THAT's LIFE...

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Elizabeth
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Re: THAT's LIFE...

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"The junk food industry is trying to make more money with less spent on quality. And that’s why you may notice that many companies are adding ground up and/or boiled beetle carcasses into their fruit juices, candy, ice creams, and more. These beetle carcasses contribute to the reds, purples, and pinks found in many junk food items.
Now you won’t find “beetle carcasses” under any of the ingredients lists. However, you may find “carminic acid” or “cochineal extract”. These terms sound scientific, but they actually describe the bugs that the junk food industry is adding to our food.
THE LARGEST EXPORTER OF COCHINEAL EXTRACT IS PERU, HAVING PRODUCED MORE THAN ONE MILLION POUNDS OF DEAD BEETLES IN 2013. INTERESTING THAT A COUNTRY THAT HAS SUCH A LARGE BUG INFESTATION FINDS A READY MARKET FOR THEM
The Food and Drug Administration has deemed these bugs as “safe” to add to the junk food industry’s products. However, once consumers realize what the industry is doing, they’ll think twice about purchasing these “snack foods” again.”
http://freedomhealthnews.com/featured/w ... ack-foods/
.

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Joel
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Jim Bakker Says Those Who Mock Him Will Answer To God

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The Raid on Harpers Ferry

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Elizabeth
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Re: THAT's LIFE...

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https://constitution.com/pediatrician-d ... -children/

"Renowned pediatrician, Dr. Michelle Cretella explains that allowing, or forcing, children to move through transgender reassignment is child abuse and is akin to forcibly sterilizing a generation of kids.
“Chemical castration is what you’re doing when you put any biologically normal child on puberty blockers. It’s treating puberty like a disease, arresting a normal process which is critical to normal development and bad for kids.
Sterilisation: not good for kids. Prepping them for what will likely result in a case in girls a double mastectomy at 16 — not how you treat depression or anxiety and I have plenty of experience treating teenagers with depression, anxiety, even suicidal depression. Indoctrinating pre-school kids with the lie that you can be trapped in the wrong body, again, that’s disrupting their normal reality testing and cognitive development. Those things are abusive.
As to the studies, there are two that I am aware of that claim affirming your child’s gender confusion is good for them. Number one, it assumes that coaching a child into a fixed-false belief is mentally healthy. Science doesn’t allow you to assume your conclusion. Number two, those studies are extremely small. Number three, those studies are very short term. And number four, the control group of “mentally healthy children” are the siblings, most of them are siblings of the trans-identifying child. Oh, and there’s a number five, the parents were the ones evaluating the mental health of the children.
This is not science…I don’t think you need to have an M.D. or a Ph.D to know that’s not science — that’s ideology masquerading as science.”

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Joel
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Sperm-damaging Lead Found in Alex Jones Infowars Dietary Supplements

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Sperm-damaging Lead Found in Alex Jones Infowars Dietary Supplements


National health watchdog launches legal action against Alex Jones’ Infowars LLC to eliminate the toxic threat from products aimed at healthy lifestyle consumers

Oakland, CA—Independent testing commissioned by national health watchdog the Center for Environmental Health (CEH) found high levels of lead in two Alex Jones Infowars products. Tests found that two supplements sold on Alex Jones’ Infowars store contained significant levels of lead well in excess of California Proposition 65 limits. Lead is a dangerous chemical well known to have devastating developmental impacts on children. Crucial, but less well-known are its effects on men, including sperm damage, heart disease, and high blood pressure. One of the Alex Jones products tested had more than six times the daily limit under Proposition 65.

Yesterday, CEH initiated legal action under California’s Proposition 65 against Infowars LLC and its affiliate Free Speech Systems LLC, for failing to warn consumers about the high levels of lead in their products and urging the company to recall products already sold. “It is not only ironic, but tragic, when we find lead in dietary supplements, since consumers are ingesting the toxic chemical with every sip and swallow,” said CEH Executive Director Michael Green. “These products are supposed to enhance human health and performance, not lead to increased risk of heart attacks and sperm damage.”

