I suppose I might have given Fenway a bigger sendoff because it is entirely possible the Red Sox will celebrate on the road unless the Dodgers get busy. If they notch a Split the Red Sox will return home no worse than 3 – 2. If the Dodgers Sweep they can achieve no more that a 3 – 2 lead heading back to Bean Town. They must get 2 of 3 or they’re done.
The Sox look like the Sox and the Dodgers are not the team that took the ‘Stros to 7.
The Traitors of Chavez Ravine send Walker Buehler (R, 8 – 5, 2.62 ERA) to the mound. He’s basically a Rookie (8 games and 9.1 total Innings in 2017). So far in the post-Season he’s appeared in 3 games losing 1. He’s given up 10 Runs on 24 Hits with 3 Home Runs and 4 Walks for an ERA of 5.40 in 16.2 Innings. He throws Fastballs, Curves, and Cutters.
Sox will start Rick Porcello (R, 17 – 7, 4.28 ERA). He’s had 4 appearences in this year’s Playoffs, winning 1. He’s allowed 5 Runs on 12 Hits with 2 Home Runs and 1 Walk over 10.2 Innings for an ERA of 4.22. He throws Fastballs and Sliders mostly with Curves and Cutters for variety.
Sox could get all they need tonight, down 3 – 0 is not a position you want to be playing from.
Federal authorities made an arrest on Friday in connection with the nationwide bombing campaign against outspoken critics of President Trump, a significant breakthrough in a case that has gripped the country in the days leading up to the midterm elections.
Law enforcement officials identified the suspect as Cesar Sayoc Jr., 56, of Aventura, Fla., just north of Miami.
The arrest came even as the crude pipe bombs continued to appear across the country. One, found in Florida, was addressed to Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat; another, discovered in a Manhattan post office, was sent to James R. Clapper Jr., a former director of national intelligence; and a third was intercepted before it reached Senator Kamala Harris, a California Democrat.
A fourth bomb, found on Friday in a mail facility in California, was addressed to Tom Steyer, a prominent Democratic donor, a person close to him said.
At a news conference in Washington on Friday afternoon, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that Mr. Sayoc had been charged with five counts, including illegal mailing of explosives and making threats against former presidents. According to a criminal complaint released as Mr. Sessions spoke, the packages sent by Mr. Sayoc included photographs of his intended targets, each one marked with a red X.
When asked why Mr. Sayoc had sent the bombs to Democrats, Mr. Sessions said he was not sure, adding that the suspect “appears to be a partisan.”
Wait a minute. I know you. You’re Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. You play basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers.
I’m sorry, son, but you must have me confused with someone else. My name is Roger Murdock. I’m the co-pilot. You are Kareem! I’ve seen you play. My dad’s got season tickets.
I think you should go back to your seat now, Joey. Right, Clarence? Nahhhhhh, he’s not bothering anyone. Let him stay here.
But just remember, my name is… ROGER MURDOCK. I’m an airline pilot. I think you’re the greatest, but my dad says you don’t work hard enough on defense. And he says that lots of times, you don’t even run down court. And that you don’t really try… except during the playoffs.
The hell I don’t! LISTEN, KID! I’ve been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCLA. I’m out there busting my buns every night! Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
Most sentences that begin with “When I was a kid…” to complain about the crazy modern world don’t end well for the speaker. If it’s just a blowhard uncle at Thanksgiving dinner, his grudging audience of maybe a dozen family members has already tuned him out after those five words. But if you’re Megyn Kelly with an audience of 2.4 million on NBC, the ending of that sentence will live on long after Uncle Know-it-all is snoring on the sofa in a pumpkin pie-induced coma. What she says matters because it enters the social unconscious as a splinter that festers into an infection in our cultural values. Kelly’s doe-eyed defense of wearing blackface for Halloween as not being racist is classic: “What is racist? When I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”
For a popular public figure with a law degree, she really is way too comfortable ignoring simple logic. Her statement is the common logical fallacy of “appeal to tradition” that suggests that because something happened in the past, it’s good, true or beneficial. Like bleeding people when they’re sick, or women not voting or slavery. Nostalgia is not an excuse for promoting bad behavior. If it were, we wouldn’t have made marital rape illegal— which we didn’t start to do in the U.S. until the mid-1970s (with it being illegal in the entire country by 1993). Why? Because legal and biblical “tradition” held that it was a wife’s obligation to have sex, and therefore she couldn’t withhold it. Even Tevya, despite his rousing rendition of “Tradition” in Fiddler on the Roof, had to adapt to the way the world was evolving.
