Wednesday, June 27, 2018

FARMLANDS (2018) Official Documentary with Lauren Southern



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Majority of Americans (70%) think media intentionally reports fake news

Nearly all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (92%) say that traditional news outlets knowingly report false or misleading stories at least sometimes, according to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll. Democrats and non-leaning independents also feel this way, but not nearly to the same extent.

Data: SurveyMonkey poll conducted June 15-19, 2018. Poll methodology; Chart: Axios Visuals
Why it matters: The data shows that trust in the media is heavily influenced by partisan politics, with Republicans more skeptical of mainstream media than their Democratic and Independent counterparts. Other studies from Gallup and Pew Research Center have drawn similar conclusions.
Get more stories like this by signing up for our daily morning newsletter, Axios AM. 
Across the board, trust in traditional news outlets continues to sink, with the overwhelming majority of Americans (70%) saying that "traditional major news sources report news they know to be fake, false, or purposely misleading."
  • President Trump has exacerbated the skepticism amongst hardline conservatives with polarizing language (and tweets) about the mainstream media being "fake news.
Bad intentions: Among those that think traditional news outlets report false news, most think they do so intentionally.
  • More than two-thirds (65%) say fake news is usually reported because “people have an agenda.”
  • Roughly one-third (30%) believe such information is shared due to laziness or “poor fact-checking.”
  • Hardly anyone (3%) thinks that fake news makes headlines by accident.  
Most people say they can spot a fake piece of news. And while Republicans are much less likely to trust that traditional news sources publish real news, they and Democrats are both mostly confident, 78% and 73% respectively, in their ability to identify whether a piece of news as fake.
When it comes to vetting news sources, roughly half of both parties say they, “stick to news sources they trust.” However, Democrats are more likely to take additional steps to verify what they’ve read than Republicans, according to survey responses.
  • More than half of Democrats (57%) say they use Google search to verify facts compared to 48% of Republicans and 55% of independents.
  • Nearly half of Democrats (43%) say they use a fact-checking website (e.g. FactCheck.org or Snopes.com) to verify facts compared to 30% of Republicans and 29% of independents.
  • Nearly half of Democrats (44%) say they check a website URL to verify its validity compared to 29% of Republicans and 36% of independents.
Methodology: This SurveyMonkey/Axios online poll was conducted June 15-19, 2018 among a total sample of 3,936 adults, selected from the nearly 3 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day. The modeled error estimate for the full sample is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The full breakdown by demographics is located here.

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Monday, June 25, 2018

Organized Crime and Illegal Immigration From Mexico: the Untold Story

 Let's tall about organized crime and how it differs in the US and Mexico. One of the most notorious mobsters was Vincent "Mad Dog" Coll.


 He was a freelance Irish contract killer born Uinseann Ó Colla. Coll committed his first murder when he was 18. He originally worked for the Dutch Schultz gang, but he was too insane to control. Between contract killings, he was an armed robber.


 After his fallout with Schultz, Coll killed as many as 40 of Schultz's men. He also broke into Schultz's warehouses to destroy vending machines and trucks. At this point, Coll turned to kidnapping gangsters for ransom.


 On July 28, 1931, Coll tried to kidnap bootlegger Joseph Rao. Coll opened fired with a submachine gun and shot five children, killing five-year-old Michael Vengalli.

 Coll was arrested on October 4, 1931. He'd dyed his hair and grown a mustache.

 During his trial, Coll (center) smiled and waved at photographers.

 Because the only eyewitness had a criminal record and mental-health issues, the judge dismissed the case. Coll went free After his acquittal, Coll returned to contact killing and kidnapping.


 On February 8, 1932, Coll was in a drug-store phone booth at 12:30 a.m. Three men entered the store. Two stood at the front, and the third went to the phone booth, took out a Thompson, and fired fifty rounds of .45-caliber bullets. Look at the grouping.


 Coll was hit with three bullets in the face, three in the chest, one in the stomach, and eight in the arms and legs. But the coroner said that many MORE bullets passed through his body.  A quote floating around was that they "turned Coll into blood and sh*t." The killer was never identified.


 See, the gangsters were ASHAMED that Coll had killed Michael Vengalli. The unwritten code was that you NEVER involve civilians.  In Mexico, the opposite is true. The cartels target civilians to show how ruthless they are.

