“What you have just heard; Only a handful of people on earth know, even in classified projects; Is highly compartmented. This is really way past TSSCI – Top Secret Special Compartmented Intelligence.” | Dr. Steven Greer
“What you have just heard; Only a handful of people on earth know, even in classified projects; Is highly compartmented. This is really way past TSSCI – Top Secret Special Compartmented Intelligence.” | Dr. Steven Greer
Lost souls at a wishing well
Dec 8, 2019
A human soul does wander
Across a man made hell
So much destruction we have caused
And the death we know so well
What we can wish for
We can make
Instead we kneel
To those who take
The soul has seen and felt so much
Of nature and the beast
The beast within the man
On whom other souls will feast
The beast within the human
Resides in all mankind
It’s the bit that feeds the hatred
And shows contempt for all that’s kind
The contempt that leads us as a people
Is designed to be that way
So we all back off in terror
When malice comes our way
The wishing well of life
As nature gave it out
Was meant for all to share
And not for the few to flout
This world and its amenities
Before mankind could walk
Was there for all the creatures
There was no need for talk
It’s a world that belongs to all and none
It’s not for humans to sell
We are nature’s greatest creation
Lost souls at a wishing well
jsa
Furious at the verdict, the state police union issued a veiled threat the same day asking whether citizens of Chicago were “ready to pay the price” of police officers not feeling comfortable doing their jobs. And while the Chicago Police Department has denied there was any work slowdown, an analysis of crime data by VICE News shows a significant reduction in police activity following Van Dyke’s sentencing on January 18.
Arrests by Chicago police officers dropped by nearly 50% citywide the evening after the sentence came down, and almost 25% in the two weeks following. At the same time, total crime as reported by police dropped to the lowest level in at least two decades, a stat consistent with a policing slowdown. Crime reports arising through street stops, such as drug arrests and weapons violations, fell the most precipitously, as officers continued to respond to serious incidents like shootings.
Police see slowdowns as a way of punishing a community by letting crime flourish unaddressed. But in Chicago, something unexpected happened: While arrests and crime reports by police fell during the two-week slowdown, they stayed low when police returned to work.
In the weeks and months following Van Dyke’s sentencing, serious crime continued to decline even though cops had returned to more active policing. So far in 2019, the number of homicides — which was previously among the highest in the U.S. — has dropped by 8%. Murders have fallen to their lowest level in five years. Shootings are down 9% compared to last year. Police were doing less, but somehow Chicago became safer.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot even used a press conference with the city’s police chief to note the improvement, saying the city was “trending in the right direction but has a long way to go.”
The proof of a slowdown lies in the fact that three particular kinds of arrests virtually stopped: drug possession, weapons violations and prostitution. This is important because narcotics, weapons and prostitution arrests are an indicator of a type of policing known as “proactive,” in which officers initiate encounters with citizens without the report of a crime. This can include stopping people based on “suspicious activity” — which can be interpreted as standing on a particular corner or moving away from a police car. Proactive policing is a fraught and controversial practice, as people of color are often disproportionately targeted.
Between January 18 and January 31, the two weeks after Van Dyke’s sentencing, police made less than one-third the average number of narcotics arrests in the previous 18 years. Prostitution arrests fell by about 90% from the average over the same time period. Weapons violations dropped as well. The massive decline suggests that officers weren’t stopping people on the street nearly as often.
During the slowdown, the crime reduction was also concentrated within black and Latino communities on the city’s south and west sides with higher crime rates, suggesting that different groups of police officers responded to the union calls for a slowdown differently. Former Baltimore police officer and professor of law and police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Peter Moskos said many cops ignore such statements by the union.
It isn’t possible to definitively determine the reason for the crime reduction after the slowdown ended. But some experts believe the drop in proactive policing, or sentencing — or both — may have improved relationships between Chicagoans and the police, ultimately playing a significant role in driving crime down.
There’s some evidence that was the case. Excessive force complaints have fallen by more than 13% so far this year. “That would suggest some improvement in police-community relations,” said Richard Rosenfeld, a professor of criminology at the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Van Dyke’s sentence may have also helped to quell anger at the department. Public reaction to the jail term varied, with McDonald’s family describing it as a “victory” while some police reform activists termed it “a slap in the face.”
