Beet L. Jooz

Oregon State Police Captain Timothy R. Fox said Daniel James Burda did jobs around the house for Dennis Day and his husband.

'Intentionally opened for public discussion'

YAHOO NEWS: Fans of the country rock group Confederate Railroad are outraged after the band was dropped from the lineup [READ MORE]

The post Fans furious after Confederate Railroad dropped from state fair lineup: ‘This political correctness thing is totally out of control’ appeared first on The Savage Nation.

Friday’s earthquake was the largest one in Southern California in nearly 20 years. Officials voiced concerns about the possibility of major aftershocks in the days and even months to come.

Claims Trump could have been indebted to 'dodgy Russians.'

Convicted billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has been been indicted on new charges related to alleged sex crimes involving minors, media outlets reported.

President Trump in a tweet Sunday morning knocked Joe Biden after the 2020 Democratic front-runner apologized for his recent remarks about his ability to work with segregationists when he was a senator."Sleepy Joe Biden just admitted he worked with...

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan on Sunday pushed back against what he called "unsubstantiated" allegations of children living without adequate food, water or sanitation at a Border Patrol sta...

A convoy of Mexican state and municipal police trucks roared along the U.S.-Mexico border in Ciudad Juarez to confront cartel gunmen, past National Guardsmen patrolling the banks of the Rio Grande River for migrants trying to cross into the United States.

Italy’s tussle with the Sea-Watch migrant rescue ship is a textbook case of politics in the age of Matteo Salvini. For weeks the hardline minister railed at the boat’s captain; and when a judge proved him wrong, he challenged her at the ballot box.

1. Trump strikes uncharacteristically apolitical tone in July 4th speech that was nearly rained out  New York Daily News
2. Live updates: Donald Trump's July 4th celebration  CNN
3. Trump 4th of July Salute to America: President Donald Trump emphasizes U.S. military might at "Salute to America" celebration in Washington DC  CBS News
4. The real reason why the left was against Donald Trump's July 4 speech  USA TODAY
5. Trump’s sad, strange, somewhat Soviet Fourth of July spectacle  New York Daily News
6. View full coverage on Google News

New York police went to a Whole Foods about suspected shoplifter. Then they paid for her groceries.  NBC News

Three New York City police officers were called to a Whole Foods on Thursday after a woman was accused of shoplifting. Instead of arresting her, they paid for ...

View full coverage on Google News

Kevin Spacey accuser drops lawsuit against actor  Yahoo Entertainment

A young man who says Kevin Spacey groped him in a Nantucket bar in 2016 has dropped his lawsuit against the Oscar-winning actor, his lawyer said Friday.

View full coverage on Google News

Venezuela is releasing 22 people, including judge Maria Afiuni and journalist Braulio Jatar, a senior U.N. official said on Friday, and an opposition lawmaker called for more releases.

NATO ships entered the Black Sea to conduct routine patrols and participate in a massive show of force exercise in Ukraine.

FOX NEWS: While Democrats and media pundits pounce to decry the Betsy Ross flag as racially problematic — with one [READ MORE]

The post BETSY ROSS FLAG FLEW OVER OBAMA INAUGURATION-NOW CALLED FASCIST BY PSYCHO-PROGS appeared first on The Savage Nation.

New York City's health department is implementing a ban on cannabidiol (CBD) additives in food and drinks, dismaying not just restaurant and café owners but even members of City Council.

Way back in February, city health officials surprised a number of bakeries, restaurants, coffee shops, and food vendors by telling them that CBD derivatives—made from the non-psychoactive components of cannabis—were not permitted in food and drinks. At that point, many places had already begun selling food with the trendy infusions. After businesses expressed their surprise at the sudden announcement, the city's health department agreed to delay enforcement until July.

Now the ban on CBD edibles is officially in effect, and fines of up to $600 per incident may start in October. The city's justification, according to Gothamist, is that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says CBD food additives are illegal under federal law. But the Department of Health is a city agency, not an enforcement mechanism of the federal government. Many observers suspect that local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors are pointing to federal law as an excuse to keep enforcing cannabis bans as states and localities legalize marijuana use.

Some members of the New York City Council, including Speaker Corey Johnson, plan to put together legislation to stop the health department from imposing fines. That itself says a lot about the misbegotten way New York City sometimes operates. The City Council needs to pass a law to stop an administrative department from implementing fines that the council never authorized? Who exactly are the lawmakers here?

City Council member Mark Levine expressed his frustration to Gothamist. "I was very concerned about the impact and confusion it would cause on small businesses and their customers," he said. And now that there's a move on the state level to develop regulations for the legal use of CBD, he added, the "ban seems like it is even more premature."

CBD products themselves are legal in New York City; they just become illegal by virtue of being added to food. It's an absurd policy that has had economic consequences—one business owner stopped plans to open a café to sell CBD-infused treats. Another coffee shop will stop adding CBD-infused shots to their drinks, but will sell the CBD products on the side so customers can add them instead.

