[Majorityrights News] Alex Navalny, born 4th June, 1976; died at Yamalo-Nenets penitentiary 16th February, 2024 Posted by Guessedworker on Friday, 16 February 2024 23:43.
[Majorityrights Central] A couple of exchanges on the nature and meaning of Christianity’s origin Posted by Guessedworker on Tuesday, 25 July 2023 22:19.
[Majorityrights News] Is the Ukrainian counter-offensive for Bakhmut the counter-offensive for Ukraine? Posted by Guessedworker on Thursday, 18 May 2023 18:55.
Beware Japan, where Starbucks enters that means they are attempting to get a property foothold and anti ethnonationalist positioning.
The following article illustrates nine Starbucks locations with perfect crypsis to assimiate the local Japanese culture and gain a realestate footold from which they may promote their (((anti-non-Jewish ethnonationalist agenda))).
In Japan, Starbucks has created unique and stunning coffee shops that marry art, architecture, local history and café culture
International coffee chain Starbucks may be big around the globe, but in Japan, it has developed a cult-like following. Since opening its first outlet in Ginza more than two decades ago in 1996, the Seattle-born brand now has a whopping 1,434 stores (and counting) across the country.
For the past few years, its fandom has reached a fever pitch. In 2015, the opening of Starbucks’ first outpost in Tottori, Japan’s least populated prefecture, attracted a thousand fans to line up from the early morning hours so that they could be the first to enter the new store. Earlier this year, prior to the opening of the world’s largest Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Meguro, the coffee giant came up with a lottery system to give winners access tickets based on specific time slots to visit the outlet. Till today, it’s not uncommon to endure a waiting time of up to five hours at the Roastery on weekends.
Starbucks’ skyrocketing popularity in Japan is partly fueled by its continuous offering of seasonal, limited-time beverages and merchandise, most of which are exclusive to the country. Moreover, the coffee chain has found a way to adapt to local culture, creating Insta-worthy, one-of-a-kind spaces at inspiring locations while featuring cutting-edge architecture and design. In fact, these outlets are so innovative that you wouldn’t have thought it was a Starbucks until you notice the familiar green mermaid logo. So here are the most stunning Starbucks in the country, from one that’s set in a heritage house in Kyoto to the Kawagoe outlet that features a zen garden.
If you prefer local and independent coffee shops instead, check our full list here.
Exclusive: Men not disciplined over activism with pan-European Generation Identity group
Two sailors have been allowed to remain in the Royal Navy without being disciplined despite being named as members of a white nationalist group.
Mike Lynton and Kenneth McCourt were reported to have been members of Generation Identity, whose “great replacement” ideology was a key inspiration for the Christchurch massacre and other terror attacks.
An undercover journalist said they were serving together at a naval base in Plymouth, where they believed fellow sailors held similar views. The journalist claimed Mr Lynton was the regional organiser for Generation Identity in southwest England at the time, and Mr McCourt was one of his recruits.
After his story was published in August, the Royal Navy promised an investigation but The Independent has learned that they were not disciplined.
The case was dealt with “administratively” and the men were not put to a court martial. They remain serving members of the Royal Navy after being referred to the government’s Prevent counter-extremism programme.
Generation Identity calls for a “remigration” of Muslims from Europe and spreads a conspiracy theory claiming that white people are being eradicated.
The theory’s name – the “great replacement” – was the title of a manifesto posted by Brenton Tarrant before the Christchurch shooting, which itself inspired several other terror attacks.
Tarrant donated money to the Austrian branch of Generation Identity and exchanged friendly emails with its leader Martin Sellner, who has been banned from entering Britain on security grounds.
Ben van der Merwe, a journalist, said he met Mr Lynton and Mr McCourt while spending five months undercover in Generation Identity last year and described both men as “committed” activists.
“They weren’t dabbling,” he told The Independent. “Mike recruited Kenny on the base while they were serving, and Kenny told me about the lower-down ranks had sympathy with all of their views.”
Mr Van der Merwe, who conducted the investigation with campaign group Hope Not Hate, said Mr McCourt disclosed their roles to him at Generation Identity UK’s annual conference in July.
“Kenny told me that his superiors were aware of his involvement with Generation Identity, and said this meant if he got [a new posting] it was a good sign for the group in terms of future activity in the navy,” he said. “He said all the officers were racist, including his diversity officer.”
What are the British forces supposed to do, ultimately? Court-martial servicemen for being patriotic?
Posted by DanielS on Monday, 27 January 2020 10:47.
Christopher Caldwell: America’s two constitutions — since the ‘60s, competing visions of a more perfect union
Christopher Caldwell, author of the book ‘The Age of Entitlement,’ says Democrats and Republicans have two different conceptions of what the country is about. Fox News, 27 Jan 2020:
Not long after he left the White House, Bill Clinton gave what is still the best description of the fault lines that run through American politics. “If you look back on the ’60s and on balance you think there was more good than harm, you’re probably a Democrat,” he said. “If you think there was more harm than good, you’re probably a Republican.”
What could he have meant by that?
