Last Tuesday, Media Right Capital and distributor Netflix announced the suspension of the American thriller, House of Cards, days after Anthony Rapp alleged Kevin Spacey, the executive producer and star had made ‘sexual advances’ towards him in the 1980’s, when he was 14-years old.
Then last Thursday, Netflix cut ties with Spacey, a day after CNN published an article circulating new allegations of sexual misconduct from several current and former members of “House of Cards”.
Since then, a long impressive list of actors, bartenders, a military advisor, and mostly men, 13 in total, are accusing Spacey of sexual misconduct from the 1980’s to present day.
Unbeknownst to many, House of Cards was predominantly filmed in Baltimore, Maryland for all five seasons making it Maryland’s largest film production. In season 4 alone, almost 2,700 cast, crew, and other support teams were hired from the Greater Baltimore region, and the production alone used local services from more than 2,000 Maryland vendors. Maryland as a whole proudly flaunts itself as the home of the production, which earned more than $128 million in 2015 from season 4’s production.
According to The Baltimore Sun, more than a half billion dollars flowed into the local economy through many businesses during the production of ‘House of Cards’…
Caterers and fast-food restaurants, carpet and furniture outlets, music and antique stores, warehouses, auto parts dealers and paint suppliers - all are included among the show’s hundreds of Maryland vendors during more than five years of filming, often in and around Baltimore, at locations including the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Baltimore Sun.
With the firing of Spacey and the entire production in limbo. There is major doubt the production will continue and could create a headache for Baltimore’s local economy.
Already, local vendors are “already feeling the loss of a deep-pocketed customer and the cachet of being associated with a hit series”, as the suspension of the production inches towards its first full-week.
Meanwhile, the crew is still getting paid says The Baltimore Sun, but many are casting doubts the production will continue.
The 4-5 year economic boom in Baltimore from a big-budget production has likely popped. The economic ripple through the community and many small businesses could be devastating, especially for the state, who has welcomed the the production with enamors tax credits over the years.
Jena Richardson,28, a crew member on House of Cards, said “if the show leaves, that means that a lot of my friends who have become my set family will have to leave to find work as well. So if we can keep the work here, then everybody can stay here and provide for themselves and their families throughout the holidays.”
Another crew member, Roger Voter,27, a tech assistant, said the loss of the show would be a “huge detriment. Having Baltimore locals being trained in these jobs under the masters of LA is great for their careers”, but as we point out Kevin Spacey has popped the filming bubble in Baltimore and it could mean newly created film techs will have to revert back to the bartending life or even return to their parent’s basements.
Bottomline: with the House of Cards bubble popped, Under Armour meltdown, and a homicide rate doubled Chicago’s. Baltimore’s outlook heading into 2018 is bleak.
A new email scam is making the rounds and this one appears to be targeting Netflix’s millions of subscribers. The email threatens to shut down the users account if they fail to update their billing information.
According to ABC News, the email asks its readers to click the link, leading them to a fake Netflix homepage and prompting them to enter their private information. According to MailGuard, an Australian cybersecurity firm, that includes billing information, so the scammers can access debit or credit card numbers.
The well-designed, individualized, and fake email convinces customers to update their account information to avoid suspension. This results in stolen personal and credit card information.
Action Fraud has enclosed an image of the scam email so it can be easily spotted.
“Unfortunately, scams are common on the internet and target popular brands such as Netflix and other companies with large customer bases to lure users into giving out personal information,” Netflix said in a statement to ABC News.Netflix says that the company will never ask for personal information in an email and advises its subscribers to be careful of any phishing emails that lead to false websites, according to its security page.
“Scammers can make their fake emails and bogus websites look pretty convincing, so it’s always a good idea to check carefully that the email comes from the actual company domain and not a scammer,” advised MailGuard on their company blog.
Never click on links in an email or text message. Go directly to the company’s website to check on your account. Scams such as this one are not new by any means, but a lot of people are falling victim to this one.
In 1906, American entrepreneur William T. Grant opened his very first “W.T. Grant Co 25 cent store” in a small town outside of Boston.
The store became popular and fairly profitable. So Grant opened another. And another.
Three decades later, Grant’s retail empire was generating $100 million in sales (an enormous sum back then). And by the time of Grant’s death in 1972, there were over 1,000 stores bearing his name.
