Swagman
Swagman's JournalThe Hollow Courage of Bill Maher
by Luke Savage
Throughout his career, Bill Maher has delighted in scolding the powerless.
Which longtime member of America’s pundit class once equated Islam with cancer? Had to apologize for comparing dogs to “retarded children”? Mused about the need for Arab men to become “civilized”? Was publicly alarmed at the rising popularity of the name Mohammad? Casually joked about a woman being throttled before calling her a bitch?
While the smart money might be on any number of bloviating right-wing vulgarians, the answer is someone of a much more liberal persuasion, aligned not with the likes of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon but with Barack Obama and the Democratic Party; given a platform not by Fox News, but rather Comedy Central, HBO, and ABC.
https://jacobinmag.com/2017/09/bill-maher-real-time-trump-islamophobia
is Julian Assange being blackmailed by Vladimir Putin?
interestingTwitter thread by someone who I believe is credible- laying out how Putin may have blackmailed Julian Assange into becoming an assert.
# I was a great supporter of Julian Assange (on here) but the last 2 years I have come to see him as an inherently evil character.
Almost every credible journalist who has worked with Assange like Nick Davies who exposed Britain's Hacking Scandal has ended up despising him and describe him as a bully, a misogynist and a terrible liar who is reveling in his fame.
Some like the highly respected John Pilger have damaged their careers by promoting Assange's falsehood that the "Establishment" would never let Trump win the election.
Everyone who worked on Wikileaks has now left because of him. Who is running Wikileaks now? A bunch of Russian kids? They sound like it at times.
One thing few people pick up on is that Assange was brought up in a bizarre Cult in Australia called The Family run by a incredibly evil woman named Anne Hamilton-Byrne and all the children were forced to have their hair died blonde and dress identically. The Cult was riddled with child abuse of all kinds : sexual. physical. mental and by neglect.
Importantly: those who eventually escaped The Family have spoken up about how evil The Family was except : Julian Assange who has never criticized The Family or Hamilton-Byrne even now that all the children have been removed by the police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Family_(Australian_New_Age_group)
Adam Khan
@Khanoisseur
Majordomo. Exposing Trump https://www.gofundme.com/TrumpRussia Author @HACKtheBIRD
https://twitter.com/Khanoisseur/status/816517526771240960/photo/1
On the Milo Bus With the Lost Boys of Americas New Right
What happens when a movement of gamers recognizes they’re not players, but pawns?
By Laurie Penny
Have you heard the one about the boy who cried Fake News?
This is a story about truth and consequences. It’s a story about who gets to be young and dumb, and who gets held accountable. It’s also a story about how the new right exploits young men — how it preys not on their bodies, but on their emotions, on their hurts and hopes and anger and anxiety, their desperate need to be part of a big ugly boys’ own adventure.
https://psmag.com/on-the-milo-bus-with-the-lost-boys-of-americas-new-right-629a77e87986#.gztaxp3mt
Iraq contractor tells of his year of hell in a 'futile, stupid war'
HE can still smell Iraq. He can even taste it.
Iraq tasted like dust, a fine talcum powder which was always on the wind and which eked its way into everything.
The smell was of oil, of garbage which was never collected, and of death. And there is one other smell which lingers. It is the equally repugnant stench of human waste, which was burned for want of a better method of disposal.
Ten years after the start of the Iraq war, David, an Australian security contractor who worked with the US army, cannot remove Iraq from his mind, from his senses, from his very being. He spent just over a year there safeguarding US army convoys and bases. It is a year which has changed his life forever
http://www.news.com.au/world-news/iraq-contractor-tells-my-year-of-hell-in-a-futile-stupid-war/story-fndir2ev-1226603060461#ixzz2OMNPkldf
Twitter, Twupert and spellcheck
Annabel Crabb
Religion is a vexed topic these days. Not only do we no longer in Australia have a vaguely agreed common deity, to whose actual existence we might privately subscribe with varying degrees of conviction, but now there are a bunch of gods and you have to be careful about invoking them carelessly.
It's with this in mind that I cast the widest possible ecclesiastical net when I offer devout joyous thanks, and a sizeable tithe, to whichever heavenly being it was who made Rupert Murdoch go on Twitter.
Of all the published works for which Murdoch is directly or indirectly responsible, his Twitter stream is the most weirdly, awkwardly, cringe-inducingly enjoyable, with the possible exception of Aliens vs Predator: Requiem.
It has everything: drama, pathos, suspense and the sort of high-spirited shenanigans that inevitably ensue when an 81-year-old man tangles with predictive text.
(One tweet in January, reporting ''universal anger with Optus'', caused deep confusion in the Australian telecommunications industry until the mogul revealed he had actually typed POTUS - the President Of The United States - only to have his iPad decide otherwise on his behalf.)
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/twitter-twupert-and-spellcheck-20120331-1w51v.html
Revealed: US plans to charge Assange
Revealed: US plans to charge Assange
Philip Dorling
February 29, 2012
UNITED STATES prosecutors have drawn up secret charges against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, according to a confidential email obtained from the private US intelligence company Stratfor.
In an internal email to Stratfor analysts on January 26 last year, the vice-president of intelligence, Fred Burton, responded to a media report concerning US investigations targeting WikiLeaks with the comment: ''We have a sealed indictment on Assange.''
He underlined the sensitivity of the information - apparently obtained from a US government source - with warnings to ''Pls [please] protect'' and ''Not for pub[lication]''.
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/revealed-us-plans-to-charge-assange-20120228-1u14o.html
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