zaterdag 23 juli 2016

NOS en Terrorisme

De NOS bericht het Nederlandse publiek:

De schutter in München was volgens de Duitse politie geen terrorist, maar een depressieve scholier.

Nog afgezien van het feit dat dit kennelijk een hele opluchting is, is de vraag: wat is de definitie van de autoriteiten, en in hun voetspoor, van de mainstream media van het fenomeen 'terrorisme'?De meeste 'terroristen' zijn hun leven lang getreiterd en vernederd, hun waardigheid is hen ontnomen door een in wezen even terroristische westerse cultuur. Pas in de dood kunnen ze gelijk worden aan hun onderdrukkers. Het is de enige manier waarop ze hun 'tormentors' van repliek kunnen dienen. 

De Daily Mail:

Did the teenage killer deliberately target teenagers for REVENGE? First images of crazed loner's fresh-faced victims emerge as it's revealed he turned gun on fellow youngsters after years of bullying 


Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook 

Is er nu sprake van contra-terreur? Of helemaal geen terreur?



Michael Moore on Trump

5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win

Friends:

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”
Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.
I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this!
You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!”
Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut. As of today, as things stand now, I believe this is going to happen – and in order to deal with it, I need you first to acknowledge it, and then maybe, just maybe, we can find a way out of the mess we’re in.
Don’t get me wrong. I have great hope for the country I live in. Things are better. The left has won the cultural wars. Gays and lesbians can get married. A majority of Americans now take the liberal position on just about every polling question posed to them: Equal pay for women – check. Abortion should be legal – check. Stronger environmental laws – check. More gun control – check. Legalize marijuana – check. A huge shift has taken place – just ask the socialist who won 22 states this year. And there is no doubt in my mind that if people could vote from their couch at home on their X-box or PlayStation, Hillary would win in a landslide.
But that is not how it works in America. People have to leave the house and get in line to vote. And if they live in poor, Black or Hispanic neighborhoods, they not only have a longer line to wait in, everything is being done to literally stop them from casting a ballot. So in most elections it’s hard to get even 50% to turn out to vote. And therein lies the problem for November – who is going to have the most motivated, most inspired voters show up to vote? You know the answer to this question. Who’s the candidate with the most rabid supporters? Whose crazed fans are going to be up at 5 AM on Election Day, kicking ass all day long, all the way until the last polling place has closed, making sure every Tom, Dick and Harry (and Bob and Joe and Billy Bob and Billy Joe and Billy Bob Joe) has cast his ballot?  That’s right. That’s the high level of danger we’re in. And don’t fool yourself — no amount of compelling Hillary TV ads, or outfacting him in the debates or Libertarians siphoning votes away from Trump is going to stop his mojo.
Here are the 5 reasons Trump is going to win:
  1. Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit.  I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat). In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) that the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich.
From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England – broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the Middle Class. Angry, embittered working (and nonworking) people who were lied to by the trickle-down of Reagan and abandoned by Democrats who still try to talk a good line but are really just looking forward to rub one out with a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs who’ll write them nice big check before leaving the room. What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here. Elmer Gantry shows up looking like Boris Johnson and just says whatever shit he can make up to convince the masses that this is their chance! To stick to ALL of them, all who wrecked their American Dream! And now The Outsider, Donald Trump, has arrived to clean house! You don’t have to agree with him! You don’t even have to like him! He is your personal Molotov cocktail to throw right into the center of the bastards who did this to you! SEND A MESSAGE! TRUMP IS YOUR MESSENGER!
And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.
  1. The Last Stand of the Angry White Man. Our male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end. A woman is about to take over! How did this happen?! On our watch! There were warning signs, but we ignored them. Nixon, the gender traitor, imposing Title IX on us, the rule that said girls in school should get an equal chance at playing sports. Then they let them fly commercial jets. Before we knew it, Beyoncé stormed on the field at this year’s Super Bowl (our game!) with an army of Black Women, fists raised, declaring that our domination was hereby terminated! Oh, the humanity!
