April 7, 2024

Washington Says It Warned, Not Asked, Iran Against Attacks On U.S. Troops

https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-us-warning-israel-response/32893647.html



The United States has warned Iran against attacking its troops and bases in the Middle East as Tehran plans its response to a suspected Israeli strike that killed seven military men on April 1. A deputy to the Iranian president's chief of staff said on April 5 that Iran had told Washington in a written message to "stay away" from Israel or risk getting "hurt." "In response, [the] U.S. asked Iran not to target American facilities," Mohammad Jamshidi wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

https://twitter.com/MhmmdJamshidi/status/1776238843710058907
Responding to a request from RFE/RL for comment, a U.S. State Department spokesperson disputed Jamshidi's claim. "We did not 'ask,'" the spokesperson said in written comments. "We responded by warning Iran not to use this as a pretext to attack U.S. personnel and facilities."

A building that Iran says housed the consular section of its embassy in the Syrian capital of Damascus was destroyed in suspected Israeli air strikes on April 1. Seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), including two generals, were among 12 people killed. Israel, as per its usual policy, has not commented on the strike.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pledged retaliation after the attack, vowing that Israel would be "punished by the hands of our courageous men." The IRGC's chief commander, Major General Hossein Salami, reiterated the threat on April 5, and a top military commander on April 6 again renewed the promise.

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Netanyahu is drawing the US into war with Iran to save himself by provoking retaliation from them.

April 6, 2024

Benga & Coki - Night (2007) UK Dubstep

Label: Tempa – TEMPA 030
Format: Vinyl, 12"
Country: UK
Released: 2007
Genre: Electronic
Style: Dubstep

April 6, 2024

Noted Tesla bear says Musk's EV maker could 'go bust' and stock is worth $14

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/tesla-bear-says-elon-musks-ev-maker-will-go-bust-stock-worth-14.html




Tesla could “go bust” while its stock could fall to $14, Per Lekander, a hedge fund manager who has been shorting Elon Musk’s electric car maker since 2020, told CNBC on Wednesday. His comments come after Tesla reported 386,810 vehicle deliveries in the first quarter of the year, significantly below even the lowest market estimates. “This was really the beginning of the end of the Tesla bubble, which probably, arguably was the biggest stock market bubble in modern history,” Lekander, managing partner at investment management firm Clean Energy Transition, said on “Squawk Box Europe.” “I actually think the company could go bust.”

Lekander was a former portfolio manager at investment firm Lansdowne Partners who successfully called a 2018 rally in carbon prices. Since 2020, Clean Energy Transition has been short Tesla’s stock, meaning Lekander’s firm will profit if the automaker’s shares fall. In a March 2021 interview with CNBC, Lekander called for Tesla’s stock to go down. At the time of the interview, Tesla’s shares closed at $233.94. On Tuesday, the stock closed at $166.63. But Lekander also called for a comeback of the traditional automakers, singling out Volkswagen. Shares of Volkswagen have fallen around 53% since that call, though they rallied at the start of this year.

Lekander has taken his bearish Tesla call further, suggesting the stock could fall to $14 per share. He said his call is based on an estimate that the company’s full-year earnings per share this year would be $1.40. Lekander contends that Tesla is a “no growth” stock and should be valued on 10 times forward earnings, versus around 58 times forward earnings currently. Forward earnings are an important metric used by traders to gauge the value of a stock. If Tesla’s stock hit $14, that would represent around 91% downside from Tuesday’s close. Tesla’s shares have already fallen more than 30% this year.

“I think however Tesla cannot be at $14. If it falls under a certain level because of everything that’s been going on, it’s going to go bust.” Lekander gave a number of reasons for his negative outlook. He said Tesla’s business model has been based on strong revenue growth, vertical integration and direct-to-consumer sales. Vertical integration broadly refers to when one company internally handles many parts of a process from the manufacturing of the car to the software. This model is “brilliant” when a company grows, but goes in “reverse” when sales fall, Lekander said.

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April 5, 2024

Far-Right Extremist Accounts Surging on Mainstream Platforms

As mainstream social media companies’ content moderation teams shrink and policies fail, extremists are flourishing and no longer have to hide on the fringe.

https://globalextremism.org/post/far-right-extremist-accounts-surging-on-mainstream-platforms/



The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) monitors hundreds of far-right extremist accounts across social media, including individuals, local organizations, and far-right political parties. Between June 2023 and March 2024, several of these accounts have shown substantial growth on Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, while losing subscribers on Telegram, a fringe platform embraced by extremist groups when they weren’t allowed on the mainstream platforms. It seems now that they no longer need fringe accounts to push their hateful ideas.

