I’ve read about them before, and still so very neat.
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US says it’s ready to resume nuclear talks with North Korea
Sexual assault numbers, suicides on the rise: 'Clearly we have to do something different,’ acting Army secretary says
“The rise in sexual assault is focused in the 17- to 24-year-old demographic, meaning soldiers who are relatively new to the Army. Suicides among active-duty soldiers also rose about 20 percent late last year.”
This is a disturbing development; Trump has railed against our alliance with Japan since the 80s, and this dispute between them and South Korea makes that whole region more unstable.
South Korea Says It Will Scrap Intelligence-Sharing Deal With Japan
We purposely blew up treaties against developing new missiles. Now Russia and China are reacting to our new tests, casting the U.S. as the rogue. I can’t help but feel Trump intended this.
Russia, China seek Security Council meeting after US missile test
Moscow and Beijing warn of ‘threats to international peace and security’ after latest US test of new cruise missile.
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Women Look to 2020 to Break the National Security Glass Ceiling
Advocacy groups see the upcoming election as an opportunity to boost the number of women in senior positions.
Want to Run for Office? Now There’s a Politics Boot Camp for Veterans
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Disturbing hazing at border where US Customs and Border Protection officer goes after journalist as someone who spreads fake news.
When James Dyer approached a U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday, he was just another traveler passing through the bustling hub. But then Dyer said he presented his journalist visa to the agent and what should have been a routine immigration stop quickly transformed into “an unsettling experience.”
In a lengthy Twitter thread that has since gone viral, Dyer, who covers film and TV for Empire magazine in the United Kingdom, detailed how the CBP agent accused him of “being part of the ‘fake news media’” before launching into a “surprising and inappropriate” diatribe that echoed rhetoric used by President Trump in his frequent attacks against the media. Dyer told The Washington Post he had flown from London to Los Angeles for Disney’s D23 Expo in Anaheim, Calif., where he plans to write about Star Wars.
“He wanted to know if I’d ever worked for CNN or MSNBC or other outlets that are ‘spreading lies to the American people,’” Dyer tweeted, referencing two media organizations Trump has repeatedly blasted as “fake news.” “He aggressively told me that journalists are liars and are attacking their democracy.”
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This is puzzling. Russia, known as a haven for hackers, implements a paperless, internet voting scheme for a major election in its capital city. WTF? What career burglar would remove the locks from their own doors?
Not surprisingly, the system was hacked in 20 minutes using a regular laptop and readily available cyber attack code. Is there something more at play here? Is Russia trying to convince the rest of the world to go paperless to make their victims easier to hack? Or, and I think this may be more likely, are the people currently in power trying to make it easier for them to rig future elections so they can stay in power? Who knows – but this is just weird.
A French security researcher has found a critical vulnerability in the blockchain-based voting system Russian officials plan to use next month for the 2019 Moscow City Duma election.
Pierrick Gaudry, an academic at Lorraine University and a researcher for INRIA, the French research institute for digital sciences, found that he could compute the voting system’s private keys based on its public keys. This private keys are used together with the public keys to encrypt user votes cast in the election.
Gaudry blamed the issue on Russian officials using a variant of the El Gamal encryption scheme that used encryption key sizes that were too small to be secure. This meant that modern computers could break the encryption scheme within minutes.
“It can be broken in about 20 minutes using a standard personal computer, and using only free software that is publicly available,” Gaudry said in a report published earlier this month.
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No, I’m not at all scared out of my mind by this. Why do you ask?
Russia will launch the world’s first floating nuclear reactor and send it on an epic journey across the Arctic on Friday, despite environmentalists warning of serious risks to the region.
A deadly explosion during testing has already caused a radioactive surge, and environmentalists to call it a potential “Chernobyl on ice” and a "nuclear Titanic.” The floating reactor is “due to go into operation by the end of year, mainly serving the region’s oil platforms.”
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Well, it’s no surprise that was a flagrant lie. 
Speaking to reporters on the White House’s South Lawn on Wednesday, President Trump claimed he was warmly welcomed at hospitals in the wake of recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and intimated that surgeons had even deserted their patients to meet him.
“The doctors were coming out of the operating rooms,” Trump said. “There were hundreds and hundreds of people all over the floor. You couldn’t even walk on it.”
But the hospitals he visited say that isn’t what happened — and that doctors would never pause surgery to greet the president.
“At no time did, or would, physicians or staff leave active operating rooms during the presidential visit,” Ryan Mielke, a spokesman for University Medical Center of El Paso, said in a statement to The Washington Post on Thursday. “Our priority is always patient care.”
