Independent Report Declares News.Bitcoin.com the Top Crypto News Site – Bitcoin News

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A new research report from BTC Peers has ranked 145 crypto news websites for quality. It analyzes scores of benchmarks including average visit duration, bounce rate, and number of backlinks. The report features the usual suspects in its top 10, including Coindesk at number three and Cointelegraph at two. Top of the list, however, is news.Bitcoin.com.

Also read: Court Gives Craig Wright More Time to Await the Mysterious Bonded Courier

The cryptosphere is filled with news sites that cover multiple cryptocurrencies, ecosystems, and angles. From the unquestioningly fawning to the unrelentingly skeptical, theres a crypto news outlet to suit all dispositions. Best is a highly subjective term, therefore, whose declaration largely depends on the needs of the reader. Nevertheless, when BTC Peers published its methodical analysis of the top 145 crypto sites and placed news.Bitcoin.com top, our publication was duty bound to report on the matter.

News.bitcoin.com won first place with 978 points, notes the report, adding: It was interesting to compare it with Cointelegraph. On the one hand, CT has a higher Alexa Rank, with more than twice the audience and more backlinks. But news.Bitcoin.com has less of a bounce rate and a twice higher avg. visit duration, which suggests that although they have a smaller audience, their readers interact with the content better and longer.

In other words, news.Bitcoin.com may not attract the highest readership, but the increased time readers spend on the site is indicative of quality long form content. Other sites may be good for grazing, but for deep analysis, news.Bitcoin.com has got it locked down. Thats the long and short of the BTC Peers report. Naturally there are a few caveats to consider.

The thorough analysis of 145 crypto news sites was commissioned with a particular audience in mind. Specifically, it was published for the benefit of Marketers and PR managers, in order to assess the quality of resources to get better results, as well as Journalists, editors, and owners of content platforms looking for quality news, and to evaluate competitors and investors and traders, to assess the quality of information sources to make better decisions.

Of these groups, marketers in particular are seeking reliable data with which to plan media campaigns. The ability to compare key metrics, such as bounce rate and Alexa ranking, across all leading crypto publications, is extremely valuable. This data enables advertisers to optimize their campaigns and to submit press releases to sites that can deliver a return on investment. Low bounce rate i.e. the amount of time a reader will spend on a page before clicking the back button is one of the leading determinants of quality.

Commenting on the report, news.Bitcoin.com Editor-in-Chief Nanok Bie said: Im grateful for this recognition, particularly the fact that BTC Peers looked closely at metrics like bounce rate and time on page, to find which site readers engage with the most. The high numbers awarded to news.Bitcoin.com are due to our consistent high quality, relevant and in-depth reporting.

He added: If youre only going to read one news source to keep up with crypto, it should be news.Bitcoin.com, as we deliver balanced, well-researched and neutral news that covers everything bitcoiners need to know about the industry.

The BTC Peers report is sure to spark debate about how media quality is measured and which benchmarks matter the most. At news.Bitcoin.com, were grateful to all our readers for their time spent reading and passionate debates in the comments section, which have helped make this site what it is namely, the best crypto news website of 2019.

What are your thoughts on the findings of the BTC Peers report? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and Dapp Review.

Did you know you can verify any unconfirmed Bitcoin transaction with our Bitcoin Block Explorer tool? Simply complete a Bitcoin address search to view it on the blockchain. Plus, visit our Bitcoin Charts to see whats happening in the industry.

Kai's been manipulating words for a living since 2009 and bought his first bitcoin at $12. It's long gone. He's previously written whitepapers for blockchain startups and is especially interested in P2P exchanges and DNMs.

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Independent Report Declares News.Bitcoin.com the Top Crypto News Site - Bitcoin News

Why Proof of Reserves Is Important to Bitcoin – Bitcoin Magazine

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Bitcoin is a movement founded on individual monetary sovereignty, transparency and peer-to-peer auditability enabled by a breakthrough in technology. It launched at a time when trust in the worlds financial institutions was at an all-time low and struck a chord. Bitcoins success has led to profits, which has, in turn, led to complacency. Today, people are once again placing their trust in new crypto institutions, some of which have done very little to earn that privilege. Over $4.4 billion was lost as a result of crypto exit scams and thefts in 2019 alone and billions more are likely at risk right now.

The technology to provide auditability and transparency for bitcoin held in custody has been inherent to the protocol from its inception. However, the industry has been slow to incorporate these features for end customers. As once-siloed companies bid to broaden their offerings (exchanges adding custody, lending, etc.), complexity will increase and transparency on proof of reserves (allowing customers to confirm that the service they are using does in fact hold their bitcoin, on-chain) will become even more important. The ability to offer proof of reserves will become a tool to earn and retain customer trust.

While the idea of proving that bitcoin sent to a particular service or company is still held by such company might seem trivial to some, there are about as many ways to structure custody and interaction with customers as there are altcoins in the crypto universe.

Some services like cold-storage vaulting allow for relatively straightforward implementations while others, like trading on exchanges, can be more complex. Beyond the technical challenges, it is important to highlight some of the business reasons.

Many exchanges are structured in a hot-warm-cold wallet security framework. In this setup, the hot wallet manages a limited balance and is used for inbound and outbound transactions. The warm wallet is a whitelisted bridge between the cold and hot, and the cold, as the safest, holds the majority of the assets. This setup allows for quick withdrawals, improving customer experience as well as operational efficiencies through transaction batching, and at the same time, be able to benefit from the safety of cold storage.

Some services offer periodic audits of their cold, warm and hot wallet balances. They have used increasingly clever ways for customers to verify that their balances were indeed included in the audit. (This has to be done openly while at the same maintaining customer privacy). Although the audit verification methods to date are still somewhat cumbersome for customers (given they are not real-time), they are a step in the right direction.

Contrary to what some may think, there is an enormous supply of bitcoin looking to be lent to earn a yield. In fact, the rates to lend and borrow bitcoin are lower than those to lend and borrow cash and equivalents (USD), meaning that (currently) there is an oversupply of bitcoin in the market (in comparison to the demand for borrowing bitcoin).

While this phenomenon has been primarily led by the increasing popularity of bitcoin interest accounts, competition is bringing new players into the space looking to monetize bitcoin that is in their custody. Presently the market is becoming flush with digital assets looking for yield and it shows no sign of stopping. As the allure of holding fractional reserves of assets increases, proof of reserves can act as a way for end customers to keep the platforms levels of fractional lending in check or verify whether their funds are there or not.

Irrespective of the type of asset or industry, aggressive lending practices eventually leads to trouble. In order to prevent a credit bubble from occurring, transparency on funds is paramount. Lets try to build the right tools and educate the Bitcoin community on the importance of transparency before another QuadrigaCX or Mt. Gox happens.

And it can be profitable! In an industry with such low switching costs and a growing user base, transparency can be the winning differentiator for people looking for a new service provider for their digital asset needs and a good reason to remain there.

Bitcoin has given us the tools to build a new financial system that is transparent and open to the world an opt-out of an existing system full of unknowns as Satoshi described. Let's keep the ethos of Bitcoin alive as we build financial services for it lets not recreate the world we had to escape. Services that give customers the information they need to make good decisions will win in the long run.

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Why Proof of Reserves Is Important to Bitcoin - Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoins transaction fee 426x more than Litecoin in 2019 – AMBCrypto

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On the latest episode of the Unconfirmed podcast, host Laura Shin spoke to Nate Maddrey, senior research analyst at CoinMetrics, a Bitcoin and crypto-asset data analytics firm. During their conversation, Maddrey mentioned how 2019 had been a big year for stablecoins overall, and that Tether is still, by far, the most dominant stablecoin in terms of market capitalization.

However, Maddrey drew attention to USDC, stating that it had grown a lot over the year, and that a lot of that growth had been driven by decentralized finance (DeFi). He also noted how transfer value for the Ethereum version of Tether overtook the transfer value on Ethereum in 2019, which shows that people really are using stablecoins as kind of a method of payment, or medium of exchange at least.

The analyst also mentioned how active addresses increased across the board, except for XRP, Stellar and Zcash, which dropped by nearly 50%. Ethereums active addresses remained relatively flat, dropping by only 1% over the year. Additionally, he explained how the four assets where the active address decreased all registered a dip in market cap and price. He said,

Im kind of hopefully optimistic that this means that valuation is being driven a little bit more by usage, but who knows if its correlation or causation?

Maddrey also noted how transaction fees is one of the best metrics to analyze when youre looking into real usage. If fees are going up, it basically means the space in individuals blocks on the blockchain is at a premium, he said, and people are willing to pay more and more to use that blockchain.

He also pointed out that there were only two blockchains with any sort of significant fees Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin fees were the highest, with its average total daily fees over 2019 reported to be around $426,000. Ethereum came in second place, collecting average daily fees of around $95,000. The next closest blockchain after that was Litecoin, he said, which had about $1,000 worth of daily fees on average.

When asked about 2020, the CoinMetrics analyst said that it would be interesting to watch whether Bitcoin and Ethereum stay separated in terms of price and market cap, especially as Ethereum transitions toward Ethereum 2.0. I think were starting to get it to a good place for crypto where were starting to converge on some of these important metrics like fees, he said, and thats going to be healthy for the industry.

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Bitcoins transaction fee 426x more than Litecoin in 2019 - AMBCrypto

In Knives Out, both liberals and conservatives are the villains – Washington Examiner

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Knives Out, an Agatha Christie-style whodunit that will likely snag some Oscar nominations soon, is not really political.

You can enjoy the film as a pretty standard murder mystery without unpacking its characters beliefs, from the Trumpism of one character to the open borders rhetoric of another. One of the most interesting things about the film is the way its able to lampoon both.

Liberal magazine Sojourners described the movies perspective as a merciless skewering of white privilege. More fundamentally, its a critique of hypocrisy.

Hollywood liberals took a beating this week when Ricky Gervais blasted their double standards: touting moral lessons about society while cozying up to Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. Knives Out follows suit.

The film is about a rich, white man and his rich, white family, who hope to inherit his wealth after his mysterious death. During a discussion at old Harlan Thrombeys birthday party the night before he dies, his son-in-law and daughter-in-law get into an argument.

Richard, whom daughter-in-law Joni pejoratively refers to as red-hat wearer, echoes the pull yourself up by your bootstraps rhetoric of the GOP. Immigrants should be rewarded for entering the country the legal way, etc.

Joni, an Instagram influencer who meditates and spouts platitudes in a way that would make Gwyneth Paltrow jealous, responds that the government is putting kids in cages.

To settle the argument, Richard calls in Marta, Harlans Latina nurse. She did it the right way, he explains. But Marta has a secret: Her mother is undocumented.

Marta becomes the unofficial protagonist of the film, leading detective Benoit Blanc through the idiosyncrasies of the family and ultimately to the truth of the murder. And while the film had a chance to present the liberal, excessively pro-immigration side as heroes, it turns them, as well as the right-wingers, into villains.

No one in the family can remember which country in South America Marta is from, and at least three different options are mentioned throughout the film. (Brazil? Paraguay? Educador?) When it is revealed (spoiler alert) that the unselfish Marta will receive all of Harlans fortune, the Thrombey family goes ballistic.

In an effort to wrest the fortune back for themselves, they threaten to expose Martas mother as an undocumented immigrant unless Marta gives them what they see as their rightful inheritance. All of the characters, from the MAGA ones (one of whom calls Marta an anchor baby) to the woke liberals, are in on the scheme. That talk about caring about immigrants seems pretty empty when one immigrant becomes an obstacle to a huge wad of cash.

