#fact is: politicians (at least the American ones) are always comprised of people who are upper class because only they can afford campaigns

[sbd-laytall]

Nightwing definitely be speaking truths here.

Black Canary (1993) #10

#fact is: politicians (at least the American ones) are always comprised of people who are upper class because only they can afford campaigns #and we all know rich people are terrible so #helena bertinelli #huntress #dick grayson #nightwing #black canary #dc comics #comic series #my post

[theantiwarindependentparty]

The AntiWar Independent Party

What We Believe

The AntiWar Independent Party was created for rational independent voters, and registered independents, who don’t support either major political party or their candidates and representatives; for moral, ethical, religious, philosophical, or political reasons. On the basis that both the Democratic and Republican parties support and participate in policies that result in engaging the United States in Endless War.

These policies result in Military campaigns, abroad, that don’t benefit the American People. Politicians from either party continuously support economic policies that offer unlimited funding to the war-machine.

One of the reasons for this, is because both parties are bought-and-paid for by endorsements from lobbyists and special interests; which results in corruption from the inside out. This doesn’t mean that our party, or it’s members, are discouraged from voting or running in elections; however, I would encourage all members of The AntiWar Independent Party to educate themselves about America’s wars, and the reasons behind them, so that they can make the best decision when running or electing an Independent, or other party, candidate.

Because of the corruption that runs rampant in both the Democratic and Republican parties, the policies of both parties, often result in wars and conflicts that benefit lobbyists and special interests; but don’t benefit the average American Citizen; including unlimited funding to foreign nations engaged in meaningless and endless conflicts, and unlimited funding for the Global Military Industrial Complex.

While we firmly remain staunch Independents who believe in the virtues of individualism and self-governance; the following is an outline of the common goals that bind us; but do not define us; as all Independents, and voters of any political persuasion, are encouraged to be Anti-War and Pro-Peace.

Domestic Policy:

The AntiWar Independent Party recognizes that Capitalism, through most of history, has been the most effective economic system; and our party honors our country’s rich history of engaging in policies, and investing in institutions, that allow any American to the live “The America Dream.”

However, we also recognize the corruption in our current economic system; and would strive for a truly “mixed economy” that offers more funding for things like healthcare and education; and less funding to the Global Military Industrial Complex. Socialist and progressive policies like a free higher-education and free healthcare for anyone who needs to see a doctor, are not beyond our grasp. However, although healthcare and education are civil-rights issues; those things should always be respected as a privilege of citizenship, rather than being seen as an “entitlement.”

Other civil-rights do exist and should defended however, for the most vulnerable, like children and the elderly. Policies should also be in place to support America’s Veterans, as well as the poorest and least fortunate among us; such as the homeless and physically or mentally disabled. I think these are policies that all thinking and feeling people can get behind, regardless of their individual political beliefs.

It is a common misconception that wars cost money, the reality is that wars make money; but the money that is made is concentrated in the defense industry. That’s why Defense Contractors like Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing are rich, while most working Americans are poor, or lower middle-class. 

The American Defense Department contributes significantly both to the destruction of the environment, through it’s use of fossil-fuels which exceed the carbon emissions of many industrialized nations; and to the economic inequality between the top 1% of financial investors, versus 99% of American workers. Both of these factors have a devastating effect on both the environment and the economy.

It is the opinion of The AntiWar Independent party, that Military Spending, is the single biggest factor responsible for the economic disparity between the rich and poor; and is the primary reason for the decline of the Middle Class. Occupy Wallstreet and other political movements helped to bring attention to the issue, though failed to address its primary factors.

Not until the American Taxpayer stops funding the War-Machine of the Global Military Industrial Complex, with their hard earned tax dollars; will there be Peace or Prosperity.

War and International Conflict:

War is only defensible as a means of self-defense. And self-defense is only necessary when the lives of Americans are at stake. We will not enter defense treaties unless others can prove that the lives of civilians are at stake, and that entering any war based on a defense treaty will not result in even greater loss of life;  nor will we support any conflict that doesn’t serve the best interests of the American people. Regardless of the conditions of any pre-existing treaties. Endless conflict is to be avoided, a civilized country does not engage in endless war.

We will not fight wars for profit, (we will not fight wars at all that aren’t necessary.) We will only fight wars to win wars. If our goals and objectives are clear, and honorable, then we will at all costs; and cannot be stopped.

Sun Tzu wrote in his book, “The Art Of War” There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare —

We will take a practical and pragmatic approach to international conflict, only engaging in war if the conditions of victory are focused and clear; and all possible attempts at diplomacy have been exhausted.

Being AntiWar does not being an idealistic pacifist that doesn’t comprehend the violence and evils of the world; being AntiWar means understanding that war isn’t always the only option. And is rarely, if ever, the best option. Being AntiWar means being above endless conflict, and above the people who benefit from such conflict.

Economic Policy:

It is the belief of the AntiWar Independent Party that the economy should work for the people, not the people for the economy.

One reason why the Military Industrial Complex is so out of control is because is comprised of hundreds of thousands of people who are “just doing their jobs.”

That’s why the AntiWar Independent Party is willing to impose sanctions on defense contractors, and people who work in the weapons industry; —

President Eisenhower, and General Smedly Butler, believed that people who work for the Military Industrial Complex; should make no more than the average soldier. I think we can enforce that law, while still offering incentives for the construction of cutting-edge weapons technology—

International Policy and Defense Strategy:

The primary challenge for any AntiWar Party or Movement is convincing it’s supporters and constitutes that being AntiWar does not mean being weak on defense. —

In fact, since the invention of America’s “War On Terror” campaign; world-wide terrorism has gotten worse, more deadly and more prevalent, than before the beginning of the war. —

This proves that endless war does not make Americans safer, or more secure, but is a huge drain on our moral as a nation; as well as our economic and environmental resources. We believe that together, we can do better.

—The AntiWar Independent Party

[zahumnypodcast]

Episode 6 notes – Populism is the new black

Populism is the new black, or so it seems judging from the ubiquity of the terms populist and populism in public discourse. Seriously, your policy is not relevant if it has not been called “populist” at some point at least once.

We are in the business of political science though and we do not take using academic terms lightly. That is why we set out to clarify what populism really is and show that not everyone who is being labelled populist really is one. Here is what we talked about in episode 6.

First of all … what is populism.

If we did this episode ten years ago we probably would have spent the whole half-hour on the different definitions political scientists argue about. But thanks to Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist, we have a definition that everyone more or less agrees with.

Populism as such is always somewhat context-specific because the particular segments of society that populists define and use depend on local realities. Nevertheless, in order for someone to call a person or a party populist, the following four attributes should be present in their language.

Number one, anti-elitism. Elites and the establishment are the primary “enemy” (often without the inverted commas) and populism presents itself as being in direct opposition to them. Populists claim to speak for those who have been overlooked, oppressed or left behind and present themselves as champions of the people. Which brings us to number two, the people. Borrowing the famous (and overused) quote about government being of the people, by the people, for the people, it is implicitly assumed that “people” is more or less everyone, or at least everyone who voted. This is not the case in populists’ eyes because the people is constituted by those who are the real, pure, uncorrupted and hard-working. That means that apart from elites, those on benefits or immigrants are often also excluded, especially by far-right populists.

Defining “the real people” is of course arbitrary albeit based on sentiments present in a given society. A good example of an instance of using these sentiments is birtherism in the United States. This conspiration theory maintained that Barack Obama was born outside the U.S. and as such unable to serve as the American president (as the Constitution prescribes that every American president needs to be born on the U.S. soil). For those who felt Obama was unfit to serve because he was...well, not particularly white, birtherism presented a great opportunity how to put a legal stamp on these feelings (racism, shush!).

Number three, the people as a homogeneous entity. When society is comprised of two opposing groups there is an implied assumption of common interests and common will of the people. That means that populism is, while not undemocratic per se, incompatible with liberal democracy – populists see themselves as the only representatives of the will of the people, and nothing is more sacred than that will – not even constitutional courts for example. Moreover, if you believe that the people is a unified entity you do not need to recognize minorities or even hold parliamentary debates. When all you do in office is exercising the will of the people, there is no need for blathering on.

And finally, number four, appeals to morality. Those follow from the distinction between the rotten elites and the pure people, in the sense of morally pure. That is why populism has the capacity to stir up emotions, it discredits its opponents through accusing them of being morally corrupt. Populist leaders can therefore be very rich and still claim to represent the common folk – social class or wealth is only secondary to moral purity. A not insignificant part of the appeal of populist leaders comes down to their accessibility enabled by social media, further showing how different they are from those in power.

What is missing from this definition of populism is any kind of ideology. Populist parties are difficult to place on the traditional left-right spectrum, which is also one of the reasons what it took political scientists so long to agree on a definition of populism. Some claim it is only a communication strategy, the aforementioned Cas Mudde uses the term “host ideology” because he sees populism as a vessel that can be filled with leftist or right-wing ideas. This will then influence the way leaders define the people and identify the enemy.

One of the best examples for this flexibility of populism is Italy. The country had the first Western all-populist government, with both the left and right represented. On the left it was the Five Star Movement. The Five Star’s priorities – their number gave the party its name - are why they are being classified as left-wing populists: public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, access to the internet as a right and environmentalism. What makes the party populist if for one that manifesto rejects traditional party politics and political elites as well as the distinction between the left and the right simply because all politicians are equally corrupt. Anti-establishment stance – check.

The Five Star Movement is sometimes referred to as digital utopists but for our purposes we could call them digital populists. As traditional party politics is corrupt they set out to capture a collective intelligence of sorts that can be defined through and on the internet. The party’s app Rousseau is the tool for that and theoretically, after everyone becomes a member, the will of the people will emerge through consensus on everything from confirming election candidates to bills to be presented in Parliament.

Despite the fact that the Five Star Movement exhibits features traditionally associated with the (far) right – Euroscepticism, an aversion towards migration or links to the anti-vaccination movement, they are still mainly associated with the left thanks to their environmentalism or emphasis of de-growth. Undeniably right-wing on the other hand is The League of Matteo Salvini.

Originally called the Northern League, the party called for the separation of Northern Italy, or Padania, from the rest of Italy. The interesting thing about The League is that it has always been populist but the subjects and contents of their message changed. The definition of the morally pure people shifted ideologically from regionalism to nationals. Geographically, “us” is no longer Padania but the whole of Italy and the main “them” is no longer rotten Rome and lazy Southerners but migrants.

Salvini is also an avid user of social media. As opposed to the Five Stars who use new technology to build a platform to define the will of the people, Salvini uses the internet to build trust and give his voters the feeling he is one of them. There are more than enough selfies with the bare-chested Salvini than Tim Bernes-Lee would approve of but it works. Emotions and emotional charge spread like wildfire online and Salvini, as well as Trump, mastered it.

When speaking of Italian populism, we also have to mention Forza Italia and Silvio Berlusconi who used populist tactics before it was cool, in the nineties. He is a good example of another trait that populism often has – a charismatic leader. Forza is rather a centre-right party using populist tactics which only reinforces the idea of a rather blurry line between “pure” populism and a party taking a page out of the populists’ book. Forza has been ideologically flexible over the years but the core values stayed – freedom and individualism, which does not sound much like the quest for a unified people.

What Berlusconi mastered though was the use of media, the reason why we mention him in connection to populism. Before the internet was widely used, people watched television. And Berlusconi offered a very different TV experience – a lot of reality and comedy shows and according to one study published in American Economic Review, there is a direct link between consumption of Berlusconi’s media and support for Forza or even the Five Stars today. The researchers claim that these viewers expected easy solutions and also, simplyput, showed signs of cognitive decline. Which is of course not to say that people voting for populists are stupid but there seems to be a correlation between people being more receptive to populist messages and their media consumption preferences.

Generally, the quest for clear definitions and then using them to pigeon-hole different parties or politicians into neat categories is not always welcomed by conditions “on the ground”. The Five Start Movement is no doubt a populist movement, but they are also utopian. The League checks all the boxes for populism but is also far-right. On the other hand, there are those who only use populist tactics such as Silvia Berlusconi so is it a good idea to describe him as a populist?

There is a good argument for why not to do that because it distorts the original meaning of the word. But we also cannot come up with a new word every time something does not exactly match the definition we came up with. This struggle is of course nothing new, we have the same problem with the word democracy. The main lesson here probably is to be aware of the fact that words can be misused as a label and populists are not the only ones who are good at using emotionally charged terms. Trying to discredit ideological or political opponents by labelling them as populists not only muddies the terminological waters of politics but also leads to the question of why it is such a bad thing to be accused of “working for the people”.

Populism therefore is not only an interesting phenomenon by itself, it also demonstrates a broader point of the difference between “official” academic definitions of terms and the way they get used – and misused - in everyday language. So, beware of your words!

References can be found on the episode page here: https://soundcloud.com/za-humny-podcast/06-je-to-populista

[marcjampole]

Mainstream news media created the conditions in which a bottom-feeder like Trump could thrive by focusing on celebrity culture to encourage conspicuous consumption

AARP the Magazine is thus a small part of the giant propaganda machine that created the celebrity culture that created Donald Trump. It took from the first stirrings of consumer culture in the 1890’s until the 21st century for the focus on celebrity to pollute our marketplace of ideas enough for a toxic algae boom like Donald Trump to emerge (with apologies to algae blooms worldwide!). But unlike cleaning up the environment, saving our political discourse is conceptually easy—all the news media has to do is dedicate more of its feature coverage to those whose accomplishments can’t be measured by money made or spent, and cease to cover every issue like a reality show featuring celebrities. Not one big action, but a bunch of little actions are needed to stem the tide of celebrity culture. AARP could do its part by working into the mix a healthy share of scientists, historians, civic leaders, activists and literary figures into Big5-Oh and other parts of the magazine.

Those seeking to put the Trump phenomenon in a broader context will usually point out that his rhetoric and actions typically stay within the margins of 21st century Republican thought, especially as it concerns taxes, regulation, healthcare insurance, women’s health issues and white supremacy. Sometimes Trump has extended those margins with more outrageous versions of standard Republican fare. Others label Trumpism as the American version of the movement throughout the West to embrace ultranationalist, anti-immigration autocrats.

As insightful as these analyses are, they miss Trump’s cultural significance. Not only does Trump represent the bitterly racist and classist endgame of Ronald Reagan’s “politics of selfishness,” he also is the apotheosis of our cultural decline into celebrity-fueled consumerism. Remember that in the real world, Trump was a terrible and unethical businessperson who drove companies into bankruptcy six times; had at least a dozen failed business ventures based on his most valuable asset, his brand name; lost money for virtually all his investors; often lied to banks and governmental agencies; and has been sued by literally thousands of people for nonpayment or breach of contract. 

But while Trumpty-Dumpty was engaging in a one-man business wrecking crew he managed to get his name in the newspaper for his conspicuous consumption, his attendance at celebrity parties and his various marriage and romances. His television show was a hit, which reaped him even more publicity. But make no mistake about it, before he started his run for political office by promoting the vicious, racially tinged lie that Obama hails from Kenya, the public recognized Trump primarily for the attributes he shared with the British royal family, the Kardashians, Gosselins, Robertsons, the housewives of New Jersey, Atlanta, South Beach and elsewhere, Duane Chapman, Betheny Frankel, Paris Hilton and the rest of the self-centered lot of rich and famous folk known only for being rich and famous and spending obnoxious sums of money.

Trump’s celebrity status always hinted at his master-of-the-universe skills in business and “The Apprentice” never missed an opportunity to reinforce that false myth. Thus, whereas the business world recognized Donald Trump as the ultimate loser, celebrity culture glorified him as one of the greatest business geniuses in human history. It was this public perception of Trump—completely opposite of reality—that gave him the street cred he needed to attract unsophisticated voters. Trump is completely a creation of celebrity culture.

When we consider the general intellectual, moral and cultural climate of an era—the Zeitgeist, which in German means the “spirit of the age”—we often focus on defining events such as presidential assassinations, Woodstock, the moon landing, 9/11, the election of the first non-white president. But a Zeitgeist comprises thousands upon thousands of specific events, trends and personal choices. 

