Music: Wolfgang Haffner — ‘Here’s to Life’ (feat Till Brönner & Chuck Loeb)
Extremist militias recruiting in fear of Clinton winning election, activists say
The Guardian reports: In the past 12 months, Jessica Campbell has had her car’s fuel line cut and its wheel nuts loosened. Late last year, she had a GPS tracker surreptitiously attached to her vehicle. She is now accustomed to being tailed by unfamiliar vehicles on Interstate 5 near her home in Cottage Grove, just outside Eugene, Oregon. Strangers have regularly come uninvited onto her property; someone even stripped the barbed wire on her fence “just to send a message”. Online, she has repeatedly been threatened with rape and death.
And last week, when she showed up at the Canyon City community hall in Grant County, she told me that someone shot at her and her entourage. They misread their GPS, took a wrong turn and stopped to get their bearings when a crack rang out with what Campbell thought was a .22 bullet whizzing by their vehicle.
Such threats are part of the pushback her work has sparked in rural Oregon.
Campbell co-directs the Rural Organizing Project, a not-for-profit group that sets out to confront the rightwing insurgency that has been bubbling away in parts of rural Oregon and throughout the west. A political organizer since high school, she now coordinates groups attempting to respond to divisive tactics from rightwing activists on immigration, race and public land ownership.
This extremist surge received national media attention during the occupation of the Malheur national wildlife refuge by the Bundy group, but it has continued to rise alongside Trump, with his legitimization of white nationalist politics and his apparent inspiration of insurrectionists across the country. [Continue reading…]
The SPLC identified 998 active extreme antigovernment groups in 2015: The antigovernment movement has experienced a resurgence, growing quickly since 2008, when President Obama was elected to office. Factors fueling the antigovernment movement in recent years include changing demographics driven by immigration, the struggling economy and the election of the first African-American president. [Continue reading…]
Donald Trump reveals evangelical rifts that could shape politics for years
The New York Times reports: When Jen Hatmaker speaks to stadiums full of Christian women, she regales them with stories about her five children and her garden back in Austin, Tex. — and stays away from politics. But recently she took to Facebook and Instagram to blast Donald J. Trump as a “national disgrace,” and remind her legions of followers that there are other names on the ballot in November.
“Trump has consistently normalized violence, sexual deviance, bigotry and hate speech,” she said in an email interview. “I wouldn’t accept this from my seventh-grade son, much less from a potential leader of the free world.”
In the nearly four decades since Jerry Falwell Sr. founded a group called the Moral Majority, evangelical Christians have been the Republican Party’s most unified and reliable voting bloc in November presidential elections. The leaders of what came to be known as the religious right were kingmakers and household names, like Pat Robertson, James C. Dobson, Ralph Reed.
But this year, Ms. Hatmaker’s outraged post was one small sign of the splintering of the evangelical bloc and a possible portent of the changes ahead. While most of the religious right’s aging old guard has chosen to stand by Mr. Trump, its judgment and authority are being challenged by an increasingly assertive crop of younger leaders, minorities and women such as Ms. Hatmaker.
“Those men have never spoken for me or, frankly, anyone I know,” said Ms. Hatmaker, the author of popular inspirational Christian books. “The fracture within our own Christian family may be irreparable.”
The fault lines among evangelicals that the election of 2016 has exposed — among generations, ethnic groups and sexes — are likely to reshape national politics for years to come, conservative Christian leaders and analysts said last week in interviews. Arguments that were once private are now public, and agendas are no longer clear. [Continue reading…]
Why is the U.S. Green Party so irrelevant?
By Per Urlaub, University of Texas at Austin
Many Americans value environmental protection and want to see more of it. But Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate, is drawing only 1 to 3 percent in recent polls, even in an election where many voters dislike the major candidates and are looking for alternatives.
Stein certainly has worked to differentiate herself from the two major party candidates. In July she asserted that electing Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton – probably the choice of most pro-environment voters – would “fan the flames of … right-wing extremism,” and be as bad as electing Donald Trump.
Pamela Anderson poisoned Julian Assange with a vegan sandwich?
