24 Feb 2015

Sovietization Of Capitalism

Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss removing the document to remove the men who rule our bureaucratic world - from their mountains of derivatives paperwork, which has added nothing to global GDP to the piles of QE, which has added merely more paper gains to an over-bloated stock market.

LiveScience, Stop Spreading Lies!

By A few days ago, LiveScience published an article titled Gendered Grammar Linked to Global Sexism by Stephanie Pappas, an article which quotes researcher Jennifer Prewitt-Freilino, a psychologist at the Rhode Island School of Design who is quoted as saying that “more and more research that is starting to come out looking at grammatical gender and language suggests that it has more of an impact than you would think.”
The problem is that the article is either ideological claptrap at best or a bigoted lie at worst. I will explain why, with quotes directly from the piece.
The article categorizes languages of the planet as being either “natural gender languages” (i.e. languages who don’t assign gender to nouns, such as Finnish or English) or “gendered languages” (i.e. languages who do assign gender to nouns, such as Spanish or French). This categorization is imperfect to say the least, but if that were the only problem with the narrative promoted by LiveScience, I wouldn’t bother writing this response.

The Police States Of America - Elderly New Jersey Man Faces 10 Years In Jail For Possession Of 18th Century Pistol

By Michael Krieger: You just can’t make this stuff up. You really can’t. Another day, another elderly American peasant pursued by a “justice” system in which real crooks receive taxpayer bailouts to pay themselves bonuses, while perfectly normal citizen behavior is criminalized.
The victim this time is a 72-year-old New Jersey man named Gordon Van Gilder, a retired school teacher, who faces 10 years in jail for possessing a unloaded antique 225-year-old flintlock pistol.
Read it and weep serfs. From Reason:

Gordon Van Gilder is a retired New Jersey school teacher and collector of 18th century memorabilia. That innocuous hobby could land the 72-year-old behind bars for the rest of his life.

Van Gilder owns an unloaded antique 225-year-old flintlock pistol, the possession of which carries a potential 10-year prison sentence and mandatory minimum sentence of three to five-and-a-half years with no chance for parole.

Revolt In Athens: Syriza Central Committee Member Says "Leadership Strategy Has Failed Miserably"

Tyler Durden's picture Not everybody is ignoring that fact that just days after the new Prime Minister promised the Greek population on prime time TV that the loathed bailout program wouldn't be extended and that Greece would have a fresh start - i.e., the mandate it was elected on - one without austerity, Greece folded on virtually every demand, to the point where the European Commission may itself have drafted the "reform agreement" that the Greek finance minister was said to have created.
One person who may be starting a splinter revolt within Syriza itself is Stathis Kouvelakis, a member of the central committee of the leftist organization, a teacher of political theory at King's College, and the latest to demonstrate that the Syriza facade of cohesive acceptance of the past week's "negotiations", is starting to crumble.
From his post "The Alternative In Greece", translated by Wayne Hall, and appearing first in Jacobinmag.

The strategy of Syriza’s leadership has failed miserably. But it’s not too late to avert total defeat.
Let us begin with what should be indisputable: the Eurogroup agreement that the Greek government was dragged into on Friday amounts to a headlong retreat.

USA And UK Kangaroo Courts On Campus: ‘Martial Law Against Men’

By Dan Bell: In 2011, the US Department of Education’s assistant for civil rights, Russlynn H Ali, wrote to universities across America instructing them that they must aggressively investigate all allegations of sexual assault on campus, regardless of whether the police chose to do so.
The directive, now infamously referred to as the ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, stated that if university disciplinary procedures failed to pursue allegations of sexual assault, they would be in violation of US equality legislation and would be stripped of government funds.
The directive, fuelled by a popular panic around an alleged ‘rape culture’ on campus, triggered a proliferation of a Kafkaesque tribunals and kangaroo courts across US universities. Four years on, dozens of railroaded male students are suing their Alma Maters for breaching their constitutional right to a fair trial, and in October last year, 28 Harvard Law professors published an open letter stating that the new procedures, ‘lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process [and] are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused’.
So far, so American. Except, astonishingly, there is now a drive to impose this discredited system of parallel justice on to campuses in the UK.

