The Lux Plug is a small board containing the TSL2561 light sensor. This tiny sensor communicates directly over I2C. There is a "LuxPlug" class in the JeeLabs Ports library to interface with this sensor and return the Lux level as an integer in the range 0-64000. The gain can be either 1x or 16x, giving 20 bits of dynamic range.
The Assembled Lux Plug comes with the SMD-sized TSL2561 chip and decoupling capacitor already soldered onto the board. Headers for this and all other JeeLabs plugs can be found here (straight) and here (right angle).
The PCB Only version contains just the printed circuit board for the Lux Plug. No parts, no headers.
The documentation and full design details are freely available at JeeLabs.


text:
Bloggytown
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis thinks it'd be a good idea to hold a separate election for proposed constitutional amendments
Posted By Xander Peters on Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 12:00 PM
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
'What's the deal with all these amendments?'
On Wednesday during an event in Jacksonville, Gov. Ron DeSantis suggested that perhaps the state should hold a separate election for proposed constitutional amendments to help declutter the ballot.
"If we're going to do these amendments, maybe have those be stand-alone elections," DeSantis said in response to a question about HB 5, which places extra hurdles in the way of constitutional petition drives, the Associated Press reported. "Maybe it would cost a little more money for the state, but at least people would know when they're going, 'that's the reason I'm going.'"
The new law, which DeSantis signed last week, requires paid petition gatherers to register with the Florida Secretary of State, bans compensating gatherers based on the amount of signatures they collect, and imposes fines if petitions aren't turned in to the state within 30 days.
From the AP:
DeSantis also said he wants to do more to change the process of amending the constitution.
One reason to hold a separate election for constitutional amendments would be to shorten general election ballots, he said.
"You know we're going to vote for the presidential, you're going to vote for Congress, state Senate, state House, all these other offices. Then you've got judges. And how many amendments did we have last time?" DeSantis said.
There were in fact 12 amendments on the ballot – seven of which were included by the Constitution Revision Commission, which convenes once every 20 years to review changes to the state Constitution. Voters approved 11.
Several state lawmakers tried to kill the CRC last year during the legislative session, but failed. Now, it seems DeSantis would like to do the same.
"To put all those amendments on when you have two or three different subjects in one amendment, I thought it was a joke. And voters are fatigued with this. The ballots are too long," DeSantis said.
He added: "I've had voters who are way smarter than me say they didn't understand some of these amendments."
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Tags: Ron DeSantis, Constitution Revision Commission, CRC, Florida Constitution, Image
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Political communication addresses issues that are at the core of our democracties. It provides wide understanding of the role and significance of media, journalism and information for public opinion.
In this Master's you will study how interactions between (non-)governmental actors, politicians, journalists and citizens take shape, and what features and effects they have. By using the latest scientific insights, you will learn how (social) media influences political engagement and how citizens' use of media is changing. You will discuss academically who tries to influence the news and how powerful the media actually are and how this differs in different countries.
Many issues are discussed in this track, always in line with recent trends and events, and preferably using an open, international and comparative perspective. Such topics include the emergence of weblogs and citizen journalism, increasing globalisation, agenda-setting and the framing of socially relevant issues by media, politicians, spin doctors and other stakeholders.
The curriculum of the track Political Communication of the Master in Communication Science comprises two required specialisation courses: 'Journalism and the Media' and 'Citizens and Public Opinion' and a method course. Students also take a Research Methods in Communication Science course during the first semester. In the second semester, students complete two elective courses, selected from the courses offered by the Graduate School of Communication, and write a Master's thesis.
Graduates are working as spokespersons, information officers, PR managers or communication consultants for organisations ranging from local municipalities to the European Union and from non-governmental organisations to ministries.
Other graduates started their own communication consultancies, publishing or online service companies, or become documentary makers and journalists, conduct (media) market research for opinion pollsters or join a company or ministry as management trainees.
The specialisation Political Communication addresses issues at the core of our democracies. It provides an understanding of the role and significance of media, journalism and information in shaping public opinion.
Important topics include the emergence of weblogs and citizen journalism, increasing globalisation, agenda-setting and the framing of socially relevant issues by stakeholders, politicians, spin doctors and media.


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Make a spectator's card teleport from a packet of five back into the deck.
Give the spectator the two black Aces and steal them before he even knows what has happened!
The magician predicts the card the spectator will select.
The spectator splits the deck into reds and blacks without looking!
Convince the spectator to make a bet he cannot win!
Find the selected Ace from a shuffled packet.
Memorize and call out the value of every card in the deck.
By following the magician's lead, the spectator does a little magic!
A card ends up where the spectator tells it to be.


text:
Some Texas Republicans decried Trump after his summit with Putin. Most have been silent.
President Donald Trump's performance alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday is drawing sharp reactions from some Texans in Congress and muted ones from others.
by Abby Livingston July 17, 2018 Updated: 2 PM
U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin shake hands after their joint news conference in the Presidential Palace in Helsinki, Finland on July 16, 2018. Lehtikuva/Jussi Nukari via REUTERS
WASHINGTON – There was an unmistakable somberness Tuesday morning at what should have been a joyful event.
U.S. Reps. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, and Beto O'Rourke, D-El Paso, were at the National Press Club in downtown Washington to accept the Prize for Civility in Public Life, an award from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.
The two men earned the award after drawing national attention in 2017 for a road trip they took together from San Antonio to Washington, D.C., after flights were canceled due to an East Coast snow storm. The two livestreamed much of the trip, answering questions from the public along the way.
But hanging over all of the praise for the two men as models of bipartisanship was Monday's Helsinki summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which Trump sided with Putin against the U.S. intelligence community's consensus that Russia interfered in the 2016 election.
That event shook Washington and the political sphere in a way not seen since the president's incendiary reaction last year to a white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville, Virginia, that had resulted in the murder of a protestor.
O'Rourke, like many of the 11 Texas Democrats in Congress, was quick to condemn Trump's performance in Helsinki. In contrast, a handful of the 27 Texas Republicans in Congress moderately criticized the president in news releases and in comments on Capitol Hill on Monday. But the vast majority of the GOP delegation have remained silent on Monday's events as of midday Tuesday.
Hurd was an outlier, as he has long been within the Texas GOP delegation. The second-term congressman issued a litany of critical comments Monday against the president's public statements.
"As a former CIA officer and a Congressman on the House Intelligence Committee, I can affirmatively say there is nothing about agreeing with a thug like Putin that puts America First," Hurd wrote in a series of Monday tweets. "The President is wrong. Russia interfered in the 2016 election and seeks to undermine our democracy"
At Tuesday's awards ceremony, both O'Rourke and one of the hosts of the event, former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, a Republican, praised Hurd's comments.
After the event, O'Rourke compared Hurd's reaction to that of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, his Republican opponent in the fall. A day earlier, Cruz had told CNN, "I think we need to be acting vigorously to prevent Russian aggression. And I think it's a mistake to be apologizing for Vladimir Putin."
On Tuesday, Cruz spoke more at length to reporters, calling Trump's press conference "a mistake" but repeatedly comparing Trump's actions to what he called President Barack Obama's failure to prevent Russia's invasion of Crimea in 2014. Cruz sought to cast Democrats' reaction to Helsinki as hypocritical and dismissed their allegations of treason as overblown.
"Treason is a grave crime punishable by death under U.S. law," Cruz said. "And it wasn't treason when Barack Obama refused to stand up to our enemies ... and it wasn't treason when President Trump stood at a podium and failed to condemn Russian aggression and interference in our election."
When asked by reporters if Cruz had spoken out strongly enough about Trump's actions, O'Rourke said, "No. This is a moment that you put your party, that you put your prospects on the next election, you put your career behind you and you put your country in front of you."
"This is a moment at which each of us must stand up and be counted, and I heard my colleague, Congressman Hurd, loud and clear yesterday," he added. "I did not hear from our junior senator at all about the president's conduct."
He went on to echo Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain's use of the word "disgraceful" in describing the president's behavior.
"This is a moment that calls for unity and a nonpartisan response to a fundamental challenge to American security, to the integrity of our democracy and in our ability to move forward," O'Rourke added.
O'Rourke further suggested that the events in Helsinki alone merited his vote for impeachment, though he has in the past he would support Trump's impeachment.
"In standing on that stage, in another country, with the leader of a country who wants to — and has sought to — undermine this country, and to side with him over the United States, if I were asked to vote on this, I would vote to impeach the president," O'Rourke said.
He went on to describe the Senate's role in the removal process of a president — a trial and examination of evidence — which comes after the House approves an article of impeachment.
"Impeachment, much like an indictment, shows that there is enough there for the case to proceed," O'Rourke said. "At this point, there is certainly enough there for the case to proceed."
Later in the day, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee held a news conference to urge Republicans to take action against the president.
U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a San Antonio Democrat and the lone Texas Democrat on the committee, said lawmakers need to look past November.
