Orbán Uses Coronavirus to Put Hungary’s Democracy in a State of Danger http://www.gmfus.org/blog/2020/03/26/orban-uses-coronavirus-put-hungarys-democracy-state-danger
‘The governing Fidesz party has the necessary two-thirds majority required to prolong the state of danger, and opposition parties had signaled their readiness to support such an extension until the end of June. Yet, on March 20, the government filed a motion for an enabling act that would allow it to govern by decree practically without limits in time and extent as well as disable parliamentary control over the executive…’
– – –
Feeling safe?
‘…At the center of the discussion about how to ramp up the production of ventilators is Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House aide, who has told people that he was called in two weeks ago by Vice President Mike Pence to produce more coronavirus test kits and who has now turned his attention to ventilators.
He has been directing officials at FEMA in the effort….’
fking hell
‘That number then shrank to 7,500 ventilators in the initial run, or maybe 5,000, an apparent recognition that auto transmissions and ventilators had very little in common.’
‘…The $1.5 billion price tag comes to around $18,000 a ventilator. And the overall cost, by comparison, is roughly equal to buying 18 F-35s, the Pentagon’s most advanced fighter jet…’
‘The pastor, Tony Spell of Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, said he does not believe his congregation is at risk of getting COVID-19, the disease associated with the coronavirus, according to CBS affiliate WAFB. “It’s not a concern,” Spell told the outlet. “The virus, we believe, is politically motivated. We hold our religious rights dear and we are going to assemble no matter what someone says.” Spell said 1,170 attended his service Sunday, according to WAFB. “We have 27 buses on Sundays picking up people in a five-parish area,” he said.
Spell also told the outlet that police showed up at the church after the service Tuesday night and informed him the National Guard would break up any future gatherings that exceed 50 people.
But a National Guard spokesman in Baton Rouge told NBC News on Wednesday it is not involved in the matter and has no role in enforcing social distancing requirements as set by Gov. John Bel Edwards…’
Around 80% of the coronavirus supplies that Russia has sent to Italy are “useless,” the country’s La Stampa daily reported Wednesday, citing high-level political sources.
Russia sent 600 ventilators and 100 military virologists and epidemiologists to Italy following talks between President Vladimir Putin and Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte last Saturday. Footage of Russian military trucks en route from Rome to the coronavirus epicenter of Bergamo circulated online this week…’
‘…Downing Street has claimed it failed to take part in an EU scheme to source life-saving ventilators to treat coronavirus because it accidentally missed the deadline.
No 10 initially said it did not take part because the UK was “no longer a member” and was “making our own efforts”.
But after critics accused Boris Johnson of putting “Brexit over breathing”, a No 10 spokesman clarified that it had missed out because of an error and would consider participating in future. It is understood the UK claims not to have received an email from the EU asking it to participate.
The mix-up means the UK has missed out on benefiting from the collective buying power of the EU. The bloc is seeking to use its clout to source large numbers of ventilators and protective equipment.
A UK government spokesperson said: “Owing to an initial communication problem, the UK did not receive an invitation in time to join in four joint procurements in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“As the commission has confirmed, we are eligible to participate in joint procurements during the transition period, following our departure from the EU earlier this year…’
‘If UK Media wrote about the UK like it does Latin America’
‘…A massive bribery scheme to buy the loyalty of Far-Right Northern Irish lawmakers and the support of pariah state Saudi Arabia are now all that keep the embattled autocrat in her Downing Street base.
Theresa May, flanked by loyal security forces
The UK “Prime Minister” who styles herself on 1980s predecessor and ally of murderous Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, seized power in the aftermath of her party’s referendum on European Union membership, which opposition groups allege was rigged, and neighbouring states declared illegitimate…’
We Are Drowning in a Devolved World: An Open Letter from Devo
Gerald Casale writes:
‘…Forty-eight years ago, on May 4, 1970, as a member of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), I was front and center being fired on by my fellow Americans in the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University, as we peacefully protested President Nixon’s expansion of the cancerously unpopular Vietnam War into Cambodia without an act of Congress. I was lucky and dodged the bullet, both literally and figuratively, but four students were killed, and nine more were seriously wounded by the armed, mostly teenaged, National Guard troops. Two of the four students killed, Alison Krause and Jeffery Miller, were close acquaintances of mine. Less than a year earlier, as an Admissions/Curriculum counselor to incoming students, I had admitted them to the Honors College program.
May 4 changed my life, and I truly believe Devo would not exist without that horror. It made me realize that all the Quasar color TVs, Swanson TV dinners, Corvettes, and sofa beds in the world didn’t mean we were actually making progress. It meant the future could be not only as barbaric as the past, but that it most likely would be. The dystopian novels 1984, Animal Farm, and Brave New World suddenly seemed less like cautionary tales about the encroaching fusion of technological advances with the centralized, authoritarian power of the state, and more like subversive road maps to condition the intelligentsia for what was to come…’
Cave That Housed Neandertals and Denisovans Challenges View of Cultural Evolution
‘…Deep in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia sits a very choice piece of real estate. It’s nothing so newfangled as a ski lodge or one of the traditional wood houses that dot the local countryside. Rather it’s a primeval limestone cave, called Denisova, that overlooks a rushing river and the surrounding forest. Multiple human species, or hominins, have sought shelter in this cave over the past 300,000 years, such is its allure. Artifacts, bits of bone and ancient DNA found in its chambers testify to the presence of these peoples. The site thus offers a rare window on a particularly fascinating period of human evolution, one in which other human species coexisted with our own kind….’
The Golden Rule: he who has the gold, makes the rules....
/jd
Bank of England urged to give Juan Guaidó Venezuela’s gold
– Interim leader has asked UK to send £1.2bn reserves to him rather than Nicolás Maduro
‘A UK foreign office minister has suggested that the Bank of England grant access to £1.2bn in Venezuelan gold reserves to the self-proclaimed interim leader Juan Guaidó rather than Nicolás Maduro…’
UAE’s Noor Capital says it bought 3 tonnes of gold from Venezuela
‘…bu Dhabi investment firm Noor Capital said on Friday that it bought 3 tonnes of gold on Jan. 21 from Venezuela’s central bank, at a time when President Nicolas Maduro is seeking to keep his crisis-stricken government solvent…’
Google’s Sidewalk Labs Plans To Package And Sell Location Data On Millions Of Cellphones
‘…If Sidewalk Labs has access to people’s unique paths of movement prior to making its synthetic models, wouldn’t it be possible to figure out who they are, based on where they go to sleep or work?…’
The Chinese Were White – Until White Men Called Them Yellow
– Europeans referred to East Asians as white until the end of the 18th century
But as the Chinese and Japanese resisted cultural assimilation they darkened – both in Western eyes and their own
‘…Calling them white, in other words, was not based on simple perception either and had less to do with pigmentation than their presumed levels of civilisation, culture, literacy, and obedience (particularly if they should become Christianised).