The Insanity Of The American Empire

Recently declassified documents establish that the treacherous US government provided hydrogen bomb technology to JSIL, the Jewish State of Israel in the Levant. We discuss the USS Liberty and how it is possible America would arm the so-called Jewish State of Israel with the most dangerous weapons known to man, when in fact Israel routinely manipulates American sons and daughters into wars for Israeli expansion and even murders Americans outright. Ken O'Keefe

A Homeless Man

By Mike Buchanan: Around 90% of street homeless people are men. It’s a scandal that in one of the richest countries on the planet, street homelessness exists. The average age of death of a homeless person is 43, compared with a life expectancy for non-homeless people of 73 years.
Two days ago, after parking in a car park, I walked towards the town centre. On the way a poorly-dressed and sad-looking man who I took to be roughly my own age (57) stopped me, and said:

Excuse me, sir, do you have a pound for a homeless man?
As it happened, I had no money on me, so I explained my position and apologised for not being able to give him anything. He thanked me, and went on his way.
Once in town, I drew some money from an ATM, with a view to giving him £5 if I were to see him again. Walking back to the car, I heard a very loud commotion emanating from a BT phone booth. It was the homeless man, smashing the phone into the sides of the booth, against the machine, and howling – HOWLING – with rage and pain. I have never in my life witnessed such an expression of extreme rage and pain. In his tirade I caught this:

Even if I were dying, I couldn’t fucking call anybody!!!

Big Barbie Is Watching You - Meet The WiFi Connected Barbie Doll That Talks To Your Children And Records Them And You

By Michael Krieger: Earlier this month, I highlighted the fact that the latest Samsung Smart TV can and will listen to your conversations, and will share the details with a third party in the post: A Very Slippery Slope – Yes, Your Samsung Smart TV Can Listen to Your Private Conversations.
Well a couple of weeks later, and we learn that Mattel’s latest high-tech Barbie doll will bring the “internet of things” right into your child’s playpen. From the The Register:
Toymaker Mattel has unveiled a high-tech Barbie that will listen to your child, record its words, send them over the internet for processing, and talk back to your kid. It will email you, as a parent, highlights of your youngster’s conversations with the toy.

If Samsung’s spying smart TVs creeped you out, this doll may be setting off alarm bells too – so we drilled into what’s going on.
The Hello Barbie doll is developed by San Francisco startup ToyTalk, which says it has more than $31m in funding from Greylock Partners, Charles River Ventures, Khosla Ventures, True Ventures and First Round Capital, and others.
Its Wi-Fi-connected Barbie toy has a microphone, a speaker, a small embedded computer with a battery that lasts about an hour, and Wi-Fi hardware. When you press a button on her belt buckle, Barbie wakes up, asks a question, and turns on its microphone while the switch is held down.

Bigotry Exposed: Tracy Crawford of Roots ‘N Wings Montessori

By Recently certain sectors of the Men’s Human Rights Movement were alerted to the comments of a Montessori school director on the website Quora1 in which she openly stated that she refused to hire male teachers, assuming them all by default to be potential sexual predators.
She was never publicly identified. Until today.
Quora is a lot like Yahoo! Answers; people post questions, and the Quora community answers. This particular question was “Why aren’t there many men teaching in preschools and elementary schools? Do they hate being around children below the age 10?” Here are screenshots of her response and commentary:

CONSPIRACY THEORY + THE MYTH OF TSIPRAS - WB7

The Forgotten War - Understanding The Incredible Debacle Left Behind By NATO In Libya

In retrospect, Obama’s intervention in Libya was an abject failure, judged even by its own standards. Libya has not only failed to evolve into a democracy; it has devolved into a failed state. Violent deaths and other human rights abuses have increased severalfold. Rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Qaddafi did during his last decade in power, Libya now serves as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other U.S. interests as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian cooperation at the UN, and fueling Syria’s civil war.

As bad as Libya’s human rights situation was under Qaddafi, it has gotten worse since NATO ousted him. Immediately after taking power, the rebels perpetrated scores of reprisal killings, in addition to torturing, beating, and arbitrarily detaining thousands of suspected Qaddafi supporters. The rebels also expelled 30,000 mostly black residents from the town of Tawergha and burned or looted their homes and shops, on the grounds that some of them supposedly had been mercenaries. Six months after the war, Human Rights Watch declared that the abuses “appear to be so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity.”

As a consequence of such pervasive violence, the UN estimates that roughly 400,000 Libyans have fled their homes, a quarter of whom have left the country altogether. 

– From Alan Kuperman’s excellent Foreign Affairs article: Obama’s Libya Debacle
Alternatively: