Tag: oppression

Another California speaking event shut down by students

1:07 pm

Fascist California: Protesters from the student chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) shut down another speaking event at a University of California campus, this time at Irvine.

A group of roughly 30 protesters descended upon the event when it was about halfway through, initially engaging civilly but quickly turning to insulting the speakers and shouting over them as they attempted to answer questions.

Video footage of the proceedings, chronicled by former UCI professor Gary Fouse, shows the protesters leading chants of “Israel, Israel, you can’t hide/we charge you with genocide” and “Israel, Israel, what do you say?/how many people have you killed today?” for nearly five minutes, eventually leaving after the police were called. “You people are colonizers or occupiers and you should not be allowed on this f*****g campus,” one of the protesters exclaimed, shouting “**** you” before leaving the venue with her applauding peers.

Kevin Brum, the founder and sole member of Students Supporting Israel at UCI, told The Algemeiner that members of the school’s police department were scheduled to be present for the duration of the “high-risk program,” but didn’t arrive on the scene until ten minutes after they had been called. “After not showing up when we first needed them, UCIPD took us out not by a safe alternate route or by clearing a path [through the corridor], but they decided to take us through a path of protesters who posed a high likelihood of violence,” Brum added.

It appears once again that the authorities in California support this violence, and are willing to aid these protesters in their jackbooted acts of intimidation.

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North Korea completes ballistic missile test

12:06 am

North Korea today successfully completed a ballistic missile test.

The unidentified ballistic missile was launched at 5:27 a.m. Sunday Seoul time (4:27 p.m. Saturday ET), off Kusong north of the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, a South Korean military official told NBC News. The missile flew around 30 minutes and landed in the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary said.

The missile is not believed to be an intercontinental ballistic missile, U.S. Pacific Command said. Defense officials said the U.S. is assessing whether it was a success of failure. “Right now it sure looks successful,” one U.S. defense official said.

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The press begins to turn against SLS

5:28 pm

This report by Eric Berger of Ars Technica, describing the press teleconference today where NASA announced that they would not fly humans on the first SLS flight in 2019, reveals a significant political change.

In the past, most mainstream reporters would routinely accept NASA’s announcements about SLS. If the agency said it was great, their stories would wax poetic about how great it was. If NASA said its greatness was causing a delay, their stories would laud NASA had how well it was doing dealing with SLS’s greatness, even though that greatness was forcing another delay. Never, and I mean never, would NASA or these reporters ever talk about the project’s overall and ungodly cost.

This press conference was apparently quite different. The press had lots of questions about SLS and its endless delays. They had lots of questions about its costs. And most significant, they had lots of questions for NASA about why the agency is having so much trouble building this rocket, when two private companies, SpaceX and Blue Origin, are building something comparable for a tenth the money in about half the time.

During the teleconference, Ars asked Gerstenmaier to step back and take a big-picture look at the SLS rocket. Even with all of the funding—about $10 billion through next year—how was the agency likely to miss the original deadline by as much as three years, if not more?

“I don’t know,” Gerstenmaier replied. “I don’t know—I would just say it’s really kind of the complexity of what we’re trying to go do, and to build these systems. We weren’t pushing state-of-the-art technology, like main engines sitting underneath the rocket or new solid rocket boosters. But we were pushing a lot of new manufacturing, and I think that new manufacturing has caused some of the delays we’ve seen. No one welds the way that we’re welding material at the thicknesses we’re welding.”

…Later, the NASA officials were asked about private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, which are also building heavy-lift rockets but at a very limited cost to taxpayers. What would they have to say about just buying those vehicles off the shelf, at significantly lower cost than an SLS launch, and preserving NASA’s funds to execute in-space missions?

Gerstnmaier’s explanations for SLS’s delays and costs, that it is a very complex and advanced piece of rocket engineering, is total bunk. This was supposed to be an upgraded Saturn 5, but it will only be able to lift about 70% of the payload. It is using the actual shuttle engines, and upgraded shuttle solid rocket boosters. While new engineering was required to refit these for SLS, none of that should have been so hard or expensive.

The key here is that members of the press are finally aware of this, and are asking the right questions. With Falcon Heavy about to launched multiple times before SLS even launches once, the continuation of this boondoggle is becoming increasingly difficult to justify.

