The First Domino

Kenneth Storey

Feb 2, 2015

The Rise of Podemos

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

What is Behind the Collapse of the Centre Left Parties in Europe?

The NeoLib Experiment has failed.  They’re not even good at lying anymore.

Yobama

Tonight the Twitter comes through again (h/t TMC).  Our topic is Slut Shaming and our panelists are Shenaz Treasury (regular), Regina King (the voice of Huey and Riley Freeman), Sabrina Jalees (CBC personality), and Jordan Carlos (Stephen Colbert’s ‘Black Friend’).

Continuity

The Jetsons

This Week’s Guests-

• Wednesday 3/25: Amy Ziering, Kirby Dick
• Thursday 3/26: John Hargrove

Amy Ziering is the producer and Kirby Dick is the director of The Hunting Ground, a documentary about college campus rape and rape culture that opened last Friday in wide distribution (well, as wide as documentaries generally get) after debuting at Sundance to great critical and audience acclaim.  After its theatical run it will be shown on CNN.

In a way this is a follow up to their 2012 film The Invisible War which was about rape and rape culture in the military.

The documentary focuses on the claim that 20% of women in colleges in the United States are sexually assaulted, and that disciplinary action only occurs in a small fraction of alleged assaults. It also claims that students are rarely expelled for rape.

There are several students who are interviewed in the film about their experiences being sexually assaulted at their college campus. They spoke about college administrators who ignore them or make them jump through hoops because they are more concerned about keeping rape statistics low.

Two of the film’s main targets were Harvard and the University of North Carolina, but they also report about fraternities such as Sigma Alpha Epsilon.

In addition, there is a section of the film about Jameis Winston (a quarterback for Florida State University) and the multiple accusations of sexual assault against him. His alleged victim Erica Kinsman publicly speaks about the incident at length for the first time.

The principal protagonists are Andrea Pino and Annie E. Clark, two former students of the University of North Carolina who were raped on campus.

Jon Ronson’s web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

Ricky Valez and Mike Yard- Awkward

I haven’t screened this clip myself.  I understand it’s about two men’s search for an extinct flightless bird in Greenland.

Tonight the Twitter comes through (h/t TMC).  Our topic is Ted Cruz’s prospects for election (hint: think snowball in a volcano).  Our panelists are Lewis Black (always a pleasure), Amy Holmes (ick), Kristen Anderson (the voice of Kanga), and Kal Pen (Harold and Kumar, the White House Office of Public Engagement).

It’s all part of Larry’s Blacklash 2016 election coverage.

Continuity

He prefers just ‘The Doctor’

This Week’s Guests-

• Tuesday 3/24: Jon Ronson
• Wednesday 3/25: Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering
• Thursday 3/26: John Hargrove

Jon Ronson is perhaps best known for his book (and subsequent film) The Men Who Stare at Goats.  Less well known (at least here in the States) is his work on BBC Radio 4 and Channel 4 Television.  He’s also managed and played with some Bands.  He’ll be on tonight to talk about his new book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s 2 part web exclusive extended interview and the real news below.

US to stop collecting bulk phone data if Congress lets law expire

Reuters

Monday 23 March 2015 18.26 GMT

Congress’s efforts to extend the law so far have proved fruitless, and congressional aides said that little work on the issue was being done on Capitol Hill.

There are deeply divergent views among the Republicans who control Congress. Some object to bulk data collection as violating individual freedoms, while others consider it a vital tool for preventing terrorist attacks against America.

Ned Price, a national security council spokesman, told Reuters the administration had decided to stop bulk collection of domestic telephone call metadata unless Congress explicitly reauthorises it.

Some legal experts have suggested that even if Congress does not extend the law, the administration might be able to convince the secretive foreign intelligence surveillance court to authorise collection under other legal authorities.

But Price made clear the administration now has no intention of doing so and that the future of metadata collection after 1 June was up to Congress.

Price said the administration was encouraging Congress to enact legislation in the coming weeks that would allow the collection to continue.

But Price said: “If Section 215 [of the law which covers the collection] sunsets, we will not continue the bulk telephony metadata program.”

“Allowing Section 215 to sunset would result in the loss, going forward, of a critical national security tool that is used in a variety of additional contexts that do not involve the collection of bulk data,” he said.

Last year the administration proposed that if collection does continue, the data should be stored by telephone companies rather than NSA itself, but that approach was rejected by the phone companies.

US officials have said metadata collection had helped important counter-terrorism investigations.

However, a review panel appointed by Obama to examine the effectiveness of surveillance techniques Snowden revealed found that not a single counter-terrorism breakthrough could be attributed to the practice.

Thank goodness for a dysfunctional Congress!

Yemen in Crisis: U.S. Closes Key Drone Base & Withdraws Forces as U.N. Warns of Civil War

Democracy Now

Out of Yemen, U.S. Is Hobbled in Terror Fight

By ERIC SCHMITT, The New York Times

MARCH 22, 2015

The evacuation of 125 United States Special Operations advisers from Yemen in the past two days is the latest blow to the Obama administration’s counterterrorism campaign, which is already struggling with significant setbacks in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the volatile region, American officials said Sunday.

The loss of Yemen as a base for American counterterrorism training, advising and intelligence-gathering carries major implications not just there, but throughout a region that officials say poses the most grievous threat to United States global interests and to the country itself.

