Beet L. Jooz

A New York state town has agreed to undergo a spooky temporary name change -- from Huntington to Hauntington -- thanks to a 7-year-old's suggestion.

For parents with children who have food allergies Halloween can be a scary time, but the Teal Pumpkin Project aims to make Halloween safe for everyone. Katelyn Wilson explains.

Alyssa Milano urged her fans to politicize Halloween by using evening for door-knocking, telemarketing, and fundraising for Democrats.

Now they are telling people what to wear

Via DataTrekResearch.com,

Ten years ago today (October 31st) someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper titled “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System”. 

The system he or she outlined went live a few months later, on January 3rd 2009. The basic idea was simplicity itself: create a monetary system that doesn’t require a trusted third party intermediary like a bank. Technology – common software running on thousands of unrelated computers around the world – alone would power the public’s trust.

In the last 10 years, bitcoin has been through multiple booms and busts but it is still with us. And since anniversaries are times to look both at the past, present and future, we have a list of 7 points that do just that.

#1. Bitcoin’s current market cap is $110 billion, and the crypto currency ecosystem it spawned is worth $203 billion. For reference:

• Bitcoin is worth more than much older entities like Goldman Sachs ($83 billion, founded in 1869) or Morgan Stanley ($78 billion, founded in 1935).

• Its market cap is still just 9% of all the $100 bills in circulation ($1,252 billion) or 17% of all 100 – 500 euro notes outstanding.

#2. Bitcoin’s rapid price increase in 2016-2017 created a whole industry of other crypto currencies, and there are now just over 2,000 products listed on industry database Coinmarketcap, trading in 15,000 markets around the world. Thirteen other crypto currencies have market caps over $1 billion. All that said, bitcoin remains the industry’s gorilla with 54% of total market value.

#3. Bitcoin’s appeal is global, with top Google search traffic over the last year coming from South Africa, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Australia and Ghana. No surprise, but current global search trends are a shadow of their late December peaks, down 92% and still heading lower.

Bitcoin’s utility in countries where the banking system or even government are less than stable is something that crypto currencies’ first-world critics usually miss. They tend to assume that everyone has ready access to a stable local currency guided by a responsible central bank with legal protections against the arbitrary seizure of personal property. Spoiler alert: they don’t.

#4. There are 29.7 million bitcoin wallets in existence, a tiny fraction of the estimated 2.5 billion smartphone users in the world. That’s the most important statistic to understand both the opportunity and problem with crypto currencies just now. Mobile payments are the future – that’s easy enough to see –and bitcoin is mobile-ready. But right now virtually all global mobile money transfers hook up to the traditional banking system. For bitcoin and other cryptos to gain real traction, they need to offer great convenience/utility than dollar, euro, or yen-based payments.

#5. Bitcoin and cryptos generally are deep in a technological “winter” at the moment. After the boom/bust cycle of 2017-2018, that is natural enough. The current setup is much like US tech stocks in 2000-2005, which took half a decade to stabilize after the dot com bubble burst. Yes, Amazon traded for $10 back then, but so did a lot of other busted dot coms that ended up going to zero. Same goes for many of the 2,000 cryptos just now.

#6. While hard to quantify, everyone we know in the crypto space agrees there is a lot of intellectual horsepower at work trying to find the “next big thing” in the space. Blockchain technology – the decentralized underpinnings of bitcoin – is getting traction at big banks like JP Morgan in proprietary software development. But finding the right consumer use cases with a crypto currency and growing that business has proved elusive.

#7. Looking out over the next 10 years for bitcoin and crypto currencies, we see the following:

• Like the 2000 – 2005 experience for US Tech stocks, many of the current class of cryptos will disappear.

• The killer app in crypto has yet to be developed, but it will come and likely target emerging markets. It will build in volatility caps and offer some sort of interest-like component to stabilize day-to-day prices.

• Bitcoin will rally again, likely during the next global recession. Remember when it started: in the teeth of the last global financial crisis. While the US banking system is sounder than in 2008, the jury is out on the rest of the world. In a severe economic downturn, bitcoin should do well again.

Bottom line: Bitcoin starts its second decade in a similar position to 10 years ago – a clever technology looking for a home.

