Coming February 6, 2024 . . .
MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE
by Michael Wolraich
Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop
Coming February 6, 2024 . . . MURDER, POLITICS, AND THE END OF THE JAZZ AGE by Michael Wolraich Pre-order at Barnes & Noble / Amazon / Books-A-Million / Bookshop |
Global disorder is on the rise. What can the US do about it? There are two fundamentally different approaches one can take—it all depends on your philosophy of how the world works.
Imagine a hurricane, a hurricane like Matthew, aimed straight at the heart of the American petrochemical industry.
By Matthew Boyle & Matthew Townsend @ Bloomberg News, Aug. 25
Also see:
Amazon's Plans to Cut Food Prices Will Be a Headache for the Fed
By Matthew Boesler, August 24
By Natalia V. Osipova & Naira Davlashyan for NYTimes.com, Aug . 24, 4:34 min long video
As skirmishes in Ukraine continue, the Night Wolves — a Russian motorcycle club that is on friendly terms with President Vladimir V. Putin — is running a combat training center just a few hours away.
Very much worth a watch. The summary doesn't do it justice; for example also shows how they serve as "protectors" of the religious and explains why the U.S. government has sanctions on the group.
Has shot to #1 most read after being posted @ 5:55 pm.
By Greg Miller @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug. 24
As CIA director, Mike Pompeo has taken a special interest in an agency unit that is closely tied to the investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, requiring the Counterintelligence Mission Center to report directly to him.
Officials at the center have, in turn, kept a watchful eye on Pompeo, who has repeatedly played down Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and demonstrated a willingness to engage in political skirmishes for President Trump.
Current and former officials said that the arrangement has been a source of apprehension among the CIA’s upper ranks and that they could not recall a time in the agency’s history when a director faced a comparable conflict [....]
Analysis by Aaron Blake @ WashingtonPost.com, 11:33 am
President Trump is now openly attacking the GOP leaders of both the House and the Senate. In tweets Thursday morning, he blamed Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) for having “failed” to replace Obamacare, and he said both McConnell and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) created the current debt ceiling “mess” by using the wrong tactics [....}
While the US argues about whether to tear down monuments to the supporters of slavery, Britain still celebrates the shameful era
Op-Ed By Afua Hirsch @ TheGuardian.com, Aug. 22
[....] The reaction in Britain has been, as in the rest of the world, almost entirely condemnatory of neo-Nazis in the US and of its president for failing to denounce them. But when it comes to our own statues, things get a little awkward. The colonial and pro-slavery titans of British history are still memorialised: despite student protests, Oxford University’s statue of imperialist Cecil Rhodes has not been taken down; and Bristol still celebrates its notorious slaver Edward Colston. When I tweeted this weekend that it’s time we in Britain look again at our own landscape, the reaction was hostile.
“I don’t want that nonsense spreading here from America. Past is past, we have moved on,” one person said. Another accused me of being a “#ClosetRacist” for even raising the question. But the most common sentiment was summed up in this tweet: “Its History – we cant & shouldn’t re-write it – we learn from it. Removing statues would make us no different to terrorists at Palmyra.” Therein lies the point. Britain has committed unquantifiable acts of cultural terrorism – tearing down statues and palaces, and erasing the historical memory of other great civilisations during an imperial era whose supposed greatness we are now, so ironically, very precious about preserving intact [....]
By David Hutt @ Asia Times, Aug. 22
Free-flowing tourism, lax law enforcement and improved internet connectivity have opened the region to a myriad of Chinese criminal outfits
More than 200 Chinese nationals were arrested in Cambodia last month after local police raided a compound near the Thai border where an alleged cybercrime gang was operating an online blackmail and extortion ring [....]
In July, Cambodia also deported 74 Chinese nationals over similar Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) scams. The same month, 153 Chinese nationals were arrested in Indonesia, also accused of running an online fraud ring that targeted wealthy Chinese businessmen and politicians. They reportedly made US$450 million in a year [.....]In Thailand, 44 people from China and Taiwan were arrested last month for operating a similar scamming operation, which reportedly conned US$3 million from their mostly Chinese victims. Chinese telecom scammers have also recently been arrested in Fiji and as far from home as Kenya [....]
Foreign minister had been due to meet US delegation led by Trump’s adviser and son-in-law in Cairo to discuss Middle East
By Reuters in Cairo via theguardian.com, Aug. 23
Egypt has called off a scheduled meeting between its foreign minister and top US presidential adviser Jared Kushner after the US decided to withhold millions of dollars in aid.
However, the office of the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, said he would meet the US delegation led by Kushner later in the day.
Two US sources told Reuters on Tuesday that Washington had decided to deny Egypt $96m (£75m) in aid and to delay a further $195m because of its failure to make progress on respecting human rights and democratic norms.