Investors loved W.T. Grant Company stock for its reliable profits and high dividends.
Many of our subscribers may remember W.T. Grant. The chain was among the largest in the US at its peak.
And then something completely unexpected happened…
In 1976, W.T. Grant Company declared bankruptcy.
At the time, it was the second biggest bankruptcy in US history. And, like the downfall of Lehman Brothers and other big Wall Street institutions at the onset of the 2008 financial crisis, it was a shock to the world.
How could a company as big and profitable as W.T. Grant Co. go bust?
In the autopsy that followed the bankruptcy, accountants found that while the company was generating substantial PROFIT, it was not generating any CASH FLOW.
These two terms sound the same, but they’re dramatically different.
Profit, or more specifically net income, includes all sorts of bizarre accounting rules that don’t actually make sense in the real world.
Due to these rules, companies are often required to adjust revenue and expenses for things like “depreciation”, or “foreign exchange gains and losses”.
These are all merely accounting terms that don’t directly and immediately affect cash balances. But they can dramatically impact “profitability.”
Here’s one example from my own experience: a few years ago, the large agriculture company that I founded here in Chile purchased a farm.
We bought it for far below the property’s market value.
It was a great deal for the business. BUT… accounting rules required that our company record a PROFIT based on the difference between what we paid for the property and what it was worth.
This idiotic rule made it seem like we achieved a profit simply for buying a property.
This makes no sense. In the real world, we would only earn a profit by SELLING the property for a higher amount than we paid. You can’t profit before you sell something.
It’s rules like this that make profit an unreliable metric.
CASH FLOW is much more accurate.
Specifically, OPERATING CASH FLOW tells us how much money a company makes from its business.
It strips out all the silly rules and focuses purely on how much cash a business generates from its operations.
Then there’s FREE CASH FLOW, which is the amount of money left over for investors AFTER a company makes all of the necessary investments it requires for future growth.
Cash flow is what counts. If a company has negative cash flow, it will eventually go under.
Profit can be misleading. And that’s what happened to W.T Grant Co. It was profitable but had negative cash flow.
Today there’s another famous business in similar circumstances– our old friend Netflix.
Quarter after quarter, Netflix reports a profit.
Just yesterday afternoon the company had its quarterly earnings call, posting a profit of $553 million. Not bad.
Yet when anyone dives just a little bit deeper into the numbers, Netflix’s cash flow is absolutely gruesome.
The company’s operating cash flow is negative. In other words, after stripping out all the unrealistic accounting nonsense, Netflix’s core business LOSES MONEY.
In fact Netflix’s operating cash flow has been negative FOR YEARS. And the amount of money its losing is increasing.
Netflix’s business has lost $1.3 billion so far through the first nine months of 2017. That’s 52% worse than the $916 million operating cash flow deficit they suffered in the first nine months of 2016, and nearly three times worse than the $504 million operating cash flow deficit during the first nine months of 2015.
Throughout this period, the number of Netflix subscribers has steadily grown, now well in excess of 100 million.
And every time Netflix reports a big surge in subscribers, the stock price soars.
This is truly bizarre. Just look at the cash flow numbers: as the number of Netflix subscribers has grown over the years, the company losses have grown even more.
It reminds me of that old saying from the 1990s dot-com bubble– “We lose money on every sale, but make up for it in volume.”
But it gets worse.
The company’s negative operating cash flow doesn’t include the billions of dollars that it spends on content.
And on its quarterly earnings call yesterday, executives announced they will spend a whopping $8 billion on original content next year.
That’s $8 billion that they don’t have. And don’t forget the $1.4 billion operating cash flow deficit.
Where are they possibly going to find this money? Simple. Debt. Netflix will pile on more and more debt despite racking up enormous cash flow deficits.
Now, to be fair, it’s not unusual for a business to lose money for a period of time as part of a longer-term plan to generate strong cash flow.
But just look at this industry: it seems like EVERYONE is diving in to this original content game.
Apple. Facebook. Amazon. CBS. Disney. Google. Sony. Time Warner. Hulu. Each of these organizations has developed a streaming service with original content.
And some of them (especially Google and Facebook) have an endless war chest thanks to their cash-gushing core businesses.
Google’s parent company (Alphabet) reported free cash flow of $11.6 billion in the second quarter alone. So it could easily outspend Netflix and still have billions of dollars left over.