“It’s possible that [citizens said], ‘OK, finally somebody’s doing something; they’re listening,’” so there’s less willingness for the public to challenge authority, and that would bleed into [fewer] other conflicts as well,” said Scott Wolfe, a professor of criminology at Michigan State University.
And better relationships between officers and the public might lead to more tips and information that could improve the police’s ability to deter and solve crimes in their districts. The arrest rate for homicides, which had hovered below 20% before the sentencing, experienced a sharp uptick to around 23% in the following months. Since the sentence, it has increased to the highest level it had been in four years.
Chicago Police Department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi credited the decline in crime to “considerable investments in data and technology” as well as community policing. He cited gunshot-detecting microphones scattered throughout the city as helping to deter crime and enabling police to more rapidly respond to shootings. But many aspects of Chicago’s violence-reduction strategy — including the gunshot-detection technology — had been in place since 2017 or earlier, long before the inflection point in arrests and crime this past January.
Chicago’s policing slowdown and subsequent decrease in crime was echoed in New York City only months later, and under similar circumstances.
In mid-August, five years after police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death for resisting arrest, the New York police commissioner removed the cop from duty. New York City police answered by beginning a slowdown: In the week following Pantaleo’s firing, arrests dropped by 27% compared to the prior year, a reduction that police privately admitted was retaliation for what they viewed as an unjust dismissal.
The New York police union also made oblique threats about public safety. But serious crime is down more than 1% so far in 2019 vs. 2018.
READ: It’s nearly impossible to sue a cop for shooting someone.
There is precedent for slowdowns failing to negatively affect crime — and sometimes even reducing it. In 2015, when an assailant killed two New York City officers in their patrol car, cops also slowed down their policing. The pullback resulted in major declines in proactive policing, ticketing, and arrests, just like this year after Pantaleo was removed.
Researchers at Louisiana State University and the University of Michigan found that violent crimes fell during and after the slowdown. Their study showed that there were thousands fewer major crime reports and that the reduction continued for more than three months beyond the end of the slowdown.
Various other research has also indicated little impact or small reductions in crime after slowdowns. “They say they’re pulling back, that their colleagues are pulling back, and the data would suggest that indeed they are. But what we’re not seeing a lot of, at least on average is … change in crime,” Wolfe said of his own findings.
His study focused on a policing slowdown after the August 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. There, traffic stops fell precipitously after massive protests, but the rate at which officers recovered contraband in stops actually increased — which suggests a decrease in proactive policing meant cops were focusing on citizens who were more likely to be actually breaking the law.
Chicago PD spokesman Guglielmi disputed the slowdown in an interview with VICE News, and noted that some measures of morale, like sick days, did not increase after Van Dyke’s sentencing. But he didn’t explain why arrests declined so dramatically. Another significant influencer of crime — the weather — wouldn’t explain such a severe dropoff. The state union did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the local chapter declined to comment.
And as narcotics stops and other forms of proactive policing have begun to increase in Chicago again, the crime rate has also increased in the latter half of the year. Excessive force complaints were down by more than 20% in the first half of the year, but they’ve begun to return to their old rates as well. Like the 2015 slowdown in New York, any effects of the slowdown — whether positive or negative — may be only temporary.
But Rosenfeld said that the declines in arrests in New York and Chicago are part of a longer-term, more widespread trend toward fewer stops and reduced policing across the nation. Litigation and public outcry against aggressive proactive practices like New York’s stop-and-frisk program — which was shown to be used mostly to stop and search minorities — has drastically cut the number of arrests for minor offenses. According to his research, arrest rates for all kinds of offenses have been decreasing for at least a decade, beginning years before videos of police violence led to a massive protest movement led by Black Lives Matter.
sputniknews.com
Dec 8, 2019
The massive 300-foot object came to light as a popular YouTuber was scanning Google Earth, assuming the sighting might vanish into thin air, should Google update the map of the puzzling icy region.
A bizarre unexplained object has been spotted on Google Earth lingering “out-of-place” right in the middle of Antarctica, and fuelling speculation as to where the purported 300 ft. object originated.
The massive dark object appears to bear no similarity to anything else found nearby, YouTuber MrMBB333 who made the discovery, pointed out in a video, further assuming the object reportedly measuring 277 feet across and about 260 feet high, may have surfaced due to melting glaciers in the vicinity. The authenticity of the video and the images of the object cannot be confirmed by anyone other than MrMBB333.
