- Mapping Where Migrants Were Apprehended At The Border The Most
Last week, U.S. Border Patrol agents fired tear gas on migrants approaching the San Diego section of the Southwest border in Tijuana. President Trump has vowed not to let the thousands of migrants currently at the border apply for asylum in the United States, forcing Mexico to deal with how to shelter the asylum seekers creating a potential humanitarian crisis.
As Statista’s Sarah Feldman points out, Mexican President-López Obrador takes office with tensions at the U.S. Mexico border being one of the first crises that he will.
According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, over 300,000 migrants were apprehended at the Southwest border during the fiscal year 2018.
You will find more infographics at Statista
About half of those arrests happened in the Rio Grande section of the border, which is part of southwestern Texas. Border patrol agents in the San Diego section of the border, an area that has received the most press in recent days, arrested close to 40,000 migrants during that same time frame.
- The Ignored Legacy Of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, & Obstruction Of Justice
Authored by Mehdi Hasan via The Intercept,
The tributes to former President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday aged 94, have been pouring in from all sides of the political spectrum. He was a man “of the highest character,” said his eldest son and fellow former president, George W. Bush. “He loved America and served with character, class, and integrity,” tweeted former U.S. Attorney and #Resistance icon Preet Bharara. According to another former president, Barack Obama, Bush’s life was “a testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous good along the journey.” Apple boss Tim Cook said: “We have lost a great American.”
In the age of Donald Trump, it isn’t difficult for hagiographers of the late Bush Sr. to paint a picture of him as a great patriot and pragmatist; a president who governed with “class” and “integrity.” It is true that the former president refused to vote for Trump in 2016, calling him a “blowhard,” and that he eschewed the white nationalist, “alt-right,” conspiratorial politics that has come to define the modern Republican Party. He helped end the Cold War without, as Obama said, “firing a shot.” He spent his life serving his country — from the military to Congress to the United Nations to the CIA to the White House. And, by all accounts, he was also a beloved grandfather and great-grandfather to his 17 grandkids and eight great-grandkids.
Nevertheless, he was a public, not a private, figure — one of only 44 men to have ever served as president of the United States. We cannot, therefore, allow his actual record in office to be beautified in such a brazen way. “When a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms,” as my colleague Glenn Greenwald has argued, because it leads to “false history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts.”
The inconvenient truth is that the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush had far more in common with the recognizably belligerent, corrupt, and right-wing Republican figures who came after him – his son George W. and the current orange-faced incumbent – than much of the political and media classes might have you believe.
Consider:
He ran a racist election campaign. The name of Willie Horton should forever be associated with Bush’s 1988 presidential bid. Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts — where Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, was governor — had fled a weekend furlough program and raped a Maryland woman. A notorious television ad called “Weekend Passes,” released by a political action committee with ties to the Bush campaign, made clear to viewers that Horton was black and his victim was white.
As Bush campaign director Lee Atwater bragged, “By the time we’re finished, they’re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis’s running mate.” Bush himself was quick to dismiss accusations of racism as “absolutely ridiculous,” yet it was clear at the time — even to right-wing Republican operatives such as Roger Stone, now a close ally of Trump — that the ad had crossed a line. “You and George Bush will wear that to your grave,” Stone complained to Atwater. “It’s a racist ad. … You’re going to regret it.”
Stone was right about Atwater, who on his deathbed apologized for using Horton against Dukakis. But Bush never did.
He made a dishonest case for war. Thirteen years before George W. Bush liedabout weapons of mass destruction to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq, his father made his own set of false claims to justify the aerial bombardment of that same country. The first Gulf War, as an investigation by journalist Joshua Holland concluded, “was sold on a mountain of war propaganda.”
For a start, Bush told the American public that Iraq had invaded Kuwait “without provocation or warning.” What he omitted to mention was that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had given an effective green light to Saddam Hussein, telling him in July 1990, a week before his invasion, “[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”
Then there is the fabrication of intelligence. Bush deployed U.S. troops to the Gulf in August 1990 and claimed that he was doing so in order “to assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland.” As Scott Peterson wrote in the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, “Citing top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated … that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key U.S. oil supplier.”
