Society's Child

Orange man bad, Empire good: Reactions To Trump's Syria withdrawal plan say more than the plan itself

Caitlin Johnstone
caitlinjohnstone.com
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 16:41 UTC

President Trump has ordered the withdrawal of US troops from Syria, which is reportedly expected to take 60-100 days or 30 days depending on who you ask. According to Kurdish forces in eastern Syria the withdrawal of American as well as French troops is already underway, though France is saying it's staying. The number of troops to be withdrawn which keeps getting repeated in the news is 2,000, but there've been reports that the actual number of US ground troops in Syria is closer to 4,000. The US-led airstrike campaign against Islamic State will reportedly continue.

Trump says the withdrawal is because ISIS has been defeated in Syria, but others are pointing to the conspicuous timing of his recent chat with Turkey's President Tayyip Erdoğan, who has announced a coming military operation against Kurdish forces in Syria east of the Euphrates in the near future, as the more likely reason. An anonymous senior US official has told Reuters that the two leaders didn't discuss a US withdrawal from Syria, but the timing of the conversation as well as a recent $3.5 billion arms deal with Turkey indicates the the US withdrawal and Erdoğan's planned military assault could very well be related. The Kurds put all their eggs in the basket of US support out of a desire to create their own nation, and a US withdrawal means they'll be forced to either court an alliance with Damascus, as some analysts believe will happen, or risk being trapped between hostile Turkish forces and hostile Syrian coalition forces as the Assad government races to reclaim Syrian territory.

Angry New Yorkers demand answers from Amazon execs: "You're worth $1 trillion. Why do you need our $3 billion?"

Julia Conley
Common Dreams
Thu, 13 Dec 2018 16:12 UTC

© @GoMadeIn/Twitter
Demonstrators from local worker advocacy groups assembled outside New York's City Hall as the City Council held a hearing on Amazon's plan to extablish a new headquarters in Queens.

The online retail giant has said its new headquarters in New York will create 25,000 jobs for residents - a claim one protester derided as "smoke and mirrors"

After being kept in the dark about New York's $3 billion deal with Amazon, allowing the trillion-dollar corporation to build its new headquarters-complete with helicopter landing pad for CEO Jeff Bezos - in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City, concerned New York City Council members and scores of angry New Yorkers on Wednesday angrily confronted company representatives over the plan.

At the first City Council meeting on Amazon's so-called "HQ2," about 150 protesters joined the mostly-Democratic lawmakers in slamming the closed-door process through which the city and state finalized the deal and the effect the corporation's arrival will likely have on affordable housing and community development in Queens and the entire city, as New York pours much-needed funds into the new one million square foot campus.

Comment: Regular citizens are right to be furious. They have Seattle's example before them and know what's coming. New York's ruling elite has sold them out.

And most chilling:

US top universities don't support presumption of innocence

Katie Anderson
Campus Reform
Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:16 UTC

A new study found that students' due process rights are in jeopardy at more than two-thirds of America's top colleges and universities.

Over 70 percent of the top 53 institutions in the United States, as rated by U.S. News and World Report, do not guarantee that students have the presumption of innocence when it comes to disciplinary hearings, according to a report published by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

According to the report, over 70 percent of the top 53 institutions in the United States...do not guarantee that students have the presumption of innocence.

The study, which gathered data throughout 2018, graded each of these top universities in the U.S based on the policies instituted by the school. FIRE awarded each college a grade on a scale from zero to 20 points, where an "A" ranges from 17 to 20 points and an "F" is zero to four points.

Comment: Who needs out-dated ideas like 'presumption of innocence'? The inquisition and gulags worked out so well.

DOJ and ATF about to find themselves in court over new bump stock ban

Chris Eger
Guns.com
Wed, 19 Dec 2018 15:06 UTC

Legal challenges have already been filed to a planned federal requirement to give bump stock owners 90 days to destroy or surrender their devices.

