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Author Topic: Non-routine News  (Read 19750 times)

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AGelbert

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The Misery Caused by Plutocratic America 😟
« Reply #240 on: December 13, 2019, 03:02:26 pm »

I believe Ford was another casualty of the diseases of despair the oligarchs are deliberately and methodically (SEE: Mens Rea) fostering on the masses of what used to be our country. It belongs to the oligarchs now.

🐊 Alligators just do what they do to eat. Unlike the oligarchs, alligators have no malice.

The oligarchic class of plutocrats that run this country are destroying it. They are destroying it because that is what psychopaths, who became billionaires through grossly unethical wage slave business practices, DO. They have never done anything else, no matter what you have read or where you have read it in some over-edumacated, upper class kowtowing "historical" bullshit about the "power of the wealthy dynasties to direct history".

It takes a while, but plutocratic psychopaths 🎩👹 always end up eating their own seed corn, to their dismay and ultimate demise. Evil is as evil does.
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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🐵 Jeremy Corbyn Throws Away UK Election to 😈🎩 Boris Johnson (w/ Victoria Jones)
856 views•Dec 13, 2019


Thom Hartmann Program
200K subscribers

Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign in the UK was awful in the British election. He ignored the wishes of those who voted to Leave the EU, many of whom are Labour supporters.

🔴 Subscribe for more clips like this: https://www.youtube.com/user/thomhart...

Corbyn’s voters stayed home and others voted for the Brexit party, which split the vote. The result was Conservative Boris Johnson taking a majority in the House of Commons of 80 seats.

Get Brexit Done was the mantra from Boris Johnson and the Conservatives.

Scotland still wants a second referendum for Scottish Independence and the Scottish Nationalist Party, the SNP, won 48 seats from the 59 in the country, which may force Westminster’s hand.

Victoria Jones joined Thom to discuss what happen at the British Election.

🔥 WATCH NEXT: Who Is Boris Johnson and Why Is He British Prime Minister? (w/ Victoria Jones)

⭐ Join our Membership and Support the Channel:  https://www.youtube.com/user/thomhart...

Agelbert RANT: So, the Fascists ☠️ won in "jolly old England", eh?     

Well, it looks like that movie we all watched several decades ago (made from the "fictional" dystopia that Orwell portrayed in his book "1984") was quite prophetic. The year in the title was 36 years early, but there is no need to quibble over details.

Here's the trailer from the 2008 remake:

1984 George Orwell Movie Trailer (1984)
   
Quote
Luis E. 3 years ago
It was supposed to be a novel, not a manual

Here's the original movie in full:

Orwell's 1984 (1956) The best one

 


He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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Re: The Misery Caused by Plutocratic America 😟
« Reply #242 on: December 14, 2019, 06:52:05 am »

I believe Ford was another casualty of the diseases of despair the oligarchs are deliberately and methodically (SEE: Mens Rea) fostering on the masses of what used to be our country. It belongs to the oligarchs now.

🐊 Alligators just do what they do to eat. Unlike the oligarchs, alligators have no malice.

The oligarchic class of plutocrats that run this country are destroying it. They are destroying it because that is what psychopaths, who became billionaires through grossly unethical wage slave business practices, DO. They have never done anything else, no matter what you have read or where you have read it in some over-edumacated, upper class kowtowing "historical" bullshit about the "power of the wealthy dynasties to direct history".

It takes a while, but plutocratic psychopaths 🎩👹 always end up eating their own seed corn, to their dismay and ultimate demise. Evil is as evil does.

Quite correct. Everyone involved ran true to form: methheads tweak, oligarchs exploit, and alligators chomp.

The availability of toxic drugs is all part of The Great Culling, the multiple-decade plan to get useless eaters off the books, and to stop consuming resources that God wants to be deployed to serve our betters. We're supposed to be too stupid to see it. Likewise with environmental toxins: if you can cut sperm count and motility in half in each generation, pretty soon you're in Children of Men territory, where reproduction has come to a halt, or The Handmaid's Tale territory, where it is reserved for the Elect.

AGelbert

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Cruise Ships have FENDER BENDER! 👀
« Reply #243 on: December 21, 2019, 11:04:13 pm »


Watch: Carnival Cruise Ships Collide in Mexico 👀

December 20, 2019 by Mike Schuler

Two Carnival cruise ships collided in Cozumel, Mexico on Friday, causing damage to both ships.

Video posted online show the stern of the Carnival Glory crash into the bow of the Carnival Legend.

Mexican authorities confirmed the incident took place around 8:30 a.m. local time.


No injuries have been reported.

More video of the incident is below:


“Carnival Glory was maneuvering to dock when it made contact with Carnival Legend which was already alongside,” Carnival said in a statement. “We are assessing the damage but there are no issues that impact the seaworthiness of either ship.”

