#meanwhile poor george is being deported

[get-back-homeward]

Davidwache Police Station | Painting by Klaus Voormann Prior to being deported, Paul McCartney spends a night in the Davidwache police station.

In the meantime, the final four could start playing [at the Top Ten club] now, and move themselves into the bunk-bed accommodation at the top of the building.c Tony Sheridan was already here, possibly others too, and the Beatles were welcome to shoehorn themselves in. It was neither the Ritz nor the pits. John was the first to move. Then Paul and Pete went back to the Bambi to grab their gear.

The place was in near darkness, as usual. They had to strike a match to see their way about … and then they decided to leave Koschmider a little gift. Pete had a few “spunk bags,” and he and Paul had the idea to hang them on nails in the wall in the long concrete passageway and set light to them. “The place was dank and dark,” says Pete. “They spluttered, they stank, and OK, maybe they singed a tiny bit of tapestry on the wall. It caused nothing but a little smoke and a few scorch marks and then they went out.”41 It was the ultimate fuck you, Bruno, or so they thought.

They got to play one night in the Top Ten, and it seems to have been a good one, pulling business away from the Kaiserkeller, but it was just this one night. Having been shafted once by Eckhorn, when he’d prized away the Jets and Tony Sheridan from the Kaiserkeller, Koschmider wasn’t going to sit back and let it happen again. He might also have guessed the Beatles would make some grand gesture for his “benefit”—they could even have hinted of it—because an inspection was made of the Bambi’s rooms very quickly. When the stinkende qualmende Piedeltüten were found, he decided to form the view it was an attempt to burn down his cinema, and informed the police.

The chronology of events over the next twenty-four hours is rife with confusion and contradiction, but may have gone something like this. Paul was picked up by the police while walking along the Reeperbahn, taken by car to the Davidwache police station (two hundred meters from the Top Ten) and locked in a cell. Pete and John were also arrested. Koschmider didn’t know which of them was responsible for the “attempted arson,” so the Polizei rounded them all up. As Stuart wrote in a letter back to Liverpool a few days later:

I am living in the lap of luxury and contentment. Better than the cell I spent a night in last week. I was innocent this time though accused of arson—that is, setting fire to the Kino (cinema) where we sleep. I arrive at the club and am informed that the whole of Hamburg Police are looking for me. The rest of the band are already locked up, so smiling and very brave on the arm of Astrid, I proceed to give myself up. At this time I’m not aware of the charge. All my belongings, including spectacles, are taken away and I’m led to a cell where without food or drink I sat for six hours on a very wooden bench, the door shut very tight. I fall asleep at two in the morning. I signed a confession written in Deutsch that I knew nothing about a fire, and they let me go.42

John was also allowed to go. It was now clear who’d done the dirty deed, and for them the ordeal continued; Paul would always remember the little one-way peephole in the door of their detention room, through which he sensed they were watched. It seems he and Pete were then allowed to leave, but a few hours later—early the following morning—they were dragged out of their Top Ten bunk beds and interviewed a second time. Pete suggests they were taken to Hamburg’s main prison at Fühlsbuttel, Paul remembers it being “the Rathaus … it doesn’t mean rat house, it just felt like one.” They were interviewed by an official of the Bundeskriminalamt (Federal CID), one Herr Gerkins, and it was definitely inadvisable to snigger. Instead, they requested permission to contact the British Embassy, like people did in the films, and were refused; then they were taken for a car ride. “We tried our best to persuade him it was nothing,” Paul says, “and he said, ‘OK fine, well you go with these men.’ And that was the last we knew of it. We just headed out with these couple of coppers. And we were getting a bit ‘Oh dear, this could be the concentration camps’—you never know. It hadn’t been that long [since the war].”43

Criminal charges were not pressed, but Koschmider, inevitably, had the last laugh. It wasn’t a camp to which Paul and Pete were being taken, but the airport—and in handcuffs, according to Stuart. They were being deported, and banned from reentering Germany unless they lodged an appeal within a month. Auf Wiedersehen, Piedels! Handed their passports at the gate, they were put on the London plane, set to fly for the first time in their lives. It then got even tastier for Koschmider because Eckhorn was billed for at least part of the cost of the plane tickets. Bruno must have been rubbing his hands with joy.

