Category Archives: Transhuman News

A student activist organisation has blamed US President Joe Biden administration for using the crisis unfolding in Afghanistan and the COVID-19 pandemic to score political points instead of handling the situation. Russian news agency Sputnik cited a statement by Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) published on September 15 which stated that the Taliban is holding more than 100 Americans hostage to gain recognition from the outside world. The YAL statement also accused Biden of covering up the hostage crisis for re-election and using the COVID-19 vaccine mandate to distract the US citizens from the developing situation on the ground.

The student activist group has blamed the Biden administration for Americas complete mishandling of the situation in Afghanistan while also claiming that the Taliban is using Americans as leverage in the talks with US State Department. As per the report, YAL senior spokesperson Eric Barkey said that US citizens deserve leadership and accountability but the White House has instead chosen to distract from its failures abroad by instituting sweeping, unconstitutional vaccine mandates at home. The student activist organisation, YAL was founded in 2008 at the end of Congressman Ron Pauls first presidential campaign.

YALs remarks came after on Wednesday, Quinnipiac University released the results of a poll stating that every second American disapproved of theway Biden handled his presidency after starting US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. On September 14, the statement read, Americans' views have dimmed on the way President Joe Biden is handling his job as president, with 42% approving and 50 per cent disapproving, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University national poll.

Notably, regarding Afghanistan, the poll results revealed that over half of US citizens, 54-41%, say they approve of Bidens decision to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan. The University stated that nearly 7 in 10 Americans, 69-24%, say it was the right thing to do to end the war in Afghanistan. However, it added, Americans give Biden a negative 31 - 65% score for the way he handled withdrawing all U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Here is the original post:
Student activists blame Joe Biden govt over handling of Afghan withdrawal and COVID - Republic World

While it is only game two of the 2021 NFL season, it feels like it is one of the bigger games in the last five seasons for the Arizona Cardinals.

That is because since Bruce Arians and the 2016 season, there has not been expectations.

This year for Kliff Kingsbury, Kyler Murray and Steve Keim is make or break. They need the playoffs, they need to be NFC contenders.

In week one, they looked just like that, now they need to keep it rolling.

Here is everything you need to know about the game.

Who: Arizona Cardinals (1-0) vs Minnesota Vikings (0-1)

Where: State Farm Stadium, Glendale, AZ

When: September 19, 2021 - 1:05 p.m. Arizona Time

TV: Fox (Channel 10 Locally) - Gus Johnson (play-by-play) Aqib Talib (analyst) Megan Olivi (sideline reporter)

Streaming: Fubo TV

Local Radio: Arizona Sports 98.7 FM - Dave Pasch (play-by-play) Ron Wolfley (analyst) and Paul Calvisi (sideline)

Spanish Radio: KQMR 100.3 FM - Luis Hernandez (Play-by-Play) Rolando Cantu (Color Analyst)

Odds: Cardinals -3.5Over/Under: 50.5

Originally posted here:
Arizona Cardinals vs Minnesota Vikings first half open thread - Revenge of the Birds

In August 2011, I was ready to give up on politics. Id gone so far as to set up a blog called Why Fucking Bother? and invited some writers I admire to convince me not to throw in the towel. Among those responding: Bhaskar Sunkara, whose contribution opened, Because were on the right side of History. I admired the optimism, but I was unconvinced.

I was pitched into this gloom because after three decades of neoliberalism, capitals political advantages seemed insurmountable. It wasnt just its control of politics and production, but it seemed like it had won the battle for our minds. Margaret Thatchers sharp observation, made two years after she took office, that economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul, seemed prescient. In my gloom of ten years ago, it felt like she and her class comrades had won, minds as well as hearts and souls had been won, and no one on our side had either the clarity of vision or the political means to reverse the trend.

And then, on September 17, 2011, a small crowd took over Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, sparking a movement that would quickly be imitated around the country and the world.

Zuccotti is hardly a conventional urban park, with far more concrete than greenery. Its history is highly relevant to the political movement that would emerge around its occupation. Originally known as Liberty Park, it was built in 1972 as part of a deal which allowed the developer to add seven stories to a tower being built across the street. (Its whats known in city parlance as a Privately Owned Public Space, one established and maintained by developers in return for a break on height or other revenue-enhancing characteristics. There are over 550 of them now.)

It was renovated in 2006 by its current owner, Brookfield Properties, and renamed after its then-chair, John Zuccotti. Zuccotti, who died in 2015, was a classic example of power in New York City a lawyer who ran City Planning in the early 1970s, he later became a deputy mayor and eventually moved where the money is, real estate development. He and his eponymous park were perfect embodiments of the system Occupy targeted, the revolving doors of public and private power. But the parks private ownership was a blessing: the cops couldnt clear it out without a request from Brookfield, which didnt come for two months.

