Hugh Fitzgerald: Should Germans be Forced to Study Arabic?
A senior German educator has called for all pupils in the country to be forced to study Arabic until they graduate in the interests of the multicultural state.
Professor of Computer Science Thomas Strothotte and President of a private Hamburg university has argued that German children should be forced to learn Arabic alongside German so they would better understand the country’s 1.5 million new migrants and make them feel more welcome. He said it would help Germany become “a country of immigration, and a multilingual society....
Sunday, August 28, 2016
Vigilante pastor KIDNAPS street children to save them from drugs and paedophiles
...Over the past 16 years, more than 3,500 people have been through his rehab clinic. Although not all of them have wanted to.
Many of the drug-addicted youngsters were rounded up and forced into mini-vans and taken to the ramshackle clinic he founded, called Republic Pilgrim....
...“But if a teenager is living on the street and taking drugs, you have got to take them. You have got to stop their addiction.
“People should have freedom, they must have a life, health and education.
“But when a teenager uses his freedom to kill himself with drugs, we must use power to stop him....
...Over the past 16 years, more than 3,500 people have been through his rehab clinic. Although not all of them have wanted to.
Many of the drug-addicted youngsters were rounded up and forced into mini-vans and taken to the ramshackle clinic he founded, called Republic Pilgrim....
...“But if a teenager is living on the street and taking drugs, you have got to take them. You have got to stop their addiction.
“People should have freedom, they must have a life, health and education.
“But when a teenager uses his freedom to kill himself with drugs, we must use power to stop him....
HACK CHECK: New York Times Seeking ‘Gender Editor’
...“We are seeking a journalist with a compelling vision of how to expand this coverage, from boardroom to bedroom, from the loftiest corridors of power to the back alleys of the world’s most impoverished villages,” the posting states. “We are looking for a creative, passionate leader to guide a cross-platform, global coverage vertical on the topic of gender and identity.”...
NYT Looking To Hire A ‘Climate Change Editor’ As Ad Revenues Slide
...The New York Times wants to hire a “climate change editor” to make what it calls “most important story in the world” more appealing to a global audience.
“The Times is ramping up its coverage to make the most important story in the world even more relevant, urgent and accessible to a huge audience around the globe,” reads a job ad from the international edition of The Times.
Its push for more global warming coverage comes as the paper embarks on a new strategy to shed its American identity and appeal more to international audiences. It’s all part of CEO Mark Thompson’s plan to spend $50 million over three years on “a new era of international growth,” Politico reported in May....
Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers
...I've also been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don't think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers' fabled commitment to "objectivity" has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.
The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let's change that....
...“We are seeking a journalist with a compelling vision of how to expand this coverage, from boardroom to bedroom, from the loftiest corridors of power to the back alleys of the world’s most impoverished villages,” the posting states. “We are looking for a creative, passionate leader to guide a cross-platform, global coverage vertical on the topic of gender and identity.”...
NYT Looking To Hire A ‘Climate Change Editor’ As Ad Revenues Slide
...The New York Times wants to hire a “climate change editor” to make what it calls “most important story in the world” more appealing to a global audience.
“The Times is ramping up its coverage to make the most important story in the world even more relevant, urgent and accessible to a huge audience around the globe,” reads a job ad from the international edition of The Times.
Its push for more global warming coverage comes as the paper embarks on a new strategy to shed its American identity and appeal more to international audiences. It’s all part of CEO Mark Thompson’s plan to spend $50 million over three years on “a new era of international growth,” Politico reported in May....
Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers
...I've also been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don't think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers' fabled commitment to "objectivity" has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.
The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let's change that....
Health Care Is a Business, Not a Right
...Unfortunately, this leaves us with something of a problem. Reciprocal altruism is fine if all you need is for Mom to sit with you and brew you some herbal tea. But in a modern society, you need to procure health care from strangers -- which is to say, through the transactional system of market exchange. Nationalizing the health care system does not fix this fundamental disconnect between our evolved instincts and the inevitable necessities of a modern economy.
National health care systems, in other words, must make exactly the same sort of decisions that private insurers and individuals do: what is worth paying for and how much to pay....
...Before the internet, most people had no way of knowing whether there were other treatments than the ones their doctors recommended, so as long as doctors only prescribed treatments that were approved, the government could maintain the fiction that there was no calculation going on.
America has never really had that comfort, because most doctors take a lot of different kind of insurance, and they don’t know what will be covered until after they’ve discussed treatment options. So Americans could hear about a treatment, find out it wasn’t covered, get outraged, and call their congressman. This may be one reason that our system is so expensive....
...A true national health care system, along the lines of Britain or Canada, would have advantages and disadvantages over what we have now. But one advantage that it doesn’t offer is to free us from the need to think about our health care in the cold logic of dollars and cents, rather than warm and fuzzy altruistic ideals. Health care cannot be a right, full stop; it has to stop before we run out of wallet. Which means that no matter how much it horrifies, we have to stop hoping for a system that will make those hard decisions and unhappy trade-offs go away.
Why Luxury TVs Are Affordable when Basic Health Care Is Not
The Return of the Obamacare Death Spiral
Earlier this week, Aetna, which covers about 900,000 people through the health exchanges created under Obamacare, announced that it would dramatically reduce its presence those exchanges. Instead of expanding into five new states this year, as the insurer had previously planned, the company said that it would drop out of 11 of the 15 states in which it currently sells under the law.
Aetna's decision follows similar moves from other insurers: UnitedHealth announced in April that it would cease selling plans on most exchanges. Shortly after, Humana pulled out of two states, Virginia and Alabama. More than a dozen of the nonprofit health insurance cooperatives set up under the law—health insurance carriers created using government-back loans in order to spur competition—have failed entirely. While some insurers are entering the exchanges, even more are leaving.
What this means is that in several states, and even more counties, there will be only one insurer available through Obamacare. In at least one county—Pinal County, Arizona—it is likely that there will be no insurer available on the exchange at all.
This slow exodus of insurers from the health law's marketplaces represents a serious threat to the continued stability and existence of its exchanges. Obamacare is perched on the edge of a death spiral....
...Unfortunately, this leaves us with something of a problem. Reciprocal altruism is fine if all you need is for Mom to sit with you and brew you some herbal tea. But in a modern society, you need to procure health care from strangers -- which is to say, through the transactional system of market exchange. Nationalizing the health care system does not fix this fundamental disconnect between our evolved instincts and the inevitable necessities of a modern economy.
National health care systems, in other words, must make exactly the same sort of decisions that private insurers and individuals do: what is worth paying for and how much to pay....
...Before the internet, most people had no way of knowing whether there were other treatments than the ones their doctors recommended, so as long as doctors only prescribed treatments that were approved, the government could maintain the fiction that there was no calculation going on.
America has never really had that comfort, because most doctors take a lot of different kind of insurance, and they don’t know what will be covered until after they’ve discussed treatment options. So Americans could hear about a treatment, find out it wasn’t covered, get outraged, and call their congressman. This may be one reason that our system is so expensive....
...A true national health care system, along the lines of Britain or Canada, would have advantages and disadvantages over what we have now. But one advantage that it doesn’t offer is to free us from the need to think about our health care in the cold logic of dollars and cents, rather than warm and fuzzy altruistic ideals. Health care cannot be a right, full stop; it has to stop before we run out of wallet. Which means that no matter how much it horrifies, we have to stop hoping for a system that will make those hard decisions and unhappy trade-offs go away.
Why Luxury TVs Are Affordable when Basic Health Care Is Not
The Return of the Obamacare Death Spiral
Earlier this week, Aetna, which covers about 900,000 people through the health exchanges created under Obamacare, announced that it would dramatically reduce its presence those exchanges. Instead of expanding into five new states this year, as the insurer had previously planned, the company said that it would drop out of 11 of the 15 states in which it currently sells under the law.
Aetna's decision follows similar moves from other insurers: UnitedHealth announced in April that it would cease selling plans on most exchanges. Shortly after, Humana pulled out of two states, Virginia and Alabama. More than a dozen of the nonprofit health insurance cooperatives set up under the law—health insurance carriers created using government-back loans in order to spur competition—have failed entirely. While some insurers are entering the exchanges, even more are leaving.
What this means is that in several states, and even more counties, there will be only one insurer available through Obamacare. In at least one county—Pinal County, Arizona—it is likely that there will be no insurer available on the exchange at all.
This slow exodus of insurers from the health law's marketplaces represents a serious threat to the continued stability and existence of its exchanges. Obamacare is perched on the edge of a death spiral....
Newly released emails shed light on Clinton's public corruption as Secretary of State
"Newly released emails from Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state raise questions about the nature of the department's relationship with the Clinton Foundation. 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. ... 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.'" (08/10/16)
The Clinton Foundation, State and Kremlin Connections
...Soon, dozens of U.S. tech firms, including top Clinton Foundation donors like Google, Intel and Cisco, made major financial contributions to Skolkovo, with Cisco committing a cool $1 billion. In May 2010, the State Department facilitated a Moscow visit by 22 of the biggest names in U.S. venture capital—and weeks later the first memorandums of understanding were signed by Skolkovo and American companies.
By 2012 the vice president of the Skolkovo Foundation, Conor Lenihan—who had previously partnered with the Clinton Foundation—recorded that Skolkovo had assembled 28 Russian, American and European “Key Partners.” Of the 28 “partners,” 17, or 60%, have made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation, totaling tens of millions of dollars, or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton....
...Amid all the sloshing of Russia rubles and American dollars, however, the state-of-the-art technological research coming out of Skolkovo raised alarms among U.S. military experts and federal law-enforcement officials. Research conducted in 2012 on Skolkovo by the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth declared that the purpose of Skolkovo was to serve as a “vehicle for world-wide technology transfer to Russia in the areas of information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology, and nuclear technology.”..
Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal
...Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.
And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock....
THE CLINTON UNIVERSITY SCANDAL?
...But did you know that Bill Clinton was a university chancellor? I didn’t either. There he is, over to the left. Moreover, he was paid $16 million by Laureate International Universities to be their “honorary” chancellor. Just think how much Slick Willie could have pulled down if he’d been a real chancellor. Just what is Laureate International University? It’s the parent company of Walden University, a mostly online, for-profit diploma mill that is facing the same kind of civil suits and fraud allegations as Trump University. Funny how the media seems to be uninterested in this story....
Report: Hillary Clinton Would Hike Taxes By $1.3 Trillion
Hillary Clinton comes up $2.2 trillion short in paying for her policy agenda, despite hiking taxes by $1.3 trillion, according to a new analysis of the Democratic nominee’s campaign platform....
Cotton: Clinton discussed executed Iranian scientist on email
Hillary Clinton recklessly discussed, in emails hosted on her private server, an Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed by Iran for treason, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Sunday.
"I'm not going to comment on what he may or may not have done for the United States government, but in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton's private server, there were conversations among her senior advisors about this gentleman," he said on "Face the Nation." Cotton was speaking about Shahram Amiri, who gave information to the U.S. about Iran's nuclear program....
CLINTONS ALREADY PLANNING NEXT STAGE OF CORRUPTION
...While the parent Clinton Foundation will stop accepting money from foreign governments and corporations, the foundation’s largest project, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, might continue to accept foreign government and corporate funding, Clinton health initiative officials said Wednesday.
And what’s one big thing Madam President Hillary will have to do if she wins? Clean up the mess that is Obamacare....
Bill Clinton's call for mass voter fraud should be condemned
...Speaking directly to illegal aliens, Clinton stated to an applauding audience of delegates that “if you love this country, you’re working hard, you’re paying taxes and you’re obeying the law and you’d like to become a citizen, you should choose immigration reform over somebody that wants to send you back.” Unfortunately for Bill, illegal aliens (and non-citizens in general) aren’t supposed to be ‘choosing’ anyone. Like in every other country in the world, here in America only citizens are supposed to vote....
Whoops: Clinton Just Promised to Raise Taxes on Middle Class
...“Well we’re not going there, my friends. I’m telling you right now, we’re going to write fairer rules for the middle class, and we are going to raise taxes on the middle class!” Clinton proclaimed to a cheering crowd....
Crony Criminals: Department of Justice Blocked Any FBI Inquiry Into Clinton Foundation
...America is being divided, before your very eyes, into those castes with Juice and those without Juice. It's devolving into a fucking organized crime family.
We are not equal under the law -- far from it. And every day this corrupt gang makes this more and more normal and more and more acceptable to the public.
I know one thing about Trump. I can't vouch for his good intentions -- he doesn't have them -- but I know the federal government and the so-called Fourth Estate will not play Mob Lawyers for him.
Anyone who says they're for Equal Treatment Under the Law and then who supports someone who has been, is, and will continue to be Above the Law is simply a liar or hopelessly confused....
"Newly released emails from Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state raise questions about the nature of the department's relationship with the Clinton Foundation. 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. ... 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.'" (08/10/16)
The Clinton Foundation, State and Kremlin Connections
...Soon, dozens of U.S. tech firms, including top Clinton Foundation donors like Google, Intel and Cisco, made major financial contributions to Skolkovo, with Cisco committing a cool $1 billion. In May 2010, the State Department facilitated a Moscow visit by 22 of the biggest names in U.S. venture capital—and weeks later the first memorandums of understanding were signed by Skolkovo and American companies.
By 2012 the vice president of the Skolkovo Foundation, Conor Lenihan—who had previously partnered with the Clinton Foundation—recorded that Skolkovo had assembled 28 Russian, American and European “Key Partners.” Of the 28 “partners,” 17, or 60%, have made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation, totaling tens of millions of dollars, or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton....
...Amid all the sloshing of Russia rubles and American dollars, however, the state-of-the-art technological research coming out of Skolkovo raised alarms among U.S. military experts and federal law-enforcement officials. Research conducted in 2012 on Skolkovo by the U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Program at Fort Leavenworth declared that the purpose of Skolkovo was to serve as a “vehicle for world-wide technology transfer to Russia in the areas of information technology, biomedicine, energy, satellite and space technology, and nuclear technology.”..
Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal
...Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.
And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock....
THE CLINTON UNIVERSITY SCANDAL?
...But did you know that Bill Clinton was a university chancellor? I didn’t either. There he is, over to the left. Moreover, he was paid $16 million by Laureate International Universities to be their “honorary” chancellor. Just think how much Slick Willie could have pulled down if he’d been a real chancellor. Just what is Laureate International University? It’s the parent company of Walden University, a mostly online, for-profit diploma mill that is facing the same kind of civil suits and fraud allegations as Trump University. Funny how the media seems to be uninterested in this story....
Report: Hillary Clinton Would Hike Taxes By $1.3 Trillion
Hillary Clinton comes up $2.2 trillion short in paying for her policy agenda, despite hiking taxes by $1.3 trillion, according to a new analysis of the Democratic nominee’s campaign platform....
Cotton: Clinton discussed executed Iranian scientist on email
Hillary Clinton recklessly discussed, in emails hosted on her private server, an Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed by Iran for treason, Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said Sunday.
"I'm not going to comment on what he may or may not have done for the United States government, but in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton's private server, there were conversations among her senior advisors about this gentleman," he said on "Face the Nation." Cotton was speaking about Shahram Amiri, who gave information to the U.S. about Iran's nuclear program....
CLINTONS ALREADY PLANNING NEXT STAGE OF CORRUPTION
...While the parent Clinton Foundation will stop accepting money from foreign governments and corporations, the foundation’s largest project, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, might continue to accept foreign government and corporate funding, Clinton health initiative officials said Wednesday.
And what’s one big thing Madam President Hillary will have to do if she wins? Clean up the mess that is Obamacare....
Bill Clinton's call for mass voter fraud should be condemned
...Speaking directly to illegal aliens, Clinton stated to an applauding audience of delegates that “if you love this country, you’re working hard, you’re paying taxes and you’re obeying the law and you’d like to become a citizen, you should choose immigration reform over somebody that wants to send you back.” Unfortunately for Bill, illegal aliens (and non-citizens in general) aren’t supposed to be ‘choosing’ anyone. Like in every other country in the world, here in America only citizens are supposed to vote....
Whoops: Clinton Just Promised to Raise Taxes on Middle Class
...“Well we’re not going there, my friends. I’m telling you right now, we’re going to write fairer rules for the middle class, and we are going to raise taxes on the middle class!” Clinton proclaimed to a cheering crowd....
Crony Criminals: Department of Justice Blocked Any FBI Inquiry Into Clinton Foundation
...America is being divided, before your very eyes, into those castes with Juice and those without Juice. It's devolving into a fucking organized crime family.
We are not equal under the law -- far from it. And every day this corrupt gang makes this more and more normal and more and more acceptable to the public.
I know one thing about Trump. I can't vouch for his good intentions -- he doesn't have them -- but I know the federal government and the so-called Fourth Estate will not play Mob Lawyers for him.
Anyone who says they're for Equal Treatment Under the Law and then who supports someone who has been, is, and will continue to be Above the Law is simply a liar or hopelessly confused....
I dumped my fiancé for a Jamaican lover but he fleeced me of £10k and turned out to be a love rat
When Louise Chesney’s besotted fiancé Paul whisked her off to Jamaica to plan their dream beach wedding, she couldn’t have been happier.
She was so in love and says she couldn’t wait to marry her perfect man.
Yet just days into their holiday, handsome local hotel worker Caffrey Brown caught her eye. And one night, after Paul had retired to bed with a headache, they shared a kiss.
Weeks later, Louise, 24, stunned family and friends by calling off her engagement to heartbroken Paul, 48....
“I’ve lost everything – I’m thousands of pounds in debt. Yet I’m still devastated at losing Caffrey because I thought he was the love of my life.”
Throughout their year-long relationship, Louise worked six days a week at her minimum-wage care home job to save the £4,000 she needed for two trips to Jamaica to visit Caffrey....
Women are 'genetically programmed to have affairs'
...Scientists at the University of Texas say they are challenging the assumption that humans have evolved to have monogamous relationships.
The team's research has put forward the "mate-switching-hypothesis" which says humans have evolved to keep testing their relationships and looking for better long-term options....
Women Initiate Divorce Much More Than Men, Here's Why
Some new data about divorce and non-marital breakups contains an unexpected finding, and I think it underscores the fact that we're in the midst of an ongoing evolution in what people want and seek in their romantic relationships. The study, based on a survey of over 2000 heterosexual couples, found that women initiated nearly 70% of all divorces. Yet there was no significant difference between the percentage of breakups initiated by women and men in non-marriage relationships....
When Louise Chesney’s besotted fiancé Paul whisked her off to Jamaica to plan their dream beach wedding, she couldn’t have been happier.
She was so in love and says she couldn’t wait to marry her perfect man.
Yet just days into their holiday, handsome local hotel worker Caffrey Brown caught her eye. And one night, after Paul had retired to bed with a headache, they shared a kiss.
Weeks later, Louise, 24, stunned family and friends by calling off her engagement to heartbroken Paul, 48....
“I’ve lost everything – I’m thousands of pounds in debt. Yet I’m still devastated at losing Caffrey because I thought he was the love of my life.”
Throughout their year-long relationship, Louise worked six days a week at her minimum-wage care home job to save the £4,000 she needed for two trips to Jamaica to visit Caffrey....
Women are 'genetically programmed to have affairs'
...Scientists at the University of Texas say they are challenging the assumption that humans have evolved to have monogamous relationships.
The team's research has put forward the "mate-switching-hypothesis" which says humans have evolved to keep testing their relationships and looking for better long-term options....
Women Initiate Divorce Much More Than Men, Here's Why
Some new data about divorce and non-marital breakups contains an unexpected finding, and I think it underscores the fact that we're in the midst of an ongoing evolution in what people want and seek in their romantic relationships. The study, based on a survey of over 2000 heterosexual couples, found that women initiated nearly 70% of all divorces. Yet there was no significant difference between the percentage of breakups initiated by women and men in non-marriage relationships....
Sunday, August 21, 2016
Man reveals his girlfriend IGNORED his marriage proposal because it wasn't 'extravagant' enough for her
...'She was very annoyed. She looked at me and said, "This is a horrible joke, Logan" then she started crying because I "ruined it" for her.
'Then she pretended the proposal didn't happen and now she's still talking about rings like I DIDN'T PROPOSE.'
Finishing off his Reddit post, Logan admitted 'I love her, but I don't know if I'm being a jerk by not meeting her expectations - or if she's being awful.'
Not getting the reaction he wanted from his girlfriend or other Redditers, a lot of the comments on the thread were in agreement that Logan intentionally went against everything Taylor wanted in favour of what he preferred....
Bros Before Homes
On the subtle sexism of men who praise experiences over stuff.
...The superiority of experiences has become our era’s reigning banality. Consider last year’s Time profile of American anti-stuff advocates: “Minimalists like to say that they’re living more meaningfully, more deliberately, that getting rid of most material possessions in their lives allows them to focus on what’s important: friends, hobbies, travel, experiences.” We hear much the same from more recent awestruck portrait in The Guardian of the new Japanese minimalism, from a man who owns just “four pairs of socks”: “Spending less time on cleaning or shopping means I have more time to spend with friends, go out, or travel on my days off.” It’s hard for me to picture how having enough socks to last an entire wash cycle could possibly impede a social life; the reverse seems more likely....
...Tony’s essay in Toronto Life inadvertently highlights the sexism underlying the minimalist trend. It’s not just—as Ruth Whippman brilliantly demonstrated at The Pool—that the cool new tidying advice is aimed, much like older housekeeping advice, at women. It’s also that the very idea of experiences mattering more than things is a way of valorizing the stereotypically masculine. “While men are conditioned to dream big—to see their happiness in terms of adventure and travel, sex and ideas and long nights of hilarity—women are now encouraged to find deep fulfilment in staying home to origami our pants,” she wrote.
Whether women are being encouraged to rid our homes of useless belongings, or urged to shop for new ones, the result is the same: Society continues to associate women with the home and the material, men with the outside and experiences. ...
What I learned from being single for 51 years: Don't ruin your life by yearning for something you haven't yet got, says CHRISTINA PATTERSON
...The steady, reliable men I met seemed boring. What made my pulse race was charming men who made me laugh. What made my heart sing, in fact, was narcissistic charmers who played the game and often didn’t stick around....
...When I hit 30, panic kicked in. I put a skull and crossbones on the invitation to my party and pretended it was just a joke about passing time.
At 40, I had just ended a relationship with another charming bad boy. And at 50? Well, if anyone had told me when I was 30 I would still be single at 50, I would probably have picked up the phone to Dignitas....
...I don’t know if my relationship will last. None of us can know. I still live on my own. My home is my castle and I have no desire to fill it with someone else’s stuff....
Reblog: Research find that as a group, only men pay tax
...Overall, the research suggests that male taxpayers are the only ones to ever have a positive contribution in taxes. Based on Figure 17, the closest that the average woman will come to having a positive fiscal incidence is when she is at minus $50,000 around 55 years of age. While feminists are demonizing men for benefiting from all liberties and rights they have constructed, they have oddly remained silent over the fact that anonymous male tax payers are paying women to exist. Read that sentence again.
The fact that feminists want a stronger government is not a coincidence. While historically, women had to choose a wealthy husband for resources, they can now stay single, be lesbians, marry a poor man, or use the sperm bank, and the state will still transfer male taxes to them. Interestingly, within 10 years of women’s suffrage, the government doubled their tax revenue and expenditure in the USA....
Today is ‘Equal Pay Day’; the next ‘Equal Occupational Fatality Day’ will occur on April 17, 2023
...Based on the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on workplace fatalities for 2011 (and assuming those fatality data will be similar in 2012), an “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” can be calculated. As in previous years, the chart above shows the significant gender disparity in workplace fatalities: 4,234 men died on the job (92% of the total) in 2011 compared to only 375 women (8% of the total). The “gender occupational fatality gap” in 2011 was considerable — more than 11 men died on the job for every woman who died while working....
Father Accused of Raping Daughter Acquitted After 'Fifty Shades of Grey' Defense
...McCulloch studied Fifty Shades of Grey to prepare for the court proceedings. On the third day of the trial, the man's daughter took to the stand, and McCulloch used passages from the book to question the girl. After just seven minutes, she broke down and admitted she had made up the accusations to teach her "strict" father a lesson. ...
How Women Throw Themselves At Pro Athletes (And Vice Versa): A Publicist Explains
...An attractive married woman—she had a huge rock on her finger—came over and started hitting on my client immediately and relentlessly. After a while, her husband came out from the dance club area, clearly upset. He never threatened anything physical. He barely even raised his voice. He just wanted to know what she was doing. His wife played dumb. So my client spoke up: "Your girl is trying to fuck me."
The husband got into it a little with his wife. He wanted to leave. My client called over one of the bouncers and told him to get rid of the couple. The wife decided to stay. The husband got booted. He was irate. She didn't care. Five minutes later, my client was having sex with her in the back office of the club. She left, and he never talked to her again. Obviously, we have no idea what happened with the marriage.
Police: Mom poisoned her baby with teaspoon of salt to get husband ‘back into her life’
Kimberly Martines was separated from her husband and desperate to lure him back into her life, so police say she hatched a plan to get his attention: It began with poisoning her 17-month-old daughter, Peyton.
She didn’t use a household cleaner or pop open a bottle of pain medication, police told NBC affiliate WYFF. Instead, Martines, of Spartanburg, S.C., turned to a simple condiment found in almost any dining room: salt....
...'She was very annoyed. She looked at me and said, "This is a horrible joke, Logan" then she started crying because I "ruined it" for her.
'Then she pretended the proposal didn't happen and now she's still talking about rings like I DIDN'T PROPOSE.'
Finishing off his Reddit post, Logan admitted 'I love her, but I don't know if I'm being a jerk by not meeting her expectations - or if she's being awful.'
Not getting the reaction he wanted from his girlfriend or other Redditers, a lot of the comments on the thread were in agreement that Logan intentionally went against everything Taylor wanted in favour of what he preferred....
Bros Before Homes
On the subtle sexism of men who praise experiences over stuff.
...The superiority of experiences has become our era’s reigning banality. Consider last year’s Time profile of American anti-stuff advocates: “Minimalists like to say that they’re living more meaningfully, more deliberately, that getting rid of most material possessions in their lives allows them to focus on what’s important: friends, hobbies, travel, experiences.” We hear much the same from more recent awestruck portrait in The Guardian of the new Japanese minimalism, from a man who owns just “four pairs of socks”: “Spending less time on cleaning or shopping means I have more time to spend with friends, go out, or travel on my days off.” It’s hard for me to picture how having enough socks to last an entire wash cycle could possibly impede a social life; the reverse seems more likely....
...Tony’s essay in Toronto Life inadvertently highlights the sexism underlying the minimalist trend. It’s not just—as Ruth Whippman brilliantly demonstrated at The Pool—that the cool new tidying advice is aimed, much like older housekeeping advice, at women. It’s also that the very idea of experiences mattering more than things is a way of valorizing the stereotypically masculine. “While men are conditioned to dream big—to see their happiness in terms of adventure and travel, sex and ideas and long nights of hilarity—women are now encouraged to find deep fulfilment in staying home to origami our pants,” she wrote.
Whether women are being encouraged to rid our homes of useless belongings, or urged to shop for new ones, the result is the same: Society continues to associate women with the home and the material, men with the outside and experiences. ...
What I learned from being single for 51 years: Don't ruin your life by yearning for something you haven't yet got, says CHRISTINA PATTERSON
...The steady, reliable men I met seemed boring. What made my pulse race was charming men who made me laugh. What made my heart sing, in fact, was narcissistic charmers who played the game and often didn’t stick around....
...When I hit 30, panic kicked in. I put a skull and crossbones on the invitation to my party and pretended it was just a joke about passing time.
At 40, I had just ended a relationship with another charming bad boy. And at 50? Well, if anyone had told me when I was 30 I would still be single at 50, I would probably have picked up the phone to Dignitas....
...I don’t know if my relationship will last. None of us can know. I still live on my own. My home is my castle and I have no desire to fill it with someone else’s stuff....
Reblog: Research find that as a group, only men pay tax
...Overall, the research suggests that male taxpayers are the only ones to ever have a positive contribution in taxes. Based on Figure 17, the closest that the average woman will come to having a positive fiscal incidence is when she is at minus $50,000 around 55 years of age. While feminists are demonizing men for benefiting from all liberties and rights they have constructed, they have oddly remained silent over the fact that anonymous male tax payers are paying women to exist. Read that sentence again.
The fact that feminists want a stronger government is not a coincidence. While historically, women had to choose a wealthy husband for resources, they can now stay single, be lesbians, marry a poor man, or use the sperm bank, and the state will still transfer male taxes to them. Interestingly, within 10 years of women’s suffrage, the government doubled their tax revenue and expenditure in the USA....
Today is ‘Equal Pay Day’; the next ‘Equal Occupational Fatality Day’ will occur on April 17, 2023
...Based on the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on workplace fatalities for 2011 (and assuming those fatality data will be similar in 2012), an “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” can be calculated. As in previous years, the chart above shows the significant gender disparity in workplace fatalities: 4,234 men died on the job (92% of the total) in 2011 compared to only 375 women (8% of the total). The “gender occupational fatality gap” in 2011 was considerable — more than 11 men died on the job for every woman who died while working....
