Forbes | It is starting to look like disrespecting the country during the national anthem is accomplishing what the concussions, domestic violence and deflategate could not do–drive down television ratings for the National Football League.
Through two weeks of football the NFL’s television ratings are down across the board. The drop in ratings and viewership is unprecedented in recent years and has occurred during the protest of the national anthem, started by San Francisco 49ers backup QB Colin Kaepernick. Just last year some opined that the league’s ratings had no ceiling. That appears to be false.
To summarize Sports Business Daily: NBC’s three primetime games, which includes the NFL Kickoff game, have averaged 23.7 million viewers, down 12% from the same period last year. ESPN also is seeing a 12% decline for its three “MNF” games to date. While CBSCBS -0.02% and NFL Network have only one Thursday night game to date, that lone game (Jets-Bills, 15.4 million viewers) was down 27% compared to the opening “TNF” game last season. Looking at Sunday afternoons, Fox is off (-0.2%) through two weeks, averaging 20.9 million viewers. CBS is averaging 17.3 million viewers through the same point, down 5%.
While some suggest that the drop in ratings may be due to the lack of “marquee” match ups, I don’t buy it. For starters, none of the recent PR debacles, such as drugs, beatings or concussions, creating something like #boycotnfl. Two, Kaepernick is the most-disliked player in the NFL. Three, I challenge anyone to look at the comments on stories about the NFL national anthem protests and tell me the anecdotal evidence does not strongly suggest many, if not most viewers are fed up either because they are against the protests, or just don’t want politics of any kind to interfere with their football.
citylab |Ferguson, Baltimore, and now Charlotte: We sometimes see that local protests in response to police killings morph into riots. Why do you think this is?
Riots, though they do occur, are relatively rare. More frequent are peaceful protests and community meetings, but these of course don’t get the same coverage. Riots occur because these police killings just keep happening, no matter how many peaceful marches happen. It is, in every sense, maddening.
Many have tried to discredit the riots by pointing to the occasional looting that has occurred, claiming such actions by protestors are destructive to "their own communities." In Ferguson, a QT gas station became an iconic site of destruction during the protests. In Baltimore, it was a CVS and the payday lender ACE Cash Express. In Charlotte on Tuesday, it was a Walmart. What drives the animus against these institutions, which often seem to be large corporate chains, and why are they the secondary targets of anti-police brutality protests?
For poor black people in cities, the surveillance that they experience at stores and on the streets are of a piece. When they walk in a store they are watched. When they leave the store, their receipts are questioned. They might be ripped off, or not, but they are made to feel less like sovereign customers and more like suspects. Unwarranted police stops feel similar. Those who are watched feel disrespected, and constantly reminded that they are not in charge. Riots provide that sense of control, but at a terrible cost.
Middle-class white people rarely have these experiences, so it is hard for them to understand what Walmart and police could have in common.
You have written that "riots reflect fury not just at the police, but at the constraints of the ghetto’s retail economy, where the poor pay more." How do police uphold this “ghetto retail economy,” where the poor are deprived of the competitive market pricing present in better-off suburbs?
In places where there are few legitimate jobs, the underground economy makes up the difference. Payday lenders and pawn brokers are the tip of an illicit iceberg, of which the drug trade is a major part. Fighting this illegal economy has resulted in police becoming an occupying force. Policing an economy with a handgun, needless to say, is an impossible task.
Are there historical cases in which riots have been an effective tactic for police brutality reform?
Riots draw attention to these issues in a way that protests and op-eds do not. It is hard to say that riots lead to reform, but without the riots, these kinds of activities would easily slip forgotten into the news cycle. In that sense, they are effective. But too much rioting, and the goodwill of Americans will ebb.
charlotteobserver | U.S. Rep. Robert Pittenger apologized Thursday after saying the violence in Charlotte stems from protesters who “hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not.”
Pittenger is a Republican whose district includes parts of the city where protests have turned violent in the wake of a police shooting of a black man.
He made the statement on a BBC-TV news program Thursday when asked to describe the “grievance” of the protesters.
“The grievance in their minds – the animus, the anger – they hate white people because white people are successful and they’re not,” Pittenger said. He then criticized people who receive welfare. “It is a welfare state. We have spent trillions of dollars on welfare, and we’ve put people in bondage, so they can’t be all they’re capable of being.”
He later apologized on Twitter, saying his answer “doesn't reflect who I am. I was quoting statements made by angry protesters last night on national TV. My intent was to discuss the lack of economic mobility for African Americans because of failed policies.”
motherjones | If you believe that the criminal justice system is racially biased, you need to know Heather Mac Donald.
