show Clinton's team in the State Department setting up business for the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative through the use of the Secretary of State's office.

The emails being discussed were not in the original 30,000 handed over to the State Department, despite Clinton's claims she turned over all work-related emails.

The State Department hosted a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders this week for a meeting about their ongoing efforts to oppose the current government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, who rose to power following the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, an ally of the Brotherhood, in 2013.One member of the delegation, a Brotherhood-aligned judge in Egypt, posed for a picture while at Foggy Bottom in which he held up the Islamic group's notorious four-finger Rabia symbol, according to his Facebook page.

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Source: The Last Refuge

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:06

In February of 2016 the U.S. State Department released more of Hillary Clinton's emails. One of those emails originated on March 22nd 2011, the exact day President Obama launched the attacks on Libya.

The released email confirms what many already knew '' it was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power who convinced President Obama to go to war in Libya:

''Turning POTUS around on this is a major win for everything we worked for''..

In 2015 we noted an article at Real Clear Politics which hit on one of the key aspects of the Benghazi fiasco media have been hell-bent on hiding; Hillary Clinton, not President Obama, is actually the person responsible for the crisis in Libya.

When we watched the House Select Committee on Benghazi hearings, it was interesting to note how no-one really went 'there' to give Clinton full ownership of the 2011 Libyan Intervention; ownership she deserves. So let's review Clinton's ownership.

It's as if both congress and the media have forgotten those ridiculous 19-days in 2011 when Hillary was flying back-and-forth to meet with French Prime-Minister Sarkozy and plan their endeavors.

In the U.S. presidential adviser Samantha Power was bending Obama's ear with declarations of a ''Responsibility to Protect'' (R2P) the Eastern Libyan citizens from the boogie man narrative assigned to Gadaffi.

Meanwhile in New York, U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice was answering calls from her British and French counterparts who were similarly selling an interventionist message.

Back in the White House, President Obama was reluctant to engage. It was Secretary Clinton working overtime to bring the President into the same line of thinking as herself.

In a moment of rare bi-partisanship many Democrats and Republicans were aligned with the White House in not wanting to intervene in Libya. Of course, there was John McCain and Lindsey Graham who joined with Team Clinton to bomb yet another nation into civil war. But too his initial credit, Obama was reluctant.

February 2011 France's Sarkozy almost immediately began calling for the ouster of Kaddaffi and requesting Western nations to get involved to insure Kaddaffi fell. Sarkozy was quite passionate about it '' which struck many observers as odd because he was 'so far out' ahead of any nation on this position.

However, unlike Egypt, as the fighting intensified in February 2011 President Obama was curiously silent around Libya.

This initial non-reaction was played by the adoring U.S. media as Obama being calm under pressure. However, this calm was beset by the reality of what was actually reported to be taking place on the ground in Libya. The word ''slaughter'' was in almost every article.

Meanwhile President Obama seemed unfazed, and strangely quiet. So much so that Sarkozy was demanding President Obama say something, anything. This U.S. silence went on for over two full weeks until eventually the media headlines began to question the Obama strategy, or, well actually, the lack thereof.

This culminated in a weekend around February 24, 25 and 26th, 2011, when headlines began to read that Kaddaffi ''strafes'' while Obama ''golfs''. and astoundingly enough the Libyan Ambassador to the U.S. went on national television and begged for Obama to do something, ANYTHING.

Then a seemingly innocuous event transpired which actually summarized the lack of U.S. leadership quite well. This became the origin of the ''leading from behind'' sentiment.

It is important to understand that under President Obama the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations is actually a cabinet level position.

In 2011 Ambassador Susan Rice and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, were essentially equal peers.

Ambassador Rice representing Obama to the U.N. in New York, and Secretary Clinton representing Obama to nations while ''on-the-road'' so to speak. Under the leadership structure of Obama's cabinet both held equal and equivocal rank.

During that critical February weekend when the world was desperately demanding some form of action around the civil war in Libya, Sarkozy was having visible fits on EU television and trying to put together a European coalition.

In direct response to Sarkozy's pleas the U.N. announced an emergency Security Council meeting of the six prominent nations to determine what, if any, action could be taken to stop what was described as the ''pending slaughter in Libya''.

However, instead of attending that emergency U.N. Security Council meeting February 25th, 2011, Ambassador Rice went to South Africa to attend a global warming summit where they were discussing the danger of bovine flatulence (cow farts) as it relates to harming the environment.

Back in Washington DC the optics were even worse.

After ignoring cries for opinion, let alone involvement, and with Ambassador Rice blowing off the U.N. Security council meeting, and against the backdrop of media beginning to sense a detached president more interested in golf than Libya, the whole optical mess exploded.

Because on that very night when the U.N. Security Council met, a detached President Obama and his wife Michelle held a Motown Review Concert in the East Room of the White House.

Talk about a bad optic '' You can't make this stuff up !!By itself the White House Motown Review Party seemed a bit detached, but against the backdrop of Hillary proclaiming hundreds of women and children are being strafed in the streets, the optic was horrendous.

The contrast was so bold, and so stark, and happened so fast, and was seen by Europe and the United Nations as, well, unfathomable. The proverbial water-carrying media couldn't ignore it if they wanted to.

Recognizing what was unfolding a rapid White House team scrambled with a crisis response'.....

Against two weeks of silence in February 2011, and a fawning U.S. media beginning to doubt their own beliefs in the administration, the White House begins damage control for their earlier detachment.

When Susan Rice skipped a Feb 25, 2011 emergency weekend U.N. Security Council meeting, the Obama administration was compromised in their ability to influence any real outcome in Libya.

Without the U.S. seated at the policy table the U.N. made two strategic resolutions/decisions which were brutally short-sighted.

The first mistake was a resolution banning the sale or transfer of arms or weaponry into Libya during the civil war. On it's face the ban might sound like a generally good idea; however, in reality it was exceptionally self-defeating. After all, it banned all weapons from entering Libya, including weapons for the opposition '' which most thought would be needed for the ''rebels'' to defend themselves.

The second mistake was criminal charges brought about by the ICC (International Criminal Court) against the Kaddaffi regime. Nothing tells a dictator to double down on his position like telling him you as soon as this is over we will lock you and your family up for life.

Essentially those charges filed by the ICC solidified the certainty that Kaddaffi would never compromise. He was forced into a singular position '' either he would win the civil war, or he would die trying. Losing the war would mean death or a life in prison '' one of these was now certain. What did Kaddaffi have to lose by fighting?

This Security Council resolution highlights the emotional short-sighted outcome of most U.N. determinations. However, historically the U.S. has tempered logic to the 6 nation table of stupidity. But not this time. This time, at the specific direction of President Obama and his policy team, the U.S. did not even participate.

However, while the White House may have been annoyingly quiet, Hillary Clinton certainly was not.

This lack of synergy led to multiple instances where Clinton's publicly voiced opinion ran exactly opposite to the Obama administration's position she was supposedly representing.

The international optic was a completely out of sync with the White House and State Department.

Sometimes embarrassingly so.

The U.S. government came under fire today for chartering a rescue boat for Americans stuck in Libya that is too small to cope with the rough Mediterranean sea.

Hundreds of American citizens were finally set to depart Tripoli harbour aboard the Maria Dolores, a small passenger ferry chartered by the U.S., trapped there by rough seas.

At the same time larger Greek and Turkish vessels have transported thousands of their own citizens to safety, crossing the choppy water to mainland Europe. (link)

The State Department was struggling with multiple plates spinning simultaneously.

Secretary Clinton was noticeably unprepared to handle the heavy lifting and President Obama was not in the mood to initially bail her out. From the botched messaging, to the failure to evacuate American citizens from Western Libya, we watched as it almost seemed President Obama was enjoying Hillary being overwhelmed.

While Hillary had been trying to fill the February 2011 void left by Obama's silence, another key player was working policy structure behind the scenes.

One of Obama's little known advisors named Samantha Power began to play a more important role.

Power is the wife of Regulatory Czar Cass Sunstein, in 2011 she was a foreign policy advisor to President Obama along with Denis McDonough and Tom Donilon.

However, Power increasingly held a sway when it came to Libya, and her influence was soon noted with the introduction of the ''Responsibility to Protect'' Doctrine, or as it became known R2P.

Essentially her approach was to frame the possibility of defeat upon the Libyan Rebels in a similar venue as the historical Rwanda genocide. The potential slaughter of the Libyan Benghazi uprising was framed around a need for Humanitarian Intervention.

Despite the U.N Security Council resolution banning weapon distribution into Libya, the broad outline of a reason for U.S. intervention became visible. NATO would arm the rebellion and NATO would take action to ''protect'' the Benghazi rebels as Kaddaffi's army moved ever closer to their weakly held positions.

Samantha Power '' Susan Rice '' President Obama '' May 2011 during the decision to arm the Libyan ''rebels''.

However, there was one big problem '' WE HAD NO IDEA WHO THE REBELS WERE. The administration had no idea what the ideology behind the Benghazi Rebels actually was.

Some analysts believe the administration actually did know, but chose not to recognize the rebels' affiliation with al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood and armed them anyway.

Others, namely CNN analysts, said there was no real way to identify the ideology and we were just going to have to take a chance on them.

Personally I think there is profoundly enough visible evidence to state the administration 'had to know'. Why?

Because there were hundreds of on-the-ground reports from the region which accurately identified individually very specific people within the rebels as radical islamists. There is no intellectually honest way to believe the administration did not know they were supporting al-Qaeda affiliates and the Muslim Brotherhood. The signs were just too obvious.

Mustafa Abdel-Jalil (Picture taken Feb. 27th, 2011) Leader of Benghazi Opposition Council

One of the first signs was the very first Kaddaffi politician who defected from the regime and joined the rebellion. Interior Justice Minister, Mustafa Abdel Jalil.

Within 48 hours of Justice Abdel Jalil surfacing as the first defector, and becoming the defacto leader of the rebels, it was easily identifiable his ideology was for a sharia compliant Libya.

But the reality of the ''rebels'' being al-Qaeda affiliated made things complex. In essence the CIA and DoD knew if Kaddaffi fell the most likely scenario would be a rise of Islamic extremism.

The compounding problem was the massive stockpiles of weapons that were at stake in the equation.

If Kaddaffi fell, decades of weapons built up in hundreds of warehouses were going to be up for grabs. Weapons that included surface-to-air missiles, MANPADS, shoulder fired stinger missiles and tons of mustard gas and WMD.

Kaddaffi had built up massive amounts of arms over a period of three decades as the worlds most notorious international terrorist.

Very soon those weapons and missiles would go missing; and it was the retrieval of those missiles that led to a joint State Dept./CIA operation putting Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi, Eastern Libya where he was assassinated in September the following year'....

So, yeah '' she owns this:

There was a relatively ignored article in the U.K. Telegraph in 2012 which specifically looked at the rise of al-Qaeda in Syria, which evolved into ISIS.

The actual fighters were interviewed and spoke in their own words about how the Western media didn't understand that ISIS was fully in control. It's an important article to read to gain a full understanding of who was doing what in Syria in 2011/2012:

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Archived Version

Source: Russia Beyond The Headlines

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 11:03

After Russia's FSB accused Ukraine of attempting to create a series of terrorist attacks in Crimea, the question is '' how will Moscow respond to this alleged provocation? Russian observers believe that the ''attacks'' were supposed to have a long-term effect, but the main issue is not Crimea '' it is the Donbass.

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Vehicles standing in queue at the checkpoint "Armyansk", at the Ukraine-Russia border. Source: Andrey Iglov/RIA Novosti

The already frigid relations between Russia and Ukraine have now been further complicated by a strange incident involving Crimea: On Wednesday, Aug. 10 Moscow accused Kiev of preparing terrorist attacks on the disputed peninsula.

According to Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the ''Ukrainian saboteurs'' were active members of Ukraine's special forces. They divided themselves into two groups and tried to cross into Crimea carrying home-made explosive devices, as well as ammunition, grenades, mines and weapons. The FSB says that after detaining the saboteurs, it learned that an entire network of agents was functioning in Crimea. Two Russian officers allegedly died in the clash

Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised that Moscow "will not close its eyes to these things," saying that the alleged actions of the Ukrainian government are "terrorist practices" and "a very dangerous game."

He added that he no longer sees any meaning in holding the next scheduled meeting of the ''Normandy Four,'' referring to the periodical negotiations between the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France on regulating the Donbass conflict in southeastern Ukraine. The meeting had been planned for September in China.

The Ukrainian government denies any link to the detained terrorists, calling the incident "fantasies" and a pretext "for more military threats against Ukraine." Ukraine's theory is that the Russian military staged the whole incident by shooting at Russian FSB border guards. Now Ukraine intends to call a UN Security Council meeting.

The FSB says that the detained, who are citizens of both Russia and Ukraine, have confessed to their act. Their supposed targets were tourist facilities and they were carrying explosives with 40 kilograms of TNT. However, the ''saboteurs'' say that they did not intend to detonate them near people; they just planned to blow up various parts of a resort in order to create panic and "destroy tourism."

While one group reportedly broke through the Russian-Ukrainian border in vehicles owned by the Ukrainian armed forces, the other used an alternative route and was supposed to leave the explosives in a prepared cache.

A Ukrainian saboteur (R) detained by the Russian Federal Security Service in Crimea. The detainee confessed planning a number of attacks using explosives in Crimea. Source: A still from a video, courtesy of the FSB Public Relations Center/RIA Novosti

'Russia can't just go and start shooting at Ukraine's military facilities'Russian observers interviewed by RBTH believe that Russia's response to the incident will depend on Ukraine.

"Russia can't go and start shooting at Ukraine's military facilities just because a Ukrainian reconnaissance group tried penetrating Crimea. This contradicts international law," said Franz Klintsevich, deputy chairman of the Russian Federation Council Defense Committee.

However, Alexander Khramchikhin, deputy director of the Institute of Political and Military Analysis, believes a military operation is possible ''if Ukraine continues such provocations.''

For now Moscow will limit its actions to diplomatic measures '' a severe warning and carrying out operational activities with its special forces within Russia. According to the Kommersant business daily, additional troops and armored vehicles have already been sent to northern Crimea.

"It is extremely difficult for us to respond to this. Never does a country, any country, admit that it employs sabotage groups. And now the most important thing is not to provide a motive for people to accuse Russia of aggression against Ukraine. Not one Russian bullet must be fired into Ukrainian territory," said Andrei Suzdaltsev, deputy dean of the Department of World Economy and Politics at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Is it all related to the Donbass?However, many Russian observers not only see a provocation in the reported incident but a "multi-move plan" on the part of Ukraine.

"This issue is not about Crimea, it's about the Donbass," noted Suzdaltsev. "Crimea is a separate territory and it is the fight for the rebellious east that is forcing Ukraine to act in this way."

Kiev is looking for possibilities to intensify relations with Russia in order to refuse implementing the Minsk-2 Agreements and then accuse Moscow of aggressive intentions, says director of the Center for Political Affairs Alexei Chesnakov, who is close to the Kremlin.

In Suzdaltsev's opinion, the Ukrainian government needs certain achievements before the elections, such as the return of the Donbass to Ukrainian control. But with Russia providing support to the Donbass rebels it is impossible.

However, if Ukraine is really behind the incident, it has put itself in a difficult position. The FSB reported the Crimean ''attack'' only a few days after it occurred '' it first had to collect the proof. According to Russia, the detained leader of the saboteurs is a man named Yevgeny Panov, who it says is an officer in the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine.

"We have two Russian corpses. The Ukrainians killed them on Russian territory. This is very serious," said Suzdaltsev.

Klintsevich, meanwhile, believes that the situation is ''obvious'' and that, with ''interrogation recordings'' at its disposal, the UN Security Council will not risk giving its unequivocal support to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

Read more: FSB accuses Ukraine of attempting terrorist attacks in Crimea>>>

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Archived Version

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 10:51

De Russische inlichtingendienst FSB zegt een aanval van Oekra¯ense speciale troepen op de Krim te hebben afgeslagen. Daarbij zou een medewerker van de FSB zijn omgekomen. Een woordvoerder van het Oekra¯ense leger laat woensdag weten dat de berichten niet waar zijn. De Oekra¯ense president Porosjenko heeft de aantijgingen "belachelijk" en "cynisch" genoemd.

"Deze fantasien zijn slechts een aanleiding voor het zoveelste militaire dreigement aan het adres van Oekra¯ne", zei Porosjenko.

Het incident zou in de nacht van zaterdag op zondag hebben plaatsgevonden. Volgens de FSB werden elitetroepen van Oekra¯ne tijdens een patrouille ontdekt in de plaats Armjansk en ontstond er een vuurgevecht. Daarbij kwamen twee Russen om het leven.

De FSB vermoedt dat Oekra¯ne met de invasie de stabiliteit op de Krim wilde ondermijnen, juist in een periode dat de regio verkiezingen aan het voorbereiden is.

De FSB zegt twintig explosieven, wapens en ammunitie in beslag te hebben genomen. Er zijn ook een onbekend aantal mensen gearresteerd, onder wie ook Russen. Zij zijn verhoord en zouden bekend hebben dat ze een aanval wilden uitvoeren.

Video: De Russische president Poetin reageert op de vermeende aanval

GrensVolgens de FSB was er maandagnacht ook een poging om de grens met de Krim over steken. Daarbij werd een Russische soldaat gedood.

Rusland annexeerde de Krim officieel in 2014, nadat een meerderheid van de bevolking in een referendum daar voor had gestemd. Voor de volksraadpleging had Rusland een militaire actie op de Krim op touw gezet om, naar eigen zeggen, de bevolking te beschermen tegen fascistische en nationalistische groeperingen uit Oekra¯ne.

Door: NU.nl/Reuters

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Fri, 12 Aug 2016 09:40

Scientists have discovered a massive asteroid that is on course to hit the Earth next week, and are scrambling to find a way to divert the object.

The asteroid has been named 2016-FI and measures approximately 1 km across. If it strikes a populated area is could wipe out entire cities and potentially devastate an entire continent or '... nah. I'm totally messing with you. There's no asteroid (at least not about to strike next week).

But there is a new study by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute that has found that 59 percent of links shared on social media have never actually been clicked, meaning that most people who share news on social media aren't actually reading it first, and that'll probably apply to this article as well.

For the study, Arnaud Legout and co-authors collected two data sets:

the first, on all tweets containing Bit.ly-shortened links to five major news sources during a one-month period last summer; the second, on all of the clicks attached to that set of shortened links, as logged by Bit.ly, during the same period. After cleaning and collating that data, the researchers basically found themselves with a map to how news goes viral on Twitter.

The map showed ''viral'' news is widely shared but not necessarily read.

According to the Washington Post, one thing study authors say is concerning about this is that it shapes the way we see the world.

Legout said in a statement:

''People are more willing to share an article than read it. This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.''

This probably won't shock most people. We see it all the time in comments sections '' people making loud proclamations about stories they clearly haven't read. Entire discussions are chaired by those who didn't actually read the article. It's maddening.

What can you do about it?

Read the article, of course, and don't share things you haven't read. Being informed is being responsible.

So, have you made it this far or are you busy building a makeshift shelter in your basement?

If you read it and want to comment, work a colour '' red, blue, yellow, pink, whatever '' into your comment, would you? But don't ruin the headline for everyone else, OK? Thanks. You're the best.

Credit: Yackler magazine

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About AuthorAaron JacksonI'm a writer for Exposing The Truth and Intelligent Living. I have a BEng in Robotics and I'm currently studying philosophy and programming.

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Archived Version

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 18:21

Good morning. A broad range of banks and tech companies say they have found ways to apply blockchain technology to commercial lending operations known as trade finance. It's another sign that blockchain, the emerging distributed ledger technology behind digital currencies such as bitcoin, can be used to remove the middle layers from a range of functions, making them simpler and cheaper. (For more on blockchain, see this CIO Explainer.)

HSBC and Bank of America Merrill Lynch said they had ''joined with the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore to emulate a letter of credit (LOC) transaction,'' Reuters reports. ''Letters of credit are one of the most widely used ways to reduce risk between importers and exporters, helping guarantee more than $2 trillion worth of transactions, but the process creates a large paper trail and is time consuming,'' Reuters said.

R3 CEV, a consortium of companies working on blockchain technologies, said more than 15 of its member banks had designed self-executing transaction agreements on its distributed ledger platform to process invoice financing and letters of credit, according to Reuters. R3 members and other companies see blockchain applications far beyond finance. Is blockchain playing a role in your business? Let us know.

OPM hires permanent CIO. The U.S. Office of Personnel Management has named David DeVries, currently principal deputy CIO at the Defense Department, as its permanent chief information officer. He replaces Donna Seymour, who resigned after two years as OPM's CIO in February, ahead of a congressional hearing into the cause of at least two data breaches at the agency in 2014.

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

Delta operations nearing recovery: CEO. Delta Air Lines Inc. CEO Ed Bastian, in an interview with the Journal's Susan Carey, says the carrier has spent ''hundreds of million in technology infrastructure upgrades and systems,'' including $150 million this year alone. ''We needed to increase the skill set, and we've done that,'' Mr. Bastian said, referencing the January hire of CIO Rahul Samant. No one has lost their job as a result of Monday's computer meltdown that led to the grounding of over 2,000 flights through Wednesday.

Banks like Watson's cost-cutting potential. Bank executives tell Reuters that they believe IBM Corp.'s Watson artificial intelligence software would help their businesses reach cost-cutting goals. IBM is touting Watson's ability to help detect credit card fraud, provide investment recommendations and handle customer questions. The problem: A full-scale implementation would cost tens of millions of dollars, too high for banks looking for an immediate payoff. So far, says Reuters, Citigroup Inc is the only major U.S. bank to announce that it is testing Watson.

Alphabet sees another top executive leave. Bill Maris, the founder of Google's venture arm in 2009 is leaving the company, Recode reports. David Krane, a managing partner, will replace Mr. Maris at GV, which over the years has recorded some hits, include early-stage bets in Uber Technologies Inc. and Jet.com. The move follows the announcement last week that Chris Urmson, a key figure in Google's self-driving car effort, had left the company. In June Tony Fadell, chief of the company's Nest unit, stepped down.

Feds embrace open source. The federal government, in an effort to cut down on software costs associated with duplicating tech efforts and relying on expensive vendor solutions, is requiring that agencies open source at least 20% of the code they develop over the next three years, Quartz reports.

Palantir buys data visualization startup.Palantir Technologies Inc., the big data company noted for its relationships with the CIA and other government agencies, has acquired Amsterdam-based data visualization company Silk, Geekwire reports.

Another tech company comes up short. In the eighteen months since Intel Corp. pledged to introduce more diversity among its ranks, the percentage of blacks and Hispanics in the chip giant's workforce has changed little, the WSJ's Georgia Wells reports. But the share of black and Hispanic employees at Intel, standing at 3.7% and 8% respectively, is greater than than at Google parent Alphabet Inc. where 2% of its U.S. employees are black and 3% Hispanic. At Facebook Inc., those shares are 2% black and 4% Hispanic.

Hack targeting Democrats wider than believed. The Russian hack of Democratic Party servers appears to be larger than believed and the FBI is now notifying party officials that their private email accounts may have been hacked, the New York Times reports. The targets appear to be individuals associated with Hillary Clinton's campaign and party operatives, the NYT says.

EVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW

Federal prosecutors are investigating whether drugmaker Valeant defrauded insurers by shrouding its ties to a mail-order pharmacy that boosted sales of its drugs.(WSJ)

The International Energy Agency has trimmed its forecast for the rise in global oil demand next year on a dimmer economic outlook (WSJ)

China's capital, suffering from years of breakneck expansion, is embarking on a radical plan to rein in its population by kicking people out of the city's center. (WSJ)

The rate of layoffs in the U.S. dipped to 1.1%, matching the lowest in records dating back 15 years. (WSJ)

Tom Loftus contributed to this article. The Morning Download comes from the editors of CIO Journal and cues up the most important news in business technology every weekday morning. Send us your tips, compliments and complaints. You can get The Morning Download emailed to you each weekday morning by clicking http://on.wsj.com/TheMorningDownloadSignup.

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Archived Version

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 18:19

The French government wants members of the public to take in refugees because there is no room left at the country's asylum centers. The authorities are even offering financial handouts to charities which actively engage in finding accommodation.

The sheer numbers of migrants entering France has forced many to sleep out on the streets because refugee centers do not have enough beds to house everyone.

Read more

That has led the government to come up with a plan to try and get members of the public to take in refugees who have nowhere to go. The idea is being championed by Housing Minister Emmanuelle Cosse, who understands that something needs to be done given the sheer number of refugees in need of accommodation.

''By the end of September, we will more than double the capacity of the refugee centers, from 2,000 to 5,000 beds,'' she told Le Monde, adding that all major cities across the country had accepted the move.

The housing minister also mentioned that a further 50 centers would be built in addition to the current 147 accommodation units that are in use.

The government is also willing to give financial incentives to charities which help to find housing for migrants. The authorities are willing to give '‚¬1,500 (US$1,675) per refugee every year, if a charity manages to find homes for 50 or more refugees. However, this will only apply to those people who have been registered as refugees.

Those looking to engage in the scheme have to commit for at least five months and must give the refugee a private room, while the system is aimed to be up and running by October.

The matter is particularly pressing in Paris and some charities have already engaged in trying to find private accommodation. The system of giving shelter to refugees has seen 15,000 housed between August 2015 and July 2016. However, the capital is unable to cope with the sheer numbers of new arrivals.

Around 50 to 60 people are coming to Paris every day, however only between 80 and 100 beds become available every week, as people leave to go into shelters or move to a different area of the country.

One woman, who wished to remain anonymous, spoke to the Local about her experiences of housing a refugee in Paris for five months, calling it ''a genuinely positive experience.''

"I now have a friend from a background I would never have come across in my day-to-day life," she said, adding that they would often share meals and discussions.

"It gave me a chance to personalize a faceless issue that confronts us almost daily. I have an intimate understanding of the reasons he left, the risks he took to get to Europe and the determination he has to fit in and stay."

However, the woman admitted that there were problems, citing the language barrier as a particular hurdle that had to be overcome, while also adding that people looking to enter into the scheme needed to be committed.

"Language was probably the biggest barrier. Even though he had French lessons three days per week, communication was not always easy. Sometimes it required extra concentration which could be difficult after a long day at work," the woman said.

Not everyone is happy about the proposed plan. The vice president of the far-right National Front Party, Florian Philippot, hit out at the move on Twitter.

''This move by Emmanuelle Cosse regarding migrants confirms the dangerous path that the puppets of Brussels are leading us down.''

Philippot was referring to the quota plan, which has been introduced by the EU for countries within the bloc to house refugees. The number of refugees in France is expected to rise to 30,000 by 2017 as the country takes its share of the quota set by the EU.

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Archived Version

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 17:17

It was mid-March 1992, and Mark McCahill had never been to San Diego before. Back home in Minneapolis, the skies had been dumping snow for six months, and would keep at it for several more weeks. McCahill checked into the Hyatt Islandia, an 18-story high-rise hotel overlooking Mission Bay. ''There were palm trees,'' he recalls. ''Boy, was it nice.''

McCahill was then in his mid-30s and managing the Microcomputer Center at the University of Minnesota''Twin Cities, which facilitated the emerging use of personal computers on campus. He and Farhad Anklesaria, a programmer in the center, had been invited to address the 23rd Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an elite convocation of academics and government officials from around the world who were literally deciding how the internet should work.

Mark P. McCahill Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota

''The gods of the internet,'' McCahill says, though in other circles they would have gone unnoticed. In his memoirs, another internet pioneer, Tim Berners-Lee, describes these gatherings as ''people in T-shirts and jeans, and at times no footwear. They would meet in different small rooms and talk excitedly.''

The internet then, as now, was a vast array of information stored in random computers around the world, only there was no easy or consistent access. It was difficult even to discover what was out there '-- there were no good search engines. The most popular protocol, or method of retrieving information from another computer, was FTP (file transfer protocol), the primitive, labor-intensive equivalent of knocking on someone's door and asking if you could carry away his piano.

The IETF had been convening since 1986 to iron out these issues, which had prevented the internet from becoming the ''Intergalactic Network'' its originators had foreseen, instead remaining the limited domain of physicists and the military. But this meeting felt different. For the first time, the internet seemed on the verge of going public.

On March 18, in a conference room of the hotel, Berners-Lee presented one possible breakthrough: the World Wide Web. It was evening. Many of the 530 conference attendees had already gone to the bar or to dinner. To the curious who stayed behind, Berners-Lee explained that the Web could be used to connect all the information on the internet through hyperlinks. You could click on a word or a phrase in a document and immediately retrieve a related document, click again on a phrase in that document, and so on. It acted like a web laid over the internet, so you could spider from one source of information to another on nearly invisible threads.

Two other programs with the potential to expand access to the internet '-- WAIS and Prospero '-- were discussed in the same session. In the reports of people who saw the presentation, the Web did not come across as the best of them, or even as particularly promising.

The next day, in the light of the afternoon, McCahill and Anklesaria presented the Internet Gopher. It was simple enough to explain: With minimal computer knowledge, you could download an interface '-- the Gopher '-- and begin searching the internet, retrieving information linked to it from anywhere in the world. It was like the Web but more straightforward, and it was already working.

In fact, most attendees needed little introduction to Gopher '-- the software had been out for months. It was the developers they were curious about, the Minnesotans who had created the first popular means of accessing the internet. ''People we'd never met were telling us how they were using our stuff and adding things to it,'' McCahill says. ''We had no idea how big Gopher was going to be until we experienced this firsthand and realized that growth could be exponential for a while.''

In the years that followed, the future seemed obvious. The number of Gopher users expanded at orders of magnitude more than the World Wide Web. Gopher developers held gatherings around the country, called GopherCons, and issued a Gopher T-shirt '-- worn by MTV veejay Adam Curry when he announced the network's Gopher site. The White House revealed its Gopher site on Good Morning America. In the race to rule the internet, one observer noted, ''Gopher seems to have won out.''

McCahill's father was an executive for Conoco, the oil company, which moved him around the country about every two years. McCahill was in junior high when the family finally settled in the Twin Cities. He graduated from the U in 1979 with a BA in chemistry, spent a year studying effluent in rivers, and realized he liked the computer analysis (''heavy number smashing'') more than the chemistry itself (''kind of dirty''). So he took a job in the U's Microcomputer Center, programming some of Apple's first personal computers.

The Twin Cities were a proto-Silicon Valley then, with a long history of producing some of the world's most powerful computers at UNIVAC, Control Data Corporation, and Engineering Research Associates, which supported the work of Honeywell, IBM, and other local tech firms. The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, or MECC, formed in 1973 to get computers in schools and created software for them '-- most famously The Oregon Trail. By the early 1980s, when only a fraction of schools in neighboring states had computers, there were about three or four in every public school in Minnesota.

When McCahill began working in the Microcomputer Center, a turf battle was heating up '-- ''a religious war,'' McCahill calls it '-- between ''the high priests of computing'' who oversaw the U's venerable mainframes, the enormous machines that once occupied entire rooms, and the growing cadre of personal-computer converts. ''Microcomputer guys were as far out of the mainstream as you could get and still be a part of the U's computer center,'' McCahill says. Anklesaria, who had earned a doctorate in genetics before gravitating to computer science, says the Microcomputer Center was ''a splinter group'' when he joined in late 1987. ''The mainframe was still the only thing '-- the Mac was considered a toy.''

McCahill sided with PCs. ''The idea of democratizing access to computing, putting computers in the hands of everyday people '-- that resonated with me, and that was part of all the early PC stuff,'' he says. ''If you were interested in PCs, you just absorbed that attitude by osmosis. It was in the air and the water.''

McCahill, who had long hair then that he now pulls into a ponytail, spent his free time wind-surfing on Lake Calhoun, and says the PC revolution ''looked like a good wave to ride '... it would enable me to do what I've tried to do ever since: take technology that is cutting edge and get it to the point that it's palatable to mom and dad and English majors.''

In the late 1980s, McCahill and Anklesaria developed the first popular internet email system, called POPMail. ''It was partly for selfish reasons,'' McCahill says. ''I wanted more people using email so I didn't have to walk down the hall to my mailbox to collect my phone messages on little slips of paper.'' Instead, secretaries could send an email. For that matter, so could callers.

At the same time, the U was determined to network its computers on the internet in a so-called campus-wide information system, or CWIS, and the schism was delaying development. By early 1991, a committee of more than 20 department heads and computing specialists had been meeting for months, producing a long list of demands '-- including the use of mainframe computers '-- but zero code. ''They had some complicated shit for doing searches that I didn't want to do,'' McCahill says. ''Farhad didn't want to write it at all.''

''But I had to show something,'' Anklesaria says. So he stripped the program down to its simplest parts '-- a basic protocol for making information in one place available somewhere else. He cobbled it together on a Mac, writing a server (a program enabling a computer to ''serve up'' requested files) and a client (how most of our computers are programmed, enabled to search for and request those files). ''And I said, 'This stuff kind of works.' Since we had nothing else, we went for it.''

Mark P. McCahill Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota

A 1994 University of Minnesota alumni magazine spread featuring the Gopher protocol architects.

McCahill pushed for a full-text search engine '-- something we now take for granted '-- and borrowed the gist of one from a computer system called NeXT, which had recently been invented by Steve Jobs. ''We had this marriage of Farhad's super-simple protocol for saying give me a list of items, a menu,'' says McCahill, ''and my thing of having a way of searching, and we glued those two together.''

It was plain text '-- no pictures, given that modem speeds were so slow. And it was organized like the one information source most people alive in the early 1990s were familiar with: a library, with similar subjects grouped together. You just pointed your gopher, as the lingo went, to any Gopher site you wanted to explore, and there you were, burrowing through the internet. It was so simple that just about anyone could make it work, even an English major.

''It was one of the rare times when we both looked at each other and said, 'Holy shit, we've got a really good idea here,''' McCahill recalls. Anklesaria called it the Internet Gopher, a triple play on words: the U's mascot, a critter that digs, and a go-fer '-- one who fetches. ''We figured that if we called it Gopher, the committee couldn't complain,'' McCahill says. ''It's the school mascot!''

Sir Tim Berners-Lee '-- he was knighted in 2004 '-- was born in London in 1955, less than a year before McCahill. His parents were both mathematicians. While McCahill's father was being shipped from Colorado to Oklahoma to Minnesota, Sir Tim's parents were developing the world's first commercially available computer.

Berners-Lee grew up with the internet, or at least the concept of it. As a child, he built mock computers out of cardboard boxes. He came home from high school one day to find his father writing a speech on how computers might someday make intuitive connections, linking information the way the brain uses random associations to link thoughts.

Creative Commons/John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Tim Berners-Lee in a 2008 photo.

He was a teenager when the internet began as the ARPAnet, connecting a handful of computers at Stanford and other universities. It was designed as a defense, a secure means of communication should the Soviets destroy the American telephone system, though its practical purpose was to allow scientists to use the computing power at another facility for massive calculations.

Berners-Lee earned a degree in physics from Oxford '-- where he built his first computer with parts from an old television, a calculator, an electronics kit, and a car battery '-- then worked as a software engineer for a few years before taking a job with CERN, the famous particle-physics lab in Geneva, Switzerland. By then, in 1984, the internet had gone global; CERN was the largest internet node in Europe.

Yet using the internet was problematic even within the CERN lab. When you wanted information, Berners-Lee later recalled, ''often it was just easier to go ask people while they were having coffee.'' He decided he could do better. He had never forgotten his father's research on the brain, and when he wove the Web, it was based on this holistic, serendipitous, strangely rewarding experience of surfing from one vaguely related idea to the next.

He finished a model of the Web in 1989, but for years it went nowhere. The concept was too abstract and it only worked on NeXT computers. But in early 1991, just as McCahill and Anklesaria were conceiving the Internet Gopher in Minnesota, the first Web servers outside of CERN were switched on.

After outlining the Gopher protocol, McCahill and Anklesaria pulled together four programmers who worked in the Microcomputer Center to write the software. McCahill wanted it in a hurry. Not because he was racing Berners-Lee, but because he wanted it over with. He wanted it before the next CWIS committee meeting, in a month.

The programmers were young guys, mostly in their 20s and, like McCahill, mostly huge Nirvana fans. Paul Lindner, a coding wunderkind from northern Minnesota who was dubbed the Gopher Dude for his evangelism, had long metal-head hair and signed Gopher emails with lyrics like ''You have to spit to see the shine'' from Babes in Toyland. Early Gopher servers were named Mudhoney, Danzig, and Anthrax. The sole outlier in the microcomputer mosh pit was Bob Alberti, a programmer who named a server Indigo, as in the Indigo Girls.

MinnPost photo by Corey Anderson

Shepherd Labs on the University of Minnesota campus.

The center was in Shepherd Labs, a hulking cement building built like a tank in 1968 on the U's Minneapolis campus, with concrete floors and no windows. Early on, it was used for NASA materials research. ''There were pipes with strange fluids running through them,'' Lindner recalls.

The microcomputer team, in addition to developing software for the U, ran a showroom for students and faculty interested in buying a Mac, taught computer training classes, tested software, and served as a help center for people with PC problems '-- walk-in and call-in. ''Everyone would answer phones at least one day a week,'' Lindner says, ''even if you were programming. That way you were close to the pain you were inflicting on people '-- if programmers today still took calls, we'd have more user-friendly software.''

Gopher, however, was claiming more and more of their time. ''It became infectious,'' Lindner says. ''How can we build this into the science fiction of our dreams, access to all the information in the world, the library of everything?''

The team, in 36-hour sessions fueled by beer, pizza, and speed metal, finished writing Gopher in about three weeks. They installed the first computer running a Gopher server '-- a Mac SE/30, a little droid of a computer with an iPad-size monitor built in '-- in a narrow hallway between their offices and the showroom, in a closet with metal shelves. It became known as the Mother Gopher.

The committee meeting where the team first presented the Gopher protocol was a disaster, ''literally the worst meeting I've ever seen,'' says Alberti. ''I still remember a woman in pumps jumping up and down and shouting, 'You can't do that!' ''

Among the team's offenses: Gopher didn't use a mainframe computer and its server-client setup empowered anyone with a PC, not a central authority. While it did everything the U required and then some, to the committee it felt like a middle finger. ''You're not supposed to have written this!'' Alberti says of the group's reaction. ''This is some lark, never do this again!'' The Gopher team was forbidden from further work on the protocol.

After the meeting, McCahill leaned on the director of the computer center, a Chinese-American man named Shih Pau Yen, who had supported Gopher all along. ''I said I would quit before I stopped working on the coolest thing we'd ever created,'' McCahill says. Yen ran interference, and the Gopher team kept working on it in their own time.

''In this bureaucracy of little fiefdoms, where everyone had a hard time working together, the one thing that could unify us was telling everyone else off,'' Lindner says. ''That was our rallying cry.''

Finally, in April 1991, still unable to persuade the U to take on Gopher, Lindner released it into the wild. He made the Gopher software available via FTP '-- the most popular way to share information on the internet at the time '-- and wrote a brief, quiet announcement on an internet mailing list: Hey, we've got this thing, come and get it.

Within months, the team was hearing from Gopher users around the country. ''It was the first viral software,'' Alberti says. ''All these people started calling the U and pestering the president and other administrators, saying, 'This Gopher thing is great, when are you going to release a new version?' And the administrators said, 'What are you talking about?'''

The ban was lifted. Never numbering more than six core members, the team fanned out to conferences to spread the Gopher gospel, while continuing to improve and diversify the protocol. In the process they ended up laying the foundation for much of how we navigate the internet. The first hyperlinks. The first bookmarks. McCahill, thinking of windsurfing, even coined the term ''surf the internet.''

A video of veejay Adam Curry wearing an "Internet Gopher World Tour" T-shirt on MTV.

Within a year, there were hundreds of Gopher servers. Berners-Lee, who had publicly introduced the World Wide Web a few months after Gopher's debut, used Gopher to do it. ''People look at the World Wide Web today and think it sprang out of Tim Berners-Lee's forehead,'' Alberti says. ''But the fact is, the only way he was able to spread the word about the Web is because the Internet Gopher was there to allow people to download his files, find a discussion group, and talk about it.''

''We had the right product at the right time,'' McCahill says. ''People were looking to expand the internet beyond physicists' stuff. Gopher could do that. It was simple to use, it could network lots and lots of computers. It gave people a reason to say, hey, this internet is good.''

Lindner was solicited for side gigs '-- twice he went to Ecuador to set up Gopher for the country's fledgling internet. ''That's when I knew we were really onto something,'' he says, ''when I was helping wire a whole country.''

Al Gore, then a U.S. senator, came to visit. Four GopherCons, held between 1992 and 1995, drew reps from the New York Times, the World Bank, Microsoft, and other global heavyweights. The Gopher T-shirt, black and scribbly, listed the names of places with Gopher servers on the back, in the style of rock tour shirts. It was an apt metaphor, as Gopher team member Daniel Torrey told the Pioneer Press in 1996: ''We thought we were rock stars.''

Some team members dreamed of fortune to go with their fame. But the internet was not yet open for business. It had been built on dot-mil and dot-edu, on public funds. Programmers shared source code; if you needed something, someone gave it to you. A dot-com address was considered crass. It was ''as though all of TV was PBS,'' Lindner says. ''No commercials.''

Still, Alberti raised the profit potential of Gopher with Shih Pau Yen. Before coming to work in the Microcomputer Center, Alberti had helped create the first online multi-player role-playing game '-- called Scepter of Goth, an ancestor of World of Warcraft and the like. ''I said we should take this private, we should make a business of this and make some money off it,'' Alberti recalls. ''He looked at me like I'd just grown another head.''

Mark P. McCahill Papers, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota

Eventually, though, the U did want some money '-- for itself. At GopherCon '93, Yen announced that for-profit Gopher users would need to pay the U a licensing fee: hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the size and nature of their business. Many users felt betrayed. In the open-source computing spirit of the day, they had contributed code to Gopher, helping the team keep up with the times. Now they were being asked to pony up.

The reaction deflated the team. As hard as they were expected to work on Gopher, they were never relieved of other duties, including answering the U's help line. ''We never got additional funding, we were going broke,'' Alberti says. ''We had the whole internet yelling at us, when are you going to update your software, when are you going to put images on Gopher pages, and make this smoother and better? And we're like: 'We're six guys!'''

For a while, the U threatened to get rid of them altogether, a bid to outsource the university's computer work, provoking one programmer to bug a computer in Morrill Hall, the U's administrative center, so the team could listen in on discussions.

Asking for a contribution seemed reasonable. When it backfired, the team posted a defensive letter to Gopher users in March 1993: '''... There has been a lot of hysteria, misinformation, and rumor floating around. '... In a time where we are having budgets slashed, it is impossible to justify continued (increasing) resources being allocated to Gopher development unless some good things result for the University of Minnesota. This is a fact of life. '... Before you go off and flame once more, ask yourself if you want to get YOUR particular server going with as little fuss and expense as possible ... or if you just want to stir up the soup.''

''That socially killed Gopher,'' Alberti says of the licensing fiasco.

Yet it wasn't the end. In 1993, Gopher was still far more popular than the World Wide Web, and Gopher traffic grew by 997 percent. But the Web was starting to catch up '-- that year, it grew by 341,634 percent.

At the San Diego internet conference, in 1992, Berners-Lee had pulled McCahill and Anklesaria aside on the last day of meetings and asked if they wanted to collaborate on a Web/Gopher hybrid. Some melding of their different designs '-- an internet super-system '-- though it wasn't clear how that might work.

''Tim is a great guy, but he's a little odd, a little scattered,'' McCahill says. ''Talking to him is like a ball of twine experience. The Web you see now, that's how he thinks.''

McCahill told Berners-Lee that he would need to look at the Web more closely. But it wasn't much to look at when McCahill went back to Minnesota and examined it. There were no graphics yet. It was still only running on NeXT computers. ''I wasn't feeling it,'' McCahill says. I told him, 'Tim, I don't think so.' Of course, I look back and say, 'I might have been wrong.' ''

Soon enough, the Web did have pictures and was available on more platforms. In 1993, the first popular Web browser, Mosaic, was introduced for sale, breaking the commercial taboo of the internet and suggesting '-- to McCahill at least '-- that tech investors had taken sides. ''The fix was in,'' he says.

In 1994, modem speeds doubled, and the interminable rendering of images on the Web '-- once dubbed the World Wide Wait '-- greatly accelerated. PCs began to be sold with these faster modems built in. To anyone looking for a simple, even crude explanation for the Web's rise, this is it: the ability to view a reasonable facsimile of a naked woman in the privacy of your own home. ''That's what came to drive a lot of the internet,'' Alberti says. ''Porn.''

The Internet Gopher, with his text-only menu and gloss-less, institutional mien, couldn't keep up. He had fallen off the wave, and almost overnight was revealed as a buck-toothed square, ignored by the girls on the beach, his surfboard held together by duct tape. ''Obsolesced,'' as one observer put it in 1994. A has-been.

''I remember the exact moment I knew I was no longer on the right track,'' says Lindner. ''It was September 9, 1993. I was invited to give a talk about Gopher at Princeton, and I had my slides all printed up on my little university-budget black-and-white foils. The person presenting before me was talking about the future of the Web, with full-color LCD projection. I said, 'I think I see where things are going.' ''

Courtesy of Bob Alberti

Mark McCahill's entry on the University of Minnesota's ''Wall of Discovery,'' which celebrates the accomplishments of students and faculty.

For McCahill, the realization happened on the street. ''I saw a URL on the side of a bus,'' he says. ''That's when I knew the Web was all about advertising. Gopher was not good for advertising. I knew it would start winding down.''

In the spring of 1994, Web traffic overtook Gopher traffic for the first time. Gopher, within a few months, began to decline. Its reign had lasted three years.