Don't trust unconfirmed reports of Assange being alive. The Clinton machine is capable of body doubles.
ARREST PAMELA ANDERSON NOW#MAGA
— MyWhiteNinja (@MyWhiteNinja) October 17, 2016
The Daily Beast reports: In past years, a Presidential nominee calling women he’s accused of groping ugly liars or a major foreign power allegedly hacking into huge swathes of campaign emails would be Internet-breaking ammo. In this election cycle, that’s a slow news day. As America’s collective bad karma continues to manifest in this strange surreality, we’ve become increasingly un-shockable. It’s been a few weeks since a non-Trump headline has hit this new, higher bar for astonishment. And then Pamela Anderson allegedly poisoned Julian Assange with a vegan Pret a Manger sandwich.
#freeassange #getalife pic.twitter.com/RI7L4JO5JE
— Pamela Anderson (@pamfoundation) October 15, 2016
According to The Daily Mail, WikiLeaks founder Assange “says his internet link was ‘severed’ by state agents hours after claims he was poisoned by a Pret vegan sandwich brought to him by Pamela Anderson.” We might be less than a month away from a post-apocalyptic hell of our own creation, but no one can ever take that lede away from us.Ludicrous as these death-by-Pret theories may seem, the facts in this case might be even stranger than fiction. [Continue reading…]
This Arabic billboard in Michigan is massively trolling Donald Trump
Mashable reports: A black billboard has appeared alongside a highway in Michigan carrying white Arabic lettering that ridicules Donald Trump and his anti-Muslim rhetoric.
The sign, situated along I-94 in Dearborn, says: “Donald Trump doesn’t know what this means, but he’s scared of it anyway.” The only words in English are the Republican candidate’s name and a website, trumpisscared.org.
A new billboard in Dearborn, Michigan says in Arabic: "Donald Trump: He can't read this, but he's afraid of it." pic.twitter.com/Zm425od5G2
— Shadi Rahimi (@shadirahimi) October 17, 2016
A+++ troll job. Billboard on I-94 is written completely in Arabic. It reads: "Donald Trump can't read this but he's afraid of it" pic.twitter.com/GMgBBckNnf
— Rawan (@rawan) October 18, 2016
Behind the advert is the Nuisance Committee super PAC, a group started by the creator of the popular Cards Against Humanity card game.“We intentionally did not put the translation on the board because I like the idea of people who do not speak Arabic have to ask their friends who do speak Arabic for them to translate the board for them,” Melissa Harris, spokeswoman for the group, told WWJ Newsradio 950.
“And I personally hope this also will generate some dialogue between Arabic speaking people and non-Arabic speaking people in Detroit and across the country.” [Continue reading…]
Obama’s Afghanistan war strategy: Do ‘just enough to lose slowly’
The Washington Post reports from Camp Shorab: Earlier this month, a small district center just south of this desolate U.S. base came under attack from Taliban militants who threatened to overrun the local police. Frantic calls arrived from Afghan officials: They needed air support.
In a U.S. command center, a steel hut of plywood walls and a dozen video monitors piping in drone feeds and satellite imagery, soldiers began directing aircraft to the area. Redhanded 53, the call sign for a gun-metal-gray twin-engine propeller plane loaded with sensors, arrived overhead just in time to watch a truck loaded with explosives slam into the main police station.
Within an hour, the Americans had marshaled an armed Predator drone in the skies over the battle in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan. But the commanding officer, Col. D.A. Sims, and his troops were unable to determine whether the men with guns on the ground were Taliban or Afghan soldiers. So Sims directed the Predator to fire one of its two hellfire missiles into an adjacent field — a $70,000 dollar warning shot just to let the militants know that the Americans had arrived.
The Oct. 3 battle is a microcosm of what is happening across Afghanistan: Taliban fighters that show enormous resilience despite being on the wrong side of a 15-year, $800 billion war; an Afghan army that still struggles with leadership, equipment, tactics and, in some units, an unwillingness to fight; and the world’s most sophisticated military reduced at times to pounding fields with its feared armaments.