She'll mess with your mind and make you either up your
politico-cultural game or admit you were wrong. What worries me is that
so few on 'our' side can, or bother to, go toe to toe with her. Just
about every one of her pieces is a statistical and analytical
tour-de-force, while we liberals tend too often to mouth liberal pieties
like inside jokes. Just yesterday, I was listening to Angela Davis
address the Commonwealth Club
(sorry. speech not posted) on my car radio. I agreed with nearly
everything she said, but they were dissatisfying lefty bromides, one and
all. Racist criminal justice system. Slavery was bad. War in Iraq. The
crowd whooped and hollered, but where was the beef, the analysis, the
facts? Forgive me Angela, patron saint of the streets, but Mac Donald
would have had you for lunch.
According
to her byline, Mac Donald "is a contributing editor of City Journal and
the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute". She's also among
America's harshest critic of blacks. Harshest and most devastating;
unlike most of the right-wing blovio-sphere, home girl does her
homework. And for her, 2 and 2 always equal black deficiency, whether in
morals, culture or crime. Trouble is, she comes loaded for bear.
I read her religiously—even have a Google alert set up in her
honor—much the same way one looks for dismembered limbs and blood stains
at an accident scene while knowing one shouldn't. One will only get
upset if successful and MacDonald upsets me every time because with
every piece, she sets out to prove that the only problems blacks face
are of their own making.
She doesn't mess around. Her City Journal latest is a devastating
response to the liberal shibboleth that the criminal justice system is
racist and designed to criminalize and incarcerate blacks en masse. No,
says Mac Donald. Black incarceration rates are a simple function of
rampant black crime.
atimes | Yes, American friends, Duterte is referring to one of the most brutal
and shameful chapters in the history of American imperialism, the
brutal subjugation of the Muslim population of Philippines’ Mindanao
over 30 years of formal war and informal counterinsurgency from 1898
into the 1920s.
Mindanao is where the United States first applied the savage lessons
of its Indian war to counterinsurgency in Asia—including massacre of
civilians, collective punishment, and torture. Waterboarding entered
the US military toolkit in Mindanao, as immortalized on the May 22, 1902
front cover of Life magazine.
And the war never ended. After the Philippines shed its colonial
status, the Manila Roman Catholic establishment continued the war with
US help. Today, the Philippines is locked in a cycle of negotiation and
counterinsurgency between the central government and the Moro Islamic
Liberation Front (MILF) —a cycle that Duterte as president hopes to
bring to its conclusion with a negotiated peace settlement.
This is not ancient history to Duterte, who emphatically stated in
his press conference that the reason Mindanao is “on the boil” today is
because of the historical crimes of the United States.
Duterte has additional reasons for his choler.
As I wrote previously at Asia Times,
Duterte suspects US spooks of orchestrating a deadly series of bombings
in his home city of Davao in 2002, with the probable motive of creating
a pretext for the central government to declare martial law on Mindanao
to fight the MILF. The 2002 Davao bombings form the foundation of
Duterte’s alienation from the United States and his resistance to
US-Philippine joint exercises on Mindanao, as he declared upon the
assumption of his presidency.
And, though it hasn’t received a lot of coverage in the United
States, last week, on September 2, another bomb ripped through a
marketplace in Davao, killing fourteen people. It was suspected of
being part of an assassination plot against Duterte, who was in town at
the time, and the Communist Party of the Philippines (which is also
engaged in peace talks with Duterte) accused the United States of being behind it.
The CPP characterized the group that claimed the bombing, Abu Sayyaf,
as CIA assets. Not too far off the mark, apparently. Abu Sayyaf is a
group of Islamic fighters/bandits formed out of the dregs of US
recruitment of Philippine Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
When these fighters came home, they apparently were enrolled and armed
as central government/CIA deniable assets in the war against the MILF.
Duterte has vowed to destroy, indeed, consume them.
So, mindful of the human rights crimes the US has committed
historically, recently, and perhaps currently in Mindanao, including a
possible assassination attempt against himself, Duterte declared himself
unwilling to submit to any questioning or censure by President Obama.
And his “son of a …” remark at the airport appears to have been along
the lines of, “If President Obama confronts me, son of a …, I’ll tell
him…”
At the ASEAN gathering in Laos, Duterte apparently tried to explain
the roots of his indignation but is getting the psycho crank who “veered
off speech and launched a tirade” treatment via AFP:
“The Philippine president showed a picture of the killings of
American soldiers in the past and the president said: ‘This is my
ancestor they killed. Why now we are talking about human rights,'” an
Indonesian delegate said. The Philippines was an American colony from
1898 to 1946.
The delegate described the atmosphere in the room as “quiet and shocked.”
It should be noted that in his press conference at the airport in
Manila, Duterte referenced the pictures he wanted to show, so it was
more of a planned event rather than a spontaneous piece of hysterics by
an unstable leader, which seems to be the frame being applied here.
The messy reality of a century of no-holds-barred counterinsurgency
under US coordination, drugs, corruption, and murder in the Philippines
distracts from the pretty picture of sailor suits, battleships, and
yo-ho-ho in the South China Sea with American and the Philippine
democracies shoulder-to-shoulder against China that the US wants to
present to the world.
