Tag: news

The Reason The Solar Observatory Was Closed Is Revealed, And It’s As Disturbing As It Is Unbelievable

As we noted earlier in the week, The National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico reopened on Monday after it was shut down September 6 following a mysterious FBI raid, according to the group which manages the facility. 

And despite federal agents swooping in on a Blackhawk helicopter, and a “bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers” before the site was completely evacuated – the official explanation has left people scratching their heads; According to officials, they had been cooperating with an existing law enforcement investigation, when “a suspect in the investigation potentially posed a threat to the safety of local staff and residents,” so “moving the small number of on-site staff and residents off the mountain was the most prudent and effective action to ensure their safety.”

AURA has been cooperating with an on-going law enforcement investigation of criminal activity that occurred at Sacramento Peak. During this time, we became concerned that a suspect in the investigation potentially posed a threat to the safety of local staff and residents. For this reason, AURA temporarily vacated the facility and ceased science activities at this location. 

The decision to vacate was based on the logistical challenges associated with protecting personnel at such a remote location, and the need for expeditious response to the potential threat. AURA determined that moving the small number of on-site staff and residents off the mountain was the most prudent and effective action to ensure their safety. –AURA

No word on why the FBI was involved, or urgently needed to fly in on a loud, suspect-spooking helicopter instead of simply driving to the facility, or why they couldn’t just arrest the guy and keep the place open. Also no explanation for the work crew climbing all over the towers, or why they shut down the post office.

But it gets even more mysterious, as SHTFplan.com’s Mac Slavo notes, the “official” reason for the closure is far more sinister, as KTSM.com reports:

A federal search warrant reveals that Sunspot Solar Observatory was shut down as FBI agents conducted computer forensic searches for child pornography.

The source of child pornography was traced to an IP address used at the observatory and a source within the building observed a computer with “not good” images on it, the warrant states.

The warrant also states that the suspect used the observatory’s WiFi and a personal laptop to download the images.

According to the FBI, a janitor is the main suspect. He was one of the few people who had access to the observatory from dusk until dawn. His name is listed on the warrant, but he has yet to be charged with a crime.

The observatory reopened on September 17.

Some are skeptical about this explanation, given that all employees were evacuated from the site. About a dozen residents who live around the site were also evacuated. The U.S. Postal Service decided to evacuate employees, too, according to a report by the Alamogordo Daily News.

Evacuating employees, local residents, and post office employees seems a little extreme, doesn’t it? How would a computer containing child pornography (as terrible as it is) be dangerous to employees and people who were not even in the building?

Why were the people working on the radio towers?

When was the last time a pedophile was taken down with a Blackhawk? It appears to us that the “official” reason for this debacle is even more unreasonable than the official “facts” behind the Skripal murders in England (though we are sure it will not be long before the Russians are blamed for the solar minimum and the need to shut down the observatory (either them or Trump).

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“Rush Game With The Tariff”: The Race Is On To Get Chinese Goods Into U.S.

As the US-imposed 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion worth Chinese goods is set to take effect Monday, the race is now on to get Chinese goods into the U.S.

By plane, train, and sea, a frenzy has begun, resulting in surging cargo traffic at US ports, booming air freight to the US, and urgent dispatch of goods from Chinese companies earlier than planned. Getting in under the wire before Trump’s tariffs bite could mean hundreds of thousands saved on single shipments. 

Bloomberg describes this week that cargo rates for Pacific transport are at a four-year high as manufacturers rush to get everything from toys to car parts to bikes into American stores.

This rush, which comes on top of a typically already busy pre-holiday season, is expected to continue well after next week as the tariff will leap from 10 to 25 percent after the new year. 

US importers are expected to stockpile Chinese products before the 2019 25% mark. There’s currently widespread reports of companies scrambling to pay expedited air freight fees to dodge the new tariffs, as well as move up their orders. 

Bloomberg relates the following on both sides of the Pacific: 

  • In Jiangsu province on China’s east coast, E.D. Opto Electrical Lighting Co. dispatched a batch of car lights by sea to Los Angeles in late August, earlier than planned.
  • In the industrial hub of Dongguan in southern China, toy maker Lung Cheong Group: “More clients in the last two months are asking if we can deliver goods ahead of the scheduled time to avoid the upcoming tariffs,” said Chairman Lun Leung. For small high-tech toys that have higher retail selling prices, some clients are willing to upgrade from sea freight to air, he said.
  • Imports to northern California’s Port of Oakland surged 9.2 percent in August. That was the busiest August in the port’s 91-year history.
  • At the Port of Long Beach, imports of containers rose 9.4 percent this year through August. That comes after a record 2017.
  • Concerns about the trade dispute is also spurring last-minute shipments across the Pacific for Ocean Network Express Pte., a combination of the container operations of Japan’s three biggest shipping firms, it said.
  • Ralph Bradley, chief executive officer of a small automotive lighting manufacturer in Fort Worth, Texas, has more than $300,000 of products coming to the U.S. on a boat from China. There’s not much he can do about paying the 10 percent duty, or $30,000, on those vehicle-lighting parts.

Describing the tariff-induced rush, Rahul Kapoor, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence in Singapore, said “We have a rush game with the tariff,” and noted instances of cargo actually left behind at Chinese docks because ships were packed so full ahead embarking for the US. 

If there’s one bright spot for Americans, it’s that initially the trade war — which has this week seen China with its own tariffs on $60 billion worth of US goods — is not expected to hit consumer check books right away. 

With accelerated shipments from China in the short term in order to beat the tariff deadlines, the anticipated price hikes at retailer giants like Walmart and Target will likely be delayed due to the surplus of items coming in. 

Meanwhile China, for its part has had its trade surplus with the US pushed to record levels in August due to the front-loading of exports. 

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Land Reform & Farm Murders In South Africa: The Untold Story Of The Boers And The ANC

Via Ammo.com,

South African farm murders have long been a niche cause on the Internet, and the country has made headlines again due to a South African government plan to seize the land of white farmers under the guise of “South African land reform.”

News of these farm murders and land seizures have gained steam with the release of Lauren Southern’s documentary Farmlands. And United States President Donald Trump has brought even more attention to the plight of Afrikaners with his tweet that he would be looking into the South African land and farm seizure.

Most people don’t know much about the history of South Africa beyond the simplistic propaganda of the 1980s – white South Africans bad, ANC good. The history and current situation of South Africa, however, is much more complex.

Defining Terms: Who Are the Key Players?