“Something appears to be in the ice and snow down in Antarctica. Looks like it may have been flying at the time it was taken”, the YouTuber uttered intriguingly in his video, further ruling out a number of suppositions:
“It doesn’t appear to be a shadow and it doesn’t appear to be soil”, he said stressing it “doesn’t look like it belongs there” while being “intelligently designed” and capable of emitting heat signals.
He later pointed at another weird sighting registered nearby, as an unknown object appeared to be “floating” in a shadow cast by a massive wall of ice.
“There’s something weird going on down there. There’s a reason why the world’s Government has made Antarctica off limits and only certain people can go to certain areas for scientific research”, one conspiracy theory believer noted, while a second suggested the object was spotted on the unredacted Google Earth application.
“The rest is off limits. Interesting finds on Google Earth people have found. I wouldn’t be surprised when Google updates Google Earth it will not be there”, the commenter said.
Others suggested that the “snow being disturbed in front of the black object” was a curious sight while another claimed it could be well be a “crash landing” or “secret hangar”.
Conspiracy theories mentioned by users appear to vary, as one, for instance, suggested it is nothing else than “Jeffrey Epstein’s escape plane for after he didn’t kill himself”.
“That’s the same shaped symbol what some of your photos what people have been seeing in the sky”, another remarked, while a third took note of the shape:
“That triangle shape you found is casting a shadow”, he posted in the comments.
“It’s so insane there is a whole continent we know 0 about”, another lamented.
Three years since Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro died at age 90 of natural causes, the Cuban Revolution has withstood ongoing destabilisation efforts to turn the island once again into an imperialist playground. Indeed, as Latin American countries grapple with the ramifications of historical and current US intervention, Cuba has steadfastly held on to the principles which Fidel imparted to the Cuban people throughout the revolutionary process. The participatory aspect of memory in Cuba has been sustained through Fidel’s emphasis on education as an integral component of the revolution.
The US might have harboured the intention that Fidel’s departure would facilitate the process for a counter-revolutionary period in Cuba and the fall of the ideals that have transformed Cuban politics and society. However, the Cuban Revolution was always bigger than Fidel. It encompassed the link between leadership and the people, built upon the historical foundations which Fidel himself articulated. Defining revolution, for Fidel, was an endorsement and affirmation of Jose Martí as the “intellectual author of the Cuban Revolution”. What Fidel achieved was a continuation which now lies in the hands of generations of Cubans who are well versed in the importance of unifying education with revolution.
This is why, despite the attempts to sabotage the Cuban Revolution, the US blockade on Cuba and its transgressions against the island – a recent USAID conspiracy involved the tarnishing of the Cuban medical contingents – have not succeeded in changing the island’s course. Indeed, as Chile and Bolivia grapple with the ramifications of neoliberalism and a military coup respectively, Cuba remains a standing bastion in the region, just as much as it did when Fidel was alive and deemed the main obstacle to US plans for the island.
The Cuban resolve to remain independent and free of colonialism necessitated a radical change – namely prioritising education within the construction of revolutionary goals. Even prior to the triumph of the revolution, Fidel exhibited awareness of implementing the continuity. As can be gleaned from the Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra (1957), as well as the First and Second Declarations of Havana (1960, 1962), Fidel’s concept of education is inclusive of Cuban independence from imperial motives in Latin America. The Manifesto declared ‘an immediate initiation of an intensive campaign against illiteracy, and civic education emphasising the duties and rights of each citizen to his society and fatherland’. Furthermore, in condemning ‘the exploitation of man by man and the exploitation of underdeveloped countries by imperialistic finance capital,’ an awareness of rights in association with education was asserted – a statement reminiscent of Fidel’s early memories concerning the link between illiteracy and exploitation. Prior to its triumph, the revolution considered education as the vehicle through which Cubans could fight for economic, social and political rights. Therefore, education as a right and duty affirmed the Cuban Revolution’s stand against imperial exploitation of people and natural resources.