"There isn't a single person whose personal career and political career is more important right now than standing up to a president who won't stand up for America," he said.
Claire Parker contributed to this report.
Most Texas Republicans think point of Mueller investigation is to discredit Trump, UT/TT Poll finds
Hysteria over Jade Helm exercise in Texas was fueled by Russians, former CIA director says
As 2018 heats up, Will Hurd "bromance" puts Beto O'Rourke in awkward position


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totalitarianism today
A compendium of red pill research: The Men's Rights Activist Movement.
Warren Farrell publishes The Liberated Man as an addition to the growing women's movement. In it, Farrell argued that gender roles wounded men as well as women by forcing them to carry the burdens of supporting a family and stifling their natural emotions.
Warren Farrell publishes Why Men Are the Way They Are, depicting a world in which women wield enormous influence and power.
Even those women who are less successful have "enormous sexual leverage over men" and "can use the power to get external rewards," he wrote. Men, on the other hand, have been reduced to "success objects," judged solely by their status and earning potential. *
Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex is published. In it, Farrell suggests that the American male is the new "nigger", and that feminism allows women to pursue their goals through charges of sexual harassment. It becomes the holy script of the MRA movement.
Paul Elam launches A Voice For Men from his laptop. It serves as "the vanguard" for a growing activism to reclaim male privilege by reducing female power.
2011- November
Anders Breivik murders 77 children and adults at a camp in Norway. His manifesto is published online. In it, Breivik rages against political correctness and offers an engaged expression of men's rights ideology in which females use "erotic capital" to "manipulate" men, fathers become "disposable", and "using terror to wake up the masses."
2011- December
A Voice for Men launches Register.her, intended to mimic sex offender registries and claiming to track female murders, rapists, and schemers. The site's motto: "Fuck Their Shit Up."
MRA's continue to refine and propagate their "doxing" techniques, which involve publicizing personal information to make someone a target of harassment. See the case of Ohio college student, Rachel Cassidy.
2014- June
Journalist Jessica Roy travels to an MRA conference and attempts to digest the ongoing sense of victimization she hears in the room. The article is published in Time, a major news outlet.
2014- September
Anita Sarkeesian and other female game designers are targeted in the Gamergate campaign.
2015 - January
Warren Farrell does an interview in which he boasts of a forthcoming book with John Gray titled Beyond Mars and Venus.
Donald J. Trump is elected President of the United States of America.
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And so I return to Emma Goldman: Part 1.
Specifically, her first-person memoir of the early Soviet period, My Disillusionment in Russia, which can be read online in its entirety. I'll excerpt interesting sections from Chapters 1 through 5 (with more posts to follow).
Excerpts from the original Preface published in Berlin, July 1922:
I found reality in Russia grotesque, totally unlike the great ideal that had borne me upon the crest of high hope to the land of promise.... Each day, each week, each month added new links to the fatal chain that pulled down my cherished edifice. I fought desperately against the disillusionment. For a long time I strove against the still voice within me which urged me to face the overpowering facts.
Emma laments the "institutionalization" of terror through the Cheka and the police. She maintains that her status as a "revolutionist" prevents her from siding with "the master class, which in Russia is called the Communist Party."
Till the end of my days my place shall be with the disinherited and the oppressed.
She wrote this book because she could nothing to reduce the tyranny of the Soviets in Russia, and so she felt it was important to educate others against it, given the extensive agitprop of blinded fellow travelers.
The masses, like the individual, may not readily learn from the experience of others. Yet those who have gained the experience must speak out, if for no other reason than that they cannot in justice to themselves and their ideal support the great delusion revealed to them.
In the Revised Preface from August 1925, Emma speaks even more forcefully against the Russian Soviet regime, openly castigating its perpetual terror machine. Responding to a writer that defends the terror on the basis of expediency, she skewers not only the methods but the intentions of the Bolsheviks:
Nothing can be further from the desire or intention of Leninism than the "preservation of the remnants of civilization."
I grant this human prescience at a time when most intellectuals remained willingly (and structurally ignorant) of what was happening in Russia.
The Russian experiment has proven the fatality of a political party usurping the functions of the revolutionary people, of an omnipotent State seeking to impose its will upon the country, of a dictatorship attempting to "organize" the new life.
A small detail about the deportation that led Emma bad to Russia along with her partner, Alexander Berkman. In her words, of course (historical records vary here):
ON THE night of December 21, 1919, together with two hundred and forty-eight other political prisoners, I was deported from America. Although it was generally known we were to be deported, few really believed that the United States would so completely deny her past as an asylum for political refugees, some of whom had lived and worked in America for more than thirty years.
In my own case, the decision to eliminate me first became known when, in 1909, the Federal authorities went out of their way to disfranchise the man whose name gave me citizenship.
As Emma travels, she discovers a common justification seeping from the lips of those on the left who ought to question the growing police state. The notorious case of John Reed:
Another Communist I saw much of the first weeks was John Reed. I had known him in America. He was living in the Astoria, working hard and preparing for his return to the United States. He was to journey through Latvia and he seemed apprehensive of the outcome. He had been in Russia during the October days and this was his second visit. Like Shatov he also insisted that the dark sides of the Bolshevik regime were inevitable. He believed fervently that the Soviet Government would emerge from its narrow party lines and that it would presently establish the Communistic Commonwealth. We spent much time together, discussing the various phases of the situation.
She continues to question the gap between revolutionary principles and Party privileges:
LIFE went on. Each day brought new conflicting thoughts and emotions. The feature which affected me most was the inequality I witnessed in my immediate environment. I learned that the rations issued to the tenants of the First House of the Soviet (Astoria) were much superior to those received by the workers in the factories.
As she reasons through the discrepancies, Emma decides to consult Maxim Gorky in the hopes that he offer empathy and detangle her concerns.
I began to suspect that the reason for much of the evil was also within Russia, not only outside of it. But then, I argued, police officials and detectives graft everywhere. That is the common disease of the breed. In Russia, where scarcity of food and three years of starvation must needs turn most people into grafters, theft is inevitable. The Bolsheviki are trying to suppress it with an iron hand. How can they be blamed? But try as I might I could not silence my doubts. I groped for some moral support, for a dependable word, for someone to shed light on the disturbing questions.
It occurred to me to write to Maxim Gorki. He might help. I called his attention to his own dismay and disappointment while visiting America. He had come believing in her democracy and liberalism, and found bigotry and lack of hospitality instead. I felt sure Gorki would understand the struggle going on within me, though the cause was not the same.
But the interview with Gorky leaves her "depressed" when Gorky rationalizes the recent creation of prisons for "morally defective children" (think American boot camps). Emma maintains that morality bears a connection to social situation and belief in free will does not allow us to "consider morality a fixed matter," a means for imprisoning errant children.
In Moscow, she notes an overwhelming lack of empathy and "fellow-feeling" among the Russians.
They explained it as a result partly of the general distrust and suspicion created by the Tcheka, and partly due to the absorbing task of getting the day's food. One had neither vitality nor feeling left to think of others. Yet there did not seem to be such a scarcity of food as in Petrograd, and the people were warmer and better dressed.
The cultural shift is problematic in that it questions the legitimacy of a revolution intended to serve all citizens. There are winners and losers, Emma says, and Tsarist methods remain in the heavy-handed promulgations of prisons for children. When she brings these questions to a friend working in the Soviet education department, he tells her that coercive laws and discipline are necessary because the Russian people are not driven to meet the needs of the revolution. The masses are not educated to grasp the whole.
Her Anarchist friends express remorse over the direction of the Bolsheviks:
I sounded my visitors on intervention. "We want none of outside interference," was the uniform sentiment. They held that it merely strengthened the hands of the Bolsheviki. They felt that they could not publicly even speak out against them so long as Russia was being attacked, much less fight their régime. "Have not their tactics and methods been imposed on the Bolsheviki by intervention and blockade?" I argued. "Only partly so," was the reply. "Most of their methods spring from their lack of understanding of the character and the needs of the Russian people and the mad obsession of dictatorship, which is not even the dictatorship of the proletariat but the dictatorship of a small group over the proletariat."
When I broached the subject of the People's Soviets and the elections my visitors smiled. "Elections! There are no such things in Russia, unless you call threats and terrorism elections. It is by these alone that the Bolsheviki secure a majority. A few Mensheviki, Social Revolutionists, or Anarchists are permitted to slip into the Soviets, but they have not the shadow of a chance to be heard."
"The picture painted looked black and dismal," Emma writes, "Still I clung to my faith." At the conference of the Moscow Anarchists, she learns for the first time of the role played by Anarchists in the Kronstadt Rebellion:
Anarchists were doing important work in the Foreign Office and in all other departments. I learned that the Anarchists had virtually helped the Bolsheviki into power. Five months later, in April, 1918, machine guns were used to destroy the Moscow Anarchist Club and to suppress their Press. That was before Mirbach arrived in Moscow. The field had to be "cleared of disturbing elements," and the Anarchists were the first to suffer. Since then the persecution of the Anarchists has never ceased.