The future of the U.S. role in Afghanistan after a decade and a half of war has received little attention in the presidential campaign and debates. But the next administration will be bequeathed a strategy that is doing “just enough to lose slowly,” said Douglas Ollivant, a senior national-security-studies fellow at the New America Foundation. [Continue reading…]
‘Anyone who flees is shot dead’: Mosul locals trapped as ISIS digs in for fight
The Guardian reports: As Iraqi security forces and Kurdish fighters closed in on Mosul, its residents cowered in their homes and braced for what is likely to be an gruelling street battle.
“Everyone is staying at home because we don’t know what else to do. Daesh [another name for Islamic State] are mostly moving around on motorbike and have small and heavy guns. The planes started bombing Mosul around 1am today and they are in the sky constantly and occasionally striking targets,” Abu Mohammed, a 35-year-old from the east side of the city told the Guardian.
Mohammed is not his real name. He is a Shia who has survived the past two years under Islamic State (Isis) control by passing himself off as Sunni.
He said he thought the airstrikes were mostly precisely targeted on Isis but added: “Daesh are moving into civilian houses and mixing with the population. For example Daesh has placed a large depot of IEDs [improvised explosive devices] in a house next to my cousin’s house. I begged him to leave his house and bring his family to stay with me as the house could be targeted by coalition. He refused and said: ‘Whatever destiny brings.’”
“People have had enough in Mosul, the majority want Daesh to go as soon as possible and would like to see the Iraqi army and peshmerga enter the city,” he said. [Continue reading…]
Russian air defense raises stakes of U.S. confrontation in Syria
The Washington Post reports: Russia’s completion this month of an integrated air defense system in Syria has made an Obama administration decision to strike Syrian government installations from the air even less likely than it has been for years, and has created a substantial obstacle to the Syrian safe zones both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have advocated.
Deployment of mobile and interchangeable S-400 and S-300 missile batteries, along with other short-range systems, now gives Russia the ability to shoot down planes and cruise missiles over at least 250 miles in all directions from western Syria, covering virtually all of that country as well as significant portions of Turkey, Israel, Jordan and the eastern Mediterranean.
By placing the missiles as a threat “against military action” by other countries in Syria, Russia has raised “the stakes of confrontation,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry said Sunday.
While there is some disagreement among military experts as to the capability of the Russian systems, particularly the newly deployed S-300, “the reality is, we’re very concerned anytime those are emplaced,” a U.S. Defense official said. Neither its touted ability to counter U.S. stealth technology, or to target low-flying aircraft, has ever been tested by the United States.
“It’s not like we’ve had any shoot at an F-35,” the official said of the next-generation U.S. fighter jet. “We’re not sure if any of our aircraft can defeat the S-300.” [Continue reading…]
UN announces 72-hour ceasefire in Yemen starting Thursday
Middle East Eye reports: A 72-hour ceasefire in Yemen will go into effect starting Thursday, the United Nations announced on Monday.
A cessation of hostilities that first went into effect in April “will re-enter into force at 23:59 Yemen time on 19 October 2016, for an initial period of 72 hours, subject to renewal,” the UN’s special envoy for Yemen, Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, said in a statement.
The ceasefire opens the door for negotiations to find a political solution to the conflict. April’s truce was followed by repeated rounds of talks in Kuwait between the warring sides, which did not come to fruition.
Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi had agreed to the truce earlier in the day. [Continue reading…]
UK security agencies unlawfully collected data for 17 years, court rules
The Guardian reports: British security agencies have secretly and unlawfully collected massive volumes of confidential personal data, including financial information, on citizens for more than a decade, senior judges have ruled.
The investigatory powers tribunal, which is the only court that hears complaints against MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, said the security services operated an illegal regime to collect vast amounts of communications data, tracking individual phone and web use and other confidential personal information, without adequate safeguards or supervision for 17 years.
Privacy campaigners described the ruling as “one of the most significant indictments of the secret use of the government’s mass surveillance powers” since Edward Snowden first began exposing the extent of British and American state digital surveillance of citizens in 2013.
