Scooter Downey@TrueLegendFilms Is this a real @marwilliamson tweet?
Marianne Williamson@marwilliamson Not only is it NOT a real Marianne Williamson tweet; it is particularly distressing because it is made to look as though it is.
Scooter Downey@TrueLegendFilms That’s good to know! Follow up: are you a witch?
Benjamin Franklin@benFranklin2018 I also saw this old one floating around – can you confirm or deny whether this is real or not?
Marianne Williamson@marwilliamson No!!!
Benjamin Franklin@benFranklin2018 ok, thank you, it seemed a little counter to the overall love message.
I can’t help but notice that Ms Williamson rather conspicuously did NOT deny being a witch….
Indiegogo has a new chief. Andy Yang will take over for outgoing CEO David Mandelbrot, who is stepping down. According to sources close to the company, several other Indiegogo employees are also leaving. Indiegogo has yet to confirm this claim or state the number or reason for their departure.
Mandelbrot announced the move on LinkedIn, citing “personal reasons” as why he’s leaving. He was at Indiegogo for six years, starting as SVP of Operations in August of 2013.
Andy Yang comes to Indiegogo from Reddit, where he was most recently leading its product team. He was previously the CEO of 500px.
Yang comes to Indiegogo at a critical time for the company. Consumers are increasingly becoming jaded by crowdfunding projects that leave backers without their promised product. Under Mandelbrot’s leadership, he helped Indiegogo net several key partners, including General Electric and Lego. The company also enlisted the help of several manufacturing and marketing professionals to help backers make projects into products.
TechCrunch requested an interview with Yang, but has yet to be granted that request.
I tend to suspect their numbers aren’t going to look a whole lot better anytime soon. Watch out for that falling rubble!
BS: From a Jewish point of view, where we don’t believe in the divinity of Christ. There you can make an argument, that the Gospels which were written significantly-
JR: He was just a prophet.
BS: No, no, no. We don’t even think he was a prophet.
JR: What do you think he was? What do you guys think he was?
BS: Well, I, I, I, what do I think he was historically? I think he was a Jew who tried to lead a revolt against the Romans and got killed for his trouble. Just like a lot of other Jews at that time who tried to lead revolts against the Romans and got killed for their trouble.
JR: So he became legend, and story, and it became a bigger and bigger deal as time went on.
BS: Yeah, he had a group of followers and that gradually grew.
JR: Do you think he was resurrected?
BS: No. That’s not a Jewish belief.
JR: Okay. I just wanted to check.
BS: We’re not into miracle stories, no. That’s not.
JR: You don’t have any miracles?
BS: Not by Jesus. There was in the Old Testament. Yeah, you’ve got Moses splitting the sea and all that.
JR: What do you think happened there?
BS: What do I think happened there? I’ll go with my Maimonidean explanation. There was, it says in the Bible, there was a strong east wind. So there was a naturalistic explanation for a physical phenomenon.
JR: That makes sense.
BS: That’s what Maimonides is constantly trying to do.
Big Bear sums up Shapiro and the so-called conservatives who are foolish enough to support him against the interests of their nation, their families, and their faith in a succinct manner: If you’re a Christian and you just heard that and you ever support him again, you’re a liar, you’re a satanist, and you’re evil.
The inescapable historical fact is that Muslims have FAR more in common with Christians than Jews do. It is considerably more accurate to talk about shared Islamo-Christian values than Judeo-Christian values. Notice that Shapiro’s Maimonidean answer about Jesus Christ is very, very different than even the non-believers of Jesus’s day, as well as being very different from whom we believe Jesus Christ to be.
When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” “But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. – Matthew 16:13-17
It looks like Creepy Joe is all but done already in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination:
Former Vice President Joe Biden lost one of his top fundraisers after controversial comments regarding his work with past segregationists and his flip-flop on repealing the Hyde Amendment, CNBC has learned.
Tom McInerney, a veteran San Francisco based lawyer, informed Biden’s team on June 20 that he can no longer help him raise campaign cash to compete in the 2020 presidential election. “I had actually let the campaign known I’d pulled back my support of Biden for now,” McInerney told CNBC. “I don’t think he did well last night,” he added, reflecting on Biden’s debate performance on Thursday night.
While McInerney is the first financier to publicly withdraw his support after Biden’s controversial round of comments, the loss is significant because it could be a harbinger of further defections.
“I would imagine I’m not alone,” said McInerney, who was a lead bundler for President Barack Obama in his first run for president. He helped Obama’s campaign raise at least $200,000 throughout that cycle, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
Democrats are the party of Diversity. It’s only right that their candidate properly represent all the Diversity and Vibrancy and Inclusivity for which they stand.
