BANNERS
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Who will /pn/ vote for in 2016?
Although I can't vote (not american) i'd put my money on Chris Christie winning. He's better than Jeb and he's not hispanic
Donald Trump
Thoughts on Donald Trump?
20% of Portugal’s working-age population has gone to other European countries due to a lack of jobs. Portugal’s Premier, Antonio Costa, has sent letters to Austria, Greece, Italy and Sweden asking for their Arab and African illegal immigrants to replace them.
Costa told the EU parliament that Portugal should “set an example” and he is against “a Europe that closes its borders to block access to refugees…”
Arabs and Africans do not want to go to Portugal, and Costa feels his country has been left out of the diversity-fest. Just 32 illegal immigrants have actually wanted to get into the country in the last few years.
Portugal’s government has even sent an ambassador to the Greek illegal immigrant camps to encourage them to consider going to Portugal, but he’s had no success.
Teresa Tito Morais, head of the Portuguese Refugee Council said the country “needs to make its voice heard to migrants arriving in Europe,”
She said
>“The arrival of refugees will benefit the regions in the country that have become deserted,”
>“A large number of Portuguese have emigrated and certain regions need to regain some life.”
Refugees? Migrants? Even she can’t make her mind up what they are.
If the Portuguese government wanted to easily solve its declining population, then it would create jobs for Portuguese workers who have left the country. They would not have to spend millions of Euros to “integrate” them, because they ARE Portuguese.
But this is, as they say, ‘two birds with one stone’. They hope to take advantage of the illegal immigrant chaos so then can “diversify” Portugal. Because right now, it’s “too White” for them, and that’s not what Europe’s about anymore, apparently.
This “diversity for only White countries” agenda is actually White Genocide. Being “too White” is frowned upon by the elite of Western countries, and they hope to solve this “problem” by mixing us with different groups.
75 CHARACTERSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
What makes peaceful neighbours become mass murderers
http://www.nature.com/news/what-makes-peaceful-neighbours-become-mass-murderers-1.17504
What happens in the brains of people who go from being peaceable neighbours to slaughtering each other on a mass scale? Back in 1997, neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried at the University of California, Los Angeles, conscious of the recent massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda, described this switch in behaviour in terms of a medical syndrome, which he called ‘Syndrome E’ 2. Nearly 20 years later, Fried brought sociologists, historians, psychologists and neuroscientists together at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Paris to discuss the question anew. At the conference, called 'The brains that pull the triggers', he talked to Nature about the need to consider this type of mass murder in scientific as well as sociological terms, and about the challenge of establishing interdisciplinary dialogue in this sensitive area.
On which data did you base your hypothetical Syndrome E?
Historians had analysed personal accounts from numerous massacres, such as of Armenians in 1915, the European Jews in the Second World War, Cambodians during the Pol Pot regime and the ethnic killings in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. I also gathered information from the few social-science experiments available at the time, such as the famous Milgram experiment [which studied the willingness of someone to inflict on another when obeying authority figures]. I was particularly struck by Christopher Browning’s 1992 book Ordinary Men, which described the testimony of hundreds of middle-aged, non-politicized German reservists who were taken to Poland in 1942. In a short time, most became efficient killers, participating in the shooting of 38,000 Jews who had been rounded up by the Nazis, and herding 45,000 more into trains destined for the gas chambers. Their commander allowed the reservists to opt out, but only 10% or so decided not to kill. I felt that the transformation into repetitive killer had to have a biology behind it — all of our behaviour is guided by brain activity.
What are the main features of the syndrome?
There was a myth that the primitive brain is held in check by our more-recently evolved prefrontal cortex, which is involved in complex analysis, and that the primitive, subcortical part takes over when we carry out brutal crimes such as repetitive murder. But I saw it the other way around. The signs and symptoms that I gathered in my research indicated that the prefrontal cortex, not the primitive brain, was responsible, because it was no longer heeding the normal controls from subcortical areas. I called it ‘cognitive fracture’ — the normal gut aversions to harming others, the emotional abhorrence of such acts, were disconnected from a hyper-aroused prefrontal cortex. I also proposed a neural circuitry in the brain that could perhaps account for this. In brief, specific parts of the prefrontal cortex become hyperactive and dampen the activity of the amygdala, which regulates emotion.
Why bring up the discussion again now?
When I proposed Syndrome E, the discipline of cognitive neuroscience was only just beginning and technologies such as fMRI brain-imaging and EEG were young. The discipline grew rapidly, and there is now a lot of information out there that I thought could be relevant (See 'Brain imaging: fMRI 2.0').
/politics/ merger & recruitment thread
Greetings, I am the BO of /politics/ and I am currently trying to unify the alt /pol/ boards into one. Is there a reason you guys would not care to join us?
If you have any questions about /politics/ or me, feel free to ask.
You are under attack right now wherever you are
In your food in your water in your media in your education in your workplace in your banks in your cities and in your farms and in a woods and in the mountains. You are being attacked and you are under attack. You must fight back. It is your right to live. TO LIVE NOT TO WAIT UNTIL DEATH.
THE GLOBAL BANKERS THAT INSTITUTE A DEHUMANIZING CAPITALISM ON THE WORLD ARE FLOODING YOUR COUNTRIES WITH PEOPLE OF LOW EDUCATION, LOW BELIEF IN FREEDOM OR TOLERANCE, AND LOW INHIBITION TO VIOLENCE
You. Must. Fight. Now.
You CAN NOT WIN BY THROWING AROUND VOTES. YOUR BALLOTS WILL NOT SAVE YOU. ONLY ORGANIZATION IN YOUR COMMUNITY. AMMUNITION IN YOUR SUPPLY LINES. AND TRUTH FROM YOUR MOUTH WILL SAVE YOU.
WHETHER YOU ARE A MUSLIM WHO WANTS TO LIVE IN PEACE, NOT PERPETUAL JIHAD WAR, WHETHER YOU ARE A CHRISTIAN WHO WANTS ALL HUMANITY TO LIVE IN PEACE. WHETHER YOU ARE AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES ALL GODS AND MYTHS ARE FABLES WRITTEN BY HUMANS AND NOTHING MORE.
You must fight to survive.
They will not stop until you are genetically broken, unable to be healthy, unable to have a family, unable to even function mentally. They want nothing but obedience from you. They want the poor to kick in the mud, while they steal banks, steal governments, steal forests and food. They only want power over you and to lord it above you at any cost.
These sick banking globalists want your race to die. They will only proliferate their bloodline, even if they appear similar to you they are not. They hate you and everything about you.
They don't care about your obsession with genderfluidity or your obsession with multicult appeasement. They absolutely do not care that you have an ivy league degree or that you managed to earn a few million dollars before you reached your thirties.
All they want is a more complete control over your mind and body.
They have all the money they need, so long as you let them tell you what is valuable and what is currency.
They crave submission.
WHEREWHITEPEOPLEMEET - Dating site criticized for being supremacist (???)
The man who launched a dating website dedicated to helping white people meet each other in a state that is almost entirely white now says the website isn’t racially motivated.
Sam Russell founded WhereWhitePeopleMeet.com, in Utah — a state that is more than 90 percent white, according to U.S. Census statistics. The Bountiful man said he got the idea while home sick, watching daytime TV.
“It’s not racially motivated at all,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune on Monday.
He said the idea came from other dating websites that help people from other groups meet each other, like BlackPeopleMeet.com, FarmersOnly.com, LDSSingles.com, Christianmingle.com, OurTime.com, et cetera.
“I was bombarded with dating sites for every walk of life, and I thought in my own mind, ‘Why can’t there be a website for where white people can meet?’ ” he told the paper.
But as Salt Lake City College inclusivity ambassador Matthew Wong pointed out, those websites usually target minorities or people with specific interests or characteristics that make it more difficult to meet potential dates who are from their communities or share their hobbies or lifestyles.
“Why does the majority need help finding the majority?” Wong wondered
“How can they need more help finding white people? If this was for a very small demographic of very introverted white people who have trouble meeting white people, I wouldn’t have a problem with that. But it doesn’t sound like it’s geared toward that specific demographic; it sounds like it’s geared toward Caucasian people in general.”
Wong noted that a lot of dating websites are already majority-white and it’s hard for many people of non-white backgrounds to find dates as a result, which creates the need for sites that help them find each other.
“Unless you’re an Asian female, it’s hard as a person of color to get any response on a dating website,” he told the Tribune.
Some defending the website have said the website stands up to the “white genocide” agenda, according to the Tribune. The notion of “white genocide” is a fear-mongering tactic used by white supremacists alleging that an organized effort is afoot to end the existence of white people.
This sentiment can be seen on the website’s Facebook account. In response to a comment that it’s hard for white people to meet each other, one woman responded:
“It’s the same thing that keeps us from having White Entertainment Television…from having White American Scholarships…White only magazines, etc. It’s because of the ever elusive yet ever sneaky narrative by leftists agenda.
Another noted that the site does not allow LGBT people to participate by forcing users to choose the opposite sex when searching for potential dates.
Others were even less sparing. In response to a post of website downtime between 1 a.m. and-2 a.m. MST, one man posted, “Ah I guess the neo nazi cocktail hour is from 1-2 am. MST.”
Germany - Catholic church says too many refugees
The German Catholic Church called for a reduction in the influx of refugees arriving in Germany, saying the country cannot take in "all the world's needy," according to an interview published on Saturday.
Germany has been struggling to cope with 1.8 million asylum seekers that arrived in 2015 and Berlin has not yet given an official estimate for how many it expects this year.
"As a church we say that we need a reduction in the number of refugees," Cardinal Reinhard Marx, chairman of the German Bishops' Conference, told the Passauer Neue Presse daily.
Germany cannot "take in all the world's needy," Marx added.
The question of how to respond to the migrant crisis, he asserted, should not solely be a matter of "charity but also reason."
However, Marx also expressed concern at a rise in xenophobia in Germany amid the worst refugee crisis that Europe has known since World War II.
A recent example came when Germany's eurosceptic right-wing populist AfD party suggested last week that police "if need be" should threaten to shoot migrants seeking to enter the country.
Border police "should be able if need be to have recourse to their firearms – as laid down by law," said party chairwoman Frauke Petry.
This type of speech is "unacceptable," said Marx, adding "Sadly there has always been a certain potential for right-wing extremism and racism in Germany."…
"This ideology has evidently been further consolidated," he said, lamenting that the belittling of foreigners had "reached the upper classes."
Anti-Islamic group Pegida, which began as a movement in Germany in mid-2014 and has since spread to France and other European countries, called on members and sympathisers from across Europe to march Saturday under the anti-migrant banner of "Fortress Europe".
Tradition is the foundation of culture
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt8QIFWaB70
Catholicism : Fight for your people or be the last generation
The reason foreigners can not into local culture.
It is not for lack of trying but for lack of knowing.
They will never understand our hard won truths. The blood t'was poured. They won't recognize our heroes.
Or understand what they fought for. They are not like our people. Not in thought, taste, or desire.
They do not enjoy what we hath. They will not enjoy what we shall.
We can not live together in a multiculti society.
We can only live in a diverse world when each group of people is left to their own sovereignty.
Catholicism is about a strong Europe enriched by European diversity, not "diversity" of foreigners.
Guaranted Income - Switzerland
Every Swiss adult resident would have the right to guaranteed basic monthly income of 2,500 francs a month, if a proposal to be submitted to voters this summer is accepted.
Swiss to vote on guaranteed income for all
In this small country that has avoided most of the massive immigrant movements they want to provide universal welfare to all citizens.
The initiative, proposed by a group of intellectuals, was one of five subjects approved by the federal government on Wednesday for the ballot box on June 5th.
Switzerland will become the first country in the world to vote on the introduction of unconditional income' at the national level.
But it has not won much support from traditional politicians, even those on the left.
The initiative’s backers say it aims to break the link between employment and income, with people entitled to guaranteed income regardless of whether they work.
Each child would receive 625 francs a month.
The federal government estimates the cost of the proposal at 208 billion francs a year.
Around 153 billion taxes would have to be levied from taxes, while 55 billion francs would be transferred from social insurance and social assistance spending.
The action committee pushing the initiative consists of artists, writers and intellectuals, including publicist Daniel Straub, former federal government spokesman Oswald Sigg and Zurich rapper Franziska Schläpfer (known as “Big Zis”), the SDA news agency reported.
Personalities supporting the bid include writers Adolf Muschg and Ruth Schweikert, philosopher Hans Saner and communications expert Beatrice Tschanz.
The group said a new survey showed that the majority of Swiss residents would continue working if the guaranteed income proposal was approved.
Only two percent would stop working, while eight percent said they could envisage this possibility depending on circumstances.
“The argument of opponents that a guaranteed income would reduce the incentive of people to work is by this is largely contradicted,” the initiative’s committee said in a statement.
However, a third of the 1,076 people interviewed for the survey by the Demoscope Institute believed that “others would stop working”.
And more than half of those surveyed (56 percent) believe the guaranteed income proposal will never see the light of day.
India - Castration for child rapists legalised
Madras High Court says castrating child rapists best solution for sex offences
In india rape is not tolerated. Rapists of grown women are lynched regularly.
If you rape a child in India and there is proof of this. You will be castrated legally now. Is it a better punishment than death? Go hang yourself if you think it is worse.
Castration. This is Madras high court's one-word solution for curbing spiralling sex offences against children.
"Traditional laws are not stringent enough to yield any desired positive result. Suggestion of castration looks barbaric, but barbaric crimes should definitely attract barbaric model of punishment. Many may not agree with this. Still, everyone needs to understand the stark reality in society and appreciate the punishment suggested," said Justice N Kirubakaran, pointing to the fact that the conviction rate in cases of sex offence against children is a mere 2.4% and that between 2008 and 2014, crimes against children had increased by 400%.
"This court is sure that additional punishment of castration of child rapists would fetch magical results in preventing and containing child abuses," said the judge while pointing out that chemical castration had come into force in several countries including the US. The judge was passing orders on a plea from a foreigner facing paedophile charges in TN for quashing the case. Turning down the plea, the judge, however, stayed the red corner notice issued against him making it clear it was being done to facilitate his participation in a criminal trial.
The immediate provocation for the court to make such a drastic suggestion was the brutal gangrape of children in Delhi last week. Calling it a "blood-curdling" and "horrific" incident, Justice Kirubakaran said castration must be an additional punishment for child abusers, especially child rapists. Incidentally in 2013, at the height of the protests in the capital over the Nirbhaya case, Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa had similarly called for death or chemical castration for rapists through amendments in Central laws.
Castration is done on child sex offenders in Poland, Russia, Estonia and nine US states including California, Florida, Oregon, Texas and Washington, he said, adding, "South Korea was the first Asian country to make castration a punishment."
"Inspite of many penal laws and the recent POCSO Act, 2012 prescribing severe punishment for crimes against children, the number of such cases has increased from 38,172 in 2012 to 58,224 in 2013 and to 89,423 in 2014. When law is ineffective and incapable of addressing the menace, this court cannot keep its hands folded and remain a silent spectator, unmoved and oblivious to the recent happenings of horrible blood-curdling gang rapes of children in various parts of India. It would not only be injustice done to the child abuse victims, but would also amount to violation of the oath taken by this court," the judge said.
This suggestion of castration would be condemned, censured and criticised as "barbaric, retrograde, stone-aged, cannibalistic and inhuman," Justice Kirubakaran said, adding that human rights activists who oppose castration are concerned mostly about offenders and perpetrators, unmindful of the physical, psychological and the emotional trauma undergone by victims. "Those activists should first exhibit sympathy and support to the victims of such crimes by visiting and consoling them at the hour of crisis instead of having misplaced sympathy on the perpetrators," he said.
Apart from "native monsters," there are foreigners "regularly landing" here to abuse our children, the judge said, adding that the case before him also concerned one such person who allegedly abused a 15-year-old boy. The British national had paid money to the boy's mother and promised to offer quality education to the boy. He took him to Delhi where he stayed with the boy in a room and assaulted him, all in 2011. After a service organization moved court and got the boy rescued, a case was registered and a chargesheet too was filed.
In his present petition, the Briton wanted the case to be quashed on the ground that the boy's mother herself had said it was not kidnap and abuse, but she had sent the Class IX boy voluntarily. The prosecution, however, pointed out that the mother's retraction itself was proof of tampering of evidence by the foreigner, and that the boy himself had stated before the magistrate that he was trafficked and abused by the Briton.
India - Most Migrants Across World
Today, a total of 15.6 million people born in India are living across ll continent s. The rate of migration to foreign countries has increased by half compared to 10 years ago.
In the five-year period from 2010 to 2015, India displaced Russia as the country with the largest diaspora in the world, as per UN data on migrants for 2015. While the UAE, with its job opportunities for all sections of people, tops as the preferred destination for India-born migrants, the US that lets in only highly qualified professional Indians, is today home to nearly 20 lakh people born in India.
Australia, which is on the other corner of the globe, comes high up on the list with 4 lakh Indians. Even tiny Bermuda hasn't escaped the attention of emigrating Indians. Some 500 Indians live there.
Between 1990 and 2010, Russia was topping the list of migrants but its diaspora was concentrated in a few countries like Israel.
Paradoxically enough, the spike in Indian migration happened after the country's economy moved into a high-growth path. In 2000, India equalled Russia in migrant outflow with 10.8 million each. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of migrants from India dipped by 0.3% but after 2005, the number has been increasing steadily.
Observers see Indian migration as helping world economies. "Indian migrants to the US have been a great asset for the world. Their contribution to development of information technology has been useful to various sections. Similarly in Gulf countries, many Indians are in the managerial cadre and their contribution has been immensely appreciated," former diplomat G Parthasarathi told TOI.
Indians working as construction labourers are also most sought after by companies in the Gulf. "Indian labourers are highly disciplined and they are ready to jobs which Europeans or people from developed countries may find it tough to do," said Parthasarathi.
In 2005, 10.5 million migrated from India and the number went up to 13.3 million at the end of 2010, an increase of 26%.
Between 2010 and 2015, the numbers increased by 17.5%, says the UN report. The number of Indians who migrated rose 18% in 2015 from 8.5 million in 2010. The number of women rose 15% from 4.8 million in 2010 to 5.5 million in 2015.
"Migrants from South Asia totalled 37.1 million, of whom 20.6% were living in Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and nearly 43% were in high-income non-OECD countries (such as the GCC). The largest source countries of migrants were India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nepal. The region hosted 12.4 million migrants, the majority of whom were from within the region," says Migration and Remittances Factbook 2016 of the World Bank.
The factbook says south-south migration is larger than south-north migration. Over 38% of the international migrants in 2013 migrated from developing countries to other developing countries, compared to 34% that moved from developing countries to advanced countries. The top 10 migrant destination countries were the US, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Russia, UAE, UK, France, Canada, Spain and Australia.
Brazil Viral Outbreak
Brazilian Brain Damaged Babies due to Virus
With major events coming up like Carnaval there are fears that the virus will spread across the entire country. The virus is confirmed to cross the placental barrier and can often cause microcephaly.
It is transmitted directly between mosquitoes and humans with only a 10 day incubation in mosquitoes.
The virus can be sexually transmitted. Remaining in the body for life.
A major problem with the virus is that it has no cures, no vaccines, no treatments. It causes only mild flu symptoms but due to a rapid spread from primarily africa and southern Asia to the Polynesian region as well as Carribeans and South America it has become a pandemic.
The virus is not restricted to one or a few species of arthropod and has been isolated from a dozen mosquito species, though as of yet spreading primarily by daytime active mosquitoes.
Justice & Health
Look at politics and realize it.
The world will need a fanatic militant movement that is decentralized which will behead islamists and beat all the capitalist empowered feminists until they fuck off.
Traditionalism had the biological norms and took it for granted.Your great grandfather and great grandmother being prime examples of femininity and masculinity were products of their time.
This movement, not to be properly called "new" will take those aspects as well as the sane aspects of science and militarize them.
A woman is valuable because she does what a man can not do - her body an ideal environment for the baby in the uterus and her gentleness and breasts ideal for the infant.
A man is valuable for his ability to focus all his energy on one task and the body physically attuned to greater strength and stamina.
A man who kills those who threaten his people is a hero; a man who loves all is a coward.
One family doing this in the western world sounds like a short event until arrest
Now imagine a movement like this that is in the millions before being uncovered or understood and it happens while the western world crumbling from the inside is unable to slow its growth.
Tell this to all who hear you because this is coming.
All valued for their strengths and respected for individual choices but encouraged to use those strengths for the good of their people.
Foreign settlers not welcome.
Taxation/Extortion not welcome.
Can you deny that a movement that empowers its women in the correct biological roles (that are actually needed by all women and most realize it too late in their 30s) , rejects every cancer that has decimated population numbers in one form or another at every collapsing empire, and rejects bullshit religions that thwart technological and informational progress is already rising on the decaying corpse of western civilization?
Time for a rejuvenating power has come. Old ideas are neither all good nor all bad and only a dead fool would deny what works while his people fail to reproduce. Technology can be a curse but not if it adheres to biology and enhances it. Instead of being used to replace everything natural it strengthens the biology of the users and is reconstructed by them instead of reconstructing them.
The time for mercy and compassion is over when the recipients of those gifts seek to destroy the kind givers.
Now is the time for protecting your people and your culture by every means necessary. The weak who speak derision will die in the filth they sow.
This undeniable truth is here before you. Create your future and defend it.
Greetings /pn/.
I am here to inquire as to why you have removed us from the interesting boards list.
Why is that?
Mu'h Ausfail
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/bfab/21-40/bfab021.html
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/bfab/41-60/bfab046.html
http://www.aic.gov.au/crime_types/property%20crime/arson.html
Arson-homicides in Australia, although rare, have almost doubled in 20 years, a new report from Australian Institute of Criminology shows.
The study, Arson-associated homicide in Australia: A five year follow up, found 44 per cent more arson-associated murders took place in the 2000s when compared with the 1990s.
"This supports the previous Australian findings that indicated that offenders may now be using fire in homicides more frequently than previously," the report states.
Arson-associated events make up a small portion of homicides in Australia (2 per cent of all homicides each year), but according to the researchers "they are of particular interest given their propensity to become uncontrollable and claim more than one victim".
The largest proportion of arson homicide victims (23 per cent) were the current intimate partner of the offender, the report states.
But lead author and QUT forensic criminologist Dr Claire Ferguson told the ABC with so few cases - 123 between 1989 to 2010 - it was hard to talk about trends.
"In most of the cases the offender knew the victim, it wasn't necessarily domestic violence,"
VIDEO: "Zionist MP Dismisses Popular Anti-Immigration Petition in UK Parliament"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esGHUAZlF58
Hide your shekels & attempt to contain your sides. You've never seen such kvetching in your life. A survivor of the Spanish Inquisition is here to tell you why a popular petition against immigration in the UK is offensive.
The video cuts deep into the hypocrisy and lies of 'positive' immigration and delves further into the causes of the Syrian conflict and who is really behind it and why. Spread the word and expose the leaders who push these policies…
18 dead in Paris, Organized Attacks, Hostage Situation
Paris shooting: Several killed and injured after 'Kalashnikov and grenade attacks' across French capital
Many people killed after several shootings and explosions across central Paris - follow live updates
Live: Deadly Paris Attacks And Hostage Situation
All the latest updates as a gunman remains on the loose amid deadly attacks in the French capital.
http://news.sky.com/story/1587380/live-deadly-paris-attacks-and-hostage-situation
At least 18 dead in multiple attacks across Paris, French police have said
posting redpill
>US will spend 43 million dollars on a gas station in the middle of nowhere in the desert in afghanistan
>$7000 coffee makers
>$600 toilet seats
>$37 for A screw
>$435 for a hammer
>$285 screwdriver
>$387 flat washer
>$469 wrench
>$214 flashlight,
>$437 tape measure
>$2,228 monkey wrench,
>$748 pair of duckbill pliers
>$74,165 aluminum ladder
>$659 ashtray
>$1,118.26 for a spare plastic cap for a navigator’s stool on a B-52 bomber (worth about two cents)
>Defense Accounting Finance Service writes $22 billion in checks every month
>Mark Krenik (pentagon officer) created a phony company and then billed himself $504,000. He had to repay the money, but was not sentenced to prison. Probation only, and a $495 fine. He told the federal judge that he did it because everyone else in his section was doing to the same, but he was not required to name names.
>Sgt. Robbie Miller convicted and sent to prison for stealing $1 million. would not have been caught but was involved in affairs with female co-workers. Agents say they got Miller when he was hauling evidence out of the office to burn it.
>Contractors were billing $300 a night hotel rooms, private jet flights, meals at five star restaurants and bar bills to the government.
>Air Force non-commissioned officers like Miller, who handle giant
accounts at Dayton, call any vendor account that is less than $100,000
“budget dust” and say it’s not worth the time or effort trying to
recover.
>hundreds of billions into stupid wasteful trash every year
>monsanto claims it needs to genetically modify our crops and use pesticides because it helps make the world a better place
>has the biggest and most expensive military and military budget in the entire world that makes the nasa budget look like pocket change in comparison
>claims space travel is too expensive
>claims they can't afford a living wage
>claims they can't give war veterans all the help they need as t.v. commercials go on and on with sad country music with vets missing arms and legs "help the veterans!"
>claims they can't cure Cancer/HIV/Ebola/ as the pink ribbon shows up on KFC chicken buckets everywhere that contain cancer causing ingredients
>claims they can't afford universal health care
>claims they can't house every homeless person
>claims they can't grow all crops organically
>claims they can't feed the poor unless the people themselves donate food, time, and money.
>claims people absolutely must pay taxes because otherwise they would go to jail for making the country crumble apart in failure.
http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=96;t=000012;p=0
http://www.wnd.com/2000/10/4314/
http://articles.latimes.com/1986-07-30/news/vw-18804_1_nut
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking
DailyFail: https://archive.is/RnMCc
BostonHerald: https://archive.is/ojJ6p
hope this helps.
>dicks again
seriously pn why do you keep promoting yourself for politics?
NO ONE WANTS TO SEE DICKS ALL DAY, NOT EVEN FAGGOTS AND THOSE ARE A TINY FRACTION OF THE PEOPLE HERE
German Consumer Sentiment Set to Rise in June
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/german-consumer-sentiment-set-to-rise-in-june-20150527-00036
FRANKFURT–German consumer sentiment is set to increase again in June, GfK market research group said in its monthly survey on Wednesday, but it warned that geopolitical risks could weigh on future consumer spending. The forward-looking GfK consumer sentiment index is set to rise to 10.2 points in June from 10.1 points in May, bucking economists' expectations of 10.0 points in a survey by The Wall Street Journal. The June figure is the highest value since October 2001, GfK said. "Private spending is a key driver for economic growth this year. However, existing risks still must not be forgotten," GfK said. Tough negotiations on the future of Greece in the euro area, the Ukraine crisis and IS terrorism could noticeably dampen consumption in Germany, it added.
GfK uses data from the current month to derive a figure for the forthcoming month. It said that economic expectations and willingness to buy increased somewhat in May from April, while the income expectations declined moderately. Consumers' economic expectations have recovered in May after a breather in the previous month, rising 3 points to 38.3 points, GfK said. The willingness to buy sub-index gained 4.3 points to 62.6 points, GfK said, adding that while it remains slightly under its historic peak value of 64.4 points in October 2006, its trend is still upward, helped by the good labor market, good income growth and low inflation.
"Retail trade especially can profit from the currently extremely high willingness to buy," GfK said. The Federal Statistics Office is scheduled to publish April retail sales data on Friday, with economists predicting a 1.0% increase on the month in April after a 1.4% drop in March. Income expectations declined by 3.1 points to 52.0 points, possibly on inflation expectations. "Energy prices, for example, have increased noticeably since the beginning of the year," GfK said, adding that the general price expectation depends on the price development at the pumps to a large extent.
Hello everyone, I created an history and social sciences board with a more academic perspective. I invite you to check it out and share some of your point of views of the world, well structure arguments about your ideas and materials to enrich our understanding of reality.
Hopefully you can visit it and if you do, please enjoy it. Luckily the board will grow and have lots of materials and opinions to share.
Trans Happening
You were just about to pickup your twin 3 year old daughters from daycare when you get a phone call from the elementary school.
Your son, 6 years old, has had a talk with the counselor and they urge you to come in for a talk about the options you have with your son to begin his transition. Your son has ''confessed' to the counselor that he has always preferred girls toys and likes to cross his legs. He enjoys cooking, coloring with pink, and sometimes likes to dress up in robes.
>year 2022
>As you enter the school there is a man in a coat there and he approaches you. He gives youhis card.
>On the card you see a name and a QR code. He tells you that all the answers are there.
You enter the principals office and there is the guidance counselor there. They explain the situation to you and then a teacher enters. It is the art teacher that you know to have taught your son for at least two years since. She is a strong proponent of LGBT culture and introducing it to kids at a younge age.
The counselor then takes you to their office where your son is waiting. He is playing with a teacup and offers you some imaginary tea. You give him a look but take the cup and then look to the counselor who has been eyeing you closely since you've entered the office.
>We affirm each person’s ability to judge for themselves who they are and express themselves in the way that is most authentic to their soul. We honor the diversity of truths that exists within our communities.
Gender is complex and multi-faceted. In North American culture several distinct facets of ourselves get lumped together when we talk about “gender”: Biological sex: attributes such as anatomy, chromosomes, and hormones that is usually assigned at birth and inform whether a person is male, female, or intersex. Gender identity: a person’s internal sense of being a man, a woman, neither of these, both, and so on; one’s inner sense of being. Everyone has a gender identity. Gender expression: the ways in which a person manifests masculinity, femininity, both, or neither through appearance, behavior, dress, speech patterns, preferences, and more. The cultural expectation is that one’s biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression will align in stereotypical ways: that someone who is male will identify as a boy/man and have a masculine gender expression, for example. This expectation does not serve our diverse world and the myriad experiences of self that exist.
So diverse!
>transACTION is designed to help churches and institutions address this issue of understanding and welcome by providing step-by-step training about the needs, apprehensions and fears of transgender people — as well as the wealth of gifts and graces they bring — while responding to the concerns of the church or religious institution.
>At end-of-the-year award ceremonies, present special “Diversity Leader” certificates to educators who actively promoted an inclusive school environment throughout the year.
>Clothing and Dress Codes is a key way students express their various identities—and many fashion choices are protected by the First Amendment.
>Enforce dress codes among all students equally. A school cannot Constitutionally forbid male students to wear dresses, for instance, if other students are allowed to wear dresses.
>Empower students to express themselves. Messages supporting LGBT rights are protected speech, whether they’re spoken, worn on a button or printed on a T-shirt.
And this just happened to be on the top of the list for transgender education, pol is always right:
If race, not economic and cultural factors, causes violent crime then why is glasgow such a violent shithole?
Incredible ‘bioconcrete’ can heal itself thanks to limestone-producing bacteria
http://bgr.com/2015/05/17/self-healing-concrete-limestone-producing-bacteria/
Remember how cool we all thought the original T-1000 was when it would heal itself after getting shot thanks to its liquid metal alloy? Well, some scientists have created something that’s almost as cool: “Bioconcrete” that can heal itself with the help of some very special bacteria. CNN reports that Henk Jonkers, a microbiology professor at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has come up with a way to efficiently patch broken concrete with the help of bacteria that can produce limestone.
This “bioconcrete” has been in the works since 2006, when Jonkers was first asked to come up with some kind of concrete that could effectively fix itself. He decided to try a new method of mixing concrete in which he’d add a “healing agent” in the form of bacillus bacteria that are capable of surviving in the harsh conditions inside concrete and remaining idle until activated. He then added calcium lactate to the concrete mixture to give the bacteria something to feed on that would make them produce the needed limestone as a waste bi-product.
“It is combining nature with construction materials, nature is supplying us a lot of functionality for free — in this case, limestone-producing bacteria,” Jonkers tells CNN. “If we can implement it in materials, we can really benefit from it, so I think it’s a really nice example of tying nature and the built environments together in one new concept.”
Oil Investors Take a Closer Look at Production
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/oil-investors-take-a-closer-look-at-production-20150517-00025
A spotlight has landed on a previously overlooked metric as oil traders drill deeper for clues on price movement. More often, investors are looking to weekly U.S. oil-production data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration for signs the global glut of crude that sunk prices last year is starting to shrink.
That data point, however, has some significant, well-known limitations, and some analysts say traders are giving too much credence to it. The EIA's weekly production data are largely based on a forecasting model, not reported output. And the week-to- week changes are often too small to be a reliable indicator of whether production is rising or falling, according to the EIA.
Still, on April 1, when the EIA report showed the first weekly production decline since January, the U.S. oil price surged by 5.2% to settle above $50 a barrel, even though the same report showed domestic crude supplies at a record high. Similarly, a small weekly production decline reported April 15 sent prices up 5.8% for the day.
Traders "only want to focus narrowly on the U.S. production data," said Tim Evans, energy-futures specialist at Citi Futures, a unit of Citigroup Inc. "They're basically intent on examining the bark on a tree rather than taking in the entire forest."
Looks like the Balkans, especially Macedonia are starting to get more tense. WWIII when?
This video will not be online long, download and mirror it while you can.
I gain nothing from this. Editing takes a lot of work and time, if you want to support me, you can do it with BTC at 1ybX49kKFNN7hKnrzaegnha4Fy9WrFATu
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly."
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 BC
You are witnessing what will be shown to future generations as the reason for the fall of an Empire.
At current immigration levels and disappearing birth rates native Europeans are destined to become a minority in their own countries within decades. This is already the case for many of Europe's largest cities.
Europeans have effectively lost their right to exist as cultures and nations in their own homelands and are facing extinction.
Millions of young Muslim men leave behind their family, pay thousands to criminal traffickers to reach the land they have been promised by European politicians illegally.
Dubbed by the media as "refugees", they cross through 6-10 safe countries to reach wealthy nations like Germany or Sweden where they hope to receive a better life at the expense of the taxpayer.
Only a fraction of them are Syrian, as they enter unfiltered, without any documents and without any legitimate right to claim asylum. Women and children are rarely seen, except in the cherry-picked sob stories of the media.
Any indigenous resistance of Europeans who refuse to hand over the countries of their ancestors to often radical and criminal Muslim foreigners is labeled "hateful", "racist", even "Nazi".
The level of cultural, moral and political subversion with egalitarian and Marxist ideologies has reached levels the KGB would never have dreamed of. Equality and tolerance are lies that serve none but a few.
The Left, mainly orchestrated by Zionist interests, is destroying our countries from the inside. Patriotism, the most basic and fundamental trait of any nation that wants to survive, has become something to be ashamed of.
Feminism has destroyed family values and birth rates. Healthy nationalism has been replaced with a culture of guilt, self-hatred, apathy, degeneracy and pathological altruism. We are told to embrace "diversity", in reality this simply means instead of just being a global minority, Europeans are supposed to become a minority in their own countries as well. No civilized society can keep up with the birth rate of third world immigrants, especially when the main goal is integration rather than assimilation. Parallel societies breed poverty, crime and radicalism.
Multiculturalism has never, at any time in human history, worked anywhere. If you believe otherwise, you're delusional. In fact it's the primary reason for every major conflict.
The crimes committed by the EU against the European peoples are directly in violation of the 1948 UN genocide convention, Article II: (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Because of this injustice, far-right parties everywhere in Europe are gaining astonishing amounts of support, becoming the biggest parties in some countries.
Any European that does not rise up to defend his country from foreign invasion because he's too scared of words does not deserve it.
We are still at a point where you will not get imprisoned for your political opinion in most European countries, but this will change very soon. Do not be apathetic, do not be weak. Be someone that can be proud to call himself European.
Seattle's Wage Hike to $15 minimum
Making it illegal for people to find work and experience hardly seems compassionate
The announcement sounded like the premise of a feel-good summer movie. High schoolers in Seattle set to start working in ice cream shops and summer camps are given a raise by their City Council. Employees and employers alike will enjoy the summer of their lives, since all those youngsters will have more money in their pockets to spend at local businesses, as well as make memories on warm, starry nights.
That may be a good trailer, but it hardly captures the reality of how Seattle’s new minimum-wage law will play out for real-life teens and the others seeking work in that city’s lower-paying industries.
Reality check No. 1 is that there are already far too few minimum-wage jobs for high schoolers and those with few skills or limited education. As the Employment Policy Institute recently reported, in the Seattle area the unemployment rate for 16- 19-year-olds with less than a high school diploma sits at a shocking 31.4 percent. That means that almost one in three teens looking for work — note that they are seeking positions that pay the current minimum wage, not $15 an hour — can’t find an opening. Their inability to find a job today doesn’t just mean less money for movies and going to the beach this summer. It means they won’t start a work history and gain the valuable skills and experience that are necessary for future jobs, ones that pay more and start them toward long-term careers.
Seattle is far from the worst job market for youth in the country: Riverside, Calif., and Portland, Ore., have youth unemployment rates in excess of 50 percent. That means that for every high schooler lucky enough to have a job, there’s another scouring want ads.
But, this law will also shape the lives of many adults who are responsible for families. Proponents of the higher minimum wage have argued that the new mandate will particularly help women, who account for two-thirds of minimum-wage workers. This statistic also suggests that women will also be far more vulnerable to the potential job losses created by the new minimum wage. Nationally, women also account for nearly two-thirds of part-time workers, positions that are also are more likely to pay the legal minimum. As employment costs rise, businesses will be tempted to cut and consolidate part-time positions in favor of fewer, more highly skilled workers. That’s bad news for those who need or prefer part-time schedules to balance their work and family responsibilities.
It’s also bad news for minority youth, who tend to have fewer education and fewer job opportunities. A higher minimum wage makes it less likely a business owner will take a chance on them. The national unemployment rate in March 2014 for African-American teenagers was almost double the rate for whites, a jaw-dropping 38 percent. That’s unlikely to reverse if the country follows Seattle’s lead and makes hiring young workers more and more expensive.
Proponents of minimum-wage hikes want to cast themselves as champions of the rights of the little guy, people and organizations fighting against greedy corporate America. Yet it’s important to keep in mind what minimum-wage regulations are at their core: laws that prevent free people from entering into contracts to trade work for wages below what government says is best. Making it illegal for people to find work and experience hardly seems compassionate. Many families recognize that skill-building positions are often worth more than what they pay, which is why unpaid internships remain a staple for middle-class youth — including, quite likely, the children of Seattle City Council members. Don’t younger Americans from less fortunate circumstance also deserve skill-building opportunities? Boosting the minimum wage will only further restrict it.
Lack of employment, not low wages, is the biggest factor creating poverty today. In 2012, just under one in 10 working-age adults living in poverty had full-time, year-round work, while two-thirds had no work at all, according to the most recent census data available (see Table 18). Raising the minimum wage will do nothing to help those who lack employment and can make their problems worse.