[….]
“Yellow” was thus a racial marker that had meaning only in relation to the other colours, all of which were defined as against white “normality”. In Blumenbach’s case, Europeans were in the centre of a racial tableau flanked by “Mongolians” and “Ethiopians” with “Americans” and “Malays” in between (Malay was a new, fifth race, comprising the inhabitants of the South Pacific and Australia, only recently discovered). The yellow race became invested with associations that insured that its physical and cultural features were different (or, rather, deviant) from the white European norm. And for other thinkers far more racially virulent than Blumenbach, the races became part of an explicit hierarchy with European white at the top and African black at the bottom, with the “intermediate” races somewhere in the middle. The problem was exactly where in the middle they were, and how to measure that supposed distance…’
U.S. Elections Are Neither Free Nor Fair. States Need to Open Their Doors to More Observers.
‘…On October 26, the OSCE – The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights in Washington, D.C., issued an interim report on the 2018 midterms. It didn’t make for pleasant reading. “The right to vote is subject to many limitations,” warned the report, “with racial minorities disproportionately impacted.”…’
Republicans attack Jewish candidates across the U.S. with an age-old caricature: Fistfuls of cash
‘…“It’s not by chance that they’re showing people showing money. It’s not by chance that these people happen to be Jews, and it’s not by chance that there’s more talk about people’s Jewish identity in politics,” [Omer Bartov, a professor of European history at Brown University] said. “Some genie is being let out of the bottle.”…’
[originally written for my facebook friends] Sziasztok!, JD here,,,, Hello my fellow EUros & others,,,, Welcome to the USA Midterm elections – this means ALL of the seats in the House of Representatives are open and 33 of the Senate seats are open – no this is not a presidential election (unfortunately)
I will make *NO* predictions!!! After 2016 no one will humiliate themselves like that ever again. :'(
The stakes could not be higher for the world – As Chomsky says: ‘The most dangerous organisation in the world today is the US Republican Party.’
It is not ONLY a question of voter turn out, but also will poor and black and latino people be **allowed to vote.**
Seriously – the Repubs have created dozens of small subtle ways to keep people from voting – please ‘like’ investigative journalist Greg Palast to understand this better.
I do not believe the US electoral system could pass a UN or european OSCE style electoral monitoring team inspection – but people feel (correctly so) they must collectively work to tip the scales of electoral injustice against the Repubs, regardless. (also watch the Allan Nairn video below).
And finally, Trump has made lying a new art form. Not merely stretching the truth or exaggerating – but total complete fiction. The Dems have NOT found a way to counter this for the last 3 years. (see the PBS video in the comments)
I will be watching the live web coverage of the elections tonight by watching the livestream at Democracy Now! (with people from The Intercept)
– starts at 1am CET <–––– (Yawwwwnnnn!!)
PBS NewsHour (23 Oct 2018) ‘…Since the president took office, they’ve identified 2,915 claims that cannot be verified by the truth…’
Immanuel Wallerstein writes:
‘…What is wrong with these analyses is the assumption of long survival of the victorious electoral behavior. Office-holders die. People are chased from office. The economic realities change drastically and with such change there often follows a change in political atmosphere, despite previous electoral results.
We must not forget that we are living in the chaotic fluctuations of a structural crisis of the modern world-system. Wild fluctuations are the basic reality. Nothing lasts too long. Catastrophe today, salvation tomorrow. Catastrophe then again.
To be sure, we must still vote as we think best to prevent short-term negatives. But the victories are necessarily short-term – important but never decisive…’
Adam Curtis why we need a new kind of radical politics
‘…“You’ve moved away from the idea that you can manage people through things like focus groups. What’s replaced them is this idea that somehow network systems or computers can assemble you in groups and deliver you in different ways, both as consumers and as voters. I think that’s running out of steam now as well.”
“A lot of Obama’s politicking was based around that – micro-targeting. Trump and Brexit are the reaction to the limitations of that.
Curtis continues: “If you manage the world by assembling people into these groups online, then you isolate them from other parts of the world and that’s why we didn’t see Trump and Brexit coming. It’s a world outside that.”
“As far as I know, Trump didn’t do any focus groups or any of the micro-targeting that Obama did through social networks. What Trump did was pre-Bernays. He created a powerful nationalist narrative for people who felt marginalised,” Curtis says.
“That is an old idea of how you deal with irrationality, you whip it up into a force which gives your nation an identity.
“Despite the fact that he’s a business-person, it’s not a consumer model of politics. It’s a grand narrative and we’re frightened of grand narratives, we have been ever since the Second World War.
“I see Trump as part of the past rather than the future – I hope.”…’
The Neuroscience of Hate Speech
– Humans are social creatures who are easily influenced by the anger and rage that are everywhere these days.
By Richard A. Friedman
‘…Of course, it’s difficult to prove that incendiary speech is a direct cause of violent acts. But humans are social creatures — including and perhaps especially the unhinged and misfits among us — who are easily influenced by the rage that is everywhere these days. Could that explain why just in the past two weeks we have seen the horrifying slaughter of 11 Jews in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, with the man arrested described as a rabid anti-Semite, as well as what the authorities say was the attempted bombing of prominent Trump critics by an ardent Trump supporter?
You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to understand that the kind of hate and fear-mongering that is the stock-in-trade of Mr. Trump and his enablers can goad deranged people to action. But psychology and neuroscience can give us some important insights into the power of powerful people’s words.
We know that repeated exposure to hate speech can increase prejudice, as a series of Polish studies confirmed last year. It can also desensitize individuals to verbal aggression, in part because it normalizes what is usually socially condemned behaviour…’
In Detroit, surviving without running water has become a way of life
‘…For years, city officials said the vast majority of shut off customers have water running again within 48 hours when they are put on payment plans.
Now, new city records obtained by Bridge Magazine show occupants of least 1,500 homes – and perhaps as many as 2,715 – still remain without water after disconnections this year.
That’s at least 1 in 7 of the city’s 11,422 shutoffs so far this year. More than 900 of those occupied homes have been without water at least three months.
For the first time this year, the city’s Department of Water and Sewerage is tracking the number of occupied homes that aren’t reconnected, following a five-year collections campaign that has shut the taps to more than 112,000 homes…’
‘…While slaveholders in the cotton South occasionally paid lip service to democracy throughout the Jacksonian era, by the 1850s many of the region’s leaders were openly touting the benefits of oligarchy and aristocracy, while condemning the free states for rule by mobocracy. They fully realized that non-slaveholding whites outnumbered them, and thus had the power to challenge slaveholder interests.
