.
After Donald Trump accused Congresswoman Ilhan Omar of “trafficking in vicious anti-Semitic screeds” at a rally in North Carolina, the crowd erupted in the chant “Send her back! Send her back! Send her back!” Trump later claimed he did not agree with the chants and that he had tried to cut them short. A tape of the event, however, makes clear that this was a lie. Moreover, Trump refused to retract the racist tweets that set in motion this frenzied mass expression of racism by renewing his call for the four Congresswomen he attacked to leave the country if they do not embrace his worldview of patriotism and American exceptionalism. In fact, he mentioned to reporters that he was “enjoying” the latest controversy over his comments, which have drawn international condemnation.” This was a spectacle that had the markings not only of a current white nationalist rally but also echoes of the hate-filled spectacles that took place in Germany and Italy in the 1930s and 1940s.
It completely baffles me that the politicians of America, most notably President Trump, can’t see that things are far beyond the point of being out of control. I get it — the NRA has the White House in their grasp and as long as Trump keeps sending those thoughts and prayers, everything will be okay. But how much does the world have to take before enough is enough? And yes, I realise this is largely an American problem, but it still affects all of us around the world, that our own human race can turn on one another in such a violent way. It’s like America has become a troubled relative in need of a serious intervention.
The Trumpster handbook is the NRA Trump isn’t original he is a reflection of his voters (ODT)
In the aftermath of Saturday’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, President Donald Trump has been widely criticized for spreading hateful anti-immigrant hysteria. The blame is well earned, but Trump is not alone. For years, the National Rifle Association has pushed the false narrative that law-abiding Americans are in danger from an invasion of violent foreigners crossing into the country from Mexico. The only way to protect yourself and your family, the gun lobby warns, is to stock up on weapons and take responsibility for your own safety.
Here are some other commentaries you may find informative: From Trump to Johnson, nationalists are on the rise – backed by billionaire oligarchs by George Monbiot; US ambassador: Trump likes Boris Johnson for ‘calling it as he sees it’ by Frances Perraudin; Why Bois Johnson’s lies and amorality could prove his undoing by Paul Mason; I was Boris Johnson’s boss; he is utterly unfit to be prime minister by Max Hastings; Boris Johnson’s braggadocio will soon come back to haunt him at Number 10 by Andrew Rawnsley; and Boris Johnson Faces a Swift and Bloody Nemesis by Roger Cohen.
Is your mind dizzying already? What should we do?
via Get used to the new world leadership – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Last year, when a rabid, anti-immigrant antisemite murdered 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, I called it an act of domestic terrorism inspired by the ideology of Trumpism. The shooting took place during the height of the 2018 midterm campaign when Trump was inciting fear of an immigrant “caravan” from Central America. The shooter got the message. Hours before his bloody rampage, he accused a Jewish refugee support agency of bringing “invaders in that kill our people”.
Saturday in El Paso it was deja vu all over again.
This auto-cued response by Trump shows just how concerned he really is about the 250 mass shootings in the 7 months of 2019 let alone the ones to come before the year’s end. Let alone the number of deaths still to come before 2020. Heaven help America if he wins another term (ODT)
‘May God bless those in Toledo’: Trump names wrong Ohio city as shooting site
Donald Trump is a vile demagogue whose racism and xenophobia have made the United States a dramatically more dangerous and threatening place.
“manifesto” echoed Trump’s anti-immigrant hate speech, CNN’s Jake Tapper listed Republicans who had declined to to go on his State of the Union program to discuss the mass shooting in Texas—and another that killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio. CNN would later report that 49 of 50 Republican lawmakers declined to appear on air to discuss the shootings.
The president griped about the Internet, video games, and mental illness. He rehashed wrongheaded arguments against gun control—with a line about how “mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.” (Hillary Clinton corrected the spin from the man she defeated by 2.9 million votes in 2016 with a tweet noting that “People suffer from mental illness in every other country on earth; people play video games in virtually every other country on earth. The difference is the guns.”)
400 million guns
With more than one gun for each of the 330 million Americans, the issue is plain. The easy access to guns places America as the world’s outlier in gun violence; the easy resort to firearms means the killings will continue on any day, in any city.
El Paso is also in Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott in 2015 said he was “embarrassed” that Texas had fallen behind California in gun purchases.
Only last week, days after the California massacre, at his rally in Cincinnati, Ohio — the state where nine would die two nights later — Mr Trump said:
“We will defend privacy, free speech, religious liberty, and the right to keep and bear arms. And just remember, with the Democrats, there is no Second Amendment. You can forget about ‘keep and bear arms’.”
In raw numbers, 40,000 Americans die from guns each year.
The “why” of it tells me that a long time ago the right to bear arms was given because at the time, lawlessness ran rampart.
It may well have been justified in the early 1800s, however, to justify the need today is to also suggest that law enforcement in the greatest country in the world has made no progress.
The word greatest doesn’t belong here. Nor does vengeance beside it.(John Lord)
via And the dead are many – » The Australian Independent Media Network
As a consequence, Australia now has one of the highest wholesale broadband prices in the world.
The El Paso shooter’s alleged manifesto is built around the “great replacement” theory — the white supremacist conspiracy theory that immigrants are being brought into the United States to replace white people. That should sound familiar: It’s a regular part of Fox News prime time. It is specifically one of the things that Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson have been criticized for pushing.
I spent a lot of time watching Fox News’ Saturday coverage of the El Paso shooting, and it was striking how the coverage bent toward propaganda. There were numerous interviews with survivors and witnesses that could have been done by any news outlet. But in between those interviews, Fox went out of its way to avoid any conversations about easy access to guns and the rash of far-right white nationalist shooters.
The network repeatedly speculated about a link between video games and the El Paso shooting.
via How Fox News pushed propaganda about the El Paso mass shooting | Media Matters for America
Democratic presidential candidates spoke out Sunday against President Donald Trump’s racist and xenophobic rhetoric, linking it to the El Paso shooting as police are investigating whether the suspected gunman, a 21-year-old white man, was motivated by a hatred of Hispanic people.
For former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), Saturday’s violence that killed at least 20 people and injured dozens more struck the city he calls home.
“We’ve got to acknowledge the hatred, the open racism that we’re seeing,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “There is an environment of it in the United States. We see it on Fox News, we see it on the internet, but we also see it from our commander in chief. He is encouraging this. He doesn’t just tolerate it, he encourages it.”
via 2020 Democrats Link Trump’s Racism To El Paso Shooting: ‘He Is Responsible’ | HuffPost Australia
The totes became so successful that last year they were integrated into Vaude’s production line, and Noura Baterdouk, a 38-year-old mother of three who fled to Germany with her family, was hired full time to sew them.
Because she is from Syria, Baterdouk has been granted the right to stay in the country and, unlike Barry, does not face the threat of deportation.
“Integration works,” von Dewitz said, citing the cases of both Barry and Baterdouk. “It’s unbelievably exhausting, but it functions, and I do think it has brought added value to our company.”
via They have jobs and are integrated, but that may not be enough for German asylum seekers
For the past six weeks, Israel has been sending paramilitary police forces to raid the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Issawiya every evening. The raids, a severe form of collective punishment, have left one young Palestinian dead and hundreds wounded.
via In East Jerusalem, nightly raids leave Palestinian neighborhood reeling | +972 Magazine
Friday’s (2 August) Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) retail sales figures confirm Australia is enduring its worst retail trade period on record.
Why? Because Australian citizens no longer have the discretionary spending power they have long enjoyed. That this is happening during an extraordinary worldwide boom in investment, jobs, growth and profits is a damning indictment of the Morrison Government’s economic management. Another one.
Conclusion: The Way Forward
You can see the problem and its solution coming, can you not? The issue is corruption: money in politics. Corporations would never have been granted the degree of influence they have were it not for our corrupt politicians. The deregulation and increasingly fascist relationship between corporations and government would never have been allowed to happen if it were not for corruption.
