Now ‘trigger warning’ is banned by Brandeis University along with the ‘offensive’ phrases ‘picnic’, ‘rule of thumb’ and ‘take a shot at it’

A liberal arts college in Massachusetts has warned its students and faculty against using ‘violent language’ – even banning the phrase ‘trigger warning’ for its association with guns.

Brandeis University in Waltham has created an anti-violence resource called the Prevention, Advocacy & Resource Center which provides information and advice to students and staff. 

It lists words and idioms, including ‘picnic’ and ‘rule of thumb,’ which it claims are ‘violent’ and suggests dreary alternatives such as ‘outdoor eating’ for the former and ‘general rule’ for the latter.

The college claims that ‘picnic is often associated with lynchings of black people in the United States, during which white spectators were said to have watched while eating, referring to them as picnics or other terms involving racial slurs against black people.’

Picnic is derived from the French ‘pique-nique,’ originally used to describe the taking of one’s own wine to a meal, which later evolved to encompass the sharing of food outdoors and started being used in England in the 18th century. 

Lynchings were often public spectacles and could be described as taking place in a picnic-like setting. A project by the Equal Justice Initiative entitled ‘Lynching in America’ notes that during the late 1800s and early 1900s, ‘white men, women, and children present watched the horrific murders while enjoying deviled eggs, lemonade, and whiskey in a picnic-like atmosphere.’

However, the word picnic itself is not derogatory and has no intrinsic links to slavery, lynchings or racism.  

Brandeis also disagrees with ‘rule of thumb’ which it claims ‘comes from an old British law allowing men to beat their wives with sticks no wider than their thumb.’

But this is another spurious etymological interpretation which has been wrongly attached to the phrase by myth and rumour.

The precise origins of the phrase are unclear but it is meant in the sense of approximating something using the thumb rather than a specific tool – there is no evidence of a legal application to wife beating.

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Facebook Doesn’t Want to Talk About Fake Users Created by the Pentagon

On a press call a few years ago, I asked Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, if the company would treat a misinformation campaign orchestrated by the US government the same as it would as one from a foreign adversary.

Facebook had organized the call to tout how it had discovered and deleted dozens of Iranian accounts, groups, and pages linked to “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—the company’s term for when people and organizations create fake accounts in an attempt to mislead and manipulate other users and the broader information landscape. The conversation came at a time when Facebook was conducting a spate of such announcements and media briefings championing its work removing phony networks tied to foreign governments.Recent reporting says US operatives “engage in campaigns to influence and manipulate social media.”

Gleicher’s response to my hypothetical question about whether they would react the same way was quite clear: “Yes. Part of the key of our operations here is that we engage based on behavior—not based on content and not based on the nature of the actor. And that’s been a very intentional choice on our part.”

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Connecticut Legalizes Marijuana to Combat ‘Racial Disparities’

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) signed a bill into law Tuesday that legalizes possession of marijuana in the state and anticipates retail sales of the drug in 2022.

The new law allows people age 21 and older to possess or use marijuana up to the specified possession limit of 1.5 ounces on their person and five ounces in their home or car.

The law also establishes penalties for use by those under 21, or possession of an amount greater than permitted by the law. Additionally, it removes most cannabis sales offenses from the state’s list of serious juvenile offenses.

The bill was passed under the umbrella of “social justice,” to combat “racial disparities,” and will place with a Social Equity Council the task of how to regulate the new legal marijuana market so that it becomes “an instrument for addressing racial, social and economic injustice,” reported CT Mirror.

“Those communities were hardest hit by the war on drugs — making up for some lost time there,” Lamont said, adding he expects his state’s new law will be “viewed as a national model.”

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New Video Shows University Of Oklahoma Faculty Teaching How To Silence And Punish ‘Problematic’ Conservatives

According to newly released video footage, University of Oklahoma instructors want to punish students who defy campus orthodoxy. Their plan is to “avoid ‘a rhetoric of dysfunctional silence’ that closes ears to marginalized voices,” by — you guessed it — silencing marginalized voices. 