That’s a small peek into the mind of the Endangered White Male. There is a sense that the power has slipped out of their hands, that their way of doing things is no longer how things are done. This monster, the “Feminazi,”the thing that as Trump says, “bleeds through her eyes or wherever she bleeds,” has conquered us — and now, after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!
  1. The Hillary Problem. Can we speak honestly, just among ourselves? And before we do, let me state, I actually like Hillary – a lot – and I think she has been given a bad rap she doesn’t deserve. But her vote for the Iraq War made me promise her that I would never vote for her again. To date, I haven’t broken that promise. For the sake of preventing a proto-fascist from becoming our commander-in-chief, I’m breaking that promise. I sadly believe Clinton will find a way to get us in some kind of military action. She’s a hawk, to the right of Obama. But Trump’s psycho finger will be on The Button, and that is that. Done and done.
Let’s face it: Our biggest problem here isn’t Trump – it’s Hillary. She is hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected. That’s why she fights against gays getting married one moment, and the next she’s officiating a gay marriage. Young women are among her biggest detractors, which has to hurt considering it’s the sacrifices and the battles that Hillary and other women of her generation endured so that this younger generation would never have to be told by the Barbara Bushes of the world that they should just shut up and go bake some cookies. But the kids don’t like her, and not a day goes by that a millennial doesn’t tell me they aren’t voting for her. No Democrat, and certainly no independent, is waking up on November 8th excited to run out and vote for Hillary the way they did the day Obama became president or when Bernie was on the primary ballot. The enthusiasm just isn’t there. And because this election is going to come down to just one thing — who drags the most people out of the house and gets them to the polls — Trump right now is in the catbird seat.
  1. The Depressed Sanders Vote. Stop fretting about Bernie’s supporters not voting for Clinton – we’re voting for Clinton! The polls already show that more Sanders voters will vote for Hillary this year than the number of Hillary primary voters in ’08 who then voted for Obama. This is not the problem. The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” – meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked why she’s voting for Hillary. A depressed voter. Because, when you’re young, you have zero tolerance for phonies and BS. Returning to the Clinton/Bush era for them is like suddenly having to pay for music, or using MySpace or carrying around one of those big-ass portable phones. They’re not going to vote for Trump; some will vote third party, but many will just stay home. Hillary Clinton is going to have to do something to give them a reason to support her  — and picking a moderate, bland-o, middle of the road old white guy as her running mate is not the kind of edgy move that tells millenials that their vote is important to Hillary. Having two women on the ticket – that was an exciting idea. But then Hillary got scared and has decided to play it safe. This is just one example of how she is killing the youth vote.
  1. The Jesse Ventura Effect. Finally, do not discount the electorate’s ability to be mischievous or underestimate how any millions fancy themselves as closet anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in the voting booth. It’s one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there’s not even a friggin’ time limit. You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, notbecause they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can. Just because it will upset the apple cart and make mommy and daddy mad. And in the same way like when you’re standing on the edge of Niagara Falls and your mind wonders for a moment what would that feel like to go over that thing, a lot of people are going to love being in the position of puppetmaster and plunking down for Trump just to see what that might look like. Remember back in the ‘90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor? They didn’t do this because they’re stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of the smartest states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of humor — and voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system. This is going to happen again with Trump.
Coming back to the hotel after appearing on Bill Maher’s Republican Convention special this week on HBO, a man stopped me. “Mike,” he said, “we have to vote for Trump. We HAVE to shake things up.” That was it. That was enough for him. To “shake things up.” President Trump would indeed do just that, and a good chunk of the electorate would like to sit in the bleachers and watch that reality show.
(Next week I will post my thoughts on Trump’s Achilles Heel and how I think he can be beat.)
Yours,
Michael Moore