Instead of using the political tension in the film to stir controversy, Knives Out plays off it for humor, particularly in the scene where the family begins fighting and hurling insults from alt-right troll to SJW student.

Everyone kind of sucks, except Marta, who, like many young immigrants in America, grew up in a difficult situation that she did not choose. The film refrains from overly politicizing her plight, but it does offer this commentary: Neither conservatives nor liberals are really on her side.

The film's director, Rian Johnson, has said Knives Out is not a "message movie." But, he told the Associated Press, it was important that the film seem modern.

"Right now, if you have dinner with your big family and you have a few glasses of wine, and you start arguing, guess what you're going to be arguing about?" he asked. "It's the same stuff we're all arguing about. And so hopefully the movie portrays that in a way where you can go with your family and you can all kind of laugh at yourselves a little bit."

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In Knives Out, both liberals and conservatives are the villains - Washington Examiner

The End of Pseudo-Liberalism | John Waters – First Things

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The self-styled intellectual class is growing excitable. Under the onslaught of Trump, Brexit, Europe-wide populism, and Jordan Peterson, can we be certain, they ask, that the open society will continue? The only way on from liberalism, they believe, is backward into the darkness whence we allegedly emerged. Even those who are not enthusiastic about liberalisms tender mercies are required to moderate their hopes for its demise, lest the new nurse turn out to be worse than the serving one. A lot of people, including people who call themselves conservatives, appear to be concerned about the future of liberalism, and this concern is causing the age to be misread.

For the discussion is bogus to begin with. What is called liberalism here is not liberalism at all, but its direct opposite. It is liberalism only in name, and therefore offers no guarantee of an open society at all. By corrupting the meanings of terms like equality, tolerance, and human rights, the liberal ascendancy of the past three decades has overburdened the skeleton of our civilization, leaving it weakened and susceptible to collapse.

We should stop using words like liberalism as though they were not already subsumed in irony, as though the sense of virtue and good intention that they are supposed to connote remained valid. I believe it has become necessary to prefix certain words in our political lexicon to alert bystanders to their hidden corruption. For three decades I have referred to pseudo-liberalism. What we call liberalism is no longer to be thought upright. If it dies, it will be a cause of celebration, not dismay.

This pseudo-liberalism is founded on a lie: the idea that freedom resides in getting whatever you demand and doing whatever you desire. In the words of the diabolical occultist Aleister Crowley: Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. A moments thought reveals such ideas as civilization-threatening. By definition, what one person demands must be taken from someplace where it already benefits others, and doing exactly what you want will invariably be a cost to someone else or, ultimatelybecause of the complexity of the human instrumentto yourself. There are libraries of philosophy and theology on these topics, but as far as contemporary conversations are concerned, it is as though not a word of this is relevant.

The Sixties generation, which introduced these incoherencies into the bloodstream of modern societies, has not been honest about its own experience of these much-vaunted freedoms, which have left a trail of devastation behind them. One symptom of this is that there is virtually no lucid witness to the errors of pseudo-liberalism, not just in the intimate areas of human relations, but in relation to economics and the movements of people in the modern world. For half a century, these converging strands of insipid thinking have dominated Western societies, steamrolling everything and everyone with the help of corporate money and devious propaganda, their incoherencies protected from scrutiny by the influence and dollars of Big This and Big That, by corrupted media and the force field of political correctness. Self-styled liberals have hijacked the idealism of the young, enlisting them for a project that has the outward appearance of virtue but is rotten to the core. They have convinced even our own children that globalism is an unequivocal good and that human safety and well-being can be maintained without the assistance of the civilization that made all these qualities possible in the first place.

Thus, pseudo-liberalism seeks to turn upside-down the value system of the civilization that once was Christendom, attacking its core institutions and mocking and censoring its history. It justifies genocide in the form of abortion and is clearly intentsometimes unwittinglyupon engineering the cultural and moral demolition of the West itself, by dint of godless relativism, induced migration, the elimination of distinct nations, and the destruction of the nuclear family.

And although this is quite clearly the most intolerant ideology to have emerged in the West since World War II, signs of the demise of this liberalism are met with handwringing from people who ought to know better. All right-thinking people must agree that populism is a bad thing. We must, while admitting its minor blemishes, still accept that what is called liberalism offers the one best way forward for Western societies.

Liberal-progressivismto give it its most informative nameis actually an advanced form of colonialism, imposing itself not just on territories but also claiming dominion over all future time, brooking no dissent and remorselessly punishing recalcitrant doubters. In this sense it is deeply totalitarian, insisting on one best way that cannot be questioned.

In his 1987 essayStories and Totalitarianism, Vclav Havel defined the mechanism of totalitarianism as the assassination of history to achieve both nihilisation of the past and mastery over the future. The instrument of this process he identified as the removal from history of the possibilities of human choice, mystery, and autonomy: History becomes a fixed sequence of unfolding inevitabilities, and the role of human beings is merely to acquiesce and embrace what is pressed upon them.

To put this another way, under the new colonialism the future is a city already constructed, waiting to be moved into. There is no space for human discussion or disagreement. It is already decidedand not, we are archly informed, by some arbitrary human authority but by the mechanistic mind of time, which ordains the course of history according to immutable and unchallengeable laws.

We are now, it is certain, seeing the early stages of the disintegration of this pseudo-liberalism. This liberalism has promised untrammeled economic growth, itself an example of its incoherence: Increasing growth never delivers increasing happiness. Moreover, in ignoring the inevitability of boom-bust, this promise provides an example of pseudo-liberal dishonesty.There is no final glorious destination.

This pseudo-liberalism also promises free speech, while curtailing it in the name of civilityemploying sophisticated abuses of language to impose censorship so as to protect its own incoherence, and arrogating to itself the right to stifle anything that offers a significant threat to itself.It also promises increasingly purer forms of democracy but in reality is pushing us ever closer to mob rule.

Pseudo-liberalism lays claim to the universalization of human rights, but it requires just a moments reflection to realize that what is meant by this is not universal in the least, but a highly ideological recalibration of the balance of power between establishments and minorities, which provide human shields for the prosecution of an undeclared war on what is.

Moreover, it is precisely the pseudo-liberal insistence on a selective understanding of human rights that lies at the heart of the current threat to Europes future. For if universal rights are to trump rights of culture, history, place, locality, home and hearth, the outcome will be the destruction of all culture, loyalty, and trust, creating an intercontinental incontinence that will sweep all order and coherence before it.

What is called liberalism attacks what is most precious in our tradition of community solidarity, opposing those values we have held dearestlove of God, nation, and familyin favor of an empty and faithless materialism and the pseudo-laws of the new ideologies. The flaws of this pseudo-liberalism amount to an indictment that far outweighs even the sum of the promised benefits, for it amounts, in truth, to the negation of democracy, free speech, and meaningful liberty.

It is true that there are actors waiting in the wings who represent something even more illiberal than the present dispensation. But we should not cling to a nurse for fear of something worse.Perhaps somewhere about the precincts of this paradox lies the explanation of why liberals have so far supported the influx of Muslims into Europe: This is part of the liberal program of disintegrating the culture, traditions, and civilization of the West. Often one is forced to wonder if liberals know anything about the nature of Islam and its ambitions, whether they are aware that the Islamic concept of the infidel disqualifies all such peoples from what they think their entitlements. No sane person could ever have accused these pseudo-liberals of being far-sighted. Still, here they have surely surpassed themselves with their willful myopia and stupidity. If they wish to imagine how it will end, I recommend they have a quiet read of Michel HouellebecqsSubmission, which tells of the capitulation of a future French establishment to the blandishments of Islam.

But the problem does not lie merely with pseudo-liberalism. Paradoxically, a dangerous tendency of thought has arisen in late times among conservatives: the idea that any flaws of liberalismsuch as, one presumes, its blind utopian globalism and politically correct excessespale compared to the barbarism to be observed elsewhere in the world. They take this to mean that we should not raise a fuss about what is happening in the West, but rather express gratitude for the openness we enjoy and the tolerance liberals extend to their opponents. This, too, is bogus. Tolerance here, like equality, means something different than it used to. Once, tolerance meant not interfering with, or attempting to suppress, beliefs that contradicted ones own, but this response has given way to a dictatorship of intolerance wherein everything is tolerated except the views of those who do not subscribe to the tenets of pseudo-liberalism.

Liberals speak of what they call the liberal order as though its virtues were self-evident. This allows them to adopt a tone of moral sanctimony. Those who disagree, therefore, mustipso factosuffer from some kind of pathological perverseness: They oppose the good out of fear, vexatiousness, or worse. But the pseudo-liberal sense of the good is selective and self-serving, and has no good plans for those who dissent from it. We have seen this, again and again, and what we have seenat the hands of social justice warriors, LGBT activists, #MeTooers, and the likeprovides evidence of what the liberal end of history would actually look like.

So let us not be frightened into shoring up that which is finally disintegrating. Pseudo-liberalism is finally disintegrating under belated retaliation from those it treats with contempt, as well as the weight of its own senselessness. The liberal state of affairs is a bit like the current state of rock n roll: Though on its last legs, no one can imagine what, if anything, comes next.This for a time appeared to be the strongest card of the self-proclaimed liberals: that they did indeed represent the end of history.Now, what is (often pejoratively) calledpopulismhas arisen to put paid to that idea.

This populism may represent the future, in one form or another, or simply the precursor to something we are not yet able to imagine.Butwhatever it is, it seems our only hope. The choice we face is not between left and right, orstill lessliberal and far right. Certainly, the choice is not between a continuation of the present pseudo-liberalism or a descent into Islamismthe first willinevitably give way to the second. Rather, the choice is between civilization and its antithesis. It could hardly be more serious.The time has come tolet the delusions of the Sixties finally die in their dilapidated beds.

John Watersis an Irish writer and commentator, the author of ten books, and a playwright.

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The End of Pseudo-Liberalism | John Waters - First Things

Did Eleanor Roosevelt Say This About the Word ‘Liberal’? – Snopes.com

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In early January 2020, Snopes readers inquired about the provenance and authenticity of a quotation attributed to former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt that contained her reflections on the word liberal and the importance of the concept of freedom in American society.

On Dec. 31, 2019, for instance, a Facebook account posted a widely shared meme containing a portrait of Roosevelt and the following quote:

Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us. Eleanor Roosevelt.

The same meme was promulgated even further two days later, when the left-leaning Occupy Democrats Facebook page posted it, along with the message Who else is a PROUD liberal?

The quote is authentic and did indeed originate in something Roosevelt wrote: her 1963 book Tomorrow is Now, which was published shortly after her death in November 1962. The relevant section, towards the end of the book, reads in full as follows:

Long ago, there was a noble word, liberal, which derives from the word free. Now a strange thing happened to that word. A man named Hitler made it a term of abuse, a matter of suspicion, because those who were not with him were against him, and liberals had no use for Hitler. And then another man named McCarthy cast the same opprobrium on the word. Indeed, there was a time a short but dismaying time when many Americans began to distrust the word which derived from free. One thing we must all do. We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us. And that would be an inconceivable situation. This I know. This I believe with all my heart. If we want a free and a peaceful world, if we want to make the deserts bloom and man grow to greater dignity as a human being WE CAN DO IT!