Occupys origins are usually traced to Adbusters, the Vancouver-based magazine, which issued a call to its email list in July 2011 to emulate the protests of the Arab Spring and bring popular occupation to the heart of finance capital. While all kinds of tendencies eventually took part in the movement, it retained some of the vague anti-consumerist politics of that origin throughout its brief life.

Despite that political squishiness, it was nonetheless very good to see a turn towards targeting ownership the 1 percent and away from the complaints about globalization that characterized the movements of the 1990s that culminated in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle in December 1999.

We were a couple of years out of the Great Recession, but jobs were frequently terrible, if there were jobs at all. The unemployment rate was still 9 percent by the official count (and over 16 percent by the broadest measure); lots of people were broke and in debt. Barack Obama, elected with the hope that hed bring about a more peaceful and egalitarian world, turned out to be a crushing disappointment. All that was very much on the minds of the occupiers from the first.

While the diagnosis was often sharp, goals were amorphous. The prevailing ideology was a fusion of anarchism and populism, with a few Fed-hating Ron Paul hard-money types thrown in. (Thank God almost no one was talking about Bitcoin in 2011, or it probably would have been big.) There was an obsession with debt which is odious, no doubt about it but much less interest in talking about what produced debt, the fact that incomes were not keeping pace with costs and that public benefits sucked, nor was there much serious analysis of how a capitalist economy was organized.

Processes were painfully verbose and time-consuming. Decisions had to be made by consensus at a General Assembly, which was basically whoever was in the park when issues were raised. According to a sixteen-page outline of Occupys governance principles in New York, voting is a competitive process, while consensus is a process of synthesizing many diverse elements together without some position or candidate winning and others losing.

Consensus may sound hyper-democratic in principle, but it turns out to be anything but in action. According to the anarchist writer Murray Bookchin, consensus was never an anarchist practice, but was instead imported into the tendency by a group of cynical Quakers in the 1970s, who used it to manipulate members of the antinuclear power Clamshell Alliance into yielding to their preferences.

Bookchin, who lamented the decay of anarchism from a social (and socialist) movement into a libertarian demand for individual autonomy, saw consensus as fine for small groups that know each other well, but not for larger groups. When large assemblies of strangers try to make decisions by consensus, it usually obliges them to arrive at the lowest common intellectual denominator in their decision-making: the least controversial or even the most mediocre decision that a sizable assembly of people can attain is adopted precisely because everyone must agree with it or else withdraw from voting on that issue.

I was part of a working group that was formulating demands a hefty social democratic package featuring public investment and greatly expanded social benefits. That approach, and notion of demands itself, were not welcome by the consensus-makers, and somehow our proposals routinely fell off the discussion agenda of the General Assembly. It was all too statist and poisoned by talk about money and budgets, which was the language of The Man.

But even our hearty band of statist nonconformists fell prey to Occupys tedious proceduralism. I arrived at one meeting of the Demands group in Tompkins Square Park at around 6 PM. As discussion began, some participants worried that the meeting might not be done by the time the park closed at midnight. The prospect of six hours of meeting filled me with dread. When I left around 7:30, the group was still working on the discussion agenda.

These governance practices point to the central problem of Occupy: it had no vision of life beyond the parks and other spaces it was occupying (a term that drew some criticism for its militarist and colonialist connotations). There was no sense of how an economy could have been organized on its principles or how a society larger than a handful of people could be governed by consensus. (And how would anyone with a job and/or family have time for all those meetings?)

Nor was there any sense of how the larger world would be transformed along Occupys principles; there was no serious theory of social change circulating. Some participants saw the occupied parks as the new society in embryo, but it was hard to imagine how these autonomous zones would ever be able to feed themselves without the continued existence of money and supermarkets. But bringing up questions like this was unwelcome. It contravened the movements foundational reticence about goals and organization, because to talk about such things was to step onto the slippery slope to authoritarianism.

And when Brookfield management finally tired of having its park be so troublesome for them and their class, the New York Police Department came in and cleared it, as police forces did elsewhere where public spaces were being occupied. Since there was no organization that could last beyond the forcible dispersal, Occupy vanished. There were attempts to revive it through brief occupations of other spaces like office buildings and foreclosed-upon houses, but the dynamism of the early months was unrecoverable.

But, but, but Having registered all these complaints, Occupy, for all its shortcomings, was a transformative event.