CIA and Turkey

Behind The CIA Desperate Turkey Coup Attempt

45645645645645On the evening of July 15, a group of Turkish army officers announced that they had staged a military coup d’etat and had assumed control of the country. They claimed that Erdogan was in a desperate flight for his life and that they were now in the process of restoring order. The only problem for those army officers and their sponsors far away in Langley, Virginia and Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania– where Turkish political operator, Fetullah Gülen, hides in exile under CIA protection–is that they did not succeed. Behind the coup attempt is a far more dramatic story of the huge geopolitical shift that the often unpredictable political survivor, President (still) Recep Erdogan, was in the midst of making when Gülen’s loyalists made their desperate, now apparently failed coup attempt. What follows is a series of Q&A remarks to the background of the dramatic events unfolding in a pivotal part of the geopolitical order.
Q: How would you comment on the events of Friday to Saturday evening, when the army carried out a coup? Are these events were predictable? WE: The coup was a reaction to the recent dramatic geopolitical shift of Erdogan. It was instigated by networks in Turkey loyal to the CIA. It clearly was a desperate move, ill-prepared.
Q: What do you think are the real reasons for such a move of the army? WE: This was a network of officers inside the Army loyal to the Fetullah Gülen Movement. Gülen is a 100% CIA controlled asset. He even lives since years in exile in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania having gotten safe passage and a green card by former top CIA people like Graham Fuller and the former US Ambassador to Ankara. 
Gülen has been a decades-long mad project of the CIA to weaponize political Islam as an instrument of regime change. Recall that in 2013 there were mass protests against Erdogan in Istanbul and elsewhere. That was when Gülen, who previously had made a deal with Erdogan’s AK Party, broke and criticized Erdogan as a tyrant in the Gülen-controlled media such as Zaman. Since then Erdogan has been moving to root out his internal most dangerous adversary, Gülen and friends, including raids on Zaman and other Gülen-controlled media. This is not about a battle between the White Knight and Evil Knievel. It is about power pure in Turkish politics. If you are interested in the details of the Gülen CIA project I urge readers to look in my book, The Lost Hegemon (German: Amerikas Heilige Krieg). 
Q: Do you think these events in Turkey could lead to civil war, as interpreted by some commentators? WE: I doubt that. The Gülen Movement in the past two years has been severely reduced in influence by Erdogan and his head of intelligence—purges etc. The traditional so-called Ataturk Army as State Guardian is long gone …since the 1980s. 
What is interesting to watch now will be the foreign policy of Erdogan: Rapprochement with Russia, reopening talks on the Russia Turkish Stream gas pipeline to the Greek border. The simultaneous Erdogan rapprochement with Netanyahu. And most critical, Erdogan’s apparent agreement, part of Putin’s demands for resumption of ties, that Turkey cease efforts to topple Assad by covertly backing DAESH or other terrorists in Syria and training them in Turkey, selling their oil on the black market. This is a huge geopolitical defeat for Obama, probably the most incompetent President in American history (even though he has some serious competition for the title from George W. Bush and Clinton).
Q: Do you believe that in this way Erdogan indeed be overthrown? WE: Not likely as it now looks. Even in the early hours when Erdogan was able to tell media that it was a Gülen coup try, I was convinced Gülen would fail. Today, July 16, it seems he has failed. The CIA has egg on its face and Obama and NATO try to cover it up by their “warm embrace of the democratically elected Erdogan (sic!).” They cared not that in Ukraine when the CIA ran the Maidan Square coup in February 2014, that Viktor Yanukovic was the “democratically elected president of Ukraine.” Look at the mess Washington made there in their effort to provoke a split between Russia and the EU.
Q: How should we interpret the information alleged that Erdogan sought asylum in Germany, and do you think that Germany would not approve? WE: There are many wild rumors. I have no information on that.
Q: How do you put the United States and Russia in relation to recent events? WE: It should be clear from what I have said that Washington was behind the coup as their impotent reaction to the major Erdogan geopolitical shift since June, when he fired Davotoglu as Prime Minister and named loyalist Binali Yıldırım. At that point Erdogan simultaneously turned away from the Washington anti-Assad strategy in Syria and towards Israel (who is in a sharp geopolitical conflict with Washington these days), towards Russia and now, even towards Assad in Syria. 
Q: What impact on developments has the fact that Turkey is a member of NATO? WE: This is difficult to assess. Washington desperately needs Turkey in NATO for its global strategy, especially in controlling oil flows of the Middle East, and now its natural gas. This is why the moment it was clear the coup would fail, Obama and company “embraced” their “friend” Erdogan. It’s called damage control in intelligence parlance.
Q: Do you believe that it is good for Turkey that Erdogan and the current government is removed in this way, rather than in the elections? WE: By the time I am writing this, it appears he is firmly still in power, perhaps more than before. 
Q: How do you think the events in Turkey may affect the European Union? WE: The EU is in the process of dissolving as a project. It was always a monstrous idea, encouraged in the 1950s by Churchill, by the early CIA and their European friends like Monnet, in order for the US better to control Europe. That was obvious when President Obama made his brazen intervention into British politics to tell the British not to exit the EU. The European Union is a monstrous top-down faceless bureaucracy, unelected, unanswerable to the people, sitting in Brussels next to NATO headquarters. 
Brexit started the dissolution. It will now go rather fast now is my feeling. Perhaps Hungary will be next if the CIA is not able to do a color revolution against Orban before their October referendum on “Huexit.” France? Marie Le Pen’s supporters and millions of French are fed up with dictates from Brussels. Look at the recent criminal decision, despite huge scientific evidence that glyphosate, the widest-used weed killer in the EU, is carcinogenic, to ignore all health and safety evidence even of EU governments, and arbitrarily re-approve it for 18 more months of poisoning of the food and the population. This is not what the people of Europe or anywhere deserve from their civil servants. 
Q: How do you think the events in Turkey may affect the migrant crisis, and do you expect the reopening of so-called Balkan route for refugees? WE: It’s too early to say. If Erdogan and Assad, brokered by Putin and Russia, and perhaps some cooperation from Israel, manage to make true peace in Syria, the refugee flow from the war could cease. People want to return home, rebuild their lives in their own country.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”