The meme shared widely in early 2020 left out certain words taken from this section, but it properly acknowledged that omission with the use of an ellipsis, and the omission did not misrepresent or change the meaning of what Roosevelt wrote. As such, the meme was accurate and authentic and properly attributed the quotation to its true author.

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Did Eleanor Roosevelt Say This About the Word 'Liberal'? - Snopes.com

Liberal Swim Teams Takes Third in Wichita – KSCB News.net

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Team Scores

1st Place Garden City 534 Points2nd Place Kapaun Mt Carmel 357 Points3rd Place Liberal 221 Points4th Place Wichita Classical 166 Points5th Place Trinity Academy 152 Points6th Place Garden City Brown 142 Points7th Place Wichita West 76 Points

Wichita West Meet1/11/2020

200 Freestyle7th Aaron Barboza9th Seth Fitzgerald

200 IM6th Jack Maxwell7th Edgar Cortez

50 Freestyle4th Jacob Sautter16th Seth Fitzgerald

100 Butterfly6th Yared Romo

100 Freestyle4th Jacob Sautter12th Jack Maxwell15th TC Stephenson

500 Freestyle8th Aaron Barboza9th Sea Jiamsripong

200 Freestyle Relay6th Jacob Sautter, Jack Maxwell, Seth Fitzgerald, Aaron Barboza9th TC Stephenson, Malachi Martinez, Yared Romo, Aidan Rice

100 Backstroke9th Malachi Martinez

100 Breaststroke7th Aidan Rice9th Edgar Cortez

400 Freestyle Relay4th Jacob Sautter, Jack Maxwell, Seth Fitzgerald, Aaron Barboza

Coach Mary Stephensons comments

It was a great Meet in Wichita. The team PRed in 14 different races. We continue to see improvement in every meet we compete in. Next meet will be next Tuesday in Hutchinson.

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Liberal Swim Teams Takes Third in Wichita - KSCB News.net

The Washington Post’s latest liberal news from the swamp – Washington Times

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ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Do you wish the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was more or less likely to mail you one of their ominous audit letters?

You know, the kind that lands in your mailbox like the carnival sledgehammer in the high striker game. Only, instead of ringing a bell, it sends your blood pressure soaring and has you running for boxes of receipts in the basement even if you did your taxes honestly and accurately, which we all should.

If not, you must be an editorial writer for The Washington Post, the government newsletter. The Post railed against Republicans this past Thursday for trimming the IRS budget.

The agencys audit rate has plummeted, The Post thundered from its prime spot in the belly of the swamp. If you pay your taxes, on time and in good faith, you should be outraged.

Or relieved, depending on your point of view.

Calling for a bigger IRS budget and more audits, The Post labeled the GOP effort to hobble the IRS an irrational populist spasm that Congress should finally suppress.

Somehow, The Post was not overly moved or spasmodic its own self when the IRS under President Obama was caught red-handed using its power to kneecap the Tea Party movement in 2009, 2010 and beyond.

Ample documentation emerged of IRS officials repeatedly visiting the White House during this time to, oh, I dont know, have tea?

Meanwhile, IRS agents were demanding years of financial records and piling on with other federal agencies against Mr. Obamas perceived political enemies. They even demanded to know if some groups seeking a tax exemption started their meetings with prayer.

It soon became clear that Lois Lerner, who was in charge of the nonprofit sector at the IRS, was illegally using the government like a Third World brute squad to hobble a major Republican constituency. Of course, nothing ever happened to her, other than retiring with a full pension. Thanks, suckers.

No wonder The Post wants the IRS to be bigger and more powerful. Its nice to have them in your corner hassling conservatives when youre trying to elect more socialists, er, progressives.

Along those lines, The Post also ran a column the same day by a self-described Republican woman who penned, How Democrats can attract Republican voters.

This swamp creature, who once chaired a major federal agency and worked in Republican and Democratic administrations, is The Posts kind of Republican. She wants Democrats to choose an experienced candidate like Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren. She warns against being lured by young Mayor Pete, who has been surging in primary state polls.

I like Buttigieg and would be happy to endorse him 20 years from now, this Republican writes. But, hes too wet behind the ears, unlike Mr. Obama who, she swoons, was, and is, an exceptional, inspirational leader, skilled politician and grass-roots organizer.

As for Mr. Trump, she says he beat Hillary Clinton only because a large segment of the electorate wanted to register a vote against her perceived elitism and disinterest in the working class.

This simplistic explanation couched in the language of Marxist class warfare is not why I voted against her. Its not even because Hillary is a crook and a liar and hung our people out to dry in Benghazi.

Its because, unlike her centrist Democrat husband, shes a hardcore leftist in the mold of Mr. Obama, whose administration put hundreds of loons in judges robes, rammed through his own version of HillaryCare and knocked America down a peg all over the world, especially in the Middle East. Thats where he did his apology to Muslims tour and shipped pallets of cash to our enemies in Tehran.

On top of all that, Mr. Trump is actually pro-American, pro-life, pro-religious liberty, appoints excellent judges and is not afraid to take on the left, including the Marxist brain trust otherwise known as mainstream media.

Did I say Marxist? How else to explain things like a lengthy, sweetheart obituary in The Washington Post on Thursday for Harry Pombo Villegas, right hand man to Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara? Most of the article is about the dashing Che, beloved of T-shirt wearing, clueless college students. They have no idea that he was a ruthless thug who personally executed many of Fidel Castros opponents without trial or mercy. Neither do The Post obits readers.

Villegas followed Che to Africa and South America, where, backed by the Soviets, Che was trying to turn more countries into communist hellholes.

Che finally was captured in Bolivia with the CIAs help in 1967 as Villegas escaped and got back to Castros Cuba. A Bolivian sergeant executed Che, with a nefarious CIA agent orchestrating it to look like he died in battle, according to Villegas memoir cited in the obit.

The very last line is a quote from Villegas: Che died as he lived; full of optimism.

So, CIA bad, Che and Villegas good. Par for the course.

Between the call for a more powerful IRS, the political advice to Democrats from the Republican woman, and the ode to one of the most vicious murderers of our time, The Post lived up to its front-page motto: Democracy Dies in Darkness.

Robert Knight is a contributor to The Washington Times.

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The Washington Post's latest liberal news from the swamp - Washington Times

Meet the six candidates vying to lead the Ontario Liberal Party – iPolitics.ca

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The Ontario Liberal Party suffered a wounding in the last provincial election, with results knocking the Grits from a majority government to a minuscule caucus stripped of its official party status. In March, hordes of OLP faithful will assemble in Mississauga to select a new leader, whom the Liberal camp is hoping can spark renewal within their ranks.

This month, iPolitics interviewed each of the six leadership hopefuls about their visions for the party ahead of a 2022 election. (Profiles are listed in alphabetical order by surname.)

Michael Coteau is betting on coalitions.

He credits them with securing his provincial seat in the 2018 election a race he clinched over Toronto deputy mayor Denzil Minnan-Wong by 1,028 votes. There were other elections before that, but Coteau was one of just seven Liberals to hold a seat in 2018; the party has since whittled down to five. Ive won six elections in a row. And Im not saying that to sound like, I win elections. Its more to me about building a coalition, Coteau said in a recent interview with iPolitics, examining his bid to become leader of the currently miniature Ontario Liberal Party.

Were not going to win this next election, as Liberals, by just betting on Doug Ford failing, Coteau said. Make no mistake. There are a lot of people who do agree with what Doug Ford is doing there are a lot of people who are loyal to him and his party. I think we need to build a coalition in this province that exceeds that kind of support.

And he extolls his faith in doing exactly that. He sees the ability as a key differentiating factor against his opponents in the leadership contest as well as his ministerial experience, though candidates Mitzie Hunter and Steven Del Duca each served as ministers in the last government as well. (Hunter held onto her seat in the 2018 vote. Del Duca was bumped from his role by PC Michael Tibollo.) Coteau sees himself as a fixer in Queens Park someone who, in his view, stabilized files like the Pan Am Games or autism services in Ontario. Critics may present dissenting views, asnews reports from 2016lay out a public disagreement between Coteau and Ontario Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyk over whether the 2015 Games cost taxpayers more than planned.

Coteau acknowledges that his 16 years in public office first as a school board trustee, then as an MPP and cabinet minister at Queens Park may work against him in some ways. Some folks wanted a fresh face, new energy, he speculated. (Two of his opponents, Kate Graham and Alvin Tedjo, are former candidates. The final hopeful to be green-lit, Brenda Hollingsworth, is a lawyer in Ottawa.) People look at me and say, Oh, hes been around for some time. Hes one of those guys whos an insider, Coteau said. Shortly afterward, he offered a clarification. Hed been on the inside, certainly; but he insists hes been on the outside of what he calls the circle of the Ontario Liberal Party telling iPolitics that he had challenged the party on matters like education reform.

Read more about Coteaus leadership bid here.

Steven Del Duca considers himself a very traditionally partisan person.

The admission comes as the Ontario Liberal leadership hopeful discussed climate change, in a recent interview with iPolitics about his bid for the partys top post. He tacks on an addendum that the file, in his view, should transcend party partiality. But Del Duca, who has beenframed by at least one of his five competitorsas a sort of symbol of the partys establishment, doesnt shy away from talking about his three decades of immersion in Liberal politics nor discussing how a prolonged stretch of time in government work can narrow your vision.

When youre inside the bubble, when you hear the same advice consistently, over and over again, and when the challenges can be considerable a lot of the things thrown at you can be tough to untangle it becomes easy to fall into the default, Del Duca reflected.

The former cabinet minister was already being described as well-connected in the Toronto Star a decade ago, before his time representing a Vaughan-area riding provincially, which began after a by-election in 2012. But he was bumped out of office by the Progressive Conservatives Michael Tibollo in 2018. (All but seven Liberal candidates provincially faced the same fate.) Del Duca acknowledges that he had at least one clear blind spot during his last go-around at Queens Park, which was a lack of understanding about Ontarios inequalities and disparities that he attributes to spending his whole life living in the Greater Toronto Area.

One of my biggest personal deficits was falling into the trap that my reality was aligned to everyone elses reality, Del Duca admitted, couching the statement by saying he always knew there were inequalities in an intellectual way, but that it had never been visceral to him before visiting a host of varied ridings across the province during the last year.

Read more about Del Ducas leadership bid here.

Kate Graham believes that Ontario could stand to learn a thing or two from local governments.

The provincial Liberal leadership hopeful, who spent a decade as a public servant in London, Ont., and teaches politics at Western University, maintains that Queens Park doesnt invite the same public participation as city halls across the province. Simply strolling into the building feels more difficult, she said. Its a very distant relationship with the public.

Local councils, which generally operate without the same formal party systems as the province, see collisions of individuals ideas and perspectives something Graham admits doesnt always work. But when it does, she sings the systems praises, denouncing what she calls hyper-partisanship and division at higher government levels.

Most people are pretty turned off by politics. They dont care much about political parties, Graham said in a recent interview with iPolitics, pointing to the sparse percentage of Canadians who are card-carrying party members. (As of 2013, Statistics Canada noted that only four per cent of respondent Canadians were members of political parties or groups.)

And while tamping down partisan views may be a tricky sell for someone like Graham who, in slightly more than two months, will face throngs of dyed-in-the-wool Grits at a leadership convention in Toronto, with hopes of gleaning their support over the five other confirmed candidates and gunning for the Ontario Liberal Partys top post she espouses a belief that even party loyalists will see a need for the change after the provincial Liberals blistering 2018 defeat.