The purpose of this piece has been to outline three main industries were profits are determined by negatively impacting people’s lives: health, prison and armed combat. As long as these facets of society remain subject to the rationales of private industry (profit at all costs) there can, and will, be no progress.
To end, two quotes from people who get it
Jailing people, really, when you think about it, turned out to be a for-profit industry. I don’t know how we didn’t see it all these years
Bill Maher
But my favourite has to be Star Trek DS9’s Quark, who said
No-one ever went broke selling weapons
via Problem Industries and The Way Forward – » The Australian Independent Media Network
JUMP! HOW HIGH WE CRY? AS HIGH AS WE SAY IF YOU WAN US OIL (ODT)
Key points:
The United States has been trying to convince allies to join an international coalition to protect shipping routes
The requests have come following Iran’s seizure of a British-flagged oil tanker
Australian ministers vowed to keep the country’s foreign policy relationship in lock-step with the US
THE SHOOTER STANDS WITH TRUMP
The 8chan document under investigation by Texas law enforcement described a gun attack that was intended to be “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas”.
The document includes expression of support for the Christchurch gunman, whose attack on peaceful worshippers in New Zealand left 51 people dead in March. The alleged Christchruch gunman also described immigrants of color as an “invasion”.
Trump has continued to refer to migrants at the United States’ southern border as an “invasion”, including in the immediate wake of the Christchurch shooting.
via El Paso shooting: 21-year-old suspect ‘posted anti-immigrant manifesto’ | US news | The Guardian
Shooting records broken on Trump’s watch and by kids. Trump has really enabled Americans to just go out and shoot each other. Trumpland is the paranoid State of the Union (ODT)
What is under emphasised and under estimated by Hirst is the importance of Murdoch media to all three stooges. Murdoch unites these puppets on his string. (ODT)
The bottom line is that these “leaders” need each other. Their relationship to each other is both a political necessity for their survival and an indicator of their shared streak of self-righteous conservatism.
If they were just harmless buffoons like the Three Stooges, we’d have nothing to worry about. But they’re not harmless — they are putting the entire planet in harm’s way.
We should not be in any doubt, Morrison, Trump and Johnson need each other and feed off the political climate their conservative populism is generating.
We will see this in full flight soon when the C-PAC circus comes to town. C-PAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, will be in Sydney for the first time from 9-11 August.
The line-up of speakers is a who’s who of deplorables. Our homegrown Trumpsters will be there, many of them from the Murdoch media stable, alongside several far-right members of the Federal Government and an assortment of Islamophobes, whiteness virtue signallers and grifters.
Morrison has already defended his colleagues who will attend it using the lame excuse of “freedom of expression”. Trump’s Fox News amplifiers are coming; Boris Johnson’s new mate Nigel Farage will also be there fresh from his starring role in the Brexit dirty tricks campaign. Meantime, Tony Abbott, Mark Latham and Campbell Newman will be representing the nasty underbelly of Australia’s political elite.
She also points to this recent science paper that finds a feedback loop. The white fluffy snow that used to cover Greenland reflects sunlight and keeps things cool. When the snow melts, the rock or ice underneath is duller and reflects less light, allowing for greater surface warmth. And more warmth means more snow melt, which means less reflection of sunlight, etc., etc.
via Be Afraid, Very Afraid: Greenland Ice Sheets Cascading into Ocean 50 Years Ahead of Schedule
The cash cow of the conservative circus make money at the Australian taxpayer’s expense. CPAC promoted by Sky After Dark for free no tax all expenses on YOU!! (ODT)
There is no shortage of tourists keen to cash in on an apparent demand for their services in Australia
“I wouldn’t continue to seek opportunities in this space, and I wouldn’t have Penthouse continue to seek out opportunities in this space if it wasn’t profitable both in a monetary and a marketing sense,” he says
And the arrival of CPAC suggests conservative organisations around the globe agree.