The lack of adequate moderation resources on mainstream platforms is well-documented. Every platform, at differing levels, hosts harmful anti-LGBTQ+ content regarding conversion therapy, continues to host members and affiliates of the Identitarian movement, whose ideology advocates for the ethnic cleansing of Europe, and YouTube even hosts established neo-Nazi political parties such as Greece’s Golden Dawn. YouTube has continued to platform extremists over the years, and in some cases, monetizes their bigoted content, while Twitter has become a safe haven for every kind of hate you can imagine. TikTok is not immune either, having been the impetus for the spread of neo-Nazi memes like “Aryan Classic.”

In the United States, the international white supremacist movement White Lives Matter’s (WLM) California chapter increased its Twitter following from 8,839 to 14,000 (+5,161) from June 2023 and March 2024, representing a 58 percent increase. Meanwhile, their Telegram channel has only grown from 1,106 to 1,252 subscribers (+146). Similarly, WLM California’s Gab account, a platform originally meant to be a “free speech social network” opposed to Twitter, only grew from 499 to 529 (+30), representing an even smaller six percent increase in followers. WLM California’s Telegram channel will post sparsely, a maximum of two to three times a day, while their Twitter account is much more active. On Twitter, WLM California will post similar content to Telegram, but more often. They will also post more “jokes” meant to appeal to a wider audience, bolstering their recruiting efforts.



Far-right influencer and Trump ally Jack Posobiec saw his Twitter following rise from 2,100,000 to 2,400,000 (+300,000), representing a 14 percent increase, and his subscribers on YouTube grew from 12,600 to 18,600 (+6,000), representing a 48 percent increase. Meanwhile, his Telegram channel demonstrated a stark decrease in subscribers, going from 162,649 to 146,867 (-15,782), a 10 percent decrease. Neo-Nazi and director of the Nationalist Network Ryan A. Sanchez, who attempted to capitalize on recruitment efforts during the recent border standoff between Texas and the federal government, didn’t have a presence on Twitter in June 2023, but created an account in August. Since then, he has amassed 2,082 followers, while his Telegram channel’s subscribers dropped from 6,095 to 5,959 (-136), representing a two percent decrease.

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April 5, 2024

DEI and Multiracial Coalition

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-04-05-dei-and-multiracial-coalition/



Our friend and Prospect Board member Randall Kennedy is a distinquished law professor at Harvard. Kennedy once clerked for Thurgood Marshall. He is author of many books, including one titled For Discrimination, a comprehensive defense of racial preference as the necessary remedy for the long legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, racial redlining, and other elements of state-sponsored racism. But Kennedy sees the DEI movement as increasingly counterproductive. In a piece written April 2 for The Harvard Crimson, Kennedy quotes an emblematic diversity statement proposed by Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. He writes: For the purpose of showcasing attentiveness to DEI, the Center suggests answering questions such as: “How does your research engage with and advance the well-being of socially marginalized communities?”; “Do you know how the following operate in the academy: implicit bias, different forms of privilege, (settler-)colonialism, systemic and interpersonal racism, homophobia, heteropatriarchy, and ableism?”; “How do you account for the power dynamics in the classroom, including your own positionality and authority?”; “How do you design course assessments with EDIB [equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging] in mind?”; and “How have you engaged in or led EDIB campus initiatives or programming?”

Kennedy sees such statements as “a troubling invitation to ritualized dissembling. A cottage industry of diversity statement ‘counseling’ has already emerged to offer candidates prefabricated, boilerplate rhetoric.” Does Kennedy have a fair point, or has he gone neocon on us? Let’s recall the distinct origins of affirmative action and DEI. Affirmative action was invented during the Johnson administration, as civil rights advocates appreciated that it wasn’t enough to simply prohibit discrimination in employment, as the 1964 Civil Rights Act did. Deep-seated racist pattens of recruitment required deliberate countermeasures. So in 1965, LBJ issued Executive Order 11246 requiring federal contractors to “take affirmative action” to reach minorities in recruitment, advertising, apprenticeship and training, as well as employment. That was literally the first use of the term. Affirmative action was embraced by corporate America, and quickly spread to higher education. It was right-wing courts, not public opinion, that challenged affirmative action, beginning with the Bakke case of 1978.