[….] From poll taxes to residency requirements, the master class easily maintained control over the political privileges of poorer whites. Men who had been previously convicted of certain crimes, or who did not have a long period of continuous residence in a certain state and locality, or could not afford to pay a poll tax of close to a day’s wages, were liable to become disenfranchised. In South Carolina, the most anti-democratic state in the South, paupers were particularly singled out as ineligible for the franchise. A person’s poverty could be used to render them politically impotent.
Widespread illiteracy and semi-literacy among the lower classes — as well as the South’s stringent censorship laws — further prevented poorer whites from involvement in the political process. When the rich did allow the non-slaveholders to vote, they were still able to control the outcome of elections, as one man observed, by “means of the votes of the poor whites whom he owns, in owning all by which they can live for another day.”…’
Rigging the vote: how the American right is on the way to permanent minority rule
‘…The American right is in the midst of a formidable project: installing permanent minority rule, guaranteeing control of the government even as the number of actual human beings who support their political program dwindles.
Voter suppression is one, but only one. [….]
The two most recent Republican presidents have entered office despite receiving fewer votes than their opponent in a national election, thanks to the electoral college, which systematically over-represents small states. (California gets one electoral vote per 712,000 people; Wyoming gets one per 195,000.) With the presidency in hand in the run-up to the 2020 census, minority rule will be further entrenched by adding a citizenship question to the census. This will result in systematic undercounting of the population in heavily Democratic areas, which will in turn further reduce their influence as legislatures draw maps based on the data…’
Wait for it.Or read our exclusive report here: https://bit.ly/2RzAWiH(Your support makes our independent journalism possible. To become a member go to TYT.com/JOIN.)
US voter suppression:
why this Texas woman is facing five years’ prison
28 Aug 2018
‘…When Crystal Mason appears in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, this week she has been warned by her lawyers to be prepared for the worst. Pack a bag, they told her, talk to your children, be ready to go to prison [….] Mason, a 43-year-old mother of three, has been sentenced to five years in Texas state penitentiary – with extra time pending in federal lock-up. All because she committed the crime of voting.
On 8 November 2016, as the world waited with bated breath for the outcome of the Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton election, she walked to her local Fort Worth polling station to perform her civic duty as a US citizen. To her surprise, her name wasn’t registered on the voting rolls, so she cast a provisional ballot pending further checks.
In the small print of the form it read: “I understand that it is a felony of the 2nd degree to vote in an election for which I know I am not eligible.” She didn’t read those words, focused as she was on correctly entering her personal details.
Nor did she know that under Texas’s strict electoral laws, she was ineligible to vote. By dint of a previous conviction for tax fraud, for which she had served five years in prison, and for which she was now out on supervised release and living back home, she was one of 500,000 Texans barred from the electoral process…’
Watch: Florida voting rights activist Desmond Meade lays out the “almost ridiculous” ways a person can be convicted of a felony in the state and lose their right to vote.
FL voters will decide this issue in tomorrow’s election through a ballot measure called Amendment 4: http://ow.ly/dP0X30mvuPE
Watch: Florida voting rights activist Desmond Meade lays out the "almost ridiculous" ways a person can be convicted of a felony in the state and lose their right to vote. FL voters will decide this issue in tomorrow's election through a ballot measure called Amendment 4: http://ow.ly/dP0X30mvuPE
AMY GOODMAN: You may never practice law because you had served time in jail.
DESMOND MEADE: Because I had served—because I was—not because I served time in jail. Remember, I said, over 75 percent of people convicted of felonies each year do not go to prison. They don’t. And so, that is something that, you know, I did. I went to prison. I was bad, you know. But because—not because I went to prison, but because I was convicted of a felony, of a felony.
So, how many of you all in the audience ever had those like balloons that says “Happy Birthday” or “Get well soon” or “Congratulation, graduate”? Raise your hand if you have. Raise it high in the air. How many of you all ever went to a—keep it raised, keep it raised. How many of you all ever went to a memorial, you know, where you have the white balloons and you release them into the air? Raise your hand. If you’ve ever released a balloon in the air, raise your hand. All of you all would be felons in the state of Florida, if you were caught by law enforcement, and you would not be able to vote for the rest of your life.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
DESMOND MEADE: Because it is a third-degree felony.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m a New Yorker. I’m a New Yorker.
DESMOND MEADE: It’s a third-degree felony to release multiple helium-filled balloons in the air. If you’ve ever—if you’ve ever—you’re walking to class, and there’s construction going on.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, wait, wait. We have—since we have cameras here that are videoing this, we have to get each face of each person who’s released a balloon.
DESMOND MEADE: Yes, right? No, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. But even when you’re walking to work or you’re walking to a class or whatever, and you happen to take a shortcut, and it may allow you to cross a construction site, trespassing on a construction site is a third-degree felony, and you could lose your rights for life. If you like to catch lobsters and you catch one and the tail is too short, that’s a third-degree felony. And so, there are just so many ways that an individual can get a felony conviction in this state that it’s almost ridiculous. But to think that that one mistake that you make—you’re walking with your friend on the beach, and you disturb turtle nesting eggs, third-degree felony. You lose your rights for life. You are no longer an American citizen.
The American Economy Is Rigged
– And what we can do about it
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
‘…The notion of the American Dream—that, unlike old Europe, we are a land of opportunity—is part of our essence. Yet the numbers say otherwise. The life prospects of a young American depend more on the income and education of his or her parents than in almost any other advanced country. When poor-boy-makes-good anecdotes get passed around in the media, that is precisely because such stories are so rare.
[….] America has long outdone others in its level of inequality, but in the past 40 years it has reached new heights. Whereas the income share of the top 0.1 percent has more than quadrupled and that of the top 1 percent has almost doubled, that of the bottom 90 percent has declined. Wages at the bottom, adjusted for inflation, are about the same as they were some 60 years ago! In fact, for those with a high school education or less, incomes have fallen over recent decades. Males have been particularly hard hit, as the U.S. has moved away from manufacturing industries into an economy based on services.
[….] In the U.S., the market power of large corporations, which was greater than in most other advanced countries to begin with, has increased even more than elsewhere. On the other hand, the market power of workers, which started out less than in most other advanced countries, has fallen further than elsewhere. This is not only because of the shift to a service-sector economy—it is because of the rigged rules of the game, rules set in a political system that is itself rigged through gerrymandering, voter suppression and the influence of money. A vicious spiral has formed: economic inequality translates into political inequality, which leads to rules that favor the wealthy, which in turn reinforces economic inequality…’
Trump 'jumps the shark' and goes full Steve Bannon – can we call him a fascist now?
Or is that still impolite?
