Select Page ::

Dont wait on the mayor, Staten Island Chuck, de Blasio wont attend the ceremony this Sunday, or ever – SILive.com

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

CITY HALL -- Mayor Bill de Blasio will skip out on Staten Islands annual Groundhog Day ceremony this Sunday for the sixth year in a row -- and it doesnt look like he plans on ever coming back.

Its the highlight of my year. I tried it, it didnt end well. I wont be back, he said at an unrelated press conference in Brooklyn on Tuesday.

The last time de Blasio came to Staten Island for Groundhog Day was in 2014. He dropped the animal after its handler put it in his arms.

Months later, in September 2014, it was revealed that the groundhog, a female named Charlotte, died of acute internal injuries a week after he was dropped by the mayor.

A statement from the Staten Island Zoo read that it appeared unlikely that the groundhogs death was related to the events of Groundhog Day.

The mayor avoided saying what else he had planned this Sunday, but commented further on his plans to stay away from Groundhog Day.

Ive been advised by wildlife experts to stay within a five-mile radius away from any groundhogs, de Blasio quipped.

I think its good to leave that in the past I think the groundhogs deserve that, he said.

Unlike de Blasio, Speaker Corey Johnson plans to attend Sundays ceremony, which he attended last year too.

Johnsons spokeswoman Jennifer Fermino said the last time Johnson attended the Islands Groundhog Day ceremony Staten Island Chuck predicted an early spring and a few days later it was 55 degrees.

Also no animals died, Fermino said.

GUIDELINES CHANGED

At the 2015 Groundhog Day event, the Staten Island Zoo implemented new guidelines which now require Chuck remain in a clear plastic enclosure from which he can only be removed from and held by his handler.

During the 2009 Groundhog Day ceremony, Staten Island Chuck bit Mayor Michael Bloomberg right before he made his prediction, as the mayor reached into the groundhogs cottage to bring him out with some of his snacks.

This years free Groundhog Day event at the Zoo takes place on Sunday, Feb. 2. The ceremony begins at 7 a.m., with Chucks prediction set for 7:30 a.m.

FOLLOW SYDNEY KASHIWAGI ON TWITTER.

Link:

Dont wait on the mayor, Staten Island Chuck, de Blasio wont attend the ceremony this Sunday, or ever - SILive.com

A-lister Margot Robbie fangirls over Love Island 2019 cast at Birds Of Prey premiere – The Sun

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

MARGOT Robbie's Love Island dream finally came true on the red carpet of her new superhero film Birds of Prey last night.

The award-winning actress, 29, managed to meet some of her favourites from the popular reality TV show and even posed for selfies with last year's cast.

The Aussie, who is most well-known for her on-screen alter ego Harley Quinn, braved the freezing cold British weather in a sleeveless black midi dress for the glamorous event.

The dress perfectly showed off her toned frame with a bow shaped belt that tied her in at the waist and she paired it with a fabulous feather top.

She added a pop of colour to her outfit with some luminous pink gloves and sparky green eye shadow.

Despite being the star of the brand new blockbuster, Maggie couldn't help but put all the attention towards her favourite reality stars who had come to support the new movie.

The Love Island super fan managed to make time to pose for photos with some of the 2019 cast favourites, including: bad boy Michael Griffiths, model Jordan Hames, and surfer chick Lucie Donlan.

The beauty revealed that she is a huge fan of the popular ITV2 reality show and has previously admitted that won't know what to do with herself when it ends.

She said: "I won't know what to do when Love Island finishes. I mean, what will I watch? It's literally the most addictive thing on TV ever.

"We have dedicated our summer to watching those guys. We are going to miss them.

"I love sitting down watching all these beautiful people have their dramas while I lie there on the sofa eating pizza and drinking beer."

However, Margot has no need to worry now that she can watch herself star in the new Suicide Squad spin-off movie - Birds of Prey.

The new DC Comics movie is set to hit our screens early next month and will focus on the return of Harley Quinn, following her break-up from The Joker.

The supervillian will team up with three female superheros, Black Canary, Huntress and Renee Montoya to save the life of a little girl (Cassandra Cain) from an evil crime lord.

Exclusive

JACK THE DAD Jack Fincham seen with baby Blossom and her mum Casey Ranger for first time

'SO ANNOYING' Holly and Phillip accused of 'faking' their hangovers by This Morning fans

IT'S HOL OVER Holly collapses on the floor as This Morning's Spin To Win goes wrong AGAIN

PANTS! Fans boo David Walliams & want him sacked as Piers slams 'nasty' Caroline Flack joke

strictly over Ashley Roberts and Strictly's Giovanni Pernice split after 14-month romance

HEARTBREAK Gaz Beadle and Emma McVey reveal heartbreak as newborn Primrose is 'suffering'

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and her real life beau, Ewan McGregor will also be staring in the film as the Huntress and Black Mask.

And The Mindy project hunk Chris Messina will star as Victor Zsasz while Roise Perez will play Renee Montoya.

A-lister Margot Robbie fangirls over Love Island 2019 cast at Birds Of Prey premiere - The Sun

Trampled By Turtles, Wilco announced for Treasure Island show – Bring Me The News

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

Two more acts have been announced for Treasure Island's summer concert series, with Trampled By Turtles and Wilco playing its amphitheater in September.

The Duluth folk-rockers will be joined by Jeff Tweedy's Chicago band for three dates in September, playing Des Moines and Green Bay before rounding out their mini-tour at the Welch casino on Sept. 19.

Trampled By Turtles have proven a huge draw in their home state, selling out the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand for a show in 2018.

They're the latest in a string of acts announced for Treasure Island this year with others including Alice Cooper, Chicago, Foreigner, Matchbox Twenty.

Tickets for the show go on sale this Friday, Jan. 31, at 10 a.m.

They will range in cost from $35 and $97 plus fees. You can buy them atTIcasino.com or by visiting the Island Box Office.

Read the original here:

Trampled By Turtles, Wilco announced for Treasure Island show - Bring Me The News

Dan McCaslin: Nature and Shallowing the Mind – Noozhawk

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

Regarding todays dominant Facebook/iPhone digital connective culture, conservative New York Times editorialist Bret Stephens critiques the impact of our eras instant communication and endless websites. Far from increasing important knowledge to enhance personal prosperity and individual happiness, we swim like homeless hominids in this digital connective culture (DCC) that causes "a kind of shallowing of our inner life," according to Stephens (see 4.1.1. Books).

Im a backcountry hiker and outdoor columnist, and lately have followed John Ruskins sublime footsteps into wild nature seeking repeated deep time episodes. In repetitive forest bathing hikes, one finds urban detox, mental rejuvenation and those crucial oceanic feelings that rewild the spirit. Rewilding, juvenescence, forest immersion, hill-country music and awe-stricken moments surrounded by Earths green beauty absolutely will compel a mental reawakening. We need new terms or new word combinations to describe the postmodern ennui and depressions sprouting all around us in the Anthropocenes harrowing DCC.

Shallowing is not actually a word, but Stephens neologism fits a new concept demanded by the infowars and "fake news" of this early Anthropocene. Like juvenescence, adjacentcy and forest bathing, the shallowing description helps me figure out whats going awry in so many westerners spirit-lives (see 4.1.1. for adjacentcy). Depression and deteriorating mental health among millennials certainly terrify everyone in America today.

The vast and ever-expanding Internet "meridians" apparently cover everything there is, but this proto neural membrane is also incredibly thin so while we know more and more and also more quickly, its usually about less and less. As a world culture, weve fallen into left-brain overspecialization again. (I covered left-brain vs. right-brain neurologies in my recent column.)

Inner resilience emerges out of the outdoor interludes that humans truly require. We can follow the animistic example of our Stone Age ancestors, and especially as urbanization/digitalization/optimization race ever onward. When your life is one of constant optimization, youre never free and you can never fully relax, as eloquent millennial Jia Tolentino points out describing todays ideal woman of the DCC

good looks, the impression of indefinitely extended youth, advanced skillsof self-presentation and self-surveillance. The ideal woman, in otherwords, is always optimizing. She takes advantage of technology. Herhair looks expensive. She spends lots of money taking care of her skin The same is true of her body. it has been pre-shaped by exercise thatensures there is little to conceal or rearrange. Everything about thiswoman has been preemptively controlled to the point that she canafford the impression of spontaneity .

Similarly, most adult humans, especially the mournful millennials, must relearn Stone Age ways I strongly recommend a process of rewilding the mind and spirit. Neo-animism (my neologism) simply means re-enchanting the world and holding off the de-animating digital destruction. The process commences with simple outings in or near green nature; its what I pushed in "Eternal Backcountry Return" (constant walking). Millennials, Gen-Xers, boomers, weve all got to re-valuate the manifest advantages in paleo thinking.

This curative process embodies the call for a renewed animism for the Anthropocene Ive dubbed this way of thinking neo-animism. The inanimate is indubitably as alive in those holy boulders shown in another column as in the dancing bees buzzing about my face. The ancient Mesopotamians even worshipped the life-force in Salt (their famous Hymn to Salt prayer), although left-brainers see only the NaCl formula. The left brains revenge on the right brain is to suffocate the wide-angle communal viewpoint.

In our collective shallowing, weve lost the appreciation for the life and life-giving force in natures inanimate stone artifacts, including mountains and exotic canyons. Perhaps it is less a shallowing than an extraordinary widening that some minds cannot comprehend or stretch to. If everything is indeed alive, then the individuals cosmos feels very different to her than in our hyper-kinetic speedy DCC.

If a reader struggles with the interpretation offered in the idea of living boulders in the field near Hurricane Deck, or seeking wisdom in places, then she should realize she might profit from extended forest bathing jaunts as she begins the neo-animism process.

After postmodernism comes post-humanism, and with the latter my neo-animism emerges as a necessary corollary.

