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Fri, 05 Nov 2021
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5 New Jersey officials and political candidates indicted for taking massive bribes

bribes jersey
© New Jersey Attorney General's Office
From left to right: Jason O'Donnell, John Cesaro and Mary Dougherty
Five current and former New Jersey public officials are facing charges of accepting bribes following a major corruption investigation, the state's attorney general announced.

The five defendants are charged with taking thousands of dollars in bribes from one cooperating witness in the form of campaign contributions, Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said. In return, the officials promised the cooperating witness, who is a tax attorney, they would vote or use their office of influence to hire or continue to hire his law firm for lucrative government legal work.

The defendants include Sudhan Thomas, incumbent Jersey City school board president, and former State Assemblyman Jason O'Donnell, who ran an unsuccessful campaign to be mayor of Bayonne in 2018.

Comment: As above so below:


Fish

UK fishermen enraged as EU cuts quota by 50% causing huge hit to earnings

fisheries
© GETTY
EU fisheries chiefs have slashed the North Sea cod quota by 50 percent
Industry chiefs were dismayed by the decision and have criticised Brussels for failing to agree to a more gradual reduction to the legal catch. Quotas for 2020 were agreed at this year's annual EU fisheries negotiations, which concluded in the early hours of this morning. Cod quotas will be cut by 50 percent in the North Sea, while limited quotas were agreed for cod in the Celtic Sea, Irish Sea and West of Scotland - just enough to allow the landing of accidental catch.

This was the last December Council attended by the UK before it becomes an independent coastal state after once it has left the EU.


Comment: More like if it leaves the EU.


June Mummery, Brexit Party MEP for East of England and founder of Renaissance of the East Anglian Fisheries (REAF), said: "The cuts in the cod quota are disappointing but hopefully this is the last time the UK will have a quota agreed on its behalf by the EU.

"We need a system where fishermen's voices count."

Comment: Those providing a valuable service to society are increasingly suffering the pressure of the rapid changes occurring on our planet and the issue is being confused by out of touch, ideologically driven bureaucrats:


Clipboard

Study: Half of US adults will be obese by 2030

weigh scale
There's no way to sugarcoat this news: Nearly half of American adults will be obese within a decade and one-quarter will be severely so, a new report predicts.

It corrects for a weakness in previous estimates that may have made the problem seem not as big as it really is. Those estimates often relied on national health surveys and people tend to understate their weight in those.

The new work used a decades-long federal study in which weight was measured to get a more accurate picture of trends and to project into the future.

"It's alarming," said a nutrition expert with no role in the study, Dr. Lawrence Appel of Johns Hopkins University. "We're going to have some pretty awful problems" medically and financially because so many people weigh too much, he said.

The New England Journal of Medicine published the study Wednesday. It was led by scientists at Harvard and George Washington universities.

Obesity raises the risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer and other health problems. It's gauged by body mass index, or BMI, a measure of weight relative to height. Underweight or normal is a BMI under 25; overweight is 25 to 30, moderately obese is 30 to 35 and severely obese is 35 or over.

Comment: See also:


Eye 2

Transgender clinics prey on autistic children because they're easy to manipulate, disturbing new research finds

transgender flag
Only a very small handful of media outlets - and none that are considered "mainstream" - are addressing the fact that children on the autism spectrum are being disproportionately targeted by the transgender lobby for "transition therapy" because of their abnormal mental states.

A group of experts who used to work in the field recently came forward with a stark warning to the public about how autistic children have basically become the LGBTQ mafia's prey of choice because of how easily these little ones buy into transgender propaganda.

As many as one in four transgenders, believe it or not, now registers on the autism spectrum. According to a paper published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, this figure is "higher than the general population," and the reason is because autistic children are more easily swayed to "go trans" when pressured by adults to do so.

A study out of the United States involving nearly 300,000 child participants also found that those diagnosed on the autism spectrum are more than four times likelier than their non-autistic counterparts to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria. This suggests that autistic children are the "target market," so to speak, for transgender drugging and surgery.

Comment: It's refreshing to see an authoritative body (the ACP in this case) that hasn't fallen prey to gender bender ideology... at least not yet. See also:


Bad Guys

How the Specter of War Fuels Colombian Protests

Colombia  protestor march
© Joshua Collins
One of many marches on Nov 21st in Bogota, Colombia
Bogota, Colombia- 8 million victims of violence. That's the toll of a nearly 50-year Colombian civil war that officially came to an end when the Government and FARC rebels signed a 2016 Peace Accord. There was a promise of unity and reconciliation the country hadn't know for generations.