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American colleges: Today’s blueprint for tomorrow’s totalitarian state

9:08 am

Link here.

I could quote almost every line. Greenfield successfully says what I have been thinking and noting (but not very successfully) for the past several months, that today’s American colleges have become oppressive places, run by violent leftist and racist mobs, and that this vision provides us a peek into the future of America. As he concludes:

Colleges have always been the training ground for the leaders of tomorrow. The blueprints for a new society begin there. If you wanted to know what leftist ideas would be going mainstream in a decade, you went to a fashionable college. The leftist idea that is going mainstream [today] is a totalitarian state.

… Imagine what tomorrow’s leaders would be like if they all got an education in North Korea. That’s the crisis we face today. The leaders of tomorrow are coming of age in the totalitarian campus states of today. When one of those polls emerge showing that 7 out of 10 college students want to ban offensive speech, it’s not a generational phenomenon so much as it is environmental indoctrination.

The left’s experiment in college totalitarianism has normalized an environment in which free speech and individual rights don’t exist, in which truth and facts were invented by imperialists, and in which a single cultural misstep can have shattering consequences for anyone who isn’t part of the right identity clique.

Today’s campus is unsafe for America. Taxpayers have invested enormous amounts of money into funding an educational system that rejects everything that makes our society work. If that does not change, then our society will be destroyed by the consequences.

The battle over freedom on campus is the battle for freedom in America. [emphasis mine]

If we do not cease funding this vicious oppressive culture, it will come back soon and bite us, and bite us hard.

Update: Said by a California professor: “College campuses are not free speech areas.” He said this as he and his students, under his instruction, were attempting to wipe out chalked opinions (placed on the sidewalk with the school’s approval) he did not like

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Assistant principal who harassed pro-life protesters resigns

5:23 pm

The assistant principal of a Pennsylvania high school who harassed several teenage pro-life demonstrators has turned in his resignation.

The key here is the teacher’s admission that he was totally wrong:

Last Friday the administrator appeared at a school district hearing after which he was suspended without pay. The district said Ruff indicated at the hearing that he might resign but requested more time to review the charges, which included violating the protesters First Amendment rights, said Michael Levin, the attorney representing the district.

“Dr. Ruff has acknowledged that the demonstrators had a right to be on a public sidewalk,” the news release said. “He acknowledged that his conduct cannot be defended or condoned, and he deeply regretted his actions as displayed on the video. This school district will not interfere with the rights of anyone to express themselves.”

He might have been a very good teacher. He might still become a very good teacher. What is important is that if and when he teaches in the future, he does so respecting the opinions of others. As Cromwell said, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.”

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Aetna leaves last two Obamacare exchanges

3:50 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Aetna has pulled out of its last two Obamacare exchanges, in Delaware and Nebraska.

Aetna projected more than $200 million in losses from its exchange plan businesses this year following a loss of $700 million for 2014 through 2016. The insurer attributed the losses to “marketplace structural issues, that have led to co-op failures and carrier exits, and subsequent risk pool deterioration.” Aetna said it had 964,000 individual commercial plan members as of the end of 2016, but that number dropped to 255,000 at the end of March.

Essentially, Obamacare is destroying the health insurance industry, because no insurance company can afford to offer insurance when anyone can simply wait until they are sick — “a pre-existing condition” in the politically stupid parlance of the time — before buying insurance. This also means that the Republican plan, in whatever form it will be take when it finally reaches Trump’s desk, will do nothing to save the industry either, since it appears that the Republicans are terrified of being called mean and will thus keep the requirement that insurance companies sell insurance to anyone, whether they are sick or not.

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Palestinian Authority stops shipping medicine to Gaza

11:02 am

They’re such nice people! Because of the political battle between Hamas, running Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority, running the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority has stopped its quarterly shipments of medicine to Gaza.

Palestine Today quotes Dr. Munir Bursh, the pharmacy director at the Ministry of Health in Gaza, saying that the Palestinian Authority has stopped supplying medicines and baby formula to Gaza altogether. “90% of the treatment of cancer patients in the Gaza Strip has stopped due to the lack of the supply of drugs,” he said. Bursh added, “This is reprehensible and very strange, threatening a major health disaster up to the collapse of the health situation in Gaza, because the Ramallah government has been responsible for supplying medicine to Gaza, despite the deficit in the previous years.”