If you weren’t afraid to fly before, you will be now that you know how Boeing is producing its 737 flight software:
It remains the mystery at the heart of Boeing Co.’s 737 Max crisis: how a company renowned for meticulous design made seemingly basic software mistakes leading to a pair of deadly crashes. Longtime Boeing engineers say the effort was complicated by a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors.
The Max software — plagued by issues that could keep the planes grounded months longer after U.S. regulators this week revealed a new flaw — was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs.
Increasingly, the iconic American planemaker and its subcontractors have relied on temporary workers making as little as $9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace — notably India.
In offices across from Seattle’s Boeing Field, recent college graduates employed by the Indian software developer HCL Technologies Ltd. occupied several rows of desks, said Mark Rabin, a former Boeing software engineer who worked in a flight-test group that supported the Max.
The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
Boeing’s cultivation of Indian companies appeared to pay other dividends. In recent years, it has won several orders for Indian military and commercial aircraft, such as a $22 billion one in January 2017 to supply SpiceJet Ltd. That order included 100 737-Max 8 jets and represented Boeing’s largest order ever from an Indian airline, a coup in a country dominated by Airbus.
I have had just one experience working with Indian software developers, when I was designing a game-training tool for 3M. To say that they were completely incompetent would have been an exaggeration, as in the end, they did manage to get a very basic, ugly version of what I had designed working. But I would estimate that they were about one-tenth as competent as the worst Western programmer with whom I ever worked.
Think about how poorly Skype and the average application works today in comparison with five years ago. Now apply that level of technological degradation to literally everything that involves putting people in the air and transporting them from one place to another.
Then again, the first rockstar programmer I ever knew was a young Indian who was the best programmer at my father’s company despite being hired right out of college, and who is still a brilliant programmer and entrepreneur. But that was literally the opposite of outsourcing. So, it’s not that Indians simply can’t do it, it’s that the probabilities don’t favor outsiders attempting to determine who can and who cannot.
A bankruptcy lawyer explains how student loan debt is often just the first domino:
Here’s what practical experience has taught me in the thousands of bankruptcy cases I’ve filed for clients: student loan debt perpetuates bankruptcy filings.
A pattern is emerging. Clients making $25,000-$40,000/year with student loans see us every decade to file a new Chapter 7 bankruptcy case. Why? They take out predatory loans and use credit cards to stay afloat. Why? Because the ~$50,000 in student loans wasn’t discharged in the last bankruptcy. There are limited programs to get around the debt temporarily, but most are stuck in the cycle.
In a sense, the predatory loans and credit cards they are taking out again and not paying are paying the student loans they’re stuck with (i.e. the money being paid on the student loans is offset by dischargeable debt they later take bankruptcy for to stay afloat). It’s a vicious cycle.
There are a number of bad reasons to not discharge student loan debt, but there are no good reasons. Literally nothing good is going to come of trying to squeeze even more blood from those particular stones.
The Saker has an important interview with an expert sinologist, which addresses the current stare-down between the US-led globohomo hegemony and the Sino-Russian leadership of the nationalist resistance to it.
A Sino-Russian alliance has long been seen in both the U.S. and in Europe as one of the greatest threats to the West’s global primacy and to Western-led world order. As early as 1951 U.S. negotiators meeting with Chinese delegations to end the Korean War were instructed to focus on the differences in the positions of Moscow and Beijing in an attempt to form a rift between the two. Close Sino-Soviet cooperation seriously stifled Western designs for the Korean Peninsula and the wider region during that period, and it was repeatedly emphasized that the key to a Western victory was to bring about a Sino-Soviet split. Achieving this goal by the early 1960s and bringing the two powers very near to a total conflict significantly increased prospects for a Western victory in the Cold War, with the end of the previously united front seriously undermining nationalist and leftist movements opposing Western designs from Africa and the Middle East to Vietnam and Korea. Both states learned the true consequences of this in the late 1980s and early 1990s when there was a real risk of total collapse under Western pressure. Attempts to bring an end to China’s national revolution through destabilization failed in 1989, although the USSR was less fortunate and the results for the Russian population in the following decade were grave indeed.
Today the Sino-Russian partnership has become truly comprehensive, and while Western experts from Henry Kissinger to the late Zbigniew Brzezinski among others have emphasized the importance of bringing about a new split in this partnership this strategy remains unlikely to work a second time. Both Beijing and Moscow learned from the dark period of the post-Cold War years that the closer they are together the safer they will be, and that any rift between them will only provide their adversaries with the key to bringing about their downfall. It is difficult to comprehend the importance of the Sino-Russian partnership for the security of both states without understanding the enormity of the Western threat – with maximum pressure being exerted on multiple fronts from finance and information to military and cyberspace. Where in the early 1950s it was only the Soviet nuclear deterrent which kept both states safe from very real Western plans for massive nuclear attacks, so too today is the synergy in the respective strengths of China and Russia key to protecting the sovereignty and security of the two nations from a very real and imminent threat. A few examples of the nature of this threat include growing investments in social engineering through social media – the results of have been seen in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Ukraine, a lowering threshold for nuclear weapons use by the United States – which it currently trains Western allies outside the NPT to deploy, and even reports from Russian and Korean sources of investments in biological warfare – reportedly being tested in Georgia, Eastern Europe and South Korea.