“What is racist?” Kelly asked. That’s a fair question, because the answer can sometimes seem complicated. Some people like to declare they are color blind with statements like, “I don’t see color. I don’t care if you’re black, white or purple.” That’s a lie no matter who says it. We all see color and we all make snap, often inappropriate judgments, even if we don’t want to. This isn’t racism, but racial awareness. The Broadway musical Avenue Q says it well in “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist”:
Everyone’s a little bit Racist, sometimes.
Doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes.
Look around and you will find,
No one’s really Color-blind.
Maybe it’s a fact we all should face.
Everyone makes Judgments… Based on race.
It’s part of our innate fight-or-flight response to identify what’s safe and what’s a potential threat. That’s why some black people have one way they act around white people, a more homogenized version of themselves, and another when they’re around other black people.
It’s less important that we all have that initial reaction than what we do about it. I look at it the same way I look at heroism. A hero feels fear, but overcomes that fear to act nobly. We may feel that twinge of bias, but then we overcome it to act compassionately. Acting out of moral conviction rather than childish fear is the basis for civilization.
The complication is that there are two major categories of racist: ignorant and deliberate. The ignorant racist may behave in bigoted ways because they don’t realize that what they are doing or saying is genuinely offensive. They could be a warm and wonderful human being but completely clueless of how they are negatively affecting others. Often, when they learn that they were inadvertently behaving badly or held inaccurate beliefs, they will feel shame and change their behavior. The deliberate racist is proudly ignorant and wishes harm to their target.
In Megyn Kelly’s case, it would be difficult to sustain an argument that she was ignorant of the blackface controversy. We’ve had many examples of it in the past few years (Ted Danson, Luann de Lesseps, Kylie Jenner, Julianne Hough, etc.) with all the usual pundits, myself included, explaining publicly why this is a hurtful and insensitive display. She’s an educated person with a news background, so there’s no way she is not informed on the issue. Which means she deliberately, without regard to the harm she would inflict on people of color, chose to pull out this old controversy. Not quite a hate crime, but hate crime-adjacent.
Should she be fired? In the best of all possible worlds, yes. Either she deliberately was racist in order to juice her flagging ratings, or she was too dumb to know it was racist, which is inexcusable for a newsperson. Either reason is grounds for dismissal. However, this is not the best of all possible worlds, and NBC might have sent her a mixed message when hiring her. Kelly made consistently racist statements while at Fox News, so when NBC hired her in 2017, its executives were saying: We’re rewarding your racism on Fox by paying you $69 million over three years. Then when she does the same thing that got her that mega-payday, NBC suddenly expresses socially conscious outrage. Not quite racist, but racist-adjacent. Firing Kelly does not wash away everyone’s past sins, but it’s still a cleansing moment.
Now Kelly hasn’t been fired yet though all signs point in that direction. Supposedly her absence Thursday was for Jury Duty and her kind bosses at NBC said, “Why not treat yourself and make a long weekend of it?”
Nobody in Television Management is ‘kind’.
Her staff (who all hate her because she’s an asshole) have been told to polish up their resumes and NBC has assured them they’ll find positions in other shows. Her attorney has switched from negotiating an extention to her 3 year contract (in its final year) and finding her a position that plays to her strengths as a “News Anchor and Reporter” (aka “Pundit”), to arranging a settlement on the remaining $23 Million in her existing agreement (so it’s not $69 Million as everyone is reporting). Oh and she wants Ronan Farrow as a witness.
Why Farrow? He’s still steamed at NBC for quashing his Weinstein scoop and Kelly has been his ally on #MeToo. It’s why she left Faux and about the only “Progressive” cause she’s ever embraced.