…
At hospitals in both cities, the president claimed, “the love for me — and me, maybe, as a representative of the country — but for me — and my love for them was unparalleled."
Because, in Trump’s mind, how much people love him is the real take away from a weekend of horrific mass shootings.
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Quoted For Truth
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The Cherokee Nation announced Thursday that it intends to appoint a delegate to the US House of Representatives, asserting for the first time a right promised to the tribe in a nearly 200-year-old treaty with the federal government.
It was a historic step for the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation and its nearly 370,000 members, coming about a week after Chuck Hoskin Jr. was sworn in as principal chief of the tribe. The Cherokee Nation says it’s the largest tribal nation in the US and one of three federally recognized Cherokee tribes.
The move raises questions about what that representation in Congress would look like and whether the US will honor an agreement it made almost two centuries ago.
Why this matters? Representation.
There are currently six non-voting members in the House. Washington D.C. and four permanently inhabited US territories – American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the US Virgin Islands – are represented by a delegate, who serves a two-year term. Puerto Rico is served by a resident commissioner, who is elected every four years.
Those representatives can’t vote on the House floor, but they can vote in committees that they are on, introduce legislation and engage in debate. Hoskin said he hoped the Cherokee Nation’s delegate would help advance the interests of the tribe and, more broadly, all Native Americans.
Who will be the tribe’s delegate?
Kimberly Teehee has been nominated to serve as the Cherokee delegate.
She is currently the tribe’s vice president of government relations, and previously worked as a senior policy advisor on Native American affairs for three years in President Barack Obama’s administration. For about 12 years before that, Teehee was a senior advisor to Dale Kildee, then a Democratic congressman from Michigan.
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Trump Allies Target Journalists Over Coverage Deemed Hostile to White House
A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.
The Trump regime is taking their disinformation war against the free press to a new level.
It has long smeared legitimate news outlets as “fake news” while pushing conspiracies, lies, & propaganda through a vast network of pundits & conservative media marching in lockstep.
Now, a loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.
They began by attacking facts & truth. Then, they branded the sources themselves as fake, so that if you quoted from them the right & its base could readily dismiss it. And now, outright harassment & doxxing of individual journalists to intimdate the free press at its core.
While they have engaged in this behavior on a small scale, such as in the attempted banning of CNN’s Jim Acosta from press conferences, a large scale effort to target numerous individuals hasn’t yet occurred. Such an effort is a classic method of totalitarian governments.
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Fires are devouring the Amazon. And Jair Bolsonaro is to blame
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Ok…well, we know that the inverted yield curve is a big indicator of a coming recession - where the long term investment’s rates are lower than the short term rates. 
Long-term Treasury rates added to their monthlong slide on Tuesday, aggravating a key yield curve inversion and sending the 10-year yield to its lowest level against the 2-year rate since 2007.
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I feel for Duffy and his wife as they look to provide for a child that will require heart surgery at birth, but at the same time, this is pretty much the definition of hypocrisy:
Rep. Sean Duffy (R-WI) announced on Monday that he will soon resign his House seat, citing family reasons. He and his wife, Fox News contributor Rachel Campos-Duffy, said their soon-to-be born ninth child will require heart surgery soon after her birth.
On Tuesday, Duffy explained that he had made sure the child will have access to health insurance despite her pre-existing conditions.
It is laudable that the Duffy family is preparing to provide as much care as possible for a child with serious medical challenges. But as a congressman, Duffy voted to take away those same important protections for others with pre-existing conditions — directly contradicting his own campaign promises.
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Millennials, a.k.a. adults ages 21-39, find the prospect of going through another recession terrifying. Some are still recovering from the last one.
Millennials got bodied in the downturn, have struggled in the recovery, and are now left more vulnerable than other, older age cohorts. As they pitch toward middle age, they are failing to make it to the middle class, and are likely to be the first generation in modern economic history to end up worse offthan their parents. The next downturn might make sure of it, stalling their careers and sucking away their wages right as the Millennials enter their prime earning years.
Derek Thompson: Millennials didn’t kill the economy. The economy killed Millennials.
It was the last downturn—the once-a-century Great Recession—that set them on this doddering economic course. The Millennials graduated into the worst jobs market in 80 years. That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment, or a couple years living in their parents’ basements. It meant a full decade of lost wages. The generation unlucky enough to enter the labor market in a recession suffers “significant” earnings losses that take years and years to rebound, studies show, something that hard data now back up. As of 2014, Millennial men were earning no more than Gen X men were when they were the same age, and 10 percent less than Baby Boomers—despite the economy being far bigger and the country far richer. Millennial women were earning less than Gen X women.
