Society's ChildS


Eye 2

Marveling at the corrupt hackery of Michael Cohen's lawyer, Lanny Davis

David Harsanyi
The Federalist
Wed, 25 Jul 2018 17:52 UTC
Lanny Davis
Lanny Davis
Davis' preternatural chutzpah puts most contemporary partisans to shame

Please don't misunderstand me: I can appreciate a a good porn-star-payoff sex scandal featuring secret recordings as much as the next guy. It's just that I was hoping our new political melodrama would feature some fresh faces. While it's going to be fascinating to watch a shyster like Michael Cohen be transformed into a hero of The Resistance, America - even with all our transgressions - simply doesn't deserve Lanny Davis. None of us do.

For those of you who didn't experience the rollicking '90s, Davis can be properly described as a personification of the cliché, "everything that's wrong with Washington." Cringingly slavish to those in power, a consigliere, fundraiser, surrogate, and cheerful liar, Davis was a perpetual presence on cable TV during the Clinton scandals. Few men in history have ever been able to summon his kind of loyalty in the pursuit of shameless, transparent deceit and corruption.
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Rocket

Air Force destroys ballistic missile during test launch due to 'anomaly'


RT
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:53 UTC
missile
© AFP photo / US Air Force / Senior Airman Ian Dudley / AFP 663
A Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile test ended in failure when the projectile was ordered to self-destruct due to an "anomaly" that developed during the flight, the US Air Force has confirmed.

The test missile, minus the nuclear warhead, was launched early Tuesday morning from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The self-destruct signal was sent at 0442 Pacific time (1142 GMT).

No details were made available as to what exactly happened to warrant the self-destruct signal.

"An anomaly is any unexpected event during the test," the Air Force's Global Strike Command said in a statement. "Since anomalies may arise from many factors relating to the operational platform itself, or the test equipment, careful analysis is needed to identify the cause."
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Quenelle

The wisdom Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi learned in colonial Israeli prison

Juan Cole
TruthDig
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:42 UTC
ahed tamimi released
© Screen shot / YouTubeAhed Tamimi at a press conference after her release from prison.
Ahed Tamimi and her mother were given petty and mean-spirited sentences of eight months by a colonial Israeli military judge presiding over stateless, occupied people who are intensively patrolled by the Israeli jackboot while their land, water, and well-being are gradually stolen from them by the judge's cousins. Tamimi as a 17-year-old girl slapped a couple of Israel Occupation personnel attempting to barge into her home. She and others had participated in a demonstration against Israelis squatting nearby on Palestinian land and encroaching on her hometown, during which there was some stone throwing at the Israeli troops who came to stop people from protesting. Those troops shot her cousin in the head with a rubber bullet. That was when Ahed went out and slapped them.

Amazingly, Tamimi used the experience of being jailed, as many colonial subjects in imperial detention cells have - including Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi - to her advantage. Kuwait's KUNA news service reported:
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Jet5

Video shows Russian Su-34 fighter jet destroying ship with supersonic missile in naval drill


RT
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:45 UTC
russian jet
© Russian MoD
A video has surfaced capturing a Russian Su-34 fighter jet destroying a target vessel with a supersonic missile during a naval drill in the Caspian Sea.

The Russian warplane can be seen launching a Kh-31 missile (NATO name: AS-17 Krypton), which hits a drifting target ship. The vessel immediately explodes, and the jet is filmed landing at an airbase later.

The action was filmed last week during a massive drill in the Caspian Sea. The exercise was reported to include the forces from the Caspian Sea Flotilla, and involved around 40 aircraft. Apart from the pictured Su-34 jet, bombers Su-23 and fighter jets Su-25 also conducted maneuvers and practiced hitting targets.

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Bullseye

Lawyer for Maria Butina reminds the world that client isn't charged with spying


RT
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:27 UTC
butina
Media reports that portray Maria Butina as a spy misrepresent the actual charges leveled against her, and no evidence has been produced to back allegations that the Russian activist was a "honey trap," Butina's lawyer told RT.

Sensational reports about Butina's alleged activities in Washington read like a spy novel, but the US government's case against the 29-year-old Russian student and gun activist is far more mundane, Robert Driscoll, Butina's lawyer, told RT in an exclusive interview.

"If you read the indictment of the case, she is alleged to be an agent of Russia who failed to register with the attorney general. Essentially, that means that they have not charged her with espionage and if you read the allegations against her, none of the allegations have anything spy-like about it. Essentially, the government is conceding that even under their own theory, if she had filed a piece of paper with the attorney general's office at the beginning of her trip to America, everything she did was legal."
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Bad Guys

As long as Julian Assange is silenced, any claims against him are illegitimate

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:24 UTC
assange protest sign
As attempts to evict Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London get more and more aggressive, we are seeing a proportionate increase in the establishment smear campaign against him and against WikiLeaks. This is not a coincidence.

The planned campaign to remove Assange from political asylum and the greatly escalated smear campaign to destroy public support for Assange are both occurring at the same time that Assange has been cut off from the world without internet, phone calls or visitors, completely unable to defend himself from the smear campaign. This, also, is not a coincidence.