Before going any further, terms should be defined and the key players identified:

  • ANC: The African National Congress, the leading party in South Africa since the end of apartheid.

  • Afrikaners: Dutch-, German- and French Huguenot-descended white South Africans who primarily speak a language called Afrikaans.

  • Bantu: A group of black South Africans including the Xhosa (of which Nelson Mandela was a member) who originally lived in the northeast of the country.

  • Boers: A subset of Afrikaners who still lead a rural and agricultural existence.

  • Democratic Alliance: Currently the second-largest party in the South African parliament, the Democratic Alliance is a broad-based centrist party that is comparatively economically liberal for South Africa. It enjoys broad, multiracial support, though it is most popular among all racial minorities – white, Coloured and Indian. Its black supporters are often derided as “clever blacks” by ANC supporters.

  • EFF: The Economic Freedom Fighters, a far-left political party in South Africa that has pushed the South African government to seize land from white farmers. Sometimes derisively called “Everything for Free,” the EFF is the third-largest party in South Africa, but is poised to become the second.

  • Khoisan: A popular name for the original inhabitants of most of the territory now known as South Africa. This is not an ethnic designation, but a linguistic one. These are who the Dutch settlers first encountered.

A Brief History of South Africa: From Early Settlement to the Boer War

To understand the current situation in South Africa, it is important to first understand the country before, during and after apartheid.

South Africa’s modern history begins with the Dutch East India Company, which established trading posts for sailors along the coast. Dutchmen soon started settling the area, with little, if any, conflict with the native Khoisan population. Dutch settlers, however, quickly came into conflict with the Dutch East India Company’s authoritarian rule.

Freedom-seeking Dutch settlers moved north starting in the 17th Century. In 1852, Boers founded the South African Republic (known as the “Transvaal Republic”) and then the Orange Free State in 1854. These are called “Boer Republics” and they, in turn, came into conflict with both southward-expanding Bantu tribes (most notably the Zulu, who were in the process of conquering other nearby Bantu tribes) and the British Empire.

“White South Africans” are typically treated as a monolith, but there are two main, distinct groups: The Afrikaans-speaking Afrikaners and the English-speaking British. Indeed, there were intense hostilities between these two groups, especially after the Second Boer War when the Boer Republics were reforged as British colonies.

Telling the Afrikaners to “go home” is a nonsensical statement. They are not Dutch. They do not hold Dutch passports, nor would they at any point have been welcomed back by the Kingdom of the Netherlands. In many regions of South Africa, the Afrikaners have been around longer than the Bantus and have a stronger claim on the land, having purchased it from Khoisans. On the other hand, traditionally Bantu land was conquered from other Bantu tribes or taken by the Bantus from the Khoisans.

A Brief History of South Africa: The Boer Wars

“The Boer Wars” refers to two wars between the Boer Republics and the British Empire, but mostly the second one. The first was a rout for the Boers and left the British Empire with egg on their face. They would not be embarrassed a second time.

The first concentration camps were built for Boers. Not just any Boers, but primarily the wives and children of Boer Commandos (irregular guerilla troops) fighting the British Empire. The strategy was simple: Lock up their women and children, and they will lose their will to fight.

It worked. Adding insult to injury, the most publicized photo of the concentration camps, a picture of seven-year-old Lizzie van Zyl nearly starved to death, was touted in the British press as evidence of parental neglect by the Boers. There was great international outcry against the British during the Boer War, but it never amounted to much.

Boer Republics were reconstituted as British colonies. In 1910, three British colonies were unified as the Union of South Africa. After World War I, South West Africa, today known as Namibia, was administered effectively as a fifth province of South Africa, but for obscure reasons never integrated. South Rhodesia voted on membership, nearly joining, but the argument that it would become “the Ulster of Africa” proved too powerful. The history of South Africa is largely that of a rebellious and unhappy British Dominion until 1948.

A Brief History of South Africa: Enter Apartheid

“Apartheid” is an Afrikaans word meaning “separateness.” It was a series of laws drafted beginning in 1948, after the success of the Afrikaner-heavy National Party in the national elections. There was a split in the party between those who favored apartheid as it happened versus those who favored complete separation, including parallel governance. The former won out in no small part due to a thirst for cheap black labor.

Most people know the basics of apartheid, but they are worth going over briefly here: South Africans were classified into one of four racial categories: white, black, Coloured (a non-pejorative term in South Africa, meaning roughly “mixed race”) and Asian or Indian. In 1949, mixed marriages were outlawed with cross-racial intercourse outlawed the following year. In 1953, amenities were segregated by law. Increasingly, the blacks of South Africa were segregated into townships and Bantustans, the latter being nominally independent “homelands” for Africans. This meant that as foreign nationals, in the eyes of the Union of South Africa, they were required to carry documentation to work in South Africa and needed to leave after they were done.

Coloureds, who had the vote, were slowly disenfranchised. Indians and other Asians were never allowed to vote.

Between the end of World War II and the declaration of a republic in 1961, internal politics were dominated by the division between conservative republican Afrikaners and liberal monarchist British whites. Apartheid enjoyed greater support among Afrikaners and less among British South Africans. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech increased support for apartheid among British South Africans because of a sense of abandonment by the homeland. Many were upset at being forced by the British government to choose between South African and British citizenship and passports.

Still, none of this amounted to what the National Party hoped to achieve – a cohesive and united white South African identity. Support for apartheid was always tepid among British South Africans.

It is certainly true that notions of racial superiority were a prime motivator for apartheid, but there was another factor in play: Communism. The Suppression of Communism Act was passed by the first apartheid government, banning any Communist organization. The Act took a broad view of what constituted “Communism.” However, given the infiltration of mass movements, particularly in the developing world at the beginning of the Cold War, this is perhaps less cynical than it is commonly made out to be. The Act was used to suppress the African National Congress, something we will talk about in detail later.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that Afrikaner society is fundamentally and deeply conservative. Pornography and gambling were illegal in apartheid-era South Africa. Most businesses could not open on Sundays. Abortion, homosexuality and reproductive education were tightly regulated. There was no television until 1976, as this was believed to be immoral and a vehicle of Communism. English-language programming was seen as a threat to Afrikaans culture.

A Brief History of South Africa: The Rise of the ANC and Nelson Mandela

The Suppression of Communism Act was the instrument used to outlaw the African National Congress. While the ANC is typically thought of as a democratic-liberal organization, this is simply not true.