WAR

When Soldiers Come Home, Who Tends to Their Moral Injuries?

Saturday, 16 July 2016 00:00 By Micael BogarYES! Magazine | Op-Ed
In the summer of 2008, my younger brother Jason was killed in Afghanistan. He was 25-years-old. It has been almost eight years since he died, and while the experience of losing a family member to war deserves many pages, I wanted to write this for all the civilians struggling to understand their role in supporting veterans as they come home.
I've now spent enough time away from the trauma of that summer to reflect on what could have been. When Jason came back from his first deployment to Iraq in the summer of 2005, he was a mess. I was coming home from the Peace Corps, and he was coming home from combat. He was quiet and brooding in a way he had never been before.
Part of me wanted to continue our debate on the value of war versus the value of peacebuilding and nonviolence. It was a debate we'd started before our deployments and one that I expected we would pick up upon our return. Instead, I found that what he really needed was someone to listen.
He was changed by his war experience, but he was also sort of hooked on it. Things in America he hadn't even noticed before now seemed so weird. "Everyone just takes everything for granted. Everyone just walks around with no idea what they have. I don't fit in here," he would say.
While we had never agreed on our politics, we were suddenly very similar. After two years of serving in the Peace Corps in Azerbaijan, I found that we both shared a new outlook: the world is a big place, and we'd just seen tiny parts of it that put America into perspective in a frighteningly real way. What separated us, however, was that when I came home I thrived. Jason did not. I had my bachelor's degree in English, and I could put "Returned Peace Corps Volunteer" on my resume -- that opened doors.
Jason had no resume. He didn't know what to do with the freedom he had after coming home, and the powerful sense of purpose and brotherly camaraderie he'd found in the military was now missing. He was lonely and adrift.
Jason deployed a second time, this time to Afghanistan. In 2007, he returned home again. Each reintegration period was like the end of scuba dive. He was coming up and out too quickly and getting dizzy. On his third deployment, he wrote our family a "just in case I die" letterthat we got months later -- after his death.
"Coming back over here again seemed more appealing than being in America surrounded by Americans that are more concerned about their next new car, new house, celebrity, etc. I feel I'm doing more good over here than I was as an electrician."
Recently I've been working on a digital series, Veterans Coming Home, that works to bridge the military–civilian divide and ease the transition home for veterans. We're challenging the mainstream media tendency to reinforce veterans as either broken or as heroes, stereotypes that only widen the gap.
A relatively new term is being used to explain veterans' negative reactions when returning home from war: moral injury. According to moral injury expert Dr. Rita Brock, director of the Soul Repair Center at Texas Christian University, "Moral injury is a normal response to a traumatic situation where you feel you've become a part of the evil or the thing that was bad. Being part of it meant you didn't do anything to stop it; you bought into a different value system." What's most interesting, though, is that you don't have to go to war to experience moral injury around the war. Civilians can have it too.
The term "moral injury" seems to help. It brings a vague, isolating suffering into focus, making it more conscious. Brock notes, "[Awareness] can dispel a whole lot of despair because the naming allows it to be spoken about, and an unburdening starts. In connecting with others who can listen deeply, self-blame can be processed, trust restored, and a moral identity reconstructed."
I do think that many of us may be experiencing moral injury, just like our veterans. If you struggled at any point with our country going to war, you are probably struggling with it still. Civilians may have a hard time looking at veterans' struggles because they force us to look at our own. And when it's unpatriotic to be angry about the war, when we're not allowed to express our feelings about the situation for fear of not supporting our troops, we feel trapped. If we're going to be able to come together on this, we have to realize it's not unpatriotic to have feelings and express them. How we express them is an entirely different thing.
When people find out my brother was killed in Afghanistan, they usually go silent. They don't know what to say. What I'd like, and what I imagine most veterans would like when they speak with civilians about their experience, is an invitation to be heard.
We're all coming home from this war, even those of us who didn't want it in the first place. This is our collective healing as a nation. Some of us are just carrying bigger pieces of it than others.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

MICAEL BOGAR

Micael is the Impact Producer for Veterans Coming Home. She has worked with media for social change since 2008. A former Peace Corps volunteer and Fulbright Fellow, Bogar has a master's degree in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University.