The Department of Health has said that part of the problem is the government has not deemed CBD to be safe. Over at The Cut, Amanda Arnold claims the "reasoning behind the policy does, admittedly, make sense: Despite being infused in everything from brownies to lavender lattes to gummies these days, the oil has not officially been deemed safe for human consumption." But no, that reasoning does not make sense. We shouldn't have to prove to the government that CBD is safe to consume. It should be up to the government to show that it is not safe in order to justify a ban.

Read more from Reason's Mike Riggs here about the current trendiness of CBD, the science behind what it does and does not do, and its confusing legal status.

President Trump on Friday said his administration's efforts to resolve a trade dispute with China and seek nuclear disarmament with North Korea amounted to cleaning up a "mess" created by the Obama administration."If you look at what we've...

Gov. John Bel Edwards is kicking off a five-day RV tour around Louisiana. He’ll begin on Saturday night in Amite, his hometown.

Former Vice President Joe Biden proclaimed that Russia didn't meddle in the 2016 US election, apparently forgetting the narrative. 

Speaking with CNN's Chris Cuomo, the 2020 presidential contender insisted that the Kremlin's evil designs to influence geopolitical outcomes wouldn't happen under his watch, and didn't happen when he and President Obama were in the White House.

"Look at what’s happening with Putin," said Biden. "While Putin is trying to undo our elections, he is undoing elections in Europe. Look what’s happened in Hungary. Look what’s happened in Poland. Look what’s happened in Moldova. You think that would happen on my watch or Barack’s watch? You can’t answer that, but I promise you it wouldn’t have, and it didn’t." 

Whoops!

(h/t Daily Caller)

Biden's comments are particularly intriguing, as many - including President Trump - have questioned why the Obama administration didn't do anything about Russian interference prior to the 2016 election. 

The reason that President Obama did NOTHING about Russia after being notified by the CIA of meddling is that he expected Clinton would win..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 26, 2017

In May, Trump brought it up again, tweeting "Why didn’t President Obama do something about Russia in September (before November Election) when told by the FBI?"

Why didn’t President Obama do something about Russia in September (before November Election) when told by the FBI? He did NOTHING, and had no intention of doing anything!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 1, 2019

Good question... perhaps someone can ask Biden at the next debate?  

Canada's Calgary Stampede, known as the country's biggest and booziest annual party, is banning the use of cannabis in the first year that legislators made the drug legal nationwide.

President Donald Trump told reporters he is considering an executive order to put a question asking people if they are citizens on the 2020 census, potentially circumventing the courts.

“We’re thinking about doing we have four or five ways we can do it. It’s one of the ways that we’re thinking about doing it. We’re doing well on the census,” Trump told reporters Friday.

Trump also mused “We could also add an addition. So we could start the printing now and maybe do an addendum after we get a positive decision,” apparently saying they could send out an addendum to the official census forms to ask if people are citizens.

The Supreme Court, in a majority opinion led by Chief Justice John Roberts, rejected the Trump administration’s rationale for adding the question, but left open the possibility that they could return with a new argument.

Administration lawyers initially said they planned to leave the question off the census forms, before Trump rebuffed those plans in a tweet.

The New York Times reported Trump administration officials had insisted the deadline to being printing census forms was last month.

Watch above, via CNN.

Is the State Department using backdoor policies to over-regulate smaller adoption agencies out of existence?

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

If you have spent literally any time arguing against western imperialism in any public forum, you have had the experience of being accused of “supporting” one of said imperialism’s targets. If you argue against regime change interventionism in Syria, you’ll get accused of being an “Assadist” or “Assad apologist”. If you argue against regime change interventionism in Iran, you’ll you’ll get people saying that you “support the Mullahs”. Enter into any debate of sufficient liveliness and it’s only a matter of minutes before it happens.

There was a meme going around at the height of the most recent failed coup attempt in Venezuela depicting a white, pink-haired socialist placing their hand over the mouth of a dark-skinned Venezuelan and saying “ACKSHUALLY, MADURO IS THE GOOD GUY”. Proponents of the Trump administration’s attempts to topple the Venezuelan government would share this meme in online debates with anti-imperialists as a way of accusing them of whitesplaining to Venezuelans that they should support an evil dictator who is oppressing them. The idea being, of course, to silence those dastardly socialists using the socially progressive value system they claim to uphold. Checkmate, leftists.

There are obviously a number of things that are wrong with this meme, including the skin pigmentation of the average Guaido supporter, the implication that all Venezuelans oppose Maduro, and the suggestion that only white western leftists oppose the Trump administration’s attempts to install a puppet regime in the nation with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. But the dumbest thing about it is the implication that someone who opposes US regime change interventionism could only be doing so because they believe that Nicolás Maduro is a “good guy”.

The reason debates about western imperialism so frequently get bogged down by moronic arguments about “good guys” and “bad guys” is because human storytelling devices train us from an early age to constantly frame narratives in those terms. Everything we’ve been taught by TV and movies tells us that if a conflict is happening, someone in it must be the protagonist and someone must be the antagonist, and that our job is to figure out which one’s which.

