Society's Child
Gathering along a fence separating them from the Syrian-controlled side of the Golan Heights, Druze commemorated the anniversary of the start of the 1973 Arab Israeli War while celebrating Syria's successes in its recent war against the terrorists.
The Russian Investigative Committee reported on Friday that its branch, in the major industrial center of Nizhny Novgorod, had pressed charges of extremism against a 27-year old man from the nearby Saratov Region. In comments with Lenta.ru news site investigators revealed the suspect's name as Vladislav Pozdnyakov.
Investigators claim that the suspect had been the mastermind behind the 'Male State' group on Russia's most popular social network Vkontakte. They also claim that most of the texts and images posted by the suspect and other group members amounted to hate speech.
Comment: While the debate on free speech should be taken on a case by case basis, and even Putin has recently intervened to ensure that common sense prevails, the internet is as much part of the public sphere as a street corner and so anyone contravening the laws of the land will fall foul of the law.
See also:
- Russian woman attacked 'manspreading' metro riders with bleach-laced water
- England's police deployed to hunt down 'offensive speech' amidst an actual rise in crime
- "Digital strip-search": Travellers to New Zealand now face $5000 fine if they refuse
Let's start by talking about obesity. At this point, so many of our young people are overweight that military recruiters are having a very difficult time finding enough "suitable candidates for military service"...
The study, featuring roughly 18,000 randomly selected participants across each of the service branches, showed that almost 66 percent of service members are considered to be either overweight or obese, based on the military's use of body mass index as a measuring standard.
While the number of overweight service members is a cause for concern, it correlates with the obesity epidemic plaguing the United States, where, as of 2015, one in three young adults are considered too fat to enlist, creating a difficult environment for recruiters to find suitable candidates for military service.
Comment: It's even worse - the internet generation isn't reading books because nearly two-thirds cannot read proficiently, nor are they proficient in math. They lack social skills and have never learned how to deal with conflict or differing opinions. Without knowing how to deal with life they find anything that is vaguely threatening a cause for official and/or violent intervention. See:
Make America Great Again? Things Not Looking Good For The 'Internet Generation'

Hassan Sufan on the right, senior leader of the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation (NFL)
According to the HTS-linked news network Iba'a, the reconciliation agreement was signed by radical scholar "Mazhar al-Ois" on behalf of HTS' leadership and by "Hassan Sufan," a senior leader of the NFL. Under the agreement, both groups will withdraw their weapons from civilian areas and release all the militants who were captured during the clashes.
The tension between HTS and the NFL began on September 26, when HTS forces attacked the town of Darat Izza in order to arrest several members of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement [one of the NFL's groups] after accusing them of carrying out several attacks inside the town.
Comment: Notice the US is nowhere in sight.
- Russian FM: Turkish drones & extra troops to patrol Idlib after making deal with Moscow
- Analyst to RT - Idlib buffer zone will help Russia & Turkey clear area of radicals
- Turkey now controls the fate of Syrian jihadists in Idlib
- Syrian Army dispatches additional military convoys to Idlib
- Good timing: Turkey designates Tahrir al-Sham (a.k.a. al Nusra) as terrorist group
Comment: Some background on Khodorovsky:
- Psychopathic criminal and former oligarch Khodorkovsky wants to lead Russia's opposition movement against Putin leadership
- Khodorkovsky created the myth that he is Putin's political opponent AFTER he was sent to prison for being a corporate thief
- Irish court names Mikhail Khodorkovsky potential suspect in €100mn fraud
There's a lot about this report which is rather disturbing, but as someone who studies Russian history for a living this particular recommendation stood out for me. History and culture are the foundations of study of any society. If you want to know a foreign country, you have for a start to learn its language, which means reading its literature. You then need to know its history to be able to put things in the right context. But there are some, it seems, who don't want people to understand context. They know the truth, and anything which might challenge it needs to be censored.
In any case, according to the argument put forward by report's author, Kateryna Smagliy, those who don't agree with her deserved to be silenced. Why? Because they are agents of the Kremlin. She urges Western governments to 'step up efforts to expose Russia's network of agents within Western academia'. 'The Russian government pursues a coherent and well-coordinated "knowledge weaponization" strategy,' she says. This strategy
led to the rise of the new phenomenon of 'hybrid analytica', which we define here as the process of design, development and promotion of various pseudo-academic narratives by duped or manipulated bona-fide intellectuals, academics and think-tank experts of political 'lobbyists in disguise', whose vested interests have been recruited through the global network of the Kremlin-linked operatives.
Comment: From the perspective of the deep state, nothing must be allowed to undermine the narrative of Russia as a belligerent and dangerous enemy of the West and thus threaten the existence of the defense industry.