Yet when reporter Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times acquired her own commercial satellite images of the Saudi border, she found no signs of Iraqi forces; only an empty desert. “It was a pretty serious fib,” Heller told Peterson, adding: “That [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn’t exist.”
President George H. W. Bush talks with Secretary of State James Baker III and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney during a meeting of the cabinet in the White House on Jan. 17, 1991 to discuss the Persian Gulf War. Photo: Ron Edmonds/AP
He committed war crimes. Under Bush Sr., the U.S. dropped a whopping 88,500 tons of bombs on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, many of which resulted in horrific civilian casualties. In February 1991, for example, a U.S. airstrike on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least 408 Iraqi civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, the Pentagon knew the Amiriyah facility had been used as a civil defense shelter during the Iran-Iraq war and yet had attacked without warning. It was, concluded HRW, “a serious violation of the laws of war.”
U.S. bombs also destroyed essential Iraqi civilian infrastructure — from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour mills. This was no accident. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported in June 1991: “Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance. … Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ‘collateral’ and unintended, was sometimes neither.”
Got that? The Bush administration deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for “leverage” over Saddam Hussein. How is this not terrorism? As a Harvard public health team concluded in June 1991, less than four months after the end of the war, the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure had resulted in acute malnutrition and “epidemic” levels of cholera and typhoid.
By January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau, was estimating that Bush’s Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including 13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done to electricity and sewage treatment plants. Daponte’s numbers contradicted the Bush administration’s, and she was threatened by her superiors with dismissal for releasing “false information.” (Sound familiar?)
He refused to cooperate with a special counsel. The Iran-Contra affair, in which the United States traded missiles for Americans hostages in Iran, and used the proceeds of those arms sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, did much to undermine the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet his vice president’s involvement in that controversial affair has garnered far less attention. “The criminal investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete,” wrote Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh, a former deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration, in his final report on the Iran-Contra affair in August 1993.
Why? Because Bush, who was “fully aware of the Iran arms sale,” according to the special counsel, failed to hand over a diary “containing contemporaneous notes relevant to Iran/contra” and refused to be interviewed in the later stages of the investigation. In the final days of his presidency, Bush even issued pardons to six defendants in the Iran-Contra affair, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger — on the eve of Weinberger’s trial for perjury and obstruction of justice. “The Weinberger pardon,” Walsh pointedly noted, “marked the first time a president ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the president was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case.” An angry Walsh accused Bush of “misconduct” and helping to complete “the Iran-contra cover-up.”
Sounds like a Trumpian case of obstruction of justice, doesn’t it?
A U.S. marshal, left, looking for a suspect, shows a mug shot to a man found allegedly using drugs in a crackhouse, according to police, in Washington, D.C., on July 18, 1989. The police raid was part of President George H.W. Bush’s war on drugs. Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
He escalated the racist war on drugs. In September 1989, in a televised addressto the nation from the Oval Office, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine, which he said had been “seized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House . … It could easily have been heroin or PCP.”
Yet a Washington Post investigation later that month revealed that federal agents had “lured” the drug dealer to Lafayette Park so that they could make an “undercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity” (the dealer didn’t know where the White House was and even asked the agents for directions). Bush cynically used this prop — the bag of crack — to call for a $1.5 billion increase in spending on the drug war, declaiming: “We need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors.”
The result? “Millions of Americans were incarcerated, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, and hundreds of thousands of human beings allowed to die of AIDS — all in the name of a ‘war on drugs’ that did nothing to reduce drug abuse,” pointed out Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, in 2014. Bush, he argued, “put ideology and politics above science and health.” Today, even leading Republicans, such as Chris Christie and Rand Paul, agree that the war on drugs, ramped up by Bush during his four years in the White House, has been a dismal and racist failure.
