[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.
I have learned a trick for a very likely way to find an image of a beautiful woman in an Internet image search: search the name “Dagmara.”
Chances are that you’ll come up with a beauty.
But this time the story came up first, i.e., of a beautiful Dagmara having committed suicide for having been bullied, probably by jealous girls of other ethnicities and races. The price of gratuitous jealousy is a terrible one; and females can be particularly vicious.
You might ask me, “what was Dagmara doing in Cornwall?” and I would answer that Dagmaras should not be in The U.K. in any great number. That if her kind were there in smaller numbers that the genetic threat may not have risen to such hostility.
I would add, sarcastically with regard to liberalism, that “racial classifications are not working hypotheses that allow the security of accountability to a just and historically coherent human ecology, agency and warrant, no.” I would add just as sarcastically in the other direction, the conventional racialist direction, “no, they are a fact of natural struggle, survival of the fittest” ...
That does bring to mind another right-wing whipping boy - their crusade against anti-bullying. Yes, isn’t bullying a wonderful thing, we all need that school of hard knocks ad nauseam - survival of the jealous and ugly, er, “the fittest.” ... “those ‘leftist’ social justice warriors just don’t appreciate realty.”
That right wing “naturalness” compounds the dilemma that defending Dagmara places before those of us who might care; a dilemma placed before us by right-wing perfidy:
We can subject her to performance requirements of liberal Darwinism and YKW - “see how terrible ‘racism’ (accountability to human ecology) is? We need to mix people even more because its just, you know, best for everyone; whatever.” And there is the other option for a Polish girl such as Dagmara, of course - she can find security and fellowship with those who embrace the ideology of Adolf Hitler.
A Polish teenager who was found dead at her school had complained about racist bullying on a website linked to young suicides after moving to Cornwall with her family.
Dagmara Przybysz, 16, originally from Poland, had complained about suffering from racism at school on the Ask.fm site two years ago.
Police and paramedics were called to Pool Academy in Pool, Redruth, Cornwall, on Tuesday at 2.15pm where the student was pronounced dead at the scene.
Poland’s right-wing Prime Minister Beata Szydlo vowed Friday (20 May) that her government would never bow to any EU ultimatum and accused some members of the European Commission of trying to “destroy” the 28-member bloc.
Szydlo was responding to a Monday deadline (23 May) set by the Commission for Poland to reverse a controversial overhaul of the country’s top court that has set off a fiery dispute between Warsaw and Brussels.
“Poland will never succumb to any ultimatum,” Szydlo said during a stormy debate in parliament.
“There are some in the European Commission… who want to destroy the European Union rather than see it develop.”
Hungary, Poland and illiberal democracy
The EU’s problem is that others are following the illiberal regimes of Hungary and in Poland, and it is possible that among them be Germany, writes George Friedman.
The executive warned earlier this week it could take further action against Poland because of concerns over the commitment of the governing Law and Justice (PiS) to the rule of law.
“If there is no significant progress by 23 May, then the First Vice-President (Frans Timmermans) has been empowered to adopt the draft rule of law opinion,” the commission said in a statement on Wednesday.
The exact contents of the opinion are not known, but if Warsaw fails to address the issues raised, it could eventually face a suspension of voting rights in the European council of ministers, the EU’s most important decision-making body.
However, Poland’s regional ally Hungary is likely to torpedo any possible sanctions, which would require the unanimous approval of all 28 EU members.
In Friday’s parliamentary debate, leaders of Poland’s liberal opposition party the Civic Platform blasted Szydlo for “desecrating the constitution” and “burning more bridges with Europe”.
An MP from the conservative Polish Peasants’ Party went so far as to charge that the actions of her administration risked “civil war”.
Poles launch campaign against court reform
Tens of thousands of Poles took to Facebook Thursday (10 March) to support the country’s top court in a constitutional battle against the right-wing government.
Szydlo’s government plunged Poland into political crisis in December when it pushed through legislation to revamp the constitutional court and modify its decision-making rules.