—Tune In, Ch. 17 (Oct 1–Dec 31, 1960)

Sources: 41 Author interview, March 7, 1985. Pete says (Beatle!, p72) there were four rubbers and always speaks of them in plural, Paul speaks of one. 42 December 12, 1960, sent to Ken Horton. This letter provides the only suggestion that John was arrested in the roundup; he’s not mentioned in other accounts. 43 Interview by Paul Gambaccini, Rolling Stone, June 12, 1979. Rathaus means “city hall.” Instead of the main prison at Fühlsbuttel, it’s more likely Paul and Pete were taken to the remand prison near St. Pauli called Untersuchungsgefängnis (easier done than said).

[leftpress]

All the News You Didn’t Even Know Was Going Down

It's Going Down | IT'S GOING DOWN | March 9th 2017

The post All the News You Didn’t Even Know Was Going Down appeared first on IT'S GOING DOWN.

This was a busy week.

Trump rolled out a new version of the Muslim Ban in a new executive order as attacks and deportation of immigrants ramped up – both of which led to various protests and demonstrations. Meanwhile, the State itself has entered into its latest shoving match, putting the FBI, Justice Department, and Trump regime at odds over claims that Obama tapped the Cheeto’s phone. Meanwhile, Ben Carson made himself look like Ben Carson, the Women’s Strike kicked off, threats of trade war with China loomed, WikiLeaks revealed yet another vast CIA spying ring, the Republicans rolled out a p...

roposal for an even worse replacement for Obamacare, at home far-Right terror attacks continued, and the police in Sacramento, CA have pushed the DA to charge upwards of 106 people for taking part in anti-fascist clashes on June 26th against the neo-Nazi group, the Traditionalist Worker Party.

With all that in mind, let’s get to the news. 

Trump that Regime

This week, the US installed a new missile system in South Korea as it pondered regime change in North Korea and prompted China to threaten an arms race, while at home Trump announced that Obama had bugged his phones, though citing no evidence whatsoever. This claim has set off a tug-of-war within the State itself, as the FBI put pressure on the Justice Department to deny these claims while the White House has remained tight-lipped.

Meanwhile, Republicans have rolled out their proposed plans for replacing Obamacare, which includes all of the worst aspects of ACA and added new horrific qualities while threatening Medicaid for the poor. As Kate Randall wrote:

The proposed Republican plan repeals the ACA’s mandate, which requires those without insurance to obtain coverage from a private insurer under threat of a tax penalty. It also repeals the requirement that large companies provide health care to their employees. It replaces the ACA’s subsidies to help low- and middle-income people pay the cost of premiums with fixed tax credits based on age.

The most important changes involve Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor as well as some elderly and disabled people, which is jointly administered by the federal government and the states. Beginning in 2020, the Republican plan would convert federal funding for Medicaid to a per capita allotment, as well as end the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid. This will undoubtedly lead to a reduction in benefits for those who qualify, as well as higher rates of uninsured poor people.

The American Health Care Act draft legislation capitalizes on the reactionary features of Obamacare–rising premiums and deductibles, lack of choice of insurers, narrowing networks of doctors and other providers, penalties for being uninsured–by offering up a plan that is even more heavily skewed in the interests of the health care industry and the wealthy.

While the Republican plan would eliminate the mandate and tax penalty, it would still penalize people who don’t have insurance. If consumers allowed their coverage to lapse for as long as two months–due to a job loss or other unforeseen interruption–insurers would be required to charge them a 30 percent penalty when they bought a health plan.

While many have panned ‘Trumpcare,’ and called it dead in the water, the reality is that the elites want to gut all lifelines and support programs from the poor and working-class while distributing wealth back up to the extremely wealthy.

