End of Show Mixes: UKPMX - Oh My Bosh - Danny Loos-Secret Agent Paul-Stepford Wives-PlaceBoing- Dave Courbanou - Able Kirby - Jungle Jones - Chris Wilson - Tom Starkweather - Conan Salada - Future Trash
The Spanish government has come under increasing criticism for raiding the offices of the .cat internet registry in the lead-up to a referendum on Catalans' independence.
On Wednesday morning, police entered the registry's headquarters in Barcelona and seized all of its computers. The cops also arrested six members of staff, and held four of them for two days. Its CTO has been accused of sedition.
The raid and arrest has sparked protests from the .cat company, as well as the Internet Society and the EFF. "We do not see it as the expertise and mandate of TLD operators within the internet's ecosystem to engage in monitoring and blocking of content outside of receiving judicial requests related to specific domains," said a post by the Internet Society's European director.
The raid follows a week of political and legal pressure exerted on the .cat registry. On September 15, a Spanish court ordered the biz to take down domains ending in .cat that were being used to drum up support for the upcoming referendum.
The company, PuntoCat, responded by writing to DNS overseer ICANN complaining about political interference. "We are being requested to censor content and suppress freedom of speech in the .cat domain names," its CEO Eduard Martin Lineros warned [PDF]. "This compromises the obligations we have as a gTLD registry operator'... may put in jeopardy our position as the steward of the catalan speaking community on the internet."
Who decides? The .cat registry has over 100,000 names and was added to the internet in 2005. It is unusual in that it is a top-level domain that relates to a geographic region but was created by US-based ICANN, rather than a local government, and so operates under ICANN's rules, whereas other "country code" top-level domains like .uk operates under their own local rules.
But, under the terms of its agreement with ICANN, PuntoCat is obliged to respect court orders from both the government of Spain and the government of Andorra. While many are angered by the court's order to take down .cat domains that carry information on the referendum, it is a legitimate court order.
Governments are extremely sensitive to geographic regions being represented online and in a recent expansion of the internet's name space, such geography-based top-level domains were given special protections: governments were allowed to block specific dot-names if they referred to physical places (the most controversial example of which has been the fight over .amazon).
The bigger issue in this case is the long-running and contentious dispute over Catalonia. The region, in north east Spain, is fiercely autonomous with its own language and customs '' and has been fighting for independence from Spain for over 70 years.
In the past decade, those efforts have grown. In 2006, a new law giving the region greater autonomy was passed. But four years later parts of it were ruled unconstitutional.
As solutions to the disputed region turned political and the region started asserting greater autonomy, the president of the Catalonia region announced in June this year that a binding referendum on independence would be held on October 1, 2017.
The Catalan parliament then approved the plan on September 6. But the Spanish government has declared the referendum illegal, provoking a constitutional crisis. A week after the Catalan parliament approved the vote, the Spanish court issued its order to the .cat registry.
Contentious The referendum has become extremely politically contentious and the Spanish government has aggressively moved to shut down any support for it '' leading to the court demand that .cat remove any domains that include information about the "illegal" referendum.
PuntoCat was told to block four main domains, including referendum.cat and ref1oct.cat. They currently display a message from the Spanish military police announcing in Spanish and English that the domain has been "seized pursuant to a seizure warrant." The rest of the .cat registry is responding normally.
The disruption, of course, extends far past just domain names. Spain's prime minister was pulled into the dispute earlier this week when separatists took to the streets of Barcelona protesting the Spanish government's efforts to stop the referendum from taking place. "Stop this escalation of radicalism and disobedience once and for all," warned Mariano Rajoy on TV.
The Spanish police had raided not just the offices of PuntoCat but also a number of regional government offices and arrested dozens of officials in an effort to prevent the referendum from taking place.
That in turn led Catalonia's government to criticize the police raids and the Spanish government for effectively suspending the region's autonomy. The situation also comes at a time of high emotions following the terrorist attack on the world famous Las Ramblas street and market last month. In short, never has Catalonia been closer to independence and at the same time embroiled in massive political and social unrest.
As the online home for Catalans, the .cat registry has been pulled into the struggle '' and that may have created a dangerous precedent where an internet registry is targeted and held responsible for the content of websites hosted on its domains. ®
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Brexit
Theresa May hints at Boeing boycott in Bombardier US tariff row | Politics | The Guardian
A worker inspects a C Series aeroplane wing in the Bombardier factory in Belfast. Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne
Theresa May has dropped a strong hint that the government will stop ordering planes from the US aerospace giant Boeing following the decision to slap punitive tariffs on planes part-made in Belfast by the Canadian company Bombardier.
Angered by the threat to 4,000 jobs in one of the poorest parts of the UK, the prime minister said Boeing's action was not the sort of behaviour Britain expected from a long-term partner but was part of a ''creeping protectionism'' around the world.
''What I would say in relation to Boeing,'' she said, ''is of course we have a long-term partnership with Boeing, various aspects of government, and this is not the sort of behaviour we expect from a long-term partner. It undermines that partnership.''
Earlier this week the US Department of Commerce backed Boeing in an action that could lead to 219% tariffs being placed on planes made by Bombardier '' a move that would make them much more expensive in the key US market.
The preliminary decision taken in Washington, while consistent with the protectionist leanings of Donald Trump has cast a shadow over the UK government's attempts to seek a new free trade deal with Washington after Britain leaves the EU.
Expressing disappointment at the decision, May said she was working with the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to seek a different outcome. Bombardier employed 4,000 people in Northern Ireland and was ''very important for us'', the prime minister said.
''I want the UK to be a global champion of free trade. Those who believe in it need to stand up and explain the benefits and show how free trade is important in raising living standards,'' she said. ''Those are discussions we need to have because I see protectionism creeping in around the world.''
May identified protectionism as one of the ''failed ideologies'' of the past and said abandoning the free market completely would harm rather than help the poor.
The prime minister was speaking at a conference to mark the 20th anniversary of Bank of England independence.
Mark Carney, the Bank's governor, said Threadneedle Street's freedom to set interest rates since 1997 had helped the economy through the financial and economic crisis of a decade ago and meant the Bank was well placed to address a range of possible developments around Brexit.
Carney warned that there were limits to what the Bank could do to prevent Brexit leading to lower real incomes, but said it had enough flexibility to make departure from the EU a smoother process.
''In exceptional circumstances like today when the economy is facing profound structural change, the monetary policy committee can extend the horizon over which it returns inflation to target from above, in order to balance the effects on jobs and activity.
''After all, even though monetary policy cannot prevent the weaker real income growth likely to accompany the transition to new trading arrangements with the EU, it can influence how this hit to incomes is distributed between job losses and price rises.''
May said Britain was leaving the EU not Europe and was seeking a solution that was good both for Britain and other EU members. The transition deal the government is seeking after the official exit date in March 2019 would be time-limited and some aspects might take less than the two-year period the prime minister is seeking.
F-Russia
DHS Got Two Claims About Russia Wrong | The Daily Caller
The Department of Homeland Security was wrong when it told both California and Wisconsin that Russian hackers had tried to hack their election website and registration files.
The DHS notified 21 states including California and Wisconsin that Russian-linked individuals had tried to target either voter registration files or public election sites. The DHS is now claiming that these hackers targeted the California Department of Technology and the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development.
''The work of our intelligence agencies is critical in defending against cyber threats. I remain committed to a partnership with DHS and other intelligence agencies, however, elections officials and the American public expect and deserve timely and accurate information,'' California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a statement Wednesday.
Mark Thomsen, chairman of Wisconsin's Elections Commission, said Tuesday, ''Either they were right on Friday and this is a cover up, or they were wrong on Friday and we deserve an apology.''
DHS spokesman Scott McConnell was rather unapologetic in a Tuesday statement to The Daily Caller.
''While we defer to each state whether to disclose the circumstance surrounding their networks, it's important to point out that discussions of specific IP addresses do not provide a complete picture of potential targeting activity. The Department stands by its assessment that Internet-connected networks in 21 states were the target of Russian government cyber actors seeking vulnerabilities and access to U.S. election infrastructure,'' McConnell told TheDC.
His statement came before California's announcement and suggested the DHS was wrong about additional states. ''DHS has made an effort to respond quickly to questions and requests for further information from states following Friday's calls, and today we provided additional information to a number of states, including Wisconsin,'' the spokesman said.
The DHS notification on Friday was met with anger by Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner. ''It's unacceptable that it took almost a year after the election to notify states that their elections systems were targeted,'' Warner said.
A Washington Post report about the alleged Russian hacking attempts also noted, ''In only a handful of states, including Illinois, did hackers actually penetrate computer systems, according to U.S. officials, and there is no evidence that hackers tampered with any voting machines.''
WATCH U.S. INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS DISCUSS RUSSIAN MEDDLING IN U.S. ELECTION:
Chuck Ross contributed reporting
Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet?
They were one small step away from demanding that the election results be nullified, indulging the sentiment expressed by #Resistance icon Carl Reiner the other day: ''Is there anything more exciting that [sic] the possibility of Trump's election being invalidated & Hillary rightfully installed as our President?''
So what was wrong with this story? Just one small thing: it was false. The story began to fall apart yesterday when Associated Press reported that Wisconsin '' one of the states included in the original report that, for obvious reasons, caused the most excitement '' did not, in fact, have its election systems targeted by Russian hackers:
The spokesman for Homeland Security then tried to walk back that reversal, insisting that there was still evidence that some computer networks had been targeted, but could not say that they had anything to do with elections or voting. And, as AP noted: ''Wisconsin's chief elections administrator, Michael Haas, had repeatedly said that Homeland Security assured the state it had not been targeted.''
Then the story collapsed completely last night. The Secretary of State for another one of the named states, California, issued a scathing statement repudiating the claimed report:
Sometimes stories end up debunked. There's nothing particularly shocking about that. If this were an isolated incident, one could chalk it up to basic human error that has no broader meaning.
But this is no isolated incident. Quite the contrary: this has happened over and over and over again. Inflammatory claims about Russia get mindlessly hyped by media outlets, almost always based on nothing more than evidence-free claims from government officials, only to collapse under the slightest scrutiny, because they are entirely lacking in evidence.
The examples of such debacles when it comes to claims about Russia are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. I wrote about this phenomenon many times and listed many of the examples, the last time in June when 3 CNN journalists ''resigned'' over a completely false story linking Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci to investigations into a Russian investment fund which the network was forced to retract:
Remember that time the Washington Post claimed that Russia had hacked the U.S. electricity grid, causing politicians to denounce Putin for trying to deny heat to Americans in winter, only to have to issue multiple retractions because none of that ever happened? Or the time that the Post had to publish a massive editor's note after its reporters made claims about Russian infiltration of the internet and spreading of ''Fake News'' based on an anonymous group's McCarthyite blacklist that counted sites like the Drudge Report and various left-wing outlets as Kremlin agents?Or that time when Slate claimed that Trump had created a secret server with a Russian bank, all based on evidence that every other media outlet which looked at it were too embarrassed to get near? Or the time the Guardian was forced to retract its report by Ben Jacobs '' which went viral '' that casually asserted that WikiLeaks has a long relationship with the Kremlin? Or the time that Fortune retracted suggestions that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN's network? And then there's the huge market that was created '' led by leading Democrats '' that blindly ingested every conspiratorial, unhinged claim about Russia churned out by an army of crazed conspiracists such as Louise Mensch and Claude ''TrueFactsStated'' Taylor?
And now we have the Russia-hacked-the-voting-systems-of-21-states to add to this trash heap. Each time the stories go viral; each time they further shape the narrative; each time those who spread them say little to nothing when it is debunked.
None of this means that every Russia claim is false, nor does it disprove the accusation that Putin ordered the hacking of the DNC and John Podesta's email inboxes (a claim for which, just by the way, still no evidence has been presented by the U.S. government). Perhaps there were some states that were targeted, even though the key claims of this story, that attracted the most attention, have now been repudiated.
But what it does demonstrate is that an incredibly reckless, anything-goes climate prevails when it comes to claims about Russia. Media outlets will publish literally any official assertion as Truth without the slightest regard for evidentiary standards.
Seeing Putin lurking behind and masterminding every western problem is now religious dogma '' it explains otherwise-confounding developments, provides certainty to a complex world, and alleviates numerous factions of responsibility '' so media outlets and their journalists are lavishly rewarded any time they publish accusatory stories about Russia (especially ones involving the U.S. election), even if they end up being debunked.
A highly touted story yesterday from the New York Times '' claiming that Russians used Twitter more widely known than before to manipulate U.S. politics '' demonstrates this recklessness. The story is based on the claims of a new group formed just two months ago by a union of neocons and Democratic national security officials, led by long-time liars and propagandists such as Bill Kristol, former acting CIA chief Mike Morell, and Bush Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff. I reported on the founding of this group, calling itself the Alliance for Securing Democracy, when it was unveiled (this is not to be confused with the latest new Russia group unveiled last week by Rob Reiner and David Frum and featuring a different former CIA chief (James Clapper) '' calling itself InvestigateRussia.org '' featuring a video declaring that the U.S. is now ''at war with Russia'').
The Kristol/Morell/Chertoff group on which the Times based its article has a very simple tactic: they secretly decide which Twitter accounts are ''Russia bots,'' meaning accounts that disseminate an ''anti-American message'' and are controlled by the Kremlin. They refuse to tell anyone which Twitter accounts they decided are Kremlin-loyal, nor will they identify their methodology for creating their lists or determining what constitutes ''anti-Americanism.''
They do it all in secret, and you're just supposed to trust them: Bill Kristol, Mike Chertoff and their national security state friends. And the New York Times is apparently fine with this demand, as evidenced by its uncritical acceptance yesterday of the claims of this group '' a group formed by the nation's least trustworthy sources.
But no matter. It's a claim about nefarious Russian control. So it's instantly vested with credibility and authority, published by leading news outlets, and then blindly accepted as fact in most elite circles. From now on, it will simply be Fact '' based on the New York Times article '' that the Kremlin aggressively and effectively weaponized Twitter to manipulate public opinion and sow divisions during the election, even though the evidence for this new story is the secret, unverifiable assertions of a group filled with the most craven neocons and national security state liars.
That's how the Russia narrative is constantly ''reported,'' and it's the reason so many of the biggest stories have embarrassingly collapsed. It's because the Russia story of 2017 '' not unlike the Iraq discourse of 2002 '' is now driven by religious-like faith rather than rational faculties.
No questioning of official claims is allowed. The evidentiary threshold which an assertion must overcome before being accepted is so low as to be non-existent. And the penalty for desiring to see evidence for official claims, or questioning the validity and persuasiveness of the evidence that is proffered, are accusations that impugn one's patriotism and loyalty (simply wanting to see evidence for official claims about Russia is proof, in many quarters, that one is a Kremlin agent or at least adores Putin '' just as wanting to see evidence in 2002, or questioning the evidence presented for claims about Saddam, was viewed as proof that one harbored sympathy for the Iraqi dictator).
Regardless of your views on Russia, Trump and the rest, nobody can possibly regard this climate as healthy. Just look at how many major, incredibly inflammatory stories, from major media outlets, have collapsed. Is it not clear that there is something very wrong with how we are discussing and reporting on relations between these two nuclear-armed powers?
Twitter, With Accounts Linked to Russia, to Face Congress Over Role in Election - The New York Times
Since last month, researchers at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan initiative of the German Marshall Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, have been publicly tracking 600 Twitter accounts '-- human users and suspected bots alike '-- they have linked to Russian influence operations. Those were the accounts pushing the opposing messages on the N.F.L. and the national anthem.
Of 80 news stories promoted last week by those accounts, more than 25 percent ''had a primary theme of anti-Americanism,'' the researchers found. About 15 percent were critical of Hillary Clinton, falsely accusing her of funding left-wing antifa '-- short for anti-fascist '-- protesters, tying her to the lethal terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012 and discussing her daughter Chelsea's use of Twitter. Eleven percent focused on wiretapping in the federal investigation into Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chairman, with most of them treated the news as a vindication for President Trump's earlier wiretapping claims.
In the face of such public scrutiny, Twitter has said almost nothing about what it knows about Russia's use of its platform. But Representative Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he would like to know exactly what the company has done to find covert Russian activity and what it has discovered so far about fake accounts '-- including their reach and impact.
''I think right now the public is aware of only a subset of a subset of Russian activity online,'' Mr. Schiff said in an interview. He said Facebook long denied that there had been Russian exploitation of its system, before reversing course on Sept. 6.
Mr. Schiff said the tech companies have asked for assistance from American intelligence agencies in trying to find and stop illicit interference from other countries, a request he said he supports.
The House Intelligence Committee announced on Wednesday that it would hold a public hearing on the matter of Russian influence next month, and a Senate aide said Facebook, Twitter and Google have been invited to testify at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Nov. 1.
This month, The New York Times reported on evidence of Russian operators creating hundreds or thousands of fake Twitter accounts to flood the network with anti-Clinton messages during the campaign. The cybersecurity company FireEye identified what it called ''warlists'' of accounts linked to Russian intelligence that sometimes spewed messages like #WarAgainstDemocrats several times a minute.