 People are telling you that to build a wall is "cruel." Have you heard of the Cadereyta Jiménez massacre?

Between 49 and 68 decapitated bodies were dumped on the road on the night of May 12, 2012. Their hands and feet were cut off, and they had been tortured.  The official story is that these were Gulf Cartel members killed by the Zetas, but it's more like that they were...migrants on the way to the US. The cartels engage in human trafficking, so they murder migrants as a form of advertising. "Don't use these guys! Use us!"


 Each migrant pays between $6000 and $12,000. So the cartels are in competition.


 From April 6 to June 7, 2011, the Zetas murdered 193 people who they had kidnapped from passenger buses in San Fernando, Tamaulipas. The women were all raped, tortured, and dismembered alive, while the men were forced to fight to the death in gladiator contests.  THERE WAS NEVER ANY REASON GIVEN FOR THIS.  They apparently did it for fun.

 There's a Mexican music genre called "narcocorridos."  These are accordion-based polkas about the cartels. 

The stars of these ballads usually end up dead, because they sing the wrong thing.


 My mother was Mexican, so I know the culture.  We are doing Mexico no favors at all by having open borders.  All we're doing is prolonging the agony.


 The people screeching about The Children™ won't tell you about the entirely different cultural values.On one side of the border, mobsters kill their own for harming civilians.  On the other side of the border, mobsters murder as many civilians as they can.


 Remember how Obama boasted of his deportations? What happened was that contract killers came to the US, carried out  their assignments, and then turned themselves in to ICE to be deported  without being questioned.   Then they came back and did it again.


 Illegal immigration is a NATIONAL-SECURITY CRISIS. We're not building a wall to be mean or racist. A wall is the only way to force Mexico to clean up its act.  The incoming Mexican president has vowed to send millions MORE illegals, form all over South and Central America.  He is weaponizing illegal immigration.   So there's no need to worry about Mexico anymore.


 EVERYBODY on both sides of the border preys on illegals.   Look up photos of the Cadereyta Jiménez massacre. If you dare.  Those butchered bodies were illegals.


 Our government must protect Americans.  The Mexicans are currently beyond reach, so they must live with the consequences of their choices. Maybe someday we can work together.  But right now, it's simply not possible...

 ADDENDUM: In the US, criminal syndicates avoid drawing attention to themselves.You can get killed or turned in to the feds for leading a flashy life. It's exactly the opposite in Mexico.  There's a saying in Mexico:"Plata o plomo." Silver or lead.Take the bribe and cooperate, or get filled with bullets.  They have no fear whatsoever of law enforcement.Rather than get into gun battles on the streets here, let's just build the wall.It's far more humane...
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1011280088124436481.html

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Friday, June 15, 2018

The male crisis that's ruining our boys and no one cares about


As women’s roles expand, society’s need for men in their traditional roles as protector, provider and parent is shrinking

When all other variants of race, socio-economic status, health and other obvious metrics are accounted for, fatherlessness is the single biggest predictor for many negative outcomes among boys.

Father’s Day approaches and with it the opportunity to consider the importance of fathers to their children.

It is difficult to overstate both the positive effects of growing up with a father and the negative effects of father absence, especially for boys. These myriad benefits and perils are on record, undisputed and easily accessible. But in this gynocentric era, what is good or bad for boys does not seem to attract the interest of our cultural elites.

Boys are in crisis everywhere. They are falling behind academically in 60 of the most developed nations. Boys are 50 per cent less likely than girls to meet basic proficiency standards in reading, math and science. Rates of ADHD among them are escalating. Since the Great Depression, the gap between male and female suicides has tripled in the U.S.

What is good or bad for boys does not seem to attract the interest of our cultural elites.
  
The common denominator behind many of these trends is fatherlessness. When all other variants of race, socio-economic status, health and other obvious metrics are accounted for, fatherlessness is the single biggest predictor for many negative outcomes among boys. Male prison inmates are 85 per cent fatherless. Juvenile detention centres are likewise full of dad-deprived boys. Male violence and fatherlessness are strongly linked, even in violence-promoting political movements. Fiyaz Mughal, a radicalization specialist with the Faith Matters Network, says, “All of these (young ISIL recruits), they have an absent father … the kids fought police, fought at school, rebelled against every power structure at every opportunity.”

