2019 so far

[ekauqodielak]

The hypersane are among us, if only we are prepared to look

Neel Burton is a psychiatrist and philosopher. He is a fellow of Green Templeton College at the University of Oxford and his most recent book is Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking (2019).

British primatologist Jane Goodall. Photo by Sumy Sadurni/AFP/Getty

‘Hypersanity’ is not a common or accepted term. But neither did I make it up. I first came across the concept while training in psychiatry, in The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise (1967) by R D Laing. In this book, the Scottish psychiatrist presented ‘madness’ as a voyage of discovery that could open out onto a free state of higher consciousness, or hypersanity. For Laing, the descent into madness could lead to a reckoning, to an awakening, to ‘break-through’ rather than ‘breakdown’.

A few months later, I read C G Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), which provided a vivid case in point. In 1913, on the eve of the Great War, Jung broke off his close friendship with Sigmund Freud, and spent the next few years in a troubled state of mind that led him to a ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.

As Europe tore itself apart, Jung gained first-hand experience of psychotic material in which he found ‘the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age’. Like Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Heracles, Orpheus and Aeneas before him, Jung travelled deep down into an underworld where he conversed with Salome, an attractive young woman, and with Philemon, an old man with a white beard, the wings of a kingfisher and the horns of a bull. Although Salome and Philemon were products of Jung’s unconscious, they had lives of their own and said things that he had not previously thought. In Philemon, Jung had at long last found the father-figure that both Freud and his own father had failed to be. More than that, Philemon was a guru, and prefigured what Jung himself was later to become: the wise old man of Zürich. As the war burnt out, Jung re-emerged into sanity, and considered that he had found in his madness ‘the primo materia for a lifetime’s work’.

The Laingian concept of hypersanity, though modern, has ancient roots. Once, upon being asked to name the most beautiful of all things, Diogenes the Cynic (412-323 BCE) replied parrhesia, which in Ancient Greek means something like ‘uninhibited thought’, ‘free speech’, or ‘full expression’. Diogenes used to stroll around Athens in broad daylight brandishing a lit lamp. Whenever curious people stopped to ask what he was doing, he would reply: ‘I am just looking for a human being’ – thereby insinuating that the people of Athens were not living up to, or even much aware of, their full human potential.

After being exiled from his native Sinope for having defaced its coinage, Diogenes emigrated to Athens, took up the life of a beggar, and made it his mission to deface – metaphorically this time – the coinage of custom and convention that was, he maintained, the false currency of morality. He disdained the need for conventional shelter or any other such ‘dainties’, and elected to live in a tub and survive on a diet of onions. Diogenes proved to the later satisfaction of the Stoics that happiness has nothing whatsoever to do with a person’s material circumstances, and held that human beings had much to learn from studying the simplicity and artlessness of dogs, which, unlike human beings, had not complicated every simple gift of the gods.

The term ‘cynic’ derives from the Greek kynikos, which is the adjective of kyon or ‘dog’. Once, upon being challenged for masturbating in the marketplace, Diogenes regretted that it were not as easy to relieve hunger by rubbing an empty stomach. When asked, on another occasion, where he came from, he replied: ‘I am a citizen of the world’ (cosmopolites), a radical claim at the time, and the first recorded use of the term ‘cosmopolitan’. As he approached death, Diogenes asked for his mortal remains to be thrown outside the city walls for wild animals to feast upon. After his death in the city of Corinth, the Corinthians erected to his glory a pillar surmounted by a dog of Parian marble.

Jung and Diogenes came across as insane by the standards of their day. But both men had a depth and acuteness of vision that their contemporaries lacked, and that enabled them to see through their facades of ‘sanity’. Both psychosis and hypersanity place us outside society, making us seem ‘mad’ to the mainstream. Both states attract a heady mixture of fear and fascination. But whereas mental disorder is distressing and disabling, hypersanity is liberating and empowering.

After reading The Politics of Experience, the concept of hypersanity stuck in my mind, not least as something that I might aspire to for myself. But if there is such a thing as hypersanity, the implication is that mere sanity is not all it’s cracked up to be, a state of dormancy and dullness with less vital potential even than madness. This I think is most apparent in people’s frequently suboptimal – if not frankly inappropriate – responses, both verbal and behavioural, to the world around them. As Laing puts it:

• The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.

• Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.

• Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last 50 years.

Many ‘normal’ people suffer from not being hypersane: they have a restricted worldview, confused priorities, and are wracked by stress, anxiety and self-deception. As a result, they sometimes do dangerous things, and become fanatics or fascists or otherwise destructive (or not constructive) people. In contrast, hypersane people are calm, contained and constructive. It is not just that the ‘sane’ are irrational but that they lack scope and range, as though they’ve grown into the prisoners of their arbitrary lives, locked up in their own dark and narrow subjectivity. Unable to take leave of their selves, they hardly look around them, barely see beauty and possibility, rarely contemplate the bigger picture – and all, ultimately, for fear of losing their selves, of breaking down, of going mad, using one form of extreme subjectivity to defend against another, as life – mysterious, magical life – slips through their fingers.

We could all go mad, in a way we already are, minus the promise. But what if there were another route to hypersanity, one that, compared with madness, was less fearsome, less dangerous, and less damaging? What if, as well as a backdoor way, there were also a royal road strewn with sweet-scented petals? After all, Diogenes did not exactly go mad. Neither did other hypersane people such as Socrates and Confucius, although the Buddha did suffer, in the beginning, with what might today be classed as depression.

Besides Jung, are there any modern examples of hypersanity? Those who escaped from Plato’s cave of shadows were reluctant to crawl back down and involve themselves in the affairs of men, and most hypersane people, rather than courting the limelight, might prefer to hide out in their back gardens. But a few do rise to prominence for the difference that they felt compelled to make, people such as Nelson Mandela and Temple Grandin. And the hypersane are still among us: from the Dalai Lama to Jane Goodall, there are many candidates. While they might seem to be living in a world of their own, this is only because they have delved more deeply into the way things are than those ‘sane’ people around them.

[joseph]

Aug 11, 2019 11:58:13 GMT -5 hotman637 said:

The thing about Chump and his talking about sex with Ivanka is that if you notice the Chump with the pink tie is a DIFFERENT Chump then the guy now so he was

REPLACED! So the replacement Chump seems to be the one talking about sex with Ivanka and he may NOT BE her "father"! I am not saying that does not make him an idiot

(NOTHING can stop him being an idiot!) but that could explain why he talks about sex with her! The guy with the pink tie actually looks a lot like the replacement Bush!

I can't disagree with this. Especially since it came to me in a dream before I knew PID was even a thing.

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 12, 2019 21:34:10 GMT -5 B said:

Historian PREDICTED Last 9 Elections- PREDICTS TRUMP WIN 2020 - Playing Card Divination
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aul0-JzQ9_I



Joseph Magi
Published on Aug 12, 2019

"AIR USE ACT
ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY

This is a PSYCHIC and INTUITIVE READING that may involve SPECULATION, the examination of RUMORS or GOSSIP."

