A pregnant mother is in prison after she "stood her ground" and used her legal gun to defend her family—and the NRA"s support is nowhere to be found.
The post Pregnant Mom Thrown in Prison for Legally Defending Her Family with a Gun—NRA Silent appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
(USA Today) DETROIT — For the past few years, national media have touted Detroit’s comeback story: It endured dark days, went through the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy, and is — literally, with the construction of a new skyscraper — on the rise.
The city is about to face a different kind of buzz.
“We’re starting to see more bees in the city,” said Timothy Paule, who, with his girlfriend, started a nonprofit to build beehives on vacant city plots. “Some people are planting urban farms, and they’re adding bees to help with the yield. Others are doing their part and placing hives in backyards to help the declining bee population.”
As the weather warms up, their bees — and millions of others — will get busy.
Paule is among a growing number of people in Detroit and around the globe who are cultivating urban beehives as part of social missions and small businesses. It is a trend that has prompted cities to lift beekeeping limitations and inspired entrepreneurs to sell beekeeper starter kits and the bees’ honey.
But to Paule, there’s a bigger benefit: saving bees, which, to him, means saving the world.
The Detroiter hopes to add as many as 200 hives in the city in the next decade through his nonprofit, Detroit Hives, by buying vacant Detroit lots, making deals with socially conscious companies to sponsor hives and teaching other people, including schoolchildren, about bees.
“If all bees were to die, we’d all die in four to five years,” Paule, 34, said. “It’s a very serious issue.”
Whether all life would be wiped out if bees became extinct is debatable, but there is scientific agreement that bees, which have seen declines in their population all over the planet, are essential to sustaining a healthy ecosystem.
Without bees, which transfer pollen and seeds from flower to flower, fruit quality suffers.
In Michigan alone — which has designated March as food and agriculture month to remind folks that the state is one of the most agriculturally diverse in the nation with 300-plus farm commodities — agriculture contributes more than $101 billion to Michigan’s economy.
In fact, every spring and summer, Michigan’s farmers rent bees by the truckload — because there aren’t enough bees to do so naturally — to make sure that their apple, peach, blueberry and cherry blossoms are properly pollinated.
“Bees play a very important role during our bloom period in pollinating all the blossoms,” said Kevin Robson, horticulture specialists with the Michigan Farm Bureau in Lansing. “And, it’s not just fruit, they also pollinate cucumbers and zucchini and squash and tomatoes — and everything with a blossom.”
The post One Hive at a Time, Backyard Beekeepers Try Saving the World appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
(USA Today) DETROIT — For the past few years, national media have touted Detroit’s comeback story: It endured dark days, went through the nation’s largest municipal bankruptcy, and is — literally, with the construction of a new skyscraper — on the rise.
The city is about to face a different kind of buzz.
“We’re starting to see more bees in the city,” said Timothy Paule, who, with his girlfriend, started a nonprofit to build beehives on vacant city plots. “Some people are planting urban farms, and they’re adding bees to help with the yield. Others are doing their part and placing hives in backyards to help the declining bee population.”
As the weather warms up, their bees — and millions of others — will get busy.
Paule is among a growing number of people in Detroit and around the globe who are cultivating urban beehives as part of social missions and small businesses. It is a trend that has prompted cities to lift beekeeping limitations and inspired entrepreneurs to sell beekeeper starter kits and the bees’ honey.
But to Paule, there’s a bigger benefit: saving bees, which, to him, means saving the world.
The Detroiter hopes to add as many as 200 hives in the city in the next decade through his nonprofit, Detroit Hives, by buying vacant Detroit lots, making deals with socially conscious companies to sponsor hives and teaching other people, including schoolchildren, about bees.
“If all bees were to die, we’d all die in four to five years,” Paule, 34, said. “It’s a very serious issue.”
Whether all life would be wiped out if bees became extinct is debatable, but there is scientific agreement that bees, which have seen declines in their population all over the planet, are essential to sustaining a healthy ecosystem.
Without bees, which transfer pollen and seeds from flower to flower, fruit quality suffers.
In Michigan alone — which has designated March as food and agriculture month to remind folks that the state is one of the most agriculturally diverse in the nation with 300-plus farm commodities — agriculture contributes more than $101 billion to Michigan’s economy.
In fact, every spring and summer, Michigan’s farmers rent bees by the truckload — because there aren’t enough bees to do so naturally — to make sure that their apple, peach, blueberry and cherry blossoms are properly pollinated.
“Bees play a very important role during our bloom period in pollinating all the blossoms,” said Kevin Robson, horticulture specialists with the Michigan Farm Bureau in Lansing. “And, it’s not just fruit, they also pollinate cucumbers and zucchini and squash and tomatoes — and everything with a blossom.”
The post One Hive at a Time, Backyard Beekeepers Try Saving the World appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.
Image source: Pixabay.com
Gun store and other business owners are now required to install security cameras to help law enforcement in Saginaw, Mich.
The new ordinance in the city requires most businesses to install at least three security cameras by March 1, 2019.
The cameras will take pictures of the face of every person entering and leaving businesses, and every person who walks up to the cash register, Michigan Live reported. Cameras will cover the parking lot, too.
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“The individuals who have the businesses will receive a certificate from the police department when they have been approved for their lighting and for their camera system,” Saginaw Police Chief Bob Ruth told Michigan Live.
Businesses that refuse to follow the new law will face a civil infraction, Ruth said.
“I think the extra work that we’re doing is far outweighed by the quality of work we’re going to get in the end, on the way we’ll be able to solve cases,” Ruth said. “It’s really going to help us.”
Businesses required to install the cameras include: gun dealers, banks, coin dealers, scrap dealers, hotels, motels, gas stations, party stores, phone sellers, pawnbrokers, pool halls, dance halls, and second-hand merchants, Michigan Live reported.
Civil libertarians acknowledged the benefit of security cameras to catch criminals but opposed the idea of cities forcing businesses to install them.
“It’s not unusual for a city or a police department to attempt to force a business to shell out for surveillance equipment and other costly security demands when violent crime or drug dealing frequently takes place on or near the premises,” Scott Shackford of Reason.com wrote. “… It’s less common for a city to make these demands in advance and absent any evidence that a particular business is a crime incubator.”
What is your reaction? Share it in the section below:
More than 600 Hepatitis A cases have been reported in Southeast Michigan as the outbreak continues to ravage the communities. Public health officials are continuing to see these numbers elevate, and warn that it will continue to worsen as we approach the holidays.
According to Voice News, more than 80 percent of those who have contracted the highly contagious liver disease have required hospitalization. Another 20 people have died after becoming infected with the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say that symptoms can be mild or severe depending on the health of the person who contracts the virus. The elderly and those with existing liver conditions are the most at risk. Those infected can be contagious for up to two weeks before showing any symptoms, which include fever, fatigue, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, abdominal and joint pain, yellowing of the skin, dark urine and light-colored stools.
The virus is spread through direct person-to-person contact, contaminated food and beverages, and illicit drug use. But this outbreak is difficult for health officials to contain since no common source of the outbreak has been identified, health officials said. Washing your hands after going to the bathroom and before preparing meals for yourself and others, using your own towels, toothbrushes and eating utensils, and not sharing food and drinks with other people are all good ways to prevent the spread of the disease.
An increased number of hepatitis A cases has been seen in recent months. In the fall of 2016, possible hepatitis A exposure related to frozen strawberries that were recalled nationwide was identified at four locations in St. Clair County and one location in Macomb County. In May, a confirmed case was discovered at the St. Clair County Detention and Intervention Center in Port Huron.
In October, an employee at the Algonac Flaming Grill was found to have hepatitis A, leading local health officials to recommend vaccinations to those who ate at the restaurant between Oct. 6 and 20. The St. Clair County Health Department offered the vaccine at several recent walk-in clinics.
Food workers with the disease have the ability to infect a large number of people rapidly and are encouraged to get vaccinated.
The holidays also pose an increased risk of exposure to hepatitis A as families and friends come together to celebrate. – Voice News
A national shortage of the vaccine has complicated efforts to contain outbreaks, but the St. Clair County Health Department reports an adequate local supply of the adult vaccine. Health officials state that the best way to prevent contraction of the hepatitis A virus is by getting two doses of the vaccine. Protection will begin two to four weeks after the first injection. The second injection will offer protection for a longer period of time.
Apparently, Chamath Palihapitiya was on to something when he revealed earlier this week that he felt “tremendous guilt” for the role that he played in Facebook’s success as a social-media company.
To wit, Facebook"s director of research David Ginsberg and research scientist Moira Burke published a blog post this week explaining that, in some instances, the social network can have a deleterious impact on an individual’s overall mood and health.
"University of Michigan students randomly assigned to read Facebook for 10 minutes were in a worse mood at the end of the day than students assigned to post or talk to friends on Facebook," the blog post said. "A study from UC San Diego and Yale found that people who clicked on about four times as many links as the average person, or who liked twice as many posts, reported worse mental health than average in a survey."
In other words, using Facebook to mindlessly browse through your feed or click posts can leave you in a foul mood after.
However, the research wasn’t exclusively negative. Facebook also worked with Carnegie Mellon University and found that "people who sent or received more messages, comments and timeline posts reported improvements in social support, depression and loneliness." Likewise, Facebook said students at Cornell who used Facebook for 5 minutes while viewing their own profiles saw "boosts in self-affirmation," while folks who looked at other profiles did not.
Chamath Palihapitiya
In other words, using Facebook to interact with people - as opposed to just "browsing" as the University of Michigan study analyzed - seemed to have a positive effect on people
Facebook says it"s going to take this data and work to encourage more social interaction among users to try and cut down on those who spend it to waste time and, ultimately, feel worse after.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s research showed that social support can help prevent suicide.
Facebook is in a unique position to connect people in distress with resources that can help. We work with people and organizations around the world to develop support options for people posting about suicide on Facebook, including reaching out to a friend, contacting help lines and reading tips about things they can do in that moment.
Toward the end of its post, Facebook acknowledged that it hadn’t yet had time to discover “all the answers” – though the company recently pledged $1 million toward research to better understand the relationship between media technologies, youth development and well-being to determine how Facebook has affected the attention spans of its users.
While Palihapitiya later walked back his assertion that Facebook is “ripping apart the fabric of how society works” after being brutally flamed on Twitter for his purported hypocrisy, the notion that Facebook is making its users sick and miserable is certainly nothing new.
As we pointed out in August, even though post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. Social media has pushed them to the brink of a mental health crisis.
For at least half a decade now (How The Fed"s Visible Hand Is Forcing Corporate Cash Mismanagement) we have warned about how the Fed’s flawed approach to monetary policy incentivizes corporations to fund share buybacks with massive amounts of debt...
…While the corporate sector has spent record sums on share buybacks...
Capex has experienced an unprecedented decline...
