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fromchaostocosmos: I feel like it needs pointing out that for…

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fromchaostocosmos:

I feel like it needs pointing out that for many Jewish people 2018 is not the first time they have been persecuted for being Jewish. In fact many Jewish even the usa have been harassed and persecuted for being Jewish for years and years now.

Also Nazi and neo-Nazis don’t want to kill Jewish people due to our religion they want to kill us due a host of reasons that stem from the fact that we are racially inferior and they see us as an infestation.

Judaism is an ethno-religion and it is dangerous to erase that. The systematic effort to eradicate Jewish people by nazi was not about religious persecution and it is incredibly important to understand that.     

What Juvenile BS!

Closing Thought–16Aug18

The more I watch Our Dear Leader perform for the media I ask myself just how far will this infantile person go in his bullying of critics….well I did not have to wait too long to find our….now did I?

President Donald Trump is following through on his threat to revoke the security clearance of former Obama administration CIA director John Brennan, a vocal critic of the president, the White House said Wednesday. “Mr. Brennan has recently leveraged his status as a former high-ranking official with access to highly sensitive information to make a series of unfounded and outrageous allegations, wild outbursts on the internet and television about this administration,” press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, per the AP. Brennan has been deeply critical of Trump’s conduct, calling his performance at a joint press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Finland “nothing short of treasonous.” Sanders said the security clearances of other current and formers officials are also “under review.”

They include former FBI Director James Comey; James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence; former CIA Director Michael Hayden; former national security adviser Susan Rice; and Andrew McCabe, who served as Trump’s deputy FBI director until he was fired in March. Also on the list: fired FBI agent Peter Strzok, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, and senior Justice Department official Bruce Ohr. At least two of the former officials, Comey and McCabe, do not currently have security clearances. Former CIA directors and other top national security officials are typically allowed to keep their clearances, at least for some period, so they can be in a position to advise their successors and to hold certain jobs. Experts have said that stripping a security clearance in response to public criticism would be an unprecedented politicization of the clearance process, and Democrats were quick to decry Trump’s move.

This mental 5 year old would risk national security to punish anyone that criticizes him….again juvenile……it is bad enough the he insults and bullies people on Twitter all because he wears his feelings on his sleeve like the spoiled brat he is.

Just another attempt by Dear Leader to silence his political enemies and that my friends is called “censorship”……got it now?

What’s next?  Banning newspapers with op-eds that hurt his feelings?

The Boston Globe decided it was time for an organized response to President Trump’s attacks on the media as an “enemy of the people”—and hundreds of newspapers responded. At least 343 publications agreed to publish editorials Thursday against what the Globe calls Trump’s “dirty war against the free press,” reports the Guardian. They include some of America’s biggest newspapers as well as smaller publications nationwide, though the Wall Street Journal is among the holdouts, reports the BBC. A selection:

  • The onslaught from the president is “scary. We’re afraid, for our personal safety and for the future of our country,” write the editorial boards of the San Jose Mercury News and the East Bay Times. “These attacks on the press are an attack on our nation’s foundation. And we’re angry. Angry that we work so hard to carry out the mission our Founding Fathers envisioned, to provide the free flow of information so critical to a well-functioning democracy, only to be demonized by our president for doing our jobs.”
  • Not covering Trump aggressively would be a “dereliction of duty,” writes the editorial board at the Topeka Capital-Journal, one of the few papers that endorsed Trump in 2016. “We’re not separate from the public. We are the public. We live and work and play in Topeka and surrounding areas. We go to restaurants and send our children to school. We drive the same roads, see the same doctors,” they write, describing Trump’s attacks as sinister. “We’re not the enemy of the people. We are the people.”
  • “We support a free and vibrant press, a nation where the powerful are held to account by the Fourth Estate. Journalists are not the enemy of the people; we’re advocating for the people. We stand with our colleagues,” writes the editorial board at the New York Post, adding: “Will this make a difference? Not one whit.”
  • “Criticizing the news media—for underplaying or overplaying stories, for getting something wrong—is entirely right. News reporters and editors are human, and make mistakes,” writes the New York Times editorial board. “Correcting them is core to our job. But insisting that truths you don’t like are ‘fake news’ is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy. And calling journalists the ‘enemy of the people’ is dangerous, period.”
  • John Diaz at the San Francisco Chronicle says that while they have published plenty of anti-Trump editorials and spoken out many times against his attacks on the press, they’ve decided not to join the crowd this time. The coordinated campaign “plays into Trump’s narrative that the media are aligned against him. I can just anticipate his Thursday morning tweets accusing the ‘FAKE NEWS MEDIA’ of ‘COLLUSION!’ and ‘BIAS!’” Diaz writes.

