[PJ] For years, actor Corey Feldman has argued that Hollywood has a very serious issue: pedophilia. He is a victim of abuse himself. As a child actor, he and his fellow '80s star Corey Haim suffered tremendously because of pedophiles in powerful positions. According to Feldman, Haim started using drugs to cope with this trauma. As most people know, drug addiction eventually killed him.
Although Feldman has been warning the entire world about Hollywood's powerful pedophiles for years now, he has mostly been ignored by the powers that be of the mainstream media. See, for instance, this exchange on The View, where he was actually blasted by Barbara Walters for having the audacity to speak out. She accused him of, among other things, "damaging an entire industry."
Yes, that's right. Her response to him explaining that he was sexually abused by Hollywood moguls as a child was that he damaged Hollywood. That was the major problem here, Walters believed, not the abuse itself.
Well, now that everybody is talking about Harvey Weinstein and other sex maniacs with a long record of abusing women, this scandal -- of pedophilia in Hollywood -- seems to be on the brink of blowing up. As actress Evan Rachel Wood of Westwood tweeted a few days ago:
#1
...It will be remarkably ugly - and unspeakably fun - to watch. The remarkably fast and thorough reaction to Harvey's activities has suggested to me that they wanted to get out in front of something much, much worse. And let's face it - Harvey has a lot to lose. Even his money won't last long once the lawsuits and/or criminal charges start...and he'll have a lot of motivation to take people down with him.
$10 popcorn, anyone?
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
10/24/2017 4:59 Comments ||
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#2
This didn't happen at a pizza joint, did it?
Posted by: Richard Aubrey ||
10/24/2017 7:49 Comments ||
Top||
#6
We can give it the coup de gras by returning copyright back to it original 28 years. If you can't make a profit in that time frame, you need to pursue other outlets. It's degenerated back into the very royal patents that the founders sought to end.
#8
I suspect the masters of misdirection will successfully mask whatever they want covered up. Double down on the "all men do it" until people start to get tired of it all, drag in a few journalists to encourage the rest to find new stories--and there'll be some other news story to take the front page...
Posted by: james ||
10/24/2017 17:52 Comments ||
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Placed here as opinion because that is where it belongs.
BLUF, these folks want to brawl.
The anti-fascists are wearing their sweatpants today. Tennis shoes are a must. They’ve been told to wear something breathable — no masks, no bandanas, no armor. Almost nobody wears black (almost nobody).
Gym members drift in through the door of the Breakaway Social Center in the Little Village neighborhood on Chicago’s West Side. The two-story corner building was once home to a $10-a-haircut barbershop, but now the walls are lined with posters bearing anarchist symbols and advertising a recent lecture on militant suffragettes.
The couches are pushed back to the walls, next to shelves stacked with political journals. On the floor, warm-ups begin. The class splits into small groups to learn a couple new moves — thrust kicks, palm heel strikes.
Lean in, turn hips for momentum, and follow through once, striking the jaw — that’s how to punch a neo-Nazi.
One of the gym’s organizers, who goes by Meyer Lanski (a play on the Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky), instructs participants to stand in line. Lanski, 32, holds out a kick shield and braces himself to receive their blows. Even some of the new participants are landing their kicks. Within the hour, the women and men start sparring, learning self-defense tactics they can use in their private lives, or at protests.
The Haymaker Collective is one of many anti-fascist groups that began offering self-defense courses in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and the political upheaval that has followed. Some groups train their members for unforeseen attacks, while other antifa organize more militant trainings to equip people with arms or prepare them for confrontations at protests. Begin the truthful part of the article:
Antifa are most often portrayed as a violent, left-leaning counterpart to the far right, seen in protests marching in all-black and bashing in windows. In April, antifa at a free speech rally in Berkeley set fires and engaged in street brawls with alt-right groups. At a protest in the same city this August, they pushed a Trump supporter to the ground and beat him until a reporter intervened. Antifa critics claim that the movement’s more violent factions do unjustifiable harm and dampen the message of peaceful protesters. Some say they play into the hands of the alt-right, who hope to gather sympathy by portraying themselves as the victims of the militant left. Thus endeth the truthful part of the article.
But anti-fascists maintain that defense and street confrontations are necessary to subdue the far right. In Charlottesville, antifa stepped in to protect clergy members from an advancing crowd of neo-Nazis. And after Charlottesville, offshoots of the Unite the Right rally flailed in the face of mass resistance movements in cities like Boston and San Francisco.
Members of Haymaker and other more militant anti-fascist factions consider the far right a threat, and one they must physically prepare to defend themselves from. As reports of hate speech and violence have dominated this past year, antifa say their membership is increasing not just with militants, but also with people who have been targets of racism and bigotry. The methods they choose to employ are as diverse as their ranks — with some taking up arms and others turning to hand-to-hand combat. Beyond just self-defense, the increasing intensity on both sides could mean bigger brawls than anything seen at Charlottesville, with neither side prepared to step down.
In workshops, trainers point out the different strategies for dealing with protesters or the police. “Police are more systematic, whereas fascists are unpredictable,” Lanski said. He and other gym members analyze news and amateur footage of protests online, and shape their trainings accordingly. In addition to one-on-one combat, they practice group fights as well.
As much as Haymaker attempts to prepare for protests that could turn violent, Lanski understands the limits to what the gym can teach. He knows there’s no way to prevent what happened in August in Charlottesville, where Heather Heyer was killed when a car barreled through a crowd of anti-racist counterprotesters. “I don’t think any of us are naive to think that self-defense could have changed what happened,” he said. Miss Heyer died as the result of a heart attack. The question as to whether her death was caused by impact of the car has not been determined, to my knowledge.
To protect those battling it out in the streets, many antifa groups train members in street medicine. Those medics monitor the crowds, handing out water and sunscreen and acting as first responders if police bring out tear gas or a confrontation gets heated. The medics typically come from nursing or emergency medicine backgrounds, but many are laypeople trained by other street medics before them.
But many antifa who spoke to BuzzFeed News said medical training alone won’t protect them during confrontations. During the street fights that broke out in Berkeley between antifa and white supremacists earlier this year, Sean Hines realized that his side wasn’t ready for that kind of confrontation with the right. “To be quite frank, they kicked our ass in a lot of instances … it was kind of an eye-opener that we really needed to start training,” Hines said.
He created a fight club in Santa Rosa, California, to teach combat training to like-minded antifa. “Antifa had strength in numbers, but when it came to symmetrical combat, we would usually lose,” he said.
Hines also founded an anarchist and socialist gun club, integrating guns into antifa self-defense to arm working-class people and create a “left-wing militia.” He’s not alone — several antifa groups are taking advantage of lax gun laws in their states and arming their members.
“The more people that are armed, the more that we have the ability to fight police terrorism or fight fascist terrorism,” said Joseph Jordan, an anarchist who participates in Seattle antifa groups. “When the fuckers see that we are willing to shoot back, they back the fuck off.”
On the East Coast, John — who asked to be identified only by his first name, as he has been arrested for possessing illegal ammunition in the past — said he feels the left has not moved quickly enough to acquire guns. “People say, ‘When the revolution happens, we’ll find the weapons.’ But weapons don’t just materialize out of nowhere,” he said. “We should take advantage of the fact that our country lets people bear arms.”
John aspires to bring the left onto equal footing with the far right, which he noticed has more effectively integrated weapons into its fighting strategy. “They basically take military doctrine and bastardize it,” he said.
In April, Phoenix’s anti-racist, gunslinging John Brown Gun Club posted a video of its members at a range, clad in black and masked in red bandanas, firing at Pepe the frog targets — and missing. The video circulated among the online right, and not in the way that the John Brown Club intended. Instead of intimidating white supremacists with a demonstration of force, the video elicited jokes about the group members’ lack of gun safety knowledge.
“The biggest thing, I think, is for the left to really figure itself out. In its current state, it’s not prepared whatsoever,” John said. “You’re inviting the right wing to attack you.” But the more people the left can arm, and arm effectively, the less the right can laugh in their faces, he argues.
John only encourages the use of guns for defending oneself or anyone else getting attacked. But he sees them as a necessary tool within a larger set of antifa strategies — a controversial stance when massacres like the one in Las Vegas have led to calls for stricter gun control laws.
Guns, John said, can aid in combating white supremacist and far-right terrorism, which he has noticed often involves a single actor carrying out shootings en masse; such was the case with Dylann Roof in Charleston and Robert Lewis Dear in Colorado Springs. “If the right wants to come and massacre us, then we’ll massacre them,” he said.
At gun ranges, anarchists John and Jordan take aim alongside conservative Second Amendment defenders. Often, they take newcomers out to the range to get a gun in their hand for the first time.
Besides the arms trainings, John and Jordan also host martial arts and physical combat trainings. But in the face of Nazis heading down the streets with AR-15s, they don’t feel hand-to-hand defense offers enough protection.
“If there was a legitimate war, martial arts wouldn’t be that useful,” John said. Learn the history of armed insurgencies, John, and you will find that armed conflict doesn't boil down to who's right, but who's left. It is ugly and will upend everything both sides have work peaceably to attain. Both sides believe, and I have read this in many forums, that an armed conflict will end quickly because one side has more weapons than the other, or one side has more people, or one side is more righteous. It will end quickly because of the massive bloodletting for both sides, and both sides will suffer greatly.
“After Trump got elected, for the first time ever I went out and bought pepper spray,” said one Haymaker organizer who goes by the pseudonym Naila. A Midwest native, Naila is Muslim, wears a hijab, and has spent much of her life as one of her small community’s visible minorities. Her local mosque has been vandalized. People driving down the street have stopped to yell slurs at her. So this June, she started carrying the pepper spray.
“But having a can of pepper spray is very different than knowing what to do when you are physically capable,” she said. Haymaker’s trainings have made her more aware of her surroundings and her own body’s natural reactions.
Naila said that more Muslim women like her feel an urgent need for self-defense and have started showing up for trainings. The gym strives to reach individuals who could be targeted by hate crimes across various backgrounds, particularly Muslims and Jews.
And they aren’t the only ones who see themselves at risk. Seattle anarchist Jordan, who is black, has noticed that many of those who have shown new interest in arming themselves, some who have never shot a gun before at all, are people of color or queer. They feel that their life is “in danger in a very direct way right now,” Jordan said.
Haymaker’s Lanski, who is Jewish, has seen anti-Semitic slurs cover synagogues in his city. He has been a victim himself. A few years ago at an anti-fascist protest, Lanski was attacked by white supremacists and ended up with his teeth knocked out. He’s scared to live in the United States now more than ever — but the gym has helped him feel more confident about his ability to defend himself. But not the ability to take a trimming.
As a black man, Jordan said that sense of urgency is constant. “I’ve always seen the degree to which a potential escalation to the point of legal force is necessary, and it’s what this fucking country is founded on.”
Antifa aren't the first leftists to promote self-defense against fascism. In founding Haymaker, Lanski said he was inspired by Pacifico Di Consiglio, a Jewish-Italian teenager who started an anti-fascist boxing gym in the Jewish ghetto in 1938 in the face of Mussolini’s anti-Semitic policies.
Jordan finds inspiration in Rob Williams, the first US civil rights leader to encourage armed resistance to racial violence. He formed and trained the Black Guard, who came to the aid of black residents in North Carolina when law enforcement would not, making him one of many leaders to advocate the long-debated idea of fighting violence with violence.
Typically, though, men have dominated these movements — a problem contemporary groups still face but are working to combat.
“We’re trying to build a space for people who may not be accepted by heteronormative macho gym culture,” Lanski said.
For him, Haymaker is as much about building strength as it is about building community. “People feel very scared, and one of the effects of fear is isolation,” he said. “This is one of the ways we want to break away.”
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, known as NATO, faces an existential problem.
No, it's not about getting member states to fulfill agreed-upon spending levels on defense. Or finding a role after the Soviet collapse. Or standing up to Russia's Vladimir Putin. Rather, it's about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Islamist, dictatorial ruler of Turkey whose policies threaten to undermine this unique alliance of 29 states that has lasted nearly 70 years.
Created in 1949, NATO's founding principles ambitiously set out the alliance goal "to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of [member states'] peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law." In other words, the alliance exists to defend Western civilization.
For its first 42 years, until the USSR collapsed in 1991, this meant containing and defeating the Warsaw Pact. Today, it means containing and defeating Russia and Islamism. Of these latter two, Islamism is the deeper and longer-lasting threat, being based not on a single leader's personality but on a highly potent ideology, one that effectively succeeded fascism and communism as the great radical utopian challenge to the West.
Some major figures in NATO appreciated this shift soon after the Soviet collapse. Already in 1995, Secretary-General Willy Claes noted with prescience that "Fundamentalism is at least as dangerous as communism was." With the Cold War over, he said, "Islamic militancy has emerged as perhaps the single gravest threat to the NATO alliance and to Western security."
In 2004, José María Aznar, Spain's former prime minister, warned that "Islamist terrorism is a new shared threat of a global nature that places the very existence of NATO's members at risk." He advocated that NATO focus on combating "Islamic jihadism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction" and called for "placing the war against Islamic jihadism at the center of the Allied strategy."
Posted by: Elmerert Hupens2660 ||
10/24/2017 00:00 ||
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h/t Instapundit
[Townhall] All human institutions are essentially a reboot of high school, and within the political scene the Never Trumpers are convinced that they are the cool kids despite being the chess club of American politics. No, they aren't the cool kids. They’re geeks, they haven't won a tournament in years and, more importantly, they're the freaking chess club.
In contrast, we normals are just that, the members of the student body who have lives and after-school jobs and girlfriends and who don't care about the dorks padding their resume with student body presidencies or, in this case, jobs at the Eagle Liberty Council for Freedom. Except now we normals have been forced to pay attention because the would-be in-crowd has so totally screwed things up that there's no real choice but get involved in campus activities and burn down the whole damn schoolhouse.
Trump is the torch, and the Fredocons in the chess club are panicking because when the school goes up in flames so does their identity. And their meal ticket.
But they brought it on themselves. You can’t get "F" after "F" after "F" without eventually flunking out. What have these guys achieved? The clowns they support in Congress can’t even repeal Obamacare. That’s a total no brainer, and therefore should have been right up their alley.
We normals are sick of being looked down upon and exploited by a bunch of people who, if this was a movie, would be played by James Spader ‐ except trainwreck 2017 James Spader, not louche/suave 1986 James Spader. I guess that makes Bill Kristol the Nepo-Con Duckie, if Duckie was a less-cool, backstabbing deep-state-loving weasel trying to sell Molly Ringwald a cabin on one of his crappy cruises.
In place of trying to earn respect by demonstrating competence, they’ve chosen to try to diss us into submission. George W. Bush decided to go all Mean Girls in a speech that insulted his (former) supporters while delighting the left, and therefore the Never Trumpers. Now, if you read W's speech on paper, every word of it about bigotry being bad is true. But you give speeches in context, and here the context is decades of leftists and their media poodles falsely accusing the normals of racism and bigotry. So when W adopted that language, he also knowingly or negligently adopted that narrative; the former newspaper and current brochure known as the L.A. Times crowed: "In stunning attack, George W. Bush rebukes Trump, suggesting he promotes falsehoods and prejudice."
#1
Never Trumpers are convinced that they are the cool kids despite being the chess club of American politics
I understand that chess is an anti-social game but comparing those of us who enjoy it anyway to Never Trumpers in quite unnecessary and not entirely accurate.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
10/24/2017 10:39 Comments ||
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#2
I think of it as differently social, Abu Uluque. Chess players socialize among themselves, while ignoring the more numerous sets of those who play cards or act in amateur theatricals -- who also socialize among themselves, ignoring those who do not partake in their particular pleasure.
[Combating Terrorism Center] Since bombs rocked Casablanca in 2003 and Marrakesh in 2011, Morocco has continually made concerted efforts to tighten its anti-terrorism laws, improve its intelligence capabilities, and address the root causes of radicalization. While Morocco has yet to see a terrorist attack by the Islamic State on its soil, future challenges loom for the government: returned foreign fighters, burgeoning jihadi cells, and increasingly complicated relationships with its counterterrorism partners in Europe and the Maghreb.
Such challenges have been highlighted in the course of recent events. In November 2015, a Belgian man of Berber-Moroccan origin was unveiled as the alleged mastermind behind the bombings that shook Paris that month, in addition to being a key member of an Islamic State cell in Brussels.
This year, catastrophic attacks in Barcelona, Spain, grabbed global headlines, and once again, it was revealed that many of the perpetrators were of Moroccan descent. Given the re-emergence of pre-existing jihadi networks in the region, the Maghreb will be simultaneously of key interest to the Islamic State and a critical piece of the puzzle for policymakers as they attempt to combat extremism.
Although no Islamic State attacks have taken place in Morocco at the time of this writing, there has been a sizable amount of activity. The following analysis employs an open source dataset of directly linked and conceptually inspired Islamic State plots and arrests in Morocco from June 2014 through June 2017.2 Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) researchers coded events as being linked to or inspired by the Islamic State only if government and/or credible media sources asserted that the Islamic State was responsible for or had inspired the event.3
Posted by: Besoeker ||
10/24/2017 09:03 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[PJ] For years, actor Corey Feldman has argued that Hollywood has a very serious issue: pedophilia. He is a victim of abuse himself. As a child actor, he and his fellow '80s star Corey Haim suffered tremendously because of pedophiles in powerful positions. According to Feldman, Haim started using drugs to cope with this trauma. As most people know, drug addiction eventually killed him.
[Combating Terrorism Center] Since bombs rocked Casablanca in 2003 and Marrakesh in 2011, Morocco has continually made concerted efforts to tighten its anti-terrorism laws, improve its intelligence capabilities, and address the root causes of radicalization. While Morocco has yet to see a terrorist attack by the Islamic State on its soil, future challenges loom for the government: returned foreign fighters, burgeoning jihadi cells, and increasingly complicated relationships with its counterterrorism partners in Europe and the Maghreb.