The ANC’s closest ally was the South African Communist Party. Indeed, Nelson Mandela, the face of anti-apartheid resistance, was not only a member of the SACP, he served on its Central Committee, something he denied for decades. The SACP has never to this day contested its own candidates in South Africa, instead fielding their people on ANC slates.

What’s more, the SACP partnered with the ANC in forming Umkhonto we Sizwe (“Spear of the Nation”), the paramilitary wing of the anti-apartheid movement.

The average person on the street likely thinks that Nelson Mandela was imprisoned simply for being black or opposing apartheid. In fact, he was imprisoned for a bombing campaign carried out by Umkhonto we Sizwe, of which he was the head. In fact, Nelson Mandela was convicted of 193 acts of terrorism. He was offered his freedom multiple times on the simple condition that he condemn terrorist attacks against the apartheid regime. He refused every time.

The ANC was not the only organization in South Africa opposed to apartheid. Many white South Africans saw the system as unsustainable. However, outside of South Africa, the situation was largely posed by the media as a question of “apartheid forever or the ANC.”

The ANC and its allies in the Communist Party and the trade union congress COSATU (known as the tripartite alliance) were not the only alternative to the ruling National Party and thus apartheid. The Progressive Federal Party was the main parliamentary opposition to apartheid, which, as the name implies, was in favor of a federated South Africa. The New Republic Party was likewise in favor of power sharing and oriented toward reconciliation with the Commonwealth.

The New Republic Party and the Progressive Federal Party were also bitter enemies. The New Republic Party was a conservative party denounced as racists by the Progressive Federal Party. The Progressive Federal Party was a liberal party derided by the NRP with the nickname “Packing for Perth,” due to the impression that their members were all emigrating to Australia. Two-thirds of South African whites supported some sort of federalism or power sharing, but moderate elements never received any international support.

Nor was the ANC the sole representative of South African blacks. Zulu nationalists, currently represented by the Inkatha Freedom Party, were often bitter enemies of the ANC by the 1980s. Many black South Africans served in the police force and other aspects of the government, leading to the rise of a barbaric form of retribution known as “necklacing.” This is filling a tire with gasoline, hanging it around the neck of a suspected collaborator or political opponent, and lighting the tire on fire. Death can take several hours.

Winnie Mandela, then-wife of Nelson Mandela, declared that “With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.” This caused the ANC to create some distance between itself and her, but ultimately she was given further positions in the movement and the ANC government.

A Brief History of South Africa: The ANC in the Saddle

In 1994, the African National Congress took power in South Africa. At this time, its paramilitary organization was integrated into the country’s regular defense forces. Convicted bomber Robert McBride, praised by no less than IRA terrorist Martin McGuinness, is the Executive Director of the Independent Police Investigative Directorate. Touted as the “Rainbow Nation,” the fall of apartheid in South Africa was part of an overall feeling of optimism throughout the world surrounding the Fall of Communism.

However, not everything was roses in the new Republic of South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was an attempt to lay bare the crimes of the apartheid regime. The tribunal, which did not dispense with sentences, but merely sought to find the truth, has been criticized for not dispensing any justice. Neither former National Party government members nor ANC partisans were punished by the Commission.

The elephant in the room at all times was an overwhelming increase in the crime rate. The term “rape gate” entered popular parlance as South Africans installed panic room doors on their bedrooms. Crime is the main reason for emigration from South Africa. The 2013 murder rate was seven times that of the United States, the 11th highest in the world. Between 2005 and 2015, over 200,000 South Africans were murdered – this in a country of about 50 million. There were over 17,000 murders in 2013 alone. Compare this to just over 14,000 in the United States during the same year, despite the fact that South Africa’s population is approximately equivalent to two states – California and Texas.

This is only the official murder rate. Many suspect that the rate is higher, due to a disengagement from formal policing and a reliance upon private security firms. Quality of public services has likewise deteriorated, with rolling blackouts being the norm in South Africa.

The ANC presides over what is potentially the largest welfare state in the world, according to economist Mike Schussler in 2010. Six percent (3.3 million South Africans) of the population pays 99 percent of the taxes, while 31 percent (16.4 million) receive social grants. This means there are five South Africans receiving welfare for every one paying taxes. 71 percent of South African children live in houses where no adult is employed.

South Africa has a sweeping affirmative action quota program. Employee demographics must, under the South African Employment Equity Act, represent the racial demographics of South Africa as a whole. This means that, for example, the national power company was pressured to fire a number of skilled white engineers, while the country was going through rolling blackouts. The country currently has a labor shortage of approximately 800,000 skilled workers.

The affirmative action program has not lead to a significant increase in the number of skilled black technical workers. In 1994, 15 percent of black South Africans held skilled technical positions. In 2014, this percentage had increased to 18. Meanwhile, between 1992 and 1997, the number of skilled technical degrees dropped by 13 percent while the number of degrees in public administration and social services skyrocketed by 199 percent.

Finally, the specter of corruption has hung over the ANC regime. Scandals surrounding the ANC government have included bribery in arms deals, the abolition of a task force dedicated to organized crime and corruption, sexual misconduct including criminal charges, and using government and civil organizations to fight its political opponents, particularly those in the Democratic Alliance.

What Are the South African Farm Murders?

It is currently twice as dangerous to be a South African farmer than a South African police officer. The murder rate among South African farmers is three times that of the standard murder rate in South Africa, which is already one of the highest in the world.

The government claims the motives for the farm attacks are robbery. However, this does not pass muster. Farm attacks frequently include raping the female members of the household – including young children – while forcing the male members of the household to watch. The victims are often then tortured to death in front of each other. Farmers claim police response to these attacks is sluggish at best and nonexistent at worse. The government stopped collecting statistics about farm murders in 2008.

What’s more, the attacks on white farmers in South Africa tend to have pitched levels of brutality about them. Without getting too lost in the weeds of the grizzly details, it’s worth mentioning some of the more grotesque attacks on farmers at least in passing:

  • In 2012, a 12-year-old boy was drowned in boiling water after watching both his parents murdered and his mother raped.

  • A 56-year-old grandmother was gang raped during a robbery netting approximately $2,000.

  • Five men sexually assaulted a woman in front of her 5-year-old son over the course of an hour and a half.

  • Over the course of six hours, a woman was tortured by having her skin cut off, raped and had her feet power drilled.

  • A 66-year-old man was beaten to death in front of his wife. She escaped being gang raped by saying that she had HIV.

  • Bedridden Alice Lotter, 76, and her daughter Helen, 57 were tortured to death over several hours, including by being stabbed in the genitals with a broken glass bottle. One had one of her breasts removed while still alive. “Kill the Boer” was painted on the wall in their blood.