These are some of the interesting, well-annotated facts that arise from a reading of The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, Warren Farrell’s latest book, written in collaboration with John Gray, author of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. For 30 years, Farrell has been the North America doyen of research into the male psyche. Some of his original insights have served as “aha” moments for women who want to understand what makes men tick.

For me, that “aha” moment came while reading Farrell’s 1993 book, The Myth of Male Power, where I encountered his theory of “disposability” as the guiding principle behind men’s self-valuation. The basic idea is that our societies depend for their survival and comfort on male willingness to take on the nastiest jobs — oil rigs, hydro lines, construction, mining — that is, those with the highest risk of injury and death, and in particular to enter into combat to protect society’s vulnerable members: women and children.

Thus, men grow up learning that in order to garner society’s admiration and respect (“social bribes,” as Farrell puts it), they must strive for a heroism that can only be earned by high risk and willingness for self-sacrifice. (I was surprised to learn that over 75 per cent of firefighters in the U.S. are volunteers.) The result is the curious paradox that men can achieve high social valuation only by conceding the pricelessness of women’s and children’s lives, while placing a low value on their own.

As Farrell and Gray explain: “The traditional boy’s journey to self-sacrifice incorporated service to others, and required responsibility, loyalty, honour, and accountability. It created his mission. And his mission created his character.” This explains why boys tell each other to “man up” when they are in pain. Society can’t afford too much empathy for those who may have to be sacrificed. It also helps to explain why, for every soldier killed in battle, 25 veterans kill themselves.

As men absorb society’s indifference or outright hostility to them, they feel increasing loss of 'mission.'
  
As women’s roles expand, society’s need for men in their traditional roles as protector, provider and parent is shrinking. As men absorb society’s indifference or outright hostility to them, they feel increasing loss of “mission.” The news is replete with the bad things some men do, and much of the media tolerant of collective condemnation. Last week The Washington Post published a vicious denunciation of men by a gender-studies professor, entitled, “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” The content of the piece, replete with falsehoods to boot, bore out the scabrous misandry its title implies.

Farrell and Gray posit a new mission for men: “warrior parenting” — a shift in attitude that puts equal valuation on “hanging out” with kids as previously put on money as the primary male contribution to family. Much of The Boy Crisis is prescriptive, delivering sage advice on how mothers and fathers can contribute their unique parenting instincts (father roughhousing is crucial to boys’ ability to regulate aggression, for example) in creating a mutually constructive “checks-and-balances” family team.

An appendix lists 55 benefits fathers bring to parenting. Many will surprise you. If the boy crisis were a girl crisis of these proportions, a national emergency would be declared. This book should be read without gender prejudice at the highest policy levels.
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Tuesday, June 12, 2018

What Happens When Local Newspapers Shut Down: 6 Facts



Financing Dies in Darkness? The Impact of Newspaper Closures on Public Finance. This study, published in May, shows what happens to local politics when local newspapers close their doors.

In short, it’s not good. But that doesn’t mean we need to preserve the relics of a bygone era. When a changing market unearths negative results, that is a golden opportunity for an innovative entrepreneur to fill the void.

And actually, the story starts when online job listings and classifieds became popular. This innovation provided locals with a better alternative to the print versions. But in the process, it took a big chunk of local newspapers’ revenue.

Craigslist was the catalyst to newspapers’ decline. But I’ll explain at the end about a tool I think could help replace local newspapers.

1. Craigslist is the Harbinger of the Local News Apocalypse.

The study found that when Craiglist was introduced to a new location, local newspapers were 10% more likely to fail.
The growing popularity of Craigslist in the 2000s came at a cost to traditional newspaper outlets, which largely rely on revenue from advertisement sales. Kroft and Pope (2014), for example, show that Craigslist had a large impact on job advertising in local newspapers, as employers were increasingly using online forums like Craigslist to advertise their job openings. Gurun and Butler (2012) provide evidence that Craigslist entry in Pittsburgh and St. Louis significantly eroded advertisement sales for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and St. Louis-Post Dispatch, causing those papers to provide more favorably slanted coverage to local corporations that purchased advertisements in those newspapers.

2. When Newspapers Close, Local Government Efficiency Deteriorates.

After local papers shut down, town and county workers’ wages increased compared to local private sector employees. On average this led to a 1.3% increase in the government wage ratio to other county employees.

The median county studied increased wages by a total of $1.4 million overall and hired an average of four more government employees per 1,000 residents.