While it has now well and truly entered the mainstream consciousness, there are still concerns that it has longevity, and could ultimately fail. Even Wences Casares, widely known as bitcoin's "Patient Zero" for his role in spurring interest in crypto in Silicon Valley, expressed worries about its future.

"It may work, it might not work," he told Bloomberg on Monday. "We are in the equivalent of 1992 for the internet."

While we don’t yet think it is a “buy” based on Google Trend and wallet growth analysis, it is still worth watching.

A conservative activist who credited Kanye West with designing "Blexit" t-shirts urging black people to leave the Democratic Party is apologizing for what she calls "a lie that seems to have made its way around the world."Candace Owens, the...

Nearly nine months after Politico first reported that interest payments stemming from nearly $70 billion in frozen assets formerly belonging to the regime of deceased Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi had been paid to opaque accounts belonging to the Libyan Investment Authority, UN investigators are finally looking into where the money went. At last count, RT reported that interest payments generated by the assets had reached $5.7 billion. According to public broadcaster RTBF, which cited anonymous sources familiar with the money flows, the money may have gone to accounts controlled by Libyan militia groups that have been accused of human rights abuses. 

Back in 2011, as NATO bombs were falling over Tripoli, the United Nations voted to sanction Libya and freeze all assets belonging to the Gaddafi regime that were being held abroad. As Politico explained, the regime had spread its capital across Europe and North America, investing in companies as diverse as the Italian bank UniCredit to the British publisher Pearson. But Brussels-based Euroclear, which had custody of four of the regime-linked accounts, chose not to halt the interest payments flowing out of those accounts. That's because in the EU, where national governments were charged with enforcing the sanctions, it was decided that only the assets themselves would be frozen, not the interest payments stemming from those assets.

Instead, capital continued to flow from these assets into accounts controlled by the Libyan Investment Authority, a nebulous quasi-state affiliated organization that controlled the seized assets when Gaddafi was still in power. These interest payments stemmed from stock dividends, bond coupon payments and other sources of revenue. So far, Belgian authorities have denied any responsibility for allowing the loophole in the sanctions regime. Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders told reporters on Tuesday that he wasn't involved in the decision to unblock interest on deposits.

"This [decision to unblock funds] is the responsibility of the Finance Ministry. I have not headed it since December 6, 2011, and have not made any decisions on this matter," Reynders said. Instead, he pointed the finger at former Finance Minister Steven Vanackere, whom he said was in charge when the ministry granted permission to unfreeze the interest payments.

Meanwhile, the UN is also investigating the disappearance of billions of dollars that are believed to have been embezzled from the Gaddafi accounts, according to Belgian MP Georges Gilkinet.

"UN documents confirm that Belgium failed to comply with a UN resolution on freezing Libyan assets," Gilkinet told RTBF, adding that he had only received fragmentary information from Belgian authorities. The politician said it is necessary "to clarify the situation, which may lead to a big scandal, because hundreds of millions of euros were sent to unknown individuals in Libya."

As Politico Europe exposed in an investigation published back in February, interest payments from frozen accounts linked to Gaddafi had been flowing to bank accounts in Bahrain and Luxembourg in recent years, in apparent contravention of an EU order stipulating that the former Libyan dictator's wealth was to be held in trust for the Libyan people to access once the country, still riven by conflict years after then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped toppled Gaddafi's regime by pushing for a NATO-led intervention that helped rebels topple his regime.

Since then, Libya has fractured into separate fiefdoms ruled by competing warlords. A UN-recognized government still rules in Tripoli, while a rival administration has seized power in the eastern port of Tobruk, across the country, Islamist insurgencies also contribute to the instability.

While Gaddafi’s wealth is meant to be held in trust for the Libyan people until the war-shattered country stabilizes, interest payments flowed from frozen accounts in Brussels to bank accounts in Luxembourg and Bahrain over recent years.

The LIA's finances remain murky, and the only aspect of this situation that is clear is that the interest payments are going to someone. But the individual or individuals who ultimately control the disparate LIA accounts remain a mystery. Though we'd be willing to wager that, whatever the money is being used for, it has nothing to do with the welfare of the Libyan people.