The coup de grce came from the U itself. In 1995, Dr. John Najarian, a renowned transplant surgeon at the university, was indicted for tax evasion, embezzlement, and fraud. Although Najarian was later cleared of all charges, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) put the U on probational status, threatening tens of millions of dollars in grants and the school's viability as a top research institution. ''It was an all hands on deck situation,'' McCahill says.

The issue was essentially simple: bad accounting. Paperwork was literally on paper, and transaction records sat around for weeks before making it into a ledger, if they made it in at all. The Gopher programming team was diverted to creating a more accountable accounting system for the U, what turned out to be the first Web-based transaction program. ''That's what my kick-ass development shop did for a year and a half,'' McCahill says, ''to show the NIH that we were cleaning things up.'' By the time they finished, the Internet Gopher was dead.

In the beginning, when the Mother Gopher was new and there were no other Gopher servers to link to, Gopherspace was empty. The Gopher team, to demonstrate the usefulness of their invention, dumped in a cookbook and searched for eggplant. As late as 1993, the most popular information in Gopherspace included recipes, weather, phone books, and movies of chemical reactions.

''Gopher represented a simpler, more na¯ve time,'' says one of its modern-day fans. Others call it ''a purer way'' of navigating the internet, of ''making structure out of chaos.''

Today, there are about 140 Gopher servers still out there, many of them relatively new. The tech world is not a sentimental place, but it does appreciate simplicity and irony in equal measure '-- many of these servers were set up on April Fool's Day.

MinnPost photo by Bill Kelley

Farhad Anklesaria: ''You have to be at the right time and place to have your technology take off and become popular.''

Cameron Kaiser, perhaps the Internet Gopher's greatest advocate these days (he runs a Gopher support site called the Overbite Project), figures he spends about 25 percent of his internet time in Gopherspace. ''It's actually rather nice to have a small ecosystem because no one's running annoying ads in Gopherspace or trying to track your browsing habits,'' he says. ''The protocol makes the former hard and the latter almost impossible.''

Courtesy of Paul Lindner

Paul Lindner

As the Web has become synonymous with the internet, and we conduct more of our lives online, we've learned to abide the misinformation, solicitations, and scams that thrive in its chaos '-- though it has changed us and society in ways we are only beginning to understand. If Gopher had won out, who knows how things would be different.

The Gopher team, who might understandably be disappointed, seem genuinely OK with how things turned out. More than OK, actually, as though they expected it. They were first, after all. And in the march of technology, the first are eventually last. ''This is the natural order of things,'' Anklesaria says. ''You have some building blocks '-- the natural thing to do is build on them. That's how civilization bootstraps and how we progress.''

If they are surprised by anything, it's that the Web was the system that surpassed them and has outlasted everything else. There was a protocol that was better than either the Web or Gopher, they say, called Hyper-G, developed in Austria, which never got off the ground. ''You have to be at the right time and place to have your technology take off and become popular,'' says Anklesaria. ''If you're at the base of a wave, you have a chance to rise with it. But if you're already on top of the wave and the wave has broken, that's not good '-- if you're too early, you won't last.''

MinnPost photo by Bill Kelley

Bob Alberti: ''The only way [Tim Berners-Lee] was able to spread the word about the Web is because the Internet Gopher was there to allow people to download his files, find a discussion group, and talk about it.''

On July 1, 1997, or maybe in 2009, most likely in the 2000s, someone walked into the closet in Shepherd Labs and unplugged the Mother Gopher. No one can agree on the date. No one from the Gopher team was around.

''While I was at the U,'' McCahill says, ''it was a point of pride that we'd keep running the server.'' But McCahill left in 2007 to become a systems architect at Duke University, developing instructional and research computing technology. Lindner left in 1996, having followed a Gopher side gig to Geneva, Switzerland, where he worked for the United Nations, and is now a software engineer in the Oakland, California, offices of Google. Anklesaria retired last spring. Of the core Gopher team members, Alberti is the only one still at the U, as an information security architect.

At its peak, the Mother Gopher consisted of 10 Apple IIci computers. But when it was finally euthanized, who knows what shape it was in. There was no ceremony. Nothing was carted off to a museum. Gopherspace simply became emptier, and the world without the Web became harder to imagine.

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Thu, 11 Aug 2016 14:31

Marijuana grows beneath lights at Alternative Solutions, a medical marijuana producer, on April 20 in Washington, D.C. Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Imageshide caption

toggle captionBrendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesMarijuana grows beneath lights at Alternative Solutions, a medical marijuana producer, on April 20 in Washington, D.C.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty ImagesThe Obama administration has denied a bid by two Democratic governors to reconsider how it treats marijuana under federal drug control laws, keeping the drug for now, at least, in the most restrictive category for U.S. law enforcement purposes.

Drug Enforcement Administration chief Chuck Rosenberg says the decision is rooted in science. Rosenberg gave "enormous weight" to conclusions by the Food and Drug Administration that marijuana has "no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States," and by some measures, it remains highly vulnerable to abuse as the most commonly used illicit drug across the nation.

"This decision isn't based on danger. This decision is based on whether marijuana, as determined by the FDA, is a safe and effective medicine," he said, "and it's not."

Marijuana is considered a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, alongside heroin and LSD, while other, highly addictive substances including oxycodone and methamphetamine are regulated differently under Schedule II of the law. But marijuana's designation has nothing to do with danger, Rosenberg said.

In a letter to the petitioners, Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and New Mexico nurse practitioner Bryan Krumm, Rosenberg said doctors are responsible for treating patients, but the FDA makes decisions about drug safety: "Simply put, evaluating the safety and effectiveness of drugs is a highly specialized endeavor."

Tom Angell, chairman of Marijuana Majority, said in a statement that the decision was disappointing.

"President Obama always said he would let science '-- and not ideology '-- dictate policy, but in this case his administration is upholding a failed drug war approach instead of looking at real, existing evidence that marijuana has medical value," he wrote.

Most Americans support legalization, Angell wrote, and the federal government should at a minimum leave regulatory decisions to the states.

Drug enforcers insist they are supportive of efforts to advance scientific research on marijuana. The DEA said it has "never denied" an application from a researcher to use lawfully produced marijuana in a rigorous medical study, and Rosenberg pointed out that research continues on a variety of subjects, including the effects of smoking marijuana in human subjects.

In December 2015, federal authorities said, they made it easier for researchers conducting clinical trials on cannabidiol, a component of marijuana. Some scientists are studying whether the substance can help treat childhood epilepsy. "That would be a wonderful and welcome development," the DEA letter said, "but we insist that CBD research, or any research, be sound, scientific and rigorous before a product can be authorized for medical use."

What's more, federal authorities said, they are increasing the amount of marijuana available for legitimate research. They said they will open up new avenues for more people and institutions to manufacture marijuana for scientific purposes. Currently, the University of Mississippi is the only such site in the U.S.

"As long as folks abide by the rules, and we're going to regulate that, we want to expand the availability, the variety, the type of marijuana available to legitimate researchers," Rosenberg said. "If our understanding of the science changes, that could very well drive a new decision."

Forty-two states and the District of Columbia allow some form of medical marijuana use, but the federal government has not taken that step despite prodding from federal lawmakers. Last month, the Democratic National Committee endorsed the idea of loosening federal restrictions on marijuana and "providing a reasoned platform for future legalization" in its platform.

For now, there remain two ways to change the federal government's classification of marijuana: for a host of federal agencies including the DEA and FDA to sign off; or for Congress to pass a law, and for the president to sign it.

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Source: The Local

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 11:27

Empty deckchairs on a beach in Schleswig-Holstein. Photo: DPA

A high pressure system sitting in the eastern Atlantic has caused one of the coldest nights in recent history, driving temperatures down to just above zero on Wednesday night, the German Weather Service (DWD) reports.

In Carlsfeld, Saxony the mercury dropped to 1.3C, thereby setting a record for the coldest August temperature ever recorded in the town since first being measured in 1990.

Meanwhile in Bad K¶nigshofen in Bavaria, a temperature of 1.5C was also just one decimal place above a record set in 1987.

In several mountainous regions of the country, frost also covered the grass on Thursday morning.

The chilly front couldn't be in greater contrast to the same time last August, when Germany was sweating through the second hottest summer since records began.

In Lindenberg in Allg¤u, the lowest temperature on Thursday morning was 6.9C. A year ago, the most respite the gods allowed the people of the small town in Bavaria was a low of 22.4C.

But the good news is that the low point has already passed for this summer and Germany can look forward to warmer nights ahead, the weathermen promise.

On the other hand though, the warm front which is set to spread across the entire country by Thursday evening will also bring clouds laden with rain, with central Germany set to face the brunt of the downpours.

Longer-term, the sun is set to reappear, particularly on southern Germany, where Bavaria will be kissed by temperatures between 25C and 30C from the weekend onwards.

Northern Germany won't be quite so lucky though, and will only experience highs of 22C, while the sun's happy work will be interrupted by the occasional shower.

Source: DWD

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Thu, 11 Aug 2016 07:05

A long-awaited decision that could determine the future of the U.S. marijuana industry is expected Thursday.

The Drug Enforcement Administration said late Wednesday that it would publish its response to a congressional petition to reschedule marijuana in the Federal Register on Thursday morning.

The announcement could have far-reaching implications for the industry, particularly if the agency chooses to change the way it regulates marijuana. Marijuana is currently filed under Schedule I, meaning it has a high potential for abuse and has no accepted medical value.

The DEA's response could move the drug to a less-restrictive schedule, which would allow more research under continued regulation. It could also deschedule it, which would completely remove it from the agency's regulation, or take no action. The DEA's email didn't indicate which course the agency might select.

If marijuana were to be rescheduled, the current infrastructure within states that have legalized the drug for medical purposes could be completely changed. For the past 20 years, states that have legalized medical marijuana have done so outside the workings of the pharmaceutical industry, using doctor's ''recommendations'' instead of prescriptions and providing it through dispensaries rather than pharmacies.

Rescheduling medical marijuana could mean it would be treated like Vicodin, OxyContin or Adderall and be subject to the standard prescription process.

Half the states in the U.S. have legalized cannabis for medical use, while four states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana. Those states have operated independently of federal agencies with regard to their marijuana industries, which has contributed to some regulatory issues regarding pesticide use and the use of medical marijuana to treat minors.

A relaxing of regulations could bridge the divide between state and federal governments. It could also make the nearly $7 billion industry more attractive to established companies in the health care space.

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 21:52

Home / News / WATCH: First Daughter Malia Obama Caught On Camera Smoking WeedAugust 10, 20160 Comments

ILLINOIS - President Obama's oldest daughter was recording on video smoking what appears to be a marijuana joint at the Lollapalooza music festival. Reporters have reached out to the White House but so far no comment on what the 18-year-old was smoking.

The internet went crazy over the weekend when several videos appeared on twitter and YouTube of the President's daughter Malia Obama twerking on stage at the same festival. The annual four day music festival is held annually in her hometown of Chicago, IL.

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 20:05

Is pouring billions more dollars into the country and keeping thousands of U.S. troops there the best way to keep us safe?

On July 25, the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan released its latest quarterly report on civilian casualties from the war. Afghanistan was already one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a civilian, but the findings of the investigation were even worse than observers and U.S. officials expected: between January 1, 2016 to June of this year, the fighting killed 1,601 civilians and injured another 3,565.

''This represents an increase of four percent in the total number of casualties compared to the first six months of 2015,'' the head of the U.N. mission said, ''and is the highest half-year total since 2009.''

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The dismal figures from the U.N. are just the most recent in a stack of reports from the U.N. Secretary General and the U.S. government that describe an extremely dire security situation in the country, nearly 15 years since the U.S. and its NATO allies embarked on a mission that has dragged on for over a decade. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's own assessment of the war to the Security Council is a good summation of what many Americans and Europeans have long suspected: insurgent violence is up, the Afghan government is still riven by factional disputes and an exceedingly slow process of appointing and confirming ministers, the Afghan army and police force is getting beaten up in the field, and chunks of rural Afghanistan are either administered or influenced by anti-government elements.

''In the first four months of 2016,'' Ban wrote, ''reports indicated rising casualties among the security forces. The sustainability of the forces remains a challenge in the light of high attrition rates. Even though recruitment was on target, re-enlistment rates remained particularly low and needed to be increased to compensate for other losses.''

The result of this attrition? A 5 percent decrease in the amount of territory the Afghan government controls, from 70.5 percent to 65.6 percent. Over one-third of the country's districts are either under insurgent control or ''at risk'' of being captured or challenged by the Taliban.

The Obama administration has taken these statistics seriously, responding to the situation as they have done throughout the past seven-and-one-half years: escalating the amount of force the U.S. military is allowed to use and slowing the scheduled withdrawal of U.S. troops. For all of the GOP's complaints about President Obama handcuffing of the military and his resistance to providing the generals running the war with more resources, money, firepower, and support, the fact is that Obama has been quite deferential to military leaders and the Pentagon. His original plan to withdraw all U.S. trainers and advisers from Afghanistan by the end of 2016 has been delayed repeatedly '-- first in March 2015, when Obama decided to provide President Ashraf Ghani with the full force of 9,800 troops through 2015 and again in October, when he extended the same force level through most of 2016.

The administration seems muddled about how to ensure that U.S. gains in Afghanistan are kept and built upon. Recognizing that Afghan security forces are struggling against the Taliban and continuing to take unsustainable casualties, Washington again has decided that being more aggressive is the right answer. Rather than stick with its goal of withdrawing to 5,500 U.S. troops into the next administration, the White House will now keep 8,400 into next year. U.S. pilots have been granted more authority to not only defend Afghan units in the field who are attacked, but aid those same forces when they engage in offensive operations against the Taliban. In some cases, American advisers will also be permitted to embed with their Afghan counterparts during those operations.

As in the U.S. troop surge from 2010-12, putting more American boots on the ground will produce positive results on the battlefield in the short-term. No fighting force in the world can compete with the U.S. soldier, so more of them will naturally help the Afghan security forces reclaim districts in remote areas. But as with the surge, security and stability in Afghanistan will likely deteriorate as soon as those U.S. assets and authorities are taken away. This assessment is borne out by the facts: less than four years after U.S. surge forces were withdrawn, the Taliban hold more territory than they have since the war began in October 2001.

After providing nearly $70 billion in security assistance, Washington is still looking at an Afghanistan that cannot sustain itself, defend itself, and whose national economy is so weak that it depends on the international community to pay for its army and police, to the tune of $5 billion per year through 2020. What happens after that, and whether U.S. and NATO officials will reassess and tie their presence and strategy to Afghan government performance, is anyone's guess.

According to U.K. Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, ''This is the wrong time to walk away from Afghanistan.'' But this begs the question: will there ever be a right time to leave Afghanistan? And if the answer is no, is maintaining thousands of troops on the ground and pumping another $70 billion into Afghanistan's army the best way to keep the U.S. and Europe safe from another terrorist attack? Or are there other ways to do the same thing, but without a multi-decade military commitment?

One hopes that the next President will ask these important questions before continuing with the status quo.

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 15:00

Posted August 9th, 2016 @ 10:04am in #Trump#Clinton

If you have been following this blog since last year, you know I have been saying Trump was playing 3D chess against 2D opponents. And by that I meant Trump was using powerful persuasion techniques while the rest of the field was flailing away with facts, reason, policy details, and other things that don't change anyone's mind.

Then, in late spring, at about the time that Bernie Sanders' flamed out, Clinton ascended to the 3D playing field and stayed there, thanks to help '' I assume '' from one or more weapons-grade behavioral psychologists who joined the cause. For the past few months both candidates have operated in the third dimension, where emotion and persuasion rule, and facts are irrelevant.

Recently, Clinton has been winning in the third dimension. She abandoned her 2D rational arguments about experience and policies and started hypnotizing voters into believing they have the power to predict the future if they try hard enough. And in that imaginary future, Donald Trump is incinerating the world with nuclear fire because he can't take advice, or he's a narcissist, or he's unstable, or he's Hitler Version 2.0. This approach is excellent persuasion, and it is working for Clinton.

Don't expect to hear anything honest or true come from the mouths of either candidate for the rest of the campaign. Both candidates are skillfully building imaginary castles and make-believe demons out of your cognitive dissonance and your confirmation bias. You're seeing the best-of-the-best persuaders (and helpers) operating at the highest level. Facts and policies are sitting this one out.

If you are an American voter, in all likelihood you are deeply hypnotized already and don't know it. I mean that literally. At this point, nearly every voter is in a deep hallucination. I could give you lots of reasons why I know that, but you wouldn't believe any of them because cognitive dissonance won't let my words penetrate your bubble of non-reality.

But I'll try, just for fun.

If you support either Clinton or Trump for president, you are under the illusion that it makes sense to hire a 70-year old (approximately) for the most important job in the land '' and one that could last eight years. That would be absurd in any other hiring context. But you are brainwashed to believe it is perfectly fine in this case. It isn't.

Likewise, if you think either Clinton or Trump have good policy ideas, that is evidence that you are brainwashed. As a civilian, you have no idea which policies are better for the economy, or trade agreements, or immigration, or for battling ISIS. But you think you do because you have been brainwashed into believing that voters can know that sort of thing. They can't. The candidates don't know either.

But my favorite way to identify brainwashed citizens is by the way they start comments on social media. The brainwashed start with one of the following openers and then go on to offer either sarcasm or no argument at all.

Look for these tells to identify the brainwashed:

1. LOL

2. Wow.

3. So'...

4. In other words'...

5. OMG

6. HAHAHAHA!

7. (Any personal or professional insult)

8. Hitler analogy

To be clear, these are only tells if they don't accompany some sort of rational counter-arguments or facts. If you see LOL followed by a link to a good counter-argument, or to credible studies, that's not brainwashing. It is only when you see the tells presented as a substitute for reason that they signal brainwashing.

Another tell for brainwashing involves people hallucinating an opponent's opinion and using sarcasm to mock their own hallucination. Example: ''LOL. So you're saying we should put all poor people in jail? Wow.''

Look for those tells in others. But more importantly, look for them in yourself.

'--

If you have seen people use LOL on social media, you might love my book. I'm not sure why.

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 12:33

WASHINGTON'--A conservative watchdog group on Tuesday released 296 pages of emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's personal server, including many exchanges that weren't handed over to the government as part of the Democratic nominee's archive.

The new emails, released by the group Judicial Watch, offer fresh examples of how top Clinton Foundation officials sought access to the State Department during Mrs. Clinton's...

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 11:11

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 09:51

When gay marriage was legalized in so many states, my concern turned to other perversions '-- especially pedophilia.''Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.''Romans 1:32 (KJV)

EDITOR'S NOTE: When the Gay Movement began it's ascent to power, they realized pretty quickly that they did not have enough members in their ranks, with homosexual population in America being less than 5%. So they began to add various other perversions, forming the umbrella group that has become the LGBT. In the past year, they have been experimenting with adding the 'Q', which stands for queer. By the time they're done, they will have also added a 'P', for pedophile.

If the unnatural and perverted act of homosexuality, spoken of clearly in the Word of God as an abomination unto the Lord, what would keep the pedophiles from jumping on that same band wagon, claiming that their's too is just an alternate lifestyle?

Back in the 70's and 80's, pedophilia was considered by doctors to be a mental disorder, but so was homosexuality! Can you see the slippery slope effect coming into play?

''Since when is a crime a disability?'' asked Jeff Herrity. His son, Brian was a victim of child molestation by Catholic priest, Gil Gustafson from 1977 to 1982, Brian was ten years old when the abuse began. ''If that is the case, everyone in prison should be disabled'', said Herrity. This was thirty years ago, in 1983, Gustafson was convicted of molesting Brian and was sentenced to a forty dollar fine, ten years of probation, and six months in jail, he only served four and a half months and was released. The abuse ''mentally and physically destroyed'' him.

NAMBLA is the North American Man/Boy Love Association

Brian died in 1995 at 28. It is estimated that Gustafson abused between four and fifteen victims. In 2002, Officials in Rome sentenced Gustafson to a life of prayer and penance. In July of 2006, Gustafson was declared disabled and collects disability checks in addition to the support the Pension for Priests gives him. Gustafson also runs his own 'Leadership' consulting firm and the church nudges clients his way. So, disability, a church pension, and his own firm, yeah, he's living the life of a frugal priest, pardon me, ex, child molesting priest.

An assist professor at Rutgers University of Law is saying that pedophilia should be protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The people with the mental disorder pedophilia should not be discriminated against, because they were possibly abused as children. She also claims that pedophilia might possibly be genetic, neurochemical, or neuroanatomic. There have been some clear distinctions made between pedophilia and child molestation. Pedophilia is the sexual attraction to prepubescent children, that is not acted upon. It is just the desire. However, if a pedophile acts on his/her sexual desires, then it becomes child molestation, therefore, a crime. Most people use the terms interchangeably, but there is a difference.

Controversy Over Push to Redefine PedophiliaIn 1973 the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. Since then, there has been a slow, progressive move toward making LGBT more and more main stream. Now they have taken over the stream and are trying to drown anyone who is straight, Christian, and disagrees with them. If God meant for us to bang anything, we would all have both working parts. Having a government that promotes the militant LGBT agenda, particularly by not defining sexual orientation, is making it easier to introduce pedophilia as a sexual orientation and not a sexual deviancy. In 2003, a group of mental health professionals formed a group called to redefine pedophilia as a sexual orientation, calling them 'minor attracted people' or MAP.

Their goal is to get MAPS protected under the same laws as LGBT. There is an underlying progression to sexualize children at younger and younger ages by promoting the idea that normal friendships are actually sexual attraction. Once that idea is accepted, pedophilia will be accepted. I guess pedophilia will be removed as a mental disorder and they will lose their disability status.'' [1] '' source

Do they not factor in all the children who are harmed and scarred for life, when they consider making pedophilia normal and culturally acceptable? It brings to mind the pro-death crowd, whose mantra has always been ''It's our body, we can do what we want with it!'' But to that I've always rebutted that when a woman becomes pregnant, there are two bodies, not one!

In the same way, the pedophiles feel that they were born to desire pre-pubescent children in a sexual way. They care not about the children '-- only about themselves.''

I do hope and pray that our Lord Jesus comes to get His church away from this wasteland of sin and abominations.''The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.'' Genesis 6:11-13 (KJV)

And as in the time of Noah, people on earth '' oblivious to God '-- are eating and drinking and have no thought for tomorrow. They do not realize that the only safe place to be is in Jesus Christ our Savior.

MARANATHA DEAR LORD!!

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 09:22

Maandagnacht zat ik een stukje te tikken over Yuri van Gelder. Hij moest nog een week wachten voordat hij in de finale kon turnen. 'Verveling ligt op de loer', schreef ik. En ook dat ik hoopte dat Yuri zijn oefening aan de ringen zou eindigen zonder nahup. Dat bezorgde hem te veel aftrek van punten.

Al mijn woorden konden de volgende ochtend bij het groot vuil. Ik lag nog in bed en las op mijn mobiel het bericht dat hij de Spelen moest verlaten vanwege ontoelaatbaar gedrag.

In de tijd dat ik het televisieprogramma Holland Sport maakte, heb ik Van Gelder een paar keer ontmoet. Mijn indruk? Een aardige jongen met een licht onzekere oogopslag. En een manisch sporter met een ijzeren discipline tijdens de training in een turnzaaltje, een plek waar ik al na een week tegen de muren zou opvliegen.

Yuri turnt al sinds zijn vijfde. Waar een ander dagelijks zijn partner of huisdier begroet, zegt Yuri 'goedemorgen, jongens' tegen twee houten ringen.

Zijn lijf is zo hard als gewapend beton, de zwakte schuilt in zijn hoofd. Dat wist hij, dat wisten mensen om hem heen. Hoe sterk hij ook was in lichamelijke zin, sinds hij bekende verslaafd te zijn aan coca¯ne en moest afkicken, ging hij door het leven als 'die turner met zijn witte lijntje'. Het is een gruwelijk gegeven voor een topsporter; je ziet er onaantastbaar sterk uit, hangt moeiteloos secondenlang in de ringen maar de buitenwereld denkt alle rotzooi erbij.

Het idee dat Yuri van Gelder dinsdag vastzat met een gordel in een vliegtuig van Rio naar Nederland, bezorgde me hartzeer. Kwalificaties als 'dom' en 'zielig' zijn niet afdoende om iemand in zo'n situatie te typeren. Ik waag me er in ieder geval niet aan, ik ken hem maar een beetje.

Vragen spoken door mijn hoofd:

Waarom mag de Braziliaanse voetballer Neymar tijdens de Spelen ongestraft in een nachtclub rondlopen?

Waarom is biermagnaat Heineken de sponsor van het Holland House?

Wat zou ik doen als ik na jaren van hard trainen eindelijk in de finale van de Olympische Spelen sta? Hoe zou ik de spanning op een groot toernooi combineren met zaken die mijn geest verruimen en even lucht geven?

De antwoorden moeten van Yuri van Gelder komen. Hij mag ze ook voor zichzelf houden. Niet alles van een sporter gaat ons aan.

Ja, ik neem het op voor Yuri, wat er verder ook nog als een soort van sensationele nahup naar buiten komt over zijn nacht in Rio. Waarom? Ik heb een zwak voor iemand met een zwakte. Een zwak voor iemand die vlucht uit de zwaarte van zijn bestaan.

Deze column las Wilfried de Jong dinsdag voor op Radio 1.

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 09:17

The internet hilariously brutalizes Trump's tacky new fundraising gimmick '' gold 'membership' cards

Trump appears to have fallen out of love with the idea of being president

Dan Rather rips Trump's 'Second Amendment' rhetoric: 'A new low and unprecedented'

Oregon militant Ryan Bundy placed under higher security after 'threatening' cops

Four Fox women drop talking points and pummel male pundit calling Trump 'the ultimate feminist'

Planned Parenthood vandal cites Bible '-- gets shut down by judge who quotes scripture back to her

WATCH: CNN's Trump surrogate struggles to spin his anti-Clinton 'Second Amendment' remark

'Another stupid thing': CNN panel slams Katrina Pierson's excuse for Trump's '2nd Amendment' snafu

George R.R. Martin confirms release date for 'very special' 'Game of Thrones' tome

Paul Krugman shoots down conservative excuses for letting beaches and train lines rot

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 07:41

The Solomon Islands: Headed for Self-destruction?

by

Cherylee P. Sevilla

Abstract

Although the Solomon Islands are hardly mentioned within the spectrum of global news, they can be described as the center of extremely important global issues. Trying to live in a developing country becomes difficult when the country's natural resources start diminishing at alarming rates. While the natives barely survive by subsistence farming and hunting, major corporations and foreign investors obtain massive amounts of money by commercial logging and fishing. In fact, the tropical rain forests are predicted to be depleted in only three years if the government allows their logging licenses to continue at 4,000,000 cubic meters per year instead of a recommended sustainable harvest rate of 325,000 meters per year (Lineback, 1998). The nation's largest commercial fishery, Solomon Taiyo Ltd. illustrates the problem with declining fish stocks as their commercial catch dropped 20 percent from 1993 (Bank of Hawaii). The native populations as well as the investors place heavy demands on the ecosystem. Unfortunately, the environment will not be able to support all the needs and wants of everyone. Therefore, the duty to preserve the Solomon Islands lies in the cooperation of the government, the natives, and the corporations. By educating the population about how to take an active role in conservation and substitution, the Solomon's' resources can be saved. The political, social and economic arenas of the islands must work together to accomplish the common goal of protecting the environment. Since each arena affects the other, the process of destruction needs to be stopped at all levels.

Welcome to the Solomon Islands

"The chain of islands known as the Solomon Islands is located in the Pacific just to the north and east of the island of New Guinea and 1,000 miles (1,609 km.) northeast of Australia." (Lineback, 1998). They also occupy around 900 miles over the South Pacific Ocean, but the islands themselves are not always closely linked (see Figure 1). The Solomon Islands are part of the chain of Melanesian islands on the eastern side of the East Indies, and they include some Polynesian outliers (Kent, 1972). Each island possesses unique qualities that transcribes unto the villagers that settled within them. Choiseul, Guadalcanal, Malaita, New Georgia, Makira, and Santa Isabel are the six major islands which are divided into provinces with Honiara, Guadalcanal as the capital territory (see Figure 2).

Coral Islands

Several of the islands were formed from ancient volcanoes and lava flows, but Ontong Java and the other fringe islands are made of coral (Diamond, 1995). When microscopic sea creatures attach themselves to a solid base, they secrete lime as they multiply in number. As these secretions built one on top of each another, it become large enough to be called a coral reef. However, in the Solomon Islands the coral structures becomes so enlarged that it forms islands which are "thrust up from the sea by earthquakes or left as a ring when a mountain collapses" (Diamond, 1995). While Ontong Java is a group of low coral atolls that lays just above the sea, Bellona and Rennell are two of the largest existing atolls. Since Ontong Java's land consists mostly of salty soil, the inhabitants are forced to cook with sea water and collect rain for drinking water. Only the big islands had the luxury of underground streams for freshwater. On the other hand, Rennell and Bellona are tropical islands, and the former even has the largest lake in the South Pacific, Lake Tegano.

Volcanic Islands

Anuta, Fataka, and Tikopia are the last of the main islands, and along with the six major islands (Choiseul, Guadacanal, Malaita, New Georgia, Makira and Santa Isabel) they make up a group of volcanic islands. On some of the islands the trees cover as much as 90% of the area, and unique wildlife roams this encompassing as well. Furthermore, there are short, but fast-flowing rivers that channel into the ocean. They are the tips of undersea volcanoes that are common in the Pacific "Ring of Fire," and the smaller islands are where overpopulation starts being a problem (see Figure 3).

Natural Resources

Three main types of soil found on the Solomon Islands are volcanic, limestone and island soils. Volcanic soils can either be extremely fertile or just a top coating of volcanic dust over thin coral and clay (Kent, 1972). Limestone soil can become waterlogged easily on the plains, but it works better on higher altitudes. Using this type of soil will not produce good crops because it tends to be very infertile. Lastly, the island soils are barely able to support the Islanders that depend on subsistence farming to survive.

Minerals located on the Solomon Islands include gold, copper, bauxite, phosphate, nickel, and cobalt deposits. In December of 1997, the Leigh Resource Corporation attained a prospecting license that resulted in the discovery of "a porphyry copper gold system (Tango) and a structurally hosted epithermal gold system (Vulu)" on Vangunu Island. Although these findings appear to be good news, the Bougainville civil war tends to put a damper on the process of copper mining. An interesting twist involves the mining of coral from the ocean, and sand from the beaches.

Vegetation on the Solomons vary from more than 230 species of orchids to mangrove swamps or beaches lined with a few coconut palms near the shore area. "There are two main categories of forest: coastal, subdivided into beach forest and mangrove forest, and primary inland forest, subdivided into lowland and foothill forest, freshwater swamp, and mountain forest...the rain forest becomes increasingly dense, forming an enclosed world of its own..." (Kent, 1972). Bougainvillea vines, begonias and hibiscus are prominent flowering plants on the islands. Meanwhile, water lilies have been spotted in rivers. Multitudes of fruit including coconuts, bananas, almonds, papayas and apples grow in the wilds.

Hundreds of multi-colored butterflies (ex. blue birdwind butterfly) along with various species of birds flourish in the forests. Famous birds that habitat the Solomon Islands are parrots of every color in the rainbow, frigate birds and frogmouth birds. Within the forests lie spiders, pythons, Rana frogs, monitor lizards, geckos, skinks and the largest freshwater crocodiles in the world. About 20 distinct species of mosquitoes thrive on the islands because they thrive in the warm, wet climate. Some mammals that have evolved naturally or were shipped on boats include rats, bats, cuscuses, cats, dogs and cattle. By far the most important animals (economically) are aquatic creatures, namely fish. Bonito (a type of tuna), tunny, mackerel and porpoise are caught for commercial value. Other commodities sold for food comprise of shellfish and sea cucumbers. Amid the coral reefs swim invaluable species of tropical fish such as coral rock cod, a clown triggerfish and a gaimard wrasse. Other creatures located in the vicinity of the reefs are barracudas, sharks and longnosed garfish. Even the finback, sperm and sulfur-belly whales swim in deeper waters further away from shore.

A Market of Raw Materials

One of the biggest economic problems for the Solomons includes their precarious position as a market for raw materials. Their situation resembles the stages of colonialism because of their exportation of raw goods and importation of manufactured goods. Unless they learn how to manufacture the goods they need, it will be impossible for the country to become self-sufficient. Abdul Azeez, a fisherman on Thulusdhoo (in Maldives) accurately described the economic situation by saying that, "The world will have to limit economic activity if we want to prevent a disaster. But that is not going to happen, because every country, rich or poor, wants more than it has." Solomon Mamaloni, the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands made matters worse by pushing the previous Prime Minister's deadline for slapping a total ban on the export of roundlogs by 1999. Since the previous Prime Minister set the deadline for 1997, the new government fails to understand the urgency of the matter. Mamaloni also let the current logging be 9 times past the sustainable levels and loggable rain forests will be finished by the turn of the century. A bit ironic; logging controls will come in one year before there is nothing left to cut.(Islands Business Pacific). Mamaloni came up with selling oxygen and rain forest water to help the national deficit at $128 million dollars (1988).

As the years pass by, the population grows more diverse because of the massive foreign investment from other countries. Coconut plantations invaded the tropical rainforests after they've been cleared for the valuable timber. Money hungry companies from Malaysia, Japan, Australia and other Asian countries take advantage of the Solomon Islanders because of their lack of economic (human-made) capital. The entire country depends on foreign countries for manufactured products, but they are not going to get these goods for free. The Islanders need to have a stable cash flow to purchase all the goods that they need. Unfortunately, the only valuable exports are natural resources such as timber, fish (tuna), and copra. While the Solomon government led by Mamaloni sells permits to the forest 'butchers' (foreign companies), the indigenous people are starting to protest. What shall happen to us if life as we know it changes with the destruction of our habitat? What will happen to our knowledge and traditions that has been passed from generation to generation for hundreds of years?

Social Aspects

The Way of Life

The Solomon Islanders vary from island to island, and village to village. With a population of 400,000 people (WPDS, 1997), there are an amazing 60 different dialects being spoken. Religion, tradition, and other ways of life are dissimilar within each group. The Islanders even look unlike each other. "About 90 percent of the working population is involved in subsistence agriculture, but less than 2 percent of the land is under cultivation" (Diamond, 1995). A large work force in a small concentrated area of occupation emulates the situation on most of the islands. The Solomons have no railroads, about 2,100 km of road (800 km of private logging and plantation roads), 27 usable airports, two industries (copra, tuna), 4 AM radio stations, no TV, and an external debt of $128 million dollars (www.op). Most of the population are Christian (97%), others are Bahai or still follow traditional beliefs. Each tribe or village tends to depart from the common experience because their way of life varies depending on location, tradition and beliefs.

For example, the Vaturanga live in the northwestern part of Guadalcanal, and they "depend heavily upon their traditional lands and their traditional skills for day to day survival. They grow many crops in their gardens, fish on nearby coral reefs, occasionally hunt wild pigs, and keep domestic pigs and chickens" (www.geocities). They are socially organized into matrilineal clans which control things like the land and resources. The Vaturanga believe in tidao (devils), female spirits, and magic (good and bad). Another example would be the Kwaio who are bush people living on Malaita Island, and they have taboos such as women being kept separate from men. Thus, the Solomon Islands is "home to some of the world's most diverse peoples" (Diamond, 1995).

Education

Education takes the number one position in the battle for the conservation of the natural resources on the Solomon Islands. During the 1960's, there were only 3 university graduates in the whole population. Families could not afford to send their sons to high school because of the high tuition, room/board and the cost of transportation to Honiara. At this time period, there existed only one high school. If someone wanted to attend a college or university, they had to be sent to Fiji, Papua New Guinea, or even Australia or England (Diamond, 1995). Although these numbers have increased over the years to sixty students attending school abroad, the literacy rate is only 60% due to difficulty in finding books or a school in certain villages. Women tend to be less educated than their male counterparts. Both sexes need to receive the same opportunities to help shape their future. Education has to be achieved because the Solomon Islanders need more doctors, scientists, lawyers and businessmen.

One of the obstacles to education is the enormous diversity of the people. The villages themselves are physically isolated from each other on many islands. Each tribe or clan has a different belief system, laws, traditions, and even languages. How can you teach everyone about their perilous situation if there are sixty languages to contend with? But, according to the citizens of Maldives, it can be done. "Even residents with little formal education can ramble on about the issue" (Filkins, 1997). What issue are they talking about? Global warming, the stubbornness of the North in limiting emissions into the air, and the threat of sea levels rising.

Population Growth

According to the 1997 World Population Data Sheet, the Solomon Islands have a population of .4 million people with a total fertility rate of 5.7. However, the life expectancy of both the male and the female is uncharacteristically high on par with more developed countries. The combination of these statistics with the natural increase of 3.4% forecasts a continual increase in population. One solution to help slow down the birth rate would be to educate the women. If the women are able to work in different fields and learn about contraception, there would be a decline in the total fertility rate. Forced migration already occurs on the smaller islands due to the inability of the land to sustain the rising population. Since the soil yields only to subsistence levels of the current population, many families need to move into less impacted areas. Another limiting factor involves the shortage of freshwater on the coral atolls. Mosquitoes are the number one carriers of disease, so the members of the village can not prevent contamination by avoiding their fellow villagers.

Health Care Crisis

Without necessary medical facilities and faculty, several diseases spread throughout the islands at an alarming rates. Malaria still runs rampant among the Solomon Islands because of the underdevelopment of a health care infrastructure. "In 1992, the Solomon Islands recorded a national rate of 440 malarial cases per 1,000 population" (Toka, 1997). Since malaria affects a good number of Solomon Islanders, international aid agencies need to continue with their monetary support towards a solution. For example, the United Nations Development program in Fiji donated $548,000 for the implementation of a sustainable community-based malaria control program in the Solomon Islands (Toka, 1997). George Taleo, the national malaria supervisor on the neighboring island of Vanuatu explains that "efforts are focused on the use of permethrin-treated bednets, ultra-low volume spraying through fogging and biological control using larvivorous fish which is now increasingly being done by local communities." Accomplishing a 10 out of a thousand incidence rate and a zero mortality rate for malaria, requires the cooperation of government to create a working health care system. Other forms of illness also starts to appear as the Mamaloni government fails to initiate the development of a stable medical field. "The incidence of filariasis is increasing in tropical and subtropical areas because of the rapid and unplanned growth of cities, which provide breeding sites for the mosquitoes that carry the disease" (Maugh II, 1998). Filariasis is a fairly recent disease that affects both men and women by swelling limbs and appendages to grotesque sizes. The most interesting side to this disease is the ostracizing and rejection of people when they contract this disease.

Government and Policy

By the 1900s, Great Britain had the Solomon Islands under their control. While under the first British commissioner, Morris Woodford, the Solomon Islanders lost much of their land because Woodford had a different definition of property. Villagers viewed the land as a group holding, like the commons in England. The only reason areas of land seemed vacant was during a 'rest' period. When the islanders sold their land to pay off debts or gave into the pressure by Woodford, they "often sold land with the belief that the land would revert back to them when the person who made the purchase died...purchasing the land did not mean purchasing the trees on the land, nor would purchasing the trees mean that the land had been purchased" (Diamond, 1995). Land rights remains a big problem today because most of the Solomon Islanders still have a communal ownership system. In fact, these properties are extended into the ocean up to the coral reefs in certain cases. Furthermore, some of the Islanders have tried to retrieve the land that Woodford sold to foreigners by taking them to court. Unfortunately, most of the cases heard in 1990 ruled in favor of the purchaser.

During World War II (1941-1944), the Japanese invaded the Solomon Islands. Although "the actual invasion and combat only lasted two years...its effects changed the Solomon Islanders and their relationship with Europeans forever"(Diamond, 1995). When the Japanese occupation began, many of the Europeans left the islands. Soon the Japanese soldiers tortured the people by looting the churches and destroying villages. The Europeans that remained started a group called the "coast watchers." With the help of the natives, they managed to set up a spy ring, and broadcast ship movements in makeshift radio stations. The Solomon Islanders also helped the American soldiers by joining the Solomon Island Labour Corps whose job was to unload cargo, and bring ammunition to the front lines. After the war ended, the Solomon Islanders lost the respect and fear they had for Britain because the Americans had treated them with both respect and generosity during the war. "The country became restless under British rule"(Diamond, 1995).

In 1978, the Solomon Islands were officially declared an independent nation. However, the Solomons are still considered a member of the Commonwealth which means that Britain appoints a governor-general who advises the Solomon government. With the about 90% of the population depending on subsistence agriculture, fishing and forestry for at least part of their livelihood (www.op), the Islanders aren't too happy with the government for exporting these commodities away (agriculture, fishing and forestry is 75% of GDP). The Solomons have a 650 million pound deficit, and when the government-owned plantations were sold last year, more than 450 forestry workers became unemployed. So the foreign companies are not only getting the timber, but the government has eliminated the possibility of the Islanders earning money for doing the labor. What brilliant plan had the government thought of to help ease this horrible situation? They're going to sell rain forest oxygen and water.

The people countered this idea by stating that oxygen remains the same no matter where it's collected, and the fact that rain forest water may not be such a good idea. "The sad irony is that bottled water may become a necessity, not just a tourist item, as good drinking water becomes harder to find and the supply to Honiara increasingly erratic" (Baird, 1996). Maybe Mamaloni should concentrate more on the problems staring him in the face and less on the possibility of selling oxygen.

On a positive note, the public was outraged when they discovered that a Malaysian logging firm bribed 7 of their government ministers. Another powerful incident of protest occurred over $10 billion dollars compensation for back-payments of profits and environmental concerns when the Panguna mine (Bougainville, Papua New Guinea) was raped of it's gold, silver and especially copper. When Bougainville Copper Limited refused to pay up, the Bougainville Resistance Organization repeatedly attacked the workers and equipment . A civil war forced the mine to close in 1989. Foreign "timber companies will fail even to abide by minimal good management practices" (Baird, 1996). When is the government going to step in and regulate what the logging companies have promised to do? Ten years from now when there are no more trees to cut? With the environmentalists and the indigenous people leading the way towards conservation, they are beginning to understand that the economy, society and the environment are not interchangeable. Wanting to limit the influence of foreign investors does not make it so, the Solomon Islanders have a lot of hard work ahead of them if they want to achieve environmental, economic and social sustainability.

Technical Aspects

Deforestation

A recent Australian study concluded that the sustainable harvest rate for the Solomon Islands amounted to 325,000 cubic meters per year. "Actual logging rates are 700,000 cubic meter per year...The government, however, has issued logging licenses for 4,000,000 cubic meters per year...such an elevated logging rate (12 times the sustainable rate) could deplete the Solomon Island's forests in only three years" (Lineback, 1998). With only 5 million acres of tropical rain forest left, these logging rates are alarming. The Solomon government seems to believe that they don't have much of a choice when it comes to selling the Island's timber off to the highest bidders. Foreign investment companies buy plots of land by purchasing a permit from the government to cut down the precious trees. Logging companies are by far the biggest threat to the tropical rain forests, and yet they are still increasing their production rate. Some companies have resorted to illegal exportation and the violation of sacred tribal sites. In addition, the coconut plantations also owned by foreign investors treat the land without any environmental considerations. The constant use and re-use of the same areas of land also degrades the soil. Include all the subsistence farmers that still use the slash and burn technique into the equation, and the forests don't have a chance. In fact, firms have started to "violate established conservation practices by cutting slopes of more than 30 degrees, which causes erosion, and within 50 yards of streams, which pollutes the waterways" (Gray, 1996).

Soil Erosion

Since the nutrients in the tropical rain forest are not stored in the soil, the loss of deep-rooted trees can convert the soil into a drier mass vulnerable to wind and rain. While the trees suffer harsh logging rates, the streams and rivers become polluted with infertile runoff. With the logging companies ignoring the "rule that says they must leave a strip of untouched forest beside any waterway" (Baird, 1996), bodies of water fall victim to discarded sediment. Much of the dirt discharges into the water, and it flows down river all the way into the ocean. Furthermore, coastal erosion interferes with the process of sedimentation that protects the shoreline from storms and hurricanes. Any change in the process, "through alterations in external factors such as sediment supply, wave direction, wave height and vegetation growth, will elicit a temporary response in island size, shape or location" (Bayliss-Smith, 1988).

Habitat Destruction

Cutting down the rain forests affects more than just the soil. Various species occupied the forest, and they depended on each other for survival. Unlike other areas the climate on the Solomon Islands creates "a competitive environment where monocultures, or large areas of a single species, seldom occur naturally. The rain forest, then, is composed of intermingled species, rather than large stands of one species"(Lineback, 1998). Without fertile soil the different types of vegetation such as the underbrush or flowers perish. After the plants die from malnutrition, the herbivores that counted on the vegetation for nourishment die of starvation. A pattern forms when the animals that feed upon insects or small herbivores die without their food source. Finally, the process reaches the Solomon Islanders who can't grow crops or hunt any animals to feed themselves.

Habitat destruction can also occur beneath the ocean's surface in the coral reefs. Several things contribute to the eradication of the process that keeps the reefs alive. The most direct method involves the collecting of coral for the conversion into lime. "Mining coral removes habitat of local marine species, and weakens coastal storm defenses" (Meltzoff, 1988). Hurricanes are common in the Solomon Islands, and they can create sandbars offshore if they beach doesn't possess enough sand. Another example is when sedimentation from deforestation makes it into the ocean, then the water quality drops. The change in quality could affect the organisms that build up the coral reefs. With less sunlight hitting the surface of the water, photosynthesis slows down, and fewer amounts of plankton are produced. For plankton feeding fish, the loss of nutrition means a reduction in the population size. Food chains in the ocean alter as the number of species in the water changes dramatically. On the other hand, if too much nitrogen and phosphorous flow down into the ocean, dangerous algae blooms can occur. Such occurrences have been known to kill fish, shellfish, and possibly humans that come in contact with either of the previous two. Massive clumps of plankton also attracts heat, so the water will invariably become warmer which can affect the coral reefs.