Carnival Glory just crashed into Carnival Legend and almost crashed into Oasis of the Seas at the Cozumel cruise port. #FoxNews #RoyalCaribbean #CarnivalLegend #CarnivalGlory #OasisoftheSeas pic.twitter.com/5ITBCfz99L

— Matthew Bruin (@BruinMatthew) December 20, 2019

The damage to Carnival Glory is seen after a collision with another cruise ship at Cozumel cruise port, Mexico December 20, 2019 in this image obtained from social media. Jordan Moseley via REUTERS

#carnivalglory 10 year anniversary cruise just crashed. License and insurance please! #carnivalcrash #10yearanniversary #cozumel #oopsie pic.twitter.com/s2gNUHcWSR

— Wendy Brewer (@WendyBrew5967) December 20, 2019

So uh yeah, just witnessed a cruise ship crash in Cozumel. #carnivalglory #carnivallegend pic.twitter.com/WbtioFqVKe

— Jordan Moseley (@j_moseley) December 20, 2019

https://gcaptain.com/watch-carnival-cruise-ships-collide-in-mexico/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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So Trump Employs Undocumented Immigrants at His Properties and Nobody Really Cares?
That seems to be the state of affairs, this time after a report on his Virginia winery after some were fired.


US-POLITICS-TRUMP-NEW YEAR
JIM WATSONGetty Images

When ICE raided some chicken plants in Mississippi last year, they rounded up nearly 700 undocumented immigrant workers. They did not arrest the managers or corporate executives who systematically employed them. This fits a pattern, according to The New York Times: between March 2018 and 2019, the feds prosecuted 112,000 people for illegal entry or re-entry, but charged just 11 employers for hiring some of these same people.

Before anti-immigrant rhetoric descended into full-on propaganda about crime and MS-13, there was a lot of talk about undocumented immigrants taking jobsfrom American citizens. In Mississippi, citizens did take some of the vacated jobs. (There's also the related charge that undocumented workers drag down wages, which is unproven but at least does not boil down solely to uncut racial grievance.) But the persistent refusal to enact penalties on people who choose to employ undocumented immigrants suggests these are not the most pressing concerns for decision-makers. The people who travel hundreds or thousands of miles to get to the U.S. are desperate for decent work, and feel it's worth the risk of deportation. It's employers who are primed for a change in incentive structure, yet they are rarely, if ever, punished. It's enough to make you think this is not, nor has it never been, about the plight of the American worker. It's a regime where workers can be simultaneously exploited by employers and demonized by political elites, ground up by the great American machine.

As usual, the President of the United States is a flag-bearer for all these most base instincts. It's tempting to see hypocrisy as a quaint relic of the Before Times, a dead concept in the era of post-truth politicking. (We are, after all, in a moment in which the president's allies are casting him as an International Corruption Crusader while he's orchestrating the Great American Heist.) But pointing this out can still serve as a reminder that none of these folks ever cared about this stuff. Donald Trump, you see, has always employed undocumented immigrants—at many of his properties, on many of his construction projects. He has no issue with these people except when it's convenient fodder for a rage spasm to get The Base going. The latest example arrived on the last day of 2019 via the Washington Post.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

Nearly a year after the Trump Organization pledged to root out undocumented workers at its properties, supervisors at the Trump Winery on Monday summoned at least seven employees and fired them because of their lack of legal immigration status, according to two of the dismissed workers...
Two of the fired workers ... said they thought the company had held off on firing them until after the year’s work was complete, taking advantage of their labor for as long as possible. Both had worked at the winery for more than a decade.

That seems like the whole arrangement in a nutshell. Extract cheap labor from people—in this case, allow them to finish the grape harvest—then discard them as soon as it's convenient to do so. In general, the property relies on immigrant labor from Mexico in the form of seasonal workers who arrive on legal visas, according to the Post, but there are also year-round undocumented workers. They are among some 49 undocumented people the Post alone has spoken with, who worked at 11 different Trump properties across four states. For years now, the president has traveled the country railing against immigrants as violent criminals and imploring people to "Buy American, Hire American," while he profited from undocumented labor in systematic fashion. In July 2018, his Mar-a-Lago property announced it was seeking 61 foreign workers on a legal basis. Hire American for thee, but not for me.

Omar Miranda worked for Trump’s Virginia winery without papers. He was just fired now that the harvest’s finished.

This goes all the way back to the '80s, of course, when Trump had hundreds of undocumented Polish immigrants building Trump Tower. He paid them as little as $4 an hour—and always well below union wage—because that's why people like Donald Trump employ people without papers. He ultimately settled a lawsuit around the workers' treatment. It's fitting that the people who made his flagship project possible would fit the theoretical description of the people he has built a political career smearing as criminals. (In practice, he is referring to brown immigrants.) But it also fits because Trump is merely a particularly garish emblem of the post-Reagan plutocrat class, where greed is good and other people—whether they're undocumented workers or they own a small contracting business—are just marks waiting to get fleeced.