Revolutionary education contrasted with the colonial and military functions of the Batista regime. Several speeches of Fidel attest to this fact. Using a metaphor of armies during a 1961 address in Havana which recapitulated the revolution’s achievements in education and a goal to eradicate illiteracy in just one year, Fidel invoked the differences between Cuba’s ‘army of educators’ and the army of ‘exploiters’. Furthermore, Fidel declared: “The resentment of imperialism is so profound, its hatred of our revolution so great, that the imperialists refuse to resign themselves.” Eradicating illiteracy was perceived as a fundamental battle against imperial and counter-revolutionary actions against Cuba, also allowing Cubans to become active participants against imperial intervention. Throughout the revolutionary phases, there is ample evidence that Cuba not only consolidated its anti-imperialist values at a national level, but also, through Fidel, managed to impart internationalism based upon education and revolutionary consciousness.
Education, therefore, has contributed to the empowerment and organisation of Cuban society. This dynamic has contributed to awareness, and termination of, the relationship between subjugation and exploitation, while striving to complete an evolution of humanity within the context of socialist revolution.
The US, which only understands the language of coercion and intervention, will not comprehend the insoluble bond not only between Fidel and the people, but also between the people and the revolution. This unity has enabled Cubans to stand principled in defence of the revolution, while also providing an internationalist example for the rest of the world to emulate.
Presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders yesterday released a plan to overhaul the US broadband market by breaking up giant providers, outlawing data caps, regulating broadband prices, and providing $150 billion to build publicly owned networks.
“The Internet as we know it was developed by taxpayer-funded research, using taxpayer-funded grants in taxpayer-funded labs,” the Sanders plan said. “Our tax dollars built the Internet, and access to it should be a public good for all, not another price-gouging profit machine for Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.”
If enacted, Sanders’ “High-Speed Internet for All” plan would be the polar opposite of the Trump administration’s treatment of broadband companies and far more aggressive than the regulatory approach of the Obama administration. Sanders pledged to “use existing antitrust authority to break up Internet service provider and cable monopolies,” specifically by “bar[ring] service providers from also providing content and unwind anticompetitive vertical conglomerates.”
Perhaps most notably, this could force Comcast to divest NBCUniversal and force AT&T to divest Time Warner. Of course, a US president can’t simply issue an order to break up these companies. But if Sanders is elected, he could nominate Department of Justice officials who are likely to file antitrust lawsuits against the companies that dominate the broadband industry.
Sanders also pledged to regulate broadband providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act, reinstate net neutrality rules, and impose other pro-consumer rules. This could be achieved via legislation, appointments of aggressive regulators to the Federal Communications Commission, or a combination of both.
Sanders said he would “eliminate data caps and ban throttling” and “instruct the FCC to regulate broadband Internet rates so households and small businesses are connected affordably.” This would include a requirement “that all Internet service providers offer a Basic Internet Plan that provides quality broadband speeds at an affordable price.”
The FCC is an independent agency, so it wouldn’t have to do what Sanders says. But if Sanders was president, he could nominate commissioners and appoint a chairperson who is likely to carry out his wishes. 1935, a time when 90 percent of rural households lacked it.”
Sanders’ $150 billion proposal includes a Department of Agriculture Rural Utility Service program “to provide capital funding to connect all remote rural households and businesses and upgrade outdated technology and infrastructure, prioritizing funding for existing co-ops and small rural utilities.” Sanders said that $7.5 billion should be set aside for tribal areas and that all public housing should provide free broadband to residents.
Sanders said the $150 billion investment will “ensure that communities stay connected during natural disasters.” Sanders also proposed a full review of broadband networks to make sure they are “resilient to the effects of climate change.”
US government plans for broadband often focus on network access without talking much about lowering prices. Sanders wants to do both. His plan said:
Large Internet service providers have enjoyed government funding, protection from competition, and light regulation while gouging customers with some of the highest prices for service in the world. Bernie will regulate these providers like a utility. The FCC will review prices and regulate rates where necessary, ensuring areas without competition aren’t able to run up prices.
Moreover, Sanders proposed eliminating the hidden fees broadband providers use to make the actual cost higher than their advertised rates. ISPs would have to “clearly state the cost of service” and not impose “unexpected rate increases” or “service termination fees.”
Sanders also wants the FCC to define broadband as a minimum of 100Mbps download speeds and 10Mbps uploads, instead of the current 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up. Sanders would also “reinstate and expand privacy protection rules,” reversing the Trump-era decision to eliminate broadband-privacy rules.