On Tuesday, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit focused on protecting campus free speech, publicized video footage of an April 14 workshop on “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” at the University of Oklahoma (OU). The workshop’s leaders presented slides about “systemic racism,” “white privilege,” and “subverting white institutional defensiveness.” In an attempt to teach so-called antiracism, the workshop’s leaders also promoted censorship and indoctrination.

The event was “one of nine professional development workshops for instructors and grad students” at OU. During the workshop, three faculty members taught their colleagues “how to foster an anti-racist environment in their classrooms,” brainstorming tactics for dissuading, censoring, and penalizing “problematic” speech. 

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Judicial Watch Critical Race Theory Investigation: Records Show Massachusetts School District Segregates Students/Staff Based on Race In ‘Affinity Spaces’

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 111 pages of records from Wellesley Public Schools in Massachusetts which confirm the use of “affinity spaces” that divide students and staff based on race as a priority and objective of the school district’s “diversity, equity and inclusion” plan. The school district also admitted that between September 1, 2020 and May 17, 2021, it created “five distinct” segregated spaces.   

Judicial Watch obtained the records after filing a May 17 Massachusetts Public Records Law request for records concerning the number of affinity spaces, the policies regarding their creation and use, the topics discussed, and any analysis of whether affinity spaces that exclude certain races are consistent with state and federal law, which would include the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the MA Equal Rights Amendment and/or the MA School Attendance Law.

The Wellesley Public School records include a document detailing the school district’s “Equity Strategic Plan 2020-2025” which includes a “District Equity by Design” plan with the stated goal of amplifying student voices by providing “opportunities for affinity spaces for students with shared identity.”

In a section of the document titled “Diversity Staffing,” a stated goal is to “Provide resources for affinity spaces for specialized populations within the wider Faculty/Staff (ie. ALANA, Admin Leaders of Color, LGBTQ+, White Educators for Antiracism, etc.)”

Wellesley Public Schools states in its plan for “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion:” “We will practice risk-taking and challenge one another to continuously examine systems of privilege and bias, and work collectively to disrupt and dismantle inequity in all its forms.” 

In an email on March 18 to Director of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Charmie R. Curry, the day of the so-called “healing space,” a Wellesley High School fitness & health teacher writes: “I wanted to check first, is it appropriate for me to go to this healing space?” Curry responds: “This time, we want to hold the space for Asian and Asian American students and faculty/staff. I hope this makes sense.”

In an April 12 email to school district colleagues, Curry notes that “Equity Literacy” is required coursework in the district. Curry writes: “There is still plenty of time to enroll in the two required courses – ‘Understanding Equity and Inequity’ and ‘Learning to Be a Threat to Inequity.’ These courses, with a keen focus on helping us to build/sharpen our structural ideological lenses, are essential to our ability to address inequities in our community. Our students who are being impacted by inequities such as racism, homophobia, ableism, etc. need to be equipped to respond today to their needs in order to positively impact their experiences.”

In addition, the school district admitted that it does not have any records analyzing whether such segregated spaces violate the U.S. Constitution, the Massachusetts Constitution or any other law.

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‘He Was Epsteined’: Conspiracy Theories Swirl After John McAfee’s Tweets Resurface Following Alleged Suicide

After news broke Wednesday that tech entrepreneur John McAfee, the founder of the McAfee antivirus software company, was found dead following a suspected suicide in a Spanish jail cell while awaiting extradition to the United States, Twitter users were quick to dig through the tech mogul’s social media feed.

Several posts stood out, leading many to suggest that the cause of McAfee’s death remains far from certain.

Soon after his arrest, McAfee tweeted from a Barcelona jail cell, and directly referenced the conspiracy theories surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s death.

“I am content in here. I have friends,” McAfee tweeted on October 15, 2020. “The food is good. All is well. Know that if I hang myself, a la Epstein, it will be no fault of mine.”

