News You Can Use

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Births in Japan Fall to Record Low in 2016 - Bloomberg

The number of babies born in Japan fell below 1 million in 2016 for the first time since records began in the 19th century, underscoring the demographic challenges facing the nation with an aging and declining population.

There were 976,979 babies born last year in Japan, the fewest since the government started tracking the data in 1899, according to labor ministry data released on Friday.

The declining birth rate and aging population combine to reduce the nation’s possible labor force and pushes up welfare costs. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration is aiming to lift the birth rate per woman to 1.8 in a bid to ease the shrinking population, from the 2016 level of 1.44.

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News from The Associated Press

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) -- Hungary's prime minister said Friday that harsh criticism by billionaire George Soros is a "declaration of war." Soros has accused Prime Minister Viktor Orban of running a corrupt "mafia state."

Orban alleged that the Hungarian-American investor was paying "agent-like networks" of non-governmental organizations to enforce his policies, including the promotion of migration, in Europe and Hungary.

"This is a declaration of war," Orban said on state radio. "We are facing a financial speculator who has made a lot of money while ... plunging many into poverty."

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Not So Great: 94,983,000 Americans Not in the Labor Force in May

(CNSNews.com) – A disappointing report from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday: The economy added 138,000 jobs in May, fewer than analysts were expecting; and after setting three straight monthly records, the number of unemployed Americans dropped by 233,000 to 152,923,000.

The unemployment rate ticked down a tenth of a point to 4.3 percent, near historic lows.

But the number of Americans not in the labor force – meaning they are neither working nor looking for work – increased by 608,000 to 94,983,000 in May, close to the record high of 95,102,000 in December 2016.  The not-in-the-labor-force number includes retirees, students, homemakers, the disabled, and others who have stopped looking for work for whatever reason.

[mes5464]

Why did we integrate in the first place!

Colleges Celebrate Diversity With Separate ‘Commencements’ - The New York Times

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Looking out over a sea of people in Harvard Yard last week, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive and one of Harvard’s most famous dropouts, told this year’s graduating class that it was living in an unstable time, when the defining struggle was “against the forces of authoritarianism, isolationism and nationalism.”

Two days earlier, another end-of-year ceremony had taken place, just a short walk away on a field outside the law school library. It was Harvard’s first commencement for black graduate students, and many of the speakers talked about a different, more personal kind of struggle, the struggle to be black at Harvard.

“We have endured the constant questioning of our legitimacy and our capacity, and yet here we are,” Duwain Pinder, a master’s degree candidate in business and public policy, told the cheering crowd of several hundred people in a keynote speech.

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Parents horrified after man performs drag show at NYC school - NY Daily News

Kiddie choirs. Children’s piano recitals. And a full-on, erotic drag show complete with gyrations, tongue gymnastics and a flashed G-string.

Families at a Manhattan public school talent show got an unexpected lesson in human sexuality when a grown man took the stage in a black, sequined dress and flaming red wig and performed a raunchy drag number where he grinded the stage and spread his legs.

The official public school Learning Expo held May 25 in an auditorium at the Museo del Barrio was billed as a talent show for students from across Manhattan’s District 4 to show off what they learned in school.

But at the end of the two-hour event, parents and kids as young as 5 were shocked when a man identified as Public School 96 Parent Association President Frankie Quinones took the stage and did an explicit lip-synch performance of a song by the campy 1980’s Puerto Rican music sensation Iris Chacón.

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Jobs and career opportunities are narrowing in the retail sector | The Kansas City Star

Consider this before you assume you can have a long or lucrative career in the retail industry:

Up to half of all current jobs in the retail sector are likely to vanish because of e-commerce, automation of jobs and the closing of brick-and-mortar stores.

Millions of retail jobs — as we now know them — are going the way of gas station attendants. Just as ATMs replaced many bank tellers, automated check-out stations are supplanting retail clerks.

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When the Left Turns on Its Own - The New York Times

Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.

This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.

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When the Left Turns on Its Own - The New York Times

Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.

This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.

[Joel]

fake tears :))

[mes5464]

Miami-Dade police want blanket surveillance from the air | Miami Herald

Miami-Dade police may deploy sophisticated aerial surveillance capable of photographing everyone outside for 32 square miles in an effort to track vehicles and individuals involved in crimes.

The proposal, first reported by the Miami New Times, would send a surveillance plane high above high-crime neighborhoods to film everything below, according to Lt. Juan Villalba Jr. Already used in Baltimore, the technology lets police pull footage after a crime occurs and try to recreate where the perpetrators came from on their way to the scene and where they fled to afterward.

