A post was merged into an existing topic: Humor, memes, funny internet stuff etc
A Kenosha Militia Facebook Event Asking Attendees To Bring Weapons Was Reported 455 Times. Moderators Said It Didn’t Violate Any Rules.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the reason the militia page and an associated event remained online after a shooting that killed two people was due to “an operational mistake.”
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This pathetic network OANN is working on a conspiracy which helps T put out there
that there is a group of 'well-funded network of anarchists trying to take down the President."
June 2020
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Recommended reading for the resistance (books)White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US, report says
A former FBI agent has documented links between serving officers and racist militant activities in more than a dozen states
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Reviews of Michael Cohen’s books are just coming out just before it’s release on Tuesday Sept 8th. Cohen’s revelations are interesting…and places T as someone who revels in money, power and will cheat, lie and turn a blind eye to interference in his favor. Cohen wants to sell books, uncover the darker side of T (we’ve seen plenty) and redeem himself.
He puts T’s affection for Putin as all about admiration for someone who amassed tons of money and has power and control. It is probably all of that, and since T turns a blind eye to what is legal vs what is something that T wants and will stop at nothing to get it, it’s a plausible theory. One wonders if Cohen and T are that stupid not to realize Putin’s end game…and degree to which T is playing with fire. These two like and want loyalty. Putin wants power.
Should be an interesting read…but need to put filters on to parse out the underhanded, and thuglike behavior.
In the book, “Disloyal: A Memoir,” which was obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its Tuesday publication date, Cohen lays out an alarming portrait of the constellation of characters orbiting around Trump, likening the arrangement to the mafia and calling himself “one of Trump’s bad guys.” He describes the president, meanwhile, as “a cheat, a liar, a fraud, a bully, a racist, a predator, a con man.”
The memoir also describes episodes of Trump’s alleged racism and his “hatred and contempt” of his predecessor, Barack Obama, the nation’s only African American president.
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He describes himself as Trump’s “designated thug” and discusses his felony convictions for lying to Congress and violating campaign laws in service to Trump.
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On Russia, Cohen writes that the cause behind Trump’s admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin is simpler than many of his critics assume. Above all, he writes, Trump loves money — and he wrongly identified Putin as “the richest man in the world by a multiple.”
Trump loved Putin, Cohen wrote, because the Russian leader had the ability “to take over an entire nation and run it like it was his personal company — like the Trump Organization, in fact.”
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According to Cohen, Trump’s sycophantic praise of the Russian leader during the 2016 campaign began as a way to suck up and ensure access to the oligarch’s money after he lost the election. But he claims Trump came to understand that Putin’s hatred of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, dating to her support for the 2011 protest movement in Russia, could also help Trump amass more power in the United States.
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“What appeared to be collusion was really a confluence of shared interests in harming Hillary Clinton in any way possible, up to and including interfering in the American election — a subject that caused Trump precisely zero unease,” Cohen writes.
Cohen’s book, however, does not reveal much in the way of new details surrounding the investigations by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and others into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
A senior White House official dismissed Cohen’s commentary on Russia as baseless, arguing that numerous investigations found “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Moscow.
Cohen asserts that another reason that Trump consistently praised Putin was to fulfill his long-held desire to slap his name on a proposed Trump Tower project in Moscow.
NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Cohen’s tell-all memoir makes the case that President Donald Trump is “guilty of the same crimes” that landed his former fixer in federal prison, offering a blow-by-blow account of Trump’s alleged role in a hush money scandal that once overshadowed his presidency.
Of all the crises Cohen confronted working for Trump, none proved as vexing as the porn actress Stormy Daniels and her claims of an extramarital affair with Trump, Cohen writes in “Disloyal: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump.”
Trump, despite his later protestations, green-lighted the $130,000 payment to silence Daniels ahead of the 2016 election, reasoning he would “have to pay” his wife a far greater sum if the affair ever became known, Cohen writes, adding the president later reimbursed him with “fake legal fees.”
“It never pays to settle these things, but many, many friends have advised me to pay,” Trump said, according to Cohen. “If it comes out, I’m not sure how it would play with my supporters. But I bet they’d think it’s cool that I slept with a porn star.”
The White House called Cohen’s memoir “fan fiction.”
“He readily admits to lying routinely but expects people to believe him now so that he can make money from book sales,” White House spokesman Brian Morgenstern said in a statement. “It’s unfortunate that the media is exploiting this sad and desperate man to attack President Trump.”