That hustle now extends to the angry and isolated people who show up to his rallies in search of community and solidarity against The Other. They will not mind that he's profited so handsomely off undocumented labor, because it's about the performance of demonstrating who's a Real American with a say in how this country is run. Also, anything he does is excusable on the basis that Democrats do it, too, or anybody who's smart would do it, or everybody does it. Now there's some truth to that: the president is indeed one of a huge number of employers who uses undocumented labor with zero consequences.


AGelbert

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🚩 Strong earthquake rocks Puerto Rico, knocks out power island-wide

Quote
...Albert Rodríguez, who is from the southwest town of Guánica, said the tsunami sirens went off before officials canceled the alert. He said there is widespread damage in his neighborhood.

"The road is c r a c k e d in the middle and it lifted up," he said. :o

Agence France Press said people wrote on social media that they were shaken awake by quake's force. One woman tweeted that she'd been "wrenched from sleep" and said, "Everybody is awake & scared all over."

Víctor Huérfano, director of Puerto Rico's Seismic Network, told The Associated Press he doesn't have immediate reports of damage or injuries because communications are down for much of the island. He said officials in the large southern coastal city of Ponce told him there was widespread damage.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/puerto-rico-earthquake-strong-quake-knocks-out-power-island-wide-today-2020-01-07-live-updates/

My mother-in-law in the San Juan metropolitan area felt it even though the quake was centered almost 50 miles southwest of her location. My brother-in-law and his wife were less than 5 miles from the  epicenter. He told my wife his bed was jerking 3 inches 👀 back and forth during the quake. Needless to say, they didn't sleep a wink after that.

M6.5 Earthquake - Puerto Rico region

Preliminary Report
Magnitude   6.5

Date-Time   7 Jan 2020 04:24:27 near epicenter
       

Location   17.951N 66.736W
Depth   10 km

Distances   
          • 5.3 km (3.3 mi) SSW of Tallaboa, Puerto Rico
          • 9.6 km (6.0 mi) SE of Guayanilla, Puerto Rico
          • 13.6 km (8.4 mi) WSW of Ponce, Puerto Rico
          • 15.3 km (9.5 mi) SE of Yauco, Puerto Rico
          • 35.8 km (22.2 mi) ESE of San Germ�n, Puerto Rico

Location Uncertainty   Horizontal: 4.6 km; Vertical 1.8 km
Parameters   Nph = 120; Dmin = 17.0 km; Rmss = 1.01 seconds; Gp = 36°
Version =
Event ID   us 70006vll


https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us70006vll
« Last Edit: January 07, 2020, 02:46:42 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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The Ominous Earthquake Swarm in Puerto Rico
« Reply #246 on: January 11, 2020, 02:31:58 pm »
"We are shocked, shocked..."


The US and China plan to sign this month to sign an interim trade agreement, which was reached in October as the two sides sought to defuse tensions. That stalled several planned escalations, but tariffs were kept on thousands of products shipped between the two largest economies.

Yep. The 🦀 Trump Train Wreck continues true to form, as Pulitzer Prize Winner Journalist David Cay Johnston accurately predicted.


🦀 Trump is not simply a stupid, incompetent greedball; Trump is simply an Evil Bastard. IOW, Trump is, and has been since he was knee high to a grasshopper, a PSYCHOPATH. Puerto Rico still hasn't gotten all the disaster aid money approved from 2017 Hurricane Maria damages. This cruelty is part of the "fun" for Trump. Disaster aid money denied is just the tip of that heinous modus operandi turdburg.

On January 7, 2020, there was a large earthquake in Puerto Rico. Many houses, culturally important old biuldings and school buildings made of concrete were severely damaged. Trump refused to send a nickel to Puerto Rico, despite this earthquaqe qualifying under the Disaster Declaration protocol for aid money.


Natural structure at Guayanilla beach area before the quake:


After the January 7, 2020 EARTHQUAKE.




Today, January 11, 2020, there was another large earthquake in Puerto Rico resulting in even more severe damages to hundreds of concrete structures, leaving hundreds more homeless. Trump is probably cheering.

« Last Edit: January 11, 2020, 04:58:41 pm by AGelbert »
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Puerto Rico Earthquakes Set Hurricane Recovery Back as 🦀 Trump Denies Aid  >:(
1,894 views•Jan 14, 2020


The Real News Network
377K subscribers

The U.S. territory was hit with two major earthquakes and hundreds of aftershocks, but local and national politics are still getting in the way of real help for the people of Puerto Rico.

Director/Video Editor: Bababtunde Ogunfolaju
Audio Engineer: Adam Coley
Chase Producer: Genevieve Montinar

Subscribe to our page and support our work at https://therealnews.com/donate.
Category News & Politics
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

AGelbert

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Earthquakes in Puerto Rico have changed the landscape. Satellites can see it from space 😲.