Which brings us—finally—to the subject of this article, AARP the Magazine, the semi-monthly slick magazine of the American Association of Retired People (AARP). The magazine usually uses celebrities and celebrity culture to give tips on personal finances, health, careers, relationships, retirement and lifestyle to its members, people over the age of 50. Because AARP membership rolls is so enormous, I have no doubt that AARP is one of the four or five most well-read periodicals in the United States.

Now AARP the organization must have many qualms about Trump and Trumpism. Trump has already rolled back consumer protections that prevent seniors from being taken advantage of by both big businesses and small-time con artists. Trump is vowing to dedicate his second term to cutting Social Security and Medicare, two programs of utmost importance to the well-being of AARP’s members. The leadership of AARP certainly understands that Trump’s cruelly aggressive effort to end immigration from non-European countries is the main cause for the growing shortages of the home care workers so vital to many if not most people in their final years. They must also realize that a tariff war affects people on fixed incomes the most.

What AARP leaders—of the organization and magazine—show no signs of understanding is that they played a role in creating the monster. The focus of AARP the Magazine and the other AARP member publication on promoting celebrity culture helped to create the playing field that Trump dominates—that shadow land of aspirations for attention and materialism in which all emotional values reduce to buying and consumption and our heroes have either done nothing to deserve their renown or have worked in the mass entertainment industries of TV, movies, sports and pop music.  

As an example of how celebrity culture permeates and controls the aspirational messages of AARP the Magazine, let’s turn to the feature on the last page of every issue, something called “Big5-Oh”: Big5-Oh always has a paragraph story with photos of a famous person who is turning 50 sometime during the two months covered by the issue. The bottom third of the page consists of one-sentence vignettes with head-and-shoulder photos of famous people turning 50, 60, 70 and 80. The copy typically describes something the famous person is doing that demonstrates she or he is continuing to thrive and do great things despite advancing age.

I’ve seen Big5-Oh in every issue of AARP I have ever read, and I have perused each issue for about 18 years. And in every issue, the famous people mentioned are virtually all celebrities, by which I mean actors, pop musicians, sports stars and those known only for being known like the Kardashians and Snooki. Only quite rarely a film director, popular writer or scientist sneaks in.

The latest issue, covering August and September 2019 exemplifies the celebrity-driven approach that hammers home the idea that only celebrities matter (since it’s only their birthdays and ages that are seemed worth memorializing). The featured person turning 50 is Tyler Perry, an actor and writer-director. The smaller features include four actor, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jason Alexander, Richard Gere and Lilly Tomlin, plus the athlete Magic Johnson and the rock star Bruce Springsteen.

Not one scientist, not one historian or sociologist. Not one civic leader, politician, physician, novelist, poet or classical or jazz musician. No astronaut, architect or engineer. I did a little cursory research to come up with a reconceived Big5-Oh for August and September 2019: The big feature, always about someone turning 50, could be the chess player Ben Finegold, the best-selling but much scandalized popular writer James Frey or the filmmaker Noah Baumbach. That’s pretty much a wash with Tyler Perry. If I were editor of this feature, I would probably still pick Tyler Perry over this competition. 

But when we get to people who turned 60 and 70 during these months, you realize how much celebrity culture guided the editor’s choice of subjects: ignored are the designer Michael Kors, the current governor of Virginia Ralph Northam, the distinguished Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, the even more distinguished journalist James Fallows, the important literary novelists Jane Smiley, Martin Amis and Jonathan Franzen, the leader of the Irish Green Party, astronaut Scott Altman and Beverly Barnes, the first woman to captain a Boeing 747. All these people are non-celebrities and all have made more significant and lasting contributions to America than the people the column’s editor selected, with the possible exception of Magic Johnson and Bruce Springsteen. 

What’s more significant, though, is including some of these people instead of all celebrities would make an important message about what we value in our society. It would say that we honor the intellectual contributions of our writers, scientists, knowledge professionals and civic leaders. The fact that AARP always selects celebrities for Big5-Oh and tends to build other stories and features around celebrities makes the opposite message about value—that all that matters is the gossip surrounding celebrities and the promotion of celebrity culture.  

Now AARP shares the blame for our culture’s emphasis on shallow consumerism and superficial celebrities with many of our cultural organizations and educational institutions. For example, the political reporting of the mainstream media reduces all political discourse to celebrity terms—name-calling, who is feuding with whom, who’s winning in the polls, the skeleton-closet scandals of the candidates’ families, which celebrities love and hate them, zingers and misstatements, the candidates’ theme songs and other main themes of celebrity culture. Notice that Trump is as much a master in these endeavors as he is an inexperienced and ignorant buffoon in matters related to governance such as policy, history, the inner workings of the government and the scientific research informing governmental decisions. Note, too, that based on how much ink and space is given to endorsements by the media, in the hierarchy of value, celebrities rate above elected officials who rate above unions, business and scientific organizations and luminaries in fields other than entertainment. 

#aarp #trump

[anthonybialy]

Bumbling Rumble

Women's wrestling champion of the world Andy Kaufman couldn't have planned a more hilarious presidency. The problem is Donald Trump may be serious. All evidence indicates he truly believes he's a heavyweight champion. McDonald's makes reaching the division easy.

A slapfest between NBA players who've never thrown a combined punch in their lives doesn't make for thrilling bouts. The unpleasant president squaring off against the repulsive media is the Iran-Iraq War of politics without the fun explosions.

Our tough guy executive spars with foes who couldn't do a chin-up. It's even in its way. Trump is Eric Cartman as the Coon attacking someone sitting in the park and pretending he stopped an assault.

The self-proclaimed top puncher won't fight for real. Trump's pattern of running his mouth when it was safe to talk tough only became clear about 30 years before he ran for the presidency. I'm sure there's no reason to verify if someone's as muscular as claimed, especially for a politician. The fact it took him so long to join the club is supposed to be an argument for him.

There are real victims of not backing up reputation. Hong Kong is getting shoved around by one of the globe's most brutish regimes, and Trump will gallantly fight back by slapping tariffs on them someday, too.

Making Americans pay more for Chinese goods will really teach us a lesson. At least Obamacare still hasn't been repealed. Plus, the tough bastard bravely refuses to do anything about entitlements that'll doom those who weren't born Fred Trump's son.

Ignoring a problem makes it disappear according to an inspirational leader. You'd think the best businessman ever would be able to diagnose an awful deal and sell Americans on saving for their own retirements instead of letting an entity connected to Nancy Pelosi squander it. And it took true bravery to start bitching about the wall as soon as his ostensible party was in the congressional minority.

Moaning about injustice is sure to remedy it. Of course the media's comprised of pathetic shills for the losing side of the Cold War. The profession teems with self-styled intellectuals who are so stupid that they majored in journalism. But it's something to not let ruin one's perception.

Adults presume life's unfair in general and in this case particularly. Stenographer pinkos are so consumed with changing the world they forget to do their actual tasks, which involve recording what interesting people do. So, do good work and let voters see that instead of the improper classification. Trump considers bitching part of his job.

The embarrassment of whining that people are mean to you should have sunk in by sophomore year of high school. Humans should expect teasing, especially those in particular who become Earth's most powerful person. Pouting is undignified for any adult, especially one with this job. Even more so, an executive who's spent a lifetime spent lucking into promotions naturally doesn't feel grateful. Trump is technically presidential.

But what about not throwing tantrums? The sort of people who believed Mitt Romney was out to ban tampons still wonder how they ended up with Donald freaking Trump. Either way, we end up with liberals who think every Republican is a murderous demonic racist out to cancel lovely insurance for personal amusement. Elizabeth Warren could switch parties like she tried with ethnicities, and suddenly she'd be a heartless orphan-kicker.

Has anyone been convinced by a Trump tweet? Even the moments where he pleasantly surprises by uttering something correct don't change minds. Take how he supposedly imposed a Muslim ban did just that except for the part how it didn't ban Muslims. Nobody was swayed by his shrieking about unfair coverage. George W. Bush wouldn't have kvetched and gotten the same result. But he fights!

An aggrieved leader's kvetching has convinced precisely zero voters. His fervent cultists treat anything he utters as prophecy as self-appointed enemies won't hear him out on the rare occasion he's accurate. The undercard is similarly dull.

Battling for truth would be easier if his grasp on reality were more than tenuous. Trump is so busy explaining how everyone against him is a mean bully that he doesn't have time to research his claims. They're undoubtedly winners.

Write off the idiots. There are always going to be suckers. On top of that, the most deluded are convinced everyone else is gullible. Pompous dolts who think they're informed after skimming a headline or hearing Jimmy Kimmel's enthralling take on compassion aren't going to be convinced by Trump's truculence.

The real answer to the question of media bias lies in winning the culture. Fight the problem at the source instead of waiting for it to pollute all the way downstream. We've forgot Andrew Breitbart's lessons, which is unfortunately easy to do considering the site with his name on it degenerated into a doughy pale pride site.

Do what's right and trust truth to win out. It's tough when mendacious zombies slime you. But if the media truly bites it as much as suspected, the one way to not help is sinking to their level. Whining others are being unfair is as undignified as it is ineffective.

You'd think a president concerned about fake news be worried about accuracy himself. That doesn't exonerate his target. The mendacious press shrieking at an exhausting president is what would happen if the Red Sox could play the Patriots. You don't have to align with either group of fiendish ghouls.

Are you genuflecting to a blithering phony or do you want the socialists to burn the Constitution with a lit flag? The lame binary choice applied to everything just makes a supposed brawl that much more of a letdown. Use your nails!

[wrath-ruin-reddawn]

Radicalism in Medieval Settings and the Scioa’tael

One of the most common complaints hurled against the Scioa’tael and its members is that, “they’re terrorists”. This slight is hard to refute, because, according to the most basic definition of terrorist– i.e. “ a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims “– they are. However, as this essay will explain, calling the Scioa’tael terrorists overlooks several centuries of social, political, and martial development, making it an unfair comparison. 

First, we must address the elephant in the room. We live in a post 9/11 world; many of us from the United States grew up in the atmosphere of pervasive fear that dominated the Bush era and the so-called War on Terror. Other nations have been similarly affected by their own tragedies, their own acts of terrorism, both foreign and domestic. This makes it difficult to talk about terrorism because it evokes deeply rooted emotions, for everyone, and understandably so. Even so, we must endeavor to dissociate our present connotations from the word itself, in order to better discuss terrorism both as it now exists and how it functioned in medieval societies. The main problem with terrorism in modern free societies, and why it is particularly reviled, is that it is fundamentally unnecessary. In cultures where people are guaranteed the right to vote, protest, and assemble, resorting to violence, especially violence against civilians, is abhorrent because the will of the people can be expressed through other ways. Voting out people whose political views we disagree with and protesting unjust laws with marches and rallies are just two of the ways in which citizens of a democracy can communicate and enforce their wishes. 

Of course, even in a democracy, there are ways in which the will of the people can be subverted. Systemic factors like social class mean that the rich individuals and powerful companies can afford to lobby and donate money to politicians in ways that the poor cannot. Heck, I have seen politicians win the popular vote but still lose the presidential election twice in my lifetime thanks to the weird setup of the American electoral college. However, even with these issues, citizens still have important, legal rights that protect their ability to assemble and protest…. rights that were largely absent under feudal systems like the world of the Witcher. The consideration of this setting is what we will discuss in the rest of this essay, to better contextualize the Scioa’tael as a movement, and to led to a discussion of revolution under oppressive regimes.

SECTION I: FEUDAL SOCIETY

I. Contextualizing the Problem

Before we can even begin to talk about the social context of the Scioa’tael, we need to try and establish what kind of world the Witcher takes place in. Although, obviously, the setting is fictional, our best bet is to try and draw connections between the Witcher universe and our own. 

One of the easiest ways to narrow our focus is to try and establish what historical time-frame the Witcher roughly corresponds to. Now, there are multiple ways to do this, but I will focus primarily on the technology, vocabulary, and historical references. Of course, this is difficult, because the fantastical elements in the Witcher use very modern terms. For example, the words “mutagen” (1946) and “gene” (1909) which both appear in the series, were only conceived in the 20th century, which clashes heavily with the Witcher’s decidedly medieval aesthetic. However, these words are derived from pre-existing French/Latin bases, so they could have hypothetically been devised earlier in the universe of the Witcher to fulfill a need. (Sorceresses, after all, are able to do some pretty incredible things, and they clearly have an advanced understanding of biology. See: the fact that they can intentionally mutate living organisms via gene therapy.) 

As for historical references, we can see a few characters mentioned in the Witcher universe who have clear parallels to real life figures. For example, Dandelion mentions a revolutionary named “Joan of the Arc Coast”, whose name is obviously very close to Joan of Arc. The real life Joan of Arc lived between 1412 and 1431. Further backing up this rough estimate for the time period is the fashion. We see several men in the Witcher series wearing chaperons (Roche’s head-gear of choice), that became particularly fashionable in the 15th century. The attire of most nobles (hose, a tunic, and shoes) also fits with this time-frame.

This places the Witcher during the medieval period. 

II. The Medieval Period in Europe Was Especially Shitty, and Here’s Why! 

In news that probably surprises absolutely no one, the medieval period was pretty awful for anyone who wasn’t a rich male noble. The primary economic and political system was feudalism, a social structure that’s basically a pyramid. At the bottom of this structure were the peasants and serfs, who worked the land overseen by knights and vassals, who in turn reported to lords, who answered to the monarchy. Obviously, in this structure the king had absolute power, and the serfs practically none. 

This imbalance of power was maintained in a multitude of ways. For starters, even though peasants comprised the majority of European populations, they lacked the resources of the upper classes. If they wanted to resist with physical force, they could find themselves up against knights: men with expensive life-saving armor who were literally trained since childhood to fight. And refusing to pay their taxes simple wasn’t an option– they didn’t even legally own the land they worked on, remember. Even free peasants still technically rented their land from their lords. If they refused to work, they could suffer terrible repercussions, and without the ability to unionize or go on strike en masse any attempts to hurt their lords by refusing to work would fail. 

An additional form of control was the church. The clergy helped maintain the power structure of the feudal system by “sanctify[ing] the divine rule of the king and justify[ing] royal measures to the rest of the population” (Ishay). Under conventional European feudalism, the church was not “a free agent… but rather an intrinsic part of the apparatus of power” (Ishay). 

Now, admittedly, the religious structures in the Witcher are different than that of the Catholic church in medieval Europe. For starters, Catholicism was incredibly influential precisely because of how singular and all-encompassing it was. “Religion permeated every pore of medieval life,” (Ishay). However, in the Witcher universe, there are at least several different religious organizations in the North. The cult of Melitele is “the most widespread” of all the Nordling’s religions, but even so it is a far cry from the utter domination of the Catholic church in Western Europe. (Of course, eventually this would change during the Protestant Reformation, and the Orthodox Church has always held sway in the East. But the important factor here is more that there was utter hegemony by one religious institution than what institution it was.) 

Despite this difference, we do see that religious institutions do seem to prop up the monarchy in the world of the Witcher, even if their reach isn’t as lengthy. We see priests at peace talks, on battlefields, and most importantly performing coronations. Nobles still use the excuse of divine right to justify their actions and their rule. Clearly, this parallels the rhetoric used in medieval Europe. To my own interpretation, although the Cult of Melitele is no stand-in for the Catholic Church, it still bolstered the institution of feudalism.

Feudalism was a system of finance as much as a governmental one, and as such examining the economies of the Northern kingdoms can provide further insight to the political weight (or lack thereof) of the lower classes. Now, towards the end of the medieval period there was an increase in the power of merchants and traders-- essentially, the foundation of what we today call nouveau riche; people who were not from genteel families rising to prominence (think of the Medici in Florence). This correlated to the flourishing of city-states and the birth of the middle class. There was also a corresponding increase in the right to own private property; something that, while uncontroversial today, was revolutionary at the time. 

"The gradual decline of feudalism and its monopolistic economy, for instance, eventually would lead to the free markets of capitalism based on the concept of the individual’s right to private property, thereby providing greater individual autonomy and opportunities for the beneficiaries to transform their newfound economic power into political power.” (Lauren)

Of course, this point would be meaningless if the Witcher did not have a similar economy to typical ones in medieval Europe. Fortunately for us, it is-- or at the very least, it appears to be. Although Geralt isn’t exactly reading newspapers with descriptions of the stock market, we can see several things that provide insight into the fiscal reality of the Nordling economy. From what we can see, there is a decent merchant class in cities like Vizima, Flotsam, and Novigrad, and there is clearly a class of people who have risen themselves up above their station. This implies that the economic situation in the North does resemble that of late medieval Europe. 