Both DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0, which spread the leaked emails and documents and were identified as having been created by Russian intelligence, used accounts that Twitter has not suspended, though they have been dormant for months. In some cases, the Russian exploitation of Facebook and Twitter was linked: ''Heart of Texas,'' a Facebook page advocating the secession of Texas that was identified as one of 470 fake profiles and pages linked to Russia, also had a Twitter feed '-- now suspended '-- called @itstimetosecede.
Experts on Russia inside and outside the government say President Vladimir V. Putin had multiple goals in last year's campaign of hacking, leaking and stealth propaganda. He hoped to damage, if not defeat, Mrs. Clinton, whom he blamed for encouraging pro-democracy protests in Russia and neighboring states.
But Mr. Putin also sought to darken the image of the United States, making it a less attractive model for other countries and reducing its international influence, said Mark R. Jacobson, a Georgetown professor and co-author of a new report on Russian influence operations.
Photo ''I think right now the public is aware of only a subset of a subset of Russian activity online,'' said Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Last week, Facebook said it was turning over more than 3,000 Russia-linked ads to Congress. Many of those ads, like the opposing Twitter hashtags on the N.F.L. anthem issue, targeted divisions in American society by simultaneously sending conflicting messages to different users segmented by political and racial characteristics.
''What we see over and over again is that a lot of the messaging isn't about politics, a specific politician, or political parties,'' said Laura Rosenberger, director of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. ''It's about creating societal division, identifying divisive issues and fanning the flames.''
Her group's web ''dashboard'' is called Hamilton 68. It is named for No. 68 of the Federalist Papers, believed to have been written by Alexander Hamilton, which warns of foreign meddling in American elections. The tool does not identify the activity of specific Twitter users but highlights the activity of the 600 accounts that researchers believe are either tied to the Russian government or repeat the themes of its propaganda.
For its part, Twitter has not said much about what it plans to say in the Congressional briefing.
''Twitter deeply respects the integrity of the election process, a cornerstone of all democracies, and will continue to strengthen our platform against bots and other forms of manipulation that violate our Terms of Service,'' Twitter said in a statement.
Twitter has also said it was working to crack down on bots that distribute tweets en masse or that attempt to manipulate the platform's trending topics.
Colin Crowell, Twitter's vice president of public policy, government and philanthropy, said in a blog post in June that the company should not be an arbiter of whether a tweet is truthful or not. Because Twitter is open and real-time, he said the platform is the best antidote to misinformation, when ''journalists, experts and engaged citizens Tweet side-by-side correcting and challenging public discourse in seconds.''
Karen North, a social media professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, said the company's defense has some merit.
''Twitter functions more like a broadcast network,'' she said. ''People say things and everyone can hear it. When false information is stated, people can jump on false statements and challenge it.''
Daisuke Wakabayashi reported from San Francisco and Scott Shane from Washington.
Follow Daisuke Wakabayashi on Twitter @daiwaka and Scott Shane @ScottShaneNYT
A version of this article appears in print on September 28, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Twitter Seen as Key Battlefield In Russian Influence Campaign.
Continue reading the main story
Report: Russia Threatens to Ban Facebook - Breitbart
In a statement, Alexander Zharov, the head of ''communications regulator'' Roskomnadzor, declared that ''the law is obligatory for all.''
''In all cases we will make sure the law is complied with, or the company will stop working in the Russian Federation. There are no exceptions here,'' Zharov continued, adding, ''In 2018, we will think about it, and maybe we will check.''
According to CNN, ''Russia's law on personal data storage came into effect in September 2015,'' and ''requires companies that collect the personal data of citizens to store the information on Russian soil.''
Russia has come under fire from the Democratic establishment recently who claim Russian adverts on Facebook may have influenced the 2016 presidential election.
This month, it was reported that FBI Special Counsel Robert Mueller is ''now in possession of Russian-linked ads run on Facebook during the presidential election.''
Facebook handed over the adverts along with detailed information about the accounts behind the adverts in response to a search warrant.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.
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GLITCH!
Airports around the globe hit by reservations glitch on Thursday
This file photo from Nov. 23, 2016, shows passenger jets stacking up over Reagan National Airport near in Washington. (Photo: J. David Ake, AP)
A reservations systems glitch slowed down thousands of airline customers around the world Thursday morning.
The scope of the disruption was not immediately clear, but '' for now '' it seemed that the snafu had not snowballed into a major meltdown.
The glitch affected check-ins on at least a half-dozen airlines, all of which use a reservation system made by IT firm Amadeus.
FLIGHT TRACKER: Is your flight on time?
Southwest, Air France, Lufthansa, Qantas and China Air were among those affected by the ''network issue'' at Amadeus.
"Amadeus technical teams took immediate action to identify the cause of the issue and restore services as quickly as possible," the IT firm said in a statement to CNN. "That action is ongoing with services gradually being restored."
MORE FLIGHT PROBLEMS: Ryanair axes 18,000 more flights, slammed for 'persistently misleading passengers'
IN PICTURES: 30 cool aviation photos (story continues below)
Still, the glitch had affected some passengers among the affected carriers at airports across the world, including London Heathrow, Seoul Incheon, Frankfurt and Zurich. In the U.S., it had affected some of Southwest's airports, such as Baltimore/Washington, Washington Reagan National and Dallas Love.
Passenger complaints surfaced Thursday morning on social media. One flier complained of long lines at the Air France counters in Paris.
''The booking system is down waiting now for more than 100 minutes,'' a passenger going by the name of Cornelia Altrichter' on Twitter said about her Thursday morning experience at the Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport.
In the U.S., several Southwest passengers took to social media with their own tales of disruptions caused by technical problems.
Southwest acknowledged the problem to USA TODAY's Today in the Sky blog, but said it did not expect the glitch to have a widespread effect on flights.
''Beginning around 4:30 a.m. CT today, our reservations system vendor Amadeus began experiencing outages, impacting Southwest Airlines along with other airlines,'' Southwest spokesman Chris Mainz said. ''We have been experiencing widespread, intermittent issues with several of our applications since that time. We are not experiencing any major delays to our operation at this time.''
Back in Europe, London's busy Heathrow Airport was among those where airlines faced sporadic issues.
"A small number of airlines are experiencing problems across the world & we're working closely with them to solve the issue," Heathrow said in a Thursday morning reply to a passenger there.
Bloomberg News added Amadeus "it couldn't comment on the extent of the disruption," but it appeared most airports suffered short-lived disruptions. "Dublin airport said its systems were down for about 12 minutes, while Manchester in northern England reported a 15-minute failure. The knock-on effect on flights could have lasted much longer, based on previous outages," Bloomberg wrote.
But, in what hopefully was a sign of a quick recovery from the glitch, Qantas -- the Australian carrier that was among those affected -- told CNN it was already recovering from the problem.
"Amadeus -- a check in system for passengers -- went down and now has come back up. Check in was resumed quite quickly," Qantas spokesman Stephen Moynihan said to the news network.
IN PICTURES: 30 (more) cool aviation photos
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2k6MI83
SJW BLM LGBBTQQIAAP
Week 45: Experts in authoritarianism advise to keep a list of things subtly changing around you, so'...
Week 45 is the week of Paul Manafort''--'who now in retrospect, seems an even more odd choice by Trump for campaign manager. As Mueller zeroes in on Manafort and Flynn, almost every Trump campaign and WH staffers, past and present, is being drawn in to the expanding Russia probe. This week several regime members drew heat for unrepentant kleptocracy.
This week DHS informed 21 states they were targeted by Russia, strangely a year later and on a late afternoon on Friday. Trump, who benefitted from a slight approval rating reprieve courtesy of positive media coverage, continues to deny Russian involvement and to act erratically and unbefitting of the office on both foreign policy and domestic issues. Trump also continues to ignore what is shaping up to be a humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico.
In a series of bizarre Sunday morning tweets, Trump referred to Kim Jong Un as the ''Rocket Man,'' retweeted a criticism of a NYT story, and retweeted two of his own tweets.Trump also retweeted a GIF of him hitting Hillary with a golf ball in the head, sparking criticism for the violent imagery against a female political opponent. Elected Republicans remained silent.The original account of the golf GIF was @Fuctupmind, whose Twitter feed is full of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQ tweets.Trump began his first UN remarks by mentioning Trump World Tower, ''I actually saw great potential right across the street to be honest with you.''Trump threatened to ''totally destroy'' N. Korea, and using his new nickname for Kim Jong Un, said, ''Rocket man is on a suicide mission.'' N. Korea's ambassador walked out before Trump's speech started.Trump also said, ''I will always put America first,'' and urged other leaders to do the same. Several analysts compared Trump's speech to the 1920's when traditionalist reacted to changing times by stoking hate of others.WAPO's Asia Pacific reporter noted Kim Jong Un's regime tells N. Korean people every day that the US ''wants to destroy them and their country. Now, they will hear it from another source''''--'Trump.On Wednesday, in an escalating war of words, N. Korea's foreign minister likened Trump to a ''dog barking.''On Thursday, while threatening escalation, Kim Jong Un called Trump a ''mentally deranged US dotard.'' N. Korea analysts noted it is unprecedented to have Kim Jong Un himself directly attack a US leader.On Friday, the LA Times reported aides repeatedly warned Trump not to deliver a personal attack on Kim Jong Un at his UN speech, saying insults could irreparably escalate tensions.Pew Research reported America's image has suffered since Trump took office. In a survey spanning 37 nations, just 22% have confidence Trump is doing the right thing in international affairs, versus 64% for Obama.As tensions rise with N. Korea, 76% of S. Koreans and 72% of Japanese say they have no confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs.Trump also blasted Iranian leaders as a ''corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy,'' and said ''the Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions,'' and an ''embarrassment'' to the US.On Friday, Iran showed off its new ballistic missile at a military parade in Tehran. President Rouhani said, ''when it comes to defending our country, we will ask nobody for their permission.''At a bilateral meeting, Trump praised Turkey's authoritarian leader Erdogan, saying: ''We have a great friendship.'' Erdogan is the subject of international condemnation for his brutal crackdown on dissidents.State authorities in NH are investigating the wounding of an 8 year-old biracial boy as a possible hate crime. The boy was pushed off a picnic table with a rope around his neck by teenagers.US Army recruiters are canceling contracts with hundreds of immigrant recruits, exposing some to deportation. Recruiters claim the move is to eliminate onerous background investigations from the enlistment process.Newsweek reported white supremacists are recruiting on college campuses. At University of Houston, flyers reading ''Beware the International Jew'' and ''Imagine a Muslim-Free America'' were hung around campus.McClatchy reported the Trump regime is considering a policy which would fast-track the deportation of thousands of unaccompanied Central American teenagers who arrived at the southern border.More than 150k children who arrived at the southern border, escaping violence and poverty in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, would be sent back when they turn 18, without seeing an immigration judge first.NPR reported parents traveling within Texas to a hospital to get their two-month old a lifesaving operation were arrested and put into deportation proceedings. A hospital nurse may have tipped border patrol off.Under Obama, immigration agents avoided enforcement actions at hospitals, schools and churches. The Trump regime rounds up people in the country illegally at those places, even if they have no criminal record.Guardian reported Trump has assembled the most male-dominated government in decades, with 80% of nominations for top jobs in the Trump regime going to men.On Friday, DeVos formally rescinded Obama-era policies campus sexual assault meant to protect victims, instead siding with men's rights advocates. No formal policy was put in place, just a higher burden of proof.WSJ reported as Trump's temporary travel ban expired Friday, DHS may replace it with a targeted approach that will impact nine countries, only one of which is not majority Muslim. Trump has no business interests in the six already on the list, it is uncertain about the additional three.A triathlon scheduled to take place at Trump National golf course in NC, originally named ''Tri at the Trump'' then rebranded ''Tri for Good,'' was canceled amid controversy. This would have been the race's fourth year.WJAR-TV, one of RI's most watched television stations, said it is being forced by its owner Sinclair Broadcast Group to broadcast multiple programs favorable to Trump.AP reported the Republican Governors Associations quietly set up a media outlet, ''The Free Telegraph.'' Critics called the website, which makes no mention of a being a product of an official party committee, propaganda.On Monday, Trump said he was looking into staging a military parade down Pennsylvania Avenue for July 4th.On Wednesday, in a speech at a lunch with African leaders, Trump praised the health care of Nambia, a nonexistent African country.Nicaragua announced it will sign on to the Paris climate accord''--'leaving only Syria and the US outside it.Trump blocked a woman with stage 4 Hodgkin's Lymphoma on Twitter. Laura Packard had tweeted Graham-Cassidy would jeopardize the lives of people like her who rely on Obamacare exchanges for coverage.AP reported lawmakers across the country introduced dozens of bills this year which would close or limit public access to a wide range of government records and meetings.The Trump regime has removed links to taxpayer-funded climate data on the U.S. Geological Survey website. A search for ''Effects of Climate Change'' had 2,825 items in December and today has zero items.WAPO reported that in a memo to Trump, Interior Sec Zinke is recommending modifying 10 national monuments created by Obama, including shrinking the boundaries of at least four.Justice Gorsuch campaigned for McConnell in a speech in McConnell's hometown on Thursday. In Week 21, McConnell passed the filibuster-ending ''nuclear option'' that allowed Gorsuch to get confirmed.WAPO reported Democrats are introducing The Hotel Act, legislation which would ban federal officials from using taxpayer fund for travel expenses at Trump-owned properties or locales.POLITICO reported HHS Sec Price used a private-jet for travel, breaking precedent. Price has been an outspoken critic of federal spending, and has developed a plan for department-wide savings at HHS.POLITICO also reported Price traveled by private by private plane at least 24 times since early May, costing taxpayers more than $300k. Many flights were to conferences, so dates were known well in advance.The most frequent justification for chartered flights is lack of comparable options. POLITICO found several commercial flight options at comparable times for five chartered flights Price took last week.WAPO reported according to a senior administration official, the WH did not approve Price's travel on chartered planes.On Friday, WAPO reported the HHS Inspector General is investigating Price's use of two dozen chartered flights in recent months.ABC reported Treasury Dept investigators are also looking into a charter flight Mnuchin took from NY to DC on August 15 at a cost to taxpayers of $25k. There are ample flight and rail alternatives available for this route.For a third time, Republicans in the Senate tried to pass healthcare without using regular order or trying for any bi-partisan support. McCain's vote against these tactics will likely cause Graham-Cassidy to fail.The Trump regime continued to sabotage Obamacare: HHS announced it will shut down the @HHSgov website for 12 hours during all but one Sunday in the remaining six weeks of open enrollment season.Jeff Mateer, Trump's nominee for a federal judgeship in Texas, in two 2015 speeches, described transgender children are evidence of ''Satan's plan,'' and lamented that states were banning conversion therapy.WAPO reported the EPA has spent $833k on Pruitt's round-the-clock personal security detail over the past three months, doubling what was spent by his predecessors, and amid massive cost cutting for the agency.According to a copy of his schedule obtained by WAPO, Pruitt met regularly with executives from the auto, mining and fossil fuel industries''--'in some cases shortly before making decisions favorable to them.POLITICO reported a review of Trump's pick for USDA hires reveals the agency is full of campaign staff and volunteers, many of whom have little or no federal policy experience or knowledge about agriculture.Trump's picks are also being paid above their pay scale. One former truck driver is being paid the highest levels on the federal government's pay scale, a GS-12, earning $80k annually, although he has no college degree.Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo said he will need to liquidate part of his children's college fund to pay for specialized legal representation in the Mueller Russia probe.Flynn's siblings launched a legal-defense fund to help defray the costs of the Russia probe. The family will not disclose the identity of donors, raising concerns from ethics experts.Reuters reported Trump is using money donated to his re-election campaign and the RNC to pay for his legal fees related to the Russia probe.CNN reported the RNC spent $231k in August to cover Trump's legal fees, paying personal attorneys Sekulow $131k and Dowd $100k.The RNC has also payed nearly $200k of Donald Jr.'s legal fees for the Russia probe in August.WSJ reported the Republican Party is funding Trump's legal defense in the Russia probe with help from a handful of wealthy individuals, including a Ukrainian-born American with close business ties to Russian oligarchs.NYT reported Donald Jr. has decided to forego his Secret Service protection, citing he wants more privacy.Jody Hunt, Sessions' chief-of-staff and Trump's pick to be assistant AG of the DOJ's Civil Division, was present at a key meeting between Sessions, Comey and Trump, at which Trump asked all but Comey to leave.Sessions new chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, said Mueller's Russia probe is turning into a ''witch hunt,'' and said Rosenstein should ''order Mueller to limit the scope of his investigation.''On Tuesday, Senate investigators canceled a meeting with Michael Cohen, saying he broke an agreement by releasing a statement and speaking to the media. NBC reports the committee will subpoena Cohen instead.Guardian reported on the eighth person at the June 9 Trump Tower meeting: Ikray ''Ike'' Kaveladze, saying he is an associate of some of Russia's richest and most powerful people.Kaveladze was involved in the 2013 takeover of Stillwater Mining by Norilsk Nickel, a Russian mining firm owned by an associate of Putin''--'the first Russian company to take a majority stake in a US company. Kaveladze served on the new company's board.NYT reported on two Trump lawyers, Cobb and Dowd, overheard by NYT reporters while discussing over lunch a clash within Trump's legal team over how much to cooperate with Mueller.Per the overheard conversation, WH officials fear that colleagues are wearing wires for Mueller. NYT reported in the aftermath McGahn erupted at Cobb, and Kelly reprimanded him.CBS reported FBI surveillance of Manafort during 2016 picked up conversations between Manafort and Russians about the campaign, and may also include conversations between Manafort and Trump.WSJ reported Mueller's team interviewed deputy AG Rosenstein about Trump's firing of Comey in June or July. Mueller has independence on his investigation, but ultimately answers to Rosenstein.Rosenstein said Trump shrugged off any potential consequences for firing Comey. Rosenstein also turned over the May 8 memo from Trump which outlined his rationale for firing Comey, to Mueller's team.CNN reported Manafort was wiretapped by the US government. The wiretap was first authorized by the special court that handles FISA warrants in 2014 when Manafort was the subject of a FBI investigation.The surveillance was discontinued late last year for lack of evidence, then restarted by the FBI under a new FISA warrant for ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, which extended into early 2017.NYT reported on aggressive tactics being employed by Mueller's investigator against Manafort, including prosecutors telling him they planned to indict him as they searched his Virginia home.To get the search warrant, Mueller's team had to show probable cause that Manafort's home contained evidence of a crime. To pick the lock, prosecutors had to persuade a judge Manafort would destroy evidence.Also of note: Mueller's team first learned of the emails between Donald Jr. and Russians to set up the June 9 meeting throughNYT reporting.WAPO reported Mueller has requested extensive records and email correspondence from the WH for 13 categories which investigators for the special counsel have identified as critical to their probe.Mueller's agents have zeroed in on Manafort and Flynn. Their past associates are being questioned on whether they tried to conceal consulting work that could have benefited foreign governments.NYT reported requests relate to the areas of Flynn's hiring and firing, the Comey firing, and Trump's Oval Office meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak at which he said the Comey firing has relieved ''great pressure'' on him.Documents are also sought for communications with Manafort, as well as Trump's campaign foreign policy team: Carter Page, J. D. Gordon, Keith Kellogg, George Papadopoulos, Walid Phares and Joseph E. Schmitz.Other areas include Flynn's conversations with Kislyak, Spicer's statements on Comey's firing, and the June 9 Trump Tower meeting and the WH response to that meeting.Axios reported Spicer's colleagues say he filled ''notebook after notebook'' at meetings during the campaign and then at the WH. Spicer was known for keeping copious notes.When Axios's Mike Allen texted Spicer for a comment, Spicer responded, ''From a legal standpoint I want to be clear: Do not email or text me again. Should you do again I will report to the appropriate authorities.''WAPO reported that less than two weeks before the RNC Convention, Manafort made an offer in an email through an intermediary to give Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska a private briefing.Manafort and Deripaska had a business relationship in which Manafort was paid as an investment consultant. Deripaska is one of Russia's richest men, and someone Putin turns to on a regular basis.Manafort emails indicate he may have been looking to get paid money owed by past clients using his role and influence as Trump's campaign manager. An email in April asked, ''How do we use to get whole?''Also of note, Deripaska claimed Manafort siphoned off $19mm of funds intended for investments'-- for which Deripaska sued in US court. It is possible Manafort was looking to wipe that debt away.Also in email, Manafort communicated with Konstantin Kilimnik, his long-time man in Kiev who attended Soviet military school, using code terms like ''OVD'' for Deripaska and ''black caviar'' for possible payments.NYT reported in order to help defray his legal expenses, Manafort is working for allies of the leader of Iraq's Kurdish region on a referendum on Kurdish independence from Iraq. The US opposes the referendum.As part of that work, Manafort may leave the country and return to the region in the coming days for the vote.NYT reported New York-based law firm Skadden, Arps has been asked by the DOJ for documentation related to work arranged by Manafort for Viktor Yanukovych, the Russia-aligned former PM of Ukraine.The work was part of an effort to shield Yanukovych from international condemnation for his government prosecuting and convicting the former Ukrainian PM Tymoshenko without evidence and for political reasons.Skadden, Arps has returned half the $1.1mm in fees the firm received. It is unclear if the document request relates to Mueller's Russia probe, and its focus on Manafort.Former Trump campaign manager Lewandowski, while defending Trump, said he hopes Manafort, Stone or any others on the campaign who colluded with Russia in 2016, ''go to jail for the rest of their lives.''Mueller brought in Stephen Kelly, fmr congressional affairs chief for the FBI, to act as a liaison to Capitol Hill. Kelly will be a point of contact and keep congressional investigators up to date on the special counsel's probe.Twitter will meet with the Senate Intel Comm next week relating to the committee's investigation into Russian interference in the US election.Bowing to pressure from lawmakers and the public, Facebook will release 3k ads bought by a Russian agency to congressional investigators. Facebook also vowed to be more ''transparent.''Daily Beast reported Russians used Facebook to organize more than a dozen pro-Trump rallies in Florida during the 2016 election. The page for one such group, ''Being Patriotic,'' was closed by Facebook in August 2017.On Friday morning, Trump defended Russia from Facebook ads as being a ''Russia hoax,'' while attacking Hillary, tweeting the greatest influence was ''the Fake News Media ''screaming'' for Crooked Hillary Clinton.''USA Today reported, according to the FBI, as many as 39 states had their election systems scanned or targeted by Russia. Several states are now considering switching back to paper ballots.On Friday, DHS contacted election officials in 21 states to notify them they had been targeted by Russian government hackers during the 2016 election. This was the first time government officials contacted the states.DHS did not make names of the 21 states public, citing privacy. BuzzFeed reported state officials are outraged, and wanting to know why it took DHS a year to inform them. Sen Warner called the delay ''unacceptable.''PA and WI, states with odd voting patterns which were the subject of recounts, were among the 21 disclosed as of Friday night. Officials in FL, another surprise on election night, said they were also a target of Russia.On Friday night, fmr DNI Clapper said US Intel's findings on Russia's election interference ''did serve to cast doubt on the legitimacy'' of Trump's victory, and expressed concern that Russian interference will continue.On Friday night in Alabama, at what was supposed to be a campaign rally for Sen Luther Strange, Trump said of his support of Strange, ''I'll be honest, I might have made a mistake.''The campaign rally turned out to be a 90 minute rant, including Trump again deriding Kim Jong Un, calling him ''little Rocket Man.''Trump also said of Colin Kaepernick who took a knee in protest, NFL owners should respond by saying, ''Get that son of a bitch off the field.''The next morning, Trump tweeted about Stephen Curry, a member of the NBA Champion Warriors who had expressed reservations about going to the WH: ''Stephen Curry is hesitating, therefore invitation is withdrawn!''A WAPO opinion writer described how Trump is making Americans sick: including rising blood pressure, a surge in mouth-guards for night-time teeth clenching and grinding, and unusually busy psychotherapists.Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, decimating the island and leaving 3.5mm without electricity for months. On Friday, 70k were evacuated over concern of a failing dam. Trump did little to mention or address this crisis.The Trump regime plans to rollback Obama-era limitations on drone strikes and commando raids outside conventional battlefields.Past weeks:
Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. File photo: DPA
Poland's governing conservatives have set up a parliamentary committee tasked with looking into the extent of World War II reparations they claim is owed by Germany, the new body's head said Friday.
"We want to begin work in the Polish parliament that will result in an analysis of the estimated amount that Germany owes Poland," the committee's presiding lawmaker Arkadiusz Mularczyk told the Polish news agency PAP.
The member of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party added that there is no set date for the committee to produce its results.
The issue of war reparations -- for years considered as settled '' was revived in July by PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Earlier this month Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said Warsaw "has the right" to ask for reparations.
But German government spokesman Steffen Seibert responded that the issue had already been settled when "Poland made a binding decision in August 1953... to relinquish demands for further war reparations."
Signed by Warsaw's communist authorities, the 1953 agreement on reparations renounced further claims against Germany.
But the PiS government disputes the validity of the post-war deal, saying it was made under the diktat of the Soviet Union.
Earlier this month the heads of state of Germany and Poland agreed that a "calm discussion" was necessary to address the issue.
Poland's foreign and interior ministers have estimated potential reparations reaching as high as $1 trillion (850 billion euros).
During World War II, Poland suffered the brunt of a two-front attack by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Six million Polish citizens, including three million of Jewish origin, were killed under the Nazi occupation of 1939-45, and Warsaw was virtually razed.
According to a survey published last month, 51 percent of Poles oppose any reparation claims against Germany, while 24 percent are in favour.
Poland's powerful Roman Catholic church warned earlier this month that "poor decisions" by the country's right-wing leaders could "undermine" ties with Germany.
The talk of reparations comes as the PiS government is under fire both at home and abroad over a slew of reforms that critics say erodes democratic standards and the rule of law.
READ ALSO: Germany rejects Polish call for more WWII reparations, as clerics call for calm
View the high resolution version of today's graphic by clicking here.
The human brain is capable of incredible things, but it's also extremely flawed at times.
Science has shown that we tend to make all sorts of mental mistakes, called ''cognitive biases'', that can affect both our thinking and actions. These biases can lead to us extrapolating information from the wrong sources, seeking to confirm existing beliefs, or failing to remember events the way they actually happened!
To be sure, this is all part of being human '' but such cognitive biases can also have a profound effect on our endeavors, investments, and life in general. For this reason, today's infographic from DesignHacks.co is particularly handy. It shows and groups each of the 188 known confirmation biases in existence.
What is a Cognitive Bias?Humans tend to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from making rational judgments.
These tendencies usually arise from:
Information processing shortcutsThe limited processing ability of the brainEmotional and moral motivationsDistortions in storing and retrieving memoriesSocial influenceCognitive biases have been studied for decades by academics in the fields of cognitive science, social psychology, and behavioral economics, but they are especially relevant in today's information-packed world. They influence the way we think and act, and such irrational mental shortcuts can lead to all kinds of problems in entrepreneurship, investing, or management.
Cognitive Bias ExamplesHere are four examples of how these types of biases can affect people in the business world:
Familiarity Bias: An investor puts her money in ''what she knows'', rather than seeking the obvious benefits from portfolio diversification. Just because a certain type of industry or security is familiar doesn't make it the logical selection.
Self-Attribution Bias: An entrepreneur overly attributes his company's success to himself, rather than other factors (team, luck, industry trends). When things go bad, he blames these external factors for derailing his progress.
Anchoring Bias: An employee in a salary negotiation is too dependent on the first number mentioned in the negotiations, rather than rationally examining a range of options.
Survivorship Bias: Entrepreneurship looks easy, because there are so many successful entrepreneurs out there. However, this is a cognitive bias: the successful entrepreneurs are the ones still around, while the millions who failed went and did other things.
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The Trump administration wants being gay to be a fireable offense '' VICE News
Trump's Justice Department appeared in federal court Tuesday to argue that employers should be able to fire people because they are gay.
In a rare occurrence, all 13 judges of the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments in Zarda v. Altitude Express Tuesday. The case originated in 2010 when skydiving instructor Donald Zarda sued his former employer, Altitude Express, alleging he had been fired because of his sexual orientation. The judges are expected to decide if the Title VII provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that protects against discrimination based on gender should also apply to discrimination based on sexual orientation.
''Employers under Title VII are permitted to consider employees' out-of-work sexual conduct,'' argued Hashim Mooppan, the Department of Justice attorney. ''There is a commonsense, intuitive difference between sex and sexual orientation.''
Tuesday's oral arguments were an even rarer occasion because another government agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, was in court to argue against the DOJ, saying gay employees are protected by Title VII. The Justice Department inserted itself into the case in July by filing a brief supporting the employer.
Librarian rejects Melania Trump's gift of Dr. Seuss books - The Washington Post
First lady Melania Trump read the Dr. Seuss book, "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" to children at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. (The Washington Post)
One of Melania Trump's favorite books is Dr. Seuss's ''Oh, the Places You'll Go!,'' which she read with her son, Barron, ''over and over'' when he was younger.
The first lady, who is increasingly carving out a public profile for herself, chose the classic children's book and nine other Dr. Seuss titles to send to an elementary school in Cambridge, Mass., in celebration of ''National Read a Book Day.''
But a librarian at Cambridgeport School refused to accept the gift, criticizing Trump administration education policies and images in the books.
Seuss's illustrations are ''steeped in racist propaganda, caricatures, and harmful stereotypes,'' librarian Liz Phipps Soeiro wrote in a letter to Trump on Tuesday.
Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel is best known for his beloved children's books. However some are critical of the artist's work. (Taylor Turner/The Washington Post)
The librarian wrote that rather than sending books to a well-funded elementary school in Cambridge, Trump should instead be devoting resources to schools in ''underfunded and underprivileged communities'' that are ''marginalized and maligned by policies put in place by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.'' Critics view DeVos, a billionaire who has worked for decades to promote school choice, or alternatives to traditional public schools, as one of the most anti-public-education secretaries in the department's history.
[Melania Trump begins to embrace the first lady's platform '-- finally]
Giving the books was part of Trump's effort to use her platform ''to help as many children as she can,'' White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said.
Those efforts include hosting a roundtable discussion Thursday about the opioid epidemic, including how it affects youths, and speaking at a luncheon on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly about work she hopes to do as an anti-bullying advocate.
The Department of Education chose one high-achieving school in every state to receive a package of books from Trump, according to a statement from the White House.
''Turning the gesture of sending young school children books into something divisive is unfortunate, but the First Lady remains committed to her efforts on behalf of children everywhere,'' Grisham said.
In her letter to children receiving the books, Trump called getting an education ''perhaps the most important and wondrous opportunity of your young lives.''
''Your education will be a lifelong pursuit that will sustain and carry you far beyond your wildest imagination, if you will let it,'' she wrote. ''Remember, the key to achieving your dreams begins with learning to read.''
On Sept. 6, she encouraged everyone to read a book, and to let every page ''take you on an exciting journey.''
The Cambridge school system released a statement saying the librarian ''was not authorized to accept or reject donated books on behalf of the school or school district,'' according to CBS Boston.
''We have counseled the employee on all relevant policies, including the policy against public resources being used for political purposes,'' the district said in the statement. Representatives from the school system did not respond to requests from The Washington Post for comment.
Phipps Soeiro points to recent literature that addresses potential racism in Seuss's work, including a book by professor of children's literature Philip Nel that argues Seuss's depiction of the Cat in the Hat was based on racial stereotypes and inspired by traditions of blackface entertainment.
She also calls Seuss ''a bit of a clich(C)'' and a ''tired and worn ambassador for children's literature'' in her letter posted on the Horn Book, a publication covering literature for children and adults.
Many of the comments on Phipps Soeiro's post commended her for taking a stand, but others suggested she was ''rude'' and ''ungrateful'' not to have accepted Trump's gift.
''I am appalled by this. How about teaching our children to be grateful for a gift, accept the gift and say thank you?'' a commenter wrote, responding to Phipps Soeiro's post.
Parents outside the school told CBS Boston they supported the librarian's statement.
''I think the letter is really articulate, constructive in its suggestions,'' said parent Alex Vanpraagh.
Seuss has long been associated with children's literacy. The National Education Association's annual ''Read Across America'' day '-- when cities and towns across the country host events to celebrate reading '-- is March 2, Seuss's birthday.
''One of the reasons we partnered with Seuss 20 years ago in 1997 was to kick-start this program,'' NEA spokesman Steven Grant told the School Library Journal.
''That was the strategy up front, so kids would see Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat and spark some attention.''
He said an estimated 45 million students and teachers take part in the reading events annually, and that in the past two years, the program's mission has been shifting toward promoting diverse literature.
But the author still has many admirers, including President Obama, who said he is ''still a big Dr. Seuss fan'' when he visited a library in Southeast Washington in 2015.
President Obama visited the Anacostia Library in Southeast D.C. to talk about a government plan to distribute e-books to students. The president also reminisced about his favorite childhood books. (Reuters)
He hailed Seuss as ''one of America's revered wordsmiths'' in a presidential proclamation on 2016's Read Across America Day.
''Theodor Seuss Geisel '-- or Dr. Seuss '-- used his incredible talent to instill in his most impressionable readers universal values we all hold dear,'' Obama wrote.
''Through a prolific collection of stories, he made children see that reading is fun, and in the process, he emphasized respect for all; pushed us to accept ourselves for who we are; challenged preconceived notions and encouraged trying new things.''
[They said Melania Trump was the face of success. She made them take down billboards with her face.]
But Phipps Soeiro wrote that as first lady, Trump has ''world-class resources'' that she could have used to make a choice other than the Seuss books.