    Oliver Stone's Warning

    Oliver Stone Issues Dire Warning on the Age of Pokemon Go: 'It's What They Call Totalitarianism'

    The filmmaker is not trying to catch 'em all.
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    Photo Credit: Nicolas Genin / Wikimedia Commons
    For all the Pokemon Go naysayers out there, acclaimed filmmaker Oliver Stone is joining your ranks.
    While discussing his upcoming film Snowden at San Diego Comic-Con Thursday, the JFK director spoke frankly about the game that’s enraptured millions of Americans, noting that it’s yet another tool companies such as Google can use to gather information about users.
    "It's a new level of invasion," Stone said, according to CBS News. "Nobody has ever seen, in the history of the world, something like Google, ever. It's the fastest-growing business ever, and they have invested huge amounts of money into what surveillance is, which is data-mining.”
    “They're data-mining every person in this room for information as to what you're buying, what it is you like, and above all, your behavior,” Stone added.
    Stone called Pokemon Go “surveillance capitalism,” calling it the “newest stage” in data mining.
    "You'll see a new form of, frankly, a robot society, where they will know how you want to behave and they will make the mockup that matches how you behave and feed you,” Stone said. “It's what they call totalitarianism.”
    The amount of data these apps (and really most sites on the internet) collect from users is a cause for concern for privacy-minded individuals. Pokemon Go’s parent company Niantic, which split off from Google last year, faces a lawsuit in Germany over its lack of user-friendly privacy terms. Earlier this week, the Federation of German Consumer Organizations, which requires companies to adhere to notoriously strict guidelines when crafting privacy policies, gave the company until August 9 to change its terms. The Federation took specific issue with Niantic’s rights to sell user data to third parties.
    “We think is there is not a high enough level of consent in the use of data—these extended rights of giving users’ data away to third parties in circumstances, which are not sufficiently described,” legal policy officer Heiko Dünkel told Fortune.
    So while you stumble around trying to catch ‘em all, remember Pokemon Go and Niantic are doing the same—with your data.
    Elizabeth Preza is an AlterNet staff writer focusing on politics, media and cultural criticism. Follow her on Twitter @lizacisms.

    Geen Jorwert Zonder Monsanto


    Monsanto wins in Europe amid protests and scandals around its GMO crops.

    The European Commission approved Friday the import of genetically modified soybean by U.S. agricultural giant Monsanto.
    "Any products produced from these GMOs will be subject to the EU's strict labeling and traceability rules," said the European Commission in a statement.
    The launch of Roundup Ready 2 Xtend variety had been delayed for months.

    "It would have been a big deal if it hadn't been approved, but this was the expected outcome, although it took longer than anyone thought," said analyst Jonas Oxgaard to Reuters.
    The announcement is also a breakthrough for Monsanto, after months of regulatory delays and a continuous controversy over whether glyphosate, the chemical in its Roundup herbicide, is carcinogenic.
    After this approval, Monsanto’s GMO soybeans are authorized to be used to feed animals and in human food, but not for planting in the EU. The authorization will be valid for 10 years.
    Meanwhile, China, Monsanto’s main importer has already approved the variety.
    The EU is the second largest importer of soybeans, importing millions of tons of GMO crops every year.
    Protests broke out recently in more than 400 cities worldwide against Monsanto. Many of the demonstrators also protested the sale of the herbicide RoundUp, which many say has caused cancer in humans and led to the development of genetically-modified crops.
    WATCH: Mexico: Activists Campaign Against GMOs 
    Just recently in Peru, RoundUp left 92 children poisoned after a plane allegedly sprayed glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weed killer, during a fumigation of a nearby sugarcane field.
    Monsanto recently declined a buying offer by Bayer worth US$64 billion. If the deal had gone ahead, Bayer would have become the world’s biggest agricultural supplier and would have been set to monopolize both pesticide and seed markets around the globe.
    Anoniem heeft een nieuwe reactie op je bericht "Long Live Muhammad Ali" achtergelaten: 

    The Suicide Times. 