Father Accused of Raping Daughter Acquitted After 'Fifty Shades of Grey' Defense
...McCulloch studied Fifty Shades of Grey to prepare for the court proceedings. On the third day of the trial, the man's daughter took to the stand, and McCulloch used passages from the book to question the girl. After just seven minutes, she broke down and admitted she had made up the accusations to teach her "strict" father a lesson. ...
How Women Throw Themselves At Pro Athletes (And Vice Versa): A Publicist Explains
...An attractive married woman—she had a huge rock on her finger—came over and started hitting on my client immediately and relentlessly. After a while, her husband came out from the dance club area, clearly upset. He never threatened anything physical. He barely even raised his voice. He just wanted to know what she was doing. His wife played dumb. So my client spoke up: "Your girl is trying to fuck me."
The husband got into it a little with his wife. He wanted to leave. My client called over one of the bouncers and told him to get rid of the couple. The wife decided to stay. The husband got booted. He was irate. She didn't care. Five minutes later, my client was having sex with her in the back office of the club. She left, and he never talked to her again. Obviously, we have no idea what happened with the marriage.
Police: Mom poisoned her baby with teaspoon of salt to get husband ‘back into her life’
Kimberly Martines was separated from her husband and desperate to lure him back into her life, so police say she hatched a plan to get his attention: It began with poisoning her 17-month-old daughter, Peyton.
She didn’t use a household cleaner or pop open a bottle of pain medication, police told NBC affiliate WYFF. Instead, Martines, of Spartanburg, S.C., turned to a simple condiment found in almost any dining room: salt....
Hard Times in Venezuela Breed Malaria as Desperate Flock to Mines - The New York Times
As a computer technician from a big city, Mr. Balocha was ill-suited for the mines, his soft hands used to working keyboards, not the earth. But Venezuela’s economy collapsed on so many levels that inflation had obliterated his salary, along with his hopes of preserving a middle-class life.
So, like tens of thousands of other people from across the country, Mr. Balocha came to these open, swampy mines scattered across the jungle, looking for a future. Here, waiters, office workers, taxi drivers, college graduates and even civil servants on vacation from their government jobs are out panning for black-market gold, all under the watchful eyes of an armed group that taxes them and threatens to tie them to posts if they disobey.
It is a society turned upside down, a place where educated people abandon once-comfortable jobs in the city for dangerous, backbreaking work in muddy pits, desperate to make ends meet. And it comes with a steep price: Malaria, long driven to the fringes of the country, is festering in the mines and back with a vengeance.
As a computer technician from a big city, Mr. Balocha was ill-suited for the mines, his soft hands used to working keyboards, not the earth. But Venezuela’s economy collapsed on so many levels that inflation had obliterated his salary, along with his hopes of preserving a middle-class life.
So, like tens of thousands of other people from across the country, Mr. Balocha came to these open, swampy mines scattered across the jungle, looking for a future. Here, waiters, office workers, taxi drivers, college graduates and even civil servants on vacation from their government jobs are out panning for black-market gold, all under the watchful eyes of an armed group that taxes them and threatens to tie them to posts if they disobey.
It is a society turned upside down, a place where educated people abandon once-comfortable jobs in the city for dangerous, backbreaking work in muddy pits, desperate to make ends meet. And it comes with a steep price: Malaria, long driven to the fringes of the country, is festering in the mines and back with a vengeance.
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Study: ColoradoCare can't cover its costs
KUSA - The 2016 ballot initiative to give every Coloradan healthcare won’t be able to cover its costs, according to a study released Monday by the Colorado Health Institute.
That’s despite the fact that the proposed amendment 69, known as ColoradoCare, would more than triple the amount of taxes collected by the state.
“Simply put, the revenue would not be sufficient,” the report stated. “CHI’s model projects that the revenue from taxes and federal funds would fall just short of paying ColoradoCare’s bills in the first year – with widening deficits in each subsequent year.”...
KUSA - The 2016 ballot initiative to give every Coloradan healthcare won’t be able to cover its costs, according to a study released Monday by the Colorado Health Institute.
That’s despite the fact that the proposed amendment 69, known as ColoradoCare, would more than triple the amount of taxes collected by the state.
“Simply put, the revenue would not be sufficient,” the report stated. “CHI’s model projects that the revenue from taxes and federal funds would fall just short of paying ColoradoCare’s bills in the first year – with widening deficits in each subsequent year.”...
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image
...This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove cultures toward linear left-brain thinking and this shift upset the balance between men and women, initiating the decline of the feminine and ushering in patriarchal rule. Examining the cultures of the Israelites, Greeks, Christians, and Muslims, Shlain reinterprets ancient myths and parables in light of his theory. Provocative and inspiring, this book is a paradigm-shattering work that will transform your view of history and the mind...
NY Times Complains That Inventing Fire Caused Sexism, Global Warming
...“Anthropologists have speculated that inhaling smoke led to the discovery of smoking,” Humans have long used fire to modify their environment and burn carbon, practices that now have us in the throes of climate change. Fire is even tied to the rise of patriarchy — by allowing men to go out hunting while women stayed behind to cook by the fire, it spawned gender norms that still exist today....
...This groundbreaking book proposes that the rise of alphabetic literacy reconfigured the human brain and brought about profound changes in history, religion, and gender relations. Making remarkable connections across brain function, myth, and anthropology, Dr. Shlain shows why pre-literate cultures were principally informed by holistic, right-brain modes that venerated the Goddess, images, and feminine values. Writing drove cultures toward linear left-brain thinking and this shift upset the balance between men and women, initiating the decline of the feminine and ushering in patriarchal rule. Examining the cultures of the Israelites, Greeks, Christians, and Muslims, Shlain reinterprets ancient myths and parables in light of his theory. Provocative and inspiring, this book is a paradigm-shattering work that will transform your view of history and the mind...
NY Times Complains That Inventing Fire Caused Sexism, Global Warming
...“Anthropologists have speculated that inhaling smoke led to the discovery of smoking,” Humans have long used fire to modify their environment and burn carbon, practices that now have us in the throes of climate change. Fire is even tied to the rise of patriarchy — by allowing men to go out hunting while women stayed behind to cook by the fire, it spawned gender norms that still exist today....
Elsewhere (208)
...I started giving quizzes to my juniors and seniors. I gave them a ten-question American history test… just to see where they are. The vast majority of my students - I’m talking nine out of ten, in every single class, for seven consecutive years – they have no idea that slavery existed anywhere in the world before the United States. Moses, Pharaoh, they know none of it. They’re 100% convinced that slavery is a uniquely American invention… How do you give an adequate view of history and culture to kids when that’s what they think of their own country – that America invented slavery? That’s all they know....
...I started giving quizzes to my juniors and seniors. I gave them a ten-question American history test… just to see where they are. The vast majority of my students - I’m talking nine out of ten, in every single class, for seven consecutive years – they have no idea that slavery existed anywhere in the world before the United States. Moses, Pharaoh, they know none of it. They’re 100% convinced that slavery is a uniquely American invention… How do you give an adequate view of history and culture to kids when that’s what they think of their own country – that America invented slavery? That’s all they know....
Pew data: Heavy majority of asylum seekers in Europe are young men under the age of 35
Military-Aged Men Extremely Over-Represented in EU Refugee Asylum Applications
...As a result, about four-in-ten asylum seekers in Europe in 2015 (42%) were young men ages 18 to 34. This was also true for most leading origin countries: 39% of those from Syria were young men, as were 38% of those from Afghanistan and 47% of those from Iraq. Young adult males made up a larger share of asylum seekers from some origin countries. For example, roughly three-fourths of asylum seekers from Gambia (80%), Pakistan (76%) and Bangladesh (76%) were young adult men in 2015....
Military-Aged Men Extremely Over-Represented in EU Refugee Asylum Applications
...As a result, about four-in-ten asylum seekers in Europe in 2015 (42%) were young men ages 18 to 34. This was also true for most leading origin countries: 39% of those from Syria were young men, as were 38% of those from Afghanistan and 47% of those from Iraq. Young adult males made up a larger share of asylum seekers from some origin countries. For example, roughly three-fourths of asylum seekers from Gambia (80%), Pakistan (76%) and Bangladesh (76%) were young adult men in 2015....
"The ['Hillary Care'] plan prescribed some eye-popping maximum fines: $5,000 for refusing to join the government mandated health plan; $5,000 for failing to pay premiums on time; 15 years in prison for doctors who received ‘anything of value’ in exchange for helping patients short circuit bureaucracy; $10,000 a day for faulty physician paperwork; and $50,000 for unauthorized patient treatment. When told the plan could bankrupt small businesses, Mrs. Clinton said, 'I can’t be responsible for every under-capitalized small business in America'!"
-- Tony Snow reporting on Hillary's health care plan
MAILBAG
...This is not a joke nor even an exaggeration. I just found out that my sister in law’s other brother-in-law was arrested in Venezuela at the airport while trying to leave the country. His crime, he was an employee for a company that went out of business. Waiting for more? There isn’t any. Maduro has decreed that any business that goes out of business has committed economic treason and its employees are subject to arrest. They had already arrested numerous owners and managers but this is the first time they went after rank and file worker bees....
How Venezuela's Repressive Government Controls the Nation Through Hunger
...In addition, lines and rationing give the government the chance to extend Orwellian supervision. Retailers are being required to keep tabs on who buys what and how much. The government has installed fingerprint scanners in grocery and drug stores. The government has seized supplies from food firms and threatened to take over idle factories. The police often allow certain groups of citizens (many with ties to the ruling party) to control access to the lines or even mug people standing in line.
Lines and scarcity give the government the chance to engage in new forms of favoritism. One of the most important games in Venezuela is guessing which stores will have which products. Only the government, which controls food distribution, knows this information for sure. So one of the games it has started playing is to disclose information only to those who are pro-government.
Another form of favoritism has been the creation of CLAPs (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción). These are government-run "committees" that distribute groceries. Bags of groceries are given mostly to loyal groups. By the end of May, more than 9,000 CLAPS were operating. A recent poll suggests that at least 9 percent of Venezuelans are taking advantage of the CLAPs. CLAPs do nothing to end Venezuela's food crisis but they do wonders for the government: they force Venezuelans to demonstrate loyalty to Maduro regime in order to qualify for the handout.
But the most important consequence of lines and rationing has been the increase in military control. Military personnel have been deployed to monitor food lines and supermarkets. They are there with the pretext of protecting citizens from crime, but what they are most successful in doing is repressing any protest that might emerge....
Looking back on the Great Leap Forward
...In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected. ...
...What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool – punishment for digging up a potato.
Caribbean contagion
...For the past 15 years Venezuela has been shipping oil to Cuba, which in turn sends thousands of doctors and other professionals to Venezuela. The swap is lucrative for the communist-controlled island, which pays doctors a paltry few hundred dollars a month. It gets more oil than it needs, and sells the surplus. That makes Cuba perhaps the only importer that prefers high oil prices. Venezuelan support is thought to be worth 12-20% of Cuba’s GDP....
... Tourism has surged since the United States loosened travel restrictions in 2014, which will partially offset the loss of Venezuelan aid. The cost of fuel is minuscule compared with the fares Hector’s American passengers pay....
Venezuelan court upholds 14-year jail term given to opposition leader, Leopoldo Lopez
A Venezuelan court upheld the 14-year sentence of jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez on Friday, in a move likely to increase tension in the crisis-hit South American country.
Lopez has repeatedly declared himself innocent of the charge of inciting violence at anti-government protests in 2014, calling himself a political prisoner.
"This is certainly a political trial. Unfortunately, the government's interest takes priority over the justice system," Lopez's lawyer Juan Carlos Gutierrez told AFP.
"They upheld his sentence under the same terms," Gutierrez said, referring to the 14-year sentence....
-- Tony Snow reporting on Hillary's health care plan
MAILBAG
...This is not a joke nor even an exaggeration. I just found out that my sister in law’s other brother-in-law was arrested in Venezuela at the airport while trying to leave the country. His crime, he was an employee for a company that went out of business. Waiting for more? There isn’t any. Maduro has decreed that any business that goes out of business has committed economic treason and its employees are subject to arrest. They had already arrested numerous owners and managers but this is the first time they went after rank and file worker bees....
How Venezuela's Repressive Government Controls the Nation Through Hunger
...In addition, lines and rationing give the government the chance to extend Orwellian supervision. Retailers are being required to keep tabs on who buys what and how much. The government has installed fingerprint scanners in grocery and drug stores. The government has seized supplies from food firms and threatened to take over idle factories. The police often allow certain groups of citizens (many with ties to the ruling party) to control access to the lines or even mug people standing in line.
Lines and scarcity give the government the chance to engage in new forms of favoritism. One of the most important games in Venezuela is guessing which stores will have which products. Only the government, which controls food distribution, knows this information for sure. So one of the games it has started playing is to disclose information only to those who are pro-government.
Another form of favoritism has been the creation of CLAPs (Comités Locales de Abastecimiento y Producción). These are government-run "committees" that distribute groceries. Bags of groceries are given mostly to loyal groups. By the end of May, more than 9,000 CLAPS were operating. A recent poll suggests that at least 9 percent of Venezuelans are taking advantage of the CLAPs. CLAPs do nothing to end Venezuela's food crisis but they do wonders for the government: they force Venezuelans to demonstrate loyalty to Maduro regime in order to qualify for the handout.
But the most important consequence of lines and rationing has been the increase in military control. Military personnel have been deployed to monitor food lines and supermarkets. They are there with the pretext of protecting citizens from crime, but what they are most successful in doing is repressing any protest that might emerge....
Looking back on the Great Leap Forward
...In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. As incentives to work were removed, coercion and violence were used instead to compel famished farmers to perform labour on poorly planned irrigation projects while fields were neglected. ...
...What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962. It is not merely the extent of the catastrophe that dwarfs earlier estimates, but also the manner in which many people died: between two and three million victims were tortured to death or summarily killed, often for the slightest infraction. When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, local boss Xiong Dechang forced his father to bury him alive. The father died of grief a few days later. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied with iron wire, a ten kilogram stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a sizzling tool – punishment for digging up a potato.
Caribbean contagion
...For the past 15 years Venezuela has been shipping oil to Cuba, which in turn sends thousands of doctors and other professionals to Venezuela. The swap is lucrative for the communist-controlled island, which pays doctors a paltry few hundred dollars a month. It gets more oil than it needs, and sells the surplus. That makes Cuba perhaps the only importer that prefers high oil prices. Venezuelan support is thought to be worth 12-20% of Cuba’s GDP....
... Tourism has surged since the United States loosened travel restrictions in 2014, which will partially offset the loss of Venezuelan aid. The cost of fuel is minuscule compared with the fares Hector’s American passengers pay....