“Egypt sees this measure as reflecting poor judgment of the strategic relationship that ties the two countries over long decades and as adopting a view that lacks an accurate understanding of the importance of supporting Egypt’s stability,” the foreign ministry said [....]
“Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” by Mark Bray, is part history, part how-to.
By Daniel Penny @ NewYorker.com, Aug. 22
On October 4, 1936, tens of thousands of Zionists, Socialists, Irish dockworkers, Communists, anarchists, and various outraged residents of London’s East End gathered to prevent Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists from marching through their neighborhood. This clash would eventually be known as the Battle of Cable Street: protesters formed a blockade and beat back some three thousand Fascist Black Shirts and six thousand police officers. To stop the march, the protesters exploded homemade bombs, threw marbles at the feet of police horses, and turned over a burning lorry. They rained down a fusillade of projectiles on the marchers and the police attempting to protect them: rocks, brickbats, shaken-up lemonade bottles, and the contents of chamber pots. Mosley and his men were forced to retreat.
In “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” published last week by Melville House, the historian Mark Bray presents the Battle of Cable Street as a potent symbol of how to stop Fascism: a strong, unified coalition outnumbered and humiliated Fascists to such an extent that their movement fizzled. For many members of contemporary anti-Fascist groups, the incident remains central to their mythology, a kind of North Star in the fight against Fascism and white supremacy across Europe and, increasingly, the United States. According to Bray, antifa (pronounced an-tee-fah) “can variously be described as a kind of ideology, an identity, a tendency or milieu, or an activity of self-defense.” It’s a leaderless, horizontal movement whose roots lie in various leftist causes—Communism, anarchism, Socialism, anti-racism [....]
By Simon Denyear @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug. 23
BEIJING — China demanded on Wednesday that the United States immediately withdraw new sanctions on companies and individuals trading with North Korea, saying such punitive measures will damage Sino-U.S. ties.
The Treasury Department imposed sanctions Tuesday on 10 companies and six individuals from China and Russia it said had conducted business with North Korea in ways that advanced the country’s missile and nuclear weapons program.
But China’s Foreign Ministry insisted that its government had fully implemented U.N. Security Council resolutions on North Korea and would punish anyone caught violating the Security Council sanctions under Chinese law [.....]
By Kate Mather @ LATimes.com, Aug. 23
Should Los Angeles police be allowed to test the use of drones?
The question will be one of many posed Wednesday evening at a series of forums held by the Los Angeles Police Department as it tries to gauge public reaction to its proposal to fly drones during a one-year pilot program [....]
The LAPD’s proposal is still in the early stages — the civilian Police Commission must sign off on both the pilot program and a policy for testing the drones before any are flown [....]
A character calling himself “Michael the Black Man” has appeared in the crowd directly behind Donald Trump, his name is Michael Woodside....In the early 1990s, the New Times reported, Woodside, Yahweh and 14 other members of the Yahweh cult were arrested by federal agents and charged with racketeering and conspiracy in 14 murders and a firebombing.....His website, has links that lead to another one, honestfact.com, with this: “Real KKK Slave Masters” are “CHEROKEE Indians (Hidden Babylonians).”
By Caitlin Owen @ Axios.com, 40 min. ago
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee is releasing more information — such as which governors it will hear from — about its effort to stabilize the individual market in September.
- But a key policy idea, reinsurance, is not currently on the table, according to a senior GOP aide.
- A reinsurance program would help insurers cover the costs of expensive enrollees, rather than passing those costs onto all enrollees through higher premiums. Letting people over 30 choose a catastrophic care plan is also off the table for now. The focus is on funding the Affordable Care Act's insurer subsidies that help low-income people with out-of-pocket costs, along with making state innovation waivers more flexible.
- The committee announced yesterday it will be holding two hearings the first week of September [....]
Like his fav strip clubs, the bare facts show nothing much to see in the fake furs, and not a lot of wiggle room in the real polls. Like Trump, his career was so over a decade ago. Unlike Trump, he doesn't have the money nor the spite-on-his-feet nor the Russian backers to bring it back. #StillOutOfTrailer
By Aaron Blake @ WashingtonPost.com, Aug. 22
[....] the 2016 campaign wasn't just about media polarization and President Trump bashing the mainstream press; it was also about dubious information. A new study provides a troubling look at how much websites that peddle fake news and conspiracy theories infected Trump's base of support.
The extensive study, from Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, tracked down the most linked-to news sources on Twitter for supporters of both Trump and Hillary Clinton. The study collected 4.5 million tweets and searched for users who retweeted either Trump or Clinton. From there, it analyzed the URLs that these users shared on their feeds.
Fourth on the list of most-shared sources among Trump supporters on Twitter was Gateway Pundit, a site especially notorious for trafficking in hoaxes and falsehoods. No. 13 on the list was InfoWars, Alex Jones's conspiracy theory website, which is infamous for suggesting the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, among many other things [.....]