He groped women. Since the start of the #MeToo movement, in late 2017, at least eight different women have come forward with claims that the former president groped them, in most cases while they were posing for photos with him. One of them, Roslyn Corrigan, told Time magazine that Bush had touched her inappropriately in 2003, when she was just 16. “I was a child,” she said. The former president was 79. Bush’s spokesperson offered this defense of his boss in October 2017: “At age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures.” Yet, as Time noted, “Bush was standing upright in 2003 when he met Corrigan.”
Facts matter. The 41st president of the United States was not the last Republican moderate or a throwback to an imagined age of conservative decency and civility; he engaged in race baiting, obstruction of justice, and war crimes. He had much more in common with the two Republican presidents who came after him than his current crop of fans would like us to believe.
- "We Are Suffering": NYC Cab Drivers Speak Out About Suicide Epidemc
One of the unfortunate stories we’ve documented over the last several years has been the alarming number of New York City taxi cab driver suicides. The most recent of these tragic events occurred just last month when a cab driver in Queens became the eighth person over the past year to take his own life as the pressure of Uber and Lyft continues to make fares difficult to find while driving NYC taxi medallions lower in value.
Of course, taxi medallions used to be a retirement plan in and of themselves. Many cab drivers have borne significant financial burdens that they committed to, years ago, in hopes that their medallion would be of substantial value that they could retire on. But the influx of ride-sharing apps over the last five or six years has driven the price (and value) of medallions lower on a steady basis.
As shown in the chart above, the price of a medallion has tumbled from over $1 million around 2013 to just over $200,000 currently, the lowest in over a decade. As a result, many cab drivers who have invested their life savings in owning a medallion have seen themselves fall into financial ruin.
To get closer to the issue, Vice News recently sent out lifelong New York resident and comedian Colin Quinn to speak with a couple of cab drivers about not only the problems that they face, but the rash of suicides that have hit the industry.
The first driver he spoke to, told him off the bat that he had taken out a second mortgage in order to help pay off his medallion some years back. He shares with Colin his story and concludes that he must continue to pay off the medallion regardless of the fact that it has dropped near 80% in price.
Another driver was even more candid, telling Quinn that having Uber and Lyft in the city weren’t even too big of a deal – namely because he, a black man, had a very difficult time getting a cab when he wasn’t working and needed to move around the city. But he told Quinn that when Uber and Lyft began to lower prices – something they could do as a result of not paying a cut to the city like cab drivers have to – then it became unfair, and that’s when taxi drivers “lost”.
A third cabdriver told Quinn that he had averaged about 3.6 passengers per hour before Uber and Lyft came into the city – a rate that generally allowed him to meet the budget he had set for himself. Now, he says he sometimes picks up just two passengers or less per hour. He also told Quinn he estimates about 35% less passengers overall for cabdrivers as a result of the now 80,000 Uber and Lyft drivers in the city.
One cab driver – a friend of a driver who recently killed himself – told Quinn that the man who killed himself was depressed and mortified as a result of his approaching retirement while feeling he wouldn’t be able to make his basic utility bills and living expenses after working for decades.
Finally, one of the drivers Quinn caught up with, Lal Singh, had spoken to the NYTimes in October. Back then, he told the Times: “When I hear that somebody did suicide, I was thinking about me. I’m going to be one of them one day.”
Singh owes about $6200 per month on the medallion he bought in 2000 and spends his day driving the length of Manhattan, top to bottom, looking for passengers. “When you have nothing to do, we are suffering. What are you living for?” he continued.
As we discussed previously here , New York City appears set to finally implement some changes to attempt to protect its cabdrivers – the only question is whether it’s too little too late at this point.
You can watch the full Vice Media video here.
- "The End Of The Beginning" – Did Trump Fold On Everything At G-20?
I knew there was something wrong with Donald Trump’s presidency the day he bombed the airbase at Al-Shairat in Syria. It was a turning point. I knew it was a mistake the moment he did it and argued as such at the time.
No act by him was more contentious.
It cost me hundreds of followers gained throughout the campaign who wanted to believe Trump was playing 4-D chess. My Periscopes went from being events to afterthoughts.