Venezuelan court upholds 14-year jail term given to opposition leader, Leopoldo Lopez
A Venezuelan court upheld the 14-year sentence of jailed opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez on Friday, in a move likely to increase tension in the crisis-hit South American country.
Lopez has repeatedly declared himself innocent of the charge of inciting violence at anti-government protests in 2014, calling himself a political prisoner.
"This is certainly a political trial. Unfortunately, the government's interest takes priority over the justice system," Lopez's lawyer Juan Carlos Gutierrez told AFP.
"They upheld his sentence under the same terms," Gutierrez said, referring to the 14-year sentence....
Secret Deal Among AGs to Prosecute Climate Change ‘Deniers’ Challenged in Court
By signing a “secrecy pact” with fellow Democrat attorneys general preparing to prosecute climate change skeptics, Rhode Island’s top law enforcement officer jeopardized free speech rights and government transparency laws, according to two legal organizations that have taken him to court.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin’s tactics in supporting President Barack Obama’s climate change policy violate state law guaranteeing access to public records, the two groups, Energy and Environment Legal Institute and Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, claim in their lawsuit.
If Kilmartin and the other attorneys general prevail in the deal to keep select details secret, the ordinary citizen will be the loser, Chris Horner, a leading critic of climate change orthodoxy, said.
“It will mean that they can create privilege for what are otherwise public records, even when shared with ideological activists and donors, so long as everyone who wants to keep their scheming secret agrees in advance,” Horner told The Daily Signal....
By signing a “secrecy pact” with fellow Democrat attorneys general preparing to prosecute climate change skeptics, Rhode Island’s top law enforcement officer jeopardized free speech rights and government transparency laws, according to two legal organizations that have taken him to court.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin’s tactics in supporting President Barack Obama’s climate change policy violate state law guaranteeing access to public records, the two groups, Energy and Environment Legal Institute and Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, claim in their lawsuit.
If Kilmartin and the other attorneys general prevail in the deal to keep select details secret, the ordinary citizen will be the loser, Chris Horner, a leading critic of climate change orthodoxy, said.
“It will mean that they can create privilege for what are otherwise public records, even when shared with ideological activists and donors, so long as everyone who wants to keep their scheming secret agrees in advance,” Horner told The Daily Signal....
How Paul Krugman Made Donald Trump Possible
...In 2012, Krugman called Mitt Romney a “charlatan,” pathologically dishonest, and untrustworthy. He said Romney doesn’t even pretend to care about poor people and wants people to die so that the rich could get richer. Romney is “completely amoral,” “a dangerous fool,” “ignorant as well as uncaring.”
In March, Krugman had a column called “Clash of Republican Con Artists.” In it, he called Trump’s foreign policy more reasonable than that of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz and said he’s just as terrified of either of those men in the White House as he is of Trump. He wrote: “In fact, you have to wonder why, exactly, the Republican establishment is really so horrified by Mr. Trump. Yes, he’s a con man, but they all are. So why is this con job different from any other?”
Yet a few weeks ago Krugman wondered how Republicans could rally around Trump “just as if he were a normal candidate.” It was exactly Krugman who normalized him! What makes Donald Trump normal to so many is that they’ve heard all the hysteria from people like Krugman before. If you use the most vile language available on a good man like Romney, or on real candidates like Rubio and Cruz, you find you have none left for the Donald Trumps of the world—and no one is listening to you anyway....
Harvard law prof: Saying at work that “Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be president because women shouldn’t work full-time” may lead to a harassment lawsuit
...According to Prof. Feldman, then, harassment law can require employers to suppress even speech criticizing a presidential candidate, if that speech expresses a sexist viewpoint. Indeed, nothing about Prof. Feldman’s analysis turns on Clinton being a candidate — if Clinton is elected, criticizing her actions as president on the grounds that her sex is causing her to act unsoundly would likewise help create a “hostile work environment.” Employers would thus be obligated to suppress such criticisms by their employees or face the risk of massive civil liability.
But wait: Prof. Feldman’s Hillary Clinton examples comes in a column that explains why the EEOC is right to order an investigation of a co-worker’s displaying a Gadsden flag, even though it’s not racist on its face — according to the column (and the EEOC), the employer has to “investigat[e] … the specific complaint’s context to see if workplace racism was in play.” This means that even if an employee complaints that a co-worker was criticizing Hillary Clinton without using overtly sexist arguments, but the employee perceived the underlying message as sexist, the employer would then have to investigate the “context to see if workplace [sexism] was in play.”...
...Pro-Trump statements? Too dangerous for employers to allow, so long as someone perceives them as sending an implicitly anti-Hispanic or anti-Muslim message. (Prof. Feldman doesn’t deny that such statements could require employer investigations, even if they are just “Vote Trump”; his response to “What if, [Volokh] asks, someone considers a pro-Donald Trump workplace symbol to be racial harassment?” is ultimately “Speech that’s constitutionally protected elsewhere is restricted at work,” and by this he means restricted by the government’s coercive power and not just by private employer choice.) Anti-Clinton statements? Too dangerous for employers to allow. How convenient….
Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism
...It would also be an abdication of political journalism’s most solemn duty: to ferret out what the candidates will be like in the most powerful office in the world.
It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.
The Trump Riots That are Mostly My Fault
...In the future, the media will kill famous people to generate news that people will care about. – The Dilbert Future (May 1997)
Three months later, the media chased Princess Di into a tunnel and created a dangerous situation that killed her but was terrific for television news ratings. The media didn’t plot to kill anyone, but they created a situation that made it likely someone important would die because of the way their business model works. That was the basis for my prediction.
Fast-forward to today and we see the media priming the public to try to kill Trump, or at least create some photogenic mayhem at a public event. Again, no one is sitting in a room plotting Trump’s death, but – let’s be honest – at least half of the media believes Trump is the next Hitler, and a Hitler assassination would be morally justified. Also great for ratings. The media would not be charged with any crime for triggering some nut to act. There would be no smoking gun. No guilt. No repercussions. Just better ratings and bonuses all around...
...In 2012, Krugman called Mitt Romney a “charlatan,” pathologically dishonest, and untrustworthy. He said Romney doesn’t even pretend to care about poor people and wants people to die so that the rich could get richer. Romney is “completely amoral,” “a dangerous fool,” “ignorant as well as uncaring.”
In March, Krugman had a column called “Clash of Republican Con Artists.” In it, he called Trump’s foreign policy more reasonable than that of Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz and said he’s just as terrified of either of those men in the White House as he is of Trump. He wrote: “In fact, you have to wonder why, exactly, the Republican establishment is really so horrified by Mr. Trump. Yes, he’s a con man, but they all are. So why is this con job different from any other?”
Yet a few weeks ago Krugman wondered how Republicans could rally around Trump “just as if he were a normal candidate.” It was exactly Krugman who normalized him! What makes Donald Trump normal to so many is that they’ve heard all the hysteria from people like Krugman before. If you use the most vile language available on a good man like Romney, or on real candidates like Rubio and Cruz, you find you have none left for the Donald Trumps of the world—and no one is listening to you anyway....
Harvard law prof: Saying at work that “Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be president because women shouldn’t work full-time” may lead to a harassment lawsuit
...According to Prof. Feldman, then, harassment law can require employers to suppress even speech criticizing a presidential candidate, if that speech expresses a sexist viewpoint. Indeed, nothing about Prof. Feldman’s analysis turns on Clinton being a candidate — if Clinton is elected, criticizing her actions as president on the grounds that her sex is causing her to act unsoundly would likewise help create a “hostile work environment.” Employers would thus be obligated to suppress such criticisms by their employees or face the risk of massive civil liability.
But wait: Prof. Feldman’s Hillary Clinton examples comes in a column that explains why the EEOC is right to order an investigation of a co-worker’s displaying a Gadsden flag, even though it’s not racist on its face — according to the column (and the EEOC), the employer has to “investigat[e] … the specific complaint’s context to see if workplace racism was in play.” This means that even if an employee complaints that a co-worker was criticizing Hillary Clinton without using overtly sexist arguments, but the employee perceived the underlying message as sexist, the employer would then have to investigate the “context to see if workplace [sexism] was in play.”...
...Pro-Trump statements? Too dangerous for employers to allow, so long as someone perceives them as sending an implicitly anti-Hispanic or anti-Muslim message. (Prof. Feldman doesn’t deny that such statements could require employer investigations, even if they are just “Vote Trump”; his response to “What if, [Volokh] asks, someone considers a pro-Donald Trump workplace symbol to be racial harassment?” is ultimately “Speech that’s constitutionally protected elsewhere is restricted at work,” and by this he means restricted by the government’s coercive power and not just by private employer choice.) Anti-Clinton statements? Too dangerous for employers to allow. How convenient….
Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism
...It would also be an abdication of political journalism’s most solemn duty: to ferret out what the candidates will be like in the most powerful office in the world.
It may not always seem fair to Mr. Trump or his supporters. But journalism shouldn’t measure itself against any one campaign’s definition of fairness. It is journalism’s job to be true to the readers and viewers, and true to the facts, in a way that will stand up to history’s judgment. To do anything less would be untenable.
The Trump Riots That are Mostly My Fault
...In the future, the media will kill famous people to generate news that people will care about. – The Dilbert Future (May 1997)
Three months later, the media chased Princess Di into a tunnel and created a dangerous situation that killed her but was terrific for television news ratings. The media didn’t plot to kill anyone, but they created a situation that made it likely someone important would die because of the way their business model works. That was the basis for my prediction.
Fast-forward to today and we see the media priming the public to try to kill Trump, or at least create some photogenic mayhem at a public event. Again, no one is sitting in a room plotting Trump’s death, but – let’s be honest – at least half of the media believes Trump is the next Hitler, and a Hitler assassination would be morally justified. Also great for ratings. The media would not be charged with any crime for triggering some nut to act. There would be no smoking gun. No guilt. No repercussions. Just better ratings and bonuses all around...
Why Did a Journal for Christian Pastors Give a Platform to a Sexual Predator?
...The first big problem (besides the part where he essentially says it was his wife who drove him to this, which is next door to saying he didn’t have a choice in the matter) is that he never really seems to get that what he did to this minor was rape. Instead, he swaddles the entire story in Christianese, using it to distance himself from his actions and make the whole situation sound… normal. As if it were, at worst, an affair. Just look at the very next paragraph:...
Disturbing Lesson from Christian Workbook Discusses Why God Allowed a Little Boy to “Be Molested”
...God will severely judge the fifteen year old boy for the evil that he did. However, your son can turn what was meant for evil into good. The vaccinations we receive for various diseases contains a small amount of the actual disease. Our immune system builds up a reaction to it so that if our body is exposed to the disease, it is prepared to fight it off. A similar result can occur in the life of your son if this matter handled in a Scriptural way....
Cooking, cleaning and making babies: Inside the ultra-conservative Christian 'cult' Gloriavale where women's lives are strictly controlled and they have no contact with the outside world
..The documentary focuses on a few women in particular - 22-year-old Dove Love who is a kitchen manager and preparing for her upcoming marriage to 17-year-old builder Watchful Steadfast.
Dove Love is doing the washing for everybody in the community, when Watchful Steadfast arrives her her house with a bunch of flowers as a marriage proposal.
She admits she didn't know she was getting married until hours beforehand.
Once the couple is married and they exchange vows - where the woman promises to submit to the man and the man vows to be a leader, they embrace before going to a consummation room where they are expected to lose their virginities....
Teen-raping Texas pastor gets life in prison after using the Bible to justify abusing women
A volunteer youth pastor was sentenced to life in prison in Texas this week for sexually assaulting multiple teens at his church, reports the Houston Chronicle.
Dell Ivan Godkin, 48, was found guilty of sexually abusing one victim beginning when she was 13-years-old, and continuing until she was 17, by telling her God approved of what they were doing.
“He would say lots of things about God being OK with it,” explained prosecutor Monica Cooper, adding that Godkin would cite passages from the Bible to explain the roles of men and women to his victims...
...The first big problem (besides the part where he essentially says it was his wife who drove him to this, which is next door to saying he didn’t have a choice in the matter) is that he never really seems to get that what he did to this minor was rape. Instead, he swaddles the entire story in Christianese, using it to distance himself from his actions and make the whole situation sound… normal. As if it were, at worst, an affair. Just look at the very next paragraph:...
Disturbing Lesson from Christian Workbook Discusses Why God Allowed a Little Boy to “Be Molested”
...God will severely judge the fifteen year old boy for the evil that he did. However, your son can turn what was meant for evil into good. The vaccinations we receive for various diseases contains a small amount of the actual disease. Our immune system builds up a reaction to it so that if our body is exposed to the disease, it is prepared to fight it off. A similar result can occur in the life of your son if this matter handled in a Scriptural way....
Cooking, cleaning and making babies: Inside the ultra-conservative Christian 'cult' Gloriavale where women's lives are strictly controlled and they have no contact with the outside world
..The documentary focuses on a few women in particular - 22-year-old Dove Love who is a kitchen manager and preparing for her upcoming marriage to 17-year-old builder Watchful Steadfast.
Dove Love is doing the washing for everybody in the community, when Watchful Steadfast arrives her her house with a bunch of flowers as a marriage proposal.
She admits she didn't know she was getting married until hours beforehand.
Once the couple is married and they exchange vows - where the woman promises to submit to the man and the man vows to be a leader, they embrace before going to a consummation room where they are expected to lose their virginities....
Teen-raping Texas pastor gets life in prison after using the Bible to justify abusing women
A volunteer youth pastor was sentenced to life in prison in Texas this week for sexually assaulting multiple teens at his church, reports the Houston Chronicle.
Dell Ivan Godkin, 48, was found guilty of sexually abusing one victim beginning when she was 13-years-old, and continuing until she was 17, by telling her God approved of what they were doing.
“He would say lots of things about God being OK with it,” explained prosecutor Monica Cooper, adding that Godkin would cite passages from the Bible to explain the roles of men and women to his victims...
PEGGY NOONAN ON HOW GLOBAL ELITES HAVE MORE LOYALTY TO EACH OTHER THAN TO THE CITIZENS THEY CONTROL
...In Manhattan, my little island off the continent, I see the children of the global business elite marry each other and settle in London or New York or Mumbai. They send their children to the same schools and are alert to all class markers. And those elites, of Mumbai and Manhattan, do not often identify with, or see a connection to or an obligation toward, the rough, struggling people who live at the bottom in their countries. In fact, they fear them, and often devise ways, when home, of not having their wealth and worldly success fully noticed.
Affluence detaches, power adds distance to experience. I don’t have it fully right in my mind but something big is happening here with this division between the leaders and the led. It is very much a feature of our age. But it is odd that our elites have abandoned or are abandoning the idea that they belong to a country, that they have ties that bring responsibilities, that they should feel loyalty to their people or, at the very least, a grounded respect.