“It’s kind of like a DVR,” Villalba said, referring to playing back television shows hours after they air. “This will allow us to go back and look at what happened.”

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News from The Associated Press

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A former top spy agency official who was the target of a government leak investigation says the National Security Agency conducted blanket surveillance in Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah, according to court documents.

Ex-NSA official Thomas Drake wrote in a declaration released Friday that the NSA collected and stored virtually all electronic communications going into or out of the Salt Lake City area, including the contents of emails and text messages.

"Officials in the NSA and FBI viewed the Salt Lake Olympics Field Op as a golden opportunity to bring together resources from both agencies to experiment with and fine tune a new scale of mass surveillance," Drake wrote.

[Joel]

InfoWars Editor Confesses To Eating The Pages Out of Books





In a revealing interview with Mitchell Sunderland over at Broadly, InfoWars Editor at Large Paul Joseph Watson confessed that he has long struggled with a “PICA eating disorder,” meaning he eats the pages out of books.

A quick Bing search revealed that Watson is referring to a condition known as Xylophagia, an eating disorder which gives patients an appetite for “substances like paper, pencils, tree barks or other items made of wood,” according to the National Library of Medicine.

Watson said in an interview regarding the diets of InfoWars‘ staff that his “eating habits are not normal.”

“I literally eat books,” Watson said. “Pages of older books especially. I have managed to curb it in recent years, but it’s still a thing.”

Watson added that there still exists no real treatment for the disorder, but assured that the consumption of pages torn from books is not harmful to the health.

“Still, at least I can safely say I’m consuming knowledge,” he concluded, adding a “:-D” smiley face.

Now, a caveat that the good folks at InfoWars have been known to spread misinformation in an attempt to stoke media coverage, so it’s maybe worth taking Watson’s claims with a grain of bark.

But InfoWars actually sells some sort of vial of liquid on its web-store called “Z-Shield”, described as “game-changing toxic metal and chemical defense support formula,” so it wouldn’t be entirely surprising to find out its Editor at Large eats old books.

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[Sunain]

I had a very hard time watching that video. :ymsick:
We've already reached the stage where people can order the gender of their child. How does that affect the Plan of Salvation? If we manipulate gender to the degree shown in this video, marriage, pre-mortal existance and forordination are meaningless because the parameters of current mortal existance have overriden it. Parents can now significantly alter the life and even destiny of their children. We can't be that far off now otherwise the Plan of Salvation will be stiffled unless God took into account Gene manipulation as part of pre-mortal gender assignment but the Family Proclaimation seems to indicate that's not the case.

Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose

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Students Get Harvard Offer Rescinded Over Facebook Posts | NBC Chicago

Harvard College has rescinded admissions offers to at least 10 prospective students after they posted offensive photos and messages on social media.

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A Hardware Update for the Human Brain - WSJ

From Silicon Valley startups to the U.S. Department of Defense, scientists and engineers are hard at work on a brain-computer interface that could turn us into programmable, debuggable machines

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California's would-be governor prepares for battle against job-killing robots | US news | The Guardian

The graduating computer science students at UC Berkeley had just finished chuckling at a joke about fleets of “Google buses, Facebook shuttles and Uber-copters” lining up to whisk them them to elite jobs in Silicon Valley. The commencement ceremony for a cohort of students who, one professor confided, were worth around $25bn, was a feel-good affair.

Until, that is, Gavin Newsom took to the lectern and burst the bubble.

The smooth-talking Democrat, and frontrunner to win California’s gubernatorial race next year, warned the students that the “plumbing of the world is radically changing”. The tech industry that would make them rich, Newsom declared, was also rendering millions of other people’s jobs obsolete and fueling enormous disparities in wealth. “Your job is to exercise your moral authority,” he said. “It is to do the kinds of things in life that can’t be downloaded.”

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New record: America arms itself, 'necessary steps to defend selves'

The spurt in terror attacks, including the recent two in England, are pushing gun sales into record territory just months after predictions that the election of a pro-gun president would end the rush.

The FBI just reported that the number of gun sales background checks for May was the highest ever for that month, 1,942,677, a trend that will make 2017 the first or second highest year for gun sales.

The continued growth of gun sales is in stark contrast to some in the media and industry who feared that the election of President Trump would snuff out sales that in 2016 were driven in part by concerns Hillary Clinton would win and implement strict gun control and an assault weapons ban.