In some ways, were in the worst spot in our history, Graham assessed, noting the 2018 loss first, then elaborating. Weve got more people running for leader than currently sitting at Queens Park. Were in debt. Weve got a lot of work to do to rebuild in ridings all around Ontario. But its also an opportunity to think big about who we are and what we stand for.

Read more about Grahams leadership bid here.

At a downtown Toronto convention centre, on an evening in late November, five hopefuls vying for leadership of the Ontario Liberal Party were handed a microphone, and given time to make their pitch to an assembled mass of party loyalists. One candidate, meanwhile, was stuck in the crowd not yet eligible for a five-minute slot on stage.

Brenda Hollingsworth, an Ottawa lawyer who was the last to toss her hat in the ring for OLP leadership, had submitted her paperwork and met the financial deadline for the race, but was still in the throws of a third-party vetting process. It wasnt because I didnt want to (run), Hollingsworth said, defending her last minute sign-up in a recent interview.

The issue was, Im a trial lawyer, she continued. I had a case that I thought it would settle in the summer, and it kept not settling. This is somebody with a catastrophic injury. I couldnt leave them, and I wouldnt have been allowed to leave them anyway. And so, the case settled towards the end of October, and I took a week to decide if it was too late or not, and decided to go for it. So, it was just sort of circumstantial.

The under-the-wire decision left Hollingsworth with a short runway to meet yet another party deadline, which loomed large. New memberships could only be sold until Dec. 2, which was mere days away. Hollingsworth said she pulled in somewhere between 300 and 325, notwithstanding any who were disqualified for any reason. Its a scarce number compared with the 14,173 new members that opponent Steven Del Duca says his campaign sold before the cut-off date. Those members factor into a pool of 37,831, who will elect delegates to select the party leader in early March.

Its not a very long runway to do those things, Hollingsworth conceded, reflecting on her campaigns early days. Cautioning that she didnt want to take away from Del Ducas success, she noted that his campaign in particular had been building momentum for the better part of a year. In addition, candidates like Del Duca, Michael Coteau or Mitzie Hunter had spent time in provincial politics before their bids. Theres no question that its a challenge when youre coming in, literally, as an outsider. Im introducing myself to a lot of people for the first time, Hollingsworth said.

Still, despite the myriad of hurdles that come with being a late entrant and an unfamiliar face, Hollingsworth is banking on an appetite for a true political outsider to be leader propelling her nascent campaign forward.

Read more about Hollingsworths leadership bid here.

Two years after an electoral reform pledge was abandoned on Parliament Hill, flickers of a similar conversation are igniting at Queens Park with Ontario Liberal leadership candidate Mitzie Hunter saying she would absolutely pursue the matter at the provincial level, if she assumes the helm of her party and it eventually forms government.

Hunter, a former cabinet minister and one of six in the running for the OLPs top post, has pushed in the past for electoral reform at the most local level, introducing a private members bill as an MPP that focused on allowing municipalities to conduct elections using a ranked-ballot system. (The idea later became a government bill, and the City of London, Ont., became the first to use ranked ballots for its local vote in 2018.)

I believe that its better. I believe that it provides a more inclusive form of electing leaders, Hunter told iPolitics in a recent interview, during which she confirmed that electoral reform was something she would pursue provincially if successful in the ongoing leadership race. Also, it forces candidates in the race to be more respectful of each other and focus on the issues rather than the personalities, and thats probably something that would be welcome at this stage in our political process, she added.

Hunter currently has no intention of reconsidering the voting age in Ontario, but she would consider a move to register teenagers for the vote while theyre still in their high school years in order to cut down on the potential of young people becoming lost in the shuffle between high school and any post-secondary education they might pursue.

But before any of that comes a rebuild, the primary task facing whomever is selected as leader of the OLP in early March. Hunter currently sits as one of just five Liberal MPPs at Queens Park, representing the Toronto riding of ScarboroughGuildwood since a byelection in 2013. (Another member of the diminutive caucus, Don Valley Easts Michael Coteau, also has his hat in the leadership ring.) Hunter is pitching her role at Queens Park, having survived the 2018 race, as a favourable position for a party leader to be in.

Read more about Hunters leadership bid here.

Alvin Tedjo is prepared to ruffle some feathers.

Tedjo, one of six candidates gunning for leader of the Ontario Liberal Party, punctuates discussion about his platform with more abstract ideas the mainstream political norm as he sees it, for example, versus what he calls the mainstream ethos. Those phrases sprung forward while discussing a chief component of Tedjos pitch to voters, which is a merging of Ontarios public and Catholic school systems.

Since I was born, in the 80s, this has been an issue. And every government, of every political stripe, has been afraid to talk about it because theyre afraid of political backlash, Tedjo claimed in a recent interview with iPolitics, discussing his bid for leader. Certainly Ive run into some people that said, well, I dont think this is a good idea, (but) most of those people are saying they dont think its a good idea politically. Theyre not saying they dont think its a good idea morally, ethically, or policy wise.

Tedjo cites aNovember poll from public opinion form Abacus Datato back his campaign pledge. The survey of 785 voting-aged Ontarians which had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.6 per cent, 19 times out of 20 found 56 per cent support for merging the Catholic and public school systems in Ontario. One in four strongly supported the idea, and on the other side, one in 10 surveyed Ontarians were strongly opposed to it. The strongest opposition came, predictably, from Ontarios Catholic population, as 45 per cent of provincial Catholics opposed consolidation and 15 per cent said they were unsure. (Forty per cent of Catholics supported the idea.)

Despite pushback, though, it would be tricky to claim that Tedjo opposes Catholic education in Ontario wholesale; his children are currently enrolled in the system themselves. They have a great education. I love what theyre getting. But what theyre getting is exclusive to them, because a) theyre Catholic, and b) my wife has French language rights. So we had four times the amount of choices than any other family in Ontario, Tedjo said. I dont see how thats fair at all.

Read more about Tedjos leadership bid here.

The Ontario Liberal Party leadership convention is scheduled to take place March 6 and 7, 2020.

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Meet the six candidates vying to lead the Ontario Liberal Party - iPolitics.ca

To The Liberal Media’s Dismay, There Will Be No Disastrous War With Iran – The Federalist

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The last few days have been an ongoing spectacle of media bias and incompetence in the coverage of the Qassem Suleimani strike and its fallout.

Mainstream outlets, suffering mightily from Trump derangement syndrome, practically rooted for a wider conflict with Iran in the hopes it might damage Trump, then evinced genuine disappointment when Iran backed down after half-heartedly lobbing a few short-range ballistic missiles in the direction of U.S. troops stationed in Iraq, which inflicted no casualties.

But just think what could have been! Three days ago, The Atlantics David A. Graham wrote a piece headlined, Its 2003 All Over Again, in which he argues the recent killing of Iranian general Suleimani by U.S. missile strike last week is just like the runup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush.

The U.S. stands on the brink of an unpredictable war in the Middle East, Graham writes, then describes a scenario in which an American president, untutored in foreign affairs, is pushed into war by a hawkish vice president and a powerful Cabinet secretary seeking to follow through on their deep-rooted ideological commitments. Meanwhile, as civilian leaders march toward war, military officers seem unprepared and startled by the administrations belligerence.

See the connection? Graham sure does. Each new piece of information about President Donald Trumps decision to assassinate Iranian General Qassem Soleimani produces sobering parallels with the situation 17 years ago.

What a difference two days make. After a face-saving missile attack on an Iraqi airbase that houses some U.S. troops, which American officials were apparently told about in advance by Iraqi intermediaries, the fight seems to have gone out of Iran. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted Tuesday night that Iran had concluded proportionate measures and that it does not seek escalationan admission by Tehran that President Trump had called its bluff and the ayatollahs arent willing to risk a broader conflict.

Further confirmation came when Shiite Cleric Muqtada al-Sadr told pro-Iranian militias in Iraq not to retaliate, saying in a statement, the crisis is over.

On Wednesday, Trump confirmed that no U.S. troops were injured in the missile attack and that Iran now appears to be standing down. Instead of ratcheting up the bellicose rhetoric, Trump gave the Iranians an off-ramp, saying America is ready to embrace peace with all who seek it, and calling for new multilateral negotiations to replace the defunct 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

So far, all of this is very unlike the leadup to the Iraq War, let alone the beginning of World War III. To the medias dismay, Trump isnt turning into Bush, and Iran isnt turning into Iraq. In fact, the entire saga has been deterrence-through-strength 101. Trump surgically took out the worlds number-one terrorist and successfully managed a de-escalation with Iran, but all the liberal media can muster in response is fear-mongering, dissimulation, and what amounts to a collective sneer at Trump and his supporters.

The Atlantic ran a column by David Frum on Wednesday crowing about how the American people still arent rallying around Trump. The Trump administration and its supporters seem to have hoped for a rally around the flag effect from the killing of Soleimani. This did not happen.

Can you imagine Frum or any other mainstream pundit writing such an article after, say, Benghazi? Of course not. Yet that was a legitimate crisis of the Obama administrations own making, a deceit-laden screwup brought on by a needless Libya campaign that turned the country into a failed state. Remember all the Atlantic think pieces on how Americans werent rallying around President Obama? Me neither.

It seems the mediaalong with no small number of Democratswill say anything and take any position, no matter how asinine, if it might hurt Trump. Theyll even praise a murderous theocratic regime. Heres the Washington Posts Dave Weigel, with a case in point:

And heres Joy Behar of ABCs The View, touting the good news that Richard Spencer, the racist neo-Nazi provocateur, regrets supporting Trump because of the Suleimani strikeat which the audience applauded.

No wonder so many people hate the mainstream press. No wonder, for example, that in the aftermath of the shooting at West Freeway Church of Christ in Fort Worth, Texas, the churchs minister, Britt Farmer, refused to speak with anyone in the mainstream media. He gave only one interview to the editor of a Christian outlet, who said Farmer feared how a conservative Christian minister in a pistol-packing congregation might be portrayed. Smart man.

Of course, no one can predict what will come next in the Middle East. Perhaps Iran will retaliate further, maybe with a terrorist-style attack against U.S. targets somewhere. But for now, by any reasonable standard Trumps gambit has worked. He dealt a harsh blow to Iran and the mullahs backed down. Just dont expect the media to be honest about it.

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To The Liberal Media's Dismay, There Will Be No Disastrous War With Iran - The Federalist

Should the Liberals stay left or go back to the centre? Heres why thats the wrong question – TVO

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If the Ontario Liberal Party is very lucky, 2020 will be the year it looks back on and remembers as the beginning of its march back into the halls of power at Queens Park. That would mark a substantial improvement over 2019, when it languished in irrelevance and lost nearly 30 per cent of its caucus (that is, two MPPs) to greener pastures. But, then, almost anything would be an improvement.

The beginning of the new year will definitively end the relatively quiet phoney war phase of the Liberal leadership race, which will see the party vote for delegates in February for the leadership convention in March. The party announced Monday that just under 38,000 people are registered to vote for delegates, who will then in turn vote for the eventual winner. This more intense period of the campaign will involve more debates, more prominent endorsements (on Tuesday, front-runner Steven Del Duca announced one from Thunder BaySuperior North MPP Michael Gravelle), and potentially more acrimony as contestants try to distinguish themselves.