    Chapeau alle EU modifyers, u bent uitgenodigd voor een feestelijke barbeque na de vakantie, gefeliciteerd namens de fokkerij, de slachterij en de hedonistische klimaathervormers
    Ten behoeve van Vlees en eiwitstapelen dus. Belangrijk voor de economie? Ah, too big a driver. Money talks


    Long Live Muhammad Ali

    Continues to Rise: Muhammad Ali (1942-2016)

    Sunday, 17 July 2016 00:00 By Lewis R. GordonViewpoint Magazine | Op-Ed
    Muhammad Ali tapes his right hand for a training session at his camp in Deer Lake, Pa., Jan. 17, 1974. (Photo: Robert Walker / The New York Times)Muhammad Ali tapes his right hand for a training session at his camp in Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, January 17, 1974. (Photo: Robert Walker / The New York Times)
    Muhammad Ali's life could be summed up in a single statement: freedom is always worth fighting for. As a professional pugilist, he inspired millions. As a political radical, he carried this conviction beyond the ring, fiercely denouncing racism and imperialism. But these two aspects of his life -- the athlete and the militant -- cannot be separated. His entire boxing career was fully political, and his greatest matches, against Ernie Terrell and George Foreman, saw him waging the struggle against white supremacy, racism, and collaborationism in the boxing ring itself.
    Insights of a Warrior
    His athletic achievements range from an Olympic gold medal in the light-heavyweight division in the Rome games of 1960 and becoming the world heavyweight champion three times with a repertoire of some of the most amazing matches in boxing history. He was so fast, creative, and tactical that he even influenced the great Bruce Lee, his noteworthy peer in Asian martial arts, world fame, and political commitments. Lee gave Ali the most sincere form of flattery by adding the latter's style of footwork to Jeet Kune Do, his approach to Gung Fu. Legendary a boxer though he was, Ali will be remembered for the Promethean struggle he fought for dignity and respect not only as a man but also as one belonging to those despised by the country of his birth.
    Ali fought, which means he also received his share of punches, despite floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee (this signature-phrase was actually penned by his Afro-Jewish assistant trainer and corner man Drew Bundini Brown). He was one of a kind, though that didn't mean there weren't his analogues in other sites of struggle for the liberation of those under the heels of white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism. I have already mentioned Bruce Lee, who, as an Asian American, no doubt appreciated Ali's courageous statements of solidarity with East Asians during the U.S. war against Vietnam. In the struggle against Jim Crow, Malcolm X, his friend whom he had sadly later disavowed, stood for the same in words and deed in the realm of what Cornel West calls prophetic protest.
    Yet, in terms of specific philosophical location and struggles in and beyond the ring, at least with regard to the basic question of standing up for what is right and the dignity it demands, his affinities were with the legendary, revolutionary philosopher psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. Unlike Ali, however, Fanon's encounter with the realities of France, his nemesis-home, was not through an Olympic trial but that of the humiliation he suffered while fighting for France in World War II, from which he returned -- like Ali who wouldn't be served in a diner in his hometown -- as a twice-decorated hero with continued, questioned status as a human being. Fanon eventually left France, fought for Algerian independence, served as a representative of the struggle throughout southern Africa, and left a powerful set of writings, all marked by the insights of a warrior, challenging us to fight for a healthy humanity. Though not a health professional, Ali shared Fanon's diagnosis of the situation: better to be angry fighting for freedom than to be a "happy" slave.
    What's in a Name?
    Born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942, he was the son of a sign-maker. The symbolism is evident. A sign always points to something other than itself, and, true to form, Ali kept questioning the world in which he lived. He never accepted the standard response to black subordination, exemplified by his father's pointing to his skin color as the source of the obstacles his son faced. Joining critical Black thought from over the ages, he in effect responded that he wasn't the problem -- it was those who imposed such limitations on him.  
    Barriers, the precocious lad understood, should be torn down. Like many freedom fighters before him, he resolved to do so in a path from initial literacy to fists of resistance and then to political speech. Politics, after all, is about power, a relationship to which racist societies demand nothing beyond silence from those it dominates. Frederick Douglass, for instance, fought for his freedom first through learning to read, then matching fists with the slave-breaker Reverend Covey before moving to the North and then engaged in abolition activism in which his powers of speech were legendary.  