Those that left needed to believe this because they had invested so much in him.
They had to believe he was playing some deep game with Putin to bring peace to the region.
He wasn’t.
I was right and truth is painful. The need for him to be Orange Jesus was so strong they created Qanon and the ‘science’ of political horoscope as slowly but surely Trump was stripped of all of his power except that of complaining about how unfair it all is.
That day he did something in the moment, with bad intelligence and let fly with tomahawks which Russian and Syrian air defenses misdirected and/or shot down.
Empty President
His goal was to show everyone there was a new, strong sheriff in town.
All it did was weaken him.
The neocons praised him as presidential. They began to get their hooks in him then. But truly, Trump was destroyed before he took office, giving up Michael Flynn, expelling Russian diplomats and compromising his cabinet picks.
Because making war is the only true test of a President to the laptop bombardiers who control foreign policy. With that one act Trump’s days as an independent agent in D.C. were numbered.
And since then the hope has been that given the enormity of the opposition to his Presidency he was still fighting for what he campaigned on — no nation building, bring the empire home, protect the borders, and clean up the corruption.
He’s made a few minor changes but not enough to change the course of this country and, by extension, the world.
The people want this change. Those with the power don’t.
G-20 Ghost
So here we are with a pathetic Trump outclassed at the G-20, a meeting he should dominate but instead is ushered around like a child, given poor earpieces and looking a little lost. He’s only allowed to have one meeting of note by his handlers, with China’s Xi Jinping.
Because that meeting wasn’t going to end with anything damaging to the long-term plan. Trump’s tariff game is tired and all it will do is hasten the demise of U.S. competitiveness in the very industries he wants us to be competitive in.
Because tariffs are a band-aid on the real problems of bureaucracy, corruption, waste and sloth within an economy. They are not a product of China stealing our technology (though they have).
And that $1 trillion deficit Trump is running? Music to the ears of the globalists who want the U.S. brought low. More military spending. More boondoggles the banks can cut a nice big check to themselves for with funny money printed without risk. This can go on for a few more years until it doesn’t matter anymore.
Trump’s folding on meeting Putin is the final nail in his presidency’s coffin. He’s not even allowed to make statements on this issue anymore. That’s for Sarah Sanders, Mike Pomposity and John Bolt-head to do.
You know, the grown-ups in the room.
No. Putin and Trump met once when they weren’t supposed to and since then Trump has been getting smaller and smaller. Sure, he held some rallies for the mid-terms to shore up his base for a few weeks while the Democrats stole more than a dozen House seats, three governorships and a couple of Senate seats, but hey he’s still working hard for no pay.
Please.
Trump needed to show some real moral courage and speak with Putin about the Kerch Strait incident like men, not sulk in the corner over a couple of ships. And yet his still throws his full support behind a butcher like Mohammed bin Salman because arms sales and Iran.
Putin, for his part, makes no bones about doing business with the Saudis. He knows that bin Salman is creating a quagmire for Trump while driving the U.S. and European Deep State mad.
Hence:
Putin refuses to apologize for thwarting our plans to overthrow him in Russia and steal Ukraine.
Time Enough to Win
For this Secretary of Defense James Mattis calls Putin, “A slow learner.” This is a flat-out threat that Mattis has more coming Putin’s way. But in fact, it is Mattis who is the slow learner since he still thinks Putin isn’t three steps ahead of him.
Which he is.
The game is all about time and money. And thanks to Mattis and, yes, Trump, Putin will win the war of attrition he is playing.
Because that is what has been going on here from the beginning. Iran, China and Russia know what the U.S. power brokers want and they knew Trump would always cave to them. So, they knew exactly how to get Trump to over-commit to a strategy that cannot and will not ever come to fruition.
I warned that Trump’s blind-spot when it comes to Iran was his weakness. I warned that he would eventually justify breaking every foreign policy promise to fulfill his plan to unite the Sunni world behind him and Israel by giving them Iran.
The End of the Beginning
Welcome to today.