The chemical was found in the Infowars Caveman Paleo Formula and the Info Wars Myco-ZX supplements. People who take the daily recommended dose of the Formula product would ingest more than twice the daily limit for lead under California law. People who take the Myco-ZX product would ingest more than six times the daily limit for lead under California law. The products were purchased online at the infowarsshop.com website.

Scientists are increasingly concerned that there is no safe level of lead exposure. According to U.S. EPA, lead exposure causes sperm damage and reduced sperm production in men as well as high blood pressure, heart disease, cancer, and delayed puberty in both men and women.

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Joel
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Gay/Jewish Neo-Nazi Comes Out

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Exclusive: Neo-Nazi and National Front organiser quits movement, opens up about Jewish heritage, comes out as gay

A white supremacist active as recently as the start of this year says today he is publicly renouncing 40 years of hate. Speaking on Channel 4 News he comes out as gay for the first time – and admits to a violent past.

After a lifetime of involvement with the far-right Kevin Wilshaw announces on Channel 4 News that he is leaving the movement – at the same time publicly coming out as gay.

The well known National Front organiser in the 1980s was still active in white supremacist groups earlier this year – including speaking at events.

But tonight on Channel 4 News he explains for the very first time why he is publicly disavowing the movement – sharing his secrets, explaining how he was both a Neo-Nazi and of Jewish heritage , while admitting to violent acts and what motivated his hatred.

Jewish heritage

Kevin Wilshaw also opens up about his Jewish mother.

“She was part Jewish, maiden name was Benjamin, we have Jewish blood on that side.

On an application form to join the National Front, he wrote about his hatred of “the Jews”.

“That term ‘the Jews’ is the global faceless mass of people you can’t personalise it, not individuals. That’s the generalisation that leads to 6 million people being deliberately murdered.

“I didn’t have many friends at school, I wanted to be a member of a group of people that had an aim, and I thought getting involved in that kind of thing would be comradeship. “

“Even though you end up being a group of people that through their own extreme views are cut off from society, you do have a sense of comradeship in that you’re a member of a group that’s being attacked by other people.”

Coming out

“On one or two occasions in the recent past I’ve actually been the recipient of the very hatred of the people I want to belong to … if you’re gay it is acceptable in society but with these group of people it’s not acceptable, and I found on one or two occasions when I was suspected of being gay I was subjected to abuse.”

Mr Wilshaw admits that being a Nazi who is gay – but with a Jewish background – is a contradiction.

“It’s a terribly selfish thing to say but it’s true, I saw people being abused, shouted at, spat at in the street – it’s not until it’s directed at you that you suddenly realise that what you’re doing is wrong.”

“You have other members leading National Front who are overtly gay. And nobody could see the contradiction of it that you have an overtly gay person leading a homophobic organisation, makes no sense.”

“Then you have someone like Nicky Crane, one of the hardest people who would be gay.”

“Even when people found out, they’d rationalise it, ‘He’s not really gay’ or ‘gay and ok’.”

Violent attack

He said he had hurt people, “but not unprovoked, in defence. In a by-election in Leeds I smashed a chair over someone’s head.”

But he denied ever having approached minorities and assaulted them.

“I’d never do that, but I have seen incidents where people were singled out because they were black by a group of people. It turned my stomach, I rejected that, I pushed it to the back of my mind.”

Mr Wilshaw was arrested for vandalising a mosque in Aylesbury in the early 1990s – and in March this year he was arrested for online race hate offences.

Extremist as recently as the start of this year

He joined the BNP after being part of the National Front and flirted with dangerous fringe groups like the Racial Volunteer Force.

Mr Wilshaw says he remembers meeting David Copeland – the Brixton and Soho nail bomber. More recently he took to social media – and until the start of year was still speaking at rallies.

Former National Front activist Matthew Collins, who now works for the anti-racist group Hope not Hate said: “One of things we noticed is there was someone who was struggling, he was becoming more and more extreme.”

“We almost expected the phone call and a cry for help, and that’s what he’s done.”

