Secession Is Still Popular

My Sunday is going good…hoping for lots of sunshine and garden stuff to do…..

Back in the 1860’s the first Southern state to secede from the union was South Carolina and immediately decided to fire upon a Union fort…..even though the Civil War is over some state tactics never die……

South Carolina wants to have the option of seceding from the US—again—if it feels the government does anything that goes against the Second Amendment. The Hill reports three Republican legislators in South Carolina introduced a bill Thursday that would let the state debate secession specifically “if the federal government confiscates legally purchased firearms.” It is extremely unlikely the bill passes out of the House by the April 10 deadline, according to the AP.

Rep. Mike Pitts says the bill is meant to draw attention to gun rights. “I see a lot of stuff where people even talk about totally repealing the Second Amendment, which separates us from the entire rest of the world,” he says. In 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede ahead of the Civil War.

A silly pile of redneck manure……some states must do anything they can to get attention even when they know they have NO intention of doing anything like secession.  State legislatures are no longer working for the people of said state instead they spend all their time passing laws that do NOTHING to improve the loves of the citizens…..this is a prime example of the stupidity of these bodies.

If one has any idea about the Constitutional process then one will realize just how moronic this piece of manure really is……ever notice the people that hold the Constitution up at every turn have very little knowledge how it works…..

chuq is out for now……thanx for your visits and comments……enjoy your time and your day.

Russian troll factory hiring for new anti-U.S. operation; biggest danger is not to America | Trudy Rubin

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia  — The four-story building at 55 Savushkina St. that housed the infamous Russian internet “troll factory” that meddled in America’s 2016 election now appears empty. I saw a huge “For Rent” sign in one of its large windows facing the street.

The main trolling operation has moved to an impersonal seven-story glass office building in the distant Lakhta business district. I couldn’t enter the building due to tight security. (Journalists seen taking pictures have been grabbed and harassed.) The city’s leading business daily Delovoy Peterburg reported late last year that the operation’s workspace has tripled.

Yet, little known to Americans, this fake news factory, whose organizers and some staff were indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for interfering with  the U.S. political system, was not initially intended to wage information warfare on America.


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Trudy Rubin / Staff

The infamous “troll factory” has moved to much larger quarters in St. Petersburg’s Lakhta business center.

Instead, its original purpose, starting in 2014, seems to have been to shape the thinking of ordinary Russians by viciously attacking domestic opposition activists and fueling public hostility toward Ukraine – and the United States.

>> READ MORE: Report from Moscow: After missile strike, will Trump or Putin be seen as the winner?

The domestic propaganda barrage continues out of the troll factory’s new digs, which include a massive online media conglomerate that intertwines news with Kremlin propaganda. “A tricky mix of normal reporting and hate speech,” one Russian journalist calls it. RBC magazine wrote in March 2017 that this “media factory” now reaches an audience that exceeds 50 million Russians a month.

 In May, this “media factory” will launch a new “information agency” called “USA Really. Wake Up Americans.” It has already put out an announcement that  it “will  focus on promoting information and problems that are hushed up by major American publications controlled by the U.S. political elite.” The agency is inviting “English-speaking journalists and authors to work on the project “ and send their CVs.

Now that its secret internet project has been exposed,  the  troll factory will apparently focus more on open information warfare. Kremlin propaganda mills masquerading as  news agencies will try to insert anti-American propaganda into U.S. – and Russian – media.

Given the rising tensions between Moscow and Washington, I think the domestic trolling operation holds more potential threat to America – than any (over-hyped) efforts to subvert U.S. democracy. It promotes Kremlin efforts to convince Russians that the United States wants to destroy their country and start WWIII (enhancing similar messages on state-controlled TV).

Since at least 2014, this trolling operation has been posting grotesque fabrications to foster Russian support for the Kremlin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine — and to whip up hostile feelings toward America. The information operation is funded by a Putin-friendly oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who just also happens to control a mercenary outfit known as Wagner that has contract troops in Ukraine and Syria.

To find out how the trolling worked, I talked to brave Russian journalists and undercover activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg who have been reporting on the fake news factory since long before Americans ever heard of Russian trolls.

>> READ MORE: Report from Moscow: Russian TV news exacerbates disconnect between Putin and the U.S. 

Vitaly Bespalov, a 27-year-old freelance journalist with long blond hair and a tattoo of Russian opposition politician Ksenia Sobchak on one arm, came to St.Petersburg in 2014 to try to find work.  He answered an ad for a “content manager” at 55 Savushkina St. and was offered a salary about a third higher than a normal starting job in Russia. It was not long after Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and he was told he would be working for a department called Ukraine II.

Bespalov had to pull  20 news stories about Ukraine daily from the internet and rewrite them to fit the Russian propaganda version. Ukrainians resisting the Russian invasion were “terrorists” and Russia-backed separatists were “volunteers.”

When a Ukrainian rocket hit an empty school where “volunteers” were hidden, the news was that Ukrainians wanted to kill children. Americans wanted to use the uprising as an excuse to start World War III.

(According to the BBC’s Russian service, the troll factory was linked to a video operation in Ukraine that produced gems like a supposed U.S. soldier shooting bullets into a Quran, clips that might enrage Russian Muslims in the Caucasus.)

After a few days, Bespalov realized what was going on and decided to “stay and get more information and make it public.”  He was later assigned to distribute links to fake news stories to social-media groups in different Russian cities. These stories were filled with clichés, such as “[Secretary of State] Clinton wants war with Russia” and nasty claims about President Barack Obama.

“I used to think this work was absolutely stupid work with no results,” Bespalov told me. But later he heard ordinary people using these clichés in their conversation “not just about Ukraine but about the USA.”

>> READ MORE: Report from Moscow: Not the Cold War, not WWIII: What to look for from Russia 

The trolling news operation backs Kremlin efforts to convince Russians that the United States wants to destroy their country. Similar messages are delivered by state-controlled TV.

Unfortunately, I was unable to learn what the American department of the troll factory is up to these days. Russian journalists say that, since 2016 it is much harder to find sources that have worked inside the troll factory. “They are scared and refuse to talk,” says Bespalov.

Only a handful of Russian news outlets still cover this story, which can put journalists at severe risk. After Vitaly Bespalov was interviewed by NBC late last year, the main state TV channel attacked him viciously, and his picture appeared on social media with false claims that he was a drug addict.

In the United States, on the other hand, we have plenty of information, overhyped, about Russian trolling. (Russian journalists I met uniformly expressed astonishment at any claims that the troll factory changed the outcome of the 2016 election.)

We know what happened in 2016, and should be fully able to take adequate precautions about any similar efforts. Forewarned about Russian trolling should be forearmed.

Published: April 26, 2018 — 3:01 AM EDT

| Updated: April 27, 2018 — 6:11 AM EDT

Russian troll factory hiring for new anti-U.S. operation; biggest danger is not to America | Trudy Rubin

The troll factory’s original purpose, starting in 2014, seems to have been to shape the thinking of ordinary Russian, by viciously attacking domestic opposition activists and fueling public hostility towards Ukraine – and towards the United States.

Source: Russian troll factory hiring for new anti-U.S. operation; biggest danger is not to America | Trudy Rubin

Now that its secret internet project has been exposed,  the  troll factory will apparently focus more on open information warfare. Kremlin propaganda mills masquerading as  news agencies will try to insert anti-American propaganda into U.S. – and Russian – media.

Given the rising tensions between Moscow and Washington, I think the domestic trolling operation holds more potential threat to America – than any (over-hyped) efforts to subvert U.S. democracy. It promotes Kremlin efforts to convince Russians that the United States wants to destroy their country and start WWIII (enhancing similar messages on state-controlled TV).