I close with a story that I haven’t seen in the mainstream press. This week the Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson reported that recent Syrian refugees being resettled in Virginia, were sent to the state’s poorest communities. Data from the State Department showed that almost all Virginia’s refugees since October “have been placed in towns with lower incomes and higher poverty rates, hours away from the wealthy suburbs outside of Washington, D.C.” Of 121 refugees, 112 were placed in communities at least 100 miles from the nation’s capital. The suburban counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington—among the wealthiest in the nation, and home to high concentrations of those who create, and populate, government and the media—have received only nine refugees.
Some of the detachment isn’t unconscious. Some of it is sheer and clever self-protection. At least on some level they can take care of their own....
Peggy Noonan: How Globalists Forsake Their Countrymen
Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street--that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending--because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.
The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.”
...
The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling.
...
From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.
So Conservatives, What Have We Learned From This Trump Thing?
...Our base demanded someone who wouldn’t be intimidated, who would fight. Instead, the establishment was dead set on dumping a steaming pile of Jeb on our collective lawn, the same durrwood you can watch on YouTube hanging a medal around Hillary Clinton's wrinkled neck. That pompous geebo can’t even take his own damn side in a fight; why is anyone shocked that our voters saw he would never take theirs?
So what have we learned about ourselves? Maybe that many of us are snobs. There's a lot of class warfare going on here, a lot of backroom snark, with a lot of conservatives who want to believe that the only people who could ever support Donald Trump are knuckle-dragging morons who can't cut it when it comes to anything besides digging ditches. Too many of us choose cultural solidarity with the liberals we live among over political solidarity with the people we expected to vote with us....
...In Manhattan, my little island off the continent, I see the children of the global business elite marry each other and settle in London or New York or Mumbai. They send their children to the same schools and are alert to all class markers. And those elites, of Mumbai and Manhattan, do not often identify with, or see a connection to or an obligation toward, the rough, struggling people who live at the bottom in their countries. In fact, they fear them, and often devise ways, when home, of not having their wealth and worldly success fully noticed.
Affluence detaches, power adds distance to experience. I don’t have it fully right in my mind but something big is happening here with this division between the leaders and the led. It is very much a feature of our age. But it is odd that our elites have abandoned or are abandoning the idea that they belong to a country, that they have ties that bring responsibilities, that they should feel loyalty to their people or, at the very least, a grounded respect.
I close with a story that I haven’t seen in the mainstream press. This week the Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson reported that recent Syrian refugees being resettled in Virginia, were sent to the state’s poorest communities. Data from the State Department showed that almost all Virginia’s refugees since October “have been placed in towns with lower incomes and higher poverty rates, hours away from the wealthy suburbs outside of Washington, D.C.” Of 121 refugees, 112 were placed in communities at least 100 miles from the nation’s capital. The suburban counties of Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington—among the wealthiest in the nation, and home to high concentrations of those who create, and populate, government and the media—have received only nine refugees.
Some of the detachment isn’t unconscious. Some of it is sheer and clever self-protection. At least on some level they can take care of their own....
Peggy Noonan: How Globalists Forsake Their Countrymen
Nothing in their lives will get worse. The challenge of integrating different cultures, negotiating daily tensions, dealing with crime and extremism and fearfulness on the street--that was put on those with comparatively little, whom I’ve called the unprotected. They were left to struggle, not gradually and over the years but suddenly and in an air of ongoing crisis that shows no signs of ending--because nobody cares about them enough to stop it.
The powerful show no particular sign of worrying about any of this. When the working and middle class pushed back in shocked indignation, the people on top called them “xenophobic,” “narrow-minded,” “racist.” The detached, who made the decisions and bore none of the costs, got to be called “humanist,” “compassionate,” and “hero of human rights.”
...
The larger point is that this is something we are seeing all over, the top detaching itself from the bottom, feeling little loyalty to it or affiliation with it. It is a theme I see working its way throughout the West’s power centers. At its heart it is not only a detachment from, but a lack of interest in, the lives of your countrymen, of those who are not at the table, and who understand that they’ve been abandoned by their leaders’ selfishness and mad virtue-signalling.
...
From what I’ve seen of those in power throughout business and politics now, the people of your country are not your countrymen, they’re aliens whose bizarre emotions you must attempt occasionally to anticipate and manage.
So Conservatives, What Have We Learned From This Trump Thing?
...Our base demanded someone who wouldn’t be intimidated, who would fight. Instead, the establishment was dead set on dumping a steaming pile of Jeb on our collective lawn, the same durrwood you can watch on YouTube hanging a medal around Hillary Clinton's wrinkled neck. That pompous geebo can’t even take his own damn side in a fight; why is anyone shocked that our voters saw he would never take theirs?
So what have we learned about ourselves? Maybe that many of us are snobs. There's a lot of class warfare going on here, a lot of backroom snark, with a lot of conservatives who want to believe that the only people who could ever support Donald Trump are knuckle-dragging morons who can't cut it when it comes to anything besides digging ditches. Too many of us choose cultural solidarity with the liberals we live among over political solidarity with the people we expected to vote with us....
NASA: Antarctic Sea Ice Reaches New Record Maximum
Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s. The upward trend in the Antarctic, however, is only about a third of the magnitude of the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean....
Massive Increase In Arctic Sea Ice Over Last Year
Experts say that the Arctic is melting down.
The area of 1.5 meter (5 foot) thick ice in the Arctic has more than doubled over last year, and total volume has massively increased. The animation below shows only ice 1.5+ meters thick....
Sea ice surrounding Antarctica reached a new record high extent this year, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s. The upward trend in the Antarctic, however, is only about a third of the magnitude of the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean....
Massive Increase In Arctic Sea Ice Over Last Year
Experts say that the Arctic is melting down.
The area of 1.5 meter (5 foot) thick ice in the Arctic has more than doubled over last year, and total volume has massively increased. The animation below shows only ice 1.5+ meters thick....
Sunday, July 31, 2016
The Victims of War
...Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. ...
Ready for Hillary: Pennsylvania Democrat Delegate Shoots Her Husband
Donald Trump Just Got Hillary Clinton To Admit Her E-mails Are A ‘National Security Issue’
...Sullivan did not explain how the e-mails, which Clinton said were about nothing more than her “yoga routines” and wedding planning for her daughter, could possibly pose a national security risk to the United States. Sullivan also failed to explain how unclassified e-mails “private personal e-mails” wholly unrelated to her work as Secretary of State — Clinton declared in an infamous 2015 press conference that she “did not email any classified material to anyone on my email” — could compromise American security.
Contrary to Sullivan’s assertion about the unprecedented nature of Russian meddling in U.S. elections, former U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) begged the Soviets to help him get rid of President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
...Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. ...
Ready for Hillary: Pennsylvania Democrat Delegate Shoots Her Husband
Donald Trump Just Got Hillary Clinton To Admit Her E-mails Are A ‘National Security Issue’
...Sullivan did not explain how the e-mails, which Clinton said were about nothing more than her “yoga routines” and wedding planning for her daughter, could possibly pose a national security risk to the United States. Sullivan also failed to explain how unclassified e-mails “private personal e-mails” wholly unrelated to her work as Secretary of State — Clinton declared in an infamous 2015 press conference that she “did not email any classified material to anyone on my email” — could compromise American security.
Contrary to Sullivan’s assertion about the unprecedented nature of Russian meddling in U.S. elections, former U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) begged the Soviets to help him get rid of President Ronald Reagan in 1984.
New stricter sexual-assault laws in Germany are making refugee activists uneasy
BERLIN — After mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year's Eve, the German Parliament voted Thursday in favor of a stricter sexual-assault law that also could ease deportation rules for refugees convicted of sex-related offenses.
The new law sharpens punishments for anyone convicted of sexual assault regardless of nationality, but it specifies jail-then-deportation rules for convicted refugees who have sought asylum in Germany....
Democratic Faith Council Member: White Christian Men, Not Muslims, Should Apologize For Terrorism
...He added, “If anybody needs to be apologizing for violence in this country it does need to be American white Christians.”...
BERLIN — After mass sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year's Eve, the German Parliament voted Thursday in favor of a stricter sexual-assault law that also could ease deportation rules for refugees convicted of sex-related offenses.
The new law sharpens punishments for anyone convicted of sexual assault regardless of nationality, but it specifies jail-then-deportation rules for convicted refugees who have sought asylum in Germany....
Democratic Faith Council Member: White Christian Men, Not Muslims, Should Apologize For Terrorism
...He added, “If anybody needs to be apologizing for violence in this country it does need to be American white Christians.”...
New Study, Scientists: ’20th Century Warming Not Very Obvious In Our Reconstruction’
A new 368-year tree ring temperature reconstruction has established that regional (China) summer temperatures were warmer than they are now (2012) during the mid-1600s and early 1700s, and that the temperature variations can be linked to variations in solar activity, volcanic forcing (cooling), and natural oceanic-atmospheric oscillations (AMO/PDO).
The authors are intent on pointing out that it is “noteworthy that 20th century warming was not very obvious in our reconstruction.” This “noteworthy” finding is mentioned four different times in the paper.
The lack of a conspicuous 20th century warming — and the warmer periods during the 1600s and 1700s — are clearly shown in the summer temperature graph below:...
Global Warming Expedition Stopped In Its Tracks By Arctic Sea Ice
A group of adventurers, sailors, pilots and climate scientists that recently started a journey around the North Pole in an effort to show the lack of ice, has been blocked from further travels by ice. The Polar Ocean Challenge is taking a two month journey that will see them go from Bristol, Alaska, to Norway, then to Russia through the North East passage, back to Alaska through the North West passage, to Greenland and then ultimately back to Bristol. Their objective, as laid out by their website, was to demonstrate “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.”
There has been one small hiccup thus-far though: they are currently stuck in Murmansk, Russia because there is too much ice blocking the North East passage the team said didn’t exist in summer months, according to Real Climate Science.
Real Climate Science also provides a graph showing that current Arctic temperatures — despite alarmist claims of the Arctic being hotter than ever — is actually below normal....
A new 368-year tree ring temperature reconstruction has established that regional (China) summer temperatures were warmer than they are now (2012) during the mid-1600s and early 1700s, and that the temperature variations can be linked to variations in solar activity, volcanic forcing (cooling), and natural oceanic-atmospheric oscillations (AMO/PDO).
The authors are intent on pointing out that it is “noteworthy that 20th century warming was not very obvious in our reconstruction.” This “noteworthy” finding is mentioned four different times in the paper.
The lack of a conspicuous 20th century warming — and the warmer periods during the 1600s and 1700s — are clearly shown in the summer temperature graph below:...
Global Warming Expedition Stopped In Its Tracks By Arctic Sea Ice
A group of adventurers, sailors, pilots and climate scientists that recently started a journey around the North Pole in an effort to show the lack of ice, has been blocked from further travels by ice. The Polar Ocean Challenge is taking a two month journey that will see them go from Bristol, Alaska, to Norway, then to Russia through the North East passage, back to Alaska through the North West passage, to Greenland and then ultimately back to Bristol. Their objective, as laid out by their website, was to demonstrate “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.”
There has been one small hiccup thus-far though: they are currently stuck in Murmansk, Russia because there is too much ice blocking the North East passage the team said didn’t exist in summer months, according to Real Climate Science.
Real Climate Science also provides a graph showing that current Arctic temperatures — despite alarmist claims of the Arctic being hotter than ever — is actually below normal....
Silicon Valley Could Get Pass in Democrats’ Antitrust Crusade
...In this election cycle, Apple, Amazon.com and Google have all given three times as much to Democrats as Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog. That’s true of the industry as a whole. Since the 2012 presidential election cycle, Internet-based tech firms, including Facebook, Salesforce.com and eBay, gave 70 percent of their contributions, some $17.9 million, to Democrats. Democrats’ relationship with Big Tech also runs deeper than money. Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., was recruited by the Democratic National Committee in 2014 to be part of a small group studying the party’s election losses that year...
Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders
WASHINGTON — When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency....
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
Data You Can Believe In
...The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ” (Facebook officials say warning bells go off when the site sees large amounts of unusual activity, but in each case the company was satisfied the campaign was not violating its privacy and data standards.)...
Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google, and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump
...Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Clinton made a deal with Google and that the tech giant is “directly engaged” in her campaign. It’s been widely reported Clinton hired Eric Schmidt—chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google—to set up a tech company called The Groundwork. Assange claims this was to ensure Clinton had the “engineering talent to win the election.” He also pointed out that many members of Clinton’s staff have worked for Google, and some of her former employees now work at Google.
So it should come as no surprise that there have been multiple reports accusing Google of manipulating searches to bury negative stories about Clinton. SourceFed details how Google alters its auto-complete functions to paint Clinton in a positive light.
For example, when you type “Hillary Clinton cri” into other engines like Yahoo! or Bing, the most popular autofills are “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” but in Google it’s “Hillary Clinton crime reform.” Google denies they changed their algorithm to help Clinton, and insists the company does not favor any candidate. They also claim their algorithms don’t show predicted queries that are offensive or disparaging....
New emails highlight ties between White House and Google
...The Campaign for Accountability published emails it obtained, which was first reported on by The Verge. The emails detail a brief exchange between White House internet advisor R. David Edelman and Google lobbyist Johanna Shelton.
In the correspondence on Jan. 3, 2013, Edelman writes to Shelton, “I hear big news is coming out momentarily,” referring to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) decision on whether to pursue an antitrust suit against Google. “Do you have the release and any accompanying materials from Google’s side?” Edelman asked, adding, “Obviously lots of interest here at the WH.”...
Facebook Removes Two Popular Libertarian Pages Without Warning
**ATTENTION**
Being Libertarian has been officially unpublished. We continue to contend that we did not break Facebook community standards, and have made an appeal to Facebook to restore the page.
In the past, we received notifications that indicated a post was removed for violating the community standards, though nothing was removed. The warning stood. We remained actively skeptical when there was widespread suspicion that Facebook was censoring non-liberal pages. But in the last 2 days, we have lost Being Libertarian and our friends at Occupy Democrats Logic. It becomes clear that Facebook does not welcome our presence on their platform, despite the opposite being stated in their terms of use.
We are not going to give up. We'll rebuild from the ground if we must. But we need your help. Share this post to your pages, your profiles, and everywhere else you can manage to place it, and tell the rest of the Facebook community what is going on. Let's send some market signals.
Thank you,
Executive Administrator Nathaniel Owen
...In this election cycle, Apple, Amazon.com and Google have all given three times as much to Democrats as Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a campaign finance watchdog. That’s true of the industry as a whole. Since the 2012 presidential election cycle, Internet-based tech firms, including Facebook, Salesforce.com and eBay, gave 70 percent of their contributions, some $17.9 million, to Democrats. Democrats’ relationship with Big Tech also runs deeper than money. Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc., was recruited by the Democratic National Committee in 2014 to be part of a small group studying the party’s election losses that year...