But for many Colombians outside the major cities, that promised peace never materialized — new rebel dissidents are flourishing, drug violence continues and government promises of investment and infrastructure in long-neglected rural areas never came to pass.

Indigenous people and social organizers have been victims of an ever-worsening spree of murders, revenge killings are common, and there are still sizable regions of Colombia that remain lawless, controlled by criminal groups.

Cardboard Box

How socialism causes atheism

Minnesota Atheists protest in the Twin Cities.
© FibonacciBlue. This image has been cropped. CC BY 2.0.
Minnesota Atheists protest in the Twin Cities.
George Orwell's 1984 defines the booming genre of dystopian literature, but Aldous Huxley's Brave New World provided a more accurate prophecy of the future. In another of his works, Ends and Means, Huxley offered deep insights into why people choose to become atheists. In a time when 26 percent of Americans are unaffiliated with any religion, and the number of atheists and agnostics in the U.S. has doubled in the last 10 years, people of faith must pay heed to his observations. Huxley wrote that he and "most of [his] contemporaries" saw atheism's moral vacuum as their "instrument of liberation," because it allowed them to embrace sexual hedonism and socialism:
The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever. Similar tactics had been adopted during the eighteenth century and for the same reasons.
"Serious writers associated political with sexual prejudice" and recommended atheism as "a preparation for social reform or revolution," he wrote. The idea that atheism foments the revolutionary spirit was not lost on the revolutionaries. In 1905, Vladimir Lenin encouraged the Bolsheviks to "follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists."

Video

Terrence Malick's new film 'A Hidden Life' is the story of a farmer who resisted Hitler - NOT a metaphor for anti-Trump #Resistance

hidden life malick
© Global Look Press / ZUMAPRESS / Reiner Bajo
A Hidden Life, Dir: Terrence Malick, Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2019
A Hidden Life by Terrence Malick celebrates an Austrian farmer's Christian principled opposition to Hitler, and any attempts to draw a parallel between the movie and anti-Trump resistance are myopic at best.

The new film is the true story of Franz Jagerstatter, a Catholic farmer in Austria who is conscripted into the German Army during WWII and must choose between his conscience, and pledging allegiance to Hitler and the Third Reich.

Jagerstatter's conscientious objections to Nazism come with dire legal consequences that put his life in peril and leave his mother, wife, and three young daughters pariahs in their small village community.

The movie, which stars a who's who of European actors, including August Diehl, Bruno Ganz, Michael Nyqvist, Franz Rogowski, and Mathias Shoenaerts, may be difficult for non-cinephiles to absorb as Malick, who has made such classics as Badlands, The Thin Red Line, and The Tree of Life, has a storytelling style that is more meditative and impressionistic than general audiences may be conditioned to accept. That said, the film is as dramatically profound and insightful as anything I have seen all year.


Although A Hidden Life was in development before Trump became president, some out here in Hollywood have interpreted the film as a metaphor for the moral imperative to resist Trump. I think that interpretation is myopic at best, and believe that the movie is unintentionally a scathing indictment of the moral vacuity and hypocrisy at the heart of the anti-Trump resistance.

The main point I took away from the film is that moral authority is essential if opposition to evil is to endure. Franz Jagerstatter had an abundance of moral authority because his loyalty was not to country, village, leader, party, policy or even church, but to the truth.

Attention

Man opens fire near Russian FSB HQ in central Moscow - at least 1 dead, reports of multiple shooters - UPDATES

moscow shooting
© Instagram / masha_araya; instagram / fishy_god
Gunfire has broken out near central Moscow's Lubyanka Square in the immediate vicinity of the Federal Security Service building. The authorities said the gunman was neutralized and two FSB officers seriously injured.

The shooting occurred around 6pm local time right at the heart of Russia's capital on a street leading to the square and the iconic FSB building and some 10 minutes on foot from the Kremlin.

Gunfire can be heard in several videos from the scene circulating on social media. The footage also shows multiple law enforcement officers in full gear and ambulances.