“Whoever made this decision is killing the entire people, and punishing the entire people.” He said that the PA supplies the Gaza Strip with medicines every two months, but it did not send any medicines for three months now.

Hospitals in Gaza are also worried about the closure of the Gaza power plant due to the spat between Hamas and Fatah, saying that they cannot desalinate the water needed for every day purposes.

The last line refers to the decision by the Palestinian Authority to stop paying its Gaza electrical bill, forcing Israel to stop supplying Gaza with electricity.

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The left moves to indoctrinate elementary school kids

9:18 am

Fascists: A new leftist movement has begun inserting racial and leftist indoctrination materials into elementary public school materials, teaching kids the evils of racism that are inherent in American society, before they are even aware that different races even exist.

Marxist theorist Paolo Freire advocated in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, that schools be used to inculcate radical values in students so they become agents of social change. Freire held that the so-called dominant pedagogy “silences” poor and minority children and that there is no such thing as a neutral educational system.

Joining Freire in his desire to use the educational system to level institutions is unrepentant communist terrorist and education theorist Bill Ayers, who has long advocated poisoning the minds of the young so they can agitate to fundamentally transform American society. “If we want change to come, we would do well not to look at the sites of power we have no access to; the White House, the Congress, the Pentagon,” he said in 2012. “We have absolute access to the community, the school, the neighborhood, the street, the classroom, the workplace, the shop, the farm.”

The article then describes at length actual examples of leftist and racist indoctrination in a variety of public elementary schools, going on right now. And make no mistake, the educational materials here are outright bigoted in their hatred of whites and American society. I am appalled that American parents are tolerating this.

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The city of the future will watch you all the time

9:09 am

New computer software is making it possible for computers to quickly analyze the data provided by surveillance cameras, which in turn will allow businesses and government to track and identify city dwellers all the time.

Through partner businesses, Nvidia’s technology is set to take things even further, enabling autonomous aerial systems streaming video back from the sky, security robots driving themselves around looking for trouble spots, and ultra high resolution, super-wide panoramic cameras that capture a whole scene instead of needing to track and follow objects.

And instead of just recording and storing footage, every camera’s output would be constantly analyzed and crunched into useful data points. We’re talking facial recognition, vehicle recognition, and pattern tracking in road and pedestrian traffic.

Clearly this will be useful in a law enforcement and security sense, and several Nvidia partners are working along these lines. BriefCam, for example, is demonstrating technology that tracks individuals and vehicles through security footage, then produces super-quick review videos in which all events in a given time frame can be made to happen in a condensed format where a bunch of them are on screen at once.

It seems to me that this new technology fits very well with the urban leftist culture that runs most American cities these days. These fascist communities, run almost exclusively by Democrats, will cheer this surveillance as a way to protect themselves from bad things, including people with opinions they don’t like. Consider how useful this would have been to Berkeley, for instance, during its recent struggle to keep conservative speakers out of town.

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Speak your mind at Duke Divinity School and get threatened

10:52 am

Fascism in academia: A department chairman at Duke Divinity School in North Carolina objected to the nature and content in a racial re-education training program, and found himself brought up on charges and has since resigned.

The link contains the full correspondence and history that led to the chairman’s resignation. In order to understand the fascist nature of the school’s actions, it is necessary for you to take the time to read it all, including the comments. Essentially, he raised cogent arguments about why he thought the racial training course was a waste of time and inappropriate, and was immediately accused of racism and harassment, and has since resigned.

As one commenter noted,

I worked at a Christian liberal arts college in the late 80s, early 90s, and even then had to put up with this stuff. Not as bad, but it was in the air. I imagine the good Dr. had simply had enough. Unless you live it, you have no idea how horribly oppressive such an atmosphere is, as the ex-student wrote about. 1984 is alive an well at America’s college, and obviously some, seminary campuses. No, bravo to Dr. Griffiths for having the guts to stand up to the totalitarian lefties at his campus.

My only criticism of this chairman is that he resigned. He should have fought it out, making these fascists defend their positions. Instead, by resigning he has ceded control of the school to them.

