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'We were playing with them': Pro-Trump Kremlin trolls on Samantha Bee exposed as hoaxers


RT
Sat, 12 Nov 2016 21:24 UTC
pro-Trump Kremlin troll
© RT
RT tracked down the alleged Kremlin trolls, who appeared on Samantha Bee's show claiming they were paid to meddle with US election - just to find out they were hoaxers who tricked the American TV crew into paying them for appearing on Full Frontal.

The Clinton camp was never able to back its claims of Russia meddling in the US election with any actual proof. But the host of the US comedy show "Full Frontal", Samantha Bee, apparently tried to help Hillary and organized an interview, with people that she described as paid Kremlin trolls.

"The Russian government has office buildings full of trolls, disseminating pro-Russian points of view in comment section all over the internet," Bee said in her show.
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Chess

Pawns fighting pawns: The weaponization of the American public

Dylan Charles
Waking Times
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 17:07 UTC
flag protest
With the election behind us, and the cloud of 24/7 candidate propaganda lifting, some deep truths about the state of American society are becoming evident, and the slow-coming, but predictable effects of social engineering are more visible than ever.

Decades of fear programming, dumbing down, authoritarian leadership, violence entrainment, divisiveness, crooked economics, moral subterfuge, and physical pollution have changed the social fabric of the nation. The result is escalating madness, tension, chaos, violence, and mindless self-destruction as people unleash their frustration, hate and rage onto their neighbors, burning their own communities to the ground.

How is it that hundreds, thousands, even millions of Americans can be triggered to hit the streets in violent protest over soft social issues, while life and death matters such as war are completely left off the register, going entirely unchallenged by the public? How is it that in 2016 the main issues driving people to action are the socially divisive ones pitting Americans against each other along race, gender and political beliefs? Why are we so willing to hurt each other, yet so unwilling to confront the machine?


Comment: Do consider that all of the current unrest may not be spontaneous and organic as it seems. Reports are coming in that the protests have an element of planning to them. Taking out ads for activists and bussing in protesters is hardly the stuff of a grassroots movement.

Anti-Trump Chaos Is Exploding Across America


Comment: Hey, precious snowflakes! Here are some legitimate reasons to protest

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Hearts

An exercise in empathy: Reflections on an election on desolation row

Gerald Jonas
WhoWhatWhy
Sat, 12 Nov 2016 16:50 UTC
Greater depression
Like many of you, I couldn't sleep Tuesday night, or rather early Wednesday morning after the election results could no longer be doubted. Closing my eyes in hopes of oblivion, I found only more agitation. My stomach hurt, my bowels fluttered, my thoughts spun round and round without order or direction.

Questions crowded in: "How could this happen?" "Whose fault was it?" "Where do we go from there?" In my emotionally distraught state, no answers surfaced, just more questions and deeper unease.

At some point, it occurred to me that, for all my agitation, I had no name for what I was feeling. I long ago learned that identifying a feeling is the first step to coming to grips with it. Of course, I knew that my intense suffering was a reaction to Trump's unexpected and appalling victory. But what exactly was that reaction? Anger, disappointment, betrayal, despair? None of these labels seemed to get at the profoundly wounding nature of my distress. Quite suddenly, in the way the mind works sometimes, I had the word I was looking for — "desolation."

Comment: If only more people would take this approach. You can't heal what you don't understand. The fact is, many people are feeling desolate after the election, just as many were feeling so before it - some for the past 15 years, some for longer. Many are worried that Trump will take the U.S. down the road to totalitarianism. What they don't realize is that, even if this were the case (and there's no guarantee at this point that it is, but the fear is at least understandable), the causes and processes leading up to it have been long in the making, and it is a bipartisan problem.

If a totalitarian system comes to the United States, the American people will have been 30 years too late in stopping it, because all the factors that contribute to the rise of a pathocracy are already here: the social injustice, the economic disparity, a privileged elite class who rules unelected, mass surveillance, militarized police, the embrace of terrorism as a geopolitical tool, predatory foreign policy, arbitrary detention, censored media, secret prisons, COINTELPRO, etc.

So if this election has you feeling a sense of desolation, perhaps it is best to ask, "Have I been deceiving myself for the past x number of years?"

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Attention

Hey, precious snowflakes! Here are some legitimate reasons to protest

Dylan Charles
Waking Times
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:50 UTC
trump protest
Supporters of Clinton in the painfully long 2016 presidential campaign warned us before the vote that if Trump lost the election, his supporters would stop at nothing to disrupt Clinton's inauguration. They said riots, violence and revolution would break out, and that Republicans would claim voter fraud and refuse to respect the democratic process or accept the results should Hillary have won.

This scare tactic and all the other nightmare fantasies about Trump projected into public consciousness by the left were insufficient to persuade enough voters to go for Hillary, and as many suspected would happen, Clinton voters are now doing the precise things they had previously declared to be unacceptable.

Hypocrisy is now as American as apple pie, and no one is really all that surprised that phony idealists are taking to the streets, destroying property, threatening to assassinate the president elect, and organizing to prevent Trump's inauguration. Some are even openly calling for revolution. The deeper irony here, though, is that people from all walks of life should be out protesting the government as well, but for much more significant reasons than to protest the outcome of the election.
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Cross

Pope wants to build bridges, inequality is "the greatest evil that exists in the world"


RT
Sat, 12 Nov 2016 12:51 UTC
Trump and Pope
Refusing to make any judgments on personalities, Pope Francis told the Italian daily La Repubblica his only concern is the negative impact the next US President's actions might have on the poor and marginalized people in the country and abroad.

The interview with Pope Francis was published on Friday but conducted on November 7, the day before the presidential election in the US, during which Republican nominee Donald Trump, against the public's expectations, secured the necessary electoral votes to become the 45th president of the United States.

When asked by Eugenio Scalfari, the founder of La Repubblica, about his opinion of Trump, the Pope answered:

"I don't make judgments on people and on politicians, I only want to understand what the sufferings are that their way of proceeding causes to the poor and excluded."
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Dominoes

India bans currency notes in push towards cashless society

John Vibes
Activist Post
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:42 UTC
money
The government in India has recently made a move to ban large currency notes, continuing the push towards a cashless society, an effort that the country has been working on for decades. 500 and 1,000 rupee notes were banned throughout the country, which may seem like large currency notes, but they exchange for just a few American dollars, and represent 85% of the cash transactions in the country.

The ban sparked a run on the banks in India this week, with customers forming massive lines at banks attempting to get cash notes out while they still could.

Banks then shut down on Wednesday, and limits were imposed on ATM withdrawals.

Politicians say that the new measure is aimed at fighting tax evasion, corruption, and "black money," but the nation's poor say that they are going to be the hardest hit.

"I went home for Diwali and my parents gave me money as a gift. I wish they had a simpler system for students. I desperately need cash to pay my rent and buy books and food," Vijay Karan Sharma from Chhattisgarh, a student at Delhi University, told the BBC.

New notes with advanced security features will be put into circulation to replace the current notes; however, financial experts in India suggest that this could be a step towards a cashless society.
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Cow Skull

Damning: Veteran reporter exposes The New York Times' arrogant, disconnected, agenda driven approach to journalism

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 15:16 UTC
Killary NY Times
Yesterday, Michael Cieply, a 12-year veteran of the New York Times who left this past July, wrote a phenomenal article at Deadline Hollywood titled, Stunned By Trump, The New York Times Finds Time For Some Soul-Searching. Before highlighting some key excerpts, let's set the stage.

The New York Times' coverage of the 2016 Presidential election was an abysmal disgrace. I first became aware of the extent of the paper's shady and compromised reporting, when the editorial board endorsed Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary over Bernie Sanders without making an intelligible or coherent argument to justify the stance. This outraged me to such an extent, I wrote a post titled, A Detailed Look at The New York Times' Embarrassing, Deceitful and Illogical Endorsement of Hillary Clinton, which you should reread in full.
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Fire

Wannabe weatherman seeking Facebook views arrested for starting wildfire

Jeff Martin & Rebecca Reynolds
Lexington Herald Leader
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:16 UTC
Johnny Mullins
© WLEX
Johnny Mullins arrested and charged with second degree arson.
A wannabe weatherman was jailed for arson after admitting he started a wildfire to draw attention to his selfie videos on Facebook, his town's police chief said Friday. Meanwhile, a Georgia sheriff appealed for help identifying the driver of a dark blue SUV last seen where other wildfires began. And in North Carolina, authorities suspect arson in more than 20 wildfires burning in a national forest.

