As everyone knows, 16-year-old Ahed Tamimi slapped a heavily-armed Israeli soldier occupying her property in Nabi Saleh on December 15, and was arrested a few days later. She has now spent over three weeks in prison.

What many people do not know is that the young woman's confrontation followed within hours the shooting by an Israeli soldier of her 15-year-old cousin, Mohammed Tamimi, during a demonstration. A rubber bullet entered his head under his nose and got lodged in his skull; a family member told Al Jazeera blood poured from his head "like a fountain."

Last week Haaretz posted a moving video, below, of an interview with Mohammed in which he states that he was going to a protest of Trump's Jerusalem announcement on his village's lands when he was shot by a soldier he did not see; that he underwent a six-hour operation and spent a week in a (medically-induced) coma; and that he cannot go out of the house for the next few months because he now lacks bone in part of his skull.

Rapper Vic Mensa has published a wrenching piece in Time Magazine about "oppression and abuse" in Palestine. He saw elderly women being "punched in the face" by Israeli soldiers, saw hundreds of children being harassed and detained, and felt a solemn obligation to bear witness. But check out two of the opening sentences in the article:

I am not anti-Semitic, and the views expressed in this essay are in no way an attack on people of the Jewish faith. My words are a reflection of my experiences on my trip, and my criticism lies with the treatment of Palestinian civilians by the state of Israel, no more and no less.

Those words are an insult to the essay itself. They were obviously stapled in by Mensa's minders, the editors. I say this as someone who has been in the editorial business forever (i.e., I don't know it for a fact); but the article has nothing to do with Jewishness.

In the land of the free, if you try to raise some extra money by selling a willing customer a product - you can and will be charged and arrested - if you don't pay the state for permission beforehand. A married couple in Key West just learned the hard way that entrepreneurial spirit - the very fabric of America - will not only be crushed by armed agents of the state, but they will also brag about it on social media.

Last week, the Monroe County Sherrif's office was so proud that they protected the citizens..ahem..their paychecks, that they took to Facebook to gloat in the fact that they detained and extorted a couple for selling shrimp.

"Couple charged with illegal shrimp sale," read the start of the post dedicated to publicly shaming a couple for trying to make an honest buck.

According to City-Data.com, when compared to the rest of the country Key West, Fl has 78.6 percent more crime. This higher crime rate makes perfect sense given the fact that the sheriff's department brags about arresting innocent people who merely forgot or felt it not necessary to pay the state for the privilege to sell another person a 5lb bag of shrimp.

I write a lot of incendiary things in this gig, but one of the things I regularly say which gets pushed back on most angrily is my insistence that the American people are, generally speaking and at their core, good. And that backlash is virtually always coming from Americans.

I encounter this anger even when speaking broadly about American political dynamics. Whenever I write about the exploitative Orwellian oligarchy that is loosely centralized behind the official United States government, I always get a bunch of bitter, annoyed Americans making well-intentioned comments about how stupid their countrymen are for continuing to support such a pervasively evil establishment.

Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cautioned against turning women into "snowflakes" as she weighed in on the ongoing #MeToo movement. She called it a positive thing that risks doing more harm than good.


In an interview with CNN's David Axelrod on 'The Axe Files,' Rice said that the ongoing movement to reveal sexual improprieties committed by certain men is a "good thing," but she warns it could go too far.

"I do think we have to be a little bit careful. Let's not turn women into snowflakes. Let's not infantilize women," Rice said, using the derogatory term 'snowflake' used to describe the new generation of youth who - as their critics contend - are overly politically correct and prone to take offense when challenged by ideas that do not conform to their worldview.

Multiple videos have surfaced online showing an officer with the New York Police Department violently shoving and choking protesters during a demonstration in protest of the detainment of an immigration rights activist.

One Twitter user posted a video compiling cell phone footage from bystanders that shows the officer walking up to two different individuals who were not threatening him - appearing to choose them as random targets from the crowd - and choking them for no apparent reason.


The protest began after Ravi Ragbir, an immigrant from Trinidad and executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York, arrived at the federal building for a check-in with ICE officials and was detained.

A crowd of nearly 300 people gathered outside the building in protest of Ragbir's detainment. The Hill reported that Ragbir has been "contesting a deportation order since 2006 and was granted prosecutorial discretion," which means that Immigration and Customs Enforcement "delays execution of a final order of deportation for immigrants who are considered low priority."

Residents in Washington, D.C. are still baffled over how every single student at Ballou High School got their diploma, despite many of them not even showing up to class.

