Society's ChildS


Briefcase

Iceland court makes Visa and Mastercard partner Valitor pay $10 million over WikiLeaks banking block


RT
Fri, 26 Apr 2019 08:55 UTC
they came for Assange
© Reuters / Mohammed Ponir Hossain
Valitor, a partner of Visa and Mastercard, must pay WikiLeaks US$10 million for refusing to lift its 2011 banking blockade against the whistleblowing site despite a court order, local media reports.

The District Court of Reykjavik is ordering Valitor to fork over some $10 million (1.2 billion Icelandic krona) to WikiLeaks payment processor DataCell and WikiLeaks publisher Sunshine Press after Valitor failed to comply with a 2013 Supreme Court order to resume processing credit card payments for WikiLeaks.

Valitor was warned when the ruling came down that if they did not lift the blockade, daily penalties would continue to pile up. It is reported that Valitor plans to appeal.

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Black Magic

'The Satanic Temple' has evolved into an anti-Trump movement, and leftists are flocking to it

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 23:55 UTC
church of satan
Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

The Satanic Temple is the perfect religion for progressives. You can believe anything you want, as long as you hate what Donald Trump, Christians and conservatives believe. Unlike the Church of Satan, the Satanic Temple doesn't even believe in a supernatural entity called Satan. Instead, they celebrate Satan as "the ultimate rebel", and they relish in using the symbol of Satan to greatly upset Christians. The Satanic Temple was founded in 2013, and from the very beginning it was clear that they were primarily a political movement. In fact, they openly tell prospective members that the only real requirement for joining is to believe "in the political and secular actions" of the group...
"If there's a local chapter where you are, to join you do have to be accepted, but there's no initiation or anything. You don't even have to be a Satanist, you can just be a strong ally who believes in the political and secular actions without being super stoked about all the aesthetic aspects."
Previously, Satanism in America had always been a shadowy underground movement, but the Satanic Temple has changed all that.
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Heart - Black

Student slated to attend Western Michigan University beheaded in Saudi Arabia

David Jesse
Detroit Free Press
Fri, 26 Apr 2019 18:17 UTC
Mujtaba Al-Sweikat
© ReprieveMujtaba Al-Sweikat is believed to be facing execution in Saudi Arabia for participating in protests. He was arrested on way to visit Western Michigan University, where he was accepted to attend.
A Saudi Arabian man who was arrested as a teenager as he was getting ready to fly to America to begin his studies at Western Michigan University was beheaded by the government Tuesday, according to a report from an official press agency.

Mujtaba al-Sweikat was 17 when he was detained at King Fahd International Airport in 2012. Earlier that year, Al-Sweikat allegedly attended a pro-democracy rally in the midst of the Arab Spring, which led to his arrest. He was intending to visit Western Michigan, where he had been accepted as a student, the university confirmed to the Free Press in 2017.

More than 35 people, including al-Sweikat, were listed on a release from the Saudi Press Agency, announcing the killings.

Sweikat was charged with armed disobedience against the king, as well as attacking, shooting and injuring security forces, civilians and passersby. He was also accused of destroying public property, causing chaos and disrupting the peace, by participating in a terrorist cell, to make and deliver Molotov cocktails.

Comment: We can expect Western governments to do very little because the totalitarian headchoppers in Saudi Arabia are critical to their nefarious goals in the Middle East and they're heavily reliant on their oil and the billions in arms sales: Also check out SOTT radio's: UK secretly training Saudi troops for war on Yemen, 'against Geneva conventions'

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2 + 2 = 4

1950s kindergarten requirements suggest today's classrooms are 'too much, too soon'

Annie Holmquist
Intellectual Takeout
Fri, 26 Apr 2019 10:08 UTC
1954 kindergarten
I received a rather frantic email from a friend when school started last fall. Panicking over the number of parents posting first day of preschool pictures, my friend wondered if she had made a mistake by not sending her four-year-old to school. "When did preschool become so popular?" she asked in dismay.

She wasn't imagining things. Preschool is very popular. Education is important, argues society, so the sooner a child starts school, the better off he will be. As a result, many little kids are almost expected to read and do simple algebraic equations before starting kindergarten. (I'm kidding on that last one. But, you never know...)