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 12, 2019 21:52:46 GMT -5 joseph said:

Aug 11, 2019 11:58:13 GMT -5 hotman637 said:

The thing about Chump and his talking about sex with Ivanka is that if you notice the Chump with the pink tie is a DIFFERENT Chump then the guy now so he was

REPLACED! So the replacement Chump seems to be the one talking about sex with Ivanka and he may NOT BE her "father"! I am not saying that does not make him an idiot

(NOTHING can stop him being an idiot!) but that could explain why he talks about sex with her! The guy with the pink tie actually looks a lot like the replacement Bush!

I can't disagree with this. Especially since it came to me in a dream before I knew PID was even a thing.

[hotman637]

Aug 12, 2019 21:52:46 GMT -5 joseph said:

Aug 11, 2019 11:58:13 GMT -5 hotman637 said:

The thing about Chump and his talking about sex with Ivanka is that if you notice the Chump with the pink tie is a DIFFERENT Chump then the guy now so he was

REPLACED! So the replacement Chump seems to be the one talking about sex with Ivanka and he may NOT BE her "father"! I am not saying that does not make him an idiot

(NOTHING can stop him being an idiot!) but that could explain why he talks about sex with her! The guy with the pink tie actually looks a lot like the replacement Bush!

I can't disagree with this. Especially since it came to me in a dream before I knew PID was even a thing.

Interesting! I had a dream I won the lottery and the winning number was "THREE", lol!

That is the thing about dreams is that there always seems to be a "catch" somewhere!

[ekauqodielak]

[timmyb52]

Aug 12, 2019 20:42:56 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

Aug 12, 2019 19:09:33 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

No...I'm saying that the large majority of news is twisted and manipulated to deceive or just give us what elites want us to know.

Only a small amount has truth.

You wanna back that up with some research…or is it just a gut feeling you have?

Just my own opinion K.

But ask yourself this...where does the "news" we receive come from?

Largely it comes from goverment agencies who give it to six corporations who run and own the majority of all news services.

The politico and corporate elites only allow us to see and hear what they want us to see and hear.

The recent "suicide" of Epstein is a perfect example IMO.

[B]

Shelter Dog Saves Best Friend Hours Before Euthanasia After Hug Goes Viral

justsomething.co/shelter-dog-saves-best-friend-hours-before-euthanasia-after-hug-goes-viral/?fbclid=IwAR0gC7WoYWjmARkWn9yLHE4Q4JtjNzMxgv_OTDtlhMImOgzQxpWvMTb6_zU

[timmyb52]

Aug 12, 2019 21:07:12 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

Aug 12, 2019 19:05:58 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

K...really?

Everything is a Russian/Right conspiracy? Really?

Didn't say *everything* and didn't say *conspiracy*, either.

I noted specific things: the known, documented, multi-pronged election fraud; the known, documented Russian/Right disinformation war; the known, documented kompromat blackmail of amoral politicians (all of whom happen to be Republicans); the known, documented ties between the GOP, the Kremlin and the NRA; the known, documented hack of Democratic servers by the Russians for the benefit of Dump & Co.; and, ok, I'll give you this one, my very strong suspicion that it will eventually be known that these grid outages are the result of Moscow hacks.

Aug 12, 2019 19:05:58 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

IMHO...I think things are a lot more complex then that Russia is in some kind of league with Trump and that the Left is above the fray.

Above the fray of colluding with Russians to undermine democracy? Do you have any evidence of Democrats taking private meetings with Putin or borrowing vast sums of money from Russian oligarchs or publicly referencing hacks made by Russians before they were known to the public or violent, destabilizing (or for that matter even benevolent) left-wing organizations that are being funded by Russian rubles, etc. etc. etc. ---? Because the aforementioned are all factual things that Cheetolini and his goons have engaged in.

Aug 12, 2019 19:05:58 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Elites appear to be at odds in order to become the new overlords of a new system based on merit.

You say this based upon what? Something the AI-bot known as "Q" told you? Who are these "elites", if not the megamillionaires at the core of the Republican party?

Aug 12, 2019 19:05:58 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

But it is the new overlords who will get to decide who gets to climb the ladder of this new fake merit based system which they get to control and form.

Again, this isn't Star Wars. We're talking about men.

And I'm not clear what "fake merit based system" you're referring to. This country has never rewarded anyone for merit. Men have been rewarded for being born with dicks. White people the luck of skin. Those with family wealth are taken care of as being part of the ruling class. And almost everyone else has been written out history just as they've been stomped out of opportunity. It'd be great if Nelson Algren was more famous and beloved than Ronald Reagan, but that's not a world we've ever lived in.

Aug 12, 2019 19:05:58 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

I see this as a battle between several elite classes of thought and ideology.

And the winner gets to control the masses with a new elitist status quo.

What I notice is that you've removed yourself from having any say in the future. You've decided to agree to an ideology that posits the world is controlled, not by men, but by Super Villains. There are plenty of sociopaths and scumbags, but they're humans, just like you and me. There are those who see life as a game to be won, an ideology which reinforces and even requires a belief in some people being *more equal than others*, and there are those view existence as a collective endeavor, in which one group 'losing' means we all lose. There are no Supers and no Subs.

Did Hillary sell our Uranium to Russia?

Did the Clintons get millions in speaking fees from Russia?

Did the Clintons pay Mr.Steele to go to Russia to get dirt on the Trump campaign in order to put together a dossier to get FISA warrants?

You are quick to see the supposed crimes of The Right but lack the vision to see the supposed crimes of The Left!

Both sides engage in deception,lies and falsehoods...they divide and conquer the common man and woman for their own personal power and greed.

Damn K...I thought you were smart enough to see that.

Look at the lengths of deception they have engaged in alone with PID!

Left or Right...it is the same coin!

These psycopaths don't care about you or me...they want us fighting one another over bullshit so they can personally benefit themselves!

Things behind the scenes are much more complex then simple Left or Right Wing ideology and reality perception manipulation through their controlled media sources.

Nuff'said.

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 13, 2019 20:29:45 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Aug 12, 2019 20:42:56 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

You wanna back that up with some research…or is it just a gut feeling you have?

Just my own opinion K.

But ask yourself this...where does the "news" we receive come from?

Largely it comes from goverment agencies who give it to six corporations who run and own the majority of all news services.

The politico and corporate elites only allow us to see and hear what they want us to see and hear.

The recent "suicide" of Epstein is a perfect example IMO.

Largely, it comes from journalists sniffing out stories. Clearly, in the example upthread from Fox News, and as has been seen over and over again with Clear Channel networks, some media companies pass out Talking Points of things they want covered. I think the issue comes down to where you're getting your news. I don't watch TV News. I read my news. And, for the most part, the information I'm taking in is coming from independent journalists who cover things that are of interest to them and which they find vital to share. They're not coming from partisan aggregators and they're not being filtered through pundits or talking heads. 

[timmyb52]

And in other news! 

[timmyb52]

Aug 13, 2019 20:58:57 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

Aug 13, 2019 20:29:45 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Just my own opinion K.

But ask yourself this...where does the "news" we receive come from?

Largely it comes from goverment agencies who give it to six corporations who run and own the majority of all news services.

The politico and corporate elites only allow us to see and hear what they want us to see and hear.

The recent "suicide" of Epstein is a perfect example IMO.