All of this competition is going to be great for consumers; these companies are collectively spending tens of billions of dollars to entertain us. And they’re going to lose money doing it.
But for investors this is sheer madness. Don’t be the sucker paying for other people’s entertainment.
A new Netflix original series, The Confession Tapes, has once again given the viewing public a stimulating look into the American injustice system—with an up close and personal look at the psychological games employed by police to elicit taped confessions that suspects claim were coerced—but resulted in convictions.
The Confession Tapes encompass a wide array of suspects and situations, revealing that there is no race, religion, background or class that immunizes a person from being persecuted. The only common thread throughout the series is that every single person featured in the series maintains their innocence to this day.
The chilling reality of the series is the resounding message that no one is immune from the hyper-focus of law enforcement, regardless of the evidence, once police have fingered a particular person to be guilty.
The series makes clear that this could happen to anyone.
While some may feel safe “being honest” with law enforcement due to their assured innocence, after watching the seven episodes of this series, they will likely think twice before choosing to so implicitly trust the police in such a tenuous circumstance.
The stories featured in the show reveal a mix of interviews and archival footage in a documentary style that allows the suspects themselves, friends, family, lawyers, prosecutors and jurors to tell the story. It is distinct in that it allows the record to speak for itself, rather than relying on dramatic interpretation.
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The Confession Tapes takes you directly to the scene, using actual footage of the crime scene, instead of using actors and dramatizations. Without question, the series allows the viewers to feel the true tragedy and weight of the cases.
READ MORE:BREAKING: Court Orders Making a Murderer Convict Brendan Dassey to Be Set Free
Perhaps the most troubling part of the series is the confession tapes themselves, as they reveal mentally fragile people being pushed into likely false confessions using a barrage of psychological tactics.
As TFTP has previously reported, not even children are safe from these brutal tactics to make innocent people say they are guilty.
A study of juvenile interrogations at 17 police departments found that none of the suspects had attorneys present during questioning, and only 21% had parents present. All of them had already waived their Miranda rights. This does not happen by accident; it is a deliberate setup by the cops.
Interrogation is a calculated, manipulative, nine-step procedure known as the Reid Technique. The goal is to heighten anxiety and wear away one’s ability to defend oneself. Loaded questions, implicit assumptions of guilt, and even fabricated evidence are used. Interrogators are trained to recognize and exploit verbal, non-verbal, and paralinguistic behavior in order to gain a confession.
In the series, each episode reveals people confident in their innocence, and happy to engage with police to prove it—only to be worn down to the point of confessing to crimes that they did not commit.
The skeptic may ask, “How could anyone ever confess to a crime they didn’t commit?”
And while on the surface that seems to be a legitimate question, The Confession Tapes reveals the extent to which police have the ability to figuratively beat down a suspect with hours of intimidation, manipulation, deception, and pressure in an effort to force a confession.
The tapes reveal police lying about evidence to coerce a confession, while trying to convince the suspects that the only chance they have is to confess in order to potentially gain a lesser sentence.
READ MORE:‘Making a Murderer’ Juror Comes Forward with Claims More Disturbing than the Documentary Itself
While the series doesn’t provide airtight proof that every person featured is innocent, it raises serious doubts about the veracity of the case brought against each and every one. Without question, each episode makes a compelling argument that the methods used by law enforcement were often extremely questionable—and in some cases outright illegal.
The Confession Tapes raises the question in many people’s minds of just how often these types of extreme tactics are employed—but not caught on tape.
In the cases where retrospectively the innocence of the suspects seems a foregone conclusion, it can be truly heartbreaking to see an innocent person be mentally broken down so thoroughly by police.
In one of the most poignant moments of the series, a man convicted of murder is partially exonerated through the use of DNA evidence – only to plead to a lesser charge in exchange for time served.
According to Journalists’ Resource, “National Registry of Exonerations statistics suggest that young people in particular are more prone to admitting guilt for crimes they did not commit.”
“Thirty-eight percent of exonerations for crimes allegedly committed by youth under 18 in the last quarter century involved false confessions,” reporter Zusha Eilson is quoted as saying in the article, “compared with 11% for adults, according to a new database of 1,155 individuals who were wrongly convicted and later cleared of all charges.”
So why would an innocent man plead to a charge that still officially deems him a “murderer?”