Judging by the spate of attacks on Duterte in the Western press and
veiled criticism from some of the Manila papers, it looks like Duterte’s
insufficient loyalty to the pivot vision may result in his downfall.
Indeed, with the Duterte-US split deepening, his removal may become a
strategic imperative for America.
unz | The actual story is that Duterte is not only using the threat of
summary executions to round up addicts and pushers; he’s naming names,
both of cartel leaders and the national and local politicians and
officers who shelter them. It’s a rather thrilling high stakes
game—allegations emerged this week that the bombing in Davao that killed
14 people and was apparently an assassination attempt on Duterte was
actually conducted by threatened narcopoliticians, not the Abu Sayyaf
Islamist banditti—but the US press has apparently shown little interest
in covering these ramifications.
Also I haven’t seen a lot of reporting on the fact that Duterte’s
drug war necessitates deeper PRC-Philippine engagement in several
important aspects.
First of all, the Philippine drug trade—primarily meth, locally known as shabu—is
dominated by Chinese Triads by virtue of the fact that the large and
poorly regulated PRC drug industry is a ready source of the
intermediates needed to make the drug and also by the fact that Triads
are deeply embedded in the major Chinese-diaspora presence in Filipino
society. The PRC has a lot to offer in terms of tighter enforcement on
the mainland and perhaps in using its good offices to encourage
crackdowns in a key Triad operational base, Hong Kong.
On the other hand, the PRC can make life difficult for Duterte if it
wants to, by turning a blind eye to the export-oriented meth trade. So
there you have it.
Duterte made his expectations concerning PRC assistance quite clear by summoning the PRC ambassador back in August:
The Philippines government said on Wednesday it had
summoned the Chinese ambassador earlier this week to explain reports
that traffickers were bringing in narcotics from China, opening a new
front in President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial war on drugs.
On Tuesday, the country’s police chief told a Senate hearing that
China, Taiwan and Hong Kong were major sources of illegal drugs, and
Chinese triads were involved in trafficking.
Foreign Affairs Secretary Perfecto Yasay told a Senate hearing on
Wednesday that the Chinese ambassador had been summoned for an
explanation, and the government would also send a diplomatic
communication to Beijing to “pursue this in a more aggressive note.”
Another area of potential Philippine-PRC cooperation is PRC
assistance in a crash program to rehabilitate the Philippine drug users
who have turned themselves in to the police to avoid getting targeted by
the death squads.
Though virtually unreported in the Western media, over 700,000 users have turned themselves in.
Let me repeat that. 700,000 drug users have turned themselves in.
And they presumably need to get a clean “rehab” chit to live safely
in their communities, presenting a major challenge for the Philippines
drug rehabilitation infrastructure. Duterte has called on the
Philippine military to make base acreage available for additional rehab
camps and the first one will apparently be at Camp Ramon Magsaysay.
Magsaysay is the largest military reservation in the Philippines. It
is also the jewel in the diadem, I might say, of the five Philippine
bases envisioned for US use under EDCA, the Enhanced Defence Cooperation
Agreement that officially returned US troops to Philippine bases. It
looks like the US military might be sharing Magsaysay with thousands of
drug users…and PRC construction workers.
I expect the Pentagon is quietly fuming at Duterte’s presumption.
rehmat1 | On Monday, Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte offended the Israeli colony(United
States) by calling for the withdrawal of American Special Forces in the
South Philippines. These American force has been training Philippine
soldiers to use US supplied military hardware against Muslim separatists
in the Mindanao and other Muslim majority islands.
“They have to go,” Duterte said in a speech during an oath-taking
ceremony for new officials. “I do not want a rift with America. But they
have to go.”
Speaking at an event being held in honor of the Islamic day of Eid’l
Fit’r in Davao City in July 2016, Duterte challenged the narrative that
the Middle East is the root of terrorism. It is not that the Middle East is exporting terrorism to America; America imported terrorism (to the Middle East), he said.
rappler | The Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTF-P) was a
contingent of US troops, including Special Forces, that was set up to
fight terrorism in the Philippines in 2002.
But it was deactivated
in February 2015. Its mission was "to advise and assist Philippine
security forces at the tactical, operational and strategic levels
against violent extremist organizations throughout the southern
Philippines," according to the US embassy.
A small group of US soldiers have stayed in the Philippines to help
the Philippine military and police in their operations against the Abu
Sayyaf and terrorists. Some of them, for example, had helped gather
intelligence that led to the Mamasapano operation
in 2015 against alleged Malaysian bomb-maker Zulkifli bin Hir alias
Marwan, according to high-level government sources. The operation killed Marwan and 44 elite cops.
The US troops have a rotating
presence in the region as part of the Enhanced Defense Cooperation
Agreement (EDCA) which the Philippine government signed with the US
government.