It injected issues of wealth concentration and financial power into public discourse with a salience they hadnt had in decades. And it marked an end to a long period of political quiescence. My question of why fucking bother? was answered.

The movements of the 1990s that culminated in Seattle were lively but never moved beyond a niche market. With Occupy, the idea of the 1 percent was suddenly on everyones mind. The problem is larger than the top 1 percent; among other things, percentiles 90 to 98, what might be thought of as the mass base for the ruling elite, must be contended with too. But shifting popular focus to the tiny sliver that owns and runs society was a major accomplishment.

During occupy, Frances Fox Piven, a scholar of social movements, often made the point that periods of major activism proceed in waves. Outsiders might think the movements have petered out, but then they reappear in different form. According to Piven, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s was often declared dead, only to resurrect even more strongly.

You could read Occupy in that spirit. It petered out, but two years later came Black Lives Matter. BLM shared the decentralized structure of Occupy, but despite that lack of formal organization, it has persisted for years, and sparked the largest demonstrations in US history in the summer of 2020.

And without Occupy, its hard to imagine the emergence of the Bernie Sanders campaign less than four years after Zuccotti was taken over and the subsequent growth of the strongest US socialist movement since the 1960s, or maybe even the 1930s a movement that thankfully isnt shy about organization or agendas.

Ten years later, were living in a political world that Occupy helped establish. For all my kvetching, its an anniversary worth celebrating enthusiastically. Im glad I didnt throw in the towel.

Excerpt from:
Occupy Wall Street at 10: It Was Annoying, But It Changed the World - Jacobin magazine

The Crown took the Best Drama crown, while the Jason Sudeikis comedy Ted Lasso had a winning first season and nabbed the award for Best Comedy at the 2021 Emmy Awards Sunday night.

Meanwhile, multiple nominee The Queens Gambit took home the gold for Outstanding Limited Series, as well as Outstanding Director for a Limited or Anthology Series.

The ceremony, featuring first-time host Cedric the Entertainer, was held at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles and aired live on CBS and streamed on sister network Paramount+.

Two big winners of the night were Ted Lasso star Sudeikis and Hacks lead Jean Smart, who took home their respective awards for Best Actor and Best Actress in a Comedy Series.

An emotional Smart, 70, mentioned the support of her late husband, Richard Gilliland, who died in March at age 71.I would not be here without him putting his career on the back burner so that I could take advantage of all of the incredible opportunities I had, she said before also thanking her children. (Smart was also nominated in the Best Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie for her role in Mare of Easttown, but lost to co-star Julianne Nicholson.)

Meanwhile, Sudeikis, 46, found a real-life comparison to his sports-themed sitcom. Heck of a year. I would say this shows about family, this shows about mentors and teachers, this shows about teammates and I wouldnt be here without those three things in my life, the dapper-dressed actor said.

In an early poignant moment, presenter and Emmy-winner Kerry Washington paid tribute to 54-year-old Lovecraft Country star Michael K. Williams, who unexpectedly died Sept. 6 in Brooklyn and was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama.

Michael was a brilliantly talented actor and a generous human being who has left us far too soon, Washington said. Michael, we know youre here; you wouldnt miss this.

Your excellence, your artistry will endure. We love you, she added before announcing the category winner, The Crown star Tobias Menzies.

Be sure to check out The Posts other Emmys 2021 coverage:

Read the original:
Emmy winners 2021 list: Live updates with all the nominees - New York Post

Ronald Dickison

Nov. 11, 1942Sept. 11, 2021

Ronald Leland Dickison, of Ironton, passed away Saturday, Sept. 11, 2021, at home surrounded by his family.

Ronald was born Nov. 11, 1942, in Ashland, Kentucky. He was the son of the late Ben Dickison and Dorothy Gillium.

He was a member of the National Guard of Kentucky and a reservist with the United States Army.

He retired from McGinnis Inc. and was known as Captain Ron.

He is a member of Saint Paul Lutheran Church in Ironton.

He was an active member of St. Paul and volunteered his time with the food pantry and Amazing Day Camp.

He is survived by his wife Barbara Sue Lewis Dickison of 59 years; three daughters, Veronica Sue Dickison, Cheryl Ann Dickison Robbins, (husband, Sam), and Kristie Lynn Dickison Perry; two grandsons, Kyle Christopher Perry and Jonathan David Robbins; and three great grandchildren Joel, Jackson and Jensen.

There will be a celebration of life at 1 p.m. Saturday, September 25, 2021, at St. Paul Lutheran Church, 101 S. Sixth St., Ironton, and visitation will be noon until time of the service at the church.