The European Commission in January launched an unprecedented probe to see if the changes — seen by critics as endangering the court’s independence — violated EU democracy rules and merited punitive measures.
Since taking office in November, the PiS government has pushed through several pieces of controversial legislation, including strengthening state control over public broadcasters and seeking to tighten already limited access to abortions.
Poland’s rejection of refugees under an EU-wide plan to tackle Europe’s worst migrant crisis since World War II has also chilled ties with Brussels.
Poland and Hungary: Tactical alliance or strategic partnership? Commentary for New Eastern Europe…
Russia has not seen such a major military buildup close to its borders since 1941 when the Third Reich sent the Wehrmacht to conquer the Soviet Union, Professor Stephen F. Cohen said in his recent interview on The John Batchelor Show, referring to NATO’s increasingly assertive strategy in Eastern Europe and the Baltics.
“We have been watching for nearly a month a steady buildup of American and NATO forces along near Russia’s borders – on land, on sea and in the air,” he said. “There has been nothing like this on Russia’s borders, such an amassing of hostile military force, since the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.”
Russia has been concerned with NATO’s overall strategy and its recent moves particularly. Last week the US completed its first land-based component of the Aegis missile shield at an air base near Deveselu, Romania. A day later, the alliance held a groundbreaking ceremony in Poland. The Aegis Ashore base is scheduled to be deployed in Redzikowo by 2018.
Austria’s election results demonstrate that the vast majority of Austrians are in favor of the Freedom Party candidate. What the government did in the last weeks and months was to try to follow the lead of the Freedom Party. They were afraid to lose even more votes and that’s why they enacted this law.
The head of Austrian rail operator ÖBB, Christian Kern, is set to become the country’s next chancellor after the other main contender for the post of Social Democratic Party (SPO) leader pulled out of the race and said the whole party backed him.
Werner Faymann stepped down as chancellor this week, bowing to a revolt inside the SPO after it suffered a heavy defeat in the first round of a presidential election last month, in which the anti-immigration Freedom Party’s (FPO) candidate came first.
Politcal Analyst Thomas Hofer:
Austria’s election results demonstrate that the vast majority of Austrians are in favor of the Freedom Party candidate. What the government did in the last weeks and months was to try to follow the lead of the Freedom Party. They were afraid to lose even more votes and that’s why they enacted this law.
France 24:
You’re referring then to elections of course. We’ve seen the far right candidate winning the first round of the Presidential election in Austria. Is support for him based on the huge migrant surge that we saw coming into Europe last summer or does it have its roots much further back than that?
Hofer: This is one reason [...] you have to know that Austria took in 90,000 refugees last year, however…
Some people don’t understand the great appeal of sports fanship to males in particular. But in the topsy-turvey of modernity in particular, when tribal affinity is disallowed as a barometer and all else seems to be so unfair - a rigged deck that females don’t tend to care about because it is rigged largely in their favor, sports, the historically coherent and statistically objective, verifiable comfort, persists - particularly when your guys, guys that you can identify with as being not very different from you have proven their objective merit despite rigorous competition.
See? We know that the way of life that we produce is fine enough, if not better, though it is sometimes hard to prove our part in an instant or episode - still, we appreciate the capacity for vicarious identity also because we do not normally have the opportunity for the exhilarating display of taking it to them in instantaneous and episodic action. Still, we can even out-manifest them in an instant and episodically, if not vicariously ..it can be proven ..on balance ..sometimes.. on balance…depending on the sport ..and other things.. oops ..its not so reliably objective… can have an anesthetizing, intoxicating effect ..not a comfort conducive to our interests after all.
Never really was. As disingenuously imposed objective criteria, it was counter productive illusion leading to the phenomenon of White fan cuckoldry. Inadvertently, however, Bonds using steroids to shatter Ruth’s slugging marks did a favor by rendering the crowning criteria of sports statistics, for Americans, anyway, the homerun, 60, 714, 755, whatever, so relative, so corrupted as to be unworthy of admiration.