Emma decides to organize a Russian Society for American Freedom similar to the Society of the Friends of the Russian Federation she had experienced in the United States. Lenin loves the idea but insists it must be housed "under the auspices of the Third International". Emma bristles:
Since my arrival I found scores of Anarchists in prison and their Press suppressed. I explained that I could not think of working with the Soviet Government so long as my comrades were in prison for opinion's sake. I also told him of the resolutions of the Moscow Anarchist Conference. He listened patiently and promised to bring the matter to the attention of his party. "But as to free speech," he remarked, "that is, of course, a bourgeois notion. There can be no free speech in a revolutionary period.
The conversation with Lenin compounds Emma's concerns:
Free speech, free Press, the spiritual achievements of centuries, what were they to this man? A Puritan, he was sure his scheme alone could redeem Russia. Those who served his plans were right, the others could not be tolerated.
A shrewd Asiatic, this Lenin. He knows how to play on the weak sides of men by flattery, rewards, medals. I left convinced that his approach to people was purely utilitarian, for the use he could get out of them for his scheme. And his scheme--was it the Revolution?
It is Peter Kropotkin who finally offers insight into the Leninist rise to power, and its consequent abandonment of principle, telling Emma "early in the October period the Bolsheviki began to subordinate the interests of the Revolution to the establishment of their dictatorship, which coerced and paralysed every social activity."
He spoke with much feeling of the oppression, the persecution, the hounding of every shade of opinion, and cited numerous instances of the misery and distress of the people. He emphasized that the Bolsheviki had discredited Socialism and Communism in the eyes of the Russian people.
"Why haven't you raised your voice against these evils, against this machine that is sapping the life blood of the Revolution?" I asked. He gave two reasons. As long as Russia was being attacked by the combined Imperialists, and Russian women and children were dying from the effects of the blockade, he could not join the shrieking chorus of the ex-revolutionists in the cry of "Crucify!" He preferred silence. Secondly, there was no medium of expression in Russia itself. To protest to the Government was useless. Its concern was to maintain itself in power. It could not stop at such "trifles" as human rights or human lives. Then he added: "We have always pointed out the effects of Marxism in action. Why be surprised now?"
The end of Burke-- and other contemporary brevities.
Trump's promises to immediately repeal and replace Obamacare, build a wall between the United States and Mexico, and dramatically restrict immigration indicates that he either doesn't know anything about federalism or really doesn't care.
American conservatives forged a large and powerful movement built on reverence for those checks and balances, particularly states' rights. Yet they could not have done so if they had remained faithful to Burke's suspicion of business and distaste for anti-establishment rhetoric.
And more about how Republicans abandoned Burke to build a Neo-fascist friendly GOP from Elizabeth Tandy Shermer.
I think the major way ideology works today is not by convincing people that things are basically okay, that the system basically works. I think most people realize that the system does not work. Ideology is in convincing people that they are the only ones who have figured it out. It convinces people that everybody else believes in the ideological model. If all the people who think that they've figured out that the system is rigged, met all the other people who also believed that, they would probably change their mind.
And more on anarchy, work and bureaucracy in this interview with David Graeber.
Historical memory is a phenomenon that is entirely sui generis, autonomous and independent. Some years ago, Polish and Ukrainian researchers initiated several joint projects. Under the auspices of the KARTA Centre, they produced more than ten volumes in the series Poland–Ukraine: Difficult Questions(Polska–Ukraina: Trudne pytania). It was not the questions that were difficult, but the answers. The difficulty in speaking scholarly truth often lies not in lack of access to documents, but in the fact that we are dealing with the spheres of psychology, emotions and a mix of high ideals and proclamations. At the same time, it concerns brutal acts, involving heinous and criminal actions. Mythology and historical memory rest on lofty words and push what was shameful, inhumane and wicked into the darkness.
And more from Adam Daniel Rotfeld on systems of international security and his Polish intellectual background.
Compliance is key to the legitimacy of any regime, and Sharp offers a handbook for how to effectively withhold it. His compendium of 198 Methods for Nonviolent Action presents a wide range of techniques—from letters and speak-outs to boycotts, strikes, sit-ins, blockades, and slowdowns—that citizens can employ to refuse an illegitimate authority. When coupled with more traditional forms of protest, these tactical disruptions of the normal functioning of the system can place immense pressure on dictators. Sharp treats authoritarian regimes as fragmented coalitions held together by a tenuous obedience to authority. Once the perception of invincibility is removed, such regimes can rapidly disintegrate.
And more from Rafael Khachaturian and Jeffrey C. Isaac on reading Gene Sharp for resistance.
Recognition is a key term in Hegel's political philosophy. Instead of imagining a bargain being struck between society and an individual bearing various "rights" (like the right to privacy), Hegel emphasizes that the concept of rights is empty until we consider the individual in a context where there exist people and institutions capable of recognizing those rights, as well as the full humanity of the person bearing them. This is the deepest reason why Hegel does not share Marx's or Rousseau's view that modern history is a story of decline, much less (as Stephen Dedalus puts it in Ulysses) a "nightmare." History for Hegel is intrinsically progressive, insofar as it is driven by a continuous negotiation between our self-understanding as individuals and the image we see reflected back to us by the people and institutions we look to for recognition. If the gap between my self-understanding and my society's understanding of me grows too wide (if I know I am an artist, but my society does not recognize me as one), this is a cause of dissatisfaction, and therefore a stimulus either to change society or to adjust my idea of myself.
And more on social media's evolving relationship to theoretical constructions of individual rights from the editors of The Point.
The modern plague of Astroturf Christianity.
Theocratic notions of sovereignty are not simply something within archaic Islam that stands over against our Western modernity. John Milbank argues, per Carl Schmitt, that theocratic notions are specifically modern in their positivity and formality.
In 1277, the archbishops of Paris and Canterbury issued certain edicts that essentially abandoned the "shared mystical outlook" arising from Hellenism and allegorical readings of sacred texts. Literalism rose to prominence as a form of power. The fourteenth century imported the assumption that only God's will makes things true, thus politicizing the divine as an arm of state policy.
To quote John Milbank, "the Islamic alliance of the absolute will of Caliph linked to the will of Allah, and with the right to fight holy wars, was taken over by Christian thought."
Milbank reveals how the Astroturf Christian Right in America has plagiarized for itself a divine mission rooted in misreading:
There is now a terrible symbiosis arising between Zionism and the American Protestant and un-Christian literalistic reading of the Old Testament in the Puritan tradition, which equates Anglo-Saxondom with Israel. Both ascribe to an idolatrously non typological and non eschatological reading of Go'd "free election of Israel," as if really and truly God's oneness meant that he arbitrarily prefers one lot of people to another (as opposed to working providentially for a time through one people's advanced insight-- as Maimonedes rightly understood Jewish election); and as if he really and truly appoints them, not just for a period, but for all time, one piece of land to the exclusion of others.
This was nowhere more obvious than during the Astroturf's enamored pursuit of the Iraq war-- a muddle that continues to plague US policy and budget priorities. God's sanction of America's holy mission enabled the US to institutionalize terror at all levels of the military apparatus, thus erasing moral distinctions between the terrorists and their opponents. It is fair to say, in the aftermath of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, that we are all terrorists now.
Milbank again:
... the trouble is not "totalitarianism" pure and simple, but the emptiness of the secular as such, and its consequent disguised sacralization of violence.
I am reminded of a passage from Jorge Luis Borges' essay, "The Superstitious Ethics of the Reader":
Today, what line of poetry would dare allude to the phoenix or make itself the promenade of a centaur? None; but no poetry, however modern, is unhappy to be a nest of angels and to shine brightly with them. I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colors are like memories or premonitions of other colors. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinites we harbor, and they might fly away.
In the world of dead angels, only demons conspire to keep our attention.
[Addendum]
For those studying the rise in "Radical Orthodoxy", John Milbank's writings are an excellent starting point. He was an early opponent of the Iraq war and makes a case for fundamentalism as a modern illness that arose from secular politics and the de-mystification of everyday life. Although I don't agree with all of John's points, I think his position represents an increasingly popular reaction to the tension between secularism and deification. More grist for your mill:
"Orthodox paradox: An Interview with John Milbank" (The Immanent Frame)
"What liberal intellectuals get wrong about transgenderism" by John Milbank (Catholic Herald)
"The impossibility of gay marriage and the threat of bio political control" by John Milbank (ABC)
"The myth of the secular: Part 6" (Ideas with Paul Kennedy)
When neoliberalism is what's left.
So far right did politics float that Richard Nixon is now a moderate and Pat Leahy looks like Che Guevara. The furthest-left there is to be is what conservatives call "radical liberal." This should be an oxymoron, but given the span of the possible, it is not. With political possibility, language too is squeezed. The signature Trumpian gesture is hyperbole. But understatement is equally pernicious. White nationalism that comes to power through the electoral process—like Nazism did—is now called "illiberal democracy." This strikes me as an obscene euphemism, like "ethnic cleansing."