The Firearms Policy Coalition, Firearms Policy Foundation, and Madison Society Foundation on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in a Washington, D.C. federal court against Acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives seeking a motion to block a pending ban on bump stocks announced earlier that day. The member groups, filing on behalf of Pennsylvania bump stock owner Damien Guedes, argue Whitaker and the ATF are overstepping their legal authority.

"The ATF has misled the public about bump-stock devices," said Pennsylvania firearms attorney Joshua Prince, who along with Adam Kraut, is representing Guedes. "Worse, they are actively attempting to make felons out of people who relied on their legal opinions to lawfully acquire and possess devices the government unilaterally, unconstitutionally, and improperly decided to reclassify as 'machineguns'."

Editor-in-chief of Mother Jones caught skewing poll data to trash Bernie

RT
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 11:01 UTC

Bernie Sanders is unfit to be president because black women don't care for him, the editor-in-chief of a prominent American magazine has argued citing a poll that... doesn't really support her claim.

Clara Jeffery, editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, revealed to the internet on Tuesday that black women do not think that Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders would be an appetizing presidential candidate in 2020, preferring instead Democratic heartthrobs such as Senator Kamala Harris and former Vice President Joe Biden.

"Survey asked black women to say who's among their top three candidates: Harris: 71.1% Beto: 38.3% Biden: 25% Booker: 24.2% Warren: 22.3% Abrams: 15.2% Bernie: 12.1% Bernie's never going to be the nominee unless he turns these numbers around," Jeffery tweeted, along with a link to her source.

French media 'in cahoots' with govt: RT interviews censored Yellow Vest protester

RT
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 11:01 UTC

A French news channel's eyebrow-raising edit has reinforced the belief that the media "are in cahoots" with the country's political elite, a Yellow Vest protester, whose anti-Macron placard was airbrushed from a photo, told RT.

Jean-Baptiste Redde said he was shocked when he learned that TV channel France 3 had sanitized an AFP photograph showing him holding a sign that read "Macron out." The channel, which dropped the "out" part of Redde's message, blamed the curious Photoshop-job on a "human error."

That explanation was far from being enough for the activist. "The censorship by France 3 casts a shadow on the media in general," he told RT France. "The protesters start to think that the media are in cahoots with politicians and the financial elite. Such sort of censorship doesn't help the situation."

Racist, sexist UCLA professor says there's 'too many white male firefighters out there'

Hank Berrien
Daily Wire
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 11:01 UTC

In an article printed in the Harvard Business Review, a UCLA professor argued that there are too many white male firefighters in America.

Corinne Bendersky, Professor of Management and Organizations at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, who does research on "gender bias," posited "black firefighters still face challenges with social exclusion and explicit racism," and "firefighters tend to default to a reductive set of traits (physical strength evaluated through strict fitness tests, for example) that serve to maintain white men's dominance in the fire service."

In addition, Bendersky opined that because 64% of calls for firefighters are triggered by medical emergencies, being male is often insufficient, writing, "To succeed as a firefighter, stereotypically masculine traits like brawn and courage are simply not enough. Firefighters also need the intellectual, social, and emotional skills required to deliver medical emergency aid, support each other through traumatic experiences, and engage intimately with the communities they serve."

Comment: Also see: 'Humanities hijacked by ideologues': Jordan Peterson excoriates Western academia

Petition calls on Disney to drop Hakuna Matata trademark, because 'cultural appropriation'

Aanu Adeoye and Adeng Korium
CNN
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 11:01 UTC

"Hakuna Matata" was a well known song in Disney's 1994 hit movie "The Lion King." A remake of the "The Lion King" is due for release next year.

An online petition is calling on Disney to relinquish its trademark of the Swahili phrase "Hakuna Matata."

The phrase, which roughly translates to "no problems" or "no worries" and is a common expression in parts of eastern and southern Africa, is perhaps best known as a song in Disney's 1994 hit movie "The Lion King."