The sad answer is that after having seen the injustice in the system at work, he clearly understands that being innocent is no protection when facing the prospect of a jury trial.
READ MORE:Netflix Series Exposes Govt-Connected Child Sex Ring in Baltimore, Police Forced to Respond
Despite going all-in on Adam Sandler content – a bizarre choice - Netflix has managed to continue growing its subscriber base, recently reaching a new milestone: It now has more paying customers than Comcast Corp., Charter Communications and all other US cable companies combined.
As Forbes reports, Netflix now has 50.85 million subscribers, surpassing cable"s 48.61 million. There is one caveat, though: Cable’s total doesn’t include minor cable networks, which could amount to 5% of total customers.
Over the past five years, Netflix has managed to more than double its subscriber base from 23.4 million in the first quarter of 2012. But growth has slowed recently due to intensifying competition from a host of rival streaming services, causing Netflix to miss both its domestic and foreign subscriber targets for the first quarter.
Here’s a summary of Netflix"s Q1 results:
1Q revenue $2.64b vs est. $2.65b
1Q GAAP EPS 40c vs 37c
1Q domestic streaming net adds 1.42 million, vs consensus est. 1.59MM vs company forecast 1.5MM
1Q international streaming net adds 3.53MM consensus est. 3.90m vs company forecast 3.7MM
2Q GAAP EPS forecast 15c vs est. 23c
2Q revenue forecast 2.755BN vs est. $2.76BN
Luckily for American cable companies, the battle for subscribers isn’t a zero-sum game. Here"s Forbes:
While cable subs are down by 4 million in the same five years that Netflix has seen huge growth, that"s not a massive drop off. It"s also worth bearing in mind that cable TV makes up only 50% of total TV viewership in pay TV. That said, Q1 2017 shows a net loss in subscriptions while Q1 2016 saw cable grow a little.
Satellite TV is doing okay, with around 38 million subscribers. Dish Network added 318,000 customers in Q1 with Direct TV stalling with gains that didn"t outpace customer loses. Satellite is still growing faster than cable though.
Faster still though are the internet-delivered services like Sling TV and Direct TV now which have added 350,000 in Q1. These services now have 1.7 million customers between them, and it"s likely that this segment will continue to see growth as customers move away from cable TV.
Cable, satellite and internet streaming services in the US have a combined 93.3 million subscribers. Even as Netflix expands into more foreign markets, it likely won’t match that total any time.
To be sure, the Netflix to cable comparison isn’t really fair to the cable companies: While the exact cost depends on the specific package, monthly fees associated with cable are typically many times more expensive than Netflix"s $10 fee.
Which brings us to our next, and final topic:Slowing subscriber growth isn’t the only metric that makes Netflix"s critics uncomfortable. The company’s unprecedented cash burn is another major red flag. In Q1, the company burned $422 million, which while less than the record $640 million burned in Q4 (over $1 billion in the last 6 months) was $160 million than its cash burn from a year ago. The company still expects to burn a total of $2 billion for the full year.
Here’s how the company explains it:
Free cash flow in Q1’17 was -$423 million vs. -$261 million in the year ago quarter and an improvement from -$639 million in Q4’16. The growth in our original content means we continue to plan to have around $2B in negative FCF this year.
We have a large market opportunity ahead of us and we’re optimizing long-term FCF by growing our original content aggressively. Negative near-term FCF is the result of the big increases in our original content, combined with small but growing operating margins. Since we want our operating margins to grow slowly so we can spend enough to quickly grow revenue and original content, we anticipate negative FCF to accompany our rapid growth for many years.
Our operating margins are our key indicator of improving global profitability; they are already growing and we plan to keep them growing for many years ahead. Eventually, at a much larger revenue base, original content and revenue growth will be slower, and we anticipate substantial positive FCF, like our media peers.
It remains to be seen if the transition from massive cash burn to cash flow positive is as simple as the company expects it to be.
For weeks I’ve been noting that stocks are being driven by a market rig.
By way of review, that rig is as follows:
1) Someone slams the VIX lower.
2) This forces risk-parity funds to buy stocks, usually the FANGs or large-cap Tech names (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google).
3) FANGs rally, which due to the weighting in the S&P 500, forces the overall market higher.
The last point is key.