It hasn't always been like this. Once upon a time kids didn't go to preschool. Or kindergarten. And when they did go to the latter, the expectations were much more kid-friendly and age appropriate.
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Attention

Teenage climate-change protestors have no idea what they're protesting

Felix Kirby
Quillette
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 07:35 UTC
climate activists
Greta Thunberg and other climate activists attend a protest in Berlin on March 29, 2019.
The Extinction Rebellion, which is the umbrella term for Britain's most recent large-scale climate-change protests, is said to have disrupted the travel of over 500,000 people, as well as cost London businesses £12-million per day. Before that, the Youth for Climate strikes, ignited by Swedish teenager Greta Thurnberg and tacitly supported by the U.K. Government, pulled north of 1.4-million students into the streets on a school day. Given the magnitude of these protests, one might hope that the protestors understood what they were protesting. Regrettably, this isn't the case. Global-warming research is a hugely complex field, and it's unlikely that any ordinary person -let alone a minor- would have any real grasp of it. Nor would they be able to appreciate the uncertainty that characterizes our understanding of how today's human activity will affect the future state of the earth's climate.

As a teenager, I fully understand the mindset of young people. We're predisposed to leap before we look. This is borne out by neuroscience. Our prefrontal cortices, which regulate (among other things) decision-making, planning, self-awareness and inhibition, do not fully develop until we are in our mid-20s. Until then, we have difficulty analyzing the long-term consequences of our actions. The upshot is that many young people tend toward reckless behaviour. Our decisions tend to be rooted not in scientific analysis but in emotional reaction; and we tend to see protest not as a tool for social or legislative change, but simply as a chance to upset the status quo. This is especially true of the Youth for Climate movement, which first took inspiration from Thunberg, a student who is now 16 years old. The low level of sophistication on display at such gatherings is such that many participants seemingly would be fine with laws that banned flying, driving, gas boilers or even cows.

Comment: See also:

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Stormtrooper

SOTT Focus: More Than 40 Members of the White Helmets Admit to Staging of Chemical Attacks in Syria


Sputnik
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 23:09 UTC
White Helmets
© AP Photo / Syrian Civil Defense White Helmets
At least 40 members of the White Helmets organization have admitted during recent interviews that they staged chemical attacks in Syria to provoke retaliation against President Bashar Assad, Foundation for the Study of Democracy Director Maxim Grigoriev said on Thursday as he unveiled the results of a new study at the UN.

"We have interviewed ... 40 members of the White Helmets, including those from Douma, who provided a detailed description of their methods commonly used by their organization to fake scenes," Grigoriev said.

The foundation conducted a fact-finding mission in Syria and located both White Helmets members and dozens of other people who participated in the staged attacks, Grigoriev said.

"Those people told us in detail how they had to participate in the staging for few dollars to buy some food for their families," he said.

One woman recounted how she was given white burial shroud to wrap herself up in and then told to lay on the ground and smear her mouth with toothpaste, Grigoriev said.

Comment: Like so many of the wars the US wages under utterly deceitful pretenses, one is reminded of the slew of stories rammed down our throats in order to serve Washington's Big Lie narratives in the service of achieving world hegemony.

See also:

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NPC

The cult of Greta Thunberg - child crusader of the eco-warriors

Brendan O'Neill
spiked
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 21:23 UTC
Greta Thunberg
Greta Thunberg
Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult should take a close look at Greta Thunberg. This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member. The monotone voice. The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. The explicit talk of the coming great 'fire' that will punish us for our eco-sins. There is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg. One can imagine her in a sparse wooden church in the Plymouth Colony in the 1600s warning parishioners of the hellfire that will rain upon them if they fail to give up their witches.

It actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg - a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids - should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies. Consider Extinction Rebellion, the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes' contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days. I followed Extinction Rebellion from Parliament Square to Marble Arch yesterday and what I witnessed was a public display of millenarian fear and bourgeois depression. People did dances of death and waved placards warning of the heat-death of the planet. It felt deeply unnerving.

Comment: From Part 1 of Corey Morningstar's Wrong Kind of Green report:
"How is it possible for you to be so easily tricked by something so simple as a story, because you are tricked? Well, it all comes down to one core thing and that is emotional investment. The more emotionally invested you are in anything in your life, the less critical and the less objectively observant you become."

- David JP Phillips, We Don't Have Time board of directors, "The Magical Science of Storytelling
On August 20, 2018 a tweet featuring a photo of "a Swedish girl" sitting on a sidewalk was released by the tech company, We Don't Have Time, founded by its CEO Ingmar Rentzhog:
"One 15 year old girl in front of the Swedish parliament is striking from School until Election Day in 3 weeks[.] Imagine how lonely she must feel in this picture. People where [sic] just walking by. Continuing with the business as usual thing. But the truth is. We can't and she knows it!"
Rentzhog's tweet, via the We Don't Have Time twitter account, would be the very first exposure of Thunberg's now famous school strike.
[...]
Mårten Thorslund, chief marketing and sustainability officer of We Don't Have Time took many of the very first photos of Thunberg following the launch of her school strike on August 20, 2018. In the following instance, photos taken by Thorslund accompany the article written by David Olsson, chief operating officer of We Don't Have Time, This 15-year-old Girl Breaks Swedish Law for the Climate, published August 23, 2018:
"Greta became a climate champion and tried to influence those closest to her. Her father now writes articles and gives lectures on the climate crisis, whereas her mother, a famous Swedish opera singer, has stopped flying. All thanks to Greta.