Fisheries

The Solomon Islands' fisheries are definitely in trouble with the amount of overfishing taking place. "Most important in the Solomon Islands...is the open-sea commercial tuna fishery, whose dominant pole-and-line technology is completely dependent on a regular supply of live baitfish from coastal lagoons under customary jurisdiction"(Hviding, 1996). Commercial fishermen along with natives catch two times more fish than the ocean can supply naturally. An increasing trend between these two parties includes a major debate between the local population's "limited entry" ideology and the industrial sector's "open access" ideology. The former ideology concentrating more on area-intensive marine resource use versus the latter ideology of area-extensive. Since fish brings in large amounts of money (about 30% of all income earnings), the country fails to regulate the market efficiently. Furthermore, tribal peoples also depend heavily on what they catch from the ocean to survive.

Global Warming

"For such countries--the Maldives, the Solomon Islands, Samoa, Fiji and others--even a small rise in the world's sea levels could mean not just washed-out sea walls and eroded coastlines but national catastrophe and even extinction"(Filkins, 1997). Many of the Solomon Islands are barely above sea level especially the coral atolls and the raised coral reefs. If global warming continues to melt the polar ice caps, then the Solomon Islanders need to prepare now for a possible disaster. If the predictions of a rise anywhere from 6 inches to 3 feet by 2100 (International Panel on Climate Change) comes true, there must be massive migrations unto safer islands. Although the islands themselves are not producing the dangerous emissions, they are the ones who will pay the price for them. The developed countries like the United States are refusing to cut back the air pollution to the levels asked for by the Pacific Islands.

Biodiversity and Exotic Species

As the environment changes whether it was due to a change in temperature (climate or ocean) or quality (water, air or soil), the species habituating that area must change as well. Darwinism starts to penetrate the Islands because only the strong will survive. When scarcity hits the Solomons, the organisms that can live off the least amount of food or water shall prevail. An extremely wonderful example of a complex ecosystem that may soon be threatened are the mangroves. The mangroves are tropical wetlands that possess unique qualities not found in any areas of the world. For example, the mangroves contain highly saturated soils and trees with three unusual features. They have prop roots which balances the tree on unconsolidated soil, and unwittingly becomes a center of biodiversity. Pneutophores (snorkels) and viviparous seeds are the remaining characteristics which allow the mangroves to thrive in a stratified area impacted by freshwater (from the rivers) as well as saltwater (from the ocean).With only .2 square kilometers of salt-tolerant mangroves left, these rare wetlands must be protected.

A narrow surviving corridor of species decreases the biodiversity of the islands because natural selection leaves behind several organisms. The ocean will also start to homogenize when water quality changes, and only a few marine creatures can adapt quick enough to survive. Although evolution takes decades or even centuries to change the demography of species, the threat of exotic species seems to be moving quicker than ever. For some reason, exotics are able to thrive in less than favorable conditions compared to native species. Combined with one or all of the other environmental problems, exotic species can be the end of many organisms. The Solomon Islands communicate with other countries mainly by ship because of their isolated situations. Usually ships travel all over the world, and they can be carriers of exotic ships especially with the practice of using "ballast water." For the time being, the major exotic species infestation in the Solomons are ants.

Problems

Social Problems

Solomon Islanders tend to live in isolated villages along different islands (with the exception of Honiara), and they rarely share a common culture. With such a diverse population, achieving certain goals are only going to be the result of hard work and dedication. Problems that stem from the enormous variety include:

Nationwide communication due to the language barrier.The establishment of treaties or contracts between the government, the native population and the foreign investors.Educational progress in accordance with the development of new structures and faculty.A shift away from short-term benefits.Economic ProblemsAs a developing country, the Solomons are no exception when it comes to their economic standing in the world. Their economic status mirrors those of nineteenth and twentieth century "colonies" to the stronger powers. The more developed countries (ex. Japan) sell the Solomon Islands manufactured goods, in return for raw materials such as timber and fish. As a market for raw materials, the Solomons experience these problems:

Dependence on developed countries for manufactured goods.Exportation of slow regenerative products.Lack of capital and infrastructure.Loss of employment due to selling raw logs.Controversies between natives and foreigners over land and sea ownership.Political Problems"Particularly important, moreover, are the roles of formal political institutions as mediators and conveyors of the different views of traditional users and new parties" (Hviding, 1996). The government holds the key to uniting the Solomon Islanders in the struggle for their resources:

Government regulation of tropical rainforests.Government enforcement of conservation practices and environmental policies.Government subsidies for the advancement of education and research for export substitution. OpportunitiesSocial Opportunities

With the Solomon Islanders being such a diverse nation, the language and cultural barrier between each tribe poses a serious threat to any community based project. Since the educational programs are behind in manpower and technology, there must be a major push towards a new network which includes the development of new facilities to teach the people within their own villages. To stop the alarming rates of destruction of the forests and aquatic environments, people are going to have to understand one another. Simple as it may sound, the cultural gaps between each individual tribe, the collective indigenous population and the commercial or industrial (usually foreign) investors run miles apart from each other. The first step to breach such distances between tradition and modern styles of thinking revolves around educating all parties. This goal involves massive changes to existing structures of educational policy because there are not enough faculty or administration to implement such an extensive plan. However, the most important factor (in anything these days) in the building of new schools and colleges is and always will be money. The real challenge to this project requires looking at the long-term benefit rather than the short-term, but today's economic policies are geared towards the immediate gain.

Economic Opportunities

If the Solomon Islands remain a market of natural resources, long-term problems will arise due to scarcity. The natural resources taken out of the earth will not be able to regenerate themselves as quickly as before, and with an increasing population this trend could speed up even more. A proposed plan includes "the regime of investment incentives will be streamlined and reoriented to induce import substitution activity, production for export markets and tourism development as means of reducing the country's dependence on imported manufactured goods and the export of primary products"(www.solomons). However, the production of substitutes and the creation of a tourist industry utilizes a lot of time, energy and capital.

Since the government has been selling their former plantations wholesale to foreign investors, the Solomon Islanders lost a vital income because the logging companies were able to cut and transport the raw logs themselves. Creating a substitution process for things that the Islands usually import, the government could give jobs back to the people in that production line. Starting this project takes a group of professionals who are well-trained in the sciences of economics and ecology. These scientists need to work together in assessing the islands for elements that can be used for substitution as well how to set up an industry without creating more damage than the rampant logging managed to do. After the creation of the working process, the Solomon Islanders learn the trade and passes it down from generation to generation. Preferably, every village adds extracurricular activity to educate the public in the dangers of unsustainable living like the people of Maldives.

Eco-tourism seems to be the new rage within the development of beautiful third world countries. In fact, the Solomon Islands looks like "an ideal vacation spot-sparkling, clear blue water, a fine sandy beach, great reef diving, snorkeling, canoeing and fishing, not to mention friendly people and delicious seafood...there's always hiking in the pristine rainforests, visits to the colourful local markets, or absorbing the local culture"(Hunnam, 1996). With all these wonderful things to do, who wouldn't want to spend an ideal vacation here (see Figure 4)? The Michi Village, a small community tourism venture was designed to meet community, cultural and conservation needs (1997). The "tourism project has also brought social and cultural benefits to the community...traditional customs, dance, song, and history-undocumented knowledge passed orally from one generation to the next..." (Hunnam, 1997). The key to the success of this resort was the involvement of the community and the joining of indigenous knowledge to the professional arena of thought.

Although the Michi Village achieved success, "the Solomon Islands are not well suited for mass market tourism, because of their size and fragility of the environment, and because of the inconvenience in transport, as yet rudimentary infrastructure, and the high cost of getting to and staying in the islands"(www.boh). Another pressing problem for the islands are the numerous cases of malaria. "Although research has been conducted over the years, malaria remains a serious problem and an impediment both to foreign travel and foreign investment" (www.boh). Most critics of eco-tourism on a massive scale agree that the only beneficial solution contains a plan for a niche market aimed at small pools of tourists. On a local level, one group of handcrafters look forward to the increase in local market opportunities, while the other side (mainly fishers) are nervous about a serious decrease in native access to the fishing grounds. Since the bulk of tourists visit the Solomon Islands for the "untouched" coral reefs, the local fishers are wary of resorts marking off places for them to fish because of the wants of the tourists. "Despite this emphasis of the tourist operation on not touching the reefs, but merely looking at them, conflict has arisen at intervals between the resort managers and the groups who use and have customary control over the reefs where diving takes place"(Hviding, 1996). Customary respect for the leaders of butubutus (tribes) requires the resort managers to ask for permission to dive around the coral reefs as well as monetary compensation. Needless to say, this tradition causes several problems between the local and foreign players.

Political Opportunities

With the government allowing the foreign logging and fishing companies to reap all of the Solomon's natural resources, the people have to take action. Prime Minister Mamaloni has proposed to sell oxygen and rain forest water as a solution towards environmental sustainability (Baird, 1996). This idea remains absurd considering the fact that within the turn of the century the loggable rain forest will be demolished. The Mamaloni government should begin demanding the implementation of conservation practices and restrictions on the extraction of natural resources. For example, a simple thing that the government could do was to enforce the conservation laws already in place like forcing the logging firms to cut the slopes less than 30 degrees which would avoid erosion and the pollution of the waterways (Gray, 1996). Or simply planting more trees, and cutting them down at a decreased rate. Limiting the number of plantations (timber or coconut) will help conserve the soil, and keep the waterways cleaner. Furthermore, the government can incorporate the indigenous knowledge from the native population with scientists to create a workable plan in reviving the ravished areas. After all, the Solomon Islanders used to rotate the fields and they all are professionals when it comes to subsistence farming.

In the ocean and surrounding aquatic areas, the government must take a stand with the locals in their move towards environmentally stable fish and shellfish populations. Instead of catering to the needs of the foreign investors, the Mamaloni government needs to improve the depleting numbers of sea creatures (tuna being the number one fishing industry). Since the sheltered reef and lagoon systems of the Solomons have suitable conditions for lagoon-based aquaculture, the Solomon Islanders started small-scale farms of seaweed and giant clams. These clams are a highly valued local food, and a potential export for the Asian markets. Unfortunately, the value of the giant clams triggered extensive poaching by mainly Taiwanese ships. One thing the government created in cooperation with ICLARM (International Center for Living Aquatic Resource Management was an international coastal aquaculture research center. This center resides at Aruligo on the northwest side of Guadalcanal, and was established by the Manila-based ICLARM in 1987. The Aruligo research center aims "to develop suitable farming systems for the village-based cultivation of giant clams, with a view both to rural cash cropping an to restocking depleted reefs"(Hviding, 1996). For the Solomon Islands this experiment qualifies as a big step forward in the conservation and protection of the coral reefs and the surrounding waters.

Conclusions

The Solomon Islands possess valuable natural resources that should be protected because they are vanishing at an appalling rate. Beautiful lagoons, rushing rivers and lush rainforests cover the islands, and contribute to the illusion of a tropical paradise (see Figure 5). In reality, the Solomons resemble a giant magnet that attracts foreign investors and commercial opportunists. According to an Australian study, logging companies devastate the rainforests at more than twice the sustainable rate, around 700,000 cubic meters a year. What does the Mamaloni government do to try and stop the unsustainable rate? The government issued even more logging licenses that added up to a harvest rate of 4,000,000 cubic meters per year (Lineback, 1998). Another large export commodity for the Solomons involves massive amounts of fish. With the natives fishing for their survival and the commercial enterprises fishing for money, the number of catch per unit effort decreases. In other words, catching the same amount of fish for everyone will take a larger amount of energy (technology or labor). Furthermore, the majority of the population remains unaware of the pressing problems happening around them. Without the creation of a stable health and educational infrastructure, the Solomon Islanders can not deal with the onslaught of social-economic problems. The only way to improve the conditions of the Solomon Islands involves the full cooperation of the government in protecting the environment and providing adequate information to ensure the survival of the people. What has the government recently proposed to help the islands? Selling rainforest oxygen and water seems ridiculous as a solution to the preservation of the natural environment. Unfortunately, the government still needs to get their heads out of the clouds, and plant their feet firmly on the ground.

ReferencesBaird, Nicola. "Unwisdom of the Solomons." New Scientist 149 (1996): 30-33.

"Bank of Hawaii-Solomon Islands Economic Report." 1998. Internet. Bank of Hawaii. 26 Apr. 1998.

Bayliss-Smith, T.P. "The Role of Hurricanes in the Development of Reef Islands, Ontong Java Atoll, Solomon Islands." The Geographical Journal 154 (1988): 377-391.

Diamond, Judith. Solomon Islands. Chicago: Children's Press, 1995. "Ethnography of the Vaturanga." 1989. Internet. Geocities. 21 Apr. 1998.

Executive Project Summary Project. Leigh Resource Corporation. Dec. 1997.

Filkins, Dexter. "Maldives Faces Global Warming Goliath." Los Angeles Times 29 Nov. 1997: A1.

Gray, Denis D. "Asian Loggers Cutting a Swath Through World's Rain Forests." Los Angeles Times 25 Aug. 1996: A2.

Hanley, Charles J. "Islanders Ask U.N. Aid Against Rising Waters." The Orange County Register 25 June. 1997: A10.

Hunnam, Peter. "Ecotourism Takes Off." 1 Jan. 1996. Worldwide Forest/Biodiversity Campaign News. Internet. Ecological Enterprises. 12 Apr. 1998.

Hviding, Edvard. Guardians of Marovo Lagoon. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1996.

Kent, Janet. The Solomon Islands. Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 1972.

Lineback, Neal. "Paradise Lost?" Geography in the News. Internet. International Map Trade Association. 21 Apr. 1998.

Maugh II, Thomas H. "Deflating a Swelling Disease." Los Angeles Times 29 Jan. 1998: B2. "Solomon Islands Forests to be Cleared before Controls in Place." 12 July 1995.

PNGRainforest Campaign News. Internet. Ecological Enterprises. 12 Apr. 1998.

Toka, Edmond. "Huge Dose of Foreign Funds to Fight Malaria." 5 June 1997. The Black World Today. Internet. 8 June 1998.

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 07:21

Huma Abedin Emails Show Clinton Foundation Donor Demands on State Department

(Washington DC) '' Judicial Watch today released 296 pages of State Department records, of which 44 email exchanges were not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to 171 of new Clinton emails (not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department). These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, ''as far as she knew,'' all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department

The new documents reveal that in April 2009 controversial Clinton Foundation official Doug Band pushed for a job for an associate. In the email Band tells Hillary Clinton's former aides at the State Department Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin that it is ''important to take care of [Redacted]. Band is reassured by Abedin that ''Personnel has been sending him options.'' Band was co-founder of Teneo Strategy with Bill Clinton and a top official of the Clinton Foundation, including its Clinton Global Initiative.

Included in the new document production is a 2009 email in which Band, directs Abedin and Mills to put Lebanese-Nigerian billionaire and Clinton Foundation donor Gilbert Chagoury in touch with the State Department's ''substance person'' on Lebanon. Band notes that Chagoury is ''key guy there [Lebanon] and to us,'' and insists that Abedin call Amb. Jeffrey Feltman to connect him to Chagoury.

Chagoury is a close friend of former President Bill Clinton and a top donor to the Clinton Foundation. He has appeared near the top of the Foundation's donor list as a $1 million to $5 million contributor, according to foundation documents. He also pledged $1 billion to the Clinton Global Initiative. According to a 2010 investigation by PBS Frontline, Chagoury was convicted in 2000 in Switzerland for laundering money from Nigeria, but agreed to a plea deal and repaid $66 million to the Nigerian government.

Clinton's top aides' favors for and interactions with the Clinton Foundation seem in violation of the ethics agreements that Hillary Clinton agreed to in order to be appointed and confirmed as Secretary of State. For example, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton on January 5, 2009, in a letter to State Department Designated Agency Ethics Official James H. Thessin:

''For the duration of my appointment as Secretary if I am confirmed, I will not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter involving specific parties in which The William J. Clinton Foundation (or the Clinton Global Initiative) is a party or represents a party'....''

As preparation for Hillary's upcoming visit to Asia, Stephen Roach, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, on Feb. 11, 2009, sends Hillary a copy of his upcoming testimony before Congress in which he would condemn any U.S. efforts to criticize Chinese monetary policy or enact trade barriers. Several days later, Hillary asked Abedin about Roach possibly ''connecting'' with her while she was in Beijing: ''I forwarded you my email to him about connecting in Beijing. Can he come to the embassy or other event?'' Morgan Stanley is a long-time financial supporter of the Clintons.

The emails also reveal that Abedin left then-Secretary Clinton's daily schedule, a presumably sensitive document, on a bed in an unlocked hotel room. An email on April 18, 2009, during a conference in Trinidad and Tobago, from aide Melissa J. Lan to Huma Abedin asks for the Secretary's ''day book binders.'' Abedin replies: ''Yes. It's on the bed in my room. U can take it. My door is open. I'm in the lobby.Thx.'' Moreover, the emails show the annoyance of another Clinton aide that the schedule was sent to an authorized State Department email address and not to an unsecured non-state.gov account.

The emails reveal that Clinton campaign adviser and pollster Mark Penn advised Clinton on NATO and piracy. Another major Clinton fundraiser, Lana Moresky, also pushed Clinton to hire someone for a position at State. Clinton directed Abedin to follow up and ''help'' the applicant and told Abedin to ''let me know'' about the job issue.

The emails show that Hillary Clinton relied on someone named ''Justin'' (presumably Justin Cooper, a Bill Clinton and Clinton Foundation employee), to set up her cell phone voicemail, rather than having State Department personnel handle it. This was in a February 11, 2009, email from Clinton aide Lauren Jiloty to Clinton, using Clinton's hdr22@clintonmail.com address.

This is the ninth set of records produced for Judicial Watch by the State Department from the non-state.gov email accounts of Huma Abedin.

The documents were produced under a court order in a May 5, 2015, Freedom of Information (FOIA) lawsuit against the State Department (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00684)) requiring the agency to produce ''all emails of official State Department business received or sent by former Deputy Chief of Staff Huma Abedin from January 1, 2009 through February 1, 2013, using a 'non-state'.gov email address.''

''No wonder Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin hid emails from the American people, the courts and Congress,'' said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. ''They show the Clinton Foundation, Clinton donors, and operatives worked with Hillary Clinton in potential violation of the law.''

In June, Judicial Watch uncovered two batches (here and here) of new Clinton email records through court-ordered discovery.

Twice in May, Judicial Watch uncovered new Clinton emails, including emails that show Clinton knew about the security risk of her BlackBerry (see here and here).

Recently, Judicial Watch released other State Department emails (one batch of 103 pages, the second of 138 pages), with newly discovered Clinton emails also going back as far as January 2009.

In March, Judicial Watch released Clinton State Department emails dating from February 2009 that also call into question her statements about her emails. Those emails contained more evidence of the battle between security officials in the State Department, National Security Administration, Clinton and her staff over attempts to obtain secure BlackBerrys.

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly stated that she believes that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails. In response to a court order in other Judicial Watch litigation, she declared under penalty of perjury that she had ''directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.'' This new email find is also at odds with her official campaign statement suggesting all ''work or potentially work-related emails'' were provided to the State Department.

###

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 06:33

On July 8, 2016, 27 year-old Democratic staffer Seth Conrad Rich was murdered in Washington DC. The killer or killers took nothing from their victim, leaving behind his wallet, watch and phone.

Shortly after the killing, Redditors and social media users were pursuing a ''lead'' saying that Rich was en route to the FBI the morning of his murder, apparently intending to speak to special agents about an ''ongoing court case'' possibly involving the Clinton family.

Seth Rich's father Joel told reporters, ''If it was a robbery '-- it failed because he still has his watch, he still has his money '-- he still has his credit cards, still had his phone so it was a wasted effort except we lost a life.''

The Metropolitan police posted a reward for information on Rich's murder.

On Tuesday Wikileaks offered a $20,000 reward for information on the murder of DNC staffer Seth rich.

Now this'...Julian Assange suggested on Tuesday that Seth Rich was a Wikileaks informant.Via Mike Cernovich:

Was Seth Rich, the source of #DNCleaks, murdered? https://t.co/bKwYQJcmQp

'-- Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 10, 2016

Julian Assange seems to suggests on Dutch television program Nieuwsuur that Seth Rich was the source for the Wikileaks-exposed DNC emails and was murdered.

From the video:

Julian Assange: Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. As a 27 year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington.

Reporter: That was just a robbery, I believe. Wasn't it?

Julian Assange: No. There's no finding. So'... I'm suggesting that our sources take risks.

HOLY SH*T!

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 01:11

As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.This post is on NYC824 in a reality check that each of you is going to have to face in this screen which you are looking at have a 6 in 10 chance will be blue screen on the 24th. So for you wealthy non donors who think you can hide, the nuclear light is going to find you sooner or later.

I have more on this in the coming days, but in flash checking those behind this are nervous. The bomb builders have lost their desire in thinking of all they which are about to die. There is something in inquiry about a secondary target consideration, but as this is designed for one location for multiple use, a second event is being rejected.By God's Grace the time line has been altered, but there is still as of this moment on Tuesday morning a 4 in 10 chance this will still take place.

I do not........I have not had the time to examine why, but since this became something of focus, I have been completely drained and I am having to work harder to focus. Assessment points to I am being affected by the time line. That much life force I/R hundreds of thousands or millions of dead, being exterminated is drawing down my life force. I can feel them. I can feel you clawing to life and that is a number of souls trying to stay alive and as I am in the matrix it is taking energies from me.

There is a great effect out there, more massive than 9 11 in that primal scream. I did not .............can not find the correct word here......I did not anticipate (thank you Holy Ghost) I did not anticipate this effect upon me.

This though is not about me. It is about your understanding the raw data in this, as while the Lame Cherry has spoken of how to create a secondary grid cheaply, the GOP has the EMP plank in their platform and Newt Gingrich is well aware of this need, it takes time. The project can not be done without Donald Trump in office, so I will lay this out for you, so your wee minds will create a jolt of fear which can actually have you doing something positive than just being lumps on a keyboard.

When a nuclear device detonates, it creates many things from heat which makes air pressure waves to electronic effects from EMP to lightning storms. You know what a surge protector is on your computer from lightning strikes, but you need to comprehend something which I will explain in the Lame Cherry Effect.

This is New York. This is Con Ed. This is a region of 50 plus million people with electric homes.

Where does that electricity come from? It comes from massive power plants surging twice as much electricity into the lines, in order to get the 120 into your homes.

Now consider a nuclear device in the biggest concentration of electrical use in a combined billions of volts. What happens as in an EMP event, when the bomb starts pushing back electricity against the power plants pushing electrical charge?

The answer is the lines will heat up, the transformers will explode and this will carry to the substations which will overload and most likely detonate too.

So you are going to have a number of fires beginning and what no one has yet figured out yet is, those Con Ed power plants are not going to shut down immediately. They will continue to produce that massive charge filling the line, with 10 million users cut off.What will then take place is a WHITE FLUX or the exact opposite of the Brown Out, meaning all of those homes are going to have a surge of electricity over charging all of your appliances, and burning them out and blowing them out, because this is not like surge protector, but is an amplified charge which will make your lights glow 10 times brighter and your appliances burning out on that charge.

Now project this out as the power grids are all interconnected. Meaning that in peak periods Con Ed gets electric from Ohio etc... and in other periods the Con Ed energy flows into Ohio and other states.

What happens in the White Flux? After it burns out the connections in New York, all that electricity is still like lightning, looking for a place to ground, and that means the surge starts flowing out spiking Canada and the eastern United States.

We witnessed this over a decade ago in Canada in their power grid surged and started affecting the American grid. It is not like even with automatic circuit breakers at the main junctions that this is something which can be immediately stopped, because all regions are generating power and keep generating power. Electricity is faster than a circuit breaker as it has proven.To put this bluntly, if the main transmission lines become breached as in the Canadian incident, what takes place in New York will reach Ottawa, Quebec and Chicago faster than it took you to read this. If Chicago surges and trips, that will set off the Minneapolis and Kansas City hubs, which are direct feeds to the plains state generators.

What I am stating is, this is not theory as it has taken place in Canada and into the American northeast in a much more limited event. It does not take an EMP event to create a power grid overload. What NYC824 in the probabilities are a state event, becoming a regional event.We simply do not have the data or war games to ascertain if this would shut down the entire North American connected grid.

If this is a widespread event, some of you will not see electricity for years or for how long you are able to survive without electricity. Others closer to the source may not see the lights on for weeks. Further out in the remote Trump country, it may be hours or days. If this reaches the West Coast and Texas though, the problem compounds to amplify the effect.

In comprehending this is a problem which will cut off your crucial Facebook time, your porn and whatever else you can afford to do, should be generating a back charge inside of you, which is now generating to the matrix in resistance of this event, which is your actually doing something positive for the first time in your selfish lives.

Oh so this is like you are thinking (no you are not as you are not that intelligent) in someone in the regime creating a false charge for Dick Allgire to pick up, who then generates it into a common thought to progress it to an NYC824 premature event, but some popular girl wades into the matrix storm, begins deflection operations and then creates a reverse pulse, utilizing your low beam wattage being combined into a fear charge to resist the building regime charge.

I suppose I should post this today as the further out my operations have to operate in saving worthless skin suits makes this all easier, so you can then return to your porn and other important events.

Nuff Said

agtG

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 01:11

Dick Allgire is the Vice President of the Hawaii Remote Viewers Guild, and is a skilled and talented remote viewer who has trained under Glenn Wheaton at the Hawaii Remote Viewers Guild (HRVG) in Honolulu for over ten years. He is an HRVG-certified instructor and the Vice President of HRVG. He has presented at several IRVA Remote Viewing Conferences, and has lectured and trained students internationally at scientific symposia.

Dick is a veteran television journalist with over 26 years experience as a reporter, anchor, and producer. Dick has worked in Hawaii since 1985, and has been at KITV since 1988.

IRVA 2011 - A Message to the PastAbstract:Can remote viewers affect the past and cause an effect that will be evident in the present? This presentation is a look at a session, done blind by a remote viewer, on camera with video recording the session. The viewer clearly hits target. But there is more to the project. The viewer attempts to impregnate the target location with a message, to see if the message will show up across time. Photo evidence will be presented which will make you think.

IRVA 2009 - Masking and Entrainment: A Case StudyAbstract:This project explores masking and entrainment. Masking is the art of arbitrary target design to facilitate the extraction of data to be extrapolated to another unrelated target area. In other words you design and create a target to represent the masked target. The data produced by a viewer working the mask represents data congruent to the masked target.

Entrainment occurs when aspects of the overlay mask target begin to reflect potentials active in the real target area. The mask becomes a living target and activity or changes in the real target are mirrored in the overlay.

Remote viewers using various disciplines- including CRV, SRV, HRVG, and ERV- were tasked with a mask target. The target was ?Tanner Dam? a fictitious earthen dam created, visualized, and given analytical servicing by the tasker. The dam represented a mask of the actual target, which was the New York Stock Exchange.

The design of the mask and entrainment was to have activity at the Tanner Dam mirror activity at the New York Stock Exchange. At the conception of this project (June 2008) the Dow Jones average was over 12,000. When the mask target was tasked and sessions worked (July-August 2008) the Dow Jones average was well above 11,000. The timeline in the tasking was ?near future? (looking ahead 90 days.)

What happened at Tanner Dam in the fall of 2008?

IRVA 2007 - HRVG Methodology: An OverviewAbstract:An introduction to the remote viewing method used by the Hawaii Remote Viewers' Guild. The presentation will discuss the theory behind the acquisition of visual imagery. It will highlight the importance of using Ideograms to capture gestaltic and sensory target data. And it will show the logical progression of perceiving data and imagery using a highly structured and intuitive method. The presentation will feature numerous examples of actual remote viewing data obtained under blind/double blind protocols, and will explain the theory behind how it was acquired.

IRVA 2004 - A Demonstration of Consensus Analysis and Reduction of Remote Viewing DataAbstract:This presentation will feature a project worked by viewers at the Hawaii Remote Viewers' Guild. An anonymous client who was geographically distant from HRVG tasked the target. The target was worked under double blind conditions by four viewers. Low-level analysis was conducted by a trained analyst who also worked under a double blind protocol.

The presentation will include the total data submitted by the viewers, and show how all viewers produce a combination of good data, contamination, and imagination. It will illustrate how analysis is able to separate the good data from the contamination. It will also demonstrate the importance of reduction. Reducing the data to its lowest possible gestaltic value enables the analyst to take data that is essentially target-related yet misconstrued by the viewer, and present it in a manner that keeps it true to target. The project demonstrates how viewers and analysts are able to rely on remote viewing structure and analytical protocol to answer questions posed by the client.

The process of analysis will be illustrated, and the final product shown. The scenarios produced by the blind analyst will be presented, showing how the extraction of consensus data and reduction of that data is able to answer the essential elements of information requested by the client.

IRVA 2001 - Remote Viewing And Direction Finding ......(RVDF)Abstract:One of the major shortcomings within the field of remote viewing is the failure of the skill to quantify unknown locations in the course of routine remote viewing work. How many targets have been worked to find a killer? How many killers have been found? How many lost treasure sites have been searched and how many treasures found? All because the skill of determining geographic location has not been designed, developed, or incorporated into Remote Viewing methodologies. Until now.

This presentation will detail the history, development and application of Remote Viewing Direction Finding and will show actual examples of data produced in session by remote viewers working against both known validation and operational targets.

Available DVDs:

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:57

Well this is a little awkward...

The Taliban-supporting, gay-punishing, father of Orlando mass-murderer Omar Mateen appeared to find the words of Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton appealing as he cheered her on at a campaign rally in Kissimmee (just south of Orlando!).

His reason for being there... Simple:

"Hillary Clinton is good for United States versus Donald Trump, who has no solutions.."

Hillary Clinton spoke to a crowd in Kissimmee, just south of Orlando. She was supposed to be talking jobs, but started the speech off paying tribute to those affected by the Pulse Nightclub shooting.

"I know how many people, families, loved ones, and friends are still grieving, and we will be with you as you rebuild your lives."

But local media WPTV happened to notice the man, who has a mustache and was wearing a red hat, behind Clinton. It was Seddique Mateen, the father of Orlando mass shooter Omar Mateen.

NewsChannel 5 asked Mateen what he was thinking about when Clinton spoke about the Orlando incident.

"We've been cooperating with the federal government, and that's about it," he said. "Thank you."

Mateen didn't want to answer any other questions, but just hours later, WPTV ran into him by chance at a rest stop on the way back to West Palm Beach. He wanted to do an interview...

...and show us a sign he made for Clinton.

Finally when asked if he thought some people would be surprised to see him there, especially given the proximity to Orlando.

"Why should they be surprised? I love the United States, and I've been living here a long time," Mateen said.

Of course, the fact that the mass-shooter's father was so perfectly placed seated right behind her is probably just a coincidence... but The Clinton campaign was very quick to deny it once social media noticed...

"The rally was a 3,000-person, open-door event for the public. This individual wasn't invited as a guest and the campaign was unaware of his attendance until after the event."

Still, we are sure if Matteen's appearance had been embraced by the nation's liberals (for being brave enough to appear and support real change in America or something like that) then the campaign spin may have been different.

One final piece of food for thought...

* * *

Clinton definitely did not want to answer any questions about it...

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Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:36

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Procter & Gamble, the largest ad spender in the world, is cutting down on its targeted Facebook ads, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The reason: The company decided the ads weren't effective.

Facebook stock fell immediately following the news but is trading at about even for the day.

"We targeted too much and we went too narrow," Marc Pritchard, P&G's chief marketing officer, told The Journal. "And now we're looking at: What is the best way to get the most reach but also the right precision?"

One example cited by The Journal explains P&G's position well. Two years ago the company tried targeting Facebook ads for its Febreze air freshener at "pet owners and households with large families." Sales for Febreze "stagnated" during the campaign but went up when P&G opened it up to everyone over 18 years old.

This doesn't mean P&G will cut back on Facebook spending generally, however, and it will still use targeted ads at points. But the implications about the effectiveness of targeted ads for big brands might trouble Facebook, which snagged $17.08 billion in ad revenue last year.

Facebook's ability to precisely target ads based on its large swaths of user data has been its main differentiator for almost a decade.

Facebook provided the following comment to Business Insider:

"Our partnership with P&G grows every year in service of effective and efficient advertising. We learn from each other and iterate. That has always been the spirit of how we work together and challenge one another. The cornerstone of our ad strategy is a mix of mass reach and personalized targeting that lends well to mobile consumption and is a strong complement to TV. Our clients tell us this strategy works because we can deliver relevant marketing to the right audiences, with unprecedented scale. It enables partners like P&G to drive the business metrics they care about.

"We see targeting success across the CPG category '-- for example, campaigns reaching audiences like 'households with dishwashers' or 'non-chocolate candy buyers' that drive awareness and sales. We believe that when brands are focused on the right metrics '-- ROI versus proxies like cost, we can most effectively help businesses grow."

Link to Article

Archived Version

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:27

Updated Aug. 9, 2016 4:55 p.m. ET FacebookFB-0.16% is going to start forcing ads to appear for all users of its desktop website, even if they use ad-blocking software.

The social network said on Tuesday that it will change the way advertising is loaded into its desktop website to make its ad units considerably more difficult for ad blockers to detect.

''Facebook is ad-supported. Ads are a part of the Facebook experience; they're not a tack on,'' said Andrew ''Boz'' Bosworth, vice president of Facebook's ads and business platform.

User adoption of ad-blocking software has grown rapidly in recent years, particularly outside of the U.S. According to estimates by online advertising trade body the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 26% of U.S. internet users now use ad blockers on their desktop devices. Facebook declined to comment when asked on what portion of its desktop users have ad-blocking software installed.

With the move, Facebook risks turning off some of its 1.7 billion monthly users who prefer not to see ads while browsing the internet. But users are more likely to access Facebook's app on smartphones and tablets, which are less susceptible to ad blocking than personal computers. Facebook will not circumvent ad blockers on mobile devices.

In the second quarter, 84% of Facebook's ad revenue came from mobile. Still, Facebook says it has lost some desktop ad revenue as a result of ad blockers. The technology poses enough of a threat that Facebook added it as separate risk factor in its annual securities filing this year.

The change will open up more online ad space for it to sell, although Mr. Bosworth said that wasn't the motivation for the move.

''This isn't motivated by inventory; it's not an opportunity for Facebook from that perspective,'' Mr. Bosworth said. ''We're doing it more for the principle of the thing. We want to help lead the discussion on this.''

Nonetheless, Facebook stands to gain financially from showing ads to ad-blocking users. On the company's second-quarter earnings call in July, Facebook executives said its ''ad load'''--the volume of ads its users typically see'--was in a ''good zone.'' That means it doesn't think it can push many more ads to users than they already see during the time they are spending on the social network.

Mr. Bosworth acknowledged that forcing ads onto people who have attempted to avoid them could irritate those users, but he said the company has invested heavily in ensuring advertising on Facebook is ''uninterruptive'' and relevant. Facebook is also introducing more ways for users to control the type of advertising they see on the service.

''It just seems like a poor bargain to be forced to choose all or nothing. There's a middle ground,'' Mr. Bosworth said.

Some ad-blocking software providers have faced fierce criticism from the media industry for their business models in recent months. Eyeo GmbH, the company behind popular desktop ad-blocking tool Adblock Plus, accepts payment from more than 70 companies in exchange for letting their ads through its filter.

''This is an unfortunate move, because it takes a dark path against user choice,'' Eyeo said of Facebook's ad decision in a blog post. ''But it's also no reason to overreact: cat-and-mouse games in tech have been around as long as spammers have tried to circumvent spam filters.''

Mr. Bosworth said Facebook hasn't paid any ad-blocking software company to have its ads pass through their filters and that it doesn't intend to.

''It's not something that Facebook wants to be a part of. It's not a business model that's set out to serve the best interests of people,'' he said.

The IAB has also been extremely vocal about its disapproval of online ad blockers and their business models, with its CEO Randy Rothenberg describing Adblock Plus earlier this year as ''an old-fashioned extortion racket, gussied up in the flowery but false language of contemporary consumerism.''

Facebook is an IAB member.

From a technical standpoint, Facebook is able to circumvent ad blockers relatively easily because it loads ads into its service itself. Many online publishers and media companies rely on third-party companies to help display ads on their webpages and services, which can make them more easily identifiable to blocking technologies.

As a result, a new breed of ''anti-ad-blocking'' technology companies has emerged, hoping to cash in on the situation by selling software designed to help media companies and publishers counteract the effects of ad blocking.

Corrections & Amplifications: Andrew Bosworth is vice president of Facebook's ads and business platform. An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to Mr. Bosworth as Facebook's vice president of engineering for advertising and pages.

Write to Jack Marshall at Jack.Marshall@wsj.com

Link to Article

Archived Version

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 23:26

If you have been following the machinations by the Obama Justice Department [sic] over amending the ASCAP and BMI consent decrees, you may have found yourself wondering who was responsible for rejecting the good faith efforts of the songwriting community in favor of a cynical back room deal with multinational tech companies and broadcasters. I have some thoughts about this, and ask your indulgence''it will take some of your time to read this timeline, but I think you'll be glad you did.

As you read, ask yourself this question: If it looks, acts and quacks, is it corrupt? And if it is, what can you do about it?

As I understand it, Obama lawyers made clear to at least the songwriter groups invited to participate in private conference calls that there was one person pulling the strings. That's consistent with the public statements from SONA and the NMPA.

We can infer that person did so probably with the blessing if not the instruction of the White House.

I suggest to you that the Obama Justice Department's ruling on 100% licensing and partial withdrawal is so illogical and divorced from reality that it can really only be understood in one way''corruption. And this is why the House and Senate Judiciary Committees need to investigate what really happened here. And credit where credit's due''the idea for this investigation comes from Rep. Doug Collins and the questions raised by Rep. Hakim Jeffries, Rep. Jerry Nadler and Rep. Judy Chu.

The Ghost in the Machine

As MTP readers will recall, a Silicon Valley lawyer named Renata B. Hesse was appointed to oversee the sections of the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and was recently appointed to oversee the entire Antitrust Division. After that elevation, her portfolio still includes Litigation Section III''run by a lawyer named David C. Kully''which itself has responsibility for the entire entertainment industry and newspapers among other sectors of the U.S. economy.

'-->Kully sued to block the court-supervised sale of the Orange County Register to Tribune Publishing in a bankruptcy auction. Too bad Google wasn't buying, that sale would have sailed right through the Justice Department [sic]. Oversight of newspapers may be one reason why you don't seen many newspapers brave enough to criticize him. (We'll come back to whether Litigation III's portfolio is a proper allocation of the taxpayers' resources given that the structure just makes agency capture that much easier.)

On July 12, 2016, Rep. Collins called for an investigation into conflicts of interest at the DOJ on its handling of the ASCAP and BMI consent decrees, and was he ever correct. Of course, if the Obama Administration intends to request Senate confirmation of Hesse and William J. Baer (a long time Washington Establishment type who is now Acting Associate Attorney General), that will be an excellent opportunity to raise some of these questions. Since I've been known to be a betting man, I will tell you right now that I doubt seriously whether Hesse will ever see a confirmation hearing in the lame duck term of President Obama. And since Baer was recently confirmed in his last role at the DOJ, there may not be a pressing need to go through the confirmation process with him, either. But we can dream.

Ms. Hesse appears to be the thought leader behind imposing 100% licensing on the songwriter community. I arrive at this conclusion by process of elimination, as the DOJ professional staff do not appear to be taking credit for coming up with it on their own. Ms. Hesse is the one who has authority over the process, at least most directly, so if the DOJ professional staff did not originate the idea, and if no one in the voluminous consent decree public comments came up with it, it must have come down from on high. At least within the DOJ or even higher.

However, it is worth noting that the ASCAP/BMI consent decree review started before Hesse took over as head of the Antitrust Division from Bill Baer.

I doubt that Ms. Hesse came up with this all on her own, so I asked myself how did this person end up being in the position she is currently in with the authority to do so much damage to so many people who don't deserve it. Not to mention the fact that when it comes to anything that the Google network touches, which is pretty much everything in human experience, the U.S. Government''at least currently and unlike their European counterparts''only seems to be interested in enforcing the antitrust law to protect Google, not to challenge it.

So how did this relatively obscure lawyer end up where she is? Let's take a look at a timeline of events in Ms. Hesse's career. I started a few months ago by reading Ms. Hesse's official biography on the Justice.gov website, but noticed immediately that it omitted large chunks of her most recent career path. That omission led me to look elsewhere in other public sources, such as the White House visitor logs and other public sources.

After graduating from Clinton alma mater Wellesley and Boalt Hall at Berkeley, Ms. Hesse worked at Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison for 7 years. Brobeck was a casualty of the Dot Bomb Bubble explosion and went out of business in 2003. Ms. Hesse's LinkedIn profile tells us that she left Brobeck in 1997 and joined the U.S. Department of Justice in 2002 as Section Chief of the Networks and Technology Enforcement Section of the Antitrust Division where she worked until 2006 when the revolving door deposited her at the top Silicon Valley law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati (the major Silicon Valley competitor of Brobeck when Ms. Hesse worked at Brobeck).

According to an interview she gave to an American Bar Association journal, Ms. Hesse started her legal career in intellectual property, presumably Valley-style at Brobeck which she ''kind of'' likes because it's ''fun and interesting'':

ANTITRUST SOURCE: [Intellectual property] is an issue that you've been very invested in personally. Why is that?

RENATA HESSE: I actually started out as an IP lawyer, and so this has always been an area that's been of interest to me. I also have historically worked a lot in the technology sector and the tele- com sector in particular. As a consequence, this was a subject matter that was innately interest- ing to me and an industry sector that I was familiar with. And I kind of like it; it's fun and interesting and it's important. But I don't have a personal agenda here, other than trying to ensure that consumers get the benefits of competition and do not see higher prices or less innovation as a result of conduct that harms competition.

The Second Resume Gap

I often say that the fastest way to get a jihadi video taken down from YouTube is for me to blog about it on MTP. I don't know if this is also true of Ms. Hesse's bio, but I can't help noticing that it got cleaned up recently on the justice.gov website.

As Artist Rights Watch noted in a previous post, Ms. Hesse's ''old'' official biography on the justice.gov website omitted her job at Wilson Sonsini which omission was determined by comparing her Linkedin profile to the official bio. But that LinkedIn profile also includes its own unexplained gap about what she did prior to joining the DOJ in 2012''her then-current employment as Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Criminal and Civil Operations:

MemberWilson Sonsini Goodrich & RosatiJuly 2006 '' June 2011 (5 years)

Section Chief, Antitrust DivisionU.S. Department of JusticeJanuary 2002 '' May 2006 (4 years 5 months)

AssociateBrobeck, Phleger & Harrison1990 '' 1997 (7 years)

Notice, there is a gap of five-odd years between 1997 and 2002. Which is strange, because during this time she is mentioned in a November 2, 2001 Justice Department press release as the contact for public comments on the DOJ consent decree with Microsoft''at which point she was the lower rank of ''Trial Attorney'' before being promoted to Section Chief in January 2002:

The proposed Final Judgment will be published by the Federal Register, along with the Department's Competitive Impact Statement, as required by the Antitrust Procedures and Penalties Act. Any person may submit written comments concerning the proposed consent decree within 60 days of its publication to: Renata Hesse, Trial Attorney, 325 7th Street, N.W., Suite 500, Washington, D.C. 20530, (202-616-0944). At the conclusion of the 60-day comment period, the

Court may enter the proposed consent decree upon a finding that it serves the public interest.

According to an updated bio on the DOJ website, we now have an update to her resume that cleans up the gaps''sort of:

Ms. Hesse served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Criminal and Civil Operations and Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General between 2012 and 2016. During this period, she also served as the Acting Assistant Attorney General from November 2012 to January 2013. She was a career trial attorney in the Division between 1997 and 2006 [overlapping Jamie Gorelick and Eric Holder's respective terms as Deputy Attorney General and Bill Baer's term as head of the FTC Competition Bureau], during the last four years of which she served as the Chief of the Networks and Technology Section. Over the course of her 15 years at the Division, Ms. Hesse has played a leading role in a number of the Division's most challenging and important investigations and litigations, including serving as the Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Division's review of the mergers between Comcast and Time Warner and Applied Materials and Tokyo Electron, Deputy Assistant Attorney General overseeing the Division's challenge to the US Airways/American Airlines merger, and lead attorney during the remedy phase of the Division's monopoly maintenance case against Microsoft.

Before rejoining the Division in 2012, Ms. Hesse served as Senior Counsel to the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, where she was responsible for overseeing the FCC's review of AT&T's proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. She was also a partner in Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati's antitrust group.

No mention of Google or what happened while she was at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Despite her obvious ''revolving door'' status, Open Secrets has not gotten around to a revolving door profile on Hesse as yet.

Yet here is where the timeline gets interesting.

The Timeline

July, 2006: Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati hires Ms. Hesse, most immediately the former chief of the Networks and Technology Enforcement Section of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division. Hesse joins WSGR as a partner in its antitrust and trade regulation practice, joining another revolving door person Susan Creighton, the former Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Competition from 2003-2005 (the post previously held by Bill Baer). Ms. Creighton appeared before the 2011 Senate Antitrust Subcommittee investigation into Google's business practices along side Google boss Eric Schmidt (the hearing where Schmidt refused to answer Senator Cornyn's questions about Google's prosecution for violations of the Controlled Substances Act on the advice of counsel, aka taking the Fifth). Hesse and Creighton are two revolving door hires.

December 18, 2008: In a Meet Innovators interview with Hesse, interviewer Adrian Bye asks, ''There's been obviously antitrust issues between Google and Yahoo! Are you able to comment on any of those?'' Hesse replies, ''I'm not, really, I'm afraid since I did a lot of work for Google on it.''

July 29, 2010: The Google legal team consisting of Hesse, Creighton, Dana Wagner and Matthew Bye begin lobbying state attorneys general investigating Google for violations of state antitrust law.