''Just down the street you have access to a phenomenal children's librarian: Dr. Carla Hayden, the current Librarian of Congress,'' she wrote. ''I have no doubt Dr. Hayden would have given you some stellar recommendations.''
She noted that in Cambridge, where yearly per-pupil spending is more than $20,000, her students have access to ''a school library with over nine thousand volumes and a librarian with a graduate degree in library science.''
''So, my school doesn't have a NEED for these books,'' wrote Phipps Soeiro, who could not immediately be reached for comment.
Other school libraries in cities including Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit are being closed because of expansion, privatization and school choice, she wrote.
''Are those kids any less deserving of books simply because of circumstances beyond their control?'' she asked.
The Department of Education could not be reached for comment about its criteria for selecting Cambridgeport School or the other 49 schools.
The 10 books on the list are: ''Seuss-isms!''; ''Because a Little Bug Went KaChoo''; ''What Pet Should I Get?''; ''The Cat in the Hat''; ''I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!''; ''One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish''; ''The Foot Book''; ''Wacky Wednesday''; ''Green Eggs and Ham'' and ''Oh, the Places You'll Go!''
Phipps Soeiro suggested a reading list of her own 10 books for the first lady and President Trump '-- ''it's the librarian in me,'' she wrote '-- that focused on themes including children standing up to racism, trying to connect with parents who are incarcerated because of their immigration status and who integrate aspects of their countries of origin into their new countries.
On Tuesday, the elementary school's Twitter account shared a photo of books it recommends.
Read more:
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How Schools Can Navigate Racism in Children's Books - The Atlantic
Reminiscing about the Dr. Seuss books we loved as children is usually a happy time for adults. We might remember first learning about equality in Horton Hears a Who! or getting starry-eyed about our futures reading Oh, the Places You'll Go! (of course, for some of us there's also a bit of residual terror about that green-food-obsessed apparition in Green Eggs and Ham).
But Philip Nel, a scholar and professor of children's literature whose specialties include Dr. Seuss and Harry Potter, is pushing readers to grapple with the political and social implications of the stories that inspire such warm, fuzzy memories. In his new book, Was the Cat in the Hat Black?: The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books, Nel argues that, yes, the Cat in the Hat was black'--or, more precisely, that Seuss's depiction of the character was based on racial stereotypes and inspired by traditions of blackface minstrel entertainment'--and that dozens more children's books of decades past are brimming with insidious, racist themes.
I spoke with Nel about how teachers and parents should discuss these books with children, how one's nostalgia for children's books can coexist with an understanding of their not-so-innocent makings, and why he's dedicated his adult life to thinking about children's literature. Below is a lightly edited version of our conversation.
Fattal: You say that your book is ''about how race is present especially when it seems to be absent.'' Can you give an example of a character or a scene in a children's book that seems to be ''race-free'' but actually isn't when you take a second look?
Nel: One obvious example would be the Oompa Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who are these orange people who are enslaved happily by Mr. Wonka. The book presents slavery as happy and fun, and the kind of thing that others would enjoy, and I'm not sure that everyone thinks of the book in those terms. In the original version, the Oompa Loompas are not white people from Loompaland'--they are in fact black pygmies from Africa. And though [Roald] Dahl changed that, he didn't change the broader themes of racism and colonialism when he did that.
Fattal: In your book you talk about nostalgia and how parents are reluctant to acknowledge racism in the books they loved growing up and want to read to their kids. Can parents share these books with their kids while also acknowledging their troubling elements?
Nel: I think that what we have to do is admit that our relationships with these books can be complicated. It's okay to think fondly of a beautiful story, but you need to also think about the way in which that beautiful story may also be racist. We can talk about what is masterful about it or what is artistic about it, but we also need to talk about some of the things in the book which are not, and if presented uncritically are simply transmitting these ideas to a new generation. I think adults need to recognize that their fondness for a book or a movie is not a defense of that. I think you would actually have a richer and more profound relationship with a work if you do think about it critically, and if we do acknowledge those mixed feelings.
''Adults like to think of children as innocent, as uncorrupted by this corrupt world, but that's not actually how life works.''Fattal: You argue that there is an imperative to keep reading these problematic children's books. What would you say to those who ask why we wouldn't just stop reading them?
Nel: There is actually a very strong case for not reading them. Racist books inflict real damage on children of all races. So there's a very strong argument to be made for that, and I don't want to diminish that at all. The reason that I am not making that argument is that I don't think that ignoring the symptom cures the disease. People need to learn that this is one place that racism comes from. They need to learn it in context. You definitely shouldn't only teach racist children's books. There's a wealth of really thoughtful, historically oriented and carefully written books that can help us think about colonialism or racism or sexism more thoughtfully, and you would only want to teach these books in that context.
I think that to erase the crime does not erase its effects. It's still there and we still have to deal with it, and in some ways, the unvarnished awfulness of it, as painful as it is to look at, can be a way to do that, and can be a way to help make it visible elsewhere. If you don't know the history of minstrelsy, then you don't notice it in Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny or the Cat in the Hat. It's knowing the history that helps you say, ''this pop culture that I enjoy is way more racialized than I was aware of, and that's troubling.''
Fattal: You talk about the need for a parent or teacher to facilitate discussions on the racist elements of children's books with students who may be too young to do this kind of critical reading on their own. What might that conversation look like?
Nel: It will obviously depend on the individual child, the age of the child, et cetera, but the best way is to ask questions. When you notice something in a book, ask questions about it. Would you be happy working in a factory and being imprisoned there? What do you make of presenting the Oompa Loompas as happy? What are some of the assumptions of this work? Why is it presenting this character in this way? Why are all the characters in this book white? What do you make of that? You want children to think about power in the text, whose interests are represented in the text, who is not being heard in the text. And you can focus those on the specific work.
I think with children you have to have a conversation'--you have to ask them critical questions, and you have to invite them to ask critical questions about the book that they are reading. It's a conversation that's going to be uncomfortable, a conversation in which you may have to admit you don't know all the answers. It's not an easy conversation to have, by any means. One of the things that I do when I teach [college students] in class is I acknowledge my own uncomfortableness. Because sometimes students don't want to talk about this. And so I acknowledge why they're uncomfortable and that I'm uncomfortable, too, and that it's okay to be uncomfortable. I think that's the kind of tone to set when you have these conversations: that this is going to be uncomfortable.
Fattal: Is learning to engage with discomfort harder for children than it is in a classroom of college students? How might educators navigate that difficulty?
Nel: Children notice race from when they're very young. Children of color have to face it head-on. But I just got a note from a friend of mine who was talking about her 5-year-old who was worried when she was getting tan that she might turn black. And that worried her, because [the 5-year-old] knows what black means. She knows that puts you at a disadvantage based on this country's laws and values. And her mother explained, and had the uncomfortable conversation of indicating, ''Well that's not how race works, but also '... black is beautiful, and we have black friends who are beautiful.'' Kids get it. I think the failure to have that conversation is an abdication of responsibility on the part of parents and educators.
''The books we read as children are some of the most important books that we read, because we read them when we are in the process of figuring out who we are.''Fattal: You talk in the book about showing children that anger can be channeled toward productive action. Are kids really capable of this move from anger or discomfort to action, and how might educators facilitate that?
Nel: The emotional experience of dealing with racism is tough, especially if you're the target. I think what's worse, though, is not dealing with it and not being given any tools for dealing with it'--to experience the injury and then not know how to deal with it. I think if a teacher is able to talk to a child and say, ''it's okay not to like a book or to be angry at the author or to be angry at a text; this is infuriating in the way that it's presenting this Native American character or this character of Asian descent, and I see why you'd be angry at it.'' I think that's actually really healthy, because it lets the child direct the anger at the appropriate target rather than internally, or rather than just kind of stewing over it.
Related StoriesEducators can also ask students, ''what should we do?'' ''Should we take it off the curriculum?'' ''Is it helpful to have a conversation about it?'' ''Should we contact the publisher?'' The emotional interest can translate to political interest, if you give those emotions an outlet, first for being expressed, and then secondly to say, ''right, I'm with you, let's do something'''--to ask, ''what can we do? Because this is upsetting.'' That shows children they have agency, they have power, they have a voice. That's so important. Adults like to think of children as innocent, as uncorrupted by this corrupt world, but that's not actually how life works. As soon as you enter this world you begin to be affected by it. You need to talk about it. You need to help children become better adults than the ones they're interacting with.
Fattal: How might a classroom discussion change on the basis of age and reading levels?
Nel: The way that you have the conversation will vary depending upon the age of the child. It'd be unlikely for me to have a conversation with a 5-year-old about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because a) that's not at their reading level, and b) the explicit content of that book may go beyond them. But it may not be over their heads to look at a book that's more appropriate in terms of reading level or age range. For example, The Skippyjon Jones books that caricature Mexican culture'--those would be a great opportunity for talking with younger readers, because they're really popular, and they're a super example of stories that can be fun and funny but also hurtful because of the way that they caricature Mexican culture and reduce it to a bunch of stereotypes.
Fattal: You've spent your life studying children's books. Do you think there's a place for children's literature in education for older students? What makes children's literature such an important genre to study?
Nel: When we revisit the books we read as children, we understand things we did not understand when we were children. The books we read as children are some of the most important books that we read, because we read them when we are in the process of figuring out who we are, what we believe, whose stories are important. And children's books are fun. I think one of the great appeals of children's books is that they need to reach a reader who is not going to be persuaded by a good review to pick it up. They need to reach a reader right away. So they're fun to read, and they are just as sophisticated and just as literary and just as thoughtfully put together as the books created for older readers. I think as grownups we need to appreciate that and we need to think about that when we buy them for or read them to the young people in our lives, because children's books are not lesser just because they are for people who have less height or experience.
Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say It's Gone Too Far - NYTimes.com
SAN FRANCISCO '-- Their complaints flow on Reddit forums, on video game message boards, on private Facebook pages and across Twitter. They argue for everything from male separatism to an end to gender diversity efforts.
Silicon Valley has for years accommodated a fringe element of men who say women are ruining the tech world.
Now, as the nation's technology capital '-- long identified as one of the more hostile work environments for women '-- reels from a series of high-profile sexual harassment and discrimination scandals, these conversations are gaining broader traction.
One of those who said there had been a change is James Altizer, an engineer at the chip maker Nvidia. Mr. Altizer, 52, said he had realized a few years ago that feminists in Silicon Valley had formed a cabal whose goal was to subjugate men. At the time, he said, he was one of the few with that view.
Now Mr. Altizer said he was less alone. ''There's quite a few people going through that in Silicon Valley right now,'' he said. ''It's exploding. It's mostly young men, younger than me.''
Mr. Altizer said that a gathering he hosts in person and online to discuss men's issues had grown by a few dozen members this year to more than 200, that the private Facebook pages he frequents on men's rights were gaining new members and that a radical subculture calling for total male separatism was emerging.
''It's a witch hunt,'' he said in a phone interview, contending men are being fired by ''dangerous'' human resources departments. ''I'm sitting in a soundproof booth right now because I'm afraid someone will hear me. When you're discussing gender issues, it's almost religious, the response. It's almost zealotry.''
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Mr. Altizer is part of a backlash against the women in technology movement. While many in the tech industry had previously dismissed the fringe men's rights arguments, some investors, executives and engineers are now listening. Though studies and surveys show there is no denying the travails women face in the male-dominated industry, some said that the line for what counted as harassment had become too easy to cross and that the push for gender parity was too extreme a goal. Few were willing to talk openly about their thinking, for fear of standing out in largely progressive Silicon Valley.
Even so, ''witch hunt'' is the new whispered meme. Some in tech have started identifying as ''contrarians,'' to indicate subtly that they do not follow the ''diversity dogma.'' And self-described men's rights activists in Silicon Valley said their numbers at meetings were rising.
Others are playing down the women-in-tech issue. Onstage at a recent event, the venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said harassment in Silicon Valley was ''rarer than in most other businesses.''
Many men now feel like ''there's a gun to the head'' to be better about gender issues, said Rebecca Lynn, a venture capitalist at Canvas Ventures, and while ''there's a high awareness right now, which is positive, at the same time there's a fear.''
The backlash follows increasingly vulgar harassment revelations in Silicon Valley. Several female engineers and entrepreneurs this year named the men they accused of harassing them, and suddenly tech's boys' club seemed anything but impervious. Travis Kalanick, Uber's co-founder, resigned as chief executive after the ride-hailing service was embroiled in harassment accusations. Dave McClure, head of the incubator 500 Startups, called himself ''a creep'' and stepped down. This month, the chief executive of Social Finance, Mike Cagney, also quit amid a harassment scandal.
In the aftermath, many stood up for gender equality in tech. Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's founder, asked investors to sign a ''decency pledge.'' Many companies reiterated that they needed to improve work force diversity.
''In just the last 48 hours, I've spoken to a female tech executive who was grabbed by a male C.E.O. at a large event and another female executive who was asked to interview at a venture fund because they 'feel like they need to hire a woman,''' said Dick Costolo, the former chief of Twitter, who now runs the fitness start-up Chorus. ''We should worry about whether the women-in-tech movement has gone too far sometime after a couple of these aren't regularly happening anymore.''
But those who privately thought things had gone too far were given a voice by James Damore, 28, a soft-spoken Google engineer. Mr. Damore, frustrated after another diversity training, wrote a memo that he posted to an internal Google message board. In it, he argued that maybe women were not equally represented in tech because they were biologically less capable of engineering. Google fired him last month.
After months of apologizing by Silicon Valley for bad behavior, here was a young man whom some in tech's leadership could potentially get behind.
Paul Graham, who founded an influential start-up incubator, Y Combinator, posted two articles about how the science behind Mr. Damore's memo was accurate. Another start-up investor, John Durant, wrote that ''Charles Darwin himself would be fired from Google for his views on the sexes.''
And the investor Peter Thiel's business partner, Eric Weinstein, tweeted, ''Dear @Google, Stop teaching my girl that her path to financial freedom lies not in coding but in complaining to HR.''
Mr. Durant declined to comment. Mr. Graham said in an email that there needed to be more distinction between fact and policy, and Mr. Weinstein said there was ''a sea of brilliant women'' and that more needed to be done to ''figure out how to more fully empower them.''
Now men's rights advocates in Silicon Valley have galvanized.
''What Google did was wake up sectors of society that weren't into these issues before,'' said Paul Elam, who runs A Voice for Men, a men's rights group. He said his organization had seen more interest from people in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley has always been a men's space, others said. Warren Farrell, who lives in Marin County, Calif., and whose 1993 book, ''The Myth of Male Power,'' birthed the modern men's rights movement, said, ''The less safe the environment is for men, the more they will seek little pods of safety like the tech world.''
This turn in the gender conversation is good news for Mr. Damore. ''The emperor is naked,'' he said in an interview. ''Since someone said it, now it's become sort of acceptable.''
He added, ''The whole idea that diversity improves workplace output, it's not scientifically decided that that's true.''
Mr. Damore filed a labor complaint against Google in August and said more than 20 people had reached out about joining together for a class-action suit about systemic discrimination against men. He is represented by Harmeet Dhillon, a local firebrand lawyer.
''It's become fashionable in Silicon Valley for people like James, a white man, to be put into a category of less desirable for promotion and advancement,'' Ms. Dhillon said. ''Some companies have hiring goals like 'We'll give you a bonus if you're a hiring manager and you hire 70 percent women to this organization.' That's illegal.''
Google declined to comment.
Two men who worked at Yahoo sued the company for gender discrimination last year. Their lawyer, Jon Parsons, said the female leadership '-- Yahoo's chief executive was Marissa Mayer, before Verizon bought the company '-- had gone too far in trying to hire and promote women. He tied the suit into today's women-in-tech movement.
''When you're on a mission from God to set the world straight, it's easy to go too far,'' Mr. Parsons said. ''There was no control over women hiring women.''
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He said that his clients, Greg Anderson and Scott Ard, had faced gender discrimination in Yahoo's media teams and that other teams like cars were headed by women, which to Mr. Parsons was a sign of problems.
''No eyebrows are going to rise if a woman heads up fashion,'' Mr. Parsons said. ''But we're talking about women staffing positions '-- things like autos '-- where it cannot be explained other than manipulation.''
Those leading Silicon Valley's gender equality push said they were astonished that just as the movement was having an impact, it opened up an even more radical men's rights perspective.
''It's exhausting,'' said Joelle Emerson, who runs Paradigm, a company that designs diversity strategies. ''It's created divides that I didn't anticipate.''
One radical fringe that is growing is Mgtow, which stands for Men Going Their Own Way and pronounced MIG-tow. Mgtow aims for total male separatism, including forgoing children, avoiding marriage and limiting involvement with women. Its message boards are brimming with activity from Silicon Valley, Mr. Altizer said.
Cassie Jaye, who lives in Marin County and made a documentary about the men's rights movement called ''The Red Pill,'' said that the tech world and the men's rights community had ''snowballed'' together and that the rise in the number of people in Mgtow is new.