So I Have Written!

Turn The Page!

“I’ve lived here my whole life.  I’m ready to leave.  I just…

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“I’ve lived here my whole life.  I’m ready to leave.  I just graduated college and I’d love to experience a new city.  But I’m stuck.  My dad is trying to become a citizen, and I need to stay in the city because I’m the one petitioning on his behalf.  We’ve been waiting for five years already.  We’ve spent so much money.  But it’s the least I can do for him.  I’ve seen where he lived in Mexico: tiny houses, dirt floors, no shoes.  He was the youngest of twelve.  His family couldn’t afford to educate him.  So he came here when he was seventeen and worked as a migrant worker in California.  He slept in train cars and ate food out of the trash.  Even now he works fourteen hours a day.  He comes home, we talk a bit, and he goes to sleep.  It’s been that way my entire life.  He’s turning fifty soon and he’d love to start his own business.  So I hope he gets his citizenship.  It’s a little dangerous because he’s on the radar now.  They have his fingerprints.  But he’s got a son that fought in Afghanistan.  And now he’s got a daughter that graduated from NYU, so I think he deserves to stay.”

Analysis of fake YouTube views

Wherever more attention or the appearance of it equates to more money, there are those who try to game the system. Michael H. Keller for The New York Times examines the business of fake YouTube views:

YouTube’s engineers, statisticians and data scientists are constantly improving in their ability to fight what Ms. O’Connor calls a “very hard problem,” but the attacks have “continually gotten stronger and more sophisticated,” she said.

After the Times reporter presented YouTube with the videos for which he had bought views, the company said sellers had exploited two vulnerabilities that had already been fixed. Later that day, the reporter bought more views from six of the same vendors. The view count rose again, though more slowly. A week later, all but two of the vendors had delivered the full amount.

Tags: fake, New York Times, YouTube

Phoenician or Arab, Lebanese or Syrian: Who were the early immigrants to America?

This article is authored by Dr. Akram Khater, Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies and Khayrallah Distinguished Professor of Lebanese Diaspora Studies, and Professor of History at NC State. His earlier article focused on Lebanese-Americans in WWI. It was originally published on the Khayrallah Center’s website and republished on Hummus For Thought with permission from Dr. Khater.


Between the 1870s and the 1930s some 120,000 immigrants left the Eastern Mediterranean and traveled to the U.S., with another 220,000 departing for Central and South America and landing in destinations like Argentina and Brazil. These men, women and children, peasants and tradesmen, factory workers, teachers and merchants came from across “Greater Syria,” an Ottoman province that today encompasses Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine/Israel. We do not know for certain their religious distribution but they included Antiochian Orthodox, Druzes, Jews, Maronite Catholics, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims.

Origin-City-1Places of Origin of Early Immigrants. To learn more about this map click on the image.

Their sense of self was located within villages and towns like Homs, Bayt Meri, Bethlehem, or Rashaya, and distilled through their experiences of family and religion. Ethnicity and nationality were meaningless to the great majority of them. In other words, when they left they were neither Lebanese nor Syrian, Phoenician nor Arab. However, their sojourns into the racially charged American social, legal and political landscape forced them to re-define themselves in terms of ethnic and national identity. Moreover, World War I and the subsequent division of their homelands into nations under the tutelage of French colonial power, engaged them in spirited—and sometimes violent—debates about who they were and where they came from. The result of these various forces differed but overlapped, and changed identities that were more fluid than fixed, and easier to use as labels than to substantially define.

As these immigrants traveled across the Mediterranean and Atlantic to “Amirka” they were required to have an ethnic/national identity if they were to gain entry to the place that they hoped would make them a handsome sum of money and afford them new opportunities. Ship companies’ clerks and Ellis Island inspectors were not interested in the intimate world of small villages like ‘Ayn Ibl (in South Lebanon), or even the geographically distinct and rapidly growing city of Beirut. Rather, until 1899 these company employees and state functionaries jotted down “Turkey in Asia” in their registers next to the migrant’s name, and after 1900 replaced it with “Syria” for most entries while keeping the earlier term in some cases. Thus, upon entrance into the US, immigrants acquired a different and larger identity—“Syrian”—than the ones they had left with. The label “Syria” made sense geographically as a designation for where they came from, but it also represented an emerging political project and idea among the educated urban elites of their homelands.