Comment:

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No Entry

Lunatic Politics: Impossible to have a conversation

Michael Krieger
Liberty Blitzkrieg
Thu, 19 Jul 2018 17:45 UTC
guy shouting
More and more people are becoming aware of and concerned about the level of political dialogue going on right now. We've gotten to a point where I'm seeing almost no intelligent debate about any serious issue. Russiagate now consumes such a massive amount of our collective energy, it feels we've become nearly incapable of discussing anything else. Even worse, Russiagate has morphed into a creepy D.C. establishment religion where merely demanding evidence for the wild claims being made gets you labeled a traitor or Putin agent. Ironically, average Americans don't care about the issue.

When Gallup recently asked Americans what the most important (non-economic) problem facing the country today is, the amount of people saying Russia was so low they couldn't even attribute a number to it.

gallup poll russia
Think about that. We're being divided into two camps of increasingly insane and angry people because of hysteria surrounding an issue nobody even cares about. As usual, we can thank mass media for turning this topic into its singular obsession as well as promoting an environment of cultural insanity and stupidity.

As a result, people aren't having intelligent conversations with one another. They're just yelling at each other. The dialogue feels more like a political hunger games where people see everything as a linguistic competition of kill or be killed. Language itself has become debased as individuals try to one up each other with name calling and hyperbole. Demonizing and dehumanizing the other side appears to be the primary goal, which will only lead to a very bad place if we don't take a collective deep breath.


Comment: Well said. Most people don't actually care about Russia - there are bigger problems at home. Take a look around you. Did Russia cause the immigration crisis? No, the US did with its imperialist polices in Central America. Did Russia move US industry overseas? No, the corporations did to get tax breaks and cheap labour. Did Russia destroy the education system? No, insanely high college tuition and terrible policies like common core did. Did Russia turn US healthcare into a debtors prison? No, that was the US. Did Russia cause the extreme income inequality in the US? No. US again. We could keep going but you get the picture. Yet the media would have everyone believe that Russia the problem. See also:

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Attention

Black reporter discovers Ukraine has 'a lot of f*cking Nazis' but insists there's no widespread extremism


RT
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 16:47 UTC
ukraine nazis
© Gleb Garanich / Reuters
There are a "lot of f*cking Nazi sympathizers" in Ukraine, but reports of widespread right-wing extremism are "propaganda," according to a black journalist who shared his experiences in the country on Twitter.

Terrell J. Starr, a reporter for The Root, took to Twitter to explain the "challenges of being black" in Ukraine. The US journalist noted that he rarely shares the "f*cked up sh*t" he experiences while working in Ukraine because his encounters with race issues in the country have been "mostly positive" and therefore "the bad ones don't always register." Starr said that 90 percent of the attention he gets for being black in Ukraine is positive, but "the 10 percent is very, very bad. And recently, I have felt some bad vibes during my travels to Ukraine."


He recounted several run-ins with this unsavory minority, including one instance in the western Ukrainian city of Yaremche, in which a man "drove by and spit at me as he threw up the Heil Hitler salute." In a similarly unpleasant encounter in downtown Kiev, Starr said that he was threatened by "right-wing extremists" who claimed to be members of the Azov Battalion - a right-wing, Nazi-rune-bedazzled punitive battalion which was incorporated into the National Guard of Ukraine in 2014.

Comment: Most Ukrainians aren't Nazis or even sympathetic to the demented ideology. But 'most Ukrainians' aren't in positions of power working to ethnically cleanse the populations of Donbass and Luhansk. It's telling how The Root rants over 'microagressions' in the US but has such a hard time calling out blatant extremism in Ukraine.

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Star of David

Caches of Israeli-made bombs found as Syrian Army completes clearing terrorists from Daraa province


Sputnik
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:13 UTC
terrorist weapons cache Daara
© Youtube / Syrian Ministry of DefenseIsraeli-made weapons supplied to jihadists forces in Syria
The Syrian army and its allies are completing the defeat of terrorists holed up in Daraa and other provinces of the war-torn country.

Syrian government forces combing towns and villages in the country's southern province of Rif Dimashq have discovered Israeli-made bombs along with loads of munitions and military hardware inside weapons caches belonging to foreign-sponsored jihadist terrorists, Syrian's official news agency SANA reported.

According to the agency, citing an unnamed field commander, Syrian army forces conducting clean-up operations in the towns of Babbila and Yalda have also found a number of anti-personnel mines, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and their rockets, machineguns, automatic rifles, chemical substances used to make bombs as well as telecommunication devices.

Comment: No surprise here.

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Pistol

Federal judge blocks 3-D printed gun blueprints from being publicly available


RT
Wed, 01 Aug 2018 17:00 UTC
3d printed gun
© Robert MacPherson / AFP
A federal judge in Seattle has blocked the release of downloadable plans for 3D-printed guns, hours before a Second Amendment activist was due to release them to the world.

US District Judge Robert Lasnik issued the temporary injunction on Tuesday, after eight Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit on Monday.

"These downloadable guns are unregistered and very difficult to detect, even with metal detectors, and will be available to anyone regardless of age, mental health or criminal history," Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson said in a statement. "If the Trump Administration won't keep us safe, we will."

The plans were due to be made public after the federal government reached a settlement with Defense Distributed, a Texas company that hosts and distributes the blueprints from its online depository, DEFCAD. Defense Distributed and DEFCAD are the creation of Cody Wilson, a pro-gun, libertarian activist.
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