…

Even after the withdrawal of American troops, the Central Intelligence Agency will still maintain some covert Yemeni agents in the country. Armed drones will carry out some airstrikes from bases in nearby Saudi Arabia or Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, as was done most recently on Feb. 20. Spy satellites will still lurk overhead and eavesdropping planes will try to suck up electronic communications.

…

About 2,000 of the approximately 10,000 troops that the United States is likely to carry over into 2016 – more than originally planned – are assigned to counterterrorism missions, mainly along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The C.I.A. relies on the American troops to provide security for its covert counterterrorism operations, including drone strikes in Pakistan.

…

The Islamic State began attracting pledges of allegiance from groups and individual fighters after it declared the formation of a caliphate, or religious state, in June 2014. Counterterrorism analysts say it is using Al Qaeda’s franchise structure to expand its geographic reach, but without Al Qaeda’s rigorous, multiyear application process. This could allow its franchises to grow faster, easier and farther.

It is a trend that American counterterrorism officials say they are struggling to understand and defeat. Indeed, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, voiced deep concerns this month over “the emergence of a terrorist threat that is increasingly decentralized, difficult to track and even more difficult to thwart.”

With the Islamic State and its supporters producing as many as 90,000 Twitter posts and other social media responses every day, American officials also acknowledge the difficulty of blunting the group’s digital momentum in the same way a United States-led air campaign has slowed its advances on the battlefield in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Syria.

“We have an effective counternarrative, but the volume, the sheer volume, we are losing the battle today,” Michael B. Steinbach, the F.B.I.’s top counterterrorism official, told a House panel last month. “The amount of use of social media and other Internet-based activities eclipses our effort.”

What?  You mean a group of people who live there has become revolutionary and is kicking the ass of the best military in the world and its paid mercenaries?

Hmm…

Batman was always Black

Like my coffee.

Tity Boi, Rosie Perez, Kenneth Cole, and Phoebe Robinson are our panel tonight.

Continuity

Chess News Roundup!

This Week’s Guests-

• Monday 3/23: Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• Tuesday 3/24: Jon Ronson
• Wednesday 3/25: Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering
• Thursday 3/26: John Hargrove

Have you ever read Rational Wiki? you might give it a try.  Here’s some of what it says about Ayaan Hirsi Ali–

I think that we are at war with Islam. And there’s no middle ground in wars. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that…there comes a moment when you crush your enemy.

-Ayaan Hirsi Ali, replacing the word “Communism” with “Islam” in Joseph McCarthy speeches

Whet your whistle (TMC told me never to do that, she has an ex who whistled and besides it hurts her ears)?  There’s more-

She is married to wingnut historian Niall Ferguson, with whom she has one son, Thomas.

Ali is a rabid critic of Islam and multiculturalism, going so far as to advocate amending Western constitutions to make it possible to shut down all Muslim schools because “the jihadi genie is out of the bottle”. Her books, columns and talk-show appearances helped pave the way for the rise of Dutch populist wackaloon Geert Wilders.

…

Ali was elected to the Dutch Parliament in 2003, but had to resign in 2006 because she had given some false information to obtain citizenship. She then moved to the United States and now works for the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative think tank.

Ali has authored several books: Infidel, her autobiography; The Caged Virgin, a set of essays on the role of women in Islam; and Nomad, the story of her life after leaving Somalia. In the Netherlands, her main impact came from her criticism of the country’s diversity policies, and her openly hostile attitude to Islam. The fact that she was a refugee, a woman, an African, and an ex-Muslim atheist lent political credibility to her views. She worked with other Dutch critics of multiculturalism, such as Paul Scheffer and Paul Cliteur, and was to some extent their spokesperson. She advocated a rigorous policy of ‘integration’ (cultural assimilation) for immigrants, insisting that they must abandon their identity, or actually not their identity, but rather those traditions being practiced by Muslim immigrants that ran contrary to the beliefs and practices of the established community.

…

Ali is perhaps unique in that unlike many wingnuts she splits her time fairly evenly between having genuine critiques of Islam and being a raving Islamophobe. She is probably one of the best examples of “Your mileage may vary” when it comes to her writings on the subject.

To be fair she was subjected to female genital mutilation under the influence of her traditionalist Grandmother and received a death threat pinned with a bloody knife to the chest of the assassinated Theo van Gogh.

While a famous critic of religious and societal norms, van Gogh wasn’t really the most eloquent writer in the business. He was well known for consistantly calling Muslims ‘goatfuckers’, dubbed Jesus the ‘rotten fish of Nazareth’ and apparently found the Holocaust hilarious, joking about ‘copulating yellow stars in the gas chamber’ and ‘the smell of caramel because they’re burning diabetic Jews’. While these are of course extreme examples, Theo van Gogh often expressed himself in this confrontational style and there is still much discussion over whether he should be seen as a ‘martyr’ for free speech or someone who willingly made those statements to piss people off.

I wonder what she will talk about?

The real news below.

Today’s Matchups-

Sorry Kansas Fans (really, who are you?) I had a funeral.

No, I am not kidding.  Father of a friend.

This Evening’s Matchups-

Now with covenient breaks!

This Afternoon’s Matchups-