Moscow suspects terrorism behind blast which killed bomber and injured three security officials

President's remark comes after journalist claims he has 'radicalised so many more people than Isis ever did'

Emanuela Orlandi disappeared in 1983 and her case has been linked to everything from the plot to kill Pope John Paul II to Rome's criminal underworld

‘There is no travel ban on them’

Coinbase, one of the top U.S. cryptocurrency exchanges, said on Tuesday it raised another $300 million in a funding round led by Tiger Global Management, valuing the firm at more than $8 billion.

President Donald Trump said he will seek to limit the right of citizenship for certain children born in the United States in a new bid to dramatically reshape immigration policies that appeared to run afoul of the U.S. Constitution.

Parents said the one-man show contained demeaning, derogatory and inappropriate language with anti-Semitic sentiment that was offensive to Jewish students.

Even more conservative estimates would render the mass of migrants larger than many American communities

Authored by William Astore via TomDispatch.com,

As America enters the 18th year of its war in Afghanistan and its 16th in Iraq, the war on terror continues in Yemen, Syria, and parts of Africa, including Libya, Niger, and Somalia. Meanwhile, the Trump administration threatens yet more war, this time with Iran. (And given these last years, just how do you imagine that’s likely to turn out?) Honestly, isn’t it time Americans gave a little more thought to why their leaders persist in waging losing wars across significant parts of the planet?  So consider the rest of this piece my attempt to do just that.

Let’s face it: profits and power should be classified as perennial reasons why U.S. leaders persist in waging such conflicts. War may be a racket, as General Smedley Butler claimed long ago, but who cares these days since business is booming? And let’s add to such profits a few other all-American motivations. Start with the fact that, in some curious sense, war is in the American bloodstream. As former New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges once put it, "War is a force that gives us meaning." Historically, we Americans are a violent people who have invested much in a self-image of toughness now being displayed across the “global battlespace.” (Hence all the talk in this country not about our soldiers but about our “warriors.”) As the bumper stickers I see regularly where I live say: “God, guns, & guts made America free.” To make the world freer, why not export all three?

Add in, as well, the issue of political credibility. No president wants to appear weak and in the United States of the last many decades, pulling back from a war has been the definition of weakness. No one -- certainly not Donald Trump -- wants to be known as the president who “lost” Afghanistan or Iraq. As was true of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the Vietnam years, so in this century fear of electoral defeat has helped prolong the country’s hopeless wars. Generals, too, have their own fears of defeat, fears that drive them to escalate conflicts (call it the urge to surge) and even to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons, as General William Westmoreland did in 1968 during the Vietnam War.

Washington’s own deeply embedded illusions and deceptions also serve to generate and perpetuate its wars. Lauding our troops as “freedom fighters” for peace and prosperity, presidents like George W. Bush have waged a set of brutal wars in the name of spreading democracy and a better way of life. The trouble is: incessant war doesn’t spread democracy -- though in the twenty-first century we’ve learned that it does spread terror groups -- it kills it. At the same time, our leaders, military and civilian, have given us a false picture of the nature of the wars they’re fighting. They continue to present the U.S. military and its vaunted “smart” weaponry as a precision surgical instrument capable of targeting and destroying the cancer of terrorism, especially of the radical Islamic variety. Despite the hoopla about them, however, those precision instruments of war turn out to be blunt indeed, leading to the widespread killing of innocents, the massive displacement of people across America’s war zones, and floods of refugees who have, in turn, helped spark the rise of the populist right in lands otherwise still at peace.

Lurking behind the incessant warfare of this century is another belief, particularly ascendant in the Trump White House: that big militaries and expensive weaponry represent “investments” in a better future -- as if the Pentagon were the Bank of America or Wall Street. Steroidal military spending continues to be sold as a key to creating jobs and maintaining America’s competitive edge, as if war were America’s primary business. (And perhaps it is!)

Those who facilitate enormous military budgets and frequent conflicts abroad still earn special praise here. Consider, for example, Senator John McCain’s rapturous final sendoff, including the way arms maker Lockheed Martin lauded him as an American hero supposedly tough and demanding when it came to military contractors. (And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.)

Put all of this together and what you’re likely to come up with is the American version of George Orwell's famed formulation in his novel 1984: "war is peace."