The burden on taxpayers increased accordingly. Each taxpayer paid an average of $85 more per year. This might not sound like a lot, but it actually amounted to .25% of the median wage–$33,700–in the counties studied.

These are averages, but certain towns showed much more shocking results.

Bell California’s only local paper closed in the early 1990s. In 1993 Bell hired a town manager at a starting salary of about $70,000.

By 2010, the same town manager was making over $785,000 per year, owned a waterfront mansion in town, and a ten-acre horse ranch outside Seattle.

The Bell Police Chief was earning more than $450,000 per year in the town of 37,000 residents. He earned 50% more than the Police Chief of Los Angeles, the closest major city to Bell, with a 2010 population of 3.8 million residents.

The study found that newspaper closures led to a decrease in local government efficiency even where overall economic conditions improved. The economic conditions of the area had nothing to do with the newspaper closures.

Closures were distributed relatively evenly from 1996-2015 as well as across economic recessions and expansions, geographic regions, and red versus blue states.

3. Political Engagement Dies With the Newspapers.

The study found that having more than two local papers was important for good government. It kept politics competitive by ensuring ideological diversity in the views expressed by the local news.

Similar results were observed whenever an area with three or fewer newspapers had one close down.

The government got worse in towns reduced to two, one or, zero local newspapers.

This seems to be because people participated less in local elections. As a result, politicians spent less money campaigning which carried over to less engaged town officials in general. This also correlated to less federal money being brought back to the municipality by local politicians active in lobbying the feds for handouts.

You could debate whether these effects are net positive or negative… As an outsider, I am happy to see less of my federal tax dollars go to random little towns. Lower spending on campaigns also seems like a good thing.

But when it comes to less civic engagement, this likely only exacerbates the problem with less efficient government. It makes it that much easier for politicians to hire more friends, pay them more, and raise taxes.

4. The Further You Live From Your Government, The Worse It Is. Newspaper Closures Compound This Problem.

[T]he relative distance between a state’s economic and political centers is a useful measure of the quality of public governance in that state, with longer distances being associated with lower quality governance. The marginal effect of external monitoring on governance quality is likely to be stronger in states with low quality governance.
Translation: if you have a really crappy government, local newspapers will improve it more than they could improve a decent government.

The study calls states where the seat of government is far removed from the seat of economics “high isolation states.”

In contrast, in “low isolation states”–where most of the population lives in economic hotspots close to the seat of government–governments improve.
[T]he distance between a state’s economic and political centers is a useful measure of the quality of public governance and accountability in the state. Governments face less scrutiny by citizens and the media when the distance between these centers is large, and Campante and Do (2014) show that the quality of governance is worse as a result.
Newspaper closures negatively affect both high isolation and low isolation states. But they affect the high isolation states worse. “This indicates that local newspapers are especially important in states that already have low quality governance.”

Newspapers can help people keep control of a government from which they are isolated. Living close to your government officials also seems to help keep them in check, but the best scenario is living close by and having a local newspaper vet the politicians.

5. Local Bond Yields Increase, Costing More To Finance Government Debt.

The major focus of the study was on the borrowing costs to local government. The study found that the interest rate towns and counties pay on their debt increased as local newspapers died. This means that debt costs towns, and therefore taxpayers, more when there is no local newspaper to scrutinize the public finances. This is because purchasers of those bonds–the people financing the debt–have less information about the stability of the local government, and are therefore taking on more risk when they lend them money.
Specifically, we find that the average offering yield for bonds issued in Closure counties during the pre-closure period is 4.047%, which is 1.5 basis points lower than the average offering yield from the matched control group (4.062%). In the post-closure period, we find that the average offering yield for bonds issued in Closure counties is 3.556%, which is 3.0 basis points higher than the average offering yield for the matched control group (3.526%).
Translation: towns where newspapers would close–but had not yet shut down–were actually paying a better rate compared the control group. After the closures, those same towns paid a higher rate than the control group.
A local newspaper provides an ideal monitoring agent for these revenue-generating projects, as mismanaged projects can be exposed by investigative reporters employed by the local newspaper. When a newspaper closes, this monitoring mechanism also ceases to exist, leading to a greater risk that the cash flows generated by these projects will be mismanaged.
The study also concludes that the cost of debt increases even more in “high isolation states”–where people live further from the seat of government power. So what we see is that a high isolation state starts with a worse government, which gets even crappier when the local newspaper shuts down, which makes the interest rates increase even more than in “low isolation states,” with a closer, better government.
While newspaper closures increase the cost of debt for both types of local governments:
the effect is much stronger in high isolation states. In particular, following a newspaper closure, yields in low isolation states increase by 5.5 basis points, while those in high isolation states increase by 12.3 basis points, for a difference of 6.8 basis points that is significant at the 5% level. This evidence supports our hypothesis that newspaper closures lead to worse public finance outcomes in states with low quality governance. We also find evidence that yields are slightly higher in high isolation states (2.2 basis points), suggesting that states with low quality governance generally have higher borrowing costs, even without accounting for newspaper closures… [emphasis added]