    Ali, who in his youth was Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., took a similar path through amateur boxing and then on to the Olympics and then professional boxing. His accolades early on included winning the Golden Glove. His determination throughout made it clear that something burned deep within him. He once remarked that he never started counting when doing sit-up exercises until after his abdomen began to hurt. Pain for him was a reminder of what he had to overcome.  As I sometimes remind readers, it wasn't liberation struggles that brought violence into Fanon's life; as a colonial subject, he was born into violence. So was Ali, who was smart enough to understand that no physical blow matched those offered by the legal system, double-standard society, and constant violence of an ideology of continued degradation in print, the radio waves, cinema, and television. Those forces, even at the spiritual level, made their messages clear: the world was supposedly better without people like him, regardless of their achievement. He had a healthy response: there's something wrong with that world, not the people it persecuted.
    Changing that world meant for Ali a battle on inner as well as outer fronts. He already waged war on the outer, where he knocked down opponents of many kinds, including, to the chagrin of racist audiences, white ones. For the inner, he sought the counsel of the Nation of Islam, which led not only to his conversion but also his birth (for him, a form of being made whole by tearing asunder the effects of enslavement) as Muhammad Ali.
    Interestingly enough, the "slave name" he discarded was in honor of Cassius Marcellus Clay (1810 -- 1903), a white abolitionist who, among his many claims to fame, fought off assassins who had shot him point blank in the chest in one instance and a group that had stabbed him on another occasion. It was, along with Frederick Douglass, Clay who had insisted that President Lincoln issue a proclamation for the emancipation of enslaved people in the U.S. South. The reach of a sign is, we should remember, always beyond itself.
    Everything about Muhammad Ali was poetic and thus symbolic. His movement from his disavowed slave name (despite its not being from an enslaver) to his anointed one (chosen by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad) is about transcending the soil: clay, after all, is an earthly permeable substance, and "Ali" is Arabic for high, or, as he correctly added, "most high." "Muhammad" means "praiseworthy." There is no doubt that Muhammad Ali's life met the challenge of his name. I suspect as well that Clay would understand the importance of Ali's choice: true freedom requires surpassing even those who fought for our emancipation.
    Politics in the Ring
    The question of Ali's name occasioned what is no doubt his most remembered, symbolic fight.  First, however, consider the proverbial lead up.
    Ali was well known for his boasting and fiery rhetoric. What his critics didn't realize is what many people of color who celebrated him across the world understood. The supposedly requisite need for white recognition is degrading. Ali refused to be patronized. Like Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, whose words irritated and often frightened white audiences, Ali's challenged antiblack racists who by definition rejected the idea that any person of African descent deserved respect. Even worse, the idea of publicly acknowledging his self-respect meant that his spirit was not crushed and his refusal to let such ever happen. His naysayers didn't understand that Ali's use of the pronoun "I" was never really singular in its designation. He knew they rejected him in his individuality, which meant his declaration spread across a people. He was announcing during the Civil Rights Struggle that Blacks were fighting for their right to exist and to flourish. That he won the heavyweight championship against Sonny Liston in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin speaks for itself.
    Ali's jaunts and taunts were unforgiving, however, to those whom Malcolm X called "house Negroes" or "Uncle Toms." Every racist society has some version of this figure. The French, for instance, have le Bon Nègre. Such figures were guided by a single creed: never, ever, upset whites. They no doubt represented for Ali the threat from within, which by extension applied not only to what he purged from his own soul but also what jeopardized liberation movements for all.
    The World Boxing Association (WBA) had stripped Ali of his title when he joined the Nation of Islam (now The World Community of Al-Islam), which the Federal Bureau of Investigations had classified as a hate group and a threat to national security. The opening left Ernie Terrell as the WBA champion. The stage was set for Terrell to represent the House Negro who could please white masters by putting the upstart Ali in his supposed "place." To make matters worse, the Louisville draft board reclassified Ali to make him eligible for the draft. His famous response, "I ain't got nothing against no Viet Cong; no Viet Cong never called me nigger," made him a hero among the downtrodden and those living in what was then called the  Third World, in addition to critics of the war, and a more intense object of white hatred. As the fight approached, Terrell kept referring to Ali by his disavowed slave name of Cassius Clay. Bear in mind that these events unfolded during 1966, when the Title IV proposing non-discrimination in housing was defeated in the U.S. Congress; the tides, in other words, were already turning against the gains from 1964. It was no small matter that his former friend, Malcolm X, was assassinated in 1965. State-sanctioned destruction of those who defied colonialism and racism was, as the expression goes, business as usual.