On the Mgtow message boards, members discuss work (''Ever work for a woman? Roll up your sleeves and share your horror story''), technology (''The stuff girlfriends and wives can't stand '-- computers, games, consoles'') and dating (mostly best practices to avoid commitment).
''I think there are a lot of guys living this lifestyle without naming it, and then they find Mgtow,'' said Ms. Jaye, who calls herself a former feminist.
Mr. Altizer leads Bay Area Fathers' Rights, a monthly support group for men to talk about the issues they uniquely face. He became interested in the community after a divorce and said his eyes were opened to how few rights men have. As for the numbers of women in tech, the effort for parity is absurd, he said.
''I've been on the hiring side for years,'' Mr. Altizer said, adding that he is not currently hiring people. ''It would be nice to have women, but you cannot find applicants.''
Hugh Hefner was not a good person. From the accounts of its residents, Hefner's Playboy Mansion functioned a lot like an internment camp. Hefner exercised totalitarian control over his ''girlfriends'': they had a 9pm curfew, and if they violated it Hefner would burst into tears and tell them they should move out. He instituted a strict set of bizarre rules, including forcing each girl to wear matching pajamas. (''If you do something wrong, you'll get an email. There's a strict code of conduct.'') He '' would constantly create drama and infighting among his girlfriends by randomly changing his long-held positions or household policies to favor one over the rest of them.'' He would selectively belittle girls (''You look old, hard, and cheap''), talked down to them and ''frequently made them cry.'' He pushed Quaaludes on the girls, referring to the drugs as ''thigh-openers.''According to Holly Madison, who spent years living with Hefner, he was manipulative, cold, and totalitarian. He refused to use condoms or be tested for STDs, and would require depressing group sex at regularly scheduled times. Each week the girls would have a scheduled time to go to Hefner to receive their ''allowance,'' and he would threaten to withhold their payment if they had dissatisfied him or broken a rule. As Madison writes:
We all hated this process. Hef would always use the occasion to bring up anything he wasn't happy about in the relationship. Most of the complaints were about the lack of harmony among the girlfriends '-- or your lack of sexual participation in the 'parties' he held in his bedroom. If we'd been out of town for any reason and missed one of the official 'going out' nights [when Hefner liked to parade his girls at nightclubs] he wouldn't want to give us the allowance. He used it as a weapon.
Madison became severely depressed over her years in the mansion, after she realized the security gates were there to keep her locked in, and began thinking suicide might be her only way out. Two other girls who spent time in the Mansion were clear: it was ''like being in prison.''
Hefner, then, was a domestic abuser. That's the name we have for this type of person. What kind of person imposes a curfew on their ''partner'' and locks them inside a mansion, dictating their clothes, regulating their personal interactions, and chastising them for breaking his ''rules''? This is tyrannical and horrifying.
If you read the obituaries for Hefner today, though, you won't really get a full sense of the man the Boston Globe describes as ''the pipe-smoking, Pepsi-quaffing founder of Playboy magazine, whose cheerfully prurient vision of the good life made him a founding father of the sexual revolution.'' The BBCbegins:
Hugh Hefner created a fantasy world for millions of men but unlike most of his readers, actually got to live the dream. He successfully tapped into a new generation of Americans who were enjoying rising standards of living in the boom years of the 1950s and 60s. A political activist and philanthropist, he produced not just a magazine, but a whole lifestyle. And in Playboy's famous bow-tie-wearing rabbit he launched one of the most recognised brands of the 20th Century.
The Washington Posttells us:
As much as anyone, Hugh Hefner turned the world on to sex. As the visionary editor who created Playboy magazine out of sheer will and his own fevered dreams, he introduced nudity and sexuality to the cultural mainstream of America and the world. For decades, the ageless Mr. Hefner embodied the ''Playboy lifestyle'' as the pajama-clad sybarite who worked from his bed, threw lavish parties and inhabited the Playboy Mansion with an ever-changing bevy of well-toned young beauties.
And the New York Times:
Hefner the man and Playboy the brand were inseparable. Both advertised themselves as emblems of the sexual revolution, an escape from American priggishness and wider social intolerance. Both were derided over the years '-- as vulgar, as adolescent, as exploitative, and finally as anachronistic. But Mr. Hefner was a stunning success from his emergence in the early 1950s. His timing was perfect. He was compared to Jay Gatsby, Citizen Kane and Walt Disney, but Mr. Hefner was his own production. He repeatedly likened his life to a romantic movie; it starred an ageless sophisticate in silk pajamas and smoking jacket, hosting a never-ending party for famous and fascinating people.
One of the most remarkable tendencies in American media is its capacity to whitewash the misdeeds of truly horrible people, whether it's the New York Times talking about what Henry Kissinger wears to lunch at the Four Seasons, or the New Yorker raving about George W. Bush's paintings without mentioning the fact that 500,000 Iraqis died in a war he launched. Multiple women have said that Hugh Hefner essentially imprisoned them in his house and demanded sex from them. Holly Madison says she nearly killed herself because of his treatment. Apparently, though, this just makes him the ''embodiment of the Playboy lifestyle.''
Of course, the ''controversies'' about Hefner do get mentioned. Here's the New York Times:
Mr. Hefner was reviled, first by guardians of the 1950s social order '-- J. Edgar Hoover among them '-- and later by feminists. But Playboy's circulation reached one million by 1960 and peaked at about seven million in the 1970s.
Look at this remarkable passage. Feminist criticism of Playboy, which centers around its embrace of the very kind of disgusting treatment of women that Hefner himself practiced, is lumped in with the persecutions of J. Edgar Hoover. ''Sure, buzzkills like the Feminazis and Hoover came after it, but the circulation was incredible.''
The feminist criticism of Playboy has always been obviously correct. Hefner literally reduced women to little bunnies who existed entirely to suck his penis. Of course, there's plenty of mention in the obituaries of Hefner's ''highbrow'' aspirations. In his words ''We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex.'' But it was always clear that the intellectual side of Playboy was strictly for men: he refused to discuss politics or literature with any of his girlfriends. They were there for him to have joyless unprotected sex with whenever he pleased.
Hefner's Playboy was committed to destroying the idea that women were people. As the Times quotes, Hefner demanded his writers go after feminism in the magazine's pages:
''These chicks are our natural enemy. What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart. They are unalterably opposed to the romantic boy-girl society that Playboy promotes.''
That ''romantic boy-girl society'' was the ''dream'' Hefner frequently said he lived. It was little more than the dream of tyrannizing over women while wearing a bathrobe.
The world of Playboy was a profoundly sad one. In photos, Hefner never looks particularly happy, and he was a recluse who didn't even seem to enjoy the copious amounts of sex he had. (''There was zero intimacy involved'... No kissing, nothing.'') Hefner's fantasy lifestyle was inhuman in every way. It was sex as something mechanical and lifeless, something one did because it was the thing that made you a Playboy, rather than because of true passion. That's the dark secret about Hefner: he wasn't even a hedonist. A hedonist pursues pleasure. Hefner didn't even care about pleasure. He cared about the taming and conquest of women.
There's an important critique of libertarian morality to the Hefner story, too. Hefner was an advocate for freedom from all kinds of government restraint, a champion of the First Amendment and abortion rights (as every obituary has reminded us repeatedly). He was a '' passionate libertarian.'' Hefner also believed he was changing American morality, saying: ''What it really comes down to is an attempt to establish what has been called a new morality'... really think that's what this thing called the 'American sexual revolution' is really all about.'' (This is taken from the NYT's charming compilation of Hefner's ''Most Memorable Interview Moments.'') Here we see exactly what happens when ''freedom'' is taken to be a moral philosophy in itself. Like many libertarians, Hefner wanted to be free, but he wanted to be free from government tyranny only so he could exercise a kind of unaccountable private tyranny. As with libertarianism always, ''freedom to be a dick'' seems to be the goal. He wanted to establish a ''new morality'' that would simply let him do as he pleased to women, without any ethical constraints. ''Liberty,'' while essential, is meaningless unless it is also coupled with a set of standards for how people should actually behave toward one another.
I am not actually celebrating Hugh Hefner's death. It's sad when people die. By ''good riddance,'' I don't mean that I take personal pleasure in his death, but that the world will be better once it rids itself of Hefner's values. And since Hefner himself was an evangelist for those values until his last days, we are better off without him. (I felt the same way when Antonin Scalia died. I didn't want him to die; I would have preferred that he had remained alive and simply renounced his horrible beliefs and become a good person. But he never did, so we had to settle for death.)
Take a Knee
Packers, Bears Link Arms in Show of Unity During Anthem; Crowd Chants USA | Bleacher Report
Morry Gash/Associated Press Players from the Chicago Bears and Green Bay Packers linked arms in unity during the national anthem prior to Thursday night's game at Lambeau Field.
The Green Bay Press-Gazette's Ryan Wood noted fans in attendance were chanting "U-S-A," while ESPN.com's Rob Demovsky observed there was a "big ovation" prior to "The Star-Spangled Banner."
The NFL relayed video of the anthem:
On Tuesday, Packers players issued a statement saying team personnel, including all players, would stand with "arms intertwined" during the anthem and that fans were invited to do the same.
"W e believe that in diversity there can be UNI-versity," the players wrote. "Intertwined, we represent the many people who helped build this country, and we are joining together to show that we are ready to continue to build.
"Let's work together to build a society that is more fair and just."
On Thursday night, Wood relayed a photo of the section in front of the press box, which did not show a heavy segment of fans linking arms:
Prior to the Packers' 27-24 overtime win over the Cincinnati Bengals at Lambeau Field in Week 3, almost all Packers players linked arms in a display of unity.
The exceptions were Martellus Bennett, Kevin King and Lance Kendricks, all of whom sat, according to the New York Times' Benjamin Hoffman and Lance Booth.
Ministry of Truthiness
Story About Jared Kushner Registering As Woma | The Daily Caller
White House adviser Jared Kushner did not register to vote in his hometown New York City as a female, contrary to breathless reporting on the subject this week.
The idea that Kushner, the son-in-law of President Trump, registered as a woman first came from American Bridge, a Democratic opposition research group founded by activist David Brock.
Citing information provided by American Bridge, the magazine Wired reported on Wednesday that Kushner registered to vote in 2009 as a female.
The story gained traction because Kushner has been involved in a series of paperwork mixups during his short tenure in the White House and also because the Trump administration has led a push against voter fraud.
The former real estate executive has had to correct filings he's submitted for security clearances on several occasions. The voter registration snafu was cited as the latest in a string of embarrassing errors.
''Kushner can't even fill out the most basic paperwork without screwing it up, so it's a mystery why anyone thinks he's somehow going to bring peace to the Middle East,'' American Bridge spokesman Brad Bainum told Wired.
''Would anyone but the president's son-in-law still have a West Wing job after repeated disclosure errors and a botched a security clearance form?'' he continued.
But The New York Daily News threw cold water on the story and the numerous reports that circulated it across the web.
The newspaper obtained a copy of Kushner's voter registration paperwork from Sept. 1, 2011 which clearly shows that Kushner checked the ''Male'' box on the form.
American Bridge and Wired relied on an entry in Nexis, a public records database used by reporters, attorneys and investigators. The entry for Kushner's 2009 voter registration in New York lists him as ''female.''
While Nexis is generally reliable, its databases are known to sometimes list incorrect addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and other personal information. Reporters typically use the database for background research purposes.
Michael Ryan, the executive director of New York's board of elections, told The Daily News that the entry was an error on his organization's part.
''It does happen from time to time,'' he told The Daily News.
A request for comment sent to Bainum received an automatic reply saying that he left American Bridge on Friday. An email sent to his replacement was not immediately returned.
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Algos
Amazon DMT
In regards to 969's continued discussion of Algos and Amazon's suggestions to buy explosive materials together, I'd like to chime in and say that for years now, it's been the case that yours and my favorite psychedelic, N,N Dimethyltryptamine can be easily extracted from, amongst many methods, Acacia plant rootbark at home. It's been, to my knowledge, an open secret and joke amongst the (big air quotes) "underground" Internet forums devoted to DMT exploration that Amazon sells this rootbark, and has since at least 2014 been suggesting the other components necessary to extract and produce a schedule 1 controlled substance on the Acacia listing, here being the turkey baster and the VM&P Naptha solvent. They are not immediately obviously related, which I think is what has always kept it off their radars, but when you know what's going on it's really funny. Attached are two pictures I just now screenshotted of an Amazon acacia plant listing.
Let's explore Hyperspace sometime if you're ever in the east of Pennsylvania.
Signed, the future Sir Dimethyltryptamine
CGI
Wow! 2014 Clinton Foundation tax return. They took in $177 million, donated $5 million, spent $86 million doing it, and kept the $86 million change ' Powdered Wig Society
WARNING! Before reading this, find a big, strong clothespin. Check that. Find a large steel industrial clamp. Clamp both nostrils shut before you begin reading, as a stench is going to fill the room the likes of which you have never experienced before and will never want to experience.
I'm not an accountant, but how the hell do you receive $177 million in contributions and spend $86 million in expenses to donate a measly $5 million in actual charity donations? The uber-corrupt Clinton Foundation managed to that in 2014. And they kept the $86 million change! WTF!?
From Thomas Ventimiglia
This should be investigated: Spent $86 million in salaries and expense to donate $5.1 million.
Read it again!
And when she didn't win, the donations completely stopped and they closed the business.
Read it again!
Wonder why the Clinton Foundation folded so suddenly after she was no longer in a position of influence perhaps will give some insight into the crooks.
They list 486 employees (line 5)! It took 486 people who were paid $34.8 million and $86.1 million in fees and expenses, to give away $5.1 MILLION
This is real. You can check the return yourself (see below). The real heart of the Clintons can be seen here. Staggering but not surprising. These figures are from an official copy of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation for the tax year 2014. The copy of the tax return is from the National Center for Charitable Statistics website. You can get the latest tax return on any charitable organization there.
Total revenue (line 12)'...'...'...'...'...'...'...'...'... $177,804,612.00
Total grants to charity (line 13)'...'...'..... $ 5,160,385.00 (that's less than 3%)
Total expenses'...'...'...'...'...'...'...'...'...'...'...'...'...'... $ 91,281,145.00
They list 486 employees (line 5)! It took 486 people who are paid $34.8 million and $91.3 million in fees and expenses, to give away $5.1 MILLION
Line 22 shows ending year net assets/fund balances of $332,471,349.00 which is up $85,171,891 from last year's tax return!
And they call this a CHARITY?
(If you accountants out there find any discrepancies in my math, please let me know by email or in the comments section, below, so that I can edit the changes into the article. Thanks!)
You can find the entire 65-page tax return here'.... Crooked Corrupt Clinton Foundation
Hate Trumps Love
EPA spending almost $25,000 to install a secure phone booth for Scott Pruitt
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt will have a soundproof communication booth. (Susan Walsh/AP)The Environmental Protection Agency is spending nearly $25,000 to construct a secure, soundproof communications booth in the office of Administrator Scott Pruitt, according to government contracting records.
The agency signed a $24,570 contract earlier this summer with Acoustical Solutions, a Richmond-based company, for a "privacy booth for the administrator." The company sells and installs an array of sound-dampening and privacy products, from ceiling baffles to full-scale enclosures like the one purchased by the EPA. The project's scheduled completion date is Oct. 9, according to the contract.
Typically, such soundproof booths are used to conduct hearing tests. But the EPA sought a customized version '-- one that eventually would cost several times more than a typical model '-- that Pruitt can use to communicate privately.
"They had a lot of modifications," said Steve Snider, an acoustic sales consultant with the company, who worked with the agency on its order earlier this summer. "Their main goal was they wanted essentially a secure phone booth that couldn't be breached from a data point of view or from someone standing outside eavesdropping."
Related: [EPA chief Pruitt met with many corporate execs. Then he made decisions in their favor.]
No previous EPA administrators had such a setup.
"What you are referring to is a secured communication area in the administrator's office so secured calls can be received and made," EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said in a statement. "Federal agencies need to have one of these so that secured communications, not subject to hacking from the outside, can be held. It's called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). This is something which a number, if not all, Cabinet offices have and EPA needs to have updated."
But according to former agency employees, the EPA has long maintained a SCIF on a separate floor from the administrator's office, where officials with proper clearances can go to share information classified as secret. The agency did not specify what aspects of that facility were outdated, or whether the unit inside Pruitt's office would meet the physical and technical specifications a SCIF generally is required to have.
Watch more!
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 25 in Oxon Hill, Md. (The Washington Post)In recent months, Pruitt and his top deputies have taken other steps aimed at heightening security. Some EPA employees have been asked to surrender their cellphones and other digital devices before meetings in the administrator's office, in much the same way visitors do when visiting the president in the Oval Office.
A senior administration official, who asked not to be identified to discuss internal procedures, said that practice was instituted to ensure that employees are focused on the discussion during meetings. However, Bowman said that "if anyone was asked not to bring [phones], it was merely a professional courtesy '-- it is by no means a policy or directive."