This year a lot of white people woke up. But it is hard to stay woke. So many outrages are committed every day that outrage becomes a chore. So much violent hatred—the shooting of Indian engineers, the desecrated Jewish cemeteries—is ignored and excused that demands for condemnation feel like nagging. So regular are the deceptions that lying is a joke, so acute the anxiety that boredom would be a relief.
The distance stretches between that horizon and the place where you are standing—between what you desire and what is on offer. Radicalism turns to fatigue, fatigue to pain. To feel less pain, sooner or later you have to feel less. What you have to feel less of is desire.
Then, before you know it, the Wall Street Journal is an oracle of truth. You're rooting for Cold War II. The FBI is your BFF. You're a Democrat.
And hopes? At the moment my fantasy is Jeff Sessions blindfolded before a firing squad, about to be executed for treason. Then I remember I despise patriotism and oppose the death penalty.
[Judith Levine, "Descent into Liberalism", n+1]
If we continue to define our group's identity by what has been done to us, we will continue to be object rather than subject.
[Jessa Crispin, Why I Am Not a Feminist]
Seattle WTO protests, 1999
The press, like the Democratic Party, is an appendage of the consumer society. These institutions are not about politics or news. They are about imparting an experience. They create political personalities, marketed as celebrities, to make us feel good about candidates. These manufactured emotions, the product of the dark arts of the public relations industry, determine how we vote. Issues and policies are irrelevant. It is marketing and entertainment. Trump is a skillful marketer of his fictitious self.
[Chris Hedges, "Donald Trump's Greatest Allies Are the Liberal Elites", Truthdig]
One of the jokes at Partisan Review was "Dwight is looking for a disciple who will tell him what to think." Even in his Marxist period, Macdonald was not a systematic or even a consistent thinker. But he was drawn to Greenberg's scheme. He adopted the avant-garde and kitsch, or highbrow-lowbrow, distinction, and the historical account that went along with it: a story about the emergence of something called "the masses," the destruction of folk art, and the rise of a debased commercial culture and its profit-seeking manufacturers—"the Lords of Kitsch," as Macdonald came to call them.
Louis Menand, "Browbeaten: Dwight Macdonald's War on Midcult", The New Yorker]
"I never had an abortion, but my mother did. She didn't tell me about it, but from what I pieced together after her death from a line in her F.B.I. file, which my father, the old radical, had requested along with his own, it was in 1960, so like almost all abortions back then, it was illegal."
[Clara Jeffrey reviews Katha Pollitt's Pro for New York Times]
"The twenty-first century is basically defined by nonessential human beings, who do not fit into the market as consumers or producers or as laborers," he said. "That manifests itself differently in different classes and geographic areas. For white, middle-class, male, useless people—who have just enough family context to not be crushed by poverty—they become failsons." The "Chapo Trap House" guys are sincerely concerned with American inequality; at the same time, their most instinctive sympathies seem to fall with people whose worst-case scenario is a feeling of purposelessness. "Some of them turn into Nazis," Christman continued. "Others become aware of the consequences of capitalism."
[Jia Tolentino, "What Will Become of the Dirtbag Left?", The New Yorker]
"I support white power, black power, brown power and yellow power," Heimbach says. "All races should be the dominant political force in their region. That is why America needs to be divided into smaller, ethnically and culturally homogenous states. In countries where races are mixed, one race will always dominate the others. That is why we need separation. Not because the white race is better than the black race. We need to stop the hate and separate."
Still, for all his talk about respect for other races, his politics, like most others on the far right, has a prominent streak of anti-Semitism. He firmly believes that the Jews are working diligently behind the scenes to eradicate the white race, faith and culture. "We can't win against them by arguing," he said at the Stormfront conference. "You can't out-Jew the Jew. It's like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are at chess, eventually someone's going to knock the board over and poop on it. Let's stop worrying about out-Jewing them or outsmarting them. Let's just stand for what we believe in, which is faith, family and folk — the three things that make us a nation."
[Vegas Tenold, "The Little Fuhrer: A Day in the Life of the Newest Leader of White Nationalists", Al Jazeera America]
March 14, 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Inside the mind's of Trump's Neo-Nazi white base.
Lovely MRA agitprop from Return of Kings.
Considered "a leader in the emerging field of masculinity studies", sociologist Michael Kimmel examines the relationship between masculinity and political extremism. On the controversial thesis that returning vets are susceptible to political extremism (a correlation borne out in the Middle East, Russia, and the former Yugoslavia), Kimmel says:
What we do know to be true is that our military exercises in Iraq and Afghanistan have left veterans coming home with serious PTSD. I mean, think of the types of terror that they've lived with – that any time you get into a car could be your last time on earth. That can't help but shake you up. Couple that with racism towards your enemy – one of the ways you convince yourself to kill an enemy is to hate them; think about what we used to say about the Vietnamese, or what my father's generation used to say about the Japanese. I think that is an equation that might make some people susceptible to far-right ideology.
Kimmel references James Gilligan's assumption that shame and humiliation underlie basically all violence: "Because I feel small, I will make you feel smaller." Interviews with extremists confirm these groups are often bound by a shared sense of "humiliation and shame":
In his famous statement, Osama bin Laden talked about how the west had humiliated the Muslim world … that conservative Muslims have been humiliated by hyper-modern society and the cosmopolitan McDonaldization of the world. For them, restoring the seventh-century caliphate is their way of reinstating traditional masculinity.
He calls this "aggrieved entitlement": "If you feel entitled and you have not gotten what you expected, that is a recipe for humiliation."
The false nature vs. nurture dichotomy does little to elucidate rigid and/or persistent masculinities. I wish my ev-psychy friends would stop trying to build a scientific case for evangelical pop psychology. As Kimmel notes, nature and nurture are "intimately linked":
What we know is that testosterone as a hormone both drives aggression and responds to aggression. It is a really malleable hormone. And I think that you can't understand the natural biological conditions of violence without understanding the social conditions, and I think you can't understand the social conditions without understanding the biological conditions.
Let me give you two examples. The first: how come men use a biological argument when they are angry and they beat up someone smaller or older than they are or they beat their wives – yet they don't beat their bosses? I mean, my boss would likely piss me off more than my wife would, right? Why don't I beat him up? Because you have to feel like you have permission. You have to believe that the target of your violence is "legitimate".
There is a famous experiment by a primatologist at Stanford. He takes five monkeys and measures their testosterone. Then he puts the five monkeys in a cage. The monkeys immediately establish a hierarchy of violence – number one beats number two, number two beats number three, number three beats number four, number four beats number five. Of course, number one has the highest testosterone, and so on.
So the experiment is: he takes monkey three out of the cage and he shoots him up with testosterone, off the scale, and puts him back in. What do you think happens? When I tell this story my students always guess that he immediately becomes number-one monkey. But that's not true. What happens is that when he goes back in the cage he still avoids monkeys number one and two – but he beats the shit out of numbers four and five.
So what any reasonable biological researcher would conclude is that testosterone does not cause aggression, it enables it. The target of the violence must already be seen as legitimate. You have a biological argument and a sociological argument. So the answer to your question is that it is never either/or. It is always both. Always.
More on fragile masculinity happening now at a gas station or Senate chamber near you:
Republicans attack University of Wisconsin-Madison's The Men's Project, a program intended to help males see outside the box of their socialized masculinity and into a world inhabited by fellow human beings.
James Gilligan celebrates the 2011 USC decision in Brown v. Plata ordering the state of California to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000. But what Gilligan celebrated in 2011 is under attack by Sessions' Justice Department.
Crown Equipment CEO James Dicke II expresses his enthusiasm for Trump's cabinet picks while complaining about how regulations stymie "the cost of production". What he fails to mention is how the US health system could absorb the costs of China's unregulated, toxic workplace environment.
Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill gets huffy about what fascism is-- and isn't. Alas, he overlooks the extent to which the aggrieved "workers groups" were actually subsumed under the former blue-collar worker badge in this election. Perhaps Brendan ought to watch a few stadium videos for insight into how militarization of angry aggrieved workers takes place in the internet age. Trump isn't arming militaries-- he's arming and supporting a growth in militias. If you imagine a happy ending to this story, you should stop watching porn. There is no happy ending to the militarization of stupidity.
Defectors from Putin's inner circle: What Andrei Illarionov has to teach us about Trump.
Meet Andrei Illarionov, a proponent of Western liberalism and democracy in Russia. From 1993 to 1994, he served as chief economic adviser to the prime minister of the Russian Federation, Viktor Chernomyrdin. He resigned in February 1994 to protest changes in the government's economic policy.