/jd
‘…President Donald Trump declared himself a “nationalist” during his rally here on Monday night, officially tagging himself with the label that has long defined his populist rhetoric and protectionist policies.
“A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about the country so much. You know, we can’t have that,” Trump said, prompting boos from the crowd.
“You know what I am, I’m a nationalist,” he added, as the crowd erupted in “USA! USA!” chants. “Use that word.”…’
Centrists Are the Most Hostile to Democracy, Not Extremists
‘…research suggests that across Europe and North America, centrists are the least supportive of democracy, the least committed to its institutions and the most supportive of authoritarianism…’
‘…”A lot of people don’t understand that refugees especially, are fleeing situations that are affecting their livelihood and their children’s livelihood,” Belly told ABC News. “If they’re willing to go through everything they go through to try to find a safe haven, it’s not because they wanted to leave home; it’s because they had to. I think that’s one thing that a lot of people miss out on.”…’
‘…Teachers at a German school have reported themselves en masse to a far-right party after it asked pupils to spy on their political views so it could compile a list of its critics.
The AfD party has set up a system through which students can report and denounce their teachers to the party if they criticise it in class, or express related political views.
But teachers at the Lina Morgenstern School in Kreuzberg, Berlin, wrote a joint letter to the AfD asking for all their names to be voluntarily added onto the “denunciation list” it is compiling.
“We attach great importance to being on this list because we will continue to ensure that school students are empowered to understand the character of your party,” the teachers wrote, according to a copy of the message made public through the GEW teachers’ union.
“Of course, we will do this in the classroom and are in line with the Beutelsbach Consensus [a policy on the presentation of controversial subjects] and Article 1 of the Berlin Education Act. We will inform our students when members and officials of your party engage in racist, inhumane, sexist, historical revisionist, antisemitic or anti-democratic activities that jeopardise our peaceful coexistence in society.”…’
Explosive device found near the home of George Soros in an upscale New York suburb
‘…An explosive device was discovered on Monday near the home of billionaire George Soros in an upscale suburb in New York.
[….] Soros was recently accused by U.S. President Donald Trump of funding a caravan of migrants heading towards the Mexico-U.S. border — an allegation that many have said lacks evidence…’
Click on image to buy a t-shirt
Maybe the New York antisemitic bomber was inspired by this Republican Party advert?
/jd
‘…Following an ancient anti-Semitic script, a Republican attack ad portrays a Jewish financier as the puppetmaster behind non-white social unrest.
The ad, literally titled “Owns,” ties Minnesota congressional aspirant Dan Feehan, a Democrat, to George Soros, the currency speculator turned philanthropist whose demonization has become central to authoritarian nationalist projects in Hungary, Russia and beyond.
In “Owns,” funded by the National Republican Campaign Committee, Soros is an Oz-like figure hovering over stacks of cash…’
The Violence Central American Migrants Are Fleeing Was Stoked by the US
‘…“Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced in the 1980s,” said Elizabeth Oglesby, an associate professor of Latin American studies at the University of Arizona. “People were fleeing violence and massacres and political persecution that the United States was either funding directly or at the very minimum, covering up and excusing.” Violence today in those countries, she said, is a directly legacy of US involvement.
[….] “The war in Guatemala was really a genocide,” Oglesby said, adding that an estimated 200,000 were killed in the subsequent 36-year-long civil war, which stretched from 1960 to 1996. “The history is important because it went so far beyond anti-communism—the purpose was to destroy people’s vision of the future. It had a terrible impact on the country, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced.”
[….] “I get asked all the time, Why can’t Central Americans just stay in their country and strive for better?” Oglesby told me. “I want people to understand, Central Americans have been trying to do that for decades, and the United States put itself on the wrong side of those struggles, and now we are reaping the consequences.”…’
the wars of President BushClintonBushObama never ended with Trump
/jd
How American Racism Influenced Hitler
– Scholars are mapping the international precursors of Nazism.
By Alex Ross
‘…Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence. “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941. “It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.” The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.
The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair. The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis’ paranoia. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?” The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs…’
and…
‘…The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S. Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction.” To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies. The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.
America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be “our Mississippi,” he said. “Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.”…’
South Carolina Is Lobbying To Allow Discrimination Against Jewish Parents
‘… The Trump Administration is considering whether to grant a South Carolina request that would effectively allow faith-based foster care agencies in the state the ability to deny Jewish parents from fostering children in its network. The argument, from the state and from the agency, is that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act should not force a Protestant group to work with Jewish people if it violates a tenet of their faith.
The case being made by South Carolina is an extension of the debate around RFRA, which is more commonly associated with discrimination against LGBTQ people, but by no means applies exclusively to that group….’
Plutocrat happy the US military still has respect ????
/jd
Paul Volcker, at 91, Sees ‘a Hell of a Mess in Every Direction’
Mr. Volcker: “Respect for government, respect for the Supreme Court, respect for the president, it’s all gone,” he said. “Even respect for the Federal Reserve.
“And it’s really bad. At least the military still has all the respect. But I don’t know, how can you run a democracy when nobody believes in the leadership of the country?”
‘…At the start of the 2016 election cycle, this power structure proclaimed Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush shoo-ins for the nominations of the Democratic and Republican parties. After all, both of these individuals had deep bases of funders, well-established networks of political insiders, experienced political advisers and all the political name recognition any candidate could possibly want.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the White House. The presidency was won by Donald Trump [….]
Median family income is lower now than it was 16 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Workers without college degrees – the old working class – have fallen furthest. Most economic gains, meanwhile, have gone to top. These gains have translated into political power to elicit bank bailouts, corporate subsidies, special tax loopholes, favorable trade deals and increasing market power without interference by anti-monopoly enforcement – all of which have further reduced wages and pulled up profits.
Wealth, power and crony capitalism fit together. Americans know a takeover has occurred, and they blame the establishment for it.
The Democratic party once represented the working class. But over the last three decades the party has been taken over by Washington-based fundraisers, bundlers, analysts, and pollsters who have focused instead on raising campaign money from corporate and Wall Street executives and getting votes from upper middle-class households in “swing” suburbs…’
Antiwar Movement Spreads among Tech Workers
– Engineering students join Google and Microsoft workers in protesting the tech-industry’s enabling of U.S. militarism
The protesters state:
‘…Many Microsoft employees don’t believe that what we build should be used for waging war. When we decided to work at Microsoft, we were doing so in the hopes of “empowering every person on the planet to achieve more,” not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality. For those who say that another company will simply pick up JEDI where Microsoft leaves it, we would ask workers at that company to do the same. A race to the bottom is not an ethical position…’
Meanwhile more than 100 engineering students at Stanford and other schools released a letter pledging that they will:
‘…First, do no harm.