Related: [Scott Pruitt says it's not the time to talk climate change. For him, it never is.]
Pruitt also has shied away from using email at EPA, often preferring to deliver instructions verbally and hold face-to-face meetings. The shift stems in part from public disclosure by the New York Times in 2014 '-- following an open-records request of emails '-- of how Pruitt and other attorneys general had worked closely with the oil and gas industry to oppose Obama administration environmental safeguards.
Thousands more pages of emails from his time as Oklahoma's attorney general, released earlier this year after the Center for Media and Democracy sued for them to be made public, detailed an often-chummy relationship between Pruitt's office and Devon Energy, a major oil and gas exploration and production company based in Oklahoma City.
In addition, Pruitt has largely avoided the agency's decades-long practice of publicly posting the administrator's appointment calendars. Only last week were details on months worth of meetings released after media outlets filed repeated Freedom of Information Act requests for that information; they showed he has met regularly with corporate executives from the automobile, mining and fossil fuel industries '-- in several instances shortly before making decisions favorable to those interest groups.
Pruitt, who has become a polarizing and high-profile figure as he seeks to roll back Obama-era policies and shrink the EPA's footprint, has essentially tripled the personal security detail that served past administrators. The detail now includes about 18 people to cover round-the-clock needs and his frequent travel schedule. Such 24/7 coverage has prompted officials to rotate in special agents from around the country who otherwise would be investigating environmental crimes.
Acoustical Solutions has done work for various government entities over the years, including building soundproof wall barriers at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and installing sound-damping wall and ceiling panels at the State Department, Agriculture Department and other agencies. Earlier this year, the Treasury Department turned to the company to provide a "sound enclosure" at the U.S. Mint in Denver.
Snider said the company also has installed numerous "audiometric" booths in other government agencies, such as Veterans Affairs, but those almost always are used for hearing tests. The EPA's request was something different altogether, he said.
"This is a first," he said. "They are definitely using this booth in a way that wasn't necessarily intended. '... [But] for the criteria they had, it fit this product."
Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.
Read more:
At EPA, guarding the chief pulls agents from pursuing environmental crimes
EPA under Trump shrinks to near Reagan-era staffing levels
EPA will reconsider Obama-era safeguards on coal waste
Thousands of emails detail EPA head's close ties to fossil fuel industry
Brady Dennis is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the environment and public health issues.
A framework for applying federal security standards to private-sector facilities
Secrets aren't advertised; they are protected. The government keeps some of the biggest secrets of all'--the exposure of which might pose a threat to national security'--in places where the name hides nothing: a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). But the buildings carrying the SCIF label are made to hide everything.
A government rule called "The Director of Central Intelligence Directive 6/9" details the physical requirements for SCIF construction: Walls, floor and ceiling must be permanently constructed and attached to each other. They should also be reinforced on the inside with steel plates, and slab-to-slab with 9-gauge expanded metal. All doors, windows, walls, floors, vents and ducts must be protected by sound masking devices, such as noise and vibration generators, bars, grills or sound baffles, in order to meet sound attenuation criteria and prevent disclosure of conversations. Entrance doors should be limited to one, which must be equipped with locks and alarms, and made of solid wood (no less than 1-and-3/4 inches thick) or clad with 16-gauge metal (no less than 1-and-3/4 inches thick). And, most important of all: The building must be nondescript enough so that you can't tell what it is.
[Also see 19 ways to build physical security into a data center]
"The concept behind SCIFs was to create a secure area that had appropriate protections in place to ensure to the greatest extent possible that the highly sensitive information inside would not be compromised," says Lynn Mattice, VP and CSO at Boston Scientific, a manufacturer of medical devices. Mattice is familiar with the requirements around SCIF construction: As director of corporate security at Northrop during the major defense buildup of the Reagan administration, he oversaw the completion of multiple rooms built to SCIF standards. At Whirlpool, where he was director of corporate security for a number of years, and now at Boston Scientific, Mattice says he has built soundproof rooms and does sweeps for electronic countermeasures from time to time.
While it's unlikely that the cost-benefit calculation for a private-sector organization would lead many businesses to build a facility meeting all of the requirements of a government-mandated SCIF'--such features can add hundreds of dollars per square foot of office space'--there are lessons to learn about secure facilities from the people who construct them according to the federal government's strict specifications. Most large organizations would benefit from employing some of the requirements, says Hal Walter, a classification compensation analyst at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "Some global organizations today are just as large as the governments that these facilities were designed for," Walter says.
The key is to know what information is sensitive enough to require many of the same methods the government uses to guard its secrets. ASSESS WHAT YOU NEED TO PROTECT
For the past five-plus decades'--think history of the Cold War'--the government has maintained a hierarchy of classified information, determined by the level of threat its exposure would bring to the United States:
Top Secret owns the list: Its public knowledge would pose grave danger to national security. Weapons design specs and sensitive intelligence fall within this category. Secret (the level that most classified information in this country is assigned) means if this information was leaked, it would cause serious damage. Confidential information would harm national security if it were made public; while it's the lowest level, it is still information that the government does not want made available.
Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) refers to the security wrapped around access to this classified information'--not the information itself. SCI is often loosely applied to describe all sensitive materials, and that's not correct, says Ben Shaw, facilities security officer (FSO) at advisory Morgan Franklin. "People use it as a blanket term," he says, when in fact, it's more like an extra layer of security, usually applied to special access programs or special government projects.
For example, the Department of Defense may want to limit access to sensitive information about a particular project so only people working on the project have access. Thus even an individual possessing a Top Secret security clearance would need specially granted access to that information (which would be maintained within a SCIF). There is no universal SCI clearance (as there is for Top Secret clearances) because an SCI access authorization is related to specific programs or information. Mattice says that before you even go through the clearance process, a contract sponsor from the government will certify that you "need to know" SCI level information. "Most SCI access authorizations require one of the most in-depth background investigations the government runs," says Mattice. Such a clearance may also require a polygraph exam and periodic reexaminations, says Mattice.
For the purposes of this article, substitute other business-critical words for "national security" when thinking about secure facilities. Walter thinks that companies would be most driven to protect matters that could be embarrassing or costly or would give advantages to a competitor. Mergers and acquisitions are good examples. "If my company was up for a merger, or I was going to discuss a takeover, controlling leaks would be critical. A company needs an area where people in upper management can securely discuss things or look at documents," says Walter. Data such as customer account information, health records and Social Security numbers would also be considered highly sensitive. And internal company information, such as business plans, should be protected as such.
Labeling sensitive information at your company will stem from a combination of your corporate goals and the need to comply with government regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or the Trade Secrets Act.
This discussion of sensitive information ties into a risk analysis of both the data sets you want to keep secure and the intellectual property you have in your company's portfolio.
Organizations with government contracts don't have much choice when it comes to the information they protect: SCIF design specifications are spelled out for them. Security executives and their business colleagues have to make these assessments themselves.
Michael Creaney, a principal and director of development at the Creaney & Smith Group, a commercial real estate developer, says that just as the level of cleanliness in a clean room, which is used by drug manufacturers, depends on what is occurring inside of it (counting, mixing or testing drugs), the level of SCIF security depends on the information within it.
Understanding what needs to be protected will start with prioritizing sensitive data. "You need to look at the information you are trying to protect, decide what the consequence would be if the information was leaked, and what you are willing to do to keep that from happening," says Walter. Some organizations find it useful to bring in outside consultants to help this evaluation process. PROTECTION AT A PRICE SCIFs are expensive, and for that reason, experts say companies with government contracts should follow the letter of their government specs'--and no more. So corporations employing SCIF-inspired standards for facility management, for heating, ventilation and cooling systems, for access control or electrical wiring, should pick and choose the requirements from the government directives that are best suited to meet their needs.
Even the lowest-level SCIF requirements come at a cost. "At the lowest level, the [facilities] are secured physically and electronically for preventing the loss of info, data and material," says Creaney, who has been building and retrofitting office space for SCIFs since 1984. This lowest level'--government SCIF projects reach five or six different levels, Creaney says'--is probably what would benefit most corporations, experts say. At that level, SCIFs may cost an extra $50 per square foot (above and beyond normal office space cost); toward the higher end, as much as $350, Creaney says. Mattice cites a range from $150 to as much as $1,000 per square foot. Shaw of Morgan Franklin says that the cost of a 2,000-square-foot SCIF divided into multiple offices can run from $400,000 to $1 million.
Walter says that it is essential for companies working on buildings with SCIF-level features to work with a contractor who can see the reasons behind extra precautions: "Otherwise you may end up with a nice-looking facility that leaks like a sieve because the people building it did not understand the reasoning behind the plans." THINK IN LAYERS Secure facilities experts like Shaw, Creaney and Tabetha Chandler, president of consultancy and SCIF builder FSO To Go, spend a lot of time studying government specifications for constructing secure facilities. The reasons for this range from the different rules that authorities have set out for what makes a secure building (see "By the Book," this page) to the fact that they say more government programs require secure facilities since the September 11 terror attacks. They deliver a clear message from this experience as bureaucratic interpreters: Know how your facility and staff need to work so you can secure assets needing protection. And be ready to do it for a long time. "It's unfortunate that people build things and then become complacent'--when it's time to enact that level of security they don't posture their business or train their staff to fully understand the requirements," says Chandler. For that reason, these experts say you should think about secure facilities as not one entity, but many. Some examples: Physical security. Chandler says that security officers need to understand their building's surroundings and environment. "Physical security is always the center point of securing classified information," she says. "Look at who is 200 meters around you; don't just center on your office suite or headquarters." At the minimum, says Walter, the facility should have one access point or door devoid of any gaps, and ductwork openings that are secure. Information security. Phones should have filters that prevent wiretapping, says Walter, and encryption is vital. "It tends to be transparent to the user, and it can be easily installed and upgraded." Controlling electronic transmissions can be accomplished with shielding, filters, grounding and devices limiting radio frequency (RF) emissions. Shielding the walls of the SCIF with foil and other conductive materials will help ground electronic signals generated within the SCIF, says Walter. Employee security. Last but most important is the human factor. "The best security systems, even ones built by the CIA, can be and have been compromised by employees," Walter notes. A select number of designated employees should be assigned responsibility for certain facets of security, such as inventory of data and documents, says Walter. If employees violate policies and procedures, they must be held accountable, he adds. It's also important to have an efficient way to identify employees who don't follow security measures and resolve the situation immediately, he says. Even if your company doesn't require a security clearance, you should know who has access to the data. And, of course, vetting everyone on the secure site through background checks is a must.
DPRK EMP
Former CIA Chief Warns of N. Korea's Other Nuclear Weapon
This is why Kim Jong-un continues provoking America. Every day there are two North Korean EMP satellites passing over America, twice a day. He's waiting for a military response. He's hoping for a reason. Trump is left with a very dangerous position thanks to the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations who did nothing before it was too late. Kim Jong-un knows he'll lose in a war against America but he only has to press a button before he dies. Then it's bye bye for America which will be reset to the stone age.
For the record, this is the first time ever someone from the CIA at his level has admitted (publicly) there are two North Korean EMP satellites circling the globe.
WASHINGTON '-- Advances in North Korea's nuclear and missile programs are pushing the international community to respond with increasingly strict sets of sanctions, with the latest round, passed this week, capping the country's oil imports while banning its lucrative textile exports.
Despite the pressure, the Kim Jong Un regime continues to pursue the development of a nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that could strike the continental United States, among other targets.
On Friday, for the second time in a month, the regime launched an intermediate-range ballistic missile over Japan's northern island of Hokkaido. It traveled about 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) before falling into the Pacific Ocean, the farthest a North Korean missile has ever flown. Within hours, the U.N. Security Council condemned the ''highly provocative'' missile launch.
Why is the North continuing its launches? Jenny Lee of VOA Korean spoke with former CIA Director James Woolsey to discuss the latest developments.
Lee: North Korea's missile launch on Friday came days after the passage of a new sanctions package by the U.N. Security Council. What do you think were Pyongyang's intentions?
Woolsey: The North Koreans wanted to shove themselves forward and say, ''I am not intimidated by any sanctions. Leave me alone. I am a powerful nuclear power.'' That's their message.
Q: How likely is it that the Kim regime has developed a functional ICBM and a miniaturized warhead?
A: Probably not fully yet. But it doesn't matter because they don't need an intercontinental ballistic missile in order to attack directly the United States. They can do so with a satellite launch and [they] have nuclear weapons contained in the satellite that continues to circle the Earth a couple of times a day. '... So it does not take an intercontinental ballistic missile to reach the United States. You can do it fine with a weapon on a satellite.
Q: You seem to be describing a nuclear electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack. Could you describe how it works, and do you think the North Koreans currently have the capacity to carry out such an attack?
A: I think it's likely that they do. The destructive mechanism would be, it would not go directly against people, but would destroy the electric grid. It uses a detonation up above the Earth. It would not be targeted at a specific location, a specific building or an ICBM silo or something. It would knock out the grid generally. That means there would be no food, no water, no telecommunications and no hospitals. It would be a hideous situation. So that could be even more devastating than a nuclear attack that was targeted on individual locations.
But having an ICBM that can be targeted on individual locations would give them more flexibility, and so I am sure they would like to have it. They are working on it, but in the meantime, in their hip pocket, I would say it's hard to avoid the conclusion that they could use a nuclear detonation on a satellite in orbit to create the electromagnetic pulse.
Q: Do you think North Korea is posing a serious threat at this point in time?
A: I think it's quite serious because it's relatively easy to do. Orbiting a satellite is the easiest thing '... and a simple nuclear weapon that is about the size of a golf bag '... is not hard to fit on a small satellite like that. With a satellite you don't have to worry about re-entry, re-entry shields, accuracy and a lot of other things that you have to worry about with ICBMs.
Q: North Korea threatened to lob a missile at Guam at one point, and as recently as this Friday, it threatened to use nuclear weapons to ''sink'' Japan and reduce the United States ''to ashes and darkness'' for supporting new U.N. sanctions. Why is the North behaving this way? What are its intentions?
A: They want to intimidate everybody else into making sure they get to hold on to their weapons, because they are convinced that that's the only way that the Kim family can stay in power. They look at the history of Saddam Hussein, and the history of [Moammar] Gadhafi, and their conclusion is if we do anything to get rid of our nuclear weapons, we are doomed. So make sure we hold on to our nuclear weapons, and the best way to do that is to intimidate everyone and make them think that we're right on the verge of using them.
Q: When it comes to dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue, the Trump administration has emphasized its willingness to resolve it through diplomacy but also has left room for military options, such as preemptive strikes against North Korea. So, do you think the U.S. currently is on the right track?
A: It's hard to be on any other right now than to try diplomacy and hold military in reserve. '... You can't think of an overall approach that would be superior to what we are doing now. But in the future, if things get worse, would we consider using force against them and could we do so successfully? The answer is '-- I don't know.
Q: The Trump administration is spearheading the effort to expand sanctions against North Korea and thereby isolate the country diplomatically and economically. Do you think they are sufficient to rein in the regime's nuclear weapons program?
A: It probably won't get the job done, but they should do as much as they can. As the Russians and the Chinese move them off of their almost total embargo of oil to 30 percent embargo, they could continue to press to get more of it '-- an oil embargo. I think we've got to work with China and figure out how, together, we could get something done here, because the Chinese are the mainstay of the North Korean government. They are powerful and they are right next door to North Korea. And they have at least some inclination to work with us '-- not as much as I would like. So we are really left with China. There's not much to do other than to try to work with them and bring them along into tougher sanctions and tougher positions.
Note: For archiving purposes, a full copy of the article will remain here.
New World Order
U.N. in Shock: Heads Turn in Stunned Disbelief as Palestinian Exposes PLO Lies - UN Watch
Wednesday, September 27, 2017 9:11 pm unwatch 0 114k
EPIC MOMENT: U.N. stunned, Palestinian delegates in shock, as UN Watch brings surprise guest speaker'--Palestinian Mosab Hassan Yousef'--to expose PLO lies. Watch heads turn & eyes bulge!
U.N. Stunned as Palestinian Exposes PLO Lies
EPIC MOMENT: U.N. stunned, Palestinian delegates in shock, as UN Watch brings surprise guest speaker'--Palestinian Mosab Hassan Yousef'--to expose PLO lies. Watch heads turn & eyes bulge!Sign up: www.unwatch.org
Posted by UN Watch on Wednesday, September 27, 2017
Help us do more truth-telling! Click Here to Support UN Watch.
Above: PLO delegate goes into shock listening to UN Watch speaker Mosab Hassan Yousef expose PLO lies.
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Statement by United Nations Watch
36th Session of the U.N. Human Rights Council
Delivered by Mosab Hassan Yousef
Thank you, Mr. President.
I take the floor on behalf of UN Watch.
My name is Mosab Hassan Yousef. I grew up in Ramallah as a member of Hamas.
I address my words to the Palestinian Authority, which claims to be the ''sole legitimate representative'' of the Palestinian people.
