White Men, Guns…And That Masculinity Thing

About 50% of the guns in the US are owned by only 3% of the gun owners.

Think about that. What if 50% of the cars were owned by 3% of the drivers? Houses with attached parking lots instead of lawns would not be totally uncommon.

When I used to shoot at local ranges as common site was of a white man who had been frightened into buying a gun to defend his home ( a statistical probability of a inner city gangbanger wandering out into the ‘burbs or rural areas to “rob de whidte folks” being on the order of winning the Powerball lottery) – acquiring his first, and probably only pistol. Fumbling with the damn thing during the Free  Hour” of range time, trying to hit a man sized target at 15 feet. Discovering it just doesn’t work like in the movies, where everyone but the “bad guys” is a crack shot. Few, if any of these guys ever realized that by the simple act of gun ownership, they had increased the chance that  someone in their house would be shot by something on the order of 2,000% Ten or twenty thousand times more likely someone would be shot in the house by a family member, than of said mythical black gangbanger out to rob only moderately better off poor white folks.

I know it is popular with the racist buffoons and their associated black conservative Lawn Jockeys to talk about the city “murder rate”.

Fact is –

In 2016, there were more than 38,000 gun-related deaths in the U.S. — 4,000 more than 2015, the new CDC report on preliminary mortality data shows. Most gun-related deaths — about two-thirds —in America are suicides, but an Associated Press analysis of FBI data shows there were about 11,000 gun-related homicides in 2016, up from 9,600 in 2015. The increase in gun-related deaths follows a nearly 15-year period of relative stasis.

Meaning 2/3rd of all gun deaths every year in the US are either accidental or suicide. If you break that down, nearly 27,000 folks – mostly white, died by suicide or accident vs 5,000 homicides committed by black folks, whose victims were over 90% fellow black folks, and 90% of the homicides were committed within 10 miles of an urban center.

So what is the real problem?

Manhood.

And specifically the manhood of the low educated white male Trump supporter.

The AR-15…Mas Murder Weapon of Choice

Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns?

Research suggests it’s largely because they’re anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market and beset by racial fears.

Since the 2008 election of President Obama, the number of firearmsmanufactured in the U.S. has tripled, while imports have doubled. This doesn’t mean more households have guns than ever before—that percentage has stayed fairly steady for decades. Rather, more guns are being stockpiled by a small number of individuals. Three percent of the population now owns half of the country’s firearms, says a recent, definitive study from the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University.

So, who is buying all these guns—and why?

The short, broad-brush answer to the first part of that question is this: men, who on average possess almost twice the number of guns female owners do. But not all men. Some groups of men are much more avid gun consumers than others. The American citizen most likely to own a gun is a white male—but not just any white guy. According to a growing number of scientific studies, the kind of man who stockpiles weapons or applies for a concealed-carry license meets a very specific profile.

These are men who are anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market, and beset by racial fears. They tend to be less educated. For the most part, they don’t appear to be religious—and, suggests one study, faith seems to reduce their attachment to guns. In fact, stockpiling guns seems to be a symptom of a much deeper crisis in meaning and purpose in their lives. Taken together, these studies describe a population that is struggling to find a new story—one in which they are once again the heroes.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO HARD WORK?

When Northland College sociologist Angela Stroud studied applications for licenses to carry concealed firearms in Texas, which exploded after President Obama was elected, she found applicants were overwhelmingly dominated by white men. In interviews, they told her that they wanted to protect themselves and the people they love.

“When men became fathers or got married, they started to feel very vulnerable, like they couldn’t protect families,” she says. “For them, owning a weapon is part of what it means to be a good husband a good father.” That meaning is “rooted in fear and vulnerability—very motivating emotions.”

But Stroud also discovered another motivation: racial anxiety. “A lot of people talked about how important Obama was to get a concealed-carry license: ‘He’s for free health care, he’s for welfare.’ They were asking, ‘Whatever happened to hard work?’” Obama’s presidency, they feared, would empower minorities to threaten their property and families.

The insight Stroud gained from her interviews is backed up by many, many studies. A 2013 paper by a team of United Kingdom researchers found that a one-point jump in the scale they used to measure racism increased the odds of owning a gun by 50 percent. A 2016 study from the University of Illinois at Chicago found that racial resentment among whites fueled opposition to gun control. This drives political affiliations: A 2017 study in the Social Studies Quarterly found that gun owners had become 50 percent more likely to vote Republican since 1972—and that gun culture had become strongly associated with explicit racism.

or many conservative men, the gun feels like a force for order is a chaotic world, suggests a study published in December of last year. In a series of three experiments, Steven Shepherd and Aaron C. Kay asked hundreds of liberals and conservatives to imagine holding a handgun—and found that conservatives felt less risk and greater personal control than liberal counterparts.