All it took was Democrats’ treatment of Brett Kavanaugh over the last few weeks to turn me into that elusive creature: a minority, immigrant woman who supports Republicans.
I moved to the United States from Trinidad and Tobago eight years ago when I married my husband, Christopher, former U.S. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia's eighth (and, in my opinion, most lovable) child. Some people might read that and think, "Well, that's no surprise then; Justice Scalia's daughter-in-law is hardly likely to be anything but Republican!"
But they would be wrong. I've always considered myself politically moderate: I am unapologetically pro-life, but my views on affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, and gun control made me sympathize strongly with Democratic perspectives and occasionally led to arguments with my husband and father-in-law.
That sense of political homelessness was a big reason that I was never in a hurry to become an American citizen. I figured I'd do it eventually, but not having a strong connection to either party, feeling unsure of where I fit into America's strange political landscape, meant it was low on my list of priorities.
Fast-forward to 2018, and Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. Protests and vows to block him by any means, "using every available tool," followed almost immediately. Anybody paying attention knew that things were about to get interesting. Unfortunately, things got less interesting than ugly and convinced me that Democrats are not who they claim to be.
Comment: Ms. Scalia's perspective is likely shared by a number of moderate voters who are fed up with what the Democratic party has become; there could be a well deserved backlash threatening the party's hoped for 'blue wave' in upcoming elections.
- Dems are ditching their party in droves; conservatives should pay attention
- #WalkAway hashtag blowing up, urging fed-up Democrats to leave the party
The shockingly insensitive skit occurred when Forest Hill High School visited Brookhaven High School for a game on Friday night in the US state of Mississippi.
Images from the show surfacing on social media portray members of Forest Hill's band dressed up as doctors and nurses while several of them are armed with toy guns.
Mathematician James A. Lindsay, British writer Helen Pluckrose, and Portland State philosophy professor Peter Boghossian have become an overnight sensation. They've earned recognition from academics all around the world including high-profile figures like Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker. But their detractors have also stepped out in full force. Lindsay, Pluckrose, and Boghossian have agreed to an exclusive interview with Quillette to address the issues raised by their critics.
For the record, I know the three writers but had no prior knowledge of their year-long project before the story broke. The following text has been transcribed from an in-person interview. It has been edited for readability and flow.
Comment: Further reading:
- The Grievance Studies Scandal: Five Academics Respond to The Implications of Hoax Papers Published in Postmodernist Journals
- Yes, the Grievance Studies hoax is hilarious - but if you're not worried you're missing the point
- 'The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct': Hoax gender studies paper accepted by a peer-reviewed academic journal
In a fact-challenged monologue helpfully subtitled on YouTube by Russia's state-owned news organization, Vladimir Putin's favorite pundit, Dmitry Kiselyov, dismissed the sexual assault accusation against Kavanaugh, by "physics professor Christine Blasey Ford," as "like a joke."
Kiselyov also warned Russian viewers to beware of what he termed an illness "spreading from America to Europe and toward Russia," in which "the infected ladies project their sexual fantasies onto men who have a successful life and career, accusing them of attempted rape."
Joe Kaplan, a Facebook executive who has been friends with Kavanaugh for decades, had the gall to attend his Senate hearing last week. Kaplan was forced to say sorry for the "deeply painful moment," while the social media network released a message saying its leadership had "made mistakes."













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