Of course, some Democrats have argued that the Trump tax plan will perpetuate essentially the same incentives as corporate tax rates are slashed and money brought back from overseas is spent on still more buybacks, instead of creating jobs and capital expenditures, like the Republicans argue it will be.
The flimsiness of the GOP’s argument was exposed a few weeks ago during a memorable gaffe involving NEC Chief (and former No. 2 at Goldman Sachs) Gary Cohn, one of two officials managing the tax bill on behalf of the White House – the other being Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, also a former Goldmanite.
During an event for the Wall Street Journal"s CEO Council, an editor at The Wall Street Journal asked the room: "If the tax reform bill goes through, do you plan to increase investment - your company"s investment, capital investment?"
He asked for a show of hands.
Alas, as the camera revealed, virtually nobody raised their hand.
Responding to this "unexpected" lack of enthusiasm to invest in growth, Cohn had one question: "Why aren"t the other hands up?
While Cohn’s dismay at the lack of enthusiasm for his tax plan was obvious and embarrassing (the clip was in heavy rotation on CNBC for much of the next day), the fact that corporations will spend the windfall created by the tax bill isn’t necessarily a bad thing, according to JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.
Of course it wouldn’t be “a bad thing” – for Jamie.
When it comes to the rest of us…well…maybe not so much.
Dimon, who was speaking at a conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan hosted by Axios, according to CNBC.
According to Dimon’s logic, repatriations enabled by the tax plan could swiftly lead to more than $1 trillion being brought back from overseas. It doesn’t matter where that money goes, the point is there will be more capital sloshing around the domestic economy…and that will eventually manifest itself in the form of capex, job creation and higher wages…
"You need a competitive tax system ... companies will retain more capital and start to use it over time," Dimon said Wednesday in response to a moderator question at the Axios Smarter Faster Revolution event in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
"Some will raise wages. Some will buy companies. Some may do dividends and buybacks. Don"t act like that is a bad thing. That is their money. Think of it as a QE4. That money gets recirculated in the American system."
Dimon said tax reform "simply needs to be done," and should have happened 15 years ago. And while the benefits aren’t “going to be immediate”, they will accelerate growth “cumulatively over time."
JPMorgan"s Jamie Dimon: Tax reform bill will result in more jobs from CNBC.
After the bill passes "probably a trillion dollars will come back from overseas," he added. "Cumulatively over time that will accelerate growth in the American economy." That effect will resemble something like QE4, though we’re not sure that’s the best comparison...
The real question is: Will the tax bill somehow prevent the Federal Reserve from needing to launch QE4 before the end of Trump’s first term. If you believe a recent Treasury Department analysis of the Senate tax plan released earlier this week.
That plan calcuated that the tax cuts would bolster US economic growth to an average rate of 2.9% real growth over the next 10 years...
...which would make the current economic expansion the longest in modern history...
...But then again, if you believe that, then we have some condos for you to buy.
BBC’s ‘America First?’ series sent Aleem Maqbool, a North America correspondent, to the inner city of Atlanta, Georgia, where he uncovered a rather shocking statistic in which 46% of the inner city residents suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a rate that is much higher than U.S. soldiers (10-20%).
Maqbool describes Atlanta’s inner city environment as a “war zone”, where death and destruction are contributing to high levels of PTSD in adults and children. He further quoted researchers and said levels of PTSD in America’s inner cities are comparable to refugee populations around the world.
To make matters worse, the video makes the claim: gun murder rates (per 100,000) in the US are at astronomical levels when compared to other countries. A startling find, when considering the US, the richest country in the world, does not perform well in the international rankings.
As the crisis spreads, PTSD in children and young adults are sparking a public health crisis, where traumatic events are negatively influencing brain development.
This is already having a significant effect on inner-city youth, who already suffer from broken families, drug abuse, education inequality, and wealth inequality.
Back in 2016, President Trump told the American people the true state of the inner cities. He correctly labeled the areas across the country, a “war zone” (see below).
"The Democrats have failed completely in the inner cities,” Trump said. “For those hurting the most, who have been failed and failed by their politicians, year after year, failure after failure, worse numbers after worse numbers, poverty, rejection, horrible education, no houses, no homes, no ownership, crime at levels that nobody has seen. You could go to war zones in countries that we’re fighting and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities that are run by the Democrats.”
“It is a disaster the way African-Americans are living in many cases and in many cases the way Hispanics are living,” Trump continued. “And I say it with such a deep felt feeling, what do you have to lose? I’ll straighten it out. I’ll bring jobs back, We’ll bring spirit back. I’ll get rid of the crime, so you’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot. Right now, you walk down the street, you get shot.”
America’s once hustling and bustling inner cities are contracting in terms of economic productivity and in some cases population. Atlanta’s inner city war zone is not the only city dealing with death and destruction, which raises our eyebrow because children who are suffering from war zone PTSD is much more widespread than thought, making it an unrecognized national public health crisis. As per MSN, America’s most dangerous inner cities:
Like Alcoholics Anonymous, President Trump submitted the inner cities into America Anonymous, a 12 step program to get the country back on the right path. The first step is admitting there is a problem, which was completed in 2016, with eleven more steps to go, who said this was going to be an easy rebuild?
It’s time the American people awaken from their decades’ long sleep and learn the truth about the disastrous mistakes government has made in governing this country.
In the medium range, Americans will have to start stomaching the consequences of bad policies in the form of an entire generation of children who are suffering from PTSD and the ramifications surrounding brain development.
Despite soaring stock market values and an endless array of postive survey data from various estabishment-based entities, University of Michigan confidence tumbled in November.
