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Debunking the propaganda and getting our facts straight on Venezuela

Alba Movements
Resumen
Mon, 14 May 2018 00:00 UTC
supporters venezuela

Supporters of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro celebrate after the National Electoral Council declared him winner of the presidential election

1. "There is no democracy": In Venezuela there have been 23 elections since 1998, the year in which Hugo Chavez was elected as President and began a process of democratization of the State's powers with high level of public participation in the decisions they make in their political, economical, cultural and organizational life. This is known as Participative Democracy with Protagonism from the people. Furthermore in Venezuela, voting is not obligatory, and still the participation levels in the last decades has been more than 70%, higher than what is there in United States, Spain, Colombia, Peru and Chile. For 11 years, Venezuela has used electronic or automatic voting system, which allows accelerating the voting process and protecting the results.

Comment: Maduro and his party may not be perfect but it bears repeating that Venezuela would not be in the shape it's in today if not for the on-going attempts on the part of the US to sabotage the sovereignty of the South American country and its work towards independence from the empire to the north.

And the attempts have been staggering in scope:

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Fire

Teen fined over $36 mn for starting Oregon wildfire


RT
Wed, 23 May 2018 02:24 UTC
A teenager has been ordered to pay $36,618,330 in restitution for the damage he caused by starting a wildfire in Oregon last year.
Columbia River in Oregon, US
© Inciweb / Reuters
Teen fined over $36 mn for sparking Oregon wildfire
The Eagle Creek fire seen burning along the Columbia River in Oregon, US on September 5, 2017.
County Circuit Judge John A. Olson ordered the unnamed 15-year-old to pay the fine on Monday for throwing fireworks into Eagle Creek Canyon, sparking an almighty inferno that spread across the forest.

The monumental payment means that the teen would have to pay over $100,000 a month for the next 30 years to pay back the balance. Judge Olson recognized that the teen will likely not be able to fulfill the payment, and so he ordered the local juvenile department to develop a financial plan for him, The Oregonian reports.
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Target

Gun Owners of America and NRA strike back at big name banks trying to undercut second amendment

Alex Roberts
Halsey News
Mon, 21 May 2018 00:00 UTC
nra graphic
Second amendment supporters have now taken aim at the banks that they once had no problem doing business with. Citigroup and Bank of America have taken to discrimination practices as they no longer treat makers of fire arms the same way that they treat their other business customers. The shot that these banks have fired at gun makers could have placed any hopes that they had of gaining favor with Republican law makers and regulators at risk. A large number of Republicans defend the second amendment themselves. The actions of the banks place themselves in direct opposition of the support that most Republicans give to the second amendment.

Two months ago Citigroup took it upon themselves to require their business clients who sell guns to make their customers pass a background check first. Just a few weeks later Bank of America cut off all loans to business clients who make military style fire arms for civilians. Both banks made their decisions after the school shooting that occurred in Parkland, Florida on February 14. Those in favor of tighter gun control laws and Democrats praised the two banks for their decisions and have tried to encourage other banks to do the same.

Comment: See also:

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Heart - Black

Sixty murders in Gaza and the end of Israeli 'conscience'

Gideon Levy
JohnPilger.com
Thu, 17 May 2018 01:05 UTC
soldiers gaza march of return
© Oren Ziv / Activestills.org
Israeli soldiers face Palestinian protesters in Gaza during the Return March protests. April 13, 2018.
On the night of the Palestinians' slaughter, Zion exulted an embassy and a Eurovision. It's difficult to think of a more atrocious moral eclipse

When will the moment come in which the mass killing of Palestinians matters anything to the right? When will the moment come in which the massacre of civilians shocks at least the left-center? If 60 people slain don't do it, perhaps 600? Will 6,000 jolt them?

When will the moment come in which a pinch of human feeling arises, if only for a moment, toward the Palestinians? Sympathy? At what moment will someone call a halt, and suggest compassion, without being branded an eccentric or an Israel hater?

When will there be a moment in which someone admits that the slaughterer has, after all, some responsibility for the slaughter, not only the slaughtered, who are of course responsible for their own slaughter?

Sixty people killed didn't matter to anyone - perhaps 600 would? How about 6,000? Will Israel find all the excuses and justifications then also? Will the blame be laid on the slain people and their "dispatchers" even then, and not a word of criticism, mea culpa, sorrow, pity or guilt will be heard?
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Quenelle

Yale University being investigated by Department of Education, accused of 'toxic environment against men'

Caleb Parke
Fox News
Sat, 19 May 2018 00:00 UTC
Yale
© REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton
The Department of Education is investigating Yale University for anti-male discrimination.
The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is investigating Yale University after a male student from another school filed a Title IX complaint in February, accusing the Ivy League institution of a "toxic environment against men."