When you remove the influence of FANG stocks (Facebook, Apple, Netflix, and Google) by giving every company in the index equal weighting, you find that the market has yet to reclaim its former peak May peak.
Why does this matter?
Because ALL market rigs, no matter how clever, ultimately fail. And when they do, the failure can be MASSIVE.
Remember this one? This was a market rig than worked for months… and then failed spectacularly in a single day:
A Crash is coming... it"s going to horrific.
We offer a FREE investment report outlining when the bubble will burst as well as what investments will pay out massive returns to investors when this happens. It"s called The Biggest Bubble of All Time (and three investment strategies to profit from it).
Today is the last day this report will be available to the public.
Baltimore, MD — Baltimore police have found themselves in an awkward position as of late after a horrifying documentary from Netflix exposed a dark underground child sex ring involving the church, politicians, and cops. The series, titled, The Keepers, has forced the Baltimore police to set up an online submission form as people began to come forward after watching it.
While the series is on Netflix for the world’s entertainment, the harsh truth is that it really happened. After the church attempted to keep it quiet by paying off the victims under the table, the documentary has exposed these monsters to the world.
The seven-part documentary series, which premiered on Friday, also covers the unsolved murder of one of the teachers, Sister Catherine Ann Cesnik. On Tuesday, enough former victims had seen the documentary that they began calling the Baltimore police department to report their abuse.
Baltimore Police have since made an online submission form available for those who would want to report any instances of sexual abuse related to the series.
“We have been contacted by victims from the past who want to report the sex offenses that occurred to them. The murder investigation related to this Netflix series was handled by the Baltimore County Police Department,” the website reads.
The Baltimore Police Department has created an online submission form for sex offenses related to the Netflix series, “…
Dozens of victims had been suppressing the memories of their abuses and when this documentary came out, it brought the nightmares right back. Originally, many people thought the first woman to come forward was ‘faking’ it, until dozens more followed suit.
READ MORE:FBI Admits to Using Surveillance Aircraft to Spy on Baltimore Protestors
Baltimore police spokesman T.J. Smith said to the Washington Post after the series was released, “We’ve heard from people who previously hadn’t reported their offense. We just wanted to streamline the process. This is a crime that occurred to them, they don’t need to constantly relive the nightmare, telling the story over and over again.”
As the Post reports, Smith said he did not know how many calls his department had received but noted that victims in the case were probably teenagers at the time, and “this is bringing back memories for them. We just wanted to cut out the middleman and want to route them directly where they need to go.” He said sex crimes detectives will receive the online submissions and reach out to anyone who believes they were victimized.
Conveniently absent from the coverage of this Netflix series on the Washington Post and other mainstream outlets, however, is the fact that the victims in this documentary have implicated politicians as well as the police in these most unspeakable crimes.
“We never set out to solve the murder,” director Ryan White says of his new Netflix docuseries, to Vanity Fair. The seven-episode show explores the 1969 disappearance and murder of Sister Cathy Cesnik, a 26-year-old nun and beloved English teacher at Baltimore’s all-girls Archbishop Keough High School. Still, White knew this was no ordinary crime: “The truth had been deliberately buried from the beginning,” he says. Indeed, what begins as an investigation into a cold case soon becomes the story of a concerted effort toconceal widespread rape and sexual abuse committed by Keough school chaplain and counselor Father Joseph Maskell, as well as other clergy, police, and a local gynecologist.
READ MORE:Cop Throws Barefoot Woman on the Ground, Repeatedly Beats Her in the Head
Because, Maskell, the monster behind this widespread rape and abuse, was well-connected int the political realm, he brought others into his sick ring to prey on these young girls.
Maskell’s brother was a high-ranking city cop. This connection had two facets. First, it allowed him to cover up their crimes using these police connections. Second, it allowed for these depraved police officers to enter into this dark child sex ring.
According to Jean Wehner, the woman at the center of the abuse, Maskell operated this sex abuse ring, bringing in outside men — many of them police officers and local politicians — to take part in the abuse.
When Wehner confessed the abuse to Sister Cathy Cesnik, Cesnik became determined to put a stop to it. However, that is exactly what got her murdered.
As the Free Thought Project has previously pointed out, pedophilia among the elite is rampant. In instance after horrifying instance, the Free Thought Project continues to push these issues to the forefront — in spite of mainstream media claiming that talk of elite pedophilia is akin to tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theory.