This wasn’t about familiarity with real-world guns—gun ownership and experience did not affect results. Instead, conservative attachment to guns was based entirely on ideology and emotions.

WHO WANTS TO BE A HERO?

That’s an insight echoed by another study published last year. Baylor University sociologists Paul Froese and F. Carson Mencken created a “gun empowerment scale” designed to measure how a nationally representative sample of almost 600 owners felt about their weapons. Their study found that people at the highest level of their scale—the ones who felt most emotionally and morally attached to their guns—were 78 percent white and 65 percent male.

“We found that white men who have experienced economic setbacks or worry about their economic futures are the group of owners most attached to their guns,” says Froese. “Those with high attachment felt that having a gun made them a better and more respected member of their communities.”

That wasn’t true for women and non-whites. In other words, they may have suffered setbacks—but women and people of color weren’t turning to guns to make themselves feel better. “This suggests that that these owners have other sources of meaning and coping when facing hard times,” notes Froese—often, religion. Indeed, Froese and Mencken found that religious faith seemed to put the brakes on white men’s attachment to guns.

For these economically insecure, irreligious white men, “the gun is a ubiquitous symbol of power and independence, two things white males are worried about,” says Froese. “Guns, therefore, provide a way to regain their masculinity, which they perceive has been eroded by increasing economic impotency.”

Both Froese and Stroud found pervasive anti-government sentiments among their study participants. “This is interesting because these men tend to see themselves as devoted patriots, but make a distinction between the federal government and the ‘nation,’ says Froese. “On that point, I expect that many in this group see the ‘nation’ as being white.”

Investing guns with this kind of moral and emotional meaning has many consequences, the researchers say. “Put simply, owners who are more attached to their guns are most likely to believe that guns are a solution to our social ills,” says Froese. “For them, more ‘good’ people with guns would drastically reduce violence and increase civility. Again, it reflects a hero narrative, which many white man long to feel a part of.”

Stroud’s work echoes this conclusion. “They tell themselves all kinds of stories about criminals and criminal victimization,” she says. “But the story isn’t just about criminals. It’s about the good guy—and that’s how they see themselves: ‘I work hard, I take care of my family, and there are people who aren’t like that.’ When we tell stories about the Other, we’re really telling stories about ourselves.”

HOW TO SAVE A WHITE MAN’S LIFE

Unfortunately, the people most likely to be killed by the guns of white men aren’t the “bad guys,” presumably criminals or terrorists. It’s themselves—and their families.

White men aren’t just the Americans most likely to own guns; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they’re also the people most likely to put them in their own mouths and pull the trigger, especially when they’re in some kind of economic distress. A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man—while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight. Most murders and shoot-outs don’t happen between strangers. They unfold within social networks, among people of the same race.

A gun in the home is far more likely to kill or wound the people who live there than is a burglar or serial killer. Most of the time, according to every single study that’s ever been done about interpersonal gun violence, the dead and wounded know the people who shot them. A gun in the home makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed by her husband. Every week in America, 136 children and teenagers are shot—and more often than not, it’s a sibling, friend, parent, or relative who holds the gun. For every homicide deemed justified by the police, guns are used in 78 suicides. As a new study published this month in JAMA Internal Medicine once again shows us, restrictive gun laws don’t prevent white men from defending themselves and their families. Instead, those laws stop them from shooting themselves and each other…(More)

 

Yet Another Vicious Republican Woman Beater

Rich white kid attacks woman with Claw Hammer…

What happens?

It all goes away and he becomes a Republican Party Official.

You got money, and are white…

Stuff that would wind up locking a poor(er) kid away for 20 years to life…Just magically goes away, and you a free to join the white wing criminal cartel.

As a teen, he savagely beat a classmate. The attack was forgotten, until he went into politics

The Republicans of Broward County, Fla., knew little about Rupert Tarsey when he ran for an open slot on the local party’s executive committee. But the young man had some decent political cred.

Before the 2016 presidential election, he told them, he knocked on thousands of doors and got 50 Republicans in the liberal enclave to register to vote to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He worshiped at the same church as the committee’s vice chair and headed a local chapter of the Catholic fraternal group Knights of Columbus. He came from a wealthy California family and followed four generations into a real estate career.

Within months of joining the local party, the 28-year-old was elected secretary in May, defeating two challengers who’d been around longer.

But something felt off about Tarsey for Bob Sutton, chairman of the committee. After a few months, Tarsey went after Sutton’s position, members said, by working to persuade the committee to unseat him. That’s when Sutton started getting phone calls warning him that Tarsey was not quite who he seemed.

“Houston, we’ve got a problem,” he said one caller told him.

