Gloria Steinem and the CIA

I know that many of the readers of this blog also follow Marcus Ranum’s blog stderr but for the few who don’t, I would strongly urge you to read today’s post. It is truly disturbing about the relationship that feminist icon and founder of Ms. Magazine Gloria Steinem had with the CIA and a program called MOCKINGBIRD which was, like COINTELPRO, one of the many covert projects of the US government to infiltrate, subvert, disrupt, and destroy progressive movements using a ‘divide and conquer’ strategy by fomenting schisms and conflicts along sectarian lines and thus prevent broader unity emerging among the many disenfranchised and disadvantaged groups.
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A strange and sad story

I am not sure what to make of this story about a doctor who took his own life possibly because of regrets that he had provided parents with fraudulent documents that their their children were vaccinated when they were not. These were parents who wanted their children to be vaccinated but he had decided in the last decade of his life that vaccinations were harmful and unilaterally pretended to vaccinate them.
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What it is like to experience an earthquake

I have been lucky to never experience a serious earthquake, the closest being slight tremors that I would likely not have even noticed if I had been outdoors or asleep. The video below was taken at an airport during the 2011 earthquake in Japan. It is quite terrifying. The tremors last for about two minutes.

What amazes me is that the person taking the video was so committed to doing so that they did not seek to run outside to avoid being injured if the balcony they were on collapsed, or to hide under something to prevent being hit by falling debris.

Boris Johnson is a true Donald Trump acolyte

Just four weeks after his party convincingly won the UK general election, prime minister Boris Johnson has sacked nine cabinet members including Chancellor of the Exchequer Sajid Javid (their equivalent of the U S treasury secretary) and replaced them with people whom Johnson thinks will be more loyal to him. Javid’s replacement Rishi Sunak only entered parliament in 2015 and was until recently a hedge fund manager. Javid himself had an 18-year career in banking ending as managing director of Deutsche Bank. Johnson’s dedication to serving the interests of the financial sector is clearly in view.
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Matt Taibbi and Mehdi Hasan tear into mainstream media analysis

Matt Taibbi writes that the dynamics of the 2016 Republican primaries are playing out again in the 2020 Democratic primaries and that it favors Bernie Sanders.

In reality, the results for Sanders cut both ways. On one hand, it’s amazing he can win any state after years of propaganda depicting him as a half-dead cross of Hitler and Stalin (MSNBC before New Hampshire outdid itself with Looney Tunes commentary about “executions in Central Park” and a “digital brownshirt brigade”).

On the other hand, there are signs after New Hampshire that some of the relentless corporate messaging against Sanders is landing. This will inspire orgies of excitement – it’s already happening – as pundits revel in every storyline suggesting Democratic voters are scrambling to find an “electable” alternative.
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DOJ career officials resign after Stone reversal

Four career prosecutors have resigned from the case following a direct intervention by the attorney general Bill Barr overruling their judgment in the case of Donald Trump’s friend, the shady Roger Stone. It is clear that Barr was obeying the dictates of Trump.

Four lawyers who prosecuted political operative Roger Stone have resigned in protest after their sentencing recommendation was overruled and slashed by Donald Trump’s justice department.

Aaron Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed and Michael Marando quit the case while Democrats demanded an independent investigation into what they described as a dangerously politicised and corrupt justice department.

The growing crisis raised fresh questions over the role of William Barr, the attorney general who has been criticised as a partisan Trump loyalist.
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Bernie Sanders wins the New Hampshire primary

Bernie Sanders has been declared the winner of the New Hampshire primary but his margin of victory over second-place finisher Pete Buttigieg was small 25.70% to 24.45%. While the turnout in the earlier Iowa primary narrowly beat the 2016 numbers but was disappointingly smaller than the record 2008 levels, this year’s New Hampshire turnout will beat 2008 and set a new record.

However Sanders won 51% of the youth vote aged 18-29, showing that his ideas resonate with future generations of voters. He alsowon nearly half the voters under 30 in Iowa.

To me the big surprise is that Amy Klobuchar did so well, winning close to 20% of the vote and beating out Elizabeth Warren who finished fourth with less than 10% and Joe Biden who finished fifth with about 8%. I read earlier that Klobuchar polls showed she had won a large share of the women’s vote and that her increase came at the expense of Warren and Biden but cannot find that link now. Since you need 15% of the vote to be awarded any delegates, the latter two will leave New Hampshire empty-handed.
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Rebuffing phony critiques of the Sanders program

Today is the New Hampshire primary and one can sense a panic in the political establishment and the corporate media that Bernie Sanders will do well there. Hence they are going into overdrive to make the case that he is an ‘extremist’ and an ‘ideologue’ and that his ideas are not ‘practical’. In this effort they are aided by the Democratic party establishment and its party hacks like James Carville who has made a good career out of talking like your average Joe while promoting the interests of the oligarchy. They are clearly hoping that most of the party voters will coalesce around Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg or with the late addition of Amy Klobuchar to the mix, as the person to stop Sanders and are clearly promoting this view.
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Why is Lipinski still supported by the Democratic party?

I have railed before about congressman Dan Lipinski who since 2004 has represented a very safe Democratic seat in the 3rd district of Illinois that he ‘inherited’ from his father. i.e., his father held it for a long time and stepped aside for his son to take it. Lipinski has had the support of the Democratic party despite the fact that his views are pretty much close to Republican positions on key issues. He is anti-LGBT and anti-women and he gets funding from the petroleum industry and big corporations.
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Livestreaming suicide

Paulo Victor Ribeiro writes about the disturbing trend in young people livestreaming taking their own lives and about the response by the streaming service Tik-Tok to the suicide of a 19-year old vlogger named João (a pseudonym) who livestreamed his suicide on that platform that was watched by 280 people. After being informed, the company focused its time and energy on the best public relations strategy to deal with this tragedy before taking action, spending three hours on it before informing the police.
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