Society's ChildS


Bad Guys

Reparations for black Americans are the perfect way to keep everyone hating each other

Micah Curtis
RT
Thu, 18 Feb 2021 18:52 UTC
black lives matter blm protest sigh
A new hearing on giving reparations to African Americans in the US has reignited discussion. But all reparations really are, are a distraction from other issues that could be solved to help black communities.

Utah representative Burgess Owens and former football star Herschel Walker discussed their opposition to the possibility of reparations in the United States on Wednesday. The basic idea of reparations is that people who descend from slaves will be given money that is taxed from other people. It is another stacking on the welfare pile. In testimony from Owens and Walker they discuss the necessities of meritocracy for the black community, but there is another element that needs to be touched on. That is national unity.

Let's be frank. There are issues within the black community that could be aided via government, or be solved just by the government butting out. But why discuss redlining practices, education, law enforcement, prison reform, and encouragement of black businesses, when you can simply demand cash? The reason for that is, above all, that Democrats are lazy when it comes to actually helping solve real issues within the black community. As much as people like Marc Lamont Hill or Ta-Nehisi Coates insist that reparations will aid some sort of healing process, they couldn't be more wrong.
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Eye 1

Latvia threatens fines for citizens watching recently banned Russian TV channels


RT
Thu, 18 Feb 2021 18:18 UTC
Mokhnachuk
© Sputnik / Vitaliy Belousov; (inset) Getty Images / Michele UrsiFILE PHOTO: Presidential candidate Vladimir Putin's election agent Ivan Mokhnachuk engaged in Rossia Channel televised debates. Left: TV host Vladimir Solovyov.
Tens of thousands of Russian-speaking Latvians will be turning down the volume and listening out for neighborhood snoopers after a new law came into force that will see viewers of unlicensed satellite TV fined just for tuning in.

Earlier this month, local media reported that the Seimas, the Baltic nation's parliament, had adopted a bill in its final reading that will criminalize people for watching unauthorized broadcasts.

The networks that will be affected are said to include dozens of Russian television channels for which signals can be picked up from across the border. More than one in three Latvians speaks Russian at home, but dozens of broadcasters showing programs in the language have had their licenses revoked and been banned from the country's airwaves since earlier this month.

Comment: See also: Washington joins crusade against free speech, backs Ukrainian crackdown on opposition media as EU & Zelensky's dad voice concerns

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Magnify

US life expectancy fell by one year in 2020, biggest drop since WWII - CDC

Manas Mishra
Reuters
Thu, 18 Feb 2021 15:06 UTC
cdc sad
Life expectancy in the United States fell by a year in the first half of 2020 - the biggest decline since World War 2 - and stood at the lowest levels since 2006, according to estimates issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Thursday.

While the estimates are provisional, and do not reflect the full effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the CDC said it was publishing provisional data for the first time in order to assess the effect of excess deaths in 2020.

Excess deaths are the difference between the number of expected deaths and the actual number.

Comment: Note that in 2018 in the UK life expectancy for the poorest females dropped for the first time in nearly 100 years, and overall life expectancy had been in decline since 2011. It's possible that a similar trend was in effect in the US, coupled with the economic and societal impact of the lockdowns, as well as the blatant mismanagement throughout - such as with sending coronavirus infected patients to old people's homes - contributed to the drop.

Also from 2018: Spain will overtake Japan in world's life expectancy ranking, US set to plunge to 64th by 2040

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Che Guevara

Antifa thugs assault Post Millennial journalist in downtown Seattle

Mia Cathell
The Post Millennial
Thu, 18 Feb 2021 17:51 UTC
antifa seattle journalist assaulted
© Katie Daviscourt/TwitterScreenshots from Katie Daviscourt's video record of Antifa's attack on her February 17, 2021
The Post Millennial's Katie Daviscourt was assaulted by an Antifa mob in downtown Seattle on Wednesday night when leftists gathered to march in protest of the Seattle Police Department's fatal shooting of an armed man who chased after authorities.


Comment: Apparently Biden's election has not been enough to satisfy the mob.

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Attention

Cuomo said 'he can destroy me': NY assemblyman alleges governor threatened him over nursing homes scandal

MJ Lee
CNN
Wed, 17 Feb 2021 16:57 UTC
Andrew Cuomo Ron Kim
New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo, Assemblyman Ron Kim
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been pleading with lawmakers for support and even threatening political retribution against Democrats who have criticized him in an aggressive effort to contain political fallout from revelations that his administration had concealed the full extent of nursing home-related deaths during the Covid pandemic.