It wasn’t long before the story of Tarsey’s past unfolded.

It began a decade ago, some 2,700 miles away at the exclusive Harvard-Westlake High School, a private college preparatory academy where tuition this year is $37,100 and which is a magnet for the children of Los Angeles’ elite.

Rupert Ditsworth, a 17-year-old from Beverly Hills, was a senior. One day in May, he finished an Advanced Placement exam and was waiting for a friend when he saw another schoolmate, Elizabeth Barcay. He invited her to lunch in his Jaguar.

They’d known each other for two years and eaten together before. She accepted.

They took the Jaguar to a Jamba Juice and sipped smoothies. After lunch, Ditsworth asked Barcay if she would go with him to mail something on the way back to school. She agreed.

Soon after, according to court records, he drove past a mailbox and detoured to a quiet residential street, parking at a dead-end with the passenger door up against a wall. There, he told Barcay he had thoughts of suicide. She suggested he drive back to school and see a counselor.

Instead, according to court records, he reached inside his backpack, pulled out a claw hammer and started swinging. Ditsworth delivered dozens of crushing blows, smashing Barcay’s nose and leg, splitting her scalp and giving her two black eyes, the records say. Her family said they counted at least 40 visible wounds.

During a struggle, the weapon broke. So Ditsworth grabbed Barcay’s throat and tried to strangle her, she testified during a preliminary hearing.

Barcay said she bit down on his finger to stop the attack. He let go.

“I’m done,” he screamed.

Bloody and wounded, Barcay managed to escape from the car before collapsing in front of a nearby home.

She survived the attack, emerging with fierce resolve. Five days later, she went to prom — in a wheelchair — and was crowned queen, the high school’s student newspaper reported at the time. Barcay could not be reached for comment for this article.

Prosecutors filed three felony charges against her attacker: one count of attempted murder and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. If convicted of those charges, Ditsworth was facing the rest of his life behind bars.

But he never spent a day in jail.

What followed instead was a series of moves that gave the teenager a near-clean criminal slate, allowing him to reinvent himself in Florida.

“When you have a lot of money, you can kind of get away with stuff,” said Celeste Ellich, vice chair of the Broward County Republican Party, who had supported Tarsey’s secretary bid before she knew about his past. “They thought they had it buried.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Ed Nison, who prosecuted the case in California, told The Times that because Ditsworth was relatively young, had no prior record and suffered from psychiatric issues, putting him in jail “would not serve the purpose that it’s supposed to serve.”

“The goal was to avoid a reoccurrence of this kind of behavior,” Nison said. “And simply locking him up wouldn’t have done anything to prevent future behavior under these circumstances.”

But at the time, others saw the situation differently.

“You should have gone to prison,” David Barcay, the victim’s father, told Ditsworth at a dramatic court hearing in 2010. “Instead, you’re going to school and making friends and enjoying the outdoors and posing for pictures with your fraternity brothers with paintball guns in army fatigues …. You have moved to Florida and created a life that has allowed you to forget.”… The Rest Here…

 

Jefferson Davis Sessions Moves to Resegregate Harvard

The usual from the usual Republican racist asses. They aren’t trying to stop Affirmative Action – Jefferson Davis wants to stop any major university from accepting black students.

Just like his POS boss, te white supremacist Chumph.

To be brutally honest – some negroes need to start throwing a few bombs at some of these so called “Civil Rights” groups. Let ’em be on the receiving end for a change.

Same old racist shit, from the same old racist POSs

Trump’s DOJ is targeting affirmative action programs, because it works for conservatives now

Harvard University is the target of a DOJ probe, at the behest of conservatives

The Department of Justice is opening an investigation into Harvard University’s admissions practice thanks to a lawsuit filed by an anti-affirmative action group.

Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit group led by conservative legal activist Edward Blum, has accused Harvard University of violating federal civil rights law by limiting the number of Asian-American students it will admit, according to The Wall Street Journal. In order to combat this alleged discrimination, the suit has requested that a federal judge bar the school from factoring race into future undergraduate admissions decisions.

“The Department of Justice takes seriously any potential violation of an individual’s civil and constitutional rights,” Justice Department spokesman Devin O’Malley told Journal. Justice Department officials have now threatened to sue Harvard University if they do not hand over requested documents by Dec. 1 (they were initially due on Nov. 2).

Yet Vanita Gupta, who led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama, described it as “highly irregular” for the Department of Justice to investigate this case after a similar one had been dismissed by the Department of Education in 2015.

Blum himself became a national figure in 2015 when he worked with a college student named Abigail Fisher in suing the University of Texas — Austin by claiming she had been denied admission because of her race. Yet when the report came out in August that the Justice Department was looking for people to investigate discrimination against white students, Blum insisted he had nothing to do with it.