In neo-animism, we conjure the image of the natural world working on us humans, not the other way round. Guardian columnist George Monbiot argues for a radical political rewilding that can mirror natures own rewilding processes. Rewilding allowing dynamic, spontaneous organization to reassert itself leads to organic complexity, and need not be exclusively top-down the way our politics are today (Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, President Trump, Kim Jong-un, Mark Zuckerberg).

Bruno Latour argues that were all actually climate skeptics: Whatever our intentions, we all act as if climate change is not real. In the same vein, most of us live our lives in some child-like state where we all act as if human life isnt time-limited. However, human lives are indeed time-limited as Buddha constantly said, and refusing to honor this crucial condition makes us weak, and also sometimes violent.

My neo-animism resembles an eco-theism where the actual planet Gaia is our church/temple/mosque (a kind of pantheism). The demands in "Facing Gaia" form a moral imperative and enhance a novel mode of experience. In a new politics for this human-created Anthropocene Era, neo-animism joins with radical post-humanism to ask fundamental questions of us, like:

Shouldnt there be fewer people?

Should 90 percent of the humongous herds of cows and pigs be culled (killed off)?

Why not rewild locally by returning grizzly bears to the San Rafael Wilderness?

How can humans accord natural rights to the evolved animals on this Gaia?

The 19th century Romantic right-brain view of physical nature was replaced by the left-brain dominant scientific view that justified any activity to wrest more value (resources) from Gaias rich body. This Industrial Age left-brain dominance allies seamlessly with the DCC today, and thus fosters that shallowing of so many human minds and imaginations.

The first step in resisting the corrosive DCC is to buy sturdy shoes or boots, and begin a regular hiking program in or near our backcountry. The Eternal Backcountry Return beckons, and certainly bring your children along!

Books and articles: For my term adjacentcy, it defines the way densely populated California urban zones lay next to wild and wilderness zones, see my Autobiography in the Anthropocene, p. 60 and passim). Stephens quote: New York Times, Dec. 21, 2019. For Tolentino quote: Jia Tolentino, "Trick Mirror," p. 64; Bruno Latour, "Facing Gaia" (Polity 2017); J. Purdy, "After Nature A Politics for the Anthropocene" (2015), discusses the "new animism," 272-275; George Monbiot: click here.

Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at [emailprotected]. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.

The rest is here:

Dan McCaslin: Nature and Shallowing the Mind - Noozhawk

The new industrial revolution will change everything – Fabius Maximus journal

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

Summary: Industrial revolutions reshaped the world. But during the long pause of tech progress since WWII, we forgot what they do to society. Here is a reminder. A timely one, since a new revolution has begun.

For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air. Treebeard the Ent in Tolkiens The Return of the King.

Technological progress slowed so much after WWII that we no longer remember what rapid change looks like. Compare two lives to see what it was like.

Bat Masterson was born on a farm in 1853, amidst people living hard lives with only simple machines. Women drew water from wells, making them old before their times. He became a gunfighter in the tech boom known as the Wild West. He was a sportswriter for the New York Morning Telegraph when he died in 1921 in a city of cars, telephones, electricity, and a powerful public health infrastructure. If we transported his mother through the Time Tunnel from her 1853 home to his 1921 home, how quickly could she adapt? Everything would be different, with a thousand advances beyond her imagination.

June Cleaver was a mother in the 1957 sitcom Leave it to Beaver

Another example: imagine if we shifted General Pershing one hundred years into the future from 1918 WWI to command a modern Army division. He would recognize all the major new tools: aircraft (fighters and bombers), submarines, rockets, radio, and tanks. But if we shifted the Duke of Wellington from the Battle of Waterloo (1815) to WWI (1917), the Duke would be lost amidst the new tech.

The specific dates of the previous industrial revolution are arbitrary, depending on whether one looks at the laboratory breakthroughs or when engineers build them. Whatever the dates, it reshaped the world.

The Singularity has happened; we call it the industrial revolution or the long nineteenth century. It was over by the close of 1918. Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses) Check. Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check. Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check.

The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone by Cosma Shalizi (Assoc. Prof of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon).

The revolution gave per capita GDP in the developed nations a boost that lasted through the 1960s. But few noticed its ending. In the 1960s, people believed in a future of rapid technological progress. But all we got was the manned space program (an expensive trip to nowhere) and the supersonic transport (a premature technology) and radical changes in the narrow fields of communications and computing. So technological progress slowed, as did economic growth.

Now a new revolution might have begun.

The most obvious wave coming is more automation from the combination of semi-intelligent machines, better algorithms, improved cheap sensors, and better manipulators.

Algorithms have already changed the workplace. In the days of yore, for example, every bank had credit officers who personally approved each loan; now algorithms do so faster, better, and cheaper for most consumer loans and mortgages.

As the revolution begins, we have credit cards with chips (replacement for cash), self-driving cars with Star Trek-like sensors and computers, retail kiosks, and facial recognition systems. All have the ability to reshape the workplace. For example, fast-food ordering kiosks provide faster and cheaper service and customers prefer them.

An industrial revolution differs from the narrow advances in the past few generations by its breath. Drones, solar power, gigabyte broadband, smart machines, 3-D printing, re-usable spaceships these and a host of other new technologies are already reshaping our world.

Coming are far greater advances, such as guard robots, computer-generated actors and models, sexbots, and wonders as yet seen only in science fiction tales. They will have a Richter 10 impact on society.

{The arrival of sexbots} will blow up the world. It will make crack cocaine look like decaffeinated coffee. Anonymous (source here).

The pace of progress appears to be accelerating towards greater breakthrough technologies.Here are three candidates from a long list. Only a few need succeed to change everything.

All this is great news for our descendants, as we move to the wonderful world predicted by Lord Keynes in 1930. Revolutions do not solve problems so much as make them irrelevant. But rapid growth creates its own problems. Look at 1880s London in this slightly altered quotation from William Manchesters biography The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory.

The city itself is overwhelmed, engulfed by changes with which it has not learned to cope, and which are scarcely understood. Some were inherent in the trebling of the population, some consequences of industrialization. Particles of grime from the factory smokestacks produce impenetrable smog which reduces visibility to a few feet.

Much of the city stinks. The citys sewage system is at best inadequate and in the poorer of neighborhoods nonexistent. Buildings elsewhere are often constructed over cesspools which, however, have grown so vast that they form ponds, surrounding homes with moats of effluvia.

And the narrow, twisted streets are neither sealed nor asphalted. People lock their windows, even in summer, but they have a lot to keep out: odors, dust.

And then there was the manure from the horses (in 1880, NYC had 180 thousand) Nobody saw this coming, and so people had to react instead of prepare. Lets do better this time.

Among the biggest economic disruptions will be from big companies unable to ride these waves. Such as Xerox who dominated the copier business and invented most of the key elements of personal computing. Such as Kodak inventor of the digital camera (1975) and organic LEDs (1987), the one-time leader in digital radiography and blood testing equipment (history here). Such as GE whose serial screw-ups are legion (e.g., see Fast Heat: How Korea Won the Microwave War by Ira C. Magaziner and Mark Patinkin in the Harvard Business Review, January-February 1989).

The social and political problems from an industrial revolution will be even more difficult for investors to manage. Two can be foreseen. First, the struggle to share the fruits of increased productivity between labor and owners. This can be solved with a little wisdom, but often a little wisdom is more than a people have on tape. Failure at this could make burying gold in the backyard a winning strategy.

Second, coping with widespread unemployment. Many remain in denial about this. In their 2004 book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane discuss fields where computerization should have little effect on the percentage of the workforce engaged in these tasks. They list truck driving as one such field. Only 16 years later that prediction looks foolish. Imagine what another 16 years will bring. Discussing the coming job apocalypse is beyond the scope of this article. I will write about it if there is any demand.

So far we prepare for these things by closing our eyes. I doubt that will prove successful, and it squanders our lead time.

Risk and reward. Greed and fear. Booms and busts. Industrial revolutions do not change their natures, but make all of these larger. Understanding the economic regime of our time can inform your decision-making in all aspects of life.

Just as the date is vague when the previous revolution began, so will the start of the next one. There are no milestones for such things. But if you look for it, you will see the signals.

Ideas!For some shopping ideas see my recommended books and filmsat Amazon. Also, see a story about our future: Ultra Violence: Tales from Venus.

If you liked this post,like us on Facebookandfollow us on Twitter. See all posts about singularities, about robots, how the 3rd industrial revolution has begun, andespecially see these

By Ray Kurzweil. See his website.

From the publisher

At the onset of the twenty-first century, humanity stands on the verge of the most transforming and the most thrilling period in its history. It will be an era in which the very nature of what it means to be human will be both enriched and challenged, as our species breaks the shackles of its genetic legacy and achieves inconceivable heights of intelligence, material progress, and longevity.

For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence

That merging is the essence of the Singularity, an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity. In this new world, there will be no clear distinction between human and machine, real reality and virtual reality. We will be able to assume different bodies and take on a range of personae at will. In practical terms, human aging and illness will be reversed; pollution will be stopped; world hunger and poverty will be solved. Nanotechnology will make it possible to create virtually any physical product using inexpensive information processes and will ultimately turn even death into a soluble problem.

While the social and philosophical ramifications of these changes will be profound, and the threats they pose considerable, The Singularity Is Near maintains a radically optimistic view of the future course of human development. As such, it offers a view of the coming age that is both a dramatic culmination of centuries of technological ingenuity and a genuinely inspiring vision of our ultimate destiny.

Like Loading...

The new industrial revolution will change everything - Fabius Maximus journal

The Many Holocausts – The Atlantic

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

Those years saw the emergence of Israels preeminent Holocaust writer. Though not a survivor of the death camps, Aharon Appelfeld, a refugee from Ukrainian captivity who became a child cook in the Soviet army, nevertheless remained possessed by Holocaust themes. These included foreboding, loss, and above all the rootlessness of a displaced writer of displaced fiction, as Philip Roth described him. Appelfelds was a Holocaust of anger, and bore the mark of his determination to preserve its uniquely Jewish character. Attending a series of lectures he gave toward the end of his life, I was stunned by his bitterness toward younger Israeli authors who, he claimed, had abandoned their Jewish identity for secular Israeli culture, and whose Hebrew was shorn of Yiddish overtones.

