this was the total attendance for the EDL's national demo today in Manchester, and I think I speak for everyone when I say:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH breathe HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA pic.twitter.com/492J61a47M

— Dan Hett (@danhett) October 20, 2018

Brussels has rejected Italy's draft budget in an unprecedented move that threatens to deepen rifts between the European Commission and the populist government in Rome.

archived
They are not all going back to where they came from. ...

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

The first hearing in Julian Assange's lawsuit against Ecuador's Foreign Affairs Ministry was suspended as the WikiLeaks founder was unable to understand his translator, and the judge called for a replacement fluent in "Australian."

"This has a strong effect for all temporary workers, not only for those in entertainment but for all temporary workers -- those in schools (there are about 750,000 such people today) and the majority of workers in the public sector (not including those in the armed services)," [Sciotto's attorney Francesco] Andretta said in an email.

archived Art. 153.
After a meeting with European Employment Commissioner ...

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday dismissed as "demagoguery" the calls by several European countries including Germany to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia following the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
"What's the link between arms sales and Mr Khashoggi's murder? I understand the connection with what's happening in Yemen, but there is no link with Mister Khashoggi," Macron told a news conference in Slovakia.

Germany (Hesse regional election), FGW projection (11:37pm CET):

CDU-EPP: 27%
SPD-S&D: 19.8%
GRÜNE-G/EFA: 19.7%
AfD-EFDD 13.2%
FDP-ALDE: 7.5%
LINKE-LEFT: 6.3%#hessenwahl2018 #hessenwahl #ltwhe #ltwhessen #hessen pic.twitter.com/25FnS7J9qo

— Europe Elects (@EuropeElects) October 28, 2018

Not enough for a CDU-Greens coalition.

Headline from DW:

Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives eke out win in Hesse election

Despite a large drop in support, the CDU has won the Hesse state regional poll, giving the chancellor some welcome breathing room. But the weakness of the political center in Germany remains glaringly obvious.

There were a couple of points of solace for Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) as the first official projections were announced for Sunday's regional election.

The CDU's tally of 27.4 percent may have been down some 11 points compared with the last Hesse vote in 2013, but it was slightly better than pre-election polls had predicted and gives incumbent state premier and Merkel ally Volker Bouffier a mandate to form the next government.

Headline from The Guradian:

Merkel suffers another election setback in key German state of Hesse

Germany's ruling parties are reeling from their second electoral upset in a fortnight, after voters in a key state abandoned them in droves. The result in the central state of Hesse could plunge both parties of Angela Merkel's coalition government into renewed crises.

Early results from a regional election seen as decisive for the future of Germany's increasingly wobbly coalition showed Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) slumping to 28%, the party's worst showing in the state since 1966 and a drop of 10 percentage points since Hesse last went to the polls in 2013.

First act: Brash young(ish) hedge fund guy takes over iconic American business, forces through closures and layoffs, makes lots of money for his friends.

From the moment he bought into what was then called Sears, Roebuck & Co., he also maneuvered to protect his financial interests. At times, he even made money. He closed stores, fired employees and ... carved out some choice assets for himself.

All seems to be going well. But now the second act: He gets too attached, and instead of passing the drained but still functioning business onto some other sucker, imagines he can run it himself. But managing a giant retailer is harder than it looks. Getting on a videoconference a couple times a week and telling the executives that they're idiots isn't enough to turn things around.

"We've now had basically 5 flat years. If you look at labor force participation since the 4th quarter of '13 until now you've really had an oscillation that is basically a sideways movement in the face of a significant downward trend"

2014 Fed staff paper https://t.co/2FUJ2v55ri pic.twitter.com/1BzgitrcNH

— Sam Bell (@sam_a_bell) 26. September 2018

pic.twitter.com/gQQKr2lunF

— Ernie Tedeschi (@ernietedeschi) 26. September 2018

DICTION CORNER

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Are you one of the deserving few, too?

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

The business of "global management consulting" has always existed in a realm of nebulous amorality. In a recent interview with Isaac Chotiner at Slate, Duff McDonald, a financial journalist who wrote a book on McKinsey, spelled it out neatly:

In their typical strategy work, they gave advice and made no representations about implementation. So if a strategy that McKinsey offered someone went horribly wrong on the implementation level, their response was always, "We have nothing to do with this. We simply gave them some ideas."

The genealogy of this attitude--or this affect of having no attitude at all--dates to the birth of management consulting at the start of the last century, to the work of the former engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who dreamed up the idea of "scientific management." Taylor was himself an engineer, and like so many of our own contemporary gee-whiz tech boys, his "scientific" was less about a rigorous method of inquiry than about replacing "Should we?" with "Can we?" in a model universe free of social consequence.

"Why is it a women's issue?"

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller pushed back against the Russian company in his crosshairs over alleged interference in the 2016 election on Tuesday, telling a federal judge in Washington that the conspiracy charges he filed against the firm aren't dependent on prosecutors proving its ["]election interference["] was a crime.
[...]
"The indictment alleges that a purpose of these manifold acts of deception was to frustrate the lawful government functions of the United States," the filing states. "Those allegations are sufficient to support the charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States regardless of  whether the defendants agreed to engage in conduct that violated [the Federal Election Campaign Act] or [the Foreign Agent Registration Act]."