September 24, 2010: DOJ settles U.S. v. Adobe Systems Inc., et al. stopping Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, and Pixar from signing non-solicitation agreements for employees. The settlement requires annual monitoring by the DOJ Antitrust Division for five years.

December 14, 2010: Then-Attorney General Eric Holder presided over a December 14, 2010 meeting at the White House requested by Google during the DOJ's drug investigation into Google's bad acts. (Eric Holder followed Jamie Gorelick into the position of Deputy Attorney General under the Clinton Justice Department.)

March 23, 2011: Hesse, Wagner, Bye, Creighton actively trying to make state investigations into Google's business practices go away.

April 8, 2011: Department of Justice Antitrust Division approves Google acquisition of ITA Software, issuing consent decree that set the requirements governing Google's future operation of the ITA business. The term of the consent decree is five years and requires Google to report all complaints to the DOJ.

May 20, 2011: FOIA logs from the Ohio Attorney General's office reveal email communications between Hesse and Beth Finnerty, the Ohio AG Section Chief, referencing Ms. Hesse's ''Google portfolio'' of work at Wilson Sonsini: (Hesse): ''Beth: Google would prefer that you serve them directly, but cc Dana Wagner and also someone at our firm. Since I will be moving on relatively soon, I think it makes sense for you to copy Chul Pak (copied on this message) in my stead. Chul is a partner in our New York office (used to run Mergers IV at the FTC) and isgoing to be taking over my Google portfolio. He's terrific and I know you guys will work well together.

June 3, 2011: A Global Competition Review article highlights Wilson Sonsini's work for Google and Hesse's involvement in the five-partner team advising Google on antitrust matters: ''Susan Creighton leads a five-partner group at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Washington DC. Creighton, Scott Sher and Renata Hesse are all Who's Who entrants'...A renewed flow of deals is keeping the team very busy. It advised Google throughout the DOJ's investigation of its just cleared purchase of ITA software.

June 24, 2011: The Federal Trade Commission opens its antitrust investigation of Google.

August 19, 2011: Google enters into non-prosecution agreement with U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Rhode Island, avoiding a grand jury appearance but admitting that it violated the Controlled Substances Act in marketing products to U.S. customers (that apparently included minors). Google pays a fine of $500 million and enters into a two-year remediation program monitored by the Department of Justice and the Food and Drug Administration as part of deal blessed by the Department of Justice and, presumably, the Attorney General of the United States. (See MTP post ''Questions for Mr. Holder on Google Drugs''.)

February 6, 2012: President Obama appoints Arnold & Porter partner William J. Baer to head Antitrust Division of DOJ. (See Baer's Revolving Door profile.)

February 29, 2012: After the nonprosecution agreement detailed Google's many violations of the Controlled Substances Act, not to mention business ethics, Google is sued by multiple stockholder groups for breach of fiduciary duty, etc., relating to the use of the stockholder's money to pay the $500,000,000 fine for its executives' bad behavior. According to the Wall Street Journal and the hearing transcript, Google's lawyer told the court that the stockholders should not have access to the 4,000,000 documents Google produced in the Rhode Island grand jury investigating the Controlled Substances Act violations that lead to the $500,000,000 fine. In particular, documents that established the culpability of Larry Page that was at issue in the stockholder case:

''The U.S. attorney in Rhode Island went off the reservation and gave a long interview about all the evidence and why it was he was so excited about the case,'' [Google's Wilson Sonsini] lawyer Boris Feldman told the judge at a Delaware state court. ''It ended up being so far off the reservation that the Justice Department apologized to Google for it and muzzled him.'' (See court hearing transcript.)

I have heard a rumor that this apology was arranged by Washington wheeler-dealer Jamie Gorelick, former Fannie Mae executive, former Deputy Attorney General under President Bill Clinton who was succeeded by Eric Holder and who represents Google in a variety of matters. And mentor of Beth Wilkenson who the FTC brought in to run the busted Google antitrust investigation.

March 26, 2012: Google Chief Economist Hal Varian meets with former Deputy Attorney General Carl Shapiro, a member of the Obama Council of Economic Advisors (and co-author with Varian of Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.) Shapiro's Google connections include:

''Senior consultant to Charles River Associates before joining the Obama Administration and again from 2012 to present. Charles River Associates advised Google during the FTC's antitrust investigation. Shapiro re-joined Charles River on November 19, 2012, days before the FTC opened settlement negotiations with Google on that antitrust investigation.

''Shapiro co-authored several white papers and studies with other academics and scholars who have received Google funding in the past including Durie Tangri partner and Stanford Professor Mark Lemley and Brookings' Robert Litan. (Professor Lemley is also a founding partner of Durie Tangri, the San Francisco firm that gleefully screwed the world's authors in the ''Google Books'' case and represented Goldieblox against the Beastie Boys for Goldieblox knowing use of a Beastie's song in an ad against the dying wishes of MCA.)

April 26, 2012: Google Chairman Eric Schmidt meets privately with White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew.

April 27, 2012: Federal Trade Commission announces the appointment of Jamie Gorelick crony Beth Wilkenson to oversee Google antitrust investigation because there just aren't enough qualified lawyers at FTC's professional staff''you know, the ones that recommended prosecution of Google.

'-->>May 1, 2012: Carl Shapiro meets alone with Hesse in the White House mess. This was the first White House meeting Ms. Hesse attended.

May 4, 2012: A few days later, Global Competition Review reports that Hesse ''has emerged as a likely candidate to take over the vacant deputy assistant attorney general position at the Department of Justice.''

May 4, 2012: Google chief lobbyist Johanna Shelton, Google Senior Trademark Counsel Annabelle Danielvarda, and Google Legal Director Terri Chen meet with U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel.

May 7, 2012: Ms. Danielvarda, Ms. Chen and Google State Policy Counsel David Lieber meet again with Espinel.

August 2012: Hesse appointed Special Advisor to the Civil Enforcement Division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

October 1, 2012: Google General Counsel Kent Walker, Google Senior Patent Counsel Suzanne Michel and Google lobbyist Johanna Shelton meet with Victoria Espinel.

October 11, 2012: Google lobbyist Johanna Shelton and Google IP Counsel Fred von Lohmann meet with Victoria Espinel.

October 13, 2012:Bloomberg reports that FTC staff has circulated a 100 page memo recommending suing Google for abusing its dominance of Internet search in violation of antitrust laws and that the FTC is considering a separate lawsuit against Google for misusing its standard essential patents to block rivals' smartphones from coming to market.

November 6, 2012: President Obama re-elected.

November 16, 2012: Google's former Google Deputy General Counsel for Patents & Patent Strategy from 2003-2012, Michelle Lee is announced as the Director of the new satellite Silicon Valley office of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in San Jose, California.

'--->November 19, 2012: Renata Hesse named as Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division. News accounts report that Ms. Hesse will be ''leading the department's efforts on intellectual property issues.''

November 21, 2012: Bloomberg reports; ''U.S. Said to Waver on Antitrust Case Against Google''. The story quotes anonymous sources claiming, ''Google may skirt the most serious antitrust allegations under investigation.''

November 27, 2012:Bloomberg reports that Google CEO Larry Page meets with FTC officials to settle the antitrust probe and that Eric Schmidt is seen on Capitol Hill with Google lobbyist Susan Molinari. The story notes that the FTC has told Google it won't accept a resolution short of a consent decree and that issues under discussion with the FTC include ''alleged misuse of patents to try to block rivals' smartphones from coming to market.''

November 27, 2012: Hesse meets privately with Victoria Espinel at the White House.

November 30, 2012: Obama campaign manager Jim Messina meets privately with White House Chief of Staff Pete Rouse at 1:30 pm. An hour later at 2:30 pm, Rouse meets privately with the DNC's Patrick Gaspard. And at 3:30 pm, Rouse meets privately with Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.

'-->>November 30, 2012, The Washington Post reports that Google and FTC negotiations avoid search issues, instead focusing on potential issues related to standard essential patents and Google's Motorola patent portfolio.

December 10, 2012: Renata Hesse, David Kappos, U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; Malcolm Lee, Department of Commerce; Terrell McSweeney, DOJ Antitrust Division; Peter Pappas, USPTO Chief of Staff; Ari Schwartz, Department of Commerce meet with Victoria Espinel.

December 8, 2012: USC Annenberg releases first corporate responsibility report on brand-sponsored piracy.

December 17, 2012, Former FTC Chairman William Kovacich criticizes the Google-FTC rumored settlement in a Bloomberg story: ''The notion of voluntary commitments is close to worthless'...They are feeble policy-making instruments and they will not in any way placate the complainants, who will correctly see them for what they are, which is an attempt to provide cover to walk away.''

December 30, 2012: Bill Baer is confirmed as head of DOJ's Antitrust Division, then investigating Google to no conclusion.

January 3, 2013: FTC closes its antitrust investigation of Google without a consent decree and requiring only a voluntary commitment from Google that it make available to competitors the company's standard-essential patents on a fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) basis. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said of the decision: ''I am disappointed'... [the FTC-Google settlement] relied on simple, voluntary commitments from Google to end certain practices that a majority of Commissioners found to have raised strong concerns about impeding innovation.''

February 14, 2013: USC-Annenberg calls out Google on brand sponsored piracy.

April 18, 2013: Reps. Goodlatte and Schiff send letter to Randall Rothenberg at Google-dominated Internet Advertising Bureau asking for explanation of flaws in IAB ''best practices'' on brand-sponsored piracy.

June 6, 2013: National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) charges that Google is continuing to allow ads for illegal online pharmacies (at Summer NAAG at which I was a speaker).

August, 2013: DOJ allows Google Drugs non-prosecution agreement with Google to lapse, but illegal drug ads are easily findable all over YouTube.

'-->August, 2013: Billboard reports that DOJ is investigating UMPG and Sony/ATV partial withdrawals from ASCAP and BMI.

September and December 2013: Billboard reports that DOJ investigation into UMPG and Sony/ATV paused due to unprecedented rate court decisions barring partial withdrawal from ASCAP and BMI.

December 2013: Billboard reports that Pandora lost part of its BMI case on an issue that would likely have been solved by Ms. Hesse's current devotion to 100% licensing;

Pandora was struck a blow on Wednesday when a rate court ruled that the Internet radio leader doesn't have a blanket license that includes the songs of publishers who have withdrawn their digital rights.

The BMI/Pandora rate court ruling means if Pandora doesn't cut some kind of deals with publishers like Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG and Kobalt '-- who all have notified BMI that come Jan. 1, they intend to withdraw their digital rights '-- Pandora could be in copyright violation if they haven't pulled those songs by that date.

Judge Louis L. Stanton has ruled the exact opposite of what occurred when Pandora squared off with ASCAP '-- a rival collection society to BMI '-- at another rate court hearing on Sept. 17. Judge Denise Cote ruled that Pandora had a license in effect and were covered by the ASCAP blanket license, including songs from all the publishers that intended to withdraw.

Yet both judges came to the same reasoning on how the consent decrees disallow the partial withdrawals of rights. Stanton agreed with Cote that publishers are either all in or all out, a position which was bolstered by Ethan Glass, a lawyer from the Department of Justice [then Assistant Chief of the Litigation III Section, now a partner at Quinn Emmanuel, Google's ''go-to'' patent lawyers].

March 2014: Reps Bob Goodlatte and Adam Schiff send ''Dear Colleague'' letter to House members calling out ad-sponsored piracy.

April 2014: Billboard and Politico report that Justice Department is leading industry sources to believe that it will amend consent decrees.

June 2014: DOJ announces review of ASCAP and BMI consent decrees by Litigation Section III, the unit of the Antitrust Division that regulates the entire entertainment industry including the music business under command of Ms. Hesse. No mention of 100% licensing.

June 6, 2014: DOJ Litigation Section III requests public comments on general review of ASCAP/BMI consent decrees, no mention of 100% licensing.

'-->July 2014: Billboard reports that DOJ sends CID to ASCAP, BMI, Sony/ATV and UMPG regarding ''alleged coordination among ASCAP, BMI, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and Universal Music Publishing Group'' presumably at the request of music users including Pandora, Google and other DiMA members.

August 6, 2014: Deadline for filing public comments on consent decrees.

November 8, 2014: Loretta Lynch nominated for Attorney General.

November 12, 2014: Global Music Rights told The Hollywood Reporter that their writers are prepared to take 42 of his clients, representing some 20,000 copyrighted works, away from the YouTube ecosystem, including the new Music Key.

November 26, 2014: Broadcasters request payola waiver from FCC.

December 2014: Pharell Williams notifies YouTube he is pulling his songs from YouTube.

April 15, 2015: European Commission sends antitrust complaint to Google for violations of EU competition law.

May, 2015: Google, Pandora and companies with market cap over $2 trillion form MIC Coalition to lobby against songwriters.

May 15, 2015:Reuters reports that the Obama Administration is locked in ''internal wrangling'' over what position to take in the Oracle v. Google case and that legal teams from Google and Oracle had made separate March presentations to the Department of Justice and other government officials in the case. The presentations centered around a U.S. Supreme Court request that U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli ''weigh in'' on the case to provide the U.S. Government's opinion on the matter. Bloomberg also reports that Public Knowledge lawyer Charles Duan met with Department of Justice antitrust officials to advance Google's point of view in the case. (Google has acknowledged funding Public Knowledge in a filing in the Oracle case made under penalty of perjury, commonly referred to as the ''Google Shill List''.)

'--> August 17, 2015: MIC Coalition sends letter to Hesse requesting investigation of SESAC.

Google and Pandora are both members of the MIC Coalition, as are DiMA and the Consumer Electronics Association of which Google and Pandora are members.

'--> September 22, 2015: DOJ Antitrust Litigation III Section requests public comment on 100% licensing.

October 2015: Pandora and Google lawyers request a vote from ABA IP Section on resolution that supports DOJ position on 100% licensing, which is voted down by experts, does not pass and is withdrawn.

November 2015: DOJ closes public comments on 100% licensing.

January 12, 2016: Rep. Doug Collins requests that the Copyright Office opine on the legal validity of 100% licensing as contemplated by the Department of Justice.

January 29 2016: Copyright Office responds to Rep. Collins with report on ''full work'' licensing that rejects DOJ's ultimate position.

April 15: 2016: Hesse appointed Acting Assistant Attorney General and head of the Antitrust Division.

July 2016: Kully holds conference calls with songwriters attempting to get them to believe that 100% licensing is normal and seeking industry acceptance of rule change. Songwriters reject this idea forcefully.

Kully refuses to send a draft of the regulation, instead reading draft aloud over the telephone.

Kully refuses to answer a direct question of whether the White House is involved in decision on 100% licensing. Kully attempts to solicit criticism of 100% licensing, but songwriters believe this is not in good faith as it would be to DOJ's advantage to manufacture some kind of industry consensus.

July 7, 2016: Kully tells songwriters that the ruling is coming whether they like it or not. Ruling to be released on July 29.

July 29, 2016: Kully leaves a voice mail on songwriters phones telling them the release has been delayed. Selected journalists receive copy of regulation embargoed until August 4.

August 4, 2016: DOJ releases ''statement'' with no attribution to any person. Entire creative community reacts negatively, Public Knowledge and MIC Coalition take victory lap. As usual, Google is silent.

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Archived Version

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 23:21

Sony/ATV Music Publishing sent a letter to its songwriters in the last day, updating them on where the company stands with regards to performance rights, re-iterating Martin Bandier's intention to withdraw from the two U.S. major performing rights organizations and also reveals the news that the company is appealing both the ASCAP and BMI Pandora rate court rulings.

The major music publishers have long complained that they don't get market-share royalty rates from digital music services and, as a way to change that, began withdrawing digital rights from ASCAP and BMI. But the judges in both the ASCAP and BMI rate-setting lawsuits ruled that publishers must be either all-in or all-out.

In other words, if they want to do direct licensing for digital services, they have to do it for everyone. The judges said that the consent decrees which the two PROs operate under does not allow partial withdrawals.

After those rulings, the publishers and PROs reached out to the Dept. of Justice, asking them to review the consent decrees with the goal of having them amended to allow partial withdrawals.

Most publishers would rather not withdraw from the PROs because replicating general licensing for the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of businesses that use music in their stores, bars, planes, hotels and clubs, would be extremely costly.

Nevertheless, Sony/ATV chairman and CEO Bandier says that, if it turns out that his appeal asking the rate courts to allow partial withdrawal or if the U.S. Dept. of Justice doesn't revise the consent decrees, then the company is "exploring other options, including the potential complete withdrawal of all rights from ASCAP and BMI."

In the letter to Sony/ATV's songwriters, Bandier wrote: "It is our hope that the DOJ and appeals process will recognize the benefits and fairness produced by partial withdrawals of performance rights."

If that occurs, then they could use ASCAP and BMI for collective licensing, where it makes sense.

"That being said, because the DOJ and legal process is not fully within our control, we may have no alternative but to take all of our rights out of ASCAP and BMI," the letter continues. "We recognize that full withdrawal is a significant step and we are carefully looking at all of the issues associated with this, including speaking with potential partners to assist us."

In an interview, Bandier said he is optimistic that the DOJ review will result in the consent decree being amended so Sony/ATV won't have to withdraw from the PROs to attain higher rates.

He pointed out that Rihanna's song "Diamonds" had 52 million streams, but the four songwriters were only paid $78,000 ($0.0015 per stream). That payment amount "doesn't make sense," he said.

With mechanical rates on the decline, and with digital streaming -- both passive and on-demand -- growing that performance rights become even more important, Bandier argued. "Sadly, the rates that are paid in that area are not equitable or adequate," Bandier said. "Its like writers' 401k's are being wiped out."

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 23:11

The Department of Justice is investigating major publishing companies, and is rumored to be looking into possible behind-the-scenes coordination between the companies.The Department of Justice has sent out CIDs (Civil Investigative Demand for Documents) to ASCAP, BMI, Sony/ATV Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group in connection with their review of the consent decrees that ASCAP and BMI operate under.

The CID requests are seeking documentation across a lot of particulars, including the effect of the consent decrees on rates, whether partial withdrawals of digital rights should be allowed, and plans to license other rights beyond the public performance rights that PROs handle today. However, a memo obtained by Billboard that was sent to employees by ASCAP senior VP of legal Richard Reimer began by noting that the CID is connected to the DOJs review of the consent decree. And, as a possible reminder to be careful of what you wish for, the DOJ is also investigating of alleged coordination among ASCAP, BMI, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and Universal Music Publishing Group.

That aspect of the DOJ investigation was mentioned in a note to ASCAP employees telling them to "preserve all documents, whether in paper or electronic format, on all the CID-related topics."

In addition to looking at whether or not partial withdrawals should be allowed, the ASCAP note to employees reveals that the DOJ is also reviewing whether PROs can become music publishers, can offer other rights beyond performance rights, and the difficulties in valuing through-to-the audience licenses.

The Department of Justice's investigation into whether or not there was a coordinated effort among publishers and PROs originated with Pandora, who alleged during its rate trial that the major music publishers and the PROs were working together to make changes to ASCAP and BMI by-laws that would allow for partial withdrawals, yielding higher performance royalty rates for all music publishers.

In her rate-setting decision, Judge Denise Cote, the ASCAP rate court judge, wrote on page 95 of her decision that Pandora has shown the Sony and UMPG licenses (which were direct deals, cut after the publishers withdrew digital rights) to be the product of, at the very least, coordination between and among these major music publishers and ASCAP.

She went on to write that "Sony and UMPG justified their withdrawal of new media rights from ASCAP by promising to create higher benchmarks for a Pandora-ASCAP license and purposefully set out to do just that," and added that they interfered with the ASCAP-Pandora license negotiations at the end of 2012.

"Because their interests were aligned against Pandora, and they coordinated their activities with respect to Pandora, the very considerable market power that each of them holds individually was magnified," she concluded.

She said there is "no need to explore which if any of these actions was wrongful or legitimate," since she decided that the direct licensing deals that UMPG and Sony cut with Pandora are poor benchmarks.

Sources within the PROs at the major publishers dismiss the significance of the investigation over alleged coordination, because they believe Judge Cote got it wrong. "Our perspective is that we welcome the opportunity to set the record straight," says one source. "Now we get to tell our side of the story to someone else."

Sony/ATV chairman and CEO Martin Bandier says he is not worried about that aspect of the consent decree review. The CID is "positive because it shows that the DOJ is taking seriously the concept of modifying the consent decree," he said. "Hopefully, by the end of the year, we can have something positive, a modified consent decree, so we won't have to withdraw" from the PROs.

In a letter Bandier sent out to songwriters yesterday, he said Sony/ATV would withdraw from the PROs if the consent decree is not modified or if appeals of the ASCAP and BMI Judges' decisions -- disallowing publishers to partially withdraw digital rights from the PRO blanket license -- prove unsuccessful.

In a statement, ASCAP said, ''We welcome the Department of Justice's investigation into the music licensing marketplace, and we are cooperating fully with DOJ staff to make sure they have the information they need. ASCAP's hope is that this investigation, combined with the DOJ's ongoing review of its consent decree, will lead to meaningful changes in the marketplace for ASCAP and its more than 500,000 songwriter, composer and publisher members."

However, sources in the digital music service sector speculate that if the DOJ finds evidence of collusion, it could result in a tighter consent decree, rather than a more relaxed amended decree. But sources in the music publishing camp respond that that may be wishful thinking on their part. "I am sure it [the investigation into whether there was coordination among publishers] is routine, " says one top music publishing industry executive. "I can't imagine anything coming from it."

Meanwhile, some sources say that DOJ was already looking into the alleged coordination among the two major music publishers and the two PROs in August 2013, well before the DOJ began its review of the consent decrees this year. But, according to those sources, the 2013 investigation didn't get far because the ASCAP Judge in September of 2013 came out with her ruling that publishers can't partially withdraw digital rights; they have to be all-in ASCAP or all-out, a ruling that was echoed by the BMI Judge in December 2013, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Still another source insists that the August 2013 investigation was actually when the DOJ began reviewing the consent decrees. For its part, the DOJ declines to comment on any aspect of the review, beyond the notice of seeking commentary back in early June.

BMI confirmed it was the recipient of the DOJ document demand, but sources familiar with the investigation say that Pandora hasn't received a CID.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 23:02

WILMINGTON, N.C. '-- Donald J. Trump on Tuesday appeared to raise the possibility that gun rights supporters could take matters into their own hands if Hillary Clinton is elected president and appoints judges who favor stricter gun control measures to the bench.

At a rally here, Mr. Trump warned that it would be ''a horrible day'' if Mrs. Clinton were elected and got to appoint a tiebreaking Supreme Court justice.

''If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,'' Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: ''Although the Second Amendment people '-- maybe there is, I don't know.''

The Trump campaign released a statement insisting opaquely that Mr. Trump had been referring to the ''power of unification.''

''Second Amendment people have amazing spirit and are tremendously unified, which gives them great political power,'' said Mr. Trump's spokesman, Jason Miller. ''And this year, they will be voting in record numbers, and it won't be for Hillary Clinton, it will be for Donald Trump.''

Mr. Trump's remark came a day after his campaign expressed satisfaction with his delivery of a prepared economic speech in Detroit and called it evidence of a new level of discipline.

Reacting to Mr. Trump's statement on Twitter, aides to Mrs. Clinton expressed immediate horror, suggesting that even by Mr. Trump's standards, the comments were jarring.

''This is simple,'' Mrs. Clinton's campaign manager, Robby Mook, said in an email. ''What Trump is saying is dangerous. A person seeking to be the president of the United States should not suggest violence in any way.''

Even those in Mr. Trump's audience appeared caught by surprise. Video of the rally showed a man seated just over Mr. Trump's shoulder go slack-jawed and turn to his companion, apparently in disbelief, when Mr. Trump made the remark.

Mr. Trump's remark was reminiscent of an allusion to ''Second Amendment remedies'' by Sharron Angle, a Republican Senate candidate who in 2010 unsuccessfully challenged the majority leader, Harry Reid, in Nevada, and was derided by Democrats, and some in her own party, as too ''extreme.''

In a radio interview that year, Ms. Angle talked about the importance of preserving the Second Amendment, not merely for members of the military or law enforcement.

''In fact, when you read that Constitution and the founding fathers, they intended this to stop tyranny,'' Ms. Angle said, adding later, ''It's to defend ourselves. And you know, I'm hoping that we're not getting to Second Amendment remedies. I hope the vote will be the cure for the Harry Reid problems.''

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, who has made gun reform his signature issue after the Sandy Hook shooting in his state, took to Twitter to castigate Mr. Trump, calling his remarks ''disgusting and embarrassing and sad.''

''This isn't play,'' Mr. Murphy wrote. ''Unstable people with powerful guns and an unhinged hatred for Hillary are listening to you, @realDonaldTrump.''

And Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, wrote on Twitter that the Secret Service should investigate Mr. Trump for making a death threat against Mrs. Clinton: ''Donald Trump suggested someone kill Sec. Clinton. We must take people at their word.''

Mr. Trump's campaign events and rallies have grown increasingly vitriolic, with angry chants and jeers directed at Mrs. Clinton, some of them led by the candidate himself. On Tuesday, Mr. Trump called Mrs. Clinton a ''liar'' and ''wacky.''

Chants of ''lock her up,'' which first gained traction during the Republican National Convention, were loud and frequent in Wilmington before Mr. Trump took the stage. One speaker, former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, tried to steer the crowd away from the chant.

''No, no, we're here to beat her, and keep her out of Washington,'' Mr. Giuliani said as he waved off the chants. He was interrupted by the same chant minutes later, and again paused and tried to wave off the crowd.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 22:59

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

PGRpdiBjbGFzcz0ibWlkX2FydGljbGVfZGVza3RvcCAiIGlkPSJtZ2EtYWQtY29udGVudF9taWRfYXJ0aWNsZV9kZXNrdG9wIiA+PCEtLSAvMjI2MzMyNTUvSUpSX0Rlc2t0b3BfSW5Db250ZW50X1ZpZGVvIC0tPgo8ZGl2IGlkPSdkaXYtZ3B0LWFkLTE0NjY2MTI2MDM5NDUtMCcgc3R5bGU9J2hlaWdodDoxcHg7IHdpZHRoOjFweDsnPgo8c2NyaXB0IHR5cGU9J3RleHQvamF2YXNjcmlwdCc+Cmdvb2dsZXRhZy5jbWQucHVzaChmdW5jdGlvbigpIHsgZ29vZ2xldGFnLmRpc3BsYXkoJ2Rpdi1ncHQtYWQtMTQ2NjYxMjYwMzk0NS0wJyk7IH0pOwo8L3NjcmlwdD4KPC9kaXY+CjwvZGl2Pg==

After losing to Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders is back to his day job as a US Senator for Vermont.

Sanders campaigned against the 1%, promising to bring America closer to his Democratic Socialist ideal and to take corporations and rich people down a peg or two.

But now that his campaign is over, he's picking up a sweet new pad.

According to Seven Days, a news publication in Vermont, the Democratic Socialist from Vermont shelled out 600 grand for a lake house.

The Burlington resident last week plopped down nearly $600,000 on a camp in North Hero.

Sanders' new waterfront crib has four bedrooms and 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront on the east side of the island '-- facing Vermont, not New York. The Bern will keep his home in Burlington and use the new camp seasonally.

''We've traveled up to the islands many times over the years '-- almost always on day trips,'' Sanders' wife, Jane O'Meara Sanders, told Seven Days in a written statement. ''We've been impressed with the North Hero community, eaten at the North Hero House and Shore Acres and have suggested them to friends who were looking for a beautiful place to stay or have dinner. St. Anne's Shrine in Isle La Motte is my favorite church and it is nearby.''

Twitter was swift to respond to the irony:

Congrats to Senator Sanders. The lake house looks lovely, especially as a third home.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 22:54

Every four years, the United States goes through a protracted elections process for the highest office in the land. This year, the election seems like anything but a normal contest, that has at times devolved into outright vitriol. The unique atmosphere of this year's election cycle may lead some to want to psychoanalyze the candidates, but to do so would not only be unethical, it would be irresponsible.

Simply put, breaking the Goldwater Rule is irresponsible, potentially stigmatizing, and definitely unethical.

Maria A. Oquendo, M.D.Since 1973, the American Psychiatric Association and its members have abided by a principle commonly known as ''the Goldwater Rule,'' which prohibits psychiatrists from offering opinions on someone they have not personally evaluated. The rule is so named because of its association with an incident that took place during the 1964 presidential election. During that election, Fact magazine published a survey in which they queried some 12,356 psychiatrists on whether candidate Sen. Barry Goldwater, the GOP nominee, was psychologically fit to be president. A total of 2,417 of those queried responded, with 1,189 saying that Goldwater was unfit to assume the presidency.

While there was no formal policy in place at the time that survey was published, the ethical implications of the Goldwater survey, in which some responding doctors even issued specific diagnoses without ever having examined him personally, became immediately clear. This large, very public ethical misstep by a significant number of psychiatrists violated the spirit of the ethical code that we live by as physicians, and could very well have eroded public confidence in psychiatry.

We live in an age where information on a given individual is easier to access and more abundant than ever before, particularly if that person happens to be a public figure. With that in mind, I can understand the desire to get inside the mind of a Presidential candidate. I can also understand how a patient might feel if they saw their doctor offering an uninformed medical opinion on someone they have never examined. A patient who sees that might lose confidence in their doctor, and would likely feel stigmatized by language painting a candidate with a mental disorder (real or perceived) as ''unfit'' or ''unworthy'' to assume the Presidency.

Simply put, breaking the Goldwater Rule is irresponsible, potentially stigmatizing, and definitely unethical.

The Goldwater Rule is published as an annotation in the Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry. I encourage you all to read the full text of the rule below, and keep it in mind during this election cycle, and other events of similarly intense public interest.

The ''Goldwater Rule:''

On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.''

Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 21:21

Trump, Dilbert, Wizards, Fear, and TestosteroneScott Adams is the presidential election's weirdest, most provocative pundit. And it's only gonna get weirder.

The Dilbert guy is not voting for Donald Trump. He's not voting for anyone; that's how they get you. No, Scott Adams'Š'--'Šfamous cartoonist, best-selling advice-book author, trained hypnotist, and, lately, architect of one of this election's most bizarre and fascinating political blogs'Š'--'Šis an impartial observer. He sees both Trump and, lately, maybe even Hillary Clinton as master persuaders, and clown geniuses, and wizards, and, yes, master hypnotists. In a sea of apoplectic talking heads and shameless partisans, he is the wokest of them all. He predicts Trump will win in a landslide, and he knows exactly why, and he has some theories about why you don't.

Adams started drawing the silly, apolitical workplace farce Dilbert in 1989, and it has ruled the comics page and the daily-calendar industry ever since. But his appreciation for Trump's gonzo persuasion techniques has inspired his more provocative urges. In the past few weeks alone, Adams has raised a ruckus by suggesting that Clinton's coronation at the Democratic National Convention lowered his testosterone rates, and that he could master any political topic in an hour. Sass him about this stuff, and he'll sass you right back. From CNN to Real Time With Bill Maher to the Washington Post, his rep as a cerebral, idiosyncratic pundit has only grown. We spoke on Friday over FaceTime about nuclear weapons, sad men, Godzilla, Twitter trolls, and babies. Here are excerpts from our conversation.

You're on vacation right now, so hopefully you're not glued to the news, but Trump is having a pretty breathtaking week. Are you up on this stuff? Can you tear yourself away?

Well, I'm watching the headlines, but I'm not reading the details of his assault against babies. So I think the headlines are telling me everything I need to know'Š'--'Šthis week, anyway.

Is there anything that Trump could do that would change your thinking about a landslide? He said himself that he could shoot somebody and it wouldn't dent his support. You keep saying that even the craziest things he does are examples of persuasion techniques'Š'--'Šdoes that apply even to murder?

Heh. No, obviously he was speaking hyperbolically. And at that time he was talking to his base supporters, who really were pretty strongly set for him. But if you look at the recent events, what's different about them is that they're manufactured by the media for the most part. It's the spin you put on things.

The fact that he said some things about a baby at a rally can be spun any possible way. Now, if you were at the rally, you probably had one kind of reaction. And if you heard about it filtered through a headline that was mischaracterized, it sounds like Trump hates babies. If you heard that out of context about anybody else, you might laugh and say, ''People don't hate babies, that's crazy.'' But because the Clinton campaign are such good persuaders at this point'Š'--'Šand their tentacles into the media are so good, either directly or through their surrogates'Š'--'Šthe overall message that Trump is evil creates this confirmation-bias trap, where you see every little story as supporting it, no matter how ridiculous it is.

Well, for starters, he does have himself to blame that it's plausible that he would get in a fight with a baby at a rally. As you say, you wouldn't really believe that headline coming from anyone else. But so many strange things have happened, he's created this world where anything is possible.

Now, listen. Listen to your own question. Listen to your own question and then tell me if you are an objective observer. I'll just repeat it back to you as closely as I can.

Sure.

''Trump has created a situation in which it seems plausible he would pick a fight with a baby.'' [Laughs.] Really? Does that sound reasonable to you? When you hear it played back?

It doesn't sound reasonable, no, but you have to say it does sound plausible.

Plausible?

I don't know, man, he's yelled at a lot of people.

Right. But even if he was yelling at the situation, do you imagine that he had some hidden anger toward babies? One hundred percent of the people at that event, and probably nearly 100 percent of the people who heard the story, hate crying babies at events, and are a little angry at the mother who would've kept him. What Trump did, the way he reacted, was 100 percent compatible with every observer. And yet! And yet! Somehow doing what every person was thinking and would like to do in that situation, being the most normal a human being can be'Š'--'Šit was spun as, he was a monster. Now, if that's not good persuasion, I don't know what is.

Did you imagine you'd wade as deep into election commentary as you have? You're blogging about it with the fervor of someone who's covering it as a full-time job.

I didn't imagine it, not ahead of time, because I'm not terribly interested in politics, and I don't write, in my opinion'Š'--'ŠI guess it crosses the boundary a little bit'Š'--'Šbut I'm trying to avoid writing about politics. I'm trying to stick to the question of persuasion, and what you're seeing here'Š'--'Šhave you read a blog about what I call ''Godzilla''?

About Godzilla? No.

I think I've tweeted about it more than blogged about it. There was a report in The New York Times that Obama, during his first election, I think, hired a number of behavioral psychologists to help him craft his message. Now, I happen to know, because of my background in hypnosis and studying persuasion for a long time, that their power is far greater than the public understands. In other words, their ability to craft a message, quickly test it, and find out how to tweak it to make it better or get rid of it, is, in the year 2016, nothing like it was 20 years ago. It's become a superpower. I can tell you that Clinton's campaign, before Bernie Sanders went out, did not have any signs of good persuasion. She was talking about experience and facts and policies and all this stuff that doesn't persuade anybody, because we don't know about facts and policies. We just pretend we do. But about the time that Bernie dropped out, she went full hard-core persuasion, and dropped all facts and reasons'Š'--'Šyou don't hear much about policies anymore. And she went to fear.

Take a look at what Clinton did to change her message. It changed from, ''Hey, I'm experienced and he's not'''Š'--'Šwhich is not terribly persuasive when people want the outsider anyway'Š'--'Šand it went from, ''Hey, he's not such a good businessman,'' to, ''He's dark, he's scary, he's crazy, he's mentally unstable, he'll have the nuclear codes.'' They went to super-scare. And I would imagine that the top persuaders, and one among them, who I call ''Godzilla,'' in particular'Š'--'ŠI think they waded in and said, ''Stop doing everything you're doing, and scare the fuck out of people. And here's how you do it. You make this guy look like he's out of control.'' So out of control that somebody like you could say, ''You know, I think he does hate that baby.'' And they pulled that off.

So thisreport, and it's unconfirmed, that he was in some sort of meeting, and he kept asking, ''We have all these nuclear weapons, why can't we use them?'' The report is that he asked that three times. And that's another thing that people already predisposed to not like him, or to be scared of him, point to as evidence that he sounds like a crazy person. Do you believe that he actually said that?

So that's the perfect kind of thing that is almost certainly out of context. First of all, it's unconfirmed. But second of all, I can easily imagine myself, in that meeting, wanting to know all the ways it's bad.

Sure.

So if I want to know all the ways it's bad, I say, ''Why can't I use it?'' And then somebody will say, ''Well, it would kill too many civilians.'' So then you can imagine me saying, ''All of our weapons kill too many civilians. So why can't I use it?'' ''Well, it also would be opening up other people to build nuclear things.'' And he would say, ''There's nothing stopping them now. So why can't I use it?'' So I can see even myself asking that question three times, because I want to understand all the ways that I shouldn't use it. And I want to make sure I'm not missing anything.

Getty ImagesBut you know, there's a reason that every president uses the same language, which is, ''We're not taking any options off the table.'' And the reason is, all the options are always on the table, until they're not. And he was asking specifically, what conditions take it off the table? Because he was trying to get informed. Would you not want the next president of the United States to understand why he shouldn't use these weapons? And how is he gonna know? Common sense only gets you so far, right? So everybody's criticizing him for using his instinct and not studying and not asking the question, and then a report that he was asking detailed questions about why he should avoid doing this terrible thing comes out as, ''Crazy man wants to use nuclear weapons.'' Do you see how easy it is to spin this stuff?

This is not your day job. Are you concerned that your more provocative political commentary might affect the way people perceive Dilbert, or your other books, or just you? Do people still call their hometown newspapers to complain about comic strips?

Well, Dilbert is pretty solid in the newspapers, and on the website, the traffic'Š'--'ŠI think the readership's bigger than it's ever been, historically. But there are lines of my business that suffer directly. So for example, I had a very lucrative speaking career until I started writing about Trump. And that disappeared. Because since I'm associated with him, and he's associated with Hitler, it's tough to invite the guy who's associated with Hitler to your club, or to your corporate gathering, I suppose. So that actually went from lots of requests all the time to just nothing, and fairly suddenly.

But my Twitter account is bigger than ever. I'm kind of new to Twitter, but 50,000 users seems like a lot to me. I'm getting more attention from more media analysts than ever before, The Wall Street Journal is coming over soon to talk to me, BBC wanted to talk to me but I couldn't schedule it. It's pretty much a continuous stream. I was on Bill Maher, CNN. I'm playing what I call a system, not a goal.

Right. From your book.

From my book. And the system is this: If you do something publicly and well, you don't know where that's gonna go. It's almost certainly gonna create opportunities that are useful. So I am consciously and intentionally cannibalizing my other opportunities for something potentially more useful, or something better. I don't know what that is. It could be anything. But people are begging me to do a podcast, just for example. I've got an offer to do another book, which I probably can sell better now than I could before. Because before, people said, ''Hey, he's the comic guy. Why do I want to buy his book that has words in it?'' But now, if they think I'm the Trump writer about persuasion, and they liked it, maybe they'd buy that book. So that's the system, with no specific goal, and probably a lot of ways that could turn out well. But in the meantime, it energizes me. Keeps me happy, and I'm having a heck of a time.

You've written that this Trump stuff, your writing on it, has reduced your income by 40 percent; you add that you've gotten threats, and even death threats. If those things are true, why are you doing this? Why publicly talk about this stuff if you've got that much to lose?

Well, for the reason I gave. It's an intentional cannibalization. But I'm also at that age, and place in my career, where there's a natural inclination to try to be useful to people who aren't as lucky. And when I saw Trump enter the race, it was clear to me that he would be deeply misinterpreted, all the time. And that his value, whatever it is, would maybe have been missed if he didn't have someone who wasn't him explain, ''No, these are techniques, not random crazy talk.'' Because remember, when he first came in, people thought he was literally just joking. Just acting like a crazy clown. And they kept thinking that until it kept working. And I was explaining it all along the way. You see a lot of other articles now, that are sort of along the same lines of what I've been saying, and I think maybe I helped loosen up that line of thinking as legitimate.

A lot of people are pointing to how he focuses energy, and how he activates certain parts of your brain, to turn off your rational thought, stuff like that. I think that, in context, if you say, ''My god, he's hypnotizing the world, that sounds like the worst thing I've ever heard,'' if you hear me say, ''No, we're all like that all the time, and they're all trying to influence us; he just has a little better tools,'' that sounds like a completely different thing. And I think that's a valid interpretation.

So everyone who knows that I'm talking to you just wants me to ask you aboutwizard theory. You've declared both Trump and Kanye West to be wizards: They're hugely successful, out of proportion maybe. They're perceived as arrogant but they can withstand criticism and the occasional PR crisis. They're skilled at cognitive dissonance. Are you, yourself, a wizard, or at least an aspiring one?

Well, the way I defined it, I get to be it, because part of the definition is success in a field that you shouldn't be succeeding in because you don't have any experience. So I became one of the top cartoonists in the world, and I don't even draw that well. I became a number-one best-selling author the first time I wrote a book. I've tried a number of other business that didn't work out, so it's part of being a system and not a goal. But the things that didn't work out were never because of my skill level. The things I couldn't control ended up being the fatal things. I'm right in the middle of launching a startup that you'll hear a lot about, something completely different from the things I've done, and it's sensational. It's probably gonna be the best thing I ever do. We're testing that now. It's amazing.

Anyway, if you judge it by that ability, most of what makes that work is an understanding of persuasion. So if you look at Trump, he jumped from convincing people to build homes, or build buildings and move into them, to persuading somebody he should be on The Apprentice, to writing a book that convinced people he's an expert on persuasion, and then politics. So Trump is using the same skill set in persuasion to succeed in field after field, and I do the same thing. So the thing that allows me to succeed is usually my understanding of persuasion. It's in my writing, it's in my drawings, my speaking.

Kanye's sort of a special case, because he might actually have, um, some issues. I won't try to diagnose him. But I will say that he has the confidence and the ability to withstand criticism, the ability to succeed in a field in which he shouldn't have succeeded'Š'--'Šyeah, he seems to have the whole package of persuasions. And I've heard his lyrics. They're pretty great too.

It's been a week since the Democratic National Convention'Š'--'Šhave your testosterone levels recovered?

It's funny'Š'--'Šthis is another good case of persuasion. The science completely supports what I suggested. As a hypothesis, by the way, not stating a fact. That when people are subjected to things that make them feel victorious and good, their testosterone levels somewhat immediately rise. It's measurable, repeatable science. As far as I know. I know what I read, right? I haven't done the experiments myself. And, certainly anecdotally, you know that if you win a big contest or whatever, you're more likely to want to have sex. I can tell you that as a professional speaker'Š'--'Šwhen I was doing it'Š'--'Šif I give a talk to 1,000 people, and there's a standing ovation, an hour later, I'm desperate to have sex. I can feel my testosterone levels coming out of my ears. And I think other public figures would report the same thing, right?

So the hypothesis is about as reasonable and normal as you can possibly get. But the response on Twitter'Š'--'Šand other places, I'm sure'Š'--'Šis, ''My god, the cartoonist thinks looking at women succeed will sap his testosterone.'' Sort of the sarcastic, mocking things. But my guess is it's not as simple as that'Š'--'Šprobably some people are getting the opposite response. If you were a man who was a die-hard Democratic supporter, then all you were watching was a victory. So you probably had a spike in your testosterone. If you were on the other side, the opposite'Š'--'Šand if you were neutral'Š'--'Šprobably it would decrease your testosterone. If you were just thinking, ''Hmm, men used to be more important.''

And by the way, I'm not saying they should've been more important. I'm just pointing out that it was like this before, and it's like this now, and the normal way that people would perceive that'Š'--'Šon an emotional level, not a rational level, not with any sense of social justice, but just how they feel it'Š'--'Š''I feel a little less important, relative to other people.'' Not everybody can be the president.

In terms of maintaining or even elevating current national testosterone levels, what advice would you give Hillary? How can she soothe men, if she's currently rattling them?

If I were advising her, I would tell her to do nothing different. Because she's way ahead in the polls, as I understand it. She simply has to keep with the fear. I use the analogy that you don't have to outrun a bear, you only have to outrun the person you're with. So to win, she just has to make Trump look increasingly scary. And it appears that that will be easy to do, and she's been very successful at it.

Just glancing at your Twitter account, you seem unfazed by any insults or backlash that you get: You'll go back and forth with people who tweet at you. Do you read all that stuff, the social media stuff, the angry blog posts? Does any of it ever get to you, or change your thinking?

In terms of changing my thinking, if I read them'Š'--'Šand I don't always read them'Š'--'Šif there's a good point in there, it might change my thinking. I can't think of a specific example where that's happened. Normally the critics do what we're talking about here, which is they interpret what I said as something that I didn't say, by conflating things, or taking something to its extreme, or simply not understanding why I said what I said. The ''learning any topic in one hour'' tweet was meant to confuse dumb people so they would talk about it. [Laughs.] It was the purpose. If they got into a conversation about how hard it was to learn the job of president, then my message got through.

I didn't take you for the sort of guy who wouldtweet a shirtless photo of yourselfat someone who was publicly criticizing or assailing your health or your fitness, but you do that, occasionally. Is there a point where you worry you might wade too far into the Twitter muck?

Well, here's the way I laughingly describe this. These are people who have chosen a verbal fight with someone who writes humorous things with the fewest number of characters, for a living. That's literally my job. If you were to name some famous people who're the best at writing short sentences of humor, I'd be on the short list. Top 100, I think. It's what I do for a living. So to me it's always hilarious that people pick a fight with me in public, in a realm in which I'm overarmed and they're underarmed. So for me, I always just consider it part of the entertainment for my followers, that they can see how I respond.

Inyour Reddit AMA, you led with the fact that you're a trained hypnotist. I'm wondering how that manifests itself in your everyday life.

So I took the course in hypnosis when I was in my 20s. And I was trying to learn, really, how the mind works. And I figured it would apply to everything I did.