The good news is that this paradigm seems to be shifting. As we reported in March, even some brave folks within the mainstream media have begun to report on this nightmarish reality.
In an exclusive interview seen by millions across the United States, Dr. Phil exposed the deadly secretive, and the highly organized world of elite pedophilia — with a former child sex slave going by the name of “Kendall” describing being literally born into, and growing up in, the world of elite sexual slavery.
READ MORE:Baltimore Cop on Why there are Riots, "I Blame the Department..they arrested Gray for some BullS***"
Kendall explains that she was born to be a sex slave, as her parents intentionally had her for the trafficker she calls her “owner.” Kendall says that her parents sold her at birth to an elite pedophile ring that serviced some of the world’s power elite, describing her first memories as being passed around groups of rich and prominent men and women for them to “take turns” with her for sadistic sexual pleasure.
While Netflix and Dr. Phil have done a huge service to society by exposing this reality, we have a long way to go to end it. Pedophilia and child trafficking is a very real issue and those who attempt to discredit it and sweep it under the rug are either horribly incompetent or complicit.
This problem will not go away through ridicule and name calling. We must shine light into the darkness through refusing to be silenced. We must stand for those who are too scared to come forward and we must be the voice for the voiceless. Please share this story with your friends and family so that they may see the real horror of what goes on behind the well-connected political scenes in this country. Until enough people become aware, none of this will end.
Our world is changing at a blinding pace that is accelerating with each passing day. Thanks to the Internet, information travels at a speed that would have been unimaginable at other times in human history, and our technological capabilities are advancing at a rate that is exponentially increasing. What all of this means is that seismic cultural shifts that used to take decades can now be accomplished in a matter of months or even weeks. So will all of this change lead to a wonderfully positive future for humanity, or will it result in a dystopian nightmare? Only time will tell, but what everyone can agree on is that our world is rapidly becoming a much different place than the world that our parents and grandparents grew up in. The following are 20 amazing facts about what happens every single minute of every single day in our rapidly changing world…
#1250 babies will be born, and 113 of them will be born into poverty.
(ANTIMEDIA) After spending over a decade out of the spotlight following his public exit from his 2000s hit Chappelle’s Show, this week comedian Dave Chappelle released two stand-up specials on Netflix.
The wildly politically incorrect sets have already drawn criticism from gay and transgender communities, but while his comedy certainly poked fun at the two minorities, it also lambasted numerous subgroups in America.
Chappelle targeted everyone from white people to black people to Asians, women, celebrities, Donald Trump, and the Hollywood establishment. Though much of the buzz surrounding the highly anticipated Netflix specials focused on Chappelle’s arguably offensive jokes about minority groups, much of his most salient commentary focused on the government and racial injustice within the system.
In his first set, titled “The Age of Spin,” filmed last year at the Hollywood Palladium, Chappelle discussed Netflix’s popular 2016 docuseries Making a Murderer. Discussing Steven Avery, a white man allegedly framed by police for murder, Chappelle joked:
“Steven Avery is in more trouble than any white person in the history of the United States has ever been in. In a justice system designed for him to thrive, he’s failed miserably — twice. I can’t even wrap my mind around it. If Making a Murderer was about a black dude, that shit would be called ‘Duh.’”
He went on, alluding to police involvement in Avery’s conviction and African Americans’ historical skepticism toward police:
“All he needed to get off that he didn’t have was a single black juror. That’s all it would’ve [taken]. Because only a black dude in the United States can look at 11 other dudes and be like, ‘I think the police did this shit.’”
Chappelle did not shy away from discussing race and politics. In his second set, “Deep In The Heart Of Texas: Live At Austin City Limits,” filmed in 2015, he tackled it head on.
“Tough time for the blacks,” he said. “These are not good times for the blacks. You know what I’m talking about right? Police are killing us again. It’s a very unfortunate set of circumstances because we were doing very well.”
Continuing, he discussed other marginalized groups in America:
“You know, America has a racial hot seat. I think we can all agree that that’s the truth, and we can also agree that that hot seat is traditionally occupied by African-Americans in general, African-American men in particular.”
“Although I can see that in recent years,” he went on, “that seat has been occupied by Mexicans, and I dare say Arabs. And we the black Americans would like to thank you both for your sacrifice and your struggle. We needed a break. We needed a goddamn break.”