“It’s really dragging the mainstream of conservatism to the fringes. There are figures now at CPAC who would have been considered beyond the pale of respectability a few years ago.”
“Members of the hard right in Australia follow American and British politics as much as they follow ours, they see Trump as this really important figure for the whole world because they believe he embodies the kind of global possibilities of the hard right,” he says. “We’re very much part of this global movement, or at least aspiring movement.”
How can the ALP regain control of the message proven by the facts since GFC? (ODT)
The Liberal Party, its ideological ally the IPA and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp have done a remarkable job of pushing the false narrative of superior Liberal economic management. The Labor Party has invited submissions to its 2019 campaign review. Alan Austin, offers a solution.
THE ECONOMY decides federal elections. Or, to be accurate, perceptions of the economy decide federal elections.
The truth about Labor’s economic management
An impressive global consensus exists that Australia’s Rudd and Gillard Governments generated the best-performed economy the world had ever seen More than 130 economists, other academics and global leaders are on the record affirming Australia handled the global financial crisis (GFC) better than any other administration.
That list includes the 66 who signed an open letter in August 2010 supporting Kevin Rudd’s stimulus program. It does not include finance ministers around the world who in 2011 voted Wayne Swan the world’s best treasurer.
Why voters believe the opposite
As argued elsewhere, three powerful organisations systematically falsify the record on Australia’s economy and have been remarkably successful in duping voters. These are the Liberal Party, the Institute of Public Affairs and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. There are others, but none with the resources and reach of these three.
The Coalition would not have won the 2016 election if voters knew Australia’s economy had deteriorated from world’s best to ranking ninth in the world. They would not have been returned in May if voters knew the economy is now outside the world’s top twenty.
via Propaganda Prescription: how Australia can get its economic mojo back – Michael West
Something as transformative as the Green New Deal — a democratically achieved Climate Leviathan — will not come about because the Democratic Party or Xi Jinping or the U.N. secretary general suddenly realizes that radical change is necessary, nor simply through ordinary parliamentary and congressional procedure. Major change of this sort could only come from a far more basic form of democracy: people in the streets engaged in actions like school strikes and coal mine blockades. This is the kind of pressure that progressive legislators could then use to push through a mutually agreed-upon Green New Deal capable of building a powerful administrative force that might convince or coerce everyone into preserving the global commons.
via Combatting the Climate Emergency: The Chinese Path or the Green New Deal?
The signal being sent here by Bolton and Pompeo (Bolpeo? Pomton?) is that no one willing to talk to the West will be allowed to, forcing the hard liners to the fore, since the hard liners are easier to set up as comic book villains, so as to rush everyone into a war against Iran.
Germany, at least, understands exactly what is going on, and if Berlin can’t stop it, at least refuses to be part of a plot to stage a war of aggression. Germany remembers the crime it itself committed in Poland in 1939, even if Americans seem to have forgotten it, starting with the Bush war of aggression on Iraq in 2003. That was another one Germany sat out.
Ironically, it was in Poland that German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas made the announcement that Germany would reject participation in the American Gulf force.
Germany knows fascism when it sees it.
via Iran: Germany and France Refuse to be Inducted into Trump’s Gulf Naval Operation against Tehran
Trump Demands the Nobel Peace Prize (ODT)
US officials said they are no longer hamstrung and could now develop weapons systems previously banned under the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, a Cold War-era agreement that both sides repeatedly accused the other of violating. The treaty was also criticised because it did not cover China or missile technology that did not exist a generation ago.
via US flags new missile test as arms treaty with Russia ends
My thought for the day
To those who think they can win a debate by being loud and crass. I say be quiet. To those who think they can win with a perceived superior intellect I say be humble. Discourse requires civility in order to produce reasoned outcomes.( John Lord)
via Reforming question time: A few less mouths that roar – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The government MP George Christensen billed taxpayers $1,600 to travel to the Great Barrier Reef and meet the far-right identity Lauren Southern but the controversial YouTuber “pulled the pin” on the appearance.