In Bakke, the Supreme Court deadlocked over whether an affirmative action program at the University of California was illegal discrimination against white people. In that case, Justice Lewis Powell broke the tie by inventing, out of whole cloth, an entirely new rationale for affirmative recruitment and acceptance of minorities: diversity. It was pedagogically good for white students to experience a diverse classroom. With the Black Lives Matter movement, a more militant version of diversity took hold. In Ibram X. Kendi’s formulation, white liberals might think they were “allies” of racial justice, but they needed to work harder at it. Meanwhile, the high court, after chipping away at affirmative action in several cases since Bakke, finally killed it last year in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. So we now have two conceptions of racial remediation going in opposite directions and talking past each other.

Affirmative action, explicitly aimed at the descendants of slaves, is in ruins. The more diffuse concept of diversity, requiring ever more exquisite sensitivity, is targeted at well-meaning white liberals. Meanwhile, in Trump country, DEI doesn’t make a dent in patterns of racism and stimulates ridicule and backlash. Kennedy writes, “Universities are under a legal, moral, and pedagogical duty to take action against wrongful discriminatory conduct. But demands for mandatory DEI statements venture far beyond that obligation into territory that is full of booby-traps inimical to an intellectually healthy university environment.” But the wider consequences may be even more serious. If we are ever to return to the days when courts and broad public opinion were accepting of affirmative action, that will take more robust multiracial governing coalitions, who in turn will elect presidents who appoint progressive judges and pursue progressive economic policies that bridge racial divides. The right question to be asked of DEI initiatives is not whether they increase sensitivity among the already sensitive but whether they help us get back to a multiracial governing coalition.

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April 5, 2024

Congress Poised to Prevent One Form of Student Debt Relief

https://prospect.org/education/2024-04-05-congress-prevent-student-debt-relief-flight-faa/



A five-year reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration has become the unlikely stage for another round of sparring on the thorny issue of student debt relief, with Congress retreating to the familiar territory of enabling more debt rather than investing in education. A provision tucked into the 1,072-page bill would increase current federal student loan limits for flight education and training. Flight experience and licensing is mandatory for incoming pilots, and a labor shortage has created a significant need to increase the numbers in the pipeline, with some airlines canceling flights over the past several years due to sheer lack of manpower. Flight training alone can cost as much as $80,000 for a four-year degree, not including tuition. The increase in loan limits, which will allow up to $107,500 in borrowing toward a degree for qualified programs, may enable more students to afford flight education. It’s taken from a bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Dan Sullivan (R-AK) last year, though the increases are smaller than what that bill envisioned.

But in exchange, the current FAA bill includes a provision that says that, regarding flight education and training loans, the government “may not take any action to cancel or forgive the outstanding balances, or portion of balances, on any Federal Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loan, or otherwise modify the terms or conditions of a Federal Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loan, made to an eligible student, except as authorized by an Act of Congress.” This would create a carve-out for flight education from any mass cancellation program, such as the one the Education Department is negotiating right now in a rulemaking process. The prohibition on debt cancellation was not in the original Baldwin-Sullivan bill. Since the prohibition wasn’t in the original bill, it certainly feels like it was inserted due to a Republican demand during negotiations, amid their high-profile fight to bar mass student debt relief. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), ranking Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee, was one of the key negotiators of the FAA reauthorization.

Republican attorneys general appealed to the Supreme Court to strike down Biden’s first debt relief plan, and have recently mounted a second lawsuit about the administration’s version of income-driven repayment, which has been in place in one form or another for over three decades. The provision talks specifically of “mass cancellation,” so presumably income-driven repayment programs would be unaffected. But a final adjudication of that would be up to the courts, and it could mean that flight education debtors might not even be able to access programs that made their debt more manageable. Another mass cancellation program involves remedies when a higher-education program defrauds students or closes down. So if this provision were to pass into law, flight education students who were given worthless degrees that cannot be used for placement into jobs would have no recourse but to pay back those loans they took out under their school’s false pretenses.



The reauthorization bill came out of a bipartisan negotiation and has been pre-conferenced between the House and Senate. Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) are the Democratic co-sponsors on the Senate side. Neither of their offices responded to a request for comment. Sen. Baldwin’s office has also not responded to a request for comment. Other Senators are unhappy with negotiators including the prohibition on debt forgiveness. “President Biden has cancelled student debt for nearly 4 million Americans, and Republicans in Congress are trying to undermine this life-changing relief through a legislative trick in the FAA bill,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), one of the biggest proponents in Washington of student debt relief. “It’s a shameful political trap that Democrats in Congress need to stand united against and strike from the final bill.”