If Seattle’s City Council wants to help people in need, then this new minimum-wage law should end up on the cutting-room floor instead of part of the city’s story. It should be repealed immediately.
pic related israel gay
Iceland Just Jailed Dozens of More Corrupt Bankers
In stark contrast to the record low number of prosecutions of CEOs and high-level financial executives in the U.S.,
Iceland has just sentenced 26 bankers to a combined 74 years in prison.
The majority of those convicted have been sentenced to prison terms of two to five years. The maximum penalty in Iceland for financial crimes is six years, although hearings are currently underway to consider extending the maximum beyond six years.
The prosecutions are the result of Iceland’s banksters manipulating the Icelandic financial markets after Iceland deregulated their finance sector in 2001. Eventually, an accumulation of foreign debt resulted in a meltdown of the entire banking sector in 2008.
According to Iceland Magazine:
In two separate rulings last week, the Supreme Court of Iceland and the Reykjavík District Court sentenced three top managers of Landsbankinn and two top managers of Kaupþing, along with one prominent investor, to prison for crimes committed in the lead-up to the financial collapse of 2008. With these rulings the number of bankers and financiers who have been sentenced to prison for crimes relating to the financial collapse has reached 26, and a combined prison time of 74 years.
Massive debts were incurred in the name of the Icelandic public, to allow the country to continue to function, which are still being repaid to the IMF and other nations eight years later by the citizens of Iceland. In contrast to the U.S., Iceland has chosen to hold the criminals that manipulated their financial system accountable under the law.
The Philippines factory fire shows the grim reality behind a fast-growth economy
http://qz.com/405744/the-philippines-factory-fire-is-low-wage-darling/
The Kentex Manufacturing factory fire that killed 72 workers last week in a industrial neighborhood outside of Manila is highlighting weakness at the heart of one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies. Thanks to a combination of increased outsourcing work, growing remittances, and government expenditure, including in manufacturing-related infrastructure, the Philippines economy has been one of the fastest-growing in Asia in recent years, even besting China at one point. The country boasts one of the region’s youngest and fastest-growing populations.
But a vital ingredient to the Philippines’ continued economic success is growth in its manufacturing sector. The Philippines has one of the lowest average manufacturing worker wages in Asia, according to a 2014 survey of Japanese companies that outsource manufacturing through the region, although it is still more than twice that of Bangladesh.
While textile and shoe manufacturers have raced to super-low-wage Bangladesh, the Philippines is trying to attract higher-value tech manufacturing work. Economists believe high value manufacturing is vital to the country’s long-term development, and consultants have dubbed the “key industry” for the country in the next 20 years. Well-paying jobs are key to increasing domestic consumption to fuel stable economic growth in the Philippines.
Philippines officials have said recently that Foxconn is looking at making Apple products in the country, as rising wages in China prompt companies to look elsewhere. Japanese companies from bicycle manufacturers to car makers have set up shop in the Philippines in recent years, as the government pushes what it calls the “China+1″ strategy to attract global manufacturing.
Last week’s factory fire may make some companies think twice. Both Kentex Manufacturing and the shoe company it was working for were locally owned, but the conditions that it operated under were not that uncommon in the Philippines, local labor leaders said.
They were also incredibly grim and fatally negligent.
Whistleblowing? Shit on Daystar - 10/24/2015
Hey, I don't know where to dump this off, but I caught some stuff regarding Palestinian Stabbings and Daystar likely falsifying stuff (yeah yeah but here)
Isreal Now News - Ask The Source - 5:00pm Central Time, USA
Interviewer - Josh Reinstein
Interviewee - Yoni Kempinski - host of www.israelinewssource.com
I've tried going to his site but it is not working. Their interview essentially had Yoni and Josh say that international news is skewed and that there is no circle of violence that gets Palestinians to stab Jews and vice versa.
I have a feeling this interview is cooked. Also, the screen splashes kept fading really fast and for some odd reason as if to hide something.
in b4 jew conspiracy
Webm Thread
Provide a short summary for your webm if you please.
Here is an overview of western culture that is irrefutable. It spells out why we are in decay and why we will shine again.
My blood is my people. My mind is my culture. My body is the blood and mind of my nation.
Jesus, Drawing Muhammad, and the Idolatry of Free Speech
Pamela Geller had every “right” to host a conference in Texas that mocked Muhammad with a “Draw Muhammad” contest. The United States gives her that freedom – the Freedom of Speech, which includes the freedom to defiantly ridicule whomever she wants. Geller is apparently not a Christian, but many Christians have come to her defense of the conference. Let me be clear: There is no Christian defense of a conference that mocks Islam, Muhammad, or Muslims.
Please, tell me, when did Jesus ever endorse ridiculing others? Let me answer that for you: Never. In fact, Jesus says the exact opposite. When he was asked which commandment was the greatest, he responded, Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. As if there were any doubt, Jesus extended the whole “love your neighbor as yourself” law to include even those we call our enemies:
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not event he Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
If Christians are going to take seriously Jesus’ command to follow him, then we need to stop this absurd defense of drawing pictures of Muhammad. And if we defend the practice of ridiculing our fellow human beings by hiding behind the Freedom of Speech, then we have made Freedom of Speech into an idol.
Pamela Geller, as a non-Christian, has the right to host the conference. But Christians do not have the right, or the freedom, to support the conference. For Christians, freedom comes from following Christ in loving God and our neighbors as we love ourselves. The obvious implications of Jesus’ command to love our neighbors means that we should not mock them.
India - Chemical and Biological Weapons Must Be BANNED
Use of chemical weapons must be condemned
India has called on the international community to be vigilant on non-state actors and terrorist groups seeking and using chemical weapons and said the use of such weapons anywhere and by anyone must be condemned.
"The use of chemical weapons anywhere and by anyone must be condemned and the international norm against the use of chemical weapons must not be breached," visiting Member of Parliament Abhishek Banerjee said at a debate on weapons of mass destruction at the First Committee of the General Assembly here on Thursday.
He said India contributed to international efforts under the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) for the destruction of Syria's declared chemical weapon stockpiles.
"The international community should continue to be vigilant on non-state actors and terrorist groups seeking or using chemical weapons," he added.
Given that disarmament is a primary goal of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the remaining possessor States should fulfil their obligations within the shortest possible time.
India completed the destruction of its chemical weapon stockpiles in 2009 within the stipulated time frame under the CWC.
The provisions of the Convention should be implemented in a manner that does not hinder legitimate activities, especially in countries like India with a large and growing chemical industry, he said adding that universality is fundamental to the success of the Convention.
He voiced India's commitment to improving the effectiveness of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and strengthening its implementation and its universalising.
"We believe this is necessary in view of the new challenges to international peace and security emanating from proliferation trends, including the threat posed by terrorists or other non-state actors seeking access to biological agents or toxins for terrorist purposes," he said.
He also supported a robust consultation process among all States Parties leading to the Eighth Review Conference next year, so as to contribute to its success through preparations on substantive and procedural issues.
He reiterated India's commitment to maintaining the highest international standards with reference to control of nuclear, chemical, biological and toxin weapons and their means of delivery.
"In this regard, India has made considerable progress in its engagement with the relevant multilateral export control regimes with a view to seeking full membership," he said.
Stop White Genocide
This global White genocide is not being carried out through mass murder – it is being carried out through political policies.
On October the 10th, protesters gathered outside the town hall in Sydney, Australia. The “Party for Freedom in Sydney” organized the protest to speak out against the extremely brutal mass murders in South Africa of which White people are specifically a target of.
“It is not a matter that is talked about often. It is never seen in the news. It isn’t discussed around the water-cooler.” wrote sydneytrads.com, which first reported on the protest.
“The murder of Whites in South Africa has a particularly savage element to it, above and beyond the merely criminal. It reeks of malice and racially motivated violence.”
“Some of the stories are truly horrific: a family brutally clubbed to death – save for the twelve year old son who was thrown into a scalding bath bound and gagged, whist the family dog was disemboweled.”
“A whole family cut up with an axe; a mother and daughter are raped and tortured seemingly for kicks; a man is stabbed 150 times and his wife and child shot at close range and other reports include the pouring of boiling water down the throats of an elderly couple and farmers being dragged behind vehicles. These are not mere acts of violence incidental to theft or other criminal activity.”
One eyewitness said “most of the people who yelled at us today were women, and all of them were White. I really don’t understand what they’re going on about. Why should the mass murder of Whites, many of whom are women and children, not be a cause for concern? That’s what we’re protesting about!”
Another person asked “do these people think we should be ignoring something that would be a cause of large scale public denunciations if it were perpetrated against, say, indigenous Australians? So it’s OK to treat Whites this way? Is that what I’m supposed to take from the abuse we got?”
Things are so bad in South Africa that one politician who was campaigning for presidency had to promise that there would “never be a white genocide” under his rule, after he was caught singing about shooting White people.
This is precisely why we all must stand united against White Genocide, not just in South Africa, but the one that’s taking place globally.
There is often some confusion to what we mean by this, let me explain. This global White genocide is not being carried out through mass murder – it is being carried out through political policies.
Firstly, majority White countries were all at the same time opened up to massive scale non-White immigration. Secondly “diversity” laws were put in place which are specifically meant to get more non-White people into White areas.
Both of these policies were put in place because there is a collective intent to get rid of White people, or at the very least, get rid of the White majority. This is White Genocide.
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Lukashenko wins 83.47% of vote in presidential election in Belarus - final results from election commission
The incumbent president Alexander Lukashenko won 83.47 percent of the vote, Belarusian Central Election Commission Secretary Nikolai Lozovik said on Friday when declaring the final voting results.
The president has managed the economy and the sweeping changes in European politics affecting the manufacturing and trade concerning Belaruse.
The country has recovered swiftly under this energetic leaders rule.
Belarus has higher support for leaders than Americans do.
/pn/? more like /pu/ this board is fucking shit
Common Core testing obsessively while failing to teach
The Corporate Education Reform Industry and its allies like President Obama, Former President George W. Bush, presidential candidate Jeb Bush and Democratic governors Andrew Cuomo and Dannel Malloy have repeatedly claimed that the Common Core, the Common Core testing scheme, diverting scarce public funds to charter schools, privatizing public education and evaluating teachers based on the Common Core test results would be good for the nation’s public school students, their parents and the country’s future.
As a result of their ill-conceived policies billions of dollars in public taxpayer funds at the federal level and tens of millions of dollars here in Connecticut are being shifted away from classroom instruction so that corporate education reform companies can continue to make even more money. A new independent study authorized by Florida’s legislatures report recently reported that,
“[This year’s Common Core Test] passing scores were not established through a formal standard setting process and therefore do not represent a criterion-based measure of student knowledge and skills”
The statement is a condemnation of a failed testing system that some officials, especially here in Connecticut, continue to defend.
The new Florida report was authored by Alpine Testing Solutions and edCount, LLC and was conducted as a result of Florida House Bill 7069 which was signed into law on April 14, 2015.
The Florida law required that, “An Independent Verification of the Psychometric Validity of Florida’s 2015 Common Core testing program” be completed and that a reported on the issue be submitted by September 1, 2015 to Florida’s State Senate K-12 Education Committee. The development of the Common Core testing program in Florida is not unlike the situation in Connecticut.
Last year, as a result of growing public pressure, Florida’s Legislature and Governor tried to convince the public that by renaming their Common Core Program they were moving away from the centralized Common Core Standards and Common Core tests that were part of the SBAC and PARCC Common Core operation. SBAC and PARCC are the two national entities developing and managing the Common Core and Common Cores testing programs.
In the case of Florida, the name was changed to the Florida Standards Assessment, while in Connecticut Governor Malloy and the Connecticut General Assembly replaced the term “Common Core” with the softer, gentler notion that our state’s students were being buried by the, “Common Core State Standards in Connecticut.”
But in neither case was the change anything more than cosmetic.
Why the disagreements? Many conservatives are outraged at attempts to "federalize" the curriculum. Jeb Bush, an ardent supporter of Common Core, is being vilified for his support – with Donald Trump going so far as to say that support of Common Core will "kill Bush". Chris Christie, a vocal supporter of the Common Core in 2014, now says his views have "evolved" and opposes it. Ted Cruz chimes in, "We need to repeal every word of Common Core!" On the left, Hillary Clinton called the arguments around Common Core "very painful, because the Common Core started off as a bi-partisan effort," but she has avoided taking much of a position. Others on the left express concern about the increasing number of hours that will be spent on testing, lack of teacher preparation, and inadequate curriculum materials.
As with many issues in politics, very few people – even those with fierce opinions – understand what Common Core is or have actually plowed through the nearly 200 pages of the standards documents. And almost no one is asking the right questions: Are these the right standards? Will they increase or diminish students' motivation to learn? And, finally, how do we assess student performance against these standards?
In an effort to implement the policy mandate of "all students college ready," the Common Core state standards have been designed to align with college admissions requirements. Because colleges require all applicants to take advanced math – at least Algebra II – this is the math standard that all students in the country will now have to meet, requiring mastery of obscure algebraic procedures that the vast majority of adults never use. In English, high school student writing will be limited to essays on the assumption that skill in writing essays is what is required for college.
The ability to tell stories – an essential tool for making one's point in the adult world – is not in the curriculum.
So what is the alternative? Is Common Core, to paraphrase the old line about democracy, the worst system except for all the others?
It's a simple formula: fewer, higher, more flexible performance standards, which are developed and graded by real teachers, plus less formulaic testing and stress = more real learning.
trump
trump trump
Eyes on Beirut
Police brutality against peaceful protesters is happening when Lebanese people are trying to reclaim their rights. Protesters are being beaten up, hosed down and shot for raising their voice. They are calling against the corruption of the government.
Beirut needs international help.
All eyes on Beirut. And spread the word.
getting real sick of you jews
My hope
I hope this place doesn't become a NatSoc hugbox like /pol/.
That's all really.
There is hope
http://www.thenews.com.pk/article-195182-Autistic-traits-linked-to-creative-problem-solving
From some pakistani newspaper
Autistic traits linked to creative problem-solving
People with autism may be more likely to think outside the box than people without the disorder, a British study suggests. Researchers surveyed 312 people online, asking if they had autism and assessing whether they might have some traits of the disorder even if they hadn’t been formally diagnosed with it. They tested participants’ creativity by seeking interpretations of images designed to be seen more than one way – such as a picture that might be viewed as either a rabbit or a duck. Then they gave participants one minute to name as many uses as possible for ordinary objects like a brick or a paper clip.
Compared to people without any indication of autism, the individuals who said they were diagnosed with autism and the participants without a diagnosis who exhibited many traits of the disorder generally offered fewer responses to these queries, but they also tended to have more unusual answers, the study found. “We think that perhaps the people with autistic traits use more effortful methods to produce answers to divergent thinking tasks (not based on obvious word associations or common uses for similar items) and therefore come up with fewer but better responses,” said lead author Dr. Catherine Best of the University of Stirling in the UK, in email to Reuters Health.
“Mild autism can provide some intellectual advantages and severe autism is a great handicap,” said Grandin, who wasn’t involved in the study. “If all the autism traits were removed, we would lose many creative minds in music, art, math and science.” It’s possible that some people with autism may focus intensely on their own thoughts, to the exclusion of listening to others speaking to them, and this might lead autistic people to generate less conventional thoughts and expressions, said Nira Mashal, head of the brain and language lab at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel.
Bear in mind, this is an online survey. It may or may not be accurate
Still there is little doubt that Abe is a right-leaning nationalist. He visits the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, sits on a variety of questionable committees — such as the Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership Diet Member’s Roundtable (Shintou seiji renmei kokkai giin kondankai), the Liberal Democratic Party Committee for Historical Investigation (Jimintou rekishi kentou iinkai), Diet Members’ Group for Considering Japan’s Future and History Textbooks (Nippon no zento to rekishi kyokasho wo kangaeru giin no kai) among others — and he would like to formally revise the Article 9 ‘peace clause’ of the Japanese constitution. But Abe’s nationalist ‘qualifications’ need to be divorced from analyses of Japan’s foreign policy.
Criticisms aside, Japan has a free press, transparent rule of law and a democratically elected government. Civil society groups are actively ensuring Japan does not forget its wartime past by remembering the so-called ‘comfort women’, arguing against the revision of Article 9 and promoting an anti-nuclear Japan by preserving the memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The sheer numbers of Japanese involved in these activities dwarf those in far-right nationalist groups, such as Nippon Kaigi, Sakura Channel and Zaitokukai, not only in number but also in the diversity of their membership.
While nationalism is present in Japan, far-right nationalism and historical revisionism is a peripheral view that does not represent mainstream Japanese society.
Seike suggests a number of measures: increasing the fertility rate (though the impact will be lagged a couple of decades); increasing the participation of older people in the active workforce (though the structure of pensions and mandatory retirement encourage them to stay out of the workforce); and expanding childcare and other benefits to young people with the aim of lifting female participation in the workforce.
Lifting migration (a difficult sell in Japan) might be another.
Mandatory retirement also tends to push workers who stay in the workforce into jobs where their acquired skills and knowledge are underutilised, leading to a loss in productivity.
But if Japan revises mandatory retirement practices by lifting the legal minimum age of retirement or by introducing anti-age discrimination legislation, it will also need to change the seniority-based wage and promotion system. If a firm lifted the mandatory retirement age while leaving seniority-based wages unchanged, it would have to raise its wage bill considerably. Tackling this will require cooperation between unions and employer groups.
Encouraging older Japanese people to stay in the workforce will only mitigate part of the problem. The social security system also needs urgent reform.
Benefits for young people should be more generous, particularly with respect to childcare. In the late-1970s, when the fertility rate started declining, the Japanese government should have been concerned about population decline. But it took until the 1990s for the government to introduce the so-called ‘Angel Plan’ — a package of policies, which on the whole was not very daring, to promote comprehensive childcare support.
Unlike pensions, medical care, and long-term care — which are guaranteed revenue under Japan’s social insurance system — childcare has historically not had any permanent revenue source. So in 2013 the National Council on Social Security System Reform, which I chaired, recommended that the government should reserve revenue from the consumption tax for childcare.
Costs in both the pension and in the medical and long-term care systems must also be contained. Changing the pension eligibility age will help with the former, but medical and long-term care spending will be somewhat more difficult to restrain. They will increase at more than the rate of increase of the older population. This is not only because people over 75 years old are more likely to need medical and long-term care, but also because of the increase in the quality and the cost of medicine and care. Addressing this problem will require cooperation with service providers.
Japan’s high debt-to-GDP ratio means that social security system reform is vital.
Space Updates
SPACE TECHNOLOGY
Nuclear Thermal Rockets
NASA is about to fund renewed research and experimentation into NTRs. Public approval will be hard
With the capability of generating high thrust and 100% more specific impulse than the best chemical rockets, the time and cost-saving potential of nuclear thermal rockets (NTR) for deep-space missions is once again gaining interest at NASA. Although never flown, the NTR concept is relatively simple. The rocket engine is based around a nuclear fission reactor, which heats the liquid hydrogen (LH2) propellant instead of igniting combustible fuel.
The resulting hot gas is pumped into a separate high-pressure chamber, which, through valve 11 communicates with tube shocks. At the other end of the shock tube we find structed diffuser serves to concentrate the energy of the shock wave, and the valve 12, connecting tube with a nozzle rocket.
Duty cycle engine is as follows: pump 5 takes the working fluid from the reservoir and high-pressure pumps it through a reactor, where it evaporates and is heated to about 2500° C — and then injected into the high-pressure chamber. Shock tube at this point is still filled with gas of low pressure left over from the previous cycle. Then the valve 11 to quickly open, compressed gas, bursting into the pipe instantaneously compresses and heats the gas in the tube, causing the appearance in it of a strong shock wave.
A proposed space elevator stretching 12 miles into the stratosphere could cut out the need for rockets to shuttle astronauts into space, according to a proposal from a Canadian company.
It sounds like an idea out of a science fiction novel, but Thoth Technology has been granted a patent for an inflatable, pneumatically pressured tower stretching 12.5 miles high. The top of the so-called space elevator would serve as a liftoff point to space, potentially saving more than 30 percent of the fuel of a conventional rocket, according to the company.
"From the top of the tower, space planes will launch in a single stage to orbit, returning to the top of the tower for refueling and reflight," Brendan Quine, the inventor of the ThothX Tower, said in a statement.
By removing the need for the vertical launch of a rocket, energy can be saved, allowing space passengers to catch a horizontal flight, much like a passenger plane, from the top of the space elevator.
Aside from being a final stop for astronauts before heading out of this world, Quine wrote in a filing with the United States Patent Office that the tower could help with wind-energy generation, communications, scientific research and tourism.
While it's just an idea for now, the patent moves it one step closer to potentially being another way to revolutionize space travel.
A potential advancement in the United States’ electric propulsion capability for the future of spaceflight is being underscored by a new NASA contract to support work on the VASIMR project – short for the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket.
VASIMR works with plasma, an electrically charged gas that can be heated to extreme temperatures by radio waves and controlled and guided by strong magnetic fields.
Ad Astra Rocket Company announced today that it has completed contract negotiations with NASA on the group’s Next Space Technology Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) award and are now entering the execution phase of the project.
Long duration, high-power test
Under the award, Ad Astra is to conduct a long duration, high-power test of an upgraded version of the VX-200™ VASIMR prototype, the VX-200SS (“SS” for steady state), for a minimum of 100 hours continuously at a power level of 100 Kilowatts.
Testing will be conducted in Ad Astra’s large, state-of-the-art vacuum chamber in the company’s Webster, Texas facility.
The NASA and Ad Astra executed the contract — a three-year, fixed price agreement — on August 7, 2015 for a total value of just over $9 million.
The agreement is structured as a one-year contract with two additional one-year extensions based on the accomplishment of mutually agreed upon progress milestones, Ad Astra added in their press statement.
NASA’s Advanced Exploration Systems Program sponsors NextSTEP awards in a 50/50 cost partnership with industry.
Former astronaut, Franklin Chang Díaz, serves as Chairman of the Ad Astra Board and Chief Executive Officer – a space traveler with NASA for 25 years and a veteran of seven space shuttle flights.
India Strategic Uranium Reserve
Department of Atomic Energy is carrying out nuclear energy programme in India.
The Indian Nuclear Power Programme has the following three stages.
The Indian Nuclear Power Programme has the following three stages.
1.First Stage: It is already commercial now, comprised setting up of PHWRs (pressurized heavy water reactors) and associated fuel cycle facilities. PHWRs use natural uranium as fuel and heavy water as moderator and coolant. The देसीgn, construction, and the operation of these reactors are undertaken by public sector undertaking the NPCIL (Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited). The company operates 16 reactors (2 Boiling Water Reactors and 14 PHWRs) with a total capacity of 3900 MWe.
2.Second Stage: It was envisaged to set FBRs (Fast Breeder Reactors) along with Reprocessing plants and plutonium-based fuel fabrication plants. Plutonium is produced by irradiation of Uranium-238. The Fast Breeder Programme is in the technology demonstration stage. Under this stage, the IGCAR (Indira Gandhi Center for Atomic Research) has completed देसीgn of a 500 MWe PFBR (prototype fast breeder reactor) being implemented by BHAVINI (Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam).
3.Third Stage: The Indian Nuclear Power Programme is based on the thorium-uranium-233 cycle.Uranium-233 is obtained by irradiation of thorium. Presently this stage is in technology development phase. The ongoing development of 300 MWe AHWR (advanced heavy water reactor) at BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) concerns thorium utilization and its demonstration.
Over the past one year, India has been pursuing its case to buy uranium from different countries including Australia and Canada. It is also procuring uranium from Russia. India renewed a contract with the Central एशियाn country to procure 5000 MT of uranium.
After a record production this year, India is working on creating a 'strategic uranium reserve' to ensure its atomic power reactors do not face shortage of the crucial nuclear fuel.
"The reserve pool could be anywhere between 5000 MT to 15,000 MT which can last for 5-10 years," said a senior government official.
India's first indigenously देसीgned 500-MW fast breeder reactor at Kalpakkam would start nuclear power generation by September.
This project will be completed at any cost now," Mr Fadnavis told PTI.
The Jaitapur project, where the French company Areva is setting up six nuclear reactors with a total power generation capacity of about 10,000 MW, has been stuck for long due to differences over the cost of electricity.
Canada will supply 3,000 MT of uranium over the next five years at a cost of USD 254 million.
"For a developed country to be a partner country of a state is not a small decision… I will return home tomorrow but I can never forget Canada's love," he said.
Prime Minister Harper described Mr Modi's visit as "historic" and said his country wanted to work with India in enhancing trade, investments and working in the security area.
India will sign a contract with Kazakhstan to procure 5,000 metric tonnes of uranium Kazakhstan is one of the major uranium suppliers to India. It has 15 per cent of the world's uranium resources and became the leading uranium-producing country in 2009.
Apart from Kazakhstan, India also has an agreement with Uzbekistan, another Central एशियाn country, to procure uranium.
India's reactors had been running under capacity for all these years due to lack of fuel.
India and Australia had last year signed a landmark civil nuclear deal, clearing the way for Canberra to sell uranium to the energy-starved country for power generation.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Kazakhstan signed an agreement on Thursday to locate the first internationally-controlled bank of low-enriched uranium in the ex-Soviet nation to ensure fuel supplies for power stations and prevent nuclear proliferation.
Set to become fully operational in 2017, is intended to provide IAEA member states with confidence in a steady and predictable supply of fuel even if other routes are disrupted.
The storage facility will be located not far from Semipalatinsk where the Soviet Union tested nuclear weapons. By the time of its 1989 closure following growing popular protests, Semipalatinsk had held 30 surface, 88 atmospheric and 340 underground tests.
The mineral-rich Central एशियाn nation of 17.5 million is the world's largest uranium producer and holds more than 15 percent of global uranium reserves, second only to Australia. It has no nuclear power stations of its own.
2:1 CONSERVATIVES TO LIBERALS
WHY ARE THE LIBERALS SHOWING SO MUCH POWER?
Divide and lack of Unity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut825BjnMco
Conservatives need a banner to rally under. Will it be the far right? Centrists are too easily swayed.
Environmentalists Getting Murdered in Brazil
The killers came from the forest, the very same forest Raimundo Santos Rodrigues so loved.
The environmentalist had spent years defending one of the last pristine swathes of the eastern Amazon rain forest from loggers, miners and farmers. But his activism had earned him enemies in Brazil’s northern state of Maranhão.
And on Tuesday afternoon, those enemies pounced.
Santos Rodrigues and his wife were riding their motorbike from the market back to the Biological Reserve of Gurupi when two men suddenly emerged from the treeline, witnesses told local media. As the couple crossed a bridge, the gunmen opened fire, hitting both the environmentalist and his wife.
To ensure their objective, the assassins ran up to Santos Rodrigues and stabbed the injured man to death. His wife, Maria da Conceição Chaves Lima, was rushed to the hospital and is expected to live.
Santos Rodrigues had been a “marked” man because of his environmentalism, said a man who spoke to G1 anonymously for fear of also being targeted.
“Loggers hated him because he denounced them,” said a co-worker, also anonymously. “He was very active in the region, defending the community, attending the Union of Rural Workers of Bom Jardim.”
Officials have promised a thorough investigation and are treating the murder as an attack on a public official. Santos Rodrigues was a volunteer with the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, part of the Ministry of the Environment.
“It will be treated with top priority,” said Alexandre Saraiva, a federal police superintendent.
But that promise appears hollow against the bloody reality in Brazil, widely considered the most dangerous country on earth for environmentalists.
Between 2002 and 2013, at least 448 environmentalists were killed in Brazil, according to Global Witness. That equates to roughly half of all the environmentalists murdered worldwide during that period.
According to local watchdog CPT, the grim tally is even worse: More than 1,500 Brazilians have been killed over the past 25 years fighting deforestation, and another 2,000 have received death threats, Men’s Journal reported in 2012.
Last year, 29 Brazilian environmentalists were murdered, again more than any other country, according to Global Witness.
The reasons behind Brazil bewildering conservationist killing spree are simple. The country’s land ownership is “among the most concentrated and unequal in the world,” leading to conflicts between subsistence farmers or indigenous groups and “well-connected landowners over who has the legal right to forests and land,” according to Global Witness.
“Magnates buy off local politicians and policemen, and kill anyone who challenges their agricultural practices,” according to Men’s Journal.
As in the slaying of Santos Rodrigues, environmentalists are in most danger inside or at the edges of the Amazon. The giant rain forest — which some activists fear will be half gone by 2030 — is the site of 68 percent of all such murders, according to Global Witness. First the trees are cut down by loggers, which then opens the land up to cattle ranchers, soy farmers or miners.
“Many people from the logging and mining companies think the only way to solve problems is by killing the people who defend the forest,” federal prosecutor Felício Pontes told Men’s Journal.
Like the Amazon itself, the problem of violence against environmentalists is shared by many Latin American countries. Last year, at least 25 environmentalists were killed in Colombia, according to Global Witness. Honduras (12), Peru (9), Guatemala (5), Paraguay (3) and Mexico (3) also reported multiple murders of conservationists in 2014.
Although more than 80% of the killings were in Latin and Central America, Asian environmentalists are also at great risk. Fifteen Filipinos were killed in 2014, followed by Thailand (4), Indonesia (2) and Myanmar (2), again according to Global Witness.
Almost none of these murders are ever solved, the group says. A 2014 Global Witness report found that 908 activists were killed in 35 countries between 2002 and 2013, yet there were only 10 convictions.
“What feeds the violence is the impunity,” Isolete Wichinieski, national coordinator of the Brazilian group Commisão Pastoral da Terra, told the Guardian.
There was no security to stop us, say Ashley Madison hackers
Hackers who stole a trove of sensitive data from AshleyMadison.com said "nobody was watching" as they scoured the infidelity website and vowed to release more emails from its executives, online technology website Motherboard reported on Friday. The tech website said it was given a contact email address for the hackers, who call themselves the Impact Team, by an intermediary. The hackers replied with a message signed with the same signature and fingerprint, known as a PGP key, posted with the Ashley Madison data releases this week, Motherboard said.
"We were in Avid Life Media a long time to understand and get everything," the website quoted the hackers as saying. "Nobody was watching. No security."
David Kennedy, founder and security consultant at TrustedSec, said that the latest download, which was released with the warning "Time's Up!", appears to be authentic. "We have explained the fraud, deceit and stupidity of ALM [Ashley Madison's parent company Avid Life Media] and their members. Now everyone gets to see their data," the hackers said in a statement.
Impact Team had threatened to publish names and nude photos and sexual fantasies of customers unless Ashley Madison and Established Men, another site owned by Avid Life Media were taken down.
Representatives of Avid Life Media could not immediately be reached for comment.
Cyber security experts said data dumps on Tuesday and Thursday by the group appeared to be genuine. Tuesday's release had customer information that included U.S. government officials, British civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations. Motherboard reported that in its exchange with the hackers, they said they had 300 gigabytes of employee emails and internal documents, "tens of thousands of Ashley Madison users pictures" and user chat messages from the site. On Tuesday, hackers released 10 gigabytes of data.
Cyber security experts have said they expect more staged releases of sensitive information.
wew
Boston police foil potential Pokemon World Championship shooting
Two Pokémon World Championships players have been arrested after Boston police found illegally-owned guns and ammunition in their car. Kevin Norton (18) and James Stumbo (27) had boasted online about their haul prior to the event, posting pictures of the weapons and their vehicle. Pokémon fans who saw these posts online tipped off the event’s private security team. They denied the players access to the event before alerting Boston police. Norton and Stumbo were later arrested at their hotel after detectives found a 12-gauge shotgun and AR-15 assault rifle, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, and a hunting knife in their vehicle.
Both players’ names appear on the tournament's official invitees list under the Masters Division. Stumbo posted a photo of the weapons on the back of their car with the caption, “Kevin Norton and I are ready for worlds Boston here we come!!!" When a group member wished them luck, Norton replied, “With killing the competition?"
BPD bureau of intelligence and analysis commander Paul Fitzgerald said, “The BPD detectives did a great job in the stop and prevention of a potential tragedy.” Norton and Stumbo will appear today at Boston Municipal Court.
All those pikachus…all those zimbabwes…
I must complain i simply must!
Consider the following, an excerpt from an 'interview' with Donald Trump in Iowa with a 9 year old
In a genuinely brilliant piece of political stagecraft, Trump arrived at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday in his 52-foot, 11-passenger, $7 million Sikorsky S-76B helicopter and offered children free rides in it. As Thomas Lake of CNN reported, William Bowman, 9, and his two brothers, Sean, 6, and Brendan 5, who live in a suburb of Des Moines, clamored aboard. They were suitably amazed.
“Mr. Trump?” William asked.
“Yes,” Trump said.
“Are you Batman?”
“I am Batman,” Trump said.
FUCKING MR WAYNE IS FUCKING RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT AND SHITTILY WINNING!
WHAT IS GOING ON?! i- i just don't understand…when will people tire of this? When will people realise that building a fucking wall is a really shitty idea? WHAT ABOUT THE MEXICANS?!?!
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wew
Exclusive: Dozens of Clinton emails were classified from the start, U.S. rules suggest
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/21/us-usa-election-clinton-emails-idUSKCN0QQ0BW20150821
For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids. While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as "Classified," it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it. But the details included in those "Classified" stamps — which include a string of dates, letters and numbers describing the nature of the classification — appear to undermine this account, a Reuters examination of the emails and the relevant regulations has found.
The new stamps indicate that some of Clinton's emails from her time as the nation's most senior diplomat are filled with a type of information the U.S. government and the department's own regulations automatically deems classified from the get-go — regardless of whether it is already marked that way or not. In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department's own "Classified" stamps now identify as so-called 'foreign government information.' The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts. This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be "presumed" classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters.
"It's born classified," said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government's Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House's National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. "If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it's in U.S. channels and U.S. possession," he said in a telephone interview, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was "blowing smoke."
1/?
Is there anything more evil in the world than the British Empire?
-Stole wealth and turned countries into shitholes
-Destroyed Africa and left it in the state it is today
-Fucked up the middle east
-Created Israel
-Killed natives left and right
-Started the slave trade
-Invented death camps and used them on the Boers
-Rounded up and tortured Cypriot citizens in the 50s
-Industrial revolution
- Machine guns, slums, prisons, child labor, bad hygiene, the Black Plague, concentration camps, you name it. If it hurts people, the British probably came up with it.
Amish farmer Emery Miller has spent the past four years scrambling to help his friends recover from the biggest investment scam to hit his community, a multimillion-dollar fleecing of widows, struggling families and the elderly.
He has written to scores of Amish and Mennonite churches and community groups across the Midwest and asked for help, hoping to offset the losses inflicted by investment adviser Monroe Beachy. All told, Beachy swindled $16.8 million, most of which came from Amish investors.
The one place Miller refuses to go for money is a courthouse.
Since Beachy was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison in 2012, not one of the hundreds of Amish families who lost their money has filed a lawsuit against him. The reason is simple: The Amish, citing their deep religious beliefs, refuse to file civil cases against others, no matter how badly they have been burned.
And that raises a key issue in a contentious society: How can the Amish, with their beliefs, avoid being duped?
"Why don't we sue? Because we just don't, Miller said. "That's how we live and what we abide by.
As society becomes more litigious, the Amish remain invested in their traditions. Ohio has the largest Amish population in the country, with more than 67,000 people. Their beliefs are tested daily, and the temptation to sue has never been greater.
Distracted drivers have plowed into buggies, injuring parents and maiming their young. Oil and gas companies have reached questionable deals with Amish farmers over leases. Some businesses have tried to bamboozle them in everyday dealings that range from the sale of heifers to small-scale construction projects.
Miller and others victimized in Beachy's scam say they believe filing a lawsuit is too aggressive. They also admit that their views have made them vulnerable to being ripped off in business dealings, as many businesses realize that they can take advantage of the Amish without facing repercussions, according to court records and interviews.
"It is highly unusual for the Amish to bring a suit, said Charles Kennedy, an attorney in Wooster who has counseled Amish. "They just don't believe in it. They will defend themselves (if they are sued), but they don't sue.
Donald Kraybill has studied the Amish for years as a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.
"To many Amish, (a lawsuit) is forbidden, Kraybill said. "It's viewed as the way the government or the world solves problems, not how the Amish solve problems.
In the past five years, Ohio residents or their attorneys filed 2.7 million lawsuits in county courthouses, according to state records. In Cuyahoga County, residents filed 153,061.
The Amish don't want to be a part of that.
"We're vulnerable. We understand that,'' said a young dairy farmer who asked not to be identified. He stressed that the Amish have worked to become savvier. They often consult with attorneys before making major business decisions. But they remain trusting.
Miller, for instance, agreed to sell two heifers to a farmer he met at an auction several years ago. He gave the man the cows on the promise that he would be paid later. The farmer never paid Miller, despite his attempts to collect.
Miller refused to take the issue further, even after he had been hospitalized and needed to pay medical bills.
"I would rather be short on the money than be him,'' Miller said.
He realizes that not all cases are as simple. His dealings with Beachy are a testament to that.
From 1990 to 2010, Beachy, 81, operated A&M Investments in Sugarcreek, a small community in Tuscarawas County in the heart of Amish country, about two hours south of Cleveland. One of the portfolios he handled was for the Amish Helping Fund, established to assist members of the community pay for land, buildings and other expenses. The fund invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with Beachy.
Records show Beachy lied to his 2,700 investors about where he placed their money. Instead of low-risk U.S. bonds and securities, he placed their investments in junk bonds and high-risk investments that fluctuated greatly, records show. Investors, many of whom were Amish, gave Beachy $33 million. By the time he filed for bankruptcy in 2010, Beachy lost $16.8 million of it.
Miller leads a committee that has spent years seeking to help the people Beachy hit the hardest. He said the committee has scraped together tens of thousands of dollars from churches and community groups to help those who lost life savings. He said he lost about $5,000 in the scheme.
"I regret that this happened, he said. "But I hold nothing against Monroe. I have forgiven him.
World Banks Dominate while pretend enemies "war"
He looks up in admiration at a portrait of Big Brother, Winston feels he has at least ended his "stubborn, self-willed exile" from the love of Big Brother
So do you believe the official narratives? That Russia is at some perpetual war with USA and that shifting alliances are real and that the wars are real?
Why do you think police get militarized and there is so much research into controlling peoples minds but so little curing common diseases?
Well of course those ppm of toxins that destroy your body are for your safety. Nevermind that these toxins could be removed to 0ppb in your food and water but are not.
It isn't even about profit. Why would it be? Who creates the money and prints the debt? Anyway. Here is some news about Oceania.
US military officials are loudly bragging about their latest initiative to reassure Europe, a program that was called, unlikely enough, the European Reeassurance Initiative (ERI), and which to this point has involved moving a lot of sand around, and building some roads in rural parts of several Baltic states.
ERI is nominally the latest in a long line of programs the Obama Administration has announced to “combat Russian aggression,” and which are meant to build up nations along the Russian frontier to support massive US military deployments to spite Russia.