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Trump administration removes members of EPA science advisory board

8:34 am

In a move related to Trump’s effort to change policy at the EPA, the administration yesterday is reported to have forced out as many as a dozen members of EPA’s 18-person Board of Scientific Counselors.

At an April meeting, the Board of Scientific Counselors discussed the importance of climate change research at EPA and “the growing need for information on, and understanding of, climate change and responses to its impacts,” according to an agenda. They also talked about the importance of considering climate change as a stressor in areas of non-climate research.

The Trump administration has already sent signals that it does not value some areas of federal research, in particular climate science and work that could lead to further regulation of the fossil fuel and chemical industries. The board had 18 members, including Richardson, who said he knew of at least one other member fired. Departures could reach a dozen, he said.

There is going to be a lot of pigs squealing about this. The big question will be whether the Trump administration will have the courage to stand up to those squeals.

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Trump signs $1 trillion spending bill

11:26 am

Trump today signed the $1 trillion continuing resolution, keeping the government well funded, with no significant cuts, through September.

The article included a detail I had not noticed previously. When the bill passed in the House, the only ones who voted against it were 103 Republicans, while the entire Democratic caucus voted for it. In other words, the Republican leadership screwed their own party and allied themselves with the Democrats to pass this big spending bill that cuts nothing and breaks almost every promise the Republicans and Trump made about spending during the election campaign.

The article also has this very revealing quote from Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney:

“I think it’s great that the Democrats like the bill. That’s fantastic.”

As I have said repeatedly, the election in November was nothing more than the Democratic primary, with a choice between a radical socialist (Clinton) and an old fashioned liberal Democrat (Trump). We get the government we deserve.

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Senate to ignore House Obamacare replacement, write its own bill

10:40 pm

Failure theater: Senate Republicans today said in interviews that they plan to ignore the House Obamacare replacement bill, passed earlier today, and write their own bill from scratch.

A Senate proposal is now being developed by a 12-member working group. It will attempt to incorporate elements of the House bill, senators said, but will not take up the House bill as a starting point and change it through the amendment process. “The safest thing to say is there will be a Senate bill, but it will look at what the House has done and see how much of that we can incorporate in a product that works for us in reconciliation,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.

“We are going to draft a Senate bill,” added Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. “That is what I’ve been told.”

I have no faith in what we will get in the end, mainly because it is apparent these guys are not starting from the premise of eliminated the law and its unworkable regulations. Instead, they are proposing, as the House did, to install their own unworkable regulations.

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Senate passes $1 trillion continuing resolution 79-18

12:48 pm

With friends like this, who needs enemies? The Republican Senate today passed the $1 trillion continuing resolution that contains none of the promised cuts to the federal budget promised by the Republican Party and by Donald Trump.

The vote was 79-18. The resolution now heads to the White House, where Trump is expected to sign it eagerly.

A look at the names in the Senate who voted against this bill essentially lists the few remaining real conservatives left. Such people are now a minority, surrounded by corrupt deal makers who have no interest in the needs of the nation.

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Republican Trumpcare passes House

12:04 pm

The Republican-controlled House today passed a replacement healthcare bill that would not repeal Obamacare but merely tinker with it around the edges.

Anyone who thinks this is an Obamacare repeal is fooling themselves. A repeal would be very simple. The details of this new bill are so complicated that I have not been able to figure them out, even after reading numerous articles, both pro and con, about them. In other words, should this bill get past the Senate it will do little good, and will only allow the collapse of the health insurance industry to continue.

Getting this past the Senate is another story. It looks like the plan here was to pass it in the House, so these creeps could lie and claim they passed an Obamacare repeal, and then have the Senate kill it for them.

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New poll suggests majority of Americans support free speech

11:42 am

A new poll has found that while a large minority of registered voters approve of banning offensive speakers from college campuses, a majority still support the idea of a free and open society.

Below the fold is the entire poll [pdf] for this particular question, with the poll results broken down across a wide selection of demographic groups. Except for only a handful of such groups, which I have highlighted, Americans across the board continue to support the idea of free speech, though the large minorities are certainly worrisome. Then again, I have seen polls like this for most of my life, and the news story routinely focuses in on the large minorities that favor restricting free speech, as does the story at the link above. Such minorities have always existed, however, and sometimes there are even circumstances where they are right!

