Society's ChildS


Pirates

Best of the Web: Cash App tech mogul Bob Lee, 43, knifed to death outside luxury San Fran high-rise

Emma James and Rohan Gupta
Daily Mail
Wed, 05 Apr 2023 21:46 UTC
bob lee murdered cash app
Tech executive and investor Bob Lee, who helped create Android and Cash App, was stabbed to death in San Francisco on Tuesday night.
A tech mogul who helped create Android and Cash App, has been stabbed to death in San Francisco.

Bob Lee, 43, was attacked in the city's plush downtown residential Rincon Hill neighborhood at 2.35am on Tuesday.

Police were called to the 300 block of Main Street near the entrance of a high-rise close to the waterfront and found the dad-of-two suffering from multiple stab wounds.

Comment: Could this have anything to do with it?: Defunding police has turned 'progressive' San Francisco into a haven for shoplifters, thieves and drug addicts





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Jet5

Fatter recruits now welcome as Air Force revises its rules

Rachel S. Cohen
Air Force Times
Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:01 UTC
air force obese soldier
© Senior Airman Jarrod Grammel/Air ForceThe Air Force is allowing recruits to join with significantly more body fat. But within a year, they will still have to pass the new body composition test that is based on a person’s height-to-waist ratio.
The Air Force has loosened its restrictions on body fat for new recruits, one of the latest moves to grow the pool of potential applicants amid the military's recruiting crisis.

In the past, men and women's bodies needed to be 20% or 28% fat, respectively, to be eligible for service. That benchmark is now 26% for men and 36% for women, Air Force Recruiting Service spokesperson Leslie Brown said Monday.

The American Council on Exercise categorizes as obese those with body fat percentages over 25% for men and 32% for women. The old Air Force benchmark fell into the range of "acceptable" fat, according to the organization.

Comment: See also:

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Colosseum

The banking crisis gets worse: $1.7 trillion in unrealized losses loom as US banks rapidly bleed deposits

Michael
The Economic Collapse Blog
Mon, 03 Apr 2023 12:00 UTC
federal reserve
If our banking system can't find a way to turn things around, our entire economy will soon be in a world of hurt. When banks get into trouble, they start getting really tight with their money. That means fewer mortgages, fewer commercial real estate loans, fewer auto loans and fewer credit cards being issued. So it should greatly concern all of us that U.S. banks are bleeding deposits at an absolutely staggering pace right now. During the week ending March 15th, 98.4 billion dollars was pulled out of U.S. banks. That was really bad, but we just learned that things got even worse the next week. During the week ending March 22nd, 126 billion dollars was pulled out of U.S. banks...
Depositors drained another $126 billion from U.S. banks during the week ending March 22, according to new Federal Reserve data. This time the outflow came from the nation's largest institutions.
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Bullseye

Yes! Twitter labels NPR as state-affiliated media

Ari Hoffman
The Post Millennial
Wed, 05 Apr 2023 22:33 UTC
NPR graphic
© National Public Radio/Twitter
NPR was labeled as "US state-affiliated media" by Twitter on Tuesday night.

According to the social media platform's guidelines, "Labels on government accounts provide additional context for accounts heavily engaged in geopolitics and diplomacy."

"Labels on state-affiliated accounts provide additional context about accounts that are controlled by certain official representatives of governments, state-affiliated media entities, and individuals associated with those entities."

"The label appears on the profile page of the relevant Twitter account and on the Tweets sent by and shared from these accounts. Labels contain information about the country the account is affiliated with and whether it is operated by a government representative or state-affiliated media entity."

Comment: Anyone who has had the misfortune of tuning into NPR in the last few years knows that when its news segments aren't promoting Democrats and dissing Republicans, its programming has devolved into climate hysteria and/or rampant whining about "racism", right down to the local affiliates. Stick to the classical music feed.

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Arrow Down

Here's why simply living in the US is likely to reduce your life expectancy

Bradley Blankenship
RT
Mon, 03 Apr 2023 20:06 UTC
Hands
© ugurhan/Getty Images
The average American lifespan keeps getting shorter, even as comparably rich countries rebound and recover after Covid-19

Recently, National Public Radio (NPR) in the US published a story titled 'Live free and die? The sad state of US life expectancy' that explored the great divide between the United States and peer countries on life expectancy.

While most countries experienced a dip during the Covid-19 pandemic and rebounded after vaccines and other treatments were rolled out, American life expectancy has essentially fallen off a cliff and never came back.

The graph published by NPR is shocking. It shows that US life expectancy is lower than in Cuba or Lebanon. The number has been known since just before Christmas when health officials announced that the country's life expectancy had dropped starkly for a second year in a row to 76 years.