Louis_Cheikho_1859-1929_jésuite_chaldéenLouis Cheikho, Courtesy of Wikipedia

“Syria”—as a distinct political and cultural space—was first popularized during the 19th century by Jesuit missionaries in Mount Lebanon who established transformative educational establishments like the Oriental Seminary in the village of Ghazir, or the Université Saint Joseph in Beirut (founded in 1875). Starting in the 1880s their faculty, including intellectual luminaries like Henri Lammens and Louis Cheikho, undertook decades-long project to “resurrect” and write the history of “Syria”—with the district of Mount Lebanon as its religious, cultural and administrative heart—as a separate Christian entity radically different from the surrounding and predominantly Muslim Ottoman provinces. Lammens popularized the idea of Mount Lebanon as a refuge for oppressed Christian minorities in his iconic book La Syrie: Prècis Historique (Syria: A Historical Summary).

By 1908 these intellectuals, along with the Maronite church and its elites, French travelers and officials went one step further where they imagined the Maronites to be the “Français du Levant,” (The French of the Levant): a culturally distinct and European group who deserve their own entity in an expanded Mount Lebanon.  This was perhaps best captured by Youssef al-Souda, a Lebanese émigré in Egypt—educated at the Université Saint Joseph between 1900 and 1907. In his book Fi Sabil Lubnan (For the Sake of Lebanon) which he published in 1919 he noted: “ Every nation has a strong desire to return to its roots…so is Lebanon proud to remember and remind all that it is the cradle of civilization in the world. It was born on the slopes of its mountain and ripened on its shores, and from there the Phoenicians carried it to the four corners of the earth.” (Asher Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, p. 48)

Similarly, the Syrian Protestant College (a higher education institution established in 1866 in Beirut by American Presbyterians, and later renamed the American University of Beirut), played a critical role in giving substance to the idea of “Syria” as a distinct cultural and political region in the Middle East. Its American professors and more importantly local graduates were central to the Nahda—or the Arab renaissance movement of the 19th century—which used Arabic “as a vehicle for the formation of a secular identity in the territory they defined as geographical Syria.” (Asher Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, p. 39). However, unlike the Jesuit missionaries and their students, the emphasis by this cohort of intellectuals was not on a Catholic/Christian nation, but rather on an ecumenical and secular Syria.

Kawkab-Ad-2Shipping Company Advertisements in Kawkab Amirka.

Thus, by the dawn of the 20th century, when the majority of Levantine immigrants arrived in the US, “Syrian” as an ethnic and national origin was reasonable enough to accept even if they were not quite sure what it meant. As community organizations and publications proliferated and gave ethnic substance to these migratory individuals and families, the term “Syrian” became more common. The center of the immigrant population in New York came to be known as the “Syrian Colony.” In letters sent back to the Maronite Patriarch Elias al-Howayek between 1899 and 1931, members of the diasporic communities regularly referred to themselves as “Syrians.” For example, in 1901 Mikhail Daher Abou Sleyman wrote asking to remove the local Maronite priest who was “bigoted” because “most of the Syrians in New York are cultured…and hate bigotry.” Community newspapers also adopted this term in their articles and advertisements. For instance, an ad in Kawkab Amirka (The Planet of America) by the Compagnie Generale Trans-Atlantique promised “Our Syrian Voyagers” comfort and security in their journey back to “Syria.”  Others, like The Syrian World, adopted the name in their very identity. Even the Federal government of the U.S. adopted this term to identify immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1911 the Immigration Commission of the House published a Dictionary of Races or Peoples wherein the “Syrian” was identified as a native Aramaic “race” of Syria and distinct from Arabs. While both spoke Arabic and were Semites, and many Arabs lived in Syria, the “Syrians” were defined as predominantly Christian and were descendants of the Phoenicians.

Naoum_MokarzelNaoum Mokarzel, Courtesy of Wikipedia.al-Huda.fw_Al-Hoda Newspaper

Two key Maronite intellectuals amongst the early immigrants to America concurred on this distinction but disagreed with each other on its meaning. Naoum Mokarzel (publisher of al-Hoda) and Philip Khuri Hitti (professor of Middle East studies at Princeton) both arrived in the U.S. just as the “Immigration problem” was being debated in the U.S., and where attempts to limit immigration to “Caucasians” was gaining steam. Mokarzel used al-Hoda as a platform to proclaim that the “Syrians” were part of the white race different from Arabs and Turks, and thus not subject to these emerging restrictions. (This is an argument that was carried into the courts to defend the rights of “Syrians” to become US citizens). He argued, like Hitti, that their Phoenician roots made them part of European culture. Hitti wrote explicitly of this in his book The Syrians in America where he noted: “With this [Phoenician-Canaanite] Semitic stock as a substratum the Syrians are a highly mixed race of whom some rightly trace their origin back to the Greek settlers and colonists…others to the Frankish and other European Crusaders…” (Asher Kaufman, Reviving Phoenicia, p. 77) Yet, while Hitti remained dedicated to the idea of Lebanon as part of a larger Syria, Mokarzel slowly moved toward a “Lebanist” position by World War I. He argued, along with the Lebanese League of Revival (based in Alexandria, Egypt) that Lebanon was distinct from the rest of the area in its non-Arab identity. Acting on this belief, he traveled after World War I to the Peace Conference in Versailles (France) to agitate for an independent Lebanon. On September 1, 1920 this project came to fruition when the French colonial authorities—at the behest of the Maronite church and intellectuals, and to satisfy its own imperial interests—created Le Grand Liban (Greater Lebanon). The newly created nation-state began to formally recognize Levantine immigrants in the U.S. and beyond as Lebanese citizens. Similarly, the French colonial authorities came to count and regard these immigrants as citizens of Lebanon.