Largely, it comes from journalists sniffing out stories. Clearly, in the example upthread from Fox News, and as has been seen over and over again with Clear Channel networks, some media companies pass out Talking Points of things they want covered. I think the issue comes down to where you're getting your news. I don't watch TV News. I read my news. And, for the most part, the information I'm taking in is coming from independent journalists who cover things that are of interest to them and which they find vital to share. They're not coming from partisan aggregators and they're not being filtered through pundits or talking heads. 

No offense K...but IMHO...printed news is just as bad, if not worse than mainstream TV news.

Most of it all owned by the same 5 or 6 coroorations who own the TV media.

Few real facts...and a ton of biased political ideology to divide the people over Left and Right bullcrap.

I prefer to read in between the lines, question whats presented, and not fall for their divisiveness.

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 13, 2019 20:48:52 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Did Hillary sell our Uranium to Russia?

No.

www.politifact.com/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/dec/07/blog-posting/complex-tale-involving-hillary-clinton-uranium-rus/

Aug 13, 2019 20:48:52 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Did the Clintons get millions in speaking fees from Russia?

No.

www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-bill-clinton-russia-sanctions-speech/

Aug 13, 2019 20:48:52 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Did the Clintons pay Mr.Steele to go to Russia to get dirt on the Trump campaign in order to put together a dossier to get FISA warrants?

Sort of. The Clinton Campaign and the DNC co-financed Steele's investigation. However, even the GOP admits the dossier was not the cause of the FBI investigation and, in fact, the investigation began nearly two months before Steele shared his findings.

www.factcheck.org/2019/03/dossier-not-what-started-all-of-this/

Aug 13, 2019 20:48:52 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

You are quick to see the supposed crimes of The Right but lack the vision to see the supposed crimes of The Left! Both sides engage in deception,lies and falsehoods...they divide and conquer the common man and woman for their own personal power and greed.

Show me a crime committed by the left. You haven't done that. You've shown me lies you've been told and believed about the left. And you've equated these complete fictions as being on par with the ongoing, factual, documented acts of treason being committed by the GOP. There is no comparison.

What other lies have you taken as truths without actually investigating? What else is Jordan Sather telling you?

Aug 13, 2019 20:48:52 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Look at the lengths of deception they have engaged in alone with PID!

We don't know who is actually behind the PID situation because people keep getting distracted by Alistair Crowley.

Aug 13, 2019 20:48:52 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Left or Right...it is the same coin!

I believed that, at one time. I bought that exact line of bullshit and voted for Nader in the first election I was old enough to vote in because I was too inexperienced and my scope of reference was too small to understand how very wrong that is, how very different the philosophies of the parties of are and how monumentally the polarized policies they support can destroy or save the lives of every individual. Richard Nixon is the guy who gave us the EPA, but the Republican party of today (and Libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke weed) has devolved into Cartoon Villainy. It's the party of Loud Proud Lying Bigots who are gleefully destroying the Earth for their own short-term gain and terrorizing everyone who can't buy entry to their country club. It's a party of abject sociopaths. The Left doesn't have to be perfect to be better than that.

Break out of your bubble, man. You've been conned.

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 13, 2019 21:30:48 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Most of it all owned by the same 5 or 6 coroorations who own the TV media.

Non-factual statement. That's simply not true. You may be choosing to only access 'reporting' coming from those companies, but those aren't your only options.

[ekauqodielak]

How YouTube Radicalized Brazil
…
New Study Demonstrates YouTube’s Role In Far-Right Radicalization, Spread Of Conspiracies In Brazil
…
YouTube should stop recommending garbage videos to users
…
Did WhatsApp help Bolsonaro win the Brazilian presidency?
…
Bolsonaro business backers accused of illegal Whatsapp fake news campaign

[ekauqodielak]

How the El Paso Killer Echoed the Incendiary Words of Conservative Media Stars

Language like “invasion” and the “replacement” of Americans has increasingly become a regular part of Fox News broadcasts, Rush Limbaugh shows and other prominent conservative media.

By Jeremy W. Peters, Michael M. Grynbaum, Keith Collins, Rich Harris and Rumsey Taylor

Aug. 11, 2019

Tucker Carlson went on his prime-time Fox News show in April last year and told his viewers not to be fooled. The thousands of Central Americans on their way to the United States were “border jumpers,” not refugees, he said. “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time,” he asked, “or will leaders sit passively back as the invasion continues?”

When another group approached the border six months later, Ann Coulter, appearing as a guest on Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show, offered a dispassionately violent suggestion about what could be done to stem the flow of migrants: “You can shoot invaders.”

A few days after, Rush Limbaugh issued a grim prognosis to his millions of radio listeners: If the immigrants from Central America weren’t stopped, the United States would lose its identity. “The objective is to dilute and eventually eliminate or erase what is known as the distinct or unique American culture,” Mr. Limbaugh said, adding: “This is why people call this an invasion.”

There is a striking degree of overlap between the words of right-wing media personalities and the language used by the Texas man who confessed to killing 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso this month. In a 2,300-word screed posted on the website 8chan, the killer wrote that he was “simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”

It remains unclear what, or who, ultimately shaped the views of the white, 21-year-old gunman, or whether he was aware of the media commentary. But his post contains numerous references to “invasion” and cultural “replacement” — ideas that, until recently, were relegated to the fringes of the nationalist right.

An extensive New York Times review of popular right-wing media platforms found hundreds of examples of language, ideas and ideologies that overlapped with the mass killer’s written statement — a shared vocabulary of intolerance that stokes fears centered on immigrants of color. The programs, on television and radio, reach an audience of millions.