‘I want to hurt extremists’

“I feel appallingly guilty as well, I really do feel guilty, not only that, this is also a barrier to me having a relationship with my own family, and I want to get rid of it, it’s too much of a weight.”

“I want to do some damage as well, not to ordinary people but the people who are propagating this kind of rubbish – want to hurt them, show what it’s like for those who are living a lie and be on the receiving end of this type of propaganda, I want to hurt them.”

Fearing some level of revenge, Mr Wilshaw says “one or two would want to sort me.. they’d see it as betrayal.”

“I am going to find it difficult, granted, to fill a void that has occupied my life since childhood.”

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DIY Biohackers Are Editing Genes in Garages and Kitchens

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Re: THAT's LIFE...

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Sarah Silverman sits down with friend and former Westboro Baptist Church member Megan Phelps-Roper to learn more about her experience growing up in the church and the moment of change that inspired her to leave.

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Utah Teen Accused of Helping Friend Hang Herself After Calling It ‘Awesome’

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Utah Teen Accused of Helping Friend Hang Herself After Calling It ‘Awesome’

Awesome.

That was the word Tyerell Joe Przybycien, a Utah teenager charged with first degree murder, allegedly used to describe the prospect of helping his 16-year-old friend, Jchandra Brown, hang herself from a rope tied to a tree, court records revealed.

“What you do if you knew a friend was trying to commit suicide?” Przybycien, 18, wrote a friend on April 19 in a text obtained by investigators.

“Talk them out of it,” the friend, whose name is not identified in the probable cause statement, replied.

“The thing is…I wanna help kill them," Przybycien wrote in text filled with misspelled words. “It be awesome. Seriously im going to help her. Its like getting away with murder! I’m so f-----d up. I’m seriously not joking. Its going down in about a week or two.”

It did and Przybycien recorded it all on his cell phone, the statement said.

“Bro It happened,” he later texted a friend. “I helped her do it too and I feel so guilty.”

Now Przybycien is facing trial for a crime that has drawn parallels to the case of Michelle Carter, the Massachusetts woman who was convicted of goading her teenage boyfriend into killing himself.

“It is reasonable to infer that but for the Defendant’s actions leading up to the decedent’s death, the decedent would not have died on May 5, 2017,” Utah District Court Judge James Brady wrote in his Tuesday ruling paving the way for the teenager’s trial.

Przybycien does not “escape criminal responsibility” because Brown made it clear she wanted to die, Brady wrote. He acted with “utter callousness to the value of human life.”

“Likewise, encouraging and helping to facilitate the suicide of an impressionable minor who could have benefited from support, counseling or therapy is completely lacking of social value,” the judge wrote in his ruling.

Przybycien, who lives in the Salt Lake City suburb of Spanish Fork, is also charged with “Abuse of Desecration of a Dead human body,” which is a misdemeanor, the records show. And he faces five exploitation of a minor charges after police allegedly found child pornography on his cell phone, including images of nude young girls — some of whom were under age five.

Przybycien is expected to plead not guilty at his arraignment next Tuesday, defense attorney Greg Stewart toldNBC News.

The sequence of events that ended with Przybycien in handcuffs began on May 6 when a turkey hunter stumbled across Brown’s body near Maple Lake, south of Payson Canyon, Utah.

Much of the evidence the prosecutors would use to charge Przybycien, according to court records, was found in in two plastic grocery bags nearby, including a handwritten suicide note from Brown with instructions to “watch the video” on the cell phone that was in one of the bags.

Also found was a receipt for the rope that had Przybycien’s name on it and an industrial strength can of air duster, a product used for cleaning computer keyboards that some teenagers use to get high.

In no time police located Przybycien, who was still in the area when they arrived — and who readily admitted he was with Brown when she died, according to the records.

Under questioning, Przybycien said Brown confided in him that she had been wanting to die, the records revealed. He admitted buying the air duster and the rope. He said he picked Brown up on the evening of May 5 after she was done with work and drove her to the spot where she died.