  • Knowledge Mandlazi went on a killing spree in 2014, murdering five whites and stating that “My hate for white people made me rob and kill.” He held up his middle finger to surviving victims in the courtroom.

Another common form of attack is the land invasion. In one example, 100 men began squatting land. The farmer did the sensible thing and left. Who could blame him in the kind of environment described above?

Far from being a “white nationalist conspiracy theory,” farm attacks have been reported on and denounced by Human Rights Watch and former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot. Afriforum, a wing of Christian trade union Solidarity, likewise reports on farm attacks regularly.

What Is Behind the South African Farm Attacks?

Anti-white racism is a popular current in mainstream South African politics. The song “Kill the Farmer, Kill the Boer” is still publicly sung, despite this being declared a hate crime. The traditional means of protecting rural South Africans, the commando units, were disbanded in 2003, leaving many South African farmers with no protection.

Anti-white rhetoric in South Africa is very real and very mainstream. Here are a few examples:

Compare this with the woman sentenced to three years in prison for calling someone a “kaffir.” It’s not surprising that some South Africans have begun getting trained by Israeli commandos to protect themselves and their property.

What Are the Farm Seizures?

The South African Constitution has recently been amended to allow for Soviet-style expropriations of farms without compensation. Zulu lands are specifically exempted.

This is a bit nonsensical for two reasons. Many white South Africans have been in South Africa longer than most Americans have been in America. Second, the dominant black ethnic group, the Bantus, doesn’t have a strong claim to most of the land in South Africa – the Khoisans would, but they sold it to the Boers or had it conquered by the British. This is as if the U.S. government started seizing land from white families in upstate New York traditionally belonging to the Iroquois and giving it out to the Cherokee.

Still, despite the fact that farm seizures are precisely the means by which Zimbabwe ended up in such a failed state, there seems to be no stopping farm seizures in South Africa. Perhaps worst of all, there are rumors that South Africa’s banks intend to collect mortgage payments even after properties have been confiscated.

In the final analysis, the farm seizures in South Africa aren’t just about dispossessing an unpopular, market dominant racial minority – though that would be disturbing enough. It’s also a threat to South Africa’s incredibly fragile democracy. The ANC is a dominant party with little chance of losing elections and thus, little reason to behave accountably. Add to this the lack of a broad-based middle class with a vested interest in strong property rights, and you have a recipe for kleptocracy and starvation.

*  *  *

Bibliography

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Was Kavanaugh Accuser Almost Raped By His Doppelgänger? A New Theory Emerges

A new theory has emerged in the case of whether Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted accuser Christine Blasey Ford roughly 35 years ago; it was Kavanaugh’s high school look-alike, whose high school house better fits Ford’s description, and who kept in touch with the other guy allegedly in the room, Mark Judge. 

The theory was presented Thursday afternoon by Ed Whelan, a former clerk to USSC Justice Antonin Scalia and currently president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a conservative think tank. Using entirely circumstantial evidence which could certainly ruin the life of the man at the center of the new theory, Whelan suggests that Kavanaugh’s high school doppelgänger, Chris Garrett, may have in fact been responsible for Blasey Ford’s recollection of the alleged incident. 

Brett Kavanaugh (left), Chris Garrett

Earlier this week, Whelan tweeted “By one week from today, I expect that Judge Kavanaugh will have been clearly vindicated on this matter. Specifically, I expect that compelling evidence will show his categorical denial to be truthful. There will be no cloud over him.” 

Here is his theory: 

In response to Whelan’s theory, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat tweeted: “I don’t know Brett Kavanaugh, which has made it easier for me than for conservatives closer to the man to believe he might be guilty. I do know Ed Whelan, which makes me assume there’s more reason to believe the doppelganger theory than just what he just tweeted. We’ll see.”

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What Did America’s Richest CEOs Study?

Authored by Jacob Wolinsky via ValueWalk.com,

Business people need to know a whole bunch of stuff about a whole lot of things if they’re to be successful (although luck and a big inheritance also help). But perhaps the most fundamental knowledge a businessperson needs is to know thyself. Plunging into the world of pharmaceuticals when you have no idea what goes on in the human body, or taking an engineering degree when you’re a salesperson at heart, could be a waste of everybody’s time.

But sometimes to learn about yourself you have to look outwards. What have other successful people studied before going on to business success? What do you have in common with those people – should you follow the lead of Bill Gates, who dropped out of class to pursue success with Microsoft? Or should you study arts and humanities to develop your people powers?

Billionaire drop-outs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg are actually the minority. In the USA, the top-earning CEO in each state has a degree, and two thirds of them went on to grab a graduate degree, too. And while privilege helps on many levels, don’t let lack of privilege dissuade you. Just six of those top-earning CEOs were Ivy League, and less than half went to private schools.

Know Thyself: Success Stories of CEOs

So what did they study? It’s a mixed bag. Around 20% went for business, naturally enough. But engineering was a very popular choice among these startling success stories, too. You can see the precise breakdown of which majors top-earning CEOs took in this excellent new resource from resume.io. But in the meantime, let’s take a closer look at some of their individual achievements.

Steve Wynn (Wynn Resorts, Nevada)

Steve Wynn is a curious and controversial character. He stands out among the 50 top earning CEOs of each respective American state as being somewhat more old-school. Perhaps inspired by his name, Wynn built up a casino and hotel empire from very little.

His father was also in the trade, owning a bingo parlor business that wasn’t doing very well. Young Steve took it over and turned the business’s fortunes around. And he didn’t need no fancy business degree to do so! In fact, Wynn is one of the few top-earning CEOs to have majored in English Literature. Gambling is nothing if it’s not a symptom of human nature, so perhaps it was the insights into man’s mind that gave Wynn the edge in the casino trade.

Wynn is 76 now, has $3bn to his name, and was making $34.5m each year as CEO of Wynn Resorts until he retired earlier this year following allegations of sexual misconduct that he claims to be a smearing attempt by a jealous former partner. Scumbag, natural genius, or both, Wynn could himself be a character from the great American novel.

Constance H. Lau (Hawaiian Electric Industries, Inc., Hawaii)

66-year-old Lau is very well educated. She topped an undergraduate degree from Yale and a graduate degree from the University of California, Hastings with an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. If ambition isn’t an indicator that somebody might have an ethical approach to business, perhaps education helps: Lau is a key player in Hawaii’s strategy of getting onto 100% renewable energy by 2045, and also helps the women and children of Hawaii and the Philippines through her work with the Consuelo Foundation.