Consumer sentiment in the U.S. cooled for a second month. While current conditions managed to improve, expectations for the future slumped...
“Perhaps the most important changes in early December were higher income expectations as well as a higher expected inflation rate in the year-ahead,” Richard Curtin, director of the University of Michigan consumer survey, said in a statement.
“The rise in inflation expectations in early December was a surprise, and confidence in this finding must await confirmation in the months ahead before any inferences are drawn.”
Careful to explain to those that care, Michigan Democrat Congressman John Conyers says he will "retire" from Congress today, and is "not resigning," following a growing list of sexual misconduct allegations. Conyers is endorsing his son, John Conyers III, to replace him in Congress.
“He is not resigning. He is going to retire,” Ian Conyers told the newspaper. “His doctor advised him that the rigor of another campaign would be too much for him just in terms of his health.”
Conyers, 88, is the longest serving House member and was one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) have both said Conyers should step aside in light of the sexual misconduct allegations leveled against him. Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the assistant Democratic leader who is also a member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) with Conyers, has also said the Michigan lawmaker should resign.
As a reminder, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi had encouraged the House Ethics Cmte to "proceed expeditiously" as it investigates accusations against Conyers.
The review began after reports Conyers reached a $27k settlement with a former aide who said she was fired for rejecting his sexual advances; since then, Conyers has been accused of harassment by other women.
Conyers has acknowledged the settlement but denied sexual harassment claims.
Conyers concluded:
“My legacy will continue through my children."
We are not so sure about that Mr. Conyers, we suspect your families legacy will be tarnished with your alleged actions.
As The Hill reports,Ian Conyers, who also serves as a Michigan state senator, also told the Times that he plans to run for John Conyers"s seat in Michigan"s 13th Congressional District.
“I’m absolutely going to file for his seat. The work of our congressional district, where I come out of, has to continue,” Ian Conyers said.
“We have got to have someone who has depth and experience but also historical understanding of what it takes to fight this type of evil in Washington.”
In the interview, the state senator refused to defend the alleged actions of his great uncle.
“I stand with my uncle in terms of his belief of no specific wrongdoing,” Ian Conyers told the newspaper. “However, those things need to have their day in court.”
Authored by JP Sottile via ConsortiumNews.com,
Polls show that Americans are tired of endless wars in faraway lands, but many cheer President Trump’s showering money on the Pentagon and its contractors, a paradox that President Eisenhower foresaw...
The Military-Industrial Complex has loomed over America ever since President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of its growing influence during his prescient farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961. The Vietnam War followed shortly thereafter, and its bloody consequences cemented the image of the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) as a faceless cadre of profit-seeking warmongers who’ve wrested control of the foreign policy. That was certainly borne out by the war’s utter senselessness … and by tales of profiteering by well-connected contractors like Brown & Root.
Over five decades, four major wars and a dozen-odd interventions later, we often talk about the Military-Industrial Complex as if we’re referring to a nefarious, flag-draped Death Star floating just beyond the reach of helpless Americans who’d generally prefer that war was not, as the great Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler aptly put it, little more than a money-making “racket.”
The feeling of powerlessness that the MIC engenders in “average Americans” makes a lot of sense if you just follow the money coming out of Capitol Hill. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) tabulated all “defense-related spending” for both 2017 and 2018, and it hit nearly $1.1 trillion for each of the two years. The “defense-related” part is important because the annual National Defense Authorization Act, a.k.a. the defense budget, doesn’t fully account for all the various forms of national security spending that gets peppered around a half-dozen agencies.
It’s a phenomenon that noted Pentagon watchdog William Hartung has tracked for years. He recently dissected it into “no less than 10 categories of national security spending.” Amazingly only one of those is the actual Pentagon budget. The others include spending on wars, on homeland security, on military aid, on intelligence, on nukes, on recruitment, on veterans, on interest payments and on “other defense” — which includes “a number of flows of defense-related funding that go to agencies other than the Pentagon.”
Perhaps most amazingly, Hartung noted in TomDisptach that the inflation-adjusted “base” defense budgets of the last couple years is “higher than at the height of President Ronald Reagan’s massive buildup of the 1980s and is now nearing the post-World War II funding peak.” And that’s just the “base” budget, meaning the roughly $600 billion “defense-only” portion of the overall package. Like POGO, Hartung puts an annual price tag of nearly $1.1 trillion on the whole enchilada of military-related spending.
To secure their share of this grandiloquent banquet, the defense industry’s lobbyists stampede Capitol Hill like well-heeled wildebeest, each jockeying for a plum position at the trough. This year, a robust collection of 208 defense companies spent $93,937,493 to deploy 728 “reported” lobbyists (apparently some go unreported) to feed this year’s trumped-up, $700 billion defense-only budget, according to OpenSecrets.org. Last year they spent $128,845,198 to secure their profitable pieces of the government pie.
The Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Defense Department, as viewed with the Potomac River and Washington, D.C., in the background. (Defense Department photo)
And this reliable yearly harvest, along with the revolving doors connecting defense contractors with Capitol Hill, K Street and the Pentagon, is why so many critics blame the masters of war behind the MIC for turning war into a cash machine.
But the cash machine is not confined to the Beltway. There are ATM branches around the country. Much in the way it lavishes Congress with lobbying largesse, the defense industry works hand-in-glove with the Pentagon to spread the appropriations around the nation. This “spread the wealth” strategy may be equally as important as the “inside the Beltway” lobbying that garners so much of our attention and disdain.