“We are so overwhelmed by this — it literally is an invasion of people crossing into Texas.” — Laura Ingraham on “The O’Reilly Factor,” May 29, 2014 “We are letting folks invade our home, walk into our home, and we won’t even defend it or protect it.” — Patrick Buchanan on “Hannity,” June 9, 2014 “This isn’t reunification. This is a government-sanctioned invasion of our country.” — Todd Starnes on “Fox & Friends Sunday,” July 6, 2014 “The invasion of illegal immigrants, and in particular unaccompanied children, at our southern border continues to spiral out of control.” — Sean Hannity on “Hannity,” July 12, 2014 “When the federal government is not able or is not willing to protect from an invasion, a state has the right to reach its own agreements, levy its own taxes and do whatever it has to, to secure its border from further invasion. And this is an invasion. Twice as big already than D-Day and twice as many again still coming.” — Louie Gohmert on “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” July 13, 2014 “The other top story is the fact that we’ve got this invasion across our southern border of all these illegals. Many are children.” — Steve Doocy on “Fox & Friends,” July 16, 2014 “In the Constitution, the founding fathers called it repelling invasion.” — Allen West on “On the Record With Greta Van Susteren,” Aug. 11, 2015 “Trump’s great accomplishment is to expose the fact that the establishment of this country is responsible for insecure borders, the masses coming across our borders, invading our country.” — Patrick Buchanan on “Hannity,” Oct. 21, 2016 “It’s a mass of humanity right now, just walking across the border, coming across the Rio Grande. This is a peacetime invasion of the United States.” — Laura Ingraham on “Special Report With Bret Baier,” Nov. 16, 2016 “These are illegal aliens who have invaded our country. And illegal alien equals criminal.” — Mary Ann Mendoza on “Fox & Friends,” March 29, 2017 “They used to call that an invasion. And they used to fight wars over stuff like that. But these days it’s a voter registration drive for the D.N.C.” — Todd Starnes on “Fox & Friends,” May 9, 2017 “We’re going to be confronted by even more serious invasion, in terms of those crossing the border with drugs.” — Jeanine Pirro on “Fox & Friends,” July 28, 2017 “Will anyone in power do anything to protect America this time, or will our leaders sit passively back while the invasion continues?” — Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” April 2, 2018 “What else would you call it? It’s gotta be — it’s an invasion of our country and of our rights. It’s just — it’s despicable.” — Art Del Cueto on “The Ingraham Angle,” April 9, 2018 “You use the word ‘invasion,’ people say ‘oh, that’s so mean.’ What else do you call this?” — Laura Ingraham on “The Ingraham Angle,” April 12, 2018 “We'll also expose the Americans aiding and abetting a mass invasion of illegal immigrants looking to exploit our laws.” — Laura Ingraham on “The Ingraham Angle,” April 26, 2018 “It doesn’t look like people seeking asylum, it looks more like an invasion of our country. And that’s sad.” — Art Del Cueto on “America’s Newsroom,” May 1, 2018 “We’re going to abolish ICE? I mean that’s the second line of defense to prevent an invasion of the United States and to kick out people who are criminals and child molesters, MS-13.” — Patrick Buchanan on “Cavuto Live,” July 7, 2018 “I don’t think we should sit back and get invaded by foreigners. I don’t. That doesn’t make me a racist, it makes me an American.” — Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Aug. 20, 2018 “When MS-13 invades our country — 10,000 members across 40 states — Nancy Pelosi talks about the spark of divinity.” — Kayleigh McEnany on “America’s Newsroom,” Aug. 23, 2018 “The reality is, our southern border is on the verge of an invasion.” — Herman Cain on “Hannity,” Nov. 15, 2018 “This is not migrants coming into the country. This is nothing short of an invasion.” — Art Del Cueto on “America’s Newsroom,” Nov. 16, 2018 “You have our troops at the border and they are meant there for a deterrence effect, to say, don’t come here, don’t invade, you have to go to the proper channels.” — Morgan Ortagus on “Hannity,” Nov. 17, 2018 “I.C.E. are the agents — they’re just police officers — who protect this nation from invading illegal immigrants.” — Sebastian Gorka on “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” Nov. 17, 2018 “You can’t shoot Americans. You can shoot invaders.” — Ann Coulter on “Justice With Judge Jeanine,” Nov. 25, 2018 “This isn’t going to stop the flow of illegals who are invading our country.” — Mary Ann Mendoza on “Fox & Friends First,” Feb. 1, 2019 “There is an invasion going on right now.” — Jeff Crouere on “America’s News HQ,” March 10, 2019 “What about us? What about our country? We’re being invaded.” — Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” April 9, 2019 “We are going to change the underlying broken laws to stop what I think is literally an invasion of people from Central America.” — Lindsey Graham on “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo,” May 12, 2019 “You guys know what it’s like. This is a walking invasion. Where’s the action?” — Brian Kilmeade on “Fox & Friends,” June 3, 2019 “Calling it anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people.” — Laura Ingraham on “The Ingraham Angle,” July 10, 2019

Here are three dozen instances on Fox News when immigration along the Mexican border was discussed in terms of an invasion.

In November 2018 — as Republicans, who were facing a tough midterm election, pushed the notion of a migrant “caravan” — references to immigrants as invaders came up on more than three shows a day on average.

“Calling it anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people,” Laura Ingraham, host of “The Ingraham Angle,” said on her show on July 10.

Days after the shooting, the “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade dismissed a connection between words used by the gunman and by President Trump, saying: “If you use the term ‘invasion,’ that’s not anti-Hispanic. It’s a fact.”

In the four years since Mr. Trump electrified Republican voters with slashing comments about Muslims and Mexicans, demonizing references to immigrants have become more widespread in the news media, the Times review found.

Sometimes the hosts are repeating the president’s signature phrases. Sometimes the president appears to take his cues from television pundits. The cumulative effect is a public dialogue in which denigrating sentiments about immigrants are common.

Before the first groups of Central American migrants received heavy news media coverage in 2018, words like “invaders” or “invasion” were rarely used by American outlets. In the last year, the use of such terms has surged, with references to an immigrant “invasion” appearing on more than 300 Fox News broadcasts. The vast majority of those were spoken by Fox News hosts and guests, but some included clips of Mr. Trump using that language at rallies and other public appearances.

The Times analysis examined the last five years of show transcripts from Fox News, CNN and MSNBC to measure the frequency of terms like “invasion” and “replacement.” Segments that included this language were verified by watching clips of the shows to determine whether hosts and guests were speaking in their own words or reporting on the language of others.

“It’s a bit of a vicious cycle,” said the conservative writer William Kristol, a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s who has worked at Fox News and other networks. “Something is said on Fox News, and Trump repeats it, and that legitimizes it — and then someone else goes a little further.”

He added, “The use of what once would have been viewed as really extreme and inappropriate and sometimes conspiratorial, sometimes dehumanizing language is really striking.”

While the notion of immigrants as a national threat was a feature of the conservative Patrick Buchanan’s unsuccessful bids to win the Republican presidential nominations in 1992 and 1996 (he used the phrase “illegal invasion” then), they ran counter to the Republican Party’s efforts to make itself more appealing to Hispanics and other minorities in the two decades before Mr. Trump became its front-runner.

The portrayal of immigration as a menace has returned with force, a shift brought on not just by radio and TV hosts, but by Republican leaders in Congress and the president himself. This year Mr. Trump has used the terms “invasion” or “invaded” seven times on Twitter to describe the situation at the border, at one point referring to the approach of the migrants as “the attempted Invasion of Illegals.” At rallies, he has injected terms like “predator,” “killer,” and “animal” in his descriptions of immigrants.

The Trump-friendly media world — from outlets like Sinclair Broadcast Group and The Drudge Report to platforms like Breitbart News and Gateway Pundit — has used similar incendiary rhetoric. “The fact of the matter is that this is an attempted invasion of our country — period,” Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump campaign adviser, said last year in a commentary on migrants that aired on nearly 200 Sinclair television stations.

At the start of the El Paso suspect’s screed, he refers to the “great replacement,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory based on a French book that claims the migration of minority groups can lead to a “genocide” of white culture.

The El Paso suspect, who confessed to the mass shooting last week, claimed in the document he posted to be defending against a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” The words “invasion” and “invaders” appear six times in the text, a stark parallel to the language heard on conservative television and talk radio today.

Before the El Paso shootings, others with deadly or hateful motives used the same language.

The replacement theory was prominent in a document posted on 8chan by the suspect in the massacre that killed 51 people in a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March.

The man who is alleged to have killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue last October had expressed his contempt for “invaders” before he opened fire on the congregation with an AR-15-style assault rifle, the authorities say. During the white supremacist demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 that left one woman dead, marchers shouted, “You will not replace us.”