He focused on the particular struggle Arabs face:
“We all go through something,” he said, “but at least I can leave my backpack someplace. If you’re Arab and you forget a backpack, you have about 20 minutes before they send that robot to blow your shit up. You can kiss all that engineering homework goodbye, Fouhad.”
In his Hollywood special, Chappelle went on an extended diatribe about when things went wrong in America. Joking about how everyone is now angry whereas it used to be only black people who were angry, he opined about how this happened, dropping surprising kernels of truth in his statement. After joking about times changing around and after World War II, he said:
“And then behind the scenes of that, there was a little-known government agency that started testing mind control drugs on the American public.”
Indeed, the CIA conducted mind control experiments on subjects using psychedelic drugs. But according to Chappelle:
“They fucked up. They tested it for 12 years. They didn’t realize these drugs were not mind-controlling. They were mind expanding. It was LSD and mescaline… and for the first time, there was a new school of thought that was chemically induced that made people question the very society they lived in.”
He continued:
“By 1960, the president of the United States was only 42 years old. Can you imagine? DMX is older than that. And he was gonna usher in a new era of peace. He was gonna avoid the Cold War. He was gonna end segregation. And they blew his fucking brains out in front of everyone in Dallas.”
He did not specify who “they” were but went on to make a biting observation about dissent in America:
“This country was never the same. There were seven more major assassinations in the 60s. Anyone that stood up and said anything was shot down in the streets like a fucking dog. Kennedy, Kennedy, King, X, Evers — on and on. You didn’t even have to be famous. You could be a college student at Kent State or in Mississippi protesting the Vietnam War, and they shot them, too. The 70s were a wild era. And while all this was going on, Bill Cosby raped 54 people.”
Bill Cosby, along with O.J. Simpson, were a frequent focus in the specials and often provided comedic relief after Chappelle made more serious statements like the one above. In another apparent affront to mainstream politics and conventional history, Chappelle appeared to question mandatory vaccinations. After he asked the Austin audience how they felt about such policies, receiving cheers in response, he responded:
“I’m sorry, ladies and gentlemen. I just… I don’t know. I don’t know about this one. First of all, black people generally don’t trust doctors — after the Tuskegee experiments and all that shit.”
Chappelle was referencing, as the Atlantic has explained it, “the 40-year experiment run by Public Health Service officials [that] followed 600 rural black men in Alabama with syphilis over the course of their lives, refusing to tell patients their diagnosis, refusing to treat them for the debilitating disease, and actively denying some of them treatment.”
Chappelle’s jokes spanned nearly every layer of potentially offensive content. He joked at length about Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition in the Hollywood special, and in the Austin special, he further questioned trans culture. Expressing support, he said, “I support anybody’s right to be whoever they feel like they are inside. I’m your ally in that.”
“However,” he continued, “my question is to what degree do I have to participate in your self-image?”
Regardless of how one feels about Chappelle’s arguably offensive show, two things were apparent: he wasn’t concerned about offending anyone, an attitude expressed recently by other major comedic players. Figures like Jerry Seinfeld and Tina Fey have bemoaned the constraints PC culture places on free speech and comedy. As Chappelle warned the audience early in his Hollywood performance after they gasped at one of his jokes:
“Ladies and gentleman, man the fuck up or you’re not going to make it through this show.”
Most importantly, Chappelle proved himself fearless in confronting deeply uncomfortable realities about American society, culture, and government, dropping otherwise shocking bits of information in with classic Chappelle comedy.
Chappelle, who famously left the limelight when his often politically and racially charged Chappelle’s Show was reaching new levels of popularity, will produce a third special for Netflix viewers to be released later this year. It is expected to tackle the 2016 election and the new era of Donald Trump.
We just learned a very important lesson about how exceedingly vulnerable our Internet truly is. On Friday, three massive waves of cyberattacks took down some of the biggest websites on the entire Internet. Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Reddit, Etsy, Business Insider, Github, Spotify, the New York Times and the Boston Globe were among the prominent websites affected. Security experts tells us that with each passing month these kinds of attacks are becoming larger and more sophisticated. And most Americans don’t realize this, but nations such as Russia, China and North Korea have been feverishly developing extremely advanced cyberwarfare capabilities. So could a day come when one of our enemies takes down our Internet completely for an extended period of time?