Refuse to participate in developing technologies of war: our labor, our expertise, and our lives will not be in the service of destruction…
Abstain from working for technology companies that fail to reject the weaponizing of their technology for military purposes. Instead, push our companies to pledge to neither participate in nor support the development, manufacture, trade or use of autonomous weapons; and to instead support efforts to ban autonomous weapons globally…’
US Wages for the 1% just reached their highest level ever
‘…The 1% has never had it so good.
The average wage for the top 1% of income earners hit $719,000 per year in 2017, up 3.7% on the year, exceeding their peak of $716,000 per year just before the Great Recession, according to a report released Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive, nonprofit think tank, citing data from the Social Security Administration. The average wage for the top 0.1% reached $2.7 million in 2017, the second-highest level ever, just 4% below their level in 2007. However, wages for the 0.1% rose 8% on the year in 2017.
Income inequality has soared in the U.S. over the last five decades, despite increases in worker productivity, the report said. “Incomes for most Americans have been stagnant for four decades,” according to a separate report released earlier this year by the staff of Keith Ellison, a Democratic congressman for Minnesota. “Instead, this increase in income inequality was almost entirely driven by soaring compensation levels for the top 1% of income earners.”…’
‘…We assume technology and the information it yields is making everyone’s life easier, freer and more comfortable.
Virginia Eubanks begs to differ, with the authority to do so. For the poor, she argues, government data and its abuses have imposed a new regime of surveillance, profiling, punishment, containment and exclusion, which she evocatively calls the “digital poorhouse.” While technology is often touted by researchers and policymakers as a way to deliver services to the poor more efficiently, Eubanks shows that more often, it worsens inequality. Data can’t provide what poor people need, which is more resources. Indeed, as with the 19th-century poorhouse, she argues, the shiny new digital one allows us to “manage the individual poor in order to escape our shared responsibility for eradicating poverty.”…’
‘…Before the 1990s, peanut allergy was so rare that barely any data on it was collected. In a 2015 article in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Paul J Turner noted that even though admissions to hospital for anaphylaxis increased between 1992 and 2012 by 615%, the incidence of fatal anaphylaxis did not. Turner and his colleagues believed that “increasing awareness of the diagnosis, shifting patterns of behaviour in patients and healthcare providers” might be contributing factors. Even though peanut allergy is much more common, its associated fatalities have not increased. [….]
The first is the delayed introduction of allergens. For years, throughout the world, allergy specialists had been advising that infants avoid the consumption of potentially allergenic foodstuffs. Not only was this incorrect but it may have played a role in driving the food allergy epidemic that we are seeing today.
Prof Gideon Lack of King’s College London, lead investigator on Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (the LEAP study) found that “of the children who avoided peanuts, 17% developed peanut allergy by the age of five years. Remarkably, only 3% of the children who were randomised to eating the peanut snack developed allergy by age five.” The children involved in the trial already had severe eczema and/or an egg allergy (both strong predictors for nut allergy)…’
Post-Cold War U.S. Foreign Policy Has Been A Near Total Failure. Two New Books Look At Why.
by Murtaza Hussain
‘…Emerging as the world’s sole superpower at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. had two possible futures to choose from. It could either cash in a peace dividend at home by gradually scaling back its Cold War-era alliance commitments, or it could embark on a bold project of “liberal hegemony,” intended to spread its own system of government and a rules-based international order across the world. Flush with confidence after the the collapse of communism, American elites chose the latter course.
[….] Rather than define victory in these reasonable terms, the war against the Taliban was instead characterized as a moral crusade on behalf of human rights, feminism, and an array of other causes about which there can be no negotiation. Rejecting any compromise with an enemy it had defined as evil, the U.S. helped its local allies pursue a campaign of total annihilation against the Taliban and its supporters. Years later, Afghanistan is no closer to being a liberal democracy and the war is still raging there, at horrific human cost. The U.S., for its part, has given up on even defeating the Taliban and is instead simply trying to negotiate a face-saving exit. After flirting with a utopian idea of transforming Afghanistan in its own image and killing tens of thousands of Afghans in the process, the U.S. belatedly realized that the entire horrible endeavor has been essentially pointless…’
Too socialist for the suffragettes: the UK left’s forgotten women
– Early female socialists never figure in any roll-call of great suffragettes, because they objected on principle to a campaign that would leave so many disenfranchised.
‘… it was a schism that descended into deep rancour when the two sides also found themselves bitterly divided over support for the First World War, where the pragmatic, patriotic fervour urged by the elder Pankhursts was viewed by the female socialists as another betrayal of the working classes doomed to do the bulk of the dying.
Albeit in a much less offensive way, those passages reminded me of the arguments that persist to this day in the United States, where the original campaign for women’s suffrage is tainted by its promotion in the southern states as a means of reinforcing white supremacy in the Jim Crow era…’
‘The Genghis Khan Equestrian Statue in Mongolia. This is the largest equestrian statue in the world’
The Rule of the Uber-Rich Means Either Tyranny or Revolution
by Chris Hedges
‘…It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power. These pathologies inform Donald Trump, his children, the Brett Kavanaughs, and the billionaires who run his administration. The uber-rich cannot see the world from anyone’s perspective but their own. People around them, including the women whom entitled men prey upon, are objects designed to gratify momentary lusts or be manipulated. The uber-rich are almost always amoral. Right. Wrong. Truth. Lies. Justice. Injustice. These concepts are beyond them. Whatever benefits or pleases them is good. What does not must be destroyed.
[….] Political theorists, from Aristotle and Karl Marx to Sheldon Wolin, have warned against the rule of the uber-rich. Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution…’
Geneticists Criticize Use of Science by White Nationalists to Justify ‘Racial Purity’
‘…In an unusual statement on the role of science in the resurgence of white supremacy in America, the American Society of Human Genetics on Friday denounced “attempts to link genetics and racial supremacy.”
The statement, which appears in the November issue of the group’s scientific journal, The American Journal of Human Genetics, said the concept of “racial purity” was scientifically meaningless. The group has about 8,000 members and is the largest professional organization of scientists who study human genetics.
As newly visible and often-virulent groups of white nationalists have invoked genetic research to claim racial superiority, some geneticists have suggested that the field was not doing enough to counter the claims.
[….] It also explains a distinction between race and ancestry that geneticists say has been muddled by the rise of commercial ancestry tests.