The plans are often ill-conceived, as the US idea to deploy huge amounts of tanks into several of these countries ran into problems because the tanks are stored in swampy areas where the mud makes it virtually impossible to drive a tank, and NATO has taken to having to “ship” those tanks back and forth to their various anti-Russia photo ops.
In this regard, ERI is trying to be the solution for the military-created problem, hauling thousands of tonnes of sand into those swampy areas to build “tank trails” that they can drive the tanks through, along with roads to support the infrastructure for the NATO operations in the area.
The army sees it as a win-win, as the pricey construction involves the use of contractors, and is subsequently popular with the host countries, and also lets the army deploy people to not-war-zones, which is “good for morale.”
That the whole program is make-work to “reassure” European nations about the US commitment to take part in some unlikely, disastrous future war with Russia is just gravy for them, as the Pentagon sees talk of a new Cold War as a great excuse to push for bigger budgets, and if they can’t physically position forces in the Baltic swamps for this scheme, they’ll build up the swamps so they can.
The Marine Corps' mission in Eastern Europe is rapidly evolving in the face of Russian saber-rattling, according to the outgoing commander of the Romania-based Black Sea Rotational Force.
Calais crisis far from over as thousands of immigrants head for the UK
The Channel Tunnel will be closed at night if the Calais crisis worsens under plans being considered by ministers - as it emerged that an African migrant walked almost its entire length.
Ministers have sought legal advice on what was described by Whitehall sources as the “nuclear option” of closing the tunnel to freight and passenger trains overnight.
The proposal, which has been discussed at meetings of the government’s emergency Cobra committee, follows concerns that the number of services at night is increasing the risk of migrants making it through the tunnel.
It comes as a Sudanese man was arrested by British police on Tuesday just steps away from the mouth of Eurotunnel in Folkestone, Kent, after dodging trains travelling at 100mph.
Haven't heard of the Calais crisis?
Don't worry the media tries to spam other non-stories to keep it out of the spotlight. You probably don't know as an American what the Calais Crisis is.
Thousands of migrants who are camped in Calais are attempting to reach the UK by crossing the Channel.
Some try to stow away on lorries bound for cross-Channel ferries. During recent strikes by French ferry workers, which closed the Channel Tunnel, migrants openly tried to board lorries stuck in traffic on the roads leading to the port. There have also been some reports of migrants attempting to stow away in people's cars.
Most recently, activity has shifted more to the Channel Tunnel. Migrants attempt to stow away on lorries headed for the Eurotunnel, or jump or cut security fences to try to hide on Eurotunnel trains themselves.
Eurotunnel has described "nightly incursions", with groups of up to hundreds of migrants attempting to breach security at once.
How long has this been going on?
While the number of migrants is currently at a high, the issue is far from new. In 1999, the controversial Sangatte refugee camp was opened in Calais, attracting thousands of would-be asylum seekers and people traffickers.
Its closure in 2001 and 2002 - on the orders of France's then minister of the interior, Nicolas Sarkozy - led to riots. Since then migrants have continued to arrive in Calais and build makeshift camps near the port. French authorities estimate there are about 3,000 people currently living in the camps known as "the Jungle", although other estimates put the higher.
The issue made headlines again in September last year after a ferry bound for the UK was stormed by about 235 illegal migrants.
The Home Office said Border Force and the French authorities together prevented more than 39,000 attempts to cross the Channel illegally in 2014/15 - more than double the number prevented the previous year, while Eurotunnel, which operates the Channel Tunnel says it has blocked 37,000 attempts since January.
And this leads to:
Mandatry ID cards (soon)
Identity cards are now "essential" in the wake of the Calais migrant crisis, campaigners have claimed.
The report said: "In the longer-term we must return to the introduction of ID cards.
"The French are right to point out that the absence of ID cards in the UK makes it far too easy for migrants to stay on illegally and find work in Britain."
"There are no ID cards. They can easily find work outside the formal economy, which is not really controlled."
ID cards were first mooted by the Labour government in 2003. However, the project was scrapped by the coalition in 2010.
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/nasa-tests-the-ferrari-of-rocket-engines-for-mission-to-mars/
This is the RS-25, the engine designed for NASA's Space Launch System rocket, intended to launch the Orion spacecraft and, eventually, see humanity on its way to Mars: the next big leap in physically exploring the solar system, our equivalent of putting astronauts on the moon in the 1960s.
At 4:30 p.m. EDT on August 13, 2015, NASA conducted a developmental test firing of the rocket's engines at its Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, the sixth in a series of seven tests for the rocket's main engine. Four RS-25 engines and two solid rocket boosters of five segments each will power the 70-metric-ton rocket configuration into deep space. "It is the most complicated rocket engine out there on the market, but that's because it's the Ferrari of rocket engines," said Kathryn Crowe, RS-25 propulsion engineer. "When you're looking at designing a rocket engine, there are several different ways you can optimise it. You can optimise it through increasing its thrust, increasing the weight to thrust ratio, or increasing its overall efficiency and how it consumes your propellant. With this engine, they maximised all three."
The resulting engine, according to Martin Burkey of the SLS strategic communications team, blows everything we currently have out of the water. "The RS-25 makes a modern race car or jet engine look like a wind-up toy," he said in a post on NASA's Rocketology blog. "It has to handle temperatures as low as minus 400 degrees where the propellants enter the engine and as high as 6,000 degrees as the exhaust exits the combustion chamber where the propellants are burned. It has to move a lot of propellants to generate a lot of energy. At the rate the four SLS core stage engines consume propellants, they could drain a family swimming pool in 1 minute."
The RS-25 produces 512,000 pounds of thrust, which is over 12 million horsepower. It's powered by four turbopumps that each generate 100 horsepower for each pound of weight, with a main shaft that rotates at a rate of 37,000 rpm, compared with 3,000 rpm for a car engine traveling at 60mph (96.5km/h). "The RS-25 is about the same weight and size as two F-15 jet fighter engines, yet it produces eight times more thrust. A single turbine blade the size of a quarter – and the exact number and configuration inside the pump is now considered sensitive – produces more equivalent horsepower than a Corvette ZR1 engine," Burkey wrote.
At such high speeds, even the smallest hitch in the process can cause massive problems, which is why the engines need to be tested extensively in a controlled situation before even thinking about leaving the ground. The test lasted nearly 9 minutes while NASA engineers collected performance data on the engine. The final test will involve firing all 4 RS-25 engines simultaneously, just as they would be fired during an actual launch of the SLS, Orion spacecraft included.
———
What about that new propulsion technology that could get a spacecraft to mars in just 70 days?
CHINESE EXPLOSIONS
FUEL DEPOT EXPLOSIONS HEART FROM MILES AWAY
12 FIREFIGHTERS now killed trying to save people hurt within the blast radius
Large and serial explosions melt steel beams in the compound.
Police said an initial blast took place in shipping containers at a warehouse for hazardous materials owned by Ruihai Logistics.
State media said senior management of the company had been detained by authorities, and that President Xi Jinping has demanded severe punishment for anyone found responsible for the explosions.
Surrounding area heat damage.
>Several thousand imported cars stored at the site were burned or destroyed, state media reported. They included more than 2,700 Volkswagens, 1,500 Renaults and 4,000 Hyundai and KIA vehicles.
So by keynesianism we know that thousands of jobs got created amirite?
SUPER COMPUTER SEVERAL KILOMETRES DISTANT UNDAMAGED
shut down as a safety precaution
Applying for Volunteership
How do we do this at this board?
Shielded by Christian Love
Support for the young women. Options for adoption. Love and kindness.
Death cultists practice abortion as if human life was meaningless.
Is it trivial because it is small?
We were all so small once.
Too many young women are pressured into abortion. A traumatizing experience that causes great pain.
Hormone imbalances result from this corrupting practice.
If we can choose which innocent life dies and which lives. Are we still listening to our hearts?
I approach you like one human being to another. Would you want to live in a society that steps on the weak when it is convenient?
A society that gets rid of the downtrodden when they become inconvenient? That is not the society I want to live in. Look in your heart.
""As a child born to a 16 year old mother who was kicked out of her home for wanting to keep me I know the story.
They tried to abduct her and convince her how finishing school right now was more important than the life of her child.
I was there growing. The stress put on my mother was great. Her family was not very religious.
40 years later today I live with my own kids, graduates from college. My mother was able to finish school while having me due to the support of her local church.
People she had never met before who saw two lives in need. Years later my mother is a devout christian that listened to her heart when everything else in her life felt wrong.
Someone was guiding her to make the right decision before she even knew there was anyone out there.""
Apparently, /n/ now links to /pn/
i don't know why but it does
It's time to revive /ubf/
Led by the dashing example of /intl/ boards like /1/, /am/, /vvv/ are growing and stabilizing. While different in theme, all of them have one common ideal: freedom of speech.
While indeed different, the users of the free boards should have a common ground for interacting, explaining their views on freedom and understanding, without one board extending its cultural hegemony over the other or cluttering itself with meta threads.
What we have going is a strong, growing counter-culture, the oppressors have /meta/ to regroup and confirm their ideals. It's only obvious that the counter-culture would have its own "/meta/ board" for the creation of inter-board counter-cultural ideas, memes and values.
Choose /ubf/
Choose freedom
India: Fighting Iodine Deficiency
>Grey for Good teamed up with Talwar, a prominent bindi distributor, and Neelvasant, an NGO doing extensive work in rural areas of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, five months ago.
>The group came up with a standard scarlet bindi with a twist: Each bindi’s adhesive came covered with 150-200 micrograms of iodine. Throughout the day,
>a woman wearing the iodine bindi absorbs on average 12% of their daily requirement of iodine, a marked improvement from before.
>The Life Saving Dot uses the same technology and design as nicotine patches, and it’s cheap; production costs are minimal, Shabaz says, and are affordable
>at just two rupees per pack. (The rural Maharashtrian women Grey for Good worked with earned an average of 20-30 rupees per day.)
>Plus, wearing the iodine-infused bindi requires no behavioral change.
>The campaign hopes to spread awareness about iodine deficiency, a problem that even the most vulnerable populations don’t always know exists.
>Initial tests have been positive; of the approximately 150 women who have been given the bindis to wear,
>none have reported negative side effects and many have reported decreases in headaches, a common side effect of iodine deficiency.
>There are still some shortcomings. Since bindis are worn by the country’s dominant Hindu majority,
>rural women of other religions aren’t going to reap the benefits. And while women face the brunt of iodine deficiency—pregnancy and birth often exacerbate symptoms and effects, making women particularly susceptible to the consequences of iodine deficiency—
>men are affected by the lack of nutrient in their diets, too.
Nationalism and Its Effects on Peace in Europe
With global crisis, unemployment, dissatisfaction, poverty and intolerance has increased and with it also nationalism. Political parties with nationalist platforms are rising and gaining more support around the world and Europe is no exception.
In Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom and across Europe we can see the rise of the right. The financial crisis in the Eurozone and beyond has triggered rising of nationalists and far-right political parties.
The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) on 9th of July released a report about the dramatic increase in anti-Semitism, lslamophobia, online hate speech and xenophobic political discourse as the main trends in 2014.
Nationalism can be positive with legitimacy, promotion of nations and inspiration for citizens or negative by creating tensions between different ethnicity and groups in or outside the country. Some negative aspects of ideology or political movement can be seen in the latest football matches in the Balkans, where supporters of team groups have burned many national flags and hooliganism that is the result of long lasting hatred and nationalism on the ground. Every country has its own history and different positions, but still similarities could be found.
The country all news is regarding to in recent times is Greece. A known slogan “Greece for Greeks” is well known in its anti-austerity party. Attacks against minorities and immigrants with racism are seen in one of the European Union (EU) members. Golden Dawn neo-Nazi party is linked to hundreds of violent attacks against minorities.
It is known for anti-immigration, racist-nationalist worldview. With elections being held this year in January the party captured 6.3% of the vote and 17 senate seats in Hellenic parliament and become the country’s third largest party. In 2014 the party won 9.4% of votes in European parliamentary election and with it 3 seats out of 21.
The party has been put on a trial this year for its criminal activity.
Nationalism in Greece has divided citizens and noncitizens to us and them and created the gap between both. With the economic crisis, Greeks debt, overall economic meltdown, unemployment and increasing number of refugees from different countries, the party led by Nikos Michaloliakos has gained more support and caused even greater intolerance to foreign people in need. Unfortunately, they are not the only one spreading intolerance. Many politicians have a stance against immigrants, which shapes the Greeks’ attitude towards nationalism.
china stronk
China is investing in Africa, South America, Middle Eastern countries and southeast asian neighbors.
What you may want to take a closer look at is China investing in Europe, Australia, Canada…
>Since 2005, the biggest recipients in this sector have been oil-rich Nigeria and Venezuela, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Algeria.
>The likes of Vietnam and Indonesia, in which China has been heavily engaged in infrastructure work, follow next, with the top 10 made up by Ethiopia – a country rich in arable land –
>Malaysia and Iran, both of which have been actively seeking investment in energy infrastructure, particularly the latter, which has been frozen out of western debt markets for years.
>In a move to curb China’s investment in assets, laws have been passed in both Australia and Canada which limit the amount of foreign direct investment made by state-owned enterprises (SOEs)
posting
In the news today news happened discuss you're all faggots and nobody fucking cares
HOTWHEELS ANNOUNCES PLANS TO RENOUNCE US CITIZENSHIP
Says US "is a terrible place"
…Speaks on community issues, denies responsibility
…wants RAND (R) to win the Republican nomination
I am turkish and i support ISIS. not because i'm muslim, but because i love gore videos. no matter what do they believe in, i love how they severe heads and sing nasheed.
i believe in tengri but i also love twink boys. i would believe in allah if i knew heaven and 72 virgin angels were real.
all hail davlat-al islam. death to skinskinned k*rdish extremists.
t. bisexual tengriist edgy multicultural anon
Posting interesting political things
Some of it is architecture, others are concept art etc
>tfw you will live to see giant mega-buildings in your lifetime
feels verticle sir
Republican Debate
Does it matter? Will Trump stuff it up? Who will be in it?
Find out next time on DRAGON BALL Z!
(really the 7th of August 9pm EST, 'kiddie's corner' debate at 5pm)
Mainstream press Attempting to hide HRC presidents child molestation
Mainstream press Attempting to hide HRC presidents child molestation
.
Last November, Terrence Bean was taken into custody in Portland, Oregon following an indictment by a jury that charged him with multiple sex crimes against minors. Now additional child sexual abuse charges have been made against him. Why isn’t the media covering this? Because he’s a prominent gay leader, that’s why.
Bean is the co-founder of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the most influential gay group in the nation; he is also a big donor to President Obama and even flew on Air Force One with him. The Associated Press (AP) chose not to cover the latest allegations, but not because it has no interest in new charges against alleged sex offenders: it does if the accused is a priest.
On June 28, AP reported on new charges against James Rupp, a former Michigan priest who was accused of sexually assaulting boys decades ago. On April 8, AP reported on new charges against Rev. Joseph Maurizio Jr., a Pennsylvania priest accused of molesting boys in Honduras. But there was no AP story on the latest charges against Bean. The AP bias is even worse than this.
On July 7, the day before Bean was hit with new charges, his lawyers filed a motion to have the multiple sex charges against him dismissed. Guess who covered that? AP, of course. The cover-up doesn’t end there.
HRC has no listing of Bean on its website, and it even lies about his role in founding the organization: it lists Steve Endean as the founder, when, in fact, he was a co-founder with Bean. That’s not an error – it’s disinformation. And by the way, guess what happened to Endean? He died of AIDS in 1993, having contracted the disease in 1985.
Thoughts on Charleston?
I think it's right to get rid of the flag from the state houses and such. It's basically like the nazi flag. Having that up is basically poking black people in the eye think, like a giant 'fuck you' to every black man in that state.
But don't take my word for it! Even George Bush agrees
Watch out Greece, it's the threat from the East: China, they say
Greek crisis is nothing compared to China
http://money.cnn.com/2015/07/06/investing/stocks-market-china-greece/index.html?iid=hp-stack-dom
Instead of focusing on Athens, investors should be much more worried about what's going on in China. You know, that country with about 1.4 billion people and the world's second largest GDP? The Shanghai Composite and Shenzhen Composite have both plunged about 30% from their highs due to legitimate concerns that Chinese stocks are in a bubble. China's government is taking steps to try and minimize any more pain in the market. But that could backfire. Regulators announced Sunday that they would make more capital available for an entity that will allow for even more margin lending, the practice of borrowing money to buy stocks. Buying on margin is incredibly risky.
Many experts believe the Chinese stock market's surge earlier this year was partly due to average investors taking on debt to invest in stocks. And when stocks first started to fall last month, many of those investors had to quickly sell their investments to pay back the loans. That fueled an even bigger drop in stock prices. It could get worse as investors realize that the slowdown in China's economy should hurt corporate profits.
"Exuberance for Chinese stocks isn't backed up by fundamentals," said Michael Pento, president and founder of Pento Portfolio Strategies, in a report Monday morning. "Instead, it appears markets are being levitated by continued government borrowings and manipulations."
Stephen: Why Beijing cannot let its bull market die
But perhaps there is a simpler explanation for Beijing’s extraordinary efforts to support equities: It created this bull market. Keeping it going is now seen as a test of the Communist Party’s strength, and possibly even its legitimacy. If you created the boom, arguably that also puts you on the hook for the bust. For the government, this means the fallout will not just be economic, but could also be political and social too.
1/2
Dear ISIS, try peacefully spreading your message. Violence is not listened to.
http://fullchan4jtta4sx.onion/fyllosstuff/src/1435178160786.jpg
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/nyregion/new-yorks-lawmakers-agree-on-campus-sexual-assault-laws.h
Bull-fighting: Jeet Heer asks 'Why are most Libertarians Male?'
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121974/cnn-poll-rand-paul-not-popular-republican-women
Since 1980, the Republican Party has been bedeviled by a persistent gender gap in presidential elections, as GOP nominees have struggled with female voters. But Rand Paul is facing an intensification of this phenomenon: He can’t even win over Republican women. A new CNN poll shows that the Kentucky senator is highly competitive among male primary voters, his 13 percent support putting him neck-and-neck with top candidates like Scott Walker (13 percent), Marco Rubio (12 percent) and Jeb Bush (11 percent). Yet among Republican women, Paul’s share of the likely vote collapses to 2 percent. The small sample size of the poll might have exaggerated the margin of error, but the size of the gender gap Paul faces is far larger than that of any other politician in the poll.
Why is Paul so unpopular among women? Setting aside what women think about Paul’s personal qualities, which would require pure speculation, consider what sets him apart from all the other candidates vying for the GOP nomination: his highly distinct political philosophy. While not a doctrinaire libertarian, Paul is by far the most libertarian-leaning candidate in the race. And there’s plenty of evidence that the libertarian worldview leaves most women cold, despite the fact that female intellectuals—Ayn Rand, most famously—have been pivotal in creating libertarianism. The demographic profile of libertarians is sharply defined. According to 2013 Pew survey, 7 percent of Americans identify as libertarian. Of those, two-thirds are men (68 percent) and nearly all are non-Hispanic whites (94 percent). That is, the typical libertarian is a white man. These firm demographic contours cry out for an explanation since, at first glance, there doesn’t seem much intrinsically white or male about libertarianism. Proclaiming itself a philosophy of individualism, with no overt celebrations of either patriarchy or racism, libertarianism still ends up being monochromatic and male.
Cathy Young, a libertarian journalist and author of the 1999 book Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality, notes that “if you look at polls that actually ask people about the role of government, the people at the far end of the libertarian scale are definitely more likely to be male, maybe by a 2:1 margin. Why? I think that for a variety of reasons (whether innately psychological, culturally driven, or shaped by life experience), women are less likely to be drawn to political philosophies that emphasize self-reliance and risk. Women are also more likely to rely on government services, both as clients and as employees.”
Jesse Walker, an editor at Reason magazine, agrees that the libertarian gender gap is real, arguing that for “various historically contingent sociological reasons, the American libertarian movement has drawn a lot on subcultures that are heavily male (computer programmers, for example), and that in turn had something of a self-perpetuating effect.” Aside from computer programming, libertarianism overlaps with other male-dominated subcultures as science-fiction fandom, the gaming community, Men’s Rights Activists, and organized humanism/atheism. But this account simply raises another question: Why do overwhelmingly male subcultures feel an affinity for libertarianism? Walker’s colleague Katherine Mangu-Ward offers a parallel explanation, noting, “Libertarianism has historically been a fringe movement. And fringes tend to be populated by men. There are exceptions, of course, but in general if you investigate the long tails of any bell curve you're going to discover a sausage fest, and libertarianism is no exception.”
1/
International Bank of Azerbaijan First Victim of Devaluation
>However, problems during the financial crisis of 2008-2009 were experienced not only by IBA. The then director of the Moscow office of Fitch Ratings for Financial Institutions Vladimir Markelov told Turan that in January-June 2009 asset quality deteriorated in all the Azerbaijani banks. The worst situation in this respect was observed in IBA.
>In the structure of problem loans of IBA 18.6% of them were overdue and 9.2% - restructured, on which the recipients once again came to agreement with the bank to change the terms of payment.
>The Chairman of the NGO Center for Economic Research Gubad Ibadoglu believes that this problem occurs in the IBA and other domestic banks due to their poor management. According to him, financial managers should take into account the global financial crisis and be able to manage risks in the crisis.
>More than half (50.2%) of the shares in IBA are owned by the state. According to Ibadoglu, in the case of deterioration of the situation the government will take measures to rescue the bank. The expert believes that dealing with banks through lending will give only temporary results and there is a need for more drastic measures.
> IBA is the only bank where a majority stake is owned by the state, which is not in a hurry with its privatization. For unclear reasons, the government put aside the roadmap for restructuring, reform and privatization of IBA, prepared by the IMF in 2012. Its implementation, according to the IMF, will open opportunities for the development of private banks, as well as diversifying the risks facing the country's banking system.
>In Azerbaijan there were 46 banks. And IBA no longer holds a special position - it is bypassed by Pasha Bank, Capital Bank and others. At the moment, the ratio of the assets of Azerbaijani banks to GDP is relatively low - about 30%.
http://autismdigest.com/the-need-to-be-perfect/
>People with autism and Asperger’s Syndrome tend towards black and white thinking. They see themselves and the world around them in polar opposites
nah
wow ni bord got here :) thank
]
u guy got lot of deskjucomn there ant that on pol so im glad :) thank bye!!
scrawny2brawny
major youtube artist
https://www.youtube.com/user/scrawny2brawny
topic: NWO conspiracy from a christian standpoint
Nigger theread
post funny nigger pics ITT
nigger pics are luke pepes in a way except they rent green and they smell bad an commin crimes
post away :–)
>not deleting dicks and brown pills
ayylien kazakh antelopes dying en masse
crosspost from /intl/ to stimulate this board
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32958032
>Around half of the world's critically endangered Saiga antelope have died suddenly in Kazakhstan since 10 May.
>An unknown environmental trigger is thought to have caused two types of normally benign bacteria found in the antelopes' gut to turn deadly.
>The animals die within hours of showing symptoms, which include depression, diarrhoea and frothing at the mouth.
>About 120,000 individual antelope have died, from a global population of approximately 250,000. Fortunately, mortality rates are now dropping, although the deaths continue in some populations.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/27/us-kazakhstan-antelope-idUSKBN0OC1XL20150527
>"We believe the cause of the deaths is pasteurellosis," Yerzhan Madiyev, deputy head of the ministry's veterinary committee, told a news conference.
>Pasteurellosis is a bacterial disease that can infect humans and cattle, rabbits, cats and dogs. Its bacteria occur naturally in the upper respiratory tract, but can be harmful when the immune system is compromised.
http://informburo.kz/novosti/svoyu-versiyu-gibeli-saygakov-vydvinul-doktor-bionauk-rossii-i-kazahstana-5079.html (russian source, citation is from wikipedia because I'm too lazy to translate it myself)
>Biologist Murat Nurushev suggested that the cause might be acute ruminal tympany, whose symptoms (bloating, mouth foaming and diarrhea) had been observed in dead saiga antelopes.[19] According to Nurushev, this disease occurred as a result of foraging on a large amount of easily fermenting plants (alfalfa, clover, sainfoins and mixed wet green grass).[19]
however one thing is mentioned nowhere else
>Среди погибших сайгаков практически не было самцов (за исключением 1-2 особей).
almost no males died from it
http://io9.com/over-120-000-saiga-antelopes-have-inexplicably-died-sin-1708176299
>It is not the first time the species has experienced a mass die-off. In 1984, an event killed about 100,000 individuals. Another 12,000 dropped dead in 2010.
>Not a single animal survived in the affected herds.
to explain the statement about no males dying despite entire herds being wiped out, from Wikipedia
>The mating season starts in November, when stags fight for the possession of females. The winner leads a herd of five to 50 females. In springtime, the mothers give birth to two (in two thirds of all cases) or one single foal.
Can I post CP and not get banned also check my dubs?
The Devil's Advocate-argue against the following
http://www.thenation.com/article/209057/olympic-bravery
The Olympic Bravery of Caitlyn Jenner by Dave Zirin
The Caitlyn Jenner story is one of triumph pulled from the precipice of tragedy. When known to the world as Bruce Jenner, Caitlyn was in her 60s and, as she said in Vanity Fair, found herself facing this thought: “If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret and never ever did anything about it, I would be lying there saying, ‘You just blew your entire life. You never dealt with yourself,’ and I don’t want that to happen.” Gender is self-determination, and Caitlyn Jenner seizing that self-determination in such a public fashion will save lives. We hopefully will see a difference not only in the shocking suicide rates of trans teens, but also in a heightened awareness of the plight of black trans women, who are victimized by an epidemic of violence. Whether or not Jenner raises those issues herself, her action provides the opportunity for advocates to do so.
The hope here is also that Caitlyn Jenner’s actions will be felt in the world of sports. Of course, they should in theory. One of my earliest sports memories was Bruce Jenner on the Wheaties box—shaggy hair, rippling muscles, and the title of greatest athlete on the planet—after winning the decathlon gold at the 1976 Olympics. I wasn’t old enough to remember that triumph, but my family had saved the box as a reminder of the inspiration it could instill. Yet it’s been almost four decades since she won the gold—a lifetime in a sports world that can often barely remember last week. Jenner’s fame today springs more from being the lowest-profile member of the exhaustingly grasping Kardashian family and their reality-TV empire. Her place—an athletic royal—among a group that’s famous for wanting to be famous was always odd, like seeing Jackie Joyner-Kersee among a crowd of women contestants on The Bachelor.
But now the Kardashian clan not only takes a backseat to someone it has largely dismissed on camera; it must also provide genuine support to her, too. Whether that support is mirrored in the world of sports will be something to see. Already, there is the welcome news that Jenner will receive the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at ESPN’s ordinarily excruciating ESPY Awards show. This is very welcome indeed. Despite its faults as watchable entertainment, the ESPY Awards do bring together all of the heavyweights in the worlds of sports and entertainment. By tradition, there is usually a standing ovation for the Arthur Ashe honoree. Athletes will be faced with the choice of whether to properly honor Caitlyn Jenner, and their reactions will speak volumes.
Modern Human Leg Mummified Using Ancient Egyptian Methods
http://www.livescience.com/50960-scientists-mummify-human-leg.html
The ancient Egyptians famously mummified the dead to preserve their loved ones in perpetuity, and now, scientists have mummified fresh tissue from a human corpse to gain insight into these ancient preservation techniques. The team adhered to ancient Egyptian techniques to mummify part of the human body, which had been donated to science. They placed the tissue in a salt solution, and measured the progress of preservation using state-of-the-art microscopy and imaging techniques.
For the most part, the mummification was successful, but it took nearly seven months (208 days), which is much longer than the two months the ancient Egyptian method took, according to Herodotus. (Other accounts report that it took even less time.) "We were not so quick like the ancient Egyptians," Papageorgopoulou said. She suspects the cooler, damper conditions in the lab in Zurich, compared with the arid environment of ancient Egypt, may explain the discrepancy. The salt solution effectively removed the water from the leg tissue, which prevented bacteria and fungi from degrading it. The microscopic analysis revealed good preservation of the skin and muscle tissue, as well. The results show just how effective the Egyptian embalming methods were, and offer a detailed view of how the process worked. "It's more or less state-of-the-art documentation on how the ancient Egyptians mummified their bodies," Papageorgopoulou said.
The study revealed that the environment's temperature, acidity and humidity were all crucial factors in the speed of the mummification process. The experiment also showed how the removal of water from the tissues using salts prevented the body from degrading. Overall, the mummification process preserved the muscle and skin tissue very well, the researchers said.
Any /pn/is heads like maps? They are autism incarnate but they are also really interesting. As you can see in the images, many maps have shitty borders often due to ancient farming lands around rivers and such. Some suffer from religious conflict like the bosnia map. Others just have too many layers, like the italy map
Anyone else have good maps to share? maybe old ones?
mattress feminist
>>2997255
> >>>/pol/2258660
>
>JUST DO IT
>
>DO IT
>
>NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE
What next for anti-spooks? The Hill explores
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/243983-spy-critics-eye-next-targets
Critics of government surveillance hope they’re in the middle of a sea change. Passage of legislation this week to rein in the National Security Agency was the first major congressional action to limit government spying in a generation, and it was a move away from the aggressive national security measures put in place after the Sept. 11 attacks. But whether the congressional view of surveillance has changed for good remains to be seen, with the battle over NSA reform set to play out again during the 2016 race for the White House. Civil libertarians on both sides of the aisle vowed to harness the momentum of their victory on the USA Freedom Act to push for other protections. “This is only the beginning,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of Congress’s most vocal privacy hawks. “There’s a lot more to do.”
The USA Freedom Act renews Section 215 of the Patriot Act and two other provisions that had expired on Monday morning. But in doing so, the act also ends the NSA’s bulk collection of U.S. phone records and other data. The bill reauthorizes the Patriot Act provisions through Dec. 15, 2019, setting the stage for another showdown during the next administration.
But civil libertarians want to go much further to curb government spying. For one, congressional privacy advocates want to tackle the “backdoor search loophole” of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. While that provision is meant to allow the government to collect the communications of foreigners, the emails and chats of Americans can be “incidentally” picked up without a warrant under operations such as the NSA’s Prism and Upstream programs. Section 702 is up for renewal at the end of 2017, putting the best chance of reforming it more than two years away. “We’re going to use this period, between now and the formal expiration date, to make the case” for reining that law in, Wyden said.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) has also promised to hold hearings on the surveillance law in coming months, which could draw additional scrutiny. “That feels like a long time away, but honestly it’s not,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program. Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA, which created the public uproar that made Tuesday’s vote possible, “feels like yesterday, and that was two years ago,” Goitein added. “The groundwork for that kind of change has to be laid over a long period.”
Civil libertarians this week listed a number of other changes they would like to tackle now that the USA Freedom Act is passed. Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) — the odd couple behind the Senate’s passage of the USA Freedom Act — are now eyeing a 1986 law that allows government agents to obtain people’s emails without a warrant. Updating that law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, has been a priority for some lawmakers for years, but a proposal has yet to cross the finish line. Lawmakers in both chambers also have attempted to write legislation banning the government from forcing companies to build “backdoors” into their technology that would give law enforcement agencies access to data.
And Wyden and House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) have worked for years on a bill to prevent the government from tracking people’s cellphone or GPS location without a warrant. That bill would also include the use of StingRay devices, which are used by government agencies to mimic cell towers to pick up information from people’s phones.
Sorry for the shilling, but every freedom leaner at least in North America should know about the Free State Project.
The Free State Project is a project to make the Small liberty leaning state of New Hampshire more free than it already is by taking advantage of the fact that New Hampshire has a very large state house of 400 despite the state being so small, giving the state good representation per capita.
Once they reach 20,000 signatures of people willing to move to New Hampshire, they will trigger a 5 year move that they will try to help movers with. About 1000+ people have already moved.
How is New Hampshire more free than most of the union? While they aren't Vermont, for starters they have no mandatory auto insurance or seatbelt laws, you don't need a drivers permit, they opted out of REAL ID, and they have some of the most free gun laws in the nation. You can find out a few more of these reasons here: https://freestateproject.org/about/101-reasons-move-new-hampshire
>what are 20,000 libertarians going to do?
Time will tell. Of the 1000+ some of them have gotten into some elected positions, about 20 of them are in the 400 member house, and they've gotten a few laws passed. They are pretty serious, and they are working with what time they have because a lot of liberals are moving into the state and trying to abolish a lot of these free laws and do what they can to make the public see Free Staters as terrorists. The Republicans are a bit more accepting. The general public has a mixed oppinion of them due to them, being a bit afraid of Libertarianism and NH's live and let live lifestyle aka "I don't care what you do as long as you don't force it on me."
So that's why I'm trying spread the word as much as I can, because the sooner the counter gets filled, the sooner more can move in, and the closer we may get to our last silver lined net before these authoritarian assholes make shit hit the fan in North America and Europe.
>what is their stance on SJW's?
Most of them have no problems with equal rights or the LGBT community, and have an LGBTesqe show on their radio service called "Flaming Freedom", but they don't want the shit SJW's want, as they believe in boycott over banning and imposing rules.
Iraq starts operation to drive Islamic State from Anbar
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32882540
Pro-government forces in Iraq have formally launched an operation to drive Islamic State out of Anbar province. The announcement was made by a spokesman for the Popular Mobilisation (al-Hashid al-Shaabi), a force comprising dozens of Shia militias. He said the operation would see government troops and militiamen move southwards from Salahuddin province and seek to cut off IS militants in Ramadi. The provincial capital fell to IS this month after Iraq's army withdrew.
Since then government forces have been massing for a counter-attack in the western province, and they say they have regained some ground east of Ramadi in the past few days. On Tuesday, fighting was reported south and west of Ramadi, as the Iraqi forces tried to cut off supply routes to the city.
The offensive has been welcomed by the Americans, with Vice-President Joe Biden pledging full US support, the BBC's defence correspondent Jonathan Marcus says. But he adds that Washington remains uneasy about the prominent role of Shia fighters, many of whom are backed by Iran.
Irish voters back gay marriage in 'social revolution'
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/23/us-ireland-gaymarriage-idUSKBN0O717R20150523
The people of Ireland backed same-sex marriage by a landslide in a referendum that marked a dramatic social shift in a traditionally Catholic country that only decriminalized homosexuality two decades ago. After one of the largest turnouts in a referendum there, 62 percent of voters said 'Yes', making Ireland the first country to adopt same-sex marriage via a popular vote. 'Yes' supporters crowded into the courtyard of Dublin Castle to watch in blistering sunshine as results trickled in from around the country were shown on a large screen. They cheered with joy as the final tally was announced and then burst into a rendition of the national anthem.
"We woke up today to a new Ireland. The real Irish Republic that I have dreamed of my whole life," said Jean Webster, a 54-year-old administrator who came out as a lesbian eight years ago after separating from her husband. Government ministers waved a rainbow flag from the stage in front of the crowd and one lesbian senator proposed to her partner live on national television. "The answer is yes to their future, yes to their love, yes to equal marriage. That 'Yes' is heard loudly across the world as a sound of pioneering leadership from our people," Prime Minister Enda Kenny told a news conference. "Ireland, thank you."
The Catholic Church, which teaches that homosexual activity is a sin, saw its dominance of Irish politics collapse after a series of child sex abuse scandals in the early 1990s and limited its 'No' campaigning to sermons to its remaining flock. The archbishop of Dublin said the result presented a challenge. "It is a social revolution. It's very clear that if this referendum is an affirmation of the views of young people, then the Church has a huge task ahead of it," Archbishop Diarmuid Martin told national broadcaster RTE. "The Church needs to do a reality check."
California looks to Australia for tips on surviving drought
SYDNEY (AP) — California has turned to the world's driest inhabited continent for solutions to its longest and sharpest drought on record. Australia, the land poet Dorothea Mackellar dubbed "a sunburnt country," suffered a torturous drought from the late 1990s through 2012. Now Californians are facing their own "Big Dry," and looking Down Under to see how they coped.
Australia also faced tough water restrictions — along with dying cattle, barren fields and monstrous wildfires that killed 173 people. But when the rains finally returned, Australians had fundamentally changed how they handle this precious resource. They treat water as a commodity to be conserved and traded, and carefully measure what's available and how it's being used. Efficiency programs cut their average daily use to 55 gallons, compared with 105 gallons per day for each Californian. The lesson: long droughts are here to stay, so societies had better plan ahead, says drought-policy expert Linda Botterill of the University of Canberra.
"We can expect longer, deeper and more severe droughts in Australia, and I believe the same applies in the U.S.," Botterill says. "As a result, we need to develop strategies that are not knee-jerk responses, but that are planned risk-management strategies."
The Tech Site Singularity Is Here: Vox Is Buying ReCode
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/vox-is-buying-recode.html
NO
ReCode, the tech website that finally pushed nerdy dudes to acknowledge that Kim Kardashian is an impressive businesswoman, is being acquired by Vox Media, according to the New York Times. The all-stock deal means the site's flagship names, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, will continue to work at ReCode, but under Vox leadership.
ReCode started in 2007 as AllThingsD, a popular technology website that was owned by Dow Jones. The site was spun off from Dow Jones and, in January 2014, relaunched as an independent entity named "ReCode," staffed by many of the same journalists. Helmed by "Silicon Valley's most feared and well-liked journalist" Kara Swisher, ReCode broke news and hosted a much-talked-about conference last year called Code Mobile. But according to the report in the Times, the revamped site has struggled to achieve meaningful traffic numbers, with comScore pegging its monthly uniques at 1.5 million.
An acquisition by Vox, which owns several successful digital properties including the Verge and Racked, will bring ReCode's industry reporting to a wider audience. "Everybody is bigger than us," Swisher told the Times. "It’s not a secret that being a smaller fish is really hard."
The Friday Read-Rand Paul's Money Problem
In a presidential campaign defined by billionaire sugar daddy donors, Rand Paul has a problem: He doesn’t seem to have one. While his rivals cultivate wealthy backers who will pump millions of dollars into their candidacies, Paul has struggled to find a similar lifeline. It’s led to considerable frustration in his campaign, which, amid rising concerns that it will not be able to compete financially, finds itself leaning heavily on the network of small donors who powered his father’s insurgent White House bids. It hasn’t been for lack of trying. In recent months, Paul has sought to woo a string of powerful Republican megadonors — from Silicon Valley executives to a Kentucky coal mogul to the billionaire Koch brothers — who, it was believed, would be philosophically aligned with his free-market views. In each case, he met disappointment.
At the top of the list was Peter Thiel, the eccentric Northern California venture capitalist who funneled $2.6 million to Ron Paul’s presidential campaign. But Thiel is being far less generous this time around, leaving Paul’s crestfallen advisers with the distinct impression that he won’t give them a dime. They’ve been left guessing as to why. One speculated that Thiel, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, was unhappy with the rollout of Paul’s policy platform. Another surmised he was skeptical of Paul’s 2016 prospects or that he’d become tired of political giving and would sit out 2016 entirely.