If you want to pity her, Faux has already said they won’t have her back (“We’re happy with our current lineup”). She was in the process of dropping her Talent Agency in favor of another that has now decided she’s not the kind of “Talent” they represent. Only her reliable Right Wing buds will book her show, but how fresh are Kelsey Grammer, Chuck Norris, and Jon Voight, musical guest Kanye West?
As reprehensible as her behavior has been that’s not the reason she’s being canned. Her Ratings blow chunks and every show she’s been on (where there was a previous host’s track record) has plummeted 30%.
And as she rides to the sunset of her career, beloved by “Centrists” who see her as a “reasonable, moderate Republican” (there is no such thing) all I can say is-
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 hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. 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.
President George W. Bush signs USA Patriot Act; Henry Kissinger says ‘peace is at hand’ in Vietnam; Gunfight at the OK Corral takes place; Actor Bob Hoskins and ‘Wheel of Fortune’ host Pat Sajak born.
Billionaires made more money in 2017 than in any year in recorded history. The richest people on Earth increased their wealth by a fifth to $8.9tn (£6.9tn), according to a report by Swiss bank UBS.
The fortunes of today’s super-wealthy have risen at a far greater rate than at the turn of the 20th century, when families such as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts controlled vast wealth. The report by UBS and accountants PwC said there was so much money in the hands of the ultra-rich that a new wave of rich and powerful multi-generational families was being created.
“The past 30 years have seen far greater wealth creation than the Gilded Age” the UBS Billionaires 2018 report said. “That period bred generations of families in the US and Europe who went on to influence business, banking, politics, philanthropy and the arts for more than 100 years. With wealth set to pass from entrepreneurs to their heirs in the coming years, the 21st century multi-generational families are being created.”
The world’s 2,158 billionaires grew their combined wealth by $1.4tn last year, more than the GDP of Spain or Australia, as booming stock markets helped the already very wealthy to achieve the “greatest absolute growth ever”.
More than 40 of the 179 new billionaires created last year inherited their wealth, and given the number of billionaires over 70 the report’s authors expect a further $3.4tn to be handed down over the next 20 years.
As you might be aware, for a couple of years now Spies of all sorts, but particularly Cops, have been able to use a $15,000 tool called a “GrayKey” from a company called “GrayShift” to access the data on your iPhone by using a brute force technique that exploits flaws in Apple’s USB/Lightning Port.
Apple is not very happy about that because security is one important thing that makes an iPhone worth $500 more than a real cell phone. They’ve been telegraphing a fix for about as long as the existence of this technology became public.
Well, it seems they found one and it’s now available in iOS 12.
Apple’s latest iteration of iOS has reportedly turned the GrayKey hacking device into an expensive doorstop. Law enforcement around the world has taken to using GrayKey to break into locked iPhones but it appears Apple has finally gotten ahead of the device’s crafty manufacturers. For now.
Forbes’ Thomas Brewster has been on top of the GrayKey saga from the beginning. On Wednesday, he cited sources from the forensic community who’ve told him that Apple’s efforts to keep bad actors and law enforcement from cracking into its users’ phones have paid off. According to the report, the $15,000 tool made by a shadowy company called Grayshift is now only capable of performing a “partial extraction” of data. It can pull a few unencrypted files and some metadata that’s virtually worthless.
One source that went on the record for Forbes, Captain John Sherwin of the Rochester Police Department in Minnesota, confirmed that the release of iOS 12 has hobbled GrayKey’s ability to unlock a phone. “That’s a fairly accurate assessment as to what we have experienced,” he told Forbes.
It’s still unclear what exact change could have been made to shut GrayKey out. Previous reporting has told us that the tool uses a workaround to brute force its way in by guessing a users’ password until it gets it right. Apple has protections in place to stop that kind of tactic and GrayShift’s methods are a closely held secret.
…
With iOS 12, Apple implemented a highly-anticipated change called “USB Restricted Mode.” This shuts off lightning port access on the iPhone if it hasn’t been unlocked by a user in the last hour. This was widely believed to be Apple’s solution to foil companies like GrayShift and Cellebrite but we don’t know for certain if that did the trick. Apple did not return our request for comment.