By Mike Wall January 13, 2020

The island's ground has shifted. 😨
 
This map shows ground changes, or displacement, on the eastern two-thirds of Puerto Rico following the 6.4-magnitude earthquake of Jan. 7, 2020. Areas of displacement are shown in red, with greater displacement by darker shades. The ground shifted up to 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) in a downward and slightly west direction. The orange circles show the cluster of quakes of aftershocks that have hit the island recently. (Image: © NASA/JPL-Caltech, ESA, USGS)

The swarm of earthquakes that have rocked Puerto Rico recently left marks that are visible from space.

About 2,000 quakes have shaken Puerto Rico since late December, with the most powerful a 6.4-magnitude temblor that took place last Tuesday (Jan. 7), centered just off the island's southwest coast. That one, the biggest quake to hit Puerto Rico in a century, killed at least one person, damaged nearly 600 buildings and caused at least $110 million in damage, Reuters reported.

The series of quakes have also altered the lay of Puerto Rico's land, researchers studying imagery captured by the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-1A satellite determined.

"The scientists found that the greatest displacement from the [satellite's] flyover area occurred west of the city of Ponce (identified by the green star), not far from the quake's offshore epicenter," NASA officials wrote in a statement on Friday (Jan. 10).

"They recorded up to 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) of ground change there," they added. "The ground appeared to shift downward and slightly to the west."

As it commonly does after natural disasters, NASA is making its data and scientific expertise available to aid response and recovery efforts in Puerto Rico.

"Products in the process of being produced include Suomi-NPP-based 'Black Marble' power outage maps, damage maps, and landslide maps," NASA officials wrote in the same statement, referring to the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, a joint project of NASA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Defense.

"A webpage has also been created on the NASA Disasters Mapping Portal to supply relevant GIS data products," the officials added. "The map contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data processed by ESA and analyzed by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and earthquake location data from the USGS [United States Geological Survey]."

The USGS is providing regular updates about the Puerto Rico earthquakes, including aftershock forecasts. You can find that information here.

Earth From Space: Amazing Astronaut Photos

Satellite Photos Help Indonesian Relief Workers Sort Through Earthquake, Tsunami Aftermath

Liftoff! Europe's Newest 'Sentinel' Satellite Will Study Earth's Seas, Land and Air

Mike Wall's book about the search for alien life, "Out There" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), is out now. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.

https://www.space.com/puerto-rico-earthquake-effects-satellite-views.html



He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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More on the domestic terrorist next door.

That Pro-Gun Rally in Virginia Wasn’t Exactly “Peaceful”
The threat of violence in Richmond—and arrest of neo-Nazis—sent other groups into hiding.


A swastika made of AR15s
Photo Illustration by Alicia Tatone

On Monday, the streets of Richmond, Virginia, were flooded with a spectacular arsenal of weaponry; some 22,000 people from all over the country had turned up to protest the gun control laws recently passed by the Virginia State Senate. Fearing a repeat of the deadly violence that had gripped the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, three years earlier, governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency and barred weapons from the Capitol grounds. Some 6,000 protesters grumblingly abided. But just outside the legions of police barricades, twice that number of people roamed the streets of Richmond bearing a bristling mass of rifles, from AR-15s to massive Barrett sniper rifles. Some wore skull masks; others waved Confederate flags. Members of hate groups like the League of the South and the American Guard, as well as the Proud Boys, mingled openly; some of the latter were wearing patches that said “RWDS”—an acronym for “Right-Wing Death Squad.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones gave a speech from a Terradyne battle tank. Adding to the bellicose mood, some attendees paraded with a massive guillotine as a prop, and others held up an effigy strung on a noose, emblazoned with the slogan, “Thus always to tyrants.”

No one was shot—a frankly extraordinary turn of events given the sheer amount of weaponry, the density of the crowd, and the weapons stuffed casually into backpacks or held loosely in the crooks of pale arms. This happy vicissitude of fate led right-wing groups to declare the event a triumph—in the words of fringe-right publications Gateway Pundit and InfoWars, a “peaceful protest.” Mainstream media, too, bought into this analysis: “Pro-gun rally by thousands in Virginia ends peacefully,” was the assessment of the Washington Post. Having made Northam the butt of their rhetorical ire during the rally, conservative groups further condemned his choice to declare a state of emergency in the state’s capital: “Gov. Northam fantasizes he saved Virginia from volatile situation,” crowed a headline at Breitbart.

All this confidence belied the fact that bloodshed—great and heavy and perhaps unprecedented on American soil—was narrowly averted. A federal motion for detention released Tuesday revealed that three members of neo-Naziterror group The Base had planned to attend Monday’s rally in Virginia, kitted out with a home-built, functioning fully-automatic rifle capable of firing several rounds at a time; survival gear; and 1,500 rounds of ammunition. They had planned to open fire into the crowd.

According to the affidavit, one of the men had postulated that there were enough “radicalized” individuals slated to be in Richmond that “all you gotta do is start making things go wrong and Virginia can spiral out to **** full blown civil war.” Their goal, one of the men stated in a video, was to “bring the collapse…If you want the white race to survive, you’re going to have to do your **** part.” The three men were arrested four days before the Richmond rally—held at bay from fulfilling the fantasies they had described of “literally hunting people” in a heavily armed crowd, and setting into motion a chain of violent events that would extend far beyond Richmond.