The tribunal said the regime governing the collection of bulk communications data (BCD) – the who, where, when and what of personal phone and web communications – failed to comply with article 8 protecting the right to privacy of the European convention of human rights (ECHR) between 1998, when it started, and 4 November 2015, when it was made public. [Continue reading…]
Where did the first farmers live? Looking for answers in DNA
Carl Zimmer writes: Beneath a rocky slope in central Jordan lie the remains of a 10,000-year-old village called Ain Ghazal, whose inhabitants lived in stone houses with timber roof beams, the walls and floors gleaming with white plaster.
Hundreds of people living there worshiped in circular shrines and made haunting, wide-eyed sculptures that stood three feet high. They buried their cherished dead under the floors of their houses, decapitating the bodies in order to decorate the skulls.
But as fascinating as this culture was, something else about Ain Ghazal intrigues archaeologists more: It was one of the first farming villages to have emerged after the dawn of agriculture.
Around the settlement, Ain Ghazal farmers raised barley, wheat, chickpeas and lentils. Other villagers would leave for months at a time to herd sheep and goats in the surrounding hills.
Sites like Ain Ghazal provide a glimpse of one of the most important transitions in human history: the moment that people domesticated plants and animals, settled down, and began to produce the kind of society in which most of us live today.
But for all that sites like Ain Ghazal have taught archaeologists, they are still grappling with enormous questions. Who exactly were the first farmers? How did agriculture, a cornerstone of civilization itself, spread to other parts of the world?
Some answers are now emerging from a surprising source: DNA extracted from skeletons at Ain Ghazal and other early settlements in the Near East. These findings have already challenged long-held ideas about how agriculture and domestication arose. [Continue reading…]
Music: Wolfgang Haffner feat. Dominic Miller — ‘Round Silence’
Poll: 41 percent of voters say election could be ‘stolen’ from Trump
Politico reports: The American electorate has turned deeply skeptical about the integrity of the nation’s election apparatus, with 41 percent of voters saying November’s election could be “stolen” from Donald Trump due to widespread voter fraud.
The new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll — conducted among 1,999 registered voters Oct. 13 through Oct. 15 — shows that Trump’s repeated warnings about a “rigged” election are having effect: 73 percent of Republicans think the election could be swiped from him. Just 17 percent of Democrats agree with the prospect of massive fraud at the ballot box.
The public sentiment is beginning to reflect Trump’s campaign message. Over the last week, the GOP nominee has intensified his criticism of the U.S. electoral system, much to the chagrin of elected Republicans, who think it threatens the peaceful transfer of power. Trump calls the process rigged, and has said the media is colluding with Hillary Clinton to throw the presidential race in her favor.
Trump’s comments casting doubt upon the process have drawn a gentle rebuke from House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose spokesperson put out what would ordinarily be an unremarkable statement on Saturday: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.” [Continue reading…]
Trump son-in-law makes approach on post-election TV start-up
Financial Times reports: Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has informally approached one of the media industry’s top dealmakers about the prospect of setting up a Trump television network after the presidential election in November.
Mr Kushner — an increasingly influential figure in the billionaire’s presidential campaign — contacted Aryeh Bourkoff, the founder and chief executive of LionTree, a boutique investment bank, within the past couple of months, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Their conversation was brief and has not progressed since, the people said. Mr Bourkoff and Mr Kushner both declined to comment.
However, the approach suggests Mr Kushner and the Republican candidate himself are thinking about how to capitalise on the populist movement that has sprung up around their campaign in the event of an election defeat to Democrat Hillary Clinton next month. Mr Trump has in recent days ramped up his criticism of the “dishonest and distorted” mainstream media, which he accuses of being biased against him in collusion with the Clinton campaign. [Continue reading…]
Inside Donald Trump’s echo chamber of conspiracies, grievances and vitriol
The Washington Post reports: He is preaching to the converted. He is lashing out at anyone who is not completely loyal. He is detaching himself from and delegitimizing the institutions of American political life. And he is proclaiming conspiracies everywhere — in polls (rigged), in debate moderators (biased) and in the election itself (soon to be stolen).