    Ali and Terrell had their epic battle on the February 6, 1967. It was a brutal, fifteen-round fight in which Ali, upon landing each punch, added, "What's my name, Uncle Tom . . . what's my name?" To perhaps the judge's, and most certainly the majority white audience's, chagrin, the decision of Ali's victory was unanimous.  
    Ali and his name were victorious, but retaliation came in a familiar pattern as unleashed on those such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson before him; he was stripped again of his titles, with the addition of his boxing license and passport taken away. Unable to leave the country, he spent 1967 to 1970 appealing his conviction for draft evasion despite being a conscientious objector, while finding alternative means of earning an income. His license was reinstated in 1970 and his conviction overturned in 1971. His return to professional boxing led to some of the greatest showdowns, the most memorable of which, in athletic terms, were his loss and then victory against Joe Frazier. His last great, politically symbolic fight, however, was against George Foreman, against whom he used his famous "rope-a-dope" technique of absorbing punches until his opponent was tired out.  
    Foreman was an Olympic gold medalist at the 1968 Mexico games in which Tommie Smith and John Carlos made their historic, raised black-gloved covered fists of protest. Foreman countered their defiance by waving the U.S. flag at the moment of his victory. Though a much beloved celebrity today, what many people of color across the globe saw in 1968 was the return of the repulsive, subservient figure against whom liberationists such as Ali fought. Taking place in the then Republic of Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo), it was the event in which Ali reclaimed his title as heavyweight champion through defeating an opponent whom audiences of color saw as complicit in the domination of his fellow oppressed peoples. The victory symbolized Africa, and indeed the then Third World, fighting back.
    The need to reassert white dominance never abandoned American popular culture. The 1976 film Rocky effectively tapped into the white supremacist dream of the Great White Hope through pitting Rocky Balboa (based on the white boxer Chuck Wepner, who in 1975 almost went fifteen rounds against Ali before losing by a knockout) against the Ali-inspired Apollo Creed. It is no surprise that in cinema, where fantasy rules, so, too, white supremacy found solace. Reviewing Rocky II in 1979 in conversation with critic Roger Ebert, Ali said: "For the black man to come out superior would be against America's teachings. I have been so great in boxing they had to create an image like Rocky, a white image on the screen, to counteract my image in the ring. America has to have its white images, no matter where it gets them. Jesus, Wonder Woman, Tarzan and Rocky."
    After regaining the heavyweight title in 1974, Ali, at age 32, was already getting old for his profession. Subsequent defeat and retirement a decade later were inevitable, and in terms of his body, the onset of Parkinson disease led to a tragic struggle, with signs of dignity characteristic of the man, for the rest of his life. His two greatest weapons against his subordination, his physical prowess and his gift of speech, were compromised.  Ali, however, was never defeated.  One could imagine how many thoughts, how many moments of reflexive muscular poise, reminded him of limitations that made him seem his own prisoner. Yet, Ali never lost sight of what was ultimately greater than himself. His faith (which led to his taking the Hajj to Mecca/Makkah in 1972), after all, taught him that being the greatest among men never meant being greater than The Most High, the Greatest of the Greatest.  His commitment, then, meant asserting perhaps his greatest virtue -- his humanity. One could imagine how, freed from his affliction, he would have spoken in solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter, against Islamophobia, and for global solidarity against the many forms of degradation besetting the world today.
    Last month, on June 10, Ali's remains returned to Louisville. Though his death returns him to the soil (yes, to clay), we all know in our hearts that we remember him, Ali, because he, as poet Maya Angelou would remind us, continues to rise.
    This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

    LEWIS R. GORDON

    Lewis R. Gordon is professor of philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; writer-in-residence at Birkbeck School of Law; visiting professor of philosophy at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica; and honorary professor at the Unit of the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa, where he was also most recently Nelson Mandela visiting professor of political and international studies (2014 and 2015). His most recent books are What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought (Fordham UP; Wits UP; Hurst, 2015; Swedish translation, TankeKraft förlag, 2016), translations in Portuguese and Mandarin forthcoming, and, with Jane Anna Gordon, Aaron Kamugisha and Neil Roberts,Journeys in Caribbean Thought: The Paget Henry Reader (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016).  Dr. Gordon is a member of Truthout's Board of Directors.  His website is: http://lewisrgordon.com and he is on twitter at: https://twitter.com/lewgord.