Though Americans are reluctant to admit it, the legacy of the 1960s that most divides the country has its roots in the civil rights legislation passed in the immediate aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. It was enacted in a rush of grief, anger and overconfidence — the same overconfidence that had driven Kennedy to propose landing a man on the moon and would drive Lyndon Johnson to wage war on Vietnam. Shored up and extended by various court rulings and executive orders, the legislation became the core of the most effective campaign of social transformation in American history.
This campaign was effective both for its typically American idealism and for its typically American ruthlessness. It authorized Washington to shape state elections, withhold school funds, scrutinize the hiring practices of private businesses and sue them. It placed Offices of Civil Rights in the major cabinet agencies, and these offices were soon issuing legally binding guidelines, quotas and targets. Above all, it exposed every corner of American social, business and political life to direction from judges.
Americans assumed that solving the unique and extraordinary problem of segregation would require handing Washington powers never before granted in peacetime. In this they were correct.
But they were also confident that the use of these powers would be limited in time (to a few years at most), in place (to the South), and in purpose (to eliminating segregation). In this they misjudged, with fateful consequence for the country’s political system.
Civil rights law may have started off as a purpose-built tool to thwart the insidious legalism of Southern segregation and the violence of Southern sheriffs. It would end up a wide-ranging reinvention of government.
After the work of the civil rights movement in ending segregation was done, the civil rights model of executive orders, regulation-writing and court-ordered redress remained.
This was the so-called “rights revolution”: an entire new system of constantly churning political reform, bringing tremendous gains to certain Americans and — something that is mentioned less often — losses to many who had not necessarily been the beneficiaries of the injustices that civil rights was meant to correct.
The United States had not only acquired two codes of rules (two constitutions), as people rallied to one code or the other, they also sorted themselves into two sets of citizens (two countries). To each side, the other’s constitution might as well have been written in invisible ink.
Civil rights became an all-purpose constitutional shortcut for progressive judges and administrators. Over time it brought social changes in its wake that the leaders of the civil-rights movement had not envisioned and voters had not sanctioned: affirmative action, speech codes on college campuses, a set of bureaucratic procedures that made immigrants almost impossible to deport, gay marriage, transgender bathrooms.
In retrospect, the changes begun in the 1960s, with civil rights at their core, were not just a major new element in the Constitution. They were a rival constitution, with which the pre-1964 one would frequently prove incompatible — and the incompatibility would worsen as the civil-rights regime was built out.
Our present political impasse is the legacy of that clash of systems. Much of what we today call polarization” or “incivility” is something more grave. It is the disagreement over which of the two constitutions shall prevail: the pre-1964 constitution, with all the traditional forms of jurisprudential legitimacy and centuries of American culture behind it; or the de facto constitution of 1964, which lacks this traditional kind of legitimacy but commands the near-unanimous endorsement of judicial elites and civic educators, and the passionate allegiance of those who received it as a liberation.
As long as the baby boom generation was in its working years, permitting the country to run large debts, Washington could afford to pay for two social orders at the same time. Conservatives could console themselves that they, too, were on the winning side of the revolution. They just stood against its “excesses.” A good civil rights movement led by the martyred Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been hijacked, starting in the 1970s, by a radical version that brought affirmative action and eventually political correctness.
But affirmative action and political correctness were not temporary. Over time they hardened into pillars of the second constitution, shoring it up where it was impotent or illogical, the way the invention of judicial review in Marbury v Madison (1803) shored up the first constitution.
Both affirmative action and political correctness were derived from the basic enforcement powers of civil rights law. And this was the only civil rights on offer. If you didn’t like affirmative action and political correctness, you didn’t like civil rights. By 2013, when Americans began arguing over whether a cake maker could be forced to confect a pro–gay marriage cake, this was clear.
The United States had not only acquired two codes of rules (two constitutions) —as people rallied to one code or the other — they also sorted themselves into two sets of citizens (two countries). To each side, the other’s constitution might as well have been written in invisible ink. Democrats were the party of rights, Republicans of bills. Democrats say, by 84 to 12 percent, that racism is a bigger problem than political correctness. Republicans, by 80 to 17 percent, think political correctness is a bigger problem than racism. The Tea Party uprising of 2009 and 2010, and its political mirror image, the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2015 and 2016, were symbols of that division.
Much happened this century to bring matters to the present boil. Barack Obama, both for his fans and his detractors, was the first president to understand civil rights law in the way described here: as a de facto constitution by which the de jure constitution could be overridden or bypassed. His second inaugural address, an explicitly Constitution-focused argument, invoked “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall” — i.e., women’s rights, civil rights and gay rights — as constitutional milestones.
In this view, the old republic built on battlefield victories had been overthrown by a new one built on rights marches and Supreme Court jurisprudence. When Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote his decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 gay marriage case that was in many ways the culmination of this new rights-based constitution, he said as much.
The election of 2016 brought the change into focus. Today two nations look at each other in mutual incomprehension across an impeachment hearing room. It appears we are facing a constitutional problem of the profoundest kind.
(((Schultz/Starbucks vulture capitalism - governmental collusion with NGO’s and tribal interests)))