Explosive devices sent to Obama, Clinton
"The official said one of the packages had the return address of Rep. Deborah Wasserman Schultz, an ironic reference to the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee."

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

archived
4. Nse Ufot must be new here.
background reporting MIA
Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Florida man arrested in bombing investigation

The U.S. Justice Department told reporters today that a man in South Florida is in custody in connection with mailing of pipe bombs to political opponents of Donald Trump.

Senior law enforcement sources have identified the suspect in the investigation as Cesar Sayoc Jr., 56, of Aventura, Florida.

Yasuda was kidnapped in 2015 by al-Qaida's branch in Syria, known at the time as the Nusra Front, after contact with him was lost in June that year. A war monitoring group said he was most recently held by a Syrian commander with the Turkistan Islamic Party, which mostly comprises Chinese [read: Uighur/Uyghur] jihadis in Syria.

re: when "good" émigrés don't land in the US
Intel Report on Assassins: "Rwandans are cold ass mofos"
"We don't have any information on this latest attempt [to kill Nyamwasa] aside from the one paragraph RFI article that came in on BBC. This is not on any other news wires. He may be dead for all we know this time."

re: "fighting rape in war," interview
Congo in the Abyss

"The Nobel Peace Prize encourages a global consensus to stop the rapes but continue the war."

BKN:The deeply political discourse imposed by the Nobel Committee is intended to bolster, not disturb, the dominant order. It is part of the Western will to write official history, where the important thing is constructing a discourse on the woman, on the brutalities she has to suffer. It's a discourse wholly accepted in Western societies because of the feminist struggles. In this discourse, Dr. Mukwege is the man of an inter-world, a Black man who is meant to become white. He is like the white man who knows how to defend the rights of women against the barbarism of uncivilized men--Black in this case--who are essentially defined by their savagery.
AG: Male rape is also a weapon of war in Congo and elsewhere. It's rarely reported, though it was given some attention in "The Nobel committee shines a spotlight on rape in conflict ," an October 11 "Economist" report that said it's hard to estimate its frequency because so many men fear to report it because they're so humiliated and may fear being accused of the crime of homosexuality. Uganda's Refugee Law Project explained this profoundly in their film Gender Against Men, which I recommend to anyone reading this. The rape of both men and women as a weapon to destroy community makes it more clear that there is an ongoing genocide against the Congolese people, not just "femicide." Could you talk about how the singular focus on violence against women hides that?

"Some of my friends drank the Kool-Aid [!] and will vote for Bolsonaro, but most of them fear that minorities [!] like ours are in danger, as well as our own democracy."

TELASUR | Brazil Decides
The Long Story, campaign 2018 from Sept to Haddad: yeah, Telasur express an editorial agenda.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

In Connecticut, activists are calling on the University of New Haven to cut ties to King Fahd Security College in Saudi Arabia. According to news reports, the Saudi forensic doctor who allegedly dismembered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi's body served on the editorial board of a publication tied to King Fahd Security College

[...]

Then, the university said--and says--"Well, we're proud of what we do. We're improving the justice system of Saudi Arabia." And our response was "Well, what are the facts about this? What evidence? Have you been able to convince the Saudi government to give the remains of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr back to his family? They executed this peaceful activist at the beginning of 2016, and his body has not been returned. Have they canceled the sentence of a thousand lashes against Raif Badawi? What about the women, the women who had been for a long time trying to get the right to drive, these feminist activists? They're in jail. How is the Saudi justice system improved?"

Judge argues that Atlanta is poised to compete with Boston, Los Angeles, and New York to fill out the US's top three tech cities behind Silicon Valley, thanks to its airport ("I can leave here at 10am and be at a lunch meeting in San Francisco," he boasts), bevy of Fortune 500 corporations and concentration of engineering talent - in addition to Georgia Tech, the city is home to Georgia State University, Emory and the historically black colleges and universities Morehouse, Spelman and Clark Atlanta.

But in the early 2000s, Judge says, investors would hear that a company was from Atlanta and immediately say, "No." By 2007 or 2008, the investors might take a meeting, but they would demand that the company relocate to California.

"Now they're saying, `We'll come to you.'"

After shooting McCluskey, Rowland was picked up on campus by a woman he met online.

archived
Ninth Circuit Takes New Look at Duty to Warn in Match Gone Bad

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

...Fock jeezus, is nothing sacred?

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}

It is of the greatest interest, and entirely consistent with Aristotle's fundamental principles of sociological classification, that he was able to discriminate between different types of democracy according to the role played in production in each individual case by the majority of the lower classes (the demos), whether as farmers, artisans or wage-laborers, or as some mixture of these elements (see Pol. VI.I. 1317^a24-9 and other passages),²⁵ whereas he can draw distinctions only on technical, constitutional grounds in three different passages discussing forms of oligarchy,²⁶ all of which would of course be ruled (as he takes for granted) by landowners (cf, III.iii below).

Cue Krugman: we accept a system with considerable inequality because ...

archived
ius civile

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

related
so isolated on your island

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.