Kremlingate Is Really Just Watergate for Morons—With Russians

The scandal surrounding President Donald Trump and his reputed secret ties to the Kremlin has swirled around him since before his inauguration 15 months ago. For his entire presidency, just what th…

Source: Kremlingate Is Really Just Watergate for Morons—With Russians

Whether the KGB got anywhere with Trump in 1987 remains unknown, but it seems a remarkable coincidence that, barely a month after his return from the USSR, he made a splash by taking out newspaper ads in three major outlets, at a cost of almost $95,000, lambasting America’s allegedly free-loading allies. The plus-sized ads demanded that the United States disband the Western security system altogether, which of course was precisely what Moscow wanted. Trump’s public attacks on America’s allies thus began—and have continued to the present day.

Unfortunately for Trump and whatever deal he may have reached with Moscow, the Soviet Union fell apart four years later, and the KGB disbanded, at least for a while. In the 1990s, when his real estate/casino empire went bust and he desperately needed cash to stay afloat—which no American bank would lend him, knowing his creditworthiness—Trump apparently went to less conventional lenders to make good on his enormous losses. By the end of the 1990s, the Trump Organization was again in the black, though nobody officially can explain how, based on public records. Here Trump’s associations with less-than-upstanding biznismen from the former Soviet Union seem to have played a dubious role.

Suspicion lingers that in the 1990s the Trump Organization, which failed as a legitimate business, reinvented itself as a money-washing machine for Eastern organized crime. There’s evidence that this is precisely what happened, and it’s been hiding in plain sight for nearly two decades. The Treasury Department’s $10 million fine levied in 2015 on the now-defunct Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City for pervasive violations of the Bank Secrecy Act gives hints that there’s a lot of unraveling being done by Team Mueller as it gets to the bottom of what the Trump Organization really is.

100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead. The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history. https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810 … and here https://johnib.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/100-years-of-communism-and-100-million-dead/ …https://twitter.com/RutheniaRus/status/990181501215105024 …

100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead.
The Bolshevik plague that began in Russia was the greatest catastrophe in human history.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/100-years-of-communismand-100-million-dead-1510011810 …
and here
https://johnib.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/100-years-of-communism-and-100-million-dead/ … https://twitter.com/RutheniaRus/status/990181501215105024 …

Donald Trump World Cup tweet targeting bid opponents shows ′cowboy mentality′ | Africa | DW | 28.04.2018

Trump’s message did not go down well in Morocco.

“The US president acts like one would expect from an imperial power,” Nabila Mounib, the general secretary of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU), told DW. “We’ve been observing this behavior in all relationships between the US and countries of the global south.”

“Trump is well versed in the language of intimidation and threats, but we Moroccans should no be concerned by the logic of the jungle,” Mounib said, insisting that every country is entitled to make a bid. “Instead, we should try creating a more humane, fraternal and just global order.”

Source: Donald Trump World Cup tweet targeting bid opponents shows ′cowboy mentality′ | Africa | DW | 28.04.2018

Frontiers Pub. Health: The Zoonotic Threat From Four Types Of Respiratory Viruses

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2018.00104/full#B1

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Zoonotic diseases – those which originated in or are normally hosted by non-human species – but can infect humans – have been with us for many thousands of years. But their ability to spread, and opportunities to adapt to humans, likely only really took off as humans began to cluster together in communities.

  • Tuberculosis probably jumped to humans when we began to domesticate goats and cattle 5000 years ago.
  • Measles appears to have evolved from canine distemper and/or the Rinderpest virus of cattle.
  • And Influenza, as most of you know, is native to aquatic birds.

The list of zoonotic diseases is long and continues to expand, and includes such notable nasties as SARS, MERS, Babesiosis, Borrelia (Lyme), Nipah, HIV, Plague, Rabies, Hendra, Malaria, Dengue, Zika, Hantavirus, Ebola, Bartonella, Leptospirosis, Q-Fever, several flavors of avian flu and many, many others.

Over the years we’ve looked at this growing trend, which was largely predicted back in the mid 1990s by noted anthropologist and researcher George Armelagos of Emory University (see The Third Epidemiological Transition (Revisited)). 

Around the same time (1995), the CDC began publishing the EID Journal, a highly respected peer-reviewed journal on emerging pathogenic threats.  Today emerging disease threats, and neglected tropical diseases, are a hot topic in scores of respected journals.

In 2014, in Emerging zoonotic viral diseases  L.-F. Wang (1, 2) * & G. Crameri wrote:

The last 30 years have seen a rise in emerging infectious diseases in humans and of these over 70% are zoonotic (2, 3). Zoonotic infections are not new. They have always featured among the wide range of human diseases and most, e.g. anthrax, tuberculosis, plague, yellow fever and influenza, have come from domestic animals, poultry and livestock.

However, with changes in the environment, human behaviour and habitat, increasingly these infections are emerging from wildlife species.

While the public health burden from non-respiratory diseases (i.e. Dengue, Zika, Lyme, Malaria, rabies, Ebola, etc.) is very high, respiratory viruses – due to their ability to spread quickly, and sometimes even globally – are among the most concerning.  

We’ve an excellent mini-review of zoonotic respiratory disease threats, published earlier this month in Frontiers In Public Health, that looks four specific types of emerging or re-emerging threats; influenza viruses, coronaviruses, enteroviruses (EVs), and adenoviruses (Ads).

Not a complete list, of course.  But these four groups are viewed as having particularly good growth prospects.

I’ve only included a few excerpts, so follow the link to read the full article.

A Mini Review of the Zoonotic Threat Potential of Influenza Viruses, Coronaviruses, Adenoviruses, and Enteroviruses 

Emily S. Bailey1,2*, Jane K. Fieldhouse1,2, Jessica Y. Choi1,2 and Gregory C. Gray1,2,3,4 

1Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, United States
2Division of Infectious Diseases, Duke University School of Medicine, Durham, NC, United States
3Global Health Research Center, Duke-Kunshan University, Kunshan, China
4Emerging Infectious Diseases Program, Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore

During the last two decades, scientists have grown increasingly aware that viruses are emerging from the human–animal interface. In particular, respiratory infections are problematic; in early 2003, World Health Organization issued a worldwide alert for a previously unrecognized illness that was subsequently found to be caused by a novel coronavirus [severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus]. 

In addition to SARS, other respiratory pathogens have also emerged recently, contributing to the high burden of respiratory tract infection-related morbidity and mortality. Among the recently emerged respiratory pathogens are influenza viruses, coronaviruses, enteroviruses, and adenoviruses.

As the genesis of these emerging viruses is not well understood and their detection normally occurs after they have crossed over and adapted to man, ideally, strategies for such novel virus detection should include intensive surveillance at the human–animal interface, particularly if one believes the paradigm that many novel emerging zoonotic viruses first circulate in animal populations and occasionally infect man before they fully adapt to man; early detection at the human–animal interface will provide earlier warning. Here, we review recent emerging virus treats for these four groups of viruses. 

Introduction

During the last two decades, scientists have grown increasingly aware that viruses are emerging from the human–animal interface. In order to combat this increasingly complex problem, the One Health approach or initiative has been proposed as a way of working across disciplines to incorporate human, animal, and environmental health. Of particular concern are emerging respiratory virus infections; in a recent seminar given by the National Institute of Health on emerging and re-emerging pathogens, nearly 18% were respiratory viruses (1).

Among the recently emerged respiratory pathogens contributing to the high burden of respiratory tract infection-related morbidity and mortality, displayed graphically in Figure 1, are influenza viruses, coronaviruses, enteroviruses (EVs), and adenoviruses (Ads). In this report, we summarize the emerging threat characteristics of these four groups of viruses.

(Continue . . . )

Structural racism at heart of British society, UN human rights panel says

Experts cite police data showing disproportionate number of minority ethnic people died due to excessive use of force by state

The disproportionate number of deaths of black and brown people in incidents with the police shows that structural racism remains rooted in the fabric of British society, a panel of UN human rights experts has said.

The panel cited data from the Metropolitan police showing a disproportionate number of minority ethnic people – particularly those of African or Caribbean descent – dying due to excessive use of force by the state.

Related: Four black men die. Did police actions play a part?

Continue reading…

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