The history of pogroms against Jews in Russia, Poland and Eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th Centuries is not very different from the recent incident in Amsterdam, where ‘normal’ crowd violence was provoked by Jews themselves who then inverted the event to make it appear they were the victims. You can read more about it here: Israeli Hooligans Storm Through Amsterdam Chanting “Fu** You Palestine”. And more about the history of pogroms here: Myth and the Russian Pogroms. ABN
Donald Trump is considering tapping North Dakota’s Doug Burgum to be his new “energy tsar”, which would give the oil state’s governor sweeping power to slash environmental regulations and boost US fossil fuels output.
Burgum, a billionaire businessman who ran in the Republican primary race this year before endorsing Trump, is the president-elect’s preferred candidate for the role, said people familiar with the discussions. Former energy secretary Dan Brouillette is also a contender.
Trump is weighing the reappointment of officials from his first term to senior energy roles as he looks to battle-hardened veterans to overhaul rules on everything from vehicle emissions to oil and gas leasing.
The new energy tsar role and its powers are not yet finalised, but people familiar with the plans said it would co-ordinate Trump’s deregulatory agenda across a patchwork of agencies including the Department of Energy, Department of Interior, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and Environmental Protection Agency.
The president-elect has vowed to gut at least 10 regulations across the federal government for every new one created and said he would appoint Tesla chief executive Elon Musk to helm a new efficiency commission “tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms”.
Rules governing climate and energy are set to bear the brunt of the regulatory bonfire.
Trump has railed against the EPA’s car emissions rules, calling them “the insane electric vehicle mandate”, and is also likely to remove curbs on oil and gas drilling on federal lands.
I am pinning this to the top of the page. This speech is so good I fear it may be AI. The speech is definitely real and is no longer pinned to the top of the page. Free speech is the lifeblood of American civilization. Never trust or believe anyone who wants to take it away from you. ABN
A group of massage therapists in Florida have been arrested amid claims they offered to perform sex acts to undercover detectives during a two-day sting dubbed ‘Operation Skin So Soft’.
During the two-day operation, which began this past Monday, undercover detectives went to 22 different Asian massage parlors around Polk County to get massages from licensed therapists.
But 20 of those women – who are all from the Republic of China – offered sex acts to the detectives completely unprompted.
One of the women arrested was said to have ‘tried to have full sex’ with the detective even after he denied her advances.
The name given to the sting – ‘Operation Skin So Soft’ – was inspired by a compliment given to an undercover officer while they were auditing the massage parlors.
This caught my eye because I lived in Taiwan for some time and because cases like this are usually not so large or so prominently displayed in the news, near top of first page of DM. Everyone in the photo is an adult. But it is often the case that sex-workers in East Asia, and probably most of the world, are sold into the profession when they are young by their parents or ‘guardians’, or otherwise forced or enticed into it at an age when they are much too young to understand the consequences. Consider 8 year-old drag queens performing in front of adult audiences in USA in this light. It used to be in Taiwan that parents ‘sold’ their children into sex-work by signing contracts that paid them while indenturing their children. Not sure what the story in Taiwan is today. Could be the same. What do the USA parents of an 8 year-old drag queen get? ABN
In a previous article I showed why, when used alone, thyroid hormone replacement often fails. In this post I’ll explain why optimizing your iodine intake is so crucial, and why both too little and too much iodine can be harmful.
Iodine deficiency is the most common cause of hypothyroidism worldwide. Once researchers realized this, health authorities around the world began adding iodine to table salt.
This strategy was effective in correcting iodine deficiency. But it had an unanticipated—and undesired—effect. In countries where iodine has been added to table salt, the rates of autoimmune thyroid disease have risen. The following is just a sample of studies around the world demonstrating this effect:
Why does this happen? Because increased iodine intake, especially in supplement form, can increase the autoimmune attack on the thyroid. Iodine reduces the activity of an enzyme called thyroid peroxidase (TPO). TPO is required for proper thyroid hormone production.
On the other hand, restricting intake of iodine can reverse hypothyroidism. In one study, 78% of patients with Hashimoto’s regained normal thyroid function with iodine restriction alone.
Identity is constructed of memories, memories that have to be tended to, and this takes time and energy.
You have to remember who you are and often have to work pretty hard just to maintain that image within yourself, to say nothing of projecting it toward other people and getting them to accept it.
A big problem with this way of constructing a “self,” an identity, is it’s probably based on misinterpretations and a good deal of self-deceit.
Our identities, such that they are, are complex fictions. They are a central flaw in our internal signaling system.
If your identity is large and complex, it will use a good deal of energy. As you signal internally to yourself about your identity, you will also be receiving signals from other people, and these signals will necessarily be processed by your large and complex identity. And that, of course, will lead to serious misinterpretations, both internal and external.
If you belong to a group that defines, or helps you define, your identity, you can save some energy but will have as much fiction, maybe even worse fiction.
Consider the codes of group behavior (group signaling) for Stalin’s NKVD officers who purged so many millions of innocents in the 1930s. All of those officers had identities that were largely determined by signals coming from the NKVD and Joseph Stalin.
There was a weird sort of ethical behavior among those officers in that they were trying to adhere to a group signaling system and not go their own way. This same problem in less serious form can be observed all over the world in every culture.
One problem with ethics and ethical signaling within groups is ethical questions can be difficult. There are few formulas that will always work, and formulas are what hold groups together.
Back to your identity. I hope it is clear that you have to be careful when you base your identity on group signaling systems. If you are a banker, you might do many bad things out of loyalty to your group. Same for all of us.
While ethics are hard to codify, the will to behave ethically is simpler. I want to do the right thing but I don’t always know what it is or how to do it. That is a good statement to make. If you can honestly say that to yourself, that is good because that means that your internal signaling system is seeking greater integrity, great clarity.
When we seek clarity and integrity within our signaling systems, we are seeking better ethics. We are changing our identities, or allowing our identities to be transformed by a higher desire for clarity, purity, integrity, goodness.
When we seek to improve our signaling systems, our ethics, we begin to abandon static identities and poorly constructed fictions about ourselves by subjecting them to a higher order of thought. If we can take a meta-position on ourselves, we will find the process of improving signaling is easier and more enjoyable than clinging to a static fictionalized identity that may have been constructed years before.
American Buddhist Net 