Appelfelds rancor, his defense of Jewish heritage, and his refusal to extract universal or moralistic meaning from the Holocaust appealed to Israeli grit. Still, he would never attain Levi- or Wiesel-like stature. One reason is the immediacy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which can eclipse the horrific events of 80 years ago. Grossmans fame, like that of Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua, owed less to his treatment of the Holocaust than to his promotion of peace. Tension, meanwhile, continues to surround the lessons Israel should draw from the Holocaustwhether, as Netanyahu told gatherers at Yad Vashem, the strong survive; the weak are erased, or, as President Reuven Rivlin said at the same event, the Holocaust will forever place the Jewish people as eternal prosecutors against anti-Semitism, racism, and ultra-nationalism.

Most striking of all, though, is the absence of a broad audience for any Holocaust book, even Appelfelds. In a country where Holocaust curricula are taught in most schools, where 18-year-olds ritually visit the camps before enlisting, and where the Knesset debates incessantly about expanding survivor pensions and extending them to the victims of fascism in North Africa and Iraq, how much awareness can any one writer add? Does Israel, where normal life comes to a complete halt on Holocaust Memorial Day, need another Night or Survival in Auschwitz?

The same cannot be said for Europe and the United States, where recent polls indicate an alarming decline of even basic Holocaust knowledge, especially among young people. Amid the passing of the World War II generation and the rise of extreme right-wing parties around the world, some with fascist pasts, the voices of Wiesel, Levi, and Appelfeld need to be heard more than ever. Now, though, they must speak in a unified language understandable to all audiences, American, European, and Israeli alike. And their message must be onethat the Holocaust teaches us multiple messages, all of them complementary. It is a message of hope, of humanism, and of Jewish national rebirth.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Follow this link:

The Many Holocausts - The Atlantic

Auschwitz and the politicisation of history – The Strategist

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

Looming over this years commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, were two contradictory impulses that lay behind the creation of the Jewish state: cosmopolitanism and nationalism. A painful dialogue between these perspectives marked the event, reflected in the utterances of the officials who attended and the objections of those who stayed away.

In opening the ceremony, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu set the tone for what was to come. He described Auschwitz as an abyss and Jerusalem as a peak, with the former representing enslavement and death and the latter epitomising freedom and life. To give meaning to the lives of those murdered in the Holocaust, he sought to link their deaths to Israels founding just a few years later. But in doing this, he risked presenting the massacre of the Jews as a necessary staging post on the marvelous journey of the revival of our people. Rather than presenting the fate of Europes Jews as a reason to renew the struggle against hatred and genocide everywhere, he focused more narrowly on the interests of the state of Israel and concluded his remarks with a battle cry against Iran.

The choice between cosmopolitanism and nationalism has always been an especially difficult one for Jews. Historically, the exclusion of wandering Jews from official life meant that they were de facto citizens of nowhere, and thus cosmopolitan by default. Yet precisely for that reason, many Jews went on to become ultra-nationalists in the countries into which they were eventually assimilated. A quintessential example was the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who as a young man initially welcomed World War I as an opportunity to fight for his country. The same contradictory sentiments are now bound up in Israels national identity, animating an abiding tension between democracy and the desire to provide a Jewish homeland.

The foreign speakers at Yad Vashem this year also embodied this conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. Russian President Vladimir Putin decried the weaponisation of history, before doing exactly that, claiming (not inaccurately) that the Holocaust was carried out not just by Germans but also by European collaborators who were often crueler than their masters. Not surprisingly, he directed this charge specifically at Ukraine, Lithuania and Latviaall countries with which Russia has a troubled relationship.

But it was the Polish government that objected most strenuously to this interpretation. After not being invited to speak, Polish President Andrzej Duda boycotted the ceremony. And in anticipation of Putins speech, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki wrote a commentary for Politico arguing that, Russia is trying to rewrite history. Far from being a liberator, the Soviet Union was a facilitator of Nazi Germany and a perpetrator of crimes of its ownbefore and after the liberation of Auschwitz. The official Polish response comes as no surprise, given that this is the same government that, in 2018, passed a law criminalising any mention of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

The contrast with the remarks delivered by the French and German presidents couldnt be greater. Each reflected on his own countrys guilt before making a case for universal human values. Those who murdered, noted German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, those who planned and helped in the murdering, the many who silently toed the line: They were Germans.

Like Netanyahu, Steinmeier also focused on the theme of renewal following the Shoah, which gave way to a new order of peace, founded upon human rights and international law. But, unlike Netanyahu, Steinmeier wasnt triumphalist. In fact, he underscored an issue that, in spite of decades of vergangenheitsbewltigung (working through the past), is now afflicting Germany: the return of anti-Semitism.

French President Emmanuel Macron was equally brutal in his self-criticism. France has looked at its history head-on and faced up to the irreparable responsibility of the French state in the deportation of the Jews, he declaimed. The lessons he takes from Auschwitz are universal and forward-looking. No one has the right to use the memory of the dead, he argued, to justify some kind of contemporary hatred.

One wonders how Zweig would have responded to all of these speakers. Although he was a protg of Zionisms founding intellectual, Theodor Herzl, a recent biography by George Prochnik shows that Zweig became increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of nationalism over the course of his life. Following the rise of the Nazis, he argued that Jews had a sacred mission not to create yet another state with cannons, flags, [and] medals. Rather, he wanted Jews to serve as the gadfly which plagues the mangy beast of nationalism, and to work for the dissolution of nationalist tendencies.

In other words, were Zweig alive today, he doubtless would sympathise more with the cosmopolitan humanism of Steinmeier and Macron than with Netanyahus ethno-nationalism. But its worth remembering that even as they established a Jewish nation-state, David Ben-Gurion and most of Israels founders were similarly committed to a cosmopolitan and universalist vision based on complete equality of social and political rights irrespective of religion, race or sex.

For my part, as a descendent of German Jewssome of whom were exterminatedI strongly support Israels right to exist. But I also believe that Netanyahus instrumentalisation of the Holocausts victimsmany of whom didnt share his Zionist nationalismdirectly undermines the ideals of the countrys founders.

As Auschwitz passes from memory into history, it is ironic that the lessons people draw from it would become more particular, rather than more universal. Clearly, the global fight against anti-Semitism needs a new narrative for the 21st-century world of hyper-fragmented and multicultural societies, where no one knows Holocaust survivors personally. Otherwise, history will continue to be politicised and pressed into the service of nationalist agendas, rather than showing the way to a more peaceful future for all.

The Wolf That Devours Everything, and Then Devours Itself – Patheos

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

The epigraph of my new book, Post-Christian: A Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, is an astonishing passage from William Shakespeare, who in 1601 predicted how things would be 400 years later and what will happen next. It is also a good summation of my book.

The lines are from Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeares take on the Trojan War, which is notpresented as the pinnacle of classical ideals, as in Homer, but as their undoing. The wise Ulysses warns what will happen when the objective order of Gods creationHis moral, social, and natural lawsis repudiated.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows. . . .

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey

And last eat up himself.

Troilus and Cressida (1601), Act 1. Scene 3. Lines 10910, 12227.

From my book:

Post-Christians of every variety reject degree, as we hear in common statements such as life has no meaning, the universe is absurd, there are no absolutes. But what makes these lines from Shakespeare so uncanny, so startlingly relevant to our own times four centuries later, is that they zero in on the three major preoccupations of contemporary thought and culture: power, will, and appetite.

Today, post-Marxists on the left and Nietzscheans on the right insist that ideas, morality, institutions, and culture itself are nothing more than masks for power, pretexts that allow one group (men, whites, heterosexuals, humans, etc.) to oppress other groups (women, racial minorities, gays, animals, etc.). The will has displaced moral absolutes as the moral authority. (Those who support abortion call themselves pro-choice. The only limit to sex is consent.) And all desires (sexual, consumer, personal) must be fulfilled at all costs, thus the unleashing ofappetite.

For Shakespeare, the coming together of power, will, and appetite forms a universal wolf that devours everything. As we have been seeing in contemporary thought and culture, this wolf is eating up universities, laws, technology, the family, the arts, the media, and churches. But, having done so, there comes a point, says Shakespeare, when the wolf starts eating up himself.

Modernism unleashed skepticism against all traditions and authorities, all in the name of reason; whereupon postmodernism unleashed that skepticism against reason itself. All that remains now is to be skeptical about skepticism. Universities have taken academic freedom so far that they now censor dissenting views, impose speech codes, and in other ways inhibit academic freedom. Humanism has advanced to the point of becoming antihuman. Progress has evolved to become neoprimitivism.

But when the universal wolf has finished devouring himself, his predation will be at an end. Life might start to flourish again. The course of post-Christian culture, when it ends in self-contradiction and catastrophe, may herald cultural rebirth.

My book unpacks all of this, demonstrates why it is so, and applies it in multiple ways.

Illustration: Wolfie Sketchie byZakeena. Licensed underCC-BY.Creative Commons Licensevia SketchPort

The Wolf That Devours Everything, and Then Devours Itself - Patheos

Gantz and Netanyahu arrive in DC to meet with Trump; plus why Gantz might have an easier time saying yes to peace plan – Jewish Insider

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

Deep Dive:The New York Timesexamineshow Iran tried for three days to cover up its role in shooting down a Ukrainian airliner before finally admitting the truth.

War on Terror:Three rocketsstruckthe U.S. embassycompoundin Baghdad yesterday, and one person was reportedly lightly wounded. The Pentagonrevealedover the weekend that 34 U.S. service members suffered traumatic brain injuries after Iranian airstrikes on an air base in Iraq earlier this month, countering earlier claims by the president.

Payback:In aninterviewwith Jeffrey Goldberg,The Atlantics editor-in-chief, at the Sundance Film Festival, former Secretary of State and 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton suggested that Mark Zuckerbergs refusal to tackle the spread of disinformation and propaganda on Facebook is Trumpian and authoritarian.