Duterte previously said he would implement the EDCA after the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality.
'It will get more tense'
Duterte also seemed to say that the presence of American soldiers in
Mindanao would make the situation there more tense. Though no American
soldier has been held captive by the Abu Sayyaf, Duterte seemed to say
American soldiers would be prime hostage targets for the terrorist
group.
"Mas lalong iinit. Pag makakita ng Amerikano, papatayin talaga
'yan. Kukuha ng ransom, papatayin. Even if you're black or white
American, basta Amerikano," said Duterte.
chinamatters |With that context, let's take another look at Rodrigo Duterte.
Duterte
is not native to Mindanao. His family comes from a central Philippine
island group, the Visayan Islands. Christians from Visayan Islands and
other regions were settled in Mindanao by the U.S. and Philippine
governments as part of a strategy to demographically submerge the Moro,
distribute prime land and resources to settlers and corporations, and
economically and politically marginalize the Moro and criminalize their
resistance in a manner that will be familiar to observers of tactics in
Tibet, Xinjiang, and Palestine.
It appears to have been successful to the point that Moros are perhaps 17% of the population of Mindanao today, down from 90% in 1900.
A 2015 news
article/puff piece provides a useful perspective on Dutarte and his
attention to the Mindanao/security issue beyond the usual “murderous buffoon” framing.
Concerning the Moro disdain for
the term “Filipino”, I have to say I did find it odd that an Asian nation decided
to keep King Philip II of Spain as its namesake, but I guess naming America
after some Italian sailor is just as weird.
All in all, a thoughtful perspective on coexistence and reconciliation in a difficult and complicated neighborhood--made more difficult and complicated by a century of massacre and meddling by the US and Manila-- that Duterte has been governing for a couple decades with considerable success.
How 'bout that.
Having said that, I would not take that “Safest City
in the World” designation to the bank. Apparently an on-line poll was successfully freep'd with 800 responses.
By now, it should be clear that there's more to the Philippines than
Manila, more to its politics and society than upper class Catholicism,
and more to its security concerns than partnering with the United States
to push back against the PRC in the South China Sea.
There's Mindanao, there's Moros, there's separatism, there's issues of
justice that have been papered over by the Manila establishment to
present a neat neo-liberal narrative that complements the US pivot to
Asia.
unz | The deep state in American is completely corrupt because it exists to sell out the public interest and it includes both major political parties as well as government officials. Politicians like the Clintons who leave the White House “broke” and accumulate more than $100 million in a few years exemplify how it rewards its friends while a bloated Pentagon churns out hundreds of unneeded flag officers who receive munificent pensions and benefits for the rest of their lives. And no one is punished, ever. Disgraced former general and CIA Director David Petraeus is now a partner at the KKR private equity firm even though he knows nothing about financial services. More recently, former Acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who supports Hillary and is publicly advocating assassinating Russians and Iranians, has become a Senior Counselor at Clinton-linked Beacon Global Strategies. Both Petraeus and Morell are being rewarded for their loyalty to the system.
What makes the deep state so successful? It wins no matter who is in power by creating bipartisan supported money pits within the system. Unending wars and simmering though hard to define threats together invite more spending on national security and make for good business. Monetizing the completely unnecessary and hideously expensive global war on terror benefits the senior government officials, beltway industries and financial services that feed off it. Because it is essential to keep the money flowing, the deep state persists in promoting policies that otherwise make no sense, to include the unwinnable wars currently enjoying marquee status in Iraq/Syria and Afghanistan. The deep state knows that a fearmongered public will buy its product and does not even have to make much of an effort to sell it.
The United States of America is not exactly deep state Turkey but to be sure any democracy can be subverted by particular interests hiding behind the mask of patriotism buttressed by phony international threats. Ordinary Americans frequently ask why politicians and government officials appear to be so obtuse, rarely recognizing what is actually occurring in the country. That is partly due to the fact that the political class lives in a bubble of its own creation but it might also be because many of America’s leaders actually accept and benefit from the fact that there is an unelected, un-appointed and unaccountable presence within the system that actually manages what is taking place from behind the scenes. That would be the American deep state.
truthdig | Yes, self-identified liberals such as the Clintons and Barack Obama
speak in the language of liberalism while selling out the poor, the
working class and the middle class to global corporate interests. But
they are not, at least according to the classical definition, liberals.
They are neoliberals.