So you look at Dilbert, for example. You'll notice that'Š'--'Šwell, you wouldn't notice until I told you'Š'--'Šyou'll notice that I'm using a hypnosis-inspired technique. Which is, Dilbert doesn't have a last name. His first name is one you've almost never heard. Very few people have that. He doesn't live in any town that's specified. The company name is never mentioned, it's a workplace. You don't know how old he is. You don't know his boss's first or last name, or any of that. And that's a hypnosis technique, where you stay general, and you let people fill in what they want to fill in. And I did that so people would say, ''Hey, that's my job.'' Because I haven't given them reasons to exclude it.

Remember when we were talking about the Clinton camp saying that Trump was dark? That's hypnosis. That is deep technique. I believe that if you study the tools of persuasion, you can be a little less susceptible. So for example, I don't register for any political party, and I don't vote. That allows me to have a little more objectivity than someone who had. Because we know there's a joiner effect. As soon as you join, you just imagine your side is right all the time, even if they aren't. So likewise, when I heard the word dark, I realized it was a trap, and so every time someone falls into the trap, I can mentally say, ''Ah, that's one of those trap things.'' And discount it. So knowing hypnosis allows you to view the world in a whole different way. It's like you take the lid off, and you can see the engine. And when something breaks, you know why.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 21:15

The smoking-cessation drug Chantix has now played a crucial role in a second violent crime. On Monday, a Maryland man was found not criminally responsible for shooting his wife in the neck in their home in 2014 because he was found to be suffering from ''involuntary intoxication'' due to Chantix. His wife survived.

Last year, an Army soldier, who brutally stabbed another soldier to death in 2008, won a new hearing because the judge in his original trial refused to let him put on an involuntary intoxication defense. The soldier claimed that he was so neurologically disturbed by Chantix that he was not aware of what he was doing. A military court then reduced his sentence from life without parole to 45 years.

Involuntary intoxication is not a new defense, but as we discussed on the True Crime blog in May, it is having more success in courts across the country. Last year in St. Paul, Minn., a woman charged with trying to kill and assault her two small children was released when prosecutors decided that the charges could not stand ''in light of the defendant's involuntary intoxication at the time of the charged incident.'' A Columbia, Mo., woman who was convicted of causing a fatal wreck while driving the wrong way on Interstate 70 has been granted a new trial because she may have been secretly given a ''date rape'' drug before taking the wheel.

The defense did not work in Fairfax County, Va., in May, where a man who had invaded another lawyer's home, took the lawyer and his wife hostage and then stabbed and shot them, later claimed that his prescribed cocktail of pain and psychiatric medications made him involuntarily intoxicated. A jury disagreed, convicted Andrew Schmuhl and sentenced him to two life sentences plus 98 years.

In Carroll County, Md., lawyers for Keith E. Sluder, 44, appear to be the second ones to specifically invoke Chantix for a successful involuntary intoxication defense. In November 2014, according to the Carroll County Times, Sluder awoke his wife and told her they had to go to his mother's house. When she followed him up the stairs, he shot her once and tried to shoot her again, but the gun malfunctioned. When a sheriff's deputy arrived and pointed his gun at Sluder, police said he tried to grab the deputy's gun. The deputy did not shoot him.

Sluder's lawyer, Lawrence Greenburg, argued at Sluder's hearing that Chantix caused Sluder to have a chemical imbalance. And prosecutors in New Carroll essentially did not argue with that, which would tend to indicate that their mental health expert examined Sluder and came to the same conclusion. The prosecutors allowed Sluder to enter an Alford plea to assault, and they dropped two counts of attempted murder.

Carroll County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Stansfield found Sluder not criminally responsible for the assault charge and ordered him released from custody Monday, according to the Carroll County Times. The Times reported that the shooting victim and her family pleaded with the judge not to release Sluder, but the judge said he was bound by the definition of not criminally responsible. The family reportedly was not happy with the decision.

Pfizer, the maker of Chantix, has denied that the drug has any neuropsychiatric effects. But McClatchy News Service reported in 2014 that more than 2,000 people had joined in lawsuits against Pfizer for various psychiatric problems, including suicide and suicidal thoughts. Pfizer settled most of them for an estimated total of at least $299 million, McClatchy reported.

Pfizer spokesman Steven Danehy said Tuesday, ''There is no reliable scientific evidence that Chantix causes serious neuropsychiatric events. In fact, the largest global clinical trial of smoking cessation medications, including varenicline, bupropion and nicotine replacement patch, which was ordered by the FDA and recently published in The Lancet also 'did not show a significant increase in serious neuropsychiatric adverse events attributable to varenicline compared to placebo and nicotine replacement patch .'''

Danehy said Chantix, generically known as varenicline, was ''an important, effective, FDA-approved treatment option for adult smokers who want to quit. Chantix is approved for use in more than 100 countries and has been prescribed to over 20 million patients worldwide, including more than 11 million in the United States.''

But the drug was still cited for its alleged role in a military murder case, which was greatly troubling to the family of Rick Bulmer, who was an Army recruit at Fort Benning, Ga., in 2008. While Bulmer slept in his bunk one night, Pfc. George D.B. MacDonald suddenly attacked him with a knife, slashed his throat and killed him for no reason. He claimed that the smoking cessation drug had made him delusional. A jury in 2009 convicted him of murder and sentenced him to life without parole.

But in 2014, MacDonald was granted a rehearing because of revelations about Chantix, which he hadn't been allowed to pursue at trial. McClatchy reported that one week after the judge in MacDonald's case refused to compel Pfizer to respond to a subpoena, the FDA issued a ''black box'' warning on Chantix because of its potential for ''serious neuropsychiatric'' problems. It is the most serious warning a medication can carry and still be sold.

Bulmer's family was outraged at the case being reopened, McClatchy reported in 2015. ''It's a mindblower, and we don't understand it,'' said Bulmer's mother, Wendy Smith. ''He cold-bloodedly killed my son. He knew what he was doing and . . . he should take his punishment.''

A plea deal resulted in a guilty plea to a reduced charge of unpremeditated murder. His sentence was reduced to 45 years.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Tom Jackman

PHOTO CREDIT: Carroll County Sheriff's Office

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 20:05

Enoch Powell's 20 April 1968 address to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre (commonly called "Rivers of Blood") was a speech criticising Commonwealth immigration and anti-discrimination legislation that had been proposed in the United Kingdom. Powell (1912''1998) was the ConservativeMember of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West. He referred to the speech as "the Birmingham speech" but it is otherwise known as the "Rivers of Blood" speech, a title derived from its allusion to a line from Virgil's Aeneid.[1] The phrase "rivers of blood" does not appear in the speech; the name alludes to the line, "As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'"

The speech caused a political storm, making Powell one of the most talked about, and divisive, politicians in the country, and leading to his controversial dismissal from the Shadow Cabinet by Conservative Party leader Edward Heath.[2] According to most accounts, the popularity of Powell's perspective on race may have played a decisive contributory factor in the Conservatives' surprise victory in the 1970 general election, and he became one of the most persistent rebels opposing the subsequent Heath government.[2]

Contents

Powell made the speech on 20 April 1968 in Birmingham to a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre. The Labour government's Race Relations Bill 1968 was to have its second reading the following Tuesday, and the Conservative Opposition had tabled an amendment significantly weakening its provisions.[3] The Bill was a successor to the Race Relations Act 1965.

The Birmingham-based television company ATV saw an advance copy of the speech on the Saturday morning, and its news editor ordered a television crew to go to the venue, where they filmed sections of the speech. Earlier in the week, Powell said to his friend Clement Jones, who was a journalist at the WolverhamptonExpress & Star, "I'm going to make a speech at the weekend and it's going to go up 'fizz' like a rocket; but whereas all rockets fall to the earth, this one is going to stay up."

Powell recounted a conversation with one of his constituents, a middle-aged working man, a few weeks earlier. Powell said that the man told him: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country'... I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas." The man finished by saying to Powell: "In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."[4]

Powell went on:

''Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking '' not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fianc(C)es whom they have never seen.[4][5]''Powell quoted a letter he received from a woman in Northumberland, about an elderly woman living on a Wolverhampton street where she was the only white resident. The elderly woman had lost her husband and her two sons in World War II and had rented out the rooms in her house. Once immigrants had moved into the street she was living in, her white lodgers left. Two black men had knocked on her door at 7:00 am to use her telephone to call their employers, but she refused, as she would have done to any other stranger knocking at her door at such an hour, and was subsequently verbally abused.

The woman had asked her local authority for a rates reduction, but was told by a council officer to let out the rooms of her house. When the woman said the only tenants would be black, the council officer replied: "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country." He advocated voluntary re-emigration by "generous grants and assistance" and he claimed that immigrants had asked him whether it was possible. Powell said that all citizens should be equal before the law, and that:

''This does not mean that the immigrant and his descendants should be elevated into a privileged or special class or that the citizen should be denied his right to discriminate in the management of his own affairs between one fellow-citizen and another or that he should be subjected to an inquisition as to his reasons and motives for behaving in one lawful manner rather than another.[6]''He argued that journalists who urged the government to pass anti-discrimination laws were "of the same kidney and sometimes on the same newspapers which year after year in the 1930s tried to blind this country to the rising peril which confronted it". Powell said that such legislation would be used to discriminate against the indigenous population and that it would be like "throwing a match on to gunpowder."[6] Powell described what he thought the position of the indigenous population would be:

''For reasons which they could not comprehend, and in pursuance of a decision by default, on which they were never consulted, they found themselves made strangers in their own country. They found their wives unable to obtain hospital beds in childbirth, their children unable to obtain school places, their homes and neighbourhoods changed beyond recognition, their plans and prospects for the future defeated; at work they found that employers hesitated to apply to the immigrant worker the standards of discipline and competence required of the native-born worker; they began to hear, as time went by, more and more voices which told them that they were now the unwanted. On top of this, they now learn that a one-way privilege is to be established by Act of Parliament; a law which cannot, and is not intended to, operate to protect them or redress their grievances, is to be enacted to give the stranger, the disgruntled and the agent provocateur the power to pillory them for their private actions.[7]''Powell argued that he felt that although "many thousands" of immigrants wanted to integrate, he felt that the majority did not, and that some had vested interests in fostering racial and religious differences "with a view to the exercise of actual domination, first over fellow-immigrants and then over the rest of the population".[8] Powell's peroration of the speech gave rise to its popular title. He quotes the Sibyl's prophecy in the epic poem Aeneid, 6, 86''87, of "wars, terrible wars, / and the Tiber foaming with much blood."

''As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with much blood". That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.[9]''According to C. Howard Wheeldon, who was present at the meeting in which Powell gave the speech, "it is fascinating to note what little hostility emerged from the audience. To the best of my memory, only one person voiced any sign of annoyance."[10] The day after the speech Powell went to Sunday Communion at his local church and when he emerged there was a crowd of journalists and a local plasterer (Sidney Miller) said to Powell: "Well done, sir. It needed to be said."[11] Powell asked the assembled journalists: "Have I really caused such a furore?" At midday Powell went on the BBC's World This Weekend to defend his speech and he appeared later that day on ITN news.

Although the majority of the Parliamentary Labour Party did not wish to "stir up the Powell issue",[12] Labour MP Edward Leadbitter said he would refer the speech to the Director of Public Prosecutions. The Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe spoke of a prima facie case against Powell for incitement. Lady Gaitskell called the speech "cowardly" and the cricketer Sir Learie Constantine condemned it.[13] Labour MP Tony Benn said:

''The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen. If we do not speak up now against the filthy and obscene racialist propaganda ... the forces of hatred will mark up their first success and mobilise their first offensive. ...Enoch Powell has emerged as the real leader of the Conservative Party. He is a far stronger character than Mr. Heath. He speaks his mind; Heath does not. The final proof of Powell's power is that Heath dare not attack him publicly, even when he says things things that disgust decent Conservatives.[12]''The leading Conservatives in the Shadow Cabinet were outraged by the speech. Iain Macleod, Edward Boyle, Quintin Hogg and Robert Carr all threatened to resign from the front bench unless Powell was sacked. Margaret Thatcher thought that some of Powell's speech was "strong meat",[14] and said to Heath when he telephoned her to inform her Powell was to be sacked: "I really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis". The Conservative leader, Edward Heath, sacked Powell from his post as Shadow Defence Secretary, telling him on the telephone that Sunday evening (it was the last conversation they would have). Heath said of the speech in public that it was "racialist in tone and liable to exacerbate racial tensions". Conservative MPs on the right of the party'--Duncan Sandys, Gerald Nabarro, Teddy Taylor'--spoke against Powell's sacking.[15] On 22 April 1968, Heath went on Panorama, telling Robin Day: "I dismissed Mr Powell because I believed his speech was inflammatory and liable to damage race relations. I am determined to do everything I can to prevent racial problems developing into civil strife'... I don't believe the great majority of the British people share Mr Powell's way of putting his views in his speech."[16]

The Times newspaper declared it "an evil speech", stating "This is the first time that a serious British politician has appealed to racial hatred in this direct way in our postwar history."[17]The Times went on to record incidents of racial attacks in the immediate aftermath of Powell's speech. One such incident, reported under the headline "Coloured family attacked", took place on 30 April 1968 in Wolverhampton itself: it involved a slashing incident with 14 white youths chanting "Powell" and "Why don't you go back to your own country?" at patrons of a West Indian christening party. One of the West Indian victims, Wade Crooks of Lower Villiers Street, was the child's grandfather. He had to have eight stitches over his left eye. He was reported as saying, "I have been here since 1955 and nothing like this has happened before. I am shattered."[18] An opinion poll commissioned by the BBC television programme Panorama in December 1968 found that eight per cent of immigrants believed that they had been treated worse by white people since Powell's speech, 38 per cent would like to return to their country of origin if offered financial help, and 47 per cent supported immigration control, with 30 per cent opposed.[19]

On 23 April 1968, the Race Relations Bill had its second reading in the House of Commons.[3] Many MPs referred or alluded to Powell's speech. For Labour, Paul Rose, Maurice Orbach, Reginald Paget, Dingle Foot, Ivor Richard, and David Ennals were all critical.[3] Among the Conservatives, Quintin Hogg and Nigel Fisher were critical, while Hugh Fraser, Ronald Bell, Dudley Smith, and Harold Gurden were sympathetic.[3] Powell was present for the debate but did not speak.[3]

Earlier that day, 1,000 London dockers had gone on strike in protest of Powell's sacking and marched from the East End to the Palace of Westminster carrying placards saying "Don't knock Enoch" and "Back Britain, not Black Britain". Three hundred of them went into the palace, 100 to lobby the MP for Stepney, Peter Shore, and 200 to lobby the MP for Poplar, Ian Mikardo. Shore and Mikardo were shouted down and some dockers kicked Mikardo. Lady Gaitskell shouted: "You will have your remedy at the next election." The dockers replied: "We won't forget."[20] The organiser of the strike, Harry Pearman, headed a delegation to meet Powell and said after: "I have just met Enoch Powell and it made me feel proud to be an Englishman. He told me that he felt that if this matter was swept under the rug he would lift the rug and do the same again. We are representatives of the working man. We are not racialists."[21]

On 24 April 600 dockers at St Katharine's Docks voted to strike and numerous smaller factories across the country followed. Six hundred Smithfield meat porters struck and marched to Westminster and handed Powell a 92-page petition supporting him. Powell advised against strike action and asked them to write to Harold Wilson, Heath or their MP. However, strikes continued, reaching Tilbury by 25 April and he allegedly received his 30,000th letter supporting him, with 30 protesting against his speech. By 27 April, 4,500 dockers were on strike. On 28 April, 1,500 people marched to Downing Street chanting "Arrest Enoch Powell".[22] Powell claimed to have received 43,000 letters and 700 telegrams supporting him by early May, with 800 letters and four telegrams against.[23] On 2 May, the attorney-general, Sir Elwyn Jones, announced he would not prosecute Powell after consulting the director of public prosecutions.

Whilst a section of the white population appeared to warm to Powell over the speech, the author Mike Phillips recalls that it legitimised hostility, and even violence, towards black Britons like himself.[24]

The Gallup Organization took an opinion poll at the end of April and found that 74 per cent agreed with what Powell had said in his speech; 15 per cent disagreed. 69 per cent felt Heath was wrong to sack Powell and 20 per cent believed Heath was right. Before his speech Powell was favoured to replace Heath as Conservative leader by one per cent, with Reginald Maudling favoured by 20 per cent; after his speech 24 per cent favoured Powell and 18 per cent Maudling. 83 per cent now felt immigration should be restricted (75 per cent before the speech) and 65 per cent favoured anti-discrimination legislation.[25]

Powell defended his speech on 4 May through an interview for the Birmingham Post: "What I would take 'racialist' to mean is a person who believes in the inherent inferiority of one race of mankind to another, and who acts and speaks in that belief. So the answer to the question of whether I am a racialist is 'no''--unless, perhaps, it is to be a racialist in reverse. I regard many of the peoples in India as being superior in many respects'--intellectually, for example, and in other respects'--to Europeans. Perhaps that is over-correcting."[26]

Powell was mentioned in early versions of the song "Get Back" by the Beatles.[27][28]

In November 2010, the actor and comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar recalled the fear which the speech instilled in Britons of Indian origin: "At the end of the 1960s, Enoch Powell was quite a frightening figure to us. He was the one person who represented an enforced ticket out, so we always had suitcases that were ready and packed. My parents held the notion that we may have to leave."[29]

In his book The British Dream, David Goodhart claims that Powell's speech in effect "put back by more than a generation a robust debate about the successes and failures of immigration".[30]

''Just when a discussion should have been starting about integration, racial justice, and distinguishing the reasonable from the racist complaints of the white people whose communities were being transformed, he polarised the argument and closed it down.[30]''Identity of the woman mentioned in the speechEditAfter Powell delivered the speech, there were attempts to locate the Wolverhampton constituent whom Powell described as being victimised by non-white residents. Despite combing the electoral register and other sources, the editor of the local Wolverhampton newspaper the Express & Star, Clem Jones (a close friend of Powell who broke off relations with him over the controversy) failed to identify the woman.[31]

Shortly after Powell's death, Kenneth Nock, a Wolverhampton solicitor, wrote to the Express and Star in April 1998 to claim that his firm had acted for the woman in question, but that he could not name her owing to rules concerning client confidentiality.[32] In January 2007, the BBC Radio Four programme Document, followed by the Daily Mail, claimed to have uncovered the woman's identity. They said she was Druscilla Cotterill (1907''1978), the widow of Harry Cotterill, a battery quartermaster sergeant with the Royal Artillery who had been killed in World War II (and second cousin of Mark Cotterill, a figure in British far-right politics[33]). She lived in Brighton Place in Wolverhampton, which by the 1960s was dominated by immigrant families. In order to increase her income, she rented rooms to lodgers, but did not wish to rent rooms to West Indians and stopped taking in any lodgers when the Race Relations Act 1968 banned racial discrimination in housing. She locked up the spare rooms and lived only in two rooms of the house. According to those who remember the period, the many children in the street regarded her as a figure of fun and taunted her.[34]

Support for the speechEditIn the United Kingdom, particularly in England, "Enoch [Powell] was right" is a phrase of political rhetoric, inviting comparison of aspects of contemporary English society with the predictions made by Powell in the "Rivers of Blood" speech. The phrase implies criticism of racial quotas, immigration and multiculturalism. Badges, T-shirts and other items bearing the slogan have been produced at different times in the United Kingdom.[citation needed] Powell gained support from both right-wing and traditionally left-leaning, working-class voters for his anti-immigration stance.

Powell has gained the support of the far-right in Britain. Badges, T-shirts and fridge magnets emblazoned with the slogan "Enoch was right" are regularly seen at far-right demonstrations, according to VICE News, and sample recordings of Powell speeches feature heavily in the music of the neo-Nazi hardcore band Of Wolves and Angels.[35] Powell also has a presence on social media, with an Enoch Powell page on Facebook run by the far-right Traditional Britain Group amassed several thousands of likes, and similar pages which post "racist memes and Daily Mail stories" have been equally successful,[35] such as British nationalist and anti-immigration Britain First's Facebook page.[36]

On 5 August 1976, Eric Clapton provoked an uproar and lingering controversy when he spoke out against increasing immigration during a concert in Birmingham. Visibly intoxicated, Clapton voiced his support of the controversial speech, and announced on stage that Britain was in danger of becoming a "black colony". Among other things, Clapton said "Keep Britain white!"[37] which was at the time a British National Front slogan.[38][39]

In November 2007, Nigel Hastilow resigned as Conservative candidate for Halesowen and Rowley Regis after he wrote an article in the Wolverhampton Express & Star that included the statement: "Enoch, once MP for Wolverhampton South-West, was sacked from the Conservative front bench and marginalised politically for his 1968 'rivers of blood' speech, warning that uncontrolled immigration would change Britain irrevocably. He was right and immigration has changed the face of Britain dramatically".[40][41]

In January 2014, UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage stated that 'the basic principle' of one passage of the speech which had been read to him was 'right'.[42] In June of that year, in response to an Islamist plot to infiltrate schools in Birmingham, Conservative peer and former minister Norman Tebbit wrote in The Daily Telegraph "No one should have been surprised at what was going on in schools in Birmingham. It is precisely what I was talking about over 20 years ago and Enoch Powell was warning against long before that. We have imported far too many immigrants who have come here not to live in our society, but to replicate here the society of their homelands".[43] Conservative MP Gerald Howarth said on the same issue "Clearly, the arrival of so many people of non-Christian faith has presented a challenge, as so many of us, including the late Enoch Powell, warned decades ago".[44]

In March 2016, German writer Michael St¼rmer wrote a retrospective pro-Powell piece in Die Welt, opining that nobody else had been "punished so mercilessly" by fellow party members and media for their viewpoints.[45]

Acknowledgement from politiciansEditThe Labour Party MP Michael Foot remarked to a reporter that it was "tragic" that this "outstanding personality" had been widely misunderstood as predicting actual bloodshed in Britain, when in fact he had used the Aeneid quotation merely to communicate his own sense of foreboding.[46]

Thirty years after the speech, Edward Heath said that Powell's remarks on the "economic burden of immigration" had been "not without prescience."[46]

In an interview for Today shortly after her departure from office in 1991, Margaret Thatcher said that Powell had "made a valid argument, if in sometimes regrettable terms."[46]

^Heffer 1999, p. 449^ abMcLean 2001, pp. 129''30^ abcdehttp://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1968/apr/23/race-relations-bill . Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). 763. HC. 23 April 1968. col. 53''198. ^ abPowell 1969, p. 282^Powell 1969, p. 283^ abPowell 1969, p. 285^Powell 1969, p. 286^Powell 1969, pp. 287''88^Powell 1969, pp. 289''90^Heffer 1999, p. 455^Roth 1970, p. 357^ abDavid Butler; Michael Pinto-Duschinsky (2 July 1971). British General Election of 1970. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 159''160. ISBN 978-1-349-01095-0. ^Heffer 1999, p. 457^Part 2: Enoch Powell and the 'Rivers of Blood Ottawa Citizen (Canada.com), 4 June 2008^Heffer 1999, p. 459^Heffer 1999, p. 461^Editorial comment, The Times, 22 April 1968^The Times, 1 May 1968^Heffer 1999, p. 500^Heffer 1999, p. 462^Roth 1970, p. 361^Heffer 1999, pp. 462''65^Heffer 1999, p. 466^Shrapnel, Norman; Phillips, Mike (7 February 2001). "Enoch Powell '' An enigma of awkward passions". The Guardian. ^Heffer 1999, p. 467^Heffer 1999, pp. 466''67^Sulpy, Doug; Schweighardt, Ray. "Thursday, 9 January 1969". Get Back, The Unauthorized Chronicle of The Beatles Let It Be Disaster. p. 153. ^Alex Sayf Cummings. "''No Pakistanis'': The racial satire the Beatles don't want you to hear". Salon.^"Sanjeev Bhaskar's family feared Enoch Powell". BBC News. 15 November 2010. ^ abGoodhart 2013, p. 144^Goodhart 2013, p. 143^Heffer 1999, p. 460^Heritage and Destiny Issue 33 July''September 2008 p13-14^Widow in Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech really did exist, Daily Mail, London, 2 February 2007, pp 50''51.^ abPoulter, James (2 April 2015). "We Tried to Ask Far-Right Groups About the Enoch Powell Paedophilia Allegations". VICE News. United Kingdom. Retrieved 23 April 2016. ^McIntyre, Niam (3 October 2014). "Britain First: Feminism and Fascism". New Left Project. Retrieved 23 April 2016. ^Bainbridge, Luke (14 October 2007). "The ten right-wing rockers". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 2 May 2010. ^Hall, John (19 August 2009). "Dabbling in right wing politics '' David Bowie, Brian Ferry and Eric Clapton". The Independent. London. Retrieved 18 January 2010. ^Rebel Rock by J. Street. First Edition (1986). Oxford Press Basil Blackwell.pp.74''75.^Helm, Toby (5 November 2007). "Race row Tory refused to sign gagging order". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 5 November 2007. ^Hastilow, Nigel (2 November 2007). "Britain seen as a soft touch". Wolverhampton Express and Star. Retrieved 5 November 2007. ^Graham, Georgia. "Nigel Farage: 'the basic principle' of Enoch Powell's River of Blood speech is right". Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 7 January 2014. ^Tebbit, Norman (10 June 2014). "Trojan Horse: I warned about this years ago". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 19 January 2015. ^McSmith, Andy (27 August 2014). "Tory MP Gerald Howarth says Enoch Powell 'was right' in notorious Rivers of Blood speech". The Independent. Retrieved 28 August 2014. ^St¼rmer, Michael (29 March 2016). "Enoch Powells fr¼he Warnung vor der Massenmigration" [Enoch Powell's early waning about mass migration]. Die Welt (in German). Retrieved 31 March 2016. ^ abcChristopher Sandford: "To See and to Speak" in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, June 2012Goodhart, David (2013). The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-War Immigration. London: Atlantic Books. ISBN 9781843548058. Heffer, Simon (1999). Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell. London: Orion. ISBN 0-7538-0820-X. McLean, Iain (2001). Rational Choice and British Politics. Oxford Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-829529-4. Powell, Enoch (1969). Freedom and Reality. Kingswood: Elliot Right Way Books. ISBN 0-7160-0541-7. Roth, Andrew (1970). Enoch Powell: Tory Tribune. London: Macdonald & Co. ISBN 0-356-03150-0. Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of Blood' speech, The Daily Telegraph, 6 November 2007 '' Full text of the speechDocument '' The Woman Who Never Was? BBC Radio 4, 22 January 2007Fiona Barton Widow in Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech really did exist Mail Online, 2 February 2007Radio Interview on Immigration Powell interviewed shortly after his controversial "Rivers of Blood" speech, BBC News (Audio clip, 3:31 mins, requires RealPlayer to listen)Speech that has raised a storm Press reaction from the Birmingham Post, 22 April 1968Rivers of Blood, The Real Source BBC Radio 4, 3 March 2008

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 17:09

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(UPDATE: I've actually now been in touch with Jesse, and he's been clean and sober for five years now. He's also working on a new project that should go live in August, so we'll update with details close to the date.)

If you'll recall, back in 1998 MTV ran a ''Wanna Be a VJ'' contest, picking an unknown lucky young person to be the co-host of Total Request Live for an entire year. In what has now come to be known as the ''Sanjaya effect,'' audiences voted for Jesse Camp, a 19-year-old homeless kid with some kind of mental illness and/or drug problem, over finalist Dave Holmes.

No one has heard much from Jesse Camp over the past fifteen years, but last night he turned up at a ''Free The Nipple'' fundraiser hosted By Russell Simmons, and '... Yeah. He's 34, you guys.

Getty Image

Getty Image

I did some wiki research to find what he's been up to since 1999, and his resume includes working at a Los Angeles feed and supply store in 2006, making telemarketing calls for a non-profit liberal organization in 2008, and being filmed by TMZ ordering eight-balls from a drug dealer outside of the TRL wrap party. Sounds about right.

Don't do drugs, kids. Drugs are bad. (Except marijuana, weed is still fine.)

(Via Too Fab)

Now check out'...

The New 'MTV Unplugged' Needs These Artists If It Wants To Match The Originalby Dariel Figueroa

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 16:58

As reported earlier by Joe Hoft'--

In recent bizarre events on the campaign trail a strange man was noticed at Hillary Clinton's side.Via Mike Cernovich:

Hillary's Handler? Brain washer? pic.twitter.com/5lsCTc8Vdk

'-- Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) August 7, 2016

** Danger and Play has much more.

The man is dressed like a secret service agent but his actions prove otherwise.In a recent campaign stop in a Union Hall in front of a sparse crowd, at about the time when some liberal protesters began to protest, Hillary Clinton suddenly froze. She looked dazed and lost. Seeing this, a group of men rushed to assist the candidate on the stage. One man however gently pats the candidate's back and then says, ''Keep Talking.''

Secret Service agents walk on stage during Hillary Clinton rally https://t.co/Btp1na4Pxt

'-- ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 4, 2016

An expert on Secret Service tactics told TGP Secret Service agents would not touch a candidate in the manner that this individual did and especially Hillary Clinton. It has been widely reported on Hillary's disdain for the agents who work to protect her. The man who touches Hillary may be a member of Hillary's close staff '' but he is NOT a Secret Service agent.

Now this'...Mike Cernovich pointed out that Hillary's handler carries a Diazepam pen.

** Diazepam auto-injector pens are used for for Acute Repetitive Seizures.Diazepam is prescribed for patients who experience recurrent seizures!

Twitter user Azusa posted this earlier.

The Ralph Retort reported:

Secret Service agent was carrying an auto-injector with Diazepam pic.twitter.com/6d3B5mmaOe

'-- Azusa (@PositiveInt) August 8, 2016

Hillary's handler was definitely carrying an auto-syringe at the DNC Convention on Hillary's big night.

Hillary has a medic carrying diazepam? @TWA2Garp@SoonerGirl000@PositiveIntpic.twitter.com/9SmooVJZFp

'-- Skip Trace_ (@skiptrace_) August 8, 2016

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 14:19

The Republican party wavers on one of the greatest moral questions it has ever faced, whether to try to stop the fascism rising in its party in the form of presidential front-runner Donald Trump. Meanwhile, a group of American experts who usually stay well out of politics, has weighed in with a dire warning for the country. Vanity Fair recently polled psychologists for their expert opinions on whether they could diagnose Trump as psychologically '... off. Of course, publicizing their opinions is extraordinary, since the American Psychiatric Association says it is unethical for psychologists to comment on public figures, and on individuals they have not personally examined. It underscores their concern for the public good.

Vanity Fair quotes clinical psychologist Ben Michaelis's diagnosis: ''Textbook narcissistic personality disorder.'' Another clinical psychologist, George Simon told Vanity Fair,

''He's so classic that I'm archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there's no better example of his characteristics, '... Otherwise, I would have had to hire actors and write vignettes. He's like a dream come true.''

Narcissistic personality disorder can be described simply as a pathological need to puff oneself up, and to put others down. Mayo Clinic publicizes an in-depth description of the traits of someone with narcissistic personality disorder.

''If you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. You often monopolize conversations. You may belittle or look down on people you perceive as inferior. You may feel a sense of entitlement '-- and when you don't receive special treatment, you may become impatient or angry. You may insist on having ''the best'' of everything '-- for instance, the best car, athletic club or medical care.''

There are few people in the public eye who more perfectly fit that description than Donald Trump. His entire life has been about a sense of entitlement over his use of the fortune loaned to him by his father. His career has been about plastering his name across ostentatious and gaudy buildings and products that he, ultimately, had little to do with building.

Trump's Twitter feed, his debate performances, his manipulation of the media, are all a study in monopolizing conversation. He has demanded special treatment in the Republican primary debates, seeking to change the rules to suit him. He steamrolls debate whenever he's criticized, angrily shouting down any accusation, even when the charge is totally true and his rebuttal is nonsensical.

Trump has defended criticism of his business record by hawking products, such as Trump steaks, that were failures, and which have not been commercially available for years. He has belittled his opponents viciously, if insubstantially, calling Jeb Bush ''low energy'' and Marco Rubio ''little Marco,'' (literally belittling the Senator from Florida).

Trump owns gold-plated vehicles and penthouses. He bought one of the world's largest yachts when he was in extreme debt, and ultimately sold it to a Saudi prince. He is in a league of his own for needing to have the ''best'' things.

Just how incredibly dangerous Trump's personality is if he were to get into the White House became scarily clear on NBC's Morning Joe recently when host Mika Brzezinski asked Trump about his foreign policy team,

''Who are you consulting with consistently so that you're ready on day one?''

Trump replied,

''I'm speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I've said a lot of things. '... My primary consultant is myself, and I have a good instinct for this stuff.''

It should go without saying that this response is absolute insanity. The tautology of his implication that he can learn by studying what he has said shows that he does not learn, and doesn't care. He doesn't need anyone but himself, and he trusts himself to a disturbing, anti-social degree.

Grasping foreign policy well enough to be a decent president of the United States is one of the most complex things a human being could possibly be asked to understand. No individual is intelligent enough to accomplish it on their own. The expertise and well-formed worldview of advisers is crucial, as any decent business executive who has avoided more bankruptcies than he has caused, would know. The ability to pick quality advisers is a key trait in a successful executive. But Trump doesn't need advisers because Trump has Trump.

The lack of seriousness inherent in that statement is extremely alarming. Trump could walk into a G20 meeting, a mediation between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a confrontation between Russia and Baltic NATO allies, a pan-Asian trade conference, and have no clue about any of the relevant actors, but decide that whatever his ''good brain'' and his ''good instinct'' tells him is the right thing to do. A leitmotif of the Trump campaign is that America gets screwed over on the world stage. The people supporting him because they're worried about that ain't seen nothin' yet.

Just ask the psychologists.

Watch Donald Trump tell Mika Brzezinski who his adviser is:

Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 13:37

Backed by Mitt Romney's moneymen, newly minted presidential candidate and actual conservative Evan McMullin appears to have one aim: stopping Donald Trump.

Call it Mitt Romney's revenge.

With less than three months left before Election Day, some prominent Republicans are banking on a long-shot candidate to bring down Donald Trump'--one who happens to be a Wharton educated Utah native and a Mormon missionary.

Don't expect Evan McMullin, who is also a former CIA counterterrorism officer and chief policy director of the House Republican Conference, to get jammed up on basic constitutional questions. He won't be grousing aloud about our national hesitance to deploying nuclear weapons on a whim or hurling brickbats at Republican leaders. It's doubtful that McMullin has ever filed bankruptcy and likely has no headline-grabbing, message-derailing personal baggage.

Republican consultant Rick Wilson, who eviscerated Trump in a weekend opinion column published in the New York Daily News, has teamed up with Florida-based pollster and operative Joel Searby to head up McMullin's campaign staff.

''A growing number of Americans are coming to the realization that Trump is more than just a political train wreck,'' Wilson wrote. ''He's a real threat to the nation'...''

McMullin, he believes, is the answer Republicans have been waiting for. Wilson readily admits that it will be an ''uphill battle,'' but said there is a strategy is get McMullin on the ballot in a broad number of states and said that if necessary, the campaign will take matters to court to do so. Americans should have a choice between ''crazy'' and ''corrupt,'' said Wilson, referring to Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Even so, the self-styled conservative independent won't likely take home any states this fall and there's no reason to believe he can topple Clinton in the polls. And with so little time left in the campaign, the likelihood that he will meet the qualification threshold for national debate appearances seems impossible. There frankly isn't enough time on the clock to build the kind of state-by-state organization necessary'-- especially since Clinton already has thousands of foot soldiers out door-knocking and has been up on television for weeks.

But McMullin might not be in the race to win, place or even show. His candidacy appears to have one specific aim: Cut off Trump's narrow path to victory.

Back in March, when former Massachusetts governor Romney stood before cameras and called Trump a ''fraud'' and a ''phony'' and said his ''promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University,'' most people watching said, ''Okay, what are your going to do about it?''

Well that answer came around noon Monday when McMullin filed the requisite paperwork, formalizing his bid for the presidency. Backed by Republican operatives who worked with Better for America, a 501(c)(4) funded in part by former Romney bundler John Kingston, McMullin might have just enough money to dig a hole in the electoral map and bury Trump in it.

Doing so means keeping previously uncompetitive states like Georgia and Arizona safely out of the win column for the New York businessman. It means forcing the quasi-reality television star to fight in territory that any other Republican candidate could have taken for granted. In several states out West and in the deep South, where the majority of Republican voters live, Trump is neck-and-neck with Clinton. Matched against Romney and John McCain, Trump is losing (or coming close to it) where he should be safest.

Recently polling shows Clinton expanding her campaign map to include states like Utah, Nevada, Arizona and even Georgia'--where she holds a stunning 44-37 lead. She's even pulling ads out of Virginia and Colorado. But, with McMullin potentially peeling off bench-warmers, independents, and center-right voters in close contests'-- people who might have otherwise stayed home or held their noses to vote for Trump'--Clinton's strength in close-in suburbs might just flip states with sitting Republican governors.

There is no reason to believe that McMullin will upset that math or carve into Clinton's base of centrist and progressive Democrats. But keeping Trump out of the White House isn't the only goal. McMullin presents a bona fide conservative alternative to the toxicity unleashed by Trump and his campaign. Should McMullin make it onto the ballot, his candidacy would give disaffected right-wingers a lever to pull.

''In a year where Americans have lost faith in the candidates of both major parties, it's time for a generation of new leadership to step up,'' McMullin told ABC News. ''It's never too late to do the right thing, and America deserves much better than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton can offer us. I humbly offer myself as a leader who can give millions of disaffected Americans a conservative choice for President.''

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For her part, Clinton has been actively courting independents and those who don't have the stomach for Trump. The early numbers show a significant softening in support for Trump in the wake of a seemingly endless string of public gaffes and verbal fisticuffs.

The ultimate fear of Republicans is that once center-right voters begin splitting their tickets, they might leave the party and never come back. (Trump is effectively locking them out and Katy-barring the door.) Thus, the GOP could lose its national footing for a generation or more. By challenging Trump, McMullin may be saving the party'--something RNC chairman Reince Priebus didn't have the mettle for.

They couldn't beat Trump in a fractured primary and their efforts on the Cleveland convention floor quickly turned to dust. But by putting McMullin in the race, with focused efforts on a handful of state contests, the #NeverTrump coalition is betting it can seal the Republican nominee's fate once and for all.

In the end, McMullin might be able to knock the wheels off the crazy-wagon.

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Archived Version

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 10:39

Saddam Hussein's Golden GunAs another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

Somehow Islam has just gone faggot since Barack Hussein Obama Chin the noted, homosexual little boy dancer pervert who was installed into the White House with Big Islam cash.

Manly Mullah OmarI mean where are the Mullah Omars? You remember him the patch eyed Taliban pirate, who stunk like camels and was just a tough hombre?

Manly Sheik bin Laden

How about Sheik Ossama bin Laden? Flowing white robes, a mystic Muslim prophet, who could star opposite like Eroll Flynn handsome against any pirate named Omar?

Manly Saddam Hussein

Then there was that great handsome Muslim lead man, Saddam Hussein. A name right out of central casting. His two handsome sons, Rapist 1 and Rapist 2 masturbating to the Bush Twins photos they had pinned on the wall?

Just look at the above photo of Saddam Hussein's golden AK 47 gun. A real macho man's pistol of 7.62 x 39 death. Yes Saddam was a man, lots of Iraqi pussy to fuck, tortured people and felt bad about boiling them in oil, smoked that big cigar, was handsome, big and strong.........that was the kind of Islamic National warrior you could just admire.

Then here comes Birther Obama. His mom jeans, throwing like a girl, bowing like a whore, apologizing like a slave, wed to some manshe named Michelle Robinson, and all the manliness just was castrated out of Islam.

Seriously, there used to be Bill Clinton's al Qaeda. Flying into Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Bombing embassies and Navy ships. Now there is just Obama IS, ISIS, ISIL with so many names it like that LGBTQ with so many letters after it, no one knows what the hell it is........and all it does is steal oil from poor Muslims, give it to rich Muslims, and image Obama protects it all.

It is just fag terrorism now, and image Obama is the head of the Gayification of Islam.

Silken Robed Islam Obama DealersOh how I miss the Muslim leaders which America stood with or made war with. Hosni Mubarak, now there was a Muslim cool leader. Colonel Khadaffi, there was the camel stud of Africa, sexing up Slavic blonde women 36 hours a day. But now alas, there is only President Assad kept alive by the Russians, a Saudi King no one knows, and those faggot Shia Muslims of Tehran hiding behind Obama nuclear warheads.

Not even Muslims want any of that, and all that shows up in America are homosexual Muslims like Omar Mateen, being mistreated by Obama militant Muslims, in gay sex club shootings. I mean, Mateen has two hot ass Muslim wives, worth 70 virgins any day, and in this homosexual Obama Muslim age, it is not enough.

There used to be Muslim Imams sexing up little boys, but that was not what the goat sexing Muslims had any part in. Now this gay Obama Islam is just one big vagina of Mecca that Muhammad would wage jihad on.What kind of Fatwa was issued, to castrate Islam of it's most viril men, it's most hairy women, and leave us with Muslims who do not have golden guns, do not ride around in flowing robes on horses or can live in the mountains for years eating nothing but dirt. Yes that was the world we had in Mullah Omar, Shiek bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Men with names and personas right out of Hollywood cinema. Now after Obama is is just the Big Bang Theory in the lead is sodomite Obama and feckless Islam as a supporting cast.

Where is the Islam not making war on the West, but ready to stick an AK 47 to the head of these Marxist Muslims trained by the Obama regime, pull the trigger and then drag their corpse around before all, firing their weapons madly into the sky, and causing all of the Muslim hearts in women to beat wildly for this kind of man, as all of the men in Islam cheer wildly in support of leader in Islam who rids itself of this fag Islam of Obama, which has brought the end to this centuries old religion.

It is why these lone wolf terrorists abound, because they are all desiring to be men again, as their organized community of Islam is just queer. Omar, bin Laden and Hussein, never had to rape children or women, because virgins gave it up to be with men like this. In this Age of Obama though, now the goat fuckers have more moral standing that what is sucking off oil and drug traffic from the Ashkenaz banking.

Oh how I miss Saddam Hussein, sexy Saddam with that powerful name and handsome mustache. How I miss Mullah Omar in his salt crusted wool robes that flies would not land on. How I miss Sheik bin Laden, looking like a holy prophet that the mahdi would be shamed in being less of a man.

Now all we have are these homosexual Marxists, no name, no golden guns, no whiskers, who can not satisfy a woman.

Where is the Muslim who walks out into the street, with chains upon him, nails those chains to the pavement, and with sword in hand defies his enemies to come and engage him like a man?After Obama all we have are gay selfies posted on Ashkenaz Facebook.

Such a pity.

Gay Muslim Obama

agtG

كما اÙكرز Ø¹Ø±Ø¬Ø§Ø Øخر اÙحصري في مØ"Ø£ÙØ(C) مكافحØ(C) اÙمØ"Ø£ÙØ(C).بطريقØ(C) أ٠بأخرى اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام قد انتهت ÙÙت٠شاذ جنØ"يا منذ باراك Ø­Ø"ين Ø£Ùباما تشين Ùاحظ، مØÙي اÙجنØ" اÙقÙي٠اÙمنحرف صبي راقصØ(C) اÙذي تم تØبيته في اÙبيت اÙأبيض مع كبير اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام اÙنقديØ(C).فك رمÙز رØ"اÙØ(C) عيد اÙمÙا عمرأعني أين هم اÙمÙا Ø£ÙمارØ"؟تتذكر Ùه اÙتصحيح اÙعينين اÙقراصنØ(C) طاÙبان، اÙذين نتن مØ٠اÙإب٠Ùكان مجرد HOMBRE صعبØ(C)؟ماذا عن اÙشيخ Ø£Ø"امØ(C) بن Ùادن؟جÙابيب Ø¨ÙŠØ¶Ø§Ø ÙØ¶ÙØ§Ø¶Ø(C)، نبي اÙمØ"Ùمين اÙصÙفي، اÙذي يمكن أن نجمØ(C) اÙعكØ" مØÙ Eroll فÙين ÙØ"يم ضد أي قرصان اØ"مه عمر؟Øم كان هناك ما كبيرØ(C) ÙØ"يم مØ"Ùم اÙرصاص اÙرجÙ، صدام Ø­Ø"ين.اØ"م اÙحق في اÙخرÙج من اÙصب اÙمركزي.نجÙيه ÙØ"يم، اÙمغتصب 1 Ù 2 اÙمغتصب اØ"ØªÙ…Ù†Ø§Ø Ø¹Ùى اÙصÙر بÙØ´ اÙتÙاØ...م أنهم عÙقÙا عÙى اÙجدار؟مجرد Ø¥ÙÙ‚Ø§Ø Ù†Ø¸Ø±Ø(C) عÙى اÙصÙرØ(C) أعÙاه من اÙذهبي AK 47 بندقيØ(C) صدام Ø­Ø"ين.مØ"دØ" رج٠مفتÙ٠اÙعضÙات اÙحقيقيØ(C) ÙÙ7،62 — 39 ÙفاØ(C).نعم كان صدام رجÙا، ÙاÙكØير من كØ" اÙعراقي ÙيمارØ" اÙجنØ" Ùتعذيب اÙناØ" Ùشعرت Ø"يØ...Ø(C) عن اÙغÙيان Ùهم في اÙنفط، ÙيدخنÙن اÙØ"يجار أن كبير، Ùكان ÙØ"يم، كبيرØ(C) ÙقÙيØ(C) ......... ان كان هذا اÙنÙع من اÙØ¥Ø"ÙاميØ(C)محارب اÙÙطني ه٠يمكن أن نعجب فقط.Øم يأتي هنا Birther Ø£Ùباما.Ø"رÙاÙه اÙجينز أمي، رمي مØ٠فتاØ(C)، ÙاÙركÙع مØ٠عاهرØ(C)، ÙاÙاعتذار كعبد، تزÙج Ùبعض manshe اØ"مه ميشي٠رÙبنØ"Ùن، Ùجميع رجÙÙØ(C) فقط كان مخصي من اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام.عÙى محم٠اÙجد، ÙتØ"تخدم ÙيكÙن تنظيم بي٠كÙينتÙن Ø٠هناك.تحÙق في برجي مركز اÙتجارØ(C) اÙعاÙمي ÙاÙبنتاغÙن.اÙØ"فارات اÙقصف ÙاÙØ"فن اÙبحريØ(C).اÙØن هناك ه٠مجرد Ø£Ùباما، ISIS، ISIL مع اÙعديد من اÙØ£Ø"Ù…Ø§Ø Ù…ØÙ Ø°Ùك اÙمØÙي مع خطابات كØيرØ(C) بعد Ø°Ùك، Ùا أحد يعرف ماذا بحق اÙجحيم ه٠........ Ùك٠ما يفعÙه ه٠Ø"رقØ(C) اÙنفط من اÙفقراØاÙمØ"Ùمين، ÙإعطاØ...ها Ø¥Ùى Ø£ØºÙ†ÙŠØ§Ø Ø§ÙمØ"Ùمين، ÙصÙرØ(C) Ø£Ùباما يحمي ك٠شيØ.انها مجرد اÙفقير اÙإرهاب اÙØن، ÙصÙرØ(C) Ø£Ùباما ه٠رØ...يØ" Gayification اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام.