In July 1994 Illarionov founded the Institute of Economic Analysis, a platform from which Illarionov popularized his strong positions favoring free-trade and rule of law. Putin noticed. Putin needed a few erstwhile economic liberals to keep democracy-watchers off his back. He brought Illarionov into his cabinet, thus neutralizing a potential source of opposition.
Days after his inauguration, Putin's economic advisor, Andrei Illarionov, discovered that Putin had signed a decree consolidating 70 percent of the country's alcohol manufacturers into a single company to be managed by Putin's close St. Petersburg friend. None of the new liberal economic advisors had been consulted or informed. Illarionov tried to ignore what would soon become a Putin pattern-- paying lip service to his economic advisors while "consistently broadsiding them with decisions that consolidated all of the country's resources in the hands of his cronies" (See Gessen, 259).
From 2000-2005, Illarionov served as key economic advisor to President Putin, where he regularly paid lip service to the pro-globalization agenda. To his credit, Illarionov has consistently argued for the rule of law and free global trade markets. As a senior advisor to Russian President Putin, Illarionov was outspoken against Russia's ratification of Kyoto. (In 2004, Putin ratified the Kyoto Protocol anyway.)
In 2006, Illarionov was appointed senior researcher of the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity in Washington, DC. In this position, he has lamented Russia's new corporate state in which state-owned enterprises are governed by personal interests and private corporations have become subject to arbitrary intervention to serve state interests as well as new ways in which political, economic and civil liberties are being eliminated. Illarionov is one of the 34 first signatories of the online anti-Putin manifesto Putin must go, published on March 10, 2010.
In May 2008 Cato Unbound blog discussion, he maintained that "the resource curse" was not more extraordinary than other forms of market capture by corrupt governments and officials. He argued that "the precedent of treating a country's natural resources as belonging to its people is the problem, not the beginning of a solution." Illarianov argued that the idea of collective national ownership of resources resulted in nationalization, a form of economic control by political elites. His view is summarized as follows:
Illarionov argues that the trade sanctions Wenar proposes would punish innocent citizens who already suffer under corrupt rulers. The issue, he argues, is not a matter of what is stolen, but how we will treat those responsible for theft.
In 2010, Illarionov received money to speak at the Heartland Institute's anti-climate change extravaganza, the Fourth International Conference on Climate Change, a mecca for policymakers and extractivists hoping to roll back environmental regulations that hold companies responsible for their environmental footprints. He also held forth against the increasing illiberalization of Putin's Russia, who many knew to be supporting nationalist, irredentist candidates in Hungary and other European states.
Illarionov was one of the 34 first signatories of the online anti-Putin manifesto Putin must go, published on March 10, 2010. Over the years, after Gessen's book went to press in 2012 and while Trump's son-in-law extended family business connections in Russia, Illarionov continued to warn about Putin.
He critiqued Putin's "mafia-style" policies in a a prescient 2015 interview:
Putin's ultimate goal is clear – it is to change the world according to his vision. It is a vision of the Sicilian world, a world that is ruled by the mighty and the powerful. It is a world in which such documents as the Helsinki Final Act or the UN Charter do not matter or simply do not exist. In such a world, borders can be violated under any pretext or without any pretext. The economic system is based on mafia-style relations.
When pushed on Putin's popular support and masses of Russian fans, Illarionov drew a distinction that should concern students of liberty:
We need to be careful when speaking about opinion polls in hard authoritarian regimes or semi-totalitarian ones like we have in. It is difficult to trust these numbers. No semi-totalitarian regime can produce a real reflection on what people really think. Even if we believe these numbers for a moment, we need to make the distinction between the level of support for Putin before Crimea and after. Before, the level of support for Putin was around 45 per cent. After, it was 85 per cent.
These numbers mean that around 45 per cent of the Russian society accepts the Sicilian way of rule within the country while 85 per cent express support for the imperial external policy. The Sicilian model by itself is not imperialist. It is a model based on the way people do business, but mostly within existing borders. Hence, Putin's increase in support is not for mafia-like rule, but for imperialism and the imperial syndrome in Russia has not yet been healed.
I quote extensively because Illarionov's remarks provide insight into the rise of white nationalism across Europe as well as its current sweep of the US political system. The interviewer notes that, "especially after the war in Ukraine, many people realised that what Putin is doing is bad". Media, policy-wonks, academics, and scholars took Putin to task publicly for his repudiation of the rule and law and slide into autocracy. The interviewer wants to know why, despite the West's knowledge of Putin's corruption and increasing dictatorship, nothing was being done to stop it.
Illarionov replied:
The West is divided. The US itself is divided, the EU of course as well. There are still many allies of Putin in the West. There is a long list of "Putintern" members: Gerhard Schröder, Silvio Berlusconi, Vaclav Klaus, Marine Le Pen and others. They are also among journalists and think-tanks throughout the world. Putin has many friends.
Unlike communism, which was rather alien to European culture even if it had some roots in European history, the Putin's Sicilian way of rule is much more familiar to Europe and closer to the European heart. It is also a reason why it is so hard to fight it.
The Sicilian mafia has not yet been taken down. It is very much alive in Italy. We see very similar types of behaviour in many other European states like Greece, Bulgaria or Hungary. Even in the Baltic states there are elements of this attitude. This type of behaviour is associated not only Russians or the Russian psyche. Yes, some Russians behave this way, but it is not exclusively a Russian problem. Look at Croats or Serbs. It is in fact deeply rooted in European human nature. Fortunately for Western Europe, it is already not a dominant part there. The success of Western European states was possible largely thanks to the fact that this side of their nature has been suppressed.
He insisted that economic policy alone would do nothing to halt Putin's take-over of Russian democracy:
It is definitely not enough to apply economic means in order to bring change. It is about having a long-term strategy with a final goal – to make Russia free, democratic and peaceful within internationally recognised borders. This should be now the strategic task for the international community. If one wants to secure peace in Europe and the world, we need to have a different Russia.
But as long as this regime lasts in Russia, in the Kremlin, it poses threat to everybody. As soon as it is changed, and that will not happen overnight, Russia will eventually come to mutually acceptable terms with the rest of the world.
When asked about possible opposition or liberal alternatives to Putin, Illarionov was at a loss. He ended the interview with a shrug.
In late 2016, intelligence sources on Russia noted that Trump advisors met with Igor Sechin, director of Rosneftgas:
In terms of the Substance of Their Discussions, SECHIN's associate Said That the Rosneftgas president WAS SO Keen to lift personal and corporate western Sanctions Imposed on the Company About enterprise, That he offered PAGE / TRUMP's associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return. PAGE has expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.
On January 20, 2017, Russian media reported that Putin allowed "Rosneftegas", whose board of directors is headed by the executive director of "Rosneft" Igor Sechin, not to disclose their financial performance. On account of the company could accumulate more than 600 billion rubles. These intelligence reports are currently in the hands of US senators and representatives. Obama's sanctions on Putin were rooted in very real and serious allegations of bribery and national security threat. Putin has unimpeachable leverage to keep an America First Trump administration silent on his invasions of neighboring states and democracies.
Just this past week, Paul Goble referenced Illarionov's statements in an interview with Kyiv's Apostrophe portal:
Russian commentator Andrey Illarionov says that "Belarus is candidate number one for a Russian invasion," a conclusion that takes on added weight given that the Kremlin is likely to view anti-Lukashenka protests as a cover for such actions just as it did earlier in Ukraine...
"No state in Europe can be completely isolated from possible aggression of an informational, corruption, propagandistic, espionage or hybrid character," Illarionov says; but "as far as its conventional [form] is concerned, Belarus at present is candidate number one."
Goble continues:
Moreover, the likelihood that Putin will now decide on an invasion is likely increased by one aspect of the situation in Minsk that recalls Kyiv in 2013 and that is more frightening to the Kremlin leader than almost any other. The mass protest was not organized by the traditional opposition parties but was spontaneous from below and thus political in a new way.
That point has been made by two Belarusian outlets (Belarus Partisan and Naviy), and Moscow is likely to view this protest not as just the latest in a long line of Belarusian discontent but as something fundamentally new and threatening.
If that is the case, Putin is likely to move against Belarus in the coming days, especially if there are no clear signals from the West that such a move would make absolutely impossible any cooperation with Russia in the foreseeable future.
And here we are, with Putin having deflected international criticism of his Ukranian invasion.
The election of Trump has shored up Putin's image as a strong world leader-- an image threatened by the white flag protest in Russia. And what better way to ensure power than to invest in the disruption of autocracy's chief enemy, a free democratic and liberal America? How the world's greatest voice for freedom became a pawn in Putin's power politics is a story we won't tell our children. Certainly not at Thanksgiving where almost every mirror in Alabama and the red states reveals a turkey.
Trump's election failed Americans. But it also failed struggling democracies who relied on on our moral authority and the threat of possible sanctions to restrain behavior on the international stage.