Whether it’s the solution or not, you might want to double-check that your phone is set up for USB Restricted Mode. You’ll need to be updated to iOS 12 and go to Settings > FaceID and Passcode.
Unfortunately I can’t duplicate the screen shot. You’ll have to go to Gizmodo to see that.
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 hungoverwe’ve been bailed outwe’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. 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.
Cuban missile crisis fuels Cold War clash at UN; China’s UN seat changes hands; ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ battle takes place; Author Geoffrey Chaucer dies; Golfer Payne Stewart killed in plane crash.
This October, Facebook and Twitter deleted the accounts of hundreds of users, including many alternative media outlets maintained by American users. Among those wiped out in the coordinated purge were popular sites that scrutinized police brutality and U.S. interventionism, like The Free Thought Project, Anti-Media, and Cop Block, along with the pages of journalists like Rachel Blevins.
Facebook claimed that these pages had “broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior.” However, sites like The Free Thought Project were verified by Facebook and widely recognized as legitimate sources of news and opinion. John Vibes, an independent reporter who contributed to Free Thought, accused Facebook of “favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices.”
In comments published here for the first time, a neoconservative Washington insider has apparently claimed a degree of credit for the recent purge — and promised more takedowns in the near future.
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Police say the only clean part of an intended drug deal at a North Carolina airport was the fact that the drugs in question were actually soap bars.
The News & Observer reports Raleigh-Durham International Airport officers arrested 43-year-old Tarvares Hargrave, 40-year-old Jason Anderson and 44-year-old Luz Ortega on drug-trafficking charges Oct. 5. But when the results of a laboratory test came back, police filed different felony charges Tuesday.
Police initially believed Anderson, of New York City, and Ortega, of New Jersey, sold 3 pounds (1.3 kilograms) of cocaine to Hargrave. Instead, according to an arrest warrant for Anderson, Hargrave received “10 bars of Ivory soap wrapped in thick plastic wrap.” But it’s a crime to take part in what someone believes is a drug deal.
It’s unclear whether Anderson and Ortega knew the package was soap.
Don’t get me wrong, Boston has an excellent Above/Below Ground Transit System usually called just the “T”. It’s cheap and reasonably kempt, the main problem is it doesn’t run 24/7 (or at least it didn’t).
So a bunch of friends and I were at a Show in Harvard Square that ended after the T shut down and Cabs were scarce and we didn’t have enough money anyway. We were only about 3 – 4 miles from home so we decided to hoof it, it’s an ok distance to walk if you’re mobile enough and don’t have any heavy burdens to drag around. It’s quick enough too, a brisk walk is about 4 or 5 miles an hour but it took us about 90 minutes because we were goofing around and sightseeing, few of us were natives and even at night the City is quite beautiful and well lit. We saw a few others but mostly we had the streets to ourselves and, in retrospect, it was a lot of fun.
We navigated by triangulating the Pru and The Great God Citgo, visible from damn near anywhere.
Last night the Red Sox did about as well as could be expected. Chris Sale lasted just as long as Clayton Kershaw and surprisingly enough it was the Dodgers who showed a weak Bullpen. Their Bats were asleep too- they looked like a team that took it to 7 against the Brewers. The Red Sox looked like the Sox, a team that took out the World Champion ‘Stros in 5.
Tonight the Sox send out their 2nd best, David Price (L, 16 – 7, 3.58 ERA). He’s very inconsistent, so far in the post-Season he’s been in 3 games, winning 1 and losing 1. He’s allowed 7 Runs on 11 Hits with 3 Home Runs and 6 Walks over 12.1 Innings of work earning an ERA of 5.11. Not so good for an Ace. He throws Fastballs, Cutters, and Changeups.