Øه كم أشتاق اÙقادØ(C) اÙمØ"Ùمين اÙتي Ùقفت أمريكا مع أ٠جع٠اÙحرب مع.Ø­Ø"ني مبارك، ÙاÙØن كان هناك زعيم بارد اÙØ¥Ø"Ùامي.اÙعقيد Khadaffi، كان هناك مØ"مار اÙجما٠من أفريقيا، تÙفيق اÙنØ"Ø§Ø Ø´Ù‚Ø±Ø§Ø Ø§ÙØ"ÙافيØ(C) 36 Ø"اعØ(C) في اÙيÙم.ÙÙكن اÙØن ÙÙØ£Ø"ف، هناك أبقى اÙرØ...يØ" اÙÙحيد اÙØ£Ø"د عÙى قيد اÙحياØ(C) من قب٠اÙرÙØ"، مÙك اÙØ"عÙديØ(C) Ùا أحد يعرف، ÙتÙك شاذ جنØ"يا اÙمØ"Ùمين اÙشيعØ(C) من طهران اÙØ§Ø®ØªØ¨Ø§Ø ÙØ±Ø§Ø Ø§ÙرؤÙØ" اÙحربيØ(C) اÙنÙÙيØ(C) Ø£Ùباما.Ùا ب٠يريد اÙمØ"ÙمÙن أي من Ø°Ùك، ÙعÙى ك٠ما يظهر في أمريكا هم من اÙمØ"Ùمين مØÙي اÙجنØ" مØ٠عمر متين، يتعرضÙن ÙØ"ÙØ Ø§ÙمعامÙØ(C) من قب٠أÙباما اÙمØ"Ùمين اÙمتشددين، في مØÙي اÙجنØ" اطÙاق اÙنار اÙنادي اÙجنØ".أعني، متين Ùه زÙجتان اÙØ¥Ø"ÙاميØ(C) اÙحمار اÙØ"اخنØ(C)، بقيمØ(C) 70 اÙعذارى أي يÙم، Ùفي هذا اÙعصر Ø£Ùباما مØ"Ùم مØÙي اÙجنØ"، فإنه Ùا يكفي.هناك تØ"تخدم ÙيكÙن Ø£Ø...مØ(C) اÙمØ"Ùمين تÙفيق اÙصبيØ(C) اÙصغار، ÙÙكن هذا Ùم يكن ما كان اÙماعز [Ø"إكØ"ينغ اÙمØ"Ùمين أي Ø¬Ø²Ø ÙÙŠÙ‡. اÙØن هذا مØÙي اÙجنØ" اÙباما اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام ه٠Ùاحد فقط اÙمهب٠كبير من مكØ(C) أن محمدا أن اÙجهاد عÙى.أي نÙع من اÙفتÙى صدرت، ÙيخصÙا اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام من انها معظم اÙرجا٠viril، انها أكØر اÙنØ"Ø§Ø Ø´Ø¹Ø±ØŒ Ùترك Ùنا مع اÙمØ"Ùمين اÙذين ÙيØ" Ùديهم اÙبنادق اÙذهبيØ(C)، Ùا ركÙب Ø­ÙÙها في تدفق اÙجÙباب عÙى ظهÙر اÙخي٠أ٠يمكن أن يعيش في اÙجبا٠ÙØ"نÙاتتناÙÙ Ø´ÙŠØ Ø"Ùى اÙتراب.نعم هذا كان اÙعاÙم كان Ùدينا في اÙمÙا عمر، Shiek بن Ùادن Ùصدام Ø­Ø"ين.اÙرجا٠مع Ø£Ø"Ù…Ø§Ø Ùشخصيات اÙحق في اÙخرÙج من اÙØ"ينما في هÙÙيÙÙد.اÙØن بعد Ø£Ùباما ه٠مجرد نظريØ(C) اÙانفجار اÙكبير في اÙصدارØ(C) ه٠Ùطي Ø£Ùباما ÙاÙØ"قيم اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام كما يÙقي اÙداعمØ(C).Ø­ÙŠØ Ø£Ù† اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام Ùا يجع٠اÙحرب عÙى اÙغرب، ÙÙكن عÙى اØ"تعداد Ùعصا Ùحزب اÙعداÙØ(C) ÙاÙتنميØ(C) 47 في اÙرأØ" من هذه اÙماركØ"ي اÙمØ"Ùمين تدريبهم من قب٠نظام Ø£Ùباما، ÙØ"حب اÙزناد Øم Ø"حب اÙجØØ(C) في جميع Ø£Ù†Ø­Ø§Ø Ù‚Ø¨Ù ÙƒÙ Ø´ÙŠØ، أطÙقÙا اÙنار من Ø£Ø"Ùحتهم بجنÙن في اÙØ"ماØ، ÙكÙها تØ"بب في قÙÙب اÙمØ"Ùمين في اÙنØ"Ø§Ø ÙÙتغÙب بعنف Ùهذا اÙنÙع من اÙرجÙ، Ø­ÙŠØ Ø£Ù† جميع اÙرجا٠في اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام يهتف بعنف Ùدعم اÙزعيم في اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام اÙذي يخÙص نفØ"ه من هذا اÙفقير اÙØ¥Ø"Ùام Ø£Ùباما، اÙتي جÙبت نهايØ(C) Ùهذه اÙقرÙن اÙدين اÙقديم.ÙÙهذا اÙØ"بب تكØر هؤÙØ§Ø Ø§Ùإرهابيين Ø°Ø...ب Ùحيد، Ùأنها رغبØ(C) ك٠ÙيكÙن اÙرجا٠مرØ(C) أخرى، كما اÙمجتمع اÙمنظم ÙÙØ¥Ø"Ùام ه٠مجرد عÙيÙ.، Ùم يكن عمر بن Ùادن Ùصدام Ø­Ø"ين ÙÙأطفا٠اÙاغتصاب أ٠اÙنØ"اØ، Ùأن اÙعذارى أعطت حتى يكÙن مع اÙرجا٠مØ٠هذا.في هذا اÙعمر Ø£Ùباما عÙى اÙرغم من اÙØن FUCKERS اÙماعز Ùها مكانØ(C) أكØر اÙأخÙاقي اÙذي ما يمتص من حركØ(C) اÙنفط ÙاÙمخدرات من اÙبنÙك أشكناز.Øه كم أشتاق صدام Ø­Ø"ين، ÙمØير صدام بهذا اÙاØ"م قÙيØ(C) ÙاÙشارب ÙØ"يم.كيف Ùي أن تفÙت اÙمÙا عمر في كتابه اÙمÙØ­ متقشرØ(C) اÙجÙباب اÙصÙف اÙذي يتجه Ùن تهبط عÙى.كيف افتقد اÙشيخ بن Ùادن، تبد٠Ùكأنها اÙرØ"Ù٠اÙكريم أن اÙمهدي Ø"Ùف فضحهم في أن يكÙن أق٠من اÙرجÙ.اÙØن ك٠ما Ùدينا هم هؤÙØ§Ø Ø§ÙماركØ"يين مØÙي اÙجنØ"، أي اØ"م، Ùا اÙبنادق اÙذهبيØ(C)، Ùا شعيرات، اÙذي Ùا يمكن أن تÙبي امرأØ(C).أين ه٠مØ"Ùم اÙذي يخرج Ø¥Ùى اÙشارع، مع Ø"ÙاØ"٠اÙÙه عÙيه ÙØ"Ùم، ÙمØ"امير تÙك اÙØ"ÙاØ"٠عÙى اÙرصيف، ÙاÙØ"يف في اÙيد يتحدى أعداØه Ùيأتي ÙاÙانخراط Ùه مØ٠اÙرجÙ؟بعد Ø£Ùباما ك٠ما Ùدينا ÙصÙر شخصيØ(C) مØÙي اÙجنØ" نشرت عÙى أشكيناز اÙفيØ"بÙك.هذه مؤØ"ف.agtGComme autre cerise Lame exclusive dans la mati¨re anti-mati¨re.D'une certaine mani¨re l'Islam vient de se faggot depuis que Barack Hussein Obama Chin l'a not(C), homosexuel petit pervers gar§on de danseur qui a (C)t(C) install(C) la Maison Blanche avec Big Islam cash.D(C)crypter du mollah Omar Message EidJe veux dire o¹ sont les mollah Omars?Vous vous souvenez de lui le patch yeux pirate talibans, qui puait comme des chameaux et (C)tait juste un hombre difficile?Que diriez-vous Cheikh Ossama bin Laden?Circuler robes blanches, un proph¨te musulman mystique, qui pourrait jouer aux c´t(C)s comme Eroll Flynn beau contre tout pirate nomm(C) Omar?Puis il y a eu ce grand bel homme de plomb musulman, Saddam Hussein.Un nom d¨s la sortie de la coul(C)e centrale.Ses deux fils beaux, Rapist 1 et 2 Rapist masturber aux photos Bush Twins ils avaient (C)pingl(C) sur le mur?Il suffit de regarder la photo ci-dessus or AK 47 armes feu de Saddam Hussein.pistolet d'un vrai homme macho de 7,62 x 39 d(C)c¨s.Oui Saddam (C)tait un homme, beaucoup de chatte irakien baiser, tortur(C) des gens et se sentait mal les faire bouillir dans de l'huile, fum(C) ce gros cigare, (C)tait beau, grand et fort ......... qui (C)tait le genre islamiqueguerrier national vous pourriez admirer.Puis vient ici Birther Obama.Son jean maman, jetant comme une fille, saluant comme une pute, des excuses comme un esclave, a men(C) une certaine manshe nomm(C)e Michelle Robinson, et tout le virilit(C) tout a (C)t(C) castr(C) sur l'Islam.S(C)rieusement, il y avait de Bill Clinton Al-Qa¯da.Voler dans les tours jumelles et le Pentagone.ambassades de bombardement et navires de la Marine.Maintenant, il est juste Obama IS, ISIS, ISIL avec tant de noms comme §a LGBTQ avec tant de lettres apr¨s lui, on ne sait pas ce que l'enfer est ........ et tout ce qu'il fait est de voler le p(C)trole d'une mauvaisemusulmans, lui donner aux musulmans riches, et l'image Obama prot¨ge tout cela.Il est tout simplement FAG terrorisme maintenant, et l'image d'Obama est la tªte du Gayification de l'Islam.

Oh combien je manque les dirigeants musulmans dont l'Am(C)rique se tenait avec ou fait la guerre avec.Hosni Moubarak, maintenant il y avait un leader froid musulman.Colonel Khadaffi, il y avait le goujon de chameau de l'Afrique, le sexage des femmes blondes slaves 36 heures par jour.Mais maintenant, h(C)las, il n'y a que le pr(C)sident Assad maintenu en vie par les Russes, un roi saoudien ne sait pas, et ceux faggot musulmans chiites de T(C)h(C)ran se cachent derri¨re des ogives nucl(C)aires Obama.Pas mªme les musulmans veulent tout cela, et tout ce qui montre en Am(C)rique sont des musulmans homosexuels comme Omar Mateen, (C)tant maltrait(C)s par Obama musulmans militants, dans des fusillades gay club de sexe.Je veux dire, Mateen a deux femmes musulmanes cul chaud, d'une valeur de 70 vierges toute jour, et en cette ¨re Obama musulman homosexuel, il ne suffit pas.Il y avait des imams musulmans sexage les petits gar§ons, mais cela n'a pas (C)t(C) ce que les ch¨vres sexage Musulmans avaient une partie. Maintenant, cet islam gay Obama est juste un gros vagin de la Mecque que Muhammad serait mener le djihad sur.Quel genre de Fatwa a (C)t(C) publi(C), castrer l'Islam de c'est la plupart des hommes de Viril, ce sont les femmes les plus poilues, et laissez-nous avec les musulmans qui ne disposent pas des armes d'or, ne pas rouler autour de robes flottantes sur des chevaux ou peut vivre dans les montagnes pendant des ann(C)esne manger que la salet(C).Oui, c'(C)tait le monde que nous avions dans le mollah Omar, Shiek ben Laden et Saddam Hussein.Les hommes avec des noms et des personnages d¨s la sortie du cin(C)ma hollywoodien.Maintenant, apr¨s Obama est est juste le Big Bang Theory dans le plomb est sodomite Obama et l'islam ineptes comme acteurs de soutien.O¹ est l'islam ne fait pas la guerre l'Occident, mais prªt tenir un AK 47 la tªte de ces musulmans marxistes form(C)s par le r(C)gime Obama, appuyer sur la gchette, puis faites glisser leur corps autour avant tout, tirant leurs armes follement dans le ciel, et causant tous les cÅ'urs musulmans chez les femmes battre sauvagement pour ce genre d'homme, comme tous les hommes dans l'Islam acclament follement l'appui de leader dans l'Islam qui se d(C)barrasse de ce fag Islam d'Obama, qui a amen(C) la fin decette s(C)culaire religion.Il est la raison pour laquelle ces terroristes de loups solitaires abondent, car ils sont tous les hommes qui d(C)sirent ªtre nouveau, comme leur communaut(C) organis(C)e de l'Islam est juste bizarre.Omar, Ben Laden et Hussein, n'a jamais eu des enfants ou des femmes viol, parce que les vierges, il a donn(C) l'ªtre avec des hommes comme celui-ci.Dans cette ¨re d'Obama mais, maintenant, les baiseurs de ch¨vre ont debout plus moral que ce qui est sucer le trafic de p(C)trole et de drogues de la banque Ashkenaz.Oh combien je manque Saddam Hussein, sexy Saddam avec ce nom puissant et beau moustache.Comment me manque le mollah Omar dans son sel en cro>>te laine robes que les mouches ne serait pas atterrir sur.Comment me manque Sheik bin Laden, ressemblant un saint proph¨te que le mahdi serait honte d'ªtre moins d'un homme.Maintenant, tout ce que nous avons sont ces marxistes homosexuels, pas de nom, pas de fusils d'or, pas de moustaches, qui ne peuvent pas satisfaire une femme.O¹ se trouve le musulman qui se prom¨ne dans la rue, avec des cha®nes sur lui, des clous ces cha®nes la chauss(C)e, et l'(C)p(C)e la main d(C)fie ses ennemis venir et engager lui comme un homme?Apr¨s Obama tout ce que nous avons sont selfies gay affich(C)es sur Ashkenaz Facebook.Quel dommage.agtGÐ' качестве еще одноÐ"о Ð¥Ñомой Cherry в экскÐ>>юзивном матеÑии анти матеÑии.Как-то исÐ>>ам тоÐ>>ько что Ðедик, так как БаÑак Хусейн Обама ÐодбоÑодком отметиÐ>>, что Ð"омосексуаÐ>>ьный маÐ>>енький маÐ>>ьчик Ñ‚Ð°Ð½Ñ†Ð¾Ñ Ð¸Ð·Ð²Ñащенца, котоÑый быÐ>> установÐ>>ен в БеÐ>>ый дом с боÐ>>ьÑим Islam наÐ>>ичными.Ð--еÑиÑÑиÑование Ðообщение Ðд муÐ>>Ð>>ы ОмаÑаЯ имею в виду Ð"де муÐ>>Ð>>а Omars?Ð'ы Ðомните еÐ"о заÐÐ>>ата одноÐ"Ð>>азый ÐиÑат ÐаÐ>>ибы, вонючий, как веÑбÐ>>юды и быÐ>> ÐÑосто жестким Hombre?Как насчет Ñейха Оссама бен Ладена?ÐзмеÐ>>ьчитеÐ>>ь беÐ>>ые одежды, мистик мусуÐ>>ьманская ÐÑоÑок, котоÑый моÐ" бы сняться наÐÑотив, как Eroll Flynn кÑасивый ÐÑотив Ð>>юбоÐ"о ÐиÑата Ðо имени ОмаÑ?Потом быÐ>> этот веÐ>>икий кÑасивый Ð'усÐ>>им ведущий чеÐ>>овек, Ðаддам Хусейн.Ðмя ÐÑямо из центÑаÐ>>ьноÐ"о Ð>>итья.ЕÐ"о два кÑасивых сыновей, насиÐ>>ьник 1 и Ð'асиÐ>>ьник 2 мастуÑбиÑовать на ÑотоÐ"ÑаÑии БуÑа бÐ>>изнецов они возÐ>>аÐ"аÐ>>и на стене?ПÑосто ÐосмотÑите на ÑотоÐ"ÑаÑии выÑе зоÐ>>отой AK 47 ÐистоÐ>>ета Ðаддама Хусейна.ПистоÐ>>ет настоящий мачо чеÐ>>овека 7,62 х 39 смеÑти.Ð--а Ðаддам быÐ>> чеÐ>>овеком, мноÐ"о иÑакской киски ебать, ÐытаÐ>>и Ð>>юдей и чувствоваÐ>> себя ÐÐ>>охо о киÐячения в масÐ>>е, коÐченую, что боÐ>>ьÑая сиÐ"аÑа, быÐ>> кÑасивый, боÐ>>ьÑой и сиÐ>>ьный ......... это быÐ>> вид исÐ>>амскоÐ"оÐ'ационаÐ>>ьный воин можно ÐÑосто Ð>>юбоваться.ÐоÐ"да вот ÐÑиходит Birther Обама.ЕÐ"о мама джинсы, отбÑасывая как девочка, кÐ>>аняясь, как ÑÐ>>юха, извиняясь, как Ñаб, ÐÑивеÐ>>и к некотоÑым manshe Ðо имени Ð'иÑеÐ>>ь Робинсон, и все мужественность ÐÑосто кастÑиÑоваÐ>>и из исÐ>>ама.ÐеÑьезно, там ÑаньÑе БиÐ>>Ð>>а КÐ>>интона АÐ>>ь-Каиды.ПоÐ>>ет в баÑни-бÐ>>изнецы и ПентаÐ"он.БомбаÑдиÑовка ÐосоÐ>>ьства и военные коÑабÐ>>и.Ð' настоящее вÑемя существует тоÐ>>ько Обама, Ðсида, Isil с таким коÐ>>ичеством имен это так LGBTQ с таким коÐ>>ичеством Ðисем ÐосÐ>>е неÐ"о, никто не знает, что, чеÑт возьми, это ........ и все это деÐ>>ает укÑасть неÑть из бедныхмусуÐ>>ьмане, отдать еÐ"о боÐ"атых мусуÐ>>ьман, и обÑаз Обамы защищает все.Это ÐÑосто ÐÐ¸Ð´Ð¾Ñ Ñ‚ÐµÑÑоÑизм сейчас, и обÑаз Обамы явÐ>>яется Ð"Ð>>ава Gayification исÐ>>ама.

О, как я скучаю Ðо мусуÐ>>ьманским Ð>>идеÑам, котоÑые АмеÑика стояÐ>>и иÐ>>и войною с.Хосни Ð'убаÑак, теÐеÑь быÐ>> мусуÐ>>ьманином ÐÑохÐ>>адный Ð>>идеÑ.ПоÐ>>ковник Khadaffi, быÐ>> веÑбÐ>>юд ÑÐиÐ>>ька АÑÑики, оÐÑедеÐ>>ение ÐоÐ>>а до сÐ>>авянскоÐ"о бÐ>>ондинок 36 часов в сутки.Ð'о теÐеÑь, увы, есть тоÐ>>ько ÐÑезидент Асад ÐоддеÑживаÐ>>ось Ñусских, саудовский коÑоÐ>>ь, никто не знает, а те, Ðедик Ñииты ÐеÐ"еÑана ÐÑикÑываясь Обамы ядеÑных боеÐ"оÐ>>овок.Ð--аже не мусуÐ>>ьмане хотят ничеÐ"о из этоÐ"о, и все, что ÐÑоявÐ>>яется в АмеÑике Ð"омосексуаÐ>>исты мусуÐ>>ьмане как ÐžÐ¼Ð°Ñ Mateen, будучи ÐÑитеснявÑийся Обама воинствующих мусуÐ>>ьман, в Ð"ей-секс кÐ>>убных съемок.Я имею в виду, Ð'атин имеет две Ð"оÑячие задницы мусуÐ>>ьманских жен, стоит 70 дев в Ð>>юбой день, и в этом возÑасте Ð"омосексуаÐ>>ьной Обама мусуÐ>>ьманин, не достаточно.Ðам ÑаньÑе мусуÐ>>ьманских имамов Sexing до маÐ>>еньких маÐ>>ьчиков, но это быÐ>>о не то, что коза Sexing мусуÐ>>ьмане имеÐ>>и какую-Ð>>ибо часть. ÐеÐеÑь этот Ð"ей Обама ÐсÐ>>ам тоÐ>>ько один боÐ>>ьÑой вÐ>>аÐ"аÐ>>ище Ð'екки, что Ð'ухаммад бы вести джихад.Какой Ñетвы быÐ>> выдан, кастÑиÑовать исÐ>>ам это боÐ>>ьÑинство viril мужчин, это наибоÐ>>ее воÐ>>осатых женщин, и оставить нас с мусуÐ>>ьманами, котоÑые не имеют зоÐ>>отые ÐуÑки, не ездить в Ñазвевающихся одеждах на Ð>>оÑадях иÐ>>и моÐ"ут жить в Ð"оÑах в течение мноÐ"их Ð>>етесть ничеÐ"о, кÑоме Ð"Ñязи.Ð--а это быÐ>> миÑ, котоÑый мы имеÐ>>и в муÐ>>Ð>>а ОмаÑ, Shiek бен Ладена и Ðаддама Хусейна.Ð'ужчины с именами и ÐеÑсонами ÐÑямо из Ð"оÐ>>Ð>>ивудскоÐ"о кино.ÐеÐеÑь ÐосÐ>>е тоÐ"о, как Обама ÐÑосто теоÑия БоÐ>>ьÑоÐ"о Ð'зÑыва в свинце бÐ>>удника Обама и бесÑоÑменный ÐсÐ>>ам как бÑоском ÐоддеÑжки.Ð'де исÐ>>ам не деÐ>>ает войну на ЗаÐаде, но Ð"отовы ÐÑидеÑживаться АК 47 к Ð"Ð>>аве этих маÑксистских мусуÐ>>ьман обученными Ñежимом Обамы, нажать на сÐусковой кÑючок, а затем ÐеÑетащить их тÑуРвокÑуÐ", ÐÑежде всеÐ"о, выÐустив оÑужие безумно в небо, и в ÑезуÐ>>ьтате чеÐ"о все мусуÐ>>ьманские сеÑдца у женщин бить дико дÐ>>я такоÐ"о чеÐ>>овека, как и все мужчины в исÐ>>аме ÑазвесеÐ>>ить дико в ÐоддеÑжку Ð>>идеÑа в исÐ>>аме, котоÑый избавÐ>>яется от этоÐ"о ÐÐ¸Ð´Ð¾Ñ Ð¸ÑÐ>>ама Обамы, котоÑый ÐÑинес конецэто мноÐ"овековая ÑеÐ>>иÐ"ия.Ðменно Ðоэтому эти одинокий воÐ>>к теÑÑоÑисты изобиÐ>>уют, Ðотому что они все жеÐ>>ающие снова быть мужчинами, так как их оÑÐ"анизованная общность исÐ>>ама ÐÑосто чудак.ÐžÐ¼Ð°Ñ Ð±ÐµÐ½ Ладен и Хусейн, никоÐ"да не ÐÑиходиÐ>>ось изнасиÐ>>ованиях детей иÐ>>и женщин, Ðотому что дев даÐ>> еÐ"о, чтобы быть с мужчинами, как это.Ð' век Обамы, хотя, теÐеÑь козьи Ð>>охи имеют боÐ>>ьÑе моÑаÐ>>ьное ÐоÐ>>ожение, что высасывает от неÑти и наÑкотиков из банковской АÑкеназ.О, как я скучаю Ðо Ðаддам Хусейн, сексуаÐ>>ьный Ðаддам с этим именем мощным и кÑасивым усами.Как я скучаю Ðо муÐ>>Ð>>у ОмаÑа в еÐ"о соÐ>>и коÑкой ÑеÑсти мантии, что мухи не выÐадут на.Как я скучаю Ðо Ñейхом бен Ладен, Ðохожий на святоÐ"о ÐÑоÑока, что Ð'ахди будет ÐÑистыдиÐ>> в том меньÑе чеÐ>>овека.ÐеÐеÑь все, что у нас есть эти Ð"омосексуаÐ>>ьные маÑксисты, ни имени, ни зоÐ>>отых оÑудий, ни усов, котоÑые не моÐ"ут удовÐ>>етвоÑить женщину.Ð'де мусуÐ>>ьманин, котоÑый выходит на уÐ>>ицу, с цеÐями на неÐ"о, Ð"возди эти цеÐи на тÑотуаÑ, и с мечом в Ñуке бÑосает вызов еÐ"о вÑаÐ"и, чтобы ÐÑийти и встуÐить с ним как мужчина?ПосÐ>>е тоÐ"о, как Обама все, что мы имеем Ð"ей ÐеÐ>>Ñи Ñазмещены на АÑкеназ Facebook.Очень жаÐ>>ь.agtG Als eine andere Lame Kirsche exklusiv in der Materie Antimaterie.Irgendwie Islam hat gerade Schwuchtel seit Barack Hussein Obama Chin die erw¤hnte, homosexuellen kleiner Junge T¤nzer pervertieren gegangen, die in das WeiŸe Haus mit Big Islam Bargeld installiert wurde.Die Entzifferung Mullah Omar Eid NachrichtIch meine, wo das Mullah Omars sind?Erinnern Sie sich an ihn der Patch Augen Taliban Piraten, die wie Kamele stank und war nur ein harter hombre?Wie w¤re es Scheich Osama bin Laden?FlieŸende weiŸen Gew¤ndern, ein Mystiker muslimischen Propheten, der h¼bsch gegen¼ber wie Eroll Flynn Star kann gegen jeden Pirat namens Omar?Dann gab es die groŸe stattlicher muslimischen F¼hrung Mann, Saddam Hussein.Ein Name wie aus Zentralguss.Seine zwei sch¶ne S¶hne, Rapist 1 und Rapist 2 Masturbieren auf die Bush-Zwillinge Fotos, die sie an die Wand gepinnt hatte?Schauen Sie sich die obige Foto der goldenen AK 47 Gewehr Saddam Hussein.Ein echter Macho Mann Pistole von 7,62 x 39 Tod.Ja Saddam war ein Mann, viele irakische Muschi zu ficken, Menschen gefoltert und f¼hlte sich schlecht ¼ber sie in siedendes –l, ger¤uchert, dass groŸe Zigarre, war sch¶n, groŸ und stark ......... das war die Art des islamischenNationale Krieger Sie nur bewundern konnte.Dann kommt hier Birther Obama.Seine Mutter Jeans, werfen wie ein M¤dchen, wie eine Hure Verbeugung, wie ein Sklave zu entschuldigen, f¼hrte zu einigen manshe namens Michelle Robinson, und all die Mannhaftigkeit wurde gerade aus dem Islam kastriert.Im Ernst, verwendet es Bill Clinton al-Qaida zu sein.Fliegen in Twin Towers und das Pentagon.Bombing Botschaften und Marineschiffe.Jetzt ist es nur Obama, ISIS, ISIL mit so vielen Namen es so, dass LGBTQ mit so vielen Buchstaben, nachdem es, niemand weiŸ, was zum Teufel ist es ........ und alle es tut, ist –l aus armen stehlenMuslime, gib es reiche Muslime und Bild Obama sch¼tzt sie alle.Es ist fag nur Terrorismus jetzt, und Bild Obama ist der Kopf des Gayification des Islam.

Oh, wie ich die muslimischen F¼hrer vermissen, die Amerika stand mit oder streiten.Hosni Mubarak, jetzt war es ein Muslim k¼hlen F¼hrer.Oberst Khadaffi, war es das Kamel Gest¼t von Afrika, slawische blonde Frauen 36 Stunden am Tag Erotisierung.Aber jetzt leider gibt es nur Pr¤sident Assad von den Russen am Leben gehalten, eine saudische K¶nig niemand weiŸ, und die Schwuchtel Schiiten von Teheran versteckt sich hinter Obama Atomsprengk¶pfe.Nicht einmal Muslime wollen irgendetwas davon, und das alles zeigt sich in Amerika sind homosexuelle Muslime wie Omar Mateen, von Obama militante Muslime schlecht behandelt zu werden, in Homosexuell Sex-Club-Shootings.Ich meine, Mateen hat zwei hot ass muslimische Frauen, im Wert von 70 Jungfrauen jeden Tag, und in diesem homosexuellen Obama Muslim Alter, es ist nicht genug.Fr¼her gab es muslimische Imame zu kleinen Jungen sexing, aber das war nicht das, was die Ziege sexing Muslime in jeden Teil hatte. Nun ist diese Homosexuell Obama Islam ist nur eine groŸe Vagina von Mekka, dass Mohammed Jihad auf Lohn w¼rde.Welche Art von Fatwa ausgestellt wurde, zu kastrieren Islam davon die meisten viril M¤nner ist, ist es den meisten behaarte Frauen, und lassen Sie uns mit den Muslimen, die keine goldenen Waffen haben, f¤hrst um nicht in Roben auf Pferden flieŸen oder in den Bergen seit Jahren leben k¶nnenessen nichts als Schmutz.Ja, das war die Welt, die wir in Mullah Omar, Shiek bin Laden und Saddam Hussein hatte.M¤nner mit Namen und Pers¶nlichkeiten direkt aus Hollywood-Kino.Jetzt, nachdem Obama ist nur der Big Bang Theory an der Spitze ist sodomite Obama und nutzlosen Islam als Nebendarsteller.Wo macht der Islam keinen Krieg gegen den Westen, aber bereit, eine AK 47 an der Spitze dieser marxistischen Muslime von der Obama-Regime trainiert zu bleiben, abdr¼cken und dann ihre Leiche ziehen um vor allem ihre Waffen wie verr¼ckt in den Himmel schieŸenund wild f¼r diese Art von Mann zu schlagen bei Frauen, der muslimischen Herzen verursacht, wie alle M¤nner im Islam wild zur Unterst¼tzung der Marktf¼hrer im Islam jubeln, die sich dieses fag Islam von Obama entledigt, die das Ende gebracht hatdiese Jahrhunderte alte Religion.Es ist, warum diese Eigenbr¶tler Terroristen gibt es zuhauf, weil sie alle sind dem Wunsch, die Menschen wieder zu sein, wie ihre organisierte Gemeinschaft des Islam nur eigenartig ist.Omar bin Laden und Hussein, hatte nie zu vergewaltigen Kinder oder Frauen, weil Jungfrauen es gab wie dies bei den Menschen zu sein, nach oben.obwohl in diesem Alter von Obama, jetzt die Ziege Ficker haben mehr moralische Ansehen, was –l und Drogenhandel aus dem Aschkenas Banking saugt ab.Oh, wie ich vermisse Saddam Hussein, sexy Saddam mit diesem leistungsf¤higen Namen und gut aussehend Schnurrbart.Wie ich vermisse Mullah Omar in seiner Salz Wolle Roben verkrustet, der fliegt auf nicht landen w¼rde.Wie ich vermisse Scheich bin Laden, wie ein heiliger Prophet suchen, dass der Mahdi in weniger von einem Mann besch¤men w¼rde.Jetzt haben wir alle sind diese homosexuellen Marxisten, kein Name, keine goldenen Pistolen, keine Barthaare, die eine Frau nicht befriedigen kann.Wo ist der Muslim, der in die StraŸe geht aus, mit Ketten auf ihm, N¤gel, diese Ketten auf das Pflaster, und mit dem Schwert in der Hand trotzt seine Feinde ihn wie ein Mann zu kommen und zu engagieren?Nachdem Obama alles, was wir haben, sind Homosexuell auf Aschkenas Facebook gepostet selfies.So schade.agtG

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 09:47

As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

I have not had the time nor energy to track the New York City target which someone planted the seed of from the regime to advance a time line, which Dick Allgire and his remote viewers have now sprouted, but do so on Friday evening on what inquiry reveals is trending.

When I last visited this one Wednesday night, I could not lock onto this warhead as it kept saying "assembled on an island" and there was not any ocean which would point to the location. It appears there was a transition in the time line current taking place, as on 9 11, in two bombing scenarios in different hijackers, something else has appeared.

Inquiry points to Turkmenistan uranium which was transported on an Asian ship to North Carolina. It was transported to Missouri, where it has been assembled into a 9 megaton h bomb. With a hat tip to Tim Rifat, the psylord, there is 34 kilos of cobalt packed into this device.

The new time line does not progress a missile launch off a Pakistani ship as previous, but is truck delivered to NYC to the 6th floor of a parking garage, where it will be detonated.

Inquiry states the ship was Malaysian.

Those behind this mean to make this a scar for the decay of the cobalt of over 5 years. There is not going to be any rebuilding with this radioactive wall they intend to build inside America.

The time line has not changed. Target is still 1 AM on the 24th.

Inquiry states this was recent mining in the ore.

Inquiry states the device will begin it's journey on August 7th. The time line can be changed and it must be attempted as now is not the time. Mr. Trump and his family are still trending as safe. First movement is inside Missouri to an underground garage. There will be several transition points.

Time to regenerate.

agtG

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 09:45

(continued)

Dopamine AgonistsDopamine agonists are drugs that activate the dopamine receptor. They mimic or copy the function of dopamine in the brain.

Requip, Mirapex, and Neupro are dopamine agonists. These medications may be taken alone or in combination with Sinemet. Generally, dopamine agonists are prescribed first and levodopa is added if the patient's symptoms cannot be controlled sufficiently.

Because dopamine agonists are better tolerated and do not have the same risks of long-term complications as levodopa therapy, dopamine agonists are often the first choice of treatment for Parkinson's disease.

However, dopamine agonists do carry a risk of short-term side effects such as nausea, vomiting, dizziness, light-headedness, confusion, and hallucinations.

SymmetrelSymmetrel may be a helpful treatment for people with mild Parkinson's disease, but it may cause side effects including confusion and memory problems. Symmetrel increases the amount of dopamine available for use in the brain, therefore reducing symptoms of Parkinson's. There have been recent reports that Symmetrel may help reduce the involuntary movements (dyskinesia) associated with levodopa therapy.

Anticholinergics (Artane, Cogentin)Anticholinergics are used to restore the balance between the two brain chemicals, dopamine and acetylcholine, by reducing the amount of acetylcholine. This acts to reduce tremor and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's. These medications, however, can impair memory and thinking, especially in older people; therefore, they are rarely used today.

Eldepryl and AzilectEldeprylandAzilectwork by helping to conserve the amount of dopamine available by preventing the dopamine from being destroyed. While controversial, there is some evidence that Eldepryl may slow the progression of Parkinson's disease, particularly early in the course of the disease. Eldepryl is well-tolerated by most people, so many experts recommend using it. Common side effects include nausea, dizziness/fainting, and stomach pain.

Azilect is taken once daily and can be taken alone early in the disease or with other Parkinson's drugs as the disease progresses. Early animal studies suggest Azilect may also slow progression of Parkinson's. Side effects include headache, joint pain, indigestion, and depression.

Tasmar, Comtan (COMT Inhibitors)When COMT is blocked, dopamine can be retained and used more effectively, reducing Parkinson's symptoms. COMT inhibitors can also increase the effectiveness of levodopa.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 09:42

As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

Someone suggested that exposing this Hillary Clinton brain disorder which everyone knows about, could end her campaign. The answer to that is Hillary Clinton's head could fall off on stage and it still would not make any difference, whether it is stealing votes from Bernie Sanders, Benghazi or Emailgate.

In the public interest though in tracking this down, I am fascinated by the manifestation, as nothing really appeared in inquiry over a year ago. Everyone knows from Huma to the always experts that Hillary Clinton has a brain disease, but attempting to diagnose it, is the mystery.

It is not Parkinsons, Shy Drager or Turrets as most have suggested. She does not have brain cancer, nor is this related to her coughing fits. This was not the reason for her absence from the Sanders debate. She had the shits.

Her odd behavior as in the barking like a dog is related to this, and it all centers on the brain injury she had several years ago. Like all brain injuries the neuron transmission is degraded, and that is what one is witnessing.

In a pre-clinical study, the researchers found that a moderate traumatic brain injury in rats caused a 15 percent loss in the brain cells known as nigrostriatal dopaminergic neurons shortly after the trauma, and that this loss continued to progress to a 30 percent loss 26 weeks after the initial injury.The loss of these particular neurons can result in the cardinal motor symptoms observed in Parkinson's patients, including akinesia (problems with movement), postural tremor and rigidity. Further, when combined with a second known risk factor for Parkinson's, the pesticide paraquat, the loss of dopaminergic neurons doubled to 30 percent much faster.The human mind has flight, fright and freeze reactions. What happens when the mind is injured or aged, is what Hillary Clinton is expressing. She is an old woman, Huma stated after the injury she really was confused and took some time to talk things through to explain things to her, when she woke up.As reported here, the woman sleeps around 14 hours a day in napping before going to bed.

What inquiry points to is Mrs. Clinton is being suffering from a brain poison, which is carbon dioxide.

Scientists have suggested that external or internal toxins may selectively destroy the dopaminergic neurons, causing Parkinson's disease. Toxins that may be linked to Parkinson's include manganese, carbon monoxide, carbon disulfide, and some other pesticides.

I realize the smart asses will jump on it says MONOXIDE and not DIOXIDE, but what inquiry is pointing to is Hillary Clinton has brain damage. She is old. What she experiences is, is a sort of auto erotic asphyxia. I am not saying she has an orgasm, but what happens when you deprive the brain of oxygen or carbon dioxide builds up, so that the neurons which are in need of this element to function in transmitting signals? One becomes disoriented, is over stimulated and passes out.What Mrs. Clinton is manifesting is a noticeable two part manifestation of barking like a dog like the crazy Aunt in the attic or she brain freezes like Gramma who you have to yell at to come back to reality.

Simply put, people have to be aware that a Hillary Clinton regime is one where Huma will be interpreter, probably John Podesta will be President with Leon Panetta running foreign affairs, while Bill who is suffering the shakes too, and when awake, will be sending his surrogate Tim Kaine to fill in the blanks that Hillary is missing when she is napping 14 hours a day.Mrs. Clinton wrote It Takes A Village, but it is going to take a committee of Muslim sympathizers to run America as Hillary Clinton is not physically capable to carry out this job. The very symptoms which are erupting are with Mrs. Clinton sleeping 14 hours a day. The Presidency will be 1000 times more taxing and more atrophy of the brain will take place.

Hillary Clinton is not yet chasing people around with butcher knives or slapping children, so she probably will not be firing nukes off in the night on her own, but Obama is setting up a nuclear war with Russia, and that is the reality of America has a chance of having a woman who brain freezes and barks like a dog with her finger on the nuclear button, or at least it will be Huma the Muslim guiding the shaking hand.

Inquiry states that Mrs. Clinton is on medications. She is taking L DOPA to attempt to keep the brain receptors functioning, but the medication as of last week was not the correct dose or it does not alleviate Mrs. Clinton's condition. She has this thing going on in mixing meds by prescription to keep the brain fog at bay in over use of Symmetrel and Artane do cause confusion.

Is any of this information going to make you vote for Hillary Clinton? NO.Is any of this information going to keep Hillary zombie from voting for her? NO

So that is why none of it interests me. She is just another old woman with a deteriorating brain who wants her finger on a nuclear button. None of this exclusive will change anything, because everyone in the puppy press knows this, and has signed off that the Hillary presidency will be run by their community organized traitors working for oil terrorism as the Jews cash the checks in their banks, and America goes in to steal the mineral wealth of Russia, to sell to Asia.

I have more important things to do like inquiring if someone is going to make Hamrod ashes to ashes.

Nuff Said

agtG

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Archived Version

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 09:35

As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.There has been much attention focused upon mysterious Black man who is part mind reader, part ventriloquist for Hillary Clinton and part Dr. Toe Tag in hovering around Mrs. Clinton as she falls and as her brain freezes.

I decided to see what inquiry would point to in Dr. Toe Tag, and we shall see how much this matches to what the propaganda which will be released is covering up.

Without any names, what we have here is a former Marine, with no combat deployment, who was a medic, that is being paid by the Secret Service.

Dr. Toe Tag is paid well as his attire is high price, and he likes wearing silk purple ties and purplish frilly shirts.

I did some checking on the Secret Service site to see if Dr. Toe Tag could exist, as I recall when the FBI had Oregon State Police murdering LaVoy Finicum, there was reference to a medical team, and indeed the Secret Service does indeed have it's own MERT, or Medical Emergency Response Team.Dr. Toe Tag is literally Hillary Clinton's own traveling medic being paid for by you. If you want one, I doubt you are going to get one, even if you are billionaire like Mrs. Clinton as a freebie.

Using advanced countermeasures, the Secret Service executes security operations that deter, minimize and decisively respond to identified threats and vulnerabilities. The protective environment is enhanced by specialized resources within the Secret Service, including: the Airspace Security Branch; the Counter Sniper Team; the Emergency Response Team; the Counter Surveillance Unit; the Counter Assault Team; the Hazardous Agent Mitigation and Medical Emergency Response Team; and the Magnetometer Operations Unit.

So Dr. Toe Tag gets his bill picked up by the tax payer.......am thinking if inquiry pointed to something else after the hinky pay checks were pointed to.......

He is an American. Sorry no Ghana illegal.

Oh and inquiry states, besides the 4 known incidents of Hillary Clinton falling down, she has had since the brain bruise incident, 15 other incidents. Apparently it is not just Hamrod's tits falling down, but all of her on a frequent enough basis that one could get odds in Vegas like for sports.

Oh I know what I was going to add.......

The New York Daily News spotted Dr. Toe Tag leaving the Bill and Hillary entourage when she had the blood clot in her brain, and was grinning like monkey in her hearse. Inquiry stated then that DTT was not part of Bill or Hillary's entourage then.He is pictured in the front passenger seat, in front of Bill by the driver. That is a prominent position in the follow car, in case Mrs. Clinton stroked out or if Mr. Bill was in need of mouth to mouth. It reveals standing and his demeanor is not security. He was simply assigned to do the breast pump on Bill and Hill, until the evac arrived, so a doctor could pronounce them DOA at Bethesda in a life flight.Anyway that is it on this. Hillary Clinton has her own combat medic, who walks for her, talks for her, thinks for her and apparently is so comforting to her, that he is like her big St. Bernard in calming her down. I do not know if she keeps kibble treats in her pocket as rewards.

It all sounds logical in the inquiry.......and begs the question, why are taxpayers paying a huge amount of money for rich Hillary Clinton's personal EMT to pull the puppet strings.....and why does she need one as no one else has their own personal military medic shadowing them.

.....and no Dr. Toe Tag is not Chi McBride.

agtG

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 09:27

As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.

I have made an oversight. You remember when the Enterprise was thrown back in time to earth and they beamed up that Air Force pilot to save him, and Spock said that the flap did not make any significant contributions to history, so it was okie doke for Capt. Kirk to just make the flier disappear..........and then Spock did a search and the pilots kid went to Mars first.....so that was the oversight?

Well even if you do not, this is like that in the NYC824 event. See I have been so focused on keeping Donald Trump and his family safe, that I completely overlooked something in the details of this plot.

OK I will explain, in no I did not miss that this H bomb plot based on Dick Allgire's grooving the time line for it to happen earlier than it should have......by the way, Dick, stop hedging your bets on the remote viewing with the children. Just admit that there is a God in Heaven who can change time lines. So stop saying this is some meteor now or maybe in September. You saw the time line right as it was initiated by the lords and priests for you to lock on, as you were seeing the event you generated. Now the event is transforming to the real event which was intentioned.....no missiles and at this point a domestic H bomb made with Asian uranium.So man up Dick or change your name to Richie as you do the RV well, but Dick you are just a viewer, not a time lord.

Now here is what interests me, in I did not miss:

This event is to hide all the Obama conglomerate looting of America at 19 trillion dollars.

This event is to get rid of Donald Trump.

This event is to start World War.

I did not think of something though and that is what I missed, and once I add this, you will say, "Oh wow Lame Cherry right again as this is all so simple".There is a primary target in this which I never considered, but it makes sense as I wrote of this in why Joe Biden was being fawned over at the DNC. That convention was meant to injure Hillary Clinton, as all of this has always been about is image Obama protecting the legacy, and installing the puppet the regime has chosen.

By this time the lights have gone off in some of you, in the primary target in the NYC824 is Hamrod Clinton.

Let that all soak in, as I explain and you will smile at the cartel with the Obama regime as this makes 9 11 look like fucktards having sex.