“Although a person’s genetics influences their phenotypic characteristics, and self-identified race might be influenced by physical appearance,” the statement said, “race itself is a social construct,” meaning it has no biological basis. “Black,” for instance, is a socially defined term that includes many Americans who have a majority of European ancestry…’
‘The American Journal of Human Genetics’ Attempts to Link Genetics and Racial Supremacy
‘…The past decade has seen the emergence of strategies for assessing an individual’s genetic ancestry. Such analyses8 are providing increasingly accurate ways of helping to define individuals’ ancestral origins and enabling new ways to explore and discuss ancestries that move us beyond blunt definitions of self-identified race…’
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: ‘…he was always a symbol of reactionary advocacy on behalf of the Saudi regime and militant Salafi Islam. That’s what he stood for. The picture that is being painted in mainstream Western media is totally unrecognizable for anybody who bothers to read Arabic. Unfortunately, all the people who are commenting about the issue and commenting even about his record of journalism, so to speak, are people who have never read anything except in the Washington Post…’
‘The murder of Jamal Khashoggi should be denounced. Professor As`ad AbuKhalil says western media’s uncritical praise of Khashoggi is unworthy, he was a loyal member of the Saudi propaganda apparatus and chose the wrong side of the House of Saud.’
And remember, this happened during the Obama Admin.
/jd
Investigation: As U.S.-Backed War in Yemen Raged, UAE Hired U.S. Mercenaries to Kill Yemeni Leaders
‘A shocking new investigation has revealed that the United Arab Emirates hired U.S. mercenaries to carry out assassinations of political and clerical leaders in Yemen. The former elite U.S. special operations fighters were paid to take part in missions to kill those deemed to be “terrorists” by the UAE. The UAE worked with the U.S. company Spear Operations Group, founded by an Israeli-American man named Abraham Golan, who told BuzzFeed, “There was a targeted assassination program in Yemen. I was running it.” The group’s first target in Yemen was a local leader of al-Islah, a political party whose members include Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tawakkul Karman. We speak with journalist Aram Roston of BuzzFeed News, who broke the story. His new piece is titled “A Middle East Monarchy Hired American Ex-Soldiers to Kill Its Political Enemies. This Could Be the Future of War.”’
‘…ARAM ROSTON: Indeed, it did happen under Obama, yes. The period of time was after the war—I mean, an interesting point was, after the war started in March, the U.S. pulled its forces directly out of Yemen, during the chaos of that war, when the war first started. The UAE, of course, still stayed there. They were the ones on the ground. And the Yemen war is a very complex war. People see that the UAE and the Saudis are in the same coalition, but the UAE and the Saudis have kind of different aims there, or traditionally had different aims there. The Saudis were bombing the Houthis, fighting the Houthis, which they believed are proxies for Iran, and the UAE, most experts will confirm, was really trying to consolidate control over the south. They want the south to separate, to secede. They want control of the ports in the south. And they want to control the political space there, because the UAE and Yemen are very close.
AMY GOODMAN: So they were trying to get the head of the al-Islah party. This is the party of Tawakkul Karman, who was sitting here a few years ago, right at the time the Nobel Peace Prize—the Nobel committee announced she was winning the Nobel Peace Prize. UAE can call them terrorists. UAE can hire a mercenary firm, the State Department would approve, to attack anyone they consider unfriendly to them?…’
No, the US didn't create ISIS – but it did help to create the circumstances from which it emerged. The conspiritorial Left fails and fails again to understand the difference between intent and unintended consequences, and also of taking advantage of a situations that which the US is not fully in control of.
That said, the US does tend to support the worst of the worst because it thinks it can with with them and rarely the people who want democracy and human rights - because how could the US ever control people with that agenda??
/jd
The ISIS Conspiracy That Ate the Web
‘…The intelligence report about Syria is just that — a report, It’s not a policy directive and there’s no proof that any action was taken based on its analysis. Nevertheless, people across the political spectrum are taking it as if it were a presidential order. Anti-Muslim bigot Pamela Geller thinks it’s a scandal because it proves President Obama knew about ISIS and chose to do nothing. Geller’s outrage is the inverse of the indignation expressed by far-leftists like the Guardian’s Seumas Milne who takes the report as proof that the U.S. abetted ISIS to sow discord in the Middle East, part of a grand divide and conquer strategy. Neither one seems to understand what they’re actually looking at.
Milne’s Guardian piece is subtler than its headline. It grants that the DIA report, “doesn’t mean the US created Isis, of course,” and adds caveats likes, “the report isn’t a policy document. It’s heavily redacted and there are ambiguities in the language.” But it assumes, ambiguities aside, that the report reveals some level of collusion with ISIS as a tenet of U.S. policy seeking to inflame sectarianism…’
Moldova Grudge Could Cost U.K. Access to $1.7 Trillion Projects
‘…The U.K.’s post-Brexit access to $1.7 trillion in public projects relies on the good will of its European neighbors. Too bad Moldova holds a grudge.
The tiny country wedged between Romania and Ukraine is joining half a dozen nations in blocking the U.K.’s re-entry to the World Trade Organization’s Government Procurement Agreement, an accord that smooths the bidding process on public contracts, including in the $837 billion U.S. market.
Why the hold-up? Corina Cojocaru, Moldova’s economic counselor to the WTO, and her team were denied entry to the U.K. last year when they wanted to discuss their future relationship with Britain after it leaves the European Union.
And Cojocaru has a good memory.
“I couldn’t get a visa and a diplomatic passport to go to London to negotiate on government procurement,” Cojocaru said in a telephone interview. “Nobody listened to us for six to seven months.”…’
‘…On 27 September, the administrative court of the northwestern German city of Oldenburg ruled that the municipality’s decision to cancel a 2016 BDS event had been unlawful.
It determined that the city council had “undermined the fundamental right of the applicant’s freedom of assembly” as well as freedom of expression, which, it added, “was (and is) severely interfered with.”
“The fundamental right to freedom of expression is, as the most direct expression of the human personality in society, one of the most distinguished human rights of all.”
The ruling, the first of its kind in Germany, could have broader political implications for BDS activism, said Ahmed Abed, the lawyer who represented event organizers in court. “This ruling could have a great impact because it is the first time an administrative court has said it is unlawful to disallow a BDS event.”…’
Nationalist rabbi: European Right no longer anti-Semitic
‘…Rabbi Melamed – who heads the Har Bracha Yeshiva in Samaria – explained that for many years, Israel’s Foreign Ministry was wary of the European right wing parties, because they harbored Nazi supporters and Holocaust deniers.
“But in recent years, the extreme right wing movements have been undergoing a process of change,” he added. “Leaders have emerged who want nothing to do with the racist Nazi heritage, and who openly support the state of Israel.”
These leaders “have distilled the movements’ nationalist positions, and now they express a proper position, which demands maintaining the European people’s national, religious and cultural identity,” the rabbi insisted.