The Dodgers will respond with Hyun-Jin Ryu (L, 7 – 3, 1.97 ERA). He likewise has appeared 3 time in these Playoffs and has a record of 1 – 1. In 14.1 Innings e’s allowed 7 Runs on 17 Hits with 1 Home Run and 2 Walks for an ERA of 4.40, not much better. He throws junk pretty consistently with a Fastball sure, but also Cutters, Curveballs, and Changeups.
Well, the predictable “False Flag” excuse has been raised by the predictable apologists for the entirely predictable violence of Trump’s and the Republicans Far Right Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN or Voluntary Militia for National Security, commonly called Blackshirts) and Sturmabteilung (SA or Storm Detachment, commonly called Brownshirts Fascists.
They hang their hat on the fact nobody died. Well, you sure killed Heather Heyer didn’t you?
We should be grateful to the Times for not pussyfooting around here. The one thing that makes Wednesday’s near-tragedy unique is that there is a straight line to be drawn from George Soros’s mailbox and the CNN headquarters to the rhetoric of the President* of the United States. This is what makes this latest reemergence of the bomb different.
In the 1970s, there were no national politicians encouraging the Weathermen to involve themselves in the political process. Bernadine Dohrn didn’t get to visit the White House. Of course, in the 1950s and the 1960s, there were southern state politicians a’plenty who knew the people who were setting off the bombs, but the national government was pretty much on the other side; even though it was often dilatory in that regard, it got there eventually. (In 2002 and 2003, the last two culprits in the Birmingham church bombing were finally convicted by Doug Jones, now a senator from Alabama.)
(Trump) trafficks in imaginary threats and encourages, by word and deed, feelings of dread and isolation and deep, familiar paranoia, the entire Hofstadter buffet. And there is an entire media infrastructure dedicated to reinforcing those feelings, 24-7, on all platforms of the modern communications industry. The Weathermen didn’t have their own TV network.
Between the time the bomb was found in George Soros’s mailbox, and the the discovery of similar devices aimed at the Clintons, the Obamas, and CNN, the rightwing media was alive with the notion that the attempt on Soros’ life was a “false-flag” operation aimed at discrediting the president* and conservatism in general. Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog did a splendid job chronicling one outburst of dangerous idiocy in the comments section of the Daily Caller, the ratty platform on which Tucker Carlson hung the entrails of a once-promising career; at Twitchy, Michelle Malkin’s old popstand; and in the deep fever swamp that is Free Republic.
…
This constituency wasn’t created out of the air. It did not spring fully grown from the brow of (Trump). It was carefully created and nurtured over the past four decades by a conservative movement bankrolled by oligarchs who were and are perfectly fine with having murderous, angry grunts out there doing the dirty work for them, the way the fine upstanding Alabama burghers of the White Citizens Council were content to have the Klan round up misfits to blow up churches and kill little girls.
And then, in 2016, lo and behold, the perfect vessel for all of this carefully fashioned rage comes along and he wins a freak election, ends up in the White House, and now everybody’s shocked down to their expensive loafers that there’s a large body of their fellow citizens who believe in, and are willing to act upon, the doomstruck fantasies that they have been so conscientiously fed over the past 40 years?
…
(F)or the love of god, spare us from the horrified How Could This Happen Here? childishness that attends events like this. We all know how it could happen here. We’ve seen demonstrations over and over again, at rallies and on the street, about how it could happen here. It could happen here because it has happened here.
But Right Wing Violence is not a problem, just ask Dr. George Tiller and those who died and were injured at the bombings of over 42 Women’s Health Clinics (just counting the ones where there were casualties), ask the 168 dead at the Murrah Federal Building, ask the 4 young girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church. The list is too long to print on these pages.
And who did this? The dastardly Leftist Anarchists of the Antifa, at the direction of Hillary Clinton and financed by George Soros in order to make the Godly White Male Real ‘Murikans look bad.
Cody looks much less frazzled, but that was after only 8 months.
Internal U.S. Army documents in 2017 on anti-fascists (antifa) parroted a fascist talking point about the far-right’s supposedly non-racist creds, according to newly released material reviewed by The Daily Beast.
Yet even as two assessments warned of an “increasingly violent” antifa, they conceded that the group poses no threat to the military.