“My fingerprints are nowhere near any of this. This was brought to my attention when I read The New York Times story,” Blum told Newsweek.

 

Crooked Chicago Cop Caught – 18 Exonerated

Two crooked Chicago cops who falsified and planted evidence on perhaps hundreds of victims have been convicted and sent to jail

Now the fallout from their extortion.

 

Official Pizza of the White Supremacists

Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter has certainly gotten his company in a mess of this one. The picture below is a fake. It is a photoshop put out by the neo-Nazis.

Consumer boycotts have become an effective way for us “little people” to punish egregious behavior by some corporations. A Marketer’s worst nightmare is to have their company identified with anything that destroys or harms their brand. It is bad enough when an employee does something stupid, but at least the company can take corrective action through punishing or firing the employee and distancing the company from bad actions.

With the Trump era comes a new problem. Undesirable or reprehensible groups associating their name and causes with corporate brands. Most recently, Papa John’s Pizza becoming the Pizza supplier of the alt-right and neo-Nazis. Now to be honest, the company’s association with these reprehensible groups isn’t entirely unearned. CEO John Schnatter’s foray into politics aligned with the right, has led some rather nasty groups to believe he is aligned with them. Schnatter’s outspoken opposition to the ACA, and later jumping in on the wrong side of the NFL Player protest controversy certainly didn’t earn his company, or personal image and friends.

Membership with the far-right extremists isn’t based on necessarily supporting their odious beliefs, it is often based simply on the idea that a certain person or group is “sticking it to the liberals”.

That has resulted in a 13% drop in stock price.

Now I have no idea of Mr. Schnatter’s beliefs. I would reject calling him a racist on the positions he has taken, however his company is being hammered by “guilt by association” even though there is little to no evidence that the company in any way attempted to support or to encourage that association. Mr. Schnatter certainly is a Republican. and demonstratively supports some of the right’s “politics of race”. That is a pretty broad range of folks, and groups which have vastly different views and agendas.

Yeah, John Schnatter -it’s unfair. But you really should have seen the sharks in that cesspool before you stuck your foot in. Politics always leads to “association”, quite often with fringe groups seeking validation, or some folks making bad assumptions. Which is why smart companies are very careful about what their brand gets attached to.

What happens when Nazis hijack your brand

The neo-Nazis were hungry. They’d spent the day in a Charlottesville courthouse testifying at the preliminary hearing of a white nationalist jailed for pepper spraying counter protesters during August’s deadly Unite the Right rally. Now, after the long drive home to Alexandria, Va., they craved pizza.

“We were going to order from the local place where we get pizza all the time, but we said no, Papa John’s is the official pizza of the alt-right now,” said Eli Mosley, the 26-year-old leader of the white separatist group Identity Evropa. “We’re just supporting the brands that support us.”

That show of support — unsolicited and unwanted by Papa John’s which Tuesday posted a tweet explicitly rejecting neo-Nazi ideas — exhibits an emerging danger to major American brands negotiating the racial politics that have cleaved the country.

It is no longer enough for companies to keep a low profile when it comes to polarizing issues involving race, brand experts say. Instead, some companiesare preemptively stating their positions, hoping to avoid being hijacked by white supremacists eager to spread their ideas into the mainstream by tying themselves to household brands, from pizzas and burgers to sneakers and cars.

“Companies need to take a public stand on issues that are affecting consumers in advance of being co-opted,” said Heide Gardner, chief diversity and inclusion officer at IPG, one of the world’s largest advertising and marketing conglomerates. “Brands need to build a certain level of sophistication around racial issues. They need to be really mindful of how charged the environment is and take pains to look at situations through a diversity lens.”

Papa John’s learned this lesson the hard way after the chain, a major NFL sponsor, found itself in the unwelcome embrace of neo-Nazi groups following a Nov. 1 call with investors that blamed disappointing pizza sales on football players’ protests against racism and police brutality.

Following the call, a neo-Nazi website hailed Papa John’s as “Seig Heil Pizza” with a photo of a pie whose pepperonis had been arranged into a swastika.

It didn’t matter that the company immediately condemned racism and all hate groups in a statement saying, “We do not want these individuals or groups to buy our pizza.”

“They can signal all they want but we know,” said Mosley, praising the chief executive’s statements.

The neo-Nazis’ campaign to co-opt brands has forced companies into a familiar pattern: corporate statements disavowing white supremacy, typically followed by silence, in hopes the controversy would blow over without long-lasting damage to their image and sales.

But that approach did not work for Papa John’s, whose stock had fallen by 13 percent since the earnings call by close of business Tuesday.

