Hundreds of Puerto Ricans took to the streets of the island's capital on Wednesday to protest austerity measures as anger builds over an unrelenting economic crisis that has hit the working class especially hard.
Protesters clutched posters decrying austerity measures including new taxes, increases in utility bills and looming furloughs and cuts to a public pension system facing nearly $50 billion in liabilities.
"They're taking advantage of us poor workers. We did not steal. We are not corrupt," read one poster held up by 70-year-old Eva Feliciano, a retired government worker who said she sometimes cannot afford to buy the groceries she and her husband need.
Puerto Rico’s public debt has ballooned because of a failing economy and an inefficient government that has spent more than it has taken in for years, often borrowing to close the gap.
Much of the borrowing is in the form of municipal bonds. As the size of the debt grew, so did the complexity, with some branches of government issuing bonds on behalf of others, or backstopping each others’ debts, until it became nearly impossible to keep track of it all. Even then, demand for Puerto Rico’s bonds was strong because they pay interest that is tax-exempt in all jurisdictions.
In addition, Puerto Rico owes billions more in pensions to retired public workers.
1990s
The government created a health insurance program for low-income people in 1994, but did not establish a way to pay for it. In 1996, Washington started phasing out a tax break for American companies with subsidiaries on the island, removing a significant driver of economic growth.
2000
Bond debt: $24 billion.
Unfunded pensions: $7 billion for the three main funds, for teachers, judges and general employees.
2014
Bond debt: $72 billion.
Unfunded pensions: $34 billion.
The island’s credit was downgraded well into junk range. Even so, Puerto Rico managed one last bond sale, oversubscribed at $3.5 billion.
May 2017
Bond debt: Still about $72 billion, because Puerto Rico has lost market access.
Pensions: $49 billion.
An independent consultant recommended sweeping changes Monday to the pension systems that cover most of Kentucky’s public workers, creating the possibility that lawmakers will cut payments to existing retirees and force most current and future hires into 401(k)-style retirement plans.
Echoing a message often repeated by Governor Matt Bevin, the PFM Group told the Public Pension Oversight Board that lawmakers must make dramatic changes to fix one of the worst-funded pension systems in the country.
“This is the time to act,” said Michael Nadol of PFM. “This is not the time to craft a solution that kicks the can down the road.”
The group, which was hired by Bevin, offered only recommendations. Any changes to the pension system would come during a potential special legislative session in October.
If the legislature accepts the recommendations, it would effectively end the promise of a pension check for most of Kentucky’s future state and local government workers and freeze the pension benefits of most current state and local workers.
. . .
Nadol said changing the benefits of current employees and retirees is the only way to significantly reduce Kentucky’s pension liability.
“All of the unfunded liability that the commonwealth now faces is associated with folks that are already on board or already retired,” he said. “Modifying benefits for future hires only helps you stop the hole from getting deeper, it doesn’t help you climb up and out on to more solid footing going forward.”
The industry has 250,000 or 260,000 units of excess inventory “that kind of needs to be weaned from the system,” said Joe Langley, IHS principal analyst for North America light vehicle forecasting.
They seem to be in almost every picture or video of flooded neighborhoods in and around Houston.
There are scores of cars and trucks with water up to their windows and in some cases over the hood and roof.
In fact, the flooding is so extensive, Cox Automotive estimates a half-million vehicles may wind up in the scrap yard.
. . .
With so many vehicles in the flood zone, auto insurers will be busy handling claims and cutting checks so flood victims can buy another car or truck.
Auto dealers are expecting a surge in business once Houston gets back on its feet.
The resale of repaired flooded cars is not illegal, as long as the flood damage is disclosed on the title to buyers. After Hurricane Katrina, thousands of rebuilt flood vehicles were sold to unsuspecting buyers with titles that had been washed or reissued in a different state.
"We didn't see this on a huge scale until Hurricane Katrina," said Scafidi. "Since then the public awareness of the problem is greater, but with thousands of flooded vehicles it's hard to prevent this from happening."
