Society's ChildS


Eye 1

'Kind of humiliating': Student reacts to Biden calling her a 'lying, dog-faced pony soldier'

Zachary Halaschak
Washington Examiner
Tue, 11 Feb 2020 05:00 UTC
joe biden
The 21-year-old college student whom 2020 Democrat Joe Biden referred to as a "lying, dog-faced pony soldier" said the insult was "kind of humiliating."

During a New Hampshire campaign stop on Sunday, Madison Moore, a student at Mercer University, asked the former vice president a question about his underwhelming finish in the Iowa caucuses and got an unusual response.

"How do you explain the performance in Iowa, and why should voters believe that you can win the national election?" she asked.

Biden, 77, responded by asking her if she had ever been to a caucus, and, after Moore nodded, he quipped, "No, you haven't. You're a lying, dog-faced pony soldier."
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Majority of Americans would vote against socialist candidate for president, poll finds

Carl Campanile
New York Post
Tue, 11 Feb 2020 18:19 UTC
Bernie Sanders
© Getty ImagesBernie Sanders
Americans are not happy with the prospect of a socialist candidate like Bernie Sanders for president, a new poll finds.

A majority of US residents — 53 percent — said they would vote against a socialist candidate for president, the Gallup poll released Tuesday reveals. Meanwhile, only 45 percent of respondents in the poll said they would vote for a socialist.

In fact, socialism was the only category in the poll rejected by a majority of Americans.

For example, 60 percent of Americans said they would vote for an atheist while 38 percent said they wouldn't. And more than nine in 10 Americans said they would vote for a presidential candidate nominated by their party who is black, Catholic, Hispanic, Jewish or a woman.

The findings come as Sanders (I-Vt.) — a self-described Democratic socialist — is a top-tier candidate vying to win the Democratic nomination for president. He was leading in polls to win Tuesday's New Hampshire primary and has surged ahead of Joe Biden in national polls.

There is a political divide over the socialist candidate question, however.

Comment: See also:

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Yellow Vest

Sinn Fein's historic breakthrough is a long-overdue rejection of the status quo and a cosy two-party system

Danielle Ryan
RT
Mon, 10 Feb 2020 21:06 UTC
Sinn Fein's Mary Lou McDonald
© AFP / Ben Stansall
It's been described as "seismic," a "tsunami," a "monsoon." Whatever you call it, Ireland has witnessed a political earthquake, with long-time outcast Sinn Fein stunning the establishment to become the island's most popular party.

By winning the popular vote, the left-wing Sinn Fein (SF), long hampered by its historic associations with the IRA and the violent struggle against the British state in Northern Ireland, has managed to pull off a feat no other political party has in almost a century.

To an outsider unfamiliar with the finer details of Irish politics, the numbers themselves may not seem so significant: SF won the popular vote with 24.5 percent, while the two center-right establishment parties, Fianna Fail (FF) and Fine Gael (FG), won 22.2 and 20.9 percent respectively. Only when you put it in its historical context does the significance of the SF rise become clear.

Under Ireland's proportional representation voting system, first preference votes for SF were a miniscule 1.9 percent in 1987. A decade later in 1997, that figure had grown to a measly 2.5 percent. By 2016, it rose to 13.8 percent, but the party was still seen as politically insignificant. Four years later and under new leadership, SF has managed to become the most popular party in the country and, finally, broke Ireland's two-party system.


Comment: Populist wave reaches Ireland: Sinn Fein stuns establishment, becoming first left-wing party to win Irish general election

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Propaganda

German newspaper admits most boat migrants are fake refugees

Arthur Lyons
Voice of Europe
Sun, 09 Feb 2020 03:39 UTC
boat migrants refugees
A prominent German newspaper has admitted that the majority of migrants who make their way to Europe from across the Mediterranean sea are not legitimate refugees.

In a piece last week, Marcel Leubecher, a political editor for the popular daily German newspaper Die Welt, noted the significant uptick in the number of migrants arriving in Italy from across the Mediterranean.

In January, 1275 boat migrants arrived in Italy, including migrants that made it to shore by themselves without the help of NGOs. Leubecher then notes that number of migrants who arrived by boat has been "above the previous year's figure every month since Septemeber."
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Bizarro Earth

UN staffer warns that 5G is a 'war on humanity'

Claire Edwards
Waking Times
Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00 UTC
un staffer warns of 5g
The first eight months of WWII with no fighting was called The Phoney War. Using millimetre waves as a fifth-generation or 5G wireless communications technology is a phoney war of another kind.

This phoney war is also silent, but this time shots are being fired - in the form of laser-like beams of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) from banks of thousands of tiny antennas[1] - and almost no one in the firing line knows that they are being silently, seriously and irreparably injured.

In the first instance, 5G is likely to make people electro-hypersensitive (EHS).[2] Perhaps it was sitting in front of two big computer screens for many of the 18 years I worked at the UN that made me EHS. When the UN Office at Vienna installed powerful WiFi and cellphone access points - designed to serve large, public areas - in narrow, metal-walled corridors throughout the Vienna International Centre in December 2015, I was ill continuously for seven months.

I did my best for two and a half years to alert the UN staff union, administration and medical service to the danger to the health of UN staff of EMR from these access points, but was ignored. That's why, in May 2018, I took the issue to the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres [transcript]. He is a physicist and electrical engineer and lectured on telecommunications signals early in his career, yet asserted that he knew nothing about this. He undertook to ask the World Health Organization to look into it, but seven months later those public access points remain in place. I received no replies to my many follow-up emails.
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Attention

Student-teacher strikes across France met with more heavy-handed policing


RT
Wed, 12 Feb 2020 03:23 UTC
French police protests
© AFP / STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN
Already beleaguered by pension reform protests and the Yellow Vest movement, France is now grappling with yet more protests, this time by students and teachers fighting new reforms to the country's baccalaureate high school exams.

