All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Meet Jen Devor, a Point Breeze Resident Who Is Running for City Commissioner – CityWide Stories – Dem for City Commissioner Philly!

Stories from all angles

Source: Meet Jen Devor, a Point Breeze Resident Who Is Running for City Commissioner – CityWide Stories

Louis C.K. Mocks Transgender People, School Shooting Massacre Survivors

Your 15 minutes are over – fool! Louis C.K. Mocks Transgender People, School Shooting Massacre Survivors

A bootleg audio recording of Louis C.K.‘s offensive new standup material has provoked more condemnation of the disgraced comedian since it was uploaded to YouTube on Saturday. The 49-minute recording, which was reportedly taken at Governor’s Comedy Club in Levittown, Long Island on December 16th, includes mockery of transgender people and survivors of school shootings. [ more › ]

Trump slows Syria pullout but claims ‘hero’ status

Even toads have more class!

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Troops ‘fighting Isis remnants’ and ‘slowly’ being sent home, tweets US president

Donald Trump has appeared to water down plans for an immediate pullout of US troops from Syria, even as he defiantly claimed that his achievements in the conflict should make him a “national hero”.

The tweeted comment on Monday came the day after a senior Republican senator said the US president had promised to stay in Syria to finish the job of destroying the Islamic State group – days after he shocked allies, and his own military establishment, by saying troops were coming home.

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‘For 30 years I’ve been obsessed by why children get leukaemia. Now we have an answer’ | Science | The Guardian

there is less breast feeding of infants and a tendency for them to have fewer social contacts with other children. Both trends reduce babies’ contact with germs. This has benefits – but also comes with side effects. Because young children are not being exposed to bugs and infections as they once were, their immune systems are not being properly primed. “When such a baby is eventually exposed to common infections, his or her unprimed immune system reacts in a grossly abnormal way,” says Greaves. “It over-reacts and triggers chronic inflammation.” As this inflammation progresses, chemicals called cytokines are released into the blood and these can trigger a second mutation that results in leukaemia in children carrying the first mutation. “The disease needs two hits to get going,” Greaves explains. “The second comes from the chronic inflammation set off by an unprimed immune system.” In other words, a susceptible child suffers chronic inflammation that is linked to modern super-clean homes and this inflammation changes his or her susceptibility to leukaemia so that it is transformed into the full-blown condition.

Source: ‘For 30 years I’ve been obsessed by why children get leukaemia. Now we have an answer’ | Science | The Guardian

Palestinian superbug epidemic could spread, say doctors

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Medics say antibiotics shortage stops them following protocols to fight drug-resistant bacteria

Doctors in Gaza and the West Bank have said they are battling an epidemic of antibiotic-resistant superbugs, a growing problem in the world’s conflict zones, which could also spill over the Palestinian borders.

The rise and spread of such virulent infections adds to the devastation of war, increasing medical costs, blocking hospital beds because patients need care for longer, and often leaving people whose injuries might once have been healed with life-changing disabilities.

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Trump reaffirms demand for border wall as shutdown enters 10th day

Such a baby and his tantrum is costing billions to tax payers and not protecting anyone!

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President said all-concrete wall was ‘never abandoned’ after three people close to him suggested on Sunday he does not want a wall

Donald Trump may or may not want an actual wall along the US border with Mexico – three people close to the president suggested on Sunday he does not but on Monday the president returned to tweeting, stridently, that he does.

Related: Democrat-controlled House faces question: what not to investigate?

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Putinism is 21st Century Fascism with Nuclear Weapons, Yakovenko Says

Paul Goble
            Staunton, December 30 – Putin’s Russia manifests in one way or another all of the 14 signs of “eternal fascism” Umberto Eco has outlined, “from the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, and reliance on historical traumas to the ideas of international and domestic conspiracy, and a cult of death,” according to Igor Yakovenko.
            But it is distinctive from 20thcentury models of fascist regimes in “about 20 ways,” the Russian commentator said in a December 26 talk to the Parnas Political University in Moscow, of which seven are the most important (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=5C27592F3D167).  They include the following:
1.      The absence of ideology and as a result the absence of propaganda. “The Putin media are not only not journalism but also not propaganda … They are weapons of an information war. They do not disseminate information and ideas: their product is feelings and emotions, including hatred, anger, and aversion to the West, Ukraine and the opposition. And love for Putin.”
2.      It is parasitic on the West.  Putinism relies on economic and technological resources created by the West. That makes it very different from the USSR or Nazi Germany, “Parasitic fascism” does not have plans for “the seizure of the planet.” Were it to do so, Yakovenko argues, it would immediately “die” as a system.
3.      It uses ‘spider’ wars which seek to exhaust opponents by spider-like attacks on its neighbors and the destruction of its opponents from the inside. All of Putin’s wars “bear a ‘spider’ character.” That is, they seek to kill the organism they are attacking and then consume it once it is dead.        
4.      Lies are the foundation of the regime and information forces are the most important weapons it has.  In the fascist regimes of the 20th centuries, military force was predominant and propaganda played a supportive role. In Putin’s regime, the reverse is true. 
5.      Putin’s fascism bears “a fake character.” It professes to be anti-Western but its “children and money are in the West;” and it claims to be a democracy but in fact is the most brutal of dictatorships. The Stalinist and Hitlerite elites also lived “not in complete correspondence with their ideologies, but the Putin elite lives by rules which directly oppose those it declares as the norms for the population.” It is thus, to use Yekaterina Schulmann’s, term, “’a reverse cargo cult.’”
6.      Putinism in contrast to 20th century fascism seeks the unlimited enrichment of its elites, either via corruption or economic machinations. 
7.      Putinism is fascism with nuclear weapons, which makes it more dangerous because it is in a position, however weak otherwise, to inflict unacceptable damage on its opponents.
According to Yakovenko, the Putin regime will inevitably lose because it is fascist “and fascism always loses.” Putin himself has accelerated this process by destroying the previous social contract with the population, by breaking the agreement with the elite for wealth in return for loyalty, and by destroying cooperation with the West via aggression.
Four categories of people oppose the Putin regime: the politically active emigres, the supporters of street protests, the supporters of elections, and those who cooperate up to a point with the regime but ultimately oppose it like Kudrin. Unfortunately, for success, they need to cooperate but each of them dislikes the others more than it dislikes the Putin regime.
That makes the direct cooperation of the four “impossible,” Yakovenko says. But success may come if they appreciate the need for all four, and each acts so as to not interfere with the others even if it can’t cooperate with them.  That is a real possibility if all understand what they are up against, the commentator concludes.