The question isn’t whether they are there. The questions should be: What are the trends? And are those who are hostile to free speech concentrated in any single demographic group that holds power?

So, what are those handful of demographic groups where a plurality favors banning speakers? Not surprisingly, those groups are Democrats, Democratic women, African-Americans, homemakers, those who do not have an identifiable job, and those who consider Medicare and Social Security to be the #1 issue facing the nation. Essentially, these groups form the heart and soul of the modern Democratic Party, which appears increasingly to also be the home of people who are hostile to freedom and wish to restrict it. This fact helps explain why the Democrats in the last Congress actually proposed an amend to the Constitution that would have partially repealed the first amendment, allowing Congress to restrict speech.

If you are Democrat and support free speech, you should be aware of this, either to change your party, or to consider leaving it. I tried the first when I lived in New York, failed, and thus was forced to chose the second. I have never looked back.
» Read more

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California proposes taxes on commercial space companies

9:09 am

We’re here to help you! The Franchise Tax Board of California has proposed new regulations that would allow the state to tax commercial launch companies.

You can read the full proposal here [pdf].

The rules are designed to apply to any company operating in California that generates at least half the money it takes in from “space transportation” — defined as the movement of people or property 62 miles above the surface of the Earth. That’s the internationally recognized line that separates our planet from the rest of space. It would apply to companies that use California as a launchpad, not California companies launching from other states, like Texas or Florida.

Essentially, they will tax any launch from Vandenberg, basing the tax on the distance the payload flies while still attached to the rocket and still the responsibility of the launch provider.

This is essentially a tax on SpaceX, since they are California’s only major launch company. This is also a tax on Vandenberg, the only spaceport in the state. The result? Expect future companies to flee California. Expect new spaceports to spring up elsewhere. As noted in the article:

At least one company has already been lured away from California for the promise of greater financial incentives — though of a more earthly variety. Moon Express, a company working to mine the moon for natural resources, moved from Mountain View to Florida. In an email, the company’s CEO and founder, Bob Richards, said the company “relocated from California to Florida in part due to the State of Florida’s progressive economic development incentives designed to attract commercial space companies

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Submarine test launch by Iran of cruise missile fails

10:52 am

How’s that Iran deal working out for you? An Iranian test launch of a cruise missile from a submarine yesterday appears to have been a failure.

Iran attempted to launch a cruise missile from a submarine in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday but the test failed, two U.S. officials told Fox News. An Iranian Yono-class “midget” submarine conducted the missile launch. North Korea and Iran are the only two countries in the world that operate this type of submarine.

In February, Iran claimed to have successfully tested a submarine-launched missile. It was not immediately clear if Tuesday’s test was the first time Iran had attempted to launch a missile underwater from a submarine.

This test is not surprising, considering that it also appears that Iran is using the billions they obtained from the Obama administration as part of the nuclear deal to fund a massive military buildup.

Iranian officials announced late last month that Iran’s defense budget had increased by 145 percent under President Hassan Rouhani and that the military is moving forward with a massive restructuring effort aimed at making it “a forward moving force,” according to regional reports.

Iranian leaders have stated since the Iran deal was enacted that they are using the massive amounts of cash released under the agreement to fund the purchase of new military equipment and other armaments. Iran also has pursued multi-million dollar arms deals with Russia since economic sanctions were nixed as part of the deal.

But hey, what’s a few bombs between enemies, eh?

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North Korean missile destroyed because it was heading to Russia?

9:53 am

A new report today suggests that the North Koreans purposely destroyed their ballistic missile on Saturday because their tracking indicated it would land in Russia.

According to South Korea’s SE Daily, the ballistic missile would have struck ‘a harbour point or a Russian territory’ if it had not failed. ‘It is for this reason that North Korea intentionally destroyed the missile,’ the website reportedly said. A source is quoted as saying the launch target was ‘different from the previous direction’ and that ‘in the past, we fired 89-90 degrees to the east, and the projectile fell off the East Sea. But the angle of this shot was 49 degrees.’

So far the theories surrounding this missile test include an unintended explosion, a planned explosion, an aborted explosion, and even sabotage. All this suggests to me that the real issue here is that we really don’t have good intelligence behind North Korea’s actions.

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