2017_09_18_11_50_36-768x634Declaration of the Arab National League. Courtesy of Dr. Hani Bawardi, author of “The Making of Arab Americans.”

Other members of the Levantine community were not so wedded to the idea of a separate Lebanon or one that abandoned its Arab heritage. In 1925 the “Syrian Revolt” broke out in the Syrian hinterlands against French colonial power. Hailed as the “Druze Revolt” by the Druze and Muslim members of the Detroit Syrian Community, the revolt galvanized them to create the New Syria Party (NSP) which declared its support for an Arab Syria. The leader of the NSP, a Muslim preacher by the name of Kalil Bazzy invited one of the top leaders of the revolt, Shakib Arslan, to visit Detroit and deliver a talk about the revolt. This move alienated the Maronite Christian community there (but not the Antiochian Orthodox one), who believed that Arslan was responsible for the reported massacres of Christians in South Lebanon, and more importantly because he represented a vision of a non-Christian dominated “Syria.” A journalist for the Detroit Free Press described the situation as follows: “In such a time [1926] the Detroit Syrian colony seems really like a “Little Syria” for here, on a smaller scale, appear the same divisions of partisan thought and factional sympathy.” (Sally Howell, Old Islam in Detroit, p. 87). Hani Bawardi carries this further by writing about the development of an Arab political consciousness in the 1930s especially with the establishment of the Arab National League which dedicated itself to rendering “political, cultural, educational and economic service to the Arab countries.” While certainly many members of the community remained aloof, the existence and persistence of this organization as an “Arab” diasporic entity is quite removed from the distinction that Mokarzel and Hitti stipulated between “Syrian,” “Lebanese” and “Arab.” (Ameen Rihani delivered an impassioned speech in 1937 about Palestine that you can listen to here.)

Debates about the identity of these Eastern Mediterranean immigrants continued after the 1930s and remain a point of contention within the Lebanese and Arab community today. Their persistence and changes over time are a warning against the hazards of assigning a single fixed identity to all those immigrants who came from “Greater Syria.” Rather, different groups adopted varying identities with some opting for being Christian-Lebanese, while others adopted a more secular “Syrian” label, and still others saw themselves as part of a larger Arab world. But even these were never set positions as later generations—facing different political circumstances than their forbearers driven by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, U.S. military involvement in the Middle East, and the rise of Islamist politics—changed how they saw and represented themselves in “Amirka.”

Download 3 million Russian troll tweets

How amazing would it be if this weren’t a thing and Twitter released this data themselves? Or better yet, what if Twitter released their own report based on research conducted by their own data scientists? No one knows how trolls use Twitter better than Twitter.

Of course, that’s not happening any time soon. So until then, download the data here.

Oliver Roeder for FiveThirtyEight:

FiveThirtyEight has obtained nearly 3 million tweets from accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. To our knowledge, it’s the fullest empirical record to date of Russian trolls’ actions on social media, showing a relentless and systematic onslaught. In concert with the researchers who first pulled the tweets, FiveThirtyEight is uploading them to GitHub so that others can explore the data for themselves.

The data set is the work of two professors at Clemson University: Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren. Using advanced social media tracking software, they pulled the tweets from thousands of accounts that Twitter has acknowledged as being associated with the IRA. The professors shared their data with FiveThirtyEight in the hope that other researchers, and the broader public, will explore it and share what they find. “So far it’s only had two brains looking at it,” Linvill said of their trove of tweets. “More brains might find God-knows-what.”

How amazing would it be if this weren’t a thing and Twitter released this data themselves? Or better yet, what if Twitter released their own report based on research conducted by their own data scientists? No one knows how trolls use Twitter better than Twitter.

Of course, that’s not happening any time soon. So until then, download the data here.

Tags: election, trolls, Twitter