It wasn't just one school. Students across the city graduated despite having missed more than 30 days of school in a single course, findings from the D.C. Office of the State Superintendent investigation found. The investigation is still ongoing, but parents' demand for answers prompted city officials to share some initial findings.

The city wide audit came after an initial investigation by WAMU and NPR at Ballou, in which they discovered a high rate of unexcused absences.

An investigation by WAMU and NPR has found that Ballou High School's administration graduated dozens of students despite high rates of unexcused absences. We reviewed hundreds of pages of Ballou's attendance records, class rosters and emails after a district employee shared the private documents. Half of the graduates missed more than three months of school last year, unexcused. One in five students was absent more than present - missing more than 90 days of school.

A Democrat-backed Senate bill aimed at restoring net neutrality after a "misguided" repeal by the FCC only needs one vote from the GOP to pass. Meanwhile, 22 states have filed suit against the federal agency.

The measure introduced Tuesday by Senator Ed Markey (D-Massachusetts) would block the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) December repeal of net neutrality rules under the Congressional Review Act (CRA). And it already has the support of all 49 Democrats and one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, The Hill reported.

If the measure passes through the Senate with a 51-vote majority, it would then also need to pass the Republican-led US House of Representatives. If the bill passes there, the decision to either approve the measure, or veto it, would lie in the hands of President Donald Trump.

Under the Congressional Review Act, legislators have a 60-day window to pass the measure from the time the FCC repealed the regulations, which was on December 14 in a 3-2 vote. FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai approved the measure to repeal rules that blocked internet service providers (ISP) in the US from offering customers paid fast lanes or throttling and blocking internet traffic. The rules had been set in 2015 under former President Barack Obama.

Identity Politics is the ideology of the liberal/progressive/left and the Democratic Party. Identity Politics teaches hatred of white people, all white people. An article last November in the student newspaper at Texas State University declared that white DNA is an abomination.

Americans, assuming that they are aware of this hostile statement toward white people, dismiss it as student sillyness. They do not understand that it is the logical conclusion of the reigning ideology in America today. Naomi Klein, for example, writing in the current issue of Sierra, takes for granted the explanations of Identity Politics when she writes that the stakes in the 2016 election were enormously high for "those targeted by racist attacks as Trump fanned the flames of rising white nationalism . . . to the prospect of women losing the right to decide whether or not to become mothers, to the reality of sexual assault being normalized and trivialized at the highest reaches of power."

Formerly, the liberal/progressive/left and the Democratic Party stood for the working class. In those days societal conflict was understood in class terms, and the capitalist was seen as the exploiter. Today the conflict is identity driven, with the white heterosexual male placed in the role as the exploiter of blacks, homosexuals and women.

The idea that power resides in the white heterosexual male is obviously erroneous. Imagine if the Texas college student had written that black DNA is an abomination or homosexual DNA is an abomination. The article would not have been published. But it is perfectly OK to denigrate whites. Indeed, white males have no protection against abuse, because they are not protected by quotas, political correctness, and hate speech prohibitions.

Whites are easily discriminated against, as the recent firing of James Damore by Google illustrates. Damore simply stated a scientific fact that males and females have different traits that suit them to different jobs. But this is a fact that is inconsistent with Identity Politics. Just as Trofim Lysenko managed to destroy Soviet genetics by denying facts, Identity Politics is destroying American society by denying facts. [Link] Ideologies are only interested in facts that confirm the ideology. When no such facts exist, ideologues make up the facts.

Americans, especially white people who are the target of the deadly ideology of Identity Politics and are placed by the ideology in the same position as Jews in Nazi Germany and capitalists in Soviet Russia, are unaware of the extent to which Identity Politics is now the dominant force in American culture. For example, as James Damore's lawsuit against Google proves, Google's corporate culture is 100 percent Identity Politics. Damore was fired because he challenged Identity Politics. Read here examples of the raw hatred that Google employees expressed against Damore. None were fired for hateful and threatening language that went far beyond Damore's mild statement that males and females have different traits. Google actually rewards employees for beating up on white heterosexual males and conservatives and holds diversity training sessions, the purpose of which is to put whites on the defensive. The whites who survive at Google are the ones who deplore their whiteness.

Amazon wants to put a camera and microphone in your bedroom with the UK launch of its latest Echo home device.

The camera on the £119.99 ($129) Echo Spot, which doubles up as a 'smart alarm', will probably be facing directly at the user's bed.

The device, which is already available in the US has such sophisticated microphones it can hear people talking from across the room - even if music is playing.

However, there remain privacy concerns over using such a device in the home.

Amazon devices have previously activated when they're not wanted meaning this small device could turn into a potential spy.