If things go well, the choice of leader will settle a bunch of arguments within the party. Some of them are relatively prosaic and of little interest to the general public: Should the party keep the delegated-convention system of picking a leader or abandon it as the other major parties have? Should the party adopt a free supporter category to expand the membership from the relatively small numbers it has today? Some involve more salient policy questions: Will it pursue Alvin Tedjos proposal to unify the Catholic and public schools in one secular system? Will it support fare-free public transit, which Michael Coteau has called for? Basically, the leader will, to some extent, get to shape the policies the party pursues going forward.

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At least as important, though, is the fact that the party will have to determine at least, for now the direction it wants to take post-Kathleen Wynne. The former premier is still a sitting MPP, and shell be a presence at the March convention, but which direction the party should go in 2020 has been the implicit question behind all the other questions in the race so far. Its usually summed up as should the party stay left or go back to the centre, but that oversimplifies both Wynnes legacy and the choices that lie ahead.

In 2018 and 19 it, became common to say that Wynne had taken the party to the left of the NDP, but her record in office is certainly more complicated than that. Wynne partially privatized Hydro One the provincial hydro utility something the NDP never forgave her for and something thats still controversial even in Liberal ranks. Her government struggled with balancing the provincial budget for years precisely because it spent those years being leery of substantial tax increases, although that changed relatively late in her tenure. Those are real parts of her record just as surely as the Universal Basic Income pilot and the $14 minimum wage are.

Numerous contestants in the current race could plausibly lay claim to part of Wynnes legacy, if they were so inclined. Michael Coteau and Mitzie Hunter served in her cabinet. Kate Graham ran as a Liberal in 2018, supporting Wynnes final platform, and has attracted some important allies of the former premier: Deb Matthews, the former deputy premier and a close friend of Wynnes, is supporting Grahams race. Pat Sorbara, Wynnes former deputy chief of staff, has joined Grahams campaign as an adviser.

Graham, for her part, doesnt endorse the idea of a hard pivot away from Wynnes legacy.

All of the issues we ran on in the last election were very, very popular things that Kathleen and the party championed. They did well at the doors, and they polled well, Graham told TVO.org on Tuesday. Theres an opportunity now to address the much bigger question of what kind of culture we want to build inside the party, instead of turning course away from one person. The partys much bigger than that.

The avatar of returning to the centre in this race is Steven Del Duca, and Del Duca himself has suggested that the Liberals were perhaps too activist under Wynne or, as he put it in debates last year, swung at a few too many pitches. But here, too, its worth appreciating the nuances. Del Duca started his leadership campaign by promising that, if he were leader, half of all Liberal candidates in 2022 would be women. Del Duca supports getting back to the $15 minimum wage, which the Tories abandoned, and has proposed a public group-benefits package (including pension, dental, and other perks) for self-employed and contract workers. It may not be a UBI, but it would represent a substantial expansion of the social-welfare system and meaningfully help the people who could use it.

Its easy to describe the recent history of the Liberal party as a swing to the left and to imagine that someone like Del Duca would move away from that, but leaders arent the sole masters of their parties fates: 2022 wont be like 2003, when the Liberals could start a 15-year-long winning streak with a mix of wonky centrism and not being Mike Harris. Even someone like Del Duca, for all his establishment support, is offering voters policies substantially more progressive even that those Wynne was willing to run on in 2014. Events of the past decade have pushed left-of-centre parties around the world to embrace more progressive policies (even the U.S. Democrats are currently engaged in a pitched debate over the proper role of the state), and the Ontario Liberals havent been, and wont be, immune.

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Should the Liberals stay left or go back to the centre? Heres why thats the wrong question - TVO

Liberals dropped in on-reserve voting in 2019 federal election as NDP remained on top – CBC.ca

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Liberal support among voters living on reserves fell significantly in October's federal election, as the New Democrats remained the top choice. But the Liberals nevertheless retained more than two-thirds of the support they had gained in the previous election, before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's stated commitment to Indigenous reconciliation hit some obstacles during his first four years in office.

Indigenous engagement in the 2015 federal election was high, with turnout reaching a historic summit of 61.5 per cent on First Nations reserves. While the NDP won that vote, the Liberals made significant inroads among First Nations voters, more than tripling their support.

On-reserve turnout figures for the 2019 federal election are not yet available, but an analysis of Elections Canada data by CBC News finds that the New Democrats were able to win the vote in on-reserve polling divisions for at least the third consecutive election but their lead over the Liberals was virtually unchanged from four years before.

A measure of First Nations people living on-reserve represents a minority of Indigenous Canadians, as it excludes any who live off-reserve as well as Inuit, Mtis, and non-status Indians. Only about half of First Nations peopleand around a quarter of all Canadians who claim Aboriginal identity in the census live on reserves. Additionally, roughly 10 per cent of people living on reserve are not Indigenous.

But among those in October who voted in polling divisions located entirely on-reserve, the NDPreceived the greatest share with 40.2 per cent of ballots cast. The Liberals finished second with 32.5 per cent, followed by the Conservatives at 17.2 per cent and the Greens at 7.5 per cent. Together, the People's Party, Bloc Qubcois and other candidates earned2.5 per cent of the on-reserve vote.

This suggests First Nations voters at least those living on reserves were more than twice as likely to vote for the NDP as other Canadians. The party captured 15.9 per cent of the vote nationwide, less than half of the share it received on reserves. Conversely, the Conservatives were twice as popular in the country as a whole as they were on reserves.

The Liberal vote share on reserves and nationwide was not significantly different.

Despite finishing first, for the NDP this representsthe party's second consecutive decrease in support on reserves. The NDPreceived58.4 per cent of the vote in polling divisions located entirely on reserves in 2011, when the New Democrats formed the Official Opposition. That dropped 12 points to 46.4 per cent in 2015 and another six points in 2019.

The Liberals saw their share of the vote on reserves drop eight points since 2015, though their score was still significantly higher than the 12.9 per cent the party received in 2011. While their drop was more than any other party's, itis perhaps not as steep as some expected, particularly after the SNC-Lavalin affair and the expulsion of Jody Wilson-Raybould, Canada's first Indigenous attorney general, from caucus.

The Conservatives saw an increase of eight points on reserves between 2015 and 2019, though their result was still lower than the 22.8 per cent earnedin 2011.

There were some significant regional variations in how First Nations voted in on-reserve polling divisions.

The Liberals were the top choice onreserves in both Atlantic Canada and Quebec, outpacing their nearest rivals by 23 and 27 percentage points, respectively.

That advantage for the Liberals appears to have been decisive in two ridings. The Liberals won the New Brunswick seat of MiramichiGrand Lake by a margin of 370 votes over the Conservatives, fewer than the gap of 414 votes separating the Liberals and Conservatives onreserves in the riding.

In the Nova Scotia riding of SydneyVictoria, the Liberals won by an overall margin of 1,309 votes over the Conservatives. Their edge over the Conservativesin on-reserve polling divisions was 1,711 votes.

In Ontario, however, the New Democrats were particularly strong. The party received58 per cent of the votes on reserves in the province, well ahead of the Liberals' 29 per cent. That is a big shift from 2015, with the New Democrats widening their margin over the Liberals by 20 points.

In TimminsJames Bay in northern Ontario, the NDP's Charlie Angus earned86 per cent of the vote in on-reserve polling divisions, more than twice his share in the rest of the riding. He received 99 per cent in KashechewanFirst Nation up from 88 per cent in 2015 where a state of emergency was declared in April due to flooding.

In Grassy Narrows First Nation, where residents have struggled with the health effects of mercury poisoning, Chief Rudy Turtle captured 72 per cent of the vote for the NDP. Defeated Liberal incumbent Bob Nault took just 27 per cent of the vote, roughly half of his share from 2015. He was probably not helped by Trudeau having to apologize after sarcastically thanking a Grassy Narrows protester for their donationat a Liberal fundraiser last year.

Turtle, however, was not able to win the Kenora riding despite his strong support on reserves. The NDPreceived67 per cent of the vote in on-reserve polling divisions in Kenora, compared to just two per cent for the Conservatives' Eric Melillo, whose support was strong enough in the rest of the riding to secure the seat.

This was also the case in the Saskatchewan riding of DesnethMissinippiChurchill River, in which 71 per cent of the population claims Aboriginal identity. The Liberals' Tammy Cook-Searson, chief of the Lac La Ronge Indian Band, won 49 per cent of the on-reserve vote, edging out NDP incumbent Georgina Jolibois by five points.

The Conservatives' Gary Vidal took just six per cent of the vote in on-reserve polling divisions, but managed to get 56 per cent of the vote in the rest of the riding. This made the difference, as Joliboisand Cook-Searson finished well back in other polling divisions with only 23 and 18 per cent of the vote, respectively.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer received only five per cent of the vote in on-reserve polling divisions in his ReginaQu'Appelle riding. He won theSaskatchewan riding,in which 21 per cent of the population claims Aboriginal descent, with 63 per cent of the vote.

This was typical for the Conservatives in the region. Across Alberta and Saskatchewan, where the partywon 47 of 48 seats, the Conservative had just 10 per cent support in on-reserve polling divisions. The NDPhad 47 per cent, followed by the Liberals at 39 per cent.

Only in British Columbia did the Conservatives edge out the other parties in on-reserve voting, with 31.4 per cent of ballots cast to the NDP's 30.8 per cent and the Liberals' 21 per cent.

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Liberals dropped in on-reserve voting in 2019 federal election as NDP remained on top - CBC.ca

Ricky Gervais Reveals Why He Roasted ‘Hollywood Liberals’ – The Daily Wire

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On Wednesday evening, comedian Ricky Gervais revealed that the reason that he roasted Hollywood liberals during this years Golden Globes was because theywear their liberalism like a medal.

I didnt roast Hollywood for being a bunch of liberals, explained Gervais via social media. I myself am a liberal. Nothing wrong with that.

I roasted them for wearing their liberalism like a medal, he continued. Im such a snowflake, liberal, I cant even really hate them for it. But my job is to take the piss. I did that.

On Monday, Gervais took a swing at Hollywood while hosting the award show, and he didnt hold back, telling liberal elites to can their sanctimonious sermons and f*** off.

So if you do win an award tonight, dont use it as a platform to make a political speech. Youre in no position to lecture the public about anything, the After Life actor and creator told the audience. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and f*** off, he continued, Okay? Its already three hours long. Right, lets do the first award.

In another portion of Gervais fiery monologue, the actor took a shot at Apple:

Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. Well, you say youre woke but the companies you work for in China unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service youd call your agent, wouldnt you?

The scathing monologue was met with criticism from the press, as noted by The Daily Wire.

I always knew that there were morons in the world that took jokes seriously, but Im surprised that some journalists do, Gervais responded via Twitter. Surely, understanding stuff is pretty fundamental to their job, isnt it? Just makes it funnier though, I guess.

The comedian even offered a list of reminders about humor for the perpetually offended:

Below is the transcript of Gervais Golden Globes monologuevia The Daily Mail:

Youll be pleased to know this is the last time Im hosting these awards, so I dont care anymore. Im joking. I never did. Im joking, I never did. NBC clearly dont care either fifth time. I mean, Kevin Hart was fired from the Oscars for some offensive tweets hello?

Lucky for me, the Hollywood Foreign Press can barely speak English and theyve no idea what Twitter is, so I got offered this gig by fax. Lets go out with a bang, lets have a laugh at your expense. Remember, theyre just jokes. Were all gonna die soon and theres no sequel, so remember that.