That night, in a renewed attempt to disown the neo-Nazis that have attached themselves to the brand, Papa John’s tweeted an emoji of a middle finger to “those guys.” The company also apologized for CEO John Schnatter’s “divisive” comments on the earnings call and affirmed its support for NFL players protesting inequality.

“We will work with the players and league to find a positive way forward,” the company tweeted. “Open to ideas from all. Except neo-Nazis.”

A spokesman told the Post Wednesday that they wanted to be “crystal clear” about where the company stood with regard to white supremacist groups.

Other companies should take heed of Papa John’s experience, experts say. As the marketplace becomes the latest battleground for the culture wars, brand strategists are advising companies accustomed to staying out of the political fray to proactively weigh in with bold statements about race — such as Nikeand Ben & Jerry’s have done — to thwart future attempts by hate groups to adopt brands as their own.

More brands, now on edge, are also building up their crisis management teams in preparation for the next racial flare up, said Tiffany Warren, chief diversity officer at Omnicom Group, a global marketing and corporate communications holding company.

“That’s the new reality,” Warren said. “It’s not just nice to have. It’s the way of doing business now.”

Some companies were just bystanders when they were swept up in the racially charged atmosphere.

Tiki Brand, owned by Wisconsin-based Lamplight Farms Incorporated, was simply minding its business as a purveyor of Polynesian kitsch, when its bamboo torches were used by white nationalist protesters in Charlottesville.

Images of angry young white men parading through the University of Virginia campus holding the flaming torches aloft turned the product once evocative of backyard barbecues and luaus into a symbol of white supremacy.

The company declined to comment on whether it has felt any financial impact from its tarnished image.

Other companies caught the admiration of neo-Nazis after their executives voiced support for President Trump or his policies.

Pottsville, Pa.’s Yuengling, touted as “America’s oldest brewery,” became the favored beer of white nationalists after the company’s owner backed Trump in the final days of the campaign.

Andrew Anglin, founder of the Daily Stormer website, declared New Balance the “official shoes of white people” after an executive of the Boston shoe company praised Trump’s stance on trade soon after he was elected. Liberals tweeted pictures of themselves trashing or burning their New Balance sneakers.

Still other firms attracted the attention of white nationalists through branding mistakes of their own. Anglin proclaimed Wendy’s the “official burger of the neo-Nazi alt-right movement” after the fast food restaurant mistakenly tweeted a picture of Pepe the Frog, the white nationalist symbol, in the same red pigtails as the Wendy’s girl mascot.

And white supremacists celebrated when a casting call for a Cadillac commercial sought “any and all real alt-right thinkers/believers.” Cadillac said at the time it did not authorize the casting notice, but Anglin had already pounced, writing in a post titled “Yes, We are Mainstream Now” that “it was natural for a major American corporation to want someone from our movement.”…

 

Putin’s Congressman and Flynn Meeting

I think I discussed a while ago that this whole thing of collusion with Russia goes a lot deeper than just the Chump and his merry band of misanthropes and traitors,

A bunch of Republicans in Congress received Russian help in their elections in exchange for…We don’t know what yet.

Putin’s favorite Bi&)*h in Congress is Republican Dana Rohrabacher, to takes orders directly from the Kremlin.

If he and Flynn were meeting during the election it opens up another path of communications between the Russians and the Chumph campaign.

Looks like lots more Republicans are going to be resigning…and/or going to jail.

I would not be surprised to learn of Flynn Indictments tomorrow.

The Washington Post reported in May that House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, also a California Republican, was secretly recorded telling other party members, in what seemed to be a joke, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump.”

In September, the Wall Street Journal reported that Rohrabacher offered Trump a deal that to protect Julian Assange, creator of WikiLeaks, which released emails damaging to Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election, from legal peril. In return for not prosecuting him for his group’s 2010 leak of State Department emails, Assange would allegedly provide proof that Russia was not the source of the hacked Democratic emails. The intelligence community has pointed to Russia as the secret provider of the email trove to WikiLeaks.

Michael Flynn meeting with pro-Russia Rep. Dana Rohrabacher in 2016 probed by Mueller

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of investigators is looking into a pre-election meeting that took place in 2016 between then-Trump campaign adviser Michael Flynn and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), who has often been described as “Putin’s favorite congressman.”

NBC News is reporting that “the meeting allegedly took place in Washington the evening of September 20” last year and “was arranged by his lobbying firm, the Flynn Intel Group.”

NBC News’ report does not have any information about the nature of the meeting, although it says that it is reviewing emails sent from Flynn’s firm to Rohrabacher’s staff thanking them for arranging the meeting.

Putin’s Congressman – Rorenbacher

Rohrabacher, a California Republican who has become notorious for his efforts to advance Russian interests as a member of the United States Congress, recently had his travel privileges restricted over fears that he has been compromised by Russian intelligence officials.