The Associated Press obtained an early copy of the book, which is scheduled to be released on Tuesday.
Cohen, who pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations and other crimes, including lying to Congress, calls himself the “star witness” of a hush-money conspiracy that still could culminate in charges for Trump after he leaves office. He described his new book as a “fundamental piece of evidence” of the president’s guilt.
Cohen’s allegations — his most detailed to date — are part of an unsparing and deeply personal put-down of Trump. Cohen assails Trump as an “organized crime don” and “master manipulator,” but allows that he saw much of himself in a man he once considered a father figure.
“I care for Donald Trump, even to this day,” Cohen writes, “and I had and still have a lot of affection for him.”
Cohen remains at a loss to explain his unswerving allegiance to a cut-throat businessman who abandoned him at the most vulnerable point in his life. He likens his fealty to Trump to a mental illness and said he thought of himself as acting like an alcoholic or drug user in need of an intervention.
“It seemed to (my family) that I wouldn’t listen to anyone, not even the people who loved me most, as I gradually gave up control of my mind to Trump,” Cohen writes.
“I confess I never really did understand why pleasing Trump meant so much to me,” Cohen adds. “To this day I don’t have the full answer.”
Cohen says in the book that he stayed loyal to Trump for so long, despite the dirty work and volatile personality, because he wanted to stay close to his celebrity and power.
“I was the canary in the coal mine for the millions of Americans who are still mesmerized by the power of Trump,” Cohen writes.
The memoir offers an introspective — and at times self-loathing — apology for the role Cohen played in Trump’s political ascent. He urged Trump for years to run for president but now laments that his election “led the nation and maybe even the world to the brink of disaster.”
“I thought Trump was a visionary with a no-nonsense attitude and the charisma to attract all kinds of voters,” he writes. But the real reason he wanted Trump in the White House, Cohen concedes, “was because I wanted the power that he would bring to me.”
But Cohen expresses little to no remorse for his federal crimes, saying he was “railroaded” by the government and pleaded guilty after prosecutors threatened to indict his wife.
“I was in the grip of the conviction machine,” he writes. “I was the ham sandwich, and I had been indicted.”
Cohen writes that Trump’s three oldest children came to his office after Trump’s campaign announcement in 2015, in which he referred to people coming to the U.S. from Mexico as rapists and murderers. Cohen says they asked him to convince their father to drop out of the race because of the damage his rhetoric would do to the company.
“MC, you’ve got to get dad to stop the campaign. It’s killing the company,” Cohen quotes Ivanka as saying.
Cohen says Trump was undeterred and unconcerned with the harm to his businesses. “Plus, I will never get the Hispanic vote,” Trump said, according to Cohen. “Like the blacks, they’re too stupid to vote for Trump. They’re not my people.”
Cohen has led a publicity blitz around his memoir even as he continues serving his federal sentence in home confinement. A federal judge ruled this summer that authorities had retaliated against him — sending him back to prison in upstate New York after he had been furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic — for publishing the book ahead of the November election.
He was released to home confinement in July and the government lifted a ban on him speaking publicly.
“This story is all I have left for my wife, my children and the country I love so much,” Cohen writes.
@anon95374541 and @MissJava - would you plz. put under the Book review area please. Seems to be all filled up? Thx.
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I just cross posted it because there’s still more news from this. Read 
Before Donald Trump ever sought the Oval Office, he was preoccupied by its occupant President Barack Obama, publicly questioning his birthplace and privately describing him as “a Manchurian candidate” who obtained his Ivy League degrees only by way of affirmative action, according to a new book by Trump’s former attorney, Michael Cohen.
Trump’s disdain for Obama was so extreme that he took his fixation a step further, according to Cohen: Trump hired a “Faux-Bama” to participate in a video in which Trump "ritualistically belittled the first black president and then fired him."
Wow
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North Korea has issued shoot-to-kill orders to prevent COVID-19 outbreak: US
North Korea issues shoot-to-kill orders to prevent virus: US
https://news.yahoo.com/north-korea-issues-shoot-kill-044306346.html
North Korean authorities have issued shoot-to-kill orders to prevent the coronavirus entering the country from China, according to the commander of US forces in the South.
The impoverished North – whose crumbling health system would struggle to cope with a major virus outbreak – has not confirmed a single case of the disease that has swept the world since first emerging in China, the North’s key ally.
Pyongyang closed its border with China in January to try to prevent contamination, and in July state media said it had raised its state of emergency to the maximum level.