However, it is important to note that greater economic mobility did not necessarily contribute to the development of better freedoms and living conditions nearly as much as other factors.  “As long as the public realm was dormant, closely linked to the private realm, and subservient to religious and feudal authority, the state, however backward, was still uncontested” (Ishay). Funnily enough, the sense of community built up through religious institutions eventually lead to people having a public outlet for their frustrations... but the world of the Witcher isn’t there yet, and so that will remain a topic for another day. 

SECTION II: THE ETHICS OF TERRORISM, ESPECIALLY IN A FEUDAL SOCIETY        

I. There Are No Alternatives

As shitty as it is to say, there really aren’t many options for nonhumans in the North. Hell, there aren’t many options for anyone in the North, even human peasants. Like we discussed above, the feudal system was crappy all around, and particularly resistant to change, as “no significant public space permitted democratic communication between the peasantry and feudal authorities” (Ishay). In some cases, like in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe serfdom continued up until “the wars, revolutions, and upheavals of the nineteenth century br[oke] practices of the past” (Lauren). 

Considering how marginalized nonhumans are, is it really surprising that the Scioa’tael formed? Although peaceful methods of resistance might be possible, it remains a fact that feudalism leaves no room “for the advancement of political and economic rights” (Ishay). Let us not forget what Dandelion says about nonhuman rights:

“It is a fact that, as the scrawlings on the wall of the University of Oxenfurt say: "Pacifying nonhumans is like wallowing in mud – everyone gets dirty, generally with blood."”

The dream of the Scioa’tael for a world in which they can self-determine, and have the same freedoms and respect that humans enjoy, is dangerous. Because “these visions of human rights possess the capacity to challenge, to generate fear, to hold out hope and inspire, and to change the world” (Lauren).     

In light of these facts, I don’t think that it’s really possible to deny that open rebellion is pretty much the only way for the Scioa’tael to gain any rights. As for how bad nonhumans have it... well, that’s an essay for another day. I’ll just say that there is definitely some racial/ethnic coding going on with the nonhumans, and that we can use this to form an even more grim outlook of their prospects than the already bleak view offered by the novels and video game series. 

II. Methodology and the Ethics of War

Now that we have established that nonhumans have almost no choices or ability to enact political change by peaceful means, we can now talk about the morality of terrorism, and try to come to a consensus about the Scioa’tael. 

Of course, ethics are inherently subjective. Although I have described, at length, how revolution in feudal societies practically demands violence, I am sure that some of you will remain unconvinced. That’s your prerogative. I think that it’s crazy, but you do you I guess. But for the rest of us, we now have to address the muddy waters of rebellion and warfare. Namely: what makes war just? What actions are permissible in war?

These questions are not easy to answer. Some believe that, as long as the cause is just, any action is justified; others that just actions are what make the cause just. I think that the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. 

This brings up another issue: namely, that the Scioa’tael don’t function as a single unit. Each unit reports to a commander, and therefore the conduct of each commando can vary wildly. For example, the unnamed leader of one Scioa’tael group abducted Ves as a young woman, keeping her as his sex slave and prisoner. Other commanders are more discerning-- although they may torch villages and kill merchants who infringe on their territories, these Scioa’tael don’t seem to take prisoners for such extended periods of time and seem to have some sense of decency. Sure, they’ll torture their enemies for information, but they draw the line at, you know, raping children.    

Two of the main criteria for defining whether a cause is just or not are just cause and right intention: i.e are you fighting for a good reason? And do you have good intentions? And in the case of most Scioa’tael groups, we can assuredly say that they have just cause (they want freedom), and right intentions (that one only does actions with the goal of seeing your cause realized-- and that you intend to stop when you win).    

And two of the main aspects of the waging of war itself is that of proportionality and non-combatant immunity. The ideal of proportionality essentially states that you should not use unnecessary force: or at the very least, force that is not greater than what you enemies use against you. Non-combatant immunity states that you should, you know, only attack viable military targets. 

Considering that the Scioa’tael aren’t using methods more extreme than the humans, we see that the moral of proportionality is maintained. Really, the only point of contention with the Scioa’tael is the principle of non-combatant immunity. Of course, the Scioa’tael would make the argument that humans violate this principle every day, and that they are only responding in kind; or they might make the argument that all humans are part of the system of oppression and thus bear some culpability for it. 

SECTION III: CONCLUSION  

In the previous sections, I have laid out the social context and justification for the Scioa’tael as best I can. I can’t offer a simple, easy answer as to whether they are doing the right thing or not. Their methods are definitely questionable, but, as American Revolutionary Thomas Paine once said, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” However, I do hope that this essay can help elevate the discourse from mud-slinging the term “terrorist” to an honest discussion, especially one that takes the sociopolitical setting of the Witcher into account instead of borrowing the word’s modern connotations wholesale. I think that, although difficult, the ethical questions raised about warfare and conduct are things that we must all consider, especially given the way the political climate is turning. How far can we go to defend liberty? Under what conditions are acts of violence permissible?  

References  

Ishay, Micheline R. The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008   

Lauren, Paul Gordon. The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Third Edition). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 

“Mutagen”, “Gene”. Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com. Retrieved 04/28/18.  

Steinhoff, Uwe. On the Ethics of War and Terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 

#the witcher #scioa'tael #the witcher meta #long post

[rulystuff]

https://servicemeltdown.com/is-the-united-states-at-end-of-empire/

New Post has been published on https://servicemeltdown.com/is-the-united-states-at-end-of-empire/

IS THE UNITED STATES AT END OF EMPIRE?

America’s economic primacy is pretty much behind us. And, I don’t believe there is any chance of reversing a trend that began thirty plus years ago. The best-case scenario for the nation is to slow the rate of economic decline – never mind social and cultural decline, which are probably lodged in irreversible decay.  As Robert Kaplan says in his book, The Revenge of Geography, we might prolong our position of strength by preparing the world for our own obsolescence and thus ensuring a graceful exit.  But even this outcome will require the strength of will that has yet to be demonstrated by leaders in business, education, and government.

Economic primacy might be measured along many fronts – income per capita, rate of growth, productivity, foreign exchange reserves, among others – but if one looks at Gross Domestic Product (GDP), perhaps the coarsest measure of a nation’s economic well-being, then the United States has lost its economic primacy to China when compared on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis.

The PPP approach levels the GDP calculation to each country’s relative price of goods. So, if a television set costs $500 in the United States while the same television costs $250 in China then, theoretically at least, we’re under counting China’s GDP by $250. Using the PPP rationale, China’s GDP was approximately $23.5 trillion in 2019 compared to that of the United States which came in at $21.4 trillion.

Some politicians, economists, lobbyists, and others, like to use a different measure of GDP to suit their own purposes. The nominal GDP, which looks at the total of goods and services produced at current exchange rates yields a substantially different calculation. The nominal GDP of the United States in 2019 came in at $21.4 trillion, a number which is identical to the nation’s GDP on a PPP basis. The reason for this is that the nominal GDP calculation is based on the dollar and so there is no currency conversion rate difference. By comparison, China’s nominal GDP came in at $14.3 trillion. If we only look at nominal GDP, it is clear we are being lulled into a false sense of economic security.

Diplomatically, China might also have an edge on the United States. In the 1980’s, the then leader of the People’s Republic of China, Deng Xiaoping, enunciated his famous maxim of tao guang yang hui. Interpreted variously, the maxim is meant as a foreign policy directive that regardless how muscular the nation might become economically, geopolitically, and militarily it is always best to keep a “low profile diplomatically.” No more beguiling example of Deng Xiaoping’s maxim is in evidence than in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Simply put, China plans to build one “road” from China to Europe and thus control all manner of transcontinental commerce. Already, China controls or has a presence in ports that handle about two-thirds of the world’s container traffic. In Greece, the port of Piraeus, a storied port dating to the Fifth Century B.C., is majority owned by the China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO) which makes Greece a strategic entry point for China into the heart of Europe.

IF WE’RE NOT MAKING STUFF WHAT ARE WE TO DO?

Let’s face it, manufacturing was lost to our shores for all intents and purposes several years ago. In 2015, China displaced the United States as the top manufacturing nation in the world. In 2019, China’s value-added output – in essence, the difference between price and the cost to produce – in manufacturing amounted to $3.9 trillion compared to $2.4 trillion for the United States. That gap will doubtless continue to grow.

There are now roughly 15 million workers in the United States engaged in manufacturing down from approximately 18 million in the 1980’s – President Trump, to his credit, was determined to revitalize manufacturing, steel, and coal but despite gains in these areas total employment numbers will continue to slip on a trend line basis.  When one considers that China has approximately 112 million manufacturing workers, the competitive disadvantage for the United States becomes palpably clear.

In 2019 our nation’s goods deficit with China was approximately $345 billion. That gap is not likely to be made up in any of our lifetimes. So, that leaves Services as the new game in town. In 2019, Services accounted for roughly 69% of our nation’s GDP. And, as a nation, we better excel in that new cycle reality. It is true, the United States ran an annual balance of payments surplus in services with China of about $36 billion in 2019 – with U.S. exports amounting to about $56 billion and imports from China totaling $20 billion. But don’t let that fool you as a $20 billion gap will be easy for China to make up especially when one considers that China’s Services sector is growing at an average of 2% per year. And, unless we accelerate the rate of growth of exports – the rate of growth is about even for both imports and exports – we might soon be facing a deficit in this sector of the economy so crucial for the good health of the nation in the twenty-first century.

THE NATION FACES SOME VERY STIFF HEADWINDS

The United States economy has structural defects which will not go away simply by holding rallies and mouthing rhetorical flourishes in the halls of Congress. Decline might be inexorable but we should not stand by as mere spectators. The will and purpose to restore our economic vitality must be marshaled by every American. It must begin, first and foremost, by demanding of our leaders, our institutions, and ourselves to be unafraid to serve in keeping with American priorities. It is the remotest possibility that we can salvage the service economy and consequently our nation unless our standard of performance is nothing less than service excellence in everything we do.

We don’t have a lot going for ourselves: Labor productivity growth is stalled at near zero levels; the rate of household savings is paltry; regulation and taxation still suffocates businesses and individuals despite President Trump’s initiatives; unemployment – not the nominal rate but the U6 rate which measures the unemployed, those that are not looking for work, and those who have had to settle for part-time work –  is mired at levels of 7% (during the Obama years the U6 rate never got below 9.2%); the national debt is on the order of 80% of GDP; entitlement spending is approximately 70% of our budget dollars and is likely to increase with both a growing number of baby boomers reaching retirement and the population’s longer life expectancy; and fraud and corruption run rampant among other serious afflictions.

Perhaps the most troubling portent for the nation’s future is its inability to clamber out of a deep and black hole in education. Among the 37 industrialized nations which comprise the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), for example, the United States ranks 31st in mathematics and roughly in the middle on science. Clearly, all of the monetary and fiscal policies in the world will hardly fix this crippling deficiency which has more to do with a cultural indifference to serious and rigorous education.

Prior to Mr. Trump’s coming to office, the federal government was hell-bent on redistributing wealth rather than getting out of the way so that risk capitalists could create wealth. Unfortunately, President Trump’s reforms designed to bring back a full-throated and free market approach to the nation’s financial issues died the moment President Biden came into office.

Meanwhile, in the corporate world, business leaders are fixated on how quarterly earnings affect their pay packages, and when push comes to shove, cutting corners and worse. How else can one explain the utter disregard American companies operating in China have for the human rights abuses perpetrated by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on its people. Abuses such as forced labor (unions are illegal in China), the internment of over a million Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities, bans on religious freedom and free expression, arbitrary arrests, and the repression of Hong Kong citizens seem not to bother the likes of executives at Caterpillar, General Motors, Ford, AMD, Micron Technologies, Intel, Texas Instruments, Nike, and many others which are doing a land-office business in China. Apple, most notably, has raised to an art form tax, regulatory, and labor dodges which allow it to stash hundreds of billions of dollars overseas while paying little or no income taxes in the United States. The company, apparently, is nonplussed by the fact that its armies of workers in China are employed for wages and benefits that would be in contravention of United States laws. How the CEO’s of these companies can live with themselves knowing full well that they are profiting from someone else’s misery is a testament to their greed and lust for power.

WHERE DOES THE CUSTOMER FIT IN?

From the way we treat our veterans, clients, patients, students, donors, and citizens – customers, all, to my way of thinking we have a lot of work to do before we can claim to excel in service. A survey by consulting giant Accenture in 2007 showed that 41% of respondents described service quality as fair, poor, or terrible – more recent surveys suggest service is worsening. Perform any human endeavor at that level of proficiency and you are an abject failure. In the services sector, however, that is par for the course. In the Far East, cultural determinants do not confuse service with servitude. As a rule, suppliers will go the extra mile to please a consumer. In the West, and particularly in the United States, the most that a service worker can muster when asked to perform a personalized service is to utter something like, “no problem.” That kind of indifferent attitude is ingrained and certain to keep our level of service quality from climbing out of the aforementioned levels of mediocrity.

In the meantime, off-shore locations feast on our indifference to service and do whatever it takes to secure and maintain a customer relationship. The oft-cited explanation for the comparative advantage of off-shore locations, namely, their low cost, is a facile response to a more complicated dynamic. It is true that off-shore locations enjoy all-in cost advantages vis-a-vis the United States. It is also true, that President Trump worked hard to enhance our competitiveness on the world stage by reducing the oppressive web of regulation; reducing our world-leading corporate tax rates; negotiating better trade deals; exiting globalist compacts financed on the backs of American taxpayers; offering a tax holiday for repatriated corporate profits, among other initiatives. Those initiatives, however, have either been rolled back or will soon be under President Biden’s Administration.

My experience is that, particularly in technical disciplines, services delivered by off-shore locations are superior to ours. An apprenticeship initiative, if it were aggressively expanded to include science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) occupations, might make us more competitive in this area. In the rarefied world of supercomputers so critical to pushing the frontiers of science and technology, for example, the United States is out-produced by China on the order of two-to-one. So, until and unless we grow a much larger crop of more competent technical workers we will continue to be outperformed by nations more determined, better educated, more dedicated, and hungrier than we are.

CAN THE UNITED STATES GUARANTEE THE PEACE?

If the nation has ceded its economic primacy, its military primacy is being severely tested. United States’ land-based forces are heavily committed to counterinsurgency operations to fend off non-state actors while conventional warfare strategic planning appears to be dead. In Europe, a likely conventional hotspot, NATO and U.S. forces are outgunned and outmanned by a factor of at least ten to one by Russian forces.

Our ocean defenses are in no better shape. The nation’s principal bulwark protecting our shores is in steep decline. The United States Navy is but a ghost of its former self. The nation now has fewer vessels than it had before World War I. Most notably, our aircraft carrier fleet which must number sixteen in order to patrol three separate ocean theaters now numbers ten or barely enough to protect two theaters. In the Mediterranean, the U.S. Sixth Fleet is a non-entity the result of which is to have created a vacuum that is now filled by the Russians, Syrians, and Iranians. In the South China Sea, where American Navy vessels seem unable to sail without colliding into tankers and containerships, the United States is being challenged by a territorially aggressive and technologically advanced Chinese Navy. Already, an armada of sophisticated dredging vessels is reclaiming land from the sea for the sole purpose of building military airfields and naval port facilities. More worrisome, Chinese fighter jets and bombers now violate Taiwan’s air space with impunity and regularity.

Former U.S. Undersecretary of the Navy, Seth Cropsey, in his chilling and sobering account, Mayday the Decline of American Naval Supremacy, reminds us that China was the naval hegemon in the fifteenth century. Under the leadership of Admiral Sheng He, Chinese sailors coursed the oceans from their territorial waters to the Strait of Hormuz. Chinese vessels of the time were of a length and tonnage that were not to be seen in the West until centuries later. China’s naval supremacy only came to an end when civil servants forced severe budget cutbacks on the kingdom. Does our own budget sequestration of 2013, with its mandate to, in effect, disarm the military, ring a bell? The results of each nation’s budget missteps are eerily similar. China, for its part, will probably not repeat its mistake.