What kind of moxy does it take not to just blow John Kennedy's head off, but to decapitate both political parties in America on one night. Massive sorrow and shock, and out comes the image blaming handguns and saying, "Well it looks like Joe Biden is the nominee and Poco is the VP as Tim Kaine is either ashes with Hamrod or the creepy neocon no one wants, so as I have declared Martial Law until the election.......which has doper Johnson, bitchy Jill and whoever Bill Kristol has ejaculated on this week, looks like it is President Joe Biden.

Oh by the way, too bad all the investment records are gone, along with all American debt, you are all now poor, but we did find a KGB secret decoder ring at ground zero, so nuclear war in Europe starts in the morning".

I mean if this was not so heinous, the Alt Right would call this shit lord magna cum turd, in it is thorough and just so perfect. Crimes like this are just beyond even crimes in you just have to worship at something so constructed.

OK as the time line has changed and might be changing as I type this, and might have changed by the time this posts on Monday. We though have to be adult in weighing this as it is not like I have a million donors from New York City or a junta of fag billionaires donating, so NYC having a dust up really has no personal interest, as what are half a million fertilizer tabs once human to me.I figure I keep Donald Trump safe and the fam.......sounds like good policy.

Then again, we have Hamrod.......no there is no interest there, but Hamrod is a weak link, while in the turmoil of the Ashy Knoll, old scramble brains Biden with a great deal of regime voter intimidation and vote fraud in these "perilous times" just might get plugs to the White House.

Again that is odds and chances, which Donald Trump could win over, but there is this thing about Irish Setters, and now Russians........well my pet Slavic babies in this Obama war would be fought on their lands and I just can not have that.

So I suppose this will have to be tracked and to see about Gotham, as Hamrod going tits up is almost a positive in this.

For some reason I think of 500,000 New Yorkers, and then of course those 400,000 Syrians all dead from Obama Clinton policies and people talk about them like so much lint. 500,000 New Yorkers and 1 LaVoy Finicum and Obama voters cheered about his murder.It is like Spock stated on Star Trek, in how the human mind deals with the numbers of tallying up the importance of death.

I will assume that this should be enough fanfare in the time line being prematurely generated for the decapitation of both American political parties in an intrigue which would have delighted even Caligula.

Private conversations

agtG

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 08:58

Ahmed Mohamed, on a family visit to Sudan in October 2015.

ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images

Ahmed Mohamed, who was arrested last year after showing a home-made clock to a teacher at his high school, has filed a lawsuit against his former school district, its principal, and the city of Irving, Texas.

Mohamed's lawsuit (PDF), filed earlier today, claims that the school district has a history of racial discrimination, and that the treatment he received violated both US civil rights laws and his 14th Amendment right to equal treatment under the law.

The suit begins by reprinting in full "The New Colossus," the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the Statute of Liberty. The suit goes on to describe the history of discrimination against immigrants in the US, dating back to the 17th century.Later, the complaint alleges that Irving Independent School District has its own history of discrimination. It details a 2009 report which found that African-American students in the district faced racial discrimination.

The complaint also describes the events of the day on which Mohamed was arrested. That section reads, in part:

Ahmed plugged the clock in and showed her [English teacher Ms. West] how it worked. Ms. West asked Ahmed ''is that a bomb?'' Ahmed was surprised and confused. In all the many times he had built contraptions and taken them to his teachers, none had ever asked him that. Ahmed replied, ''no, it's an alarm clock, see?'' Ms. West then told Ahmed she would hold it for him and give it back at the end of the day. She placed the pencil box on her desk. For the next several hours, the home-made clock was out of Ahmed's hands. There was no alarm raised, no evacuation, no bomb squad called. Nothing happened at all.

Later that day, Ahmed was pulled out of class and arrested.

The officers pulled him forcefully out of his chair, yanked his arms up behind his back so far that his right hand touched the back of his neck, causing a lot of pain. They placed Ahmed in handcuffs and marched him out of the front of the school, four officers grabbing onto him, two on each side holding his hands and his arms. They put him into the back of a police car. They took him to the police station and booked him as a criminal, with mugshots and fingerprinting'--all still without his parents.

Following his arrest, Ahmed's plight was written up in the Dallas Morning News and later received international media attention. Ahmed received praise from tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg and Jimmy Wales, as well as an invitation to visit the White House, which he accepted. In November, the family wrote a letter to the city of Irving suggesting it was owed $15 million and that the damages against Ahmed's family were "incalculable."

Following the incident, Ahmed and his family have moved to Qatar. The family, visiting Texas for the summer, gave a new round of media interviews in recent weeks. Ahmed's father, who has run for president of Sudan twice, is planning to run again in 2020.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 08:36

Parents of two Benghazi victims have sued Hillary Clinton, arguing that she caused the death of their sons and later defamed them in statements made to the media, according to court documents.

''During her campaign for President, Defendant Clinton has negligently, recklessly, and/or maliciously defamed Plaintiffs by either directly calling them liars, or by strongly implying that they are liars, in order to protect and enhance her public image and intimidate and emotionally harm and silence them not to speak up about the Benghazi attack on at least four separate occasions,'' Larry Klayman, an attorney for the families, wrote in his complaint.

The suit was brought by Charles Woods and Pat Smith, parents of Benghazi victims Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith, respectively.

The suit also suggests Clinton's use of a private server to handle classified emails could have contributed to the deaths.

"Having used a secret private email server that we now know was used to communicate with Ambassador Christopher Stevens with confidential and classified government information, and which we also now know was likely hacked by hostile adversaries such as Iran, Russia, China and North Korea aligning with terrorist groups, it is clear that Hillary Clinton allegedly negligently and recklessly gave up the classified location of the plaintiffs' sons, resulting in a deadly terrorist attack that took their lives,'' Klayman said in a statement.

A Clinton spokesman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 07:14

The first week of August was a rough one for Donald Trump's campaign; by coincidence, it was also a busy one for Trump supporters, who see a media coverup protecting Hillary Clinton. Over the weekend, the Trump campaign released a Web ad that mocked Clinton's admission that she "short-circuited" by giving a misleading answer about the investigation into her emails.

[Clinton acknowledges misspeaking about FBI director's testimony]

"She took a short-circuit in the brain," Trump said at a Saturday night rally. "She's got problems. Honestly, I don't think she's all there."

At the same time, the Drudge Report, WorldNetDaily and a small army of would-be Twitter sleuths tried to build the case that the Democratic nominee for president has serious health issues and only they had noticed. Clinton's age and health had been subject to parody by some conservative media, but the new speculation was completely serious.

None of the evidence, often shared (or sent to reporters) with the hashtag #HillarysHealth, held up. In every case, a Clinton moment that had been captured by the media was reinterpreted and wrenched out of context. The highest-profile #HillarysHealth discovery came at the American Mirror, an obscure conservative news site with what it packaged as a scoop '-- "SHOCK PHOTO" '-- but had been aggregated from Twitter.

"The questionable health condition of Hillary Clinton should be a major issue of the 2016 campaign," wrote the site's editor, Kyle Olson. "The latest evidence comes in the form of Clinton being helped up a set of stairs by multiple individuals outside what appears to be a home. The photos, published by Reuters and Getty, show the 68-year-old candidate with aides holding her arms as she ascends the stairs."

Olson shared two photos of Clinton, shot from behind, being helped as she unsteadily ascended the stairs. He left out the context: The photos were from February. As CNN's Brian Stelter first noticed, Getty Images had published the photos during Clinton's South Carolina primary campaign. The photo agency noted, in its caption, that Clinton had been steadied after slipping on the stairs.

But the American Mirror's version of the story went viral, with help from the Drudge Report. The photos led that site for most of Sunday. As of Monday morning, the original post had been shared more than 20,000 times on Facebook.

Asked why he did not note the timing of the photo in his story, Olson explained that "Hillary Clinton's health is an ongoing issue during the campaign" and that any issues could be resolved if she released her full medical records. (Like previous candidates for president, she has so far released a letter from her physician, which says that she had a concussion in 2012 and has hypothyroidism now.)

"She should be transparent and inform Americans about her health status," Olson said. "As for the timing of the photos and my writing about them, as Hillary Clinton said, 'What different, at this point, does it make?' The broader point is that she appears to have issues and Americans deserve to know about them."

Indeed, for other websites critical of Clinton, the "stairs" photo was just one part of a #HillarysHealth mosaic. It gave WorldNetDaily a hook to resurrect "a July 21 video posted on YouTube [which] shows Clinton's head suddenly turning and shaking vigorously for several seconds." That video, titled "Hillary Clinton has seizure/convulsions - tries to play it off making fun of seizures," was also robbed of its context. Two clips of Clinton bobbing her head had been looped and slowed down, as ominous music and voice-overs played behind them '-- a combination that helped the clip score 1.4 million views.

The clip wasn't from July 21, and (as the scrum of media should have indicated) it wasn't rescued from pro-Clinton censors. It was from June 10, when Clinton, fresh off a series of wins that effectively locked up the Democratic nomination, held a few events ahead of the District of Columbia's primary. Beat reporters followed Clinton to a coffee shop in the Shaw neighborhood; CNN's Dan Merica, to her left, asked her about the breaking news of President Obama's official endorsement. Then, to her right, the Associated Press's Lisa Lerer asked a question about Elizabeth Warren, whom Clinton had met with as vice presidential speculation swirled.

The reporters, who had covered Clinton for a year, interpreted her exaggerated head-bobbing as a joke at how she'd been suddenly surrounded '-- and as a successful attempt at ending the scrum. It did not occur to them that it would become seen as evidence of a "seizure," as people suffering from seizures do not typically laugh and continue to hold cups of coffee.

In WorldNetDaily's coverage, the evidence that Clinton's bobble-head moment resembled a seizure is that bloggers said it did. At InfoWars, the conspiracy news site founded by Alex Jones, the investor Martin Shkreli explained that Clinton was revealing a "cardinal symptom of Parkinson's disease."

Even when Clinton remained controlled, steady and unsmiling, #HillarysHealth sleuths were ready. Mike Cernovich, a self-help author best known as the attorney for a central figure in the "Gamergate" saga, seized on the speculation about Clinton to ask if Clinton traveled with a private doctor. "Remember when you thought famous people like Michael Jackson and Elvis had good medical care?" he asked. "What's Clinton on?"

Cernovich's speculation started with an incident from last week, when Clinton was campaigning in Las Vegas. Mid-speech, she paused and narrowed her eyes to look at protesters. Secret Service Assistant Special Agent in Charge Todd Madison rushed to her side, telling her that the situation was under control, and that she could keep talking.

As was widely reported, Clinton was reacting to a commotion from four animal rights activists. According to Melina Mara, a Washington Post photographer who was shooting at the event, first the activists hoisted their signs; then, one pushed a female protester over the barrier. As Clinton looked on, the protester stumbled and was being hauled back.

To some Clinton fans, it seemed like she had remained steely while a threat was taken care of '-- a contrast with the way Trump had handled himself when a protester tried to rush him during the primaries.

To Cernovich, it was clear that Clinton was "completely frozen" and "lost control of her executive functions/pre-frontal cortex." She actually riffed on the protesters, telling them to protest Donald Trump's sons, who are proud hunters.

But in a follow-up post, Cernovich speculated that Madison was not in fact a Secret Service agent, but a medical professional who must be around her at all times. In his comments on Twitter and at InfoWars, Shkreli speculated that Madison was holding "an Apokyn pen, used to treat Parkinson's," in a photo that revealed something in his right hand.

"The media is completely covering up this story," wrote Cernovich. "We will continue to investigate it aggressively. By the way, my journalism is entirely self-funded."

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton leads her Republican opponent Donald Trump by 8 points in a new Washington Post/ABC News poll. The poll also found a majority of voters see both candidates as dishonest. (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 03:53

We need the truth and we need Donald Trump. 2016

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in a bar. Donald leans over, and With A

smile on his face, says, ''The media is really tearing you apart forThatScandal.''Hillary: ''You mean my lying about Benghazi?''Trump: ''No,the other one.''Hillary: ''You mean the massive voter fraud?''Trump: ''No,the other one.''Hillary: ''You mean the military not getting their votescounted?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''Using my secret privateserver with classified material to Hide my Activities?''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''The NSA monitoring our phone calls, emails and everythingElse?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''Using the Clinton Foundationas a cover for tax evasion, Hiring Cronies, And taking bribes from foreigncountries?Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''You mean the drones beingoperated in our own country without The Benefit of the law?''Trump: ''No, theother one.''Hillary: ''Giving 123 Technologies $300 Million, and rightafterward it Declared Bankruptcy and was sold to the Chinese?''Trump: ''No,the other one.''Hillary: ''You mean arming the Muslim Brotherhood and hiringthem in the White House?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary:''Whitewater, Watergate committee, Vince Foster, commodity Deals?''Trump: ''Nothe other one:''Hillary:''The funding of neoNazis in the Ukraine that ledto the toppling of thedemocratically elected president and to the biggestcrisis that countryhas had since WWII ?''Trump: ''No the otherone:''Hillary: ''Turning Libya into chaos?''

Trump: ''No the otherone:''Hillary:''Being the mastermind of the so-called ''Arab Spring'' thatonly broughtchaos, death and destruction to the Middle East and NorthAfrica ?Trump: ''No the other one:''Hillary: ''Leaving four Americans todie in Benghazi and go to sleep?Trump: ''No the other one:''Hillary:''Trashing Mubarak, one of our few Muslim friends?''Trump: ''No the otherone:''Hillary:''Encouraging and supporting the murders of Palestinians andthedestruction of their homes, towns and villages by Israel ?''Trump:''No the other one:''Hillary:''The funding and arming of terrorists inSyria, the destruction anddestabilization of that nation, giving the orderto our lapdogs inTurkey and Saudi Arabia to give sarin gas to the''moderate'' terroristsin Syria that they eventually used on civilians, andframed Assad, andhad it not been for the Russians and Putin, we would haveused that as apretext to invade Syria, put a puppet in power, steal theirnaturalresources, and leave that country in total chaos, just like we didwithLibya?Trump: ''No the other one:''Hillary: ''The creation of thebiggest refugees crisis since WWIITrump: ''No the other one:''Hillary:''Leaving Iraq in chaos? ''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''The DOJspying on the press?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''You mean HHSSecretary Sibelius shaking down health insurance Executives?''Trump: ''No, theother one.''Hillary:''Giving our cronies in SOLYNDRA $500 MILLION DOLLARSand 3 Months Laterthey declared bankruptcy and then the Chinese boughtit?''

Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''The NSA monitoring citizens' ?''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''The State Department interfering with an Inspector GeneralInvestigation on departmental sexual misconduct?''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''Me, The IRS, Clapper and Holder all lying toCongress?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''Threats to all of Bill'sformer mistresses to keep them quiet''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary:''I give up! '... Oh wait, I think I've got it! When I stolethe WhiteHouse furniture, silverware, when Bill left Office?''Trump:''THAT'S IT! I almost forgot about that one''.

From: Kathleen Armand

Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2016 7:39 AM

To: Kathleen Armand

Subject: Re: Helldabeast lies

Save this

From: Kathleen Armand

Sent: Monday, July 25, 2016 7:43 AM

To: Kathleen Armand ; Judy Schaben; TinaMcMurtrie ; ellen Jeter

Subject: Re: Helldabeast lies

THIS SAYS ITALL'...'...'...'...'...'...'...PASS IT ON.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are in abar. Donald leans over, and With Asmile on his face, says, ''The media isreally tearing you apart for ThatScandal.''Hillary: ''You mean my lyingabout Benghazi?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''You mean themassive voter fraud?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''You mean themilitary not getting their votes counted?''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''Using my secret private server with classified material toHide my Activities?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''The NSAmonitoring our phone calls, emails and everything Else?''Trump: ''No, theother one.''Hillary: ''Using the Clinton Foundation as a cover for taxevasion, Hiring Cronies, And taking bribes from foreign countries?Trump:''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''You mean the drones being operated in our owncountry without The Benefit of the law?''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''Giving 123 Technologies $300 Million, and right afterward itDeclared Bankruptcy and was sold to the Chinese?''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''You mean arming the Muslim Brotherhood and hiring them in theWhite House?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''Whitewater, Watergatecommittee, Vince Foster, commodity Deals?''Trump: ''No the otherone:''Hillary:''The funding of neoNazis in the Ukraine that led to thetoppling of thedemocratically elected president and to the biggest crisisthat countryhas had since WWII ?''Trump: ''No the other one:''Hillary:''Turning Libya into chaos?''

Trump: ''No the otherone:''Hillary:''Being the mastermind of the so-called ''Arab Spring'' thatonly broughtchaos, death and destruction to the Middle East and NorthAfrica ?Trump: ''No the other one:''Hillary: ''Leaving four Americans todie in Benghazi and go to sleep?Trump: ''No the other one:''Hillary:''Trashing Mubarak, one of our few Muslim friends?''Trump: ''No the otherone:''Hillary:''Encouraging and supporting the murders of Palestinians andthedestruction of their homes, towns and villages by Israel ?''Trump:''No the other one:''Hillary:''The funding and arming of terrorists inSyria, the destruction anddestabilization of that nation, giving the orderto our lapdogs inTurkey and Saudi Arabia to give sarin gas to the''moderate'' terroristsin Syria that they eventually used on civilians, andframed Assad, andhad it not been for the Russians and Putin, we would haveused that as apretext to invade Syria, put a puppet in power, steal theirnaturalresources, and leave that country in total chaos, just like we didwithLibya?Trump: ''No the other one:''Hillary: ''The creation of thebiggest refugees crisis since WWIITrump: ''No the other one:''Hillary:''Leaving Iraq in chaos? ''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''The DOJspying on the press?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''You mean HHSSecretary Sibelius shaking down health insurance Executives?''Trump: ''No, theother one.''Hillary:''Giving our cronies in SOLYNDRA $500 MILLION DOLLARSand 3 Months Laterthey declared bankruptcy and then the Chinese boughtit?''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''The NSA monitoring citizens' ?''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''The State Department interfering with an Inspector GeneralInvestigation on departmental sexual misconduct?''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary: ''Me, The IRS, Clapper and Holder all lying toCongress?''Trump: ''No, the other one.''Hillary: ''Threats to all of Bill'sformer mistresses to keep them quiet''Trump: ''No, the otherone.''Hillary:''I give up! '... Oh wait, I think I've got it! When I stolethe WhiteHouse furniture, silverware, when Bill left Office?''Trump:''THAT'S IT! I almost forgot about that one''.

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Tue, 09 Aug 2016 03:12

Incredibly, in 2013 the International Finance Corporation announced a record setting $150 million investment in Laureate at a time when its financial condition was rocky at best. Clinton's involvement sealed the deal. Then the Clinton Global Initiative and Clinton Foundation entered into a joint venture with Laureate to create CGI-University. Yet none of these related party disclosures are included in any of the Clinton Foundation or Clinton Global Initiative filings for relevant periods (starting in 2008 or so).

New York State law requires specific approvals for an entity to hold itself out as being a university. In this case CGI (a fraud) created CGI University (a fraud) in league with Laureate, a fraud. Laureate is a highly leveraged failing investment whose principal beneficiaries are Wall Street fat cats and billionaires, and William Jefferson Clinton.

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Mon, 08 Aug 2016 21:44

This article is about the political organization. For the band, see Tammany Hall NYC.Tammany Hall, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was a New York City political organization founded in 1786 and incorporated on May 12, 1789, as the Tammany Society. It was the Democratic Partypolitical machine that played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics and helping immigrants, most notably the Irish, rise up in American politics from the 1790s to the 1960s. It typically controlled Democratic Party nominations and political patronage in Manhattan from the mayoral victory of Fernando Wood in 1854 and used its patronage resources to build a loyal, well-rewarded core of district and precinct leaders; after 1850 the great majority were Irish Catholics.

The Tammany Society emerged as the center for Democratic-Republican Party politics in the city in the early 19th century. After 1854, the Society expanded its political control even further by earning the loyalty of the city's rapidly expanding immigrant community, which functioned as its base of political capital. The business community appreciated its readiness, at moderate cost, to cut through red tape and legislative mazes to facilitate rapid economic growth, The Tammany Hall ward boss or ward heeler '' "wards" were the city's smallest political units from 1786 to 1938 '' served as the local vote gatherer and provider of patronage. By 1872 Tammany had an Irish Catholic "boss," and in 1928 a Tammany hero, New York GovernorAl Smith, won the Democratic presidential nomination. However, Tammany Hall also served as an engine for graft and political corruption, perhaps most infamously under William M. "Boss" Tweed in the mid-19th century. By the 1880s, Tammany was building local clubs that appealed to social activists from the ethnic middle-class.[2][3] In quiet times the machine had the advantage of a core of solid supporters and usually exercised control of politics and policymaking in Manhattan; it also played a major role in the state legislature in Albany.

Charles Murphy was the highly effective but quiet boss of Tammany from 1902''1924.[4] "Big Tim" Sullivan was the Tammany leader in the Bowery, and machine's spokesman in the state legislature.[5] In the early twentieth century Murphy and Sullivan promoted Tammany as a reformed agency dedicated to the interests of the working class. The new image deflected attacks and built up a following among the emerging ethnic middle-class. In the process Robert F. Wagner became a powerful United States Senator, and Al Smith served multiple terms as governor and was the Democratic presidential candidate in 1928.[6][7]

Tammany Hall's influence waned from 1930 to 1945 when it engaged in a losing battle with Franklin D. Roosevelt, the state's governor (1928''33) and the United States president (1933''45). In 1932, MayorJimmy Walker was forced from office when his bribery was exposed. Roosevelt stripped Tammany of federal patronage. Republican Fiorello La Guardia was elected mayor on a Fusion ticket and became the first anti-Tammany mayor to be re-elected. A brief resurgence in Tammany power in the 1950s under the leadership of Carmine DeSapio was met with Democratic Party opposition led by Eleanor Roosevelt, Herbert Lehman, and the New York Committee for Democratic Voters. By the mid-1960s Tammany Hall ceased to exist.

1789''1850EditThe Tammany Society, also known as the Society of St. Tammany, the Sons of St. Tammany, or the Columbian Order, was founded in New York on May 12, 1789, originally as a branch of a wider network of Tammany Societies, the first having been formed in Philadelphia in 1772.[8] The society was originally developed as a club for "pure Americans".[9] The name "Tammany" comes from Tamanend, a Native American leader of the Lenape. The society adopted many Native American words and also their customs, going so far as to call its hall a wigwam. The first Grand Sachem, as the leader was titled, was William Mooney, an upholsterer of Nassau Street.[10]

By 1798, the society's activities had grown increasingly political. High ranking Democrat-Republican Aaron Burr saw Tammany Hall as an opportunity to counter Alexander Hamilton's Society of the Cincinnati and developed it into a political machine.[9] Eventually Tammany emerged as the center of Democratic-Republican Party politics in the city.[10] Burr used Tammany Hall influence in the election of 1800, in which he was elected Vice President of the United States. Many historians believe that without Tammany, President John Adams might have won New York State's electoral votes and won reelection.[11]

Early cases of political corruption involving Tammany Hall came to light during the group's feud with local politician Dewitt Clinton. The feud began in 1802 after he accused Aaron Burr of being a traitor to the Democratic-Republican Party.[12] In 1803, Clinton left the United States Senate and became Mayor of New York City.[13] As mayor, Clinton enforced a spoils system and appointed his family and partisans to positions in the city's local government.[13] Tammany Hall soon realized its influence over the local political scene was no match for that of Clinton,[13] in part because Burr's support among New York City's residents greatly faded after he shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.[14] Tammany continued to support him for a time,[14] but eventually pressure from the public persuaded the organization to no longer affiliate themselves with Burr.[14]

In December 1805, Dewitt Clinton reached out to supporters of Burr in order to gain enough support to resist the influence of the powerful Livingstone family.[14] The Livingstone family, led by former New York City mayor Edward Livingston, backed New York Governor Morgan Lewis and presented a significant challenge to Clinton.[15] The Tammany Hall Sachems agreed to meet with him on February 20, 1806.[15] The Burrites thought this assured the reinstatement of their political chief,[15] but the Tammany Hall Sachems turned on them and agreed to work to bring them into Clinton's fold rather than have them work together with Clintonites as a joint-union.[14] The Sachems were expelled and Tammany Hall continued to oppose Clinton.[14]

Tammany Hall afterwards became a locally organized machine dedicated to stopping Clinton and Federalists from rising to power in New York;[16] in 1806, however, local Democrat-Republicans began to turn against Tammany Hall.[17] In 1809, the local Common Council cracked down on Tammany Hall and found that a number of its Sachems secretly received huge funds.[18] Following the disclosures, the Federalists won control of the state legislature and the Democratic-Republican Party barely maintained control of the local government in New York City.[19] The Tammany Hall Sachems then agreed to discipline the organization by passing laws that established an organization that oversaw Tammany Hall's finances and limiting contributions to the organization.[20]

Between the years 1809 and 1815, Tammany Hall slowly revived itself by accepting immigrants and by secretly building a new wigwam to hold meetings whenever new Sachems were named.[21] The Democratic-Republican Committee, a new committee which consisted of the most influential local Democratic Republicans, would now name the new Sachems as well.[22] Support for Tammany Hall regrew after they supported the War of 1812.[23] In 1815, Tammany Hall grand sachem John Ferguson defeated Dewitt Clinton and was elected mayor. In 1817, however, Clinton became Governor of New York and Tammany Hall was again weakened. During this time, Tammany Hall began to accept Irish immigrants as members and soon became dependent on them to maintain viability as a political force.[24] Until his death in 1828, Clinton would remain Governor of New York, with the exception of the two-year-period 1823''1824, and Tammany Hall's influence waned.

During the 1828 U.S. presidential election, Tammany Hall leaders met with Democratic candidate Andrew Jackson and agreed to endorse him after he promised to give them control over the allocation of some federal jobs.[25] After he was elected President, Jackson fulfilled his promise.[25] After 1829, Tammany Hall became the city affiliate of the Democratic Party, controlling most of the New York City elections afterwards.[26] In the 1830s the Loco-Focos, an anti-monopoly and pro-labor faction of the Democratic Party, became Tammany's main opposition by appealing to workingmen. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, the Society expanded its political control even further by earning the loyalty of the city's ever-expanding immigrant community, which functioned as a base of political capital.

The Tammany Hall "ward boss" served as the local vote gatherer and provider of patronage.[27] During the 1840s, hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived in New York City to escape the Great Irish Potato Famine and Tammany saw its power grow greatly.[28]

Immigrant supportEditTammany Hall's electoral base lay predominantly with New York's burgeoning immigrant constituency, which often exchanged political support for Tammany Hall's patronage. In pre-New Deal America, the extralegal services that Tammany and other urban political machines provided often served as a rudimentary public welfare system. The patronage Tammany Hall provided to immigrants, many of whom lived in extreme poverty and received little government assistance, covered three key areas. First, Tammany provided the means of physical existence in times of emergency: food, coal, rent money or a job. Second, Tammany served as a powerful intermediary between immigrants and the unfamiliar state. In an example of their involvement in the lives of citizens, in the course of one day, Tammany figure George Washington Plunkitt assisted the victims of a house fire; secured the release of six "drunks" by speaking on their behalf to a judge; paid the rent of a poor family to prevent their eviction and gave them money for food; secured employment for four individuals; attended the funerals of two of his constituents (one Italian, the other Jewish); attended a Bar Mitzvah; and attended the wedding of a Jewish couple from his ward.[29]

Tammany Hall also served as a social integrator for immigrants by familiarizing them with American society and its political institutions and by helping them become naturalized citizens. One example was the naturalization process organized by William M. Tweed. Under Tweed's regime, "naturalization committees" were established. These "committees" were made up primarily of Tammany politicians and employees, and their duties consisted of filling out paperwork, providing witnesses, and lending immigrants money for the fees required to become citizens. Judges and other city officials were bribed and otherwise compelled to go along with the workings of these committees.[30] In exchange for all these benefits, immigrants assured Tammany Hall they would vote for their candidates.[26] By 1854, the support which Tammany Hall received from immigrants would firmly establish the organization as the leader of New York City's political scene.[26] With the election of Fernando Wood as mayor in 1854, Tammany Hall would now dominate New York City politics until Fiorello La Guardia won the mayoral election of 1934.[26]

Tweed regimeEditTammany's control over the politics of New York City tightened considerably under Tweed. In 1858, Tweed utilized the efforts of Republican reformers to rein in the Democratic city government to obtain a position on the County Board of Supervisors (which he then used as a springboard to other appointments) and to have his friends placed in various offices. From this position of strength, he was elected "Grand Sachem" of Tammany, which he then used to take functional control of the city government. With his proteges elected governor of the state and mayor of the city, Tweed was able to expand the corruption and kickbacks of his "Ring" into practically every aspect of city and state governance. Although Tweed was elected to the State Senate, his true sources of power were his appointed positions to various branches of the city government. These positions gave him access to city funds and contractors, thereby controlling public works programs. This benefitted his pocketbook and those of his friends, but also provided jobs for the immigrants, especially Irish laborers, who were the electoral base of Tammany's power.[31]

According to Tweed biographer Kenneth D. Ackerman:

It's hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed's system ... The Tweed ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box. Its frauds had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing and organization.[32]

Under "Boss" Tweed's dominance, the city expanded into the Upper East and Upper West Sides of Manhattan, the Brooklyn Bridge was begun, land was set aside for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, orphanages and almshouses were constructed, and social services '' both directly provided by the state and indirectly funded by state appropriations to private charities '' expanded to unprecedented levels. All of this activity, of course, also brought great wealth to Tweed and his friends. It also brought them into contact and alliance with the rich elite of the city, who either fell in with the graft and corruption, or else tolerated it because of Tammany's ability to control the immigrant population, of whom the "uppertens" of the city were wary.

It was therefore Tammany's demonstrated inability to control Irish laborers in the Orange riot of 1871 that began Tweed's downfall. Campaigns to topple Tweed by the New York Times and Thomas Nast of Harper's Weekly began to gain traction in the aftermath of the riot, and disgruntled insiders began to leak the details of the extent and scope of the Tweed Ring's avarice to the newspapers.

Tweed was arrested and tried in 1872. He died in Ludlow Street Jail, and political reformers took over the city and state governments.[31] Following Tweed's arrest, Tammany survived but was no longer controlled just by Protestants and was now dependent on leadership from bosses of Irish descent.[24]

1870''1900 EditTammany did not take long to rebound from Tweed's fall. Reforms demanded a general housecleaning, and former county sheriff "Honest John" Kelly was selected as the new leader. Kelly was not implicated in the Tweed scandals, and was a religious Catholic related by marriage to Archbishop John McCloskey. He cleared Tammany of Tweed's people, and tightened the Grand Sachem's control over the hierarchy. His success at revitalizing the machine was such that in the election of 1874, the Tammany candidate, William H. Wickham, unseated the unpopular reformist incumbent, William F. Havemeyer, and Democrats generally won their races, delivering control of the city back to Tammany Hall.[33]

1886 mayoral electionEditThe mayoral election of 1886 was a seminal one for the organization. Union activists had founded the United Labor Party (ULP), which nominated political economistHenry George, the author of Progress and Poverty, as its standard-bearer. George was initially hesitant about running for office, but was convinced to do so after Tammany secretly offered him a seat in Congress if he would stay out of the mayoral race. Tammany had no expectation of George being elected, but knew that his candidacy and the new party were a direct threat to their own status as the putative champions of the working man.[34]

Having inadvertently provoked George into running, Tammany now needed to field a strong candidate against him, which required the cooperation of the Catholic Church in New York, which was the key to getting the support of middle-class Irish-American voters. Richard Croker, Kelly's right-hand man, had succeeded Kelly as Grand Sachem of Tammany, and he understood that he would also need to make peace with the non-Tammany "Swallowtail" faction of the Democratic Party to avoid the threat that George and the ULP posed, which was the potential re-structuring of the city's politics along class lines and away from the ethnic-based politics which has been Tammany's underpinning all along. To bring together these disparate groups, Croker nominated Abram Hewitt as the Democratic candidate for mayor. Not only was Hewitt the leader of the Swallowtails, but he was noted philanthropist Peter Cooper's son-in-law, and had an impeccable reputation. To counter both George and Hewitt, the Republicans put up Theodore Roosevelt, the former state assemblyman.[35]

In the end, Hewitt won the election, with George out-polling Roosevelt, whose total was some 2,000 votes less than the Republicans had normally received. Despite their second-place finish, things seemed bright for the future of the labor political movement, but the ULP was not to last, and was never able to bring about a new paradigm in the city's politics. Tammany had once again succeeded and survived. More than that, Croker realized that he could utilize the techniques of the well-organized election campaign that ULP had run. Because Tammany's ward-heelers controlled the saloons, the new party had used "neighborhood meetings, streetcorner rallies, campaign clubs, Assembly District organizations, and trade legions '' an entire political counterculture"[36] to run their campaign. Croker now took these innovations for Tammany's use, creating political clubhouses to take the place of the saloons and involving women and children by sponsoring family excursions and picnics. The New Tammany appeared to be more respectable, and less obviously connected to saloon-keepers and gang leaders, and the clubhouses, one in every Assembly District, were also a more efficient way of providing patronage work to those who came looking for it; one simply had to join the club, and volunteer to put in the hours needed to support it.[37]

Hewitt turned out to be a terrible mayor, due to his personality defects and his nativist views, and in 1888 Tammany ran Croker's hand-picked choice, Hugh J. Grant, who became the first New York-born Irish-American mayor. Grant allowed Croker free run of the city's contracts and offices, creating a vast patronage machine beyond anything Tweed had ever dreamed of, a status which continued under Grant's successor, Thomas Francis Gilroy. With such resources of money and manpower '' the entire city workforce of 1,200 was essentially available to him when needed '' Croker was able to neutralize the Swallowtails permanently. He also developed a new stream of income from the business community, which was provided with "one stop shopping": instead of bribing individual office-holders, businesses, especially the utilities, could go directly to Tammany to make their payments, which were then directed downward as necessary; such was the control Tammany had come to have over the governmental apparatus of the city.[38]

Croker mended fences with labor as well, pushing through legislation which addressed some of the inequities which had fueled the labor political movement, making Tammany once again appear to be the "Friend of the Working Man" '' although he was careful always to maintain a pro-business climate of laissez-faire and low taxes. Tammany's influence was also extended once again to the state legislature, where a similar patronage system to the city's was established after Tammany took control in 1892. With the Republican boss, Thomas Platt, adopting the same methods, the two men between them essentially controlled the state.[39]

1894 mayoral electionEditIn 1894, Tammany suffered a setback when, fueled by the public hearings on police corruption held by the Lexow Committee based on the evidence uncovered by the Rev. Charles Parkhurst when he explored the city's demi monde undercover, a Committee of Seventy was organized by Council of Good Government Clubs to break the stranglehold that Tammany had on the city. Full of some of the city's richest men '' J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Abram Hewitt and Elihu Root, among others '' the committee supported William L. Strong, a millionaire dry-goods merchant, for mayor, and forced Tammany's initial candidate, merchant Nathan Straus, co-owner of Macy's and Abraham & Straus, from the election by threatening to ostracize him from New York society. Tammany then put up Hugh Grant again, despite his being publicly dirtied by the police scandals. Backed by the Committee's money, influence and their energetic campaign, and helped by Grant's apathy, Strong won the election handily, and spent the next three years running the city on the basis of "business principles", pledging an efficient government and the return of morality to city life. The election was a Republican sweep statewide: Levi Morton, a millionaire banker from Manhattan, won the governorship, and the party also ended up in control of the legislature.[40]

Still, Tammany could not be kept down for long, and in 1898 Croker, aided by the death of Henry George '' which took the wind out of the sails of the potential re-invigoration of the political labor movement '' shifted the Democratic Party enough to the left to pick up labor's support, and pulled back into the fold those elements outraged by the reformers' attempt to outlaw Sunday drinking and otherwise enforce their own authoritarian moral concepts on immigrant populations with different cultural outlooks. Tammany's candidate, Robert A. Van Wyck easily outpolled Seth Low, the reform candidate backed by the Citizens Union, and Tammany was back in control. Its supporters marched through the city's streets chanting, "Well, well, well, Reform has gone to Hell!"[41]

Despite occasional defeats, Tammany was consistently able to survive and prosper. Under leaders such as Charles Francis Murphy and Timothy Sullivan, it maintained control of Democratic politics in the city and the state.

Machine politics versus the reformersEditThe politics of the consolidated city from 1898 to 1945 revolved around conflicts between the political machines and the reformers. In quiet times the machines had the advantage of the core of solid supporters and usually exercised control of city and borough affairs; they also played a major role in the state legislature in Albany. Tammany for example from the 1880s onward built a strong network of local clubs that attracted ambitious middle-class ethnics.[42][43] In times of crisis however, especially in the severe depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s, the reformers took control of key offices, notably the mayor's office. The reformers were never unified; they operated through a complex network of independent civic reform groups, each focused its lobbying efforts on its own particular reform agenda. The membership included civic minded, well-educated middle-class men and women, usually with expert skills in a profession or business, who deeply distrusted the corruption of the machines.[44] Consolidation in 1898 multiplied the power of these reform groups, so long as they could agree on a common agenda, Such as consolidation itself.[45]

There was no citywide machine. Instead Democratic machines flourished in each of the boroughs, with Tammany Hall in Manhattan the most prominent. They typically had strong local organizations, known as "political clubs", as well as one prominent leader often called "the boss". Charles Murphy was the highly effective but quiet boss of Tammany Hall from 1902''1924.[46] "Big Tim" Sullivan was the Tammany leader in the Bowery, and machines spokesman in the state legislature.[47] Republican local organizations were much weaker, but they played key roles in forming reform coalitions. Most of the time they looked to Albany and Washington for their sphere of influence.[48][49]Seth Low, the president of Columbia University, was elected the reform mayor in 1901. He lacked the common touch, and lost much of his working class support when he listened to dry Protestants eager to crack down on the liquor business.[50][51]

From 1902 until his death in 1924, Charles Francis Murphy was Tammany's boss. Murphy wanted to clean up Tammany's image, and he sponsored progressive era reforms benefiting the working class through his two prot(C)g(C)s, Governor Al Smith and Robert F. Wagner. Ed Flynn, a prot(C)g(C) of Murphy who became the boss in the Bronx, said Murphy always advised that politicians should have nothing to do with gambling or prostitution, and should steer clear of involvement with the police department or the school system.[52]

A new challenge to Tammany came from William Randolph Hearst, a powerful newspaper publisher who wanted to be president. Hearst was elected to Congress with Tammany support, was defeated for mayor after bitter a contest with Tammany, and won Tammany support for his unsuccessful quest for the governorship of New York. Hearst did manage to dominate Tammany mayor John F. Hylan (1917''25), but he lost control when Smith and Wagner denied Hylan renomination in 1925. Hearst then moved to California.[53]

La Guardia in, Tammany out: 1933 to 1945EditIn 1932, the machine suffered a dual setback when Mayor James Walker was forced from office by scandal and reform-minded Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president of the United States. Tammany Hall leader John F. Curry and Brooklyn political boss John H. McCooey had joined forces to support Al Smith's candidacy.[54] Roosevelt and his lead campaign manager James Farley stripped Tammany of federal patronage, which had been expanded under the New Deal'--and passed it instead to Ed Flynn, boss of the Bronx who had kept his district clean of corruption.[55] Roosevelt helped Republican Fiorello La Guardia become mayor on a Fusion ticket, thus removing even more patronage from Tammany's control. La Guardia was elected in 1933.[56] After becoming mayor, LaGuardia reorganized the city cabinet with non-partisan officials and sought to develop a clean and honest city government.[56]

As mayor, LaGuardia successfully led the effort to have a new city charter adopted which would mandate a proportional representation method of electing members of the City Council. The measure won on a referendum in 1936.[56] After the new charter went into effect in 1938, the ward system which had allowed only a small number of people to serve on the City Council since 1686 ceased to exist, and the new 26-member New York City Council now had certain functions governed by the Board of Estimate.[57] La Guardia's appointees filled the board of magistrates and virtually every other long-term appointive office, and the power of Tammany Hall had now been reduced to a shadow of what it once was.[56] In 1937, LaGuardia became the first anti-Tammany "reform" Mayor to ever be re-elected in the city's history[56] and was again re-elected in 1941 before retiring in 1945.[56] His extended tenure weakened Tammany in a way that previous reform mayors had not.[56]

Tammany depended for its power on government contracts, jobs, patronage, corruption, and ultimately the ability of its leaders to control nominations to the Democratic ticket and swing the popular vote. The last element weakened after 1940 with the decline of relief programs like WPA and CCC that Tammany used to gain and hold supporters. Congressman Christopher "Christy" Sullivan was one of the last "bosses" of Tammany Hall before its collapse.

Criminal issuesEditManhattan District AttorneyThomas E. Dewey also got longtime Tammany Hall boss Jimmy Hines convicted of bribery in 1939[9] and handed him a 4''8 year sentence.[58] The loss of Hines would serve as a major blow to Tammany, as he had given the political machine strong ties to the city's powerful organized crime figures since the 1920s.[59] A few years prior, Dewey also had powerful mobster and strong Tammany ally Lucky Luciano convicted of racketeering and handed him a 30''50 year sentence;[60] however, Luciano was still able to maintain control of the powerful Luciano crime family from prison until his sentence was commuted to deportation to Italy in 1946.[61] Several Tammany Hall officials affiliated with Hines and Luciano were also successfully prosecuted by Dewey as well.[60]

Indian Summer, 1950sEditTammany never recovered, but it staged a small scale come-back in the early 1950s under the leadership of Carmine DeSapio, who succeeded in engineering the elections of Robert F. Wagner, Jr., an outspoken liberal Democrat,[62] as mayor in 1953 and W. Averell Harriman as state governor in 1954, while simultaneously blocking his enemies, especially Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr. in the 1954 race for state Attorney General. Unlike previous Tammany "bosses", however, DeSapio had promoted himself as a reformer and always made his decisions known to the public.[63] The fact that DeSapio was of Italian descent also demonstrated that Tammany was no longer dominated by Irish-American politicians.[63] Under DeSapio's leadership, the nationality of Tammany Hall's leaders diversified.[63] However, DeSapio's close ties with the city's lead mobster Frank Costello, Luciano's self-appointed successor,[61] helped establish him as a corrupt figure.[63] During DeSapio's reign, Costello was the main person who influenced the decisions made by Tammany Hall officials.[63]

By 1956, however, Costello, who was convicted of tax evasion in 1954 and now controlled the Luciano family from prison, was engaged in a major power struggle with fellow associate Vito Genovese and his grip on power greatly weakened.[61] In 1957, Costello was released from prison after winning an appeal but officially abandoned his role as head of the Luciano family following a failed assassination attempt.[61] In 1958, DeSapio's "reform" image was severely damaged after he ran his own candidate for Senate, Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan.[63] New Yorkers now saw DeSapio as an old-time Tammany Hall boss, and Hogan would lose the Senate election to Republican Kenneth Keating;[63] Republican Nelson Rockefeller would also be elected Governor the same year as well.[63] Democrats who once praised De Sapio now excoriated him.[63] In 1961, Wagner won re-election by running a reformist campaign that denounced his former patron, DeSapio, as an undemocratic practitioner of Tammany machine politics.[63]Eleanor Roosevelt organized a counterattack with Herbert H. Lehman and Thomas K. Finletter to form the New York Committee for Democratic Voters, a group dedicated to fighting Tammany. In 1961, the group helped remove DeSapio from power. The once mighty Tammany political machine, now deprived of its leadership, quickly faded from political importance, and by the mid-1960s it ceased to exist, its demise as the controlling group of the New York Democratic Party was sealed when the Village Independent Democrats under Ed Koch wrested away control of the Manhattan party.

Note: There were two distinct entities: the Tammany Society, headed by a Grand Sachem elected annually on May 23; and the Tammany Hall political machine headed by a "boss". The following list names the political bosses, as far as could be ascertained.