And welcome to the end of Trump’s presidency because now he is pot-committed to regime change while the vultures circle him domestically. He has become Bush the Lesser with arguably better hair.
He has alienated everyone the world over with sanctions and tariffs, hence his desire to “Get me out of here” as the G-20 wound down. No one believes he matters anymore. By tying himself to the Saudis and the Israelis the way he has he, the master negotiator, has left himself no room to negotiate.
And that is leading to everyone defying him versus cutting deals to carve up the world, end the empire and come home.
Trump is not leading here. He is being led. And change requires leaders. He has been led down the path so many presidents have, more militarism, more empire. Because when you’re the Emperor everyone is your enemy. This is the paranoia of a late-stage imperial mindset.
It certainly is the mindset of Trump’s closest advisors – Mattis, Bolton and Pompeo.
So Trump’s “America First’ instincts, no matter how genuine, have been twisted into something worse than evil, they are now ineffectual keepers of the status quo fueling ruinous neoconservative dreams of central Asian dominance.
And he has no one to blame but himself.
* * *
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- "Like Walking On Eggshells" – Women Say #MeToo Is Hurting Their Prospects For A Wall Street Career
Considering Wall Street’s reputation as a bastion of sexism and conservative values, the big banks and their peers on the buy side have largely avoided the embarrassing sexual misconduct scandals that have plagued other industries (like Hollywood, where seemingly every man – serial rapists and controlling boyfriends alike – who has ever mistreated a woman has received their comeuppance).
One reason for the disquieting silence could be that women on Wall Street are too afraid to speak up, fearing that they would be blackballed from an otherwise lucrative and successful career. Another is that banks – given that practicing risk mitigation is their primary craft and trade (though not always successfully) – and big buy side firms have such an aversion to negative publicity that they quietly take care of problem employees before word gets out. Or they ensure that it never does.
Well, on Monday, reporters at Bloomberg News posited another explanation: That Wall Street executives have become so terrified of being falsely accused of sexual misconduct – or of having their words and intentions “misinterpreted” – that they’re afraid to walk within 12 paces of a junior female employee without a phalanx of HR reps present to oversee the encounter.
Bloomberg even came up with a catchy name for the phenomenon: “The Pence Effect” – a reference to Mike Pence’s policy of never dining alone with a woman who isn’t his wife. Ironically, the “Pence Effect” has become so widespread that it’s starting to hurt the chances of young women hoping to break into the industry.
Across Wall Street, men are adopting controversial strategies for the #MeToo era and, in the process, making life even harder for women by creating an atmosphere of de facto gender segregation.
Interviews with more than 30 senior executives suggest many are spooked by #MeToo and struggling to cope. “It’s creating a sense of walking on eggshells,” said David Bahnsen, a former managing director at Morgan Stanley who’s now an independent adviser overseeing more than $1.5 billion.
This is hardly a single-industry phenomenon, as men across the country check their behavior at work, to protect themselves in the face of what they consider unreasonable political correctness – or to simply do the right thing. The upshot is forceful on Wall Street, where women are scarce in the upper ranks. The industry has also long nurtured a culture that keeps harassment complaints out of the courts and public eye, and has so far avoided a mega-scandal like the one that has engulfed Harvey Weinstein.
Put another way, the #MeToo movement is doing more to reinforce the “boys club” atmosphere on Wall Street than break it down.
One female banker who spoke with Bloomberg said that women in the industry are struggling to find ways to deal with this problem because “it’s hurting our careers.” And while it might save some Wall Streeters from an embarrassing, or potentially career changing, sexual harassment lawsuit, it could expose them to a legal action of a different kind: Gender discrimination.
“Women are grasping for ideas on how to deal with it, because it is affecting our careers,” said Karen Elinski, president of the Financial Women’s Association and a senior vice president at Wells Fargo & Co. “It’s a real loss.”
There’s a danger, too, for companies that fail to squash the isolating backlash and don’t take steps to have top managers be open about the issue and make it safe for everyone to discuss it, said Stephen Zweig, an employment attorney with FordHarrison.