There, Przybycien told investigators, he helped Brown tie on the noose, made sure it was tight, and then took out his cell phone to record her final moments.

The footage, according to court records, showed Brown with the noose around her neck standing on a rock holding a shirt and the can of air duster.

Przybycien can be heard asking her to say something. Then Brown inhales a big snort of the air duster, loses consciousness, and falls in a “twisting motion.”

“That did not work,” the suspect is heard saying, the records reveal. “That did not even work.”

But Przybycien continues to record Brown for up to 11 minutes and ask her questions that she does not answer.

“Thumbs up if you’re okay,” he says at one point, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

“I guess I’ll just leave this here now.”

Przybycien allegedly told police he had hoped to retrieve the rope as a souvenir.

“I feel guilty,” he later told police in a recorded interview that was played during a preliminary hearing. “I feel like I did murder her. I helped her so much.”

Stewart said nothing Przybycien did directly caused Brown’s death.

“Her putting the noose around her neck, stepping onto the pedestal, and inhaling the compressed air so she passed out and slipped from the pedestal caused her death,” he said. “Without an assisted-suicide law in the State of Utah, prosecuting a young man for murder for actions that didn’t directly cause the death of another seems like a slippery slope. If someone’s actions didn't directly cause a death, juries will have to decide where cause begins and ends, and outcomes will be all over the place.”

Brown’s aunt, Polly Meija, disagreed.

“Her problem was, she thought she found a friend,” Meija told the Salt Lake paper. “And she found a monster.”

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Man admits he lied to Fox News about Navy SEAL service

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Fitness Instructor Marries Herself

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Only question I have... can she claim married on her taxes?

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Richard Spencer Supporters Charged In Florida Shooting

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Three men who traveled from Texas for white nationalist Richard Spencer's Thursday speech at the University of Florida were charged with attempted homicide for allegedly opening fire on protesters. The shooting took place during a confrontation following the Gainesville speech, which drew hundreds of protesters and a smaller group of Spencer fans, along with a massive deployment of police trying to prevent a repeat of the street violence that marked a Spencer-related rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August. There was very little violence during Thursday's event in Florida, with one Spencer supporter getting pushed and punched by protesters. The shooting took place after the speech at a bus stop. No one was injured.

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Elizabeth
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Re: THAT's LIFE...

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Set up.


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Sirocco
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Re: THAT's LIFE...

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Richard Spencer is a socialist moron, but he, though perhaps doesn't know it, shows the utter stupidty and complete insanity the left has, like Milo and Ben Shapiro, anyone conservative is a nazi or racist, regardless if they actually are.
They cry wolf over everything, nothing is believed anymore.
No one takes someone calling a nazi seriously because they'll call a gay jew a nazi because he said feminists are fat.

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Elizabeth
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Re: THAT's LIFE...

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New Zealand's new Prime Minister Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern, aged 37, born in Hamilton New Zealand, was raised a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but left the church in 2005 because it conflicted with her personal views, in particular her support for homosexual rights. She voted in favour of the marriage equality bill in 2013, and supports the liberalisation of abortion laws. In January 2017 stated she was now agnostic. Her partner is television presenter Clarke Gayford.

Jacinda Ardern’s left-leaning Labour party will form a coalition government with NZ First and the Green party. She has vowed to be a progressive leader.


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Elizabeth
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Re: THAT's LIFE...

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"Mexico’s Immigration Law:
- Mexico welcomes only foreigners who will be useful to Mexican society:

- Foreigners are admitted into Mexico “according to their possibilities of contributing to national progress.” (Article 32)

- Immigration officials must “ensure” that “immigrants will be useful elements for the country and that they have the necessary funds for their sustenance” and for their dependents. (Article 34)


- Foreigners may be barred from the country if their presence upsets “the equilibrium of the national demographics,” when foreigners are deemed detrimental to “economic or national interests,” when they do not behave like good citizens in their own country, when they have broken Mexican laws, and when “they are not found to be physically or mentally healthy.” (Article 37)

- The Secretary of Governance may “suspend or prohibit the admission of foreigners when he determines it to be in the national interest.” (Article 38)

- Mexican authorities must keep track of every single person in the country:

- Federal, local and municipal police must cooperate with federal immigration authorities upon request, i.e., to assist in the arrests of illegal immigrants. (Article 73)

- A National Population Registry keeps track of “every single individual who comprises the population of the country,” and verifies each individual’s identity. (Articles 85 and 86)

- A national Catalog of Foreigners tracks foreign tourists and immigrants (Article 87), and assigns each - - - - individual with a unique tracking number (Article 91).