There was Sean Parker, the flashy Napster co-founder who was portrayed by Justin Timberlake in the hit 2010 movie “The Social Network.” But Parker, who has known Paul for several years and has met with him to discuss 2016, isn’t expected to endorse Paul — or any Republican candidate, for that matter. Those familiar with Parker’s thinking say he’s most likely to provide financial support to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton. There was Larry Ellison, the former Oracle CEO known for his penchant for megayachts. In October, Ellison hosted a Silicon Valley fundraiser for Senate Republicans that Paul attended — an event that led to speculation that Ellison, whose net worth is said to hover around $54 billion, would get behind the Kentucky Republican. But he’s instead thrown his support to Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and will host a fundraiser for him on June 9.
1/
daily reminder that this is ok
There will be no news spam
The holohax never happened
HI I'M ADOLF HITLER, FOUNDER AND CEO OF THE NAZI PARTY. THE HISTORY BOOKS ARE WRONG, THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS DID NOT KILL THE JEWS. I PERSONALLY KILLED EACH AND EVERY ONE OF THE SIX MILLION WITH MY GARGANTUAN GERMAN GLOCKENSPEIL. MY MASSIVE FRANKFURTER FROM THE FATHERLAND SMASHED EACH AND EVERY HEEB WITH MORE ZEST AND ZEAL THEN ZYKLON-B EVER COULD FATHOM. FOUR AND ONE HALF MILLION PERISHED UNDER MY IMPRENGABLE BUNKER. THE OTHER ONE POINT FIVE MILLION I DROWNED IN A COLLOSAL RAIN OF MY FUHRERFUNK, EACH JEW CHOKING WITH DELIGHT ON MY DELICIOUS DONGDROPPINGS. THEIR GASPING, CHOKING VOICES SOUNDED LIKE A GREEK CHORUS UNTIL THE FINAL BREATHS OF THE LAST. I GUARANTEE IT.
What are you reading?
Just done with that first one, definitely recommended read for anyone interested into an introduction to the life, thought and work of Michael Bakunin.
Starting the second one now, should be a very short read.
Cameron meets Juncker to discuss Britain's EU terms
London (dpa) - British Prime Minister David Cameron and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Monday began renegotiating the terms of Britain's EU membership ahead of an in-out referendum. Cameron hosted a dinner for Juncker at Chequers, the prime minister's official residence in southern England, officials said.
The prime minister, whose Conservative party won a parliamentary majority in national elections earlier this month, has promised to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership and hold an in-out referendum before the end of 2017. Cameron is to travel to several European capitals this week, including Paris and Berlin, to push his case for reform.
He is expected to give more details to his plans for the referendum in a speech to the state opening of parliament on Wednesday. Changes to welfare payments designed to cut the number of EU migrants will be an "absolute requirement" in the negotiations with other EU nations, Cameron said in a speech last week.
—-
The cat is out of the bag-what will happen?
Josh Duggar of '19 Kids and Counting' Apologizes, Resigns after Reports of Molesting 5 Young Girls
Josh Duggar, 27, the eldest child in the Duggar family of 19 Kids and Counting, apologized for acting “inexcusably” after InTouch, a gossip website, revealed that he had “forcibly fondled” 5 girls, all minors, when he was about 15 years old.
“Twelve years ago, as a young teenager I acted inexcusably for which I am extremely sorry and deeply regret. I hurt others, including my family and close friends. I confessed this to my parents who took several steps to help me address the situation,” Duggar said on the family’s official Facebook page. The hit TLC series, based on the Arkansas family, has been on the air since 2008.
Duggar also resigned his job as executive director of FRC Action, an affiliate of the Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council (FRC). The Hollywood Reporter on Friday published that TLC aired a 19 Kids marathon on Thursday, sparking viewer outrage. On Friday, TLC without comment pulled the May 27 program from its broadcast schedule.
‘Sleeping beauty’ papers slumber for decades
http://www.nature.com/news/sleeping-beauty-papers-slumber-for-decades-1.17615
Some scientific studies are popular from the start, garnering multiple citations from other researchers. But others can languish as 'sleeping beauties' for more than a century before awaking to glorious approval, a study finds. Filippo Radicchi, a researcher in complex networks at Indiana University Bloomington, and his colleagues have analysed a set of 22 million scientific papers to identify such beauties — and to find the fairest of them all.
The rate at which papers acquire citations generally declines after an initial period of growth. Previous research shows that the fate of a paper can often be determined based on how many citations it attracts in its first five years.
But some papers lie dormant for years before experiencing a sudden spike in citations as they are discovered and recognized as important. In 2004, bibliometrics expert Anthony van Raan of Leiden University's Centre for Science and Technology Studies in the Netherlands labelled this the ‘sleeping beauty’ phenomenon. Perhaps the most famous example is a 1935 quantum-mechanics paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, which rested unloved for decades.
The smart card: Apple Pay competitor or simple stopgap?
http://www.cnet.com/news/stratos-smart-card-apple-pay-competitor-or-simple-stopgap/
Paying with a Stratos may not be as seamless as holding your iPhone near the register and using Apple Pay. Apple's mobile payments service lets iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners use their smartphones and their fingerprints to charge purchases to their credit cards just by holding their iPhone near a terminal. And while technologists rejoice at Apple Pay's security, only 6 percent of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus owners used Apple Pay as of March, according to market researcher InfoScout. Now so-called smart cards like Stratos, Coin, Plastc and Swyp have come on the scene. When coupled with a smartphone app, these devices – which cost around $100 – let users store and toggle among different payment cards on the fly. Cards are scanned in using a small card reader and managed with a smartphone app. Their pitch: A single all-purpose solution that melds modern networking and payments technologies for mainstream consumers.
That is, until the financial infrastructure catches up with Apple Pay, Google Wallet and other digital payments systems. That's because consumers and businesses still rely on credit card technologies and financial networks implemented decades ago. Credit and debit cards, and the terminals that accept them, are ubiquitous. Kiosks that work with Apple Pay or any competitors, are not. "There's this chicken and egg problem," said Thiago Olson, CEO of Stratos, based in Ann Arbor, Mich. According to Olson, mobile payment companies design products that few can use because a small minority of merchants will accept that. That, in turn, means few consumers adopt the new technologies.
Greg Rosen, an investor at New York-based venture fund Box Group, shares that point of view. Although he was an early preorder customer of Coin, which originally launched in November 2013, Rosen just got his hands on the finished product. He's used the card for three weeks now without any hiccups. "It would be awesome if every single merchant took Apple Pay," he said. But that's not the reality. "It's kind of crazy that we're in 2015 and we're still paying with cash and plastic, and we have a computer in our pocket." Until the computers in our pocket become the main way to pay, he has a Coin card.
Ancient DNA suggests dogs split from wolves 40,000 years ago
Man's best friend may be a very old friend indeed. An analysis of a bone from a newly identified ancient wolf species suggests dogs may have split from wolves as early as 40,000 years ago – with or without being domesticated at the same time. Exactly when dogs started to be domesticated and split from wolves is a matter of some controversy. Archaeological evidence analysing the shapes of canid skulls found near early human camps suggested it might have happened as far back as 35,000 years ago. DNA analysis, focusing on differences between living dog and wolf genomes, seemed to suggest they must have split much more recently – between 11,000 and 16,000 years ago.
Now Love Dalén from the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm and colleagues have sequenced the genome of a wolf that lived 35,000 years ago in Taimyr, northern Russia, according to carbon dating. This allowed them to recalibrate the molecular clock – the rate at which genetic differences accumulate over time – and better reconstruct the wolf-dog evolutionary tree. They found that dogs and wolves must have split into two separate lineages 27,000 to 40,000 years ago, bringing the DNA and archaeological evidence into line with each other.
They also found that some northern latitude dog breeds, having split from wolves, then interbred with the now extinct Taimyr wolf, which could have helped them adapt to the challenging northern environment. These breeds include the husky, Greenland sledge dog and, to a lesser extent, the Chinese shar pei and Finnish spitz.
Gene defect linked to visual impairment in dyslexics
http://www.sciencecodex.com/genetic_defect_linked_to_visual_impairment_in_dyslexics-157952
A risk gene for dyslexia is associated with impairments in visual motion detection, according to a study published May 27 in The Journal of Neuroscience. Mutations in the gene DCDC2 have previously been associated with dyslexia, and this study found that dyslexics with an altered copy of the gene are unable to detect certain types of visual motion. The researchers used a series of visual tests to compare typical readers with two groups of dyslexics – one with and one without a specific deletion in the DCDC2 gene.
The subjects were presented with images of patterned black and white lines and asked to determine whether the image was moving horizontally or vertically. Dyslexics with the genetic deletion failed to detect the motion of the image, although they were able to determine the orientation of the lines. The group of dyslexics with a normal copy of the DCDC2 performed similarly to the normal readers, with only a minor impairment in motion detection.
"This is the first paper I am aware of demonstrating a genetic marker that distinguishes between dyslexics with deficits in motion perception and those without," says Joseph LoTurco, a neuroscientist at the University of Connecticut who studies brain development and was not involved in the study. "It could be extremely valuable in future studies designed to discover optimal intervention strategies, and in early detection for children at risk for dyslexia."
Hyundai Sonata Is First With Android Auto
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/android-auto-hyundai-sonata,news-20970.html
Android Auto has been out for a few months and available via in-dash receivers, such as Pioneer’s AVIC-8100 NEX head unit. But if you wanted it built-in on your car from the factory, you’ve been out of luck . . . until now. With its 2015 Sonata, Hyundai has beat other automakers to the finish line as the first company to feature Android Auto on a production car. Android Auto comes as part of Hyundai’s 8-inch touchscreen Navigation system on the Sport, Eco, Limited, Sport 2.0T and Limited 2.0T models (starting at $23,175), but not the $21,150 base SE model. Hyundai has also said that existing 2015 Sonata owners will be able to upgrade their cars with Android Auto by getting a USB download from dealerships later this summer.
Android Auto is a big deal for potential car buyers, as it provides a familiar interface on their car’s navigation system so they can text, look up points of interest and make hands-free calls using Google’s voice recognition software. It also includes support for many popular media apps, such as Spotify, iHeartRadio and Google Play Music, so the tunes you love on your phone can soothe your ears in the car.
Just remember that you still need to plug in your phone (running Android 5.0 or later) using the car's USB connection. This locks down your phone while driving, and shifts control to the touchscreen in the dashboard.
Robert Rodriguez Tackling 'Jonny Quest' for Warner Bros.
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/jonny-quest-movie-robert-rodriguez-797743
Jonny Quest is back on. Robert Rodriguez has come aboard the adventure project, an adaptation of the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoon, which has been dormant for the past several years. Moving the Warner Bros. adventure along is Terry Rossio, whose credits range from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies to The Mask of Zorro. Rodriguez and Rossio are rewriting the script initially penned by Dan Mazeau, with Rodriguez on board to direct. Dan Lin and Adrian Askarieh are producing.
Quest was a 1964 ABC primetime cartoon that chronicles the neato adventures of Quest, a boy who accompanies his father on globe-spanning missions. Rounding out the team are Hadji, a Kolkatan orphan and Jonny's best friend; his pet bulldog, Bandit; and government agent/bodyguard Race Bannon. (Jonny was voiced by Tim Matheson of Animal House fame, and his father, Benton C. Quest, was voiced by John Stephenson, who passed away last week.) While the show lasted only a season — it was canceled not due to ratings but because it was expensive to produce — it lived on lucratively for the next few decades in syndication. The late 1980s and the 1990s brought forth cartoon revivals and comic books. And Hollywood interest.
After Ted Turner bought the Hanna-Barbera library in the early 1990s, Richard Donner (Superman, Lethal Weapon) and Lauren Shuler Donner were involved in an adaptation.
Cleveland Police to Accept Tough Standards on Force
CLEVELAND — The Cleveland Police Department, which has become synonymous with the racially charged debate over police tactics, has agreed to follow some of the most exacting standards in the nation over how and when its officers can use force, and it will accept close oversight to make sure those rules are not ignored, city and federal officials said Tuesday.
The agreement is part of a settlement with the Justice Department over what federal officials have called a pattern of unconstitutional policing and abuse in Cleveland. The department found in a review released late last year that police officers here used stun guns inappropriately, punched and kicked unarmed people, and shot at people who posed no threat. The episodes often went unreported and uninvestigated, investigators found.
“There is much work to be done, across the nation and in Cleveland, to rebuild trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve where it has eroded, but it can be done,” said Vanita Gupta, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “Today’s agreement really should serve as a model for those seeking to address similar issues in their communities.”
Refugee Abuse: Torture Scandal Rocks German Police
In his spare time, Torsten S. engaged in typically rural activities in his village near Hanover: fishing, raising chickens, chopping wood, speeding through the mud in his jeep. But if the accusations against him turn out to be true, the police sergeant had another, uglier side that came out at work.
"I smashed him."
"He squealed like a pig."
"Then the bastard ate the rest of the rotten pork out of the refrigerator. Off of the floor."
In August 2013, Torsten S. supposedly placed his penis on the shoulder of a police colleague and told him to put it in his mouth while holding his service weapon to the colleague's head. The investigating magistrate has described this as a possible attempted rape. Torsten S. told SPIEGEL that the accusations against him have been "exaggerated," but on the advice of his lawyer, he declined to say more. On Tuesday morning, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats, summoned the president of the Federal Police Force, Dieter Romann, to the Interior Ministry. Afterwards, Romann went directly to Hanover, where he visited the police station in which attacks are alleged to have taken place. Romann told officers there that he expects the issue to be completely resolved. He said the investigation would also identify those who had seen something but said nothing. Those who look away, he said, also make themselves culpable.
According to Hamburg criminologist Rafael Behr, who has been delving into the culture of police units for about 20 years, the climate in many police departments favors secrecy. Units have created the sense that their fates are tied together, that they are constantly under threat from criminals, drunks and a hostile outside world. He claims that the rule, even if one officer crosses the line, is for officers to stick together. This, he says, is also one of the reasons why only a fraction of the about 2,000 investigative procedures against police for violence every year end up in court. "You don't tattle on a colleague, that is the iron rule," Behr says.
Fund Managers Who Spit Out Their Own Cooking
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=698713
I found four managers at six funds who formerly had more than $1 million of their own money in their funds but have sold their positions completely. In most cases, the fund companies did not provide an explanation. There are some plausible excuses, such as divorce or home purchases, to explain why they might have sold their holdings. Other possible reasons could include managers moving their money to other funds that they think focus on a more appealing asset class. Still, it’s pretty discouraging to see managers selling the following funds, all of which have some appeal.
Wells Fargo Advantage Small/Mid Cap Value (SMMVX) and Wells Fargo Advantage Small Cap Value (SSMVX)
Charles Rinaldi sold his entire stake in both of these funds, which he has managed for years. Wells Fargo said the longtime lead manager did so for estate-planning purposes. That makes me wonder if he is nearing retirement; he’s now likely in his 70s, as he graduated from college in 1965. I’d feel better if his comanagers showed more enthusiasm for these funds. Michael Schneider has investments in both in the $10,001–$50,000 range, and Eric Astheimer has nothing in either fund.
Scout Unconstrained Bond (SUBFX)
Mark Egan quickly ramped up to more than $1 million in the fund after it was launched in 2011, but then he sold his shares. The latest filings don’t show Egan investing in any of the six funds he comanages. However, Scout said Egan took the money out for tax reasons and later invested the bulk back into this fund. In addition, comanagers Thomas Fink and Todd Thompson each have more than $1 million in this fund.
Fund Company Mistakes
In researching this article, I heard from Wells Fargo that it had erred in its filing for Wells Fargo Advantage Absolute Return (WARAX). The firm had incorrectly reported that manager Ben Inker had more than $1 million invested, and then the next filing said he had nothing. Wells Fargo said he never had anything in the fund and just had money in the GMO fund that the Wells Fargo fund invests in. It’s a telling story, as Wells Fargo layers on additional fees, and investors in the underlying GMO fund have enjoyed better performance thanks to lower fees.
President Obama’s legacy is increasingly in legal jeopardy
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/05/26/obama-courts/
President Obama's second-term agenda, it seems, is in the hands of the courts. Same-sex marriage. Obamacare. Climate change. And now immigration. And in many cases, there is significant doubt about whether his signature initiatives will stand legal scrutiny.
The latest blow to Obama's second-term plans came Tuesday when a federal appeals court in New Orleans denied the administration's request to move forward with implementing his expanded executive action on immigration to defer deportation for millions of undocumented immigrants.
Texas and 25 other states have sued to have it shelved. The drama is sure to ensue for months, writes the Post's David Nakamura, and throw into doubt whether the fight over all of Obama's executive actions on immigration will be settled before he leaves office in January 2017.
China to extend military reach, build lighthouses in disputed waters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/26/us-china-defence-idUSKBN0OB0CA20150526
China outlined a strategy to boost its naval reach on Tuesday and announced plans for the construction of two lighthouses in disputed waters, developments likely to escalate tensions in a region already jittery about Beijing's maritime ambitions. In a policy document issued by the State Council, the Communist-ruled country's cabinet, China vowed to increase its "open seas protection", switching from air defence to both offence and defence, and criticised neighbours who take "provocative actions" on its reefs and islands. China has been taking an increasingly assertive posture over recent years in the disputed waters of the South China Sea, where it has engaged in extensive land reclamation in the Spratly archipelago.
China claims most of the South China Sea and criticised Washington last week after a U.S. spy plane flew over areas near the reefs. Both sides accused each other of stoking instability. A U.S. State Department spokesman declined to make a specific comment on the Chinese strategy paper, but said Washington urged Beijing "to use its military capabilities in a manner that is conducive to maintaining peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific region."
Jeff Rathke reiterated the U.S. view that China’s reclamation work had contributed to rising tensions and said building up of underwater features did not confer a right to a territorial sea or an exclusive economic zone. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said President Barack Obama considered the South China Sea security situation "critically important" to U.S. national security and the global economy and said Washington was committed to working with other Asia-Pacific states to protect the free flow of commerce there.
Ohio bull-riding leads to 300 baptisms — and prompts questions about church as entertainment
Pastor Lawrence Bishop II generated about 300 baptisms and an internet sensation last week by riding — and getting bucked off — a large bull inside his jam-packed Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio, last week. The stunt by the former bull rider was designed to draw crowds and win souls for Christ, he told ABC’s Nightline in a report that aired May 19. “You know, the Bible said to compel them to come in, and so that’s what we’re doing,” Bishop said during the broadcast. “It didn’t say how to compel them.”
But some ministers question the approach, describing it as a prime example of entertainment dressed up as evangelism. “Two things,” American Baptist minister Alan Rudnick said when asked about the bull-riding pastor. “The first is: come on, really?” ‘Why should we knock that?’
The bull-riding-for-Jesus story reminded Rudnick how Christ, during his temptation, avoided the lure of using the dramatic to prove his divinity. Nor did Jesus perform his miracles simply to sensationalize and win large numbers of converts, said Rudnick, pastor of First Baptist Church of Ballston Spa, N.Y. “He listened to people and heard their stories,” he said. “He could have come on a cloud with trumpets.”
Being a Good Loser is Essential to Becoming a Good Investor
http://www.pragcap.com/being-a-good-loser-is-essential-to-becoming-a-good-investor
I was talking to a potential client last week who boasted about his current positions which didn’t show a single position in the red on that day. I didn’t say anything, but I thought to myself: “well, that’s probably a sign of a poorly diversified portfolio”. This might sound strange, but it’s when everything is working that I most often get alarmed. The reason is a bit counterintuitive, but a crucial piece to broader portfolio success. You see, when a portfolio’s components are 100% correlated it generally means that you’re not very well diversified. And if you’re not diversified then you’re probably taking a lot more risk than you think.
The reason why this is true is because high beta positions tend to become increasingly correlated when we most need our portfolios to become uncorrelated. For instance, when we look back at the financial crisis we can see that stock losses were undiscriminating. That is, it didn’t matter if you were allocated in healthcare stocks, utilities, tech stocks or dividend paying stocks. When the market panicked equities as a whole were taken down substantially because equities are naturally high beta relative to other safe assets like bonds and cash. By having some cash (usually t-bills in a brokerage account) and bonds in a portfolio you actually smoothed your returns during the crisis. You traded some potential upside in return for predictability.
The unfortunate reality about trading higher returns for greater predictability is that you have to learn to be a good loser. You have to accept the reality that your neighbor who is leveraged to the gills in tech stocks will outperform you handily when things are going well. You have to accept the reality that you will open your portfolio at times and see red positions. You have to accept the reality that the S&P 500 will often outperform your portfolio. But you also get to know that, over the course of a volatile market cycle, your savings will be allocated in such a manner that you will have created greater predictability about how much of that savings will be actually be there at certain times when you might need it. Therefore, by learning to accept losses you actually increase the odds that you will achieve your financial goals.
Charter nears $55-billion deal to buy Time Warner Cable
Charter Communications is poised to scoop up Time Warner Cable in a $55-billion deal that would make it the largest pay-TV provider in Southern California. The acquisition, expected to be announced Tuesday, is considered more likely to clear regulatory hurdles than the recently scuttled acquisition of Time Warner Cable by Comcast Corp. That's partly because the combined company would be far smaller, with 17 million customers nationwide. Had Comcast succeeded, it would have served 30 million households.
Charter, backed by cable pioneer John Malone's Liberty Media Corp., would nonetheless command a giant footprint in Southern California, with more than 2 million customers in Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange, San Diego, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. The proposed union of two of the Southland's biggest cable companies has the potential to break the logjam in the yearlong stalemate over distribution of the Los Angeles Dodgers' TV channel. As a goodwill gesture, Charter could quickly begin carrying the SportsNet LA channel, which is owned by the Dodgers, for its current customers in Southern California.
Such a move would enable baseball fans in Glendale, Malibu, Burbank, La Cañada Flintridge, Long Beach and other areas currently served by Charter to watch Dodgers games on SportsNet LA. Time Warner Cable has been the only major distributor in Southern California to carry the network since it launched at the start of the 2014 baseball season.
Jim Chanos: China Debt To GDP Could Soon Reach Astronomical Rate of 400%
http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/05/jim-chanos-china-debt-bubble/
Economies and stock markets are not synonymous. However, with the Chinese economy grinding to a halt and Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index ripping higher, few times in history have we seen such stark contrast. So, what is the “reality” in China? The answer is complex and obscured by opaque reporting, but the trillion dollar question for investors is how a Chinese “hard landing” will impact fragile world economic recoveries and financial markets. Starting in the 1980s, China recognized the need to put hundreds of millions of people to work and transition into a less agrarian, more manufacturing-based export economy. Free trade theory says that from 1990 from 2013, the value of the Yuan should have tripled, but instead, due to active suppression, the currency lost half of its value during that time. For the last decade, Chinese officials have allowed the Yuan to appreciate slightly to further transition to a more balanced and consumer-driven economy, but the credit-fueled experiment has largely failed.
To give some perspective, Jim Chanos stated on Wall Street Week that when his firm, Kynikos Associates, began digging deeper into China’s fundamentals in late 2009, it had 15% nominal GDP growth – 10% real, 5% inflation, while today it has 5% GDP growth – 7% real, 2% deflation. During those years of torrid economic growth, China’s stock market stagnated as little of the wealth accreted to equity investors. Now, the opposite is happening: China’s economy is the boulder that can’t be pushed up the hill, but more money is finding its way into shareholders’ pockets. Why?
First, you have to understand the problems in China are a credit story, not an equities story. Jim Chanos has been outspoken about shorting China over the last several years, but says his firm has never had an interest in betting against the Shanghai Index. The country is suffering from a massive debt overhang that is a result of the “grow at all costs” mentality. Local debt, not federal debt, is the issue. Municipalities overdosed on debt to finance projects, like ghost cities, that have seen little return. Underperforming loans, especially in the housing sector, now weigh heavily on bank balance sheets. Chinese government debt is only around 65% of GDP, but when you factor in local, corporate, and household debt, the number looks at lot scarier at around 290%. Jim Chanos believes that in a few years, China’s debt-to-GDP could resemble the 400% levels seen in troubled Eurozone pariah Greece.
Federal appeals court deals blow to President Obama’s amnesty
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/26/appeals-court-deals-blow-obama-amnesty/
A federal appeals court refused to lift an injunction against President Obama’s deportation amnesty in a ruling Tuesday that delivers a second major legal setback to the administration and keeps millions of illegal immigrants on hold. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit sided with a lower court that ruled Mr. Obama probably broke the law in taking unilateral action last year to grant an amnesty from deportation. The three-judge panel, ruling 2-1, shot down Mr. Obama’s hopes of quickly restarting the amnesty, and make it likely he’ll have to go to the Supreme Court to try to win his case.
The majority, Judges Jerry E. Smith and Jennifer Elrod, said the president’s new program, known as Deferred Action for Parental Accountability, or DAPA, is a binding policy that should have gone through the usual public notice and comment period instead of being announced unilaterally by Mr. Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson late last year.
“We live in a nation governed by a system of checks and balances, and the president’s attempt to bypass the will of the American people was successfully checked again today,” said Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who, as his state’s attorney general last year, began the lawsuit challenging the new amnesty.
Things to add
Post here for things you want added to /pn/, including flags, banners, spoiler images, volunteers, features, news sites and boards etc
EDIT-included examples of 'things'
Prove race exists
Define race
Prove it exists
Link to at least 3 studies that have been published since 2006 that agree that race exists by your definition
Explain as if you were talking to an illiterate 5 year old what race is without referring to skin colour or skull shapes
Tell me why government should stop important people from all over the world
North Korea Claims It Can Miniaturize Nuclear Weapons
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/north-korea-claims-it-can-miniaturize-nukes.html
In case you're sick of worrying about ISIS, here's a disturbing update from North Korea. The country's military just announced that it can miniaturize nuclear weapons, which would allow them to be delivered via missile. "We have had the capability of miniaturizing nuclear warheads, as well as producing multiform weapons, for some time," said the statement on state-run Korean Central News Agency. "We can also guarantee the accuracy not only of short-to-mid-range but also long-range rocket launches, for which we have had the technology for a long time."
The North Korean government is usually one of the worst sources for information about North Korea's weapons capabilities, but in this case top U.S. military officials agree. General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula, said in October that he believes the North Koreans, "have the capability to have miniaturized the device at this point, and they have the technology to potentially actually deliver what they say they have." On the other hand, he said they'd probably need to test the system extensively before it's truly usable, and Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said at the time that there was no "smoking piece of evidence" that the North Koreans had actually miniaturized nukes.
a bit old but anyways
Scientists Claim That Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death
A book titled “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe“ has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible.
thoughts?
Paul Krugman DESTROYS Hillary Clinton
http://freebeacon.com/blog/paul-krugman-destroys-hillary-clinton/
Writing in the New York Times on Monday, Krugman argued that the Iraq War wasn’t merely an “innocent mistake,” but rather a “criminal” act perpetrated upon the American people and the world. The Krug then offered a scathing condemnation of politicians who supported the war effort, such as Hillary Clinton:
Now, you can understand why many political and media figures would prefer not to talk about any of this. Some of them, I suppose, may have been duped: may have fallen for the obvious lies, which doesn’t say much about their judgment. More, I suspect, were complicit: they realized that the official case for war was a pretext, but had their own reasons for wanting a war, or, alternatively, allowed themselves to be intimidated into going along. For there was a definite climate of fear among politicians and pundits in 2002 and 2003, one in which criticizing the push for war looked very much like a career killer.
In other words, Krugman is saying that Hillary Clinton either A) has monumentally poor judgment, B) knew the case for invading Iraq was based on faulty evidence, but supported it anyway because she loves war, or C) supported a disastrous invasion because she thought it would help her political career. One imagines that none of these options describe a quality that Democrats would like to see in a presidential nominee. And yet, liberals are praising Hillary’s answer to a question about the Iraq War on Tuesday.
“I’ve made it very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple,” she said. “And I have written about it in my book; I’ve talked about it in the past.”
That’s her brilliant answer: “Oops.” As Krugman wrote, she would clearly prefer not to talk about it, presumably because at every stage of the conflict in Iraq, Hillary’s position (pro-invasion, anti-surge, pro-withdrawal) has been the most conducive to the rise of ISIS. Kudos to Krugman for calling her out.
Mom, Kids Among 12 Missing in Texas and Oklahoma Flash Flood
http://time.com/3895702/texas-oklahoma-flash-flood-mom-kids-missing/
Three people were confirmed killed, two in Oklahoma and one in Texas, after severe flash flooding this weekend. Another 12 are missing, including a mother and her two children. Laura McComb, daughter Leighton, 4, and son Andrew, 6, haven’t been seen since Sunday, according to WHNT. They were reportedly staying at a river house in the town of Wimberley, Texas, when a wall of water swept the home and family of four, including husband Jonathan, away.
After being found 12 miles down the river, Jonathan is in the hospital recovering from several broken bones and a collapsed lung. According to Fox News, the waters rose so quickly in the town that 1,000 people were forced to evacuate and hundreds of homes were destroyed. “We do have whole streets with maybe one or two houses left on them and the rest are just slabs,” Hays County emergency management coordinator Kharley Smith told CBS about the town of Wimberley.
In Oklahoma, Capt. Jason Farley drowned after being swept away during a water rescue, the Claremore Fire Department confirmed. He had been a 19-year veteran of the department. The Blanco River crested above 40 feet, more than triple its flood stage of 13 feet, NPR reports. Rescuers used pontoon boats and a helicopter to pull people out.
Hey how many mods do we have on this board? I'd be up for doing it 4 3 if you need any help
as a bit of a bribe, here's a web em', I forget what it is because of the filename
Box-Office Preview: 'Tomorrowland' May Nab $45M Over Holiday Weekend
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/box-office-tomorrowland-may-nab-797569
Disney's Tomorrowland may nab $45 million during the four-day holiday weekend, while Universal's holdover Pitch Perfect 2 may gross $42 million in its second weekend. Meanwhile, there's also a race brewing between Warner Bros. and Village Roadshow's Mad Max: Fury Road and MGM and Fox 2000's Poltergeist. George Miller's actioner and Gil Kenan's horror film are both aiming for $30 million over the holiday weekend.
Tomorrowland, directed by Brad Bird, had a limited release in only 701 theaters beginning at 7 p.m. Thursday night. The film, which is expected to top the U.S. box office, will expand wide to 3,972 theaters for the Memorial Day weekend.
George Clooney stars as an inventor who takes along a spirited teen (Britt Robertson) to an alternate world called Tomorrowland. The $180 million movie, an ode to Walt Disney's hopes for creating a utopian society, also stars Hugh Laurie. Bird co-wrote the script with Damon Lindelof.
Oculus Rift Requirements Released: Laptops Lose, No Macs
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/oculus-rift-hardware-requirements,news-20934.html
Oculus VR has released the list of hardware requirements for the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset (which goes on sale in early 2016, price unknown). And that list is a doozey — ruling out all but the latest hardware, which, by Oculus VR's own admission, excludes virtually all current laptops on the market. Oculus is also focusing on Windows development, leaving Mac and Linux users hanging for the time being. In a post on the Oculus VR blog, technical director Atman Binstock makes clear why the hardware requirements are so demanding. "… rendering techniques and quality matter more than ever before, as things that are imperceivable on a traditional monitor suddenly make all the difference when experienced in VR," he wrote.
In short, he says, rendering smooth images on the Oculus Rift requires 3x the graphics power as required for showing a normal 1080p video — moving up to 400 million shaded pixels per second, vs. 124 million for regular 1080p video.And dropped video frames, which are hard to notice on a 2D screen, are painfully obvious in VR.
These are the specific requirements:
NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
8GB+ RAM
Windows 7 SP1 or newer
2x USB 3.0 ports
HDMI 1.3 video output (297MHz clock) via a direct output architecture
US science academies take on human-genome editing
http://www.nature.com/news/us-science-academies-take-on-human-genome-editing-1.17581
The US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and National Academy of Medicine (NAM) will launch a major initiative to develop guidelines for editing human genomes, they said on 18 May. The initiative follows the April announcement that researchers had used a gene editing system called CRISPR-Cas9 to remove a mutated gene from a human embryo. The work involved a small number of embryos and was only partially successful, but it has sparked wide debate about the ethics of editing human genomes in ways that can be passed on to future generations.
While researchers and ethicists disagree on whether such research should continue, most agree that its ethical and legal ramifications should be discussed further before a modified embryo is implanted into a human. Many countries ban human germline editing outright. The United States forbids the use of federal funds for such research, although it is legal in most US states.
The science academies' initiative will hold an international summit this fall, including scientists, ethicists, patient groups and others yet to be determined. The academies will also establish a working group to study the ethical, legal, social and scientific issues involved in germline editing and develop a consensus statement on the practice. A separate advisory committee will be appointed to guide future decision-making. An NAS spokesperson says that the academies expect to announce the members of these committees in coming months.
Demographic War With the Jews
According to the figures published by Ramallah, there are some 12.1 million Palestinians worldwide, 2.8 million of whom live in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) with another 1.8 million residing in Gaza. By comparison, the global Jewish population is 14.3 million with 6.2 million of them living in Israel.
If these numbers are accurate (and there is reason to take them with a grain of salt), Palestinian women indeed are giving birth to more children than their Jewish counterparts.
http://www.israeltoday.co.il/NewsItem/tabid/178/nid/26604/Default.aspx
If we fully open all national borders, what's to fear, /pn/?
It's not like terrorists cannot get in already.
Pic unrelated.
Okay, anarchists, listen up. Statist socialism and traditional anarchism, i.e. libertarian socialism are mutually exclusive. This is not some great, hidden gem of wisdom, it's what anarchists have been talking about for over a hundred years. Why, then, do I see your sorry asses walk alongside fucking marxist scum like you were best fuckbuddies? You guys are supposed to be fucking enemies!
This is why I can't take people who call themselves socialists serious. Hell, I would probably call myself a socialist if it hadn't become an umbrella term for people who are literally retarded.
ENERGY
So let's talk about what's your favorite fuel source and you can tell us why it is thorium.
Thorium Fuel is "Nuclear" but can never melt down.
Thorium "Radiation" emissions don't even last 100 years
>If something goes wrong in a MSR and the temperature starts going up, a freeze plug can melt, pouring the entire core into subcritical drain tanks that are intimately linked to an ultimate heat sink, keeping them cool. This is an interesting accident mitigation feature that is possible only in fluid fuel reactors.
China is getting ready to rev their thorium fuel reactors, why aren't we?
Jews
Are Jews responsible for all the problems in the world??
Pope scuttles plan to set up investment fund for Vatican bank
http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=25014
Pope Francis has vetoed a plan to set up an investment fund for the Vatican bank, the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), reports Andrea Tornielli of La Stampa. The investment fund, which would have been based in Luxembourg, was proposed by Jean-Baptiste de Franssu, the IOR president, and approved by the bank’s board. But the council of cardinals that supervises the IOR questioned the idea, and sent it to the Pope for a final decision, Tornielli writes.
Pope Francis has insisted that the IOR should not be managed like an ordinary investment bank. The establishment of an investment fund in another country would have required complex legal and financial planning that the Pope apparently considered incompatible with the transparency and simplicity that he has sought for the Vatican bank.
/pn/ music thread?
Ignore the annual first quarter recession
http://thereformedbroker.com/2015/05/24/ignore-the-annual-first-quarter-recession/
Every year we have a recession in the first quarter and every year people get hysterical. And every year the economy rebounds into summer and the hysterics roll back their estimate cuts and their calls for economic demise. Putting aside why economy-watchers are so easily fooled or confused after so many episodes of the same show, it’s worth understanding why this occurs.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s US economist Ethan Harris explains the quirks in the data that lead to this annual freak-out (emphasis mine):
The economy has a major seasonal recession in every 1Q and some of the secondary indictors that go into GDP are not seasonally adjusted… Work at the Philadelphia Fed shows that over the past 30 years GDP growth has averaged 1.9% in 1Q and 3.0% in the rest of the year, suggesting about a percentage point downward bias in the quarter…The bottom-line from all of this is that bad seasonals probably sliced about 1.5% off of growth in 1Q and added about 0.5% to other quarters of the year…the pattern is not just a matter of a few years. Moreover, the story is also a lot more credible if there is a good narrative behind it. Here is that narrative.
Every year there is a major drop in GDP in the first quarter as the holiday season ends and severe weather kicks in. How big is this recession? The government does not publish unadjusted data for real GDP, but there is unadjusted data for nominal GDP through 2006. Looking back over the 10 year period from 1997 to 2006 the seasonal drop in 1Q is huge and varies significantly from year to year. It typically plunges 10% on an unadjusted basis, requiring a huge upward adjustment of 14.9 to 21.1pp to correct the seasonal drop (Chart 1). Even a small error in this large and variable adjustment could create serious mismeasurement when we drill down to real GDP. The adjustment challenge for 1Q GDP is much higher than for other quarters and for other data. In the other three quarters of the year the seasonal adjustment lowers growth by about 5pp—or a third as much. And for payrolls the 1Q adjustment is only about half of that for GDP. Big adjustments create room for big errors.
EU citizens not eligible for referendum vote, says No 10
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-32872211
Citizens from most EU countries living in the UK will not get a vote in the referendum on Europe, No 10 has said. The franchise will be broadly the same as for a general election, rather than local or European elections. Irish citizens in the UK are eligible. Residents from two other EU nations, Malta and Cyprus, also qualify, along with others from the Commonwealth. David Cameron is to hold talks with the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker at Chequers later. Legislation for the voting eligibility of the referendum - which the Conservatives have promised to hold before the end of 2017 - will be introduced to Parliament via the EU Referendum Bill on Thursday.
The Bill will make clear that the franchise will follow broadly the same rules as the general election:
-British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens over 18 who are resident in the UK will be eligible to vote.
- So too will UK nationals who have lived overseas for less than 15 years.
- The franchise will not include 16 and 17-year-olds, unlike the Scottish independence referendum.
- Members of the House of Lords and Commonwealth citizens in Gibraltar will also be allowed to vote, although they cannot participate in general elections.
A Number 10 source said: "No Brit under the age of 58 has had their say on the UK's membership of the European Union. "It is time to put this right and to give people the choice - in or out. "This is a big decision for our country, one that is about the future of the United Kingdom. That's why we think it's important that it is British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens that are the ones who get to decide."
Fate of U.S. domestic surveillance program uncertain after Senate vote
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/23/us-usa-security-nsa-idUSKBN0O729C20150523
The U.S. Senate blocked a measure to extend spy agencies' bulk collection of Americans' telephone records early on Saturday, leaving the fate of the program uncertain days before its June 1 expiration. By a vote of 54-45, the Senate failed to reach the 60-vote threshold needed to advance a bill that would have extended for two months provisions of the "USA Patriot Act" that allow the collection of vast amounts of telephone "metadata."