But even with the Base threat—which was thoroughly ignored by right-wing media—neutralized, it seems myopic at best to describe the Monday event as “peaceful.” There was, it was true, an absence of immediate bloodshed; but what abounded, in that armed and insurrectionist sea of humanity, was the promise that bloodshed might happen at any time, should the will of the mob be thwarted. America’s exceptional tolerance towards armed white gunmen—its brooking of gun-toting militias around the country, and the po-faced seriousness with which the media takes claims of “freedom” when it comes to the right to own weapons of mass slaughter—is entirely restricted to this demographic. Famously, California enacted gun-control legislation prohibiting the open carrying of firearms after a demonstration of armed Black Panthers on the steps of the state house; this swift reactive prohibition was enacted by then-governor Ronald Reagan. The threat of white supremacist violence, despite resulting in multiple shooting massacres against black people, Jews, and Latinos in the last several years, has yet to pierce the national consciousness as the vast and threatening specter it is. Terrorists were intercepted on the way to this rally with the open goal of sparking civil war; the thousands of armed individuals roaming the streets of an American city openly proclaimed their intent not to obey laws they might disagree with. Yet their very whiteness rendered them invisible as a threat: in America, if you are white, you can wear a mask and carry a gun and hang a governor in effigy, and go home quietly at the end of the day, unmolested.

On Monday, itself the sea of armed men kept the city in a kind of artificial stillness—not safety but fear. There is a difference between peace that consists of calm and security, and the false peace of being held under threat. One may be silent when held at gunpoint, but it is not the silence of contentment; it is the silence of mortal terror.

Reporter friends who planned to attend the event went in with a sense of dread, a war-zone fatalism at what might happen. Molly Conger, a Virginia-based leftist activist and citizen journalist, told me that she had cautioned other activists to stay far from the capital and avoid counterprotest. She attended, she told me, because she felt an obligation to document the event, rather than to protest it. “I still think it was the right thing to do,” she told me Tuesday, of her decision to warn other activists away. “I would be distraught if I had the power to keep people away and didn’t and they died in a mass shooting.” At the event, she said, “the crowd was so thick I got knocked in the face and chest with rifle barrels.”

The effects on locals amounted to a sweeping petrification. Due to Monday’s event, Richmond natives closed their businesses downtown—from a 7-11 near the Capitol to a barbershop to the entirety of Virginia Commonwealth University, which suspended all activities for the day, including internships and clinical placements; a university statement made clear that this was in response to the threat, not the federal holiday. NBC reported that some residents of Jackson Ward, a historically black neighborhood in the city, left town entirely for the day—which was Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Due to the state of emergency declared by the governor, legislative business slowed to a crawl; nonessential personnel stayed away from the capitol. So did other political groups that had planned to lobby the legislature on Monday, part of a “Lobby Days” tradition that dates back decades. The Northern Virginia Association for the Deaf had planned to lobby the legislature in support of a bill that would require movie theaters to include captions. Its president, Maryrose Gonzalez, told me they’d stayed home to avoid “getting caught up with the gun people.”

The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, a group that had hosted a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Richmond for 28 years, canceled its vigil. “Advocates have faced armed individuals trying to intimidate us each year,” wrote the group’s president, Lori Haas, in a press release. “But this year is different; we have received information that heavily armed white supremacists will be seeking to incite violence, and our organization has decided that the safety of our volunteers, advocates, and staff, many of whom are survivors of gun violence, must be our top priority.”

An annual, long-planned march for the rights of undocumented Virginians, coordinated by New Virginia Majority, an advocacy group for working-class Black and Brown Virginians, was cancelled on the Friday before the gun lobby group. Ibby Han, a representative of the organization Virginia Student Power, which had partnered in the MLK Jr. Day event since 2015, told me that the New Virginia Majority event had expected around 1,000 attendees, many of whom were undocumented. The advocacy event was centered around drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants and criminal justice reform. “We are enraged,” the organization wrote, “that we cannot use our voices today at the General Assembly.”

That the zeal of armed activists should crush the rights of others to advocate is neither novel nor unexpected, for all their loudly proclaimed adoration of “freedom.” Americans weary of mass shootings at malls, churches, kindergartens, concerts, nightclubs, abortion clinics, hospitals, universities, and movie theaters—in short, in any place where people gather—have long pointed out that the fear marring any movement through the commons constitutes an infringment of the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. We speak the names of towns that have become synonymous with mass shootings like a litany, a kaddish for the dead. This state of affairs is enforced by a minority that is both well-heeled and well-armed. As if to underscore the point, the NRA handed out 1,000 free 30-round magazines to gun owners before the rally. The event on Monday served the only possible purpose thousands of armed men gathering en masse can serve: it served as a threat, in this case against democracy itself.