Web’s Reach Binds N.S.A. and Silicon Valley Leaders
WASHINGTON — When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for another giant institution that manages and analyzes large pools of data: the National Security Agency....
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
Data You Can Believe In
...The campaign’s exhaustive use of Facebook triggered the site’s internal safeguards. “It was more like we blew through an alarm that their engineers hadn’t planned for or knew about,” said St. Clair, who had been working at a small firm in Chicago and joined the campaign at the suggestion of a friend. “They’d sigh and say, ‘You can do this as long as you stop doing it on Nov. 7.’ ” (Facebook officials say warning bells go off when the site sees large amounts of unusual activity, but in each case the company was satisfied the campaign was not violating its privacy and data standards.)...
Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google, and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump
...Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said Clinton made a deal with Google and that the tech giant is “directly engaged” in her campaign. It’s been widely reported Clinton hired Eric Schmidt—chairman of Alphabet, the parent company of Google—to set up a tech company called The Groundwork. Assange claims this was to ensure Clinton had the “engineering talent to win the election.” He also pointed out that many members of Clinton’s staff have worked for Google, and some of her former employees now work at Google.
So it should come as no surprise that there have been multiple reports accusing Google of manipulating searches to bury negative stories about Clinton. SourceFed details how Google alters its auto-complete functions to paint Clinton in a positive light.
For example, when you type “Hillary Clinton cri” into other engines like Yahoo! or Bing, the most popular autofills are “Hillary Clinton criminal charges” but in Google it’s “Hillary Clinton crime reform.” Google denies they changed their algorithm to help Clinton, and insists the company does not favor any candidate. They also claim their algorithms don’t show predicted queries that are offensive or disparaging....
New emails highlight ties between White House and Google
...The Campaign for Accountability published emails it obtained, which was first reported on by The Verge. The emails detail a brief exchange between White House internet advisor R. David Edelman and Google lobbyist Johanna Shelton.
In the correspondence on Jan. 3, 2013, Edelman writes to Shelton, “I hear big news is coming out momentarily,” referring to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) decision on whether to pursue an antitrust suit against Google. “Do you have the release and any accompanying materials from Google’s side?” Edelman asked, adding, “Obviously lots of interest here at the WH.”...
Facebook Removes Two Popular Libertarian Pages Without Warning
**ATTENTION**
Being Libertarian has been officially unpublished. We continue to contend that we did not break Facebook community standards, and have made an appeal to Facebook to restore the page.
In the past, we received notifications that indicated a post was removed for violating the community standards, though nothing was removed. The warning stood. We remained actively skeptical when there was widespread suspicion that Facebook was censoring non-liberal pages. But in the last 2 days, we have lost Being Libertarian and our friends at Occupy Democrats Logic. It becomes clear that Facebook does not welcome our presence on their platform, despite the opposite being stated in their terms of use.
We are not going to give up. We'll rebuild from the ground if we must. But we need your help. Share this post to your pages, your profiles, and everywhere else you can manage to place it, and tell the rest of the Facebook community what is going on. Let's send some market signals.
Thank you,
Executive Administrator Nathaniel Owen
GQ ‘Journalist’ on Pat Smith: ‘I would like to beat her to death’
GQ Writer Said He Wanted to 'Beat' Benghazi Mom 'To Death' -- Then Apologizes
...Last night, when Pat Smith was speaking onstage at the Republication National Convention, I tweeted that “no matter how many children she’s lost, I’d like to beat her to death.”...
Trump shushes NBC reporter, accuses her of trying to 'save' Clinton
...The two then talked over each other for a period of time, as Tur repeated her line of questioning, until Trump eventually concluded with, "Be quiet. I know you want to save her."...
GQ Writer Said He Wanted to 'Beat' Benghazi Mom 'To Death' -- Then Apologizes
...Last night, when Pat Smith was speaking onstage at the Republication National Convention, I tweeted that “no matter how many children she’s lost, I’d like to beat her to death.”...
Trump shushes NBC reporter, accuses her of trying to 'save' Clinton
...The two then talked over each other for a period of time, as Tur repeated her line of questioning, until Trump eventually concluded with, "Be quiet. I know you want to save her."...
Sunday, July 17, 2016
Reporter: FBI ordered ‘no photos, no pictures, no cell phones’ during Clinton/Lynch meeting
...“The former president steps into her plane. They then speak for 30 minutes privately. The FBI there on the tarmac instructing everybody around ‘no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.'”...
'Gag' order: FBI confirms special secrecy agreements for agents in Clinton email probe
The FBI has confirmed to a senior Republican senator that agents were sworn to secrecy -- and subject to lie detector tests -- in the Hillary Clinton email probe, an extensive measure one former agent said could have a "chilling effect."...
...The measures show the extent to which the bureau has gone to keep additional details of the politically sensitive case from going public. While Comey has provided some information on why the FBI did not opt to pursue charges, Attorney General Loretta Lynch repeatedly ducked questions on specifics of the case at a House hearing Tuesday. ...
FBI Director Comey’s full remarks on Clinton email probe
...To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now....
...“The former president steps into her plane. They then speak for 30 minutes privately. The FBI there on the tarmac instructing everybody around ‘no photos, no pictures, no cell phones.'”...
'Gag' order: FBI confirms special secrecy agreements for agents in Clinton email probe
The FBI has confirmed to a senior Republican senator that agents were sworn to secrecy -- and subject to lie detector tests -- in the Hillary Clinton email probe, an extensive measure one former agent said could have a "chilling effect."...
...The measures show the extent to which the bureau has gone to keep additional details of the politically sensitive case from going public. While Comey has provided some information on why the FBI did not opt to pursue charges, Attorney General Loretta Lynch repeatedly ducked questions on specifics of the case at a House hearing Tuesday. ...
FBI Director Comey’s full remarks on Clinton email probe
...To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now....
What planet are you on, Leo? DiCaprio flies his LA friends 6,000 miles around the world so they can listen to his speech on GLOBAL WARMING
Leonardo DiCaprio warned about global warming in his Oscars speech
Later this month he is holding a gala dinner for his foundation in St Tropez
Robert DeNiro and Arnold Schwarzenegger are among those he's invited
Each guest flying 12,000 miles from LA will release seven tons of CO2
Leonardo DiCaprio warned about global warming in his Oscars speech
Later this month he is holding a gala dinner for his foundation in St Tropez
Robert DeNiro and Arnold Schwarzenegger are among those he's invited
Each guest flying 12,000 miles from LA will release seven tons of CO2
Ship of Fools
...They were leftists all right. In between palsies of fretting, they’d tell you how wonderful the Soviet union was: Pensions were huge, housing was cheap, and they practically paid you to get medical care. Believe me, you haven’t been bored until you’ve been buttonholed by a seventy-year-old woman who holds forth all afternoon on the perfidity of American foreign policy and shows you pictures of her grandchildren. These were people who believed everything about the Soviet union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper....
...They were leftists all right. In between palsies of fretting, they’d tell you how wonderful the Soviet union was: Pensions were huge, housing was cheap, and they practically paid you to get medical care. Believe me, you haven’t been bored until you’ve been buttonholed by a seventy-year-old woman who holds forth all afternoon on the perfidity of American foreign policy and shows you pictures of her grandchildren. These were people who believed everything about the Soviet union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper....
It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism. What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favourable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies. The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.
-- Thomas Sowell
Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favourable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies. The same principle, or lack of principle, applies to many other privately owned businesses. It is a very successful political ploy that can be adapted to all sorts of situations.
-- Thomas Sowell
Sunday, July 10, 2016
Exxon-Mobil is abusing the first amendment
...The obvious point, which remarkably bears repeating, is that there are circumstances when scientific theories must remain open and subject to challenge, and there are circumstances when the government must act to protect the integrity of the market, even if it requires determining the truth or falsity of those theories. ...
...The obvious point, which remarkably bears repeating, is that there are circumstances when scientific theories must remain open and subject to challenge, and there are circumstances when the government must act to protect the integrity of the market, even if it requires determining the truth or falsity of those theories. ...
Left-wing German politician who was raped by migrants admits she LIED to police about her attackers' nationality because she did not want to encourage racism
Selin Gören was attacked by three men in January in the city of Mannheim
She went to police but did not reveal the ethnic make-up of the suspects
Instead, the 24-year-old said she had been robbed by German speakers
Refugee activist had feared there would be a backlash against migrants
Fury as feminist blames toddler alligator death on white 'entitlement'
A white Chicago-based Social Justice Warrior with 11,000+ followers on Twitter is under heavy fire after criticizing the grieving father of the toddler who was snatched by an alligator for his “white privilege.”...
PC Europe Now Blaming Women for Provoking Muslim Rapists
...At first I was scared, but now I'm more angry than anything. After the attack they told me that women shouldn't be alone on the streets after 8:00 pm. And they also gave me other advice, telling me I should dye my hair dark and also not dress in such a provocative way.
Indirectly that means I was partly to blame for what happened to me. That is a massive insult....
Syrian Immigrant Who Said 9/11 ‘Changed The World For Good’ Is A Homeland Security Adviser
One of the members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s (HSAC) Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism is a 25-year-old immigrant of Syrian heritage who said that the 9/11 attacks “changed the world for good” and has consistently disparaged America, free speech and white people on social media.
Laila Alawa was one of just 15 people tapped to serve on the newly-formed HSAC Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism in 2015 — the same year she became an American citizen. Just last week, the subcommittee submitted a report to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, recommending that the DHS avoid using Muslim terminology like the words “sharia” and “jihad” when discussing terrorism.
Alawa says she immigrated into the U.S. when she was ten years old. Her family had already left Syria by the time she was born. “But I will always be Syrian. I will always be from Syria. I will always be of Syria,” she wrote in November 2015, calling the country her “homeland.”...
Selin Gören was attacked by three men in January in the city of Mannheim
She went to police but did not reveal the ethnic make-up of the suspects
Instead, the 24-year-old said she had been robbed by German speakers
Refugee activist had feared there would be a backlash against migrants
Fury as feminist blames toddler alligator death on white 'entitlement'
A white Chicago-based Social Justice Warrior with 11,000+ followers on Twitter is under heavy fire after criticizing the grieving father of the toddler who was snatched by an alligator for his “white privilege.”...
PC Europe Now Blaming Women for Provoking Muslim Rapists
...At first I was scared, but now I'm more angry than anything. After the attack they told me that women shouldn't be alone on the streets after 8:00 pm. And they also gave me other advice, telling me I should dye my hair dark and also not dress in such a provocative way.
Indirectly that means I was partly to blame for what happened to me. That is a massive insult....
Syrian Immigrant Who Said 9/11 ‘Changed The World For Good’ Is A Homeland Security Adviser
One of the members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s (HSAC) Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism is a 25-year-old immigrant of Syrian heritage who said that the 9/11 attacks “changed the world for good” and has consistently disparaged America, free speech and white people on social media.
Laila Alawa was one of just 15 people tapped to serve on the newly-formed HSAC Subcommittee on Countering Violent Extremism in 2015 — the same year she became an American citizen. Just last week, the subcommittee submitted a report to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, recommending that the DHS avoid using Muslim terminology like the words “sharia” and “jihad” when discussing terrorism.
Alawa says she immigrated into the U.S. when she was ten years old. Her family had already left Syria by the time she was born. “But I will always be Syrian. I will always be from Syria. I will always be of Syria,” she wrote in November 2015, calling the country her “homeland.”...
CBS News Political Director: 'Our Job' to Steer Away from the Clintons' Past
..."Well it’s ah...so it feels like this campaign’s going to be a lot about Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton’s past and Donald Trump’s past. Elections are supposed to be about the future. And it feels like we are not, um, we’re not having that conversation. Although we’ve tried it. Actually, you know, one of our jobs is to try to take the conversation and make it about the future and people’s lives, not about adjudicating the past."...
How The DNC—And Media—Conned Us Into Clinton
...The strategy email also cautioned DNC operatives to leave “no fingerprints”as they “utilize reporters to drive a message.”
Want to repeat that sentence: “Utilize reporters to drive a message.” I’m waiting for Woodward or Bernstein to comment....
...And of course, many reporters along the way did the bidding the Clinton memo outlined—in some cases, openly prepping them with questions before going on-air....
..."Well it’s ah...so it feels like this campaign’s going to be a lot about Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton’s past and Donald Trump’s past. Elections are supposed to be about the future. And it feels like we are not, um, we’re not having that conversation. Although we’ve tried it. Actually, you know, one of our jobs is to try to take the conversation and make it about the future and people’s lives, not about adjudicating the past."...
How The DNC—And Media—Conned Us Into Clinton
...The strategy email also cautioned DNC operatives to leave “no fingerprints”as they “utilize reporters to drive a message.”
Want to repeat that sentence: “Utilize reporters to drive a message.” I’m waiting for Woodward or Bernstein to comment....
...And of course, many reporters along the way did the bidding the Clinton memo outlined—in some cases, openly prepping them with questions before going on-air....
The NRA tried to use our gun story as propaganda
...Dr McPhedran would not rule out the possibility that the 1996 buyback and ban on semi-automatics led to an underground market for firearms in Australia.
“It’s not unreasonable to say that it can certainly happen,” she said.
“However, our data about guns in Australia before 1996 isn’t terribly comprehensive so it is a difficult question to answer – we still don’t really know how many guns were not handed in during the buyback.”..
Australia’s Gun 'Buyback' Created a Violent Firearms Black Market. Why Should the U.S. Do the Same?
...In Australia, part of the supply of banned firearms comes from defiance of the original prohibition. The Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia estimates compliance with the "buyback" at 19 percent.
Other researchers agree. In a white paper on the results of gun control efforts around the world, Franz Csaszar, a professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, Austria, gives examples of large-scale non-compliance with the ban. He points out, "In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities."...
Spike in handgun crimes reveals nation’s secret problem
...Associate Professor Philip Alpers, one of Australia’s leading firearms researchers and a director of the Centre for Armed Violence Reduction at the University of Sydney, said the national ban on semi-automatic weapons following the Port Arthur massacre had spawned criminal demand for handguns.
“The ban on semi-automatics created demand by criminals for other types of guns,” he said, adding: “The criminal’s gun of choice today is the semi-automatic pistol.”
Our investigation found:
• NSW: in 2014-15, there were 3463 firearms charges, up 83 per cent on 2005-06
• Victoria: in 2014-15, there were 3645 firearms-related charges, up 85 per cent on 2005-06
• SA: in 2014, charges for possession and trafficking of guns are up 49 per cent on 2010-11
• Tasmania: in 2014, charges for unlawful gun possession were up 32 per cent on 2005-06
...Samantha Lee, an advocate for tighter firearms laws at Gun Control Australia, said the laws regulating the sale of ammunition in Tasmania and Victoria were weak.