They serve the dictates of neoliberalism—austerity,
deindustrialization, anti-unionism, endless war and globalization—to
empower and enrich themselves and the party. The actual liberal
class—the segment of the Democratic Party that once acted as a safety
valve to ameliorate through reform the grievances and injustices within
our capitalist democracy and that had within its ranks politicians such
as George McGovern, Gaylord Nelson, Warren Magnuson and Frank Church and
New Deal Democrats such as Franklin D. Roosevelt—no longer exists. I
spent 248 pages in my book “Death of the Liberal Class”
explaining the orchestrated corporate campaign to erase the liberal
class from the political landscape and, more ominously, destroy the
radical labor and social movements that were the real engines of social
and political reform in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Democratic and the professional elites whom Frank excoriates are,
as he points out, morally bankrupt, but they are only one piece of the
fake democracy that characterizes our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”
The problem is not only liberals who are not liberal; it is also
conservatives, once identified with small government, the rule of law
and fiscal responsibility, who are not conservative. It is a court
system that has abandoned justice and rather than defend constitutional
rights has steadily stripped them from us through judicial fiat. It is a
Congress that does not legislate but instead permits lobbyists and
corporations to write legislation. It is a press, desperate for
advertising dollars and often owned by large corporations, that does not
practice journalism. It is academics, commentators and public
intellectuals, often paid by corporate think tanks, who function as
shameless cheerleaders for the neoliberal and imperial establishment and
mock the concept of independent and critical thought.
The Democratic and the professional elites are an easy and often
amusing target. One could see them, in another era, prancing at a masked
ball at Versailles on the eve of the revolution. They are oblivious to
how hated they have become. They do not understand that when they
lambast Donald Trump as a disgrace or a bigot they swell his support
because they, not Trump, are seen by many Americans as the enemy. But
these courtiers did not create the system. They sold themselves to it.
And if Americans do not understand how we got here we are never going to
find our way out.
During Barack Obama’s administration there has been near-total
continuity with the administration of George W. Bush, especially
regarding mass surveillance, endless war and the failure to regulate
Wall Street. This is because the mechanisms of corporate power embodied
in the deep state do not change with election cycles. The election of
Donald Trump, however distasteful, would not radically alter corporate
control over our lives. The corporate state is impervious to political
personalities. If Trump continues to rise in the public opinion polls,
the corporate backers of Hillary Clinton will start funding him instead.
They know Trump will prostitute himself to money as assiduously as
Clinton will.
guardian | Exclusive: New survey, part of most definitive portrait of gun ownership in decades, shows just 3% of American adults own half of guns in the US.
Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every
American adult, according to the most definitive portrait of US gun
ownership in two decades. But the new survey estimates that 133m of
these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults –
a group of super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.
The unpublished Harvard/Northeastern survey result summary, obtained exclusively by the Guardian and the Trace,
estimates that America’s gun stock has increased by 70m guns since
1994. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who own guns
decreased slightly from 25% to 22%.
The new survey, conducted in 2015 by public health researchers from
Harvard and Northeastern universities, also found that the proportion of
female gun owners is increasing as fewer men own guns. These women were
more likely to own a gun for self-defense than men, and more likely to
own a handgun only.
Women’s focus on self-defense is part of a broader trend. Even as the
US has grown dramatically safer and gun violence rates have plummeted,
handguns have become a greater proportion of the country’s civilian gun stock, suggesting that self-defense is an increasingly important factor in gun ownership.
“The desire to own a gun for protection – there’s a disconnect
between that and the decreasing rates of lethal violence in this
country. It isn’t a response to actuarial reality,” said Matthew Miller,
a Northeastern University and Harvard School of Public Health professor
and one of the authors of the study.
The data suggests that American gun ownership is driven by an
“increasing fearfulness”, said Dr Deborah Azrael, a Harvard School of
Public Health firearms researcher and the lead author of the study.
nntaleb | By some coincidence, the day before the Boston barbecue, I was flaneuring in New York, and I dropped by the office of a friend I wanted to prevent from working, that is, engage in an activity that when abused, causes the loss of mental clarity, in addition to bad posture and loss of definition in the facial features. The French physicist Serge Galam happened to be visiting and chose the friend’s office to kill time. Galam was first to apply these renormalization techniques to social matters and political science; his name was familiar as he is the author of the main book on the subject, which had then been sitting for months in an unopened Amazon box in my basement. He introduced me to his research and showed me a computer model of elections by which it suffices that some minority exceeds a certain level for its choices to prevail.
So the same illusion exists in political discussions, spread by the political “scientists”: you think that because some extreme right or left wing party has, say, the support of ten percent of the population that their candidate would get ten percent of the votes. No: these baseline voters should be classified as “inflexible” and will always vote for their faction. But some of the flexible voters can also vote for that extreme faction, just as nonKosher people can eat Kosher, and these people are the ones to watch out for as they may swell the numbers of votes for the extreme party. Galam’s models produced a bevy of counterintuitive effects in political science –and his predictions turned out to be way closer to real outcomes than the naive consensus.
This idea of one-sidedness can help us debunk a few more misconceptions. How do books get banned? Certainly not because they offend the average person –most persons are passive and don’t really care, or don’t care enough to request the banning. It looks like, from past episodes, that all it takes is a few (motivated) activists for the banning of some books, or the black-listing of some people. The great philosopher and logician Bertrand Russell lost his job at the City University of New York owing to a letter by an angry –and stubborn –mother who did not wish to have her daughter in the same room as the fellow with dissolute lifestyle and unruly ideas. [5]
The same seems to apply to prohibitions –at least the prohibition of alcohol in the United States which led to interesting Mafia stories.