The unlikely story of this remarkable man is told in Cate Lineberry’s thoroughly researched new history “Be Free or Die: The Amazing Story of Robert Smalls’ Escape from Slavery to Union Hero”.
Smalls was the Planter’s wheelman, essentially its pilot, responsible for guiding it through the complicated waterways around the harbor. Although he was its most knowledgeable sailor, he could not operate the ship alone. He convinced his fellow black crew members to go along with the getaway — and swear to secrecy.
The crew waited for Smalls’ sign, for that moment when the white officers would be gone. That moment came on May 12, 1862.
. . .
In the early morning hours of May 13, Smalls and his crew unmoored the Planter from its berth in Charleston’s Southern Wharf. Their first stop: to pick up several other escapees, including Smalls’ wife, Hannah, and their children.
Their next hurdle was Fort Johnson, a Confederate stronghold. As the Planter paddled its way past the fort, the mood on board was fraught. Smalls and his group knew they had crossed a critical threshold. If at any point they were caught, they had all agreed, they would join hands and jump to their watery deaths.
If they could not be free, they would not live in slavery, either.
Somehow, they made it past Johnson.
Finally, and perhaps most terrifyingly, Smalls had to avoid the suspicion of the night watch of the famous Fort Sumter. Tense minutes ticked by as the Planter crept past the heavily armed fort.
By this point, the Planter’s Captain Relyea realized that his ship was gone and was asking questions back in the harbor. But he failed to raise the alarm in time, and the Planter was able to slip past Sumter and into the channel leading to the Atlantic. As soon as they were in the clear, the crew lowered the Planter’s Confederate flag and raised a white sheet in its place.
In the foggy early dawn, the Planter was intercepted by the clipper Onward, part of the Union blockade of Charleston Harbor. Initially thinking the Planter was a Confederate ironclad bent on ramming his ship, the captain of the Onward trained his ship’s guns on the escaped steamer. Then he saw the white flag.
. . .
So impressed were Union officials by Smalls’ courage and intelligence, that he was brought to meet President Lincoln. He continued to prove himself a highly skilled, brave member of the Union cause, and was rewarded for his efforts by becoming the first black captain of a Navy ship. That ship was none other than the Planter.
You’ll notice that I didn’t provide any expansion data. That’s because NONE of the .380 or .38 special rounds expanded at all! All of the bullets except for the two 9mm rounds could have been reloaded and fired. They had no expansion whatsoever.
. . .
Many knowledgeable handgun instructors have noted that there really isn’t much significant difference in stopping power between most of the rounds people shoot at criminals. Is there any wonder? Look at the .38 and .380 rounds we tested. All penetrated the same distance and remained .35 caliber. Bullets with identical performance in gelatin should have similar performance in human bodies as well. It just doesn’t make much difference what round you carry in your “mouse guns.”
. . .
The bottom line learning point for me was that one should not rely on a bullet’s expansion out of a short barreled pistol. When shot through clothing, all the bullets remained remarkably unchanged with no expansion whatsoever and penetrated to a similar depth.
The human body is not a consistent medium. Muscle, fat, organ, and bone all have different mass, density, hardness, and flexibility. In general, a bullet will penetrate much deeper in gelatin that it will in human flesh.
The primary reason for the diminished penetration in an actual body is the presence of skin and bone.
Skin is very elastic. A bullet uses up a lot of energy stretching the skin before the skin actually breaks. Most ballistic experts believe that the skin itself is equal to one to two inches of gelatin penetration.
Bones also tremendously slow bullets and limit their penetration.
We want a bullet that penetrates 12″-18″ of gelatin. That translates to roughly 6″-10″ of human flesh, depending on the structures hit.
. . .
Ten days ago, I participated in a ballistic laboratory of a different sort at the Paul-E-Palooza Memorial Training Conference. Instead of shooting gelatin, we shot (dead) pigs instead. It gave us the ability to actually see how bullets performed in real flesh and bone.
Keep in mind, all of the pigs were less than twelve inches across. Every load tested penetrates deeper than twelve inches in gelatin. How many rounds do you think penetrated through and through on the pigs?
If you guessed NONE you would be correct. Not a single round (including the rifle and shotgun rounds) fully penetrated the pigs. Most wound channels were six to eight inches deep. Those that hit larger bones terminated even earlier.
Sure, Trump occasionally misspeaks, and sure people can get bored with a speech. But more importantly, the press is so relentlessly and insanely biased towards anything Trump says or does that it’s sometimes impossible to figure out what they’re reporting on, other than whatever is inside their heads, pre-packaged and ready to “report.” From offhand comments on Russia, to his comments on what happened in Charlottesville, it’s near impossible to divine what Trump says from how it’s written about. He could say the sky is blue and get coverage along the lines of “by not mentioning the white clouds, Trump encourages white supremacy.”
. . .
You’d think that Trump’s victory, so stunning that it surprised even those of us who wanted anything but to see Hillary win, would have caused a media wake up, something along the lines of “wait, if this could happen, maybe things aren’t the way we expected” or “maybe there is a defect in our thought.” Or perhaps even “technology has made it so that we can no longer present a unified front in news, without people being able to see and judge for themselves.”
However, that is not what seems to have happened ... It’s like the media has been in an enchanted sleep, as though a particularly ugly Snow White had fallen asleep under a spell and failed to note how the world changed around her as she slept.
. . .
And yet instead of reassessing, they just keep trying more of the same, or, by wildly projecting, saying that Trump supporters might harm them, this while deep-sixing coverage of the attack on Scalise by an anti-trump leftist because it doesn’t fit their narrative.
It’s as though they think if they only attack with enough force and vigor they’ll get the result they always got.
Like lab mice in a long deserted lab, they keep pushing with their noses on the pellet dispenser, sure eventually it will dispense just what they want. Only they’re not as smart as lab rats. Lab rats adapt and learn. The biased press can only do the same thing over and over again, until all you can think of while watching them is: How long before they starve or starting eating their fellows?
On the one hand, we have the Catholic Church maintaining it will make no change in its protocol about the sanctity of the confessional. And it maintains that, despite the fact that – as just revealed by the Criminal Justice report by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse – it has presided over cases like the one in Rockhampton where Father Michael McArdle was forgiven no fewer than 1500 times by 30 of his fellow priests for raping children in his care.
"I was devastated after the assaults, every one of them," Father McArdle affirmed in a 2004 affidavit, quoted in The Australian on Tuesday. "So distressed would I become that I would attend confessions weekly. [After every confession], it was like a magic wand had been waved over me."
Now, as not a single one of those priests called the police – sanctity of the confessional and all that – McArdle continued his atrocities for decades, devastating the lives of ever more children.
And, on the other hand, we have the Catholic Church waving a flag upon what it sees as the moral high ground, warning the rest of us of what will happen to society if we vote for marriage equality. And its warnings include the dangers to children of gay couples.
I ask this seriously. How long can we, as a society, BEAR this?
... gives the state more power to seize children from families that oppose the LGBTQI and gender ideology agenda, and allows government agencies to effectively ban couples who disagree with that agenda from fostering or adopting children.
. . .
Bill 89 ... adds “gender identity” and “gender expression” as factors to be considered “in the best interests of the child.”
At the same time, it deletes the religious faith in which the parents are raising the child as a factor to be considered, and mandates child protection services consider only the child’s own “creed” or “religion” when assessing the best interests of the child.
Police say a boy found a gun in a dressing room at an Atlanta mall and it fired when the mother pulled the trigger to see if it was real.
News outlets report the mother and son were inside a dressing room at the Adidas store in Lenox Square on Wednesday when the 10-year-old boy found what he thought was a toy gun under a bench. Atlanta police spokeswoman Stephanie Brown says the mother took the gun from the boy and pulled the trigger "to see if it was real." A single shot was fired.
The death of stuntwoman Joi "SJ" Harris on the set of Deadpool 2 is tragic. It's even more heartbreaking as we've learned that the that crew members on the set consider her death to have been preventable.