The Army assessments, dating from mid-2017, were meant to alert servicemembers to potential risks anti-fascists posed to military or military installations. But they also stated that the U.S. Military is “not aware of any threats from Antifa directed at the Army or DoD [the Department of Defense] in general.” The heavily redacted documents, marked unclassified, were provided to The Daily Beast by the transparency nonprofit Property of the People and are believed to be the first public disclosures of Defense Department references to antifa.
The documents showed the Army struggling to characterize antifa, or antifascism, a decentralized movement that confronts extremist right-wing forces. Despite conceding that antifa is not connected to any known threat facing servicemembers, the documents showed the Army is encouraging servicemembers to “maintain situational awareness” of the movement, whose profile has soared after the election of Donald Trump—and which mainstream Republican politicians demagogically describe as a Democrat-aligned mob.
…
“With the newly released documents, we again find a U.S. agency targeting anti-fascists as security threats while downplaying the menace posed by white nationalists,” said Ryan Shapiro, Property of the People’s executive director.
One of the documents, dated June 30, 2017, is titled “Situational Awareness: Criminal Activity Sometimes Associated With ANTIFA and ANTI-ANTIFA Gatherings.” Warning of potential violence at “scheduled nationwide protest[s]” for the 4th of July holiday, it portrays Antifa as a sprawling “network of left-wing anarchist group [sic] whose goal is to ‘smash fascism in all its forms,’ specifically sexism, racism, homophobia, government corruption and Islamophobia.” (Some anti-fascists are anarchists, while others are not.)
Antifa’s antagonists, however, are portrayed in a more favorable light: “According to open source [publicly available information, often news reports], ANTI-ANTIFA members are individuals and groups who are engaged in a political battle against ANTIFA, but who are not affiliated with racist nationalists.”
The Army did not provide its basis for that assessment beyond saying it came from “open source” information.
This anti-antifa claim is more than just false—it’s a popular talking point with fascist groups hoping to disguise their racism.
One of the most vocal anti-anti-fascist groups is an extremist collective called Anticom or Anti-Communist Action. Now largely defunct, the most active version of the group billed itself as “the right’s response to antifa.” But Anticom was more than anti-communist; the group was intimately tied to neo-Nazis, as leaked chat logs published by the media nonprofit Unicorn Riot revealed. In between acts of racist incitement, Anticom members predicted a forthcoming “massacre” and “a genocide,” in which white supremacists would have “the military on our side” the leaked chats reveal.
The group had a presence at Unite the Right, and members worked as security for prominent white nationalists like Richard Spencer, ProPublica reported. Despite appearing at white supremacist rallies and promoting genocide online, Anticom told ProPublica that “all races and ideologies are welcome” in the group, as long as they “are anti-communist.”
Similarly, chat logs from the now-defunct white supremacist group the Traditionalist Worker Party also showed the violent group trying to salvage its reputation after Charlottesville by shifting the blame onto anti-fascists. “You want people hating antifa as much as possible lol,” one wrote in the logs, which were published by Unicorn Riot. Elsewhere in the logs, the violent group discussed building explosives to use against anti-fascists.
“‘Antifa’ means anti-fascist, i.e. people who are against fascism,” a New York City anti-fascist activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast. “The provenance of the term ‘anti-antifa’ originates in the messaging of neo-Nazi movements and is absolutely a term used by ‘white power’ groups and adherents around the world. Just breaking down the term, anti-anti-fascist just means fascist. The question that arises is why is the U.S. Federal government casually using a term originating in neo-Nazi circles?”
…
Although the TWP and Anticom have disbanded or fallen in stature, their anti-anti-fascist posturing has been taken up by other far-right groups like the Proud Boys, American Guard, and Resist Marxism, which have fostered violent extremists while publicly claiming not to be racist.
And although those far-right groups claim to brawl with anti-fascists out of self-defense, their members have been accused or convicted in a series of brutal attacks. Overall, the far-right has been responsible for most extremist killings over the past decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League. From 2008 to 2017, 71 percent of extremist murders were carried out by the far right, dwarfing killings by Islamic extremists (26 percent) and far-left extremists (three percent).
Meanwhile, the Army assessments ultimately conceded antifa that posed no known threat to the U.S. military.
…
Johnson said left-wing extremism targeting the U.S. military was a marginal phenomenon. He recalled a “handful” of episodes from “five to seven years ago” involving vandalism at recruitment stations. “The type of threat is property destruction, and it’s usually [done] after hours, when no one’s around,” Johnson said, indicating a disinterest in causing someone physical harm.
By contrast, Johnson said, white supremacists actively target servicemembers for recruitment, creating a “substantial infiltration problem from white nationalists and anti-government extremists on the far right.”
In May, ProPublica revealed that at least three members of the race-war focused militia Atomwaffen, including its founder, were members of the Army National Guard, active-duty Army, or the Marines. A Marine veteran, Erik Sailors, trains white supremacists in the group Patriot Front for physical confrontation, according to The Intercept’s Shaun King and The Daily Beast. Splinter reported last year that the leader of a neo-Nazi group present at Charlottesville was a Marine Corps recruiter. A Military Times poll last year reported that about one in four servicemembers saw instances of white nationalism within the military, with the number rising to 42 percent amongst nonwhite troops.
“The Army’s intelligence center … uncritically accepted far-right talking points whitewashing ‘Anti-Antifa’ groups’ racist underpinnings,” Shapiro said. “In so doing, the Army continues the American intelligence community’s long tradition of finding more common ground with violent, jingoistic bigots than those devoted to stopping them.”
So “False Flag” is a LIE! Atrios dug up a funny quote about Dick Cheney from his archives-
Cheney’s Razor (n.) – A philosophic rule that the most complex explanation of an unknown phenomenon is probably correct. From Cheney, Dick. (CF)
Sometimes if it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck- it’s a duck.
Well, I can’t quite keep up with “breaking” so I don’t even try. In broad outline mail/pipe bombs have been found at the homes of-
Barack and Michelle Obama
Bill and Hillary Clinton
George Soros
and the Offices of CNN (addressed to John Brennan)
Notably absent?
Nancy Pelosi
MSNBC
Which is kind of surprising since those seem to be the Top 6 Demons in the Alt-Right Pantheon of Anti-Christs. If I were Nancy or MSNBC I’d feel disrespected.
If they were typical of devices of their type (explosive powder means Black Powder which is uncontrolled because it is so easy to make yourself which people have been doing for over a thousand years) and if you’ve ever watched any Mythbusters you know that Gunpowder is not terribly explosive. It burns (you can basically jog faster) and expends and unless it’s contained it it kind of fizzles out. The explosion comes from the release of energy when the internal gas pressure exceeds the strength of the container, so it would injure or kill those in close proximity (maybe 20, 30 feet). Now if it were “Smokeless” Powder (also commonly available without any special screening or license) your bang would be bigger but not significantly. Structural damage would be highly unlikely unless there was quite a lot (pounds to start with) and it was detonated at a critical point.
So it’s a joke, right?
Not at all. The object of Terror is to Terrorize and Intimidate. Given the targets it’s hard to impute any motive to the Bomber except political, and Alt-Right let’s blow up all the Baby Killing Factories and shoot all the Murderers crawling out of the rubble and any Black, Brown, or Female Subhuman who doesn’t show “respect” Batshit Wingnut Crazy at that. Speculation is that it’s meant to keep the “wrong” sorts from Voting.
In the fever swaps of flat out of the ass guessing it’s the start of the Turner Diaries race war and swarms of Teabaggers are going to cleanse the Unbelievers and Heretics. I think that’s a little over blown, it’s probably just 3 or 4 guys with delusions of grandeur in addition to the voices that the CIA keeps beaming into their heads.
You know, the Tinfoil doesn’t work unless you soak it in Urine.
But the point is that this is the kind of violence the Trump and Republicans encourage.
And when it’s all over it they will tell us it’s only a few nutjobs who “misinterpreted” their remarks and everything will be exactly the same.
Update: Debbie Wasserman-Shultz? Yeah, I’ll bet Nancy is really pissed now.
