Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Everyone’s welcome here, no special handshake required. Just check your meta at the door.
Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:30am (ET) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.
This Day in History
Breakfast News
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A New Kind of Violent Extremist Hell Is Being Created in the Middle of Iraq
So now a huge Hardcore Sunnistan stretches all the way from the suburbs of Aleppo to Tikrit and from Mosul to the Jordanian/Iraqi border – the same one that dissolved in 2003 when Shock and Awe turned into Mission (Un)Accomplished.
In an eerie echo of Dick Cheney’s army’s footprints reverberating in the sands of Anbar province, the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) and their coalition of the willing (jihadis, Islamists, Ba’athists and tribal sheikhs) now pose as the “liberators” of Iraqi Sunnis from the clutches of an “evil” Shi’ite majority government in Baghdad.
In addition, ISIS also controls the PR wars. Here, a jihadi details how any sort of possible Washington “kinetic” involvement will be interpreted as an unholy alliance between the Empire and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki against the underdogs.
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3 Ways Arab Millennials Are Transforming the Middle East
Three and a half years ago, the world was riveted by the massive crowds of youths mobilizing in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand an end to Egypt’s dreary police state. We stared in horror as, at one point, the Interior Ministry mobilized camel drivers to attack the demonstrators. We watched transfixed as the protests spread from one part of Egypt to another and then from country to country across the region. Before it was over, four presidents-for-life would be toppled and others besieged in their palaces.
Some 42 months later, in most of the Middle East and North Africa, the bright hopes for more personal liberties and an end to political and economic stagnation championed by those young people have been dashed. Instead, a number of Arab countries have seen counter-revolutions, while others are engulfed in internecine conflicts and civil wars, creating Mad Max-like scenes of post-apocalyptic horror. But keep one thing in mind: the rebellions of the past three years were led by Arab millennials, twentysomethings who have decades left to come into their own. Don’t count them out yet. They have only begun the work of transforming the region.
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10 Blistering Highlights from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Hobby Lobby Dissent
Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a scathing 35-page dissent in the disastrous 5-4 Supreme Court decision Monday granting corporations First Amendment religious rights to deny women birth control coverage. The court had ventured far out in to unprecedented territory by granting private companies the right to be exempt from laws their owners don’t agree with. Crazy! In their zeal to deny women access to reproductive healthcare, expand the rights of corporations and hurt Obamacare, “The court,” she wrote, “has ventured into a minefield.”
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How Did the FBI Miss Over 1 Million Rapes?
Earlier this month, a 911 dispatcher in Ohio was recorded telling a 20-year-old woman who had just been raped to “quit crying.” After she provided a description of her assailant, the caller went on to say, “They’re not going to be able to find him with the information that you’ve given.” This incident had its viral moment, sparking outrage at the dispatcher’s lack of empathy. But it also speaks to the larger issue of how we are counting rapes in the United States. Sixty-nine percent of police departments surveyed in 2012 said that dispatchers like this one, often with little training, are authorized to do the initial coding of sexual assault crimes.
That’s important, because miscoding of such crimes is masking the high incidence of rape in the United States. We don’t have an overestimation of rape; we have a gross underestimation. A thorough analysis of federal data published earlier this year by Corey Rayburn Yung, associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Law, concludes that between 1995 and 2012, police departments across the country systematically undercounted and underreported sexual assaults.
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Conspiracy of the Plutocrats: Secrets of the Wealth-Inequality Explosion Revealed
The growing wealth gap in developed countries is an incredibly disturbing development. New research suggests that inequality might be growing even faster than we thought. Worryingly, this concentration of wealth has coincided with a concentration of debt at the bottom, as families struggle to maintain their standards of living with stagnating incomes. But even this data understates wealth inequality, argues Gabriel Zucman in “The Hidden Wealth of Nations,” because official statistics fail to capture offshore wealth holdings.
Zucman is an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics and a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. At only 27, he’s already co-authored papers with economics superstar Thomas Piketty. His most recent paper estimates that global offshore holdings total $7.6 trillion and rob governments of hundreds of billions in tax revenues each year. He also finds that over the past few decades, companies have stored more and more profits overseas, making the effective corporate tax rate less than half the tax rate on the books.
All of this is happening at the same time as Thomas Piketty’s blockbuster treatise, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” has brought the issue of wealth and income inequality to the forefront of the political discussion by introducing historical data on inequality. Pikettyargues that the best way to address the data, political and economic concerns of wealth is a progressive international tax on wealth holdings, as well as policies to build wealth for the middle class. What was once a technocratic discussion about efficiency has become a deeply political debate about who gets what, as slow growth makes distribution more important. Even the most conservative economists have to grapple (albeit clumsily) with addressing the moral dimension of inequality.
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Must Read Blog Posts
“We cannot ignore this corruption anymore.”
by OPOL
Hellraisers Journal: That’s it, they’re nothing but cattle, and the only way is to kill them off.
by JayRaye
Gender Prison: White House to protect transgender people via executive order
by rserven
12 Things You Can Do to Stay Calm and Peaceful
by Dawn Gluskin
19 Best Double-Entendre Songs That Are Really About Sex
by Noah Berlatsky
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The Daily Wiki
A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm system characterized by a low-pressure center, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain. Depending on its location and strength, a tropical cyclone is referred to by names such as hurricane (/ˈhʌrɨkeɪn/ or ˈhʌrɨkən), typhoon taɪˈfuːn, tropical storm, cyclonic storm, tropical depression, and simply cyclone.[1]
Tropical cyclones typically form over large bodies of relatively warm water. They derive their energy from the evaporation of water from the ocean surface, which ultimately recondenses into clouds and rain when moist air rises and cools to saturation. This energy source differs from that of mid-latitude cyclonic storms, such as nor’easters and European windstorms, which are fueled primarily by horizontal temperature contrasts. The strong rotating winds of a tropical cyclone are a result of the (partial) conservation of angular momentum imparted by the Earth’s rotation as air flows inwards toward the axis of rotation. As a result, they rarely form within 5° of the equator.[2] Tropical cyclones are typically between 100 and 4,000 km (62 and 2,485 mi) in diameter. A cyclone is turned into a hurricane when the wind speed reaches 120 kilometres per hour (75 mph).
The term “tropical” refers to the geographical origin of these systems, which form almost exclusively over tropical seas. The term “cyclone” refers to their cyclonic nature, with wind blowing counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere. The opposite direction of circulation is due to the Coriolis force.
In addition to strong winds and rain, tropical cyclones are capable of generating high waves, damaging storm surge, and tornadoes. They typically weaken rapidly over land where they are cut off from their primary energy source. For this reason, coastal regions are particularly vulnerable to damage from a tropical cyclone as compared to inland regions. Heavy rains, however, can cause significant flooding inland, and storm surges can produce extensive coastal flooding up to 40 kilometres (25 mi) from the coastline. Though their effects on human populations are often devastating, tropical cyclones can relieve drought conditions. They also carry heat energy away from the tropics and transport it toward temperate latitudes, which may play an important role in modulating regional and global climate.
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Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac
Early morning cheerfulness can be extremely obnoxious. ~William Feather
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Breakfast Tunes
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Stupid Shit by LaEscapee
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