“If men avoid working or traveling with women alone, or stop mentoring women for fear of being accused of sexual harassment,” he said, “those men are going to back out of a sexual harassment complaint and right into a sex discrimination complaint.”
While it might not seem like such a big deal to outsiders, being excluded from after work drinks (or strip club trips) with the boss can deprive female employees of valuable opportunities for mentorship. But while some men are loathe to have a one-on-one meeting with a junior female employee behind a closed door, others have pointed out that, in reality, avoiding the line between sexual harassment and normal every day interactions between a superior and their junior isn’t all that hard.
There are as many or more men who are responding in quite different ways. One, an investment adviser who manages about 100 employees, said he briefly reconsidered having one-on-one meetings with junior women. He thought about leaving his office door open, or inviting a third person into the room.
Finally, he landed on the solution: “Just try not to be an asshole.”
That’s pretty much the bottom line, said Ron Biscardi, chief executive officer of Context Capital Partners. “It’s really not that hard.”
But in the age of #believeallwomen, why even risk it?
- Patriotism Is Plummeting In America
Authored by Jeff Charles via LibertyNation.com,
It once seemed like a given that the majority of Americans felt pride in their country. Despite differing views on the role of government in American life, one sentiment the public appeared to have in common was a distinct love of country. Sure, there were individuals on the hard left who viewed the U.S. as an evil, imperialistic nation, but it felt like the majority of the populace believed that despite its flaws, America was still the greatest nation on the planet. A new study suggests that this has changed – and it is not hard to figure out why. Over the years, the far left has instituted a vicious smear campaign against the United States, and it appears those efforts have paid off.
The Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness (FLAG) recently published a reportanalyzing the level of patriotism among Americans. The researchers studied national pride among varying generations of United States citizens and found that the level of patriotism among Americans under the age of 38 dropped drastically. This group includes Generation Z and millennials, who the study indicates are “becoming unmoored from the institutions, knowledge, and spirit traditionally associated with American patriotism.”
Patriotism On The Decline
Here are some of the FLAG findings:
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About half of those surveyed believe that the United States is both racist and sexist.
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46% of younger Americans do not believe that “America is the greatest country in the world.”
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14% of millennials believe that “America was never a great country and it never will be.”
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46% of younger Americans think “America is more racist than other countries.”
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44% of younger Americans think former President Barack Obama had a “bigger impact” on the United States than George Washington.
The report also revealed a disturbing lack of knowledge when it comes to the constitution. It found that 84% of Americans do not know which specific rights are protected by the First Amendment.
To some, the results of the study are shocking. Nick Adams, the founder of FLAG, said:
“We suspected that we would find decreasing numbers of Americans well-versed in our nation’s most important principles and young people less patriotic than the generations that came before, but we were totally unprepared for what our national survey reveals: an epidemic of anti-Americanism. That half of millennials and Gen Z believe that the country in which they live is both ‘racist’ and ‘sexist’ shows that we have a major fraction of an entire generation that has been indoctrinated by teachers starting in grade school that America is what’s wrong with the world.”
Of course, when you look at how the progressive left has been gradually inserting their anti-American ideology into the culture like a political IV dripping poison into the nation’s bloodstream, it is not difficult to discern what has occurred in American society.
The Left Is Succeeding
The progressive left has retained control over the country’s most essential means of expressing ideas. In universities, leftist professors and administrators ensure that students are taught primarily progressive ideas while squelching the spread of any views opposing those beliefs.
Most of the nation’s newspapers and television news outlets are owned and run by progressives, who use these platforms to disseminate leftist ideology to the masses. Through skewed – and often deceptive – reportage, they seek to persuade the American public to adopt their views. They also use their influence to smear conservative politicians, organizations, and leaders.
To make matters worse, it is nearly impossible to go to a movie theater or turn on your favorite sitcom without being bombarded with a slew of progressive messages. The left’s hold on the entertainment industry has empowered them to further their agenda while preventing conservative views from getting into the mainstream.