Describing an alleged exchange with the governor that has not been previously reported, Democratic Assemblyman Ron Kim told CNN that he received a call on his cell phone from the governor last week as he was bathing his children at home.

"Gov. Cuomo called me directly on Thursday to threaten my career if I did not cover up for Melissa [DeRosa] and what she said. He tried to pressure me to issue a statement, and it was a very traumatizing experience," Kim said. Cuomo proceeded to tell the assemblyman that "we're in this business together and we don't cross certain lines and he said I hadn't seen his wrath and that he can destroy me," according to Kim.
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Bullseye

Cuomo administration's nursing home coronavirus crisis handling investigated by FBI, US Attorney: report

Thomas Barrabi
Fox News
Wed, 17 Feb 2021 00:00 UTC
Andrew Cuomo
The investigation is not yet far along and is focused on top members of Cuomo's coronavirus task force

The FBI and US attorney's office in Brooklyn have begun an investigation into how New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration handled the state's nursing home crisis during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report Wednesday.

The investigation is not yet far along and is focused on top members of Cuomo's coronavirus task force, the Albany Times-Union reported, citing a source with direct knowledge of the matter. Neither Cuomo nor any administration official has at this point been accused of any wrongdoing.

Members of Cuomo's task force include New York State Health Commissioner Howard Zucker and Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa. The latter drew scrutiny this month after she seemingly admitted the governor's team withheld information related to COVID-19-related deaths at nursing homes.

"As we publicly said, DOJ has been looking into this for months. We have been cooperating with them and we will continue to," Cuomo senior advisor Rich Azzopardi said in a statement.

Comment: This story gets even more interesting now that members of Cuomo's own party are seeking to curtail his emergency powers. And one state legislator, New York Democrat, Assemblyman Ron Kim says that he was personally threatened by Cuomo:
It is looking increasingly certain that Democrats in the NY State legislator - both the state assembly and the Senate - will move to strip Gov. Andrew Cuomo of his emergency COVID powers, imposed nearly 1 year ago, just days after the first cases were confirmed in New York.

Overnight, a flurry of unflattering news reports hit. In one, a New York Democrat, Assemblyman Ron Kim, said the governor had threatened to "destroy" him after Kim criticized a top Cuomo staffer heard on tape telling state lawmakers that Cuomo had worried the Trump Administration would try to use deaths in NY's nursing homes - eventually found to be nearly twice the number initially reported - as a "political football" to attack Cuomo.

More importantly for Cuomo, it was reported last night that leaders of the New York State Senate would move to strip Cuomo of his emergency pandemic powers granted during the pandemic, an extremely rare rebuke for the governor from Democrats within his own party. The Senate's measures, which could be voted on as soon as next week, highlight the growing animosity between Cuomo and state lawmakers since the governor admitted to intentionally withholding critical data on virus-related deaths from the state legislature in a Monday holiday press briefing.

Kim said the governor - in a call last Thursday - ordered him to walk back criticisms of a top Cuomo aide whose leaked comments on nursing home data sparked a bipartisan furor. An adviser to Cuomo said Wednesday that Kim was "lying" about the conversation, per the Washington Post. The governor also lashed out at Kim during a news conference, accusing Kim of having a "long and hostile relationship" with his office.


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Bulb

Thousands of service members refuse Covid vaccine


NBC
Thu, 18 Feb 2021 15:42 UTC
military vaccine
© Tech. Sgt. Anthony Nelson Jr. / U.S. Air Force/APHickam 15th Medical Group hosts the first COVID-19 mass vaccination on Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, on Feb. 9, 2021.
By the thousands, U.S. service members are refusing or putting off the Covid-19 vaccine as frustrated commanders scramble to knock down internet rumors and find the right pitch that will persuade troops to get the shot.

Some Army units are seeing as few as one-third agree to the vaccine. Military leaders searching for answers believe they have identified one potential convincer: an imminent deployment. Navy sailors on ships heading out to sea last week, for example, were choosing to take the shot at rates exceeding 80 percent to 90 percent.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Jeff Taliaferro, vice director of operations for the Joint Staff, told Congress on Wednesday that "very early data" suggests that just up to two-thirds of the service members offered the vaccine have accepted.

That's higher than the rate for the general population, which a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation put at roughly 50 percent. But the significant number of forces declining the vaccine is especially worrisome because troops often live, work and fight closely together in environments where social distancing and wearing masks, at times, are difficult.