Given the absence of competing assurances or alternatives, Russians can tell themselves autocracy is the future and their leader is in control. A major player in world events. A puppet-master behind the curtains. The only question is whether congressional Republicans and theocrats will place their commitment to the rule of law over their desperation to maintain access to the orange emperor's court. What we've seen so far is not encouraging.
Cited: Masha Gessen, The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (Riverhead Books: New York, 2012). Additional sources include this PRI podcast.
February 26, 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Why Trump hasn't condemned rise in hate crimes and speech: Christofacism shall rise again.
The obvious answer: because he doesn't believe "hate speech" or "hate crimes" should exist.
The bloodsport tangent: because Bannon and his neo-fascist team-mates rely on being able to access and fan this hate and fear to keep Trump's voters happy and connected.
The "alt-right effect": because ignoring it enables Breitbart to continue publishing articles about crybaby snowflakes whenever a hate crime occurs. The alt-right depends in large part on this ability to challenge what it calls "political correctness" in order to reverse-victimize themselves. Look no further than the Men's Rights Movement.
How was Trump's side-step of the press conference anti-Semitism question interpreted by policymakers, citizens, activists, and Jewish communities? The responses fell pretty much as expected. It should be noted, of course, that Breitbart received front row seats at the press conference just in case any mammal was in doubt about the anointed media mouthpiece for this administration:
"I am the least anti-Semitic person you've ever seen in your entire life," Trump said, in a statement that's a top contender for the title of most ridiculous presidential statement in history. He didn't condemn anti-Semitism, of course, because he doesn't want to and because he's now equipped with an exemption given him by the Israeli prime minister in a shameful fact that is probably making generations of proud right-wing Revisionists spin in their graves. [Chemi Shalev writing for Ha'aretz]
"His response was baffling," Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt told Haaretz. The issue "is not electoral votes. It's about the wave of hate crimes since the election and the spike in anti-Semitism across the country," he said. "President Trump seemed uninformed about this issue and missed an opportunity to decry the rhetoric of hate that seems to be surging online and in the real world. Intentional or not, this emboldens anti-Semites." [Ha'aretz]
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T'ruah: the Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, called his response "so bizarre." "Over and over he has empowered white supremacists and he did the same thing today," she said. "He's never said straight up one word that anti-Semitism is not acceptable. Even when he was straight out asked. How hard would it have been for him to say 'I'm really disturbed about the uptick of anti-Semitism and any of my supporters should cease any anti-Semitic behavior,'" asked Jacobs. [Ha'aretz]
Mik Moore, President of the Jewish Council for Education & Research, laid out his theory on why Trump publicly discredited his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. The small Neo-fascist mitten is difficult to overlook:
When push comes to shove, and push certainly will come to shove, Jews should know that Trump doesn't need them. That's what he told the assembled at the Republican Jewish Coalition this past December; it's what he told the press when he undercut his son-in-law. He needs only the mob. Jews are expendable.
Men on white horses return to save the day...
"Expendable" is a gentle way to describe the emboldened Neo-Nazis of Alabama. This past week, nice neighborhoods in Birmingham were leafleted by the United Dixie White Knights. The White Knights are currently battling the neoliberal conspiracy to turn all boys gay, thereby further attacking the potency of white masculinity.
Who are these fellows? In their own words:
The United Dixie White Knights are honorable American Patriots, Beware what you join, we are true White Knights built upon the image of our Noble Confederate Ancestors. We dont do documentarys, hug negros or play politically correct, our security as well as yours is our top priority. We work with the 6 other true Klan organizations and many White Nationalists and Confederate organizations.
If you are an honorable man or woman over the age of 17 then join us today! We need you, your race needs you and most of all your country needs you. If your on the fence, get off it and come kneel before the fiery cross before America turns into some third world cesspool.
We are the most politically active pro White activists in America today. We don't sit in barns and hide our faces in the sand, we are proud White Knights whose literature is distributed regularly to awaken the white American sheep. If you wish to play Dungeons and Dragons in the dark and just want to join to get a robe, you won't make it here long. We seek soldiers for the White race, America and God.
The UDWK is led by the elected Imperial Wizard Brent Waller and governed by a three man board. We are here for one purpose and one purpose only, to preserve a future for our children, our race, our country and the word of God. We seek only the best and brightest men and women of high moral character. You must agree to a background check, a home visit to verify you, attend meetings if physically and financially able and help put out literature meant to awaken the sleeping giant in the white Aryan race. If that's you, then get off your ass white boy and come join us today!
It's no surprise that the UDWK trace their roots back to Georgia's Stone Mountain, a place one has to visit in order to discover the fresh faces and yuppie strollers of modern tea party style racism. The parking lot was filled with SUVs worshipping Sarah Palin. Georgia's white middle class mommies take their god with guns.
The UDWK is built upon the foundation of the original first era Klan, and reborn atop Stone Mountain GA in 1915. We practise Klancraft to the Knighthood or K Duo level. Our main priority though is not books, it's preserving a future for our race and children,as such we are true White Knights and are the most politically active order in the business.
Our national office is located in the great southern state of Mississippi. Our state is the only state in which the stars and bars of the Confederate flag are still a part of our state flag. Mississippi has always been the battleground of resistance to tyranny. Many of the battles of the 1960s and during the second war for independence that ended in 1865 were fought here.
Out of the ashes of the great war, a noble order of White men rose to continue the resistance to tyranny, unjust Federal law, and the foreign agenda that removes God from this nation. Although General Forrest disbanded the Ku Klux Klan, our order continues on the similar path of resistance.
We no longer attach Ku Klux Klan to our name for legal reasons and Government listings. Our causes are similar, we seek to restore this nation to its original founding as a republic. To achieve this goal we are very involved in politics, getting our message out through the media, and distributing literature.
We are led by the elected Imperial Wizard Brent Waller and governed by a three man board. We still wear the sacrad robes of our ancestors, but often do things in public in suit and tie or a patched vest. We do not do public rallys, documentary's for Johnny Jew and your security is our number one priority. We seek to restore this nation by any means necessary and believe men like Louis Beam, Bob Mathews and Sam Bowers were on the right path but got sidetracked.
Some list us as a Conservative Klan, as we won't be limited to who we will work with, but we are not a Conservative Klan, we are the closest thing to the original that exists today. We no longer use the name Ku Klux Klan as it is listed as a Domestic Terrorist organization, this fact is something you should consider before joining any group foolish enough to put Ku Klux Klan in it's legal name.
We have members from all walks of life. We are built for the future, not the past. Most of these groups today calling themselves Klan are far from it, don't be fooled by slick websites, failed old groups, Chameleons, and a leader who only wants your money while he hides his head in the sand. I can count the true Klan organizations on one hand and don't believe these famous enemy hate map listings, they need a boogyman for their ponzie scheme.
I see so called Klans today hugging negros, making fools of themselves on documentary's paid for by the ADL, allowing negros into Klaverns and Crosslightings. Let me speak frankly, the UDWK maintains the original intent of the Ku Klux, we are proud pro white activists. We do not play politically correct for anyone, and until the day we drive the spear of God, the American Republic and common sense through our enemies hearts, we will leave the light on for them.
Beware what you join today! My name is Brent Waller, I'm a father, husband, and American welder. I'm a former Sons of Confederate Veterans camp commander and Mississippi Division recruiter of the year and a lifelong registered Republican. I have traveled all over this nation. I do not run, I do not hide and believe strongly in taking the political fight to our enemy's. I grew up in Laurel Mississippi and have met many of the men you heard about in movies of the civil rights era, like Sam Bowers.
Almost every friend I had in school, had a father, uncle or grandfather in the White Knights of Mississippi. I also have family ties to the original United Klans of America. From the day I was born, until today, I have learned the lessons of men like Bowers, and the wisdom of my grandfather. In short I'm in it to win it, and believe strongly that our newly elected President should continue to swing his hammer. We must purge this land of foreign influence, regain control of our money, build a strong border wall, limit or eliminate immigration, and purge our country and Supreme Court of liberal whack jobs, Jews, homosexuals and foreign agendas.
When Brent Waller isn't heating up iron for Civil War reenactments, he is busy battling the evil "chameleon" and penning thoughtful essays about the "tyrannical Supreme Court":
I awoke today to a beautiful spring morning, the birds are chirping, bumblebees are buzzing around and new life seemed everywhere. Then I turned on the news and hear the Republicans are holding up Obamas Supreme Court nominee. Let's take a look at the Tyrannical Supreme Court shall we?
Below is a list of Judges and their religious affiliation. By my count, there are 6 Catholics who bow down to a Pope in Rome and three Jews, one of which is a false Jew as It claims to be Gay. Not a single Protestant is to be found.
Ask yourself this, why in a country dominated by Christians does not a single one serve on the Supreme Court? Now let's look at where they came from prior to being put forth on the Supreme Court.