- Foreigners with fake papers, or who enter the country under false pretenses, may be imprisoned:

- Foreigners with fake immigration papers may be fined or imprisoned. (Article 116)

- Foreigners who sign government documents “with a signature that is false or different from that which he normally uses” are subject to fine and imprisonment. (Article 116)

- Foreigners who fail to obey the rules will be fined, deported, and/or imprisoned as felons:

- Foreigners who fail to obey a deportation order are to be punished. (Article 117)
- Foreigners who are deported from Mexico and attempt to re-enter the country without authorization can be - imprisoned for up to 10 years. (Article 118)

- Foreigners who violate the terms of their visa may be sentenced to up to six years in prison (Articles 119, 120 and 121). Foreigners who misrepresent the terms of their visa while in Mexico — such as working without a permit — can also be imprisoned.

- Under Mexican law, illegal immigration is a felony. The General Law on Population says,

- “A penalty of up to two years in prison and a fine of three hundred to five thousand pesos will be imposed on the foreigner who enters the country illegally.” (Article 123)

- Foreigners with legal immigration problems may be deported from Mexico instead of being imprisoned. (Article 125)

- Foreigners who “attempt against national sovereignty or security” will be deported. (Article 126)

- Mexicans who help illegal aliens enter the country are themselves considered criminals under the law:

- A Mexican who marries a foreigner with the sole objective of helping the foreigner live in the country is subject to up to five years in prison. (Article 127)"

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Joel
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Why Is Hitler So Popular In India?

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This is what being struck by a monster lightning bolt looks like

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Elizabeth
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Re: THAT's LIFE...

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At around 3.40am just outside the township of Bourke NSW on the Kamilaroi Highway, on the right when leaving town, my son and I were watching the stars and galaxies when we noticed, and then witnessed and watched, two unidentified flying objects bright as stars with some flashing hint of red, moving sporadically. Stopping, starting, up, down, sideways, forwards, backwards. We watched for some time, and then to avoid a possible alien abduction, we thought it best to return to the motel rather than stay star gazing any longer. We were back in the motel at 4am.

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Joel
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Study: InfoWars supplements contain lead

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Elizabeth
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Re: THAT's LIFE...

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https://conservativetribune.com/white-a ... tyalliance