The War the Pentagon Knew How to Win

Twenty years ago, when I was a major on active duty in the U.S. Air Force, a major concern was the possible corroding of civil-military relations - in particular, a growing gap between the military and the civilians who were supposed to control them. I’m a clipper of newspaper articles and I saved some from that long-gone era. “Sharp divergence found in views of military and civilians,” reported the New York Times in September 1999. “Civilians, military seen growing apart,” noted the Washington Post a month later. Such pieces were picking up on trends already noted by distinguished military commentators like Thomas Ricks and Richard Kohn. In July 1997, for instance, Ricks had written an influential Atlantic article, “The Widening Gap between the Military and Society.” In 1999, Kohn gave a lecture at the Air Force Academy titled “The Erosion of Civilian Control of the Military in the United States Today.”

A generation ago, such commentators worried that the all-volunteer military was becoming an increasingly conservative and partisan institution filled with generals and admirals contemptuous of civilians, notably then-President Bill Clinton. At the time, according to one study, 64% of military officers identified as Republicans, only 8% as Democrats and, when it came to the highest levels of command, that figure for Republicans was in the stratosphere, approaching 90%. Kohn quoted a West Point graduate as saying, “We’re in danger of developing our own in-house Soviet-style military, one in which if you’re not in ‘the party,’ you don’t get ahead.” In a similar fashion, 67% of military officers self-identified as politically conservative, only 4% as liberal.

In a 1998 article for the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings, Ricks noted that “the ratio of conservatives to liberals in the military” had gone from “about 4 to 1 in 1976, which is about where I would expect a culturally conservative, hierarchical institution like the U.S. military to be, to 23 to 1 in 1996.” This “creeping politicization of the officer corps,” Ricks concluded, was creating a less professional military, one in the process of becoming “its own interest group.” That could lead, he cautioned, to an erosion of military effectiveness if officers were promoted based on their political leanings rather than their combat skills.

How has the civil-military relationship changed in the last two decades? Despite bending on social issues (gays in the military, women in more combat roles), today’s military is arguably neither more liberal nor less partisan than it was in the Clinton years. It certainly hasn’t returned to its citizen-soldier roots via a draft. Change, if it’s come, has been on the civilian side of the divide as Americans have grown both more militarized and more partisan (without any greater urge to sign up and serve). In this century, the civil-military divide of a generation ago has been bridged by endless celebrations of that military as “the best of us” (as Vice President Mike Pence recently put it).

Such expressions, now commonplace, of boundless faith in and thankfulness for the military are undoubtedly driven in part by guilt over neither serving, nor undoubtedly even truly caring. Typically, Pence didn’t serve and neither did Donald Trump (those pesky “heel spurs”). As retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich put it in 2007: “To assuage uneasy consciences, the many who do not serve [in the all-volunteer military] proclaim their high regard for the few who do. This has vaulted America’s fighting men and women to the top of the nation’s moral hierarchy. The character and charisma long ago associated with the pioneer or the small farmer -- or carried in the 1960s by Dr. King and the civil-rights movement -- has now come to rest upon the soldier.” This elevation of “our” troops as America’s moral heroes feeds a Pentagon imperative that seeks to isolate the military from criticism and its commanders from accountability for wars gone horribly wrong.

Paradoxically, Americans have become both too detached from their military and too deferential to it. We now love to applaud that military, which, the pollsters tell us, enjoys a significantly higher degree of trust and approval from the public than the presidency, Congress, the media, the Catholic church, or the Supreme Court. What that military needs, however, in this era of endless war is not loud cheers, but tough love.

As a retired military man, I do think our troops deserve a measure of esteem. There's a selfless ethic to the military that should seem admirable in this age of selfies and selfishness. That said, the military does not deserve the deference of the present moment, nor the constant adulation it gets in endless ceremonies at any ballpark or sporting arena. Indeed, deference and adulation, the balm of military dictatorships, should be poison to the military of a democracy.

With U.S. forces endlessly fighting ill-begotten wars, whether in Vietnam in the 1960s or in Iraq and Afghanistan four decades later, it’s easy to lose sight of where the Pentagon continues to maintain a truly winning record: right here in the U.S.A. Today, whatever’s happening on the country’s distant battlefields, the idea that ever more inflated military spending is an investment in making America great again reigns supreme - as it has, with little interruption, since the 1980s and the era of President Ronald Reagan.