The Virginia state legislature that rally-goers were eager to call “tyrants” had been elected, democratically, the previous year, in a wave election that shook off a 20-year Republican chokehold on the legislative body of the state. One of the major issues that propelled Democrats to victory was the promise of gun-control legislation, particularly after a mass shooting in Virginia Beach left 12 city residents dead and four others wounded in May 2019. For all their loud objection to “tyranny,” the purpose of the armed crowd was to thwart the will of an electorate that had outvoted them. Virginians’ overall enthusiasm for gun control measures has not waned since last year’s election; a poll conducted in December revealed that Virginia voters strongly support requiring background checks on all gun sales, 86% to 13%, and passing a “red flag” law to remove guns from someone who may harm someone, 73% to 23%. A majority, 54% to 44%, support banning assault-style weapons.

Nonetheless, in advance of Monday’s event, socialist state legislator Lee Carter, the target of a whirlwind of pro-gun conspiracy theories, went into hiding. Carter’s bill had been proposed in a prior legislative session, intended to support teachers’ rights to strike; responding to safety concerns about the potential of police strikes, he had amended it to maintain the status quo prohibiting law enforcement officers from public-sector striking. This was interpreted, in a whirl of YouTube rants and conspiracy chatter, as a bill to punish sheriffs who might refuse to enforce gun-control laws. The death threats were so relentless, he told GEN, that he chose to hide out in an undisclosed safe house on the day of the rally. “I’m not interested in becoming a martyr,” he said. The message was clear enough, it has been clear enough for years: to oppose the monopoly of gun owners over the American commons is to risk death.

The rally was, as one attendee put it to Vice reporter Tess Owen, intended to be“a show of force.” Not the force of popular will, nor the force of solidarity, but the kind of force that comes packed into magazines, with barrels cocked, effigies hung in nooses, white skulls etched on black masks. It was a force that silenced others who sought to raise their voices, and was meant to. Monday was a day of a clenched fist raised in menace; rather than be lulled by the temporary absence of bloodshed, Americans would do better to be poised for the inevitable falling of the blow.

Talia Lavinis a writer based in Brooklyn. Her first book, Culture Warlords, is forthcoming in 2020 from Hachette Books.


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Surly1

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****-Life Syndrome,” Trump Voters, and Clueless Dems
« Reply #250 on: January 25, 2020, 07:15:58 am »
****-life-syndrome-trump-voters-and-clueless-dems/?fbclid=IwAR18IC2CxVAZVQDIekpzCXjUqDkBdNWvT3x_REXbseoeSqx42-O50Z_X8EA" class="bbc_link" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“****-Life Syndrome,” Trump Voters, and Clueless Dems

Photograph Source: Frank Boston – CC BY 2.0

Getting rid of Trump means taking seriously “****-life syndrome”—and its resulting misery, which includes suicide, drug overdose death, and trauma for surviving communities.

My state of Ohio is home to many ****-life syndrome sufferers. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton lost Ohio’s 18 electoral votes to Trump. She got clobbered by over 400,000 votes (more than 8%). She lost 80 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Trump won rural poorer counties, several by whopping margins. Trump got the ****-life syndrome vote.

Will Hutton in his 2018 Guardian piece, “****-life-syndrome">The Bad News is We’re Dying Early in Britain – and It’s All Down to ‘****-Life Syndrome’” describes ****-life syndrome in both Britain and the United States: “Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security.”

The Brookings Institution, in November 2019, reported: “53 million Americans between the ages of 18 to 64—accounting for 44% of all workers—qualify as ‘low-wage.’ Their median hourly wages are $10.22, and median annual earnings are about $18,000.”

For most of these low-wage workers, Hutton notes: “Finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources. Yet turn on the TV or visit a middle-class shopping mall and a very different and unattainable world presents itself. Knowing that you are valueless, you resort to drugs, antidepressants and booze. You eat junk food and watch your ill-treated body balloon. It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.”

****-life syndrome is not another fictitious illness conjured up by the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industrial complex to sell psychotropic drugs. It is a reality created by corporatist rulers and their lackey politicians—pretending to care about their minimum-wage-slave constituents, who are trying to survive on 99¢ boxed macaroni and cheese prepared in carcinogenic water, courtesy of DuPont or some other such low-life leviathan.

The Cincinnati Enquirer, in November 2019, ran the story: “Suicide Rate Up 45% in Ohio in Last 11 Years, With a Sharper Spike among the Young.” In Ohio between 2007 and 2018, the rate of suicide among people 10 to 24 has risen by 56%. The Ohio Department of Health reported that suicide is the leading cause of death among Ohioans ages 10‐14 and the second leading cause of death among Ohioans ages 15‐34, with the suicide rate higher in poorer, rural counties.

Overall in the United States, “Suicides have increased most sharply in rural communities, where loss of farming and manufacturing jobs has led to economic declines over the past quarter century,” reports the American Psychological Association. The U.S. suicide rate has risen 33% from 1999 through 2017 (from 10.5 to 14 suicides per 100,000 people).