“There is very little regulation of ammunition purchase,” she said. “In most jurisdictions you can purchase ammunition because you have a firearm licence and there is no restriction on the type you can purchase – so if you own a rifle you can still purchase ammunition for a handgun.”
Assoc Prof Alpers said the increased police focus on the ammunition trade had been an important development.
“Gun enthusiasts are quite right when they say guns don’t kill – it’s the bullets that kill,” he said. “For many years we just focused on the guns and ignored the ammunition that was lying around – now people are starting to realise that ammunition control is just as important.”...
Australia’s hidden gun problem: the worst suburbs for gun crime
The deadly weapon that’s about to be sold near you
...Gun control campaigners are calling on state governments to ban a new lever-action gun that can fire seven bullets in as many seconds.
The Turkish-made Adler A110 has some of the characteristics of a semi-automatic weapon, but is technically classified as a shotgun under national gun laws.
Samantha Lee, the chair of Gun Control Australia, said the Adler A110 should be banned because it approximates the performance of semi-automatic weapons that are illegal under national gun laws....
Chart of the day: More guns, less gun violence between 1993 and 2013
AFTER ORLANDO, THE HOMEMADE AR-15 INDUSTRY SURGES
...Dr McPhedran would not rule out the possibility that the 1996 buyback and ban on semi-automatics led to an underground market for firearms in Australia.
“It’s not unreasonable to say that it can certainly happen,” she said.
“However, our data about guns in Australia before 1996 isn’t terribly comprehensive so it is a difficult question to answer – we still don’t really know how many guns were not handed in during the buyback.”..
Australia’s Gun 'Buyback' Created a Violent Firearms Black Market. Why Should the U.S. Do the Same?
...In Australia, part of the supply of banned firearms comes from defiance of the original prohibition. The Sporting Shooters' Association of Australia estimates compliance with the "buyback" at 19 percent.
Other researchers agree. In a white paper on the results of gun control efforts around the world, Franz Csaszar, a professor of criminology at the University of Vienna, Austria, gives examples of large-scale non-compliance with the ban. He points out, "In Australia it is estimated that only about 20% of all banned self-loading rifles have been given up to the authorities."...
Spike in handgun crimes reveals nation’s secret problem
...Associate Professor Philip Alpers, one of Australia’s leading firearms researchers and a director of the Centre for Armed Violence Reduction at the University of Sydney, said the national ban on semi-automatic weapons following the Port Arthur massacre had spawned criminal demand for handguns.
“The ban on semi-automatics created demand by criminals for other types of guns,” he said, adding: “The criminal’s gun of choice today is the semi-automatic pistol.”
Our investigation found:
• NSW: in 2014-15, there were 3463 firearms charges, up 83 per cent on 2005-06
• Victoria: in 2014-15, there were 3645 firearms-related charges, up 85 per cent on 2005-06
• SA: in 2014, charges for possession and trafficking of guns are up 49 per cent on 2010-11
• Tasmania: in 2014, charges for unlawful gun possession were up 32 per cent on 2005-06
...Samantha Lee, an advocate for tighter firearms laws at Gun Control Australia, said the laws regulating the sale of ammunition in Tasmania and Victoria were weak.
“There is very little regulation of ammunition purchase,” she said. “In most jurisdictions you can purchase ammunition because you have a firearm licence and there is no restriction on the type you can purchase – so if you own a rifle you can still purchase ammunition for a handgun.”
Assoc Prof Alpers said the increased police focus on the ammunition trade had been an important development.
“Gun enthusiasts are quite right when they say guns don’t kill – it’s the bullets that kill,” he said. “For many years we just focused on the guns and ignored the ammunition that was lying around – now people are starting to realise that ammunition control is just as important.”...
Australia’s hidden gun problem: the worst suburbs for gun crime
The deadly weapon that’s about to be sold near you
...Gun control campaigners are calling on state governments to ban a new lever-action gun that can fire seven bullets in as many seconds.
The Turkish-made Adler A110 has some of the characteristics of a semi-automatic weapon, but is technically classified as a shotgun under national gun laws.
Samantha Lee, the chair of Gun Control Australia, said the Adler A110 should be banned because it approximates the performance of semi-automatic weapons that are illegal under national gun laws....
Chart of the day: More guns, less gun violence between 1993 and 2013
AFTER ORLANDO, THE HOMEMADE AR-15 INDUSTRY SURGES
Sally Kohn stop blaming BLM the way I blame pro-lifers
...Do we really need to be told the protests were a response to what looks like bad policing? Didn’t everyone know that? It seems Kohn is once again trying to rule out the blaming of the protests for inciting the violence but, again, that’s not a stance she takes consistently. She is eager to blame violence on a protest movement when that violence is against a Planned Parenthood clinic. She is unwilling to acknowledge that she is guilty of the same behavior she deplores in others....
Krugnuts: Climate of Hate
...But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.
It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate...
NYC protesters chant for dead cops
Black Lives Matter Protesters Chant 'Pigs In A Blanket, Fry 'Em Like Bacon!' - KILL THE COPS!
Left-Wing Pundit Has THE ABSOLUTE WORST Take On The Dallas Police Attack
Sally Kohn thinks police are to blame for the sniper-style ambush that killed five Dallas police officers on Thursday....
Black Lives Matter Leader: Dallas Cop Ambush Is A Conspiracy To Make Black Lives Matter LOOK BAD
A prominent Black Lives Matter activist spent Friday afternoon proposing that the work of Dallas cop-killing sniper Micah Xavier Johnson is a conspiracy designed to make the Black Lives Matter movement look bad.
The activist, Johnetta Elzie, took to Twitter to announce her theories....
CNN Contributor Shifts Blame To Christians After Islamic Terrorist Attack In Orlando
Leftist CNN contributor Sally Kohn attempted to shift the narrative to Christians in the aftermath of radical Islamic terrorist who killed 49 people in a gay bar in Orlando, Florida....
Loretta Lynch: References to Islam From Orlando Terrorist 911 Call Removed "To Avoid Revictimizing"
Lynch: "Partial Transcript" Of Orlando 911 Calls Will Have References To Islamic Terrorism Removed
...The Washington Post reported last week that the gunman made multiple phone calls while holding hostages: "The gunman who opened fire inside a nightclub here said he carried out the attack because he wanted 'Americans to stop bombing his country,' according to a witness who survived the rampage."
Salon reported that: “Everybody who was in the bathroom who survived could hear him talking to 911, saying the reason why he’s doing this is because he wanted America to stop bombing his country."
The Washington Post also noted that during his 911 call from the club, the gunman referenced the Boston Marathon bombers and claimed "that he carried out the shooting to prevent bombings, [echoing] a message the younger Boston attacker had scrawled in a note before he was taken into custody by police."..
...Do we really need to be told the protests were a response to what looks like bad policing? Didn’t everyone know that? It seems Kohn is once again trying to rule out the blaming of the protests for inciting the violence but, again, that’s not a stance she takes consistently. She is eager to blame violence on a protest movement when that violence is against a Planned Parenthood clinic. She is unwilling to acknowledge that she is guilty of the same behavior she deplores in others....
Krugnuts: Climate of Hate
...But there has, in fact, been a rising tide of threats and vandalism aimed at elected officials, including both Judge John Roll, who was killed Saturday, and Representative Gabrielle Giffords. One of these days, someone was bound to take it to the next level. And now someone has.
It’s true that the shooter in Arizona appears to have been mentally troubled. But that doesn’t mean that his act can or should be treated as an isolated event, having nothing to do with the national climate...
NYC protesters chant for dead cops
Black Lives Matter Protesters Chant 'Pigs In A Blanket, Fry 'Em Like Bacon!' - KILL THE COPS!
Left-Wing Pundit Has THE ABSOLUTE WORST Take On The Dallas Police Attack
Sally Kohn thinks police are to blame for the sniper-style ambush that killed five Dallas police officers on Thursday....
Black Lives Matter Leader: Dallas Cop Ambush Is A Conspiracy To Make Black Lives Matter LOOK BAD
A prominent Black Lives Matter activist spent Friday afternoon proposing that the work of Dallas cop-killing sniper Micah Xavier Johnson is a conspiracy designed to make the Black Lives Matter movement look bad.
The activist, Johnetta Elzie, took to Twitter to announce her theories....
CNN Contributor Shifts Blame To Christians After Islamic Terrorist Attack In Orlando
Leftist CNN contributor Sally Kohn attempted to shift the narrative to Christians in the aftermath of radical Islamic terrorist who killed 49 people in a gay bar in Orlando, Florida....
Loretta Lynch: References to Islam From Orlando Terrorist 911 Call Removed "To Avoid Revictimizing"
Lynch: "Partial Transcript" Of Orlando 911 Calls Will Have References To Islamic Terrorism Removed
...The Washington Post reported last week that the gunman made multiple phone calls while holding hostages: "The gunman who opened fire inside a nightclub here said he carried out the attack because he wanted 'Americans to stop bombing his country,' according to a witness who survived the rampage."
Salon reported that: “Everybody who was in the bathroom who survived could hear him talking to 911, saying the reason why he’s doing this is because he wanted America to stop bombing his country."
The Washington Post also noted that during his 911 call from the club, the gunman referenced the Boston Marathon bombers and claimed "that he carried out the shooting to prevent bombings, [echoing] a message the younger Boston attacker had scrawled in a note before he was taken into custody by police."..
Women are using Tinder to con men into doing chores
...The 47-year-old, who has been dating in NYC for the past 20 years, decided to put the app to use after being repeatedly disappointed by the city’s dating pool. “I’ve tried speed dating and all the dating apps, but every time I put my real age, all I get are idiots and losers,” Bloom, a publicist, tells The Post. “I figured, why not make them useful and have them help me around the house?”
So that afternoon, she swiped right on a 40-something bachelor. His default photo featured him wearing overalls and holding a hammer.
“I wasn’t attracted to him, but he was very forthcoming,” she says. She messaged him, saying she was only looking for someone to come over to install her air conditioner, making it very clear it wasn’t a date.
After he came over, opened her window and set up her AC, she said thank you — and promptly kicked him out. He later messaged her to go on a proper date, but she never replied and doesn’t regret it....
Wife fights for share of ex's £175,000 payout for child abuse: Estranged partner could make legal history after arguing money is a marital asset
Andrew Kerslake received £175,000 compensation for sex abuse as a child
Ex-wife Helen Tippett, 41, is fighting for a share as part of divorce case
She claims money is a marital asset and a win would make legal history
But Mr Kerslake, 45, put money in a trust so it goes to charity when he dies
Ex-wife sues former husband over compensation for the 24 years he spent in prison for crimes HE DIDN'T COMMIT!
Steven Phillips was wrongly convicted of a string of sexual assaults he didn't commit
DNA evidence cleared him of any wrongdoing in 2008
As compensation for his time in prison, the state of Texas will pay him about $6million
Devastated Texas father speaks as daughters killed by their crazed mom are laid to rest: 'If you have loved ones, tell them you love them every day'
...She "had ample time" to shoot her estranged husband, but she "wanted him to suffer" watching her kill their children, Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls said at a Wednesday press conference....
Texas mom who shot dead her two daughters let her estranged husband live because she 'wanted him to suffer'
Christy Sheats shot her daughters Madison, 17, and Taylor, 22, on Friday
Her husband Jason Sheats was distraught after watching his children die
Sheriff says she left him alive to punish him as she 'wanted him to suffer'
Neighbors said he had begged his wife not to shoot the girls after a dispute
It's taboo to admit it, but I wish my unborn baby wasn't a beastly boy!
...But the truth is I like girls, I understand girls and I’ve always dreaded the idea of having a boy. People say how emotionally uncomplicated boys are and how manipulative and fussy girls are. But what use is a plain-speaking boy to me? I wouldn’t know where to start. I know exactly where I am with girls and their petty mind games. I’ve played them myself. I’m a Grand Master of them....
...Little girls, with their own interest in wholesome things and willingness to have their hair done and to wear dainty shoes, fit in with this ridiculous pursuit of the picturesque and the perfect in a way that riotous little boys do not....
...And, in the end, your boys will leave you for another woman. They will get girlfriends, who will be hateful and wilful and annoying.
These girls might even — horror! — marry your son and take him, and your grandchildren, away for ever. It is the mother of the bride who is the centre of attention, it is the maternal grandmother who traditionally gets the action with the grandchildren. You stand to lose everything!...
...The 47-year-old, who has been dating in NYC for the past 20 years, decided to put the app to use after being repeatedly disappointed by the city’s dating pool. “I’ve tried speed dating and all the dating apps, but every time I put my real age, all I get are idiots and losers,” Bloom, a publicist, tells The Post. “I figured, why not make them useful and have them help me around the house?”
So that afternoon, she swiped right on a 40-something bachelor. His default photo featured him wearing overalls and holding a hammer.
“I wasn’t attracted to him, but he was very forthcoming,” she says. She messaged him, saying she was only looking for someone to come over to install her air conditioner, making it very clear it wasn’t a date.
After he came over, opened her window and set up her AC, she said thank you — and promptly kicked him out. He later messaged her to go on a proper date, but she never replied and doesn’t regret it....
Wife fights for share of ex's £175,000 payout for child abuse: Estranged partner could make legal history after arguing money is a marital asset
Andrew Kerslake received £175,000 compensation for sex abuse as a child
Ex-wife Helen Tippett, 41, is fighting for a share as part of divorce case
She claims money is a marital asset and a win would make legal history
But Mr Kerslake, 45, put money in a trust so it goes to charity when he dies
Ex-wife sues former husband over compensation for the 24 years he spent in prison for crimes HE DIDN'T COMMIT!
Steven Phillips was wrongly convicted of a string of sexual assaults he didn't commit
DNA evidence cleared him of any wrongdoing in 2008
As compensation for his time in prison, the state of Texas will pay him about $6million
Devastated Texas father speaks as daughters killed by their crazed mom are laid to rest: 'If you have loved ones, tell them you love them every day'
...She "had ample time" to shoot her estranged husband, but she "wanted him to suffer" watching her kill their children, Fort Bend County Sheriff Troy Nehls said at a Wednesday press conference....
Texas mom who shot dead her two daughters let her estranged husband live because she 'wanted him to suffer'
Christy Sheats shot her daughters Madison, 17, and Taylor, 22, on Friday
Her husband Jason Sheats was distraught after watching his children die
Sheriff says she left him alive to punish him as she 'wanted him to suffer'
Neighbors said he had begged his wife not to shoot the girls after a dispute
It's taboo to admit it, but I wish my unborn baby wasn't a beastly boy!