For as long as humans have been telling stories, this is how they’ve been doing it. A hero wants something, has some kind of adventure trying to get it, but a villain tries to stop them. It’s a recipe for exciting storytelling that’s been used since time immemorial, and it works because the standard human ego is structured to spin mental narratives about itself as the central character whose wants are constantly being fulfilled by friendlies and thwarted by hostiles. Almost every story from the earliest prehistoric campfire circles to the latest Hollywood blockbuster has in essence been nothing other than a storyteller using a simple mind hack to attract the interest and attention of their audience, just by making their narrative relatable using the protagonist/antagonist framework which the ego finds so appealing.

We’re always the hero in our little ego narratives about our day-to-day lives. We like people who do things we want and we dislike people who do things we don’t want. We stand transfixed by our babbling mental ego narratives, so we find any similar external narrative mesmerising in the same way.

But it’s just an illusion. There are no “good guys” or “bad guys” in real life, either in our personal lives or in international affairs. There are just people. Some of those people do things we like more often than they do things we don’t like, and vice versa, but that’s not a matter of whether they’re “good” or “bad”, it’s a matter of our personal preferences and how we think people ought to behave. “Good” or “bad” isn’t written on anyone’s DNA or inscribed above their heads upon the fabric of reality; we made it up.

In reality, it’s very possible to oppose US regime change interventionism in Venezuela without having a single thought ever appear in your head about whether or not Nicolás Maduro is a “good guy”. American-led regime change interventionism has a well-documented and historically undeniable history of increasing suffering and death in the nations in which it takes place, and consistently fails to accomplish what its proponents claim it will. You don’t need to have any opinions about who Maduro is as a person to recognize this self-evident fact and oppose yet another US regime change campaign in yet another oil-rich nation.

To preempt the inevitable Godwin’s law counter-argument here, of course it’s useful to discern individual behavior patterns in people and talk about what specific patterns they tend to exhibit. Of course it’s useful to recognize that Hitler did many things that we should always oppose going forward. But notice how the only reason Godwin’s law exists is because the “good guys versus bad guys” dichotomy allows people to associate anyone who opposes their side with Hitler, thereby marking them as the “bad guy” side in a given debate. That’s all anyone who fulfils Godwin’s law is ever trying to do.

It’s very useful to pay attention to the specific behavior patterns of specific individuals, and to make distinctions as to whether or not those behavior patterns are desirable or undesirable to you. But it’s also very useful to understand how the “good guys vs bad guys” dichotomy is leveraged by those who seek to control our thoughts and perceptions.

Think about it: where are we trained to look for heroes in real life? Soldiers and policemen, the violent enforcers of the status quo. Politicians like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, depending on which side of the fake partisan divide you’re on. And where are we trained to look for villains? Dictators and rule-breakers, and people who are on the other side of the illusory partisan divide.

Awful convenient for those who benefit from maintaining the status quo, no?

There is one direction in which we are very seldom trained to look for a superhero to come to the rescue, and that’s within. The notion that we ourselves might be the real agents of change in this world is downplayed by the propagandists who fear a surge in populism more than they fear anything else in this world.

Much better to keep people focused on polarizing figures like Donald Trump, who most people seem incapable of viewing as anything other than either a Deep State-fighting superhero or a Hitler-like supervillain whose actions are either all pure good or all pure evil. Divorced from the “good guys vs bad guys” dichotomy, this administration’s behavior can be described in the same way as its predecessors: mostly violent and oppressive with a few helpful things mixed in. Yet it’s rare to find anyone who is capable of discussing Trump outside of the false dichotomy.

And the same would be more or less true of whoever Trump winds up running against in 2020. Even if by some miracle Bernie Sanders or Tulsi Gabbard overcome the rightward-slanted DNC nomination process and go on to beat Trump in the general election, they will with absolute certainty advance many of the destructive agendas upon which the US empire is built. They are not heroes either. This doesn’t mean they’re villains, it just means that “heroes versus villains” is an illusion we’ve been trained since our earliest media-consuming days to buy into.

The world makes a lot more sense when you peel away the lens from your eyes which perceives life in neat little Hollywood-shaped narratives with protagonists and antagonists and clear beginnings, middles and ends. Because it turns out that we’re all actually a bunch of confused primates doing the best we can with the wildly unique and incredibly complex sets of conditioning we’ve been dealt by our individual birth circumstances and life events. The “good guys versus bad guys” dichotomy is just imaginary conceptual overlay on top of a giant biological storm which carries on in cool indifference to our puny little egocentric narratives.

Atoms swirl, cells cluster, and life lifes away as this strange new species stumbles around trying to make sense of the world with its recently evolved extra gray matter and the capacity for abstract thought which comes with it. It has some successes and many failures in trying to figure out how to make living on this spinning rock a little more harmonious, and it will either succeed or it will fail. It’s egoically comfortable to slice this dance up into a narrative about heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, but it’s really all one twirling, churning, chaotic and beautiful dance.

*  *  *

The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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