The latest records of MPs’ financial interests reveal that Christensen accepted a free “reef trip from Cairns to Great Barrier Reef” from a company named Axiomatic Events.
Axiomatic had arranged for Southern to meet up with Christensen, Dr Peter Ridd, a controversial marine scientist, and some local young conservatives on 16 July 2018, leaving from Cairns and taking a fishing charter out to the reef.
But Southern declined to interview Christensen during the trip. He instead posted a video of him and Ridd, out on the reef together.
Christensen has only just this week declared that Axiomatic paid for the boat trip, more than a year after it took place. Other costs appear to have been picked up by taxpayers.
A very insightful argument for the disbandment of the Department of Home Affairs written in February 2019 and even more topical today, with the revelations of the Department’s failure to prevent an influx of Chinese gangsters and traffickers together with its overall incompetence in dealing with its workload. The article also explodes the myth of Morrison stopping the boats, pointing out that he and his colleagues were responsible for the arrival of many more boats than they ever stopped.( Alister Nicholson)
Next week, Australia will host its first Australian Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. The organiser says the event will “not be a one-off” and that its US backers, the American Conservative Union (ACU), had committed to holding the event long-term.
You also get to hear from ACU’s executive director Dan Schneider and their chairman, Trump fundraiser Matt Schlapp, whose wife Mercedes is Trump’s Director of Strategic Communications. In his role as vice president of federal affairs at Koch Companies Public Sector, LLC, Schlapp directed the major federal public policy strategies on anti-environmental and energy policies, financial markets, legal reform, and international and domestic tax issues.
For your entertainment, you can also listen to Nigel Farage – the man who so desperately wanted Brexit and then had no idea what to do with it when he got it.
Home grown contributions will come from luminaries like Craig Kelly, Mark Latham, Tony Abbott and Amanda Stoker as well as Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and sundry kids from the IPA.
The ACU have been involved with some shady fundraising practices in the past. Asked whether they saw an Australian conference as a financial opportunity, Cooper disagreed. “My perception of the ACU is that they are looking to spread their message,” he said. “If anything they are going to be investing in us for a long, long time.”
Considering how the government is going in the US and the UK, I fail to see what advice we could get from this bunch of tossers.
Unless it’s on how to put a fool in power.
via Foreign influence in Australian politics – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The Australian tourist visa processing system was once fair, impartial, transparent and accountable. However, recent information surfacing about Australian visitor visa processing indicates that practices under the new Home Affairs super-department are secretive, unfair, deceitful, unaccountable, dishonest and, in some areas, even illegal.
Trump is engaged in political triage. He doesn’t bother campaigning in areas of the country where he’s disliked by the majority. He directs federal funding as much as possible to areas dominated by his supporters. He insults his blue state opponents with electoral impunity. It’s sobering to learn that, according to an analysis in the Cook Political Report, Trump could lose by five million votes — nearly twice the margin of the popular vote in 2016 — and still win the presidency via the Electoral College. Now that is a disgusting mess.
It has been 35 years since Ethiopians immigrated to Israel, after leaving their strong, close-knit diaspora communities where they kept Jewish tradition alive all those years. And yet, almost four decades later, this community is still fighting for equality in a country where many have failed to look beyond their skin color and traditional clothing.
How ‘cultural racism’ helps Israelis rationalize inequality, discrimination | +972 Magazine
Muhammad Rabi’ Elayyan was summoned by the Israeli police to be interrogated; the summons was handed to his family in occupied Jerusalem, who had to take him to the police station. The boy is just five years old, but he is not the first child to be taken for interrogation. We know of this particular child’s predicament because of the support that he received from his neighbours who accompanied him to the police station on Tuesday morning. The images of the incident flashed around the world.
Palestinian youngsters born and brought up under Israel’s occupation learn to be resilient from their elders. Furthermore, they are social media savvy, so incidents like the incident with Muhammad Rabi’ Elayyan on his way to interrogation at the hands of Israeli officials will never go unrecorded.
olddogthoughts 
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