Rebound:WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey hasspentthe past few months devising a plan to save the company by slowing down and scaling back the opposite of his co-founder Adam Neumanns onetime approach.

Living History:CNN anchor Wolf Blitzerinterviewedfilm director Steven Spielberg for his CNN documentary Voices of Auschwitz.

About Time:The Dutch prime ministerissuedthe countrys first-ever apology for its persecution of Jews during World War II, including collaborating with the Nazis.

Talk of the Town:A store in New Orleanss French Quarter, Rare Finds,will removeJim Crow-era antique pieces and Nazi-related items after complaints from the director of the Anti-Defamation Leagues local chapter.

Lawsuit:A member of the Rothschild family, Geoffrey Hoguet, issuingthe city of Vienna for perpetuating Nazi laws by plundering the familys foundation.

Problematic Pilgrimage:The Christian Science Monitortakes alookat the debate raging in the small Hungarian village of Bodrogkeresztr, which has become a hotspot for pilgrims visiting a Hasidic rabbis grave.

Seen on SNL:Alan Dershowitz, played by Jon Lovitz,showed upin a Saturday Night Live skit while visiting Jeffrey Epstein in hell. In aninterviewwithVanity Fair, Dershowitz said that he brought up his past ties to Epstein with Trump before he was hired.

Compare and Contrast:In an hour-long recording of a private dinner with Trump in 2018, former Rudy Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Frumanappear to compareTrump to the messiah while presenting him with a gift from Ukrainian Chief Rabbi Moshe Azman. Its like messiah is the person thats come to save the whole world. So its like youre the savior of the Ukraine. Parnas could be heard telling Trump to show the gift to Jared Kushner to explain its meaning.

House Party:Jeff Bezoshosted an Alfalfa afterpartyat his mansion in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Attendees included Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), Microsoft founder Bill Gates, actor Ben Stiller, David Rubenstein, David Solomon, and Dina Powell.

Open Skies:Israeli Interior Ministry Arye Deriannouncedon Sunday that for the first time in the countrys history, Israelis will be permitted to visit Saudi Arabia for religious purposes or for business trips limited to nine days.

Awaiting Mercy:Naama Issachar, the young Israeli-American woman imprisoned in Russia, has reportedly officiallyrequesteda pardon.

Rushing to Judgement:Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI)retweeted and later removed a tweet that claimed that a Palestinian boy whodrownedin a flooded ditch in East Jerusalem was kidnapped by Israeli settlers, assaulted and thrown in a water well.

The rest is here:

Gantz and Netanyahu arrive in DC to meet with Trump; plus why Gantz might have an easier time saying yes to peace plan - Jewish Insider

Countrywide protests signify a nod to new humanism that seeks to synthesise political ideas and identities – The Indian Express

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

Written by Amit Chaudhuri | Updated: January 25, 2020 11:34:53 am To be Indian is to be Hindu, the BJP has instructed us, in a way that mutilates both categories. The protests have replied: To be Indian is to be human.

For an occurrence to become an adventure, said Sartre in his brief memoir, Words, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it. Necessary and sufficient: By which I suppose Sartre means that what makes an adventure adventure-like is determined after the fact, when an inchoate event has a narrative and a sort of completeness imposed upon it in retrospect. You cant decide to have an adventure; you cant always know youre in one.

What Sartre said about the adventure, I often felt was true of history: That few people are actually aware of being in history, or in a significant historical moment. The present is frayed, open-ended, distracting, often humdrum: It doesnt have the polish and carefully-put-together air that history does in books, whether theyre scholarly works or novels, or in cinema. Most people Ive met whove lived through great historical change confess to not being aware at the time of the experience of the importance, the historicity, of what they were going through.

The events in India in the last month and a half have made me revise my view. For the first time I can think of, I am aware of living in history. It has all the frayed and unpredictable qualities of the present; yet its sui generis nature has taken us by surprise. We werent schooled to recognise it or led to expect it; but we know it for being history now that it has happened.

Opinion |Understand the CAA it is a humanitarian legislation

Im referring, of course, to the nationwide protests that began in the midst of the deep gloom of the Citizenship Amendment Bill becoming an act in both houses of Parliament. They first started in Assam for a particular set of reasons; then related to the fraught question of what it means to be Indian in Jamia Millia, Aligarh Muslim, and Jawaharlal Nehru universities; spreading then to streets and squares everywhere, breaking with the terrible normalcy of the BJPs second terms first seven months, replacing the post-CAA despair with incandescence and exuberance. No historical moment, or protest, is like another this much is clear now. Not only India, the world has known nothing like this before. Whats being formulated is the thought that to be Indian is not only to be secular it is to be human. Although the conflagration and revaluation was prompted by religion, its not God thats at issue here.

The words, idea of India, trip readily off the tongue. But what does being an Indian actually mean? At which point did the word begin to be used by the English, and when and how was it wrested away from the coloniser so that it became a keyword, a potent concept, for the natives? To be Indian was to be many things, but I think it also comprised an overhaul of the colonisers ownership of humanism. When a late 19th-century Englishman used the word human, he most often meant Englishman or, at most, European. When late 19th-century Indians, increasingly divorced from power in their own country, used the word Indian for themselves, they were inserting themselves into the history of humanism, which gave them the freedom to perform and be defined by a range of characteristic but seemingly contradictory actions. Whether or not the Indian was a Muslim or high or low-caste Hindu or a Christian or man or woman, they could read, equally, the Gita, the Bible, or Wordsworth, or listen to a qawalli or a bhajan, often in new secular contexts; to be Indian also meant one could oppose the English coloniser politically while being able to study, and be moved by, English poetry. This is how the experience and consciousness of being Indian expressed anew, and in an unprecedented way, what it meant to be human. That to be Indian was not a political identity alone. Besides civilisational pride, it was this modulation of humanism that gave Indians their sense of parity, their absence of a sense of cultural marginality, in relationship to their political rulers.

Opinion |With a flag, song and book: Reclaiming national symbols is an act of political genius and imagination

In the last half century, its not only liberalism and, in India, secularism that have been called out as fraudulent; humanism, of which the other two are offshoots, is a world-view thats been largely put on the shelf. The reasons for this are unarguable: To do with the powerful whether theyre European, or male, or elite, or all of these using the word human primarily to refer to those who are European, or male, or elite, and leaving the rest of the world outside the words purview. On these grounds, humanism was made illegitimate, both by the Left and the Right, as an idea that was more exclusionary than inclusive. It splintered into a variety of political identities, to do with class, race, gender, and postcolonial difference, which the word human had once enveloped and muffled. No one but a nostalgist would invoke humanism. It had had its day.

Or so it seemed until last month. The protests since mid-December participated in by women, men, and children of all religions and classes, almost entirely peaceful and mostly unaffiliated to any political party represent the first resurrection anywhere in the world of what one thought was an anachronism: The humanist legacy. The resurrection has brought renewed attention to the Constitution, which is a humanistic rather than a nationalistic document. To be Indian is to be Hindu, the BJP has instructed us, in a way that mutilates both categories. The protests have replied: To be Indian is to be human.

Most protests worldwide have had to do, with good reason, with the indispensable assertion of the interests of beleaguered groups and identities: Wed forgotten what it meant to fight for humanity because it had become blurred as an idea, or an ideal. Fighting for an ideal itself belonged, conceptually, to another epoch and value-system. Who remembers now that an ideal can be more pressing and immediate than self-interest? The world would have been unconvinced of this until recently. Yet, the Hindu or the Muslim person on the street rejecting the CAA is not there for sectarian reasons, but to fight for an ideal articulated decades before it was formalised in the Constitution. Humanism, not nationalism, determines the contexts in Shaheen Bagh and elsewhere, of national flags and pictures of Ambedkar and Gandhi and the recitations of the Preamble; yet not even Gandhi or Ambedkar, or any European liberal, could have dreamt that humanism could be so radical an instrument, cutting across religions, classes, castes, and genders.

Who would suspect, unless one discovers Shaheen Bagh or Park Circus, humanisms deep compatibility with religious identity, and the latters kinship with rationality? If theres one thing that interviews, comments, and placards on the street have revealed, its that the ordinary person is not to be respected for their ordinariness alone, nor the burkha-clad woman for her ethnicity and difference, but for speaking with a more profound common sense, clarity and rationality than our politicians. Remember, only a tiny sliver of the rational tradition belongs to Western science; much of it originates in spiritual movements that rebut bogus religiosity, going back to Buddhism and various devotional movements. All these cultural energies have gone into creating the new humanism were seeing taking birth on the street.

Realising, in an absolutely fresh way, that history, unlike the adventure, is not the recounting of a narrative but where we are now, Ive entered it in some of these streets and parks myself.

This article first appeared in the print edition on January 25, 2020 under the title Reclaiming the Republic. The writer is a novelist and essayist.

Opinion | CAA protests have inspired a new vocabulary of citizenship, but the Republic needs much more

For all the latest Opinion News, download Indian Express App

Excerpt from:

Countrywide protests signify a nod to new humanism that seeks to synthesise political ideas and identities - The Indian Express

From The Wire to everything else, the Anatomy of an Islamist: Into the mind of Sharjeel Imam, mastermind of Shaheen Bagh – OpIndia

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

The EndGame of the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act has become evident after the mastermind of the Shaheen Bagh protests revealed his intentions of cutting off the North East from the rest of India. Sharjeel Imam, the mastermind, also happens to be a columnist at The Wire. If one had read his eulogy of Jinnah that was published on The Wire, then he or she wouldnt have been surprised with the path he has chosen for himself.

Sharjeel Imam can be heard saying in the viral video, If five lakh Muslims are organized then we can cut off the North-east from the rest of India. If we cannot do so permanently, then at least we can do it for months. Our responsibility is to cut Assam from India, only then will the Government will hear our voice. If we have to help Assam then we will have to cut Assam from the rest of India.