The Daily Beast reported earlier this year that Rohrabacher was given instructions by Russian intelligence officials on how to alter sanctions legislation and to set up “a virtual show trial on Capitol Hill” last June, right at around the time that Donald Trump Jr. and key members of the Trump campaign met with Russian nationals who claimed to be representatives of the Russian government’s efforts to undermine the candidacy of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.

Rohrabacher’s original plan was to have a show trial in Congress of anti-Putin campaigner Bill Browder in which he would “confront Browder with a feature-length pro-Kremlin propaganda movie that viciously attacks him—as well as at least two witnesses linked to the Russian authorities, including lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.”

 

 

Rick Perry – “Fossil Fuels Prevent Rape”

The Chumph’s Energy Secretary is as dumb as a rcok…

 

Even worse – this new found desire to prevent sexual assaults is rather questionable…

 

Fishy Deal in Puerto Rico Where Two Man Firm Wins $300 Million Contract

It appears corruption  and nepotism is still alive in Puerto Rico. A tiny firm with connections to a Chumph Cabinet member gets a massive contract…

Small Montana firm lands Puerto Rico’s biggest contract to get the power back on

For the sprawling effort to restore Puerto Rico’s crippled electrical grid, the territory’s state-owned utility has turned to a two-year-old company from Montana that had just two full-time employees on the day Hurricane Maria made landfall.

The company, Whitefish Energy, said last week that it had signed a $300 million contract with the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority to repair and reconstruct large portions of the island’s electrical infrastructure. The contract is the biggest yet issued in the troubled relief effort.

Whitefish said Monday that it has 280 workers in the territory, using linemen from across the country, most of them as subcontractors, and that the number grows on average from 10 to 20 people a day. It said it was close to completing infrastructure work that will energize some of the key industrial facilities that are critical to restarting the local economy.

The power authority, also known as PREPA, opted to hire Whitefish rather than activate the “mutual aid” arrangements it has with other utilities. For many years, such agreements have helped U.S. utilities — including those in Florida and Texas recently — to recover quickly after natural disasters.

The unusual decision to instead hire a tiny for-profit company is drawing scrutiny from Congress and comes amid concerns about bankrupt Puerto Rico’s spending as it seeks to provide relief to its 3.4 million residents, the great majority of whom remain without power a month after the storm.

“The fact that there are so many utilities with experience in this and a huge track record of helping each other out, it is at least odd why [the utility] would go to Whitefish,” said Susan F. Tierney, a former senior official at the Energy Department and state regulatory agencies. “I’m scratching my head wondering how it all adds up.”

PREPA’s executive director, Ricardo Ramos, and a spokesman did not respond to emails asking why the utility didn’t activate the mutual-aid network. On a tour of the idled Palo Seco power plant, Ramos told reporters that Whitefish was the first company “available to arrive and they were the ones that first accepted terms and conditions for PREPA.”

Ramos said that the utility is “completely content” with the work Whitefish is doing. “The doubts that have been raised about Whitefish, from my point of view, are completely unfounded,” he added, saying that concerns about Whitefish were probably spread by jealous competitors.

Whitefish officials have said that the company’s expertise in mountainous areas makes it well suited for the work and that it jumped at the chance when other firms were hesitating over concerns about payment. The company acknowledges it had only two full-time employees when Maria struck but says its business model calls for ramping up rapidly by hiring workers on short-term contracts.

Spokesman Chris Chiames dismissed criticism about the company’s qualifications. “We are taking personal risks and business risks working in perilous physical and financial conditions,” Chiames said. “So the carping by others is unfounded, and we stand by our work and our commitment to the people of Puerto Rico.”

 

Al Franken Rips Jefferson Davis Sessions a New One

Ouch!

 

Kaepernick Files Legal Grievance Against NFL

About time…There is now ample evidence of this happening.

I also expect the filing of a grievance by the NFL Players Union against the league.

 

 

Women of Color Tell White Sisters – “What took you so long on Twitter!”

The feminist movement has a color line as well…

Rose McGowan

Leslie Jones

WOMEN OF COLOR HAVE BEEN COMPLAINING ABOUT TWITTER LONG BEFORE WHITE WOMEN

Thousands of women across Twitter boycotted the platform in solidarity with actress Rose McGowan on Friday, leaving many women of color with a troubling question: What took so long?

#WomenBoycottTwitter began trending Thursday night, when Twitter temporarily suspended McGowan’s account amid a string of tweets from the actress speaking out against her alleged rapist, Harvey Weinstein, and actor Ben Affleck, whom she told to “fuck off.” McGowan and other women argued the platform had been silencing a survivor of alleged sexual assault — so on Friday, women said they would abstain from Twitter.