Lawrence Rosenthal, a professor at the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said that the shared vocabulary of white nationalists and many prominent conservatives was chilling. “Where that intersects with the Republican Party today,” he added, “is the Republican argument that the Democrats are in favor of immigration because that will give them a permanent majority.”

Mr. Limbaugh, whose syndicated radio show has a weekly audience of 15 million, has trafficked in similar themes.

“So here we’ve got hundreds of people flooding our southern border claiming refugee status. ” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Aug. 12, 2013 “When you flood the country with millions of people who are predestined to vote Democrat, in a vast majority sense, who are inexperienced and low wage, what in the world is going to happen? When you bring in that many or legalize that many and you’ve given up your assimilation, the assimilation aspect of immigration?” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Jan. 30, 2014 “So now the regime is considering a plan to stem the surge of migrants, but what instead is actually going to happen — and any fool should know this — this is going to encourage a flood of new illegal immigrants to try their luck using the refugee excuse.” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” July 25, 2014 “Meanwhile, the flow of illegal immigrant children into the U.S. is expected to rise this year. Record breaking numbers. This is an untold story. We think it was the story of last year, where you had all these minors from Central America flooding the border, and they were.” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Feb. 24, 2016 “ If just threatening to enforce the law has slowed the flood of illegal immigrants, think what actually enforcing it will do.” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” April 11, 2017 “And Trump is exactly right. They do want the country flooded with illegal immigrants and refugees. ” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Nov. 28, 2017 “You think it’s not an immigration issue; it is. Their express purpose is to flood the United States. Their express purpose is to storm the border and flood in. ” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Oct. 23, 2018 “They’re headed this way, and if the flood is not stopped, this is all — it’s gonna become demographically axiomatic after a while. It has to be stopped. It has to be stopped.” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” Jan. 21, 2019 “I think they’re gonna continue to flood the border no matter what Trump does because I think this is all politics. I don’t think that the root of this is people escaping disease and poverty and what have you.” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” March 6, 2019 “There’s something behind this, folks, all these caravans amassing. This just doesn’t happen organically. This is part of a targeted political project to flood this country and to paralyze the Trump administration.” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” April 2, 2019 “They want the illegal immigrants, and they want the flood. They want invasion because they don’t like America, and they want to restructure America and erase all aspects of the founding. ” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” April 15, 2019 “My memory is there are three different funding organizations with U.S. dollars and U.S. organizations that are behind the assemblage of these caravans, including the drug cartels and human traffickers who are attempting to participate in this swarming and flooding of the border. ” — “The Rush Limbaugh Show,” July 16, 2019

Mr. Limbaugh has repeatedly described the flow of migrants across the Mexico border as a flood that will overtake America with cheap labor and dilute the country’s identity.

On Wednesday, responding to the El Paso shootings, Mr. Limbaugh said, “What is it about the word ‘invasion’ that so bothers these people? Is it because that’s what it is? Have we ever seen anything like this?”

On Fox News, Mr. Carlson has proffered a version of this idea, albeit in less extreme language than that of the 8chan message boards where the El Paso killer lurked.

“Their political success does not depend on good policies but on demographic replacement, and they’ll do anything to make sure it happens.” — Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Dec. 20, 2017 “Have they ever proposed shutting the government down to protest on behalf of American workers? Who’ve been harmed by immigration policies that have replaced them with cheap foreign labor?” — Michelle Malkin on “Fox & Friends,” Jan. 19, 2018 “This is really destroying one culture and replacing it with the new foreign culture.” — Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Aug. 3, 2018 “Of this my friends you can be sure — your views on immigration will have zero impact and zero influence on a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants.” — Laura Ingraham on “The Ingraham Angle,” Oct. 16, 2018 “I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just — I’m for Americans, and nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying. We’re going to replace you.” — Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Dec. 4, 2018 “So our plan here in the West is to just let the depressed people die off and replace them with people from other countries. What do you think of that plan?” — Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Feb. 13, 2019 “If the city’s unemployment rate is high, it’s just more proof that they deserve replacement by foreign workers of some kind.” — Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” March 4, 2019 “We need to stop viewing struggling Americans as defective people who deserve to be replaced by superior foreign immigrants — the Pelosi model.” — Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” May 17, 2019

Mr. Carlson’s shows routinely feature discussions of being replaced by immigrants.

Mr. Carlson, whose show averages about three million viewers a night, has featured guests who subscribe to the replacement theory, like Peter Szijjarto, the foreign minister to Hungary’s nationalistic president, Viktor Orban. In February, Mr. Carlson and Mr. Szijjarto discussed the need to increase birthrates in their respective countries. Otherwise, Mr. Carlson said, “our plan here in the West is to just let the depressed people die off and replace them with people from other countries.”

Another prime-time Fox News host, Laura Ingraham, who was considered for a communications job in the Trump administration, has used similar language. Last October, she warned viewers that their opinions “will have zero impact and zero influence on a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain migrants.”

Fox News had no comment.

The overlap between fringe ideology and the words of conservative talk show hosts is not accidental, critics say. “They’re putting that into the zeitgeist,” said Carl Cameron, the former chief political correspondent for Fox News, who is now working for a news aggregator aimed at a progressive audience, Front Page Live.

“Fox goes out and looks for stuff that is inherently on fire and foments fear and anger,” Mr. Cameron added.

The use of “invasion” and “invaders” has also surfaced on outlets away from right-wing media. The Times review of demonizing terms for immigrants found a spike in such terms in 2018 on CNN and MSNBC, but almost exclusively in the context of reporting how leading conservatives had been using such language.

Fox News, it should be noted, is not monolithic. While its prime-time lineup of Mr. Carlson, Sean Hannity and Ms. Ingraham is devoted to right-wing commentary, some of the network’s news reporters, like the anchor Shepard Smith, have taken pains to refute misleading language about migrants. Chris Wallace, the “Fox News Sunday” host, recently grilled the White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, about the racism inherent in Mr. Trump’s critical remarks about Baltimore.

Days after the El Paso massacre, Mr. Carlson said on-air that white supremacy was “actually not a real problem in America” and likened it to a “hoax.” His words ignited widespread criticism, including from fellow conservative commentators like Erick Erickson and a Fox News weekend anchor, Arthel Neville.

The next night, Mr. Carlson returned to his show and urged his critics to “calm down,” warning about the roiling divisions in the country, before announcing that he was leaving on a vacation that he and Fox News said had been previously planned.

[timmyb52]

Aug 13, 2019 21:33:39 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

Aug 13, 2019 20:48:52 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Did Hillary sell our Uranium to Russia?

No.

www.politifact.com/facebook-fact-checks/statements/2018/dec/07/blog-posting/complex-tale-involving-hillary-clinton-uranium-rus/



No.

www.snopes.com/fact-check/hillary-bill-clinton-russia-sanctions-speech/



Sort of. The Clinton Campaign and the DNC co-financed Steele's investigation. However, even the GOP admits the dossier was not the cause of the FBI investigation and, in fact, the investigation began nearly two months before Steele shared his findings.

www.factcheck.org/2019/03/dossier-not-what-started-all-of-this/



Show me a crime committed by the left. You haven't done that. You've shown me lies you've been told and believed about the left. And you've equated these complete fictions as being on par with the ongoing, factual, documented acts of treason being committed by the GOP. There is no comparison.