Let us conjecture that the formation of moral values in society doesn’t come from the evolution of the consensus. No, it is the most intolerant person who imposes virtue on others precisely because of that intolerance. The same can apply to civil rights.
An insight as to how the mechanisms of religion and transmission of morals obey the same renormalization dynamics as dietary laws –and how we can show that morality is more likely to be something enforced by a minority.
thedailybell | It is fairly clear to anyone who pays attention that the Clintons are part of a larger corrupt system that is dedicated to removing or diminishing nation-states in order to create stronger global governance.
Part of this system involves putting into place destructive mechanisms that undermine the military, politics and even the media.
It is this last point that is important to note here. Hillary’s political campaign has forced the worst kind of biased and inaccurate reporting out into the open.
The most “prestigious” publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times as well as the country pre-eminent thought magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic regularly issue article that almost anyone capable of reading can debunk.
We would argue this is not by accident. The other day (here) we made the point that it seemed Hillary’s elite backers were desperate to ensure her election. We hypothesized that her ability to lead the US into war was seen as most valuable.
It is fairly clear that the world’s economic system is worsening and that central banking actions are undermining whatever shards of solvency are still apparent. Consider this thesis as viable and then accept that it is being buttressed by reports such as the one just issued by Gallup (here) showing that Americans hold mass media in lower respect than ever.
We would argue that these two results are not unrelated. American mainstream media is being torn down on purpose along with the political process to further raze democracy and weaken the West’s functionality generally.
christianmerc |Given the extraordinary access a "free press" has been given to the president, members of congress and the judiciary, it is all designed to allow the people, the voters, the ones who actually decide who the office holders will be, information that could not be gained individually. It is their duty to provide the voters with information that might make a candidate unsuitable to hold office; to expose lies and report the truth, regardless of who the other contender for the office might be. The press is, right now, acting as voters, as imposing themselves into the election and making a determination for the rest of society. That is not their Constitutional role and despite the great contempt the Constitution seems to evoke among these "elites," it is still a duty, a responsibility, to reveal the flaws and inadequacies of any given candidate for any given office from dog catcher to president and while they fully understand their responsibility when it comes to Trump, they seem at a complete loss when it comes to Hillary Clinton.
I personally am not all that interested in this election; it is a disgrace, a disappointment to consider either candidate as the best we have to offer; as serious representatives of the American people, but that is not my call and I recognize it. I believe the American people are as disserved by these candidates as they are disserved by the people reporting on the election.
If there is anything to be said about any of it, it is that we always get what we deserve and our lack of principle, our lack of interest in the political process has led to this debacle. We are the laughing stock of the world and deservedly so.
Granny Goodness - sick and contagious with pneumonia hugs little girl on the street
theamericanconservative | On the day she is said to have been diagnosed with “pneumonia,” Mrs. Clinton delivered a notorious speech in which she denounced “xenophobes,” among others, as fit for a “basket of deplorables.” People who are for open borders and globalism have a habit of dismissing their opponents as xenophobes — that is, people who fear (and therefore loathe) foreigners.
A reader has sent inan essay by Georgetown professor Jason Brennan, in which he argues that we can avoid stupid decisions like the Brexit vote if we institute an “epistocracy,” system through which smart people who know things rule. Excerpt:
In an epistocracy, political power is to some degree apportioned according to knowledge. An epistocracy might retain the major institutions we see in republican democracy, such as parties, mass elections, constitutional review, and the like. But in an epistocracy, not everyone has equal basic political power. An epistocracy might grant some people additional voting power, or might restrict the right to vote only to those that could pass a very basic test of political knowledge.
Any such system will be subject to abuse, and will suffer from significant government failures. But that’s true of democracy too. The interesting question is whether epistocracy, warts and all, would perform better than democracy, warts and all.
All across the West, we’re seeing the rise of angry, resentful, nationalist, xenophobic and racist movements, movements made up mostly of low-information voters. Perhaps it’s time to put aside the childish and magical theory that democracy is intrinsically just, and start asking the serious question of whether there are better alternatives. The stakes are high.
theatlantic | Before there was an alt-right, there was The Turner Diaries.
First
published nearly 40 years ago, the infamous dystopian novel depicts a
fictional white nationalist revolution culminating in global genocide.
The
events of the book open 25 years ago today—September 16, 1991, the date
of the first entry in Earl Turner’s diary. The fictional diary
describes a racist’s vision of a nightmare world, in which “The
System”—African American enforcers led by Jewish politicians—attempt to
confiscate all guns in the United States. A secretive organization known
as The Order rises up to take back the country for white supremacists,
eventually winning an apocalyptic insurgency and nuclear war, first
taking over the country and later the world.