But you all look lovely all dolled up. You came here in your limos. I came here in a limo tonight and the license plate was made by Felicity Huffman. No, shush. Its her daughter I feel sorry for. OK? That must be the most embarrassing thing thats ever happened to her. And her dad was in Wild Hogs.

Lots of big celebrities here tonight. Legends. Icons. This table alone Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro Baby Yoda. Oh, thats Joe Pesci, sorry. I love you man. Dont have me whacked. But tonight isnt just about the people in front of the camera. In this room are some of the most important TV and film executives in the world. People from every background. They all have one thing in common: Theyre all terrified of Ronan Farrow. Hes coming for ya. Talking of all you perverts, it was a big year for pedophile movies. Surviving R. Kelly, Leaving Neverland, Two Popes. Shut up. Shut up. I dont care. I dont care.

Many talented people of color were snubbed in major categories. Unfortunately, theres nothing we can do about that. Hollywood Foreign press are all very racist. Fifth time. So. We were going to do an In-Memoriam this year, but when I saw the list of people who died, it wasnt diverse enough. No, it was mostly white people and I thought, nah, not on my watch. Maybe next year. Lets see what happens.

No one cares about movies anymore. No one goes to cinema, no one really watches network TV. Everyone is watching Netflix. This show should just be me coming out, going, Well done Netflix. You win everything. Good night. But no, we got to drag it out for three hours. You could binge-watch the entire first season of Afterlife instead of watching this show. Thats a show about a man who wants to kill himself cause his wife dies of cancer and its still more fun than this. Spoiler alert, season two is on the way so in the end he obviously didnt kill himself. Just like Jeffrey Epstein. Shut up. I know hes your friend but I dont care.

Seriously, most films are awful. Lazy. Remakes, sequels. Ive heard a rumor there might be a sequel to Sophies Choice. I mean, that would just be Meryl just going, Well, its gotta be this one then. All the best actors have jumped to Netflix, HBO. And the actors who just do Hollywood movies now do fantasy-adventure nonsense. They wear masks and capes and really tight costumes. Their job isnt acting anymore. Its going to the gym twice a day and taking steroids, really. Have we got an award for most ripped junky? No point, wed know whod win that.

Martin Scorsese made the news for his controversial comments about the Marvel franchise. He said theyre not real cinema and they remind him about theme parks. I agree. Although I dont know what hes doing hanging around theme parks. Hes not big enough to go on the rides. Hes tiny. The Irishman was amazing. It was amazing. It was great. Long, but amazing. It wasnt the only epic movie. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, nearly three hours long. Leonardo DiCaprio attended the premiere and by the end his date was too old for him. Even Prince Andrew was like, Come on, Leo, mate. Youre nearly 50-something.

The world got to see James Corden as a fat p****. He was also in the movie Cats. No one saw that movie. And the reviews, shocking. I saw one that said, This is the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs. But Dame Judi Dench defended the film saying it was the film she was born to play because she loves nothing better than plunking herself down on the carpet, lifting her leg and licking her [expletive]. (Coughs) Hairball. Shes old-school.

Its the last time, who cares? Apple roared into the TV game with The Morning Show, a superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. Well, you say youre woke but the companies you work for in China unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney. If ISIS started a streaming service youd call your agent, wouldnt you?

So if you do win an award tonight, dont use it as a platform to make a political speech. Youre in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and f*** off, OK? Its already three hours long. Right, lets do the first award.

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Ricky Gervais Reveals Why He Roasted 'Hollywood Liberals' - The Daily Wire

Liberal Democrat MP savaged by Brexiteer get a job with the EU and clear off!’ – Express

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The MP for Oxford West sat down with Iain Dale to discuss the Withdrawal Agreement Bill passing yesterday. A caller introduced as Cornelius then joined the conversation and he did not hold back.Cornelius accused Ms Moran of failing still failing to accept the general election and referendum results.

He said: "She still doesn't accept the general election result, the result of the referendum.

"They will still try to oppose any deal and make it difficult for Boris Johnson to bring back any deal to parliament."

The Liberal Democrat MP replied: "Yes I will oppose his deal, I voted against it today."

The caller continued: "We had to have another general election because parliament was blocked and you're still rabbiting on about staying in the EU.

READ MORE:Lib Dems seek to scupper Brexit with public inquiry

"If you are so entrenched in the EU, why don't you just get a job with the EU? Clear off!

"The country has listened to people like you for three and a half years and youre still talking about it."

Ms Moran responded: "If the winner takes all and you have all MPs voting the same way all the time, that's not a parliamentary democracy, that's a dictatorship."

LBC host Iain Dale said: "I think you could have voted for the second reading of the bill, then people would of understood at least you recognised were leaving."

Ms Moran replied: "We do. The parliamentary maths is what it is and I hope you've heard an understanding of where we are now.

"But you don't just go along with everything.

"Good decisions are made when all of the good points of view are in the room.

"That's what we're doing and we have a mandate to do that."

Yesterday SNP's Ian Blackford unleashed a furious rant directed at Boris Johnson demanding a Scottish independence referendum following the passing of the Brexit bill.

Mr Blackford said: "This is an important point in the election we held last December the people of Scotland stood by the SNP on the basis of our right to choose.

"We will not accept being taken out of the European Union.

"I say to the Prime Minister respect democracy, respect the election result, respect the right of the people of Scotland to choose our future.

"We will have our referendum Prime Minister, Scotland will remain an independent European country!"

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Liberal Democrat MP savaged by Brexiteer get a job with the EU and clear off!' - Express

Iran’s Messaging About The Downed Airliner Echoes Democrats and Liberal Media – PJ Media

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President Trump has accused the media of being "enemies of the people," and he has been proven to be even more correct than he could have known.

Iranian officials originally denied responsibility for the Ukrainian airliner that crashed near Tehran. On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Sharif tweeted his official statement about it, he conceded it was accidentally shot down, but blamed the United States, nonetheless.

Human error at time of crisis caused by US adventurism led to disaster, he tweeted.

Of course! They shot down the plane, but it's America's fault, which is to say it's Donald Trump's fault! Just as the left couldn't quite celebrate the news that General Soleimani had been killed, they also are willing participants in the Blame America Brigade, even Democrats running for president.

American media has also chosen the blame America narrative. In their story about the crash, the Associated Press published a story with the headline, An Iranian general dies in U.S. attack, and innocents suffer, which prompted significant outrage. The Associated Press attempted to explain the absurd headline.

The headline was updated to more clearly describe what the story is about: Canadians struggling to come to terms with how the killing of an Iranian general in a U.S. drone strike may have led to the deaths of dozens of their citizens in a plane crash, an AP spokesperson told Fox News.

Why is it that the messaging of Democrats and the media so often sounds the same as that of our enemies? Is it because Barack Obama made it cool, is it Trump Derangement Syndrome as usual, or something bigger?

_____

Matt Margolis is the author ofTrumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama's Legacyand the bestselling bookThe Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. You can follow Matt on Twitter@MattMargolis

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Iran's Messaging About The Downed Airliner Echoes Democrats and Liberal Media - PJ Media

There Was Crossfire! That Latest Attempt By Democrats And The Liberal Media To Blame Trump For Ukrainian Airline Crash – Townhall

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Iran shot down a Ukrainian airliner. It occurred during the nations missile attack against U.S. forces in Iraq that blessedly ended with zero American casualties. The worlds largest sponsor of terrorism had to save face after President Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qasam Soleimani, commander of Quds force, and the regions grim reaper. He was a top terrorist and how hes an ashtray. For those who love this country, its a win. Its a good thing. It was a good kill. It was a lawful kill. For the hate America crowdwe call them Democratstheyre acting as if the Iranian version of Gandhi was blasted half-way to hell. There were worries about war. The missile attack allowed liberal media outlets to hyperventilate for about 36 hours before Iran decided to stand down. There was no war. There is no war. Most of the world slept through World War IIIand the liberal media was once againwrong.

It was a win for Trump. Time magazine editor Ian Bremmer, who is no MAGA supporter, said that on CNN this week since it reestablished the red lines and deterrence that was degraded by the Obama administration. There is now a window for diplomacy to resume. Even with a partisan impeachment plot against him, Trump is still riding high and scoring wins. The Left probably cant sand that which is why theyre peddling this piece of misinformation that a Ukrainian airliner shot down by Iran outside of the capital Tehran was due to crossfire. We didnt fire back. This is fake news that some members of the media and the 2020 Democratic field were peddling. Some threw a tantrum when they got dragged for it. Oh, and they lectured us of course, like CNNs Susan Hennessey:

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) outright blamed Trump for the downed airliner (via Free Beacon):

Rep. Jackie Speier (D., Calif.) on Thursday said that Iran's shooting down of a Ukrainian airliner was collateral damage from President Donald Trump's killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.

"If what is being projected is true, this is yet another example of collateral damage from the actions that have been taken in a provocative way by the president of the United States," Speier told CNN.

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer had asked Speier if she believed Iran confused the commercial flight for a U.S. military plane, suggesting that "it certainly sounds like it was a mistake by the Iranians." Speier did not mention Iran in her response, only implicating Trump in the downed flight.

Trump killed a terrorist. Iran was put in its place. And now, in their anger, the Left is using dead civilians who were shot down by Iran to blame Trump. This is the definition of insanity. Its Trump Derangement Syndrome. Im so sorry this is happening to you, liberal America. Not really though.

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There Was Crossfire! That Latest Attempt By Democrats And The Liberal Media To Blame Trump For Ukrainian Airline Crash - Townhall

A CIA chemist, mind control and the return of psychedelic drugs – The Boston Globe

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As LSD raced through the American counterculture during the 1960s, it became an ultimate symbol of protest. Guardians of mainstream culture panicked. In 1968 Congress made mind-altering drugs illegal. President Nixon called LSD guru Timothy Leary the most dangerous man in America. LSD was listed as a Schedule I drug, meaning that it has no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. For decades, serious research into its potential was impossible. That taboo is now dissolving.

The apocalyptic stereotype of LSD, which during the 1960s was said to cause everything from birth defects to insanity, was bound to fade. Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who accidentally discovered it in 1943, hoped it could be used to treat mental illness, and for a time it was taken seriously as a therapeutic tool. The LSD-themed musical that is scheduled to open in March focuses on three celebrities who used it during the 1950s: Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley, and Clare Booth Luce. Entitled Flying Over Sunset and written by James Lapine, who shared a Pulitzer for Sunday in the Park With George and has won three Tony Awards, it is likely to fuel burgeoning interest in psychoactive drugs.

Perhaps the most striking evidence of that interest was the announcement in September that Johns Hopkins Medicine has received $17 million in private and foundation grants to open a Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. Among its first projects will be experiments to see if LSD and related drugs can be used to treat anorexia, early-onset Alzheimers, or opioid-use disorders or even to help people quit smoking. Researchers at Johns Hopkins have endorsed calls that psilocybin be reclassified as acceptable for medical use. LSD could be next. Sidney Gottlieb, who introduced Americans to LSD nearly 70 years ago, is returning for a curtain call.