"A majority of white Americans believe they face discrimination of one kind or another in contemporary America, according to a new poll.
A poll published this week by NPR specifically revealed that a 55 percent majority of white Americans feel that “there is discrimination against white people in America today.”
The poll also found that 19 percent of white Americans said they’d been subject to discrimination while applying for work, 13 percent said they had while pursuing promotions in the workplace, and 11 percent said they had while applying to or studying at college.
To be clear, any white (or Asian) American who’s lost out on a job opportunity or a chance to study at a college because of affirmative action has indeed been discriminated against — because institutional decisions based on an individual’s skin color are inherently discriminatory and racist.
Speaking with NPR about his own beliefs regarding the discrimination faced by whites, 50-year-old equipment operator Tim Musick, a white man, noted as well the implicit bigotry of claims that all white people are racist — a claim touted frequently by the liberal media.
“I think that you pretty much, because you’re white, you’re automatically thrown into that group as being a bigot and a racist and that somehow you perceive yourself as being more superior to everybody else, which is ridiculous,” he said. “I’m just a man that happens to have been born white.”
It can be reasonably argued that anti-white discrimination began rising dramatically during the administration of former President Barack Obama, who injected his radical, Alinskyite brand of identity politics into every issue.
From throwing his support behind Black Lives Matter to making premature judgments in the Michael Brown police shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and the Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida, Obama governed from the perspective that black people are always the victims and whites always the oppressors.
This skewed, racist perspective seemed to metastasize across the nation during his tenure, to the point that we now see similar attitudes in Hollywood, in the liberal media and especially on college campuses.
We now have Latina students demanding white women stop wearing hoop hearings, college professors actively ranking prospective students on the basis of their race and minorities reportedly assaulting white students who engage in so-called “cultural appropriation.”
And don’t even get me started on the numerous colleges that have chosen to lecture white students on their alleged white privilege, or allow their minority students to make patently racist presentations on how, for instance, “White people are a Plague to the Planet.”
These are just a few examples. Honestly, it would take me days to compile a comprehensive list of the anti-white attitudes and behaviors commonly seen these days across the nation.
Let me just say, though, that as a minority, I agree with the 55 percent majority of white Americans who feel that “there is discrimination against white people in America today.” But I would take it further, in that I contend contemporary whites suffer bigotry, discrimination and racism.
You know, growing up, I was taught to judge individual people by their individual attitude, behavior and character. These days, however, I see kids being brainwashed by mainstream actors/actresses, mainstream newspapers/magazines and even college faculty into believing the exact opposite.
It’s a sad state of affairs, as well as a reason for why Martin Luther King Jr., a real civil rights activist who dedicated his life to genuine equality and racial harmony, must be rolling in his grave."


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Shelbyville white supremacists Get Trolled With Free Genetic Test Offer

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The results could be fun
Joel wrote: August 16th, 2017, 3:04 pm
White nationalists are flocking to genetic ancestry tests. Some don’t like what they find

It was a strange moment of triumph against racism: The gun-slinging white supremacist Craig Cobb, dressed up for daytime TV in a dark suit and red tie, hearing that his DNA testing revealed his ancestry to be only “86 percent European, and … 14 percent Sub-Saharan African.” The studio audience whooped and laughed and cheered. And Cobb — who was, in 2013, charged with terrorizing people while trying to create an all-white enclave in North Dakota — reacted like a sore loser in the schoolyard.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, hold on, just wait a minute,” he said, trying to put on an all-knowing smile. “This is called statistical noise.”

Then, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, he took to the white nationalist website Stormfront to dispute those results. That’s not uncommon: With the rise of spit-in-a-cup genetic testing, there’s a trend of white nationalists using these services to prove their racial identity, and then using online forums to discuss the results.

But like Cobb, many are disappointed to find out that their ancestry is not as “white” as they’d hoped. In a new study, sociologists Aaron Panofsky and Joan Donovan examined years’ worth of posts on Stormfront to see how members dealt with the news.

It’s striking, they say, that white nationalists would post these results online at all. After all, as Panofsky put it, “they will basically say if you want to be a member of Stormfront you have to be 100 percent white European, not Jewish.”

But instead of rejecting members who get contrary results, Donovan said, the conversations are “overwhelmingly” focused on helping the person to rethink the validity of the genetic test. And some of those critiques — while emerging from deep-seated racism — are close to scientists’ own qualms about commercial genetic ancestry testing.

Panofsky and Donovan presented their findings at a sociology conference in Montreal on Monday. The timing of the talk — some 48 hours after the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. — was coincidental. But the analysis provides a useful, if frightening, window into how these extremist groups think about their genes.

Reckoning with results

Stormfront was launched in the mid-1990s by Don Black, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. His skills in computer programming were directly related to his criminal activities: He learned them while in prison for trying to invade the Caribbean island nation of Dominica in 1981, and then worked as a web developer after he got out. That means this website dates back to the early years of the internet, forming a kind of deep archive of online hate.