The Turner Diaries was created in the 1970s by William Luther Pierce, leader of the neo-Nazi group the National Alliance. Crudely written and wildly racist, The Turner Diaries has helped inspire dozens of armed robberies and more than 200 murders in the decades since its publication.
The Turner Diaries first
made headlines when a violent white nationalist gang appropriated the
name of The Order, following the tactical blueprint for terrorism in the
book. Turner catapulted to national prominence when it was revealed to
be a key inspiration for Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Timothy McVeigh, who killed 168 people using a truck bomb strikingly similar to one described in detail in the book. Since then, The Turner Diaries
has inspired hate crimes and terrorism across the United States and in
Europe in more than a dozen separate plots through the present day.
But beyond the violence committed by its readers, The Turner Diaries was
also the seed of significant shift in white-nationalist ideology and
recruitment, the effects of which are increasingly relevant today. In “The Turner Legacy,”
a new paper for ICCT – The Hague, I examine the complicated history of
racist dystopian propaganda and the reasons for Turner’s enduring
impact.
monoskop | This is the first volume of this study of the fantasies of some of the men centrally involved in the rise of Nazism. The author develops his account by focusing on the representation of masculinity and homosexuality and their relation to the preparations for and conduct of war. He offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of the role of warfare as a search for sensation without desire or pleasure, leading to an image of the body which emphasizes hardness, self-discipline and, ultimately, violence.
psychoanalyze-aktuell.de | The book grew out of the spring lecture "The laughter of the perpetrators", which was held on 10 and 11 March 2014 Cultural Minoriten in Graz and as an event of the Graz Academy in cooperation with the Cultural Minoriten PRESS held.The blurb of the book can read that the number UNRUHE RETAIN to a "present tendency (the responses), which is more and more uncomfortable.The progress of modernity inherent in an wear unrest during the past increasingly devalued and the future of their substance is robbed. "
The origin of the material for this lecture and for the design of the book is named at the end of the book by Klaus Theweleit: "This book is made largely of newspaper;written along current newspaper reports on the in and contexts perpetrated murders of recent years and decades between and ;between the killers of IS in northern Iraq and Syria, the genocide of the Tutsi population in Rwanda in the 90s and the murders of the German NSU in the first decade of the 21st century.But older murders are included in the text: the mass murder of Communists in Indonesia of the 60s, the torture of the indigenous population in Guatemala in the '80s, back to the deeds German World War soldiers, provided they under the common viewpoint :the laughter of the perpetratorswere (and fall).For many of these events is true: <Everything we know, we know from journalists.>"(P.245)
The collected quotes serve to prove the thesis of the book, which is subtitled "psychogram killing lust".In the journalistic representation of atrocities caused by their rows citation objectivity and compression that makes any displacement impossible and the reader pulls into a voyeuristic close so that in a second, this time the body's defense procedure in the form of nausea and vomiting, the defense against any form is amplified by pleasure through (identificatory) participation in the atrocities.Again, this could be interpreted as evidence of the existence of killing desire, albeit in the form of defense against, understand.This physical reaction makes the book but also a disgrace.
The journalist quotes are indeed consistently taken from current affairs, but it goes Klaus Theweleit but also to the continuation of his thesis of the "male fantasies" that two-volume work of 1977, in which he Fascist masculinity and violent fantasies of soldiers of 2 . WK had analyzed.He describes a certain dominant type of man who is trying to enforce its rule without regard to others with violence and killing.In an interview with the FAZ he says of his latest book itself: "Yes, true, in a way it is also a kind, male fantasies revisited".But this is not so much about this almost universally observable male fantasies of tyranny and killing desire, but also the conditions under which from fantasies action records, with the result that "psyche and physique .... completely absorbed by the act" are (S. 15).
It seems therefore to go to both topics in the book, about the conditions that lead to the emergence of these male fantasies and the conditions which make acts of fantasies.But this does not happen as in a scientific paper, but in the process invented by Klaus Theweleit style that already use found in the "male fantasies".The FAZ (01.09.2016) describes in a comment: "He did this with a completely new method and science sound, in a mixture of literature and psychoanalysis, autobiographical narrative, books, maps and political commentary".30 years after the publication of the "male fantasies" commented Sven Reichart (University of Konstanz) this style with the words: "In fact, from a stringent structure of the two-volume out of the question.Between numerous books and paintings can be found on 1147 printed pages long source quotes that are sometimes whimsically-associative, sometimes not interpreted.Then there is again the passages in which produced a close relation to the theories and interpretations of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich to Melanie Klein and Gilles Deleuze / Felix Guarttari and the material will be indicated accordingly.The book is anything but linear or written from a single source.Scroll forward or back are appreciated and factored in this permeable written network.Theweleit gave in an interview the advice: .Reichart comes with Benjamin Ziemann to the judgment that "male fantasies" today could apply as well as a book.