Rabbi Melamed went on to say that “[j]ust as it is forbidden to steal the property of a private individual, as the communists did in the countries that they took over, so it is forbidden to steal from people their national and religious identity, as the communists’ successors – the extreme liberals on the Left, like the British Labor party – seek to do.”…’
How restrictive voting requirements is the USA target minorities
Carol Anderson: ‘…And that’s one of the great ways the way voter suppression works, is that it sounds reasonable, until you see how it’s operationalized, and when you also understand, for instance, that the issue of voter I.D. is based on the lie of voter fraud.
And what I mean by that is that Justin Levitt, a professor out of California, did a study. And from 2000 to 2014, he counted up all of the votes in all of the elections and came to one billion votes. Out of that, he identified 31 cases of voter fraud, 31 cases out of one billion votes…’
There are so few refugees left in #Hungary these days that PM Viktor Orbán has selected a new scapegoat,,,,, the danger posed by Gender Studies ????
/jd
‘…On October 12, 2018, without any public statement or explanation, gender studies Master degrees were removed from the list of accredited subjects in Hungary. Students currently enrolled can finish their course of studies as usual and with both Hungarian and US accreditation, but no new students enrolled from September 2019 will be able to earn a Hungarian accredited degree in the field of Gender Studies…’
‘…Helen—a smart, cheerful five-year-old girl—is an asylum seeker from Honduras [….]
In July, Helen fled Honduras with her grandmother, Noehmi, and several other relatives; gangs had threatened Noehmi’s teen-age son, Christian, and the family no longer felt safe. Helen’s mother, Jeny, had migrated to Texas four years earlier, and Noehmi planned to seek legal refuge there. With Noehmi’s help, Helen travelled thousands of miles, sometimes on foot, and frequently fell behind the group. While crossing the Rio Grande in the journey’s final stretch, Helen slipped from their raft and risked drowning. Her grandmother grabbed her hand and cried, “Hang on, Helen!” When the family reached the scrubland of southern Texas, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended them and moved them through a series of detention centers.
[….] Helen was given a pack of crayons and spent the summer coloring patriotic images: busts of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, the torch on the Statue of Liberty. She was granted an hour of “Large Muscle Activity and Leisure Time” each day, and received lessons on the human respiratory system, the history of music, and “the risk and danger of social media.” “Helen,” a caseworker observed, “has excellent behavior at all times.” She had no major sources of stress, her reports noted, aside from “being separated from her family.” Her teachers encouraged her to develop “smart goals”—ambitions that are “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.” Helen’s goal was simple: “Minor disclosed wanting to live with her mother and family in the U.S.”
[….] On Helen’s form, which was filled out with assistance from officials, there is a checked box next to a line that says, “I withdraw my previous request for a Flores bond hearing.” Beneath that line, the five-year-old signed her name in wobbly letters…’
Always read the end of NYT articles, that's where the info is. It looks like Trump is for a permanent occupation of parts of Syria...
/jd
‘…[Trump] has spoken positively about the idea of withdrawing the approximately 2,000 American soldiers who are based in eastern Syria in areas once controlled by the Islamic State, although he now appears committed to leaving them there. In August, his administration decided not to spent $230 million that had already been earmarked for stabilization programs in that area.
The Saudi money, in addition to another $50 million given by the United Arab Emirates, will allow American programs there to continue, but on other countries’ tabs.
The funds will be used by USAID and the State Department for a variety of programs, including infrastructure repairs and provision of health, education and sanitation services.’
‘…And beyond that, the Olympics were taking place amid turmoil around the nation and around the world. Two major assassinations in the United States. A student riot that paralyzed much of Paris. The Czech uprising against Communist rule that became known as Prague Spring. People beaten in the streets during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
And in Mexico City, dozens, perhaps hundreds, of students protesting the country’s authoritarian government were killed by that same government.
The games went on anyway…’
‘…Smith and Carlos were banned from future participation in any Olympics for life. (They were in their early 20s in Mexico City, and this effectively prevented them from competing in other races in Munich and Montreal.) There were no offers of the complimentary stadium tickets usually offered to medaled athletes.
(Peter Norman suffered many of the same indignities when he returned to Australia. He was ostracized, never allowed on an Australian Olympic team again, despite qualifying in several national trials. His offense: wearing an Olympic Project for Human Rights button, like Smith and Carlos, and refusing to disavow his podium mates. When he died, in 2006, Smith and Carlos flew to Australia to be pallbearers.)
But for all the detractors, many thought of Carlos and Smith as heroes, especially in black America. Their upraised fists became a symbol of black refusal to submit to racial injustice — a precursor to today’s take-a-knee protests by NFL players…’
And, I think people assume the white guy was separate from the black guys, not true
/jd
The third man: The forgotten Black Power hero
‘…Yet few know that the man standing in front of both of them, the Australian sprinter Peter Norman who shocked everyone by powering past Carlos and winning the silver medal, played his own, crucial role in sporting history.
‘…On his left breast he wore a small badge that read: “Olympic Project for Human Rights” — an organization set up a year previously opposed to racism in sport. But while Smith and Carlos are now feted as human rights pioneers, the badge was enough to effectively end Norman’s career. He returned home to Australia a pariah, suffering unofficial sanction and ridicule as the Black Power salute’s forgotten man. He never ran in the Olympics again.
[….] Australia too, was in the midst of racial strife. The country’s “White Australia” policy had provoked protests of its own. It put heavy restrictions on non-white immigration — and a raft of prejudicial laws against its indigenous aboriginal population, including a policy of taking Aboriginal children from their birth parents and handing them to white couples for adoption, a practice that continued until the 1970s…’
Bittersweet Justice in Guatemala
A Guatemalan court found that the army committed genocide against the Maya Ixi, but at the same time acquitted the chief of military intelligence of wrongdoing.
‘…In 2013, Guatemala brought charges against the former dictator, Efraín Ríos Montt, and his chief of military intelligence, Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, for the crimes of genocide against the Maya Ixil population. It was an historic trial, marking the first time in Guatemala that a former head of state was put on trial for serious human rights violations.
During Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war (1960-1996), 200,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed or disappeared and countless others were subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced labor, and forced displacement. Some 600 villages were destroyed. A UN commission found that ninety-three percent of atrocities were the responsibility of the Guatemalan military…’
A new study reveals the real reason Obama voters switched to Trump
‘…One of the most puzzling elements of the 2016 election, at least for a lot of Americans, was the millions of voters who switched from voting for Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016. Somewhere between 6.7 million and 9.2 million Americans switched this way; given that the 2016 election was decided by 40,000 votes, it’s fair to say that Obama-Trump switchers were one of the key reasons that Hillary Clinton lost.
[….] The study, from three political scientists from around the country, takes a statistical look at a large sample of Obama-Trump switchers. It finds that these voters tended to score highly on measures of racial hostility and xenophobia — and were not especially likely to be suffering economically.