But others, mostly women of color, asked where those women had been when Jemele Hill was suspended from ESPN for her tweets about President Donald Trump, or when alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos sicced his internet trolls on Leslie Jones.

“Calling white women allies to recognize conflict of #WomenBoycottTwitter for women of color who haven’t received support on similar issues,” director Ava DuVernay tweeted Thursday night.

“What happened with Rose McGowan being suspended was wrong,” writer and sociologist Eve Ewing added. “Unequivocally wrong. But if that’s what activated your awareness, I don’t especially trust you.”

 Follow

Ava DuVernay 

✔@ava

Calling white women allies to recognize conflict of #WomenBoycottTwitter for women of color who haven’t received support on similar issues.

2:00 AM – Oct 13, 2017

Some women of color on the platform took advantage of an alternative to #WomenBoycottTwitter, using the hashtag #AmplifyWomen to uplift women and give their stories of sexual assault and trauma broader reach.

“As a queer WoC and a survivor of sexual assault, you’re not gonna shut me up,” wrote one Twitter user who used the hashtag. “You’re not gonna shut any of us up.”

Twitter did eventually restore McGowan’s account midday Thursday. The company claimed that it is “proud to empower and support the voices on our platform, especially those that speak truth to power.”

In the meantime, Twitter remains under fire for not suspending the account of President Donald Trump amid charges that he has violated the social media’s rules with his demeaning and insulting tweets.

Most recently, the president retweeted a GIF of him firing a golf ball at former rival Hillary Clinton, which some said advocated violence, a Twitter no-no.

 

Russian Owned Fake BLM Lawn Jockeys Outed

The Russians also targeted black folks in their collusion to elect Trump.

It appears that the Russians had a better handle on utilizing social media than eve Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

 

How Russia recruited wannabe YouTube stars to convince Black Lives Matter activists to vote for Trump

Two purported Black Lives Matter supporters who endorsed President Donald Trump have been outed as propagandists employed by the Kremlin.

The Daily Beast reports that two wannabe social media stars, who go by the names of Williams and Kalvin Johnson, have recently seen their Facebook and Twitter accounts suspended because they were found to have been part of a Russian propaganda operation to boost support for Trump’s candidacy among black Americans.

In their videos, the two men regularly attack former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton as an “old racist b*tch,” while praising Trump for being a pragmatic businessman who couldn’t have succeeded if he’d actually been a racist.

“We, the black people, we stand in one unity,” one of the men said in a video that posted last November. “We stand in one to say that Hillary Clinton is not our candidate.”

The video also claimed that Clinton “is going to stand for the Muslim,” and claimed that this was a reason that black Americans should not support her.

In the video endorsing Trump, one of the men defended accusations that Trump was racist by claiming that “any businessman cannot be a racist because when you are a racist, then your business is going down.” The man then made a “black power” fist and told his viewers to back Trump.

In other videos, Williams and Kalvin highlight cases of police brutality and profess support for the Black Lives Matter movement in an apparent attempt to bolster their credibility among black activists who would otherwise be skeptical of their Trump endorsement.

While the duo’s reach on YouTube is very limited, they apparently had a solid following on Facebook, where their page had 48,000 fans.

 

Yet Another Chumph Racist Lie About Puerto Rico

The racist POS Chumph opens his mouth again to lie…

Trump complains Puerto Ricans won’t aid relief: ‘Their drivers have to start driving trucks’

…Trump called out truckers in Puerto Rico as not helpful enough, which may have been based on false reports from right-wing blogs that the island’s Teamsters union had gone on strike.

“We need their truck drivers, their drivers have to start driving trucks,” Trump said. “We have to do that, so at a local level they have to give us more help. I will tell you the first responders, the military, FEMA, they have done an incredible job in Puerto Rico, and whether it’s (the San Juan mayor) or anybody else, they’re all starting to say it. I appreciate very much the governor and his comments. He has said we have done an incredible job and that’s the truth.”

U.S. Air Force Col. Michael Valle said “zero blame” should be placed on truckers, many of whom are unable to get to work due to storm damage or are unable to get fuel for their vehicles….

The real problem?

Puerto Rico, short on fuel, cannot deliver food and medicine to the victims of Hurricane Maria

…Then there’s the issue of sustaining operations at Crowley’s port. Powering generators — including for a large amount of refrigerated containers, which contain perishable food and medicine — requires 2,500 gallons of diesel per day. There’s also a lack of fuel for trucks to deliver these supplies to the 3.4 million Americans across the island.

“It makes me sad and frustrated,” said Jose Pache Ayala, vice president of Crowley Puerto Rico Services. “Just to see that we have here all these goods, and that people out there are just begging, anxious, in the need of such important supplies and they are all sitting here in this yard.”