"It's really too bad because he's not a bad kid — he's just misguided," said James Stephens, the police chief in Jenkins, Kentucky, where Johnny Mullins, 21, was arrested this week on a second-degree arson charge.

"He likes to do Facebook videos and have people follow him on his 'weather forecast,' so that's pretty much why he did what he did," the chief said. "He enjoyed the attention he got from the Facebook stuff."


Comment: Typical of a narcissistic society with an unhealthy obsession with social media status.


"He didn't realize how much danger he was putting other people in," Stephens added.

A teenager in Harlan County, Kentucky also was arrested for arson this week, and in Tennessee, authorities said Friday that Andrew Scott Lewis was charged with setting fires and vandalism causing more than $250,000 in damage and threatening homes outside Chattanooga.

No arrests were announced in most of the rest of the suspicious fires, which have been torching forests in and around the southern Appalachian mountains. The relentless drought across much of the South has removed the usual humidity and sucked wells and streams dry, making the woods ripe for fire.

Comment: Dozens of wildfires spread across North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Georgia

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Magnet

Mexico's 'avengers': Vigilantes supported by public sick of crime and lack of punishment in new development called 'justiciero'

David Agren
The Guardian
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00 UTC
Mexican federal police
© Dennis Grombkowski/Getty Images
Mexican federal police patrol the streets of Guadalajara. Widespread dissatisfaction with law enforcement and the justice system has fueled public sympathy for vigilantes.
A wave of vigilante killings - such as the bus passenger who shot four robbers - has struck a chord with Mexicans fed up with crime, corruption and impunity

It was still dark when four men boarded the packed commuter bus heading for Mexico City and ordered the passengers to hand over their valuables.

They gathered up mobile phones and wallets, but as they prepared to leave near the town of Toluca, one passenger stood up, drew a pistol and shot the four assailants, killing their leader instantly.

The three injured robbers stumbled off the bus, but the gunman followed them out and shot them dead at the roadside. Then he returned to the bus, handed back the passengers' belongings and disappeared into the darkness.

Police in Mexico state, which wraps round the country's capital like a horseshoe, have deployed hundreds of officers in search of the so-called justiciero - or avenger.
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USA

Oregon and California propose secession in wake of Trump election

Lizzy Acker
Oregon Live
Fri, 11 Nov 2016 15:51 UTC
protest
© Beth Nakamura
A swarm of protesters marched through Portland Wednesday night in protest of the presidential election results.
Oregon Live update: The petition for this ballot measure has been withdrawn after overwhelming positive and negative responses.

Two days after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States, two Portlanders have submitted a petition for a 2018 ballot initiative to have Oregon secede from the United States.

On Thursday morning, Jennifer Rollins, a lawyer, and Christian Trejbal, a writer, filed the Oregon Secession Act.

"Oregonian values are no longer the values held by the rest of the United States," Trejbal said over the phone Thursday.

Those values? "Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness," Trejbal said, "plus equality."

"Obviously," he said, the ballot proposal "came about partially in response to the election results on Tuesday."

"But," he added, "it's been developing over time."

Comment: The 'Calexit' movement could gain traction and come up for vote in 2019:
The Yes California movement still has a way to go, however. President Louis Marinelli has tried to get the referendum on the ballot in the past, but has yet to reach the 400,000 signatures needed to appear on the ballot. However, Marinelli is looking to try again and get an initiative on the ballot in 2018 when Californians choose their governor for a referendum in 2019.

Even if the initiative passes, that may not be enough to stop California from skedaddling away from a Trump presidency. The laws surrounding states' secession is murky at best, as pro-secession Texans learned the hard way earlier this year.

There are no clear paths for a state to leave the US, and the last time any state really made an active attempt was in the Civil War. "The Civil War played a very big role in establishing the power of the federal government and cementing that the federal government has the final say in these issues," Eric McDaniel, Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Texas Tribune.


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