“White voters with racially conservative or anti-immigrant attitudes switched votes to Trump at a higher rate than those with more liberal views on these issues,” the paper’s authors write. “We find little evidence that economic dislocation and marginality were significantly related to vote switching in 2016.”…’
At last the Feminist agenda can be completed! and I am not even saying that's such a bad idea. Would the world really be worse off if women ran things the way men do today? Serious question.
/jd
Same-sex mice have babies
‘…Baby mice have been made with two mums and no dad, say researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
It took a substantial feat of genetic engineering to break the rules of reproduction.The scientists said the “bimaternal” (two mammas) animals were healthy and went on to have pups of their own.
But there was bad news on the all-male front. Mice with double-dads were attempted, but died within days of being born.
[….] It was easier with double mums. The researchers took an egg from one mouse and a special type of cell – a haploid embryonic stem cell – from another. Both contained only half the required genetic instructions or DNA, but just bringing them together wasn’t enough…’
Language framing: The left is losing the language game
‘…The elephant continues to win. Whoever controls the words controls the ways in which ideas are framed. Anyone can disagree with your beliefs, but so long as they use the same framework of words you use to describe your beliefs, even in adamant opposition to them, you win…’
‘A low-intensity war is being fought on the streets of Europe and the aim is on fascism. This critically acclaimed documentary takes us behind the masks of the militants called antifascists.
In 2013 a group of armed nazis attacks a peaceful demonstration in Stockholm where several people are injured. In Greece the neo-nazi party Golden Dawn becomes the third largest in the election and in Malmö the activist Showan Shattak and his friends are attacked by a group of nazis with knives and he ends up in a coma.
In this portrait of the antifascists in Greece and Sweden we get to meet key figures that explain their view on their radical politics but also to question the level their own violence and militancy.’
Why Real Change Won’t Come From Billionaire Philanthropists
‘When wealthy elites embrace issues such as inequality, poverty, climate change, women’s empowerment, and LGBTQ rights, are they spurring change—or reinforcing the status quo? In his new book Winners Take All, the writer Anand Giridharadas says it’s the latter. Giridharadas persuasively argues that when they adopt pressing social and economic issues as causes, plutocrats simply reinforce their position atop the hierarchy…’
Question: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos, George Soros, and Mike Bloomberg (who is allegedly considering running for president) position themselves as the antidote to Trump. But you see them and Trump more as flip sides of the same coin. Why is that?
Anand Giridharadas: ‘One of the things that became very clear to me as I reported this is: It’s not about billionaires we like versus billionaires we don’t like. This is not about rich people who do the right thing versus rich people who do the wrong thing. This is a fundamental question of, why do rich people have so much power over public life in America?…’
DNA Tests Prove Aboriginal Australians Are the World’s Oldest Culture
The genetic study helps show that the ancestors of today’s Aboriginals came here about 58,000 years ago.
‘…Prior to this study being published, some scientists had debated whether or not modern Aboriginal people are the descendants of ancient tribes who first populated Australia. This research, the most comprehensive genomic study of Indigenous Australians to date, also helps to confirm that all humans share the same common ancestors from a single African migration event.
That event occurred when both Papuan and Aboriginal ancestors left Africa as part of a larger group of migrants around 72,000 years ago, then split with that main group of early humans about 58,000 years ago. Probably the first group of humans to cross an ocean, they reached “Sahul”—the supercontinent that was made up of modern day Tasmania, Australia, and New Guinea together—and then split apart about 37,000 years ago. The supercontinent only split up around 8,000 years ago.
“Australia has one of the longest histories of continuous human occupation outside Africa, raising questions of origins, relatedness to other populations, differentiation and adaptation,” the study concludes. “We find that Aboriginal Australians and Eurasians share genomic signatures… a common African ancestor.”…’
I always said #Murica elected an Internet Troll, now we must also count his wife...
/jd
‘…”I want to show them that I don’t care,” Melania Trump continued. “You could criticize whatever you want to say, but it will not stop me to do what I feel is right.”
She said her point was proven because by the time she put the jacket back on for her return flight, she could see “how the media got obsessed by it.”
First ladies and other political figures are often watched closely for what they wear, given the potential for sending messages and signals with fashion choices.
Trump’s choices, if anything, have prompted even more speculation than past first ladies.
Trump has criticized her husband’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy that separated families, and in the interview she said she was blindsided by it.
Her comments about the jacket in the ABC interview were in contrast with those of her spokeswoman, who at the time said the jacket had “no hidden message”.
President Trump, however, said the jacket was meant to be a hit at the media.
The president eventually halted the policy following widespread criticism from both parties, but The Washington Post reported on Friday that new options are being considered that could again separate families as officials deal with a new surge of immigrants at the border…’
Kurds in Syria Will Use Crypto to Power an Anarchist State
‘…Because its primary currency is the Syrian lira, the main currency of the Syrian state (which Rojava has just spent years fighting), there’s a growing belief in some quarters that cryptocurrency could provide a better alternative, Erselan Serdem, a leader of Rojava’s technological development program, told CoinDesk.
Alongside a system of self-governing communes, Rojava plans to implement new technological academies, with a particular emphasis on cryptography and cryptocurrency, Serdem said.
Assisting the change is Amir Taaki, an early bitcoin developer who fought alongside Rojava in the war. As detailed by CoinDesk, Taaki is also in the process of setting up a European-based technological academy in Barcelona.
“[Rojava is] a revolutionary project that wants to build a new society based on anarchist principles, and that means law, defense, society and culture,” Taaki told CoinDesk.
The new academies follow the philosophy of Kurdish political theorist Abdullah Ocalan, who is promoting a form of governance called “democratic confederalism.” Advocating for direct democracy, feminism and ecology, Serdem said that blockchain and cryptocurrency are crucial for achieving this vision…’
In the history of Catholicism it will be remembered that America's CIA crucified one of its martyred saints.
/jd
The killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero was one of the most notorious crimes of the cold war. Was the CIA to blame?
‘…The men received orders from a National Police detective, Oscar Perez Linares, who came to the house. A man of few words, he was treated by the others with the respect reserved for those not afraid to kill. Several times, Jorge heard the others laughing at how Linares had shot Romero. Linares sat with a half-smile. “You should have seen the blood that came from that priest!” was his only comment.
At the time, Jorge’s story was impossible to check – although the rest of what he said turned out to be true. After the war, I looked in declassified CIA files. Sure enough, in mid-1983, an unusually detailed CIA report, quoting a senior Salvadoran police source, named Linares as a member of a four-man National Police squad which murdered Romero. Other Salvadoran officers said the same thing. And the man who drove the car which took the killer to the church also picked out a photo-fit of Linares. So why, if the CIA had such evidence, and solving the murder was such a priority, was nothing done?…’