FLAG’s report demonstrates that progressives have managed to convince young Americans to believe the worst about the United States; if those who continue to love the United States wish to see the paradigm shift back again, they must be willing to fight hard for it.
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- What Really Happened On Saturday? China Censors US Embassy's WeChat Posts On Trade War Truce
After a weekend in which the Trump administration, to much fanfare, announced a breakthrough in the trade war with China according to which Beijing would purchase substantial amounts of US farm products and remove barriers to trade in exchange for a delay of new tariffs and higher tariff rates, Donald Trump left his top advisers scrambling on Monday to explain just what was in the trade deal he claimed he’d struck with China to reduce tariffs on U.S. cars exported to the country – an agreement that doesn’t exist on paper and hasn’t been confirmed in Beijing.
As we reported earlier, Trump announced the deal in a two-sentence Twitter post late Sunday. The White House provided no additional information, and in a briefing in Beijing a few hours later, a spokesman for the foreign ministry declined to comment on any changes to car tariffs. Asked about the agreement on Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, coyly dialed back expectations and added qualifiers.
“I’ll call them ‘commitments’ at this point, which are – commitments are not necessarily a trade deal, but it’s stuff that they’re going to look at and presumably implement,” Kudlow told reporters during a briefing that followed TV interviews and informal briefings by him and Mnuchin earlier in the day.
That wasn’t the extent of the confusion. As part of the broader trade truce, the U.S. said it had agreed to hold off on raising tariffs Jan. 1 while negotiations took place. Bizarrely, Kudlow initially said that the Chinese had 90 days from Jan. 1 to come up with “structural changes” regarding intellectual property protections, forced technology transfer and other issues. The White House later corrected him to say that the 90 days actually began on Dec. 1, Saturday.
With both sides apparently having their own version of what actually transpired during the Saturday night dinner, the confusion was exacerbated by the absence of a joint statement from the U.S. and China following the dinner. Financial markets were left struggling to digest talks that the White House portrayed as a major victory for the president.
“That’s what happens when you don’t have the detailed negotiations going into the summit” and end up with the “broad swath of a 35,000-foot deal,” said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It’s risky. There’s certainly no guarantees that it will produce the outcomes that we want.”
But where things got truly bizarre, is that according to the SCMP, a social media post by the US embassy describing the trade agreement between the two nations was being partially censored on Monday, with the WeChat article visible but blocked from forwarding or sharing. The embassy WeChat posts about the outcome of the talks were in English and Chinese.
At the same time, separate posts on the death of former president George H.W. Bush were not similarly affected, and could be shared.
As noted above, the official statements made by China and the United States about what was agreed at the meeting in Argentina between presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump contained marked differences and omissions on both sides, which in the absence of a joint statement statement is to be expected. However, for China to censor the US version of events suggests that not only does China have a different take on what really happened on Saturday, but it also disagrees with the US take and – more importantly – wants to prevent the Chinese population from learning what Trump has been telling the US about what took place.
For example, the Chinese statement did not include mention of the 90-day deadline or a requirement that the nation begin buying more US farm, energy and other products.
The US embassy has repeatedly used its account on Tencent Holdings’ WeChat network and other social media to post statements and news critical of China, including about the detention of Muslims in China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. It was unclear if Beijing had ever gone so far as to censor official US communications, as it did today.
The US embassy declined to comment on a specific post, but a spokesman said the embassy faced regular and routine blocking of social media posts in China.
- Not Lovin' It – Researchers Find Feces On Every McDonald's Touchscreen Tested
Authored by John Vibes via The Mind Unleashed blog,
A study recently conducted by researchers at London Metropolitan University found that touchscreens used by customers at multiple McDonald’s locations were covered in fecal bacteria. Dr. Paul Matawele, one of the lead researchers in the study, explained that the spread of this bacteria could lead to serious infections.
“We were all surprised how much gut and faecal bacteria there was on the touchscreen machines. These cause the kind of infections that people pick up in hospitals. For instance Enterococcus faecalis is part of the flora of gastrointestinal tracts of healthy humans and other mammals. It is notorious in hospitals for causing hospital acquired infections,”Matawele said.