However, last week more bad news arrived after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that maternal mortality in the country reached a high in 2021. And another paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) found rising mortality rates among US children and adolescents. This means you can't blame Covid-19 exclusively for the drop in life expectancy and assume it'll jump right back up as soon as the pandemic is finally dealt with.
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Pirates

'Guerrilla group' claims responsibility for Tatarsky bombing


RT
Wed, 05 Apr 2023 11:48 UTC
Vladlen Tatarsky
© Vorontsova/RIA NovostiA billboard erected in memory of the deceased military correspondent Vladlen Tatarsky who was murdered in a cafe in St Petersburg
The St. Petersburg division of the so-called National Republican Army (NRA) has claimed it was behind the murder of military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, according to a Telegram statement shared by former Russian State Duma Deputy Ilya Ponomarev.

Ponomarev, who has been branded a "foreign agent" by Moscow, previously claimed to be the mouthpiece of the NRA, although there is no conclusive evidence that the group actually exists.

According to the statement, the NRA carried out the attack against "a group of Z-activists and personally against the well-known arsonist and propagandist, war criminal Maksim Fomin," referring to Tatarsky's real name.

The group insisted that the bombing was "prepared and carried out by us autonomously," and without assistance from foreign forces or special services. The NRA also denied the involvement of Darya Trepova, who is the main suspect in the blogger's assassination.
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Snakes in Suits

New details emerge from questioning of Tatarsky murder suspect - media


RT
Tue, 04 Apr 2023 13:17 UTC
trepova
© Ministry of Internal Affairs of RussiaDaria Trepova, detained in St. Petersburg on suspicion of involvement in organizing the murder of military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky
Darya Trepova claims she was set up, according to the Fontanka news outlet...

The main suspect in the murder of prominent Russian military blogger Vladlen Tatarsky, Darya Trepova, has confessed details of her involvement in the bomb attack, according to the Fontanka news outlet.

Tatarsky was killed in an explosion on Sunday at a café in St. Petersburg, after Trepova handed him a statuette that contained an improvised explosive device (IED). The bombing, which also wounded 40 people, has been classified as a terrorist attack.


Comment: See also:

"Legitimate target" — Bellingcat defends terror attack at St. Petersburg cafe

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Footprints

France braces for further protests


RT
Wed, 05 Apr 2023 13:23 UTC
protest
© Thomas Samson/AFPStudent protest against pension reform bill • Pantheon, Paris, France
French trade unions called for record turnout at protests on Thursday, after negotiations with the government over a controversial pension reform bill broke down. France has been consumed by protests and riots since President Emmanuel Macron's government hiked the retirement age without a vote in parliament.

Union representatives met with Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne on Wednesday, warning beforehand that they would walk out if Borne refused to entertain the idea of bringing the retirement age for most workers back to 62 from 64. Borne refused, and the union representatives walked out, calling for strikes and mass demonstrations the following day.

Cyril Chabanier, who heads the CFTC union, told reporters:
"We again told the prime minister that the only democratic outcome could be the text's withdrawal. The prime minister replied that she wished to maintain the text, a grave decision."
Sophie Binet, leader of the CGT union, said:
"We decided to put an end to this useless meeting. The prime minister has chosen to send us back to the streets."

Comment: See also: France on verge of 'democratic breakdown', Macron warned

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HAL9000

Bill Gates dismisses mounting calls to pause AI Chatbot development


Zerohedge
Wed, 05 Apr 2023 05:45 UTC
Bill Gates
Reuters reports that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates dismissed calls to halt the development of more advanced AI chatbots more powerful than OpenAI's GPT-4. Last week, an open letter signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio called for a six-month pause in developing new AI tools. Gates stated that the proposed pause in AI chatbot development would not "solve the challenges."

According to Gates, the focus should be on effectively integrating AI technology into society. He finds it hard to understand how a pause could work globally with so many firms working on the technology.
"I don't think asking one particular group to pause solves the challenges," the billionaire said on Monday.

"Clearly, there are huge benefits to these things... what we need to do is identify the tricky areas," he noted.
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USA

While we're obsessing about the economy and the Fed, society is unraveling

Charles Hugh Smith
oftwominds.com
Wed, 29 Mar 2023 00:00 UTC
fabric of society


The market and the government will continue to promote and support a neofeudal status quo until they are forced by society to restore the common good and opportunity.

Of the three primary dynamics of human endeavor--the market, government and society--we focus almost exclusively on the first two. Society is rarely considered as a force of its own. It is implicitly viewed as reactive to the market economy and government, the churning wake left as the market and government chart the course.

In other words, society is secondary to the economy and governance, the venue of fashions, trends, entertainment, culture wars, etc., fodder for media and social media, a reflection of what's happening in the market and government.

As I explain in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal, this is a misunderstanding of society's role as a force that changes the economy and governance in profound ways.

We give social transformation short shrift because it's not easy to study or understand. Social change is amorphous and doesn't lend itself to quantification like the market or the legal structures of government policy. We end up relying on snapshots such as opinion polls that are inherently limited in scope and accuracy. Respondents tend to give answers they they believe are expected or reflect their views of the moment. Other data is collected from groups that are self-selecting.
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