One of the biggest supermarket chains on the island, Supermercados Econo, has 104 containers in the Crowley yard and is only slowly moving them out. Major food distributor V Suarez has 114 containers. Wal-Mart has 70 containers stuck at the terminal for lack of trucks, drivers and fuel to move them out.

There are 226 supermarkets ready to open across the island, but they can’t open their doors until they have the diesel to fuel generators to power the buildings, according to the head of the food and beverage association.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has stepped in to help alleviate the fuel distribution disruption. On Wednesday afternoon, more than a dozen fuel trucks departed Crowley’s terminal in San Juan.

The Department of Defense has also stepped in to support FEMA’s efforts to stabilize the situation…

And just today –

Joy and relief greet Puerto Rico fuel deliveries after hurricane

…Two weeks after Hurricane Maria plowed into the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, cutting power and hobbling fuel distribution, finding gasoline and diesel has become a regular ordeal for the island’s 3.4 million residents, with no guarantee of success.

Rodriguez, a 63-year-old retiree with a bright shock of white hair and beard, was one of the lucky few on Monday. He managed to purchase enough gasoline for both his car and his generator at home, where he cares for his 93-year-old father.

Fuel scarcity has been one of the major headaches facing hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, which relies on gas shipped from the U.S. mainland.

Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello on Monday reported progress in getting fuel supplies to the island, with 500,000 barrels of diesel and close to 1 million barrels of gasoline due to arrive in upcoming days.

More than 720 of the island’s 1,100 gas stations were now up and running, Rossello added, which he said should allow more Puerto Ricans to operate generators and get around.

Puma Energy, which is partially owned by commodities trading giant Trafigura, operates six terminals on the Caribbean island, and is working with the regional government to add more delivery trucks to its fleet….

Why it took so long to get fuel to Puerto Rico –

Why Puerto Rico is being denied shipping deliveries of fuel

…Some members of Congress want the Trump administration to suspend shipping restrictions that would allow more fuel and emergency supplies to reach Puerto Rico.

The Jones Act prohibits foreign-flagged vessels from picking up and delivering fuel between U.S. ports. That act was suspended from Sept. 8 through Sept. 22 to allow shipments to Texas and Florida after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Puerto Rico was included under that waiver for petroleum products.

Since that suspension ended Sept. 22, the Trump administration hasn’t issued a new one for Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria struck. That hurricane wiped out the power supply, destroyed cell towers and led to massive fuel shortages on the island that relies on diesel for much of its power.

President Trump, who plans to visit Puerto Rico on Tuesday, said the administration is studying the waiver request, but that shipping interests are opposed.

“Well, we’re thinking about that, but we have a lot of shippers and a lot of people that work in the shipping industry that don’t want the Jones Act lifted, and we have a lot of ships out there right now,” Trump said. “And I will tell you the governor was very generous yesterday with some statements and so was the mayor of San Juan; very, very generous with their statements.”…

 

At Least 50 Dead to the NRA Altar

If you do a search of the Internet it really isn’t that hard to find parts to make an automatic weapon. Indeed, the only thing that prevents more people from owning them legally is a tangles and expensive net of Federal Regulations. Once again the guns everywhere for everyone crowd gets their desired result.

This mass murderer appeared, at least from the sound of the rounds to have had a modified AK-47 type weapon.

The victims this time were Country Music fans, a group that stereotypically would be considered pro-gun. Although any American should consider the slaughter of innocent people, doing nothing worse that partying and listening to some music – morally repugnant at any level.

Two things interesting about this – One, the Chumph is flying in tomorrow, something he didn’t do for Puerto Rico – because statistically the victims of this horrific act will be almost all white.

Second, the MSM is already “whitewashing” the killer. “He never did anything wrong.” “He never showed any indication of being troubled.” “He was your average guy” “His girlfriend and brother never suspected a thing.”

Yeah – “It  was a total and complete surprise”…If you ignore the fact that guys just like him commit mass murders with guns, every few months in this country.

And “Concealed carry”? You fucking Glockity-Glock is useless against a guy with a high powered machine gun better than 150 yards away. It is why all out soldiers carry rifles, instead of cap guns. Might as well hang a sign on your chest -“I’m too fucking stupid to shoot.”

How much you want to bet, Republican’ts in Congress don’t do a damn thing about gun laws?

And yeah, I am pro-gun…Just not pro-insanity.

 

NCAA Basketball Rocked With Arrests of Coaches

Wow! This one included back door payments of $100 k or more to the athlete’s family…

And several hours ago – apparently took down one of the top coaches in the country, Rick Pitino of Louisville.