The data collection program, in which the National Security Agency sweeps up vast amounts of Americans' telephone records and business information, was exposed two years ago by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who is now a fugitive in Russia. The vote against the extension came after the Senate narrowly blocked the "USA Freedom Act," a bill that would end the bulk telephone data collection and replace it with a more targeted program.
That vote was 57-42, just short of the 60 needed.
Islamic State on the march? What fall of Ramadi tells us
No sooner had Ramadi fallen into the hands of the Islamic State than the drumbeat began. The Islamic State was on the doorstep of Baghdad. Iraqi forces were in disgrace, showing "no will to fight," United States Secretary of Defense Ash Carter told CNN Sunday. The loss was "terribly significant," added Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona to MSNBC, suggesting that "we'll have to have more people on the ground…."
But a broader view suggests very little has changed. Indeed, at this point, the advance of the Islamic State appears to have less to do with the relentless expansion of a rigid and hateful ideology and more to do with the practical matter of tribal politics. In Iraq, the United States' guns, money, and influence are long gone, while civil war has left much of Syria in chaos. In this power vacuum, Sunni tribesmen have in many cases leaned toward the Sunni-led Islamic State, fearing that Baghdad and Damascus are simply stooges for Shiite Iran.
In some respects, this presents a blueprint for how to constrict the space available to the Islamic State. Seven years ago, the US military helped drive a "Sunni Awakening" that significantly undermined Al Qaeda authority in Sunni areas of Iraq. Back then, it was the "strongest power," in Mr. Abdul-Hussain's words, and acted to woo and focus Sunni tribes against the atrocities of Al Qaeda.
With build 10122, Windows 10 finally starts coming together
http://www.zdnet.com/article/with-build-10122-windows-10-finally-starts-coming-together/
The Windows 10 user experience is coming together.
The signature feature of Windows 10 is, of course, the Start menu, which blends a Windows 7-style Programs list on the left with a larger palette of Windows 8-like tiles on the right. The screenshot above shows the default Start menu in a Parallels virtual machine running on OS X Yosemite. (That configuration works very well, by the way.) In this build, the File Explorer, Settings, and Power apps move from the top to near the bottom of that left column, with an All Apps link leading to an alphabetical list of programs and program groups. The menu is resizable as well, and search results (with or without Cortana) are more tightly integrated into the menu space.
Push Button Reset makes a clean install ridiculously easy.
For an 18-month-old Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet, I used the Reset option this morning to restore the original Windows 8.1 factory image from late 2013, which then required literally hundreds of updates, multiple restarts, and way too much babysitting for too many hours before the device was usable. Windows 10 can still use those Windows 8.x factory partitions on upgraded devices, but the new OS is capable of generating a clean install image from its own system files. I decided to try that option on a virtual machine that had been upgraded several times and was using nearly 40 GB of a 64 GB drive. The entire process took less than an hour, with one additional short wait near the end when I signed in with my Microsoft account.
The included apps are improving dramatically.
The MSN family of apps–Money, Weather, Sports, News, and so on–are good showcases for what the platform can do. They're much richer than their Windows 8 predecessors, with designs that scale very nicely from a small, phone-sized window to larger screens. I'm still in the process of wrapping up installations on a pair of small tablets, but so far what I have seen is very nice. I'll share more about the tablet experience in a follow-up post.
The Next Roomba May Recognize All Your Crap
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/next-roomba-may-recognize-crap/
The Internet of Things is plagued by communication breakdowns. While connected thermostats, egg trays, and even forks can beam data to apps and offer phone-based controls, this isn’t exactly what we were promised from this technology. In order for the Internet of Everything to achieve its real promise of context-aware automation without much user input, disparate pieces of hardware must communicate with one another, understand what’s going on, and control themselves accordingly. Like a sentient being, your home should “know” when to preheat the oven, turn on a bedside lamp, or brew a fresh pot of coffee. If you’re using an app, you’re essentially using a remote control. There’s nothing particularly “smart” about that.
Colin Angle, the CEO of iRobot, thinks making the Internet of Things more useful means marginalizing apps in favor of maps. The company recently announced that by the end of this year, it will market a robot that can create a map of your home by recognizing and labeling everything in it using a camera and a cloud-based engine. It will use that info to drive next-generation operating systems for connected homes.
“This idea that the Internet of Things is going to simplify our lives—I think it will, but we’re going to need some technology that doesn’t yet exist in order to take the benefits,” Angle told WIRED. “What you don’t want is eight gazillion apps on the phone for every single component… What we need to do to improve things rather than make them more complicated is to have our homes be able to track the intent of the people living in it. And then do the right thing.”
El Museo del Barrio, Fountain House, Empowers Africa, and Gray Matters
THIS DECADENT CITY
El Museo del Barrio's sold out annual spring Gala was held on Thursday, May 14th at The Plaza Hotel. Board member Yolanda Santos was presented with the Joseph A. Unanue Trustee Leadership Award by long-time friend Marifé Hernández; Senior Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer at Time Warner Inc., Lisa Garcia Quiroz, received the Corporate Excellence in the Arts Awards presented by Lin-Manuel Miranda; and the Founder and President of Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, Eugenio López Alonso, was honored with the Excellence in the Arts Award presented by Jane Holzer.
Christofle again generously donated the three silver awards for the Gala. Cocktails, including specialty tequila concoctions, began at 7pm in the Terrace Room. Dinner and dancing to music by Avenida B followed at 8pm in the Grand Ballroom. This year's Gala borrowed its aesthetic themes from El Museo´s current exhibition, which explores the work and legacy of Mexican cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa. The event was designed by Jeronimo Gaxiola and featured a multidisciplinary performance by Erika Harrsch in collaboration with singer Magos Herrera. An emotional appeal was led by Sotheby's Gabriela Palmieri. The Gala raised $1 million dollars for the museum.
I don't think I can handle these pictures…
Google Fiber pushes automatic piracy fines to subscribers
http://www.zdnet.com/article/google-fiber-pushes-automatic-piracy-fines-to-subscribers/
Google Fiber is allegedly acting as a conduit for automatic demands for money in relation to piracy and copyright infringement. Google Fiber, the high-speed broadband service, is quickly expanding across the United States. Touting speeds which leave current Internet offerings in the dust – allowing consumers to enjoy up to 1 GB/ps – the service has moved from its original pilot grounds in Kansas City and is expected to appear in Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham, NC along with Nashville, TN and Atlanta, GA later this year.
Consumers are clamouring for broadband speeds up to 100 times faster than the national average, but may have a nasty shock if they plan to use the service in order to download content from file-sharing websites and torrent search engines which infringe upon intellectual copyright. As reported by TorrentFreak on Wednesday, the rollout of Google Fiber has potentially become a catalyst for an increase in targeted piracy notices.
According to the publication, piracy notices are being automatically forwarded to users of Google Fiber, and not only include regular cease-and-desist warnings but controversial demands from companies such as Rightscorp and CEG TEK.
Protests, arrests after Ohio officer's acquittal in 2 deaths
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150524/us-cleveland-police-shooting-6882b03767.html
CLEVELAND (AP) — Police in riot gear made numerous arrests overnight as protesters took to the streets after a judge found a city police officer not guilty in the deaths of two unarmed black suspects killed in a barrage of police gunfire. Michael Brelo, 31, faces administrative charges while remaining suspended without pay after his acquittal Saturday on two counts of voluntary manslaughter, but he no longer faces the prospect of prison. The anxious city now awaits a decision on criminal charges against a white officer in the fatal shooting of a black 12-year-old boy with a pellet gun.
Brelo and 12 other officers fired 137 shots at a car with Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams inside it on Nov. 29, 2012. The shooting occurred at the end of a 22-mile-long chase involving more than 100 Cleveland police officers and 60 cruisers after Russell's Chevy Malibu backfired while speeding by police headquarters. During the chase, an officer reported that he thought he'd seen Williams with a gun. At the end, police mistook police gunfire for shots from Russell's car.
Brelo fired 49 of those shots that night, but it was the final 15 fired into the windshield while he stood on the hood of Russell's car that led his indictment and a four-week trial. He faced up to 22 years in prison if convicted on both counts. The shooting helped prompt an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice that concluded Cleveland police had engaged in a pattern and practice of excessive use of force and violations of people's civil rights.
Lower Earnings, Higher Stock Prices: The Voting Machine
http://pensionpartners.com/blog/?p=1458
“The stock market is a voting machine rather than a weighing machine. It responds to factual data not directly, but only as they affect the decisions of buyers and sellers.”- Graham and Dodd, Security Analysis Earnings drive stock prices, so says investing lore. As earnings rise, stock prices move higher. As earnings fall, stock prices move lower. If it were only that simple. With the S&P 500 hitting new all-time highs, earnings should be exploding higher. To the contrary, for the 2nd consecutive quarter, they are moving lower. With 92% of companies reported, S&P 500 earnings have declined 13% in the first quarter of 2015. This follows a 14% decline in the prior quarter.
What about the top line? Surely this just an accounting issue. But sales growth is also showing a decline, -1.8% over the prior year, the first year-over-year decline since 2009. What about sectors? Surely the decline in earnings is solely due to Energy which had a terrible quarter due to the collapse in Crude. But six out of the ten major S&P 500 sectors showed year-over-year declines, including both consumer sectors which were supposed to have benefited most from the decline in gas prices.
So how in the world are stocks hitting new all-time highs? As Graham and Dodd said, the stock market is a voting machine that responds to factual data only as they effect the decisions of buyers and sellers. Buyers and sellers have become fixated on one fact and one fact alone: easy monetary policy. While earnings and economic data have been weak in 2015, the Federal Reserve has responded by becoming increasingly dovish. Expectations for the long-awaited rate hike off 0% have been pushed all back to December, with Fed Fund futures now predicting there is only a 50% probability of that occurring. We are only a hair’s breadth away from expectations moving to 2016.
Data deluge puts Japan in spotlight this week
http://www.cnbc.com/id/102704532
Japan should remain the key focus for Asian markets in the week ahead as investors look to a slew of data on tap to confirm that the economic giant is poised for a comeback. Government data last Tuesday showed the world's third-largest economy expanded an annualized 2.4 percent, marking its fastest pace in a year and beating the 1.5 percent print expected in a Reuters poll. The optimism led the benchmark Nikkei 225 up 2.7 percent for the week.
Monday will bring April trade figures, while inflation, jobs, industrial production and household spending data for the same month are all due for release at the end of the week. "In Japan, expect to see labor market indicators remain solid, a slight improvement in household spending and a bounce in industrial production," Shane Oliver, head of investment strategy and chief economist at AMP Capital, wrote in a note published Friday.
However, the closely-watched consumer price index (CPI) may disappoint. Moody's Analytics expects the core inflation rate to rise 2.2 percent from a year earlier in April, unchanged from the previous month. Excluding the effects of the consumption sales tax hike a year ago, the nationwide consumer price index ticked up a modest 0.2 percent.
Three Boomer Presidents Are Enough
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/three-boomer-presidents-are-enough_952535.html
Last week, Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin convened a focus group of Iowa Democrats to discuss Hillary Rodham Clinton. They were Ready for Hillary. Indeed, they were enthusiastic about the prospect. But when Halperin asked them to name an accomplishment of Hillary as secretary of state, they couldn’t come up with one. Nor, for that matter, could they have named an accomplishment of Hillary as senator. Nor as first lady. Nor as Arkansan.
This is not evidence of the deficiencies of the Iowa school system. No group of Americans in any state could honestly name any significant accomplishment of the woman who is the prohibitive favorite for the Democratic nomination for president, and who is ahead in most general election polls as well. Not that this is necessarily a problem for the Hillary candidacy. None of the three most recent presidents had much to show for himself by way of accomplishments, personal or professional or political, when he ran for office. Each could in fact be said to have had more in the way of disqualifications than qualifications for office. Yet Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all became president.
Once is happenstance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a trend. Perhaps lack of accomplishment is a feature, not a bug, for baby boomer presidents.
Pentagon chief: Iraqis must have 'will to fight' to defeat Islamic State
http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-fg-ashton-carter-islamic-state-20150524-story.html
your tears are salty pol
The Obama administration intensified its defense of the president's strategy against Islamic State militants Sunday, with Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter making a vigorous case that the terrorist group can only be defeated if the Iraqis “develop the will to fight.” In the wake of Islamic State victories in the Iraqi city of Ramadi and in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra last week, Carter fended off suggestions that it’s time to position U.S. ground troops and troop air controllers near the trouble spots in an effort to contain the Islamic State.
Local officials and fighters must take responsibility, he said. “They are the ones that have to beat ISIL and keep them beat,” Carter said on CNN’s “State of the Union," using an alternate acronym for the group. “We can participate in the defeat of ISIL but we can't make Iraq run as a decent place for people to live. We can’t sustain the victory; only the Iraqis can do that.”
The U.S. role in the turbulent region might change at some point, Carter acknowledged, suggesting he would remain open to recommending a change in strategy. But the fall of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, points to a need for the U.S. to help improve the Iraqis' equipment and training while “encouraging their will to fight so that our campaign enabling them can be successful."
This is nice board
Da Newz:
Long running webcomic Homestuck has just released it's 7515th page.
Da Polz:
Killing off Meenah after her lesbian transition is blatant sexism. Is Hussie trying to say that the existence of lesbianism in the alpha timeline gave weight to degeneracy as personified by lord english and the doomed B2 session? What message does this give to the children of this generation aspiring to become lesbians themselves?
ITT: We discuss the amazing policies and awesome successes of our legal lord and secular savior, President Obama, and everything else that makes him great.
RAND PAUL AID LICKS A CAMERA-CONFUSION REIGNS
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/rand-paul-aide-licks-camera-117824.html?hp=l2_4
No candidate likes being hounded by opposition researchers, but one member of Rand Paul’s team has a peculiar way of expressing his distaste. At a townhall event Monday for Rand Paul in Londonderry, New Hampshire, the Kentucky senator’s political director for the state, David Chesley, licked the camera of a tracker sent by American Bridge, a left-leaning opposition research group.
The interaction was caught on camera and quickly posted to American Bridge’s YouTube account. “Well, he’d been standing there, trying to block the camera. That’s not uncommon, though,” explained American Bridge spokesperson Ben Ray. “Licking the camera … well, that’s new to us.”
When asked for an explanation of the camera-licking incident, Rand Paul spokesman Sergio Gor responded: “Senator Rand Paul visited New Hampshire today to accept the endorsement of twenty New Hampshire State Representatives who support his run for the White House, and to visit with and take questions from the voters of NH.” “It was a great day of events,” Gor added, declining to mention Chesley’s apparent appetite for being on camera.
Paul supporters, you can lick the dust as Chris Christie passes you in New Hampshire. Say what you will about bridge closures, at least his aids don't lick cameras
2016 news
Jeb courts evangelicals in Liberty University address
He reassures a skeptical voting bloc on religious freedom and Christianity’s role in the world.
Jeb Bush on Saturday made a major overture to evangelical voters, seeking to reassure a skeptical voting bloc that when it comes to core beliefs about religious freedom and Christianity’s role in the world, he’s with them. The former Florida governor and likely presidential candidate made his pitch at a commencement address at Liberty University, a prominent symbol of evangelical Christianity in Lynchburg, Va., that has become a routine campaign stop for presidential hopefuls. Bush aimed to connect with evangelical voters — many of whom have been wary of his potential candidacy — by decrying progressives who, in his characterization, see no role for religion in public life.
“I am asked sometimes whether I would ever allow my decisions in government to be influenced by my Christian faith,” Bush said, building on a spirited defense of the First Amendment and the importance of free exercise of religion. “Whenever I hear this, I know what they want me to say. The simple and safe reply is, ‘No. Never. Of course not.’ If the game is political correctness, that’s the answer that moves you to the next round. The endpoint is a certain kind of politician we’ve all heard before – the guy whose moral convictions are so private, so deeply personal, that he even refuses to impose them on himself.”
Hitler did a few things wrong
Aside from being too high and disorganised to win a war
He did everything right
Man Declared Dead Starts Moving, Breathing While Being Readied For Morgue
(Reuters) - First responders preparing to take the body of a Milwaukee man pronounced dead to the morgue got a jolt when the man suddenly began moving and noticeably breathing, authorities said on Friday. They had gone to the 46-year-old man's high-rise building on Tuesday after his worried girlfriend called for assistance, saying she had not heard from him for two days, according to a medical examiner's report.
When they arrived at his apartment, they found him cold, pale and rigid at the foot of his bed, the report said. They did not try to resuscitate him. About 50 minutes later, the medical examiner arrived and notified the man's family of his death. As the examiner readied the body to be taken to the morgue, the man began to move his left arm and right leg, the report said.
Paramedics took the man, who has not been identified, to a nearby hospital, where he was admitted to the intensive care unit.
Greece won’t meet IMF repayments in June, interior minister says
ATHENS—Greece said Sunday that it won’t have the money it is due to repay to the International Monetary Fund next month unless it strikes a deal with international creditors over further rescue funding. Interior Minister Nikos Voutsis told privately owned television station Mega that Greece is scheduled to repay EUR1.6 billion ($1.76 billion) to the IMF between June 5-19, but the payments cannot be met.
“This money will not be given,” he said. “It does not exist.” Despite months of negotiations between Greece’s leftist-led government and creditors—the European Union and the IMF—over the country’s bailout, little progress has been made. The ruling Syriza party, elected on an antiausterity ticket in January, opposes reforms to the labor market and pension system demanded by international creditors that argue that Greece must complete these economic overhauls to achieve sustainable growth and solvency.
A default on Greece’s obligations to the IMF could spark heavy deposit withdrawals from Greek banks and force capital controls, deepening the country’s economic crisis, economists say. Talks are continuing between the two sides in Brussels, though hopes have been dashed that a recent reshuffle of Greece’s renegotiating team will accelerate a deal.
Nanomachine pumps molecules 'uphill'
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2015/may/22/nanomachine-pumps-molecules-uphill
A new molecular pump capable of pumping other small molecules up an energy gradient has been developed by researchers at Northwestern University in the US. The new pump is very much like the protein pumps in living cells, and might be used to design artificial molecular machines similar to those found in nature. Such machines could be important for a range of applications, including synthetic muscles, tiny robots and advanced mechanical motors.
Molecular machines are ubiquitous in nature and have evolved over billions of years to exploit energy from sunlight or complex chemical reactions in the body. They are made up of complicated assemblies of proteins that are responsible for a host of processes in living organisms, such as ion transport, ATP synthesis and cell division. In fact, our muscles are controlled by the co-ordinated movement of thousands of these machines.
"Our new molecular pump is, in a sense, reminiscent of the pump proteins in our cells, which are vital components of life involved in transferring energy from food to a form that is compatible with our cells," explains Paul McGonigal, who is part of Fraser Stoddart's team at Northwestern. "We have designed a relatively simple small molecule that can also drive a system away from equilibrium with chemical energy from redox (oxidation-reduction) reactions."
Yellen: 1st rate hike likely by year end if economy improves
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150522/us--fed-yellen-e8bc5a2a5d.html
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Friday she expects to begin raising interest rates later this year — if the job market improves and the Fed is confident inflation will climb closer toward its target rate. She described the U.S. economy as "well positioned for continued growth," but at the same time highlighted a number of headwinds that threaten progress. Wages have been disappointing and too many people who want full-time jobs and instead working part-time, she said. She also noted a lackluster housing recovery and modest business investment.
The Fed has kept its key benchmark rate at a record low near zero since December 2008. "I think it will be appropriate at some point this year to take the initial step to raise the federal-funds rate target and begin the process of normalizing monetary policy," Yellen said to the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce in Providence, Rhode Island.
But when the central bank finally begins to raise rates, Yellen said it would proceed cautiously, "which I expect would mean that it will be several years before the federal funds rate would be back to its normal, longer-run level."
Pope's pronouncements making trouble for GOP Catholics
Catholic Republicans are developing a pope problem. Earlier this month, Francis recognized Palestinian statehood. This summer, he’s going to issue an encyclical condemning environmental degradation. And in September, just as the GOP primary race heats up, Francis will travel to Washington to address Congress on climate change. Francis may be popular with the general public, but key Republican primary constituencies — hawks, climate-change skeptics and religious conservatives, including some Catholics, are wary of the pope’s progressivism. Some, pronouncing themselves “Republicans first and Catholics second,” even say they would look askance at a candidate perceived to hew too closely to the bishop of Rome. This internal conflict flips a familiar script, in which Democrats like John Kerry and Joe Biden were labeled “cafeteria Catholics” when their stances on social issues like abortion and gay marriage differed from those of the church.
“In northwest Iowa, we are discussing this a great deal, and sometimes it’s hard for us to reconcile the pronouncements we read from the Holy Father with our conservative principles,” said Sam Clovis, a Catholic and political activist who’s run for U.S. Senate and state treasurer in Iowa. Jeb Bush — who praised the pontiff in a commencement speech at Liberty University this month — could lose out in the Iowa caucus, said Clovis. “It’s going to cause a lot of problems for Jeb Bush, because Republicans are simply not going to take him seriously,” he said.
Bush declined to address whether his admiration for the pope might affect how religious conservatives view him. In his speech at Liberty he said, “I cannot think of any more subversive moral idea ever loosed on the world than ‘the last shall be first, and the first last.’ “It’s a voice like no other,” he continued, “seen in the example of Francis the saint, or of Francis the pope.” The other Catholic Republicans in the presidential conversation have taken their own wary approaches to Francis.
HSBC fears world recession with no lifeboats left
The world economy is disturbingly close to stall speed. The United Nations has cut its global growth forecast for this year to 2.8pc, the latest of the multinational bodies to retreat. We are not yet in the danger zone but this pace is only slightly above the 2.5pc rate that used to be regarded as a recession for the international system as a whole. It leaves a thin safety buffer against any economic shock - most potently if China abandons its crawling dollar peg and resorts to 'beggar-thy-neighbour' policies, transmitting a further deflationary shock across the global economy.
The longer this soggy patch drags on, the greater the risk that the six-year old global recovery will sputter out. While expansions do not die of old age, they do become more vulnerable to all kinds of pathologies. A sweep of historic data by Warwick University found compelling evidence that economies are more likely to stall as they age, what is known as "positive duration dependence". The business cycle becomes stretched. Inventories build up and companies defer spending, tipping over at a certain point into a self-feeding downturn.
Stephen King from HSCB warns that the global authorities have alarmingly few tools to combat the next crunch, given that interest rates are already zero across most of the developed world, debts levels are at or near record highs, and there is little scope for fiscal stimulus.
Whither Faith?-Bill O'Reilly
http://www.billoreilly.com/column/Whither-Faith?pid=45376
A new study is comforting to some, downright alarming to others. Pew Research, the highly-respected polling outfit, questioned tens of thousands of Americans about their religious faith and affiliation. The most striking finding: Christianity is in a steep and secular decline, pardon the pun. Only about 70% of Americans now identify themselves as Christians, a drop of 8 percentage points from just seven years ago.
So, where did all those missing Christians go? They have not converted to Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, or any other religious "ism." No, they have basically dismissed religion altogether. The biggest increase in the survey was among Americans who describe themselves as atheist, agnostic, or "nothing in particular." Pew researchers characterized the trend as nothing less than "astounding."
The Most Expensive Wars in U.S. History
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/05/21/the-most-expensive-wars-in-u-s-history/
Declared an official holiday in 1971, Memorial Day honors those who have given their lives in service to the United States. While the human toll is always great, wars also cost treasure as well as blood. Many factors can affect the cost of waging war. Using a report from the Congressional Research Service, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the most expensive wars in U.S. history. While the Mexican-American War cost just $2.4 billion, or 1.4% of GDP in 1847, spending on World War II accounted for nearly 36% of GDP in 1945, or $4.1 trillion. These are the most expensive wars in U.S. history.
Many early wars in U.S. history resulted in the acquisition of land. The Mexican-American War in the 1840s yielded much of the territory that makes up the present-day Southwest. Similarly, the Spanish-American War prior to the start of the 20th Century ended with U.S. control of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
In every conflict before World War II, nearly all of the country’s defense budget was spent on direct conflict — classified as wartime spending. For example, the U.S. spent 1.1% of GDP in 1899 to fight the Spanish-American War, and just 1.5% of GDP was spent on total defense spending.
Google I/O 2015 Kicking Off Next Week: What To Expect ... And Not Expect
The countdown to Google I/O 2015 has moved from months to days, with the company's annual developers conference set to kick off this weekend. As the search engine company prepares to deliver its state of the union address, it's time to look at what fans can expect from keynote presentations and what may likely be glossed over or unmentioned. Last year's Google I/O covered Android L (now Android 5.0 Lollipop), Google Auto, Android TV and the Android Wear platform. Here's what is expected (and also ignored) this year:
Android M
It's been pulled now, but there was, for a short time, mention of Android M—Milky Way or Mars maybe—in an entry on the conference's schedule. The developer version of Google's next mobile operating system was mentioned in an entry titled "An Android for Work Update" that described how Android M can create new markets for hundreds of millions of devices for workers.
Virtual Reality
The first generation of virtual reality experiences will be offered primarily through headsets that rely on computers and video game consoles, but the sector is expected to move to mobile to drive it to the masses. Google is preparing to leverage that market. In a half-hour session titled "Make Believe," Google will engage developers on the future of VR and its efforts to be part of that movement. "Join us to explore virtual reality and how it may change our lives," stated the entry. "Learn how it works and how to design virtual reality experiences. Includes lessons learnt from virtual reality game developer Katie Goode."
Satellite Mapping
The company that gave the world satellite images of itself, of every square foot of every perfect mountain and every imperfect road, is preparing to move its cartography services into real time. Google acquired satellite mapping service SkyMap last year. This year, in a session titled "The Earth in real time," it's preparing to tell the world what it intends to do with the service. "With Skybox, we're looking to take the next step forward in satellite imaging and find new ways to help people use data from space to solve problems on Earth," stated the description.
Google Glass
Last fall, Google said its Glass program had graduated, and the company thanks all of the smart glasses' early adopters. While the company partnered with Intel to push more power into Google Glass, there has been little or no evidence to place the wearable tech into the I/O 2015 agenda. The conferences' wearable sessions focus on fitness and personal security. In the one talk that will cover app development for wearables, the description focuses on the Wear platform.
New Phone
Apple hasn't tipped its hand as to what the iPhone 6's S variants will hold and the spring of 2015 appears a bit too early for Google to show what it has planned for the fall.
Most Mountains Don't Come With Pointy Peaks
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/most-mountains-dont-come-pointy-peaks-180955378/
If you asked someone to draw a mountain, they'd likely sketch a mass wtih a series of pointy spikes. But a study published this week in Nature Climate Change suggests that mountain peaks may in fact hide the larger range's true form. Paul Elsen, a grad student at Princeton University, and Morgan Tingley, a researcher at the University of Connecticut, wanted to dig deeper into mountain topography. So, they examined satellite data from 182 mountain ranges around the world, looking at how the amount of land area changed with elevation.
With a classic, cartoon-like peak, you'd expect the land area to get smaller and smaller as you go higher and higher. But most of the most of the ranges — 68 percent to be exact — didn't do that. Instead, as elevation climbed, a small fraction actually had more area, almost like a reverse pyramid. Some had an hourglass shape, with less area at mid-elevation, and others took more of a diamond shape, carrying most of their area in the middle.
The team wasn't totally surprised by their results. “I did expect that we’d see some patterns that were not this classic pyramid, [but] I had no idea that pyramid mountains would be the exception to the rule," Elsen, who got interested in the subject while doing fieldwork in the Himalayas told The Washington Post's Chelsea Harvey.
Another /pol/ ripoff??? Good Goy!!
FWS moves to regulate bird kills from oil wells, power lines
http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060019062
The Obama administration is considering a new program to permit and mitigate accidental bird kills from drilling pits, gas flares, power lines and communications towers, a move aimed at reducing major sources of avian mortality that was cheered by bird advocates. The Fish and Wildlife Service today released a notice of intent to prepare a programmatic environmental impact statement that could establish a permitting regime under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act requiring that such incidental take be mitigated and potentially offset by habitat restoration or protection.
The service plans to take 60 days of public comments and will hold open houses in Sacramento, Calif.; Denver; St. Louis; and Arlington, Va., in the coming months. It has also scheduled a July 8 webinar to discuss the proposal. At issue is how the agency enforces the 1918 migratory bird law, which prohibits the harming of any of 1,027 covered bird species, even, according to some interpretations, if the harm is accidental. FWS already permits hunting of migratory birds as long as harvest levels allow bird populations to sustain themselves. It also permits the killing of certain migratory species that prey on other wildlife, including blackbirds, cowbirds, grackles, crows and magpies.
But there is currently no mechanism for industry sectors to obtain the right to unintentionally kill migratory birds, which happens frequently when birds collide with or are electrocuted by power lines, for example, or when birds try to land in oil and gas disposal pits. FWS said it wants to create legal assurances for companies that face liabilities under the migratory bird law, while offering a means for impacts to be mitigated. The proposal is still in a very early stage, so it is unclear whether it will extend to the wind sector or cover building collisions, two other major sources of bird mortality.
Nazi Art: Sculptures from Hitler's Chancellery Discovered
For decades, the bronze horses that once adorned Adolf Hitler's Reich Chancellery in Berlin had been missing. But on Wednesday, the Nazi works of art were finally discovered during a series of raids held across the country. SPIEGEL has learned that authorities were also able to recover a sculpture by Nazi-era artist Arno Breker called "The Wehrmacht," which flanked the grand entrance to Hitler's Chancellery.
The recoveries were made possible by a longtime informant helping Berlin state police investigators. SPIEGEL has learned that the woman was first offered the bronze horses, created by the Nazi-party sculptor Josef Thorak, for €3.1 million ($3.4 million) in September 2013 by a dubious art dealer. She immediately went to the police. She was subsequently approached three more times by dealers in Germany, most recently in January, 2015.
Berlin investigators worked closely together with the Dutch art detective Arthur Brand, from Amsterdam. In February, Brand established contact with a dealer in Antwerp, who offered him the bronze horses for €8 million. In consultation with the police, Brand posed as the representative of a fictitious collector from the US. Later, Brand was offered additional works of Nazi art, including the 40-ton Breker relief called "The Guardsman" ("Der Wächter").
Hawaii groups plant coconut trees, protest against Monsanto
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150524/us-monsanto-protest-4e15fd3161.html
By CATHY BUSSEWITZ
HONOLULU (AP) — Demonstrators spent Saturday planting coconut trees and waving signs in rallies across the Hawaiian Islands as part of an international day of protests against agriculture business Monsanto. The protesters complained about the impacts that companies like Monsanto have on the community when they spray fields with chemical pesticides. They say they want agribusiness companies to stop using Hawaii as a testing ground for pesticides and genetically modified foods.
"Get off the island," said Diane Marshall, a Honolulu teacher. "I would like to see them close up shop." In Waikiki, a man wore a gas mask in front of a statue of surfer Duke Kahanamoku to demonstrate the dangers of pesticides. Others in bikinis talked with tourists about why they don't want genetically modified goods to be grown in Hawaii.
"What's cool about doing it in Waikiki with the tourists is it's kind of giving them a light on what the issues are in Hawaii — that it's more than just paradise," said Nathaniel Whittaker, 28, of Honolulu.
IT'S HAPPENING!- CONTRA-CORNER FORECASTS MARKET CHAOS
http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/wall-street-r-i-p-the-bubble-is-dying-at-the-zero-bound/
…At length, however, even the monetary politburo will run out of excuses and deceptions. When the juice stops and the last machines go quiet, of course, there will be pandemonium in the casino, and here’s why. The Great Financial Bubble dying at the zero bound has been inflating with just three interruptions——1987, 2000 and 2008-09—for the last 33 years. As a result, the market value of stocks, bonds and other debts have simply become decoupled from national income.
At 2X GDP in 1981, the financial market was valued at its multi-decade trend level. Since then, the market value of corporate equities has risen 17X and debt outstanding is up by 20X.
Accordingly, financial markets today are capitalized at 5X national income. That’s an elephantine bubble by any other name. And that’s why market spasms like yesterday’s 15-minute rip do indeed signify that monetary rigor mortis is rapidly setting in.
The Insurance Scam That’s Fleecing Low-Income Drivers — And How Police Are Making It Worse
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/23/insurance-scam-fleeces-poor/
Ms Martin was taken in by a widening scam in which crooks, posing as auto insurance agents, prey on working people struggling to find affordable policies. Under the scam, the perpetrator offers auto insurance for a low price — low because the scammer, posing as a broker, will buy an authentic policy using fraudulent means of payment, keeping the policy just long enough to collect a proof of insurance card. The racket is a growing problem in New York City and South Florida, according to an insurance industry group, but seems most prevalent in Michigan, where premiums are inflated by a state mandate that drivers purchase insurance plans which have unlimited lifetime medical benefits, among other features. Victims in Michigan are thrown even deeper into crisis when police, as is common there, accuse victims of being in on the scam and seize their vehicles and other assets under civil forfeiture laws.
The scam and seizures show how crooks and cops can end up working in concert to further imperil those already on the economic brink. Indeed, in this case, low-income residents are pinched at every turn. They start off with especially high insurance premiums, consumer advocates argue, because insurance companies sometimes charge people in low-income communities more for auto insurance in a practice some have labeled modern redlining. Bogus agents exploit the need for cheaper policies by selling insurance that’s too good to be true, leaving victims financially exposed, for example, in the case of an accident. As if all that weren’t enough, the police then turn on the victims of the fraud, who are far easier to track down than the original perpetrators.
“You have a blend of crooked agents selling innocent, squeezed drivers bogus policies and insurance cards, and high insurance premiums,” said James Quiggle of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, a group that receives funding from insurance companies.
NSA winds down once-secret phone-records collection program
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150523/us-nsa-surveillance-dbd7e82d6e.html
WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Security Agency has begun winding down its collection and storage of American phone records after the Senate failed to agree on a path forward to change or extend the once-secret program ahead of its expiration at the end of the month. Barring an 11th hour compromise when the Senate returns to session May 31, a much-debated provision of the Patriot Act — and some other lesser known surveillance tools — will sunset at midnight that day. The change also would have a major impact on the FBI, which uses the Patriot Act and the other provisions to gather records in investigations of suspected spies and terrorists.
In a chaotic scene during the wee hours of Saturday, Senate Republicans blocked a bill known as the USA Freedom Act, which would have ended the NSA's bulk collection but preserved its ability to search the records held by the phone companies on a case-by-case basis. The bill was backed by President Barack Obama, House Republicans and the nation's top law enforcement and intelligence officials.
It fell just three votes short of the 60 needed for passage. All the "no" votes but one were cast by Republicans, some of whom said they thought the USA Freedom Act didn't go far enough to help the NSA maintain its capabilities. If Senate Republican leaders were counting on extending current law and continuing the negotiations, they miscalculated. Democrats and libertarian-minded Republicans refused to go along. A bill to grant a two-month extension of the law failed, and senators objected to each attempt by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky offer up a short term extension.
Santa Barbara's oil-slicked waters
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27589-santa-barbaras-oilslicked-waters.html#.VV_gu0Y_zCI
This aerial photo shows part of Santa Barbara's coastline in California, after an estimated 21,000 gallons of oil spewed into the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday. Taken on Wednesday, oil-soaked kelp darkened the water as efforts to mop up the spill continued. The cause was a burst pipe, which leaked for 3 hours and released more than 100,000 gallons of oil in that time. Most of it remained on land, spreading across roughly 6.5 kilometres of beach, but enough leaked into the sea to form a 14-kilometre slick.
Many are concerned about the harm it will do to the area's wildlife, which includes whales and sea lions. The same area suffered a devastating spill in 1969, when a platform blowout released hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the sea, killing thousands of marine mammals and seabirds.
In the struggle to limit the damage this time, more than 300 people have been involved in clean-up efforts so far. Volunteers have been helping a crew of workers involved in cleaning the beach by raking and vacuuming up oil, and vessels have been deployed to remove oil from the sea surface.
/pn/? more like /pu/
Get it? pu? like pee you?
Because this board stinks lmao
California Accepts Farmers' Offer to Cut Water Use by 25 Percent
California government employees announced Friday that the state would accept a proposal made by some farmers earlier this week to voluntarily cut their water use by 25 percent during the upcoming peak growing season. Farmers who opt into the voluntary program would be protected from potentially deeper cuts during the period, which runs from June 1 to September 30.
The farmers involved irrigate in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta region and hold “riparian” water rights, meaning they draw water directly from the flowing river delta to irrigate land on its banks.
These riparian rights are different from other water rights in the state. While most other farmers get their water from aqueducts and from the state and federal water projects which allocate water based on a longstanding priority system of “senior” and “junior” water rights, riparian rights holders have rights to divert a specific proportion of the river’s natural flow to irrigate their crops. In other words, when the flow decreases, as in times of drought, the state restricts their access to water proportionally to the new, lower volume.
China says charter completed for AIIB
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2015/05/22/92/0301000000AEN20150522008400315F.html
BEIJING, May 22 (Yonhap) – Senior officials from the member-nations of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) have completed work on the bank's charter and will sign it in late June, China's foreign ministry said Friday. Fifty-seven countries, including South Korea, became founding members of the AIIB, which is seen as a potential counterbalance to U.S.-led multilateral lenders such as the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the World Bank. The U.S. and Japan did not join the AIIB.
Completion of the charter came after a three-day meeting in Singapore with senior officials this week, the ministry said in a statement. China has said the new bank will start operations by the end of this year however the statement did not give any details on the charter.
A South Korean source involved in the negotiations said previously that the members have agreed to raise the initial capital of the new lender to US$100 billion, compared with the original target of $50 billion.
Senate blocks extension of Patriot Act provisions
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/23/patriot-act-extension-senate-vote/27717837/
WASHINGTON - Three key sections of the Patriot Act are set to expire on June 1 unless the Senate resolves a stalemate with the House over the future of the sweeping anti-terrorism law. The Senate early Saturday blocked a bill that would have extended the provisions for another two months, leaving the leadership in a tough spot as the deadline loomed and Congress prepared to take a week-long recess for the Memorial Day holiday.
The bill failed on a procedural vote, not garnering the required 60-vote threshold to move forward. Afterward, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., repeatedly tried to push forward shorter extensions that would allow the bill to expire later in June, but Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., led the objections to that effort.
McConnell then said he would reconvene the Senate on May 31, just hours before the expiration, in hopes that lawmakers would come to an agreement. "We need to act responsibly on behalf of the American people," he said on the floor.
Did Sid Blumenthal Violate Foreign-Lobbying Law?
Clinton consigliere Sidney Blumenthal’s now-notorious e-mails to Hillary Clinton on Libya could constitute a criminal violation of U.S. foreign lobbying laws. According to several experts, if his business and intelligence ties with Libyan interim government officials were as extensive as evidence suggests, Blumenthal’s repeated communications to America’s top diplomat broke a federal criminal statute requiring the registration and reporting of foreign agents engaged in lobbying foreign officials.