Kids of the 1980s and 1990s have had a new, huge, financially catastrophic demand on their meager post-recession earnings, too: a trillion dollars of educational debt. About a quarter of Gen Xers who went to college took out loans to do so, compared with half of Millennials. And Millennials ended up taking out double the amount that Gen Xers did. No wonder, given that the cost of tuition has gone up more than 100 percent since 2001, even after accounting for inflation.
The toxic combination of lower earnings and higher student-loan balances—combined with tight credit in the recovery years—has led to Millennials getting shut out of the housing market, and thus losing a seminal way to build wealth. The generation’s homeownership rateis a full 8 percentage points lower than that of the Gen Xers or the Baby Boomers when they were the same age; the median age of home-buyers has risen all the way to 46, the oldest it has been since the National Association of Realtors started keeping records four decades ago.
If the largest generation ever is now in the workforce but they’re not building wealth, what happens to the middle class in America?
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It’s all about access to homeownership, which has always been the foundation to building wealth in America.
The decadelong economic expansion has showered the U.S. with staggering new wealth driven by a booming stock market and rising house prices.
But that windfall has passed by many Americans. The bottom half of all U.S. households, as measured by wealth, have only recently regained the wealth lost in the 2007-2009 recession and still have 32% less wealth, adjusted for inflation, than in 2003, according to recent Federal Reserve figures. The top 1% of households have more than twice as much as they did in 2003.
This points to a potentially worrisome side of the expansion, now the longest on record. If another recession comes, it could be devastating for people who have only just recovered from the last one.
[…]
Behind this trend: More than 85% of the assets of the wealthiest 1% are in financial assets such as stocks, bonds or stakes in private companies. By contrast, slightly more than half of all assets owned by the bottom 50% of households comes from real estate, such as the family home. Economic and regulatory trends over the past decade have not only favored stock over housing wealth, but have also made it harder for the less affluent to even buy a home.
[…]
Since 2009, home prices have outpaced incomes, making it harder for families to purchase their first home.
Home prices have increased 41% since 2009
Income has grown 8%
Until the mid-2000s, the net worth of households across the wealth distribution increased at roughly the same pace, keeping inequality stable. That started to change when housing prices took off in the early 2000s. For the bottom 50%, rising home values were more than offset by mortgage debt, which almost doubled between 2003 and 2007. For the top 1%, debt was flat between those years. When the housing bubble burst, many less-affluent households saw housing wealth wiped out; some lost their homes altogether.
Today, the bottom half of American households aren’t carrying so much debt compared with the prerecession peak, after adjusting for inflation. And starting in 2012, a recovery in home prices has allowed their net worth to inch up. But house prices, adjusted for inflation, have yet to reach their 2006 peak, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller index. Meanwhile, a decade of rising equity prices has buoyed the 1% wealthiest households, pushing the value of their financial assets up 72% since the recession, after adjusting for inflation.
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Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47,” the Stoner family told NBC News. “He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events.”
The AR-15 has become the centerpiece of a national debate over assault weapons and gun control, after attackers have used them and similar guns in mass shootings. Proponents of stricter gun control say that assault weapons like the AR-15 should be banned, arguing they are not intended for civilian use. Gun rights activists say that banning the gun would infringe on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. The National Rifle Association has taken to calling the AR-15 “America’s rifle.”
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Yes- a living wage is how people in this country can just get by…and if 25% does not achieve that, then we are relegated to the haves and have nots.
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Find the irony/misdeed below…not hard to spot…a few of them.
Pence staying at T owned property 3 hours away from meetings/lunchs in Ireland (emoluments are served for lunch perhaps) AND despite Pence’s record of animosity towards LGBT issues, he’s having lunch with a couple who love each other and are the same sex.
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This one strikes home; my wife works security. When we discovered she was getting paid way less than her colleagues, her union got her pay raised and back pay. Most security companies do not own the property their people work at. This effectively abolishes their unions.
Trump’s NLRB Outlaws Union Organizing At Workplace If Property Not Owned By Employer
Dude. Stoners are the least likely to shoot anybody. Ever.
Tucker Carlson Tries To Blame Marijuana For Mass Shootings
https://thefreshtoast.com/cannabis/tucker-carlson-tries-to-blame-marijuana-for-mass-shootings/
Tucker Carlson brought on Alex Berenson, an anti-marijuana author largely discredited by the scientific community, to bolster his argument.
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