"She was improving, but I was watching her and, oh my God, I thought, ‘It’s just a matter of time before she crashes into a wall or runs somebody over," a source tells The Hollywood Reporter. This source had been training Harris to perform the stunt, and noted that another member of the stunt staff had spoken to producers about their safety concerns. Harris had endured two previous crashes during the practice stunts.
. . .
It appears that the producers did not take the stunt team's worries seriously, and were adamant that the stunt be performed by an Afrian-American woman in order to more closely resemble the character Domino, played by actress Zazie Beetz. Joi Harris had previously never performed motorcycle stunts on film, and was primarily a road racer. According to Deadline, Harris was not wearing a helmet during the take, because Domino wasn't wearing one in the scene.
"The producers put pressure to have somebody of the same sex and ethnicity in a position she wasn’t qualified to be in," stunt coordinator Conrad Palmisano told THR. "The stunt coordinators caved to the pressure."
Would that series, or one like it using the same production team, depict Mohammed in precisely and exactly the same way?
Nurse Practioner Trish Patterson at Prestige Urgent Care said ... they haven't had any patients with damage from looking at the eclipse, but they've had a few customers experience pain after they put sunscreen in their eye Monday since they did not have protective glasses.
"One of my colleagues at moonlight here stated yesterday that they had patients presenting at their clinic that put sunscreen on their eyeball, and presented that they were having pain and they were referred to an ophthalmologist," Patterson said.
"... the problem lies in their socialization into the military culture that is that of a white supremacist organization. They have been permanently tainted, and are no long(er) fit for a four-year university."
"Veterans usually have an overwhelming presence in the classroom, which can distract other students. This is usually true for vulnerable individual such as LGBTQQI2SAA, who have been known to be the butt of insensitive jokes made by veterans."
"This is not to say that veterans should not be allowed an education. Veterans should be allowed to attend trade schools, or maybe even community college. But, in order to protect our academic institutions we must ban veterans from four-year universities."
Millions of people agonize over every move of the regime and they worry about the specter of worse to come. They feel trapped in the kind of nightmare from which you desperately need an escape—desperately hoping to wake up so as to put the terror behind you ... What people don’t know, and need to know, is that THEY ARE THE WAY OUT OF THE NIGHTMARE, if they join together and act outside all the normal avenues that they expect society and government to provide for redress of their concerns—outside the ways that they would normally think of to act themselves for remedy. Waiting for investigations, waiting for the Democrats to act, thinking that Trump will implode, hoping for 2018 Congressional elections, even protesting each abuse—as righteous and part of people raising their heads as such protest is, these are all acting within the normal frameworks that people have grown accustomed to thinking and acting within for change in policy and direction. But change, even under “normal” times, rarely comes without ferocious struggle if it is not change in the interests of at least some of those in power. BUT EVEN MORE, THERE IS NOTHING NORMAL ABOUT THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME. FASCISM IS NOT NORMAL.
. . .
Christian fascism runs through this regime, from Steve Bannon’s world apocalyptic view of a war for Western (read white) Judeo-Christian civilization on through the Trump cabinet with Rick Perry, Betsy DeVos, Ben Carson, and that vicious nut job now on the Supreme Court—Neil Gorsuch. This is a REGIME—that word matters—it is an amalgam of all the strains of fascism that have run through America’s history which have become forged over the last decades and now, in the context of the huge problems this country and system faces, has come to power. It may have shocked all or some of these fascists movements that Donald Trump is the vehicle that they are riding, but they have recognized it, and now it is so. Bannon and the Nazi Rudy Giuliani have said: THIS is our last chance (even as they have left unsaid, but made clear) to consolidate fascism.
. . .
November 4, 2017, we begin. Why have we set this date? Because without the kind of mass determined opposition of millions of people being in the streets day after day night after night, there is little chance of the whole regime being removed before they are able to cement into place a fascist re-ordering of society. By setting the date, we focus our attention and that of the whole society on the form of political protest that is required.
The Democrats, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, etc., are seeking to resolve the crisis with the Trump presidency on the terms of this system, and in the interests of the ruling class of this system, which they represent. We, the masses of people, must go all out, and mobilize ourselves in the millions, to resolve this in our interests, in the interests of humanity, which are fundamentally different from and opposed to those of the ruling class.