The company trademarked the expression the same year, according to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The petition, created by Zimbabwean activist Shelton Mpala, has received more than 50,000 signatures.

Comment: Also see:

Sick: Teacher who raped child should get off easy because he wanted it say lawyers

Joshua Rhett Miller
New York Post
Wed, 19 Dec 2018 09:25 UTC

Attorneys for a former middle school teacher who admitted having sex with a 14-year-old student argued she should serve less than the minimum sentence for the crime because the boy was a "willing participant," according to a motion filed on behalf of 27-year-old Stephanie Peterson obtained by the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Peterson, who previously taught at New Smyrna Beach Middle School, pleaded guilty in October to lewd and lascivious battery sex act with a child and electronic transmission of material harmful to minors, admitting that she had sex with an eighth-grader in her car and gave him oral sex in her home and in a barn behind his home between November 2017 and last January, court documents show.

Peterson could have been sentenced to up to 20 years in prison if convicted of both felonies at trial, but she now faces between five and 10 years behind bars when she's sentenced Wednesday at a courthouse in DeLand.

Comment: If this were a male teacher one can only imagine the public outcry if the warped lawyers tried to claim the child 'wanted it':

And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Predators Among Us - Interview With Dr. Anna Salter

Feminism's dependency trap

Marilyn Simon
Quillette
Thu, 20 Dec 2018 08:35 UTC

Reading the news stories about #MeToo and sexual harassment, and the barrage of social media posts that accompanied these headlines, I became saddened but also increasingly frustrated. It wasn't the reports of men behaving badly that angered me, but the despair that seemed to be the expected response to these stories, and the helplessness that my female friends appeared to attach to femininity itself that I found troubling.

The unintended and painful irony of recent feminism's preoccupation with overcoming male oppression has been to place men at the centre of female identity. This makes the feminine experience something like an echo; women's voices seem to be little more than a response, or a rebuttal, to men's voices, which are taken to be primarily an instrument of patriarchal oppression. But, in my own experience, men aren't interested in maintaining power and control over women - they simply don't see women as a group that they are oppressing, or that they would like to oppress.

We hear a lot about "male privilege" but historically it has been the "privilege" of men to make their way in the hard world in order to first win a woman's affections, and then support the family structure financially. We might call this "patriarchy," but this term isn't the synonym for misogyny that contemporary progressive political culture seems to think it is. (One has to appreciate the misplaced sincerity of many of my university students who roundly condemn The Patriarchy, while driving their father's Toyota to campus every day, and using his savings to pay for their tuition. Not infrequently it occurs to me that the people who are most vocal against The Patriarchy are those who have benefited from it the most.)

Comment: See also:

New Lt. Governor of Virginia Winsome Sears: "We're going to have safer neighborhoods, safer communities, and our children are going to get a good...

parzival

Bill Gates is going to be the one with the uncertain future,,, * New Lt. Governor of Virginia Winsome Sears: "We're going to have safer...

parzival

The more we hear about adverse affects the more we will merely shrug. It's a catch 22. Is that an asteroid trail in the photo?

sass

Welcome to the new normal. The more sensory exposure we have about such things, the less it is an issue.

sass

more misbehaving phuqqin' jewzskies starring on the sott; speaks for itself

Jibrish

Society's Child

Orange man bad, Empire good: Reactions To Trump's Syria withdrawal plan say more than the plan itself

Angry New Yorkers demand answers from Amazon execs: "You're worth $1 trillion. Why do you need our $3 billion?"

US top universities don't support presumption of innocence

DOJ and ATF about to find themselves in court over new bump stock ban

Editor-in-chief of Mother Jones caught skewing poll data to trash Bernie

French media 'in cahoots' with govt: RT interviews censored Yellow Vest protester

Racist, sexist UCLA professor says there's 'too many white male firefighters out there'

Petition calls on Disney to drop Hakuna Matata trademark, because 'cultural appropriation'

Sick: Teacher who raped child should get off easy because he wanted it say lawyers

Feminism's dependency trap

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