Lau promote goods practice through her work with the Hawaii Business Roundtable and at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies. She is also involved in the Punahou School.

Alex Gorsky (Johnson & Johnson, New Jersey)

Gorsky is a special case in business: he studied engineering, which is not so rare, but he did so at US Military Academy West Point. His drive and discipline have paid off in the cutthroat world of pharmaceuticals where he has been CEO and Chairman of the Board at Johnsons since 2012, earning around $30m/year. But he had to work his way up, taking an MBA at Wharton and jobs in sales, marketing, and management at Johnsons in America, Europe, and Africa.

And he seems to be good at what he does, since he drove Johnson & Johnson to the number one spot on Barron’s Magazine’s list of the “World’s Most Admired Companies” in 2016, and won them the top pharmaceutical company spot on Fortune Magazine’s list of the “World’s Most Respected Companies.”

Doug McMillon (Walmart, Arkansas)

Doug. Dougie. Mack. Doug McMillon sounds like a name you can trust. Well, his is an all-American tale, since he began on an hourly wage as a summer associate packing boxes for Walmart in 1984. He later became a manager in Tulsa, and then navigated his way through the business as a merchandising and buyer trainee. It took him a quarter of a century to become president and CEO, and he can now fire any box packer he likes in his 6,000 stores across 28 countries.

So what did ‘Mr Walmart’ study? Well, he took a masters in business administration at the MBA University of Tulsa even while working for Walmart. Thus he has learned business, and the business of Walmart, from the inside out, which is very useful when you have 270 million customers at your door.

Inspired? Choosing a degree should not be about emulating the success stories that have gone before you, but taking their lessons on board before you make a decision that will best suit you. Know thyself, for it’s a long and turbulent career ahead and you don’t want to get lost.

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Opioid Crisis Emerges As Top Campaign Theme For Midterms 

The opioid epidemic is the deadliest drug overdose crisis in US history – on track to kill more people over the next ten years than currently live in entire cities like Baltimore or Miami. More people died last year from drug overdoses than American soldiers during the Vietnam War. In recent times, the opioid crisis has become an issue that the country can no longer ignore. 

According to television advertising data from Kantar Media/CMAG, it is not President Trump’s “greatest economy ever” on the minds of voters this midterm election season; it is the opioid crisis devastating communities across the heartland. 

So far in 2018, anti-opioid ads on television have aired in congressional and gubernatorial races more than 50,000 times across 25 states, said The Wall Street Journal. At this point in 2014, Kentucky was the only state with political ads mentioning opioids that aired only 70 times. In other words, political ads against opioids have skyrocketed roughly 714 times when compared to this time in the 2014 midterm election cycle. 

“Ads discussing the drugs make up only 3% of total TV advertisements, lagging behind immigration and gun control. The analysis shows how ads have begun to mimic the spread of the crisis, as candidates from both parties have pushed out anti-opioid ads at an accelerated clip.

The ads’ messages include promising more funds for treatment and stopping the inflow of opioids from elsewhere, among other things.

The jump in ads lifts the opioid issue from near obscurity to a potent, nationwide political topic. The map of ad purchases shows the role the issue is playing in states with closely contested U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races such as Florida, Missouri, Wisconsin and West Virginia. In Ohio and Pennsylvania, House candidates have aired thousands of ad,” said the Journal. 

Kantar Media/CMAG says the ad numbers do not sufficiently correspond to the map of overdoses. For instance, Florida is running a tremendous amount of ads but has a lower amount of overdoses than many states. States including Wisconsin, Missouri, and Pennsylvania have run thousands of ads but are not the most affected. 

The Journal asks the difficult question: What accounts for the heavy play in those regions?

Well, the total amount of overdose deaths are shocking. Each of those states has had a 50 percent jump in opioid overdose deaths between 2012 and 2016. Kantar Media/CMAG shows the states that are running the most ads broken down by political affiliation.

While President Trump continues to tout the stock market hitting record highs, most Americans do not own stocks and are starting to look beyond the propaganda that everything is awesome. They are also catching a disturbing whiff of a decaying empire that one of the top campaign themes for this fall’s midterm elections is the “greatest economy ever” opioid crisis. 

* * * 

Over the summer, a new cross-sectional study of socioeconomic measurements at a county level and a national sample of Medicare claims discovered that chronic use of prescription opioids was highly correlated with support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

According to the study titled “Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016,” which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on June 22, researchers from the University of Texas Medical Branch discovered that Trump won about 60 percent of the vote in the 693 counties with the highest rates of opioid use (90-day supply or more Medicare opioid prescriptions). Trump won 39 percent of the 2016 vote in the 638 counties with the lowest rates of long-term opioid use.

(A) 2015 Long-term opioid use by county

(B) 2016 Percentage Trump vote by county

 

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California Governor’s Veiled Threat To Trump: “Something’s Got To Happen To This Guy”

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

California governor Jerry Brown recently spoke a veiled threat to president Donald Trump.  Brown is dissatisfied with Trump’s stance on the often altered “science” of “climate change” and said, “something’s got to happen to this guy.”

In an interview that aired Monday, Jerry Brown called the president a “saboteur” in the fight to combat climate change, and in a thinly veiled threat said that “something’s got to happen to this guy.” Speaking to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell at an environmental summit in San Francisco last week, Brown tore into Trump for the president’s tweets about the death toll in Puerto Rico from last year’s Hurricane Maria and urged voters to vote for Democrats in November’s midterm elections in an effort to thwart Trump’s agenda, according to Fox News.

Brown was quoted as saying:

“We never had a president who was engaged in this kind of behavior. I mean he’s not telling the truth; he keeps changing his mind; he’s sabotaging the world order in many respects.”

“It’s unprecedented, it’s dangerous, and hopefully this election is going to send a strong message to the country; the Democrats will win…something’s got to happen to this guy, because if we don’t get rid of him, he’s going to undermine America and even the world.”

There’s nothing like a little fear-mongering to get people to vote themselves into slavery. 

“California has positioned itself as the center of the Trump resistance,” Jessica Levinson, a clinical law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, told Fox News. “It’s bloody combat.”

Shortly before the climate conference began last week, California’s socialist governor also signed a piece of legislation that will require the phasing out of all electricity in the state produced by fossil fuels by 2045.

“It’s really extraordinary that the president can deny science like that,” Brown told MSNBC of Trump’s questioning the veracity of climate change.