“I think there is both smell and smoke,” says Elliot Berke, a Washington D.C. lawyer who works regularly on cases involving the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
Designed to prevent U.S. officials from being unwittingly influenced by representatives of foreign governments, the law requires individuals to do more than simply identify themselves as foreign lobbyists. “FARA doesn’t just require registration,” says Berke. “It requires ongoing reporting of specific contacts and the labeling and filing of information like memos with the Justice Department within 48 hours of dissemination.”
Biola Grieves Death of Student on Mission Trip
http://magazine.biola.edu/article/15-spring/biola-grieves-death-of-student-on-mission-trip/
Hasiet Joy Negash spent her final days on earth living out a dream. Alongside a team from Biola’s Student Missionary Union, Negash traveled to India during the first two weeks of 2015 to share the good news of Jesus Christ. She played and fished with orphaned children. She washed the feet of untouchables. She gave a gospel message in a town where the mayor, a member of parliament and hundreds of teachers were present. Then, on Jan. 15, the vibrant 19-year-old Biola student collapsed after complaining of asthma-related breathing difficulties. She was taken to a local hospital, where doctors were unable to revive her.
“The only thing my sister ever cared about was doing God’s will,” her brother, Hosana, said at a campus memorial service on Feb. 5. “She always wanted to spread the gospel in a foreign country, and when the opportunity arose, there was no changing her mind. The trip to India was all she ever talked about from the day she learned about the trip to the day she left.”
Negash’s death — the first ever to occur on a Biola mission trip — brought an outpouring of emotion on the university’s campus, where she was a familiar and friendly face.
AP Interview: Steinem says isolating N. Korea not working
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150523/as-nkorea-dmz-crossing-e51ed756e9.html
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) — Iconic women's rights activist Gloria Steinem may be in North Korea, but she is as outspoken as ever. In an interview with The Associated Press, the 81-year-old feminism pioneer said she decided to join a group of women in a rare and in some quarters highly controversial walk across the Demilitarized Zone dividing North and South Korea because she thinks efforts to force change by isolating the North have failed. But, she said, she has no intention of letting the North's leadership off the hook for its own human rights record.
Steinem and a group of 29 other women from 15 countries are set to walk across the DMZ on Sunday after obtaining a rare green light from both governments. The permission didn't come easily — they had to alter their plans to go through the symbolic truce village of Panmunjom, where the Korean War armistice was signed in 1953, because officials in Seoul and the United Nations Command responsible for security in the area said they could not guarantee the group's safety.
Instead, the women will take a route that links the two Koreas to the Kaesong industrial complex, a joint North-South business venture near the border.
G.M. Inquiry Said to Find Criminal Wrongdoing
Justice Department investigators have identified criminal wrongdoing in General Motors’ failure to disclose a defect tied to at least 104 deaths, and are negotiating what is expected to be a record penalty, according to people briefed on the inquiry. A settlement could be reached as soon as this summer. The final number is still being negotiated, but it is expected to eclipse the $1.2 billion paid last year by Toyota for concealing unintended acceleration problems in its vehicles, said the people, who did not want to be identified because the negotiations weren’t complete.
G.M.’s eagerness to resolve the investigation — a strategy that sets it apart from Toyota, which fought prosecutors — is expected to earn it so-called cooperation credit, one of the people said. That credit could translate into a somewhat smaller penalty than if G.M. had declined to cooperate.
Former G.M. employees, some of whom were dismissed last year, are under investigation as well and could face criminal charges. Prosecutors and G.M. are also still negotiating what misconduct the company would admit to.
George Clintonopoulos!
http://www.wnd.com/2015/05/george-clintonopoulos/
What took so long?
The question isn’t whether George Stephanopoulos compromised his credentials as a “journalist” by failing to reveal his donations to the Clinton Foundation. The question is why, immediately after Stephanopoulos left the Clinton administration, ABC hired this partisan in the first place.
In 1996, when ABC hired him, the initial press release said he would “serve both as a political analyst and as a correspondent.” The “correspondent” role caused such an uproar – even in liberal mainstream media – that a few days later ABC quickly retreated: “I don’t know how that got into the press release,” said a spokeswoman. “He will not report the news.”
Then-ABC News Vice President Joanna Bistany said Stephanopoulos would be a commentator like ABC contributor William Kristol, Republican Dan Quayle’s former chief of staff. “I view it the same way as Kristol,” she said. “He has a point of view, a political persuasion.” Bistany also said, “We want a mix of voices,” assuring that Stephanopoulos wouldn’t “do anything that has any appearance of conflict.”
Then came the double cross.
By 1999, Stephanopoulos was a regular contributor on “World News Tonight” and “Good Morning America” and had co-anchored ABC’s overnight news program. Still, ABC assured viewers that he’d stay away from partisan political stories. “We’re all conscious of the sensitivity with him having been part of the news in Washington,” said then-ABC News President David Westin. “We wouldn’t have him be the beat reporter on the (Al) Gore campaign.” An ABC spokeswoman added, “He will not be the beat reporter assigned to a campaign,” although that “does not mean that we won’t have him doing more general political stories.”
In 2002, Stephanopoulos became host of “This Week,” and two years later ABC named him “chief Washington correspondent.”
Now comes the news that Stephanopoulos gave $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation but failed to disclose the contribution to his employer and to his viewers. He offered this apology: “Those donations were a matter of public record, but I should have made additional disclosures on-air when we covered the foundation, and I now believe that directing personal donations to that foundation was a mistake. … I should have gone the extra mile to avoid even the appearance of a conflict. I apologize to all of you for failing to do that.”
Stephanopoulos, however, has yet to publicly disclose further ties to the Clinton Foundation. He served several times as a panelist, moderator or “featured attendee” for the foundation. Also, the Washington Free Beacon reports that Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, once worked as an intern for Stephanopoulos when he briefly taught at Columbia.
IS militants purge Syrian town of Assad loyalists
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150523/ml--islamic_state-59447be136.html
BEIRUT (AP) — Islamic State group militants hunted down Syrian government troops and loyalists in the newly captured town of Palmyra, shooting or beheading them in public as a warning, and imposing their strict interpretation of Islam, activists said Friday. The purge, which relied mostly on informants, was aimed at solidifying the extremists' grip on the strategic town that was overrun Wednesday by IS fighters.
It also was part of a campaign to win the support of President Bashar Assad's opponents, who have suffered from a government crackdown in the town and surrounding province in the last four years of Syria's civil war. The strategy included promises to fix the electricity and water grids — after Palmyra is cleared of regime loyalists, according to an activist in the historic town. The man is known in the activist community by the nom de guerre of Omar Hamza because he fears for his security.
The capture of Palmyra has raised alarm that the militants might try to destroy one of the Mideast's most spectacular archaeological sites — a well-preserved, 2,000-year-old Roman-era city on the town's edge — as they have destroyed others in Syria and Iraq. For the moment, however, their priority appeared to be in imposing their rule, with activists saying there were no signs the group moved in on the ancient ruins.
US stocks fall slightly on lower oil, mixed earnings news
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150522/financial_markets-c153667ac9.html
NEW YORK (AP) — The stock market capped a quiet week of trading on a down note. Major indexes fell from the start on Friday as oil drillers and other energy-related companies followed oil prices lower. Stocks spent much of the rest of the day drifting between losses and gains as investors considered a mixed bag corporate earnings and a slight increase in inflation.
The Standard & Poor's 500 index closed down 4.76 points, or 0.2 percent, to 2,126.06. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 53.72 points, or 0.3 percent, to 18,232.02. The Nasdaq composite edged down 1.43 points to 5,089.36. Trading was light ahead of the Memorial Day weekend in the U.S. Just 2.5 billion shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange, three-quarters of the normal level.
Nine of the 10 industry sectors of the S&P 500 were lower, led by a 0.8 percent drop in telecommunications stocks. Among stocks making big gains, Deere & Co. rose $3.89, or 4.3 percent, to $93.35 after the equipment maker beat analysts' estimates for its latest quarterly earnings. The company also raised its profit forecast for the year. Campbell Soup rose 98 cents, or 2 percent, to $47.91 after reporting better-than-expected results, too.
In economic news, the Labor Department reported that inflation rose 0.1 percent in April, its third straight increase. The report also noted that core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, climbed 0.3 percent, the biggest one-month increase in more than two years. The numbers suggest that an improving economy could be setting the stage for the Federal Reserve to raise its benchmark short-term interest rate. The central market has held the rate near zero for more than six years.
Rolling Stone, Alan Dershowitz, and Catholic Priests
http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2015/05/rolling-stone-alan-dershowitz-and-catholic-priests
By now, virtually everyone has heard of the Rolling Stone fiasco, with its explosive article, “A Rape on Campus,” having been unmasked as deeply flawed. Although the magazine featured a long story about campus sexual assault, the police found no evidence to substantiate the allegations of rape at the University of Virginia.
Perhaps fewer are familiar with the case of Alan Dershowitz, the well-known Harvard Law professor who tells his own frightening story of a false accusation. Dershowitz’s reputation for integrity, built over the course of a lifetime, was recently threatened by an uncorroborated allegation of sex with an underage woman. While that accusation has now been stricken from the record, Dershowitz notes that “you can’t unring a bell,” his sterling career and good name having been called into question.
Of course, there remains seared in American memory the tragedy of the Duke University lacrosse team, with three members of that squad having been accused of rape. Their story quickly became a national parable about race, class, and gender, with the athletes widely condemned in the court of public opinion prior to their exoneration. So hasty was their denunciation—on campus and off—that the attorney general of North Carolina subsequently condemned the “tragic rush” to accuse the students.
These high-profile episodes should make us think, once again, about Catholic priests who have been falsely accused of sexual abuse, and about the need for a just process in dealing with their cases.
One of the most significant problems facing priests today is that the standard for removing an accused priest from ministry is not “clear and convincing evidence,” or even a “preponderance of evidence,” but merely that an accusation is “credible”—the least reliable standard of assessment. David Pierre, in his eye-opening book,Catholic Priests Falsely Accused, has shown that a “credible” accusation might mean nothing more than, at a given time, the accuser and the priest lived in the same geographical area. Cardinal Avery Dulles pointed out that accusations can be deemed “credible” simply because they are not entirely groundless.
Driver left in tight spot after prankster wraps car in cling film
This is hilarious for everyone except for the owner of this car found with cling film around it. An unlucky motorist in Kent returned to their Toyota to discover it in this unfortunate state. If that wasn’t enough, pranksters had also left photos of breasts and a half naked man touching his nipples under the wrapping.
The tightly packaged car was spotted outside East Borough Primary School in Maidstone. ‘I spotted the car at break just after I finished my maths exam,’ said 15-year-old schoolgirl Cheryl Russ. ‘At first I thought it was a rain cover but then when I got closer I realised someone had wrapped it in clingfilm.
‘I got my mum to drive past it later and it had gone.’
Listen to Chris Christie’s Profanity-Laced Performance at Press Dinner
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/05/chris-christie-profanity-laced-speech
New Jersey governor Chris Christie is known for his salty language, and his love of a good curse word was on full display Wednesday night at the annual New Jersey Legislative Correspondents Club Show. The event, a good-natured exercise in roasting and joking not entirely unlike the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
Christie, who is widely presumed to be planning a Republican bid for the presidency, opened by acknowledging that his staff did not create a video for his appearance, as they had in some years past. After listing a number of potential excuses for not having produced a video, Christie delivered his first punch line. “I can tell you all of those things, and none of it would be true,” he said. “The truth of the matter is, we don’t give a shit about this, and we don’t give a shit about you.”
The opening joke, like most of Christie’s jokes throughout the night, was met with raucous laughter in the audience.
“Speaking of things I don’t give a shit about, let’s start with the president of whatever this thing is,” Christie continued, before ripping into NJ.com reporter Claude Brodesser-Akner. “I’m not even going to try the last name, not because I can’t pronounce French names or whatever it is, but because, again, I don’t give a shit what his name is.”
Christie made fun of Brodesser-Akner for previously working at TMZ. “This is a guy who says he doesn’t know what I’m doing every day,” Christie said of Brodesser-Akner. “I heard that part of [his] speech. Then just get the fuck away from me. Every time I turn the corner in New Hampshire, or Iowa, or any place else, you and that beard are there. So here’s my suggestion: open your eyes, clean the shit out of your ears, and pay attention. Then you’ll know what I’m doing.”
Pro gaming doesn't need balls to be considered a 'sport'
http://www.engadget.com/2015/05/21/esports-are-legit-sports/
Professional gaming, commonly referred to as eSports, is a rapidly booming industry thanks to online streaming sites like Twitch, and League of Legends is one of the biggest games in the business. Twitch proudly hosts every League of Legends tournament, most of which feature ESPN-style analysts, commentators and giant touchscreen game-review boards.
134 million people watch eSports worldwide and League of Legends generated around $1 billion in revenue in 2014 alone. The 2013 League of Legends championships sold out the Los Angeles Staples Center and brought in 32 million viewers. Over the past few years, China and the UK have even built dedicated arenas just for eSports.
[says] ESPN President John Skipper, eSports are "not a sport," . ESPN radio host Colin Cowherd agrees: "If I am ever forced to cover guys playing video games, I will retire,". Cowherd has also equated eSports with a gunshot wound to the face.
Clinton received sensitive info on private email account
WASHINGTON (AP) — Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton received information on her private email account about the deadly attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi that was later classified “secret” at the request of the FBI, according to documents released Friday, underscoring lingering questions about how responsibly she handled sensitive information on a home server. The nearly 900 pages of her correspondence released by the State Department also contained several messages that were deemed sensitive but unclassified, detailed her daily schedule and contained information — censored in the documents as released — about the CIA that the government is barred from publicly disclosing.
Taken together, the correspondence provides examples of material considered to be sensitive that Clinton, the front-runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, received on the account run out of her home. She has said the private server had “numerous safeguards.”
Clinton’s decision while secretary of state to opt out of a State Department email account has become a political problem for her, as the Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks has used the disclosures of her email usage to paint her as secretive and above standard scrutiny.
S. Korea keeps importing fish from Japan after Fukushima disaster
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/business/2015/05/22/72/0501000000AEN20150522004400320F.html
SEJONG, May 22 (Yonhap) – South Korea has imported more than 100,000 tons of fish from Japan even after the Fukushima nuclear disaster caused local consumers to shun products from the neighboring country due to health concerns, government data showed Friday. According to the data by the Korea Customs Office (KCS), South Korea brought in 130,973 tons of fish products from Japan between March 2011, when a powerful earthquake and subsequent tsunami crippled a nuclear power plant, and last month, with their value topping US$420 million.
Reflecting health concerns, however, imports from Japan had been decreasing every year. In 2014, Japanese imports made up just 2.3 percent of all fishery products brought into the country, down from 7.6 percent in 2010. A local poll conducted last year by the Korea Consumer Agency showed 92.6 percent of respondents still expressed health concerns about the nuclear disaster, with 52.9 percent saying products from Japanese fisheries were the most worrisome.
The government said South Koreans had bought fish from Japan because South Korea only banned imports from eight prefectures near Fukushima since September 2011. This measure was taken after the nuclear plant dumped large quantities of radioactive materials into the ocean. The government also made it mandatory for all fish imports to be reported and compelled them to be screened for cesium and iodine, although products that had permissible traces of radiation were allowed into the country.
Where Washington’s Jewish elite worship
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2015/05/22/where-washington-jewish-elite-worship/
President Ulysses S. Grant laid its cornerstone back in 1876. And it's been nothing but spotlight from there for Washington's most prestigious synagogue. President Obama made history Friday by speaking at Adas Israel, one of the oldest congregations in the city. “The people of Israel must always know America has its back," he said. But Obama is far from the only political leader to grace its marbled, tree-lined steps.
As The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin points out, in 1963 the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. chose Adas Israel to make his first civil rights speech to a Jewish congregation. Almost every Israeli ambassador to the United States in recent memory has joined the congregation. Top advisers for the secretary of state and Treasury Department worship there. At least two Supreme Court justices drop by on holidays. "The president is probably the last person in the White House who hasn't been to Adas," Norman Eisen, Obama's former ambassador to the Czech Republic, told Eilperin.
Today, Washington has one of the nation's highest percentage of Jewish worshipers, at about 4.3 percent compared with 2 percent of Americans overall, according to the Berman Jewish DataBank. Many of those are members of Congress: A 2014 Pew Religion study found about 5 percent of Congress is Jewish, more than double the national average. And many of those lawmakers attend Adas Israel.
Its rabbi made headlines last year by coming out as gay
Last year, Adas Israel's senior rabbi Gil Steinlauf sent a letter out of the blue to his congregation and supporters. One of his congregants, Atlantic senior writer Jeffrey Goldberg, shared it with his readers:
I am writing to share with you that after twenty years of marriage, my wife Batya and I have decided to divorce. We have arrived at this heartbreaking decision because I have come to understand that I am gay.
Steinlauf's announcement was well received among the global Conservative branch, which at the end of 2006 controversially announced homosexuality no longer ran afoul of Jewish law. "There is no need for this sort of secret anymore," Goldberg wrote. "There is no reason for the rabbi of a progressive synagogue to hide from his congregants who he, in fact, is."
It's become the de facto synagogue for politicians to give a nod to Israel
When the prime minister of Israel was assassinated in 1995, then-Vice President Al Gore and members of Bill Clinton's Cabinet and Supreme Court attended a memorial service at Adas Israel. Presidents from Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon have addressed the powerful U.S.-Israeli community there.
Today, U.S.-Israel political relations are at some of their lowest in recent memory. Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu don't get along, and their distrust was punctuated earlier this year by Netanyahu's joint address to Congress denouncing Obama's nuclear deal with Iran.That could explain why Obama spoke at Adas Israel on Friday. His administration is at a pivotal moment for the high-profile nuclear negotiations, which is being closely watched by wary members of Congress from both parties. As Eilperin notes, Obama could certainly use the support from the progressive American Jewish community that worships at Washington's most elite synagogue.
The Libertarian Moment is Everywhere Around Us (Increasing Social Tolerance Edition)
http://reason.com/blog/2015/05/22/the-libertarian-moment-is-everywhere-aro
For the past 15 years or so, Gallup has charted how Americans describe themselves when it comes to social and economic issues. For the first time ever, equal percentages of us define ourselves as liberal and conservative on social issues:
(see image)
Even among Republicans, social liberalism is ascendant, with self-described conservatives dipping from a low of 67 percent in 2009 to just 53 percent now. The key issues driving the growth of social liberal views and the decline of social conservative views, says Gallup, are gay marriage and pot legalization. Support for both of those things has skyrocketed in the 21st century, with a velocity that is nothing short of stunning.
I think you can safely add to these issues a more broad-based embrace of what Matt Welch and I dubbed the "Libertarian Moment," or comfort with and demand for increasingly individualized and personalized options and experiences in every aspect of our lives. More and more choices in everything are busting out all over the place and such change is even coming to those areas still controlled by relatively top-down governmental edicts (education, health care, retirement).
According to a composite index of libertarian views on social and economic issues developed by pollsters at CNN, something clearly is afoot. The pollsters look at whether people believe that government is trying to do too many things individuals should be doing and whether or not people think government should enforce a particular set of morals. In 1992, the index of libertarian belief stood at 92 points. It's now at 113 points. Virtually all surveys show trends of people thinking the government is doing too much, is incompetent or untrustworthy, or represents a larger threat to the future than big labor or big business.
Senate advances fast-track trade bill sought by Obama
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/21/us-usa-trade-idUSKBN0O61WJ20150521
President Barack Obama on Thursday moved closer to winning the power to speed trade deals through the U.S. Congress when the Senate advanced legislation important to his Asian trade push. Senators voted 62-38 to set up a speedy decision on the "fast-track" trade negotiating authority the president needs to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal. The TPP is part of Obama's so-called pivot to Asia, a strategy to counter China's rising economic and diplomatic clout in Asia.
Obama called the vote "a big step forward," adding that his trade agenda dovetails with the "strong labor standards, strong environmental standards" that his fellow Democrats in Congress are demanding. Thirteen of 44 Democrats backed the legislation in the Senate's second procedural vote. Some supported moving ahead with fast-track after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, assured them he would set a vote next month on a bill to renew the Export-Import Bank's charter, according to leading Democratic senators. The charter is due to expire at the end of June.
They were joined by 49 of 54 Republicans, giving supporters of the legislation more than the 60 votes needed to proceed in the 100-member Senate. With some of the Senate's arcane procedural underbrush cleared away, senators tried to focus on amendments to the bill - some of them contentious - and there could be yet another procedural vote requiring 60 supporters.
‘Shale-ionaires’ suffering from wave of bankrupt oil drillers
At the height of the U.S. energy boom, Texas landowner John Baen received about $100,000 a month in royalty payments from companies producing oil and natural gas on his property. Now the checks are much smaller, and when he opens his mailbox each day, he’s afraid he’ll find yet another bankruptcy notice. So far, four of the producers sending him checks have caved in to rising debts as oil prices slumped, seeking court protection from their creditors. “I feel like crying because I know I’m going to get another 10 notices,” said Baen, 67, who owns 10,000 acres of land and mineral rights on other property.
A rebound in oil prices that bottomed near $44 a barrel in March has provided some relief to stronger companies that have been able to compensate with cost cuts and more efficient operations. For many smaller, cash-strapped producers, current prices of almost $60 still aren’t enough to make ends meet compared to the $100-plus prices seen during the boom days.
West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark grade, gained 74 cents to $59.72 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange at 11:47 a.m. London time. There have been at least a dozen bankruptcy filings in recent months, and more than a dozen have defaulted on bond payments or warned investors of challenging times ahead, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
That’s sending shock waves through the world of private land and mineral rights owners — sometimes called “shale-ionaires” — who were enriched by the explosion in U.S. shale drilling. Those resource owners basically rent out their oil and gas rights to producers in return for a share of the revenues. When the industry does well, the mineral rights owners do well. When business tanks, they share the pain with producers.
Seventeen executed by jihadists in Syria's Palmyra
Beirut/Paris(dpa) - Islamic State jihadists have executed 17 people after seizing control of the historic Syrian city of Palmyra, a monitoring group said Thursday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said some of the 17, whose numbers included pro-government fighters and regime supporters, had been beheaded. The killings bring the total number of executions over Islamic State's week-long offensive in Syria's central desert to 66, the Britain-based group said.
The jihadist group took control of the Syrian side of Al Walid Tanef crossing in Homs province, the last crossing which connects the country with Iraq, a monitoring group said. "Syria lost its last crossing with neighbouring Iraq after regime forces withdrew from the area," the head of the group, Rami Abdel Rahman, said.
The crossing is near the westernmost point of Iraq's Anbar province where the borders of Iraq, Syria and Jordan meet.
Drought-ridden California faces decision on new water cuts
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150522/us--california_drought-water_cuts-074d26af84.html
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — Farmers along the river delta at the heart of California agriculture expected to get an answer Friday on their surprise offer to give up a quarter of their water this year in exchange for being spared deeper mandatory cutbacks as California responds to the worsening drought. Regulators with the state Water Resources Control Board promised a decision on the proposal by a group of farmers along the delta of the Sacramento-San Joaquin rivers — a rare concession by holders of some of California's strongest water rights.
For the first time since a 1977 drought, California regulators are warning of coming curtailments for such senior water-rights holders whose claims date back a century or more. Earlier in the current drought, the state mandated 25 percent conservation by cities and towns and curtailed water deliveries to many farmers and communities with less solid claims to water.
The most arid winter on record for the Sierra Nevada snowpack means there will be little runoff this summer to feed California's rivers, reservoirs and irrigation canals. As of Thursday, the U.S. Drought Monitor rated 94 percent of California in severe drought or worse.
By the numbers: Apple iPhone, iPad and Mac quarterly sales
Apple iPad sales have been somewhat flat the past couple of years, a trend that our own Gregg Keizer reported on recently. But how flat is demand? And is the number of iPads sold actually starting to trend down? Sales of iPads – as well as iPhones and Macs, actually – are cyclical, with many more sold close to Christmas than are in mid-spring. That makes it hard to look at raw quarterly numbers and see a trend. But, as blogger Dr. Drang posted with accompanying graphics, if you calculate a 4-quarter moving average (use the average of the most recent 4 quarters as each data point instead of the stand-alone quarterly number), you'll get a much more useful picture of what sales are doing.
Using data from Bare Figures, here's what moving averages look like for iPad, iPhone and Mac unit sales. While overall revenue lets you know how important various product lines are for a company, unit sales can be a better measure of waxing and waning popularity.
On the graph below, you can click (or tap on mobile) on device names in the legend to turn them on and off – you'll need to turn off iPad and iPhone data in order to see the trend for Macs, since unit sales are so much lower. Mouse over (or tap on mobile) points to see underlying data.
2015 Q1 iPhone- 52.5 million units sold
2015 Q1 iPad-14.9 million
2015 Q1 Mac- 5 million
Alzheimer’s origins tied to rise of human intelligence
http://www.nature.com/news/alzheimer-s-origins-tied-to-rise-of-human-intelligence-1.17589
Alzheimer’s disease may have evolved alongside human intelligence, researchers report in a paper posted this month on BioRxiv1.
The study finds evidence that 50,000 to 200,000 years ago, natural selection drove changes in six genes involved in brain development. This may have helped to increase the connectivity of neurons, making modern humans smarter as they evolved from their hominin ancestors. But that new intellectual capacity was not without cost: the same genes are implicated in Alzheimer's disease.
Kun Tang, a population geneticist at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences in China who led the research, speculates that the memory disorder developed as ageing brains struggled with new metabolic demands imposed by increasing intelligence. Humans are the only species known to develop Alzheimer's; the disease is absent even in closely related primate species such as chimpanzees.
Tang and his colleagues searched modern human DNA for evidence of this ancient evolution. They examined the genomes of 90 people with African, Asian or European ancestry, looking for patterns of variation driven by changes in population size and natural selection.
Theology Feud Pits Half of Town's Protestant Churches Against Another
Eight churches—including Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and non-denominational congregations—in Fountain Hills have teamed up for a campaign of public banners and sermons aimed at the theology of a nearby Methodist church. The sermon series—“Progressive Christianity: Fact or Fiction?”—was launched with an op-ed and half-page advertisement in the local newspaper, and promoted with banners at the eight churches involved.
One described it as a “landmark series” and an “unprecedented step” that “demonstrate[s] in a very real way the unity of the 'body of Christ' in Fountain Hills.” Another stated, “Imagine Baptists united with Lutherans working side-by-side with Presbyterians, all while holding the raised hands of charismatics.” It’s the latest salvo in a months-long war of words over theology in the town of about 23,000, located about half an hour outside of Phoenix. Fountain Hills has approximately 15 Protestant churches.
At issue: the topic of “Progressive Christianity,” taught at The Fountains, a United Methodist church. That church’s pastor, David Felten, is known for supporting LGBT rights and progressive theology.
HOTHEADS LEAVE
ash chekem
/pn/ - Politics and News★
You won't get banned for your opinion
Catalog
8chan Bitcoin address: 1NpQaXqmCBji6gfX8UgaQEmEstvVY7U32C | Buy Bitcoin easily in the US | Buy Bitcoin anonymously all over the world | Bitcoin FAQ
Ben "givin' the boot to moot" Garrison is selling mugs, T-shirts and mousepads as an official partner. 10% of sales of these items go to the Infinity Development Group!
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Probing the links between faith and climate denial
http://www.episcopalcafe.com/probing-the-links-between-faith-and-climate-denial/
Yesterday’s Washington Post features an interesting story on the possible links between faith and climate denial. The report features interesting visual data on different religions and denominations including Anglicans. From the article:
The main driver of climate science rejection, however, appears to be a free market ideology — which is tough to characterize as religious in nature. Nonetheless, it has often been observed (including by me) that evolution denial and climate science rejection often seem to overlap, at least to an extent.
And there does seem to be at least some tie between faith and climate science doubt. Research by Yale’s Dan Kahan, for instance, found a modest correlation between religiosity and less worry about climate change. Meanwhile, a 2013 study in Political Science Quarterly found that “believers in Christian end-times theology are less likely to support policies designed to curb global warming than are other Americans.”
>>>/operate/19705 for why there aren't images accompanying this news article. When they are reinstated, you shall get the all important image
The GOP’s baffling confusion on social issues
http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-gops-social-issue-schizophrenia
Torn between competing factions of a restive GOP base, the 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls seem more confused than ever over how to integrate social issues into their fledgling campaigns.
While some, like Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, are clearly planning to run as culture warriors, others, like Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, are trying to shift the focus toward other areas, like the economy. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, meanwhile, seem to be waffling between playing to the Republican Party’s conservative Christian base and appealing to a broader set of voters. Both Cruz and Bush flipped their own scripts in the last week, with Cruz, a staunch supporter of so-called “traditional marriage,” demanding to be asked about something other than gay rights, and Bush abandoning his “respect everyone” stance on marriage equality in favor of a strong endorsement of religious freedom.
This lack of consensus over how to address social issues speaks to a couple of problems facing the emerging GOP presidential field. One is how to reconcile the values of the party’s primary voters – who tend to be older, whiter, and more religious – with those of an increasingly diverse and tolerant general electorate. And the other is how to pull ahead in a crowded pack of plausible GOP contenders, a group currently without a front-runner in sight.
“With such a wide field, different people have to ask themselves, ‘OK, how do I break though?’” said conservative consultant Keith Appell, whose firm was recently hired by former Hewlett-Packard CEO and Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s Super PAC. Appell spoke with msnbc on his own behalf and not for the Super PAC
Slow Release- Hayes Criticizes bin Laden Info Leak
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/slow-release_952617.html?page=1
After four years of fierce internecine battles and inexplicable delays, the intelligence community last week started the process of releasing more documents captured in the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) posted on its website several dozen documents of uneven importance, bringing the total number of bin Laden documents available to the public to slightly more than 100.
A statement from the office of James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, reports that an interagency team, working with the White House, will examine the remaining documents with the goal of releasing those “whose publication will not hurt ongoing operations against al Qaeda or their affiliates.” The statement further promises that the “intelligence community will be reviewing hundreds more documents in the near future for possible release.” So it’s a start. But it’s not much of one.
The talk of “hundreds” of additional documents is curious. In the days after the raid, Obama administration officials touted the size and importance of the intelligence haul. Tom Donilon, who was then President Obama’s national security adviser, said that the collection was the equivalent of a “small college library.” And a Pentagon spokesman said that the captured documents represented the largest single collection of materials from a senior terrorist in U.S. history.
More in the article
Transactional Justice: The Death Penalty and Tsarnaev
Catholic tradition has long upheld the approach to criminal justice that the Old Testament presumed even while introducing moderating guidelines like “an eye [one eye only] for an eye.” These teachings were incorporated into the first edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (#2266, 1992 ed) , although the very next entry urges public authorities to limit their action to “bloodless means.” But just five years later, the entire treatment of protecting the common good was rewritten. Recourse to the death penalty is still “not excluded” (#2267), but only tolerated as a last resort when the public authority simply has no other way to keep the person from doing harm.
We are still on the level of transactional justice. It’s a very American viewpoint, seeing society as a collection of more or less undifferentiated individuals, the loss of any number of whom, while unfortunate, does not really affect the whole in an essential way. “An eye for an eye” works out well enough in this sort of system. When something goes wrong with a part of the body, though, be it a cell, an organ or a limb, we are not quite so cavalier. Nobody says, “an eye for an eye” when it is a matter of their eyesight. Heck, we are not even comfortable with Jesus’ own words, “If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out!” (although a few people in history have gone that far).
The trouble I see with transactional justice, especially when it goes as far as the death penalty, is that it keeps society on the level of transactional violence: it is just that society is authorized to carry out the violent act and random citizens are not. When it comes to ideologically motivated crime, such as the terrorism in Boston, there is no deterrent effect; there is not even the acknowledgement of legitimate authority. (The Tsarnaev brothers, having immersed themselves in an extremist culture of transactional violence, felt justified in taking lives in retribution for lives lost in the far-off Caucasus.)
Capital punishment is a distant reality for me (I don’t know any Death Row prisoners; I have never met anyone affected by a capital crime), but I do understand the transactional approach to society. Indeed, I could probably limit myself to this one area and never run out of things to bring to the sacrament of Penance. I have a terrible tendency to treat people in a transactional way; to reduce them to the roles they carry out, or the function they occupy in society (or, God help us, in community).
PayPal Pivots From Platform To 'Operating System'
Later this year, PayPal will spin off as a public company separate from its mothership, eBay, which acquired the payment company in 2002. As it prepares for life without a corporate parent, PayPal faces growing competition from rival payment services. Alibaba, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Square, and Stripe, alongside more than a thousand other startups, aspire to be the next PayPal. But the first PayPal plans to continuing growing beyond the $8 billion in revenue it generated in 2014.
The financial services industry is about to embark on a period of rapid change driven by technology – the proliferation of mobile devices and the power of software to alter business models, said Dan Schulman, PayPal president and designated CEO upon independence, at a PayPal media event in San Francisco Thursday. Citing Moore's Law and the mobile revolution, Schulman described the impact of technological change on the financial services industry as a "digital tornado."
"We're coming into the market at a time when the financial services industry is going through some really fundamental shifts," said Schulman, asserting that PayPal is "very well positioned to be a leading player in that transformation."
Spin currents endure at room temperature in germanium
Currents of electron spin can travel more than half a micron through germanium at room temperature, according to researchers in Japan and the UK. While physicists already know that germanium is a good conductor of spins at very low temperatures, this is the best measurement yet of its ability to transport spin at room temperature. The results suggest that the semiconductor could be used to create spintronic devices, which make use of the spin magnetic moment of the electron to store and process information.
The idea of spintronics has been around for several decades, and the nascent technology promises to deliver devices that are smaller and more energy efficient than conventional electronics. Another potential application of spintronics is to use individual electron spins – which can point up or down – to store and transfer information in quantum computers.
However, practical spintronic devices have proven to be very difficult to build, because electron spin does not travel very far in most materials and therefore the information is quickly lost. The main challenge is overcoming a well-known effect in physics called the "spin–orbit interaction". As the electron travels through a material, the relative motions of the positively charged atoms create magnetic fields that tend to rotate the electron's spin. In most materials, this results in the rapid destruction of a spin current across very short distances. Fortunately, some semiconductors already used in electronics – including silicon and germanium – have very weak spin–orbit interactions, and so a lot of effort has been put into studying the spin-transport properties of these materials.
You are now aware that spintronic is a word. What a future we live in
Just what is truth anyway?
The hide post feature exists
I should hope that you don't use this for people's opinions, but it can be handy
Flavor Flav Arrested Again
http://blog.wenn.com/all-news/flavor-flav-arrested-again/
Rap icon Flavor Flav has been arrested in Las Vegas following a traffic stop. Police pulled the Public Enemy star over early on Thursday and booked him for speeding and on suspicion of driving under the influence. They also allegedly caught him in possession of marijuana and driving with a suspended license. It’s the latest legal headache for the colorful star, who was arrested for speeding last year as he made his way to his mother’s funeral in New York.
When cops there pulled him over, they discovered his license had been suspended 16 times.
Ignored and Unreported, Muslim Cartoonists Are Poking Fun at ISIS
http://www.newsweek.com/ignored-and-unreported-muslim-cartoonists-are-poking-fun-isis-332040
Recently, an attack on a Muhammad cartoon contest held in Garland, Texas, was foiled by local police, leaving two gunmen dead.
The event was organized by Pamela Geller, a self-appointed “expert” on Islamic terrorism and jihad, who makes a lucrative living pandering Islamophobic clichés that many commentators have analogized to hate speech.
While a number of Geller’s trenchant discourses on Islam have been taken up by writers, one of her statements declaring that Judeo-Christian culture is superior to Islam because “Islam does not allow humor” appears to have fallen on deaf ears.
Over the past year, cartoonists across the Middle East have critiqued ISIS with equal amounts of ferocity and fearlessness. Besides the cartoon arts, plenty of videos satirizing ISIS also have been produced. Most frequently, cartoonists in the Muslim world berate what they see as ISIS’s perversion of Islam and its destruction of cultural heritage in Iraq.
Muslim cartoonists also have expressed outrage over ISIS’s recent ransacking of the Mosul Museum and its bulldozing of ancient sites, most especially the Assyrian city of Nimrud. While ISIS members has been keen to make videos of their “iconoclastic performances” go viral for a target Euro-American viewership, most often the antiquities that fall into their hands are sold on the black market and even eBay, thus providing them with much needed monies to fund their operations.
[BOARD QUALITY DETENSIFIES]
I hold the opinion that, as of right now, this board is severely autistic. Would anyone like to make a counter-argument?
Rock Hurling Is Old Nemesis of Train Crews
PHILADELPHIA — In the dark blocks of crumbling rowhouses pushed up against vacant factories along Glenwood Avenue, a group of young men hanging out on a stoop on a recent night said it was easy to sneak onto the nearby railroad tracks. “There’s fences, but a lot of times they are falling down,” said a 16-year-old with long hair and a thin mustache who gave only his first name, Isaac. “A lot of people go down, creepy people, bums — they throw rocks, they throw bottles, but usually it’s no big deal.”
Nevertheless, the possibility that a flying object hit an Amtrak train before it lurched off the rails Tuesday in Philadelphia has unnerved riders and drawn increased public scrutiny to the safety along that stretch of track. Federal and railway officials say being struck by rocks, bricks and even bullets is a longstanding problem for trains in the country’s rail systems. While not speculating on the cause of Tuesday’s accident, a retired Amtrak engineer and a former transportation safety official with the federal government each said that a projectile striking a train would be a dangerous distraction for an engineer.
Investigators have not assigned a cause or blame for the crash of Amtrak’s Northeast Regional Train 188 as it made its way to New York from Washington. Eight passengers were killed and more than 200 people, including members of the crew, were injured. The engineer, Brandon Bostian, told investigators that he had no recollection of anything after passing the North Philadelphia station. Around the same time, projectiles also hit two other trains in the area, breaking windows.
Getting “rocked,” as locomotive engineers call it, is so common on the Northeast Corridor that trains long had metal grills over their windshields to act as armor. These days, thick glass is specifically designed to withstand the impact of a cinder block. Amtrak officials say trains are pelted in the neighborhoods around the crash site monthly.
Amtrak told to expand speed control at deadly crash site
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150517/us--amtrak_crash-a548cc0839.html
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Federal officials announced Saturday that Amtrak must immediately expand its use of a speed restriction system on Philadelphia's northbound rails where a speeding train reached 106 mph, flew off the tracks and crashed, killing eight people.
The Federal Railroad Administration said an emergency order would be issued in coming days that calls for Amtrak to ensure the presence of the automatic train control system that notifies an engineer when a train is above the speed limit and automatically applies the brakes if the engineer doesn't act to slow the train down.
The system is already being used for southbound trains approaching the curve where Tuesday's derailment occurred. Amtrak said it would abide by the federal directive and others announced Saturday, adding that Amtrak's "overarching goal is to provide safe and secure rail passenger travel."