In addition to an increasing rate of suicide, drug overdose deaths rose in the United States from 16,849 in 1999 to 70,237 in 2017, more sharply increasing in recent years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently reported that opioids—mainly synthetic opioids—were involved in 47,600 overdose deaths in 2017 (67.8% of all drug overdose deaths).

Among all states in 2017, Ohio had the second highest rate of drug overdose death (46.3 per 100,000). West Virginia had the highest rate (57.8 per 100,000).

“In 2016, Donald Trump captured 68 percent of the vote in West Virginia, a state hit hard by opioid overdoses,” begins the 2018 NPR story: “Analysis Finds Geographic Overlap In Opioid Use And Trump Support In 2016.”

The NPR story was about a study published in JAMA Network Open titled “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” lead authored by physician James Goodwin. In counties with high rates of opioid use, Trump received 60% of the vote; but Trump received only 39% of the vote in counties with low opioid use. Opioid use is prevalent in poor rural counties, as Goodwin reports in his study: “Approximately two-thirds of the association between opioid rates and presidential voting was explained by socioeconomic variables.”

Goodwin told NPR: “It very well may be that if you’re in a county that is dissolving because of opioids, you’re looking around and you’re seeing ruin. That can lead to a sense of despair . . . . You want something different. You want radical change.”

****-life syndrome sufferers are looking for immediate change, and are receptive to unconventional politicians.

In 2016, Trump understood that being unconventional, including unconventional obnoxiousness, can help ratings. So he began his campaign with unconventional serial humiliations of his fellow Republican candidates to get the nomination; and since then, his unconventionality has been limited only by his lack of creativity—relying mostly on the Roy Cohn modeled “Punch them harder than they punch you” for anyone who disagrees with him.

I talked to Trump voters in 2016, and many of them felt that Trump was not a nice person, even a jerk, but their fantasy was that he was one of those rich guys with a big ego who needed to be a hero. Progressives who merely mock this way of thinking rather than create a strategy to deal with it are going to get four more years of Trump.

The Dems’ problem in getting the ****-life syndrome vote in 2020 is that none of their potential nominees for president are unconventional. In 2016, Bernie Sanders achieved some degree of unconventionality. His young Sandernistas loved the idea of a curmudgeon grandfather/eccentric uncle who boldly proclaimed in Brooklynese that he was a “socialist,” and his fans marveled that he was no loser, having in fact charmed Vermonters into electing him to the U.S. Senate. Moreover, during the 2016 primaries, there were folks here in Ohio who ultimately voted for Trump but who told me that they liked Bernie—both Sanders and Trump appeared unconventional to them.

While Bernie still has fans in 2020, he has done major damage to his “unconventionality brand.” By backing Hillary Clinton in 2016, he resembled every other cowardly politician. I felt sorry for his Sandernistas, heartbroken after their hero Bernie—who for most of his political life had self-identified as an “independent” and a “socialist”—became a compliant team player for the corporatist Blue Team that he had spent a career claiming independence from. If Bernie was terrified in 2016 of risking Ralph Nader’s fate of ostracism for defying the corporatist Blue Team, would he really risk assassination for defying the rich bastards who own the United States?

So in 2020, this leaves realistic Dems with one strategy. While the Dems cannot provide a candidate who can viscerally connect with ****-life syndrome sufferers, the Dems can show these victims that they have been used and betrayed by Trump.

Here in Ohio in counties dominated by ****-life syndrome, the Dems would be wise not to focus on their candidate but instead pour money into negative advertising, shaming Trump for making promises that he knew he wouldn’t deliver on: Hillary has not been prosecuted; Mexico has paid for no wall; great manufacturing jobs are not going to Ohioans; and most importantly, in their communities, there are now even more suicides, drug overdose deaths, and grieving families.

You would think a Hollywood Dem could viscerally communicate in 30 seconds: “You fantasized that this braggart would be your hero, but you discovered he’s just another rich **** politician out for himself.” This strategy will not necessarily get Dems the ****-life syndrome vote, but will increase the likelihood that these folks stay home on Election Day and not vote for Trump.

The question is just how clueless are the Dems? Will they convince themselves that ****-life syndrome sufferers give a **** about Trump’s impeachment? Will they convince themselves that Biden, Buttigieg, Bloomberg or Warren are so wonderful that ****-life syndrome sufferers will take them and their campaign promises seriously? Then Trump probably wins again, thanks to both ****-life syndrome and ****-Dems syndrome.


AGelbert

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Watch: Wild Docking in Norway
« Reply #251 on: January 28, 2020, 03:54:28 pm »


Watch: Wild Docking 👀 in Norway
January 27, 2020 by Mike Schuler

Check out this wild video out of northern Norway showing an expedition cruise ship docking during strong winds.