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Roger Stone calls for Trump to seize total power if he loses the election
Stone also said federal authorities should seize all Nevada ballots, federal agents and GOP state officials should “physically” block voting, that Trump should nationalize police forces, and that Trump should order widespread arrests
Roger Stone is making baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and is urging Donald Trump to consider several draconian measures to stay in power, including having federal authorities seize ballots in Nevada, having FBI agents and Republican state officials “physically” block voting under the pretext of preventing voter fraud, using martial law or the Insurrection Act to carry out widespread arrests, and nationalizing state police forces.
Stone, a longtime confidant of the president, made the comments during a September 10 appearance on far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ Infowars network. On July 10, Trump commuted a 40-month prison sentence that was handed down to Stone after he was convicted of lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses as part of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into 2016 election interference. Namely, Stone lied to Congress about his contacts with WikiLeaks, which released hacked emails with the aim of boosting Trump’s prospects. In the weeks leading up to the commutation, Stone made a number of media appearances where he asked Trump to grant him clemency and said that in exchange, he could be a more effective campaigner for the president’s 2020 reelection efforts.
Stone’s efforts are now underway, and his aim appears to be to spread conspiracy theories about voter fraud and call for actions that would likely intimidate potential Joe Biden voters.
During his September 10 appearance on The Alex Jones Show , Stone declared that the only legitimate outcome to the 2020 election would be a Trump victory. He made this assertion on the basis of his entirely unfounded claim that early voting has been marred by widespread voter fraud.
Stone argued that “the ballots in Nevada on election night should be seized by federal marshalls and taken from the state” because “they are completely corrupted” and falsely said that “we can prove voter fraud in the absentees right now.” He specifically called for Trump to have absentee ballots seized in Clark County, Nevada, an area that leans Democratic. Stone went on to claim that “the votes from Nevada should not be counted; they are already flooded with illegals” and baselessly suggested that former Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) should be arrested and that Trump should consider nationalizing Nevada’s state police force.
Beyond Nevada, Stone recommended that Trump consider several actions to retain his power. Stone recommended that Trump appoint former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) as a special counsel “with the specific task of forming an Election Day operation using the FBI, federal marshals, and Republican state officials across the country to be prepared to file legal objections and if necessary to physically stand in the way of criminal activity.”
Stone also urged Trump to consider declaring “martial law” or invoking the Insurrection Act and then using his powers to arrest Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, “the Clintons” and “anybody else who can be proven to be involved in illegal activity.”
Stone is no stranger to interfering in elections. He was reportedly an organizer of the so-called “Brooks Brothers riot” during the 2000 presidential election that led to vote counting being suspended in Miami-Dade County, Florida.
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Just the last thing anybody needs…except we are in a deviant world…and truth gets upended,
sadly.
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Animal Populations fell by 68% in 50 Years and It’s Getting Worse.
“We know it is crashing”: Humanity has forced critical natural systems into the danger zone.
The world is losing its mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish, and with them, the security of ecosystems that have supported humanity since it first emerged.
That’s the conclusion of the Living Planet Report 2020, a biannual assessment by World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, which records the decline in vertebrate life. This year’s report, released Wednesday, shows that these animal communities shrunk on average 68% between 1970 and 2016. Parts of the world are much worse off. The tropical Americas have seen animal populations decline 94% in the same period. The size of observed animal communities in or near freshwater globally have fallen by 84%.
The authors put half the blame on changes to how we use land and the sea, citing such things as clearing ecologically important forest and freshwater use. Overfishing and hunting, invasive species, pollution and climate change round out the main causes of the global animal population crash.
The report delivers a tough overall message. It suggests that continued human abuse of the planet may lead to collapse of the very natural systems and resources that allowed global civilization and modern societies to persist in the first place. And, they say, humanity is demonstrably to blame, and the damage is unprecedented in speed and vastness within human history.
These conclusions come amid reports that nations have not lived up to commitments made in recent years to address biodiversity loss. This year was supposed to be a consequential one for addressing the issue. But the underlying problem remains.
The Living Planet Index, the backbone of the report, measures the size of vertebrate populations. That’s different from identifying threatened or extinct species, which may indicate little about the overall health of an ecosystem and, consequently, the natural services provided to people, said Rebecca Shaw, WWF’s chief scientist and chair of the report’s steering group.
“One of the things that science has told us in the last decade so clearly is that we depend on intact natural systems and intact natural ecosystems, in all its component parts, to deliver those things we count on every day: clean air, clean water, pollination, a stable climate, food, healthy soils to produce the foods we eat,” Shaw said. “And what this index tells you is a very important component of that health is declining and declining fast.”