Hark, a small swamp monster arises from the muck to salvage Waller's spring and make white Christian America great again. Behold Waller's heartfelt thoughts on Trump:
Donald Trump won because the liberal lefts 8 years under Obama practically drove Americans in some parts of this nation into a third world status. It takes Americans to run out of jobs and cheap beer and to awaken to our NWO wars that are bankrupting us and watch as Obama's Muslim friends kill other Americans to get pissed off. If the polls are evidence, they are finally pissed off. Many are out of work, millions of jobs were sent overseas, our debt is through the ceiling and at the same time he opened the gates to illegal immigration while at the same time he pratically begged so called refuges from the very wars he helped create to come here. This man should have been impeached and he will go down possibly as the worst President in United States history.
Donald Trump has announced his nominee and the winner is Neil Gorsuch. A man who as you probably guessed attended one of the few colleges most Supreme Court Judges come from, Gorsuch attended Columbia University, and then earned his doctorate from Oxford.
During his childhood, Gorsuch attended Catholic School but today his religious affiliation is Protestant, he is a member of St John's Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado. One would be correct to assume that any man trained in Catholic schools who later changed his religious affiliation has some type of issues with Catholicism.
The true Klan has always had an issue with Catholicism, We only believe in God, and kiss no man called a Pontiff's ring. We believe only Christ can absolve us of our sins as our Holy Bible teaches us. Catholics bow to a foreign pope, and as the leading proponent of America first, last and only for 151 years we dislike this point of contention with Catholics.
Eight years of a Trump Presidency will ensure more Supreme Court nominees for Trump. Kennedy is talking of retirement, and you can see the fear in the extreme lefts eyes and hear it in their voices on the liberal left propaganda machines that some American sheep think is news.
The Jews of the NWO are frightened, they are losing the grip of the show and they know it. They will be pulling the puppet masters strings hard, we can expect to see more puppets in the streets marching, burning and looting. Money being paid to these puppets will be tripled. It's the puppetmasters strings we must cut, we must destroy them now during the Trump Presidency or we may never get another chance.
A Protestant Christian will soon sit on the Supreme Court after a hard fought defeat for the liberal left, and oh what a great day that will be. Kagan will no doubt curl up like the viper she is, when Gorsuch takes his seat.
A second Protestant nominee by Trump will be the death toll of the lefts agenda. That day should be celebrated as the day America is reborn into her relationship with God and the day Satanic influence over the highest court in our land was killed.
The South shall rise again... in Leakesville....
To Waller and his fellow fallen, the sun has come out and the future is bright with Trumpism. All is well in the Realm of Alabama. Not even logic is required to see that Trump's failure to address rising anti-Semitism is taken as a sign of approval by local neo-Nazis.
And so I turn back to the response of the American Jewish community, specifically, Bradley Burston's hard-left reprimand (Bradley's position on Trump has been consistently oppositional):
We largely let him get away with marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day by pointedly omitting any mention of the Jews, then choosing that very day to issue an order choking off immigration of non-Christian refugees fleeing genocide.
What is true – and as an obsessive CNN viewer he knows this – is that there have been scores of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers, his own followers have issued rafts of threatening, Nazi-themed tweets against his Jewish critics, and he has done nothing, nothing at all, to condemn them or act against them.
On the contrary. Here is a political animal with a superhuman sense for what and whom his followers want him to say, do and attack. When he was out working the crowds, he knew in his bones that white supremacist anti-Semites saw him as their great hope. He fed them all the red meat he could dish out.
You can argue that a man disassociated from reality cannot be held accountable for the consequences of his actions, or for enabling or encouraging others to do his dirty work for him. Dirty work which works to his direct advantage. No more. A man who initiates, fuels, and fans anti-Semitism, a man who is in a direct position to combat it and does not, is, in my view, an anti-Semite.
Trump's silence speaks volumes to avowed, proud anti-Semites. Trump's silence is loud and clear: I'm with you.
And perhaps that is where I should drop the mike. The silence is deafening. The cliches are rotting on the laundry lines. Trump has left intelligent observers with nothing to express apart from disbelief and continuous disgust.
Defectors and Deserters: A different perspective on Bowe Bergdahl.
My husband empties the dishwasher with the painstaking diligence of the 21st century male while I sit at the kiddie table and muse about the more pressing issues of the average, middle-class American day.
"So…." I begin with all the languor of a pickled bean pod, "This Bowe Bergdahl fellow is really getting attacked in the media."
We nod together, gazing at our shoes, recalling those early courtship arguments over the significance of praying to a sanctified piece of fabric and placing our hands on our hearts while so doing.
Something is really bothering my husband- a red-white-and-blue something hanging heavy in his head. Empathizing with Bowe's discovery that his country's government was not actually helping or protecting the citizens of Afghanistan does not assuage my husband's concern about the consequences of Bowe's decision to act on his ethics.
It goes back to the existentialists- and the big question of the previous century- namely, whether one should put conscience before country in everyday life. But he doesn't see it that way.
My husband's Atlanta childhood is difficult to resuscitate; he remembers baseball, tree swings, Six Flags, with all the generalized amnesia induced by a childhood of plenty.
None of his relatives admit to harboring doubts about the virtues of the Republican Party. And no male member of his family- not his father, not a single one of his four uncles- ever served in any of the US military's overseas activities. Armchair warriors, they are the angry Americans we read about, the ones still livid over the failure to win the war in Vietnam and vanquish communism once and for all.
Given his upbringing, my husband's ability to think globally is impressive.
But, Bowe still bothers him.
"Can't we just agree that it was wrong for him to desert?" he pleads, assuming there are better options for the conscience-stricken soldier.
"Why didn't he just refuse to serve and do his time in jail?", my husband adds, as if the answer to this question might illuminate entire continents of moral misunderstanding.
"Um, maybe you should do a little reading. Start with Solzhenitsyn and Hannah Arendt."
"Maybe you should read a little more history yourself, including documents pertaining to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War," he counters.
"Obviously there's Lincoln. But there's also Czeslaw Milosz."
"Senator Max Clelland," he snaps.
"Vaclav freaking Havel," I snap back.
"Groucho Marx?"
The disconnect in our cultural frame of reference becomes obvious. At first, I ascribe it to the varying experiences of a native son and an immigrant. But when my immigrant parents cluck their tongues and decry Bowe's lack of loyalty to their favorite flag, I realize the disconnect is much more complicated.
The disconnect lies between two different worldviews. In one worldview- the one to which my husband and parents subscribe- a government deserves loyalty above and beyond the considerations of personal ethics. In the other worldview- the one to which many dissidents and activists subscribe- modern history offers us the human casualties of the nation-state, each death paid for with taxes, each individual tragedy made possible by unthinking political loyalty.
I can feel the blood in my temples beginning the slow simmer that precedes a boil. Our kitchen feels too confining for the conversation. How can we put human tragedy in a room threatened by an avalanche of sippy cups without doing its victims an injustice?
So it arrives: the hot-headed, stupid comment without which we might actually begin to understand one another.
"Who are you to judge the deserters or the defectors?" I whisper-scream so as not to wake our sleeping angels. "You have no clue what it means to be a veteran of the crimes committed by the nation-state!"
Here's where it comes from: In 1980, Doru and Lydia implemented their secret plan to escape the worker's paradise created by Romania's exorbitant dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. Part of this plan required them to leave me, their adorable infant daughter, in the care of my father's parents until events were sorted out for better or worse.
The actual events involved slipping through Czechoslovakia to Wisconsin, where my father had established connections in the academic community, then applying for political asylum, moving to another state, waiting for their asylum application to be acknowledged, dealing with the complications ensuing as a result of Reagan's decision to grant MFN status to Romania, filling out the endless paperwork to bring me stateside, and adding more water to the soup in the hopes that it might last just a few more days.
By the time the US government finally approved my visa, I had a new little sister to fill my place as family baby.
Growing up in Alabama offered me continuous reminders about the evils of communism from folks who wore their Bible belts too tight. When the wall came down at the end of 1989, my parents took a leave from their jobs, withdrew us from school, and rented a car in Germany to drive through the interminable border crossing lines in the newly liberated territories of East and Central Europe. For the first time since their defection, my parents were returning to the land of their youth and the fold of their extended family. I couldn't wait to meet all the people that populated the kitchen stories of my childhood.
There is simply no way to convey the intoxicating wonder and ebullience of those early post-communist days.
While many aunts and second cousins kissed and hugged us at every turn, I got distracted by the heated conversations over tuica, the ones that dragged on until early in the morning. Overhearing these conversations revealed, for the first time, the accumulated anger and resentment of those who had remained and lived under Ceasescu. Frequently, my parents' voices grew thin and reedy, hesitant in that peculiar manner adopted by defendants in a trial.
The accusations mounted like dental plaque. My parents had "run away". They had "deserted their family". They didn't "stand up and protest the system". They didn't go to prison or the gulag for their beliefs. They just ran.
Fortunately, my father's parents did not disown or persecute him for his political treason. One might even hold them responsible for raising their defector son in a way that made it possible for him to marry my mother and do what no risk-averse, well-settled citizen would seriously consider, namely, leaving everything behind and starting again as strangers in a strange land.