What other lies have you taken as truths without actually investigating? What else is Jordan Sather telling you?



We don't know who is actually behind the PID situation because people keep getting distracted by Alistair Crowley.



I believed that, at one time. I bought that exact line of bullshit and voted for Nader in the first election I was old enough to vote in because I was too inexperienced and my scope of reference was too small to understand how very wrong that is, how very different the philosophies of the parties of are and how monumentally the polarized policies they support can destroy or save the lives of every individual. Richard Nixon is the guy who gave us the EPA, but the Republican party of today (and Libertarians are just Republicans who want to smoke weed) has devolved into Cartoon Villainy. It's the party of Loud Proud Lying Bigots who are gleefully destroying the Earth for their own short-term gain and terrorizing everyone who can't buy entry to their country club. It's a party of abject sociopaths. The Left doesn't have to be perfect to be better than that.

Break out of your bubble, man. You've been conned.

Have I? Or Have you? Or have we all?

History will tell I guess.

[ekauqodielak]

Surrogate Angels of Death

What to make of the First Lady holding the motherless child and youngest survivor of the El Paso massacre.

By Rhonda Garelick • Aug. 10, 2019

Photo: @flotus/Twitter

Imagine this: A shooter has entered a public place, where you are walking with your family. You have but a minute to realize you can save your 2-month-old by using your own body to shield him from the bullets raining down around you. Mere days later, your baby, the youngest survivor of the El Paso massacre, will appear on television with the very man who inspired the terrorist who killed both you and your husband. A photograph is taken, for posterity.

In the photo, your baby wears a bowtie and tiny jacket; someone has dressed him up for this occasion. He gazes off to the side (toward his aunt, who stands beside First Lady Melania Trump), his body stiff, his face solemn. He is not at ease in this strange lady’s arms. How could he be? Your child has just gotten out of the hospital, where he was treated for broken bones incurred when you desperately threw yourself over his little body and took the bullets that seconds later orphaned him and his two siblings.

Neither the president nor Melania so much as glances at Baby Paul. Oblivious (as ever) to the solemnity of their occasion, they smile broadly, matching veneers on full beam. Your husband came from a family of Trump supporters. Perhaps, in a different world, you might even have wanted to meet Donald Trump, or take a photo with him as he gave one of his signature thumbs-up gestures — everything is A-OK here.

Imagine this, then look at this photo again.

Babies make excellent political props — so useful for a quick kiss and cuddle during campaign stops, instant humanizers of even the stiffest politicians. But the Trumps are different. We rarely see them with babies. They are the least “familial” First Family in our lifetimes, despite (or perhaps because of) having created the most family-centered, nepotistic, mob-dynasty-style administration in history. We detect no family warmth from this president (save his unsettling attachment to Ivanka). No spousal affection. But also so little acknowledgment of any of his other children, of the fact of being a father (and grandfather) at all. Where is Barron, for example? We never see him or receive even the most anodyne updates about him — his progress in school, his favorite sports team. Where are the grandkids? Nothing. And certainly, Melania is the least publicly maternal First Lady we’ve ever had. She doesn’t even pretend to care.

No, in Trumpville, the emotional texture and familial feeling usually modeled by a First Family has been replaced with the enthusiasm of anonymous crowds, with the mass hysteria whipped up at Nuremberg-style rallies led by the President, where people seek the thrill of connection conjured by ritualistic chants of racism and misogyny (“Lock her up!” “Build that wall!” “Send them back!”). Donald Trump seems to experience love only in such soulless settings, with their underlying threat of violence — and he encourages his followers to do the same.

Those fascistic ceremonies lie at the root of the El Paso massacre, and that’s what makes this photo especially galling. Motherless Baby Paul is the latest victim of the hatred those rallies gin up. For Trump then to create uncharacteristically this faux portrait of familial love, to play-act a kind of happy Daddy, Mommy, and Baby — by borrowing THIS baby — is an abomination. In this simulacrum of a family portrait, the centerpiece is a direct evocation of the massacre that rendered him available for “adoption” in this photo in the first place. And since the picture blithely replaces the baby’s slaughtered parents — murdered for the family’s Latinx ethnicity — with two unconcerned, smiling white people, it performs a kind of symbolic kidnapping, cruelly appropriating someone else’s child for personal gain. (Note also the marginalized positions of the two Anchondo relatives.)

The abuse and kidnapping of children of color are recurrent themes in this administration. Consider the children of the 680 Mississippi food workers cruelly arrested this week, who returned from their first day at school to find their parents vanished. They are the victims of child abuse, if not outright psychological torture. Ditto for the many children who lost parents and other relatives in three, largely racially inflected gun massacres in the past two weeks. Not to mention the children who were themselves killed in those shootings (including a 6-year-old Latino boy in Gilroy, CA). As for the thousands of migrant children ripped from their parents’ arms and held in subhuman, lethal conditions (with no plans in place for family reunification) they are unmistakably the victims of ongoing mass-scale, state-sponsored de facto kidnapping.

There is, furthermore, strong evidence that some of those migrant children have now been forcibly adopted out to white American families via “Bethany Christian Services,” an anti-choice adoption agency known for its coercive practices and run by Brian DeVos, a cousin-by-marriage of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. This amounts to kidnapping on top of kidnapping — and probably represents the end of any hope that these children might ever reunite with their own families.

All of these ghastly truths make themselves felt in this single photo of the vacuous and smug Trumps masquerading as kindly hospital visitors, seeking to comfort the El Paso survivors. Posing for this photograph, the Trumps remove any last doubt about their dead-eyed cruelty and transactional view of life. Smiling emptily above this wounded little boy, whose life was shattered before he could take his first step, the president and his wife call to mind those famous safari photos taken by Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr. — in which they, like their father, smile brightly over the victims of their own heedless cruelty and violence. To Donald Trump, this baby is little more than a hunting trophy in his own brutal race war (which explains his triumphant thumbs up).

Injured, confused, squirming away from Melania’s brittle embrace, and straining toward what’s left of his family, Baby Paul now stands in for all the children — indeed, all human beings — who, like him, have been harmed and are being held against their will by a white supremacist president.

Of course, Trump would have liked to include many more of the survivors in his photo op, but he met with none of the others. Of eight survivors in the hospital, five outright refused to meet with the president. As speaking, sentient adults, they were able to withhold their consent. (According to the hospital, the absence of other survivors was due to their injuries or the Spanish-language barrier.) But Baby Paul was too young to say no. When he learns later about what happened to his infant self, about the day when both his parents, as well as the peace of his childhood, were stolen from him, how will he feel about this photograph then? How would you feel?

This post has been updated to correct the age of the child killed in the mass shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival (he was six, not two), and to correct Brian DeVos’s relationship to Betsy DeVos (he is her cousin by marriage, not her brother.)

[ekauqodielak]

“They Feel Like They Are Being Jailed”

The government wants to build more shelters to detain migrant kids. A former supervisor at one such shelter explains why she couldn’t be a part of it anymore.