In all likelihood, it will take the United States a generation, assuming proper funding and political will, to restore the U.S. Navy so that we can confidently state that the nation can project power and protect seaborne commerce beyond the horizon.

Just as troubling as the rickety state of the nation’s military naval forces is the state of the United States Merchant Marine. The Merchant Marine fleet hauls cargo during peacetime and is attached to the Defense Department during wartime to transport troops and supplies into war zones. The United States should hope it does not get into a major conflagration oceans away as it has experienced a dramatic attrition in its Merchant Marine fleet and manpower inventory. In 1960, the United States had nearly 3,000 vessels in the Merchant Marine fleet. Today, the nation has fewer than 175 vessels or less than one-half of 1% of the total vessel count worldwide. Worse, United States-flagged vessels carry a mere pittance of the total volume of goods and materials that transit through the nation’s ports. The consequence of what is obviously a weak flank in the nation’s defense posture is that in the event of a major outbreak of hostilities the United States would be reliant on foreign-flagged vessels to carry troops, armaments, and supplies with all of the attendant security risks.

One can argue that China’s bellicosity toward the United States is as asymmetrical as it is frontal and direct: China’s theft of roughly $225 billion, at the low end and as much as $600 billion at the high end, annually in counterfeit goods, pirated software, and theft of trade secrets from the United States; its monopoly of rare earth metals critical not just for consumer products but for Defense Department applications; its financing of over fifty Confucius Institutes on college campuses and schools designed to spread CCP propaganda; and its unleashing of the Wuhan virus which has cost the lives of more than five-hundred thousand innocent Americans is proof positive that China’s strategy is to envelop the United States on all fronts.

AMERICA AT A CROSSROADS

In sum, if as the great military historian B.H. Liddell Hart suggests, a nation’s Grand Strategy is a composite of its political, military, economic and diplomatic tools in its “arsenal” which can be brought to bear to advance a state’s national interest then the United States appears to be convulsing in its gradual decay. As I have argued in my essay, The United Kingdom Is Resurgent, the former world economic power, lost its supremacy because it failed to adapt to the winds of change which buffeted its shores long after the economy reached its apex in the early twentieth century.

It is also provocative to think that there might be a “natural” life cycle to nations as there is to human beings that is irreversible. Regardless of one’s view in embracing one or another theory that might explain the demise of nations, there is no reason to remain indolent in resisting such decline even if there is only the remotest possibility of such an outcome. Keep in mind that the demise of Rome was hardly cataclysmic but the result of a long succession of imprudent decisions made by the Empire’s leaders.

[bbcbreakingnews]

Legalise cannabis, eliminate drug dealer & cop-neta-cartel nexus

Even as the world moves towards legalising marijuana for medicinal & recreational use, opinion is split in the land of bhang laddoo & thandai The criminalisation of cannabis by clubbing it with narcotics like heroin is a direct consequence of the notorious ‘war on drugs’ launched by Richard Nixon in the US in 1971. A plant which had been grown and consumed in diverse ways by populations around the world, including in India, for millennia, with minimal harm to the user or their community (unless getting the munchies can be considered harmful), was instantaneously transformed into a banned substance. Simultaneously, the state, and its hatchet-men, the police, were empowered to prosecute and incarcerate the vast number of people who suddenly became criminals. We now know that the “war” was intended to target perceived enemies of the state and the worst hit were African-Americans who were up-ending centuries of white supremacy through civil rights action. The moral brigade, not surprisingly comprising people who preferred an expensive Scotch, would claim that the inclusion of cannabis in the war on drugs was justified by the fact that it was as addictive as opiates and that it served as a ‘gateway’ drug for more dangerous drugs. Decades of research have confirmed that there is no evidence of a withdrawal syndrome or tolerance, cardinal features of addiction, associated with cannabis use. And while it is true that cannabis does occasionally act as the first step on a person’s journey to stronger drugs, this is perversely facilitated by the law which criminalises its use, forcing the user to buy cannabis from dealers for whom getting more people to use addictive drugs is a business opportunity.

In 2017, a group of American physicians wrote in the prestigious American Journal of Public Health that “every year, the United States makes 575,000 arrests for marijuana possession alone, which is greater than the number of arrests for all violent crimes combined. The war on marijuana exacerbates poverty, which is strongly correlated withamong other problems—reduced access to healthcare. The unjust prohibition of marijuana has done more damage to public health than has marijuana itself.” Similar unambiguous declarations from the medical and public health communities in other countries have accompanied a transformation of public attitudes leading scores of countries and American states to decriminalise or legalise cannabis. In India, the mindless inclusion, under pressure from the US, of cannabis under its stringent narcotics legislation has always been a fig-leaf. If enforced consistently, at least 30 million people who have owned up to using cannabis in national surveys should be prosecuted, a number which is about 60 times the size of India’s current prison population! Unsurprisingly, this law has given the police another weapon to harass individuals they can cherry-pick for arbitrary reasons, as we have seen play out in the epilogue to Sushant Singh Rajput’s suicide. It is time for this law to be junked, along with other laws whose justifications are simply a façade for a primitive moral compass or frank hatred, such as the criminalisation of homosexuality, of interfaith marriage or the consumption of beef. I favour legalisation rather than decriminalisation for one simple reason: the for mer offers the only route to eliminate the drug dealer and the criminal nexus of police, politicians and the drug mafia. I unreservedly recommend the approach taken by Canada where all manufacture, distribution and sale of cannabis is controlled by the state. It is an imperative not to let corporates, whose deadly profiteering in knowingly selling tobacco products or recklessly marketing of opiate analgesics and alcoholic beverages has caused untold misery to millions of lives, into this marketplace. Needless to say, the approach to cannabis legalisation must embrace all the best practices to prevent the harmful use of substances such as alcohol, from age restrictions to offering counselling for those who wish to stop. We must be particularly wary of the high-potency versions of cannabis which do pose health risks to younger users with mental health vulnerabilities. Instead, the government must champion our own numerous ‘organic’ varieties, as for our richly diverse heritage of mangoes, rice and teas. The war on cannabis has been unanimously declared a failure by the scientific community. It is time for India to abandon this futile and archaic battle which was thrust upon her by foreign nations who have themselves admitted defeat. In doing so, we might also put one liberal brick back into the edifice of our nation which is being systematically stripped of its liberal foundation. ( Patel is professor of global health at Harvard Medical School)

source https://bbcbreakingnews.com/2020/12/25/legalise-cannabis-eliminate-drug-dealer-cop-neta-cartel-nexus/

[newstechreviews]

Like most people, Jess spent a lot of time online during weeks of lockdown earlier this year. But the 36-year-old Australian wasn’t focused so much on playing Animal Crossing or watching Netflix. Instead, she found herself diving ever deeper into the Internet for information about QAnon.

Jess, who asked for her last name not to be used because her employer doesn’t allow her to share views on social media, says she became interested in the complex conspiracy theory in part because it claims to offer answers amid the turbulence of 2020.

She says she’s not always sure she believes everything she reads about QAnon online. But she has become active in the QAnon community on Twitter, tweeting out a mix of claims about secret pedophilia rings, anti-Joe Biden articles and pro-Trump content several times a day. “It seems to have really started picking up here. I think, because things are picking up so much over there in America,” Jess tells TIME from her Sydney home. “A lot of the stuff I read and see is shared by people in the U.S.”

TwitterJess, a mother from Sydney, Australia, says she became interested in QAnon during weeks of lockdown. She now tweets claims about secret pedophilia rings, anti-Joe Biden articles and pro-Trump content multiple times a day.

For a conspiracy theory with origins in American politics, QAnon is proving remarkably malleable for export outside the U.S., fueled by growing frustration over COVID-19 restrictions around the world. In Australia and New Zealand, especially, it has taken on a life of its own—with followers adapting QAnon to incorporate local politicians and causes.

As in the United States, QAnon in Australia and New Zealand has mixed with other global conspiracy theories, including false beliefs that 5G towers are spreading coronavirus, unfounded claims that COVID-19 was either pre-planned or is a hoax and baseless theories about public vaccination programs. That turgid brew of misinformation is increasingly moving offline and spilling over into the streets in the form of protests or sometimes aggressive refusals to follow social distancing restrictions.

“We have seen the emergence of transnational, amorphous conspiracy-theory based movements,” says Joshua Roose, a senior research fellow at Deakin University in Australia. “All share a strong distrust in government and state institutions.”

QAnon began in 2017 as a uniquely American conspiracy theory. Followers of the movement, which has moved from far-right Internet forums onto mainstream social media sites, believe that President Donald Trump is fighting against a shadowy secret society that runs the world. Supporters claim this elite cabal is comprised of Democratic politicians, Satan-worshipping pedophiles and Hollywood celebrities who run a global child sex-trafficking ring, harvesting the blood of children for life-sustaining chemicals. None of this has any basis in fact.

Read More: How Conspiracy Theories Are Shaping the 2020 Election—and Shaking the Foundation of American Democracy

QAnon spills over into the streets

The local strain of QAnon appears to be spurred by anger at COVID-19 restrictions: A resurgence of COVID in July forced the Australian state of Victoria—where Melbourne is located—into one of the most restrictive lockdowns in the world for weeks. In New Zealand, a small coronavirus outbreak in August also forced the government to reimpose restrictions in Auckland, the largest city.

Lockdown measures have eased in both countries, but supporters of QAnon continue to spread their conspiracy theories online—and, increasingly, offline. QAnon signs cropped up at “Freedom Day” anti-lockdown protests across Australia on Sept. 5, as well as at similar protests in Auckland.

Speed Media/Icon Sportswire/Getty ImagesA protester holds a sign up during the Freedom Day Rally in Sydney on Sept. 5, 2020.

At checkpoints set up to ensure citizens are following COVID-19 movement restrictions in the state of Victoria in August, police were forced to smash several peoples’ car windows and drag them out for refusing to provide personal details because they claimed to be “sovereign citizens”.

The fringe movement started in the United States in the 1970s, with followers believing that ultimate power is vested in individuals, who are therefore not obligated to obey government rules they disagree with, whether that be motor vehicle regulations, answering to the police or paying taxes. Videos of the Victoria arrests have been widely shared on social media accounts that also spread QAnon theories—further fueling anger over COVID-19 restrictions.

Read more: The Misinformation Age Has Exacerbated—And Been Exacerbated By—the Coronavirus Pandemic

A local twist on a conspiracy theory

QAnon may center around an American conspiracy theory, but that hasn’t stopped supporters in Australia and New Zealand from adding their own local flavors.

One twist involves the hundred miles of storm drain tunnels running beneath Melbourne. Some Australian QAnon posts claim that Melbourne’s coronavirus lockdown was meant to keep the streets clear for an operation to rescue child sex-trafficking victims in the tunnels. (There is no evidence of this.)

The conspiracy theory also predicts the arrest of high-level officials for sex trafficking crimes. Again, resourceful Australian QAnon followers have adapted that narrative for their home turf. One Facebook post seen by TIME (falsely) alleged that Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been under house arrest since January. The evidence? Blurry, close-up photos of Morrison wearing long pants, which appear to have either bunched up or been folded at the ankle and supposedly prove the Australian leader is wearing an ankle monitor.

Similar (false) rumors have also circulated using pictures that show Victoria Premier Dan Andrews walking down the street. Andrews, who has faced heavy criticism from the right for weeks-long coronavirus lockdowns this summer, features heavily in posts on QAnon-affiliated pages.

At a rally in New Zealand in early September, protesters referenced multiple COVID-19 conspiracy theories, according to local reports. But demonstrators have also woven in local causes. Some protesters were seen holding signs calling to “ban 1080,” a reference to the government’s use of poison to control populations of invasive rodents (the cause has been supported by some mainstream groups in recent years, but has been fodder for conspiracy theorists.) At least one protester was spotted with a sign that depicted Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as Adolf Hitler.

At the anti-lockdown rally in Aotea Square today the organiser told the crowd he found it "exhausting to go along with tyranny and to forgo my freedom of speech and my freedom to associate". There was also this. pic.twitter.com/jaStobR4Gc

— Simon Wilson (@simonbwilson) September 5, 2020

One social media post in May claimed that Bill Gates was in New Zealand and asserted that the country of 5 million is a “perfect” nation “to test and trial” a vaccine for the coronavirus. (A spokesperson for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said Gates had not been in New Zealand.)

And combining QAnon’s American roots with local feelings often meshes in inconsistent ways. For example, many Australian QAnon-affiliated accounts are highly critical of Australian police, who have used tough responses to enforce COVID-19 restrictions. Those posts are often shared alongside rightwing U.S. media articles praising American officers.

Read More: Here’s Why Experts Worry About the Popularity of QAnon’s Conspiracy Theory

Social media companies respond

Despite its presence at protests, QAnon really thrives online, and it gained a substantial foothold in Australia and New Zealand during COVID-19 lockdowns. One Facebook group started in Australia, comprising a mix of people denying the existence of the coronavirus, anti-vaxxers, so-called sovereign citizens and QAnon supporters, had more than 65,000 members before it was removed by the social media giant.

“You put marginalized people under pressure and fear and they look for non-mainstream and unorthodox theories to regain their sense of control and agency,” says Michael Grimshaw, of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.

The conspiracy theories—and opposition to coronavirus restrictions in general—remain at the fringes in both nations. A recent Pew poll shows that 94% of Australians think the country did a good job handling the pandemic (the same poll reported that only 47% of Americans felt the same way). An August poll found that public confidence in health officials in New Zealand was above 80%.

But misinformation is increasingly bleeding over into the mainstream. Australian television chef Pete Evans—who has 275,000 Instagram followers—has posted QAnon-related content on Instagram in recent months. In New Zealand, a lifestyle influencer with more than 60,000 followers posted in support of QAnon claims in her Instagram story. “There’s soooooo much I want and need to address on here. But I’m going to start slowly and it will start with Hollywood, Cabal and Human Trafficking,” she said in one Instagram story. “People may think why? That’s America it has nothing to do with us. In the big scheme of things it has EVERYTHING to do with us. All you need to do is research Jacinda Ardern and her ties with Bill Gates…”

Both Facebook and Twitter say they’re taking action against QAnon-related content. Twitter announced in late July a stronger approach to dealing with QAnon, including permanently suspending accounts that violate its policies, banning URLs associated with QAnon from being shared on the site, limiting content from its trends and recommendations and not highlighting it in searches.

Facebook said in August it had removed 790 groups, 100 pages and 1,500 ads tied to QAnon and other groups it said support violence and blocked more than 300 hashtags across Facebook and Instagram worldwide. The company says that QAnon pages, groups and accounts will be removed when they violate Facebook’s community standards, including inciting violence. The company also said it will limit some content from recommendations and the ranking of this content will be lower in News Feed.

Despite their efforts to reduce the accessibility of QAnon content, a quick search shows Australia and New Zealand-specific QAnon conspiracy theories are widely available on both platforms. TIME found at least three separate Twitter accounts, with thousands of followers each, that used Australian QAnon hashtags in their profiles. TIME also found public Facebook groups specific to Australia and New Zealand that hosted QAnon posts, each with hundreds of members.

Three Facebook groups with QAnon-related posts that TIME asked the company about remain public. Facebook said that one post alleging the Australian Prime Minister is under house arrest would be removed when TIME inquired about it. But days later the post was still available on the platform. Facebook said this was due to a technical glitch on their end. However, at least one other post on the group also made the same false allegation about the Prime Minister.

One Australia-focused QAnon account with more than 4,000 followers was removed by Twitter for “multiple account violations” after TIME inquired about it.

Entering the mainstream

Increasingly, ordinary Internet users are spreading QAnon-related memes and theories. Lydia Khalil, a research fellow at the Sydney-based think-tank the Lowy Institute, says some conspiracy theories have spread via mommy blogs, and fitness and wellness influencers, who have latched on to the child-sex trafficking and anti-vaccine elements of these theories.

“Not all of the people spreading this stuff are hard-core conspiracy theorists or extremists, they’re picking up on hashtags or more nebulous elements of this and then pushing it out without really understanding who’s behind it and where it’s coming from,” she says.