The video was filmed on January 21 as the Hurtigruten expedition ship MS Nordnorge was docking Bodø, Norway. As you can see the Captain uses the ship’s anchor to ease the ship alongside the pier, earning him high praise on social media.


The 123.3 meter, 11,384 gross tonne MS Nordnorge was built in 1997 (refurbished in 2016) and provides expedition cruises for up to 590 passengers within the Artic Circle.

Last week’s wild docking wasn’t its first rodeo, either. Check out the video below showing the same ship pulling off a similar maneuver in 2016.


https://gcaptain.com/watch-wild-docking-in-norway/
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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New Section of Trump’s ‘Virtually Impenetrable’ Wall Gets Blown Over by Wind in California




Photo: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

On the campaign trail and trips to the southern border, President Trump has called his big, beautiful wall “tough,”“virtually impenetrable,” and hot enough “to fry an egg on.” On a September visit to the Otay Mesa border site in San Diego, he boasted, “This wall is not something that can be really knocked down.”

But on Wednesday, Customs and Border Protection confirmed to CNN that newly-installed wall panels in Calexico, California were knocked down by wind gusts of up to 37-miles-per-hour, causing the metal slats to timber into Mexican territory:

Agent Carlos Pitones of the Customs and Border Protection sector in El Centro, California, told CNN that the sections that gave way had recently been set in a new concrete foundation in Calexico, California. The concrete had not yet cured, according to Pitones, and the wall panels were unable to withstand the windy conditions.

The wall has faced a few setbacks that contradict Trump’s claims of near-impenetrability, like in November when the Washington Postreported that smugglers were using reciprocating saws — available for less than $100 — to cut through sections of the steel-bollard barrier in minutes. And though the president has claimed that no one would be able to climb the wall, smugglers have found a simple summiting method, using rebar ladders to hoist up one side, and rope ladders to scale down the other.

The fall of the inland California wall section is certainly less embarrassing than the cost-per-mile of the Trump administration’s campaign wish fulfillment on the border. Two weeks ago, the White House grabbed another $7.2 billion in Pentagon funding for the wall, to bring the total taxpayer cost to $18.4 billion. Last week, the administration celebrated the great success of that sum after hitting the 100th mile of wall built under Trump, a majority of it serving as replacement for existing border structures.


AGelbert

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He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. Matt 10:37

Surly1

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It's about time.

The FBI Just Put White Nationalists and Neo-Nazis on the Same Threat Level as ISIS
“Not only is the terror threat diverse, it’s unrelenting," said FBI chief Chris Wray.


By Tess Owen Feb 6 2020, 12:03pm

Feb 6 2020, 12:03pm

The FBI has elevated racially-motivated violent extremism to a “national threat priority,” in yet another sign that the U.S. government has finally woken up to the threat posed by white nationalists and neo-Nazis at home and abroad.

In a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray outlined several concrete steps the agency had taken to combat violent far-right extremists, explaining that the “national threat priority” designation puts those groups or individuals on the same footing as ISIS” in terms of the resources the FBI will devote to it.

“We’re particularly focused on domestic terrorism, especially racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists,” said Wray. “Not only is the terror threat diverse, it’s unrelenting.”

READ: 'I need to claim my first victim': Alleged Neo-Nazis' Violent Plans for Virginia Rally Revealed

Wray’s announcement comes just two weeks after FBI agents arrested eight members of the violent neo-Nazi group The Base, three of whom were allegedly discussing firing into the crowd during the large pro-gun rally in Virginia last month. In recent months, the FBI also foiled two synagogue bombings, Wray said.

The FBI chief also said that he’d created a domestic terrorism and hate crimes fusion cell to “bring together the expertise of domestic terror folks and hate crimes folks.” “They’re working together to not just focus on the threats that have already happened but to look ahead around the corner to anticipate where else we need to be.”

Last September, DHS unveiled its new counterterrorism strategy that, for the first time, recognized white nationalism as a major threat. Congress has held well over a dozen hearings on the matter, and lawmakers have called on the State Department to designate international far-right networks as foreign terror organizations, and on DHS to produce threat assessments of those networks.

And according to Wray’s testimony last November, the FBI made 107 domestic terrorism arrests in fiscal year 2019 — around the same number of international terrorism arrests.

Making far-right extremism a national threat priority means the FBI can allocate more resources to the problem in terms of personnel, agents, and analysts, says Mark Concordia, FBI and New York State Counterterrorism instructor and associate professor of criminal justice at Roberts Wesleyan College.

“The decision would be based on intelligence analysis and obviously the potential increase in these types of attacks, whether the investigation shows they are a hate crime or racially motivated, and whether they can be tied to a larger organization or ideology rather than an individual hate crime” said Concordia.

Citing Justice Department sources, CBS reports that more federal arrests targeting neo-Nazi or white nationalists are coming down the pike, including people with ties to networks in Europe, Ukraine, and Russia.

« Last Edit: June 04, 2021, 01:47:30 pm by AGelbert »

 

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