Teresa Mathew • Aug 13, 20193:18 PM

Young people walk the grounds of the Homestead Temporary Shelter for Unaccompanied Children on July 15 in Homestead, Florida. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

When Evelyn Caffo began working at a shelter for unaccompanied migrant children two years ago, she thought she had found a clear way to help her community. “I’m from Peru, so I love to help people from South and Central America,” she explained. Instead, Caffo said, she soon realized she had become part of a system where children were routinely denied necessities out of spite and where “psychological manipulation has become routine.”

“When I started, I thought this is so awesome,” said Caffo, who worked at the Center for Family Services in New Jersey from December 2017 until May 2019, first as a residential counselor and then as a supervisor. But soon, she started noticing shelter employees had a certain attitude toward the kids in their care. “If the kids needed shoes, they’d say, We don’t have shoes. Or if they asked for food, they’d say there’s no more food.”

Shelters like the one Caffo worked in are being held up by federal officials as a partial solution to the humanitarian crisis at the border. After public outrage over migrant children being held for weeks by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in abysmal conditions, administration officials are arguing that they need more funding to move children from the border and hold them in long-term detention centers.

These shelters are overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, which holds migrant children until a parent, relative, or other guardian comes forward to sponsor them. Unlike the detention centers run by CBP, ORR facilities are meant for longer-term stays and typically have the corresponding infrastructure: cafeterias, classrooms, and counseling services.

Even though they give kids toothbrushes and beds, these long-term shelters have well-documented patterns of abuse and neglect. Elana Levites-Agababa has worked at a health center in Camden for the past two years, where she treated children from two different ORR shelters in southern New Jersey. Though she noted that conditions in the ORR shelters are significantly better than those in CBP’s detention centers, she was alarmed by what she saw at the New Jersey shelters.

Levites-Agababa has spoken out about seeing children in ORR facilities routinely miss medical appointments and be ignored when they voice concerns about feeling ill. “There’s no dignity in how they’re being kept in these homes,” she told Slate. “People are profiting off detaining children.”

Unaccompanied migrant children are supposed to be transferred out of CBP facilities and into ORR’s custody within 72 hours of apprehension. ORR contracts with a number of for-profit and nonprofit shelters, which take the children until they can be placed with a sponsor or a foster family. The Center for Family Services, where Caffo worked, runs several shelters in New Jersey.

“Most of these children entered our country in search of safety, a better life and connection with a family member or caregiver, and our dedicated staff have been largely successful in making those connections and reuniting families, reuniting 95 percent of children with family or a sponsor,” Jen Hammill, a spokesperson for the Center for Family Services, wrote in an email.

Caffo cried tears of relief when she was promoted to the role of supervisor at the shelter. She was thrilled that she would have the chance to improve the lives of the children under her care, many of whom had been traumatized first in their native countries and again as they were shuffled across borders and through the bureaucracy of the immigration system. She thought that she would be able to change the system from within. But as she attempted to make changes, she quickly found that her fellow supervisors and other shelter administrators were ready to push back.

Noticing that the children craved foods they were familiar with instead of the standard milk and cereal, Caffo went in one Sunday morning and made a special breakfast of eggs and beans. “That’s when the problems started,” she said. Administrators “were telling me, ‘You can’t do that.’ When the kids needed clothes I would try to give it to them, but then [the managers] would assign inventory to another person so I couldn’t.”

ORR shelters generated over 4,500 allegations of sexual abuse and harassment between 2014 and 2018; more than 1,000 of those cases—178 of which involved abuse at the hands of adult staff members—were referred to the Department of Justice.

As of June, ORR had received nearly 60,000 referrals from DHS. In May, the agency released a statement saying that if those numbers continued, the 2019 fiscal year would have the largest number of unaccompanied immigrant children in the program’s history. That same month, Border Patrol agents apprehended more than 11,000 unaccompanied children along the border.

Caffo remembered a 12-year-old girl who had come to her, crying, saying that she had not only been denied medicine for her headache but had been told that she would get “even dumber” if she took it. “She said, ‘Do you know why I have this pain in my head? I carried baskets full of fruit on my head in the summer because I had to help my mom work,’ ” Caffo recalled.

But she didn’t feel that her co-workers would be interested in that explanation. “A lot of workers at the shelter have this mentality that these kids crossed the border so they’ve committed a crime: They’re criminals,” she said. “So the way they treat them is based on their ideas on why they’re here.”

In response, Hammill wrote that “each child is linked with a caring and highly trained bi-lingual caseworker upon arrival and offered a warm meal, new clothes, and a shower. Within the first few days, children receive a medical examination and appropriate vaccinations. Children are fully informed of the services they will receive while with us and of their rights.”

The Trump administration’s policies have only compounded the crisis.

Previously, the majority of migrant children in shelters were teenagers who would spend a few months in shelters before being placed with family in the U.S. Now, the number of children under 13 is growing. Thus far in 2019, unaccompanied children and families represent 63 percent of all those apprehended at the southern border.

In the past, unaccompanied minors have typically been children who either crossed the border alone or with adults other than their parents. But the current administration has separated many children who came with parents or legal guardians, reclassified them as “unaccompanied,” and detained them.

Many children who come, Levites-Agababa pointed out, have some point of contact in the U.S. already. When they are transferred from the border, she said, it should be to “what is ideally their permanent home as opposed to now, where geographically it has no relation to their home and has substandard medical care and substandard education, and they are cut off from their families.”

Under President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy, all adults, including parents and guardians, were prosecuted for illegal entry and sent into criminal custody. Their children could not follow them under a 1997 settlement that established conditions for the treatment of minors in government custody.

In June 2018, after significant backlash over family separation, Trump signed an executive order directing DHS to keep families together for the duration of their proceedings. But between the zero tolerance policy and the signing of the order, more than 2,500 children were separated from their parents. Last week, the ACLU filed a lawsuit saying that at least 900 children have been separated from their parents since the executive order was signed last year.

On top of the escalation in immigration enforcement, a 2018 agreement between ORR, CBP, and ICE mandates that the agencies share information, which has discouraged potential sponsors from coming forward to take the children home.

At an oversight hearing, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro said the agreement was “using children as bait and scaring sponsors from coming forward by rendering HHS as an immigration enforcement tool.” She pointed to another recent change: “They began fingerprinting all members of the household beyond those individuals applying to be sponsors, thereby discouraging sponsors from coming forward, leaving children languishing in federal custody.”

Many immigrants have good reason to fear the way their information could be used against them. From July to November 2018, 170 undocumented immigrants were arrested once they came forward to claim children. Congress subsequently passed a law banning the arrest of sponsors with no prior criminal record. Yet that has done little to alleviate fears, and those fears have inevitably led to more children in federal custody. A report from the Women’s Refugee Commission and the National Immigrant Justice Center found that fewer potential sponsors—parents, legal guardians, close relatives—are coming forward out of fear that their information will be sent to ICE.

There may soon be another reason for sponsors to hesitate to take children out of shelters: a new administration policy that could reclassify unaccompanied minors, stripping them of that status (and making it more challenging for them to apply for asylum) if they are sent to stay with a sponsor.