Just go to U.S. Department of Defense’s contract announcement webpage on any weekday to get a good sense of the “contracts valued at $7 million or more” that are “announced each business day at 5 p.m.” A recent survey of these “awards” found the usual suspects like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics. The MIC was well-represented. But many millions of dollars were also “won” by companies most Americans have never heard of … like this sampling from one day at the end of October:
Clearly, the DoD is large enough, and smart enough, to award contracts to companies throughout the 50 states. Yes, it is a function of the sheer size or, more forebodingly, the utter “pervasiveness” of the military in American life. But it is also a strategy. And it’s a tactic readily apparent in a contract recently awarded to Raytheon.
On Oct. 31, 2017, they got a $29,455,672 contract modification for missions systems equipment; computing environment hardware; and software research, test and development. The modification stipulates that the work will spread around the country to “Portsmouth, Rhode Island (46 percent); Tewksbury, Massachusetts (36 percent); Marlboro, Massachusetts (6 percent); Port Hueneme, California (5 percent); San Diego, California (4 percent); and Bath, Maine (3 percent).”
Frankly, it’s a brilliant move that began in the Cold War. The more Congressional districts that got defense dollars, the more votes the defense budget was likely to receive on Capitol Hill. Over time, it evolved into its own underlying rationale for the budget.
As veteran journalist William Greider wrote in the Aug. 16, 1984 issue of Rolling Stone, “The entire political system, including liberals as well as conservatives, is held hostage by the politics of defense spending. Even the most well intentioned are captive to it. And this is a fundamental reason why the Pentagon budget is irrationally bloated and why America is mobilizing for war in a time of peace.”
The peace-time mobilization Greider referred to was the Reagan build-up that, as William Hartung noted, is currently being surpassed by America’s “War on Terror” binge. Then, as now … the US was at peace at home, meddling around the world and running up a huge bill in the process. And then, as now … the spending seems unstoppable.
And as an unnamed “arms-control lobbyist” told Grieder, “It’s a fact of life. I don’t see how you can ask members of Congress to vote against their own districts. If I were a member of Congress, I might vote that way, too.”
Essentially, members of Congress act as secondary lobbyists for the defense industry by making sure their constituents have a vested interest in seeing the defense budget is both robust and untouchable. But they are not alone. Because the states also reap what the Pentagon sows … and, in the wake of the massive post-9/11 splurge, they’ve begun quantifying the impact of defense spending on their economies. It helps them make their specific case for keeping the spigot open.
Enter the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which notes, or touts, that the Department of Defense (DoD) “operates more than 420 military installations in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico.” Additionally, the NCSL is understandably impressed by a DoD analysis that found the department’s “$408 billion on payroll and contracts in Fiscal Year 2015” translated into “approximately 2.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP).”
And they’ve become a clearinghouse for state governments’ economic impact studies of defense spending. Here’s a sampling of recent data compiled on the NSCL website:
But that’s not all. According to the DoD study cited above, the biggest recipients of DoD dollars are (in order): Virginia, California, Texas, Maryland and Florida. And among the top 18 host states for military bases, electorally important states like California, Florida and Texas lead the nation.
President Trump speaking at a Cabinet meeting on Nov. 1, 2017, with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to Trump’s right and son-in-law Jared Kushner seated in the background. (Screen shot from whitehouse.gov)
And that’s the real rub … this has an electoral impact. Because the constituency for defense spending isn’t just the 1 percent percent of Americans who actively serve in the military or 7 percent of Americans who’ve served sometime in their lives, but it is also the millions of Americans who directly or indirectly make a living off of the “defense-related” largesse that passes through the Pentagon like grass through a goose.
It’s a dirty little secret that Donald Trump exploited throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Somehow, he was able to criticize wasting money on foreign wars and the neoconservative interventionism of the Bushes, the neoliberal interventionism of Hillary Clinton, and, at the same time, moan endlessly about the “depleted” military despite “years of record-high spending.” He went on to promise a massive increase in the defense budget, a massive increase in naval construction and a huge nuclear arsenal.
And, much to the approval of many Americans, he’s delivered. A Morning Consult/Politico poll showed increased defense spending was the most popular among a variety of spending priorities presented to voters … even as voters express trepidation about the coming of another war. A pair of NBC News/Survey Monkey polls found that 76 percent of Americans are “worried” the United States “will become engaged in a major war in the next four years” and only 25 percent want America to become “more active” in world affairs.
More to the point, only 20 percent of Americans wanted to increase the troop level in Afghanistan after Trump’s stay-the-course speech in August, but Gallup’s three decade-long tracking poll found that the belief the U.S. spends “too little” on defense is at its highest point (37 percent) since it spiked after 9/11 (41 percent). The previous highpoint was 51 percent in 1981 when Ronald Reagan was elected in no small part on the promise of a major build-up.
So, if Americans generally don’t support wars or engagement in the world, why do they seem to reflexively support massive military budgets?
Frankly, look no further than Trump’s mantra of “jobs, jobs, jobs.” He says it when he lords over the sale of weapon systems to foreign powers or he visits a naval shipyard or goes to one of his post-election rallies to proclaim to “We’re building up our military like never before.” Frankly, he’s giving the people what they want. Although they may be war-weary, they’ve not tired of the dispersal system that Greider wrote about during Reagan’s big spree.
Ultimately, it means that the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex isn’t just a shadowy cabal manipulating policies against the will of the American people. Nor is the “racket” exclusive to an elite group of Deep State swamp things. Instead, the military and the vast economic network it feeds presents a far more “complex” issue that involves millions of self-interested Americans in much the way Eisenhower predicted, but few are willing to truly forsake.