To find relevant comments in the 12 million posts written by over 300,000 members, the authors enlisted a team at the University of California, Los Angeles, to search for terms like “DNA test,” “haplotype,” “23andMe,” and “National Geographic.” Then the researchers combed through the posts they found, not to mention many others as background. Donovan, who has moved from UCLA to the Data & Society Research Institute, estimated that she spent some four hours a day reading Stormfront in 2016. The team winnowed their results down to 70 discussion threads in which 153 users posted their genetic ancestry test results, with over 3,000 individual posts.

About a third of the people posting their results were pleased with what they found. “Pretty damn pure blood,” said a user with the username Sloth. But the majority didn’t find themselves in that situation. Instead, the community often helped them reject the test, or argue with its results.

Some rejected the tests entirely, saying that an individual’s knowledge about his or her own genealogy is better than whatever a genetic test can reveal. “They will talk about the mirror test,” said Panofsky, who is a sociologist of science at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. “They will say things like, ‘If you see a Jew in the mirror looking back at you, that’s a problem; if you don’t, you’re fine.'” Others, he said, responded to unwanted genetic results by saying that those kinds of tests don’t matter if you are truly committed to being a white nationalist. Yet others tried to discredit the genetic tests as a Jewish conspiracy “that is trying to confuse true white Americans about their ancestry,” Panofsky said.

But some took a more scientific angle in their critiques, calling into doubt the method by which these companies determine ancestry — specifically how companies pick those people whose genetic material will be considered the reference for a particular geographical group.

And that criticism, though motivated by very different ideas, is one that some researchers have made as well, even as other scientists have used similar data to better understand how populations move and change.

“There is a mainstream critical literature on genetic ancestry tests — geneticists and anthropologists and sociologists who have said precisely those things: that these tests give an illusion of certainty, but once you know how the sausage is made, you should be much more cautious about these results,” said Panofsky.

A community’s genetic rules

Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe are meticulous in how they analyze your genetic material. As points of comparison, they use both preexisting datasets as well as some reference populations that they have recruited themselves. The protocol includes genetic material from thousands of individuals, and looks at thousands of genetic variations.

“When a 23andMe research participant tells us that they have four grandparents all born in the same country — and the country isn’t a colonial nation like the U.S., Canada, or Australia — that person becomes a candidate for inclusion in the reference data,” explained Jhulianna Cintron, a product specialist at 23andMe. Then, she went on, the company excludes close relatives, as that could distort the data, and removes outliers whose genetic data don’t seem to match with what they wrote on their survey.

But specialists both inside and outside these companies recognize that the geopolitical boundaries we use now are pretty new, and so consumers may be using imprecise categories when thinking about their own genetic ancestry within the sweeping history of human migration. And users’ ancestry results can change depending on the dataset to which their genetic material is being compared — a fact which some Stormfront users said they took advantage of, uploading their data to various sites to get a more “white” result.

J. Scott Roberts, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, who has studied consumer use of genetic tests and was not involved with the study, said the companies tend to be reliable at identifying genetic variants. Interpreting them in terms of health risk or ancestry, though, is another story. “The science is often murky in those areas and gives ambiguous information,” he said. “They try to give specific percentages from this region, or x percent disease risk, and my sense is that that is an artificially precise estimate.”

For the study authors, what was most interesting was to watch this online community negotiating its own boundaries, rethinking who counts as “white.” That involved plenty of contradictions. They saw people excluded for their genetic test results, often in very nasty (and unquotable) ways, but that tended to happen for newer members of the anonymous online community, Panofsky said, and not so much for longtime, trusted members. Others were told that they could remain part of white nationalist groups, in spite of the ancestry they revealed, as long as they didn’t “mate,” or only had children with certain ethnic groups. Still others used these test results to put forth a twisted notion of diversity, one “that allows them to say, ‘No, we’re really diverse and we don’t need non-white people to have a diverse society,'” said Panofsky.

That’s a far cry from the message of reconciliation that genetic ancestry testing companies hope to promote.

“Sweetheart, you have a little black in you,” the talk show host Trisha Goddard told Craig Cobb on that day in 2013. But that didn’t stop him from redoing the test with a different company, trying to alter or parse the data until it matched his racist worldview.

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