Stephen Hawking fears robots could take over in 100 years
Worried that one day we'll have robot overlords? You're in good company. Renowned physicist, cosmologist and author of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking said this week that robots, powered by artificial intelligence (A.I.), could overtake humans in the next 100 years.
Speaking at the Zeitgeist conference in London, Hawking said: "Computers will overtake humans with AI at some within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours," according to a report in Geek. In an interview with the BBC Hawking said A.I. poses no threat to the human race today but could in the future as machines – specifically robots – become smarter, bigger and stronger than their human developers. "It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate," Hawking said at the time. "Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."
Not all tech people and scientists are as concerned about A.I. as Hawking and Musk seem to be, though. A lot of people tend to think of A.I. as the brains behind robotics. But it also powers smartphones, email spam filters and apps that make restaurant recommendations. A.I. is a long way away from creating a robot that easily can learn and is self-aware enough to cast its human operators aside and take over the world. And talk about these fears runs the risk of slowing down AI research, some have worried.
Morocco's Islamic women preachers lead social revolution
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/19/us-morocco-women-morchidat-idUSKBN0O40MG20150519
CASABLANCA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Girls are "like a timebomb ready to explode and ruin the family's reputation", the Moroccan jewelry trader tells his customer as she admires a display of necklaces. The solution is to "get rid of this bomb" by marrying your daughters off as soon as you can, he explains. His customer, Hannane, replies firmly that Islam does not advocate child marriage and that women can also play an important role outside the home.
Hannane is one of a new generation of female religious leaders, known as morchidat – part of a quiet social revolution in the North African country. Their groundbreaking work is the subject of a British film, "Casablanca Calling", which will be showcased on Tuesday night at an international conference on child marriage in Morocco's famous port city. The morchidat were introduced in 2006, partly in an attempt to counter Islamist radicalism following suicide bombings that rocked Casablanca in 2003.
The hope is that these female spiritual leaders can both encourage a more tolerant Islam and improve the position of girls and women in Moroccan society. "The morchidat are a rare experiment in the Muslim world," the film's Moroccan associate producer Merieme Addou told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "It's the first time in a Muslim country that a religious role has been given to a woman."
The morchidat give guidance to women and young people in mosques, schools, orphanages, hospitals, prisons and rural villages. But Addou says they have their work cut out as they try to overcome the many problems facing Moroccan society.
What is /pn/'s opinion on women? Good, bad, equal or not?
I personally think that as there was equal chance that I could have been born a woman as I would have as a man, that the sexes are equal. Your thoughts?
THANK GOD I DONT GET BANNED HERE AND NO POSTS ARE DELETED THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD THANK GOD
NO MORE CENSORSHIP
wait a minute.. are we a divide and conquer tactic?
So there's /news/, /pol/, /polpol/, /leftypol/, /midpol/, /intpol/, /pn/ - what the fuck is really going on here? Is the logical end to an open-source discussion board to splinter into boards for each and every fucking user?
Is the division of political discourse on the internet (8ch in particular) an attempt to stifle thoughtful discussion and the progress of activism? Is the splintering of /pol/ communities an intentional maneuver to disable them? Are we being sorted by ideology and quarantined, one by one, into our own "hugboxes"?
Feminists want us to define these ugly sexual encounters as rape. Don’t let them.
THE WHOLE THING
There was the time when, 19 and naïve, I was guilt-tripped into entirely unwanted physical intimacies with a much older married man. And the time, three or four years later, when I went to visit an on-and-off long-distance boyfriend and quickly realized that it was over for me—but he assumed we were still on, and I didn’t have the nerve to say no to sex. And the time I told a man, “Look, I’m not going to sleep with you,” and it was taken as “try again in a couple of hours.”
When they happened, my view of these encounters ranged from “a mistake” to “it’s complicated.” It still does—even though, these days, we are encouraged to reinterpret such experiences as sexual violations. To many feminists, stories like these are evidence of a pervasive, misogynistic rape culture. “Kids see movies where there’s an aggressor who gets pushed away, but keeps trying until the girl relents,” writes advocate, author, and filmmaker Kelly Kend. “This is a rape dynamic that has been played off countless times as just how it works.” Canadian feminist author Anne Theriault laments “the still-pervasive and very flawed idea that if she doesn’t say no, it’s not rape”—clearly referring not just to attacks involving violence or incapacitation (for which few would demand a verbal “no” as proof of rape), but encounters in which a woman yields to unwanted overtures.
To me, this crusade against “rape culture” over-simplifies the vast complexity of human sexual interaction, conflating criminal sexual acts like coercion by physical force, threat or incapacitation—which should obviously be prosecuted and punished whenever possible—with bad behavior.
Was I a victim? Even in the first incident, in which the man knowingly pressured me into something I didn’t want, I could have safely said no. Consent for bad reasons is still consent; despicable behavior is not always criminal. (Getting guilt-tripped into giving money to a freeloading friend is not robbery.) In the second instance, it would be an infantilizing insult to deny my responsibility for a mutual misunderstanding. In the third, what happened was not only consensual but wanted; my initial “no” was sincere, but it was mainly an attempt to stop myself from acting on an attraction against my better judgment.
Besides, I know that sometimes the roles were reversed. There was the ex-boyfriend I thought I was seducing in the hope of getting him back—only to realize, the one time he finally said no harshly enough, that it had been more pressure than seduction. There was the man who told me it was too soon for us to get involved, and said, “we shouldn’t be doing this” more than once the evening we first went to bed. If I were to claim victimhood, I would either have to admit to being a perpetrator as well, or fall back on a blatantly sexist double standard.
KNOWING WHAT WE KNOW NOW, WOULD YOU SAY JEB BUSH IS RETARDED?-Coulter
Was Jeb Bush too busy watching telenovelas during his brother's presidency to remember the Iraq War? We went to war at such breakneck speed after 9/11, that, before the invasion, I was able to write approximately 30 columns about it, give five dozen speeches on it, discuss it on TV a hundred times and read 1,089 New York Times editorials denouncing the "rush to war." So I remember the arguments.
Contrary to the fairy tale the left has told itself since Obama truculently gave away America's victory in Iraq, our argument wasn't that we had to invade Iraq because of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. And the left's argument certainly was not: "He doesn't have any WMDs!" Our argument was: There were lots of reasons to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and none to keep him.
Indeed, after Bush's State of the Union address laying out the case for war with Iraq, The New York Times complained that he had given too many reasons: "Even the rationale for war seems to change from day to day. Mr. Bush ticked off a litany of accusations against Iraq in his State of the Union address …" (New York Times, Feb. 2, 2003)
Among the reasons we invaded Iraq were:
(1) Saddam had given shelter to terrorists who killed Americans. After 9/11, it was time for him to pay the price:
(others are in the article)
First cut is the deepest: Who wouldn’t make the GOP debate
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/fox-new-gop-debate-candidates-118152.html?hp=c1_3
The first Republican presidential debate would likely exclude two governors, a U.S. senator, and the only woman in the GOP’s presidential field, according to criteria released Wednesday.
Fox News Channel, which will host the first debate on Aug. 6 in Cleveland, announced that the debate will be limited to 10 candidates, as determined by an average of the five most recent national polls selected by Fox News.
Which 10 candidates would make the cut at the moment?
The precise standards aren’t completely clear , but according to Pollster.com, the five most recent national, live-caller polls commissioned by nonpartisan outfits put Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in first place at 14.2 percent, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush close behind, at 12.8 and 12.7 percent, respectively.
In fourth was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (9.6 percent), followed by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (8.6 percent), former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (7.9 percent), neurosurgeon Ben Carson (5.9 percent) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (5.8 percent).
Illegal immigrants' pay will be seized, pledges David Cameron
The wages paid to illegal migrants working in the shadow economy will be confiscated by police as part of a fresh drive by David Cameron to push down immigration. He will announce that a major Immigration Bill in next week’s Queen’s Speech will include moves to prosecute firms which only advertise abroad for staff and to accelerate the deportation of illegal immigrants.
The Bill will create a new criminal offence of illegal working, which will apply to migrants who have come to Britain illegally as well as those who have overstayed their leave. Figures are expected to show net annual migration is close to 300,000 – three times the “tens of thousands” figure promised by the Prime Minister ahead of the 2010 election. In a joint letter to The Independent, three influential think-tanks call on Mr Cameron to use tax receipts from foreign workers to ease the pressure on services in areas with high immigration levels.
The issue haunted Mr Cameron during the election campaign and was exploited by Ukip to win the support of large numbers of former Tory and Labour supporters.
Euro-Area Recovery Stutters as German Growth Loses Momentum
The euro area’s economic recovery weakened for a second month in May as growth in Germany, the region’s largest economy, lost momentum. Markit Economics said on Thursday that its composite index of services and manufacturing in the euro zone slipped to 53.4 from 53.9 in April and 54 in March. While that’s above the 50 mark that divides expansion from contraction, it’s less than the reading of 53.9 forecast by economists in a Bloomberg survey. The German gauge dropped to 52.8 from 54.1.
Euro-area growth accelerated to 0.4 percent in the first quarter, and Markit said its surveys indicate a similar pace will be achieved in the current three months. Nevertheless, with global demand showing signs of faltering as Chinese manufacturing remains sluggish, the recovery in Europe isn’t yet assured even as it benefits from central bank stimulus and a weaker euro.
“The euro zone’s recovery lost some of its vigour in May,” said Chris Williamson, chief economist at Markit. “At the moment the extent of the slowing is not a major concern, but will no doubt be causing some nail-biting at the ECB as policymakers await signs that quantitative easing is the panacea the region needs.”
Islamic State seizes ancient Palmyra city from Syrian forces
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/20/us-mideast-crisis-syria-northeast-idUSKBN0O50PB20150520
Islamic State insurgents stormed the historic Syrian city of Palmyra on Wednesday, fighting off pro-government forces who withdrew after evacuating most of the civilian population, state television said. The capture of Palmyra is the first time the al Qaeda offshoot has taken control of a city directly from the Syrian army and allied forces, which have already lost ground in the northwest and south to other insurgent groups in recent weeks. The central city, also known as Tadmur, is built alongside the remains of a oasis civilization whose colonnaded streets, temple and theater have stood for 2,000 years.
Islamic State has destroyed antiquities and ancient monuments in neighboring Iraq and is being targeted by U.S.-led air strikes in both countries. Syria's antiquities chief called on the world to save its ancient monuments and state television said Islamic State fighters were trying to enter the city's historical sites. Palmyra is also a strategic military gain, home to modern army installations and situated on a desert highway linking the capital Damascus with Syria's eastern provinces, mostly under insurgent control.
"Praise God, it has been liberated," said an Islamic State fighter speaking via the Internet from the Palmyra area. He said Islamic State was in control of a hospital in the city which Syrian forces had used as a base before withdrawing.
“Nihil boni sine labore:” The builders’ creed
http://michellemalkin.com/?p=165682
“Government doesn’t innovate. People like me do. Government doesn’t create jobs. We do.” When Mag Instrument needed a certain battery clip, it refused to import the part from China. Tony designed his own clip and spent $1 million tooling up his plant to manufacture the parts in-house and in-country. Maglite defiantly refuses to outsource workers because “it would offend against his faith in the American free-enterprise system, and against the spirit of giving back. Mr. Maglica knows that Mag Instrument got where it is by being an American company.”
The owner of 200 other patents, Tony the tireless tinkerpreneur showed me an empty lab room where he had been developing new, revolutionary incandescent bulb parts. The machinery is dormant. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency forbade him from producing the bulbs in the wake of the government’s incandescent bulb ban. He had planned to hire more workers to make the new products. Those plans are off. “That was such a shame,” Tony told me. “Such a waste.” But he remains undaunted and undeterred in pursuit of the American Dream.
Unlike the golfer-in-chief at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue who mocks wealthy capitalists as “society’s lottery winners,” Tony hasn’t taken a vacation in more than a decade and doesn’t plan to anytime soon: “As long as I’m alive, I will never give up.” For the self-made makers and builders of America, it’s a lifelong creed: Nihil boni sine labore.
DOG BLEZ AMERIGA
Reasonable Regulation of the Right to a Jury Trial
http://www.libertylawsite.org/2015/05/20/reasonable-regulation-of-the-right-to-a-jury-trial/
I have been blogging about the original meaning of the Seventh Amendment. Here I want to discuss another issue concerning its meaning: how much the Amendment allows the legislature to change the rules governing jury trials? One concern about the Seventh Amendment is that it might be thought to freeze in place the precise common law at the time. If the legal system changes in other ways, then those frozen rules might not have a coherent relation with the rest of the system.
I am not sure that I find this complaint that serious. Assuming that the common law rules were frozen in place, if the courts enforced those rules, the legal system would have to grow around those rules, rather than growing in a way that renders those rules obsolete. Moreover, other constitutional clauses also freeze certain rules in place and we normally assume that it is a good thing.
But let’s put the policy issue aside and explore the original meaning. I don’t think the Seventh Amendment “right of trial by jury” necessarily freezes all the details of the right. The most likely way that the right to trial by jury would not freeze all the details is if the Amendment protected the right against infringement, but allowed reasonable regulation of the right that did not undermine its fundamental features. Under this principle, the legislature could make certain changes to the details of the right, but could not deprive individuals of the core of the right. Obviously, drawing the distinction in particular cases might sometimes be difficult.
One would, of course, need evidence to draw this inference. One bit of evidence is that this distinction between infringing a right and reasonably regulating a right was often draw in the early years of the republic and it may therefore have been a background principle underlying some or all of the constitutional clauses. One does want to be careful about this. Some clauses used the term “abridge” and the abridge/regulate distinction work better there than in the absence of this language.
A more difficult issue involves the second of the clauses in the Seventh Amendment: “and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.” This does not speak of a right, but to the rules of the common law. It is possible that the background rule might still kick in, but I think this is less likely, not only because it does not use the language of right, but also because this provision appears to be added in for extra emphasis (after all, it might be thought otherwise redundant of the right to a jury trial).
By Prof. Rappaport
A Diamond Jubilee: ABT's 75th Anniversary Spring Gala
why is this news, it's so addictive
Wednesday, May 20, 2015. Yesterday, rain was forecast, but although in the first half of the day it was cloudy and grey with the temperatures in the low 70s, by mid-afternoon the Sun was out and it was a beautiful day and early evening. The night before, Monday, I went over to the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center where the American Ballet Theatre 75th Anniversary Spring Gala hosted a Diamond Jubilee gala performance and dinner dance.
It was one of New York’s more glamorous evenings, made moreso by the perfect late Spring weather. It began at 5:30 with a Champagne Reception on the Grand Tier of the opera house, followed by the performance scheduled to begin at 6:30 (although what with the city’s rush hour traffic and people’s work schedules, it was a little after 7 before the guests were in their seats and ready for the curtain). The program began with a video of Ambassador Caroline Kennedy recalling her mother’s love and support of the ABT, and her own excitement as a young girl being taken to many of the performances and even meeting some of the great stars.
Ambassador Kennedy’s remarks were followed by brief speeches by Ruth Ann Koesun, Sigourney Weaver, Susan Jaffe and Joel Grey who introduced videos of the history of the ABT (first know as The Ballet Theatre) and its founders in 1939-1940 – including Mikhail Mordkin and Lucia Chase – who actually founded the company in 1937, and Oliver Smith, Jerome Robbins, Richard Pleasant. Chase, Pleasant and Smith, it appears, were most influential in the first three decades of the company. Chase and Smith were the first Artistic Directors (1940 – 1980), succeeded by the great Mikhail Baryshnikov (1980 – 1989), followed by Jane Hermann and Oliver Smith from ’89 through ’92 when Kevin McKenzie came aboard and remains to this day.
The evening featured a one-time-only performance spanning ABT’s seven and a half decades, with film excerpts of historic performances and interviews with major figures in the dance world, and special guest appearances. The dance program was 23 pieces from the company’s repertoire dating back to the beginning, followed by a Grand Finale.
Ex-Gawker Editor A.J. Daulerio ‘Pivots,’ Eliminates Editorial Staff of New Site
http://recode.net/2015/05/20/ex-gawker-editor-a-j-daulerio-pivots-fires-editorial-staff-of-new-site/
When he announced his in-the-works local news site Ratter last year, former Gawker editor A.J. Daulerio told Capital New York he wanted Ratter editors across the country to “be tenacious distractions to their respective power-elites.” But the “distractions” are wholly internally directed. Daulerio cut his entire editorial staff Wednesday. He laid off assistant editor Michael Rosen, Ratter San Francisco editor Will Kane and Los Angeles editor Brittany Malooly. Last week, Daulerio let go the site’s managing editor, Kate Conger. Julia Schweizer, Ratter’s VP of operations, is still with the company. Daulerio confirmed the news over the phone.
“We’re still a young business, and this is more a pivot than it is anything else. We have a couple things coming up in the next couple months that we’d be better off starting from scratch with,” Daulerio said. In March 2014, Daulerio told Capital New York he was using seed money from Gawker Media, Mark Cuban and other investors to launch Ratter, a local news site with a “tabloid sensibility.” The total funding wasn’t disclosed, but Gawker Media kicked in $500,000 and the company’s value was set at $2.5 million.
Daulerio became well known at Deadspin and Gawker for breaking stories like the Brett Favre sexting scandal and for stunts like taking LSD and trying to pitch a no-hitter in a baseball video game. When he left Gawker in January 2013, boss Nick Denton called Daulerio “the most successful editor of Gawker.com” — praise which he backed up by bringing in Daulerio for a temporary stint to revive Gawker’s Hollywood gossip site, Defamer.
Since its November launch, Ratter’s biggest story appears to be a post by Daulerio on harassing sexts allegedly sent by Justin Bieber (they weren’t). Ratter has also run thoughtful dispatches from a transgender prison guard at San Quentin Prison and a series on San Francisco’s Zodiac serial killer. On what prompted the layoffs, Daulerio said, “My assessment of where things were headed editorially — I felt it was the best move at this point, while we are still relatively small. It’s nothing against the people who were there, it’s about giving the business the opportunity to succeed.”
When asked if Ratter was planning on hiring new staff soon, he said it was “to be determined.”
Aspen Man Hires Stuffed Owl As His Defense Attorney
Defending yourself in a court case is rarely recommended, but appointing a stuffed owl as your lawyer is really bird-brained. Nevertheless, that's who – or what – Charles Abbott brought as his attorney when he appeared in an Aspen, Colorado, courtroom on Tuesday, the Associated Press reports. Abbott is accused of violating a protection order involving his former roommate Michael Stranahan. The order was filed after Abbott allegedly assaulted Stranahan at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
Stranahan said Abbott violated the order by going to Stranahan's home to retrieve belonging when the victim was out of town, according to KWGN.com. In court, Abbott placed a fuzzy stuffed owl at the defense table and told the judge that the owl – named "Soloman" – would be his legal counsel until a public defender was assigned to the case, the Aspen Times reports.
“He’s a very sensitive guy, has law degrees from Yale, Harvard and Stanford,” Abbott told the judge, according to the paper. “I think he’ll be able to represent me before a public defender comes online.”
California to order end to pumping from San Joaquin River
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150521/us--california_drought-water_cuts-0bfd7875f9.html
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Regulators are ordering farmers with California's oldest water rights to stop pumping from the San Joaquin River watershed for the first time in memory. State water board engineer Kathy Mrowka told a public drought hearing that the curtailment orders will be sent to so-called senior rights holders on Friday.
The mandatory conservation orders for rights holders with century-old claims to rivers and streams will be the first anywhere in the state since the 1970s. They would be the first in memory to senior water-rights holders along the San Joaquin River. California officials already have ordered conservation for cities and towns and some other farmers. Friday's order is the start of expected across-the-board cuts for the state's most senior rights holders.
John Kerry visits Boeing, defends controversial trade deal
With Boeing’s 737 plant in Renton as a backdrop, Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday defended a Pacific Rim trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration against criticism from unions and prominent congressional Democrats. Kerry said opponents of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — a pending trade pact among 12 countries including the U.S., Japan, Vietnam and Canada — are wrong to blame international trade for ills such as income inequality or offshoring of U.S. jobs.
“The remedy is not to pull back from trade agreements themselves or attempt to stop globalization, because that’s not possible,” Kerry said during his 50-minute speech outside a massive Boeing hangar. “Globalization has no reverse gear, my friends.” Kerry urged Congress to give President Obama the “fast-track” trade authority he’s seeking to finalize the TPP agreement, which would then be sent to Congress for an up-or-down vote.
Floating stadium, underwater TV studio for World Cup in Qatar?
Four years back, Emirates 24|7 had first reported that Dutch Docklands, a Netherland-based sustainable floating architecture specialist, had proposed the idea of a floating Olympic village and a stadium for Fifa World Cup 2022. “They will need to build infrastructure and stadiums. Although for many people it will be quite a visionary thought, but we can build a floating stadium or even a whole village for them,” Paul van de Camp, Chief Executive Officer, Dutch Docklands, told this website.
Back to present: A media report states that Qatar is planning to build an underwater broadcast studio for TV coverage during the World Cup. “The project we are in the process of designing for is an underwater broadcast centre [and] is quite a real possibility,” Arabian Business quoted Patric Douglas, CEO, Reef Worlds, as saying.
Qatar’s World Cup authorities “like the design” and “they like the notion of doing the World Cup underwater with sharks swimming around,” Douglas told the website. The site for the proposed underwater broadcast centre is likely to be a carved out area of rock, which would then be turned into a giant aquarium.
Beau Biden, vice president's son, hospitalized
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/05/19/beau-biden-hospitalized/27607919/
WASHINGTON — Beau Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden and a Democratic candidate for governor of Delaware in 2016, has been hospitalized at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for an undisclosed illness. The vice president's office confirmed Tuesday that Beau Biden was undergoing treatment at the Bethesda, Md. military hospital, but did not go into further details.
The 46-year-old former Delaware attorney general has a history of health problems. He suffered what was described as a mild stroke in 2010. And in 2013, he became disoriented while on family vacation and later underwent a procedure to remove a small brain lesion at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Boston bomber to face about 20 of his victims at sentencing
http://www.religionnews.com/2015/05/20/boston-bomber-to-face-about-20-of-his-victims-at-sentencing/
BOSTON (Reuters) Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will face about 20 of his victims at a hearing next month when he will be formally sentenced to die for the 2013 attack, a U.S. judge said on Tuesday. The same jury that found Tsarnaev, 21, guilty of killing three people and injuring 264 with a pair of homemade pressure-cooker bombs at the race’s crowded finish line on April 15, 2013, sentenced him to death for his crimes last week.
“We could proceed rather expeditiously,” in making the jury’s sentence formal, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole told prosecutors and defense attorneys in the same courtroom where Tsarnaev was tried. He did not set a date for the one-day sentencing hearing, but said he would do so soon. Federal prosecutors said that about 20 victims, a group that includes people injured by the bombing and those whose friends or family were hurt or killed, have indicated they wish to speak at the sentencing hearing.
Tsarnaev, who did not appear at Tuesday’s hearing, would also have the right to speak at the sentencing hearing but would not be obligated to say anything. He did not speak in his own defense during his trial.
Polariton refrigerator could chill tiny semiconductor devices
A new method for using light to cool solids has been created by physicists in France and Germany. The technique uses quasiparticles called "polaritons" to remove vibrational heat from a tiny piece of semiconductor, and unlike previous optical cooling schemes it works at very low temperatures. The scheme could provide a new way of cooling very small electronic devices, as well as giving physicists an alternative approach to studying heat transport.
Developed by Maxime Richard of the University of Grenoble and colleagues, the new cooling technique is based on "anti-Stokes fluorescence" (ASF), which has already been used with limited success to cool solids. In the case of a semiconductor, this involves laser light being used to create an electron–hole pair, or "exciton", in the material, which can then absorb one or more thermal vibrations (phonons). The exciton will go on to decay into a photon that carries with it the thermal energy.
Physicists have been able to use ASF to cool a semiconductor from room temperature to 260 K – a difference of about 30 K. Achieving more cooling power is difficult because defects in the semiconductor cause some excitons to decay and return heat to the material via multiple phonons. Some of the laser light therefore heats the material, rather than cooling it.
Apple Acquires High-End GPS Startup to Save Maps
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/apple-maps-ios-9-coherent,news-20939.html
In its latest move to improve its Maps platform, Apple has acquired GPS hardware and software startup Coherent Navigation. Coherent specialized in GPS-based navigation products and services that leveraged data from satellite network Iridium. Along with other recent Apple acquisitions, this pickup suggests an upcoming major revision to Maps, which comes standard on Macs, iOS devices and the Apple Watch.
Coherent products were built for both consumers as well as the U.S. government and military. Company co-founder Paul Lego now bills himself as a member of the Apple Maps Team on his LinkedIn profile, where he stated that Coherent was “a commercial high-precision navigation service.” If Apple Maps could describe itself with similar confidence, it could go a long way in catching up to Google Maps.
Apple Maps had such a poor and rocky launch, company CEO Tim Cook wrote a public apology for its failings a week after it was released in 2012. Ending a partnership that used Google Maps inside of Apple's own solution, the original version of Apple Maps became a point of frustration because of its inaccuracy. Once Google Maps made it back to iOS as a standalone app, Maps-integrated apps began offering an option for users to use Google's option instead, since Apple Maps was built on so little data in comparison.
St. Louis Fed hit with hack
http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/19/technology/st-louis-fed-hack/index.html?iid=HP_LN
Visitors to parts of the St. Louis Federal Reserve's website last month were sent to phony sites that could be used to steal their personal information. The hack targeted the St. Louis Fed's Web servers – not the Fed branch itself or its website. This kind of "domain name server hack" sends a person to a different site, often laced with malware or phishing software. The fake sites were designed to look exactly like the St. Louis Fed's website, so that victims weren't tipped off to the scam.
It's akin to dialing your bank's telephone number, only to be automatically redirected to an imposter who pretends to be your banker. If you give up your bank account information, thinking you are talking to your bank, you're out of luck. Visitors who navigated to research.stlouisfed.org on April 24 were potentially affected.
N. Korea calls off U.N. chief's visit to Kaesong complex
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2015/05/20/86/0301000000AEN20150520002252315F.html
SEOUL, May 20 (Yonhap) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday that North Korea has called off his planned visit to the inter-Korean industrial complex in its border city of Kaesong. Ban was scheduled to visit Kaesong on Thursday to meet with South Korean businesses and North Korean workers inside the factory park.
"Early this morning, North Korea suddenly informed us through a diplomatic channel that they are calling off the North Korean authorities' permission for my visit to the Kaesong Industrial Complex," Ban said during a speech at the Seoul Digital Forum. "There was no explanation at all for the reason for the sudden cancellation. Such a decision by Pyongyang is very regrettable."
Ban, who announced his planned visit during the World Education Forum on Tuesday, would have been the first U.N. chief to visit the complex since its launch in 2004. He would also have been the first U.N. chief to visit North Korea in more than 20 years. In announcing the visit Tuesday, Ban said he hoped to help promote reconciliation between the two Koreas.
In Defense of Google
http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2015/Lemieuxgoogle.html
On April 15, 2015, the European Commission (EC), which is the European Union executive, accused Google of "abusing a dominant position… by systematically favouring its own comparison-shopping product in its general search results pages."1 The EC announcement followed five years of threats to, and negotiations with, Google. The EC also announced a formal investigation into the alleged market power that Google gets over companies that use its free Android operating system.2 The French government is also planning an action against Google.
The EC accusation illustrates how antitrust can be used as a protectionist instrument and a coercive tool by less-efficient competitors. More generally, it reveals the poverty of the standard antitrust doctrine, which ignores the fact that the pursuit or maintenance of a dominant market position gives firms a strong incentive to innovate. This doctrine is blind to the fragile and temporary character of any market dominance not protected by government regulation. It downplays the fact that market dominance crucially depends on how one defines the relevant market. The attack against Google ignores the huge value that Google has created by providing services that are essentially free for the individual consumer. And note the irony of the whole confrontation: the European Union, a large non-competitive organization, charges a private company with abusing an uncertain market position.
Five Banks Face Combined $5 Billion Bill Over Forex Manipulation -- Reuters
Five big banks are expected to face a combined bill of more than $5 billion on Wednesday in a settlement with U.S. and U.K. authorities over currency-market manipulation, Reuters reported Tuesday. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Citigroup Inc., Barclays PLC (BCS, BARC.LN) and Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC (RBS, RBS.LN) are expected to plead guilty to U.S. criminal charges related to foreign-exchange manipulation, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
UBS AG is expected to avoid a criminal charge after receiving immunity for alerting on the issue, according to Reuters, but it faces a criminal charge over rigging benchmark interest rates, people familiar with the matter said. Barclays is expected to settle with other British and U.S. regulators as well, meaning its penalties could top $2 billion, significantly higher than the other banks, Reuters said.
Florida Student Falls to Death at Scorching Masada
A 20-year-old American college student died after falling during a hike on Masada in southern Israel. The woman, part of a group from Florida State University, fell some 26 feet off the historic mountain’s Snake Path on Tuesday afternoon while traveling with an unnamed organized group, according to reports. It took more than an hour to rescue her from a steep cliff.
Florida State identified the woman as Briana McHam, of Pompano Beach. “My heart is broken and in pieces,” McHam’s aunt, Jeanette Blackwell Sameem, wrote in a Facebook post. “Words can’t express the heart and pain we’re feeling.” “We are deeply saddened by the loss of one of our students, who was at the beginning of a life of discovery broadening her horizons,” said Dr. James Pitts, Florida State’s director of international programs.
After visiting the hilltop Masada, three students in the program elected to walk down to the bottom of the fortification. Two completed the walk without incident, but McHam was found deceased, Florida State said in a statement. In temperatures of at least 104 degrees, McHam was dehydrated, suffering from heat stroke and not breathing when she was recovered, Israeli news outlets reported, citing Magen David Adom paramedics.
Paramedics were unable to resuscitate McHam and she was declared dead at the scene.
The Mother of All Snakes Looked Surprisingly Modern
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/mother-all-snakes-was-surprisingly-modern-180955349/
Some 110 million years ago, long before the dinosaurs died, the most recent common ancestor of all living snakes slithered through the dense jungles of Gondwana, stalking small mammals and beetles beneath an ancient moon.
That’s the conclusion of a recent analysis from researchers at Yale University, who conducted the first in-depth genetic and anatomical study of dozens of snake species, living and extinct, to come up with a best guess for the behavior and physical traits of the ancient creature. At 10 feet long and with two puny limbs dragging near its tail, it would probably give you the chills if it crossed your path today.
The findings underscore the great evolutionary success of the snake body structure. There are more than 3,000 species across every continent except Antarctica, but snakes haven’t changed much in more than 100 million years. “Despite not having legs, snakes are adept at surviving in a variety of habitats—deserts, forests, aquatic environs, in trees, underground. They are incredibly adaptable,” says Daniel J. Field, a Yale evolutionary biologist who, along with colleagues, published the analysis in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology.
Court Rules Samsung Copied Apple; Apple Will Not Get $930m
Samsung may not end up having to pay the entire $930 million in damages awarded to Apple in a 2013 patent case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has found that the California court that handled the case may have to reconsider up to $382 million of that money. The case was filed by Apple in 2011, with the company accusing Samsung of copying a number of patents related to the design of its smartphones. Apple won the trial in 2012, and was awarded a whopping $1.05 billion. In 2013, the courts took off $450.5 million from those damages, but awarded Apple an extra $290.5 million later in the year. In the end, the total came to $930 million.
As was expected, Samsung appealed the decision. The court of appeals has found that while the patents related to design were infringed upon, those related to trade dress – how products are packaged and presented – were not. "We therefore vacate the jury's damages awards against the Samsung products that were found liable for trade dress dilution and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion," reads the ruling from the court of appeals.
Jay Z 'Completely Used Me,' Artist Marina Abramovic Claims
Performance artist Marina Abramović, whose 2010 installation The Artist Is Present inspired Jay Z's 2013 music video Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film, revealed that she is now angry with the way the collaboration turned out. "I am very pissed by this, since he adapted my work only under one condition: that he would help my institute," she recently
She went on to say that she and the rapper had a meeting where she gave him permission to use her work only if he helped her draw attention to her work. "Then he just completely used me," she said. "And that wasn’t fair."
As Fact magazine noted in 2013, the rapper had met with the artist and agreed to an unspecified donation to the Marina Abramović Institute. A rep for Abramović said at the time that Jay Z "intends to offer the institute some other form of ongoing support" in a "long-durational collaboration." A Roc Nation spokesperson at the time confirmed that the rapper would make a donation, but declined to offer any details. It's unclear whether Jay Z actually donated any funds or other support.
Alfonso Ribeiro Set as New Host of ABC's 'America's Funniest Home Videos'
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/alfonso-ribeiro-host-americas-funniest-796980
Alfonso Ribeiro, best known as Carlton Banks on the 1990s sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, has been named as Tom Bergeron's replacement, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The outgoing emcee made the announcement during Tuesday's season finale of Dancing With the Stars, which Bergeron also hosts. Ribeiro, who won the ABC dancing competition last season, returned to the reality series for the passing of the baton. The new deal will continue his relationship with the network.
As the show's longest running host at 15 years, Bergeron tweeted in March 2014 that he would be departing AFV at the end of its current season. He will, however, continue on with DWTS. As the network began its search for a new television personality, Ribeiro, who had an existing relationship with the network (and with Bergeron) from his time on DWTS, stood out as a likely candidate. He's also no stranger to hosting. Among his most recent gigs: The Cooking Channel's Unwrapped 2.0, ABC Family's Spell-Mageddon and GSN's Catch 21.
Ribeiro will be the fourth person to host the humorous video competition series, now entering its twenty-sixth season. Full House alum Bob Saget kicked off the Vin Di Bona-created show in 1989 and stayed for eight seasons. John Fugelsang and Daisy Fuentes took over for a short two-year stint before Bergeron came on board.
Apple, Google Tell Obama He's Wrong About Encryption
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/obama-crypto-letter,news-20947.html
A who's who of Silicon Valley tech giants, computer-security experts and advocacy groups asked President Barack Obama to reject police "backdoors" for smartphone and computer encryption in an open letter sent today (May 19). "We urge you to reject any proposal that U.S. companies deliberately weaken the security of their products," said the letter. "We request that the White House instead focus on developing policies that will promote rather than undermine the wide adoption of strong encryption technology."
Signatories include Apple, Google, Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo, plus more than 40 other companies and trade groups. Joining in were nearly 40 mostly left-leaning and libertarian public-advocacy groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and nearly 60 technology experts.
The letter is the strongest tech-industry response yet to renewed demands by the Justice Department and the FBI that law-enforcement personnel retain a secret method — a police "backdoor" theoretically unavailable to ordinary citizens and, presumably, criminals and foreign spies — of reading commercially encrypted messages and data. Otherwise, officials fear, police may lose access to suspects' files and communications, a phenomenon known as "going dark."
'Cyber-archaeology' salvages lost Iraqi art
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-32742622
Priceless historical artefacts have been lost recently, to violence in Iraq and earthquakes in Nepal. But "cyber-archaeologists" are working with volunteers to put you just a few clicks away from seeing these treasures - in colourful, three-dimensional detail. The effort began with a conversation between two young researchers in late February, days after shocking footage emerged of Islamic State militants tearing down and smashing artworks in the Mosul Museum in northern Iraq.
Chance Coughenour and Matthew Vincent are PhD students working for the Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage (ITN-DCH), an EU-funded project set up to apply new technology to cultural heritage issues. "We were talking about the destruction and [Chance] suggested that we crowd-source the reconstruction of these images, using photogrammetry and images from the public," Mr Vincent told the BBC's Science in Action programme.
Photogrammetry is a popular technique in modern cultural heritage projects. It uses software to turn multiple 2D photographs of a single object into 3D images.
Popular ‘it’s a God thing’ phrase reveals troubling theology, pastors say
You may have used this popular phrase a few times yourself. Or maybe you’ve heard others say it when some unexpected miracle happens. “It’s a God thing.” But there are some who take issue with the phrase, or at least with how and when it is used — and when it isn’t used. One of them is writer and Texas pastor Shane Pruitt, who recently penned an article titled “Should We Be Saying ‘It’s a God Thing?’” for Relevant magazine.
“The great things that happen in our life — it’s a God thing,” Pruitt said. But here’s where Pruitt and other ministers part ways with the popular phrase. The catch, they say, is if unexpected windfalls are God things, then so must be those unexpected inconveniences and even tragedies. Lost a job or a spouse? “When things don’t go our way — it’s still a God thing,” Pruitt said.
But even that doesn’t sit right with Michael Sciretti, the spiritual minister of spiritual formation at Freemason Street Baptist Church in Norfolk, Va. “I don’t get too hung up on what happens to people, good or bad,” he said. “I have concerns with theology that says everything that happens is God’s will.” “Whether it’s good or pleasurable, or bad or not as pleasant, how do I respond from a place of the heart?” he said.
That means finding a way to remain centered regardless of the circumstances “so whatever happens I am never completely shaken or lose myself,” Sciretti said. Another weakness of simply applying the slogan to negative events as well as positive ones is that it presumes the individual is at the center of the universe, Sciretti said. The challenge is learning to let go of the ego and let God take center stage.
“Cancer? No, that’s not a God thing, but it can be a God thing how I respond to cancer,” he said. God’s will can be done in that and any other situation “if I can let God get inside of me to grow my being to be more grateful and have more compassion.”
Teacher ‘eats a hamster in front of class to show them how dear life is’
A teacher decided to give his pupils an extracirrcular lesson recently, by allegedly eating a live hamster in front of them. Police are investigating the teacher, identified only as Yu, who reportedly gave the little rodent his grisly end to show the pupils in his South Korean classroom ‘how dear life is’. The class he was teaching at a boarding school in Jeongeup, North Jeolla Province were reportedly teasing hamsters, causing him to take the drastic (and, let’s be honest, over the top) method of teaching them a lesson.
Yu is also accused of using abusive language in front of the seven children who claim to have witnessed the gruesome act. He has since left the school following complaints from several parents and other members of staff. Some parents have filed a complaint with the police, claiming that Yu’s actions were a form of child abuse.
He has since apologised for the incident. Yu told Yonhap News Agency: ‘I couldn’t control the situation and couldn’t stand it. ‘While watching the hamsters die from teasing, I thought I should teach the children it was wrong to make light of life.’
Takata air bag recall doubles to nearly 34 million
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150519/us--takata_air_bag_recall-baccff2746.html
WASHINGTON (AP) — Under pressure from U.S. safety regulators, Takata Corp. has agreed to declare 33.8 million air bags defective, a move that will double the number of cars and trucks included in what is now the largest auto recall in U.S. history. The chemical that inflates the air bags can explode with too much force, blowing apart a metal inflator and sending shrapnel into the passenger compartment. The faulty inflators are responsible for six deaths and more than 100 injuries worldwide.