Comment: Community has greater potentials for understanding and human strength than coercion. The groups in society that are still able to maintain close relationships with others may find greater strength in getting through these times.

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Brick Wall

UK government has decided to introduce Covid ghettos. What next, Covid camps?

Dr Lisa McKenzie
RT
Wed, 17 Feb 2021 07:12 UTC
ouncil housing estate
Washing dries on a line in a council housing estate, parts of which are being redeveloped and sold off to private buyers in south London
It has been announced that a further 1.7 million people have been added to the Covid shielding list in England - and, of course, it is the poorest among us who must keep out of sight and out of mind.

The list was expanded after scientists at Oxford University developed an algorithm to assess people's risk of severe disease or death based on their ethnicity, BMI, postcode, and their levels of deprivation.

As a social scientist that has researched, lived, and known working-class communities I can look at this list and say with confidence that the new shielders are the working class, because these are exactly the same factors I would look at when studying a community's weak relationship to power and the damaging consequences of structured and structuring institutional inequalities.

Those that are at risk of being harmed by this virus are the poor, and why? Is it an accident? A coincidence? Their inferior genetic makeup? Or that 40 years of neglect, austerity, and an obsessive focus on looking after the upper and middle classes, hoping the good stuff trickles down, have failed? Instead of us all being in this together, governments of all stripes have neglected the working class, and the poor are where they have always been: alone and at the bottom. An afterthought.

Comment: Of course the lockdowns affect everyone, but It seems that a psychological and economic lockdown is being particularly aimed at those who have the least recourse to be resilient - and the most to lose - whatever resources of health and well-being that they do still have:

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Handcuffs

Moscow police conduct more than 100 probes into actions of riot officers at pro-Navalny rallies to determine possible wrongdoing


RT
Wed, 17 Feb 2021 15:18 UTC
navalny protest moscow
© RIALaw enforcement officers detain a protester during a rally in support of opposition activist Alexei Navalny, in Moscow, Russia.
Investigators in Moscow are looking into whether any police officers breached rules on the use of force as part of efforts to disperse mass unauthorized protests in support of jailed opposition figure Alexey Navalny, last month.

On Wednesday, Tatyana Potyaeva, the city's human rights ombudsman, told TASS that a series of checks were being conducted. According to the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Russian capital, she said, "based on injuries received by citizens, who claim they were due to law enforcement agency employees, over 100 inspections are being carried out, the results of which will be sent for consideration."

"According to media reports and appeals from members of the public," she added, "random people who found themselves in the area where mass actions were taking place were also detained, and among them were minors."

Comment: See also:

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Eye 1

The US' 2020 elections: From conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact

Andrew Korybko
One World
Wed, 10 Feb 2021 07:58 UTC
conspiracy
The Cat's Out Of The Bag

The Democrats and their supporters previously defamed everyone speculating about secretly concerted efforts against former President Trump in the run-up to and after last year's elections as "conspiracy theorists", and such individuals even risked being deplatformed from social media for exercising their constitutionally enshrined freedom of speech depending on how they articulated their personal views in this respect. They were told that publicly expressing such an interpretation of events is equivalent to spreading "disinformation" and attempting to "delegitimize" the "democratic" outcome of the US' electoral process. That makes it all the more surprising then that Time magazine admitted in a report last week that a self-described "conspiracy" run by a "well-connected cabal of powerful people" "got states to change voting systems and laws" and "successfully pressured social media companies" among other achievements aimed at "democratically" toppling Trump. In other words, "conspiracy theory" became "conspiracy fact".

Politically Inconvenient Questions

This naturally begs the question of why that pro-Democrat media outlet would so proudly brag about "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election", as its piece is titled. Time can't be "discredited" by the Democrats otherwise they'd inflict the same such damage against the dozens of individuals named in their report who voluntarily cooperated with journalist Molly Ball in order to show, as one of them phrased it, that "the system didn't work magically" and that "democracy isn't self-executing". Whether they intended to or not, they confirmed this hitherto so-called "conspiracy theory" as a "conspiracy fact", thereby vindicating every Trump supporter who earlier expressed such sentiments. Not only that, but they also tacitly acknowledged that those who were deplatformed were victims of the same self-described "conspiracy" run by a "well-connected cabal of powerful people". It's seemingly inexplicable why they'd do this, but deeply reflecting on the deliberate decision to reveal all of this provides some plausible explanations.

Comment: See also: TIME Magazine: 'Trump was right. There was a conspiracy...well-funded cabal, powerful people changing laws, steering media & controlling information'

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