I ask: where does your legitimacy come from?
The Palestinian people did not elect you, and they did not appoint you to represent them.
You are self-appointed.
Your accountability is not to your own people. This is evidenced by your total violation of their human rights.
In fact, the Palestinian individual and their human development is the least of your concerns.
You kidnap Palestinian students from campus and torture them in your jails. You torture your political rivals. The suffering of the Palestinian people is the outcome of your selfish political interests. You are the greatest enemy of the Palestinian people.
If Israel did not exist, you would have no one to blame. Take responsibility for the outcome of your own actions.
You fan the flames of conflict to maintain your abusive power.
Finally, you use this platform to mislead the international community, and to mislead Palestinian society, to believe that Israel is responsible for the problems you create.
Thank you.
Authorunwatch Related PostsThe Incredible Work of UN WatchSep 27, 2017 0 6k
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The Incredible Work of UN Watch '-- Fighting U.N. Dictators & Double StandardsSep 20, 2017 0 482
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2020
Democrats' best hope for 2020: Oprah | New York Post
On Sunday night's ''60 Minutes,'' a panel of Michigan voters spent 20 minutes discussing their political differences on screen. It was a moving segment and a powerful one, but it wasn't all that novel if you've been paying attention to the political divide over the past year. The power came not really from what the panelists were saying but who the moderator was: Oprah Winfrey.
Listening, asking, speaking without judgment, trying to find common ground '-- it was a superb performance by Oprah, and I use the word ''performance'' advisedly. She was dazzling in exactly the way that Oprah could always be dazzling, finding a tone appropriate for the moment without being heavy-handed.
If any figure in the United States bears watching over the next couple of years as our political culture continues the radical transformation that led to the election of Donald Trump, it's Oprah. I believe she's uniquely positioned, should she wish to commit herself, to seek the Democratic nomination for president and challenge Trump in 2020.
If you think that Trump can be beaten by a two-term governor of a Midwestern state with really good ideas about health care, or by a senator who really attracts young people, think again. The idea that a relatively conventional elected official will differentiate herself from Trump by dint of her seriousness or that an unconventional elected official can out-populist Trump is crazy.
If you need to set a thief to catch a thief, you need a star '-- a grand, outsized, fearless star whom Trump can neither intimidate nor outshine '-- to catch a star. We're through the looking glass here. America is discarding old approaches in politics. Democrats will have to do the same to match the mood to the moment.
And that's where Oprah Winfrey comes in. She is the mirror image of Trump, but more so. Of course, she's female and he's male; she's America's generous aunt and he's America's crazy uncle. And yes, she's black and he's white, she's liberal and he's whatever he is.
It goes beyond that. He's rich and she's rich, but she made her $3 billion herself and with no controversy. She is, in herself, the embodiment of the American Dream. He got famous from TV, and so did she, but she became vastly more famous and vastly more successful at it.
She went from Oscar-nominated actress to queen of tabloid TV. Then, sensing a cultural shift, in 1993 she dropped the bleak stuff and turned her show into a parade of the positive, with happy celebrity interactions and relentless guidance toward self-actualization (''be your best self''). Her cultural standing broadened and deepened when she assumed the mantle of book-publishing savior with her monthly novel selection. Then she became a magazine mogul. Then she became the manager of an entire cable network named for her.
As for politics, it's worth remembering that Oprah played a not-insubstantial role in the 2008 election. Her decision to endorse Barack Obama after his campaign failed to catch fire in its first eight months in 2007 provided the initial accelerant that took him from 25 points back to winning the nomination away from Hillary Clinton.
She introduced Obama to the Hollywood crowd in September 2007 at a $3 million fundraiser. And that December, she spent four days with him in the key early states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. In the latter, Winfrey helped bring 30,000 people to a stadium to make it clear to women and African-Americans that he was her guy. His victory in South Carolina was probably the key moment for his campaign.
A 2008 study at the University of Maryland suggested that Winfrey herself was responsible for more than 1 million votes cast for Obama in the Democratic contest '-- which suggests he might not have prevailed had she not campaigned on his behalf.
A Trump-Oprah contest cannot just be one of personalities. Trump did not just win due to his. His embrace of voter anger and the idea he would ''Make America Great Again'' gave his candidacy a fiery aspect no Republican could match and against which Hillary Clinton never found the right weapon.
Oprah would need that, too. She can't just be the anti-Trump. She would have to find a transcendent message of her own that rose above Democratic constituent service and spoke to the right people in the right states to take the fight to Trump's underbelly.
She can do it '-- in theory.
The question is: Would she want to?
School Book Scam
In the morning,
I'm e-mailing from an anonymous account as I'm sure you'll understand why.
I work for a major textbook publisher and spend most of my time on texts for various engineering and technical disciplines at the college level. You guys are spot on with your analysis of the collegiate textbook industry, and it’s been a boom time with gratuitous student loans that have increased college attendance rates.
But here’s the real scam (and I have to caveat that I can only really speak for engineering/technical texts): Almost every technical text has homework problems at the end of each chapter that are assigned by the instructor throughout the semester. While very (and I mean very) little of the actual content is changed (you might see 10 pages of real substantial change in a 300 page text), every homework problem is changed to prevent students from using older editions. Frequently they don’t bother to change the wording or structure of a problem, just the numbers within it.
As a simplified example: “If Sally had 3 apples and ate 1, how many does she have left?” may be changed to “If Sally had 4 apples and ate 3, how many does she have left?”
The goal (and it’s openly discussed in our offices) is to do enough to make it impossible for the student to use any previous version to drive sales up.
Keep up the good work,
Anonymous
Armageddon
Facing poverty, academics turn to sex work and sleeping in cars | US news | The Guardian
T here is nothing she would rather do than teach. But after supplementing her career with tutoring and proofreading, the university lecturer decided to go to remarkable lengths to make her career financially viable.
She first opted for her side gig during a particularly rough patch, several years ago, when her course load was suddenly cut in half and her income plunged, putting her on the brink of eviction. ''In my mind I was like, I've had one-night stands, how bad can it be?'' she said. ''And it wasn't that bad.''
The wry but weary-sounding middle-aged woman, who lives in a large US city and asked to remain anonymous to protect her reputation, is an adjunct instructor, meaning she is not a full-time faculty member at any one institution and strings together a living by teaching individual courses, in her case at multiple colleges.
about''I feel committed to being the person who's there to help millennials, the next generation, go on to become critical thinkers,'' she said. ''And I'm really good at it, and I really like it. And it's heartbreaking to me it doesn't pay what I feel it should.''
Sex work is one of the more unusual ways that adjuncts have avoided living in poverty, and perhaps even homelessness. A quarter of part-time college academics (many of whom are adjuncts, though it's not uncommon for adjuncts to work 40 hours a week or more) are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs such as Medicaid.
They resort to food banks and Goodwill, and there is even an adjuncts' cookbook that shows how to turn items like beef scraps, chicken bones and orange peel into meals. And then there are those who are either on the streets or teetering on the edge of losing stable housing. The Guardian has spoken to several such academics, including an adjunct living in a ''shack'' north of Miami, and another sleeping in her car in Silicon Valley.
The adjunct who turned to sex work makes several thousand dollars per course, and teaches about six per semester. She estimates that she puts in 60 hours a week. But she struggles to make ends meet after paying $1,500 in monthly rent and with student loans that, including interest, amount to a few hundred thousand dollars. Her income from teaching comes to $40,000 a year. That's significantly more than most adjuncts: a 2014 survey found that the median income for adjuncts is only $22,041 a year, whereas for full-time faculty it is $47,500.
'We take a kind of vow of poverty'Recentreports have revealed the extent of poverty among professors, but the issue is longstanding. Several years ago, it was thrust into the headlines in dramatic fashion when Mary-Faith Cerasoli, an adjunct professor of Romance languages in her 50s, revealed she was homeless and protested outside the New York state education department.
''We take a kind of vow of poverty to continue practicing our profession,'' Debra Leigh Scott, who is working on a documentary about adjuncts, said in an email. ''We do it because we are dedicated to scholarship, to learning, to our students and to our disciplines.''
A quarter of part-time college academics are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs
Adjuncting has grown as funding for public universities has fallen by more than a quarter between 1990 and 2009. Private institutions also recognize the allure of part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, don't receive benefits or support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not teach enough to qualify for health insurance.
This is why adjuncts have been called ''the fast-food workers of the academic world'': among labor experts adjuncting is defined as ''precarious employment'', a growing category that includes temping and sharing-economy gigs such as driving for Uber. An American Sociological Association taskforce focusing on precarious academic jobs, meanwhile, has suggested that ''faculty employment is no longer a stable middle-class career''.
Adjunct English professor Ellen James-Penney and her husband live in a car with their two dogs. They have developed a system. 'Keep nothing on the dash, nothing on the floor '' you can't look like you're homeless, you can't dress like you're homeless.' Photograph: Talia Herman for the GuardianThe struggle to stay in housing can take many forms, and a second job is one way adjuncts seek to buoy their finances. The professor who turned to sex work said it helps her keep her toehold in the rental market.
''This is something I chose to do,'' she said, adding that for her it is preferable to, say, a six-hour shift at a bar after teaching all day. ''I don't want it to come across as, 'Oh, I had no other choice, this is how hard my life is.'''
Advertising online, she makes about $200 an hour for sex work. She sees clients only a handful of times during the semester, and more often during the summer, when classes end and she receives no income.
''I'm terrified that a student is going to come walking in,'' she said. And the financial concerns have not ceased. ''I constantly have tension in my neck from gritting my teeth all night.''
To keep their homes, some adjuncts are forced to compromise on their living space.
Caprice Lawless, 65, a teacher of English composition and a campaigner for better working conditions for adjuncts, resides in an 1100 sq ft brick house near Boulder, Colorado. She bought it following a divorce two decades ago. But because her $18,000 income from teaching almost full time is so meager, she has remortgaged the property several times, and has had to rent her home to three other female housemates.
''I live paycheck to paycheck and I'm deeply in debt,'' she said, including from car repairs and a hospitalization for food poisoning.
Like every other adjunct, she says, she opted for the role thinking it would be a path to full-time work. She is so dependent on her job to maintain her living situation that when her mother died this summer, she didn't take time off in part because she has no bereavement leave. She turned up for work at 8am the next day, taught in a blur and, despite the cane she has used since a hip replacement, fell over in the parking lot.
If she were to lose her home her only hope, she says, would be government-subsidized housing.
''Most of my colleagues are unjustifiably ashamed,'' she said. ''They take this personally, as if they've failed, and I'm always telling them, 'you haven't failed, the system has failed you.'''
A precarious situationEven more desperate are those adjuncts in substandard living spaces who cannot afford to fix them. Mindy Percival, 61, a lecturer with a doctorate from Columbia, teaches history at a state college in Florida and, in her words, lives in ''a shack'' which is ''in the woods in middle of nowhere''.
Lecturer Mindy Percival's mobile home in Stuart, Florida. Her oven, shower and water heater don't work. Photograph: Courtesy of Mindy PercivalThe mobile home she inhabits, located in the town of Stuart, north of Miami, was donated to her about eight years ago. It looks tidy on the outside, but inside there are holes in the floor and the paneling is peeling off the walls. She has no washing machine, and the oven, shower and water heater don't work. ''I'm on the verge of homelessness, constantly on the verge,'' she said.
Percival once had a tenure-track job but left to care for her elderly mother, not expecting it would be impossible to find a similar position. Now, two weeks after being paid, ''I might have a can with $5 in change in it.'' Her 18-year-old car broke down after Hurricane Irma, and she is driven to school by a former student, paying $20 a day for gas.
''I am trying to get out so terribly hard,'' she said.
Most of my colleagues are ashamed. I'm always telling them, 'you haven't failed, the system has failed you'
Caprice Lawless, adjunct English teacherHomelessness is a genuine prospect for adjuncts. When Ellen Tara James-Penney finishes work, teaching English composition and critical thinking at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley, her husband, Jim, picks her up. They have dinner and drive to a local church, where Jim pitches a tent by the car and sleeps there with one of their rescue dogs. In the car, James-Penney puts the car seats down and sleeps with another dog. She grades papers using a headlamp.
Over the years, she said, they have developed a system. ''Keep nothing on the dash, nothing on the floor '' you can't look like you're homeless, you can't dress like you're homeless. Don't park anywhere too long so the cops don't stop you.''
James-Penney, 54, has struggled with homelessness since 2007, when she began studying for her bachelor's degree. Jim, 64, used to be a trucker but cannot work owing to a herniated disk. Ellen made $28,000 last year, a chunk of which goes to debt repayments. The remainder is not enough for afford Silicon Valley rent.
At night, instead of a toilet they must use cups or plastic bags and baby wipes. To get clean, they find restrooms and ''we have what we call the sink-shower'', James-Penney said. The couple keep their belongings in the back of the car and a roof container. All the while they deal with the consequences of ageing '' James-Penney has osteoporosis '' in a space too small to even stand up.
James-Penney does not hide her situation from her class. If her students complain about the homeless people who can sometimes be seen on campus, she will say: ''You're looking at someone who is homeless.''
''That generally stops any kind of sound in the room,'' she says. ''I tell them, your parents could very well be one paycheck away, one illness away, from homelessness, so it is not something to be ashamed of.''
Ellen James-Penney teaching an English class at San Jose State University in California. She tells her students, 'you're looking at someone who is homeless'. Photograph: Talia Herman for the Guardian'I hung on to the dream'Many adjuncts are seeking to change their lot by unionizing, and have done so at dozens of schools in recent years. They are notching successes; some have seen annual pay increases of about 5% to almost 20%, according to Julie Schmid, executive director of the American Association of University Professors.
Schools are often opposed to such efforts and say unions will result in higher costs for students. And for certain adjuncts, any gains will come too late.
Mary-Faith Cerasoli, 56, the homeless adjunct who captured the public's attention with her protest in New York three years ago, said that in the aftermath little changed in terms of her living situation. Two generous people, a retiree and then a nurse, offered her temporary accommodation, but she subsequently ended up in a tent pitched at a campground and, after that, a broken sailboat docked in the Hudson river.
But there was, however, one shift. All the moving around made it hard for her to make teaching commitments, and in any case the pay remained terrible, so she gave it up. She currently lives in a subsidized room in a shared house in a wealthy county north of New York.
For Rebecca Snow, 51, another adjunct who quit teaching after a succession of appalling living situations, there is a sense of having been freed, even though finances continue to be stressful.
Author Rebecca Snow, now retired from adjuncting, has moved to a small apartment just north of Spokane, Washington. Photograph: Rajah Bose for the GuardianShe began teaching English composition at a community college in the Denver area in 2005, but the poor conditions of the homes she could afford meant she had to move every year or two. She left one place because of bedbugs, another when raw sewage flowed into her bathtub and the landlord failed to properly fix the pipes.
Sometimes her teenage son would have to stay with her ex-husband when she couldn't provide a stable home. Snow even published a poem about adjuncts' housing difficulties.
In the end she left the profession when the housing and job insecurity became too much, and her bills too daunting. Today she lives in a quiet apartment above the garage of a friend's home, located 15 miles outside Spokane, Washington. She has a view of a lake and forested hills and, with one novel under her belt, is working on a second.
Teaching was the fantasy, she said, but life on the brink of homelessness was the reality.
''I realized I hung on to the dream for too long.''
Do you have an experience of homelessness to share with the Guardian? Get in touch
Hams will Save the World, RIGHT?
American Red Cross Asks ARRL's Assistance with Puerto Rico Relief Effort
09/24/2017 The American Red Cross (ARC) has asked the ARRL for assistance with relief efforts in Puerto Rico. ARC needs up to 50 radio amateurs who can help record, enter, and submit disaster-survivor information into the ARC Safe and Well system. In the nearly 75-year relationship between ARRL and ARC, this is the first time such a request for assistance on this scale has been made. ARRL now is looking for radio amateurs who can step up and volunteer to help our friends in Puerto Rico.
Requirements
There are very specific requirements and qualifications needed for this deployment.Due to the nature of this deployment you will need to process in as ARC volunteers. This includes passing a background check. The ARC has indicated that it will cover all expenses for transportation, lodging, and feeding while on deployment. ARC will also provide liability coverage for volunteers. The only out-of-pocket expense to the volunteer would be personal items purchased during deployment.ARRL and ARC will require training for volunteers being deployed. ARC will provide general deployment training and advanced training in working in austere environments. ARRL will provide to ARC training on Amateur Radio equipment and modes to be used, reporting guidelines, and operating guidelines.Deployment will be for up to 3 weeks.Qualifications
General class Amateur Radio license or higherFamiliarity with WinLink, HF voice, and VHF simplex communicationsStrong technical skillsAbility to work under difficult conditionsAbility to deploy for up to 3 weeksAbility to work as part of a teamHelpful Skills
Spanish language skillsPrevious experience in disaster responsePrevious or current work as a Red Cross volunteerPrevious experience with shelter operationsIf you feel that you meet these qualifications and would like to be considered for this deployment, please contact ARRL Emergency Preparedness Manager Mike Corey, KI1U (860-594-0222), who will make the introduction of qualified volunteers to ARC.