But 2017's high sales numbers has show that there is more than politics involved when people consider buying a weapon, especially in the new era of street terrorism like that seen in London and Manchester recently.

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Surveillance in the Obama Era - WSJ

How far did the Obama Administration go in collecting intelligence on Americans, including members of the political opposition? This question has aroused little curiosity in much of the press corps or among Democratic politicians like Rep. Adam Schiff, who used to at least pretend they were concerned about government monitoring of telephone networks. But for citizens who still care about such potential threats to liberty, there was interesting news on Friday.

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US firm to try 'reawakening the dead' in Latin America | Daily Mail Online

A US firm called Bioquark plans to test stem cell theory on brain dead patients
The method, which hasn't been tested on animals, will be tested in Latin America
The team outlined a trial proposal last year to do in India, but were shut down

[Joel]

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Why would any white male go to college. They get treated like dirt there.

The proportion of men on college campuses is dropping

John Maxwell is curious about the world and freely shares, in casual conversation, tidbits of English history. Yet he says he’ll never again set foot in a college classroom.

“I consider myself mostly self-taught and I just believe I should cut my own path in life,” said the 24-year-old Maxwell, who dropped out of Littleton’s Araphoe Community College after one semester.

Maxwell said he didn’t want to waste his parents’ money on college work that held little or no interest to him.

“I just wanted to see what I wanted to do with my life and college was never a part of that,” said Maxwell, currently an employee at a Parker liquor store. “It might cost me financially down the road, but I never really saw myself as getting rich anyway. So I don’t see it as much of a loss.”

[lundbaek]

From www.worldaffairsbrief.com

....At the constitutionalist John Birch Society, which publishes this magazine and for six decades has been working to "Get U.S. Out Of the United Nations," the decision was also met with celebration. "It was the right thing to do," said CEO Art Thompson, who leads the organization with chapters in all 50 states. "Rarely does the media talk about the loss of sovereignty or the fact that such agreements are based on false science. Even with all of this, the worse part of it all is how it was done - a treaty done by the president while not involving the Senate or Congress in any way. That's unconstitutional, and if for no other reason meant that we needed to withdraw. It set a very dangerous precedent." Popular analyst and commentator Joel Skousen with World Affairs Brief, meanwhile, cheered the move, but also offered some words of caution. Members of the establishment, he said, "are throwing a tantrum because Trump won't go along with the Big Lie about global warming, and pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord." However, Trump's leaving the door open to a "better" deal is a bad sign. "Unfortunately, by being willing to re-enter talks, he's made a major capitulation to the climate change claim that carbon [dioxide] is a pollutant, which is totally false," Skousen warned, highlighting concerns expressed by more than a few experts. "Trump, having ceded the crucial argument is now only trying to lessen the damage to America's energy needs." — The New American

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You know what this means? As long as I can eat without working then I will accept food stamps. If I have to work to get food stamps, I might as well get a better paying job and stop taking the food stamps. In other words, I could have found and kept a good enough job all along.

13 Alabama counties saw 85 percent drop in food stamp participation after work requirements restarted | AL.com

Thirteen previously exempted Alabama counties saw an 85 percent drop in food stamp participation after work requirements were put in place on Jan. 1, according to the Alabama Department of Human Resources.

The counties - Greene, Hale, Perry, Dallas, Lowndes, Wilcox, Monroe, Conecuh, Clarke, Washington, Choctaw, Sumter and Barbour - had been exempt from a change that limited able-bodied adults without dependents to three months of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits within a three-year time frame unless they were working or participating in an approved training program.

During the economic downturn of 2011-2013, several states - including Alabama - waived the SNAP work requirements in response to high unemployment. It was reinstituted for 54 counties on Jan. 1, 2016 and for the remaining 13 on Jan. 1, 2017. As of April 2017, the highest jobless rate among the 13 previously excluded counties was in Wilcox County, which reported a state-high unemployment rate of 11.7 percent, down more than 11 percentage points from the county's jobless rate for the same month of 2011.

[mes5464]

You mismanaged and now you want the whole state to pay for it!

Hartford’s Finances Spotlight Property-Tax Quandary - WSJ

“My goal and my hope is that legislators from around the state of Connecticut will recognize that Hartford cannot responsibly solve a crisis of this magnitude at the local level alone,” he said.

Around the U.S. the main source of funding generated by municipalities is property-tax revenue, contributing 47% of the money raised by local governments, according to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.