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https://twitter.com/strikedebt/status/1775856807832949191

April 5, 2024

Madam Architectuur perches green-tiled home extension on curved concrete terrace in Belgium

https://www.dezeen.com/2024/03/27/sofie-madam-architectuur-belgium-house-extension/











Brussel-based architecture studio Madam Architectuur has renovated a home in Dilbeek, Belgium, adding a green-tiled extension built on a green-pigmented concrete base. Green hues were chosen for the extension to match the surrounding lush landscape and set it apart from the existing white house, which was built in 1937. Named Sofie, Madam Architectuur aimed to retain most of the home as possible and celebrate its unique shape, which has a steeply pitched roof and arched openings. The extension, which was made from steel and timber. was built on the north side of the home to create a dining room with views of the nearby fields.











"The idea was to restore the existing house to its honour as much as possible," Madam Architectuur co-founder Door Smits told Dezeen. "The plan was also very logical, but the orientation of the house was not optimal. We wanted to add a space with direct sunlight and a link with the beautiful green area," he continued. "We also wanted to add a contemporary addition that is an interesting contrast to the existing architecture so that spaces with a different character coexist, allowing different experiences." Covered in green tiles, the extension was built on a green-pigmented polished concrete platform, which forms the internal floor.











Designed to create flow between indoor and outdoor spaces, the concrete platform extends from the extension and curves around the side and rear of the home, forming two outdoor terraces on either side of the dining room. "The terrace is wider where needed and narrower where not," said Smits. "The organic form makes a softer transition with the surroundings." "It embraces the house, both the old and the new part, and makes everything one whole. As the terrace goes around the house, it catches the morning, noon and evening sun in different places." The terrace at the side of the home is sheltered by a roof with a circular opening. "Through the round opening, the light falls very nicely on the floor ?? a round circle that turns with the sun, sometimes on the floor of the terrace and sometimes on the floor inside," said Smits.











Inside, Madam Architectuur altered the kitchen to make it more spacious while preserving the home's existing wood flooring, stairs and mouldings. Informed by the home's existing arched windows and doorways, the studio added curved shapes to the interior, including on the kitchen island and in the changes of flooring between the kitchen and dining room. "There were many arches in the existing house," said Smits. "This form was continued in the opening between the existing house and the extension, both in the wall opening and in the transition of the two floor materials."

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April 5, 2024

Jennifer Rubin: Israel is at a crisis point: The world has had enough

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/04/israel-aid-workers-war-gaza-deaths/

https://archive.is/oVWbA



Israel’s strikes killing seven World Central Kitchen personnel, who were working for José Andrés’s nonprofit to feed the hungry in Gaza, were, by Israel’s account, a mistake. Saying that, however, does not absolve the country of responsibility for the latest tragedy in a war that has killed nearly 200 aid workers. Plainly, Israel has failed to construct or observe adequate rules of deconfliction to protect humanitarian aid workers. Moreover, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement that, in essence, mistakes happen in war is utterly insufficient — and revealing of his utter tone-deafness. Innocents do get killed — which is precisely why you want to avoid wars, carve out safe passage for innocents including humanitarian relief workers and make every effort to bring conflicts to a negotiated end.

“Several humanitarian groups said Tuesday that they would suspend their operations in Gaza after seven World Central Kitchen workers were killed in an Israeli strike, threatening already precarious deliveries to the aid-starved enclave,” The Post reported. “The strike sent shock waves through the international aid community. WCK and at least two other groups said they would pause their operations in Gaza.” Israel has vowed to abide by the laws of war, but that requires its military action not “cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” When massive civilian casualties including aid workers continue, there is reason to question compliance with international law.

A war launched for self-defense can lose legitimacy if the means of fighting violate international norms. Andrés’s plea for Israel to “stop restricting humanitarian aid, stop killing civilians and aid workers, and stop using food as a weapon” will resonate with many Americans. Accordingly, Israel cannot continue to fight for diminishing returns if it is not willing or able to protect innocents. Israel seems to be wearing out the patience of even the Biden administration, arguably the most pro-Zionist in history. (Matters have gotten so bad that, before the latest strike, even Netanyahu’s BFF, former president Donald Trump, was telling Israel to wrap up the war.) The Times of Israel quotes an anonymous U.S. official furious that adequate measures to coordinate with aid workers are “only being put in place now.” Indeed, even in Israel there is recognition that not enough has been done. An Israeli official told the Times of Israel, “Soldiers are operating under immense pressure in very difficult conditions in which Hamas embeds itself within the civilian population, but the rules of engagement are designed to help deal with such conditions, and they’re too often being ignored.”