Comment: As usual with mass shootings of this sort, reports of multiple shooters are in conflict with the official narrative of a "lone shooter." This case is no different, so far. Despite initial official reports of a single gunman, Russian media sources quoted eyewitnesses reporting up to 3 gunmen. But RT is reporting that officials are now denying reports of multiple shooters. So the situation is still confused. But live Russian-language coverage claimed that the FSB confirmed that there WERE 3 shooters, one of whom was highly trained, another who was holed up in the FSB HQ parking lot. Two of the shooters are reported dead, and special forces are reportedly planning to attack the third in the parking lot.

The identity of the shooter who was killed by the FSB has yet to be established.


RT reports:
While the FSB itself is reportedly treating the incident as an "act of terrorism," Russia's Investigative Committee has described it as an "attempted murder of law enforcement officers," while announcing the launch of a criminal probe.
UPDATE (Dec. 20)

Reporting has been all over the place on this one. It seems the Russian authorities have settled on a single shooter. Footage emerged of his final moments:


The shooter had a Kalashnikov, and ended up injuring a total of 5 and killing 2 (one who was described as a police officer in some reports, but was apparently an FSB employee/guard, and another FSB employee who later died from his wounds). A witness says he was constantly reloading his rifle and shooting indiscriminately at the wall of nearby houses. The shooter has been identified as Evgeny Manyurov, a 39-year-old ex-security guard described as a loner and firearms enthusiast:
Russian media identified the gunman as Evgeny Manyurov, a 39-year-old man from Podolsk, a small satellite city located about 16km (10 miles) south of Moscow. His identity was later confirmed by Russia's Investigative Committee.

There is not much public information about him, but he is listed as a member of a Moscow shooting club who took third place in a competition last month in the pistol caliber carbine category.

An instructor at the club said Manyurov was a poor shooter who only trained there for several months. The only outstanding thing about the man was that he insisted on practicing in a trench coat, which, according to the newspaper that conducted the interview, the man wore during the shooting. Footage shows the same type of coat on the shooter on Thursday evening.

Manyurov's mother told another outlet that her son took up shooting three or four years ago and was passionate about it. In fact, he legally owned seven firearms, including two Saiga carbines, two hunting shotguns and a non-lethal handgun. One of the carbines was apparently used in the shooting. Since getting a license for rifles in Russia requires at least five years of ownership of a shotgun, his experience with guns must be even longer.

The suspect also had a background in law and spent some time as a private consultant. That career was apparently not very successful, since it lasted for just five months. For the past several years, he worked as a security guard, but resigned some time ago.

In one interview, Manyurov's mother said her son "spoke on the phone to some Arabs," but they communicated in English, which she does not understand.

The man is said to have been a loner, without any close friends or a long-term partner.
A loner, a poor shooter, the FSB's HQ targeted despite no apparent motive, and mystery calls from English-speaking 'Arabs'.

Hmmm, it sounds like this could be yet another 'wet-op'. But the Russian authorities, like the US authorities lately with the 'random mass shootings' in Pensacola and New Jersey, have elected to 'eat them' by playing them down rather than hyping them in the media.


Hearts

Random acts of kindness: Florida man spends $4,550 to pay strangers' utilities bills before Christmas

Mike Esmond
© Mike Esmond
Mike Esmond paid for the utilities bills for 36 families who were at risk of having their water, gas or heat shut off.
When Mike Esmond saw that his utility bill was due on Dec. 26, he thought back to the winter he and his family spent without heat.

They had fallen on hard times and weren't able to pay their bill.

This year, he was grateful he didn't have such a worry. But he thought of the families who did and decided to help in anyway he could.

Esmond, a 73-year-old resident of Gulf Breeze, Florida, ended up paying the bills of 36 families who were at risk of having their utilities shut off.

In all, his generosity amounted to $4,558.

Handcuffs

Man sentenced to 16 years in prison for burning church's pride flag

Adolfo Martinez
An Ames man was sentenced Wednesday to about 16 years in prison after he set fire to a church's LGBTQ flag in June.

Adolfo Martinez, 30, of Ames, was found guilty last month of third-degree arson in violation of individual rights — hate crime, third-degree harassment, and reckless use of fire as a habitual offender.

He was arrested after stealing a pride banner hanging at Ames United Church of Christ, 217 6th St., and burning it early June 11 outside Dangerous Curves Gentleman's Club, 111 5th St., police said.