More disturbingly, he speaks of isolating Northeast India by blocking the Chickens Neck. The Chickens Neck is a narrow stretch of land of about 22 kilometres located in West Bengal, that connects the northeastern states to the rest of India, with Nepal and Bangladesh lying on either side of the corridor. Thus, Sharjeel has made his intentions very clear, he wants a Civil War in the country and ultimately, another partition.

- Ad - - article resumes -

Before we speak of his article published on The Wire, we need to focus on some of the extremely problematic posts he has made on Facebook. It would give our readers some clue into how Sharjeel Imam thinks. First, theres the usual apologia for Yakub Memon and Afzal Guru that we have come to expect from Radical Muslims. According to them, executing two dreaded Islamic terrorists is valid grounds for Muslims to lose their faith in the country.

Source: Sharjeel Imams Facebook profile

Then, there is the justification for the Pulwama Terror Attack. Again, while it is true that sensible people would find this rhetoric extremely troubling, the justification for terrorism is a regular feature of the mainstream media. And Sharjeel Imam, here, is no different. He also accuses the USA, Israel and India of Islamophobia because the three countries are not willing to entertain justifications for terrorism.

Source: Sharjeel Imams Facebook profile

With regards to the ongoing protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, Sharjeels rhetoric is akin to the rhetoric peddled by the likes of Shehla Rashid and others who have continuously prevented secular parties from claiming that these are secular protests. Like others, Sharjeel, too, exhorts Muslims to stop liberals from hijacking what are essentially Muslim protests.

Source: Sharjeel Imams Facebook Profile

Now, we shall elaborate on the really problematic aspects of his ideology. It is pertinent to mention here that Sharjeel Imam is a student of Modern Indian History at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The most concerning aspect of his ideology is the fact that he places Jinnah in the context of India in the 21st century. He says about Jinnah, The more I read Jinnah Papers, the more I realize that almost all of Jinnahs political career was spent as the leader of a minority community, organising the community against odds, and against what he considered as the Hindu revivalist forces of his time, which intended to monopolize power after British left.

Source: Sharjeel Imams Facebook Profile

Sharjeel continues, Seventy years later, the Muslims and other minorities of India know too well what he meant. In other words, Jinnah who was an Indian Muslim for the first 71 of the 72 years of his life, is infinitely more relevant for the besieged Indian Muslim minority than for Pakistani Muslims. In very specific ways, as an Indian Muslim politician fighting for minority rights, his methods, his arguments, his successes and his failures are lessons for us.

Sharjeel Imam goes on to assert that Indian Muslims should study Jinnah in order to understand the myth of Secular Congress. This is extremely problematic rhetoric. Sharjeel hasnt limited himself to praising Jinnah in the manner in which Mani Shankar Aiyar of the Congress party praises Jinnah. From his portrayal of Jinnah, it is clear that he wants Indian Muslims to emulate Jinnah and seize power in the country.

Read: An enemy community was foisted upon the Muslims after Independence: Shaheen Bagh mastermind Sharjeel Imam reveals real-agenda behind CAA protests

Where his thoughts about Jinnah become really clear is his article published on The Wire. From his eulogy of Jinnah on The Wire, it is evident that Sharjeel does not find any fault with Jinnahs conduct that led to the partition of the country. He does not even believe that partition was necessarily a bad thing. He says, In order to demystify Jinnah and to resolve such contradictions, a fuller discussion of Partition should have been a part of our educational setup. However, it has been made impossible to know such a historic figure by attributing violence of Partition to him. This as an attempt by Congress to hide its failures to accommodate the genuine Muslim demands and aspirations for political proportional representation.

Sharjeel did not stop there of course. He says that the questions raised by Jinnah are just the starting point of a larger debate which will inevitably take place again and again, as the situation of Indian Muslims is made to worsen. He believes that Jinnah led a righteous struggle to protect Indian Muslims from Hindu rule. Also, Sharjeel goes to great lengths to prove that Jinnah was a leader of Indian Muslims. He says, Indian Muslims, despite having been indoctrinated for generations now, retain some memory of Partition and Jinnah. For many of them, Jinnah is the author of Partition and yet one of the greatest leaders of Muslim India in the last century, who made the Muslim League into a national party by mobilising millions of Muslims across British India.

He states further, Jinnahs communalism is positive communalism as discussed above, and need not be understood through the contemporary meaning of the word. He did not believe that India was a nation, as is shown by the frequent use of the term continent as well as subcontinent. He was merely representing one community in this grand ocean of communities, and in this process, he was trying to secure rights for all numerically inferior communities.

Read: Its official: Endgame of Shaheen Bagh protest is second partition of India. Listen to what mastermind and The Wire columnist says

Sharjeel adds, Jinnah argued that it does not matter if we are 15% or 25%, unless we receive safeguards, they have all the resources to monopolise power. In other words, the Muslim majority provinces chose to secede rather than stay in a Hindu-dominated centralised India, as they saw no other option. Hence Partition is not their responsibility, it is their compulsion by the conditions created by Congress.

Lastly, according to Sharjeel, Jinnah raised questions which are still relevant. As the largest religious minority in the world, Indian Muslims, are one of the major victims of majoritarian democracy. It is the political struggle of these hundreds of millions of besieged Muslims which will define the meaning of plural democracy for the coming centuries. He ends the article with the words, The AMU portrait of Jinnah must not go. If anything, we need thousands more.

Thus, it is fairly obvious by now that Sharjeel Imam wishes to replicate what Jinnah achieved in 1947. It is also clear that he considers Jinnah as an Indian Muslim who became disillusioned with politics in the country and thus embarked upon a righteous quest to partition India along religious lines. Whats really troubling here is the fact that a widely read Indian media outlet provided a platform to such an individual to spread his propaganda.

Questions must be asked about the mainstream media and intellectual elite who have provided cover to such individuals to run their propaganda. It also shows that the liberal class can be fooled by a Jihadi if he is good enough with words. The manner in which Sharjeel has eulogized Jinnah and portrayed his Jihad against India as a righteous struggle to protect the interests of Muslims should have been the first sign that he is an extremely dangerous individual. However, since he was able to cloak his bigotry in fanciful words, Sharjeel was given great respect by the liberal fraternity. It only serves to demonstrate how gullible the liberal establishment is.

Furthermore, the liberal establishment should at least now stop to reconsider the danger that their rhetoric poses to peace in the country. The love for Jinnah, the justifications for Islamic Terrorism in Kashmir, the whitewashing of Yakub Memon and Afzal Guru, liberals should at least now realize that they are only furthering the interests of Radical Islam by peddling such extremely dubious rhetoric. The liberal establishment should also realize what their whitewashing of history and peddling narratives of Islamophobia without any shred of evidence has led to. It has led to a situation where dangerous individuals like Sharjeel Islam are using the cover their rhetoric provides in order to further the cause of Radical Islam.

Read: Jinnah wali Azadi slogans raised at Shaheen Bagh: The true face of anti-CAA protests and what these slogans mean

It is also pertinent to mention here that Sharjeel Imams rhetoric eulogizing Jinnah is textbook Pakistani propaganda. He is regurgitating the propaganda points that the Pakistani establishment makes. Sharjeel doesnt once refer to the genocides that were committed by the Muslims in their pursuit of Pakistan, he doesnt once mention the call for Direct Action Day that led to the slaughter of innumerable Hindus. He conveniently ignores the genocide of Bengali Hindus that Pakistan committed in 1971. All of this was Jinnahs tree yielding fruits. And yet, Sharjeel doesnt once refer to them and continues to whitewash his legacy while demonizing the Congress party.

There is a certain kind of truth that only radicals like Sharjeel Imam are capable of saying. It is the king of truth that liberals try to whitewash for the cause of secularism. Where Sharjeel Imam really distinguished himself, prior to his recent call for civil war, is when he declared in a Facebook post that Muslims did not choose India due to ideals of secularism. He said, and it is true, that Muslims remained in India due to their property and other reasons.

Source: Sharjeel Imams Facebook Profile

The above Facebook post from September 2019 is the biggest slap on the face of the likes of Asaduddin Owaisi who like to boast about how they chose secular India over Islamic Pakistan. Imagine if a BJP politician had said such a thing. The entire liberal establishment would have nailed him to a cross. And here we have Sharjeel Imam who is provided a platform by The Wire and the liberal establishment which have helped the mastermind of the Shaheen Bagh protests at every turn by painting these protests as secular and about saving the constitution.

Sharjeel Imam has also flaunted the fact that Indian Muslims cheer for the Pakistan cricket team. He sees nothing wrong with it and, in fact, exhorts Muslims to not be on the defensive about it. Most conspicuously, however, he says that growing up, he had great knowledge about Saeed Answar but did not have much idea about Saurav Ganguly. He asks his audience to figure out the reason behind it.

Source: Sharjeel Imams Facebook Profile

The evidence of his bigotry is abundant in his Facebook posts. In another Facebook post, Sharjeel denigrates Idol-Worship and calls it Shirk. He also insults polytheism, the form of religiosity most Hindus subscribe to, by using it as an insult. He equates atheism, secularism, humanism, even nationalism, to Shirk.

Source: Sharjeel Imams Facebook Profile

Thus, what is clear from Sharjeel Imams Facebook posts and his eulogy of Jinnah is that he doesnt see any difference between Pakistani and Indian Muslims. He equates Nationalism to Shirk because the Ummah transcends national boundaries. He asks Indian Muslims to not be ashamed of celebrating Pakistans cricket team because he believes it is natural for Indian Muslims to identify themselves more with Pakistan than with India. In fact, he encourages Indian Muslims to feel that way. At the most fundamental level, Sharjeel Imam sees Jinnah as an Indian Muslim who revolted against Hindus in order to create the Islamic State of Pakistan. He sees Jinnahs Jihad as a righteous struggle for the protection of Muslim interests and he believes the oppressed Muslims of India should tread a similar path.