In lieu of flowers, the family ask that donations be made in Rons name to St. Paul Lutheran Church.

Phillips Funeral Home, 1004 S. Seventh St., Ironton, is honored to be assisting the family.

To offer the Dickison family condolences, please visit http://www.phillipsfuneralhome.net.

Read the rest here:
Ronald Dickison - The Tribune - Ironton Tribune

Get real time updates directly on you device, subscribe now.

Its not too unusual to see someone outside of professional wrestling enter the ring. You see it quite often in places like WWE, who had Bad Bunny in a huge spot at Wrestlemania earlier this year. However, seeing this on an independent show is where things get interesting, so when actor Ron Funches started to beef with Tony Deppen, no one knew what to expect. However the outcome at GCW Highest In The Room proved that Funches put the work in.

For GCW: Art Of War Games, Ron Funches was on commentary. Throughout the show, hed bump heads with the always crazy Tony Deppen, and theyd enter an unusual feud. Deppen was even called out on The Late Late Show with James Corden by Funches. Funches got some mentoring from Danhausen ahead of this match, and really showed up.

Hed do everything from slamming the head of Deppen through a door and nailing a Canadian Destroyer, but was unable to get the win. However, going for almost 15 minutes with someone like Tony Deppen isnt easy for trained wrestlers. That alone was impressive to see even when the match was heavy on comedy. Funches is unlikely to pursue a full career in wrestling, but did earn respect.

After the dust settled Deppen still didnt like Funches. However, as told on Twitter they had a moment of peace. After getting in the back, Ron Funches handed me a peace treaty; but it was disguised as a blunt. We smoked, I calmed down, and thanked him for taking our sport serious by putting in the work. Doesnt mean I like him, but I have a little respect for him.

Funches would respond with the following I knew I didnt have a shot taking on a true professional wrestler by myself and turned to help from my famous friends Danhausen & paul scheer and that was ultimately a mistake cuz Paul sucks! Tony Deppen is a great wrestler and it was an honor to lose to him.

How do you feel about actors getting into professional wrestling? Let us know what you think in the comment section down below.

SUBSCRIBE NOW: Get TheOvertimers Hottest Stories, Breaking News and Special Features in your email, CLICK HERE!

Remember to stay up to date with the latest news on TheOvertimer. Dont forget to visit Screenstinger for great videos, news, and gameplay!

Read more:
Actor Ron Funches Proves Himself In The Ring With GCW - The Overtimer

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Its official. The Staten Island Republican Partys candidates for the New York Supreme Court, Richmond County, will be on the ballot in Novembers general election.

Judge Ron Castorina and attorney Paul Marrone will represent the party in hopes of filling the two vacant seats on the New York Supreme Court in the 13th Judicial District (Richmond County).

On Wednesday, the 1st Department of the NY Supreme Courts Appellate Division ruled in favor of the Republican Partys appeal to have their candidates, Castorina and Marrone, on the ballot for the general election this November.

The Staten Island Republican candidate nomination documents filed this past spring were initially deemed invalid by the NYC Board of Elections (BOE), resulting in the candidates being left off of the primary election ballot in June. Last month, the BOE commissioners convened to review the case, and ultimately affirmed the validity of the documents.

Some Democrats contested the BOE commissioners decision. But with the Appellate Division ruling in their favor, Anthony Reinhart, chairman of the Staten Island Republican Party, told the Advance/SILive.com that the GOP prevailed.

We have successfully defeated Staten Island Democrats attempt to throw our qualified candidates off the ballot, Reinhart said.

Staten Islanders have proven repeatedly that they want sensible jurists who will uphold the rule of law and keep the socialist, anti-law enforcement agenda out of the courtroom. The Staten Island Republican Party is continuing its tradition of putting forward well-qualified candidates who will serve this community with honor, integrity and fairness, he continued.

Local Democratic Party Executive Director James Clinton shot back at local Republicans, and touted his partys candidates Charles Troia, a court of claims judge. and Ann Thompson, a criminal court judge.

He pointed to Castorinas failed 2018 Surrogate Court bid when the New York City Bar Association declared him unqualified for the position, and the Richmond County Bar Association didnt offer an opinion. The candidate lost that race to former Assemblyman Matt Titone.

Both of our Democratic candidates are sitting judges and have been deemed qualified by bar associations in the past. I cannot say the same for my Republican friends, he said. Its a shame that Mr. Reinhart is seeking to politicize the bench with unqualified candidates for the Supreme Court.

Here is the original post:
Staten Island GOP wins appeal for S.I. Supreme Court candidates to be on the ballot - SILive.com