Gottlieb was the most powerful unknown American of the 20th century unless there was someone else who worked in total secrecy, conducted grotesque experiments on human subjects across three continents, and had what amounted to a government-issued license to kill. He ran historys most systematic search for techniques of mind control, a project that CIA director Allen Dulles named MK-ULTRA. Dulles believed that if a way could be found to seize control of human minds, the prize would be nothing less than global mastery. In 1951 he hired Gottlieb to direct the search. Although Gottlieb had a doctorate in biochemistry from Cal Tech and had worked in several government laboratories, he was an unlikely choice. Dulles and most of the men who ran the early CIA were silver-spoon products of the American aristocracy. Gottlieb was the 32-year-old son of Orthodox Jewish immigrants, grew up in the Bronx, attended City College of New York, stuttered, and limped. He was also a compassionate humanist who meditated, lived in a cabin without running water, grew his own vegetables, and rose before dawn to milk his goats. He was his generations most prolific but also most gentle-hearted torturer.

Gottlieb was fascinated with the mind-control potential of LSD. He and his fellow seekers dared to hope that it might hold, as one of them put it, the secret that was going to unlock the universe. By his own account he used it himself at least 200 times. Years later he recalled his first trip: I happened to experience an out-of-bodyness, a feeling as though I am in a kind of transparent sausage skin that covers my whole body and it is shimmering, and I have a sense of well-being and euphoria for most of the next hour or two hours, and then gradually it subsides.

In 1953, Gottlieb persuaded the CIA to spend $240,000 to buy the worlds entire supply of LSD from its sole producer, the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz. Over the next decade, he used his unique stash for two purposes. Some of it went to prisons in the United States and to CIA safe houses in Europe and East Asia, where it was used in heinous experiments on unwitting or unwilling human subjects. In one of them, seven African American inmates at a prison in Kentucky were given what the prison doctor called double, triple and quadruple doses of LSD every day for 77 days. Experiments abroad, in which LSD was used in concert with other drugs and with torments like electroshock, were even harsher, and caused an unknown number of deaths. These were the most extreme experiments on human subjects that have ever been conducted by an officer or agency of the US government. Gottlieb had concluded that before he could insert a new mind into someones brain, he had to blast away the existing mind. Some of his most gruesome experiments at black sites in Europe and East Asia were aimed at finding out if overdoses of LSD and other drugs could do that. His victims, called expendables, were prisoners of war, suspected enemy agents, and refugees who would not be missed if they disappeared.

The other side of Gottliebs LSD research was quite different voluntary and non-coercive. He wanted to know how ordinary people would react to LSD in a clinical setting. Since the CIA could not conduct these experiments itself, Gottlieb set up bogus medical foundations that served as conduits for MK-ULTRA funds. Through them, he contracted with hospitals and clinics across the United States that agreed to carry out tests on volunteers. Among the first to sign up was a graduate student named Ken Kesey, who was given doses of Gottliebs LSD and psilocybin at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Menlo Park, California. He liked it so much that he not only urged his friends to volunteer, but took a job at the hospital. That gave him material for his counterculture masterpiece One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and also allowed him to pilfer vials of LSD for use at his soon-to-be-famous acid test parties.

Gottlieb was also sponsoring experiments at nearby Stanford University which, like most MK-ULTRA contractors, did not realize that it was working for the CIA. Among the first volunteers at Stanford was the poet Allen Ginsberg, who listened to Tristan und Isolde on headphones during his first experience and went on to promote the healthy personal adventure of LSD use. Another was the Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, who later wrote some of his most celebrated songs while tripping. Together, these unwitting MK-ULTRA subjects helped turn on a generation.

It took decades for LSD evangelists to grasp the bizarre truth that their formative and ultimately culture-shattering LSD experiences were part of a CIA project aimed at finding a tool for mind control. The United States government was in a way responsible for creating the acid tests and the Grateful Dead, and thereby the whole psychedelic counterculture, Robert Hunter concluded. When an interviewer asked John Lennon about LSD, he replied: We must always remember to thank the CIA. Those answers were correct as far as they went, but early psychic voyagers had never heard of Sidney Gottlieb. If they had, they would have realized that they had him to thank for LSD, not simply the United States government or the CIA.

Timothy Leary, the most prominent LSD promoter of that era, was also introduced to psychedelics thanks to Sidney Gottlieb. He learned of their existence from a 1957 article in Life magazine about an expedition to find magic mushrooms in Mexico. Fascinated with the prospect of a mind-altering substance, he traveled to Mexico, found and tried the magic mushroom, pronounced it above all and without question the deepest religious experience of my life, and set off on the path that made him the Pied Piper of LSD. Neither he nor anyone else could have known it at the time, but Gottlieb had used MK-ULTRA funds, disguised as a foundation grant, to subsidize the expedition that had produced the Life article. The LSD movement was started by the CIA, Leary recognized years later. When he mused, I wouldnt be here now without the foresight of CIA scientists, what he meant was: I wouldnt be here without Sidney Gottlieb.

Gottliebs decade of MK-UTRA experiments led him to two conclusions. He had proven conclusively that with the application of enough drug overdoses and other extreme techniques over extended periods, it is possible to destroy a human mind; the trail of ruined lives he left in his wake is horrific testimony to his success. Yet he was also forced to admit that he had failed to find a way to insert a new mind into the resulting void. As MK-ULTRA ended in the early 1960s, Gottlieb concluded that psychoactive drugs are too unpredictable in their effect on individual human beings, under specific circumstances, to be operationally useful.

Once MK-ULTRA was behind him, Gottlieb went on to other glories at the CIA. Because he knew more about toxins than anyone in the US government probably more than anyone in the world it was logical that his CIA superiors would call on him when they needed ways to kill. He made the poisons used in failed attempts to kill Fidel Castro, and at one point mused about creating aerosolized LSD that could be sprayed into a radio studio from which Castro was about to speak. In 1960 he carried poison to the Congo to be used in killing Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. The poison was not used, and several months later a Belgian-Congolese squad captured and executed Lumumba. For the last seven years of his career he ran the Technical Services Staff, which makes tools and devices for spies. In later life, perhaps troubled by what he had done, he volunteered at a hospital for leprosy patients, taught students with speech defects, and counseled dying patients at a hospice. Yet LSD is his most mind-boggling legacy. He saw it not as a tool for psychic exploration, as did his unwitting hippie disciples, or for clinical use, but as a potential key to abolishing consciousness so minds could be opened to outside control.

Before retiring from the CIA in 1973, Gottlieb destroyed most records of MK-ULTRA. Nonetheless enough have remained to make it possible to reconstruct his astonishing career. Without Gottlieb, LSD might not have become a driving force in American culture during the 1960s or an object of renewed fascination today. His perturbed spirit hovers above as a new era of interest in psychoactive drugs finally begins to unfold.

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, and author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control. Follow him on Twitter @stephenkinzer.

Stephen Kinzer is a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

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A CIA chemist, mind control and the return of psychedelic drugs - The Boston Globe

Syd Barrett: How LSD Created and Destroyed His Career With Pink Floyd – Biography

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By the spring of 1967, Pink Floyd was at the forefront of the psychedelic rock movement that was pushing its way into mainstream popular culture.

Fronted by lead guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett, and including bassist Roger Waters, drummer Nick Mason and organist Richard Wright, the band cracked the Top 20 in the United Kingdom with their catchy debut single, "Arnold Layne." In May 1967, they made an indelible impression with the Games for May concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, featuring a quadraphonic sound system, dazzling light show and bubble-generating machine.

As described in Crazy Diamond: Syd Barrett and the Dawn of Pink Floyd, the band was fueled by the creativity of its frontman, known for his cryptic lyrics that mixed mysticism and wordplay, and an experimental guitar style that made use of echo machines and other distortions.

Sadly, the same forces that drove Barrett to artistic breakthroughs also led him down the path of self-destruction, leaving him exiled from the group shortly after they arrived on the charts and rendering him a cautionary tale as Pink Floyd became one of the biggest bands in the world.

Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd perform in 1966

Photo: Adam Ritchie/Redferns

In 1965, as the foursome that became Pink Floyd were finding their musical footing between classes at London's Regent Street Polytechnic and Camberwell College of Arts, Barrett had discovered the mind-altering effects of LSD.

The turn to psychedelics had a massive impact on the group's direction. Taking their cues from their frontman, Pink Floyd began doing away with the R&B covers that were being imitated by countless other bands from the era and embracing original sounds. And the highly intelligent Barrett, already known for marching to his own peculiar beat, began heavilyingesting LSDand producing song lyrics that were seemingly pulled from unknown realms of the cosmos.

It was that combination of original music, stage presentation and lyrical prowess that captured the attention of record companies in the first place, but by the time Pink Floyd was being presented as the next big thing in British rock, Barrett was already losing his tenuous grasp on reality through his incessant drug use.

His old friend and eventual replacement David Gilmour noticed as much when he dropped by the Chelsea Studios in May 1967 for the recording of the band's second single, "See Emily Play."

"Syd didn't seem to recognize me and just stared back," Gilmour recalled in Crazy Diamond. "I got to know that look pretty well and I'll go on record as saying that was when he changed. It was a shock. He was a different person."

Despite the mounting worries about their friend's mental health, Pink Floyd was thriving. "See Emily Play" became a bigger hit than "Arnold Layne," reaching No. 6 on the British charts.

Furthermore, Barrett had delivered a string of brilliant songs for the group's debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. "Chapter 24" was inspired byI Ching, the ancient Chinese text, "Astronomy Domine" and "Interstellar Overdrive" became emblematic of the group's atmospheric sound and "Bike" showcased its writer's willingness to embrace the absurd.

However, it wasn't long after Piper landed in record stores in early August 1967 that Barrett's deteriorating state began causing headaches for his bandmates. Later that month, it was reported that the drug-addled frontman was suffering from "nervous exhaustion," forcing the group to cancel its planned appearance at the National Jazz and Blues Festival.

By the time the band departed for a U.S. tour in the fall, it was clear that Barrett's public presence was becoming a major problem. He stood on stage, detuning his guitar, during a gig at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, and stared catatonically at the hosts during appearances on Dick Clark's American Bandstand and The Pat Boone Show. Alarmed, the band's managers aborted the tour to avoid additional embarrassing incidents.

Syd Barrett

Photo: Andrew Whittuck/Redferns

Meanwhile, Barrett was under pressure to produce a successful follow-up single to "See Emily Play." "Scream Thy Last Scream" and "Vegetable Man" were deemed too dark for release, and while "Apples and Oranges" finally got the go-ahead in mid-November, it lacked the catchiness of its predecessors and flopped.

The group headed out for a U.K. tour around this time, with Barrett causing more tension by either refusing to exit the tour bus at gigs or walking off before the start of a show. Following a disastrous appearance at a Christmas concert, the band reached out to Gilmour, then fronting another struggling group called Jokers Wild.

Entering 1968 with intentions of continuing as a five-piece band, Pink Floyd tried an arrangement in which Barrett would remain on board as a behind-the-scenes songwriter, before abandoning the idea of dealing with him altogether. By March 1968, Barrett was no longer with the band he co-founded and pushed to prominence.

Within a few years, the remaining members of Pink Floyd were being celebrated as arena rock gods while Barrett's own musical career was finished, and he spent the rest of his life away from the public eye. His presence on the group's quirky early records serving as a reminder for what could have been a long and successful career for a unique, gifted artist.

Even though he was no longer a member, Barrett still had an impact on Pink Floyd, and the bands ninth studio album, Wish You Were Here, was recorded as a tribute to their co-founder.