In its very early days, the Tammany Society would meet in various taverns, most often in Barden's Tavern on Broadway near Bowling Green,[67] and these back rooms would serve as unofficial campaign headquarters on election days.[68]

In 1791, the society opened a museum designed to collect together artifacts relating to the events and history of the United States. Originally presented in an upper room of City Hall, it moved to the Merchant's Exchange when that proved to be too small. The museum was unsuccessful, and the Society severed its connections with it in 1795.[69]

Then, in 1798, the Society moved to more permanent and spacious quarters, the "Long Room" of "Brom" Martling's Tavern, located at Nassau and Spruce Streets, near where City Hall stands today. Tammany controlled the space, which it dubbed "The Wigwam", and allowed other responsible political organizations it approved of to use the room for meetings. This space became commonly known as "Tammany Hall".[67]

Despite the advantages of their new headquarters, it had limitations as well, and in 1812 Tammany moved again, this time to a new five-story $55,000 building it constructed at the corner of Nassau and Frankfort Streets, just a few blocks away. The new Tammany Hall had a large room that could accommodate up to 2,000 people for political and social events, while the rest of the building was run as a hotel. The Society was to remain there for 55 years.[70]

With the greater affluence, and influence, of Tammany under Tweed, a new headquarters was deemed desirable, so the building at Nassau and Frankfort was sold to Charles Dana and his friends, who would buy a newspaper, The Sun, and move it there.[71] The cornerstone for the new Tammany headquarters was laid on July 14, 1867. When the leaders of the Society found that they had not raised sufficient funds, and needed $25,000 more, a meeting was held at which $175,000 was immediately pledged.[72] Completed in 1868, the new Wigwam was located at 141 East 14th Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, but the building was not simply the clubhouse of a political organization:

Tammany Hall merged politics and entertainment, already stylistically similar, in its new headquarters '... The Tammany Society kept only one room for itself, renting the rest to entertainment impresarios: Don Bryant's Minstrels, a German theater company, classical concerts and opera. The basement '' in the French mode '' offered the Caf(C) Ausant, where one could see tableux vivant, gymnastic exhibitions, pantomimes, and Punch and Judy shows. There was also a bar, a bazaar, a Ladies' Cafe, and an oyster saloon. All this '' with the exception of Bryant's '' was open from seven till midnight for a combination price of fifty cents.[73]

The building had an auditorium of sufficient size to hold public meetings, and a smaller one that became Tony Pastor's Music Hall, where vaudeville had its beginnings.[74] The structure was topped off by a large-than-life statue of Saint Tammany.[72]

In 1927 the building on 14th Street was sold, to make way for the new tower being added to the Consolidated Edison Company Building. The Society's new building, located in Manhattan on East 17th Street and Union Square East, was finished and occupied by 1929.[75] When Tammany started to lose its political influence, and its all-important access to graft, it could no longer afford to maintain the 17th Street building, and in 1943 it was purchased by a local affiliate of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Tammany left, with the leaders relocating to the National Democratic Club on Madison Avenue at East 33rd Street, and the Society's collection of memorabilia going into a warehouse in the Bronx.[76] The building housed the New York Film Academy and the Union Square Theatre, as well as retail stores at street level, until a complete renovation of the building commenced in January 2016.[77][78] The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated it in October 2013.[79] Plans to add a glass dome to the building were nixed by the Landmarks Commission in 2014; however, the interior is still slated to be completely rebuilt, including the demolition of the theater.[78] In 2015, a scaled-back version of the glass dome was approved by the commission.[80]

Tammany Hall is prominently featured in the film Gangs of New York, with Jim Broadbent portraying "Boss" Tweed.Tammany Hall features as a power-broking group in the 2012 TV series Copper, pulling strings behind the scenes in the Five Points neighborhood of New York City.Notes

^Tammany Hall Today: A Site of Higher Education in Union Square^Peel, Roy V. The Political Clubs of New York City (1935)^Shefter, Martin. "The electoral foundations of the political machine: New York City, 1884''1897." in Joel Silbey et al. eds., The history of American electoral behavior (1978) pp: 263''98, esp pp 294''95.^Huthmacher (1965)^Czitrom, Daniel. "Underworlds and underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and metropolitan politics in New York, 1889''1913," Journal of American History (1991) 78#2 pp 536''558 in JSTOR^Slayton, Robert A. Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith (2001). ch 6''15.^Huthmacher, J. Joseph. Senator Robert F. Wagner and the rise of urban liberalism (1968) ch 1''4^Hodge, Frederick Webb (ed.) Handbook of Indians North of Mexico (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 30. GPO 1911), 2:683''684^ abc"Sachems & Sinners: An Informal History of Tammany Hall"Time (August 22, 1955)^ abThe History of New York State^Parmet and Hecht, pp. 149''150^Myers, p. 20^ abcMyers, p. 21^ abcdefMyers, p. 22^ abcMyers, p. 23^Myers, p. 24^Myers, p. 25^Myers, pp. 27''30^Myers, p. 30^Myers, pp. 31''32^Myers, pp. 36''38^Myers, p. 38^Myers, p. 39^ abPanayiotopoulos, Prodromos (2006). Immigrant enterprise in Europe and the USA. Routledge Studies in the Modern World Economy. p. 52. ISBN 0-415-35371-8. ^ ab"New York Election Results". Mahalo.com. ^ abcd"Tammany Hall". ^New York City used the designation "ward" for its smallest political units from 1686''1938. The 1686 Dongan Charter divided the city into six wards and created a Common Council which consisted of an alderman and an assistant alderman elected from each ward. In 1821, the Common Council's authority was expanded so it would also elect the city's mayor, which had previously been appointed by the state government. In 1834, the state constitution was amended and required the city's mayor to be elected by direct popular vote. In 1834, Cornelius Van Wyck Lawrence, a pro-Tammany Democrat, would become the first mayor ever elected by popular vote in the city's history. See "A Brief History of Election Law in New York" on the Gotham Gazette website^"Tammany Hall: Boss Tweed & Thomas Nast" Racontours^Riordin, pp.91''93^Connable and Silberfarb, p.154^ abBurrows & Wallace, p.837 and passim^Ackerman, Kenneth D. Boss Tweed: The Rise and Fall of the Corrupt Pol Who Conceived the Soul of Modern New York New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005; quoted in Hammill, Pete, "'Boss Tweed': The Fellowship of the Ring"New York Times (March 27, 2005)^Burrows & Wallace, p.1027^Burrows & Wallace, p.1099^Burrows & Wallace, pp.1103''1106^Burrows & Wallace, p.1100^Burrows & Wallace, pp.1106''1108^Burrows & Wallace, pp.1108''1109^Burrows & Wallace, pp.1109''1110^Burrows & Wallace, pp.1192''1194^Burrows & Wallace, pp.1206''1208^Roy V. Peel, The Political Clubs of New York City (1935)^Martin Shefter, "The electoral foundations of the political machine: New York City, 1884''1897." in Joel Silbey et al. eds., The history of American electoral behavior (1978) pp: 263''98, esp pp 294''95.^Richard Skolnik, "Civic Group Progressivism In New York City," New York History (1970) 51#5 pp 411''439.^David C. Hammack, Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (1982) pp 308''13^J. Joseph Huthmacher, "Charles Evans Hughes and Charles Francis Murphy: The Metamorphosis of Progressivism." New York History' (1965): 25''40. in JSTOR^Daniel Czitrom, "Underworlds and underdogs: Big Tim Sullivan and metropolitan politics in New York, 1889''1913," Journal of American History (1991) 78#2 pp 536''558 in JSTOR^Jackson, Encyclopedia of New York City, (1996) pp 914, 999, 1149''51^Marvin G. Weinbaum, "New York County Republican Politics, 1897''1922: The Quarter-Century After Municipal Consolidation." New York Historical Society Quarterly (1966) 50#1 pp: 62''70.^"Seth Low," in Jackson,Encyclopedia of New York City, (1996) p 695^Steven C. Swett, "The Test of a Reformer: A Study of Seth Low, New York City Mayor, 1902''1903," New-York Historical Society Quarterly (1960) 44#1 pp 5''41^Terry Golway, Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (2014) p 186^Ben Proctor, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863''1910 the parenthesis 1998) ch 11^"Curry and McCooey to Support Ticket; Roosevelt Held 'Luckiest Man' in Nation". The New York Times. July 3, 1932. p. 10. Retrieved June 8, 2012. ^"Edward Flynn (1891''1953)"George Washington University website^ abcdefg"La Guardia Is Dead; City Pays Homage To 3-Time Mayor". The New York Times. ^New York City Council website^Hines, James J. Newspaper Clippings from the Trials, 1938''1940: Finding AidHarvard Law School Library website^"Harlem gangs from the 1920s and 1930s '-- Tammany Hall and The Mob"truTV^ ab"Harlem gangs from the 1920s and 1930s '-- End Game"truTV^ abcd"Articles/Biographies/Criminals/Costello, Frank". Free Information Society. ^Clarity, James F. (February 13, 1991). "Robert Wagner, 80, Pivotal New York Mayor, Dies". The New York Times. ^ abcdefghijKandell, Jonathan (July 28, 2004). "Carmine De Sapio, Political Kingmaker and Last Tammany Hall Boss, Dies at 95". The New York Times. ^ abWiles, David (2003). "Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall Machine". New York State University at Albany. Retrieved 11 November 2014. ^Technically, Costikyan was not leader of Tammany Hall itself, but of the New York Democratic Committee^Hevesi, Dennis (June 23, 2012). "Edward N. Costikyan, Adviser to New York Politicians, Is Dead at 87". New York Times. Retrieved October 8, 2012. ^ abAllen, pp.7''8^Burrows & Wallace p.322^Burrows & Wallace p.316^Allen, p.24^O'Brien, Frank Michael. The Story of the Sun: New York, 1833''1918 George H. Doran Co, 1916. p.229^ abAllen, pp.99''100^Burrows & Wallace p.995^Wurman, Richard Saul. Access New York City. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. ISBN 0-06-277274-0^"Second Tammany Hall Building Proposed as Historic Landmark". Retrieved 2008-03-03. ^Allen, p.259^http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2016/01/tammany-hall-empties-out.html^ abhttp://ny.curbed.com/archives/2014/11/26/landmarks_nixes_tammany_halls_glass_tortoise_shell_topper.php^Tammany Hall a Landmark NY Daily News^http://ny.curbed.com/archives/2015/03/11/shrunken_tortoise_shell_topper_approved_for_tammany_hall.phpBibliography

Allen, Oliver E. The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall (1993) online editionBurrows, Edwin G. & Wallace, Mike (1999). Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-195-11634-8. Connable, Alfred, and Silberfarb, Edward. Tigers of Tammany: Nine Men Who Ran New York. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. HooperYY, Franklin Henry (1911). "Tammany Hall". In Chisholm, Hugh. Encyclop...dia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. Huthmacher, J. Joseph "Charles Evans Hughes and Charles Francis Murphy: The Metamorphosis of Progressivism," New York History (1965) 46#1 pp. 25''40 in JSTORMyers, Gustavus. The History of Tammany Hall. Boni & Liveright, 1917Parmet, Herbert S. and Hecht, Marie B. Aaron Burr; Portrait of an Ambitious Man 1967.Further reading

Colburn, David R., and George E. Pozzetta. "Bosses and machines: Changing interpretations in American history." History Teacher (1976): 445''463. in JSTORCornwell, Jr., Elmer E. "Bosses, Machines, and Ethnic Groups", in Callow Jr., Alexander B. (ed.) The City Boss in America: An Interpretive Reader. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.Erie, Steven P. Rainbow's End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of Urban Machine Politics, 1840''1985 (1988).Finegold, Kenneth. Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago (1995)Golway, Terry. Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics (Liveright/W.W. Norton & Company; 2014) 367 pages; revisionist history argues it gave voice and support to marginalized immigrants.Henderson, Thomas M. Tammany Hall and the New Immigrants: The Progressive Years (Ayer Co Pub, 1976)Home, Rufus. "The Story of Tammany", Harper's New Monthly Magazine. Part 1: Vol. 44, No. 263 (April, 1872), pp. 685''96. Part 2: Vol. 44, No. 264 (May, 1872), pp. 835''48.LaCerra, Charles. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Tammany Hall of New York. (University Press of America, 1997). 118 pp.Lash, Joseph. Eleanor, The Years Alone. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1972, 274''276.Lui, Adonica Y. "The Machine and Social Policies: Tammany Hall and the Politics of Public Outdoor Relief, New York City, 1874''1898." in Studies in American Political Development (1995) 9(2): 386''403. ISSN 0898-588XMandelbaum, Seymour J. Boss Tweed's New York (1965) ISBN 0-471-56652-7Moscow, Warren. The Last of the Big-Time Bosses: The Life and Times of Carmine de Sapio and the Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall] (1971) Online editionMushkat, Jerome. 'Fernando Wood: A Political Biography (1990) Online versionSloat, Warren. A Battle for the Soul of New York: Tammany Hall, Police Corruption, Vice, and Reverend Charles Parkhurst's Crusade against Them, 1892''1895. (Cooper Square, 2002) 482 pp.Stave, Bruce M.; Allswang, John M.; McDonald, Terrence J. and Teaford, Jon C. "A Reassessment of the Urban Political Boss: An Exchange of Views" History Teacher, Vol. 21, No. 3 (May, 1988), pp. 293''312Steffens, Lincoln. The Shame of the Cities (1904); Muckraking expose of political machines in major citiesStoddard, T.L. Master of Manhattan (1931), on CrockerThomas, Samuel J. "Mugwump Cartoonists, the Papacy, and Tammany Hall in America's Gilded Age." Religion and American Culture 2004 14(2): 213''250. ISSN 1052-1151 Fulltext: in Swetswise, Ingenta and EbscoWerner, M. R. Tammany Hall (1932)Zink, Harold B. City Bosses in the United States: A Study of Twenty Municipal Bosses (1930), Four chapters on Tammany bosses This article incorporates text from a work in the public domain: Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site operated by the National Park ServicePrimary sourcesCostikyan, Edward N. "Politics in New York City: a Memoir of the Post-war Years." New York History 1993 74(4): 414''434. ISSN 0146-437XRiordan, William. Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1963); 1915 memoir of New York City ward boss George Washington Plunkitt who coined the term "honest graft"

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Mon, 08 Aug 2016 11:57

The airline said early Monday that all departing flights have been delayed by a global computer system outage.

"Our systems are down everywhere," it tweeted in response to disgruntled customers.

Delta(DAL), the world's second largest airline, said the problem is a power outage at its Atlanta hub, starting at about 2:30 a.m. ET.

"Large-scale cancellations are expected today," Delta said. While flights already in the air are operating normally just about all flights yet to take off were grounded. Getting information on the status of flights was particularly frustrating for passengers.

"We are aware that flight status systems, including airport screens, are incorrectly showing flights on time," said the airline. "We apologize to customers who are affected by this issue, and our teams are working to resolve the problem as quickly as possible."

Passengers on Twitter reported problems -- including the inability to check in or being stuck on the tarmac -- from airports around the world, including San Francisco, Rome and Athens.

"The airline provided passengers with little information," said New Yorker Carly Hayes, who was due to travel from Fiumicino Airport in Rome to New York's JFK, in an Instagram quote.

Jackie Watanabe, who was due to travel from Las Vegas to Minneapolis, tweeted that the airline was handing out blankets to passengers who wanted to get some sleep on the floor of the terminal there.

"I'm not ready to go into camping mode yet, but other passengers are," she said, tweeting a photo of sleeping passengers.

Sean Carson, due to travel from Kona, Hawaii, to Los Angeles, said he had on a plane for more than four hours. He told CNN the pilot announced earlier that pizza was being delivered.

Delta did not give any details of why the computer failure was grounding flights. It would be premature to assume hacking was the cause since "most of these wounds are self inflicted," said Mary Schiavo, a CNN analyst and former U.S. Transportation Department inspector general.

Reports of delays on social media appeared to have begun around 3 a.m. ET.

Delta's problems come less than three weeks after Southwest Airlines canceled more than 1,000 flights following a system outage.

-- CNN's Donie O'Sullivan contributed to this report.

CNNMoney (Hong Kong)First published August 8, 2016: 5:20 AM ET

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Mon, 08 Aug 2016 10:29

Katie Dowd|on August 7, 2016

Photo: Silvia Izquierdo, Associated Press

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In this June 1, 2015 file photo, a discarded sofa litters the shore of Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In this June 1, 2015 file photo, a discarded sofa litters the shore of Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Photo: Silvia Izquierdo, Associated PressImage2of25

A competitor practices during training for the whitewater kayak event prior to the 2016 Summer Olympics on August 2, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

A competitor practices during training for the whitewater kayak event prior to the 2016 Summer Olympics on August 2, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Photo: Jamie Squire, Getty ImagesImage3of25

A competitor from Poland practices during training for the whitewater kayak event prior to the 2016 Summer Olympics on August 2, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

A competitor from Poland practices during training for the whitewater kayak event prior to the 2016 Summer Olympics on August 2, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

Photo: Jamie Squire, Getty ImagesImage4of25

Germany's canoeist doubles Franz Anton (L) and Jan Benzien (R) take part in a training session at the Canoe and Kayak White Water X-Park stadium in Rio de Janeiro on August 2, 2016, ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. lessGermany's canoeist doubles Franz Anton (L) and Jan Benzien (R) take part in a training session at the Canoe and Kayak White Water X-Park stadium in Rio de Janeiro on August 2, 2016, ahead of the 2016 Rio ... morePhoto: CARL DE SOUZA, AFP/Getty ImagesImage5of25

Poland's entrants in the 49er sailing class Lukasz Przybytek and Pawel Kolodzinski sail during a training session on Rio de Janerio's Guanabara Bay for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, on August 6, 2016. / AFP PHOTO / WILLIAM WESTWILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty Images lessPoland's entrants in the 49er sailing class Lukasz Przybytek and Pawel Kolodzinski sail during a training session on Rio de Janerio's Guanabara Bay for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, on August 6, 2016. / AFP PHOTO ... morePhoto: WILLIAM WEST, AFP/Getty ImagesImage6of25

In this July 15, 2016 photo, a group of Guiana dolphins swim near fish farm pens in Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Olympic sailors competing in the Rio de Janeiro may navigate through fetid waters and possibly bump into floating trash. But if they are lucky enough, they might also sail past a few dozen dolphins that live in Guanabara Bay. Despite the untreated sewage and toxic industrial pollution that flows into bay waters, 34 Guiana dolphins live, breed and feed in the bay. (AP Photo/Renata Brito) lessIn this July 15, 2016 photo, a group of Guiana dolphins swim near fish farm pens in Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Olympic sailors competing in the Rio de Janeiro may navigate through fetid waters ... morePhoto: Renata Brito, Associated PressImage7of25

In this July 15, 2016 photo, a Guiana dolphin lifts its tail out of the water while swimming in Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Olympic sailors competing in the Rio de Janeiro may navigate through fetid waters and possibly bump into floating trash. But if they are lucky enough, they might also sail past a few dozen dolphins that live in Guanabara Bay. Despite the untreated sewage and toxic industrial pollution that flows into bay waters, 34 Guiana dolphins live, breed and feed in the bay. (AP Photo/Renata Brito)(AP Photo/Renata Brito) lessIn this July 15, 2016 photo, a Guiana dolphin lifts its tail out of the water while swimming in Guanabara Bay near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Olympic sailors competing in the Rio de Janeiro may navigate through ... morePhoto: Renata Brito, Associated PressImage8of25

A trash-collecting boat called "eco-barco" (eco-boats) collect garbage at Guanabara Bay, where sailors will compete during the upcoming Rio 2016 Olympic Games, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on August 1, 2016. A fleet of 12 trash-collecting "eco-barcos" -- an emergency measure taken by Rio after having completely failed to deliver the promise of treating 80 percent of the pollution -- have spent months patrolling the bay, plucking an average of 45 tons of rubbish a month -- about one and a half tons daily -- from the water, according to officials. / AFP PHOTO / VANDERLEI ALMEIDAVANDERLEI ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images lessA trash-collecting boat called "eco-barco" (eco-boats) collect garbage at Guanabara Bay, where sailors will compete during the upcoming Rio 2016 Olympic Games, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on August 1, 2016. A ... morePhoto: VANDERLEI ALMEIDA, AFP/Getty ImagesImage9of25

A man washes himself in the polluted waters of Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, July 30, 2016. While local authorities including Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes have acknowledged the failure of the city½s water cleanup efforts, calling it a ½lost chance½ and a ½shame,½ Olympic officials continue to insist Rio½s waterways will be safe for athletes and visitors. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana) lessA man washes himself in the polluted waters of Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Saturday, July 30, 2016. While local authorities including Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes have acknowledged the failure of the ... morePhoto: Felipe Dana, Associated PressImage10of25

Waste litters the water as two sailors prepare for a training session at Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay on August 1, 2016 ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. / AFP PHOTO / WILLIAM WESTWILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty Images lessWaste litters the water as two sailors prepare for a training session at Rio de Janeiro's Guanabara Bay on August 1, 2016 ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. / AFP PHOTO / WILLIAM WESTWILLIAM WEST/AFP/Getty ... morePhoto: WILLIAM WEST, AFP/Getty ImagesImage11of25

FILE - In this Nov. 3, 2015 photo, Brazilian athletes Samuel Albrecht and Isabel Swan practice in Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A new pollution problem has surfaced in Guanabara Bay, the venue for sailing in the Rio de Janeiro Olympics. Sailors complained Monday about an oil slick that turned white boats brown with crews in town practicing for the Olympics, which open in a month. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File) lessFILE - In this Nov. 3, 2015 photo, Brazilian athletes Samuel Albrecht and Isabel Swan practice in Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A new pollution problem has surfaced in Guanabara Bay, the venue for ... morePhoto: Felipe Dana, Associated PressImage12of25

FILE - In this March 10, 2015, file photo, pigeons fly over the polluted Botafogo beach at Guanabara Bay during a tour for the press in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes' administration has failed to meet targets for cleaning up Rio's notoriously polluted waterways, including some where Olympic events will be held. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File) lessFILE - In this March 10, 2015, file photo, pigeons fly over the polluted Botafogo beach at Guanabara Bay during a tour for the press in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes' administration ... morePhoto: Felipe Dana, Associated PressImage13of25

In this Nov. 5, 2015 photo, workers remove garbage collected by floating waste barriers in the Meriti River, which flows into Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A new round of testing by The Associated Press shows the city's Olympic waterways are as rife with pathogens far offshore as they are nearer land, where raw sewage flows into them from fetid rivers and storm drains. . (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo) lessIn this Nov. 5, 2015 photo, workers remove garbage collected by floating waste barriers in the Meriti River, which flows into Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A new round of testing by The Associated ... morePhoto: Silvia Izquierdo, Associated PressImage14of25

In this Nov. 5, 2015 photo, trash floats in the Meriti River, which flows into Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The dozens of rivers that crisscross metropolitan Rio dump hundreds of millions of liters of raw sewage into the bay each day. By the government's own estimate, just half of the city's wastewater flowing into the bay is treated. (AP Photo/Silvia Izquierdo) lessIn this Nov. 5, 2015 photo, trash floats in the Meriti River, which flows into Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The dozens of rivers that crisscross metropolitan Rio dump hundreds of millions of liters ... morePhoto: Silvia Izquierdo, Associated PressImage15of25

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - AUGUST 04: Jessica Fox of Australia competes in Kayak (K1) Women during a practice session ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games at the Whitewater Stadium on August 4, 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images) lessRIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL - AUGUST 04: Jessica Fox of Australia competes in Kayak (K1) Women during a practice session ahead of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games at the Whitewater Stadium on August 4, 2016 in Rio de ... morePhoto: Christian Petersen, Getty ImagesImage16of25

Slovenia's canoeist Benjamin Savsek takes part in a training session at the Canoe and Kayak White Water X-Park stadium in Rio de Janeiro on August 2, 2016, ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. / AFP PHOTO / CARL DE SOUZACARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images lessSlovenia's canoeist Benjamin Savsek takes part in a training session at the Canoe and Kayak White Water X-Park stadium in Rio de Janeiro on August 2, 2016, ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. / AFP PHOTO / ... morePhoto: CARL DE SOUZA, AFP/Getty ImagesImage17of25

Police officers have been welcoming travelers to the international airport in Rio with banners reading "Welcome to Hell" and other slogans. Heck of a greeting, right?lessPolice officers have been welcoming travelers to the international airport in Rio with banners reading "Welcome to Hell" and other slogans. Heck of a greeting, right?... morePhoto: VANDERLEI ALMEIDA, AFP/Getty ImagesImage18of25

Photo: Mario Tama, Getty ImagesImage19of25

Shortly after an Olympic torch ceremony on June 20 in Manaus, a jaguar used as a mascot during the occasion got loose from its handlers. A soldier shot the jaguar dead, a metaphor for the run-up to the Rio Olympics if we've ever seen one.lessShortly after an Olympic torch ceremony on June 20 in Manaus, a jaguar used as a mascot during the occasion got loose from its handlers. A soldier shot the jaguar dead, a metaphor for the run-up to the Rio ... morePhoto: JAIR ARAUJO, AFP/Getty ImagesImage20of25

The unsanitary waters off Rio are no surprise '-- it's been criticized for years. But what's in the water is so much worse than anyone thought. An AP investigation found that thousands of liters of raw, unfiltered human sewage pour into the ocean every second. lessThe unsanitary waters off Rio are no surprise '-- it's been criticized for years. But what's in the water is so much worse than anyone thought. An AP investigation found that thousands of liters of raw, ... morePhoto: Silvia Izquierdo, Associated PressImage21of25

Although they'll have air-conditioned comfort, they won't have televisions. Those are strictly bring-your-own. So hopefully the Olympians have a data plan and Netflix.

Although they'll have air-conditioned comfort, they won't have televisions. Those are strictly bring-your-own. So hopefully the Olympians have a data plan and Netflix.

Photo: Elise Amendola, Associated PressImage22of25

More than 145 public health experts signed an open letter to the World Health Organization in May asking the UN to consider moving or postponing the Rio Olympics because of the threat of Zika virus. Many high-profile athletes, like golfer Rory McIlroy, have already pulled out of the Olympics due to Zika. lessMore than 145 public health experts signed an open letter to the World Health Organization in May asking the UN to consider moving or postponing the Rio Olympics because of the threat of Zika virus. Many... morePhoto: Leo Correa, Associated PressImage23of25

Activists have reported that at least 4,120 families lost their homes because of the Olympics. The report claims that thousands of families were evicted to make room for Olympic venues. Other activist groups say the Brazilian government is "cleansing" homeless children and adults in advance of massive tourist crowds. lessActivists have reported that at least 4,120 families lost their homes because of the Olympics. The report claims that thousands of families were evicted to make room for Olympic venues. Other activist groups ... morePhoto: Mario TamaImage24of25

After the first construction firm filed for bankruptcy, the Olympic velodrome venue remained unfinished ahead of a test event in March. Olympic organizers found a second company to finish construction, but the velodrome got perilously close to being unfinished at the start of the games. lessPhoto: YASUYOSHI CHIBA, AFP/Getty ImagesImage25of25

Report: Olympic kayaker capsizes after hitting a sofa

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Pollutants may not be the only thing that get you in Rio's waters.

A Sky News reporter tweeted that an Olympic kayaker on a practice run capsized after hitting a sofa. The Olympic organizers are currently investigating.

It would hardly be a shocker if someone did encounter a rogue sofa. Photos of Guanabara Bay in the run-up to the Olympics showed all manner of trash and furniture in the waters.

MORE: Rio's waters so full of human sewage, athletes will be swimming in literal crap

In fact, it's not the sofas that are the real hazard. The water quality in Rio is so poor that scientists recommended athletes keep their mouths closed to avoid ingesting it.

An AP article from last week reported:

[A] survey of the aquatic Olympic and Paralympic venues has revealed consistent and dangerously high levels of viruses from the pollution, a major black eye on Rio's Olympic project that has set off alarm bells among sailors, rowers and open-water swimmers.

In light of the findings, biomedical expert Valerie Harwood had one piece of advice for travelers to Rio: "Don't put your head under water."

The kayak prelims take place on Sunday, so we'll keep you updated on any further furniture encounters.

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Mon, 08 Aug 2016 10:22

Melania Trump is the wife of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, mother of young Barron Trump, and our country's potential next first lady. But before all of that, Melania Trump was a model '• and during her modeling career she posed in several nude photos.

One of those photos, taken in 1995 when she was just 25 years old, is plastered across the Sunday cover of the New York Post.

The image, which features Mrs. Trump's bare breasts censored with stars, is accompanied by the charming headline: THE OGLE OFFICE.

Over the course of Donald Trump's campaign for the presidency, Melania Trump's past has consistently been used as ammunition against him, by liberals and conservatives alike. In March, a conservative anti-Trump Super PAC ran ads attempting to convince Mormons not to vote for him '• by trotting out nude photos Mrs. Trump took in 2000 for British GQ.

The ad featured an image of Mrs. Trump lying nude on a bed, and read, ''Meet Melania Trump, your next first lady. Or, you could support Ted Cruz...''

But it's not just Republicans who are guilty of this kind of rhetoric. People who would describe themselves as liberal have also taken shots at Melania's modeling career. They've used her nude shots to dismiss her as a dumb trophy-wife, and to compare her to the ''classy,'' current FLOTUS, Michelle Obama:

Misogyny is misogyny, and it manifests itself on both sides, as does the hypocrisy. In response to the Ted Cruz attack ad on his wife, Donald Trump tweeted an image meant to ridicule the appearance of Mrs. Cruz as compared to the seemingly more beautiful Mrs. Trump. And responding to the New York Post's sensationalized cover of Melania Trump this week, Trump advisor Jason Miller told CNN on Sunday: ''There's nothing to be embarrassed about. She's a beautiful woman.''

Why is Melania Trump being discussed by the media, by both liberal and conservative anti-Trumpers, and by her husband himself as if she is an object? Why is it that her former career and her looks are being used to attack her husband, when his politics, his blatant racism, and his dangerous, fear-mongering rhetoric should really be all the material one needs to call him out?

Of course, the sexist scrutiny that Mrs. Trump is getting should come as no surprise. Michelle Obama has undergone similar attacks over the last eight years. She's been called, numerous times, an ape and a monkey. She's been criticized for daring to show her bare arms in an official White House photos. She's even had her looks compared to Melania Trump's in a horrifyingly sexist and racist cartoon. (One wonders where Melania's defenders '• the people praising her nude photos as beautiful and ''nothing to be ashamed of'' '• were when Michelle Obama was shamed for exposing her arms.)

What this speaks to is how the first lady (or potential first lady) is still viewed as an extension of her husband, rather than as an individual in her own right. Even though first ladies throughout history have done amazing things while in the White House, the Jackie O effect persists: We remain more obsessed with their clothes and their hair, than their passions and their projects.

Defending Melania Trump from being slut-shamed and reduced to a ''thing'' rather than a person, doesn't mean having to defend Donald Trump if you disagree deeply with his message. He himself, after all, seems to be pushing her body and her beauty as a selling-point.

Ultimately, the nude photos are irrelevant. They tell nothing about Melania Trump's character or her ethics, and they certainly tell us nothing of Donald Trump's.

Editor's note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims '-- 1.6 billion members of an entire religion '-- from entering the U.S.

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Mon, 08 Aug 2016 10:11

The sun is setting on solar power, the money's gone and nobody's asking any questions.Posted by Pointman on April 13, 2012 · 111 Comments

If you keep an eye on the financial world, which I do, and especially the green sectors, which I also do, it's been an interesting time of late. Within the last few weeks, Solar Trust of America (STA), owner of the world's largest solar plant, filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11, and nobody expects much of it, if anything, to emerge from it. STA joins a long list of companies in the solar energy sector, who've gone bankrupt, ducked into protection from their creditors, suspended production indefinitely or are simply circling the plughole.

Across the world, a few of the more prominent and expensive casualties are Solyndra, Solar Millennium AG, Energy Conversion Devices Inc, Q-Cells, Solon, Solar Millenium, Solarhybrid, Ener1, Range Fuels, Beacon Power Corp and there's a whole lot of others. In case you haven't noticed, it's probably not a good idea to invest your hard-earned pennies in any company with ''solar'' in its name. It's almost as bad a mistake as thinking you had some sort of long-term future employment with one of them.

Nearly all of these companies were the beneficiaries of huge government startup grants or loan guarantees. The products they made were effectively sold to consumers with a subsidy, to make them more attractive. The customers also had the benefit of some generous feed-in tariff schemes. All that money that was sunk into them has now gone and the specific green industry sector it was expected to create, is pretty much moribund.

In Germany, which gets the same amount of sunshine as the US state of Alaska and where inexplicably nearly half the solar power output of the world was installed, investment experts expect not a single solar cell company to be in business in five years time, since not one of them is currently showing an operating profit, nor is expected to do so in the foreseeable future. In Germany alone, the government have to date handed out about '‚¬100 billion in subsidies to renewable energy and even there, the most fervently green country in Europe, they've begun to have some serious doubts. It's a money pit. The promised green jobs haven't appeared and unemployment in the developed nations continues to rise. On a world-wide basis, the money wasted runs into the billions of dollars.

Billions and billions and we've ended up with pretty much nothing. Actually, that's not quite correct. What we will have, within a decade or two, is a clear up job that'll make Chernobyl look like a training day. As the vast arrays of panels age, they'll crack and contaminate the topsoil with poisonous chemical particles. Take a careful look at the picture below, because that's what we'll have to pay to detoxify, and make no mistake, we'll be the ones paying, despite a few of the companies installing these panels having given undertakings to dispose of the panels at the end of their service life. The hard-nosed investor in me reckons they'll be safely bankrupt by the time any such expensive undertakings have to be honoured.

I wonder where we will store all that contaminated topsoil? Perhaps wherever we'd planned to store nuclear waste, before we decided not to build any more nuclear plants.

Why are they going bust? The usual reasons given are that there's too many companies in the solar energy industry and that subsidies are being cut by the governments. Let's take a hard financial look at these excuses.

Too many companies chasing the same buck. All of them were in receipt of government grants and loan guarantees. Solyndra alone cost the US government 500 million USD in loan guarantees and it looks like the blood-letting over STA could reach 2 billion USD. Even in the loony world of state funding of renewables, I would expect an application, with an attached business case, was submitted to the relevant department handing out the taxpayer's money. At the time, it should have been blindingly obvious that there simply wasn't enough business for them all. That's the first basic question you ask when considering any development loan request from a company.

It was the classic stampede of new startup companies rushing in to fill a new business sector, followed by the inevitable shakeout, the only difference being that it's not the minnows going bust. Who exactly approved the applications? Why on earth did they? Has anyone gone back and reviewed the veracity of the statements made in the original applications? Is there anyone, anywhere, seriously looking into where the money went?

As far as I'm aware, in any substantial sense, the answer to all those questions is no.

Subsides being cut; that's true but then, they were never supposed to last forever. They were part of larger stimulus packages, which were only supposed to get those businesses up and running. If the business proposals and revenue projections were correct, all those companies should have been running profitably by now. They patently weren't, so pretty much the same questions arise and with the same answer '' nobody is asking any questions.

The business case for the whole industry was supported by numerous studies by scientists, academia, so-called industry experts and advocates of renewable energy, all of whom said it was the clean and profitable future of energy production. Obviously, all those studies were seriously wrong and ended up costing governments billions. Has anyone got back to these ''experts'' and asked why the studies and their financial models were all so bad? Given how shoddy their expert advice has proven to be, is anyone asking for the money back, which we paid for this supposed expertise? In the light of how bad expert advice in this area has been, is anyone reviewing advice for similar green sectors, such as wind power? Anyone? Anywhere?

Never in the history of the world, has such an amount of money been wasted, without any trace of financial oversight or accountability. Not only has the money been squandered, but at a time of high unemployment, the fashionable rush to create illusory green jobs, has actually destroyed jobs in the real economy. A study in Spain concluded that for every green job created by their massive renewables investment, the real economy lost 2.2 real jobs and only one in ten of those green jobs created, will be permanent. The much touted transfer of jobs from the real economy to the green economy simply never occurred either. Similar studies in Britain, Canada and Scotland have come back with equally appalling numbers. Spain was one of the early ones to dive head first into the green clean energy dream and now has an unemployment rate of 21%.

President Obama pledged a 150 billion USD investment over the next decade, to create a promised 5 million green jobs but nearly half way through that period, the number of green jobs created is so pitiful, the numbers are already being ''massaged.'' Apparently, if you drive a hybrid powered bus, you're officially classified as having a green job. Bart should tell that to Otto the next time he climbs on the school bus '' I think Otto will be kinda pleased about that.

Energy produced from renewables, such as solar power, is at least ten times more expensive than conventional sources, so the only way it can be afforded, is if you heap on various direct and indirect stealth taxes on those conventional sources to subsidise it.

The macroeconomic impact of the resultant rise in energy prices is on enterprise. Once the cost of energy and regulation rises to a certain price point, it's simply a no brainer to relocate the company to a more business friendly environment, either out-of-state or out-of-country. A classic case is California, where commercial electrical rates are already 50% higher than in any other state in the Union. Because of recently enacted state legislation and the upcoming ''California Global Warming Solutions Act'', it's estimated that an additional hike in energy prices of between 19% to 74%, dependent on your location in California, will occur in the next decade.

Companies have been relocating, in whole or in part, out of California. It's a bit like the California gold rush of 1851, but in reverse; everyone is getting the hell out of the place. In the first quarter of last year alone, one business relocater counted 70 of these ''disinvestment events'', as they're euphemistically called, and that in a state with a 10.9% unemployment rate and some very severe budgetary problems.

Another effect of this rise in energy prices, is to push more and more ordinary people into what's now called fuel poverty and as usual, it's the poor and low wage earners, who are taking the pain. What hard statistics I can find on the number of people now priced into this situation, are quite simply appalling.

The only country, for which I can find official national statistics on fuel poverty, is the UK but whatever country you live in, I imagine the figures might be similar, dependant on your climate and how far your government has gone down the renewable's rabbit hole.

The UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change's (DECC) latest report in July 2011, which only gives figures up to 2009, estimated that 18% of UK households were then officially classified as being in fuel poverty. The UK Citizen's Advice Bureau, again a guesstimate circa 2009, is concerned that 5.5 million people in UK face living in freezing conditions through Winter, because of self-rationing or disconnection. Given the steep jump in domestic power prices over the last three years, the figure must now be well over 25%. When it comes to any of DECC's numbers, it's interesting to note that they attribute the increase to several factors, but never once do they mention green taxes, which is why I view even the dire figures supplied by them with some suspicion, as being too conservative.

Mr. Cameron, here we are in the twenty-first century and in a quarter of households in the UK, the people you're supposed to be responsible for, are having to make stark choices between food and heating as a result of your continuing policies and the policies of your predecessors. And that, in the teeth of the worst recession in living memory. I know with your background of Eton, Oxford, millionaire status and coming from a rich and privileged background, it's perhaps difficult for you to appreciate the hardships that choices like that inflict on ordinary people.

You've never spent a Winter just being cold, so let me help you out and give you an idea of what it's like. It's pensioners, who spend most of Winter in bed for warmth, because they can no longer afford to heat their home, it's families wearing overcoats indoors, it's kids trying to do homework when their hands are freezing, it's Dad's overcoat thrown over the sleeping kids in an unheated bedroom as an extra blanket, it's the sickly ones of all ages really suffering through Winter, it's months of coughs and colds and chilblains, it's the cold-related deaths that never should have happened and it's just basically plain miserable. As usual, the biggest proportion of people in poverty, fuel or otherwise, are always the children. Are you starting to get some sort of idea of what it's like outside the slick and well-heated political circles of London?

You could at least take your foot off the green taxation pedal and help them out but you won't though, will you? Saving the planet is simply too important to ever contemplate doing anything like that. Quite frankly, as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, you're a bloody disgrace.

Governments wasting vast amounts of taxpayer's money on financially absurd projects is always bad but if the net effect of doing so, is to impoverish and harm their own most vulnerable citizens, then it's unforgivable.

(C)Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Sleeping with the enemy.

There's a killer in your house.

Climate Alarmism and The Prat Principle.

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Garza also had words for former President Bill Clinton, who she said angered her over a comment he made to black protesters. During a campaign event for Hillary Clinton, Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted Clinton's event. Bill Clinton told the protesters that they were ''defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.''

''I was angry about that for about a month'--seriously, like every single day. It's reprehensible for him to defend the impacts his policies have had on our communities,'' Garza told Bloomberg Businesssweek.

Garza also declared that despite Clinton's claims that ''black lives matter,'' she has participated in processes that had a negative effect on black people.

''Early on, she would say, ''Yes, black lives matter,'' but she wouldn't acknowledge her role in processes that fundamentally showed black lives did not matter. She says that she is for economic justice, but she doesn't support $15 an hour as the minimum wage,'' Garza told Bloomberg Businessweek.

Towards the end of the interview, Garza declared that the black community is not ''indebted'' to the Democratic party in any way.

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Garza also had words for former President Bill Clinton, who she said angered her over a comment he made to black protesters. During a campaign event for Hillary Clinton, Black Lives Matter protesters interrupted Clinton's event. Bill Clinton told the protesters that they were ''defending the people who kill the lives you say matter.''

''I was angry about that for about a month'--seriously, like every single day. It's reprehensible for him to defend the impacts his policies have had on our communities,'' Garza told Bloomberg Businesssweek.

Garza also declared that despite Clinton's claims that ''black lives matter,'' she has participated in processes that had a negative effect on black people.

''Early on, she would say, ''Yes, black lives matter,'' but she wouldn't acknowledge her role in processes that fundamentally showed black lives did not matter. She says that she is for economic justice, but she doesn't support $15 an hour as the minimum wage,'' Garza told Bloomberg Businessweek.

Towards the end of the interview, Garza declared that the black community is not ''indebted'' to the Democratic party in any way.

Follow Amber on Twitter

Send tips to [email protected].

Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].

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Sun, 07 Aug 2016 20:51

Alicia Garza wants Americans to understand that racism is about much more than people being mean to each other.

Interview by Josh Eidelson | August 4, 2016

Photographs by Molly Matalon for Bloomberg Businessweek

From

The following is a condensed and edited interview with Alicia Garza, co-founder, Black Lives Matter.

People often trace Black Lives Matter to three years ago. The night George Zimmerman was acquitted after killing Trayvon Martin, you went on Facebook and wrote'‰'...A rant is what I called it, but it ended up being a love letter to black people. There was so much being said either about ''we already knew that was going to happen,'' or about what black folks need to do to prevent ourselves from being murdered­'--''just vote,'' ''just get a better education.'‰'...'' None of that deals with how vigilantes are grown and supported by laws, or how to eradicate ­systemic racism.

So I wrote a love letter, ending with, ''Black people, I love you. I love us. We matter. Our lives matter.'' Patrisse Cullors put a hashtag in front of it. And we started talking about building and organizing to really be a magnet for people who wanted to figure out how to fight back. And our sister Opal Tometi helped us build the platforms online to connect people. All three of us were organizers. So part of what we asked our network to do was to use ''Black Lives Matter'' in their work if it was helpful. Folks did.

''Lots of people who are great people are implementing and ­protecting systems, practices, structures that fundamentally exclude, disenfranchise, marginalize black people''

What's the biggest misconception people have about Black Lives Matter?That we only care about black people. We are clear that all lives matter, but we live in a world where that's not actually happening in ­practice. So if we want to get to the place where all lives matter, then we have to make sure that black lives matter, too.

In conversations about racism in American culture or politics, the focus is often on racism as a ­personal defect or an attitude. Does that make it harder to take on systemic racism?It's terrible. The way that people understand racism in this country is about interpersonal dynamics, like racism is people being mean to each other. That sucks, but if that's all it was, let's just sing Kumbaya together.

But racism is a set of interlocking dynamics: One in three black men can expect to spend some time incarcerated; women are the fastest-growing population in prisons and jails'--and 30 percent are black; black folks are on the low-earning end of the economy. Lots of people who are great people are implementing and ­protecting systems, practices, structures that fundamentally exclude, disenfranchise, marginalize black people.

How much concrete progress has happened over the past three years?The combination of really sharp agitation on social media and really brilliant, creative, and impactful actions in the streets has made it so that this is at the forefront of almost every conversation. In one year, there were 40 laws passed around criminal justice reform around the country. Some were good; some of them were actually pretty crappy, but it signals that even ­legislators are understanding that this is the moment that they're in.

Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, August 8-21, 2016. Subscribe now.Photographer: Molly Matalon for Bloomberg Businessweek

Do you think America has been becoming any less racist over the past 10 or 20 or 30 years?There's a real battle. The emergence of Donald Trump, and the phenomenon around him, is really a backlash against how successful this movement has been. There's millions of people backing a fascist ideologue.

Is there a role for Black Lives Matter to play in stopping Donald Trump?Ultimately, Donald Trump is not talking to us. He's trying to organize ­disaffected white folks who feel like immigrants are taking their jobs. He's trying to organize the business class. So if Donald Trump is going to be stopped, it has to be by people who he wants to organize saying, ''We're not standing for that.''

Do you worry that your protests will create a backlash and more support for Trump?No. What I worry about in doing disruptive action is that because there is a set of forces that are whipping up ­hysteria, what it means sometimes is that there is violence rooted in that ­hysteria that then gets directed at my folks.

So what is there to do about that?Organize, and hold folks ­accountable. Part of what's happening with this culture of vigilantism is that people are able to do it and get away with it. George Zimmerman has actually attempted to make some money off of his act of vigilantism.

''What I worry about in doing disruptive action is that because there is a set of forces that are whipping up ­hysteria, what it means sometimes is that there is violence rooted in that ­hysteria that then gets directed at my folks''

What do you make of the FBI director's suggestions that scrutiny of the police may be leading to more violent crime?It's hard to take those statements seriously, because they're not grounded in any evidence. They are used to generate distrust and to squelch dissent.

Have you been disappointed with President Obama on racial justice?He obviously occupies a very ­difficult position. He has to be a consensus builder and a coalition builder. He's in a context where the very fact that he is a black man is to his disadvantage. You had an enormous amount of really ­disgusting things that were being thrown at him.

And at the same time, when he's given the opportunity to address the problem of racial inequity and racial injustice, he often uses it as an opportunity to scold black people about what we should be doing differently.

Has Hillary Clinton done or said anything as a presidential candidate that's surprised you?Early on, she would say, ''Yes, black lives matter,'' but she wouldn't acknowledge her role in processes that fundamentally showed black lives did not matter. She says that she is for economic justice, but she doesn't support $15 an hour as the minimum wage.

After Bill Clinton told black protesters, ''You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter,'' you wrote, ''My back is tired of being the path to the White House.''I was angry about that for about a month'--seriously, like every single day. It's reprehensible for him to defend the impacts his policies have had on our communities. The Clintons use black people for votes, but then don't do anything for black communities after they're elected. They use us for photo ops.

So where does that leave you on a Clinton-Trump election?I am going to do everything in my power to make sure that we are not led by Donald Trump. That being said, there's lots to be engaged in at the state level, the local level. We're going to ­continue to push. We're not indebted to or endeared to the Democratic Party.

''We need to make sure we're creating spaces to create new leaders and new types of leadership''

How does technology help or hinder the organizing?It connects us across boundaries. Technology is a tool to bring people into closer relationship, but the work offline is critical to making sure that lasts. The open source nature of the internet is both a blessing and a curse, because just as much as we can watch what's happening around the world, we can also be watched.

What's the worst advice anyone has given you?''Tone it down.''

What have you taken, tactically or strategically, from the successes and the failures of the '60s civil rights movement?One thing is that you cannot underestimate the power of direct action and disruption. The other is that you have to be willing to use many different tools: electoral organizing, community organizing. We need to make sure we're creating spaces to create new leaders and new types of leadership. And we cannot be afraid to imagine what it means to have power. You don't want to just be throwing rocks at the castle. We look at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and their strategy for the Democratic convention, where they built a new political party and tried to be seated there. We have to use all the tools available.