The Washington Post reported that ORR was planning to eliminate English classes, legal aid, and recreational activities like soccer. DHS spokesman Mark Weber told the Post that it was discontinuing anything “not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation,” due to a lack of funding. And even as the agency cuts these services, it is expanding: The government is planning to open up new facilities with roughly 3,000 more beds for detained children. Because each facility will be classified as a temporary emergency shelter, it will be exempt from state welfare requirements.

Even before the cuts, Caffo had wondered how any child could stay positive while housed in a facility where, she said, “they feel like they are being jailed.” She quit her job after realizing that the change she was trying to create couldn’t survive the entrenched culture of the system. “I tried making the shelter better,” she said. “Why are we spending so much money creating these shelters when they’re getting abused?”

[ekauqodielak]

A Glib Sociopath on Why a Gun Ban Simply Won’t Work

Sure, you can ban assault rifles—the next mass murderer will just drop anvils on people.

By Tom Tomorrow

[ekauqodielak]

Why are Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum hanging out in Russia?
…
'This Is Crazy': Scientists Alarmed as Lightning Near North Pole Seen as Latest Sign of Climate Breakdown
…
Trump's Immigration Chief Pretty Sure the Statue of Liberty Says Something About Needing Money to Get In
…
Dennis Prager Peddles Complete Nonsense About 'Google Censorship' In The WSJ
…
How the U.S. decided which China tariffs will be delayed

[B]

Strange Jeffrey Epstein Segment On Australian News Show
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk6SFjSOv9s



Vrillex
Published on Aug 14, 2019

-----------

They do it all the time. A very common technique. (B's comment)

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 14, 2019 12:37:31 GMT -5 B said:

Strange Jeffrey Epstein Segment On Australian News Show
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tk6SFjSOv9s



Vrillex
Published on Aug 14, 2019

-----------

They do it all the time. A very common technique. (B's comment)

More importantly, of course, and I'm sure you've spent much time thinking about this, is what should be done for Epstein's victims?

[ekauqodielak]

Don’t Let the Trump Administration Rewrite Emma Lazarus

The Statue of Liberty poem “The New Colossus” was written as a radical call to welcome all immigrants—not just the wealthy and connected.

By John Nichols • Today 2:15 pm

People look at the Statue of Liberty from a ferry boat in Jersey City, New Jersey. (AP Photo / Mel Evans, File)

Ken Cuccinelli, the failed Virginia gubernatorial candidate who has been given the unenviable task of promoting the Trump administration’s latest plan to discriminate against immigrants, has stirred some controversy with his crude rewrite of “The New Colossus.” But in doing so he has invited Americans who care about our history to recall the radical inspiration and intent of the Emma Lazarus poem that is so intertwined with the Statue of Liberty.

Cuccinelli, the acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, appeared this week on NPR’s Morning Edition to argue for new “public charge” policies that would make it easier to reject visa and green card applications from working-class immigrants who might need public benefits at some point in the future.

NPR’s Rachel Martin asked Cuccinelli a good question: “Would you also agree that Emma Lazarus’s words etched on the Statue of Liberty, ‘Give me your tired, give me your poor,’ are also a part of the American ethos?”

It was Cuccinelli’s reply that raised the eyebrows of those who know the story of Lazarus and her poem. “They certainly are: ‘Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge,’” he answered, reworking not just the words but also the intent of the poem. Cuccinelli then added, “That plaque was put on the Statue of Liberty at almost the same time as the first public charge was passed—very interesting timing.” Very interesting, indeed.

Emma Lazarus was raised in a prominent New York family that had roots in the city going back to long before the American Revolution. She was well-educated and well-established in the city of her birth. She had experienced success as a poet and traveled in the circles of the intellectual and literary stars of her time. She was, as well, an activist who championed the radical reform movement led by political economist Henry George. She embraced George’s campaigning, as an author and a candidate for mayor of New York, to alleviate poverty and address economic inequality.

George argued for public ownership and land reforms that would spread the wealth. His was a moral call to arms that influenced generations of radicals and reformers. “More is given to us than to any people at any time before; and, therefore, more is required of us,” argued George. “We have made, and still are making, enormous advances on material lines. It is necessary that we commensurately advance on moral lines. Civilization, as it progresses, requires a higher conscience, a keener sense of justice, a warmer brotherhood, a wider, loftier, truer public spirit. Falling these, civilization must pass into destruction. It cannot be maintained on the ethics of savagery.”

Lazarus was inspired by George’s argument that justice could best be achieved by aiding and empowering “the men and women who are at the very bottom of the social scale. In securing the equal rights of these we shall secure the equal rights of all.” She took a particular interest in the circumstance of the immigrants who were arriving in New York in the late 1870s and early 1880s. As a descendant of some of the first Jews to settle in the city, she was moved by the condition of Jewish immigrants who were fleeing pogroms and anti-Semitic violence in Eastern Europe.

Lazarus did not believe it was appropriate to turn away newcomers because they lacked professional skills or degrees. She understood that the United States needed to be a haven for the oppressed, not merely as an act of moral duty but as an embrace of progress. Those who were welcomed at the golden door, and who were provided with education and assistance, Lazarus believed, would make the United States a dramatically greater nation. This was a controversial view, in her day as in ours. Yet it was the view she expressed in “The New Colossus,” a poem written as part of a fund-raising drive to pay for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal—a poem that, as James Russell Lowell explained, gave French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s La Liberté éclairant le monde (Liberty Enlightening the World) its raison d’être.

In doing so, she helped to shape an American ethos that Donald Trump and Ken Cuccinelli now seek to rewrite. But the original statement was the right one, the one that made the Statue of Liberty what Paul Auster saw: “a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world.” It must remain so, just as “The New Colossus” must remain the poem, and the statement, that Emma Lazarus intended:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

[ekauqodielak]

These are the people with whom you're making common cause.

Steve King: Without Rape and Incest, “Would There Be Any Population in the World Left?”

The incendiary Iowa Republican says he can’t rule out that he isn’t the product of rape or incest.

Tom Williams/Zuma

The twisted logic of the most extreme elements of the anti-abortion movement just got even more absurd. Laws restricting abortion access should not have exceptions for rape and incest, says Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), because throughout history, many people have been born as a result of rape and incest—including, perhaps, himself.

“What if we went back through all the family trees and just pulled those people out that were products of rape and incest, would there be any population in the world left if we did that?” King said at a Westside Conservative Club meeting in Urbandale, Iowa, on Wednesday, according to the Des Moines Register. “Considering all the wars and all the rape and pillage that’s taken place…I know I can’t certify that I’m not part of the product of that.”

King has a history of making offensive statements about immigrants, Muslims, and transgender people. In January, he was removed from the House Judiciary and Agriculture committees for telling the New York Times, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?” Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suggested he resign.

On Wednesday, he asserted that women who conceive as a result of rape and incest should be forced to carry the pregnancy to term, “because it’s not the baby’s fault.”

“I’d like to think every one of the lives of us are as precious as any other life,” he said. “And that’s our measure. Human life cannot be measured. It is the measure itself against which all things are weighed.”

Watch King’s comments below: