#ak-47 predator

[grits-galraisedinthesouth]

Show me your friends & I will tell you who you are: "Chrissy Teigen admits she would eat Human Flesh & she's shocked to be in the minority."

The next time MEgain Markle complains about suicidal ideation or "shows up" to speak with grieving parents about cyberbullying & mental health, please remind her of her FRIENDS.

The irony of MEgain: a predator, a bully, and a professional VICTIM who is rebranding as a mental health/digital justice "activist" inviting a disgraced celebrity predator and cyberbully to promote her "brand" is not lost on anyone.

Activist John Stephens was recruited by NOprah before the wedding to shut down media personalities who exposed Markle's red flags. After the wedding, BULLY Teigen on Twitter: "although I've never met Meghan, I'm very protective of her."

In 2019 or 2020, Toronto Papers revealed that MEgain was friends with the owners of a popular LA cannibal club restaurant. Holiday something??

Celebrities publicly promote eating placenta, why wouldn't they consume human flesh. There is nothing new under the sun. Regardless of Chrissy's behavior, she and hubby are untouchable.

Nigeria

Police arrested 11 people and closed a restaurant after two human heads wrapped in cellophane were discovered at a hotel restaurant that had been serving human flesh.

A tip-off led police to the macabre discovery in Anambra, Nigeria, with 11 people being arrested and AK-47 guns and other weapons being seized.

Human flesh was apparently being sold as an expensive treat at the restaurant, with authorities saying that roasted human head was even on the menu.

"I went to the hotel early this year, after eating, I was told that a lump of meat was being sold at N700, I was surprised," a pastor who had visited the eatery said.

"So I did not know it was human meat that I ate at such expensive price.

"What is this country turning into? Can you imagine people selling human flesh as meat," he added. "Seriously I’m beginning to fear people in this part of the world. "

Another local added to the Osun Defender newspaper: "I always noticed funny movements in and out of the hotel; dirty people with dirty characters always come into the hotel.

"So, I was not surprised when the police made this discovery in the early hours of yesterday."

The tabloid reported that two army caps, 40 rounds of live ammunition and 'so many cell phones' were also discovered by authorities.

[wuxiaphoenix]

Worldbuilding: A Thought on Catgirls

First question: what kind of cats?

This is important because the vast majority of cat species are solitary predators. A mother teaches her kittens or cubs to hunt, and then they disperse. There are exceptions - lions living in prides, groups of cheetah males banding together to hold a territory so they can successfully chase down a female, individual cats of various species who form friendships with another of their kind, or even a different species altogether - but almost all cat species follow this template.

Housecats are the major exception to this rule. Domesticated or feral, housecats will live in large colonies wherever prey permits it, with even most toms being relatively social and not a danger to unrelated kittens.

(Most. Not all.)

So if your catgirl has any real cat instincts or behavior patterns, you need to know what kind of cat. The overly friendly and living-in-groups catgirl so stereotypical of harem setups would almost have to be lioness or housecat based. Maybe cheetah. Maybe. They can live a sort-of domesticated life as hunting animals, and have in centuries past. But they also tend to be verrrrrry nervous, as befits a relatively small predator trying to make a living where every lion, hyena, and leopard will not only steal their kill but kill and eat them in the bargain.

I invite you to picture the havoc wreaked by a perpetually nervous catgirl on everyone and everything in the vicinity. No, seriously, think about it. Unless your hero who befriends her has the absolute upbeat chill of the average golden retriever, she’d fret herself into nervous exhaustion and death.

Most harem heroes are not chill.

So. Housecat, likely your best bet. Although then you get to deal with the fact that the average housecat is, pound for pound, one of the most heavily armed mammals on the planet. As vets say, six ends, and five of them are pointy. A housecat scaled up to human size is essentially cougar-sized; a large cougar. Meaning their preferred prey size should be much the same... and cougars will take down moose.

You may be getting the idea that this should not be as fluffy and friendly a critter as anime would lead you to believe. And that doesn’t even get into the possibilities of opposable thumbs, magic, or modern weaponry.

Not to say that a more realistic catgirl couldn’t be good company! Of course she could. As long as there was good food, a warm place to cuddle in a sunbeam, and plenty of prey to chase, she’d probably be great company. She’d just also have a habit of borrowing your broadsword (or AK-47, or laser rifle) and leaving you alien-rhino-sized headless gifts to show you how loved you are. Or maybe even bringing them back partly alive; after all, you’ve got to keep your hunting skills sharp! It’s fun!

...I may be too Amused by this image. Thoughts?

[eclipseshotel]

Assassin Predator could shoot cum at you and it would be like getting blasted by an AK-47

[1yyyyyy1]

Very few things grate on my nerves more than women discussing femininity and how much easier it is to embody it to make it through life as opposed to relying on yourself. Just about every video on femininity talks about your power having to do with men doing things for you, and I thought power was a loaded AK-47… My bad I guess.

It is not a secret that I am pretty feminine despite the contents of my blog, which, according to some women, means that I am supposed to be putting this energy out there and be "rewarded' for being the way that I am, otherwise I would be in my "masculine" and should be pathologized apparently. Anyone can read through my blog and look at the patterns of male behavior I provide plenty of proof for, and with how prevalent this behavior is it starts being pretty obvious as to why I would be against receiving things from men. I have heard and seen enough about how men talk and think to be at ease in their proximity — why would I want my door to be opened by a creep? I genuinely want to know why me not wanting to be perceived by a predator is being made out to be a flaw of character or some kind of dysfunction. You do not need to put up with anyone to embody feminine receptivity because it is an energy, it is a state of being just like what these women are saying instead of a deliberate action, like dressing up and going on a date, and I seriously want to know what is not clicking for the people who have the gall to lecture others in a condescending tone about how unreasonable they are for not being receptive to others. When you are in a state of receptivity and do not want to interact with people for whatever reason, the universe will align in such a way that a store near you stocks the exact thing you want after never having had that item before while you are grocery shopping, a movie you have been dying to watch will appear on your feed or your material gains will come from your family members who you at least have to put up with instead of coming in contact with random men out there. I would go as far as to say that refusing direct contact with people goes far beyond avoiding men because the attention you get from society is overall low quality as it stands right now and there is no real need to be open to the people in your direct vicinity just to be handed in a thing or two. You have to be seriously undignified as not to care about the quality of people you come in contact with for that to happen.

Any metaphysical concept can be tailored to one's specific needs and nobody has to accept anything below their standards unless they want to. There is no power in leveraging your femininity in your day-to-day life when you have dignity, and women's fervent desire to position it as empowerment speaks volumes about their character.

[bravesalamander]

The clinton one was attached to his racist crime bills that were targeted at black people which he and his wife [along with biden] called black people super predators. The gun control by reagan was because black panthers were openly demonstrating with AK-47's as a display of force that they would not be pushed around by the police.

Neither instance was because of a concern of safety, but out of anti-black racism. I think this may be important to remember.

[shadows-colours-critical]

yeah, i get what you're saying about IRL food chain stuff, but i don't think in Mel's world she would go THAT DEEP with sizes, specific situations, etc... (especially considering she doesn't seem to like doing research), that's why i used prey and predator in a very generalized way

I also noticed how the only "good" predator character is Nicole...

Also in this whole thing, where humans fall under this whole thing? Are they prey? Predator? Something else?? None???

Yeah, I highly doubt Mel would.

I mean... The only "good" predators I know of for Shadows Colours are Nicole, Archer, and Sean. (yeah, believe it or not, ferrets are predators, they might not look like it, but they were evolved to hunt, and I guess AK-47 would count considering he's a hybrid between a dingo and a goatasus, making him partially a predator.)

I'm not really sure where humans would fall under considering IRL we are basically predators, but apparently in this universe, there's more goatasi than humans, so humans might either be prey or something else because I legit don't think Mel thought that through, because really, the only two humans we've seen other than the gods are Nectarine and Plum.

[piltover-sharpshooter]

//I remember after watching 'Prey' (Great movie by the way, second best Predator film imo) and I had a thought. In the movie, the feral predator is much less powerful in terms of kit, his tools aren't as precise as what we are use to seeing in the 'modern day' settings.

This is either because the race itself isn't as advanced, which unlikely tbh, they already have spacecraft, or the much more likely explanation that Yautja's code of honor has them limit the power of tools they can use in comparison to the power of the prey they hunt, hence for people with bows, arrows and muskets you can't take the shoulder cannnon, that's for AK-47 levels.

Now here's the thing...what tools would they use for a more advanced prey? If a Yautja hunted a group of Colonial Marine, what kind of weird shit would they pull?

[digital-morganism]

movie grenades are so survivable because they aren't actually grenades, they're giant firecrackers. In. The CMU (Cinematic Movie Verse) all humans are at least part superhero since time immemorial, rendering weapons of all kinds, from the Roman gladius to the venerable AK-47 significantly less lethal and necessitating larger armies to wage war against each other. The only way to defeat such a creature is with fire, the natural predator of celluloid

[lettherebemonsters]

I just realized that Gunpowder has a scope on his AK-47.

I'm imagining him on rooftops sniping the shit out of whatever predator is out there trying to nab someone.

[knight-of-ashes]

If I see one more liberal call for a revolution immediately after calling for a ban on "military style weapons" I'm gonna fucking lose it and start digging a tunnel

Every single jackass who posts that AR-15 versus predator drone meme then posts a picture of Wonder Woman with a sword and says that's how they're gonna defend the right to abortion is a brain dead imbecile

Every single comment about common sense regulations I see is about extra laws that would empower police to decimate inner cities and would never actually get semiautomatic weaponry out of the hands of disillusioned and violent young men. I see no one talking about weapon storage or ways to empower schools to actually get help for these men and I just see people talking about magazine restrictions and banning AR-15s which aren't even the most powerful or most high capacity guns on the market. They're just what's currently ubiquitous because of the military industrial complex and they're about to get replaced by the new SIG 6.8mm rifles. Nobody wants to ban AK-47s even though they're just as easy to acquire and higher caliber. Everyone dismisses gang violence in these conversations like young Black men don't deserve a chance to get out of that hell.

I have so many ideas for policies and regulations for just the firearms side (not even talking UBI and universal healthcare) that would actually solve these massacres and I'm too fucking angry at my friends to even say them because they have to share their stupid fucking Star Wars and Discworld memes to make sure everyone knows how sad they are about another batch of kids dying before they go back to consuming endless streams of Disney content and voting for Democrats who won't lift a finger on this issue.

I have a friend who's not allowed to legally own firearms for a few more years because she was forcibly hospitalized after crashing her car into a tree at night during a suicide attempt that she regretted before the hit happened, and meanwhile her brother has never been hospitalized and still can legally use guns despite ranting and raving in a manic fugue state in his front yard and threatening to kill people while the cops stood there laughing. How the fuck are you going to get every AR-15 off the streets when this is our normal? When cops just let any man light enough keep their guns even against department policy? When schools repeatedly report problem kids and get ignored until after the problem kid has finally shot everyone up? How are you going to stop shootings by banning the sale of only one style of semiautomatic rifle and not doing anything about any other type of gun, or working on any sort of training minimum requirements? Are we gonna talk about how ICE was waiting at the school to arrest any undocumented parents, and how ICE has been implicated in multiple firearms smuggling schemes while using even the slightest suggestion of illegal activity as an excuse to kill any Latino on site, and how undocumented Latino workers often have unregistered firearms because they know cops will not protect them?

23 people are dead. Two adults, 19 kids, and the shooter himself, an 18 year old who was a week away from graduation if his grades were good enough for that. We need a solution, not useless platitudes, and banning exactly one type of gun then calling for a revolution like you have emptily for the past five years is a useless platitude. These are people who hid at home during the BLM protests who think they're gonna change something.

HOW ARE YOU GOING TO HAVE YOUR REVOLUTION WITHOUT WEAPONS?

[typingtess]

NCIS: LOS ANGELES:  “Indentured” – Act Two

The Governor wants NCIS to be careful with Collins – he’s running for the Senate.  Sam thinks he needs to get a Make Arizona Great Again hat.  Sam-Kilbride sneak peek.  

Deeks comes up with possible back-story for Kensi’s addict – a lonely Culver City housewife.  Kensi paints and screws up her nails to make her look bad.  Mia Hahn did a few years at college studying complicated math.  Kensi is going in as Meg.  Fatima is her back-up – Layla.

Deeks asks how Kensi is doing about Kessler.  Kensi’s fine – they tracked Boucher, they are the predators, not Kessler.  Kensi is worried that Deeks is going to cause them to do something stupid.  Deeks thinks their lives are too good to do something stupid.

Collins meets with Kilbride and Sam.  Sam is introduced by his old SEAL title but Sam makes it clear it is NCIS Agent.  Kilbride tells a shocked Collins about the ATF massacre.  Collins was buying 250 AK-47s for a militia group protecting the border.  He didn’t know Meyers’s weapons were illegal.  Kilbride thanks Collins for his cooperation.  

Outside the office, Sam is furious – what Collins was doing was illegal.  Kilbride and Sam exchange words – Sam is doing the job of an NCIS Agent, is Kilbride willing to do the same?

Kensi checks into rehab.  The woman doing intake is kind.  Fatima is in the rehab already.  She’s seen Mia already – she’s likely sneaking drinks in the bathroom.  Fatima is going to follow her.  Kensi is being taken to her room.

Roundtree is working at Eric’s desk.  Callen-Sam-Roundtree sneak peek.  Collins and Kilbride are friends – Sam is worried that he is trying to protect the General.

[phroyd]

Nineteen minutes before the first 911 call alerted authorities to a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Tex., a hate-filled, anti-immigrant manifesto appeared online.

It spoke of a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” It detailed a plan to separate America into territories by race. It warned that white people were being replaced by foreigners.

The authorities were scrutinizing the 2,300-word screed on Saturday and attempting to determine whether it was written by the same man who killed 20 people and injured more than two dozen others near the Mexican border.

Police were interviewing the suspected killer, Patrick Crusius, a 21-year-old white man from Allen, Tex., a roughly 10-hour drive to the Walmart. What brought him to a crowded shopping center in El Paso is one of the many questions on the minds of investigators.

The manifesto that may be linked to Mr. Crusius described an imminent attack and railed against immigrants, saying, “if we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable.”

From New Zealand to Pittsburgh to a synagogue in Poway, California, aggrieved white men over the last several months have turned to mass murder in service of hatreds against immigrants, Jews and others they perceive as threats to the white race.

The unsigned manifesto, titled “The Inconvenient Truth,” draws direct inspiration from the mass murder of Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand in March that left 51 people dead. In that attack, the alleged killer published a manifesto online promoting a white supremacist theory called “the great replacement.” The theory has been promoted by a French writer named Renaud Camus, and argues that elites in Europe have been working to replace white Europeans with immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa.

Christchurch has become a rallying cry for extremists the world over. The manifesto potentially linked to the El Paso killings begins, “In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

The gunman who opened fire at a synagogue in Poway, Calif., near San Diego, in April, posted an anti-Semitic diatribe on 8chan, the same online message board where the El Paso document surfaced. The Poway manifesto echoed the words of the Christchurch killer, and also drew inspiration from a massacre at a synagogue in Pittsburgh last October. In that mass shooting, the killer railed against immigrants, Jews and other groups.

The El Paso shooting, if the manifesto is linked to the gunman, potentially underscored the global spread of white supremacist ideology in the age of social media and at a time when immigration in America and elsewhere has become a divisive political topic.

Shortly after the mass shooting Saturday, Mr. Crusius’ LinkedIn and Facebook accounts were shut down. A LinkedIn page that circulated online after the account was closed down appeared to be several years old, and Mr. Crusius seemed to be a lost young man.

He wrote on LinkedIn while in high school, “I’m not really motivated to do anything more than what’s necessary to get by. Working in general sucks, but I guess a career in Software Development suits me well. I spend about 8 hours every day on the computer so that counts toward technology experience I guess.”

The posting concluded: “Pretty much just gonna see what technology careers present themselves to me; go with the wind.”

If the manifesto is conclusively linked to the suspected gunman in El Paso, federal authorities may treat Saturday’s attack as a hate crime or an incident of domestic terrorism.

The F.B.I. has said that more Americans have died in domestic terror attacks than in international terror attacks since 9/11, and that domestic terrorism is increasingly motivated by white supremacist ideology.

In July, F.B.I. Director Christopher Wray told Congress that the bureau had made about 100 domestic terrorism arrests in the first three quarters of the year, roughly the same number of international arrests over that time period. The bureau is on track to make more domestic terror arrests than it did in 2019.

No United States government agency is responsible for designating domestic terrorism organizations, and there is no criminal charge of domestic terrorism. Individuals who are considered domestic terrorists are charged under other existing laws, such as hate crime, gun and conspiracy statutes.

Officials have said that domestic terrorists continue to be radicalized online, where individuals are able to align with other extremists, become inspired and find the resources they need to act.

The investigation is currently being led by the state of Texas, with assistance from the local sheriff’s department, the F.B.I., Border Patrol and others. During a news conference Saturday afternoon, law enforcement officials said that they were exploring potential capital murder charges.

“Not speaking about this particular instance, which is still under investigation, the manifesto narrative is fueled by hate, and it is fueled by racism and bigotry and division,” said Veronica Escobar, the congresswoman who represents El Paso. “El Paso has historically been a very safe community. We’ve been safe for decades. We will continue to be safe.” She added, “This is someone who came from outside of our community to do us harm.”

Once again on Saturday, America’s epidemic of mass shootings intersected with the divisive issues of race and immigration.

The words of the manifesto, in citing “the great replacement” theory, echo the slogan that was chanted during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. in 2017: “Jews will not replace us.”

The writer of the manifesto also suggested that Democrats in the United States have a strategy to gain a permanent majority by embracing the growing Hispanic population, a notion that has gained currency on right-wing radio shows for years.

The manifesto said the gunman planned to use an AK-47-style rifle, which has been frequently used in mass shootings. The four-page document said politicians of both parties were to blame for the United States “rotting from the inside out,” and that “the heavy Hispanic population in Texas will make us a Democrat stronghold.”

The manifesto also railed against automation and embraced an argument familiar in anti-immigrant circles: that immigrants are taking jobs from “natives.”

“My opinions on automation, immigration, and the rest predate Trump and his campaign for president,” the document says.

Phroyd

[nerds4life]

The Essence of Evil: Sex with Children Has Become Big Business in America

By John W. Whitehead for Global Research, April 24, 2019

“Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Children, young girls—some as young as 9 years old—are being bought and sold for sex in America. The average age for a young woman being sold for sex is now 13 years old.

This is America’s dirty little secret.

Sex trafficking—especially when it comes to the buying and selling of young girls—has become big business in America, the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns.

As investigative journalist Amy Fine Collins notes,

“It’s become more lucrative and much safer to sell malleable teens than drugs or guns. A pound of heroin or an AK-47 can be retailed once, but a young girl can be sold 10 to 15 times a day—and a ‘righteous’ pimp confiscates 100 percent of her earnings.”

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.

According to USA Today, adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

Who buys a child for sex? Otherwise ordinary men from all walks of life.

“They could be your co-worker, doctor, pastor or spouse,” writes journalist Tim Swarens, who spent more than a year investigating the sex trade in America.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period of servitude.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.

This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.

This is not a problem found only in big cities.

It’s happening everywhere, right under our noses, in suburbs, cities and towns across the nation.

As Ernie Allen of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children points out,

“The only way not to find this in any American city is simply not to look for it.”

Don’t fool yourselves into believing that this is merely a concern for lower income communities or immigrants.

It’s not.

It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice.

In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.

For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.

No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex.

Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out,

“Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“

“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”

Where did this appetite for young girls come from?

Look around you.

Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.

“All it takes is one look at MySpace photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”

This is what Bennett refers to as the “pornification of a generation.”

“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”

In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?

Social media makes it all too easy. As one news center reported,

“Finding girls is easy for pimps. They look on MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks. They and their assistants cruise malls, high schools and middle schools. They pick them up at bus stops. On the trolley. Girl-to-girl recruitment sometimes happens.”

Foster homes and youth shelters have also become prime targets for traffickers.

Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.

While Debbie was fortunate enough to be rescued, others are not so lucky. According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, nearly 800,000 children go missing every year (roughly 2,185 children a day).

With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.

Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:

Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”

What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become.

“They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”

Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted,

“We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”

This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said:

“In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”

A common thread woven through most survivors’ experiences is being forced to go without sleep or food until they have met their sex quota of at least 40 men. One woman recounts how her trafficker made her lie face down on the floor when she was pregnant and then literally jumped on her back, forcing her to miscarry.

Holly Austin Smith (image on the right) was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.

Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old.

“I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”

As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune:

“In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.

This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.

Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the government’s war on sex trafficking—much like the government’s war on terrorism, drugs and crime—has become a perfect excuse for inflicting more police state tactics (police check points, searches, surveillance, and heightened security) on a vulnerable public, while doing little to make our communities safer.

So what can you do?

Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.

Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.

This epidemic is largely one of our own making, especially in a corporate age where the value placed on human life takes a backseat to profit. It is estimated that the porn industry brings in more money than Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.

Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.

Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.

Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.

That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.

But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.

*

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Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

[sednonsatiata]

To argue that the current extinction event could be averted if people just cared more and were willing to make more sacrifices is not wrong, exactly; still, it misses the point. It doesn’t much matter whether people care or don’t care. What matters is that people change the world. This capacity predates modernity, though, of course, modernity is its fullest expression. Indeed, this capacity is probably indistinguishable from the qualities that made us human to begin with: our restlessness, our creativity, our ability to cooperate to solve problems and complete complicated tasks. As soon as humans started using signs and symbols to represent the natural world, they pushed beyond the limits of that world. “In many ways human language is like the genetic code,” the British paleontologist paleontologist Michael Benton has written. “Information is stored and transmitted, with modifications, down the generations. Communication holds societies together and allows humans to escape evolution.” Were people simply heedless or selfish or violent, there wouldn’t be an Institute for Conservation Research, and there wouldn’t be a need for one. If you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the Amazon gripping an ax, or, better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book on your lap.

Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

[xtruss]

'NATO Has the Watches, We Have the Time'

Unless the U.S. shows resolve, the Taliban will simply wait us out.

— Wall Street Journal | By James Shinn | October 26, 2009

David Klein

Those of us in the Bush administration who were responsible for its "Afghan Strategy Review" kept our mouths shut when we handed over the document to the Obama transition team last fall. We didn't want to box in the new administration.

And when President Barack Obama and his advisers rolled out their own Afghanistan strategy on March 27, I was quietly pleased. It came to basically the same conclusion we had: The paramount goal was to squash terrorism through counterinsurgency and better governance in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs promised the press corps at the time that its strategy would be "fully resourced." Later, in August, Gen. Stanley McChrystal's assessment of the situation in Afghanistan was leaked. It was a road map to implement precisely the Obama strategy that was announced in March.

But one key element of both the Bush and Obama strategies is getting lost in the debate—that we must apply the military and economic resources for the time required to achieve our goals. As the Obama administration's March 27 White Paper notes, "There are no quick fixes to achieve U.S. national security interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan."

The average counterinsurgency war lasts a decade and a half; the successful British campaign in Malaya in the 1950s, for example, took 12 years. Even if Gen. McChrystal gets the 40,000 additional troops he has requested, there is unlikely to be short-term progress in meeting any of the security "metrics" that opponents of the war in Afghanistan will try to insert into the defense appropriations for carrying out the president's strategy.

What the White House says—or doesn't say—about a long-term commitment is hugely important. Americans are famously impatient, and there is cruel wisdom in the oft-quoted Taliban boast that "NATO has all the watches, but we have all the time." Most Afghans are sitting on the fence, waiting to see who wins. Our allies are nervously looking for the exits, and the Pakistanis and the Iranians are hedging their bets in case the U.S. decides to pull the plug.

Meanwhile, as the Obama national security apparatus publicly wrings its hands over strategy, the media promote half-baked solutions to Afghanistan that further confuse friends and enemies while ignoring the crucial matter of time. Three of the least sensible solutions are "remote control" counterterrorism, a grand regional solution to disputes between neighboring states (including a resolution of the Kashmir territorial dispute between India and Pakistan), and the negotiation of a peace deal with the Taliban.

Replacing the hard work of counterinsurgency and nation-building with Predator drones and Special Operations defies geography and common sense. A Predator has a range of 400 miles: It is 600 miles from Pakistan's Waziristan region to the Arabian Sea.

From where are you going to fly the drones? What intelligence will be available to guide the drones or special ops if we abandon Kabul and Islamabad to fight on their own?

A "regional" solution that convinces India, Pakistan and Iran (among others) that their interests are better served by a stable Afghanistan than by backing proxy forces there is a laudable undertaking. But it would take years of patient diplomacy, in which the terms and pace of NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan will be the central item of negotiation. Fat chance of striking a deal if you're already gone.

As for a deal with Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his leadership council, the Quetta Shura, forget about it. They have no incentive to lay down their arms if they still think time is on their side.

The Taliban will eventually come down from the hills, probably in dribs and drabs, when they've been sufficiently pummeled by the combined Afghan National Army and NATO forces, seen their base among the Afghan people undermined by improved governance, and had their sanctuaries in Pakistan squeezed from the East. This is going to take time.

Time was very much on the mind of Afghanistan's Minister of the Interior Hanif Atmar recently, when I visited him in his office in Kabul—shards of glass still on the floor from the suicide bomb attack on the nearby Indian Embassy a few days earlier. "All the Taliban have to do is blow things up," he said. "We have a lot more things to worry about. Despite the deteriorating security situation in parts of the country, we still have a window of time to prevail, if we and our American allies have sufficient resolve."

I also visited Mullah Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil on a dusty street in the Karte Char district. A sleepy policeman with an AK-47 outside was the only symbol of his house arrest. He was Mullah Omar's secretary and then both a spokesman and foreign minister for the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan until his capture in 2001. Today he remains an interlocutor between the Karzai government and the Quetta Shura up in the mountains. I thought he'd be a good judge of Taliban resolve.

Time was on his mind, too. He was puzzled by the drawn-out pace of the Obama administration's strategy deliberations. He took care to distance the Quetta Shura's objectives (to govern Afghanistan and remove foreign troops) from the goals of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan across the border (which are close to those of al Qaeda, namely to bring down the government in Islamabad and establish a greater Islamic Caliphate).

In response to my skeptical questions, he also drew a distinction between the Afghan Taliban and al Qaeda. "But the longer this war drags on, the harder it is to separate our interests from theirs," he said.

Mullah Mutawakil's sparse quarters featured a Koran, several volumes of Islamic jurisprudence and a television. "I watch the news, and the Turkish soap operas," he confessed with a smile. He wasn't wearing a watch.

Mr. Shinn was assistant secretary of defense for Asia (2007-2008) and one of the authors of the Bush administration's Afghan Strategy Review. He previously served in the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.