When they came to the US, my grandparents practiced their English and dressed in the manner trending with Alabama natives at the time. Neither considered the act of speaking English, or acknowledging the local "hallelujah"-laced lingo, as a betrayal of their homeland. Only the most militant propagandist could have accused them of "accommodation" or "appeasement".
For the most part, my grandparents modelled politeness and non-confrontational engagement. They took the time to learn about the country they visited, using what they learned to help them negotiate the varying cultural norms and conditions. Ultimately, they made these efforts out of love for my father and a desire to share in our family's life, whatever its current geographic location.
Like my grandparents, Bowe's father learned the language of his son's captors. He showed deference by using the Haqqani lingo, and grew a long beard to keep from being identified with an enemy country. Bowe's mother wore a veil out of respect and to keep from antagonizing extremist Muslims. Surely I am not the only American who can understand and empathize with these actions.
My grandfather, Claudiu, spent time in a Danube Canal work camp for his impertinence.
"Just because people tell you to do something doesn't make it right," Claudiu told me as I juggled cooking his lunch, nursing some infant or another, and keeping my brain from morphing into a mush suitable only for toothless mouths.
What he meant: "Don't do anything that makes you less of decent human being".
What he didn't mean: "Don't do anything that makes you less of a human being unless everybody else, even the powerful guys, are doing it too."
The question of conscience is- and had always been- an individual one. A personal encounter with lived ethics. A means of self-reckoning. A source of personal honor and integrity.
When I asked Claudiu how it felt to spend five months living in the country he fought against during World War II, he grinned and began picking his teeth. "War is war," he sighed, "And war is a fight between governments, not people."
But the US fighter jets that shot down his only brother as he flew a plane to defend Bucharest from bombs- how could he not hold his brother's death against us?
Too wise to be baited, Claudiu reminded me that no one can judge what another man does to protect his family- "In matters of taste and conscience, each man is king".
Bowe Bergdahl chased his most idealistic, exciting American dream straight into the US Army, where he was stationed on the front lines of the counterinsurgency, the battle for the "hearts and minds" of individual Afghan villages and communities.
In one of the two letters sent to his parents during his five year captivity, Bowe tried to explain why walked away from the base. He was disillusioned by the leadership- by the senseless risks and conditions imposed on his fellow soldiers- and by the failure of the US effort to win the war of ideas. He was depressed, oppressed by a sense of futility and lack of purpose; the aimlessness best depicted in novels by Herman Hesse.
What I found in Bowe's letters was a young prisoner's efforts to reassure his family (and himself)- to discover some purpose to the horror and suffering of life. "All things happen for a reason", Bowe wrote, citing mathematics as "evidence" of higher meaning and purpose. Then, "just because we cannot understand the master equation does not mean it is not there."
My husband gazes at me carefully. Marriage to a non-native accustoms you to a certain amount of suspense. He recalls our experience at the Social Security office when I applied to change my name, and an elderly bouffant informed my husband, "Sir, I don't know what this woman told you but you married a legal alien without a work permit". The bouffant remained unimpressed by my USA-issued passport.
"Ms. I-can't-pronounce-that, what we need is an original birth certificate."
"From communist Romania?" my mouth dropped. "Can you even read a Romanian birth certificate?"
"This conversation is finished," said the bouffant. Case closed. No further consideration. The garish misunderstanding brushed away with the words, "You are dismissed".
It's easy to dismiss Bowe's actions as those of a traitor. It's hard to explain why we offer defectors the benefits of acting on conscience while condemning our own citizens make similar choices.
Both my parents and Bowe acted from individual conscience. Both assumed the primary risk for their choices. Neither took another life in so doing. Yet both endangered family members, friends, and buddies affected by the actions. Best not to judge those who run from the lies their government asks them to live and tell, lest you wake one morning to find your thoughts resembling shoddy propaganda.
July 13, 2014 | Permalink | Comments (5)
"Lies", a poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Lying to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling them
that God's in his heaven
and all's well with the world
They know what you mean.
They are people too.
Tell them the difficulties
can't be counted,
and let them see
not only
what will be
but see
with clarity
these present times.
Say obstacles exist they must encounter,
sorrow comes,
hardship happens.
The hell with it.
Who never knew
the price of happiness
will not be happy.
Forgive no error
you recognize,
it will repeat itself,
a hundredfold
and afterward
our pupils
will not forgive in us
what we forgave.
I found this translation online at The American Dissident, which also has two other Yevtushenko poems deserving your immediate attention, especially one of my all-time favorites, "Conversations With An American Writer". As former President Dubya taught us, lies don't magically disappear- they just blow up in other people's faces.
June 16, 2014 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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text:
A Running List of the Publications and Reporters Who Have Had Their Credentials Revoked By Donald Trump
Gabrielle Bluestone
Filed to: the real donald trump
the real donald trump
This afternoon, Donald Trump announced his campaign would be revoking the press credentials of the "phony and dishonest" Washington Post, which has run a host of stories critical of his candidacy and campaign. As it were, they are in great company—Trump has banned individual reporters and entire outlets for far less.
The Des Moines Register
In July 2015, Trump's campaign denied credentials for the Des Moines Register at a rally in Oskaloosa, Iowa because Trump was unhappy with an editorial titled "Trump should pull the plug on his bloviating side show."
"We're not issuing credentials to anyone from The Des Moines Register based on the editorial that they wrote earlier in the week," Corey Lewandowski reportedly explained.
In March 2016, Politico reporter Ben Schreckinger had his credentials to cover a rally at Mar-a-Lago revoked after he wrote a piece critical of Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. He was not given an explanation for the sudden ban.
According to Politico's Hadas Gold, Schreckinger attempted to attend anyway and was denied entry and escorted off the property.
BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins has reportedly been banned from covering Trump events after writing several pieces critical of Trump.
The New Tri-State Defender
Historically black paper the New Tri-State Defender couldn't even get a response from the Trump campaign when it applied for credentials to a March rally in Memphis.
"We sent out two email requests," executive editor Karanja Ajanaku told TheWrap at the time. "The first email was sent on the Monday before the event, but we never heard back. The second email was sent on Thursday. They never even acknowledged our emails."
Still the campaign did manage to acknowledge emails from James Edwards' white supremacist site, The Political Cesspool, which obtained credentials for the event.
Times reporter Trip Gabriel was ejected from a January rally in Waukee, Iowa, after publishing a story critical of Trump's Iowa field operation. Gabriel, who says he was escorted out of the rally by a staffer and a police officer, was told he was ejected on orders from "Chuck and Stephanie," an apparent reference to Trump's Iowa state director, Chuck Laudner, and his wife, Stephanie.
The Trump campaign began denying credentials to reporters from the Daily Beast in November—right around the time executive editor Noah Schactman called for a boycott of Trump's businesses. Campaign reporter Olivia Nuzzi, who was barred for a time, has been let into some events since, though she appears to be the only one: Daily Beast reporter Gideon Resnick writes on Twitter, "I and every other reporter at The Daily Beast have not had access for months and months."
The Trump campaign began categorically denying credentials to Univision reporters in October, which he sued for $500 million after they refused to air the Miss Universe pageant citing his comments on Mexicans. That ban has extended to reporters for Fusion TV, which is owned by Univision: In October, the campaign revoked their credentials for a rally in Doral, Florida. Trump also banned Univision employees from using his Miami golf course.
Reporters from the Huffington Post, which first filed Trump coverage to its entertainment section and later affixed an addendum on Trump stories declaring him a racist, were reportedly banned from getting credentials for Trump campaign events. Another HuffPo reporter, Samantha-Jo Roth, who attempted to enter a rally with the general public, says she was also turned away, apparently because of camera equipment in her backpack.
The National Review
Reporters for the National Review, many of whom had previously been credentialed for Trump events, were reportedly blacklisted by the campaign after the Review published a January cover story collection of editorials denouncing Trump. Reporter Alexis Levinson says the revocation has led to the publication covering Trump less: "I just don't pitch stories that involve me covering Trump stuff anymore," she told Mother Jones in March. "I don't have three hours to go spend in line. It's so irritating."
Mother Jones reporter Patrick Caldwell says he was denied credentials, without explanation, to a February Nevada victory party, even though the press pen clearly had room for additional reporters. Caldwell reports similar outcomes for his colleagues:
When Mother Jones' Russ Choma tried to go through the media entrance to a New Hampshire event in December, Trump's campaign staff summoned local police to escort him from the venue. My colleague Pema Levy was turned away from a Trump event in Iowa in January, along with several other reporters.
Those reporters included BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins and the Daily Beast's Olivia Nuzzi.
Gawker's Hamilton Nolan is pretty sure he applied for press credentials for a rally in New Hampshire. As far as he can recall, he didn't get them. Night editor Hudson Hongo was also denied credentials at a May rally in Eugene, OR.