The partnership between Russia and China has become truly comprehensive, and is perhaps best exemplified by their military relations. From 2016 joint military exercises have involved the sharing of extremely sensitive information on missile and early warning systems – one of the most well kept defense secrets of any nuclear power which even NATO powers do not share with one another. Russia’s defense sector has played a key role in the modernization of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, while Chinese investment has been essential to allowing Russia to continue research and development on next generation systems needed to retain parity with the United States. There is reportedly cooperation between the two in developing next generation weapons technologies for systems such as hypersonic cruise and anti aircraft missiles and new strategic bombers and fighter jets which both states plan to field by the mid-2020s. With the combined defense spending of both states a small fraction of that of the Western powers, which themselves cooperate closely in next generation defense projects, it is logical that the two should pool their resources and research and development efforts to most efficiently advance their own security.
Remember, the world is not binary. The fact that the globohomo hegemony is pure satanic evil does not mean that either the Chinese or the Russians are good guys. But at least they don’t eat people and molest children, and in the case of the Russians, hate Jesus Christ and persecute Christians.
So, the liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.
The liberal idea failed the West because it proved to be directly contradictory to all three pillars of the West, Christianity, the European nations, and the Greco-Roman legal and philosophic legacies. It was, in the end, intrinsically anti-Western.
On the other hand, President Trump would be much more able to run against the lunatic Democratic program if he couldn’t so readily be accused of following an Israel First program:
President Trump blasted the contestants in the second Democratic presidential debate on Thursday when they all declared their support for health care coverage for undocumented immigrants.
All of the candidates — including former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Kamala Harris and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg — raised their hands when asked by an NBC moderator if they would support a health care plan that would cover undocumented immigrants.
“All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited healthcare,” Trump wrote on Twitter from Japan, where he is to attend the G20 Summit.
“How about taking care of American Citizens first!? That’s the end of that race!”
How about it, Mr. President? Israel has a wall. Where is America’s big, beautiful wall? What ever happened to America First? Still, the ineptitude is astonishing.
Moderator: If you can only get one issue through, what would it be?
Swallwell: Ending gun violence.
Bennett: Climate change, and the lack of economic mobility.
Gillibrand: “Family Bill of Rights,” paid-leave plan, universal pre-K, daycare.
Kamala Harris: Tax cut for middle/working class. DACA. Guns.
Bernie: “We need a political revolution against the special interests!”
Biden: Defeat Trump.
Buttigieg: “Fix our democracy, before it’s too late.”
Yang: $1,000 Freedom Dividend for every American adult, starting at age 18.
Hickenlooper: Climate change.
Williamson: I admire the Prime Minister of New Zealand.
Williamson’s response is my favorite. It’s one step above “I like Oreos.” Although the inability of the other three women to grasp what “one issue” means is also amusing.
You may look at this photo and think that its deep message is “We are all hoping for a better life and will take extraordinary risks on behalf of those we love.” But someone else will probably say, “People shouldn’t cross borders without permission.” The drowning becomes a kind of punishment, a river stands in for ideas of human authority, and the photograph doesn’t break through anything. It merely reiterates an old and cherished belief: Bad things happen to those who break the rules. … there will be efforts to make it an allegory of law and judgment rather than an opportunity for moral imagination and compassion.
The day after these two people perished in the Rio Grande, the president of the United States dismissed an accusation that he had sexually assaulted a prominent author and columnist in the 1990s. He used a phrase similar to ones he has used in the past to deflect similar allegations: “She’s not my type.” It is a terrible thing to say, with a specifically misogynistic meaning in the context of how men practice violence against women.
But it is a perfect summation of our new and deformed American conscience. It is pithy and dismissive, an invitation to look at people who have been victimized and see only otherness. It shuts down any understanding of trauma before empathy has begun to interrogate how trauma is felt and experienced. It is about looking without seeing, judging without understanding. For anyone who wants an off-ramp to the moral demands made by this image, this could be the universal caption: “They weren’t our type.”
Translation: Did you not see the DROWNED LITTLE KID? How can you not submit to our insane immigration policies when we are showing you pictures of a DROWNED LITTLE KID! And WITH HER DADDY no less! FFS, what do we have to do, drown an entire kindergarten class of refugees just to evoke the desired Pavlovian reaction from you heartless bastards! The title kind of gives it away. “We used to think photos like this could change the world.” That’s just it. They did. But that was before people began to recognize that they were being rhetorically manipulated.