Researchers tested eight different McDonalds locations throughout the London and Birmingham area, and each location had its own collection of different viruses and bacteria, from listeria at one location to Staphylococcus at another.
“Seeing Staphylococcus on these machines is worrying because it is so contagious. It starts around people’s noses, if they touch their nose with their fingers and then transfer it to the touchscreen someone else will get it, and if they have an open cut which it gets into, then it can be dangerous. There is a lot of worries at the moment that staphylococcus is becoming resistant to antibiotics. However, it is still really dangerous in places like Africa where it can cause toxic shock,” Dr. Matawele said.
“Listeria is another rare bacterium we were shocked to find on touchscreen machines as again this can be very contagious and a problem for those with a weak immune system,”Matawele added.
Meanwhile, a vast majority of the samples tested positive for traces of the bacteria Proteus.
Dr. Matewele explains, “Proteus can be found in human and animal faeces. It is also widely distributed in soil. It can cause urinary tract infections and is also one of the hospital acquired infections where it may responsible for septicaemia. Klebsiella is also from the gut and mouth, they are associated with urinary tract infections, septicemia and diarrhoea. Some species can infect the respiratory tract resulting in pneumonia.”
Customers receive their food immediately after touching these screens, and they often wash their hands before ordering their food, instead of after. A spokesperson for McDonald’s said that the machines are cleaned regularly throughout the day.
The statement from McDonald’s said, “Our self-order screens are cleaned frequently throughout the day. All of our restaurants also provide facilities for customers to wash their hands before eating.”
However, Matewele said that the same bacteria could be found on the machines for several days. This study raises concerns about touchscreen technology in general, as they are becoming more common for public use in fast food restaurants and grocery stores.
“Touchscreen technology is being used more and more in our daily lives but these results show people should not eat food straight after touching them, they are unhygienic and can spread disease. Someone can be very careful about their own hygiene throughout the day but it could all be undone by using a touchscreen machine once,” Matewele says.
While touchscreens present an obvious concern, it is likely that most surfaces in public places contain a variety of different germs, so it is always best to be cautious and hygienic.
- Man Suffering "Psychotic Crisis" Pleads Guilty To Trump Assassination Attempt Involving Forklift
A North Dakota man pleaded guilty in federal court on Friday to stealing a forklift as part of a plan to “flip” President Trump’s limo and “kill the president,” according to US Assistant State’s Attorney Brandi Sasse Russell.
“The intent was to basically try to get to the limo, flip the limo and get to the president and he wanted to kill the president” on the day Trump was to speak at the Andeavor Mandan Refinery about tax reform, said Sasse Russell according to the Grand Forks Herald.
Gregory Lee Leingang, 42, was charged in federal court with one count of attempting to enter or remain in a restricted building and on grounds while using a dangerous weapon, as well one count of attempting to damage government property. –Grand Forks Herald
Just before Trump’s 2 p.m. arrival on September 6, 2017, Leingang stole a forklift in the city of Mandan and entered the motorcade route, according to Sasse Russell. After the forklift became stuck in a gated area, Leingang fled but was later arrested by Mandan police, where he would later admit his plan to local detectives and a member of the United States Secret Service.
“He was suffering a serious psychiatric crisis during this incident,” said Leingang’s public defender, Michelle Monteiro, during his court hearing.
Leingang told U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Hovland on Friday that he is diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and bipolar disorder, and he has been on and off medications since he was 12 years old. –Grand Forks Herald
Earlier in the day, Leingang set two fires at the state parole and probation office, as well as the Bismarck Municipal Ballpark maintenance shop. He pleaded guilty to setting the fires and was sentenced to 10 years in state prison. He was also sentenced to five years for stealing the forklift, and another five years for an unrelated burglary that he pleaded guilty to. His estimated release from state prison is 2038, while a federal sentencing hearing is scheduled for February.
He is currently seeing a psychiatrist and therapist in prison and is reportedly doing well now according to his attorney.
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