“It’s bad, and how we counteract it is with a climate summit, with normal people respecting the truth, and communicating that with other normal people, and combating the President of the United States in what are lies, distortions, and quite frankly, bizarre behavior.”

But the Trump administration hasn’t cowered to Brown’s threats and fear mongering. The administration announced on Tuesday that it was rolling back an Obama-era rule meant to curb climate-changing pollution and easing restrictions on energy companies that allow huge volumes of natural gas to escape after drilling it from land in the United States.

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Leaked Memo Shows US Overlooked Mass Civilian Deaths In Yemen To Preserve Arms Sales

On rare occasion a story is unearthed in the mainstream media which demonstrates in stunning clarity how major foreign policy decisions are really made in Washington, especially when it comes to waging perpetual war in the Middle East often under the official rhetorical guise of “protecting civilians”.

A bombshell Wall Street Journal report details a leaked classified memo which shows Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided to continue US military involvement in the Saudi war on Yemen in order to preserve a massive $2 billion weapons deal with Riyadh. 

Human Rights Watch 2016 report: Saudi Arabia Uses US-Made Cluster Bombs and Guided Missiles in Yemen.

This should come as no surprise to those aware of the decades long “oil for weapons” relationship that has defined Gulf countries’ ties to the West in modern history, but it’s unusual to have such high level confirmation of the decision-making process almost in real time. 

The WSJ summarizes the importance of the classified memo, which its reporters have seen in full:

Mr. Pompeo overruled concerns from most of the State Department specialists involved in the debate who were worried about the rising civilian death toll in Yemen. Those who objected included specialists in the region and in military affairs. He sided with his legislative affairs team after they argued that suspending support could undercut plans to sell more than 120,000 precision-guided missiles to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to a classified State Department memo and people familiar with the debate.

The number of civilian casualties cited in the WSJ report — 16,700 killed or injured — is on the very lowest end of estimates to emerge over the past three years of the conflict. Some Yemeni reporters and regional humanitarian organizations have suggested the actual figure is closer to 70,000 killed. 

In August the Saudi-US coalition bombing campaign, which has been largely ignored in international media since it began in 2015, was thrust into the American media spotlight after a bus full of school children was struck by a guided bomb produced by Lockheed Martin.

The attack, which killed 40 children, was described by the Saudi coalition  — of which the US plays a central role — as part of ongoing “legitimate” military operations against pro-Iran Houthi forces. 

The school bus bombing and prior documented attacks on hospitals, funerals, and civilian residents, caused a bipartisan group of Congressional lawmakers to attempt to shut down US support to the Saudi/UAE coalition. 

NPR has previously described the US role in Yemen while reporting from inside the country as focused on providing “targeting information, equipment and aircraft refueling to the Saudi air campaign, which has been widely criticized for being indiscriminate and killing civilians in places like hospitals, funerals and homes.”

When earlier this month Pompeo certified before Congress that the Saudi coalition was working to reduce harm to civilians in Yemen — something Congress recently put into effect — is was an obvious sham. 

And now there’s overwhelming proof that this was the case. Just prior to Pompeo’s certifying that US support for the Saudi coalition bombing campaign should continue, officials within the State Department argued against it, per the WSJ report: 

Most of the State Department’s military and area specialists urged Mr. Pompeo in the memo to reject certification “due to a lack of progress on mitigating civilian casualties.”

That included the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and the Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. Their recommendation was also backed by the legal advisers who took part in the policy review.

But what ultimately tipped to scales in favor of continued support? The WSJ reports the following based on the leaked memo and the testimony of officials close to the matter.

The only group that urged him to fully support the Saudi-led coalition was the Bureau of Legislative Affairs, which argued in the memo that “lack of certification will negatively impact pending arms transfers.”

The State Department’s legislative team said “failure to certify may also negatively impact future foreign military sales and direct commercial sales to the region.”

Pompeo’s official endorsement of the US Gulf allied military campaign came last week in spite of the memo informing Congress that “Recent civilian casualty incidents indicate insufficient implementation of reforms and targeting practices.” And the memo spells out that “Investigations have not yielded accountability measures.”

Thus the Raytheon sale of 120,000 precision-guided missiles to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — a deal said to be worth over $2 billion — appears the ultimate decider here. 

The certification authorized the Pentagon to continue fueling coalition jets, and other areas of partnership such as intelligence sharing. Ironically this came last Wednesday during the same week the United Nations issued its own statement declaring the Yemen war the world’s “worst humanitarian crisis”.

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Nomi Prins: Donald In Wonderland – Down The Financial Rabbit Hole With President Trump

Authored by Nomi Prins via TomDispatch.com,

Once upon a time, there was a little-known energy company called Enron. In its 16-year life, it went from being dubbed America’s most innovative company by Fortune Magazine to being the poster child of American corporate deceit. Using a classic recipe for book-cooking, Enron ended up in bankruptcy with jail time for those involved. Its shareholders lost $74 billionin the four years leading up to its bankruptcy in 2001.

A decade ago, the flameout of my former employer, Lehman Brothers, the global financial firm, proved far more devastating, contributing as it did to a series of events that ignited a global financial meltdown. Americans lost an estimated $12.8 trillion in the havoc.

Despite the differing scales of those disasters, there was a common thread: both companies used financial tricks to make themselves appear so much healthier than they actually were. They both faked the numbers, thanks to off-the-books or offshore mechanisms and eluded investigations… until they collapsed.

Now, here’s a question for you as we head for the November midterm elections, sure to be seen as a referendum on the president: Could Donald Trump be a one-man version of either Enron or Lehman Brothers, someone who cooked “the books” until, well, he imploded?

Since we’ve never seen his tax returns, right now we really don’t know. What we do know is that he’s been dodging bullets ever since the Justice Department accused him of violating the Fair Housing Act in his operation of 39 buildings in New York City in 1973. Unlike famed 1920s mob boss Al Capone, he may never get done in by something as simple as tax evasion, but time will tell.

Rest assured of one thing though: he won’t go down easily, even if he is already the subject of multiple investigations and a plethora of legal slings and arrows. Of course, his methods should be familiar. As President Calvin Coolidge so famously put it, “the business of America is business.” And the business of business is to circumvent or avoid the heat… until, of course, it can’t.