Read: Shaheen Bagh protests: Deep dive into how JNU student and The Wire columnist Sharjeel Imam went from let us burn Constitution to saving it

Let this not be forgotten. The liberal establishment helped a Radical Islamist like Sharjeel Imam achieve his objective perfectly. While the Liberal Establishment accuses ordinary BJP voters of being fascists, they are the ones who collaborated with someone who whitewashed a Jihadist who was responsible for the death of millions and millions of Hindus.

Sharjeel Imam has been at the forefront of the anti-CAA protests from the very beginning. In a video that had gone viral on social media by the 17th of December, he could be seen inciting Muslims to do Chakkajam in Delhi and wherever they have sufficient numbers. He called for Muslims to bring entire cities to a halt. There are over 30% urban Muslims in UP. Do you have no shame at all? Why cannot you do Chakkajam in UP? The area in Bihar where I am from, the rural Muslim population is 6% while the urban Muslim population is 24%. Indian Muslims mostly live in cities. So it is upon you. You can bring your cities to a halt. If anyone asks you not to, disown them he was heard saying in the viral video.

There is another aspect that needs to be investigated here. A thorough investigation needs to be conducted into the extent of the collusion, if there was any, between Sharjeel Imam and the students of Jamia who gave a call for Jihad. As we have reported earlier, days before violence erupted in the national capital, the students Barkha Dutt labelled Shero gave a call for violent Jihad. While Sharjeel Imam eulogized the man responsible for the partition of the country, the Jamia Jihadans eulogized the men responsible for the Moplah massacre which resulted in the slaughter of hundreds and thousands of Hindus. Like Sharjeel, one of them did express great grief at the execution of Yakub Memon.

The role of the media also needs to be investigated amidst the current unrest. Slogans such as Hinduon se Azadi and yet, they were whitewashed the media. Slogans of Jinnah Wali Azadi were raised at the Shaheen Bagh protests and still, these protests were painted as secular. It needs to be investigated whether the Liberal Media is doing so due to their ideological affinity towards Radical Islam or whether there are more sinister reasons behind it.

The role of politicians needs to be investigated as well. AAP MLA Amanatullah Khan was spotted with Sharjeel Imam, it also needs to be mentioned that Amanatullah himself is accused of inciting riots. Hehad created ruckus outside Delhi police demanding the release of a 22-year-old Muslim youth named Furkan who is accused of instigating riots in Jamia Millia University in December. There is every indication of a grand conspiracy here. And as had said earlier, this is truly the Khilafat 2.0.

Black Coffee Enthusiast. Post Graduate in Psychology. Bengali.

From The Wire to everything else, the Anatomy of an Islamist: Into the mind of Sharjeel Imam, mastermind of Shaheen Bagh - OpIndia

Brent Csutoras on the Evolution of Social Media, the Rise of SEJ & His Fascinating Journey [PODCAST] – Search Engine Journal

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android |

You really, really, really need to have somebody that you can get along with. Your partners and the people that youre involved with, you have to spend some time getting to know how they operate under distress and have a plan for how youre going to deal with the financials Nobody wants to invest when youre going to the next level, but I think a real, true business structure is essential.

For episode 180 of The Search Engine Journal Show, its my turn to interview Brent Csutoras, Co-Owner of Search Engine Journal and a seasoned digital marketing consultant.

Csutoras talks about the evolution of social media, the rise of Search Engine Journal, and his fascinating journey in the industry.

Brent is a digital marketing consultant with over 13 years of combined experience in SEO and social media marketing.

He is also a co-owner at Search Engine Journal and founder of its parent company, Alpha Brand Media.

Aside from having founded various digital agencies throughout the years, he has also spoken at many of the top marketing conferences, such as Pubcon, Affiliate Summit, SMX Advanced, State of Search, SES, UnGagged, SEOktoberfest, and more.

An avid futurist, Brent enjoys focusing on the implications of future technology on society and societal growth.

In todays episode, were turning the tables and putting The Search Engine Journal Shows own Brent Csutoras in the hot seat.

How to connect with Brent Csutoras:

Twitter | LinkedIn | BrentCsutoras.com

This podcast is brought to you byAhrefsandOpteo.

Visit ourpodcast archiveto listen to other Search Engine Journal Showpodcasts!

Image Credits

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android |

See the original post:

Brent Csutoras on the Evolution of Social Media, the Rise of SEJ & His Fascinating Journey [PODCAST] - Search Engine Journal

Finding the sweet spot in the food conversation – RealAgriculture

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

How is agriculture and food production impacting the planet? Many naysayers believe our farming and food system is taking its toll, linking agriculture to 10 to 15 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, while painting it as a resource hog that gobbles up 40 percent of the earths land base and 70 percent of its water.

Jack Bobo, however, believes that agriculture has done a good job feeding an ever-expanding global population. Bobo, a futurist with a hefty food resume, including stops in the U.S. Department of State and the biotechnology industry, says unfortunately most environmental and conservation groups dont share the full story of agriculture.

Bobo admits that agriculture does have its challenges the nitrification of water and deforestation, for example but if you look at where weve come from things look dramatically different, he says.

At the Ontario Certified Crop Advisors Association annual meeting earlier this month Bobo, CEO of Futurity Consulting, shared a different view of agriculture: one that reveals significant progress and efficiencies that have delivered tremendous benefits. He notes that between 1980 and 2011, U.S. farmers reduced the amount of water required to produce a bushel of corn by 50 per cent, while the level of soil erosion caused by each bushel dropped by 60 percent.

Things are wildly better today than they were in the past, but people dont see those productivity gains and believe things are moving in the wrong direction, he says.

Bobo also shared hunger statistics to support his point. He noted that 800 million people on the planet go to bed hungry, about 12 per cent of world population. That sounds like a broken food system but if you went back 30 years ago that number would have been 24 per cent of all the people on the earth, he says. Fifty years ago, 36 percent of all people went to bed hungry. Things are not bad and getting worse, theyre good and getting better, but not fast enough.

In this interview, Bobo tells RealAgricultures Bernard Tobin that when telling agricultures story one of the big challenges farmers face is the declining influence of scientific solutions and evidence. If you lead with science, you are going to lose with science, he says.

Bobo believes its critical for farmers to personalize agricultures story. Farmers need to tell people why they do what they do, acknowledge peoples concerns and understand why people worry about their food. Thats how you build trust, says Bobo. If you build trust then theres an opportunity to engage in a scientific conversation. (Story continues after the interview.)

When he looks at population growth models global population is expected to peak in the 2050s before slowly declining in the second half of the century Bobo notes that agriculture will need consumers blessing to utilize science, technology and innovation if it hopes to meet the planets food needs. In the next 30 to 40 years, we have to produce as much food as we produced in the past 10,000 years of human civilization. Thats an enormous challenges, he says.

To have the necessary freedom to operate and utilize technology advances, Bobo believes all agriculture stakeholders will have to engage with consumers to help build public trust and de-escalate the food conversation. Science tells us what we can do, he notes, but its the public that tells us what we should do.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android |

Follow this link:

Finding the sweet spot in the food conversation - RealAgriculture

Giant Comet Struck the Earth Seeding Microbes That Started Earth-Based Life – Science Times

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

A new genesis of life throughout the cosmos is now proposed, and it is just mind-boggling. It postulates that life in other parts of the cosmos was caused by a near collision of a proto-earth, with a comet. This giant comet carried away remnants of microbes that hitched and seeded part of the cosmos.

This process can be called "interstellar panspermia", to seed the stars with Terran lifeforms.

It seems that life did persist on the asteroid surface as the comet flew through space, these space bugs evolving into more robust life forms. Waiting for the chance to be released in a suitable world, similar to proto-earth. This galactic Noah's ark must have carried quite a variety of lifeforms, until entering its last journey and depositing its live cargo. These creatures might be out there, earth-born but different.

A study that proposes, one of the most eccentric ideas regarding life in the universe, is by Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb, both astrophysicists at Harvard University. Digressing on the major ideas that their paper suggests is very dramatic and chaotic compared to other ideas. In contrast to the idea that earth cannot have seeded life, because collisions with comets are sparse or were not as frequent.

When and what specific epochs in the earth need to be cleared up, and to prove this theory. The earth is old and proving scrapes with comets is a tall order. The proof has been known to show up in unexpected places too.

Proving the comet hitching microbes is not far from other concepts thought to be false. Notions are always challenged, and it is up to the scientist to provide proof for his theory. A sun-centered solar system was once, very "earth-centric", quantum physic was not valid according to Newtonian models, or bacterium on a wild stellar-joyride that crashes and seeds a compatible world. Most are accepted except the microbes on a stellar joyride, it can be proven according to prior human history.

All these ideas have a basis and not all pure guesswork, when small rockets in the 70s encountered bacteria in the higher atmosphere, in colonies. If comets that invade the orbits of planets, then impacts are possible but not impossible to happen. Comets are porous and might shelter microbes from radiation and ill effects of living in outer space, before crashing.

It might not be the most acceptable explanation, but the survival of bacteria in xeno-worlds is a worthy field of study for xeno-biologists. This portent to be another field of application for scientists to investigate.

Not all scientists agree, and Stephen Kane from the University of California was not convinced that earth-born life was ever exported to the stars. It would be stacked against phenomenal odds to survive as well.

Siraj and Loeb's propositions have to be proven on several points, which leads to everything stacked against it as acceptable truth.

a. When the comet collided with the atmosphere, how did the bacteria stay on despite the incredible velocity?

b. Is the way bacteria attach to comets explainable?

c. How were bacteria able to reach under the surface?

d. Is it even possible to survive the radioactivity of the comet?

e. These rockets experiments are sitting on the loose ground not very plausible.

There is no sure outcome for the problem, and if a giant comet did take along microbes, these then seeded somewhere out there. We will never know, but it might just happen.

Originally posted here:

Giant Comet Struck the Earth Seeding Microbes That Started Earth-Based Life - Science Times

Comets receive Xpress Wellness Team of the Week honor – Duncan Banner

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

Facing county rivals and going a perfect 3-0 then taking home the Stephens County Tournament title is how the Velma-Alma Comets received the Xpress Wellness Team of the Week honor.