Kursat Chistoff Pekgoz, an English literature doctoral student at the University of Southern California who has no affiliation to Yale, filed the complaint after he singled out the Ivy League for its overall culture of anti-male discrimination by providing benefits exclusively for women, despite declining male enrollment. This is not the first time Yale has been accused of discriminating against men using Obama-era Title IX policies that have been pulled back under the Trump administration. But this complaint, unlike the others, is unrelated to sexual misconduct on campus.
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2 + 2 = 4

How work, not welfare programs, is transformative

Peter Cove
City Journal
Tue, 22 May 2018 22:35 UTC
Anti-poverty programs should foster autonomy, not perpetual dependence.
technology worker
With the House of Representatives' rejection of a $867 billion farm bill last week, efforts to reform the federal Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as "food stamps," have run aground, at least for now. Conservative House Republicans backed the proposal, which tied aid to work or training requirements for able-bodied people-a principle that enjoys broad support from voters across the political spectrum. The liberal Left, however, opposes and often derides work requirements for welfare and other forms of assistance, seeing such conditions as arbitrary and cruel.

New York Times economic columnist Eduardo Porter expressed his opposition to the plan in a column that reads like a screed against the American Dream. Encouraging poor people to get jobs as a condition of receiving aid, contends Porter, perpetuates a myth that ending dependency is the key to getting out of poverty. He cites the example of a poor single mother on welfare who can't pay her bills and drinks lots of beer. When she is forced off welfare and gets a job, he says, she still can't pay her bills and still drinks lots of beer.
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Newspaper

Indian govt employee says he's the reincarnation of Vishnu, skips work to go to '5th dimension'


RT
Tue, 22 May 2018 22:28 UTC
Indian artist dressed as Hindu Lord Vishnu
© Anindito Mukherjee / Reuters
Indian artist dressed as Hindu Lord Vishnu for Janmashtami festival in New Delhi
A senior engineer at an Indian government agency has been a no-show at work for eight months as he was busy performing his duties as a deity, namely the 10th reincarnation of Vishnu, the man explained in a letter to his employer.

Some office workers are ready to go to great lengths to find a legitimate reason to be absent from work, however, one government employee in India took it out of this world.
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Coffee

Starbucks new bathroom policy yields mixed reactions


CBS LA
Sun, 20 May 2018 21:35 UTC
Starbucks
© Getty Images
Everyone is welcome at your neighborhood Starbucks. This includes just hanging out or using the bathroom.

The policy change comes five weeks after two black men who did not purchase anything were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks.

CBSLA's Chris Holmstrom headed to Hollywood Boulevard to get local reactions to the policy change.

"I've definitely done it. So I don't see a problem with it," said Nicole McDonald.

"I think it should have always been that way, especially because of the way racism is you know," said Desiree Mollere.

But some customers have other concerns.
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USA

America in decline: Boy Scouts Jamboree will make condoms available to all participants

Bob Unruh
WND
Mon, 21 May 2018 21:08 UTC
boy scouts stamp
The Boy Scouts have decided to accept people who identify as gay and lesbian among their ranks. And girls are welcome now, too, into the iconic organization, which has renamed itself Scouts BSA.

So what's next?

A mandate that condoms be made available to "all participants" of its global gathering.

It's among the demands of the World Scout Committee for any host country of a World Scout Jamboree.

That would include the 24th World Scout Jamboree, scheduled July 21-Aug. 1, 2019, in West Virginia.

The Scouts say: "For the first time, a world jamboree will be hosted by three national Scout organizations: Scouts Canada, Asociación de Scouts de México, and the Boy Scouts of America. These three distinct cultures will join together to host the world Scouting community in a celebration of cultural exchange, mutual understanding, peace, and friendship."

With condoms.

Commenting on the condom policy, John Stemberger, president of the Florida Family Policy Council, wrote that "it is not clear how far down the rabbit hole the Boy Scouts will continue to fall."
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Pistol

The best explanation for mass shootings: Social contagion

David French
National Review
Fri, 18 May 2018 21:04 UTC
columbine
© Gary Caskey/Reuters
Columbine High School students cry while awaiting friends and family at Leawood Elementary school in Littleton, Colorado, April 20, 1999.
On another terrible day, I hate to introduce even more pessimism, but when we discuss mass shootings, one of the first questions we ask is the simplest and also the hardest to answer. Why? Why does this keep happening? Those who advocate for gun control have an immediate answer - the prevalence of guns in the United States. Yet guns have been part of the fabric of American life for the entire history of our republic. Mass shootings - especially the most deadly mass shootings - are a far more recent phenomenon.

Writing in 2015, Malcolm Gladwell wrote what I think is still the best explanation for modern American mass shootings, and it's easily the least comforting. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex argument, essentially he argues that each mass shooting lowers the threshold for the next. He argues, we are in the midst of a slow-motion "riot" of mass shootings, with the Columbine shooting in many ways the key triggering event. Relying on the work of Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, Gladwell notes that it's a mistake to look at each incident independently:
But Granovetter thought it was a mistake to focus on the decision-making processes of each rioter in isolation. In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds - which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero-instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator's accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that - and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.

Comment: This logic just might explain the 20th century. Would you have been a Nazi or a Bolshevik? Maybe not if there were only a couple of them. But what is your threshold?

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