This description can also be applied to the new book, "The laughter of the perpetrators, Breivik among other things".It gives the impression that the author finds an empathic access to the inner world of the perpetrators and also the description of contextual factors of the outside world seem like plausible explanations and let hunches of contexts and reasons arise, but as in a collage (eg Kurt Schwitters and others), in where the overall vision and the individual elements continuously alternate.The temptation is then great to look at the individual elements in their details and about losing the overall picture in mind.But what Klaus Theweleit wants to tell us with this book?He speaks of himself, he speaks of us and he speaks of our present.
antimedia | Though the U.S. population accounts for only 4.4 percent of the world’s population, its prisons held 22 percent of the world’s prisoners at the end of October 2013, making America’s incarceration rate the highest in the world.
And while the cost of today’s federal prisons has surpassed the Federal Bureau Of Prisons’ $6.85 billion budget, state prisons are not far behind. With “[s]tate corrections budgets … nearly [quadrupling] in the past two decades,”
Vera Institute of Justice notes, each average inmate now costs
taxpayers over $31,000 per year. In 2010 alone, states spent over $5.4
billion on maintaining their prisons.
But while we know everything about government’s prison budgets, few
reports shed light on the hidden costs of high incarceration rates.
In order to help the U.S. population understand what mass
incarceration means to smaller communities, Washington University in St.
Louis conducted a study entitled “The Economic Burden of Incarceration in the U.S.,” led by doctoral student and certified public accountant Michael McLaughlin.
Researchers concluded the “annual economic burden” resulting
from the high rate of incarceration in America is an estimated $1.2
trillion, or nearly 6 percent of the GDP. This burden is also eleven
times higher than what governments take from taxpayers to support state
and federal prisons.
NYTimes |This short film, narrated by Jay Z (Shawn Carter) and featuring the artwork of Molly Crabapple, is part history lesson about the war on drugs and part vision statement. As Ms. Crabapple’s haunting images flash by, the film takes us from the Nixon administration and the Rockefeller drug laws — the draconian 1973 statutes enacted in New York that exploded the state’s prison population and ushered in a period of similar sentencing schemes for other states — through the extraordinary growth in our nation’s prison population to the emerging aboveground marijuana market of today. We learn how African-Americans can make up around 13 percent of the United States population — yet31 percentof those arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rate as whites.
Policy makers are joining advocates in demanding an end to biased policing and mass incarceration, and in November, Californians specifically have the opportunity to vote Yes on Prop 64, the most racial-justice-oriented marijuana legalization measure ever. Prop 64 would reduce (and in many cases eliminate) criminal penalties for marijuana offenses, and it’s retroactive — people sitting in prison for low-level marijuana offenses would be released and have their records expunged. In addition, Prop 64 would drive millions of dollars in direct funding and investments to those communities most harmed by the criminal justice system.
guardian | Teenagers in America are resorting to sex work because they cannot afford food, according to a study that suggests widespread hunger in the world’s wealthiest country.
Focus groups in all 10 communities analysed by the Urban Institute,
a Washington-based thinktank, described girls “selling their body” or
“sex for money” as a strategy to make ends meet. Boys desperate for food
were said to go to extremes such as shoplifting and selling drugs.
The findings raise questions over the legacy of Bill Clinton’s landmark welfare-reform legislation
20 years ago as well as the spending priorities of Congress and the
impact of slow wage growth. Evidence of teenage girls turning to
“transactional dating” with older men is likely to cause particular
alarm.
“I’ve been doing research in low-income communities for a long time,
and I’ve written extensively about the experiences of women in high
poverty communities and the risk of sexual exploitation, but this was
new,” said Susan Popkin, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and lead author of the report, Impossible Choices.
“Even for me, who has been paying attention to this and has heard
women tell their stories for a long time, the extent to which we were
hearing about food being related to this vulnerability was new and
shocking to me, and the level of desperation that it implies was really
shocking to me. It’s a situation I think is just getting worse over
time.”
The qualitative study, carried out in partnership with the food banks network Feeding America,
created two focus groups – one male, one female – in each of 10 poor
communities across the US. The locations included big cities such as
Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington and rural North Carolina and eastern
Oregon. A total of 193 participants aged 13 to 18 took part and were
allowed to remain anonymous.
Their testimony paints a picture of teenagers – often overlooked by
policymakers focused on children aged zero to five – missing meals,
making sacrifices and going hungry, with worrying long-term
consequences.
Popkin said: “We heard the same story everywhere, a really disturbing
picture about hunger and food insecurity affecting the wellbeing of
some of the most vulnerable young people. The fact that we heard it
everywhere from kids in the same way tells us there’s a problem out
there that we should be paying attention to.”
The consistency of the findings across gender, race and geography was a surprise.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