6. Online News Sources Have Not Effectively Replaced Print Sources of Local News

The study indicated that these negative effects of local newspapers closing were not inevitable. If a replacement to the local newspaper is better at investigating the government, it could have a positive effect on local government efficiency and bond prices.

Clearly, Craigslist was a better alternative for job listings and classified ads. But what can replace the political vetting which newspapers do?

Unfortunately, it seems that an effective replacement for regulating local government has not yet arrived.

The study compared high versus low internet usage in areas where a print paper closed. They used this as a general indicator of whether or not residents were more likely to replace print news sources with online news sources.
[T]he closure of a local newspaper creates a local information vacuum. Moreover, it is unlikely that such a vacuum can be easily filled by other sources of media. First, local issues are not topical enough for the national news media, which faces a much broader audience. Second, non-traditional media outlets, which are primarily online, have not sufficiently filled the investigative journalism gap that has resulted from newspaper closures (Waldman (2011)). Instead, these non-traditional outlets have primarily been in the business of content dissemination rate.
That means that the replacements don’t do deep digging, they just pump out stories with information aggregated from other online sources.

To touch back on the example of Bell, California, the closest local tv stations were in Los Angeles and rarely covered Bell.

Where There are Problems, There are Opportunities.

What this says to me is that someone is about to cash-in when they serve consumers a solution to this problem.

Perhaps the issue is convenience. Local newspapers get delivered to your door. They don’t have to compete with much else–just some catalogs and mail. But online, local sources need to get YOU to go to THEM. Even if they get the opportunity to throw a digital newspaper at your e-mail address, it has to compete with spam, your friends, work, and national news.

One alternative that comes to mind–admittedly because I have a vested interest in the company–is BadMirror.tv.

This is an online tv viewing experience, and anyone can add videos from YouTube or Vimeo.

In my area, there are videos on BadMirror from a resident who has covered topics like corruption in a local church, cleanliness issues at a downtown restaurant, and a proposed ordinance to ban skateboarding on city sidewalks. This seems like a great opportunity for someone like him to dig deep into local politics and expand his following.

It is now easy to watch videos from the internet on your television, so BadMirror is just like another station to flip on in the background. You can keep it on the news channel, or let it play interspersed with videos of local musicians, restaurant reviews, and upcoming local events.

The platform has only recently launched, but in the future, they plan to pay content creators based on how popular their content is. But all content is only shown locally until it gets enough likes and views to expand into a larger region. That means that locally relevant content is more likely to get an initial boost in popularity.

And while local newspapers had trouble with funding, an innovative independent investigative reporter has much less overhead. Combing something like BadMirror with a blog might be a viable business model for a local journalist. A few big stories a year would drive big waves of traffic to the blog, while daily aggregating could make sure people keep coming back. Adding video summaries of the local news to BadMirror helps find the local audience.

Of course, take my words with a grain of salt; I want to see BadMirror continue to grow, and solve problems that neither the internet at large or fading businesses like newspapers can tackle.
But far be it from me to end an article without offering a solution!

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Thursday, June 7, 2018

Trudeau : The Canadian Connection to Pizzagate



Pierre Trudeau was a trained Jesuit, Margaret Sinclair is from the original bloodline from the founding Scottish Freemasons, they were paired up for that reason, Margaret was an MK-ULTRA 'sex beta ' , after Margaret returned to Daddy Trudeau she had a 'nervous breakdown ', Pierre sent her to the psychiatric hospital in Montreal and was re-programmed by a CIA trained doctor who happened to be Mila Mulroneys father .
Everyone needs to search "Kathy Obrien" on youtube.

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