This, of course, does not mean that the struggle among the powers-that-be is irrelevant or unimportant; rather, the way to understand and approach this (and this is a point that must also be repeatedly driven home to people, including through necessary struggle, waged well) is in terms of how it relates to, and what openings it can provide for, “the struggle from below”—for the mobilization of masses of people around the demand that the whole regime must go, because of its fascist nature and actions and what the stakes are for humanity.
ON NOVEMBER 4, 2017:
We will gather in the streets and public squares of cities and towns across this country, at first many thousands declaring that this whole regime is illegitimate and that we will not stop until our single demand is met: This Nightmare Must End: the Trump/Pence Regime Must Go!
Our protest must grow day after day and night after night—thousands becoming hundreds of thousands, and then millions—determined to act to put a stop to the grave danger that the Trump/Pence Regime poses to the world by demanding that this whole regime be removed from power.
Our actions will reflect the values of respect for all of humanity and the world we want—in stark contrast to the hate and bigotry of the Trump/Pence fascist regime.
Our determination to persist and not back down will compel the whole world to take note. Every force and faction in the power structure would be forced to respond to our demand. The cracks and divisions among the powers already evident today will sharpen and widen. As we draw more and more people forward to stand up, all of this could lead to a situation where this illegitimate regime is removed from power.
No reviews, no revenue.
That’s the key takeaway from a new study published in Psychological Science, which finds that if two similar products have the same rating, online shoppers will buy the one with more reviews.
. . .
The study concluded that consumers see products with more reviews as being more popular, and they’re more comfortable having what everyone else is having, regardless of quality.
“[When] faced with a choice between two low-scoring products, one with many reviews and one with few, the statistics say we should actually go for the product with few reviews, since there’s more of a chance it’s not really so bad,” wrote researcher Derek Powell of Stanford University, lead author of the report. In other words, when there’s only a handful of reviews, a few bad ones break the curve and bring down the overall rating.
“But participants in our studies did just the opposite: They went for the more popular product, despite the fact that they should’ve been even more certain it was of low quality,” he wrote.
Matt Moog, CEO of PowerReviews, previously conducted a study with Northwestern University that drew from an even larger data pool of 400 million consumers, which also found that the more reviews there are of a product, the more likely it is that a customer will purchase that product. “Around 20 [and running up to 50] is the optimal number of reviews for a product to have to give consumers the confidence that this product has been tried enough by enough people,” he told Moneyish.
. . .
Most online shoppers (97 percent to be exact) say reviews influence their buying decisions, according to Fan & Fuel Digital Marketing Group, which also found that 92 percent of consumers will hesitate to buy something if it has no customer reviews at all.
And 73 percent of shoppers say written reviews make more of an impression on them than the star or number ratings, according to Deloitte.
From the organizers of BAMN to the organizers of Refuse Fascism, to just your typical Antifa member has allegedly been doxxed. 8chan has released the first and last names of all of them and promises to be releasing the personal info of all of them.
We checked out some of these and a lot of the ones we can confirm actually check out to be true. We couldn’t go through them all of course because there are thousands and thousands of names. Here is the 8chan link with the names.
Just in case for some reason this link gets taken down, we have had the pleasure of saving all of these for re-release if such a thing happens. The OP of the post also promises to post additional personal info of the members. And if you're an Antifa member checking out this site, maybe see if your name is there. They are all in alphabetical order by last name.
Some of them who attended Charlottesville and committed violence have also been doxxed with pictures and personal info including Facebook page, home address as well as some other information.
After decades of peace, war is threatening the Kingdom of Avranche. Its old foes are stirring, in a new alliance with darker powers. Black wings bring death and torture in the night.
Owain, former King’s Champion, hears rumors of sorcery. Visiting the grave of his sword brother, he stumbles into a deadly raid, and uncovers coded orders for a larger plot.
The kingdom’s enemies know Owain is now their greatest danger. He must race against time to find and deal with them… before they deal with him!