BTC
Ads don't work so websites are using your electricity to pay the bills | Technology | The Guardian
The Pirate Bay posted in mid-September that code was 'just a test'. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
With the continuing collapse in online advertising revenues, websites are turning to other methods to pay their hosting bills '' including using visitors' computers and phones to mine cryptocurrency.
It's a controversial practice, with some likening it to running malware on visitor's computers, but it is a potentially lucrative endeavour for websites. The downside is that at best it slows down visitors' machines, and at worst it can also drain their batteries or send their electricity bills soaring.
BitTorrent search engine The Pirate Bay, and US video streaming service Showtime, are two sites that were discovered to be sending mining code to users. The former owned up, posting in mid-September that the code was ''just a test'' and that the experiment was being done with a view to removing all adverts from the site.
The latter removed the code on Monday, shortly after a user noticed it and specialist press began reporting. But it has yet to answer questions on why the code was there from the Guardian and other media organisations.
Cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin and its successors, are backed by a system of ''miners'', who race to be the first to solve tricky computing problems in exchange for a reward for doing so. The rewards are large '' the bitcoin network, for instance, gives away coins worth $7m to miners every day '' but to be in with a chance, miners need to gather an extraordinarily large amount of computing power.
Not only is it expensive to buy those computers, it also consumes a huge amount of electricity to run them. As a result, the most profitable mining companies often have access to cheap energy, or some other efficiency boost - one firm, based in Iceland, saves money by letting the country's naturally cold climate cool its computers.
Website-based mining short circuits that: the electricity bills are paid by the visitor, but it's the website that gets the reward.
''Gaming and video sites typically are more resource intensive, so it seems to make little sense to run a miner at the same time without having a noted impact,'' says Malwarebytes analyst J(C)r´me Segura. ''Having said that, many people who consume copyrighted content are perhaps less likely to complain about an under-par user experience.
''The question at this point is: how far can publishers push the limits towards a really bad user experience? You may be surprised that for many, this is not really a problem at all and that double dipping is, in fact, a fairly common practice,'' he added.
In the long run, such practices may simply push more users to install adblockers, Segura noted. It's just as easy to block mining as it is to block adverts, using much the same techniques. Segura said: ''There's no question that users are annoyed by a rollout that did not include their opinion, even though many were actually favourable to this alternate solution to online ads.''
Showtime did not respond to a request for comment.
Millennials
The single life in NYC is driving millennials to binge-drink | New York Post
Manhattan lawyer Robert Halpern, a longtime East Village resident, is suing the State Liquor Authority for allowing too many booze-serving restaurants in his neighborhood. He's seething over ''bottomless'' brunches where customers can drink as much as they want for one low price '-- causing ''noise,'' ''crowds'' and ''uncivil behavior.''
I don't know if it's true that there are 454 such restaurants in his neck of the woods, as Halpern claims. But he's 100 percent correct that today's brunch parties are all about getting blitzed.
Our drinking scourge is not limited to Halpern's First Avenue and St. Marks Place. I live on First Avenue '-- miles uptown at East 76th Street '-- and most every night, noisy young drunks spill from the aptly named Stumble Inn nearby. They hog the sidewalks with revelers from Iggy's, Seamstress, Pony Bar, American Trash among other sloshing stations in the blocks near my building.
Liquor's fine by me. I've loved the stuff since I was 16 and flashed a fake ID to get into Dean's Happy Landing on Deer Park Avenue in North Babylon (the legal drinking age then was 18).
I've known and enjoyed every taste of the city's drinking culture since 1972 '-- the ''swinging singles'' Upper East Side scene, Maxwell's Plum, Studio 54, wine bars and in modern-day restaurants where I spend perhaps too much of my life.
But take it from me: There's never been as much binge boozing as there is today. It stretches far beyond the Lower East Side's infamous ''Hell Zone'' to Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg and Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side. In the Meatpacking District, vomit on the pavement makes me cringe more than smelly carcasses once did. Even hotel rooftops and high-end restaurants are affected: Top chef Michael White actually employs a bouncer to stand on Lafayette Street to protect his Italian trattoria Osteria Morini from ''young, affluent, intoxicated people stumbling from one place to the next,'' a manager explained to me.
Sometimes it makes me dread going out. I was among a throng of customers who endured a stressful wait for the bathroom one recent night at Megu, a Japanese eatery where miso-glazed black cod is $45. An overindulging young woman had tossed her sake onto a guy at the next table. Her girlfriends were helping her recover in one of the individual toilets, which they hogged for 15 minutes.
When gender expectations are wildly out of sync, anxiety is soothed with alcohol's fast-acting flood of relief.
In Chelsea and the High Line areas, partying mobs swarm in and out of the bar-rich Standard, Dream and Maritime hotels. Even Chinatown's once-somnolent Doyers Street now has three adjacent booze-friendly places that make the narrow, curving block near-impassable when revelers spill off the sidewalk.
A few causes of this drunken oblivion are obvious. Affluent young singles cluster in neighborhoods oversaturated with saloons. Restaurants promote ''beverage programs'' more than food.
Some media outlets seem bent on driving half the youthful population into AA. Time Out New York's September issue feature on the craft-beer scene is blurbed on the magazine's cover as ''67% information, 33% inebriation.''
But there might be a deeper reason for the trend beyond profit-mad restaurateurs or hedge-fund millennials with too much time on their hands.
I'm no psychiatrist or sociologist, but over-drinking strikes me mainly as a condition of the single. Available women have long outnumbered available men in the city but the imbalance has grown worse. Manhattan is home to 38 percent more women than men among recent college graduates, according to a book by researcher Jon Birger, ''Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game.'' The percentages of New Yorkers in the prime bar-going ages of 20-34 were about the same in 2015 as they were in 2000 '-- around 25 percent according to the US census '-- but because the city's population increased by more than a half-million during that period, they represent many more people.
Surveys claim Americans are marrying at slower rates than in the past, but chatting to young urbanites reveals a more nuanced story: Millennial New York women very much want to wed, but there aren't enough guys to go around.
Men, meanwhile, want to hold out for as long as they can get away with it, thanks to a supposed glut of lust-crazed young females with whom they can frolic. Media hype for Tinder-driven hook-ups '-- a risky and ruinous lifestyle that most unmarried people swiftly tire of if they indulge at all '-- gives men the idea that every woman at the bar is fair game for a quick sex romp.
What's that got to do with binge drinking? When gender expectations are wildly out of sync, anxiety is soothed with alcohol's fast-acting flood of relief.
The house is full of hot-looking prospects, but a lot of people aren't getting what they want. So, as Peggy Lee sang in ''Is That All There Is,'' let's break out the booze and have a ball '-- even at brunch.
NA-Tech News
Harvard Study Proves Apple Slows Down old iPhones to Sell Millions of New Models | Creative Mag
If you were Apple, what tricks would you utilize to increase the sales of your latest product?
If you know corporations, you'd know they use any possible trick they can as a generality to increase their profit: think of how huge a factor it would make in the sale of new iPhones if the old ones became slower.
People have made the anecdotal observation that their Apple products become much slower right before the release of a new model.
Now, a Harvard University study has done what any person with Google Trends could do, and pointed out that Google searches for ''iPhone slow'' spiked multiple times, just before the release of a new iPhone each time.
The study was performed by student Laura Trucco. The study also compared the results to ''Samsung Galaxy slow,'' and found that the same spike in searches did not occur before the release of a new Samsung phone.
This isn't the first time the theory has been put forth. Surprisingly a New York Times writer suggested Apple might configure its new operating systems to only really work properly on new devices.
Writer Catherine Rampell said:
When major innovations remain out of reach, and degrading durability threatens to tick off loyal customers, companies like Apple can still take a cue from the fashion industry.
The public has to get wise to the way corporations generally operate. They hire efficiency experts and people who can maximize the profit made from any product they produce. Not every corporation is the same, but the inherent incentive must be understood, or people will continuously be played by the corporations.
Source: anongroup.
Jim Carrey: 'Apple's New iPhone is Designed to Enslave Humanity'
(C) YouTube Jim Carrey says the new iPhone was designed to usher in the New World Order Movie star Jim Carrey has spoken out to expose Apple's latest iteration of its hugely popular iPhone, to reveal that its new Face ID technology was designed to "enslave humanity".The actor stated that his days of using products by the Californian company are "over" after learning that their devices are being used to "usher in a totalitarian New World Order".
Speaking at the Toronto Film Festival whilst promoting his new Netflix documentary, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, he said:
"If George Orwell wrote 1984 today, it would have been about tech companies ruling over a totalitarian state instead of communists, the stores would be called 'town squares' and the phones that you are forced to buy would read your face,"
Carrey was referring to Apple's recently revealed iPhone X, or iPhone10, which is due to go on sale in early November.
The much-anticipated smartphone is Apple's biggest launch to date and has dropped fingerprint scanning technology which has been replaced with its new facial recognition system.
The phone uses tiny cameras that scan the user's face, so only the registered owner can unlock and use the phone, just by looking at it.
The unique facial scan of every iPhone user will be stored on Apple's servers, which many fear is a dangerous intrusion of privacy.
Jim Carrey gave an impromptu interview earlier this month, in which he first circled an E! News reporter like a prowling animal, before answering her questions with playfully abrupt philosophical statements like "There is no me" and "There are just things happening and there are clusters of tetrahedrons moving around together."
The interview went viral on social media and provoked mixed reactions, which the iconic actor felt compelled to explain those unexpected, metaphysical statements, later on, releasing a new raft of dystopian, metaphysical warnings at the Toronto International Film Festival, this time rounding on Apple and their new Face ID technology.
READ MORE: Jim Carrey Framed for Killing Girlfriend After Exposing Illuminati SecretsApple's new Face ID technology, according to Carrey, will fall into the wrong hands and pose a huge threat to the future of humanity.
"You can guarantee this same tech will be used'--by someone'--to identify protesters, to figure out if you're depressed or manic'--and how to cash in on that," the Truman Show star said.
"Same family of technologies will be used to classify you'--right or wrong'--as a criminal or a terrorist'--or what your sexual orientation is.
"I'm not saying Apple will. But I am saying that this is increasingly doable and will be done by the people you don't want doing it'--the people who are driving us towards a New World Order."
Carrey highlighted that facial recognition technology is merely the "latest step on the march towards total surveillance.''
Invasive surveillance is nothing new, from monitoring employee productivity to running consumer behavior studies and other forms of market research.
(C) press Jim Carrey's recent red carpet interview went viral, provoking mixed reactions In recent years, as technology has become more advanced, it has become more intrusive, pervasive and outright disturbing.
"What's wrong with a password that I and only I store up here?'' Carrey said, tapping his temple with his finger.
"No cloud-based storage is necessary.
"You know they want to read your thoughts.
"The idea of a password is anathema to them.
"How dare you keep a secret from them!
"The global elite thinks your secrets are a threat to them. Secrets are lies.
"I wake up in the morning and sit and have my coffee and look out at my beautiful garden, and I think to myself, 'Remember how good this is, because the privacy of the individual, private property, personal dignity, there are powerful forces working to take it all away from us.'
"Only when they can read our thoughts will they stop. And by then it will be too late. They will have total power.''
"They will have total power."
CLIPS & DOCS
VIDEO - AMBUSHED: U.N. Heads Turn in Stunned Disbelief as PLO Lies Exposed by Palestinian Hero - YouTube
The New York Board of Elections on Thursday corrected information suggesting President Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had listed his gender as ''female'' on a voter registration form.
Kushner, now a White House adviser, did check the box for ''male'' on his original registration form, the board said, but the information was entered incorrectly in a database.
''It does happen from time to time,'' Board of Elections Executive Director Michael Ryan told The New York Daily News. ''I wouldn't call it a common occurrence.''
Reports about Kushner registering as a female vote went viral after the Democratic opposition research firm American Bridge found data in a voter database that said he had checked the box for ''female.''
The voter registration data was found through Nexis. The Hill and other news outlets confirmed the information, which was first reported by Wired.
New York voter registration forms require registrants to check a box to denote their gender, M or F, and the Daily News found that Kushner clearly checked the box signifying he is a male voter.
The correction, marked CORRECTED GENDER, appeared Wednesday in the AVID database, which is accessible only from a board of election's office.
When registered to vote in New Jersey, prior to 2009, Kushner's gender was labeled as "unknown," which Ryan said could have contributed to the mix-up.
American Bridge pounced on the apparent mistake, pointing to Kushner having to update his federal security clearance forms multiple times to amend with unreported contacts with foreign officials.
Kushner told congressional investigators that those mistakes have been due to a ''miscommunication'' with his assistant.
- This story was updated on Sept. 28 with the new information from the New York Board of Elections.
VIDEO - Does the Russiagate story still hold water? (DEBATE) - YouTube
Both Blacktivist accounts, each of which used the handle Blacktivists, regularly shared content intended to stoke outrage. "Black people should wake up as soon as possible," one post on the Twitter account read. "Black families are divided and destroyed by mass incarceration and death of black men," another read. The accounts also posted videos of police violence against African Americans.
The Blacktivist accounts provide further evidence that Russian-linked social media accounts saw racial tensions as something to be exploited in order to achieve the broader Russian goal of dividing Americans and creating chaos in U.S. politics during a campaign in which race repeatedly became an issue.
Related: Russian-bought Black Lives Matter ad on Facebook targeted Baltimore and Ferguson
The Facebook account had 360,000 likes, more than the verified Black Lives Matter account on Facebook, which currently has just over 301,000.
The page also publicized at least seven rallies and demonstrations around the country in 2016. The events ranged from the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party to a march in Baltimore commemorating the death of Freddie Gray. In several cases, it appears that the events were real, and were organized by other groups, but that the Blacktivist account was working to increase turnout.
"We are fed up with police violence, racism, intolerance and injustice that passed down from generation to generation. We are fed up with government ignorance and the system failing black people," the page's description of the march for Freddie Gray read.
That same Freddie Gray event was covered by RT, a television network funded by the Russian government.
CNN reported Wednesday that at least one of the Facebook ads bought by Russians during the 2016 presidential campaign referenced Black Lives Matter and was specifically targeted to reach audiences in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore, two cities that had gained widespread attention for the large and violent protests over police shootings of black men.
The Twitter account, @Blacktivists, provided several clues that in hindsight indicate it was not what it purported to be. In several tweets, it employed awkward phrasing that a native English speaker would be unlikely to use. It also consistently posted using an apostrophe facing the wrong way, i.e. "it`s" instead of "it's."
The Blacktivist Facebook account was among the 470 Russian-linked accounts identified by the social media network and disclosed to Congress earlier this month, the sources said. The matching Twitter account was among the roughly 200 accounts Twitter identified with links to those found by Facebook.
Facebook shared its findings about the accounts with Twitter, enabling Twitter to identify 22 matching accounts and an additional 179 accounts that linked back to those accounts, the sources said. This matching process went beyond public-facing similarities and included private information that could link the accounts.
All of the ads handed over by Facebook were linked to the Internet Research Agency, a shadowy company that U.S. military intelligence has described as "a state-funded organization that blogs and tweets on behalf of the Kremlin." A senior Kremlin spokesman said last week that Russia did not buy ads on Facebook to influence the election.
Related: Twitter tells Congress it took action on 200 Russia-linked accounts
As with the Russian-backed Facebook accounts, the Russian-backed Twitter accounts sought to amplify political discord by highlighting hot-button political issues like race and immigration.
Some of the Twitter accounts also promoted anti-Hillary Clinton stories, a source with knowledge of the matter told CNN. The U.S. intelligence community believes one reason Russia meddled in the election was to damage Clinton's chances of winning.
Blacktivist posted a video on Facebook in August of this year with the caption, "Watch another savage video of police brutality. We live under a system of racism and police are directly letting us know how they feel and where we stand."
The video was from a July incident in San Diego in which a police dog was seen biting an African-American man in handcuffs.
CNN has not confirmed when the Blacktivist Facebook account was established. The corresponding Twitter account was set up in April 2016, according to cached page records.
"Black community welcomes you! We want to bring peace in life of our brothers and sisters!" the "About" section of the Facebook page read.
One of the Russian-bought Facebook ads that the social media network is handing over to Congress backed Green Party candidate Jill Stein. "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein," the ad read. "The only way to take our country back is to stop voting for the corporations and banks that own us. #GrowaSpineVoteJillStein." The Stein ad was first reported by Politico.
A segment of that wording appeared verbatim on the @Blacktivists Twitter account on November 2, 2016. "Choose peace and vote for Jill Stein. Trust me, it's not a wasted vote," the account tweeted.
Both accounts appear to have been active as recently as last month.
-- CNN's Marshall Cohen contributed reporting.
CNNMoney (New York) First published September 28, 2017: 9:00 PM ET
VIDEO - Hackers target European Commission | Euronews