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Syd Barrett: How LSD Created and Destroyed His Career With Pink Floyd - Biography

Gwyneth Paltrow’s New Netflix Docuseries Is Full of Psychedelics and Orgasms – Vogue

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So what happens in a workshop? Gwyneth Paltrow asks Betty Dodson with a grin. Everyone gets off! the sex educator replies. Cut to a woman, fully clothed, lying on a table, writhing around mid-orgasm. This exchange is just a taste of what to expect from Paltrows new six-episode docuseries The Goop Lab, debuting on Netflix later this month.

From energy healing to psychic medium sessions, the serieshosted by Paltrow and Goop chief content officer Elise Loehnenseeks to explore new frontiers in wellness. The crazier and more out there, the better. We took the open-minded approach that weve cultivated at Goop and applied a different, visual lens with Netflix, Paltrow explains in a statement. In the process, we found new ways to answer this: How do we make the most of our lives?

Despite prompting more than occasional eye rolls, and that $145,000 lawsuit concerning Goops claims about hormone-balancing jade eggs, the platform continues to expand on its investigation of all things alternative in the female wellness space. Paltrow shows no signs of giving up her reign as Hollywoods unofficial shamanand if The Goop Lab trailer is any indication, whether youre a keen believer, steadfast skeptic, or just plain curious about her unorthodox health practices, her latest venture is bound to draw you in.

The Goop Lab premieres on Netflix on January 24.

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Gwyneth Paltrow's New Netflix Docuseries Is Full of Psychedelics and Orgasms - Vogue

5 Psychological Forces That Turn People into Political Hacks | Aaron Pomerantz – Foundation for Economic Education

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Theres really no denying that we are in a time of deep political division. With everything from the impeachment proceedings to a contentious election cycle that began as soon as the midterms ended, it seems we may have indeed become the divided republic the American founders feared. Though there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future, there are key psychological forces affecting our political discourse and decision-making that, if not addressed, guarantee our political system will not improve.

Tempting as it might be to just blame politicians and pundits in DC for the rise in tribalism, the truth is that these psychological forces affect us all, regardless of age or background. If we truly want to see change, we must examine how each of us is affected by these forces and learn to break free of them. The consequences of doing so will be far-reaching and impactful.

The old adage that two heads are better than one is generally true. However, in groups where unity and conformity are valued above optimal decision-making, groupthink may occur.

Groupthink is when individual critical thinking, personal beliefs, and ideologies are abandoned in favor of whatever the group believes is the best idea. Any doubts or questions about the decision-making process are ignored or quashed in favor of the groups survival. This is especially true when the group making the decision feels threatened by an extreme us vs. them situation, something clearly experienced by both parties in the current political climate. Decisions made under such circumstances are often disastrous.

Closely related to the phenomenon of groupthink is group polarization. Groups are something of a gestalt entity in that they are often greater than the sum of their parts. Being part of a group can intensify our attitudes and beliefs in a phenomenon known as risky shift. The group discussion feeds into itself, and we become more extreme and polarized.

Both groupthink and group polarization are commonplace problems in todays political society. Both sides of the political spectrum have become less and less tolerant of dissent, and both are being pushed further toward extreme beliefs.

We must overcome the dangers of groupthink and group polarization by valuing principle over conformity.

We see this on the left, where even supposed moderate candidates like Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg support extreme positions on gun control, environmental policy, and health care reform. We see it on the right as free-market and small-government values give way to economic protectionism and the expansion of federal power. In both cases, these attitudes can be observed to not only affect the politicians who make decisions but also their constituents.

Now, conformity is not an inherently bad thing. We all conform to questionable family traditions over the holidays for the sake of peace. However, while ugly Christmas sweaters are harmless fun for those who enjoy them (personally, I dont get it), this isnt the same as sacrificing our individuality to the whims of a political group.

Both groupthink and group polarization can be alleviated by devils advocates and their assertion of individual beliefs and opinions. If we want to break free from political tribalism, we must overcome the dangers of groupthink and group polarization by valuing principle over conformity and by not being afraid to speak outeven if it threatens the unity of our political groups.

One of the most unique features of the American political experiment is that our founding documents explicitly lay out the belief that all people are created equal, each possessing intrinsic and inherent value, worth, and dignity. Political discourse over the last decade, however, has largely operated contrary to this ideal. Both sides of the aisle lament this loss of civility in politics, and theyre both right.

Political rhetoric and behavior have served to dehumanize our opponents on all sides of the political spectrum. Phrases like trumpkin and libtard all dominate the political discussion. Even words like fascist and socialist have been divorced from their original political and economic meanings, instead becoming labels to affix to our opponents to justify treating them however we want. We behave as if simply holding the wrong political opinion makes one less worthy of the respect and dignity due to all human beings.

Nobody wants to sit down and have a discussion with someone who dehumanizes them.

Such dehumanization thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as our behaviors and attitudes toward other people can actually shape them to conform to our preconceived notions. By treating people like they are subhuman, we end up inspiring them to behave in just such a fashion. We thus perceive our initial dehumanization as justified even though we ourselves are part of the problem. This continues the vicious, self-supporting cycle that has dominated American politics over the last decade.

Ameliorating this problem is both simple and difficult. The golden rule is well known but rarely practiced, especially in an atmosphere as divisive as our political society. However, it is imperative that we do so not only for the moral purpose of respecting human dignity but also for the practical purpose of allowing actual political discourse and decision-making. Nobody wants to sit down and have a discussion with someone who dehumanizes them.

This is not to say that we cannot and should not disagree with other viewpoints and ideas. However, we must do so in a way that attacks the ideas, not the people, and recognizes the truth of innate human dignity. We should resolve to follow the golden rule even when it is difficult (as it surely will be) and refrain from dehumanizing our political opponents.

Heuristics are mental shortcuts that we use in everyday life to conserve our cognitive resources. Ordinarily, heuristics are adaptive, positive strategies; we simply dont have the time or resources to actively think through daily habits like driving home from work or how to behave in a meeting. When overused or misapplied, however, heuristic thinking can be disastrous, especially in terms of political decision-making and discourse.

One powerful example of heuristic thinking gone wrong in politics is the availability heuristic, where we judge the prevalence of a phenomenon based on how easily we can call it to mind, regardless of whether our mental representation reflects reality. For instance, both violence and crime are at an all-time low and decreasing. The world is getting better.

However, if you look at political rhetoric and decision-making, you wouldnt think this was the case. Because we can easily call to mind examples of mass violence or dangerous criminals, we think these are commonplace occurrences even though they are not. The result has been that we encounter and treat others not as individuals but as mere representations of abstract stereotypes that are unlikely to reflect reality.Thus, we might make decisions divorced from reality. In politics, these decisions become uselessor even dangerouslegislation, from the zero tolerance criminal justice policies pushed by Attorney General Barr, to potentially disastrous red flag legislation.

Another example of maladaptive heuristic thinking is the representativeness heuristic, where we judge people based on how well they conform to our mental representations of stereotypes. This can be seen in the recent generation wars between millennials and baby boomers, exemplified in both the Ok, Boomer craze and categorizing all millennials as snowflakes.

The same principle can be seen in how we treat the abstract notions of Trump supporters or liberals, to say nothing of ethnic stereotypes. The result has been that we encounter and treat others not as individuals but as mere representations of abstract stereotypes that are unlikely to reflect reality.

Heuristic thinking is good for small, everyday decisions. However, when it comes to politics or people, it utterly divorces us from reality. To make our political society better, we must all engage with those around us in an honest, effortful, and appraising way, not simply continue relying on mental shortcuts.

Any decision we make involves what are known as construal levels. Construal levels refer to the psychological distance between us and the concepts in play, with distant concepts thought of abstractly and idealistically (the high construal level) and close concepts thought of concretely and practically (the low construal level). While the high construal level can be helpful for coming up with an idea or setting a goal, the low construal level is equally necessary for making and implementing any sort of decision.

Modern political discourse and decision-making are entirely wrapped up in the high construal level. The border wall? Mexico will pay for it! Dont ask how that will happen or why it hasnt already. The trade war? That will help us beat China, although what it means to beat China has never really been defined, and weve already begun to see the negative consequences of protectionist economic policy. Free health care and universal basic income for all? Well figure it out when we get there, even if these ideas are economically impossible.

Its all well and good to discuss abstractions, but without a plan to realize them, nothing will be accomplished.

However, the best example might be the Green New Deal, which contained not a single shred of practical considerations for its implementation and exemplifies high construal level thinking without any consideration of practicality.

Again, the solution to such problems is both simple and difficult. In such an idealism-driven political society, we dismiss naysayers who question the practical implications of political plans. However, in all political discourse and decision-making, we must consider both construal levels. Its necessary to consider high construal level ideas when setting goals. Even the lauded idea of small government is a high construal level goal since it is incredibly distant from our current reality.

However, without a willingness to think on the low construal levelto think about the practicality and feasibility of plans and goals, including what might potentially go wrongno good decision can be made. Its all well and good to discuss abstractions, but without a plan to realize them, nothing will be accomplished. We must not only think about high construal level ideals but also low construal level realities, and we must demand that our government and representatives do the same.

Psychological reactance is what occurs when we are told we cannot do a thing and, resentful of a perceived threat to our freedom, proceed to do precisely what we were warned against. As with the aforementioned phenomena, reactance is widely observable across the political spectrum.

When we are told that perhaps mocking and attacking children is inappropriate behavior (especially from adults in positions of social or political power), the immediate response is to simply double-down and attack them harder, be it Greta Thunberg or Barron Trump.

When words like retard are condemned for being insensitive toward the disabled, the immediate reaction is to protest in the name of freedom of speech, disregarding the fact that just because you can say something doesnt mean you should. We must instead focus on furthering and defending our own beliefs and values in a measured and principle-driven way.When protesters bring up the systematic problems of police brutality, the response isnt to thoughtfully consider these issues but rather to celebrate the police as an institution even more unreservedly and even threaten those who protest them.

Of course, when our actual freedoms are threatened, there is nothing wrong with defending them. Indeed, it is right and necessary that we do so. But when we base our entire political personas on triggering the other side, it is neither conducive to discourse nor likely to produce any sort of change.

Rather than basing our political identities on ideas and values, we instead become pure reactionaries and often break the laws of good taste (to say nothing of the golden rule). Rather than basing our political discourse and decision-making on pure reactance to our opposition, we must instead focus on furthering and defending our own beliefs and values in a measured and principle-driven way.

Breaking free from political tribalism does not have a top-down solution. We cannot change the behavior of the big people in Washington, DC, nor can we change the behavior of others around us.

However, we can resolve to change our own political attitudes and behaviors. All we can do is choose to work against the psychological forces impeding our political discourse and decision-making. If we choose to do so, the effects will not be confined to ourselves alone but will also have far-reaching effects all the way to the top.

We have a choice before us: to continue the patterns of thought and behavior that have brought us to such a contentious political situation or to make a change. After all, in a representative government like ours, it is not ultimately up to politicians or pundits but to we the people to, and please pardon the truism, be the change we want to see in the world.

After all, the most basic level of society is the individual, and if we can practice individual self-governance, these changes will have a greater impact than any one of us could imagine. If we truly want to address the deep political divisions, partisanship, and tribalism, that sort of fix must begin with ourselves.

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5 Psychological Forces That Turn People into Political Hacks | Aaron Pomerantz - Foundation for Economic Education