But leaders in Australia and New Zealand have been forced to publicly address some of the conspiracy theories because they became so prevalent. Australian officials have been forced to publicly refute the link between 5G and coronavirus, and on a television program on Aug. 5, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told people identifying as “sovereign citizens” and anti-maskers intentionally defying coronavirus restrictions to “get real.”

New Zealand’s health minister asked the public at a Sept. 10 COVID-19 briefing to “think twice before sharing information that can’t be verified.”

Speed Media/Icon Sportswire/Getty ImagesMany protesters blame 5G technology for the Coronavirus during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Anti-Lockdown Protest at Parliament House in Melbourne on May 10, 2020.

Matthew Schlapfer, a business consultant who lives in the Australian city of Perth, says he’s unfriended or been unfriended by about 10 people in recent months as he got fed up with seeing conspiracy theories filling his Facebook feed.

“I started getting really annoyed and reaching out and saying ‘where are you getting your information from?'” he says. “I would ask ‘what’s the source for this?'” and they couldn’t tell me.

Schalpfer, who is in his mid-forties, says many of the posts that started the disagreements were related to QAnon. Others argued against the use of vaccines, or falsely proclaimed that COVID is a hoax. Some of his former friends—including two ex-girlfriends, three former colleagues and several high school acquaintances—have posted messages supporting Trump.

“They have fully bought into this Trump saving us from the deep state and this global child pedophilia ring run by the liberal elites thing,” Schlapfer says.

#Blogger

[mcrandoms]

Fear mongering against the truth..... not only not the party of “Ike” but it’s not even your parents Republican Party any more.

The values and ideals once held as the Republican Party platform, are the core values and ideals of the Democratic Party.

The Republican Party needs to be saved from itself.....its time for a reformation.

Donald J. Trump is not an accident.

The GOP has in the last 40 years relentlessly devolved away from addressing the needs of ordinary people, catering instead to extreme ideologies and the wealthiest donors.

Rather than addressing pressing problems like income inequality and climate change, the modern GOP focuses instead on cutting taxes for the super-wealthy, expanding earth-killing carbon extraction, and endless war.

Once there was a more Social Democratic Republican Party — in 1956

In August 1956, the Republican Party gathered in San Francisco to re-nominate President Dwight D. Eisenhower as its candidate in the upcoming presidential election.

The party that year adopted a platform that emphasized that the GOP was “proud of and shall continue our far-reaching and sound advances in matters of basic human needs.”

This included boasting that Eisenhower had overseen a hike in the federal minimum wage that raised incomes for 2 million Americans while expanding Social Security to 10 million more people and increasing benefits for 6.5 million others.

Today’s Republican Party has made weakening labor unions a priority, but the 1956 platform noted that under Eisenhower, “workers have gained and unions have grown in strength and responsibility, and have increased their membership by 2 millions.”

But it wasn’t always this way.

Sixty years ago, the Republican Party was advocating for civil rights and gender equality, a stronger welfare state, and environmental protection.

It also touted an increase in federal funding for hospital construction and expanded federal aid for health care for the poor and public housing.

The platform also pointed out that Eisenhower had asked for “the largest increase in research funds ever sought in one year” to tackle ailments like cancer and heart disease.

Rather than opposing self-governance for Washington, D.C., 1956’s Republicans encouraged it, saying they “favor self-government national suffrage and representation in the Congress of the United States” for those living there. The platform also asked Congress to submit a constitutional amendment establishing “equal rights for men and women.”

The platform boasted proudly of the African-Americans who had been appointed to positions in Eisenhower’s administration, and of ending racial discrimination in federal employment. At no point did the document call for any restrictions on immigration; rather, by contrast, it asked Congress to consider an extension of the 1953 Refugee Act, which brought tens of thousands of war-weary European refugees to American shores.

Experiencing two global wars shaped Eisenhower’s worldview, turning him into an advocate of peace.

Eisenhower cut the military budget by 27 percent following the Korean War, and used his bully pulpit to highlight the trade-offs of military spending. “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed,” he said in a 1953 speech.

In his farewell address on January 17, 1961, he highlighted the rise of what he called a “military-industrial complex” — a war industry that he cautioned could exert “undue influence” on the government.

Four decades later, when President George W. Bush submitted his defense spending request in 2002, he bragged to Congress, “My budget includes the largest increase in defense spending in two decades — because while the price of freedom and security is high, it is never too high. Whatever it costs to defend our country, we will pay.”

Richard Nixon is hardly remembered as a progressive, but he was much more aggressive in tackling issues like hunger and environmental protection than the Republicans in power today.

Nixon, acting under pressure from antipoverty activists, asked Congress to improve and expand the food stamp program, saying that the fact that “hunger and malnutrition should persist in a land such as ours is embarrassing and intolerable.” His administration sponsored the first and only White House conference on hunger. He increased funding for both food stamps and school lunch programs.

The Environmental Protection Agency was a Nixon creation. Nixon used his 1970 State of the Union address to present the country with a choice: “The great question of the ’70s is, ‘Shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water.’”

Three decades later, George W. Bush began his presidency by sitting out the landmark Kyoto climate treaty and opening up millions of acres of land and sea to carbon extraction. Faced with opposition over nominating a former mining executive as head of the Mine Safety and Health Administration, he used a recess appointment to get around Senate accountability.

Meanwhile, humiliating America’s hungry has become a sport for the GOP. Lawmakers regularly propose onerous and offensive restrictions on public assistance, such as drug testing recipients, something that has proven to be little more than a waste of money.

When Ronald Reagan signed the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act into law, he did something none of the 18 Republican presidential candidates who ran this year endorsed: He granted amnesty to 2.9 million undocumented immigrants.

Speaking at one of the 1984 presidential debates, Reagan explained that he believes “in the idea of amnesty for those who have lived here for some time and put down roots even though sometime back they may have entered illegally”

Under Trump, demagoguery about immigration has risen to new heights, but it was a path laid out for the real estate mogul by years of politically opportunistic nativism. Whether it was 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s plan to encourage “self-deportation” or Ben Carson’s comparison between Syrian refugees and rabid dogs, the party has scapegoated vulnerable migrants and refugees for political points.

None of this is to argue that Republicans of the past were progress peaceniks.

Eisenhower overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran; Nixon began the drug war and prosecuted an unnecessary war in Cambodia; Ronald Reagan helped dismantle America’s labor movement and bloodied Central America.

But the Republican Party of the past at least showed itself capable of responding to domestic and global issues, offering and implementing successful policies to deal with pressing problems like poverty, environmental degradation, and a refugee crisis.

So, what Happened to the Republican Party?

There is no easy explanation, but there are a few key catalysts for the party’s slide into extremism.

One is the role that labor organizing and public activism played in pushing the Republican Party of the past to endorse progressive policy. Eisenhower’s more social democratic Republican Party did not exist in a vacuum.

The 1950s are often portrayed as an idyllic and stable period in American history, but they were also a time of raucous labor actions.

In 1954, 28.3 percent of employed workers were in labor unions, the highest in American history (today the number is just over 11 percent). The first year of Eisenhower’s presidency saw 437 work stoppages involving 1,000 or more workers; altogether, 1.6 million workers took part in strikes aimed at increasing wages and reducing inequality. By comparison, 2015 saw a paltry dozen strikes of the same size, involving only 47,000 workers.

Richard Nixon’s establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency was preceded by an explosion of environmental activism. Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Gaylord Nelson went around the country in 1970 urging activists to engage in a massive environmental demonstration that would match the energy of antiwar and civil rights protests during the prior decade.

During the nation’s first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans took part in protests, teach-ins, and other educational events aimed at building political will to push the government to protect the environment.The outpouring of support changed public dialogue in the country. “Conservatives were for it. Liberals were for it. Democrats, Republicans and Independents were for it,” the New York Times noted after the protests. “So were the ins, the outs, the executive and legislative branches of the government. It was Earth Day, and, like Mother Nature’s Day, no man in public office could be against it.”

Alongside the decline of these populist forces that in the past helped shape the Republican Party’s agenda, the country has seen an explosion of capital into the nation’s public elections — funds Republican Party officials have chased as they seek higher office.

Writing to his brother in 1954, President Eisenhower said that the factions in the Republican Party who would seek to eliminate Social Security and other New Deal reforms are comprised of “a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Decades later, Eisenhower’s “negligible” oligarchs emerged in the visage of David and Charles Koch, right-wing oil and gas billionaires. The former actually ran for the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential ticket in 1980 on a platform of completely eliminating the Social Security and Medicare programs.

The election in 2012 was America’s most expensive ever, with $6 billion spent in federal elections. The Kochs spent over $400 million backing GOP candidates, more than the top 10 labor unions combined. Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson spent over $100 million during the year, dragging Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney far to the right.

Just 18 percent of Romney’s funding came from small donors — those giving $200 or less. And that doesn’t count various outside groups making independent expenditures, which exploded that year. A Demos report on the election’s spending found that “just 61 large donors to Super PACs giving an average of $4.7 million each matched the $285.2 million in grassroots contributions from more than 1,425,500 small donors to the major party presidential candidates.”

This system of political financing from a handful of millionaires and billionaires has corrupted both major parties, but its influence is almost total in the Republican Party. Of the 161 co-sponsors of legislation in the House of Representatives to create a public financing system for congressional candidates, only one, North Carolina’s Walter Jones, is a Republican.

This leaves the party out of step with even the more progressive instincts of its own partisans.

For example, a majority of self-identified Republicans in America want to see an increase in the minimum wage.

No congressional Republicans have signed onto the current bill in Congress to raise the wage to $12 an hour over a period of time.

In his address to delegates at the 1956 Republican National Convention, Eisenhower boasted of a political party that “attracted minority groups, scholars and writers, not to mention reformers of all kinds, Free-Soilers, Independent Democrats, Conscience Whigs, Barnburners, ‘soft Hunkers,’ teetotalers, vegetarians, and transcendentalists!”

He laid out the vision of a political party that “detests the technique of pitting group against group for cheap political advantage,” calling the Republicans the “Party of the Future.”

The Republican Party of today, has failed to live up to that promise.

Today, the GOP may be facing its worst demographic threat in its modern iteration. Among Latino voters, for instance, the party saw a decline from winning 40 percent of that demographic in the 2004 presidential election to 27 percent with Mitt Romney in 2012. A Univision poll released in mid-July estimated that current presidential nominee Donald Trump is netting just 19 percent of the registered Latino vote.

Ultimately, the Republican Party’s drift away from inclusion and the public interest and toward a coterie of extreme donors and ideologies does have an electoral cost, one that could force reformation or perhaps the birth of a new political party — just ask the Whigs.

[displacedprincess]

True Facts About Elena & Avalor

A collection of headcanons about Avalor

Country Facts

Official languages: (Avaloran) Spanish, (Avaloran) Portuguese, Avaloran Sign Language

major announcements from the government are given in Spanish, Portuguese, and AvSL.

88% of Avalorans are bilingual in Spanish and Portuguese

there are pockets of Portuguese-monolingual speakers, mostly along the border with Brazil.

other common minority languages: Amerindian languages such as Quechua, Arabic (tied for fastest growing), Farsi/Dari (tied for fastest growing), Chinese (mainly Cantonese or Hokkien), French, German, English, Russian, others

Arabic and Farsi/Dari, and Pashto are becoming more widely spoken due to Avalor having taken in refugees from the Middle East conflicts

A huge number of asylum seekers from magick-hostile countries come to Avalor as well - hence large pockets of Russian, German, and French speakers.

Avalor is full of natural resources; gold, nickel, copper, and an abundance of rivers.

The country has a small coastline, where the capital city is located, and mountain regions bordering Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Brazil.

There are also several islands as part of Avalor’s territory

 80% of Avalor’s electricity is hydo or solar powered. Of the remaining twenty percent, 15% is wind-powered, 2% is from tidal energy, and only 3% is from non renewable sources like coal.

Avalor was heavily influenced by Catholicism in its development, but it’s not the dominating religion anymore. Catholicism and Protestantism are about evenly matched in numbers. 

The biggest protestant denominations in Avalor are - Nazarene, Methodist and Presbyterian

The Avaloran nobility tend to practice Catholicism more devoutly than the lower classes; lower classes are more religiously diverse

Avalor has the 4th highest population of Jewish people in Latin America, behind Argentina, Uruguay, and Panama.

Islam and Buddhism are the fastest growing religions in Avalor.

Some Amerindian peoples practice their traditional religions.

Avalor is prone to earthquakes, and occasional volcanic eruptions - there are only ten known active volcanoes in the country. 

In 2008, a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck a small city near Avalor City, causing widespread damage throughout most of the small country. Landslides, fires, thousands lost their homes, and almost one hundred people were killed. Then fourteen-year-old Princess Elena criticized foreign governments on social media, and again publicly during a press conference, for being slow to aid her country. Her parents apologized on her behalf, but the princess made it very clear in a Tweet following the apology that she was “not sorry, and that people are dying, they don’t have time for me dance around your feelings while calling the world out for failing us.”

The racial makeup of Avalor is primarily mestizo and white, with sizable Afro-Avaloran (growing fast as well) and Amerindian populations, and growing Asian (East, South, Southeast) and Middle Eastern populations. 

Avalor is often considered a third-world country, but many Avalorans would disagree and they reject the term “developing. ” 

Avalor’s literacy rate is 96.2% of total population

Average life expectancy is 88

Avalor’s birth rate has fallen in recent decades, with higher education becoming much more affordable, birth control methods being covered under the country’s national healthcare program, comprehensive sex-ed being more widespread, and women now marrying later and having babies later.

The birth rate currently sits at 2.33 babies for every one woman

As recently as the 1980s, the birth rate was 4.10 children

Avalorans do tend to have larger families than other industrialized countries - most families want at least two, family is very important in Avaloran society

Average age of first birth in 1975: 20; average age of first birth in 2015: 26

Average age men first marry: 28; Average age women first marry: 24

Women are generally marrying only 3-4 years later than they did in 1975, but they are holding off on having children for a few years.

Despite the drastic plummet in the birth rate, Avalor’s population alternates between stagnant and growing, due to the steady birth rate of 2-3 children per family and the large immigrant population.

Immigrant families to Avalor typically maintain much of their home culture, Avalorans tend to encourage it, and the local governments celebrate cultural holidays celebrated by large minorities in their regions.

A study by the University of Avalor - Avalor City, found that immigrant children marry into native born Avaloran families, other immigrant group families, and families within their own immigrant group about equally

Another study has shown that immigrant groups typically feel welcomed, and that their biggest concern before and after arrival is usually learning Spanish.

Common vectorborne diseases include - dengue fever, malaria, and yellow fever

Common food and waterborne illnesses in poorer, rural areas include - hepatitis A and typhoid fever

King Raul and Queen Lucia signed into law that children must be vaccinated to attend public school

Avalor is relatively easy to become a citizen of

citizen by birth

dual citizenship is recognized

must live in Avalor for 6 years before becoming a naturalized citizen

exceptions can be petitioned for, for parents, children, and spouses to speed the process along by 2 years

Avalor’s Military is comprised of five branches

Avaloran Army

Avaloran Navy

Avaloran Air Force

Avaloran Marine Corps

Avaloran Royal Guard*

*The Royal Guard is not always directly enlisted into, but can be. The Guard pulls many of its members from the AMC Special Forces. Training for the guard is known to be exceptionally rigorous.

Enlistment for active duty service begins at 18 years old

Until 2007, there was a compulsory enlistment written into law for men and women 18-24 for a period lasting eighteen months. King Raul and Queen Lucia ratified an amendment to the Constitution eliminating the draft.

Voting rights are given to all citizens at age 18. Felons are permitted to vote in most of the country, as of 2013. This was a social change supported by the late King and Queen and signed into law by Princess Elena.

There is no legal minimum age to smoke cigarettes, but purchasing, you have to be nineteen.

The minimum purchasing age of alcohol is eighteen, but in the presence of a parent or guardian, teenagers are often permitted a beer, a glass of wine, or a cocktail in restaurants. The alcohol culture in Avalor is similar to parts of Europe, where it’s introduced in controlled environments at an early age.