The Safe

So far, Treasury Secretary and former Trump national campaign financechairman Steven Mnuchin has remained out of the legal fray that’s sweeping away some of his fellow campaign associates. Certainly, he and his wife have grandiose tastes. And, yes, his claim that his hedge fund, Dune Capital Management, used offshore tax havens only for his clients, not to help him evade taxes himself, represents a stretch of the imagination. Other than that, however, there seems little else to investigate — for now. Still, as Treasury secretary he does oversee a federal agency that means the world to Donald Trump, the Internal Revenue Service, which just happens to be located across a courtyard from the Trump International Hotel on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue.

As it happens, the IRS in the Trump era still doesn’t have a commissioner, only an acting head. What it may have, National Enquirer-style, is genuine presidential secrets in the form of Donald Trump’s elusive tax returns. Last fall, outgoing IRS Commissioner John Koskinen said that there were plans to relocate them to a shiny new safe where they would evidently remain.

In 2016, Trump became the first candidate since President Richard Nixon not to disclose his tax returns. During the campaign, he insisted that those returns were undergoing an IRS audit and that he would not release them until it was completed. (No one at the IRS has ever confirmed that being audited in any way prohibits the release of tax information.) The president’s pledge to do so remains unfulfilled and last year counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway noted that the White House was “not going to release his tax returns,” adding — undoubtedly thinking about his base — “people didn’t care.”

On April 17, 2018, the White House announced that the president would defer even filing his 2017 tax returns until this October. As every president since Nixon has undergone a mandatory audit while in office, count on American taxpayers hearing the same excuse for the rest of his term, even if Congress were to decide to invoke a 1924 IRS provision to view them.

Still, Conway may have a point when it comes to the public. After all, tax dodging is as American as fireworks on the Fourth of July. According to one study, every year the U.S. loses $400 billion in unpaid taxes, much of it hidden in offshore tax havens.

Yet the financial disclosures that The Donald did make during election campaign 2016 indicate that there are more than 500 companies in over two dozen countries, mostly with few to no employees or real offices, that feature him as their “president.” Let’s face it, someone like Trump would only create a business universe of such Wall Street-esque complexity if he wanted to hide something. He was likely trying to evade taxes, shield himself and his family from financial accountability, or hide the dubious health of parts of his business empire. As a colleague of mine at Bear Stearns once put it, when tax-haven companies pile up like dirty laundry, there’s a high likelihood that their uses aren’t completely clean.

Now, let’s consider what we know of Donald Trump’s financial adventures, taxes and all. It’s quite a story and, even though it already feels like forever, it’s only beginning to be told.

The Trump Organization

Atop the non-White House branch of the Trump dynasty is the Trump Organization. To comply with federal conflict-of-interest requirements, The Donald officially turned over that company’s reins to his sons, Eric and Donald Jr. For all the obvious reasons, he was supposed to distance himself from his global business while running the country.

Only that didn’t happen and not just because every diplomat and lobbyist in town started to frequent his money-making new hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Now, according to the New York Times, the Manhattan district attorney’s office is considering pressing criminal charges against the Trump Organization and two of its senior officials because the president’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid off an adult film actress and a former Playboy model to keep their carnal knowledge to themselves before the election.

Though Cohen effectively gave Stormy Daniels $130,000 and Karen McDougal $150,000 to keep them quiet, the Trump Organization then paid Cohen even more, $420,000, funds it didn’t categorize as a reimbursement for expenses, but as a “retainer.” In its internal paperwork, it then termed that sum as “legal expenses.”

The D.A.’s office is evidently focusing its investigation on how the Trump Organization classified that payment of $420,000, in part for the funds Cohen raised from the equity in his home to calm the Stormy (so to speak). Most people take out home equity loans to build a garage or pay down some debt. Not Cohen. It’s a situation that could become far thornier for Trump. As Cohen already knew, Trump couldn’t possibly wield his pardon power to absolve his former lawyer, since it only appliesto those convicted of federal charges, not state ones.

And that’s bad news for the president. As Lanny Davis, Cohen’s lawyer, put it, “If those payments were a crime for Michael Cohen, then why wouldn’t they be a crime for Donald Trump?”

The bigger question is: What else is there? Those two payoffs may, after all, just represent the beginning of the woes facing both the Trump Organization and the Trump Foundation, which has been the umbrella outfit for businesses that have incurred charges of lobbying violations (not disclosing payment to a local newspaper to promote favorable casino legislation) and gaming law violations. His organization has also been accused of misleading investors, engaging in currency-transaction-reporting crimes, and improperly accounting for money used to buy betting chips, among a myriad of other transgressions. To speculate on overarching corporate fraud would not exactly be a stretch.

Unlike his casinos, the Trump Organization has not (yet) gone bankrupt, nor — were it to do so — is it in a class with Enron or Lehman Brothers. Yet it does have something in common with both of them: piles of money secreted in places designed to hide its origins, uses, and possibly end-users. The question some authority may pursue someday is: If Donald Trump was willing to be a part of a scheme to hide money paid to former lovers, wouldn’t he do the same for his businesses?

The Trump Foundation

Questions about Trump’s charity, the Donald J. Trump Foundation, have abounded since campaign 2016. They prompted New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood to file a lawsuit on June 14th against the foundation, also naming its board of directors, including his sons and his daughter Ivanka. It cites “a pattern of persistent illegal conduct… occurring over more than a decade, that includes extensive unlawful political coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing transactions to benefit Mr. Trump’s personal and business interests, and violations of basic legal obligations for non-profit foundations.”

As the New York Times reported, “The lawsuit accused the charity and members of Mr. Trump’s family of sweeping violations of campaign finance laws, self-dealing, and illegal coordination with Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.” It also alleged that for four years — 2007, 2012, 2013, and 2014 — Trump himself placed his John Hancock below incorrect statements on the foundation’s tax returns.

The main issue in question: Did the Trump Foundation use any of its funds to benefit The Donald or any of his businesses directly? Underwood thinks so. As she pointed out, it “was little more than a checkbook for payments from Mr. Trump or his businesses to nonprofits, regardless of their purpose or legality.” Otherwise it seems to have employed no one and, according to the lawsuit, its board of directors has not met since 1999.

Because Trump ran all of his enterprises, he was also personally responsible for signing their tax returns. His charitable foundation was no exception. Were he found to have knowingly provided false information on its tax returns, he could someday face perjury charges.

On August 31st, the foundation’s lawyers fought back, filing papers of their own, calling the lawsuit, as the New York Times put it, “a political attack motivated by the former attorney general’s ‘record of antipathy’ against Mr. Trump.” They were referring to Eric Schneiderman, who had actually resigned the previous May — consider this an irony under the circumstances — after being accused of sexual assault by former girlfriends.