That may seem obvious to the girls out there, but to the young boys who are looking for a reprieve from their shit tests, sports statistics have provided recourse more than vicarious identity, but assertion of heterosexual identity and indication that one is not shirking competitive proofs, even while not actively in the hunt - attending to the serous, manly criteria of purely objective measures nevertheless.
Any sensible boy who looks at baseball stats now should face the facts, that the criteria of measure of who his heterosexual identity is constructed with needs to take into account, or should take into account, his people, including particularly noting difference from the criteria that females may have regarding selection for our fitness or rejection of our non-fitness; and, in turn, rejection of their criteria when it is not adaptive to the fitness of our kind.
Though most of us White boys put a mental asterisk by Hank Aaron’s record breaking 715 (in 1974) and new record setting of 755, to note that he accumulated the number in many more games than Ruth, the record and baseball nevertheless lost much of our identification as blacks started to become emblematic among its leaders.
In different times:
“Say it ain’t so, Joe” was the cry for Joe Jackson to defend himself against unfairly puritanical standards to protect baseball’s criteria.
Country bumpkin, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, was one of the greatest hitters of the early part of last century. He was banned from baseball by the baseball commissioner for allegedly being part of the “Blacksox scandal”, in which the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series in a deal with Jewish Mobster Arnold Rothstein.
Though some of his teammates almost assuredly did throw the series, Jackson’s statistics illustrate that he played hard and well - that he was not a part of throwing the series. But such were the times and such was the concern for the integrity of the game, its statistics and objective criteria - that his merely being associated with players who would cheat was enough to get him unjustly banned from baseball.
Crucially, the game maintained integrity as a White criteria until integration started with Saint Jackie Robinson a little after World War II. The game’s integrity predictably degenerated in a myriad of nasty ways after that. Statistical degeneration culminated with Barry Bonds, who, incensed that “White boy” Mark McGwire had used steroids to hit 70 home runs in a season and shatter Babe Ruth’s one time single season record of 60, went onto a steroids program himself; to not only hit 73 in a season, but to break Babe Ruth‘s single season slugging percentage record and the sine qua non, to become the all time home run king, surpassing Ruth’s legendary mark of 714, for an altogether new, steroid enhanced bar at 762.
Conscientious, talented but troubled Croatian, Roger Maras, compared to Mark McRoids
There was some public shaming; but not so much as an asterisk by the roiders statistical record breaking marks. Its worth mentioning since there was large consternation for Roger Maris - first one to break Babe Ruth’s single season record with 61 in 1961 - meeting resistance for recognition as the record bearer by his generation’s baseball commissioner, who suggested that his new single season record should have an asterisk by it because he did it in 162 games while Ruth did it in 154. That’s how concerned American boys and their fathers were about maintaining the game’s objectivity (and how concerned the commissioner was, who also happened to be Babe Ruth’s biographer).
Now Barry Bonds does steroids, a more destructive example to kids and greater detriment to the game’s objectivity even than gambling against one’s own team, let alone merely being on the same team as others who did it, and Bonds doesn’t get so much as the asterisk that Maris was threatened with, let alone banishment from the game - as he should have been and as Shoeless Joe Jackson should not have been - “Say it ain’t so Joe” was the saying in 1919 when Joe Jackson was accused of participating in throwing the world series. Jackson did maintain his innocence, said it wasn’t so; and his world series statistics in 1919 bear that out.
Babe Ruth taking batting tips from Joe Jackson, the man he modeled his hitting style after because he considered him the best.
So much the standard bearer of the game’s style and grace was Joe Jackson, that Babe Ruth, the all time statistical king and most famous baseball player of all, stated that he modeled his swing after Joe Jackson, because he thought he was the best hitter that he’d ever seen.
I believe that it wasn’t so, Joe, that you should have been banned; but that it is so, Barry, that the way you accomplished your record should have little boys forever look upon baseball statistics, let alone salaries, as sham objective metric of worth, no comfort and no measure worth concern for White men.
Ty Cobb, the all time Batting Average leader at .367, was concerned not only for the integrity of the game and its statistics - lamenting that Ruth had made “the home run king and strategy a deuce” - but for its racial hygiene as well: he referred to Ruth as “that nigger” and “nigger lips” (to say nothing of Ruth’s nose). In truth, he liked Ruth and would let him, his nose and lips slide. However, he did correctly want to maintain the game as a criteria to assess baseball skills relative to Whites and their way of life.
Trump is looking less like the one who is freeing the White Republican base from its Neo Con backing than he is a somewhat lower grade interface - a bit more gritty and streetwise, perhaps, perfect to stay ahead of reactionary trends in the WN curve; having shared interest with the YKW to protect domestic real estate assets - he has neither extricated himself nor the implicit White Republican base from YKW entanglements.
In an oddly ironic twist, today Donald Trump announced that he has picked as chairman of his newly launched fundraising operation none other than a former employee of the bank he has repeatedly criticized in the past, and which he used as a foil to criticize Ted Cruz: Goldman Sachs.
Trump announced that heading up his own personal fundraising operation as national finance chairman will be Steven Mnuchin, a long-time business associate, chairman and CEO of the hedge fund Dune Capital. More importantly, however, he spent 17 years at Goldman Sachs where he was most recently a Partner, having built a fortune of $46 million before launching his own hedge fund.
While employed at Goldman, he purchased the remains of IndyMac Bank (now known as OneWest Bank), the Pasadena, California-based mortgage lender that collapsed in 2008. “Notoriously press-shy, the executive endured 2011 protests on the lawn of his Bel Air mansion by foreclosed homeowners angered at his lender’s handling of soured mortgages.”
As Zero Hedge readers are familiar, Trump often critized his main competitor Ted Cruz for his links to the bank because of loans used to finance Cruz’s Senate campaign, and because Heidi Cruz was a one-time employee of Goldman. “I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over him. Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton,” Trump said in one debate.
He had no qualms, however, in hiring one of the most prominent Goldman alums to raise money for him.
In addition to Goldman, Mnuchin also worked at Soros Fund Management, whose founder, George Soros, has funded many left-leaning causes. Where it gets even more bizarre is that Mnuchin has donated frequently to Democrats, including to Clinton and Barack Obama.
As a hedge fund manager, Mnuchin is part of a group of businesspeople Trump has excoriated. In August, Trump said hedge fund managers were “getting away with murder” as he touted his proposal to end the so-called carried interest loophole, which gives private equity and hedge fund managers preferential tax treatment.
“The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” Trump said at the time on CBS’ Face the Nation. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky,” he said. “They are energetic. They are very smart. But a lot of them—they are paper-pushers. They make a fortune. They pay no tax. It’s ridiculous.”
They apparently are also very good at raising money.
Some more on Mnuchin’s background: starting his career in the early 1980s as a trainee at Salomon Brothers before moving to Goldman Sachs in 1985, Mnuchin was front and center for the advent of instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps. He has called securitization “an extremely positive development in terms of being able to finance different parts of the economy and different businesses efficiently.” The pitfalls of the financing method came later, he’s said.
Mnuchin’s father, Robert Mnuchin, was a partner at Goldman Sachs in the 1960s. The second-youngest of five siblings, Steven attended the prestigious Riverdale Country School and then Yale University, where his roommate was Edward Lampert, who would go on to become a hedge-fund manager and owner of Sears.
More recently, in October 2014 Mnuchin became co-chairman of the board of the Hollywood studio Relativity Media due to Dune’s fascination with movies. Dune has provided financing for batches of winning movies, like the “X-Men” franchise and “Avatar,” Hollywood’s all-time box-office champion.
Relativity Media filed for bankruptcy last summer, just a few months after Mnuchin’s arrival. According to Variety, Dune was intimately involved in the studio’s failure.
The money-man and fellow investors in a Dune Capital fund are said to have lost as much as $80 million — equity that is almost certain to be lost for good, said two sources familiar with the situation. And disgruntled Relativity investors privately are questioning how a bank Mnuchin once headed – OneWest Bank of Pasadena – was allowed by Relativity to drain $50 million from the studio just weeks prior to the July 30 insolvency filing.
Mnuchin had left Relativity just days before the company reached an agreement with OneWest to extend the loan deadline and allow the bank to claim that money.
To be sure, Hillary Clinton, who in turn has been attacked for her paid speeches to Goldman Sachs, also has a high-ranking Goldman official in her ranks, former CFTC commissioner Gary Gensler, who is the former secretary of state’s chief financial officer and whom she is grooming for a potential Treasury Secretary. But for Trump, a self-professed “anti-establishment” candidate, who has repeatedly stated he will fund his own way and is not “for sale to special interest groups”, his sudden proximity to Wall Street comes as a big surprise and will leave many of his supporters demanding an explanation.
Moldova, an Eastern European country and former Soviet republic, has terrain encompassing forests, rocky hills and vineyards. It shares linguistic and cultural roots with its neighbor, Romania. Its wine regions include Nistreana, known for its reds, and Codru, home to some of the world’s largest cellars. The capital, Chișinău, has Soviet-style architecture and the National Museum of History, exhibiting ethnographic and art collections.
Capital: Chișinău
Gross domestic product: 7.97 billion USD (2013) World Bank
President: Nicolae Timofti
Population: 3.559 million (2013) World Bank
Official language: Romanian
In a sickening gesture of its malevolence toward native Europe, The EU body has threatened to fine those Eastern European countries not going along with the genocide program but which instead maintain their responsibility to foster and protect their native populations with migration control. In particular, the EU is targeting with genetic infection not only those countries characterized by healthy native demographic maintenance but is at the same time targeting with a devastating economic lose-lose proposition those countries, such as Poland, with the nerve to be doing fairly well economically and those countries such as Moldova, clinging to economic life. Perversely thus, the EU is punishing good demographic behavior, those who are economically well behaved and those that can least afford it - - threatening them with heavy fines if they do not participate in EU migration programs that would be both disastrous to them economically and tantamount to biological weaponry deployed against their native genome.
The EU Commission plans to impose fines on countries that refuse to take refugees under revised EU asylum laws to be put forward on Wednesday (4 May).
The commission will propose a sanction of €250,000 per refugee, according to the Financial Times.
The commission’s proposal will maintain the guiding principle of the current system that the country where migrants first step into the EU must deal with asylum applications.
But it proposes that when a country at the EU’s external border is overwhelmed, asylum seekers should be distributed across the continent.
The commission has been trying to encourage reluctant countries, particularly in central and eastern Europe, to take part in the redistribution system.
Slovakia and Hungary have already brought a court case to challenge an earlier EU decision to redistribute migrants based on a mandatory quota.
But commission officials say the outcome of the court’s decision will not affect their plans to overhaul the asylum system, known as the Dublin regulation.
EU countries last year agreed to redistribute 160,000 asylum seekers across Europe in two years, but have so far actually redistributed only a small portion.
Central European politicians have been vocal about an earlier version of the proposal for mandatory redistribution that was released last month.
At the time, Czech European affairs minister Tomas Prouza tweeted: “Permanent quotas once again? How long will the EU commission keep riding this dead horse instead of working on things that really help?”
Diplomats from eastern EU states have told this website that they are not “heartless people” and they are willing to help refugees in other ways, but they believe a redistribution system will simply lead to more immigrants arrive in the EU.
Turkey falling short
Along with the revised Dublin regulation, the commission is expected to recommend visa-free travel for people from Turkey and Kosovo on Wednesday, even if Ankara is not able to fulfil all the 72 benchmarks that the EU set as conditions.
Sources suggest Turkey is falling short on a handful of the demands – for example issuing biometric passports, and granting visa-free travel to Turkey for EU countries including Cyprus, which Turkey does not recognise.