Authord by Alex Thomas via SHTFplan.com,
Despite losing the 2016 election largely because the Democrat Party refused to move away from divisive identity based politics they have apparently not learned their lesson, with at least one powerful female Democrat deciding to piggyback off the wave of sexual assault allegations sweeping the country by openly telling Michigan voters to vote for her because she is a women.
Democratic candidate for Michigan’s Attorney General, Dana Nessel, has released an ad for her campaign that directly implies that voters should choose her simply because she does not have a penis and therefore cannot sexually assault someone she works with like many male politicians (on both sides of the aisle) have been accused of over the past month.
“Who can you trust most not to show you their penis in a professional setting? That would be the candidate who doesn’t have one,” Nessel says with a straight face as headlines of male sexual harassment play across the screen.
Nessel attempted to explain the fact that she is now attempting to guilt voters into voting for her as a way to show that they are against sexual harassment in an interview with a local news outlet.
“If you get more women in office, if you get more women in positions of authority, you’re less likely to have issues where someone is pulling out their penis at an inappropriate time in the the workplace,” she told WWJ’s Charlie Langton.
“I’m not saying that all men harass and I’m certainly not saying that women are incapable of sexually harassing, but I know from many years serving as an assistant prosecutor prosecuting sex crimes, honestly, the vast, vast majority of those cases do involve men. So I thought that point needed to be made.”
So there you have it.
The Democrats apparently plan to run on a platform that uses guilt to force Americans to vote for them or risk making it look as if they do not care about the issue of sexual harassment.
Absolutely disgusting.
When was the last time you stopped to think about how much the government spends on welfare?
Most people probably don’t think about it too much, but we bet even for those who do, they don’t know how much their government spends, much less what the money actually pays for.
That’s why we created a new map showing you how much each state spends on the public dole.
Our viz takes U.S. Census Bureau data from GoBankingRates to create a map for the entire country. Each bubble represents a state, and the size of the bubble corresponds to the size of the public expenditure on public welfare. We then color-coded each circle according to the size of the expense. Shades of blue mean that the state spends relatively little money, but pink and red indicate a higher-than-average amount. There’s a lot that you can quickly learn by breaking mapping public welfare expenses in this war.
First off, what is public welfare? This can be a controversial topic with a lot of stereotypes, so let’s get our definitions straight. If you rely on public welfare, then you turn to the government for help with paying your basic necessities, like food, housing and healthcare. The federal government runs programs that provide these types of things, and to varying degrees, so do some states. As you can clearly see, some places are more generous than others.
California is the obvious standout on the West Coast, dropping north of $100 billion on public assistance. Texas is the only other Western state with over $30 billion of expenditures, followed by Washington at under $12 billion.
There’s a significant cluster of high-spending states across the Northeast, including New York ($61.4B) and Pennsylvania ($26.8B). Florida stands out in the South at over $27B, thanks in large part to its retirement communities. There’s also a cluster of states in the Upper Midwest in light pink, where there a lot of old manufacturing cities.
We should also point out the states with much smaller expenditures, stretching across the Midwest and into the deep South. The simplest explanation for the lack of huge welfare budgets in these states has to do with geography: there just aren’t a lot of big cities in places like Iowa and Alabama compared to other states. This helps explain why California and New York spend so much on welfare. They rank first and fourth as the most populous states.
Here’s a straightforward list of the top ten states with the highest expenditures on public welfare. Note the enormous difference between California and New York and the rest of the country.
1. California - $103 Billion
2. New York - $61.4 Billion
3. Texas - $35.4 Billion
4. Florida - $27.2 Billion
5. Pennsylvania - $26.7 Billion
6. Illinois - $21 Billion
7. Ohio - $20 Billion
8. Massachusetts - $18.6 Billion
9. New Jersey - $17.3 Billion
10. Michigan - $16.3 Billion
Here’s an interesting fact for you. The top ten states listed above spend more on public welfare ($346.9B) than all of the bottom forty states (plus the District of Columbia) combined ($262.7B).
Regardless of how populated any particular state is, you want to pay attention to these numbers because they foreshadow future budget problems.
When you consider the fact that many states run operating deficits and have enormous debt problems, you begin to wonder if some of these numbers are sustainable for the long term.
Update: House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has had a change of heart regarding her colleague John Conyers - whom she recently praised as an "icon" who fought for civil rights and women"s rights. A day after the Washington Post published a story about how Congressional Democrats were divided over the issue of whether Conyers should resign, Pelosi is saying that she now believes he should resign. As we reported below, Conyers was hospitalized in his hometown of Detroit earlier today, reportedly due to "stress". She called the allegations against her colleague "serious", "disappointing" and "very credible."
Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi says Rep. John Conyers should resign: The allegations are "serious, disappointing, and very credible." https://t.co/KhGfwep1RZ pic.twitter.com/8ALtYc3kQH
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) November 30, 2017
* * *
A day after reports emerged that Michigan Rep. John Conyers wouldn"t seek re-election in 2018, ending a more than 50-year career in the House, local media reported that he had been hospitalized after returning to the Detroit area.
Conyers" office confirmed the congressman is hospitalized but did not say why or at which hospital. Political consultant Sam Riddle spoke to reporters Thursday morning and said Conyers was hospitalized due to stress. Riddle said he spoke to Conyers" wife, Monica Conyers, Thursday morning.