Being the No. 1 seed in the 89th Annual Stephens County Tournament, the Comets got their first win this past Tuesday against Bray-Doyle winning 85-30 to head to the semi-finals.

Austin Hunt, an All-Tournament team member, had 20 points, tournament MVP Morgan Cox had 12 points, Tyler Stewart had 12 as well and Clay Wright had 10 points in the game.

In the semi-finals of the tournament the Comets got the 59-43 victory over Davis and Cox and Jace Saville showed their offensive might to break into the championship game.

In the third quarter of the game Saville hit three from the field while getting baskets from Hunt, Cox and Stewart to build the lead to 14 points heading into the final quarter of play.

Hitting buckets in the fourth quarter was Hunt, Saville and Tristan Wainscott and they were able to withstand a rally from the Wolves to make it to their second straight championship game.

The Comets faced off against the No. 2 seed Marlow Outlaws in the championship where extra time was needed for the 57-50 overtime victory.

Hunt hit a three bucket while Cox and Stewart hit two buckets as the Comets took the 7-0 lead before an eventful fourth quarter sent the Comets into overtime to win a repeat title.

Wainscott sealed the deal with two free throws to put them up by 10 with only a last second three falling for Marlow and the Comets repeated for the second year in a row the county title.

Comets head coach Kenny Bare said it is a great feeling for his team to take home the team of the week honor and bringing home the big trophy to Velma-Almas gym.

We are proud to receive the award for team of the week and are very proud to bring back the SCT Trophy to V-A, Bare said.

Having a record of 16-2 on the year and in the final rankings was the No. 5 Class A team and the Comets start their final five games at home against the Alex Longhorns.

The game with the Longhorns and Comets had not gone final as of press time and will be posted in the Thursday edition of The Duncan Banner.

Their next game will be homecoming as they host Healdton this Friday with the Lady Comets starting at 6:30 p.m. and then the boys following at 8 p.m.

Read the original here:

Comets receive Xpress Wellness Team of the Week honor - Duncan Banner

1/24/20 SPORTS EXPRESS: Comets give up four straight goals in loss to Senators; Whitesboro boys basketball remains undefeated with win over RFA;…

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

This week's featured Athlete of the Week is: Slater Constantine, Sauquoit Valley Track and Field

AHLSenators 5, Comets 2*

Men's Ice HockeyAmherst 2, Hamilton 2 Final/OT

Women's Ice HockeyNeumann 2, Utica 6

Boys Ice HockeyOswego 1, Clinton 3Auburn 0, Whitesboro 3Fulton 6, Mohawk Valley 2Girls Ice HockeyClinton 5, Alex Bay 2Men's BasketballHartwick 76, Nazareth 80Fredonia 40, SUNY Oneonta 81

Women's BasketballHartwick 69, Nazareth 51Fredonia 39, SUNY Oneonta 49

Girls BasketballWhitesboro 42, Rome Free Academy 51*Herkimer 44, New York Mills 50*Holland Patent 34, Cooperstown 43Central Valley Academy 39, Oneida 60South Lewis 21, Lowville 56Sherburne-Earlville 52, Waterville 67West Canada Valley 60, Sauquoit Valley 14Morrisville-Eaton 40, Westmoreland 51CBA 63, New Hartford 68Canastota 39, Oriskany 48Camden 26, Vernon-Verona-Sherrill 65Liverpool 53, West Genesee 58Dolgeville 33, Clinton 60

Boys BasketballRome Free Academy 70, Whitesboro 77*Proctor 54, Notre Dame 49*Vernon-Verona-Sherrill 49, Camden 35Cazenovia 63, Holland Patent 75Frankfort-Schuyler 57, Adirondack 55Oneida 54, Central Valley Academy 49

Girls VolleyballMount Markham 3, Waterville 0Morrisville-Eaton 1, Oneida 3

Boys BowlingVernon-Verona-Sherrill 8, Whitesboro 3

*Game highlights in attached video

Don't forget to call in scores and stats to: (315) 768-2254 or email us at: sports@wktv.com

Second Amendment Rally Seems to Have Anti-Gun Extremists Disappointed That it was so Peaceful – NRA ILA

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

In the days leading up to the annual lobby day in Richmond, Va.where thousands of Virginians traditionally lobby their legislators on numerous issues an unprecedented number of supporters of the Second Amendment were expected to show up in opposition to the virulently anti-gun legislative agenda of Governor Ralph Northam and Virginia Democrats. In response, anti-gun advocates and their supporters in the media tried to paint a picture of an impending violent confrontation.

Of course, defaming law-abiding gun owners is nothing new for those who abhor the Second Amendment.

Any time a violent criminal uses a firearm to commit a heinous act, extremists dedicated to banning firearms attempt to blame anyone who supports our right to keep and bear arms. Every time a state legislature passes legislation to make it easier for American citizens to defend themselves or otherssuch as by making it easier to carry a firearm for personal protectionthose opposed to the idea of personal protection predict future tragedies committed by the law-abiding, or question the rationality of such measures.

The recent heroic actions by Texas permit holder Jack Wilson highlight this sad strategy of the anti-gun community.

When Texas law was changed so that places of worship could have armed security, former Vice President Joe Biden questioned its rationality. After Jack Wilson saved countless lives, it became yet another reminder of Bidens gift for gaffes to create problems for the 2020 Democrat presidential candidate.

Even after the fact, anti-gun New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg had the audacity to suggest that Wilson should not have been allowed to legally act in the defense of countless congregants facing an imminent lethal threat.

Bloombergs campaign mouthpiece, Kevin Sheekey, even tried to walk back Bloomberg questioning Wilsons action this week, claiming, Mike Bloomberg supports [Jack Wilsons] right to own a gun with a background check. We salute him, I salute him.

Sheekey went on to say, The question is where he and Mike Bloomberg disagree, which is should anyone who walks out of an insane asylum be able to get a gun? Mike Bloomberg would say no,Im not sure what other people would say.

Of course, this clarificationhas nothing to do with Bloombergs assertion that law-abiding citizens cannot be trusted to act responsibly when using a firearm to defend themselves or others. And Sheekeys use of the term insane asylum,which we are pretty sure is not on the list of approved PC terms when discussing mental health, may require additional clarification.

So, as deplorable as it is to see the anti-gun crowds narrative that law-abiding gun owners represent some sort of threat, we are sadly accustomed to it.

Before the legislative session had even begun, Virginia Democratic members of Congress threatened law-abiding citizens with the Virginia National Guard to confiscate firearms.

The week before gun owners and Second Amendment advocates gathered in Richmond this past Monday to voice their opposition to the Virginia Democrat gun-ban agenda, Governor Northam ramped up the ridiculous rhetoric.

Northam and Bloombergsbought-and-paid-for Virginia General Assembly had already rushed through legislation to ban firearms at the Capitol. This was just prior to NRAs own day for legislative action, where we invited members to join us in speaking out against Northams extremist agenda. This event, which even Governor Northam described as a peaceful event,saw more than 2,000 NRA members gather in Richmond, without incident (as we would expect).

Even though gun owners regularly gather by the thousands, and sometimes tens-of-thousands, without any problems, Northam decided to ramp up the anti-gun hysteria ahead of Mondays event by declaring a State of Emergency,and expanding the zones where lawfully possessed firearms are prohibited around the Capitol.

And the media fanned the flames of Northams attempt to paint law-abiding gun owners as dangerous.

Prior to Mondays event, fear-mongering headlines were everywhere.

Time.com went with, Tensions are High, Extremists are Expected to Attend.

Yahoo! News ran a piece by Bloombergs primary anti-gun shill, Shannon Watts, which included in its headline, Extremists Plan to Rally in Virginia.

An MSNBC.com headline claimed, As gun rights rally looms in Virginia, Richmond residents fear another Charlottesville.

The day of the event, more of the same, and sometimes worse.

Huffington Post proclaimed, Thousands Of Pro-Gun Activists And Far-Right Extremists Swarm Richmond, Virginia.

Yahoo! News announced, Tensions Are High, Some Protesters Are Showing Up Armed.

Craig Melvin, an MSNBC anchor, received quite a bit of push-back for stating that thousands of white nationalists attended the rally.

The media, of course, were not alone with hyping the hysteria.

Harvards own David Hogg apparently took a break from his studies to tweet (his favorite form of communication) a plethora of insults and incendiary jibes at the men and women who took the time to peacefully express their political views. Hogg made references to white supremacistsand nazis(sic), said youre a fascistof many attendees, and said some who showed up that they actually think there (sic) in Call of Duty. He even took the time to tweet Donald Trump is an idiot.

So, thats what you apparently get with a Harvard education these days. Maybe next semester he will take a class on civility, or even English.

When the event was over, and no acts of violence had been reported (which was no surprise to anyone actually familiar with law-abiding gun owners), many in the media felt compelled to actually report the rally ended peacefully. Thats not news, unless you spent the days before the event trying to foment fear over the potential for violence. Sadly, it sounds more like disappointment.

But the denigration of what was estimated as 22,000+ gun rights activists simply using their collective political voice to oppose attacks on our cherished freedoms didnt end with the close of this Lobby Day.

Before, during, and after the rally, countless media hacks tried to portray the event as less an expression of support for the Second Amendment, and more a gathering of white men who, as Hogg put it, are white supremacists,nazis,and fascists.

In fact, the rally was incredibly diverse, with men and women from across the racial spectrum. It was far more inclusive than, say, the stage at the last Democrat Presidential debate.

One of the more egregious diatribes post-rally came in the form of a GQ column penned by Talia Lavin. While most in the media reported on how peaceful the event was (again, not news, but expected behavior from law-abiding gun owners), Lavins fevered, anti-gun imagination projected an image of a rally with the promise that bloodshed might happen at any time.

But was she even there? Unlikely.

Her column appears to be cobbled together from various other news articles, and second-hand reports from [r]eporter friends who planned to attend, and a leftist activistwho claimed she was there.