The New York state court system has, in fact, emerged as a vital force in the pushback against the president and his financial shenanigans. As Zephyr Teachout, recent Democratic candidate for New York attorney general, pointed out, it is “one of the most important legal offices in the entire country to both resist and present an alternative to what is happening at the federal level.” And indeed it had begun fulfilling that responsibility with The Donald long before the Mueller investigation was even launched.

In 2013, Schneiderman filed a civil suit against Trump University, calling it a sham institution that engaged in repeated fraudulent behavior. In 2016, Trump finally settled that case in court, agreeing to a $25 million payment to its former students — something that (though we don’t, of course, have the tax returns to confirm this) probably also proved to be a tax write-off for him.

These days, the New York attorney general’s office could essentially create a branch only for matters Trumpian. So far, it has brought more than 100 legal or administrative actions against the president and congressional Republicans since he took office.

Still, don’t sell the foundation short. It did, in the end, find a way to work for the greater good — of Donald Trump. He and his wife, Melania, for instance, used the “charity” to purchase a now infamous six-foot portrait of himself for $20,000 — and true to form, according to the Washington Post, even that purchase could turn out to be a tax violation. Such “self-dealing” is considered illegal. Of course, we’re talking about someone who “used $258,000 from the foundation to pay off legal settlements that involved his for-profit businesses.” That seems like the definition of self-dealing.

The Trump Team

The president swears that he has an uncanny ability to size someone up in a few seconds, based on attitude, confidence, and a handshake — that, in other words, just as there’s the art of the deal, so, too, there’s the art of choosing those who will represent him, stand by him, and take bullets for him, his White House, and his business enterprises. And for a while, he did indeed seem to be a champion when it came to surrounding himself with people who had a special knack for hiding money, tax documents, and secret payoffs from public view.

These days — think of them as the era of attrition for Donald Trump — that landscape looks a lot emptier and less inviting.

On August 21st, his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, was convictedin Virginia of “five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account.” (On September 14th, he would make a deal with Robert Mueller and plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy.)  On that same August day, Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, also pled guilty to eight different federal crimes in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, including — yep — tax evasion.

Three days later, prosecutors in the Cohen investigation granted immunity to the Trump Organization’s chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg. A loyal employee of the Trump family for more than four decades, he had also served as treasurer for the Donald J. Trump Foundation. If anyone other than the president and his children knows the financial and tax secrets of the Trump empire, it’s him. And now, he may be ready to talk. Lurking in his future testimony could be yet another catalyst in a coming Trump tax debacle.

And don’t forget David Pecker, CEO of American Media, the company that publishes the National Enquirer. Pecker bought and buried stories for The Donald for what seems like forever. He, too, now has an immunity deal in the federal investigation of Cohen (and so Trump), evidently in return forproviding information on the president’s hush-money deals to bury various exploits that he came to find unpalatable.

The question is this: Did Trump know of Cohen’s hush-money payments? Cohen has certainly indicated that he did and Pecker seems to have told federal prosecutors a similar story. As Cohen said in court of Pecker, “I and the CEO of a media company, at the request of the candidate, worked together” to keep the public in the dark about such payments and Trump’s involvement in them.

The president’s former lawyer faces up to 65 years in prison. That’s enough time to make him consider what other tales he might be able to tell in return for a lighter sentence, including possibly exposing various tax avoidance techniques he and his former client cooked up.

And don’t think that Cohen, Pecker, and Weisselberg are going to be the last figures to come forward with such stories as the Trump team begins to come unglued.

In the cases of Enron and Lehman Brothers, both companies unraveled after multiple shell games imploded. Enron’s losses were being hidden in multiple offshore entities. In the case of Lehman Brothers, staggeringly over-valued assets were being pledged to borrow yet more money to buy similar assets. In both cases, rigged games were being played in the shadows, while vital information went undisclosed to the public — until it was way too late.

Donald Trump’s equivalent shell games still largely remain to be revealed. They may simply involve hiding money trails to evade taxes or to secretly buy political power and business influence. There is, as yet, no way of knowing. One thing is clear, however: the only way to begin to get answers is to see the president’s tax returns, audited or not. Isn’t it time to open that safe?

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“Transphobic” Swedish Professor May Lose Job After Noting Biological Differences Between Sexes

A university professor in Sweden is under investigation for “anti-feminism” and “transphobia” after he said that there are fundamental differences between men and women which are “biologically founded” and that genders cannot be regarded as “social constructs alone,” reports Academic Rights Watch. 

For his transgression, Germund Hesslow – a professor of neuroscience at Lund University – who holds dual PhDs in philosophy and neurophysiology, may lose his job – telling RT that a “full investigation” has been ordered, and that there “have been discussions about trying to stop the lecture or get rid of me, or have someone else give the lecture or not give the lecture at all.” 

“If you answer such a question you are under severe time pressure, you have to be extremely brief — and I used wording which I think was completely innocuous, and that apparently the student didn’t,” Hesslow said.

Hesslow was ordered to attend a meeting by Christer Larsson, chairman of the program board for medical education, after a female student complained that Hesslow had a “personal anti-feminist agenda.” He was asked to distance himself from two specific comments; that gay women have a “male sexual orientation” and that the sexual orientation of transsexuals is “a matter of definition.” 

The student’s complaint reads in part (translated): 

I have also heard from senior lecturers that Germund Hesslow at the last lecture expressed himself transfobically. In response to a question of transexuallism, he said something like “sex change is a fly”. Secondly, it is outrageous because there may be students during the lecture who are themselves exposed to transfobin, but also because it may affect how later students in their professional lives meet transgender people. Transpersonals already have a high level of overrepresentation in suicide statistics and there are already major shortcomings in the treatment of transgender in care, should not it be countered? How does this kind of statement coincide with the university’s equal treatment plan? What has this statement given for consequences? What has been done for this to not be repeated? –Academic Rights Watch

After being admonished, Hesslow refused to distance himself from his comments, saying that he had “done enough” already and didn’t have to explain and defend his choice of words. 

“At some point, one must ask for a sense of proportion among those involved. If it were to become acceptable for students to record lectures in order to find compromising formulations and then involve faculty staff with meetings and long letters, we should let go of the medical education altogether,” Hesslow said in a written reply to Larsson.

He also rejected the accusation that he had a political agenda – stating that his only agenda was to let scientific fact, not new social conventions, dictate how he teaches his courses. 

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