"I just spoke with Monica Conyers on the phone and we want you to know that the congressman is resting comfortably in an area hospital. He"s doing OK, as well as he can be expected for a gentleman that"s approaching 90 years of age," Riddle said. "The congressman"s health is not what it should be and lot of that is directly attributable to this media assault."
The 88-year-old congressman returned to Detroit this week amid sexual harassment claims from his former staffers.
One of the women accusing Conyers of sexual harassment spoke early Thursday.
Marion Brown described what she claims Conyers did to her while she worked for him.
"Some of the things that he did, it was sexual harassment," she said. "Violating my body, propositioning me, inviting me to hotels with the guise of discussing business, and then propositioning for sex. He just violated my body. He has touched me in different ways, and it was very uncomfortable and very unprofessional."
Conyers settled a sexual harassment claim with Brown back in 2015.
Buzzfeed reported last week that Conyers had used taxpayer money to pay settlements to several former staffers who accused him of sexual harassment.
Let’s talk about power. The way I see it, there are basically two types of power, political and economic. You can wield power through the government, or through your giant bank account.
In the crony world of corporate-political America, the lines are blurry. These days most people gain their political or economic power by mixing the two. But you can still tease apart whether someone’s power derives mostly from political or economic sources.
And there are all these people with either type of power who secretly behind closed doors act completely inappropriately when it comes to sexual advances.
(There’s more to the story about why the media is just now reporting these things. Read my take on the media’s plan for using sexual assault accusations as a weapon. But for our current discussion, suffice to say, most of these guys are major creeps exploiting their positions.)
So what happens to the people in each power-house when they are caught, with credible evidence?
The economically powerful in the private sector get fired. They have sponsors pulled, they have projects canceled. The power they used to take advantage sexually is seriously diminished. Even if it doesn’t cost them outright, it costs them in network connections. It costs them in reputation, and reputation is a key component of economic power.
The latest to be fired is Matt Lauer. Weinstein and Spacey lost projects and gave up lucrative deals. Mark Halperin and Charlie Rose were fired. Louie C.K. lost a whole bunch of shows and specials.
And the politically powerful are not affected. Al Franken has not resigned. John Conyers has not resigned. Some people even think Trump is getting off easy, although his controversy is more about words than actions. Bill Clinton is lucky he is from a different era. Roy Moore will become a Senator if a slim majority of Alabama voters approve.
The L.A. Times is taking politicians to task on the difference.
Congress also has more than a whiff of entitlement, accustomed to operating by its own rules while other organizations rush to protect themselves from liability.
Beyond that, some lawmakers argue that voters, not colleagues, should serve as the ultimate judges of those under scrutiny.
When Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C.) was asked Wednesday about the difference between quick actions taken against non-politicians and lagging moves against members of Congress like Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, he blurted out one line:
“Who elected them?” he said, referring to the private-sector figures.
This highlights the problem with holding government accountable. This shows how much easier it is to hold the private sector accountable. When people and organizations have to worry about their wallets, they respond.
The market is very effective at regulating behavior. We, the people, have the power hit the economically powerful where it hurts: their wallets.
We have no such power with politicians. In fact, the taxpayers fund their settlements! The government doesn’t stand to lose “business” no matter what its members do. They will still be funded by tax dollars, we have no choice.
And to fire them, we need to wait until the next election cycle. But even then, the politicians at fault might not be in your district. Even if they are, you need a majority to hold them accountable.
Public pressure on politicians does nothing to curtail their power unless it causes them to lose an election. But as consumers, we can immediately affect the power of people in the private sector. They don’t need a slim majority to maintain power, they need a broad customer base excited to hand over their dollars.
The private sector has built-in incentives to punish people who fall into disfavor with customers.
Political power is a creepy club of factions and games. When someone in the private sector is accused of sexual misconduct, their peers quickly disown them. They are banished, exiled, shunned, and may God have mercy on their souls.
But politicians know that their power is not subject to the same constraints as economic power.
Democrats have remained coy about whether or not Franken and Conyers should resign. Some Republicans have called for Roy Moore to drop out of the Alabama Senate race. But President Trump remains supportive. Marco Rubio says it is a “difficult situation.”
Because on the one hand, as a Republican, you want the Republican Party to keep the seat. On the other hand, I personally find the accusations against him to be credible, and I don’t think he has done or said anything in the last month that has helped himself or in any way made me feel better about it,” Rubio said. “But he’s staying in the race, the people of Alabama will have their vote and we’ll move on from there.”
So that is that, colleagues wash their hands of the situation. Let the voters decide their fate. Because that always works so well…
Power Goes to Their Head
I think power does basically the same thing to people whether it is economic or political power.
And if these people are willing to put their careers on the line for a cheap sexual thrill, imagine what else they are capable of.
I don’t know if this says something about human nature, our culture, or men in general. But the lesson I get out of it all is that power imbalances cause people to do crazy things. How easy it is for power to go to someone’s head.
Behavior that everyone knows is completely inappropriate is common among people who feel above others.
Those with economic power learn from their fall from grace. Congress’ solution? They will implement sexual harassment training for politicians and staff, and call it a day.
Lockheed Martin’s Fortis Knee Stress Release Device (K-SRD) – an AI controlled exoskeleton is designed to turn U.S. soldiers into super-machines. The Army is currently testing the technology at Fort A.P. Hill running it through normal tasks of combat infantry– in order to see if productivity increase.
The Fortis exoskeleton, which weighs 85-pounds, looks like a piece of tech from Iron Man’s suit, works with AI to analyze and replicate individual walk patterns, provide additional torque, and add more power to combat infantry personnel. Attached to the exoskeleton are independent actuators, motors and lightweight conformal structures, powered by a 3-pound lithium ion battery that allows soldiers to complete tasks while expending less energy.
