Welcome to Sott.net
Fri, 05 Nov 2021
The World for People who Think

Society's Child
Map

Bullseye

Democratic presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson wins over internet after denouncing 'dark psychic force' taking hold in US

marianne williamson
© Reuters / Lucas Jackson
Democratic presidential hopeful Marianne Williamson became the most-searched candidate on Google after her second primary debate, in which she condemned the "dark psychic force" that Donald Trump allegedly unleashed upon the US.

Williamson, an author and celebrity spiritual adviser, was dismissed by many as a fringe candidate when she announced her bid for the White House. But in the second round of the primary debates, she dazzled voters with a zinger-filled performance that diverged from the usual Democratic talking points.

She dominated Google searches following the debate. Before the debate began, Williamson was the top searched candidate in only two states.

Her comments about the worrying state of America's social and political climate were particularly well received.

Bomb

5 killed, 38 injured in blast targeting police vehicle in Pakistan

Balochistan map
© Katehon.com 2016
A powerful blast targeting a police vehicle in Pakistan's restive Balochistan province has killed five people, including two security personnel, and injured 38 others, a top police official said on Wednesday.

The blast took place close to a police vehicle at the Bacha Khan Chowk in the remit of the City Police Station on Tuesday, Quetta's Deputy Inspector-General (DIG) of police Abdul Razzaq Cheema said.

The target of the blast appeared to be the Station House Officer (SHO) of the area who received some injuries and has been shifted to a hospital, the DIG told reporters.

"The bomb went off as soon as SHO Shaffat got down from his vehicle," he said, adding that the condition of the SHO is said to be critical.

Cheema said it was too early to confirm whether it was a suicide attack or the blast caused by a remotely triggered device.

People 2

Surprise, surprise? Americans think of media as even more destructive than banks and corporations

cameras
© REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
A recent survey has revealed that most Americans believe that the news media, more than any other institution, have a negative impact on their country - findings that are hardly surprising, according to media analyst Lionel.

Conducted by the Pew Research Center, the poll found that 64 percent of Americans believe that the media has a damaging effect on the United States - making them more loathed than other often-demonized institutions such as banks (39 percent) and large corporations (53 percent).

"This doesn't surprise anybody," media analyst Lionel told RT.
The media are not here to provide information ...so that you can make intelligence decisions. No, that's not what the media are. The media are corporate tools.
But numbers don't lie and the news media shouldn't feel singled out. With growing distrust in corporations - especially tech companies - America's establishment institutions can take solace in the fact that none of them enjoy majority support.


NPC

Twisted: US Soccer Federation says women's team who complained about gender pay gap earned more than their male counterparts

national soccer team
© MenVincent Carchietta
Earlier this year, the US women's team filed a lawsuit against the US Soccer Federation over years of alleged 'gender discrimination', seeking equal pay with their male colleagues.

The US Women's National Team has been paid more than the country's Men's National Team over the past decade: the women received $34.1 million in salaries and game bonuses, while the men were paid $26.4 million, the US Soccer president, Carlos Cordeiro, said in a letter released on Monday.


Cordeiro explained that the pay structures for male and female players are different but not because of gender. In fact, the women have a guaranteed salary plus bonuses for the matches while the men have no fixed salary and are only paid for the training camps they attend and the games they play, plus game bonuses. Apart from this, women players enjoy a package of benefits (for example, healthcare) that are not provided to the men, the US Soccer president said.

Comment: This is the 'gender gap' in a nutshell.


Sherlock

Twitter pundits mourn 'suspicious death' of Kremlin critic, who is alive

Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr.
© RIA Novosti / Aleksei Kudenko
Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr.
A host of Twitter commentators, including a popular CNN strategist, were apparently in such a hurry to put a sinister spin on the death of a long-time Kremlin critic that they 'buried' his son instead.

Condolences poured in following the death of Vladimir Kara-Murza, a prominent Russian historian and TV journalist, who passed away on Sunday at the age of 59. His son, Vladimir Kara-Murza Jr., 37, announced his father's passing on social media, without providing any details on the cause of death.

It was reported, however, that the late journalist, who rose to prominence during the 1990s, was in poor health prior to his death, having suffered several heart attacks.

While the two men do have the same first and last names and have strikingly similar features (they are father and son, after all), it was Kara-Murza Jr. who broke the news, which should have left little room for misinterpretation.

Dollars

Greedy Ghost takes over Europe: Don't sit, don't eat, in an age of profit before people

Riviera dei Fiori
© Global Look Press / imagebroker / Michael Weber
Harsh punishment meted out to two German backpackers for the 'crime' of brewing their own coffee at the Rialto Bridge in Venice is symptomatic of the way that public space is being eroded and profit being put before humanity.