...But the truth is I like girls, I understand girls and I’ve always dreaded the idea of having a boy. People say how emotionally uncomplicated boys are and how manipulative and fussy girls are. But what use is a plain-speaking boy to me? I wouldn’t know where to start. I know exactly where I am with girls and their petty mind games. I’ve played them myself. I’m a Grand Master of them....
...Little girls, with their own interest in wholesome things and willingness to have their hair done and to wear dainty shoes, fit in with this ridiculous pursuit of the picturesque and the perfect in a way that riotous little boys do not....
...And, in the end, your boys will leave you for another woman. They will get girlfriends, who will be hateful and wilful and annoying.
These girls might even — horror! — marry your son and take him, and your grandchildren, away for ever. It is the mother of the bride who is the centre of attention, it is the maternal grandmother who traditionally gets the action with the grandchildren. You stand to lose everything!...
Sunday, June 12, 2016
Katie Couric Anti-Gun Doc Deceptively Edited to Suggest Gun Rights Activists Don't Have Answers
A segment in the Katie Couric documentary Under the Gun, airing on EPIX, featuring a question about background checks and terrorists and felons asked to gun rights activists, was deceptively edited to replace a slew of answers from gun rights activists with nine seconds of their silence.
The Washington Free Beacon obtained an audio recording of the original exchange. The nine seconds of silence was taken from elsewhere in the footage the film crew collected. A spokeswoman for EPIX responded to the Free Beacon, saying the company stood behind Couric and her crew's "creative and editorial judgment."
Meanwhile, Couric's director says she added the pause so that viewers "could consider this important question" before providing an answer, according to Fox News' Howard Kurtz, who also tweeted that Couric said she was "very proud" of the film. The question is not presented from a narrator to the viewers, but from Couric to the group of gun rights activists.
Unfortunately, such journalistic malpractice is not uncommon. Documentaries like Blackfish (about SeaWorld) and Gasland (about fracking) twist the truth in the service of an agenda. Such films know their conclusions and go out in search of premises. Under the Gun sounds like it comes from the same genre.
Such shenanigans, of course, tend to fall under the protections of free speech—but they're notable in a climate where some politicians, and their backers, often from the same side of the ideological divide as films like Under the Gun and Gasland, seek to classify political speech and advocacy they disagree with as prohibited, under the guise of campaign finance or corporate regulation or whatever excuse those who wish to silence speech concoct. This makes false but persistent claims of objectivity particularly noxious....
A segment in the Katie Couric documentary Under the Gun, airing on EPIX, featuring a question about background checks and terrorists and felons asked to gun rights activists, was deceptively edited to replace a slew of answers from gun rights activists with nine seconds of their silence.
The Washington Free Beacon obtained an audio recording of the original exchange. The nine seconds of silence was taken from elsewhere in the footage the film crew collected. A spokeswoman for EPIX responded to the Free Beacon, saying the company stood behind Couric and her crew's "creative and editorial judgment."
Meanwhile, Couric's director says she added the pause so that viewers "could consider this important question" before providing an answer, according to Fox News' Howard Kurtz, who also tweeted that Couric said she was "very proud" of the film. The question is not presented from a narrator to the viewers, but from Couric to the group of gun rights activists.
Unfortunately, such journalistic malpractice is not uncommon. Documentaries like Blackfish (about SeaWorld) and Gasland (about fracking) twist the truth in the service of an agenda. Such films know their conclusions and go out in search of premises. Under the Gun sounds like it comes from the same genre.
Such shenanigans, of course, tend to fall under the protections of free speech—but they're notable in a climate where some politicians, and their backers, often from the same side of the ideological divide as films like Under the Gun and Gasland, seek to classify political speech and advocacy they disagree with as prohibited, under the guise of campaign finance or corporate regulation or whatever excuse those who wish to silence speech concoct. This makes false but persistent claims of objectivity particularly noxious....
THE BIG UNEASY
...Aaron Pressman, a politics and law-and-society major, told me that he has always felt free to express his opinions on campus, but has faced “a lot of social backlash.” One of his ambitions is to become a public defender, and he has studied the free-speech work of the A.C.L.U. Last year, when he noticed a broadly worded clause about flirtatious speech in Oberlin’s new sexual-harassment policy, he advocated for more precise language. (His research told him that such broad prohibitions were often used to target ethnic groups.) “A student came up to me several days later and started screaming at me, saying I’m not allowed to have this opinion, because I’m a white cisgender male,” Pressman recalled. He feels that his white maleness shouldn’t be disqualifying. “I’ve had people respond to me, ‘You could never understand—your culture has never been oppressed.’ ” Pressman laughed. “I’m, like, ‘Really? The Holocaust?’ ”...
...“We’re asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”...
...Acey, who insists that Karega’s posts were more anti-Zionist than anti-Semitic, thinks professors often hide their racial biases. “But they’ll vote in a way that does not benefit the students,” he says. “Like, the way the courses are set up. You know, we’re paying for a service. We’re paying for our attendance here. We need to be able to get what we need in a way that we can actually consume it.” He pauses. “Because I’m dealing with having been arrested on campus, or having to deal with the things that my family are going through because of larger systems—having to deal with all of that, I can’t produce the work that they want me to do. But I understand the material, and I can give it to you in different ways. There’s professors who have openly been, like, ‘Yeah, instead of, you know, writing out this midterm, come in to my office hours, and you can just speak it,’ right? But that’s not institutionalized. I have to find that professor.”...
The Transgender Bathroom Debate and the Looming Title IX Crisis
...Whether or not the federal government acted unlawfully, it has now set in motion a potential Title IX collision course between its directives on sexual violence and on bathrooms. Schools attempting to comply with the federal bathroom policy have at least two possible ways of doing so: allow students to use sex-segregated bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity, or move away from sex segregation of such facilities. The latter, gender-inclusive arrangement, which was in place in my college dormitory more than twenty years ago, is not uncommon on campuses, and a social movement to desegregate at least some portion of bathrooms is growing. Some colleges have made every bathroom on campus open to any gender, and this solution could well become a practical choice at K-12 public schools.
But there is also a growing sense that some females will not feel safe sharing bathrooms, shower rooms, or locker rooms with males. And if a female student claimed that a bathroom or locker room that her school had her share with male students caused her to feel sexually vulnerable and created a hostile environment, the complaint would be difficult to dismiss, particularly since the federal government has interpreted Title IX broadly and said that schools must try to prevent a hostile environment. This is not wholly hypothetical. Brandeis University found a male student responsible for sexual misconduct for looking at his boyfriend’s genitals while both were using a communal school shower. The disciplined student then sued the school for denying him basic fairness in its disciplinary process, and a federal court recently refused to dismiss the suit....
...Aaron Pressman, a politics and law-and-society major, told me that he has always felt free to express his opinions on campus, but has faced “a lot of social backlash.” One of his ambitions is to become a public defender, and he has studied the free-speech work of the A.C.L.U. Last year, when he noticed a broadly worded clause about flirtatious speech in Oberlin’s new sexual-harassment policy, he advocated for more precise language. (His research told him that such broad prohibitions were often used to target ethnic groups.) “A student came up to me several days later and started screaming at me, saying I’m not allowed to have this opinion, because I’m a white cisgender male,” Pressman recalled. He feels that his white maleness shouldn’t be disqualifying. “I’ve had people respond to me, ‘You could never understand—your culture has never been oppressed.’ ” Pressman laughed. “I’m, like, ‘Really? The Holocaust?’ ”...
...“We’re asking to be reflected in our education,” Adams cuts in. “I literally am so tired of learning about Marx, when he did not include race in his discussion of the market!” She shrugs incredulously. “As a person who plans on returning to my community, I don’t want to assimilate into middle-class values. I’m going home, back to the ’hood of Chicago, to be exactly who I was before I came to Oberlin.”...
...Acey, who insists that Karega’s posts were more anti-Zionist than anti-Semitic, thinks professors often hide their racial biases. “But they’ll vote in a way that does not benefit the students,” he says. “Like, the way the courses are set up. You know, we’re paying for a service. We’re paying for our attendance here. We need to be able to get what we need in a way that we can actually consume it.” He pauses. “Because I’m dealing with having been arrested on campus, or having to deal with the things that my family are going through because of larger systems—having to deal with all of that, I can’t produce the work that they want me to do. But I understand the material, and I can give it to you in different ways. There’s professors who have openly been, like, ‘Yeah, instead of, you know, writing out this midterm, come in to my office hours, and you can just speak it,’ right? But that’s not institutionalized. I have to find that professor.”...
The Transgender Bathroom Debate and the Looming Title IX Crisis
...Whether or not the federal government acted unlawfully, it has now set in motion a potential Title IX collision course between its directives on sexual violence and on bathrooms. Schools attempting to comply with the federal bathroom policy have at least two possible ways of doing so: allow students to use sex-segregated bathrooms and locker rooms based on their gender identity, or move away from sex segregation of such facilities. The latter, gender-inclusive arrangement, which was in place in my college dormitory more than twenty years ago, is not uncommon on campuses, and a social movement to desegregate at least some portion of bathrooms is growing. Some colleges have made every bathroom on campus open to any gender, and this solution could well become a practical choice at K-12 public schools.
But there is also a growing sense that some females will not feel safe sharing bathrooms, shower rooms, or locker rooms with males. And if a female student claimed that a bathroom or locker room that her school had her share with male students caused her to feel sexually vulnerable and created a hostile environment, the complaint would be difficult to dismiss, particularly since the federal government has interpreted Title IX broadly and said that schools must try to prevent a hostile environment. This is not wholly hypothetical. Brandeis University found a male student responsible for sexual misconduct for looking at his boyfriend’s genitals while both were using a communal school shower. The disciplined student then sued the school for denying him basic fairness in its disciplinary process, and a federal court recently refused to dismiss the suit....
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module....
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module....
Prepare to have your sex life regulated by government
Adults may soon find their sex lives regulated to the point where nearly every sexual encounter is defined as rape unless neither party reports the activity.
The American Law Institute will vote in May on whether to adopt a model penal code that would make "affirmative consent" the official position of the organization. Affirmative consent — or "yes means yes" — policies have already been adopted by many colleges and universities, and have been passed as law in California and New York....
...Under affirmative consent policies, there is no way to actually prove such consent was obtained. Students are required under the policies to ask permission for each level of sexual activity. So a typical sexual encounter would cease to be a passionate act and instead become a contractual, question-and-answer session. From the moment any physical contact is about to be made, one person must begin asking for permission.
"May I touch you here?" "May I kiss you?" "May I kiss you here?" and the like would all be required questions under such policies....
Adults may soon find their sex lives regulated to the point where nearly every sexual encounter is defined as rape unless neither party reports the activity.
The American Law Institute will vote in May on whether to adopt a model penal code that would make "affirmative consent" the official position of the organization. Affirmative consent — or "yes means yes" — policies have already been adopted by many colleges and universities, and have been passed as law in California and New York....
...Under affirmative consent policies, there is no way to actually prove such consent was obtained. Students are required under the policies to ask permission for each level of sexual activity. So a typical sexual encounter would cease to be a passionate act and instead become a contractual, question-and-answer session. From the moment any physical contact is about to be made, one person must begin asking for permission.
"May I touch you here?" "May I kiss you?" "May I kiss you here?" and the like would all be required questions under such policies....
MPs warn voters being 'conned' as Brussels keeps plans for EU army secret until after referendum
British voters are being “conned” by Brussels officials who are keeping plans for a European army secret until after the referendum, leading Tories have claimed.
Liam Fox, the former defence secretary who served under David Cameron, told The Telegraph that the ambitions showed the EU is wedded to the “dangerous fantasy” of creating a single defence force.
Another eurosceptic Tory MP said voters were being “deceived” and “hoodwinked” about the true scale of the EU’s drive to create a single army.
The backlash came as it emerged plans to move towards the creation of a European army are being kept secret from British voters until the day after next month’s referendum....
British voters are being “conned” by Brussels officials who are keeping plans for a European army secret until after the referendum, leading Tories have claimed.
Liam Fox, the former defence secretary who served under David Cameron, told The Telegraph that the ambitions showed the EU is wedded to the “dangerous fantasy” of creating a single defence force.
Another eurosceptic Tory MP said voters were being “deceived” and “hoodwinked” about the true scale of the EU’s drive to create a single army.
The backlash came as it emerged plans to move towards the creation of a European army are being kept secret from British voters until the day after next month’s referendum....
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has accused Google of making a deal with Hillary Clinton.
"Google is directly engaged with Hillary Clinton’s campaign," Assange said via video link at the international media forum "New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream" hosted by Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency.
A video link up with Julian Assange, journalist, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, at the session, End of the Monopoly: The Open Information Age, held as part of the New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream international media forum at the Rossiya Segodnya International Multimedia Press Center
Moreover, the Internet giant Google is heavily integrated with the US establishment and is allying with the US exceptionalism campaign, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday. "Google is heavily integrated with Washington power, at personal level and at business level… Google which has increasing control over the distribution channels… is intensely allying itself US exceptionalism," Assange added....
"Google is directly engaged with Hillary Clinton’s campaign," Assange said via video link at the international media forum "New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream" hosted by Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency.
A video link up with Julian Assange, journalist, founder and editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, at the session, End of the Monopoly: The Open Information Age, held as part of the New Era of Journalism: Farewell to Mainstream international media forum at the Rossiya Segodnya International Multimedia Press Center
Moreover, the Internet giant Google is heavily integrated with the US establishment and is allying with the US exceptionalism campaign, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday. "Google is heavily integrated with Washington power, at personal level and at business level… Google which has increasing control over the distribution channels… is intensely allying itself US exceptionalism," Assange added....
California to extend Obamacare to illegal immigrants using ‘innovation waiver’
California legislators have passed a bill which would allow illegal immigrants to purchase insurance on the state’s Obamacare exchange. The bill first has to be signed by Gov. Jerry Brown and then the change would need to be approved by the federal government.
If approved, the change would break another promise made by President Obama when selling the law to Americans. During a 2009 address to Congress Obama said, “There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants.” He added, “This too is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” That was when Rep. Joe Wilson famously interjected, “You lie!” The break in decorum earned him an official rebuke....
California legislators have passed a bill which would allow illegal immigrants to purchase insurance on the state’s Obamacare exchange. The bill first has to be signed by Gov. Jerry Brown and then the change would need to be approved by the federal government.
If approved, the change would break another promise made by President Obama when selling the law to Americans. During a 2009 address to Congress Obama said, “There are also those who claim that our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants.” He added, “This too is false. The reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally.” That was when Rep. Joe Wilson famously interjected, “You lie!” The break in decorum earned him an official rebuke....
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