Other outstanding issues include data protection, fighting corruption, effective cooperation with Europol and state-level law enforcement agencies, and a revision of anti-terror laws so that they cannot be used against journalists or opposition figures.
However, the commission will suggest visa-free travel with the condition that these criteria are met by the end of June, when Turkey is expecting visa requirements to be lifted.
Does the presumptive Republican nominee see African Americans and Hispanics as part of the American “we”?
Lucas Jackson / Reuters
Celebrating his big win in Indiana—and his elevation to presumptive nominee of the Republican Party—Tuesday night, Donald Trump spoke at Trump Tower in New York City, where he delivered a promise to heal the deep fractures in his party.
“We want to bring unity to the Republican Party,” he said. “We have to bring unity. It’s so much easier if we have it.”
Do Black Votes Matter to Donald Trump?
That will be a tall order. But as a general-election candidate, Trump will need to win over more than just Republicans. In his inimitable way, he pledged to bring together the rest of the nation as well.
“We’re going to bring back our jobs, and we’re going to save our jobs, and people are going to have great jobs again, and this country, which is very, very divided in so many different ways, is going to become one beautiful loving country, and we’re going to love each other, we’re going to cherish each other and take care of each other, and we’re going to have great economic development and we’re not going to let other countries take it away from us, because that’s what’s been happening for far too many years and we’re not going to do it anymore,” he said. (That’s a single sentence, if you’re keeping track at home.)
Trump faces significant obstacles to achieving that unity, particular with blocs that are not white men. Seven in 10 women view him unfavorably. It’s even worse with minorities. A recent Gallup poll found that 77 of Hispanics view Trump unfavorably. A Washington Post poll pegged that number at eight in 10, seven of them “very unfavorable.” An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll found an astonishing 86 percent of African Americans had a negative view of Trump.
One reason for those atrocious ratings is the way Trump speaks to and about minorities, which was on display during his victory speech Tuesday.
“We’re going to have great relationships with the Hispanics,” he said. “The Hispanics have been so incredible to me. They want jobs. Everybody wants jobs. The African Americans want jobs. If you look at what’s going on, they want jobs.”
Part of Trump’s rhetorical power is his supercharged used of “we,” a method that persuades people across the country that they are part of a larger movement, and somehow share with Trump his aura of wealthy and luxury. (It’s the same technique he’s used to sell real estate for years.) In the midst of his spiel about all the ways “we” would make America great again, Trump tossed in this passage about minorities.
His phrasing is telling. First, it suggests that for Trump, blacks and Hispanics aren’t part of “we”—“they” constitute separate groups. Perhaps that’s an accidental, unthinking division, but subconscious racial division is no less dangerous. Second, it shows him assuming that minority concerns can be reduced to economics. That view is perhaps unsurprising for a man who has spent his career trying to accumulate wealth, but it is a two-dimensional view of black and Hispanic Americans.
The fact that his policies simply don’t line up with what most African Americans want in a president is one reason his numbers with black voters are so bad. Another factor is a presidential campaign driven in large parts by divisive appeals to racism and bigotry against Hispanics, Muslims, and other groups. Trump also has a long history of racially charged incidents, from alleged tenant discrimination to his strident reaction to the Central Park Five.
The entertainer has long spoken about minority groups with the outdated formulation involving a definite article: “I have a great relationship with the blacks. I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks,” he said in 2011, using language that undermined his claim. He’s said similar things about “the Hispanics.”
Changing the way Trump speaks about African Americans and Hispanics won’t solve his problems with those groups, but if he wishes to unify the country, beginning to speak about them as though they are part of the American populace would be a good place to start.
Way to go right-wingers. As usual, the real Republican men are too rational to see race…these men are color blind, love everybody.
This loving domestic unity is going to be good for European EGI, going to be good for the economy - Asia is going to buy its products.
Viktor Orban and Premier Beata Szydło
Steve Mnuchin, derived fortune at Goldman Sachs
Moldova