The agreement adds more than 18 million air bags to existing recalls, covering both the passenger and driver's side. The recalls of passenger-side air bags, previously limited to high-humidity states along the Gulf Coast, are now expanded nationwide by 10.2 million vehicles. A nationwide recall of driver's side air bags was expanded to include an additional 7.9 million vehicles.
"We know that owners are worried about their safety and the safety of their families," said Mark Rosekind, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as he announced the agreement. "This is probably the most complex consumer safety recall in U.S. history." Safety regulators sparred with Takata for the past year over the size of the recalls and the cause of the problem. For the most part, the air bag maker refused to declare the inflators defective and even questioned the agency's authority to order it to conduct a recall.
Abbott vows not to shut down live cattle trade after sledgehammer revelations
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has vowed not to close down the live cattle trade to Vietnam following revelations Australian cattle are being slaughtered with sledgehammers in Vietnamese abattoirs. Animal rights group Animals Australia documented brutal practices in Vietnam late last month and lodged a complaint with the Department of Agriculture last week. Animals Australia communications director Lisa Chalk said the footage of the cattle being killed with repeated blows to the head with a sledgehammer was "so shocking and distressing" that the organisation had decided not to publicly release it at this time.
Speaking to reporters in Brisbane on Wednesday, Mr Abbott said the government would "carefully investigate" any allegations and "take appropriate action" if the allegations were proven. "But the last thing we'll do is close down this trade," he said. Mr Abbott said the Gillard government's 2011 decision to suspend the live cattle trade to Indonesia following an ABC Four Corners program which exposed cruelty in Indonesian abattoirs had been a "catastrophic" decision.
"We're certainly not going to take the former government as our role model," he said. "We're certainly not going to rush into making the sort of mistake which the former government made. "We know that on the basis of a television program, a panicked Labor government closed down the live cattle export trade. "It cost thousands of Australians their livelihoods, at least for a period. It badly damaged our relations with Indonesia, a country which is very important to us. So it was a crazy decision, probably the most short-sighted blunder in Australian foreign policy in recent memory."
Interviewed on ABC TV on Wednesday, Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce said the use of sledgehammers was "barbaric."
Save Obama (on trade)-Krauthammer
That free trade is advantageous to both sides is the rarest of political propositions — provable, indeed mathematically. David Ricardo did so in 1817. The Law of Comparative Advantage has held up nicely for 198 years. Nor is this abstract theory. We’ve lived it. The free-trade regime created after World War II precipitated the most astonishing advance of global welfare and prosperity the world has ever seen. And that regime was created, overseen, guaranteed and presided over by the United States.
That era might be coming to a close, however, as Democratic congressional opposition to free trade continues to grow. On Tuesday, every Democrat in the Senate (but one, with another not present) voted to block trade promotion — a.k.a. fast-track — authority for President Obama, which would have given him the power to conclude the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal being hammered out with 11 other countries, including such key allies as Japan, Australia and Singapore.
Fast-track authority allows an administration to negotiate the details of a trade agreement and then come to Congress for a non-amendable up-or-down vote. In various forms, that has been granted to every president since Franklin Roosevelt. For good reason. If the complex, detailed horse-trading that is required to nail down an agreement is carried out in the open — especially with multiple parties — the deal never gets done.
(written May 14)
Los Angeles Lifts Its Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour
LOS ANGELES — The nation’s second-largest city voted on Tuesday to increase its minimum wage from $9 an hour to $15 an hour by 2020, in what is perhaps the most significant victory so far for labor groups and their allies who are engaged in a national push to raise the minimum wage. The increase, which the City Council passed in a 14-to-1 vote, comes as workers across the country are rallying for higher wages and several large companies, including Facebook and Walmart, have moved to raise their lowest wages. Several other cities, including San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle and Oakland, Calif., have already approved increases, and dozens more are considering doing the same. In 2014, a number of Republican-leaning states like Alaska and South Dakota also raised their state-level minimum wage by ballot initiative.
The effect is likely to be particularly strong in Los Angeles, where, according to some estimates, 46 percent of the city’s work force earns less than $15 an hour. Under the plan approved Tuesday, the minimum wage will rise in increments over five years. “The effects here will be the biggest by far,” said Michael Reich, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was commissioned by city leaders here to conduct several studies on the potential effects of a minimum-wage increase. “The proposal will bring wages up in a way we haven’t seen since the 1960s. There’s a sense spreading that this is the new norm, especially in areas that have high costs of housing.”
Asian American groups accuse Harvard of racial bias in admissions
A coalition of Asian American groups filed a federal complaint against Harvard University Friday alleging the school engaged in "systemic and continuous discrimination" against Asian Americans during its admissions process. More than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani groups came together for the complaint, which was filed with the civil rights offices at the justice and education departments. They are calling for an investigation into Harvard and other Ivy League institutions that they say should stop using racial quotas or racial balancing in admission.
"We want to eliminate discrimination of Asian Americans, and we want procedural justice for all racial groups," Yukong Zhao, one of the chief organizers and a guest columnist with the Orlando Sentinel, told NBC News. "All racial groups should be treated equal." The coalition includes the Chinese-American Association of Orange County, in California; the Global Organization of People of Indian Origin, in New York; and the Pakistani Policy Institute, also in New York, Zhao told the network.
Bruce Jenner I'm Going to Be Full Woman Surgery Scheduled
Bruce Jenner says he will fully become a woman, and strongly intimates he will have sexual reassignment surgery this spring. Bruce was not 100% clear, but strongly suggested he's going under the knife. You've gotta listen to the whole thing … he flip flops a bit, first telling Kim he's going all the way with the transition, and then talking about surgically tweaking his facial features.
But in context, it sounds like the conversations – shot months ago for "Keeping Up with the Kardashians" – are about sexual reassignment surgery, but on the other hand it could be Bruce and the girls are simply talking past each other. You also see in the clip how Khloe is having trouble handling it. Kim, on the other hand, is strong and even confronts Bruce about full disclosure.
Errors and Lies
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/18/opinion/paul-krugman-errors-and-lies.html?_r=0
Surprise! It turns out that there’s something to be said for having the brother of a failed president make his own run for the White House. Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago. But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.
Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.
The fraudulence of the case for war was actually obvious even at the time: the ever-shifting arguments for an unchanging goal were a dead giveaway. So were the word games — the talk about W.M.D that conflated chemical weapons (which many people did think Saddam had) with nukes, the constant insinuations that Iraq was somehow behind 9/11.
And at this point we have plenty of evidence to confirm everything the war’s opponents were saying. We now know, for example, that on 9/11 itself — literally before the dust had settled — Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, was already plotting war against a regime that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. “Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] …sweep it all up things related and not”; so read notes taken by Mr. Rumsfeld’s aide.
The Spiritual Child
http://www.aish.com/f/p/The-Spiritual-Child.html?s=show
When I began my journey of connecting with parents after writing Raising a Child with Soul, there were some who could not fathom the idea that children are spiritual beings. I often recalled my father’s words as he gazed at my newborn son in the nursery. “Slova Chanalah, this little soul just arrived from the heavens above. He was learning Torah from the mouths of angels. He came into this world the purest of the pure. Watch over him and teach him well.” There was no doubt for me; children are born naturally spiritual.
Now, a Columbia University psychologist, Dr. Lisa Miller, has written a book asking us to think about our child’s spiritual journey in this world. We learn that there is EQ, IQ, and natural spirituality as well. Children possess an innate spiritual compass that is part of our biological endowment; it must be cultivated to flourish. Through highlighting psychological and neurological research she proves that children raised in a nurturing spiritual life are happier, more successful, more resilient, more optimistic, and better able to handle life’s challenges. These kids grow up to become adults who live with grit, are aware of their blessings, find purpose and mission in their careers, value their relationships and see hardships as priceless opportunities.
She compels parents to think about their children’s sacred growth through scientific research. A study of twins shows that a person’s sense of being connected to a Higher Being is inherited. In other words you can create a spiritual legacy and pass it on to your children. Any parent of teenagers will be thrilled to learn that they can help protect their teens from engaging in risky behaviors and even cope better with depression by helping them be in touch with their spiritual side. Miller takes the case for spirituality further by warning us that “spiritual stunting” can cause damage by preventing a child from developing a true sense of self and resiliency. Crisis occurs when a child’s spiritual development is neglected or denied.
ZenFone 2 (5.5-inch) review
http://www.cnet.com/products/asus-zenfone-2/
If the 4GB Asus Zenfone 2 were $100 cheaper, it would be near the top of our recommended phones list; however, its $299 and S$499 (converting directly to about £245 and AU$475) price makes it a tough sell in a world of capable sub-$200 phones. There is however a 2GB version of the phone retailing for $199 (converting to £127 and AU$249); however, since we've as of yet spent no time with the 2GB version, we can't yet say how it performs compared to the its 4GB sibling. Both versions of the phone will be available starting May 19th carrier unlocked at Amazon, Newegg and Groupon in the US.
The ZenFone 2 is somewhere in-between budget and flagship and unfortunately lacks the performance and features to be considered a high-end handset. That said, it's capable in its own right, delivering silky smooth performance thanks to its combination Intel Atom CPU and 4GB of RAM. And while its 13-megapixel rear camera takes decent shots, its low-light performance handily beats that of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Apple iPhone 6. It has a sharp vibrant 5.5-inch screen, but the plastic build unfortunately feels cheap and bulky. Its Zen UI is clean, aesthetically pleasing and packed with useful features, but at times isn't all that intuitive to navigate thanks to the changes Asus made to its Android 5.0 interface.
Those looking to spend less should check out the Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime. It has longer battery life, decent cameras and costs less than $200. The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge are the current highest of high-end Android, but tip the scales at $600 unless you're willing to commit to a 2-year contract.
Much more in the article!
Mad Max Director Joins Twitter to Thank Fans, Hint at Sequels
http://www.showbiz411.com/2015/05/17/mad-max-director-joins-twitter-to-thank-fans-hint-at-sequels
Here’s George Miller’s first Tweet. “More Max to come”:
Hello Twitter! Thanks for all the kind words written and said about the film. We had a lot of fun making it..and there's more Max to come.
Obama’s ISIS strategy takes hit
http://thehill.com/policy/defense/242434-obamas-isis-strategy-takes-new-hit
President Obama’s strategy in fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is facing fresh scrutiny after the militant group toppled government forces in the major Iraqi city of Ramadi. The city’s fall represented the biggest military gain for ISIS this year. The White House on Monday acknowledged the seizure represents a “setback” but signaled it is unlikely to alter its approach to combatting ISIS, which relies on U.S.-led airstrikes and training Iraqi security forces to fight the ground war.
Pro-government troops fled Ramadi as ISIS fighters flooded the city, raising doubts about their ability to sustain gains as they try to retake territory. “There are two clocks ticking here: We know the tide isn’t necessarily going to turn until the Iraqi forces get their act together and regain ground against ISIS,” said Janine Davidson, senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “They are digging themselves out of a very big hole. While we wait for progress on that front, ISIS continues to take ground.”
Republican national security hawks have used the fall of Ramadi to pressure the White House to step up its response to the group. Some, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), have advocated for more U.S. troops on the ground. The White House wants to avoid being drawn into another war in Iraq, however, and even some GOP critics are wary of expanding the use of U.S. ground troops.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a 2016 presidential candidate, said in February that he wouldn’t put American boots on the ground and would instead focus on arming and training Kurdish peshmerga fighters. The Obama administration has sought to downplay the significance of ISIS gains in Ramadi, saying that the battle is far from over.
The most underpaid profession on Earth
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29425
Britmouse is back blogging with lots of interesting new posts. A short one that caught my attention discussed this story from 2010:
I saw the governor of the Bank of England [Mervyn King] last week when I was in London and he told me whoever wins this election will be out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be,” Hale said in an interview on Australian TV reported by Reuters.
Of course the Conservatives were recently re-elected, and indeed slightly improved their standing because they no longer rely on support from the Liberal Democrats. BTW, I agree with this comment from Britmouse:
. . . sad to see so many true liberal voices leaving Parliament. You’ll be missed, Vince.
King headed the Bank of England in 2010. So why was his political forecast incorrect? Perhaps he thought the economy would do poorly during the period of austerity. But why would he think that? Perhaps because he’s a Keynesian, like Ben Bernanke and most other central bankers. Maybe he doesn’t believe in monetary offset. Of course there are other possibilities, maybe he thought austerity would be unpopular even if the economy did fine. But I think it more likely that he was making an implied forecast of slow growth and a weak job market. In fact growth was weak, but during 2013 the job market began improving dramatically:
Tycoon Tumbles Off Stage At Football Final
http://news.sky.com/story/1486019/tycoon-tumbles-off-stage-at-football-final
An Australian billionaire silenced a booing crowd when he fell off stage on to his head while presenting a football trophy. Football Federation Australia chairman Frank Lowy was treated by paramedics for several minutes after he stumbled off a podium at the 2015 A-League Grand Final. The 84-year-old, however, escaped serious injury at Melbourne's AAMI Park and presented Melbourne Victory players with their winners' medals shortly afterwards.
The Victory had beaten Sydney FC 3-0. Mr Lowy, who founded the global chain of Westfield shopping malls, had been booed by spectators as he took to the stage, but there was stunned silence as he somersaulted more than a metre on to the turf. Applause then broke out from the 30,000-strong crowd when footage of the smiling tycoon was shown on the big screen.
Mr Lowy said in a statement later: "I want to thank everyone for the concern shown and support for me after my tumble at the Grand Final.
YouTube May Show ‘Innocence of Muslims’ Film, Court Rules
http://recode.net/2015/05/18/youtube-may-show-innocence-of-muslims-film-court-rules/
Google should not have to remove an anti-Islamic film from its YouTube website because a woman complained that she was duped into performing in a film that depicted the prophet Mohammed as a fool and sexual deviant, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Monday. In a case widely followed for its potential impact on the entertainment industry, an 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco said that an injunction that had prohibited Google from broadcasting the film should be dissolved.
The 9th Circuit opted to rehear the case after an earlier three-judge panel opinion had ordered Google to take down the controversial film “Innocence of Muslims.” The film, billed as a trailer, triggered anti-American unrest among Muslims in Egypt, Libya and other countries in 2012. The plaintiff, actress Cindy Lee Garcia, objected to the film after learning it incorporated a clip she had made for a different movie, which had been partially dubbed and in which she appeared to be asking: “Is your Mohammed a child molester?”
The case raised questions on whether actors may, in certain circumstances, have an independent copyright on their individual performances. Several organizations, including Twitter, Netflix and the ACLU, filed court papers urging the 9th Circuit to side with Google.
Gun violence rare for outlaw motorcycle gangs known for drugs, brawls
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/05/18/waco-shooting-motorcycle-bandidos-texas/27549313/
WACO — The shootout between two rival gangs and the police at the Twin Peaks restaurant on Sunday casts a new, frightening light on Texas' outlaw motorcycle gang culture, known for its drug dealings and bar brawls, but rarely for outbreaks of extreme violence. On Monday, police worked to decipher exactly how the weekend clash between rival motorcycle gangs ended with nine people dead, 18 others injured and more than 190 people arrested.
"We have not seen anything like this ever in Texas," said Todd Harrison, president of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas. Sunday's gathering was a Region 1 meeting of the Texas Confederation of Clubs and Independents, which gathers each month in different Texas cities to discuss new memberships, motorcycle rights and legislative bills that impact riders, among other topics.
But a brawl between rival outlaw gangs Bandidos and Cossacks quickly spun out of control, spilling into the parking lot. Law enforcement in the area, including 18 Waco police and four state officers, engaged some of the gang members in gunfire, Waco police spokesman Sgt. W. Patrick Swanton said. The brawl, which eventually involved at least five gangs, ended with 192 people charged with engaging in organized crime resulting in death, a capital offense that could bring the death penalty in Texas. Police recovered nearly 100 weapons from the scene, including brass knuckles, knives and clubs.
35 Years Later, Where You Can Still See Signs of the Mt. St. Helens Eruption
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/where-see-signs-americas-deadliest-eruption-180955278/
When Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, the landscape changed in an instant—the geologic version of an instant, anyway. It was the deadliest eruption the United States had ever seen, leveling everything for miles north of the mountain and blanketing ash as far as Montana. On the 35th anniversary of the event, the scars still shape the Cascade Mountains of Washington state.
That fact that this particular mountain blew its top wasn’t exactly a surprise; before explorer George Vancouver named it after a fellow Brit, the local Cowlitz tribe called it Lawetlat'la, or “The Smoker.” It was known to belch steam and had spewed ash as lately as the 1850s. This volcanic activity is a lot closer to the surface than the magma reservoir recently discovered under Yellowstone; that volcano, if it blew, would dwarf the destruction caused by St. Helens. Fortunately, that three-mile-deep pool of magma is unlikely to surface anytime soon.
The weeks leading up to the May 18 eruption were full of signs. More than 10,000 earthquakes were measured around the 9,677-foot peak and steam escaped through a growing summit crater. “Very clearly it was awake and building toward something,” says USGS volcanologist Seth Moran. “What happened was more extreme than just about everyone was expecting.”
In 1980, USGS scientist David Johnston, just 30 years old, knew an eruption was imminent on the night of May 17. Hydrologist Carolyn Driedger remembers reluctantly packing up her sleeping bag after Johnston told her to go home for the night, though she expected to return the next day for a helicopter study. She was among the last to see Johnston, who died instantly from his post when the lateral blast shot the top 1,000 feet of mountain at him at more than 300 miles per hour.
Today Mount St. Helens is the most-monitored volcano in the Cascades, with weather and seismology stations on every flank. On May 16, 2015, the Johnston Ridge Observatory, a visitor center located near where the scientist died, opens for the season with three days of science education talks, eruption eyewitness stories and a commemoration ceremony. Around the mountain, signs of the massive 1980 eruption are everywhere, telling the story of a cataclysm.
Bank of America is forecasting a ‘scary summer’ for the stock market
Investors might want to add a little cash and some gold to their portfolio’s summer outfit. So say analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, who are forecasting a grim summer for stocks this year. In other words, it might be wise to apply ample dollops of market-correction block in addition to any sunscreen you might wear. While falling short of calling for an outright bear market, which needs a rise in interest rates and a decline in earnings per share, Bank of America is painting a pretty ugly picture for investors over the next several months.
The Wall Street firm warns that the market will see a scary summer because investors are trapped in this “Twilight Zone”—the transition period between the end of quantitative easing and the first rate hike by the fed, as it tries to normalize its fiscal policy. In the interim, investors can expect mediocre returns, volatile trading, correlation breakdowns and flash crashes, says chief investment strategist Michael Hartnett.
Moore’s Curse
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/moores-curse
In 1965, the year in which the number of components on a microchip had doubled, Gordon Moore predicted that “certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue.” In 1975 he revised the doubling rate to two years; later, it settled down at about 18 months, or an exponential growth rate of 46 percent a year. This is Moore’s Law.
As components have gotten smaller, denser, faster, and cheaper, they have increased the power and cut the costs of many products and services, notably computers and digital cameras but also light-emitting diodes and photovoltaic cells. The result has been a revolution in electronics, lighting, and photovoltaics.
But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. Modern life depends on many processes that improve rather slowly, not least the production of food and energy and the transportation of people and goods. There is no shortage of historical data to illustrate this reality, and I have calculated representative rates for the decades coinciding with the development of transistors (the first commercial application was in hearing aids in 1952) and microprocessors, as well as the rates for the entire 20th century, or even longer.
Corn, America’s leading crop, has seen its average yields rising by 2 percent a year since 1950. The efficiency with which steam turbogenerators convert thermal power to electricity generation rose annually by about 1.5 percent during the 20th century; if you instead compare the steam turbogenerators of 1900 with the combined-cycle power plants of 2000 (which mate gas turbines to steam boilers), that annual rate increases to 1.8 percent. Advances in lighting have been more impressive than in any other sector of electricity conversion, but between 1881 and 2014 light efficacy (lumens per watt) rose by just 2.6 percent a year, for indoor lights, and by 3.1 percent for outdoor lighting (topped by the best low-pressure sodium lamps).
Here's George R.R. Martin's Response to Sunday's Controversial Game of Thrones
On Sunday night's episode of Game of Thrones, Sansa Stark married Winterfell's resident sadist, Ramsay Bolton, and was subsequently brutally raped by her new husband as childhood friend Theon was forced to silently watch nearby. While fans of the show are accustomed to quite a bit of brutality, the sick psychological effects of what viewers are dubbing the "Black Wedding" were too much even for some die-hards.
In a late-night blog post, George R.R. Martin defended the inflammatory episode, emphasizing that the show and the book series occupy different worlds:
There have been differences between the novels and the television show since the first episode of season one. And for just as long, I have been talking about the butterfly effect. Small changes lead to larger changes lead to huge changes. HBO is more than forty hours into the impossible and demanding task of adapting my lengthy (extremely) and complex (exceedingly) novels, with their layers of plots and subplots, their twists and contradictions and unreliable narrators, viewpoint shifts and ambiguities, and a cast of characters in the hundreds.
There has seldom been any TV series as faithful to its source material, by and large… but the longer the show goes on, the bigger the butterflies become. And now we have reached the point where the beat of butterfly wings is stirring up storms, like the one presently engulfing my email.
And despite the fact that the show and book series are "two roads diverging in the dark of the woods," Martin believes that "all of us are still intending that at the end we will arrive at the same place."
Every 4 Seconds New Malware Is Born
New research data out today shows that the rate of new malware variants released by malicious attackers continues to break records. According to the G DATA SecurityLabs Malware Report, new malware types were discovered less than every four seconds and 4.1 million new strains were found in the second half of 2014, an increase of close to 125 percent over the first half. Over the course of the entire year, nearly 6 million new malware strains were discovered. This is a 77 percent increase over 2013.
The data shows that in the second half of 2014, Trojans still remained atop the categories tracked by G DATA researchers, but could be on pace to be supplanted by adware. Adware showed the highest rate of growth among all of the malware categories, at a rate of 31.4 percent. While the number of new downloaders was on the rise during the second half, adware's growth rate outpaced that rise to take over the number two spot on the malware category chart. Meanwhile, spyware increased in prevalence while backdoors decreased, putting them in the number four and five spot, respectively.
Interestingly, while rootkits ranked ninth in the categories list, the second half of the year saw a huge spike in their prevalence. The report showed that there were 18 times more new variants than in the first half of 2014.
Taking Care of our Own
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121822/paid-leave-goes-progressive-pipe-dream-political-reality
his January, in his State of the Union address, President Obama did something that no president has ever done in a venue of this importance: He called for paid family leave. “We are the only advanced country on Earth that doesn’t guarantee paid sick leave or paid maternity leave to our workers. Forty-three million workers have no paid sick leave—forty-three million. Think about that,” he said.
The White House believes it has an opportunity to push for comprehensive paid leave. “The economy is recovering,” Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett told me in April. “Employers can take a deep breath, step back, and say, ‘Now that we’ve survived and come out of a very challenging time, what can we do to ensure our companies are globally competitive?’ Plus there’s the change in the demography of the workplace—now women comprise over half of the college-educated workplace.” The time, it seems, is now, although some might wonder what took so long.
It is astonishing, when you think about it, that paid leave has only entered the national political discourse in a meaningful way in 2015, with little help until recently from major political figures. The price paid by Americans who lack the right to take paid time off to recover from childbirth, to care for newborns, or to respond to the calamities of fallible health—our own and that of our loved ones—could not be higher. We have no choice but to neglect the needs of our families, or our work, or both. After unemployment, births and family illnesses are a leading cause of what is known as “poverty spells”—when one’s income dips below the minimum needed to afford food and shelter. Nationally, about 9 percent of workers who take time to care for a loved one end up on public assistance, and only 12 percent of private-sector workers are covered by formal paid leave policies, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Compensation Survey.
The Existential Conundrum That Is the American Waste Paper Basket
If the acclaimed 20th-century existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger had written a book about garbage cans, it might read like portions of “The Paradox of the Waste Paper Basket” by Jos Legrand. Published earlier this year in Maastricht, Netherlands, where Legrand lives, Paradox is a concise history of the trash receptacles used in American offices between 1870 and 1930. You know, exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a retired Dutch art-history teacher to be passionate about.
Legrand’s unnumbered book (it’s about 50 pages long) arrives as the zeitgeist, as Heidegger probably would have put it, is unusually preoccupied with garbage cans. In many municipalities across the United States, one must practically have a degree in waste management before tossing one’s refuse in the trash. There’s a blue can for recyclables, a green one for compostables, and if your garbage is truly garbage, it goes in the black can, depending, of course, on where you live (which can make traveling complicated, but I digress…).
Happily for us, Legrand digresses, too, devoting a fair amount of his book to the “European” (his word) perspective on the great American waste paper basket. “Mistakes are as old as the office,” he writes, “and therefore the waste bin is the symbol of the ‘officium imperfectum,’ the imperfect office.” This, Legrand believes, is just one of several paradoxes of the office waste paper basket.
“As long as the bin hasn’t been emptied,” he elaborates, “its contents are the physical rendering of our thinking, our doubts, and ultimately the rejection of everything that doesn’t fit into a certain system. Once emptied, that visibility is over, or, as Heidegger would say, the truth is hidden again.”
Girl Scouts of America Allows Boys Who Identify as Girls to Join Troops
Social conservative organizations are now raising red flags after it was recently revealed that the Girl Scouts of America are allowing boys who identify as girls to join its troops. In a blogpost published last Thursday on the Girl Scouts of America webpage, the organization's "Chief Girl Expert," Andrea Bastiani Archibald, wrote of how the Girl Scouts exists to serve "all girls," no matter what they look like or their biological gender. "The foundation of diversity that Juliette Gordon Low established runs throughout Girl Scouting to this day," Archibald wrote. "Our mission to build 'girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place' extends to to all members, and through our program, girls develop the necessary leadership skills to advance diversity and promote tolerance."
Archibald's post further explains that GSUSA even goes as far as to allow transgender girls to become troop members on a "case-by-case" basis, which is a fact also highlighted in the GSUSA FAQ page. "Girl Scouts is proud to be the premier leadership organization for girls in the country. Placement of transgender youth is handled on a case-by-case basis, with the welfare and best interests of the child and the members of the troop/group in question a top priority," the FAQ page reads. "That said, if the child is recognized by the family and school/community as a girl and lives culturally as a girl, then Girl Scouts is an organization that can serve her in a setting that is both emotionally and physically safe."
A number of conservative groups have spoken out against the GSUSA policy. The American Family Association has started an online petition to help encourage the GSUSA to change its policy. The petition states that GSUSA has lost its "moral compass" and added, "this policy undermines the trust that parents place in the GSA's leadership to make wise decisions and the obligation the GSA has to protect their daughters." The AFA petition has already garnered over 35,000 signatures.
The Basic Economics of Smaller Economy
http://www.alhambrapartners.com/2015/05/18/the-basic-economics-of-smaller-economy/
Since hitting it most recent low in mid-March, spot WTI has rebounded about 40% reaching above $61/barrel at one point. The ultimate low, which brought the physical price down under $43, was on the morning of March 18. The FOMC statement later that afternoon has been taken as a removal of any close threat to ZIRP, taking enormous pressure off the “dollar.” But the abatement of such compression is not necessarily the same as initiating its opposite condition; if tremendous “dollar” buying were to scale back it does not mean that everyone has now turned into a “dollar” seller.
There are numerous indications which suggest that funding is only taking a break (if even that) after March 18 and that in between has been more of a listless lack of conviction in any direction. That hasn’t stopped certain downstream markets from running away in the interim. Some of that, especially in credit, may be related to what I think are rising expectations for a renewal in QE (or perhaps some other more creative means for doing very little) but there is also just plain speculation and momentum.
That seems to be where the oil market is, falling somewhere in between raw speculation and being attentive about the “dollar” pause. The front end is seemingly a high beta version of the “dollar” while the back end is stapled into the mid to high $60’s. Interestingly, in recent days the curve has moved away from backwardation as the outer maturities increased somewhat relative to late April. However, for the most part the WTI curve has become rather stale of late as it seems that open space in the “dollar” has been long enough for pure momentum to begin to fade.
That raises the question that if a 40% jump in prices is not enough to achieve the more “natural” backwardation, then maybe fundamental imbalances, of both finance and economics, aren’t yet ready to let go of price dynamics.
EU agrees to take military action against migrant smugglers
FOR THE REPUBLIC! well not yet but soon
Brussels (dpa) - EU foreign and defence ministers agreed Monday to establish a naval mission to crack down on migrant smuggling networks in the Mediterranean Sea, but the mission will need a United Nations Security Council mandate to meet its target launch date in June. The European Union is trying to curb the loss of life at sea amid an unprecedented influx of migrants attempting to reach the bloc's southern shores by paying smugglers to place them on rickety, overcrowded vessels.
The mission, codenamed EUNAVFOR Med, will aim to "break the business model of smugglers and traffickers of people in the Mediterranean," ministers said in a statement. It will be headquartered in Rome, under the command of Rear Admiral Enrico Credendino. The common costs of the operation are estimated at 11.82 million euros (13.67 million dollars) for an initial 12-month mandate, plus a two-month setup phase, the statement said. Italian Defence Minister Roberta Pinotti welcomed Monday's decision as an "important step forward." The operation recognizes "that the Mediterranean is no longer the boundary just of Italy, but the boundary of Europe," she added.
The mission will consist of several phases, starting with the gathering of intelligence on the smugglers' operations. The ultimate aim is to intercept and possibly incapacitate boats used to transport migrants on the open sea, in Libyan waters or even on shore, depending on the legal basis granted by the UN.
The CIS gave no official statement
Pension crisis, 'gorilla in the room,' gets just one line in Emanuel inaugural address
http://chicago.suntimes.com/chicago-politics/7/71/615196/emanuel-city-must-prevent
Mayor Rahm Emanuel made it a one-liner during a second inaugural address devoted almost exclusively to “preventing another lost generation” of young people. But the “gorilla in the room” was as plain as day to the aldermen who joined the mayor onstage at the swearing-in ceremony Monday at the Chicago Theater. In fact, the $30 billion pension crisis, which has dropped Chicago’s bond rating to junk status, has placed the city in such a precarious position that the mayor’s City Council floor leader has warned 13 rookie aldermen not to expect the political version of spring training.
“Normally the first couple months in City Council are very slow and very relaxed. He said, `Don’t expect that this time. It’s gonna be very difficult the next couple of months. We’re gonna have to pass legislation very quickly to deal with this financial situation,’ ” said 26-year-old Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th), the City Council’s youngest member. “I’m not surprised that the mayor didn’t address it because we know the gorilla in the room and we’re gonna tackle that gorilla.”
Ald. Pat O’Connor (40th), the mayor’s floor leader, said the rapid-fire votes that will be required to pull Chicago away from the financial cliff might even cancel the Council’s traditional August recess. “I can say with great certainty that we’re not gonna wait for the budget cycle to confront some of these problems,” O’Connor said. “It’s uncharted territory for all of us. What we see coming down the pike are ordinances and measures that will either be belt-tightening or revenue-enhancing.”
The Illinois Supreme Court’s decision to overturn state pension reforms has placed Emanuel’s plan to save two of four city employee pension funds in similar jeopardy. That triggered a downward spiral of events that saw Moody’s downgrade Chicago’s bond rating to junk status and do the same to the Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Park District. Standard & Poor’s and Fitch ordered lesser drops
ISIS is winning this war, Mr President. And you are the only person in the world who can stop them.
ISIS is winning the war. Those are five words I never thought I’d write, but they are undeniable. The terror group’s capture of the key city of Ramadi in Iraq is a massively significant turning point in this increasingly bloody and gruesome conflict. Why? Because Ramadi is known as the ‘Gateway to Baghdad’, due to its proximity to Iraq’s capital.
So it means ISIS is now only one relatively small military step away from attacking and possibly seizing the very heart of the country. If that happens, all hell will break loose. Such a prospect should be genuinely alarming to President Obama and his administration. But the President only has himself to blame.
Yes, it’s true that Obama’s predecessor President George W Bush started all this deadly chaos with the invasion and occupation of Iraq 12 years ago. That futile, utterly self-defeating exercise stirred up a hornet’s nest in the region so violent and virulent that it makes Saddam Hussein’s vile regime look positively benign. But Obama’s had plenty of time to devise a successful strategy for dealing with the emerging threat of ISIS, and so far he has spectacularly failed.
As they beheaded Americans, he made somber speeches, then played golf minutes literally seven minutes later. As they burned Jordanian pilots in cages, Obama assured us with almost casual confidence that he was on top of things. As they threw gays to their death off rooftops and slaughtered Christians on beaches, still the leader of the free world exuded calm.
The attacks on George Stephanopoulos are getting the problem backward
http://www.vox.com/2015/5/16/8614093/george-stephanopoulos-clintons-donation
On the one hand, I find it weird that George Stephanopoulos donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation. He should have known how it would look. On the other hand, look is really the operative word there. It's not as if Stephanopoulos's ties to the Clintons were some kind of closely guarded secret. Stephanopoulos worked on Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign for president. He was communications director in Clinton's White House. The sudden realization that Stephanopoulos might be, in his heart of hearts, sympathetic toward the Clintons is a bit odd.
It's easier to see what's going on here when you realize Stephanopoulos wasn't the only media figure to donate to the Clinton Foundation. Dylan Byers reports that the hyper-conservative Newsmax gave more than a million dollars. So did James Murdoch — yes, he's one of those Murdochs — and the News Corporation Foundation, the Murdoch family's philanthropy, threw in at least another $500,000.
But no one much cares about those donations because no one really thinks Newsmax or Fox News are going to end up biased toward the Clintons. They care about Stephanopoulos's donation because they think Stephanopoulos is already biased toward the Clintons, and this just proves it.
Warren strikes back at Obama with scathing report on trade deals
Sen. Elizabeth Warren Monday issued a report slamming U.S. trade deals, citing "decades of broken promises," about enforcing fair labor standards. Warren, D-Mass., has been one of the more outspoken Democratic critics of international trade deals and the report comes as the Senate prepares to vote on a bill that would give President Obama "fast track" authority to sign off on new trade deals. The 15-page report, which includes three pages of citations, takes apart claims and promises by the Obama administration and proponents of trade deals that the agreements bring about increased enforcement of labor standards.
"This analysis reveals that the rhetoric has not matched the reality," the report concludes. "There have been widespread enforcement problems and flaws that prevent enforcement of the labor provisions of these free trade agreements." Warren cites a report by the Government Accountability Office that found neither the office of the United States Trade Representative nor the Department of Labor monitors or enforces compliance with trade pact labor agreements. The report points to "horrific labor abuses," in some countries, including Colombia, where 105 union activists have been killed since a trade deal with the United States was signed in 2006.
Warren is hardly the only Democrat opposing the Senate bill granting more authority to sign trade deals. Most Democrats oppose it, including Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Republicans are mostly in favor of the bill, but some want to amend it to curb currency manipulation, including former U.S. Trade Representative and now Sen. Rob Portman, of Ohio, who is up for re-election in 2016.
Kitzhaber scrapped workable Oregon health exchange for political benefit
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/18/oregon-gov-john-kitzhaber-scrapped-workable-obamac/
Former Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber was told in early 2014 that the Obamacare state health care exchange his administration spent $305 million building could be made operational. But his administration chose instead to scrap the project and seek a scapegoat to keep the fiasco from harming his re-election, according to evidence turned over to congressional investigators.
The materials, reviewed by The Washington Times, include emails and memos between state officials and campaign aides as well as a transcript of a conversation from a state official turned whistleblower that suggests federal tax dollars were sacrificed for political convenience.
The memos show Mr. Kitzhaber’s election campaign aides took the unusual step of instructing state officials on how to handle the Cover Oregon exchange project, especially when the project was abandoned just before its launch. The campaign aides even sought to supervise the testimony of a state official appearing before the U.S. Congress.
Hillary Clinton was paid millions by tech industry for speeches
In one of her last gigs on the paid lecture circuit, Hillary Rodham Clinton addressed an eBay summit aimed at promoting women in the workplace, delivering a 20-minute talk that garnered her a $315,000 payday from the company. Less than two months later, Clinton was feted at the San Francisco Bay-area home of eBay chief executive John Donahoe and his wife, Eileen, for one of the first fundraisers supporting Clinton’s newly announced presidential campaign.
The two events spotlight the unusually close financial ties between Clinton and a broad array of industries that have issues before the government and paid millions of dollars to her and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, in the months preceding the launch of her presidential campaign. Disclosure documents filed by Hillary Clinton last week revealed that the couple have earned about $25 million for delivering 104 paid speeches since January 2014.
While Bill Clinton’s lucrative speaking career since leaving the White House in 2001 has been well documented, the new disclosures offer the first public accounting of Hillary Clinton’s paid addresses since she stepped down as secretary of state. And they illustrate how the Clintons have personally profited by drawing on the same network of supporters who have backed their political campaigns and philanthropic efforts — while those supporters have gained entree to a potential future president.
Rockefeller University, Bal des Berceaux, and ICAA
Last Thursday, the Women & Science Initiative of The Rockefeller University held their annual Women & Science Lecture and Luncheon in the Caspary Auditorium on the campus, attended by a record crowd. The subject of the lecture was "Understanding Addictions; Genes, Molecular Neurobiology, Behavior, and New Treatment Insights." Mary Jeanne Kreek, Patrick E. and Beatrice M. Haggerty Professor Laboratory of the Biology of Addictive Diseases, was interviewed by Laura Landro, Assistant Managing Editor and columnist of the Wall Street Journal. Dr. Kreek spoke about her trailblazing career in medicine and some of her latest findings in addiction research.
Chairmen of the event were Judith Roth Berkowitz, Beth Kojima, Samantha Boardman Rosen, MD, Patricia Rosenwald and Lulu C. Wang. Founding Chairs of the lecture and luncheon are Lydia A. Forbes, Isabel P. Furlaud, Nancy M. Kissinger, and Sydney R. Shuman.
On May 8th at the Plaza Hotel, the French-American Aid For Children (FAAFC) held its 74th annual Bal des Berceaux. The Bal des Berceaux is an annual fundraiser that raises money for seven children charities in the US and France. FAAFC honored Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club for its 100th Anniversary, a charity directed by Daniel Quintero, that FAAFC has been supporting since 1983. About 40 talented children from this after-school center as well as Gérard Chambre, a renowned French singer and comedian and ardent supporter of work that helps underprivileged children worldwide, performed at the Bal. The Master of Ceremonies was Mark Ellwood, Television broadcast journalist and author.
All funds raised from the event will be dispersed to charities in the US and France. The US charities include:
• Kips Bay Boys & Girls Club: an after-school activity center in the Bronx where teens and youngsters learn to recognize and develop their potentials;
• Storefront Academy Harlem: a private, tuition-free school in Harlem with programs from pre-school to 8th grade;
• The Children's Village: a residential care and treatment center for neglected, battered and abused children in judicial care, reeducating families to reintegrate their children back into a safe home life.