And clearly, she has stepped up her game, influencing the national conversation on the climate crisis-two weeks before the election. We Don't Have Time reported on Greta's strike on its first day and in less than 24 hours our Facebook posts and tweets received over twenty thousand likes, shares and comments. It didn't take long for national media to catch on. As of the first week of the strike, at least six major daily newspapers, as well as Swedish and Danish national TV, [1] have interviewed Greta. Two Swedish party leaders have stopped by to talk to her as well." [Emphasis added]
The article continues:
"Is there something big going on here? This one kid immediately got twenty supporters who now sit next to her. This one kid created numerous news stories in national newspapers and on TV. This one kid has received thousands of messages of love and support on social media.... Movements by young people, such as Jaime Margolin's #ThisIsZeroHour that #WeDontHaveTime interviewed earlier, speaks with a much needed urgency that grown-ups should pay attention to..." [Emphasis in original]
Yes - there was, and still is, something going on.

It's called marketing and branding.
"Yesterday I sat completely by myself, today there is one other here too. There are none [that] I know." - Greta Thunberg, August 21, 2018, Nyheter newspaper, Sweden [Translation via Google]
The "one kid immediately got twenty supporters" - from a Swedish network for sustainable business. What is going on - is the launch of a global campaign to usher in a required consensus for the Paris Agreement, the New Green Deal and all climate related policies and legislation written by the power elite - for the power elite. This is necessary in order to unlock the trillions of dollars in funding by way of massive public demand.

Read the rest here.


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Attention

Hillary state department appointee Candace Marie Claiborne pleads guilty to spying for China

Frank Miles
Fox News
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 20:30 UTC
Candace Marie Claiborne spy china
Candace Marie Claiborne
A former State Department employee admitted Wednesday to misleading investigators about accepting thousands of dollars in gifts and benefits from Chinese intelligence agents in exchange for information.

Candace Marie Claiborne, 63, pleaded guilty in federal court in Washington to a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States. The charge carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

"Candace Marie Claiborne traded her integrity and non-public information of the United States government in exchange for cash and other gifts from foreign agents she knew worked for the Chinese intelligence service," Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers said in a statement. "She withheld information and lied repeatedly about these contacts."

Comment: US State Department employee facing felony charges for taking bribes from Chinese spies & lying about it

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No Entry

'Intellectual terrorism': France's Sciences Po University conference obstructed by anti-fascist protest


RT
Wed, 24 Apr 2019 21:47 UTC
Sciences Po
© Reuters/Philippe WojazerSciences Po University in Paris, France
A conference organised by a student association at France's renowned Sciences Po University has found itself on the verge of disruption as another student group vowed to prevent the attendance of a philosopher they called racist.

The participation of a well-known French-Jewish philosopher and a member of the Academie francaise, Alain Finkielkraut, in a round-table debate held in one of Europe's most prestigious schools of social sciences has drawn the ire of a local anti-fascist student group, which called for a protest against the intellectual and almost got the whole event canceled altogether.

The conference entitled 'Modernity, legacy and progress' and organized by a student group called 'The Critique of the European Reason' was initially scheduled to take place within the premises of the university in Paris on Tuesday. However, a day before the event, another student group - an anti-fascist association 'Sciences Po in Struggle - Institute of Clement Meric' said in a Facebook post it would hold a protest against the very idea of Finkielkraut ever setting foot within the university walls.

Finkielkraut wrote many books on a wide range of topics, including anti-Semitism, French colonialism and the issues of identity and integration. While he believes that Western tradition was eroded by multiculturalism, he has never explicitly supported any far-right groups.
Alain Finkielkraut
© Reuters/Benoit TessierAlain Finkielkraut
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Bizarro Earth

The 'fat sex therapist' compares fitness to Nazism, dieting to rape

Kathrine Timpf
National Review
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 18:31 UTC
fat sex therapist
The link between health problems and weight problems is a reality, no matter how people may feel about it, and pretending it isn't only serves to hurt them.

A woman whose Instagram name is "The Fat Sex Therapist" gave a speech at St. Olaf College on Thursday in which she compared fitness instructors to Nazis and putting children on diets to rape.

"I truly believe that a child cannot consent to being on a diet the same way a child cannot consent to having sex," Sonalee Rashatwar said in her two-hour speech at the college's main stage.

"We should be critical of the use of science and the production of knowledge to continue promoting this idea that certain bodies are fit, able, and desirable . . . is it my fatness that causes my high blood pressure, or is it my experience of weight stigma?" she asked the audience.
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