The idea that someone who likely wasnt even at the event could offer insight as to the mood of the event isnt Lavins only problem. The researchshe did for her GQ piece was filled with errors.

She claimed some 22,000 people from all over the country had turned up to protest the gun control laws recently passed by the Virginia State Senate. In fact, the rally had been planned for some time, as a protest for all of the anti-gun legislation Governor Northam and his ilk had been threatening to pass since last year.

Lavin also claimed that NRAhanded out1,000 free 30-round magazines to gun owners before the rally.If by before the rallyshe meant a week before, during our own, separate day for legislative action, then that would be accurate. But that doesnt fit into the image of a scene she described as a spectacular arsenal of weaponry.A description she crafted based, presumably, on photos and video of the event. So well just make an educated guess that her sloppy work resulted in her conflating two different events, either intentionally or not, to feed her negative narrative.

Again, rather than doing actual research, Lavin relied on a news article or two to also claim, The effects on locals amounted to a sweeping petrification. Due to Mondays event, Richmond natives closed their businesses downtownfrom a 7-11 near the Capitol to a barbershop.Rather than the image of a shuttered downtown Lavin tried to create, many, if not most, businesses remained open, and flourished with the concentrated influx of customers.

She also brought up the notion that some groups chose to cancel their own Lobby Day events. Some may have simply not wanted to deal with competing for space with 22,000+ other citizens who were making their political voices heard. Sadly, some may have been scared away by Governor Northam and media hacks like Lavin projecting a sense of impending doom.

Lavin quoted from a press release by one group that claimed it canceled because of its fear over heavily armed white supremacistsseeking to incite violence. But that came from the rabidly anti-gun Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (formerly the National Coalition to Ban Handguns). It seems far more likely the group saw an opportunity to take advantage of the hysteria created by Northam and the media, get a little attention, and avoid showing up with a handful of activists that would just get dejected and go home early.

Now, the name Talia Lavin may sound familiar to some. In 2018 she resigned from her position as fact-checkerfor the New Yorker after she posted a picture of an ICE agent, and implied he had a Nazi tattoo. He did not.

So, apparently attention to detail has long been a failure for Talia. Coincidentally, like Hogg, she is also a product of Harvard.

So, before, during, and after a rally in Richmond that saw 22,000+ Second Amendment advocates come together to voice their opposition to legislation designed to infringe on the rights of law-abiding gun owners, anti-gun extremists, politicians, and their enablers in the media did everything they could to malign the attendees. They projected an image of impending violence at the thought of so many gun owners in one place, then seemed to imply it was newsthat the rally was peaceful.

Again, gun owners gathering together peacefully is not news; thats the norm.

Then again, anti-gun extremists, politicians, and their enablers in the media working together to malign law-abiding gun owners, sadly, isnt really newseither. Its just another day that ends with y.

Read the original:

Second Amendment Rally Seems to Have Anti-Gun Extremists Disappointed That it was so Peaceful - NRA ILA

Texas shooting security guard warns of attacks on Second Amendment, criticizes Bloomberg | TheHill – The Hill

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

The man who is credited with stopping a shooter during an attack at a church in Texas by opening fire and killing the gunman has sharply criticized a gun control policy touted by former New York City MayorMike Bloomberg.

Jack Wilson told The Dallas Morning Newsin an interview that he thinks a gun control plan pushed by Bloomberg, a 2020presidential hopeful running in the Democratic primary, would have left him helpless to respond to the shooter.

If we were operating under Bloombergs position, we wouldnt have had any guns in there, Wilson told the newspaper. The outcome would have been extremely more severe than it was.

A spokeswoman for Bloomberg's campaign responded to the claim, telling the newspaper that under Bloomberg's proposal, the shooter's criminal history would have prevented him from obtaining a firearm.

"Mr. Wilson certainly acted bravely, but the killer had a history of violence and mental health issues and under Mikes plan, he would never [have] had a gun, the spokeswoman said.

Bloomberg, who has made gun control a centralissue of his 2020 campaign, previously addressed the Texas shooting during an address in Montgomery, Ala.

"It may be true that someone in the congregation had his own gun and killed the person who murdered two other people, but its the job of law enforcement to have guns and to decide when to shoot," the former mayor said at the time, adding, "You just do not want the average citizen carrying a gun in a crowded place."

Bloomberg'sremarks earned him criticism from President TrumpDonald John TrumpDemocrats outraged over White House lawyer's claim that some foreign involvement in elections is acceptable Senators take reins of impeachment trial in marathon question session White House announces task force to monitor coronavirus MORE, who tweeted days afterward:"Now Mini Mike Bloomberg is critical of Jack Wilson, who saved perhaps hundreds of people in a Church because he was carrying a gun, and knew how to use it. Jack quickly killed the shooter, who was beginning a rampage. Mini is against the 2nd A. His ads are Fake, just like him!"

Now Mini Mike Bloomberg is critical of Jack Wilson, who saved perhaps hundreds of people in a Church because he was carrying a gun, and knew how to use it. Jack quickly killed the shooter, who was beginning a rampage. Mini is against the 2nd A. His ads are Fake, just like him!

See the article here:

Texas shooting security guard warns of attacks on Second Amendment, criticizes Bloomberg | TheHill - The Hill

Yavapai County Board of Supervisors to Vote on Second Amendment Resolution – Signals AZ

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

By Kristina Abbey | on January 30, 2020

"Talking Glass" Audible Stories on Signals AZ made possible by The Fain Signature Group - Celebrating 60 Years of Community Building

On February 5, 2020, the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors will consider a Resolution that mirrors the Resolution approved by the Mohave County Board of Supervisors, which supported the Second Amendment of the United Stated Constitution and declared Mohave County a Second Amendment Sanctuary County.

The discussion by the board regarding protection of the Second Amendment started at a regular Board of Supervisors meeting in Cottonwood on December 18, 2019. Preceding a presentation by Myrna Lieberman, Jon Mitchell and Drake Mitchell regarding support for the second amendment of the Constitution of the United States, Supervisor Garrison allowed for a period of public comment. With 17 Public Participation forms completed, the public spoke for nearly 40 minutes in support of, and opposition to, supporting the Second Amendment and identifying Yavapai County as a Sanctuary County.

At the first regular Yavapai County Board of Supervisors meeting for 2020, Chairman Craig Brown opened the meeting to public comment. Estimates placed the total number of people in attendance at nearly 500 with 388 of them completing Public Participation forms and 91 of those requesting the opportunity to speak in support of or against the Second Amendment Proclamation scheduled to be voted on by the Board.

After nearly three and half hours of public comment, Supervisor Mary Mallory put forth a motion to table the proclamation, and Vice-Chairman Garrison seconded the motion, to give the board time to consider the opinions expressed and produce something that reflected the public comments regarding the Proclamation.

Yavapai County Board of Supervisors Chairman Craig Brown said, We listened to and understand the concerns of the public, both for and against this issue, and I believe that this Resolution will address most of those concerns. It is my hope and belief that this Board will come together and support this resolution when we vote on it Wednesday.

The Resolution has been attached to this Press Release and the public is encouraged to read it.

The Board of Supervisors meeting on February 5 will be live-streamed to the Cottonwood Board of Supervisors meeting room at 10 S. 6th Street in Cottonwood AZ. Anyone wishing to view the meeting, that is not able to attend in person, can visit Yavapai.us or follow this link:www.yavapai.us/meetings/video-list to watch the meeting online. Video is only supported in the Edge browser & on Mobile Devices.

Mohave Countys Resolution has been attached to this Press Release and can also be found on their website or by following the link below. lfportal.mohavecounty.us/bos/0/doc/1557984/Page1.aspx

More here:

Yavapai County Board of Supervisors to Vote on Second Amendment Resolution - Signals AZ

Letter: Here’s the truth about recent Second Amendment rally – INFORUM

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Danzig

I've been hoping and waiting for someone to rebut the knee-jerk liberal reaction Tony Bender had to the the diverse Americans who attended the Second Amendment rally in Virginia in his Jan. 23rd column. Rather than a a serious take on the subject he resorted to snarky purial comments that ignored the facts.

Calling those in attendance "white nationalists" or "white supremacists" was the laziest cliched reaction the liberal left has. I guess he forgot to add the label of homophobes.

One of my favorite speakers was the keynote speaker who happened to be a young black woman whose first comment was "Man, this is the worst white nationalist gathering I've ever been to they had to bring me in." She knew how the event was going to be portrayed despite the facts.

He wrote what I assume he thought was a pithy remark about the attendees wearing masks, evoking images of black clad armed invaders with their faces covered. A simple search would have shown him that among the estimated 22,000 people in peaceful attendance, only one person was arrested. That person was arrested for breaking the law about covering one's face with a mask. That person was a young black woman.

Another simple search would have found the vocal group surrounding the Black Guns Matter movement. They were in attendance standing up for the original mission of the NRA, which was to make sure the African American population was armed for their own protection. A cursory search would have found that the local members of Antifa were there. Were they marching against the Second Amendment and protecting the world from the white nationalists? No those silly people didn't realize they too were white nationalists and were marching with the Second Amendment supporters.

Another group that was present was led by Veronica Slootsky on behalf of the Jewish community.

We have a lot of concerns about safety of the Jewish community, given these new laws, The proposed gun laws would prevent Jewish people carrying guns at religious events where they already feel targeted.

A rabbi wouldnt even be able to carry a weapon in his own synagogue, attendee Steve Birnbaum said. SB 35, that allows a municipality to ban firearms at permitted events, our Hanukkah menorah lightings are permitted events. Our highest risk events we would be left defenseless.

Please, editors of the Forum, we understand that you try to hire inflammatory writers to throw out red meat, but if you wish to remain relevant and trusted at least check the veracity of the so-called opinions. They are diatribes that are written up without looking into the facts of the event but rather what the writer believes the event to be about. You can not complain that this country is becoming divided and uncivil and then contribute to it in this way.

Letter: Here's the truth about recent Second Amendment rally - INFORUM

Select Page ::