The military’s purpose should be, as Richard Kohn put it long ago, “to defend society, not to define it. The latter is militarism.” With that in mind, think of the way various retired military men lined up behind Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, including a classically unhinged performance by retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn (he of the “lock her up” chants) for Trump at the Republican convention and a shout-out of a speech by retired General John Allen for Clinton at the Democratic one. America’s presidential candidates, it seemed, needed to be anointed by retired generals, setting a dangerous precedent for future civil-military relations.

A Letter From My Senator

A few months back, I wrote a note to one of my senators to complain about America’s endless wars and received a signed reply via email. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that it was a canned response, but no less telling for that.

My senator began by praising American troops as “tough, smart, and courageous, and they make huge sacrifices to keep our families safe. We owe them all a true debt of gratitude for their service.” OK, I got an instant warm and fuzzy feeling, but seeking applause wasn’t exactly the purpose of my note.

My senator then expressed support for counterterror operations, for, that is, "conducting limited, targeted operations designed to deter violent extremists that pose a credible threat to America's national security, including al-Qaeda and its affiliates, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), localized extremist groups, and homegrown terrorists.” My senator then added a caveat, suggesting that the military should obey “the law of armed conflict” and that the authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) that Congress hastily approved in the aftermath of 9/11 should not be interpreted as an “open-ended mandate” for perpetual war.

Finally, my senator voiced support for diplomacy as well as military action, writing, “I believe that our foreign policy should be smart, tough, and pragmatic, using every tool in the toolbox -- including defense, diplomacy, and development - to advance U.S. security and economic interests around the world.” The conclusion: “robust” diplomacy must be combined with a “strong” military.

Now, can you guess the name and party affiliation of that senator? Could it have been Lindsey Graham or Jeff Flake, Republicans who favor a beyond-strong military and endlessly aggressive counterterror operations? Of course, from that little critical comment on the AUMF, you’ve probably already figured out that my senator is a Democrat. But did you guess that my military-praising, counterterror-waging representative was Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts?

Full disclosure: I like Warren and have made small contributions to her campaign. And her letter did stipulate that she believed “military action should always be a last resort.” Still, nowhere in it was there any critique of, or even passingly critical commentary about, the U.S. military, or the still-spreading war on terror, or the never-ending Afghan War, or the wastefulness of Pentagon spending, or the devastation wrought in these years by the last superpower on this planet. Everything was anodyne and safe -- and this from a senator who’s been pilloried by the right as a flaming liberal and caricatured as yet another socialist out to destroy America.

I know what you’re thinking: What choice does Warren have but to play it safe? She can’t go on record criticizing the military. (She’s already gotten in enough trouble in my home state for daring to criticize the police.) If she doesn’t support a “strong” U.S. military presence globally, how could she remain a viable presidential candidate in 2020?

And I would agree with you, but with this little addendum: Isn’t that proof that the Pentagon has won its most important war, the one that captured - to steal a phrase from another losing war -- the “hearts and minds” of America? In this country in 2018, as in 2017, 2016, and so on, the U.S. military and its leaders dictate what is acceptable for us to say and do when it comes to our prodigal pursuit of weapons and wars.

So, while it’s true that the military establishment failed to win those “hearts and minds” in Vietnam or more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, they sure as hell didn’t fail to win them here. In Homeland, U.S.A., in fact, victory has been achieved and, judging by the latest Pentagon budgets, it couldn’t be more overwhelming.

If you ask - and few Americans do these days - why this country’s losing wars persist, the answer should be, at least in part: because there’s no accountability. The losers in those wars have seized control of our national narrative. They now define how the military is seen (as an investment, a boon, a good and great thing); they now shape how we view our wars abroad (as regrettable perhaps, but necessary and also a sign of national toughness); they now assign all serious criticism of the Pentagon to what they might term the defeatist fringe.

In their hearts, America’s self-professed warriors know they’re right. But the wrongs they’ve committed, and continue to commit, in our name will not be truly righted until Americans begin to reject the madness of rampant militarism, bloated militaries, and endless wars.

Their focus has moved towards Jon Favreau's TV series 'The Mandalorian'

An undercover video released by Project Veritas shows Democrat Kyrsten Sinema's campaign manager listing all the gun controls Sinema supports.