Martin Cizmar, - Raw Story
Stephan: Almost every day now I see stories about police brutality, police killing unarmed people of color, and general thuggery. And they are doing this tricked out in military combat gear. Look at the picture that accompanies this article.
This is all part of the rising authoritarianism in the United States, and the decline of American democracy. What do I mean by this? Consider this story.
Neo-Nazi rally happened in tiny Newnan, Georgia today.
According to some reports, as few as 35 Nazis showed up to hear their leader mock men wearing skinny jeans. To protect them, the state had to send 400 heavily armed law enforcement officers in full riot gear.
But that doesn’t mean things were smoothly. The cops were very aggressive with counter-protestors, according to reports from the scene and videos which show use-of-force arrests because of bandanas.
Huffington Posts’s Christopher Mathias was shocked by the brutality of the cops.
“I just witness the most over-aggressive policing I’ve ever seen in #Newnan,” he wrote on twitter. “Tackling protesters and arresting them… for wearing masks.”
The issue was that anti-Nazi activists covered their faces with bandanas—which the cops responded to with violent confrontations and arrests.
The images were described as “shocking” by others, as well.
The rally organizers carried Nazi flags but faced no violence.
The Nazis were seemingly emboldened by their protection forces. When Mathias tried to ask organizer Jeff Schoep a tough questions, the Nazi told him that he would “have [him] removed for being […]
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Saturday, April 21st, 2018
Stephan:
There will be no SR today. Due to the constant malicious login attempts we experience the passwords we use have become incredibly complicated. Something went wrong at Stephan's end, and he could not log in. He is traveling and was unable to get in touch with me. Our apologies.
Beth Alexander
Webmaster
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Simon Denyer and Annie Gowen, - The Washington Post
Stephan: When I was in China a few months ago, the gender disparity was obvious in crowds in the street. But from talking to Chinese people my takeaway was that the effect it has had is to increase the status of women. If you are a man in China and you want to get married you have to make yourself very attractive to women, because you have so many competitors. I was told several times that many men in their 30s remain virgins, and have never had a girl friend. Here is an excellent story on this situation in both China and India.
I find it very ironic because it results from a preference for boy babies.
Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.
Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight.
“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, […]
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Stephan: Citizens United, perhaps the worst decision ever taken by the Supreme Court, legalized bribery and made it possible for the rich to purchase the government they want. The election of Trump is one result, as well as a demonstration that it is easy to manipulate an ignorant, frightened, resentful, White minority. If you give them the right dog whistles they will happily go to the polls and vote against their own self-interest.
Credit: DonkeyHotey
I recently heard on cable news that special counsel Robert Mueller wanted to interview some “Russian oligarchs” about their supposed influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Liberal talking heads at such organizations as MSNBC and CNN keep warning that nothing has been done yet to protect the integrity of our voting process against “Russian interference” as the 2018 midterm elections loom ever closer on the nation’s horizon.
What about the American oligarchs, I wondered, people like businessman Richard Uihlein, who regularly distort U.S. elections at every level—local, state and federal? Who will protect our “democracy” from the plutocratic “wealth primary” power of the American oligarchy?
If you are like most U.S citizens, you’ve never heard of Richard Uihlein. An heir to the Milwaukee-based Schlitz beer fortune, Uihlein is the billionaire CEO of Uline Inc., a private, family-owned Wisconsin company that sells shipping and packaging materials to the tune of $2 billion in annual revenue. He lives in a mansion in Lake Forest, a hyperopulent preserve north […]
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Michael Stone, - Progessive Secular Humanist
Stephan: This site is definitely biased but, in this instance, they raise a point I see over and over in the right wing media. You may think it is crazy but millions of White Americans passionately believe Jesus is coming back from the sky and will reward them, as the chosen, and punish everyone else , and cast them into the pit of hell for a thousand years. Read the Book of Revelations. Really. They believe this. It is why Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem.
Biblical prophecy predicts the Rapture is April 23: Christians look forward to the end of the world, when they will rise in the sky and meet Jesus.
Fox News reports the end of the world is April 23, according to prominent Christian numerologist David Meade:
For a certain branch of evangelical Christianity, Revelation 12:1–2 describes the beginning of what is known as the Rapture and the second coming of Christ.
The passage reads: “And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of 12 stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pains and the agony of giving birth.”
In the passage, the woman is represented as Virgo.
According to Meade, the alignment represents “the Lion of the tribe of Judah,” marking the Rapture, the belief that Christ will bring the faithful into paradise prior to a period of tribulation on earth that precedes the end of time.
“Christian numerologist” Meade told the U.K.’s Daily Express:
During this time frame, on April 23, 2018 the moon appears under the feet of the Constellation Virgo.
The Sun appears to precisely clothe Virgo… Jupiter is birthed on […]
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