In a rare display of solidarity between erstwhile enemies since time immemorial, students and teachers alike blocked-off schools and engaged in brief clashes with police as they resisted the introduction of continuous assessment (E3C (Common Continuous Control Tests)).
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Police Scotland at odds with England & Wales forces, as they suspend controversial facial recognition software


RT
Wed, 12 Feb 2020 03:16 UTC
facial recognition video cameras
© Global Look Press / bildgehege
The rollout of controversial facial recognition software is to be put on hold by Police Scotland following a report by MSPs that claimed it was "unfit" for use, as England and Wales police continue to operate the technology.

A justice sub-committee of lawmakers in the Scottish Parliament in Holyrood published the report on Tuesday, concluding that there would be "no justifiable basis" for Police Scotland to invest in the software due to privacy and human rights concerns.
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Briefcase

Journalist Abby Martin sues state of Georgia over law requiring pledge of allegiance to Israel

Alan Macleod
Mint Press News
Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00 UTC
Abby Martin
© Facebook ScreenshotJournalist Abby Martin announces a federal free speech lawsuit to overturn Georgia's unconstitutional Israel boycott in partnership with CAIR and the Partnership for Justice Fund.
After refusing to sign a pledge of allegiance to the state of Israel, the state of Georgia shut down a media literacy conference featuring journalist and filmmaker Abby Martin at Georgia Southern University. Martin had recently released a documentary critical of the Israeli government called "Gaza Fights for Freedom." Now she is suing the state, claiming the decision is a violation of the First Amendment. Along with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF), today she filed a federal free speech lawsuit against the university system of Georgia.

Martin was dismayed by the university's decision: "This censorship of my talk based on forced compliance to anti-BDS laws in Georgia is just one level of a nationwide campaign to protect Israel from grassroots pressure. We must stand firmly opposed to these efforts and not cower in fear to these blatant violations of free speech," she said.


Comment: Watch Abby Martin speak truth to oppressive power as only a few journalists in this day and age do:



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Cow Skull

"We made it up": Ex-Infowars editor says he published lies about Muslim community to spread hate

Igor Derysh
Salon
Fri, 06 Dec 2019 11:00 UTC
Alex Jones of InfoWars
© Drew Angerer/Getty Images/InfoWarsAlex Jones of InfoWars
"And for what? Clickbait headlines, YouTube views?" former video editor Josh Owens writes in New York Times essay

A former Infowars video editor admitted that the outlet fabricated lies about a Muslim community in New York to push host Alex Jones' threats of sharia law in the United States.

Josh Owens, who spent years working for Infowars, wrote an essay for The New York Times Magazine describing how Jones' media empire made up facts to fit its narrative and how employees were subjected to Jones' angry, violent outbursts.

The day before Jones interviewed then-candidate Donald Trump on his show in 2015, Owens wrote that he traveled to Islamberg, a Muslim community in rural upstate New York, where Jones had instructed him to investigate what he called "the American Caliphate."

Though the Muslims that lived in the community had not been connected to any violence and some had publicly denounced ISIS, Jones wanted to push the far-right rumor that the community was a "potential terrorist-training center," Owens wrote.

Comment: So whatever accurate and good reporting Jones has done over the years can now get easily discredited by news of his fervent lying and really fake news. What an egomaniacal doofus.

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Life Preserver

Trump's greatest vulnerability is the economy - just ask poor Americans

Reverend William Barber
The Guardian
Tue, 11 Feb 2020 21:06 UTC
white rural poor americans
© Travis Dove/The New York TimesFour in 10 poor Americans are white, and many live in rural areas, yet most of the dollars to help the poor go to aid minorities in cities.
Rather than offer a report on the State of the Union, Donald Trump used his annual primetime slot in the House of Representatives to host a re-election rally. The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, summed up the sentiment of the House majority when she stood behind Trump and ripped the text of his speech in half. "I tore up a manifesto of mistruths," she later said. But of all the lies he told, the president is proudest of the economy he claims is booming. Poor and low-income Americans know that the economy is, in fact, his greatest vulnerability.

Yes, the Dow is at a record high and official unemployment rates are lower than they have been in decades. But measuring the health of the economy by these stats is like measuring the 19th-century's plantation economy by the price of cotton. However much the slaveholders profited, enslaved people and the poor white farmers whose wages were stifled by free labor did not see the benefits of the boom.

In America today, 140 million people are poor or low wealth. While three individuals own as much wealth as all of them put together, the real cost of living has soared as wages have stagnated. Since the 1970s, the number of people who are paying more than a third of their monthly income in rent has doubled, and there is not a single county in the nation where a person working full-time at minimum wage can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment. Sixty per cent of African Americans are poor or low-income, as are 64% of Hispanics, but the largest single racial group among America's poor and low-income - 66 million Americans - are white.

Comment: Trump isn't a 'threat to our democracy' because, as the author rightly pointed out, it's functionally a plutocracy - and always has been.

The real 'threat to our democracy' is the Democratic establishment, which won't do as the Republican establishment did in 2016 and yield to a real challenger.

What the US needs is for democracy to actually function within the Democratic Party, which in turn would force Trump's Republican Party to compete with them on the fundamental issue of eradicating or at least alleviating poverty.

Trump rants about the USA 'never becoming socialist' and holds up the craziest exemplars of lefty ideology expressed by middle-class coastal elites to earn strawman points. The Democratic establishment then reacts by playing kayfabe with him. Both then get away with ignoring the tens of millions of dirt-poor Americans whose atrocious conditions would make developing countries' 'authoritarian leaders' blush.

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