Most of the population doesn’t own a car. City dwellers take trains, buses, bikes, or walk. Townspeople bike or walk to the nearest bus or train station.

Horses aren’t commonly owned outside of the upper class.

Avalor is a popular study abroad destination for magick and mundus alike.

Pop Culture

Princess Elena is a style icon in her country and surrounding South American countries. Anything she’s spotted wearing sells out the next day, and designers were always asking if they could design a dress for her for X event.

Gabe is in the background and occasionally foreground of a lot of pictures of Elena that come up on Google Images. If you type in “Hot Avaloran Guard”, pictures of Gabe come up.

There’s a collection of thirst tweets out there about Gabe, Elena used to read them out loud to him.

American late night comedy shows are popular in Avalor, and Avalor has several of their own. The most popular is Avalor Esta Noche con Andre Esquivel. Andre Esquivel is often called the Jon Stewart of Avalor.

Avalor has a version of SNL, and Princess Elena is often parodied on the program. Her parents were too, and Esteban also is. All four had hosted the program at least once - Elena, twice. Once when she was 15, shortly before her parents were killed, and the second time when she was nineteen.

The Avaloran royal family, since SNL Avalor’s debut in the late 90s, has always supported the show for its satire - even when it was about them. They’re known for laughing at themselves and encouraging political satire because, in the words of the late King Raul Castillo, “A good leader welcomes criticism, both satirical and serious, because a good leader doesn’t attack journalists and comedians for doing their jobs.”

SNL Avalor liked to parody Elena for sneaking out of the palace to go dancing, often portraying her as a ditzy party girl.

Conversely, whenever Princess Elena told off another world leader via Twitter or Instagram, in a press conference, or told off an Avaloran politician that the Avaloran public also disliked, she was portrayed as a boss bitch on SNL Avalor. It depended on what they wanted to go for at the moment.

The actress who usually plays Elena on SNL Avalor is named Lana Basa; however, actor Pepe de Castro often dons a wig and a dress to portray the princess.

Avaloran telenovelas are known in several other countries, but they also have a following for their romantic comedy dramas, shot in a similar style to Korean and Chinese TV dramas.

Avaloran cinema is relatively well-known throughout Latin America.

A handful of Avaloran actors have broken into bigger industries. Juan Añonuevo is the Avaloran actor even Americans know, and Felisa Mondragón is the Avaloran actress most known.

#&&...hc #take me home [avalor]

[garancefranke-ruta]

It's not just GOP town halls: Democrats also feeling the heat to reject Trump

Last Sunday, on the final day of the first congressional district work period of the year, a group of fired-up activists held a mock town hall with a cardboard cut-out of their U.S. senator after being unable to secure the in-person forum they wanted.

The twist: That senator was a Democrat, and the mock town hall took place in one of the most liberal precincts of California.

Republican members of Congress from coast to coast have faced off with angry constituents at rambunctious town hall forums since President Trump took office, leading many of them to scale back their availability to members of the public. But the fired up progressive base behind much of that activism is not restricting its activities to the Republican side of the aisle. In a world where the new president has the lowest level of support from members of the opposing party in Gallup polling history, and in which Democrats’ unfavorable views of Trump are of blindingly hot intensity, Democratic politicians like Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., are on the receiving end of one message over and over: Resist. Resist everything.

“Senator Feinstein has been California’s senator for many, many, many years — for 24 years — and she is one of our more moderate members of Congress. And the fact that while her moderate positions may have worked well in the past while we had a fairly normal sort of state of politics, things are not normal now,” said Claudine Co of Indivisible SF, the San Francisco outpost of the progressive group formed after the election to, in her words, “convince our members of Congress to oppose the Trump administration and its policies as much as we can.”

“We want her to try to just oppose everything about the Trump administration,” said Co, who objected to Feinstein’s votes in favor of selected Trump Cabinet secretaries. “We want her to say no. We want her to be as obstructionist as possible.”

The effort to bring Feinstein’s votes in line with resistance values began as soon as Trump took office, and has involved Indivisible groups in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Oakland, as well as MoveOn.org and less formally organized groups of activists operating under the banner of the People’s Town Hall Project. Urging Feinstein to oppose and vote against the nomination of her Senate colleague Jeff Sessions to be attorney general — which she ultimately did — became a huge activist push during the week before the vote, after she had first voted yes on five of Trump’s nominees. On Jan. 30, two hundred people protested outside Feinstein’s Pacific Heights, Calif., mansion, carrying signs like “Obstruct or Go Home” and “Less Yes, More No, Otherwise You Gotta Go.”

“If you don’t know what people want, you haven’t been watching the news; you haven’t been to the airport; you haven’t been to the Women’s March. You are ignoring everyone that is trying to talk to you,” one woman said in an address to Feinstein, who did not appear to be home, during what turned into a sort of citizen’s town hall, San Francisco Magazine reported.

So many activists called Feinstein’s office and sent letters about Trump’s nominees that at the end of February she sent a letter to the California Indivisible chapters thanking them for reaching out to her and noting that over 112,000 constituents had called or emailed about Jeff Sessions and another 95,000 had reached out to urge her to oppose Betsy DeVos for education secretary. “Your engagement and grit inspire me to work even harder to protect the democratic values, principles, and communities that have always made our country great,” she wrote. But she declined, again, to hold a town hall meeting with the activists.

The next day, they confronted her at a San Francisco policy forum, inside and outside.

What a beautiful group of #indivisible San Franciscans asking to be heard by our Senator @SenFeinstein. @IndivisibleTeam pic.twitter.com/OPqUNNBjYN

— Indivisible SF (@IndivisibleSF) February 25, 2017

The front page the San Francisco Chronicle declared, “Feinstein pressed to resist Trump.”

Wow check us out on the front page of the Chronicle! Go team! We #standindivisible & expect u 2 #resist more @SenFeinstein @IndivisibleTeam pic.twitter.com/8dAf6Eft3c

— Indivisible SF (@IndivisibleSF) February 26, 2017

Whether the self-styled resistance of the Trump era is like the tea party movement is a subject of debate within it. Members of the resistance point to Clinton’s popular vote win as evidence that they represent the majority in America and not an angry minority. “The current resistance isn’t reacting to its lost status as the majority in American politics, as the Tea Party was,” former Clinton deputy national press secretary Jesse Ferguson argued in a recent Time magazine editorial. “It is speaking out for the majority of Americans who feel inadequately represented in Washington. This resistance is giving political voice to those the political system has deprived of a voice. They are speaking for the silenced majority.”

“I am so sick of the attempts to somehow make folks fighting against 45 [Trump] the same as the Tea Party back in 09. The s*** ain’t comparable,” tweeted writer and TWIB Nation CEO Elon James, agreeing with him.

And yet the groups that make up the resistance frequently and explicitly point to the tea party as a model. “We modeled #indivisible strategy on the Tea Party, but @JesseFFerguson piece rings true. Resistance is the majority,” wrote Indivisible co-founder and executive organizer Ezra Levin in reply.

“We didn’t agree with a lot of [the Tea Party’s] tactics that were sometimes overly aggressive — sometimes even violent — but we thought they were smart on overall strategy,” Levin told Yahoo News. “That strategy was a local, defensive, congressional advocacy strategy implemented by constituents.”

And like the Tea Party, that strategy often involves targeting members of your own party as well as the opposition. Though it has gotten less attention that the confrontations with Republicans, Democrats have been seeing huge crowds at their town hall meetings when they hold them. From the moment Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., started his 2017 town hall schedule the day before the new president was inaugurated, his constituents have been imploring him to resist the Trump agenda and defend the Affordable Care Act — and his town halls since then have been packed.

“Interest is obviously off the charts,” Wyden told the Portland Tribune in January after a meeting that drew 200. By the end of February, his town halls were drawing crowds as large as 800.

“At the end of the day, elected officials understand they have to accountable to the real faces they represent, or those people are going to get somebody else,” Wyden, who has served in the Senate for 20 years and is among its most liberal members, said. “It’s not rocket science.”

On the other side of the country, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse drew a crowd that urged a resist Trump message in mid-February. More than 800 people showed up for the first meeting of the year with the Rhode Island’s congressional delegation, the Providence Journal reported. They held signs reading “Persist!” and chanted “Just say no!” to approving Trump’s Cabinet nominees.

In fact, the more liberal a member’s district, the more likely they are to be confronted by resistance activists, who are organizing at an astonishing scale. Indivisible now has at least two groups in every congressional district in the country, the group’s leaders report — a grand total of 5,664 verified groups. Resistance movement leaders boasted on a multi-organization weekly organizing call that draws upwards of 30,000 listeners about effort targeting Whitehouse and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. In Brooklyn, protesters marched on Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Park Slope apartment at the end of January. “Chuck’s a chicken,” they chanted: “Filibuster everything!” “He has to champion the resistance or he has to get out of the way!” 39-year-old Hae-Lin Choi, a protest organizer, told NBC New York.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi held a community healthcare forum in mid-February that drew people with her local group, Indivisible San Francisco. “We’d love to have a photo op with you after and we are backing you up 100 percent as long as you are resisting Trump’s agenda,” a member of the group told her in video posted online.

“There is nothing they have put forth that anybody could cooperate with,” Pelosi told the activists.

"We have everything at stake and nothing to lose by just going all out" — We agree, @NancyPelosi! @IndivisibleTeam #indivisible pic.twitter.com/kJNTdWrHjN

— Indivisible SF (@IndivisibleSF) February 21, 2017

And they’re not just showing up to meetings or making calls. Indivisible S.F. has been holding weekly meetings with new Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif. They have been meeting with Feinstein’s staff every week or week-and-a-half. Members of Indivisible LA are also meeting with her staff.

Look at this group of badasses who collectively told @SenFeinstein's Chief of Staff today that Dems are done playing nice. Great meeting! pic.twitter.com/ayNTQoyJD9

— Indivisible LA (@indivisible_la) February 25, 2017

These meetings are still not enough, the activists say. They want a proper town hall with Feinstein. Not having gotten what they want, On Sunday, Indivisible East Bay held an “Empty Chair” town hall in Oakland, asking questions to a cardboard cutout of the senator, and placing her face on milk cartons. The event drew about 550 people.

Our Senior Senator is not here. But we are. #feinsteinemptychair #standindivisible @indivisibleEB pic.twitter.com/5KYOUwAFAm

— Indivisible SF (@IndivisibleSF) February 26, 2017

“Despite requests from a coalition of community groups comprised of 15,000 Californians to talk with their Senator face-to-face, Feinstein has declined to attend the event in Oakland, California, letting down her constituents,” Indivisible East Bay complained on its website. Indivisible SF signed on to support their effort — as did more than 50 other local groups — explaining on Twitter: “We are big fans of @SenFeinstein! We ALSO think she needs hear what matters to her constituents!”

And now, with Feinstein back in Washington, activists are turning their attention to her staff back home. On Sunday, March 5, the activists who once swarmed around her home are planning a protest outside the home of her California state director.

#_revsp:Yahoo! News #_author:Garance Franke-Ruta #_lmsid:a077000000CFoGyAAL #_uuid:ef909ba1-8db3-3c36-b519-1eb202ceecda

[rfhusnik]

I’m A Salesman

Written By:  Gerald Selas

  I want to admit something here. This first paragraph of this piece was the last one I wrote for it. And in the next paragraph, which was originally the first of this writing, I think you’ll begin to learn why I’ve added this introduction. I’ve done it simply because I want to stress a couple of points and I don’t know where else to do so within this composition. First, let’s respect rather than defund our police. They care about us. They keep us safe. Yes, sometimes like everyone else they make mistakes, but in their field of endeavor outlandish mistakes can’t be tolerated. And second, in my opinion all this “group” business is detrimental to all lives in America and across the world. We’re born as individuals, we should live as individuals. Sometimes however it seems we think we need to live the lives of others as well as our own.    

Let me apologize in advance for what I’m guessing will be a rather choppy and unstructured prose piece. Like all Americans I’m very concerned at this current time. In my opinion our nation faces three great immediate challenges: one, the coronavirus, two, warranted peaceful protests, and three, unwarranted violence disguised as protest.

I’m a salesman. And I never was very good at composition. But I have two “special problems” in regard to what’s taking place in America today. I’m sure everyone has their own opinions and fears concerning the current pandemic and violence. I have two which are especially bothersome to me. They both concern the upheaval sparked in our society by the gross police over-reaction toward someone who’d apparently committed a minor offense. And like everyone else, I’m also fearful of the pandemic, but this current writing will express two wishes I have concerning our present state of societal unrest. Again, my apologies to anyone who reads this written piece to its end. I’m not much at writing. I’m a salesman, and, I believe, a great example of the so-called “common man”.

I’m sure you know by now that “the city” has a new mayor. Well, he contacted me a few days ago and asked if I’d write what he called “a common man’s take” on the current situation in The United States. He said he’d read about my brief appearance in Joseph Same’s “The Same Tapes” book, and therefore knew that at least for a while I’d been both a salesman and someone with a minor drinking problem. I told him I was still in sales, but had stopped drinking alcohol completely. I also said I’d undertake his task. Thus, what follows now is my so-called “take”.

Despite the claim of equality as an ultimate goal, there really are two other, and in my opinion, far more important desired outcomes sought by those now imposing fear, chaos, and anarchy across America. And the first of those is a seemingly universal effect which is always present in every questionable search for societal change. A struggle begins when a certain individual or group is singled out as having been the target of some sort of mistreatment. The apparent offenders are then lambasted in almost all the current media formats, and are promoted as haters of all such people who don’t happen to be white and male. But what is lost in this mirage which is then presented as clarity, is that the oldest hatred and abuse known to mankind is being promoted again, i.e. the working middle class of every particular nation is evil, and although its members do the work which keeps all societies functioning, those people are, as some have called them, deplorable.

And the second sought for result in any form of societal unrest is most likely a scenario which is not even understood by most of those engaged in that unrest. It’s the attempt to somehow pit the two extreme wings (left versus right – communism versus fascism) of the political spectrum against each other in the sick hope that eventually some sort of national or even worldwide conflict will emerge from their engagement against each other. And if we could take the time to learn from history rather than attempt to downplay or rewrite it, perhaps we’d realize that the same scenario which sparked World War Two (far left versus far right) could occur here in the United States. But truthfully, it’s been only within a few hundred years that radical isms have been given names; before that we could make a case that the same scenarios which led to WWII were present in societies then, but were disguised by various dictators, tyrants, monarchists who sought to further evil rather than good, and sometimes even figures from outside the realm of politics who gained control of certain nations for a while.

Nonetheless, we can rest assured, all mortals who once lived, or who live still within time’s scope, carried or carry their actions and non-actions with them as crosses to bear as they navigated or still do navigate through the years granted them by a force so powerful it’s time’s only inhibitor. And as history has unfolded, many controllers, and many organizers and reorganizers have vied for the conscience of the moment. And they’ve had a lot of answers for problems which most often have faded away with time’s passing, or else have been found out as not having been as significant as had first been believed. Thus the challenge for mortals in regard to time has always been the search for appropriate and safe actions and reactions in response to changes wrought by its passage.

So, as we speak of the current situation of time in America we must admit that rioters can shout and threaten. And they can tear down statues of people who long ago lived according to the social mores of their time. But nonetheless, time always wins in all disputes. And it wins because it features fleeting lifetimes lived temporally. And fleeting temporal lifetimes end quickly, and then enter the realm of the eternal.

And frankly, if we wish to live as best we can temporally, then we dare not defund or eliminate police forces! It seems incomprehensible that in this day and age some individuals would actually prefer to have a society in which all types of lawlessness could thrive.

I would urge anyone who thinks our nation will be better off without police to try to envision what such a scenario would entail. Rapists, murderers, thieves, and all types of lawbreakers would have a free hand to terrorize everyone – everywhere. And for victims of crimes, it would come as a shock when they called their police department only to find it had been eliminated in an effort to appease certain radicals who themselves might someday need police protection.

But certainly police officers can be trained better than they are currently. And certainly we can expect that police will treat all Americans with respect, and grant them all the rights afforded them under the law; but then we must also hope that all Americans will likewise afford the police the respect they deserve. And let’s not forget that many police officers have already been hurt or killed in violence tied to the recent mistake made by one of their own.