In the presidential campaign’s home stretch, Donald Trump is fully inhabiting his own echo chamber. The Republican nominee has turned inward, increasingly isolated from the country’s mainstream and leaders of his own party, and determined to rouse his most fervent supporters with dire warnings that their populist movement could fall prey to dark and collusive forces.
This is a campaign right out of Breitbart, the incendiary conservative website run until recently by Stephen K. Bannon, now the Trump campaign’s chief executive — and it is an act of retaliation. [Continue reading…]
CNN reports: Top Donald Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani claimed Sunday that Democrats could steal a close election by having dead people vote in inner cities, while vice presidential candidate Mike Pence said the ticket will “absolutely accept the result of the election.”
“I’m sorry, dead people generally vote for Democrats rather than Republicans,” the former New York City mayor told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.” “You want me to (say) that I think the election in Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair? I would have to be a moron to say that.”
But he did say the amount of cheating would only impact extremely close races — noting, for example, if either Trump or Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania by “5 points,” the cheating he alleges would occur would be negligible and not change the outcome. [Continue reading…]
Fears mount on Trump’s ‘rigged election’ rhetoric
Poitico reports: No one knows how to handle what might be about to hit on Nov. 9.
Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to lose on Nov. 8, refuse to concede the election, and teeter the country into an unprecedented crisis of faith in government. Republicans and Democrats, in Washington and beyond, fear that the aftermath of the 2016 election will create a festering infection in the already deep and lasting wound that the campaign is leaving on America.
And, they say, only Republican leaders who speak up will have any chance of stopping it.
“Polls close, but can you believe I lost large numbers of women voters based on made up events THAT NEVER HAPPENED. Media rigging election!” Trump tweeted Sunday morning in response to the latest round of numbers showing him behind.
President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and their top aides, along with leaders on Capitol Hill, worry about the preview Trump is providing in this final month, part kamikaze mission to take down Clinton, part temper tantrum by a man who has never been embarrassed on either this scale or spotlight.
They worry about how his egged-on followers might respond, and the violence – perhaps against Muslims, Latinos or any of the many other groups he has targeted in his campaign rhetoric — that might follow. [Continue reading…]
new NBC/WSJ poll, by race: whites +11 Trump, non-whites +60 Clinton
— John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) October 16, 2016
Putin’s hope to ignite a Eurasia-style protest in the United States
Jackson Diehl writes: In the fall of 2004 Vladimir Putin suffered a blow he has never forgotten. The fraudulent election of a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president, which Putin had directly and brazenly engineered, was overturned by a massive popular uprising. What came to be known as the “Orange Revolution” created a model for resistance to rigged elections in autocracies across Eurasia — in Kyrgyzstan, Belarus, Azerbaijan and, in 2012, Russia itself.
Most of the rebellions didn’t succeed. But Putin developed an obsession with “color revolutions,” which he is convinced are neither spontaneous nor locally organized, but orchestrated by the United States — and in the case of the Moscow protests four years ago, by Hillary Clinton herself.
That’s the context in which Russia’s intervention in the 2016 U.S. presidential election must be understood. Putin is trying to deliver to the American political elite what he believes is a dose of its own medicine. He is attempting to ignite — with the help, unwitting or otherwise, of Donald Trump — a U.S. color revolution.
Let’s look at the way those revolts unfolded. In every case, they pitted an outsider political movement against an entrenched elite willing to employ fraud and force to remain in power. The outsiders mobilized their followers to collect evidence of rigging on election day and, when they could, conducted exit polls and “quick counts” to obtain vote totals they could contrast with official results. They disseminated their findings through satellite channels and other foreign media. When the inevitable victory of the ruling party was announced, they called their followers to the streets for mass protests they hoped would cause the regime to crumble — or at least discredit its phony election triumph.
Of course, Trump’s populist campaign is no more comparable to the pro-democracy insurgencies in formerly Soviet lands such as Ukraine and Belarus than Clinton’s administration-in-waiting is to the Putin regime. But Putin’s audacious goal is to create the illusion that they are. “He’s trying to establish that our system is just as bad, just as corrupt, as his,” says Brian Whitmore, a senior editor of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. [Continue reading…]