Don't smell the coffee in Venice, at least not if you brewed it yourself on a portable mini-stove in the center of the historic city instead of paying for it at a coffee shop or café, or you could be in big, big trouble.

Two German tourists who did that recently were fined a total of €950 ($1000) and asked to leave the city.

The tourists made no mess. They caused no obstruction, but they were clobbered under regulations from Venice's city council. These regulations (detailed here) include a €200 fine for sitting down outside to consume food or drinks, except within designated areas. Can you imagine the mentality of the 'passer-by' who reported them to the police?

Stock Down

More than 4m in UK are trapped in deep poverty, study finds

deep poverty UK
© Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
More than 4 million people in the UK are trapped in deep poverty, meaning their income is at least 50% below the official breadline, locking them into a weekly struggle to afford the most basic living essentials, an independent study has shown.

The Social Metrics Commission also said 7 million people, including 2.3 million children, were affected by what it termed persistent poverty, meaning that they were not only in poverty but had been for at least two of the previous three years.

Highlighting evidence of rising levels of hardship in recent years among children, larger families, lone parent households and pensioners, the commission urged the new prime minister, Boris Johnson, to take urgent action to tackle growing poverty.

Comment: It's no real surprise that the "austerity experiment" has lead to widespread and worsening poverty in the UK. Maybe it's time to end the 'experiment'. How many studies need to be done before people recognize the problem?

See also:


Attention

Man finds 'mummified' baby while cleaning out his deceased mom's freezer

St Louis mummified frozen baby freezer
© Christine Byers of the Post-Dispatch
Adam Smith peers into his mother's freezer where he found the remains of an infant wrapped in a box she kept for more
than 40 years.
A Missouri man cleaning out his mother's freezer last weekend made a horrifying discovery: a frozen human baby.

Adam Smith found the baby inside a box his mother had stored in the freezer for as long as he can remember, KMOV-TV reported.

"It still had skin, hair and everything; it was mummified," he told KSDK-TV. "After that, I freaked out, put it in the box and called police right away."

Car Black

Hacked self-driving cars will create traffic chaos say US researchers

highway traffic
© AP Photo/ Damian Dovarganes
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc. have revealed findings from a study on the potential ways in which hackers could spread traffic chaos.

According to data gathered by researchers, travel delays might become the least of people's concerns in the near future, when tens of millions of self-driving cars are reportedly expected to be on American highways, according to the media report.

'Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars have physical consequences', assistant professor and study co-leader Peter Yunker of Georgia Tech's School of Physics said in a written statement about the research, cited by The Daily Mail.

Yunker and three co-authors simulated what a group of hacked autonomous cars could do to traffic in a place like Manhattan, where streets and avenues form a grid designed to reduce the potential for gridlock.

Fatal accidents and injured or sick people dying in ambulances stuck in gridlock are two potentially severe consequences of cyber-attacked vehicles connected to the Internet, according to the study.

Comment: See also:


USA

Pornographic Democracy

left protesters trump
To represent anything is to reduce and deform it, obviously, for even Leonardo's Mona Lisa is but a stick figure compared to the witty, voluptuous and redolent broad, whose repartees, smiles, jokes and burps, from moment to moment, can only increase her charm and terror, and that's why man never allowed himself to be engulfed by any medium, be it oil painting, music or literature. After the most satisfying page, he still looked up and walked outside. Traveling vast distances, Chekov discovered heaven in Ceylon and hell in Sakhalin, and Flaubert was only being reductive when he goofed, "The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy." He, too, had plenty of lust for the actual.

Well, a perpetual orgy is certainly here, but it has nothing to do with literature, or even literacy, and it's not voluntary. If pornography can be understood as a lurid usurpation of the real, then we're watching an endless pornographic movie. Most democratically, we're all trapped in this foul theater. An orgy of the virtual has taken over every aspect of our lives.

Pornography multiplies frequency, duration, angles, positions and sexual partners, an endless and eternal sexual buffet, except that none of it is really happening. Similarly, American democracy gives the appearance of boundless participation by all citizens, for they can't just vote in caucuses and elections, but cheer at conventions, march in protest, write letters to newspapers, comment on the internet and follow, blow by blow, the serial mud wrestling between opposing politicians. Pissed, they can freely curse Bush, Obama or Trump without fearing a midnight knock on the door. Alas, none of their "political activities" actually matters, for Americans don't influence their government's policies, much less decide them. It's all an elaborate spectacle to make each chump think he's somehow a player, in on the action, when he's actually all alone, in the dark, to beat his own meat, yet again.

He has railroaded, premasticated opinions on everything, but without the means to act on any of it. Only his impotence is real.