According to CNBC, the primary target of the attacks on Friday was a hosting company known as Dyn, and these attacks came from “tens of millions” of IP addresses simultaneously…
Internet traffic company Dyn on Friday warned of another cyberattack after websites and services across the East Coast were shut down earlier in the day.
Dyn told CNBC Friday afternoon the attacks are “well planned and executed, coming from tens of millions IP addresses at same time.”
“We have begun monitoring and mitigating a DDoS attack against our Dyn Managed (Domain Name System) infrastructure. Our Engineers are continuing to work on mitigating this issue,” Dyn said on its website at 11:52 a.m. ET.
Specifically, the types of attacks that we witnessed on Friday are known as “denial of service” attacks. If you are not familiar with denial of service attacks, the following is a pretty good explanation from Business Insider…
It appears to have been caused by a large digital denial of service (DDoS) attack leveled at the servers of the domain name system (DNS) host Dyn. A DDoS attack typically overwhelms a server with data requests in order to prevent normal users from having their own queries answered. The DNS is a large database that, among other things, converts a simple domain name into a more complex IP address from which data can be retrieved. Taking down a DNS server means that a user’s browser can’t use it to resolve which IP address to fetch the files of a web page from.
These attacks were so big that the Department of Homeland Security is looking into them. It is being reported that North Korea has been ruled out as a suspect so far, but nothing has been said about Russia or China.
As I mentioned above, countries such as Russia, China and North Korea have been working very hard to develop extremely advanced cyberwarfare capabilities in recent years. In particular, Russia has been heavily investing in this area since at least 2007…
Russia’s intelligence services decided years ago to make cyber warfare a national defense priority, said Dr. David Stupples, director of the Centre for Cyber Security Sciences at City University London. They have become increasingly proficient in cyber operations as a result.
“From around 2007, Russia decided that information warfare was key to winning any world conflict, and that it was this area of capability and technology they decided would benefit from vastly increased military investment,” Stupples said. “What made this decision easier was that Russia was also home to the largest numbers of some of the world’s best hackers.”
For almost a decade, the Russians have been preparing to fight a cyberwar with the United States.
And at this point many analysts believe that they are far better equipped to fight a cyberwar then we are.
So it would seem to be incredibly foolish to provoke an enemy into a fight that we could not possibly win. Unfortunately, that is precisely what Barack Obama is doing. According to a stunning report from NBC News, the Obama administration is actually threatening Russia with “an unprecedented cyber covert action”…
The Obama administration is contemplating an unprecedented cyber covert action against Russia in retaliation for alleged Russian interference in the American presidential election, U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.
Current and former officials with direct knowledge of the situation say the CIA has been asked to deliver options to the White House for a wide-ranging “clandestine” cyber operation designed to harass and “embarrass” the Kremlin leadership.
The sources did not elaborate on the exact measures the CIA was considering, but said the agency had already begun opening cyber doors, selecting targets and making other preparations for an operation.
I can’t even begin to describe how foolish this is.
Yes, without a doubt we could do some damage to the Russians. But the Russians believe that when they get hit by an enemy that they should hit back even harder.
Considering how important the Internet has become to the U.S. economy, do we really want to invite the Russians to attack it?
Talk about an event that could crash our economy almost overnight. This year alone “the Internet economy” will account for more than a trillion dollars. Without the Internet, vast numbers of businesses would not be able to function normally, and an extended outage would cause financial markets all over the planet to start crashing.
And many experts believe that it was the Russians that took down the Ukrainian power grid a while back. So do we really want to invite the Russians to attack our power grid?
Anyone out there that believes that our power grid is “secure” is dead wrong. We are exceedingly vulnerable, and the Russians know this.
Could you imagine the chaos that would happen if our power grid suddenly went down in the middle of the winter? An extended outage would potentially be life-threatening for millions of people that live in our coldest areas.
And what about our banks and financial systems? Do we really want to invite the Russians to shut those down?
It really is in our best interest to try to find a way to develop a better relationship with Russia. Unfortunately, we are about to elect a crazy woman as our next president that has a fierce vendetta against the Russians, and Russian politicians are very open about the fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected in November that the odds of World War 3 happening will go up dramatically.
You may wake up one day only to discover that a massive cyberattack has completely changed life in America overnight.
When that happens, you won’t be able to say that you weren’t warned in advance.