White House spokesman John Kirby was remarkably blunt. “We were outraged to learn of an IDF strike that killed a number of civilian humanitarian workers yesterday from the World Central Kitchen, which has been relentlessly working to get food to those who are hungry in Gaza,” he said on Tuesday. Expressing “hope” that the investigation’s results would be made public, Kirby declared, “This incident is emblematic of the larger problem and evidence of why distribution of aid in Gaza has been so challenging. But beyond the strike, what is clear is that the IDF must do much more to improve deconfliction processes so that civilians and humanitarian aid workers are protected.” Later in the day, President Biden issued his own blistering statement, emphasizing that “this is not a stand-alone incident.” In some of his harshest language yet, he declared, “Israel has not done enough to protect aid workers trying to deliver desperately needed help to civilians. Incidents like yesterday’s simply should not happen.” He reminded Israel, “The United States has repeatedly urged Israel to deconflict their military operations against Hamas with humanitarian operations, in order to avoid civilian casualties.” Promising to do all the United States can to deliver aid to Gaza, Biden stressed: “I will continue to press Israel to do more to facilitate that aid. And we are pushing hard for an immediate cease-fire as part of a hostage deal.” Rarely have we seen Biden criticize Israel in such emotional terms.

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April 5, 2024

RFK Jr. clarifies that his view of Jan. 6 is the conspiratorial one

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/05/rfk-jr-jan6-statement/

https://archive.is/T6mqa



Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s approach to national politics is uncomplicated. Whatever the conventional wisdom — however sound it might be and no matter the scale of the evidence supporting it — he’s against it. If his last name were Smith, he’d have a fairly popular podcast and a line of nutritional supplements. But he was born into a different industry. On Thursday, his scattershot presidential bid was ruffled (to the extent that it can be) by a reference to people in prison for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol having been “stripped of their Constitutional liberties.” The campaign quickly clarified that this presentation, one that echoes the views of his ostensible opponent Donald Trump, was an error introduced by “a new marketing contractor.”

Kennedy subsequently decided to clarify his position on the Capitol riot. In a statement released on Friday afternoon, he affirmed that … he broadly agreed with the position of his ostensible opponent Donald Trump. “January 6 is one of the most polarizing topics on the political landscape,” the statement begins, which is, by itself, an exceptional distillation of Kennedy’s approach to political issues broadly. The Capitol riot is polarizing because it is extremely useful for Trump and his allies to obscure and misdirect his supporters about what happened, which was that he lied about the election results and encouraged people to come to Washington on that day to protest and then directed them at the Capitol. It is polarizing in the way that vaccination is polarizing: There is a reality and there is a surreality, and the two are necessarily in conflict because the latter exists largely as a source of conflict.

“It is quite clear that many of the January 6 protestors broke the law in what may have started as a protest but turned into a riot,” Kennedy’s statement reads. “Because it happened with the encouragement of President Trump, and in the context of his delusion that the election was stolen from him, many people see it not as a riot but as an insurrection.” That is not why people see it as an insurrection. People see it as an insurrection because it was an explicit effort to block the transition of power away from the guy who lost the election. It was a largely ad hoc and ultimately unsuccessful effort to do so, but it is not just a term applied because [waves hands] Trump. “I have not examined the evidence in detail,” the statement continues, “but reasonable people, including Trump opponents, tell me there is little evidence of a true insurrection. They observe that the protestors carried no weapons, had no plans or ability to seize the reins of government, and that Trump himself had urged them to protest ‘peacefully.'”

This is an absolute all-timer of a cop-out. The guy is running for president but claims that on the issue that he himself describes as one of the most polarizing in politics, he gives us puppy eyes and insists that he simply doesn’t know much about it. But what he does know is that other people tell him that the mainstream consensus is wrong, and that’s all he needs to hear. What he’s hearing is incorrect. There were firearms in the crowd that day, if that’s the standard Kennedy requires for a “true insurrection” — but enough other weapons that Trump reportedly asked the Secret Service to skip using metal detectors for his speech at a rally on the Ellipse that morning because the crowd was “not here to hurt me.” Nor was the crowd trying to “seize the reins of government,” as Kennedy says he heard; it was instead trying to keep the reins in Trump’s hands, and did, however temporarily. As for Trump “urging” the crowd to be peaceful, that’s a bit undercut by his firing them up during his speech that morning, his demand they attend the “wild” protest in the first place — and his utter indifference to speaking out against the violence until hours after it began.

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April 4, 2024

Sade - Smooth Operator (C.I.S.C.O. Edit)

VENGOEDIT001
Released February 9, 2022
℗ 2022 Rene Dina