But now I have a very simple, yet sincere favor which I’m going to ask of the National Football League. I know it’s something which will involve a lot of money. Yes, it will involve a lot of money to people who already have a lot of money; or at least who should have a lot of it unless, as someone I once knew used to say, “money burns a hole in their pockets.”

As a show of respect for, and in solidarity with America’s middle class which has been the unfortunate recipient of massive condemnation hurled at it by various groups, politicians, current and former professional athletes, and haters of civil liberty, I think the NFL should cancel the 2020 season. Now of course there’s another very real reason why this action could be taken, i.e. the national pandemic; but frankly, I fear professional sports, and especially professional football are fanning the flames of racial anxiety in this nation. I know that I for one am not going to enjoy being told by a bunch of twenty or thirty something millionaires what a rotten and disgusting individual I am simply because I was born white. And also, when we single out one racial group for acknowledgement via song prior to the beginning of a game, we short change all other ethnicities in the nation, and mock the “inclusiveness” which many are now trying to say is needed between all racial and ethnic groups in America. I think the NFL needs to give some serious thought to the non-field problems it’s now become so much involved in, otherwise, in 2020 professional football may be playing with fire rather than with game balls.  

And, maybe the NFL will also face a crisis in regard to the names of its teams. Certainly certain ethnic groups will not wish to be offended by various monikers. And, who knows, down the road perhaps animal rights groups will also protest the teams named as animals and birds. And all of this will take place while the United States of America, guided by leftist politicians, will use the fact that its populace is comprised of diverse cultures and ethnic backgrounds as a reason for division and racism, rather than for the melding together of one great American people.    

[thisdaynews]

Republicans used to ignore Trump’s resorts. Now they’re spending millions.

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/republicans-used-to-ignore-trumps-resorts-now-theyre-spending-millions/

Republicans used to ignore Trump’s resorts. Now they’re spending millions.

Between 2012 and 2014, campaigns and political groups spent a combined $69,000 at Trump businesses, according to the report. But since June 2015, when Trump announced he was running for the White House, political spending at the president’s properties has topped $19 million. Some of the initial surge was related to the Trump campaign’s using a Trump company plane during the 2016 election, but much of the uptick comes from conservative candidates and groups.

House Democrats, who have launched a broadimpeachment investigationthat currently includes whether Trump has illegally profited from his businesses while president, say Republicans are trying to curry favor with the president by spending money at his businesses. Some may even be trying to gain access to the president, who has visited his own properties more than 300 times since he was sworn into office.

“President Trump has perfected the financial shakedown of seeking political influence as a way of life,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House Oversight Committee. “This is now standard operating procedure in Washington. It’s pay-to-play all day.”

At least another 179 foreign governments, businesses, trade associations and religious entities — some with interests before the federal government — have frequented Trump properties, according toPublic Citizen, which gathered data from Federal Election Commission records, social media and news reports.

That includes 28 foreign governments — including Azerbaijan, India, Kuwait, Turkey, Ukraine, Malaysia, Romania and Saudi Arabia — as well as 41 conservative advocacy organizations, 51 businesses or business groups, 16 charities, 16 religious groups, 12 state or local groups, nine foreign businesses or business groups and six police or fire organizations. For example,T-Mobile executivesstayed at Trump International Hotel in Washington while seeking a green light from the federal government for a merger with Sprint.

“The unceasing parade of foreign governments, politicians and corporations holding events and spending their dollars at Trump’s properties has become normal in Trump’s America,” said Alan Zibel, research director of Public Citizen’s Corporate Presidency Project. “That doesn’t make it right or legal.”

The Trump Organization didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House referred questions to a previously released statement.

“As he announced in January 2017, President Donald Trump is not involved in the day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization and he does not take any action that benefits him personally,” White House spokesman Judd Deere said. “While House Democrats continue to spread false rumors in complete denial that the President was a successful businessman for decades, President Trump continues to keep his promises to the American people.”

Some of the groups spending money explained that they choose Trump developments because donors and supporters favor the locations.

“Trump Organization properties are world-class venues in destination locations that our supporters want to visit and are excited to attend events at,” said Kelly Sadler, spokeswoman for America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC. “The staff is always respectful, professional and provides best-in-class service.”

Sadler said America First Action, which spent $545,000 at Trump properties since Trump’s election, pays fair market value for its events in compliance with FEC rules and guidance.

House Democrats areinvestigatingwhether Trump is violating the Constitution, which forbids a president to profit fromforeign governmentsunless approved by Congress or to receive any money from theU.S. governmentexcept an annual salary. They are even looking intoan allegationthat groups — including at least one foreign government — tried to ingratiate themselves to Trump by booking rooms at his hotels but never staying in them, POLITICO reported last month. Trump already faces lawsuits alleging he violated the Constitution.

“Donald Trump is violating the Constitution by accepting money from foreign governments, and by refusing to turn over key documents his administration is covering it up,” said Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), chairwoman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee with jurisdiction over Trump’s Washington hotel. “We’ve issued subpoenas in our investigation because we deserve to know the extent of President Trump’s lawlessness and corruption.”

Trump ignored calls to fully separate from his eponymous company, which comprises more than 500 businesses, after he was sworn into office. He still owns his business but placed his holdings in a trust designed to hold assets for his benefit and can receive money from the trust without the public’s knowledge. His company donated about $343,000 to the U.S. Treasury that it said came from profits from foreign governments, but watchdog groups say the amount should be higher.

Political spending is easier to track. Federal records show that 192 campaign or political groups have spent a combined $8.3 million at Trump businesses through Oct. 31. Of those, 30 spent more than $10,000 and 108 spent more than $1,000, according to the new report.

The groups spent the most — about $2.5 million — at Trump’s Washington hotel, which has become a place to see and be seen by candidates, Trump staffers and congressional aides. Trump leases the building from the federal government, despite language in the contract that says no “elected official of the Government of the United States … shall be admitted to any share or part of this Lease, or to any benefit that may arise therefrom.”

Mar-A-Lago, the resort in Palm Beach, Fla., that Trump has dubbed the Winter White House, and Trump National Doral in Miami have each received about $740,000.

Trump’s campaign was the biggest spender — accounting for nearly $3.8 million, or about 45 percent of the money. That includes renting office space in Trump Tower in New York, where Trump famously rode downthe escalatorand launched his candidacy in 2015, and renting a 757 airplane nicknamed Trump Force One through his company TAG Air.

“The campaign pays fair market value under negotiated rental agreements and other service agreements in compliance with the law,” a Trump campaign official said. “The campaign works closely with campaign counsel to ensure strict compliance in this regard.”

The Republican National Committee spent $1.6 million. Trump Victory, a joint fundraising committee for Trump’s campaign and the RNC, paid $991,000. Vice President Mike Pence’s Great America Committee, which supports pro-Trump candidates, dropped $238,000.

The biggest spenders from Congress include some of Trump’s top allies, including groups or campaigns representing House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark), Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Rep. Greg Pence (R-Ind.), the vice president’s older brother, who was elected to Congress in 2018.

Jay Webber, a failed candidate from New Jersey, spent nearly $40,000 for an October 2018 fundraiser at the Trump D.C. hotel that the president himself headlined. Omar Navarro, who ran unsuccessfully against longtime Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California twice, has paid more than $18,000 since 2017.

Trump often tweets out endorsements of Republican candidates after they hold events at his properties, according to 1100 Pennsylvania, which tracks visits to Trump properties.

The RNC said many factors are taken into account when determining where to hold an event. “Aside from the fact that donors enjoy visiting Trump properties, other factors like security, price and convenience are all part of the committee’s decision-making process,” an RNC official said. The official said that Trump properties can be cheaper to rent than other venues and that the FEC demands the RNC receive market rates.

Revenueincreasedat many of the resorts Trump visited in 2018, including Trump International Hotel in Washington, which has become a top destination for Republicans, according to Trump’s most recent personal financial disclosure forms. That comes even as Trump’s overall income dipped slightly, to $434 million in 2018 from $450 million in 2017.

Trump has repeatedly denied that he is using the presidency to boost spendingat his resorts.

“I have a lot of hotels all over the place,” he told reporters in September, “and people, they use them because they’re the best.”

Read More

#Foreign #Millions #Politics #spending

[thatsnotcanonpodcasts]

Russians, Komodo & Apps

Welcome back, we have another fun episode for you all this week. First up we have an absolute idiot in Russia insulting adult comic book readers. Now, we must apologise for the response to this segment, we Nerds love our comics and really enjoy reading them. As fans we love the artwork, the complexity of the stories, the downright fun of it all, and the insane gadgets that end up becoming a reality. Although we are still waiting to see the Fantastic 4’s flying car. Now things get heated in this as you might expect, but wow, you will love this. Would you like to learn more?

Next up we have Australian Dragons and their last surviving cousins living overseas. For all those people who have decided to live abroad after they finish university you aren’t the first. Oh no, not even close. You are a few thousand years behind these guys. Now as typical Aussies they like to relax over a nice steak; enjoy a bit of time in the sun, and when they get angry fighting like a legend. Just in case you are wondering who we are talking about it is the, yeah nah. You will need to listen in to find out.

Do you wish you could go play certain games you had on an old phone but are having trouble finding it? Perhaps it is a game on a friend’s phone and no matter how hard you look you just never seem to know where they got it from. Well things are about to get worse, because Infinity Blade are no longer supporting some of their games. So, better check out what this means for that bundle of games you have in your library and read those acknowledged agreements and game licences. Are you freaking out? Well listen in to find out what is happening before it is too late.

As usual we have the shout outs, remembrances, birthdays and special events of interest. We would like to say thank you to all the awesome fire fighters battling the numerous bush fires raging around Australia. For all those people who have lost homes, businesses, jobs and all those things that make a life we hope you are safe. As always, stay safe, look out for each other and stay hydrated.

EPISODE NOTES:

Russian Politician vs adult comic book reader - https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/09/08/russian-minister-of-culture-vladimir-medinsky-calls-adult-comic-book-readers-morons/

Komodo Dragons - https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-last-dragons-survived-extinction

App Archiving

- https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/d1eys0/are_infinity_blade_games_no_longer_available_to/

- https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT208436

Games currently playing

DJ

- Warframe - https://store.steampowered.com/app/230410/Warframe/

Professor

– Space Run - https://store.steampowered.com/app/275670/Space_Run/

Buck

– The Orville Interactive Fan Experience - https://store.steampowered.com/app/1096200/The_Orville__Interactive_Fan_Experience/

Other topics discussed

Disney Vs Disney Debates (TNC Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/disneyvsdisneypodcast

James Oliver Rigney Jr. aka Robert Jordan (American author of epic fantasy. He is best known for the Wheel of Time series, which comprises 14 books and a prequel novel.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Jordan

George Raymond Richard Martin aka George R. R. Martin (American novelist and short story writer in the fantasy,horror, and science fiction genres, screenwriter, and television producer. He is best known for his series of epic fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, which was adapted into the HBO series Game of Thrones)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin

Berserk (Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kentaro Miura.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berserk_(manga)

Ouran High Host Club (manga series by Bisco Hatori.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouran_High_School_Host_Club

The Phantom (American adventure comic strip, first published by Lee Falk in February 1936)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Phantom

Wynonna Earp (weird West comic book miniseries created and owned by Beau Smith.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynonna_Earp

The Boys (American comic book series, written by Garth Ennis and co-created, designed, and illustrated by Darick Robertson)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boys_(comics)

Hack/Slash (comic book series, launched from several one shots of the same name, published by Image Comics. The series was created by writer and sometime penciller Tim Seeley.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hack/Slash

The Punisher (fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punisher

Joker star Marc Maron blasts outraged Marvel fans

- https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2478614/joker-star-marc-maron-blasts-outraged-marvel-fans-after-superhero-movie-backlash

Parthenogenesis (natural form of asexual reproduction in which growth and development of embryos occur without fertilization.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis

QUT joins top 200 universities worldwide

- https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/national/queensland/qut-joins-global-elite-universities-in-new-rankings-20190911-p52qdd.html

Swedish scientist suggests cannibalism as a solution to climate change

- https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientist-cannibalism-climate-change

Komodo Dragons (also known as the Komodo monitor, is a species of lizard found in the Indonesian islands of Komodo, Rinca, Flores, and Gili Motang)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komodo_dragon

Can cats live on a vegan diet

- https://www.petmd.com/blogs/thedailyvet/lorieahuston/2014/june/vegan-diets-cats-31822

What happens to feeding your pet a vegan diet

- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-07/can-your-pet-become-vegan/10969616

Komodo Dragon facts

- https://www.livescience.com/27402-komodo-dragons.html

Nintendo sues RomUniverse for copyright infringement

- https://www.businessinsider.com.au/nintendo-sues-romuniverse-copyright-infringement-claims-2019-9?r=US&IR=T

How to play iPod games on PC

- https://itstillworks.com/play-ipod-games-pc-7715671.html

Flappy Bird (mobile game developed by Vietnamese video game artist and programmer Dong Nguyen under his game development company dotGears.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird

Prince of Persia (1989 fantasy cinematic platformer originally developed and published by Brøderbund and designed by Jordan Mechner for the Apple II.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_of_Persia_(1989_video_game)

Accursed Farms (YouTube channel)

- Channel - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ6KZTTnkE-s2XFJJmoTAkw

- Games as a service is a fraud - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

Fallout 76 charging $7 for a fridge and people are not happy

- https://www.gamesradar.com/fallout-76-players-arent-happy-about-being-charged-dollar7-for-a-fridge/

Warframe market

- https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/Market

Replicator (In Star Trek a replicator is a machine that can create (and recycle) things.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek)

CBS kills Star Trek fan project

- https://www.pcmag.com/news/364042/cbs-kills-star-trek-stage-9-fan-project

Girl gives birthday cake to Queensland Firefighters

- https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/499154903701389312/621667655765721089/70147954_10157763711869669_3177814528142344192_n.png

Bardot (Australian girl group which formed in 1999 on the Australian reality television series Popstars.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardot_(Australian_band)

The Nomad Soul (adventure game developed by Quantic Dream and published by Eidos Interactive.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nomad_Soul

Dr Zhivago (novel by Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957 in Italy.)

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Zhivago_(novel)

Indian lunar lander falls silent

- https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/09/india-chandrayaan-2-landing-attempt-moon-lunar-south-pole/

You, Me, and a Poltergeist (TNC Podcast)

- https://thatsnotcanon.com/ymaappodcast

Shoutouts

8 Sept 1965 – The Monkees were born, a small ad in New York’s Daily Variety on this day attracted 437 young men interested in forming the world’s first "manufactured" boy band –The Monkees. It happened after young movie and TV director Bob Rafelson, looking for his big break, dreamt up a show about a struggling rock band. He ran a production company called Raybert with his business partner Bert Schneider, whose father was the head of Columbia Pictures. The TV division of Columbia agreed in 1965 to go ahead with the project. All that was then needed was a band – or, at least, “four insane boys” who could literally play the part. - https://www.onthisday.com/articles/hey-hey-were-the-monkees

9 Sept 1999 – Sega Dreamcast was released in America, it was the first in the sixth generation of video game consoles, preceding Sony's PlayStation 2, Nintendo's GameCube and Microsoft's Xbox. The Dreamcast was Sega's final home console, marking the end of the company's 18 years in the console market. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast

9 Sept 1839 - English scientist and astronomer John Herschel takes 1st glass plate photograph, which still exists, and experimented with some colour reproduction, noting that rays of different parts of the spectrum tended to impart their own colour to a photographic paper. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Herschel

11 Sept 2019 - Tribute to the firefighters - https://10daily.com.au/news/australia/a190911uqndh/a-tribute-to-our-amazing-firies-in-10-incredible-photos-20190911

Remembrances

7 Sept 2019 - Robert Axelrod also credited as Axel Roberts and Myron Mensah, American actor. He was primarily known for his voice work, which included Digimon, Cowboy Bebop and Space Pirate Captain Harlock, having started voice acting for the English-language versions of anime in 1980; providing the voice of Lord Zedd, the main antagonist of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers; and Finster, the original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers monster maker. He also portrayed a Paul McCartney look-alike on the popular sitcom Family Matters, and later in his career appeared in several productions by comedy duo Tim & Eric. He died at the age of 70 in Los Angeles,California - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Axelrod_(actor)

9 Sept 1976 - Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who became the founding father of the People's Republic of China (PRC), which he ruled as the Chairman of the Communist Party of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976. Idelogically a Marxist–Leninist, his theories, military strategies, and political policies are collectively known as Maoism. A controversial figure, Mao is regarded as one of the most important and influential individuals in modern world history. He is also known as a political intellect, theorist, military strategist, poet, and visionary. Supporters credit him with driving imperialism out of China, modernising the nation and building it into a world power, promoting the status of women, improving education and health care, as well as increasing life expectancy as China's population grew from around 550 million to over 900 million under his leadership. Conversely, his regime has been called autocratic and totalitarian, and condemned for bringing about mass repression and destroying religious and cultural artifacts and sites. It was additionally responsible for vast numbers of deaths with estimates ranging from 30 to 70 million victims through starvation, prison labour and mass executions. He died from a heart attack at the age of 82 in Beijing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong

9 Sept 1997 - Burgess Meredith, American actor, director, producer, and writer. Active for more than six decades, Meredith has been called "a virtuosic actor" and "one of the most accomplished actors of the century". A lifetime member of the Actors Studio by invitation, he won several Emmys, was the first male actor to win the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor twice, and was nominated for two Academy Awards. He established himself as a leading man in Hollywood with critically acclaimed performances as George Milton in Of Mice and Men, Ernie Pyle in The Story of G.I. Joe, and the narrator ofA Walk in the Sun. Meredith was known later in his career for his appearances on The Twilight Zone and for portraying arch-villain The Penguin on the 1960s TV series Batman and boxing trainer Mickey Goldmill in the Rocky film series. For his performances in The Day of the Locust and Rocky, he received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He later starred in the comedy Foul Play and the fantasy film Clash of the Titans. He narrated numerous films and documentaries during his long career, including Twilight Zone: The Movie. He died from complications of Alzheimer's disease and melanoma at the age of 89 in Malibu, California - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgess_Meredith

Famous Birthdays

9 Sept 1828 - Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. He received multiple nominations for Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906, and nominations for Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902 and 1910, and his miss of the prize is a major Nobel prize controversy. he is best known for the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. He first achieved literary acclaim in his twenties with his semi-autobiographical trilogy, Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, and Sevastopol Sketches, based upon his experiences in the Crimean War. Tolstoy's fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Family Happiness, and Hadji Murad. He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays. In the 1870s Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening, as outlined in his non-fiction work A Confession. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. Tolstoy's ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Tolstoy also became a dedicated advocate of Georgism, the economic philosophy of Henry George, which he incorporated into his writing, particularly Resurrection. He was born in Yasnaya Polyana, Tula Governorate - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy

9 Sept 1890 - Colonel Harland David Sanders, American businessman, best known for founding fast food chicken restaurant chain Kentucky Fried Chicken (also known as KFC) and later acting as the company's brand ambassador and symbol. His name and image are still symbols of the company. The title 'colonel' was honorary – a Kentucky Colonel – not the military rank. Sanders held a number of jobs in his early life, such as steam engine stoker, insurance salesman and filling station operator. He began selling fried chicken from his roadside restaurant inNorth Corbin, Kentucky, during the Great Depression. During that time Sanders developed his "secret recipe" and his patented method of cooking chicken in a pressure fryer. Sanders recognized the potential of the restaurant franchising concept, and the first KFC franchise opened in South Salt Lake, Utah in 1952. When his original restaurant closed, he devoted himself full-time to franchising his fried chicken throughout the country. The company's rapid expansion across the United States and overseas became overwhelming for Sanders. In 1964, then 73 years old, he sold the company to a group of investors led by John Y. Brown Jr. and Jack C. Massey for $2 million ($16.2 million today). However, he retained control of operations in Canada, and he became a salaried brand ambassador for Kentucky Fried Chicken. He was born in Henryville, Indiana - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel_Sanders

9 Sept 1953 - Janet Fielding, Australian actress, known for her role in the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who as companion of the Fourth Doctor, and later of the Fifth Doctor,Tegan Jovanka. She made a guest appearance on Jim'll Fix It in a Doctor Who-related sketch alongside Colin Baker'sDoctor in 1985 (A Fix with Sontarans). She played Mel during Sylvester McCoy's audition for the part of the Seventh Doctor. She was born in Brisbane, Queensland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Fielding

Events of Interest

9 Sept 1983 - Vitas Gerulaitis bets his house that Martina Navratilova can't beat 100th ranked male tennis player

- https://www.onthisday.com/people/martina-navratilova

- http://www.mertovstennisdesk.com/2013/10/14/the-most-famous-100-player-in-atp-history/

9 Sept 2012 – The Indian space agency puts into orbit its heaviest foreign satellite yet, in a streak of 21 consecutive successful PSLV launches. The satellite known as SPOT 6 along with SPOT 7 form a constellation of Earth-imaging satellites designed to provide continuity of high-resolution, wide-swath data up to 2024. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPOT_(satellite)#SPOT_6_and_SPOT_7

11 Sept 1940 - The American Mathematical Society met at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a few hundred miles north of the building of Bell Labs in New York, where was the Complex Number Computer. George Stibitz arranged to have the computer connected by telephone lines (28-wire teletype cable) to a teletype unit installed there. The Complex Number Computer worked well, and there is no doubt it impressed those who used it. The meeting was attended by many of America's most prominent mathematicians, as well as individuals who later led important computing projects. The Dartmouth demonstration foreshadowed the modern era of remote computing, but remote access of this type was not repeated for another ten years. - https://history-computer.com/ModernComputer/Relays/Stibitz.html

Intro

Artist – Goblins from Mars

Song Title – Super Mario - Overworld Theme (GFM Trap Remix)

Song Link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GNMe6kF0j0&index=4&list=PLHmTsVREU3Ar1AJWkimkl6Pux3R5PB-QJ

Follow us on

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NerdsAmalgamated/

Twitter - https://twitter.com/NAmalgamated

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/6Nux69rftdBeeEXwD8GXrS

iTunes - https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/top-shelf-nerds/id1347661094

RSS - http://www.thatsnotcanonproductions.com/topshelfnerdspodcast?format=rss

General Enquiries

Email - [email protected]

#Russians #Minister of Culture #Politicians #Comics #russia #vladimir medinsky #Robert Jordan #Disney Vs Disney Debates #George R. R. Martin #Game of Thrones #Berserk #Manga #Watchmen #The Killing Joke #Ouran High Host Club #The Phantom #Wynonna Earp #The Boys #Hack/Slash #Joker #Marc Maron #Marvel #Parthenogenesis #News #Comic News #QUT #Science news #Komodo Dragons #cannibalism #climate change

[topmixtrends]

AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION has been about to ruin the country for a long time.

William F. Buckley first sounded the alarm in his 1951 jeremiad God and Man at Yale, and politicians and pundits have echoed him ever since. Soon and very soon, this chorus cries, in unison and across the years, tenured radicals will indoctrinate a generation. Today’s student protestors will capture the commanding heights of American politics and culture tomorrow. Taught to despise capitalism, religion, even Western civilization itself, they will imperil it all.

But the red brigades never take charge. Canonical authors survived the upheavals of the 1960s, and the political correctness craze of the 1990s. Outside of campus, a free enterprise system based on competition and self-interest survived both, too. Perhaps America has her right-wing Cassandras to thank. If not for the occasional broadside like Heather Mac Donald’s The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture, every collegiate football game might begin with a rousing rendition of “The Internationale.”

Or maybe the Cassandras are wrong, and have always been wrong. As far back as 1963, University of California president Clark Kerr was already calling campus radicalism one of the “great clichés about the university.” No matter how wild Berkeley looked on the nightly news (or online today), “the internal reality is that it is conservative.” He was referring to academia’s internal organization, which was and remains steeply hierarchical. But higher education also plays a conservative role in American life. Consider academia’s history or social function at any length, and the cliché of the radical campus becomes difficult to believe. The real question is why it persists.

¤

With no less vigor than Buckley, Mac Donald charges higher education with corrupting the youth and endangering Western culture. While he decried atheism and collectivism, she singles out race and gender studies, which in her mind “dominate higher education.” Today “the overriding goal of the educational establishment is to teach young people […] to view themselves as existentially oppressed.” True to the old formula, Mac Donald warns that what happens on campus won’t stay on campus. Those who cry #MeToo and chronicle microaggessions will one day “seize levers of power.” The stakes, as always, couldn’t be higher: “[A] soft totalitarianism could become the new American norm.”

Trained as a lawyer, Mac Donald offers a one-sided brief, a classic polemic. The book is full of anecdotal evidence and statistical sleight-of-hand, with partial truths and gross distortions on almost every other page. Mac Donald is aghast, for example, when UCLA’s English Department drops its Shakespeare requirement, detecting “a momentous shift in our culture that bears on our relationship to the past — and to civilization itself.” She never mentions the department’s extensive historical requirements, or the fact that it will offer 16 courses on Shakespeare this academic year. Outside of higher education, the National Science Foundation is “consumed by diversity ideology” because it offers a few $1 and $2 million-dollar grants for implicit bias research and promoting women and minorities in STEM fields. For context, the NSF’s 2017 budget was $7.4 billion.

In any case, the real problems with the book go beyond shoddy sourcing. Start with the “dominance” of race and gender theory. Departments like African American and Women’s Studies tend to be relatively small, and although race and gender are popular topics across the humanities, an honest look at top university presses, as opposed to small and specialized journals, would find nothing close to dominance. (Harvard University Press’s winter catalog opens with a biography of Charles de Gaulle.) Nor are these issues omnipresent on campus. Mac Donald describes higher education as something like a one-party state, but aside from the occasional banner celebrating “diversity” or a poster asking students not to don a sombrero this Halloween, the supposed ruling party has a suspiciously light touch. From community colleges to the Ivy League, the vast majority of teaching and research proceeds without any reference to race or gender whatsoever.

But surely the professors are as radical as ever, poisoning young minds? It’s true that the professorate sits to the left of the general population, especially at selective liberal arts colleges. But in the most comprehensive survey of higher education available, conducted by the sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons in 2007, more of the faculty was “moderate” (46 percent) than liberal (44 percent). And while 17.2 percent of older faculty claimed to be “liberal activists,” the percentage of young faculty members who said the same was minuscule: 1.3 percent. Even if the number of activist professors has grown since 2007, they aren’t necessarily radicalizing their students. A good deal of research suggests otherwise. According to the political scientist Mack Mariani and education specialist Gordon Hewitt, students become slightly more liberal during college, but no more than their non-collegiate peers do during the same time period. Fearsome as they seem to Mac Donald, student radicals are like their mentors: met more often online than on campus.

But wait, Mac Donald might reply, what about those posters and banners you mentioned? Like the ones at Berkeley reading “I will acknowledge how power and privilege intersect our daily lives,” or “I will be a brave and sympathetic ally.” Or what about Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion with its bulging staff and $20 million budget? In Mac Donald’s lone innovation to the campus polemic genre, she pays more attention to administrative press releases and campus decorations than she pays to professors’ books. Yet while diversity initiatives (and bunting) are indeed prevalent around many campuses, she misunderstands them. She believes that they reveal “the contemporary university’s paramount mission: assigning guilt and innocence within the ruthlessly competitive hierarchy of victimhood.” What they really reveal, although indirectly, is the present state of one of American higher education’s oldest and most intractable tensions.

Professors and administrators may consider themselves egalitarians, but especially in the top tiers, their schools create elites. As Paul Mattingly writes in American Academic Cultures: A History of Higher Education, colleges and universities have long been “highly selective devices for producing not only trained minds but also a social leadership class […] in a society formally committed to democratic equality.” Back in the early 1960s, Berkeley’s Kerr thought he had a way to ease this tension between elitism and democracy. “The great university is of necessity elitist — the elite of merit — but it operates in an environment dedicated to an egalitarian philosophy.” This prompted a question: “How may an aristocracy of intellect justify itself to a democracy of all men?”

Yale and Harvard once groomed the sons of the nation’s great families, Bushes and Cabots and so on. In postwar America, Berkeley would justify itself on the grounds that it produced “the elite of merit,” a meritocracy. Kerr’s vision of the university is now a reality. A college degree is all but necessary for entry into managerial, professional, or creative fields, which comprise the heart of the nation’s upper middle classes.

The trouble is that in order for a meritocracy to be fair, the competition has to take place on a level playing field: in order to have true equality of opportunity, one’s background shouldn’t determine where one ends up in life. In the United States, it largely does. According to studies headed by the economist Raj Chetty, America’s social mobility rate lags behind that of Canada, Denmark, and even the United Kingdom, a famously class-bound society. Although college admissions looks like a level playing field (anyone can apply to Harvard), SAT scores follow family income, and the overall admissions process favors those who can pay the sticker price, even after taking affirmative action into account.

Once enrolled in selective institutions, students compete with each other again — for grades, prestigious extra-curricular positions, and internships. They build social networks and learn to work and behave in line with the norms of the upper middle class. After graduation the victors, bedecked with honors, can pursue lucrative careers, or even rise to positions of prominence in American public life. But despite all that competition, a 2015 Pew study still found that “a family’s economic circumstances play an exceptionally large part in determining a child’s economic prospects later in life.” To the extent that its sorting process reflects existing inequalities, higher education can’t help but replicate and thereby reinforce inequalities in society at large. There’s a word for an institution that does that, and it isn’t radical.

In this context, diversity banners are not evidence of Maoism on the march. They are evidence of an institution whose ideals are at odds with its social function. Few in higher education want to work in a laundering operation that exchanges parental capital for students’ social capital so that they can turn it back into material capital again. The promise of affirmative action is that it will work against this tendency, at least a little. Affirmative action policies often assist students from poor families, and after college they do about as well as their wealthier peers.

There’s a rich irony at the heart of the old radical campus cliché. During the postwar period, conservatives feared that higher education was fomenting leftist revolution. In reality, elite institutions like Berkeley and Yale were enshrining meritocracy as the official rule of American life, while more quietly preserving the advantages that come with money. Higher education prepares students to succeed within a competitive, stratified American society, not change it. The fear is always that today’s radicals will implement their ideas tomorrow. Or, in Mac Donald’s words, “a pipeline now channels left-wing academic theorizing into the highest reaches of government and the media.” But will those who attain “the highest reaches of government and media” really be interested in tearing the heights down? It didn’t happen in the 1960s. It didn’t happen in the 1990s. Don’t count on it this time, either.

So why does Mac Donald insist otherwise? Why are conservatives still so afraid of higher education after all these years? Most obviously, demagoging higher education works political wonders. It’s not only Buckley and Mac Donald who sell books against higher education; politicians from Nixon and Reagan to Scott Walker and Donald Trump have sold their campaigns that way, too. While lambasting egg-headed professors, they can both pose as populists and promise tax cuts for the rich.

Even more, though, precisely because higher education turns out the American elite, small disturbances in academia resonate deeply within the conservative soul. The political theorist Corey Robin has argued that reactionaries draw their energy from “the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” Whether it’s Burke horrified by the fall of the Bourbons, or Buckley opposing the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, conservative movements thrive on imminent threats to existing hierarchies. Imperiled, they sound the alarm, rally the troops, man the battlements, and eventually ride out to conquer. Robin has suggested that, despite its seeming strength, American conservatism is actually in disarray because it lacks a worthy antagonist. Numerically speaking, the socialist left is tiny, while the Democratic Party embraces “market-based” solutions to health care scarcity and global warming. Without a suitable enemy, the whole movement could collapse.

But what’s that sound? A handful of protestors on the quad? They’ve arrived in the nick of time! Never mind that they’ve been showing up since the 1950s. This time, it’s different. This time, the threat to “our culture” is real. If so, then even modest reforms — meant to do nothing more terrible than diversify the upper middle class — must be opposed as if they were threats to civilization itself.

¤

Paul W. Gleason teaches in the religion departments of California Lutheran University and the University of Southern California. In 2017, he received the National Book Critics Circle’s “emerging critic” award.

The post Why Are Conservatives So Afraid of Higher Education? appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2SJeHaT

#Los Angeles Review of Books #topmixtrends