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Doctoral Candidate Who Sought to Prove Justice System Was ‘Racist Against Blacks’ Stabbed to Death by Black Male in Chicago

Anat Kimchi, a 31-year-old Israeli-born doctoral candidate and scholar at the University of Maryland, wrote a paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2019 attempting to prove America’s criminal justice system was racist against “young black offenders” and “black drug offenders.”

While visiting Chicago over the weekend, Kimchi was ambushed and stabbed in the back and neck while walking near a homeless encampment at 401 South Wacker at around 3:35 p.m. Police said witnesses told them the assailant was a homeless “slim black male with long dreadlocks who wore a red bandana and a blue tank top,” CWB Chicago reported.

Every last media outlet appears to have hid the suspect’s description in accordance with their new rules against “amplifying narratives that connect Black and brown communities to crime” but CWB Chicago reported it straight.

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The U.S. Marines Are Getting Suicide Drones — Lots Of Them

In the near future, the United States Marine Corps will begin fielding a so-called suicide drone, essentially a quickly deployable — and expendable — flying bomb. Based on the UVision Hero-120, the loitering munition is the largest of the company’s short-range systems.

What It Can Do

Don’t let “short-range” fool you, however. Powered by an electric motor and controlled by a “man-in-the-loop” the Hero-120 has a maximum range of 40 kilometers, or nearly 25 miles, and can stay aloft for an hour. The canister launched drone has 8 pop-out fins and is remarkably lightweight.

The entire drone weighs just 12.5 kilos and packs a 4.5-kilo explosive warhead, presumably in its nose. Packed into multiple canister launcher-type pods, it is not hard to imagine large numbers of the Hero-120 sent aloft at once — and in fact, that is exactly what the Marine Corps wants to do.

The Marine Corps contracted with Mistral, an American weapon system company, to integrate the Hero-120 onto the LAV and JLTV land vehicles, as well as onto the LRUSV, a long-range remotely operated drone boat. When mated to a vehicle, multiple Heros could be stacked together, not unlike a multiple rocket launcher system.

The Marine’s new suicide drone will differ slightly from the Hero-120 however, though it is not exactly clear what this difference will be exactly. 

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Hillary Violated State Department Policy to Get Convicted Child Trafficker Out of Haiti. Activist Found Dead.

In a well-known criminal case in which an American woman from Idaho attempted to smuggle 33 Haitian children across the Haitian border into the Dominican Republic soon after the 2010 earthquake, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took extraordinary measures, including the deployment of former president Bill Clinton as a negotiator, to get the woman released and sent back to the states to freedom. Also released were 9 co-participants in the enterprise, who denied any in-depth knowledge of the plan.

In 2013 an NBC News report claimed that the Clinton State Department had squashed an internal investigation into allegations of pedophilia and prostitution involving State Department personnel.

The Dominican Republic is recognized by the US State Department as a hotspot for the child sex tourism industry. Last year Clinton allies, including Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager, John Podesta, got caught up in a furor known as Pizzagate, which claimed that actionable evidence for launching an investigation had been uncovered by lewd pedophiliac images by a Wikileaks release of emails belonging to Podesta, who has acknowledged they are his. Podesta charged “they stole my emails” after a G-20 conference last year. While focused on assigning blame to “the Russians,” Podesta inadvertently acknowledged the emails’ authenticity. Wikileaks boasts a record of never having published an inauthentic document.

It is highly unusual for a secretary of state to get personally involved in a case of arrested Americans abroad. Department policy is to not interfere with a host nation’s legal proceedings. In 2010, that same year, there were more than 3,500 U.S. citizen arrests overseas, according to the Bureau of Consular Affairs.

Laura Sislby, now age 46, was convicted in a Haitian court in 2010 of lesser charges than human trafficking, although the Haitian public was demanding such charges. Described by CBS News as an “Idaho businesswoman,” Silsby took the Haitian children from their homes with promises to their parents of a “better life” for them in a school in the Dominican Republic, although she had stated to members of an Idaho church, and the Haitian authorities, that the children were orphans. Silsby had falsely stated at one point that she had found the children in front of a collapsed orphanage.

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