According to Scout.com,
It is built with a conformal upper structure that works on a belt attached to the waist.
The belt connects with flexible hip sensors throughout the systems. These sensors tell the computer where the soldier is in space along with the speed and velocity of the movements.
Keith Maxwell, senior program manager, exoskeleton technology, Lockheed Martin said, “we’ve had this on some of the Army’s elite forces, and they were able to run with high agility carrying full loads. We were showing a decrease in the metabolic cost of transport, the measure of how much energy is required to climb uphill.”
The technology is designed to help soldiers, run, maneuver, carry injured comrades and perform a wide range of combat tasks, while exerting minimal energy said Scout.com. Engineers report that AI systems working in sync with motors on the exoskeleton can reduce about nine percent energy per task.
The machine “knows what you are trying to do when you are trying to do it,” Maxwell said.
Just yesterday, we explained how self-driving cars decide who lives and dies indicating AI is starting to have a much larger presence in human decision making.
A few weeks ago, we reported on Ford - wrapping its workers in exoskeleton suits (Non-AI) to improve worker productivity, as the company recognizes the ugly demographic shift in the western hemisphere will produce lower productivity. The push for the exoskeleton through corporations and government points to a transhumanist approach to evolve the human race through technology, with human-beings currently hitting physical and mental limitations.
You may not already know it, but the transhumanist agenda to condition the American people in the acceptance of merging humans and technology is well underway in the media.
A recent, independently-funded study from University of Michigan’s Human Neuromechanics Laboratory found the exoskeleton significantly improved mobility of the test subjects. International Business Times provides a brief overview of the study,
four trained experts wore the Fortis exoskeleton and carried as much as 40 pounds (around 18kg) of weight on their backs while walking on a treadmill inclined at 15 degrees.
The subjects kept varying their speeds in order to demonstrate real-life situations, which could sometimes require troops to walk fast or run over rough terrains. They also performed the same physically-demanding task without any gear.
Ultimately, the results of the test showed significant differences between both scenarios. When wearing the exoskeleton, participants conserved energy and witnessed a significant reduction in exhaustion, while without it, they were quick to suffer from fatigue.
In a preview of things to come, Lockheed Martin’s AI controlled exoskeleton identifies the transhumanist trend of evolving the human race through technology. This is not science fiction, as it’s already happening today in corporations and government who are actively testing wearable robots for practical applications. At first, it seemed great, using AI exoskeletons to improve productivity, but what happens when AI becomes self aware? We already seen this story before– just rewatch The Terminator.
Authored by Alex Thomas via SHTFplan.com,
As the establishment continues to declare that the era of “self-driving” cars is upon us, many Americans have been left wondering what the privacy implications for such a tremendous change in society will end up being.
Now, with the very real possibility that, in the event of an accident, these cars would literally make the decision between who dies and who lives, Americans have even more to worry about when it comes to handing over control of their vehicle to a supercomputer.
According to multiple reports, the cars themselves are being designed to make so-called “moral” decisions which, in other words, means that the programming would essentially allow say a car full of people to crash rather than a school bus.
USA Today reports:
Consider this hypothetical:
It’s a bright, sunny day and you’re alone in your spanking new self-driving vehicle, sprinting along the two-lane Tunnel of Trees on M-119 high above Lake Michigan north of Harbor Springs. You’re sitting back, enjoying the view. You’re looking out through the trees, trying to get a glimpse of the crystal blue water below you, moving along at the 45-mile-an-hour speed limit.
As you approach a rise in the road, heading south, a school bus appears, driving north, one driven by a human, and it veers sharply toward you. There is no time to stop safely, and no time for you to take control of the car.
Does the car:
A. Swerve sharply into the trees, possibly killing you but possibly saving the bus and its occupants?
B. Perform a sharp evasive maneuver around the bus and into the oncoming lane, possibly saving you, but sending the bus and its driver swerving into the trees, killing her and some of the children on board?
C. Hit the bus, possibly killing you as well as the driver and kids on the bus?
The article goes on to say that the above question is one that is no longer theoretical as upwards of $80 billion have been invested in the sector with companies such as Google, Uber, and Tesla all racing to get their self-driving cars onto a road near you.
Interestingly, the USA Today report, as well as those quoted within it, seems to outwardly worry that the questions surrounding self-driving cars will cause Americans to shun them and continue to drive cars operated by actual humans who can choose whether or not they wish to save their own family or someone else’s if an accident were to take place. Clearly there is an agenda at play here.
The article continued:
Whether the technology in self-driving cars is superhuman or not, there is evidence that people are worried about the choices self-driving cars will be programmed to take.
[…]
Last month, Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google’s self-driving car initiative, told Bloomberg that the cars will be designed to avoid accidents, but that “If it happens where there is a situation where a car couldn’t escape, it’ll go for the smaller thing.”
But what if the smaller thing is a child?
How that question gets answered may be important to the development and acceptance of self-driving cars.
Azim Shariff, an assistant professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, co-authored a study last year that found that while respondents generally agreed that a car should, in the case of an inevitable crash, kill the fewest number of people possible regardless of whether they were passengers or people outside of the car, they were less likely to buy any car “in which they and their family member would be sacrificed for the greater good.”
All in all the entire report is a must-read, especially when you consider that we are now directly talking about allowing either private companies or the government to decide whether or not ourselves or our families are worthy of being saved in a car accident.
This truly is a scary situation.