The authors did not mince words. They say that the evidence for biodiversity destruction is “unequivocal.” This word carries a great deal of meaning. Given their penchant for nuance and skepticism, scientists are loathe to say that anything is 100% true. But for more than a decade “unequivocal” has been climate scientists’ pentasyllabic alarm for grim seriousness. Using it to the same effect in the Living Planet Report 2020 elevates biodiversity loss to the level of trouble reserved for climate change, and entwines the two global environmental dilemmas.
“I used the word very purposefully,” said Robert Wilson, author of an early Living Planet Report 2020 chapter and a former leader of both the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its biodiversity counterpart. “I want to make sure that everybody understands that the evidence is ‘unequivocal’ or ‘absolutely certain’ or ‘beyond doubt’.”
The report is littered with uncharacteristically bold and direct statements that make clear how they interpret the evidence they’ve compiled from 4,392 different vertebrate species across 20,811 populations. Rarely are they more straightforward than in a chapter on the health of soil ecosystems: “Soil biodiversity keeps us alive, so we need to ensure that we stop destroying it.” Pesticides, erosion and paving over land all contribute to soil’s degradation or demise.
This year’s report draws on powerful computer models to simulate policies that could avoid biodiversity loss. The “Bending the Curve Initiative” uses seven sophisticated Earth system scenarios to explore ways to both slow the trend and make sure the world’s growing population is fed. This initiative was published simultaneously Wednesday in the journal Nature.
Any solutions are a heavy lift, the authors conclude, but by changing what the world eats, and how it produces the food it consumes, nations can almost halve expected biodiversity loss. The measures include expanded conservation, increasing agricultural yields, eliminating food waste, and halving global meat intake.
Doing these things is technically and economically possible “but designing and implementing policies that enable such efforts will be challenging and will demand concerted leadership,” David Leclère of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and colleagues write in Nature.
The report joins a large and expanding library of bad news. Scientists warned for years that temperatures would rise, California fires would grow, hurricanes would intensify, and potential pandemics would escape deforested areas to cities. What these earlier predictions have in common is that they came true.
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Stuff like this happens; normally it gets kept quiet. The timing of this one is suspicious.
A package containing the poison ricin and addressed to Trump intercepted by law enforcement
Package addressed to Donald Trump containing poison ricin intercepted by law enforcement
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T is egging on and yes, ‘celebrating’ violence - in this instance reporter for CNN, Ali Velshi did get shot at with a rubber bullet. This man is disugusting.
Video
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I posted Ali Velshi’s response here:
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I do not know what this big ‘reveal’ is…but I see @courthouse news attached to it, and I believe they are capable writers. Looks like a possible dump of Financial Records (like the Panama Papers) which will show up where the money is, in offshore accounts. Wonder who will be on the list?
Coming out Sunday 9.20…be on the lookout.
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Pentagon sending troops to Syria after clashes between U.S., Russian military
The troops are meant to discourage Russians from crossing into the eastern area where U.S., coalition, and Syrian Democratic Forces operate, say officials.
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In light of RBG’s untimely death and her legacy, those in power will do everything in that power to keep in control. Here’s a rallying cry from former R strategist, now part of The Lincoln Project Steve Schmidt who reacts to what’s going down now.
Main objective for The Lincoln Project is to rid ourselves of T and his cronies: “Trumpism is UNAMERICAN. It is illiberal, demagogic,dishonest, cruel, corrupt and disgusting.”
Protecting RBG’s legacy is only a hope. What we can or will do about it is another hope as well, but Schmidt recommends standing firm against that corrupt power.
And have seen it on some comments on twitter that because this is RoshHassanah the marking of the New Year in the Jewish faith, it is believed that becaue RBG died on the start of it,that there was a reason for she was good and the most righteous. So true.
@NinaTotenberg
A Jewish teaching says those who die just before the Jewish new year are the ones God has held back until the last moment bc they were needed most & were the most righteous. And so it was that #RBG died as the sun was setting last night marking the beginning of RoshHashanah
thread
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The big Sunday read
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This is hitting the mainstream.
Behind Trump’s Turkish ‘bromance’: Lev Parnas, oligarchs and a lucrative lobbying deal
Turkey’s effort to influence the Trump White House began at the Watergate, in a meeting brokered by a figure from the Ukraine impeachment saga, Lev Parnas.
Adam Klasfield’s twitter feed is blowing up with this stuff.
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