Bill Moyers this week put Trump’s class war agenda front and center, and shook off claims of Trump or Bannon’s ‘populism’:

A glance at the membership of the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum shows they are flocking to his side, with masters of financial buccaneering like Stephen Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, along with Doug McMillon of retail giant Walmart. There is even an ex-governor of the Federal Reserve Board, Bush appointee Kevin Warsh. This is hardly a populist revolution of the kind preached by John Steinbeck’s Tom Joad.

Trump’s senior government appointments reinforce this impression: his Cabinet, filled with moguls from Big Oil, mega-banking, investment and retail, makes George W. Bush’s Cabinet look like a Bolshevik workers’ council. Even Steve Bannon, Trump’s “alt-right” Svengali, is an alumnus of Goldman Sachs, whose stock has surged 38 percent since the election. The fact that America’s premier corporate raider, Carl Icahn, will be special adviser on regulatory reform, and that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin was a Goldman executive for 16 years, does not inspire confidence that economic management will be different from that which piloted us into the 2008 crash.

Trump’s $6.2 trillion in planned tax cuts are the Bush policy on steroids, and are potentially three times the magnitude of the 10-year cost of Bush’s cuts. Because they are heavily targeted at the rich—47 percent of the cuts will go to the top 1 percent—they will exacerbate income inequality, which is already at its highest level since the 1920s. The tax-relief crumbs for low-income earners will be nullified or made worse by an assault on the minimum wage. Assistance to the poor and near-poor could be further eroded by a reduction in Medicaid benefits (already in the works, courtesy of Speaker Paul Ryan and the Republican Congress). These actions will exacerbate the ongoing trend toward jobs without benefits.

Despite their windfall from Trump’s tax policies, the rich will only be able to consume so many filet mignons, Sub-Zero refrigerators and Patek-Philippe watches before reaching satiation. The rest of their tax cut dividend will go into lifting the equities market to stratospheric levels or building palatial monuments in Glen Cove, Palm Beach or Palo Alto. Since the tax cuts will be much greater than Bush’s own prodigious fiscal mismanagement, the potential equities and real estate bubble could be a thing to behold. This is anything but a populist economic policy.

Ironically, in the face of Trump’s latest temper tantrum about spying, it has been revealed that the CIA has created a vast web of apparatuses that allow them to better spy on people using cellular devices. According to The New York Times: 

WikiLeaks on Tuesday released a significant cache of documents that it said came from a high-security network inside the Central Intelligence Agency. WikiLeaks called the documents Vault 7, and they lay out the capabilities of the agency’s global covert hacking program.

By the end of 2016, the C.I.A. program had 5,000 registered users, including government employees and contractors. And they had produced more than a thousand hacking systems. The agency’s arsenal, the documents indicate, included an array of malware ranging from viruses to clandestine “zero day” vulnerabilities in the software of major companies.

The files have circulated among former United States government hackers and contractors in “an unauthorized manner, one of whom provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive,” WikiLeaks said.

It goes on to write about the threats to a person’s smartphone:

The software targeted by the hacking program included the most popular smartphone operating systems: Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android.

The C.I.A. hacking initiative had a “mobile devices branch,” which developed an array of attacks on popular smartphones to infect and extract data, including a user’s location, audio and text messages, and to covertly activate a phone’s camera and microphone.

Apple’s iPhone software, according to the documents, was a particular target, including the development of several “zero day” exploits — a term for attacking coding flaws the company would not have known about.

Though Apple has only 15 percent of the global smartphone market, the intensive C.I.A. effort was probably explained by the “popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.”

Even more chilling:

The C.I.A. focused on smartphone operating systems in large part to intercept messages before they could be encrypted, according to the WikiLeaks documents. So by targeting the phone’s underlying software, the C.I.A. was looking to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Weibo and other smartphone communications applications.

The Intercept wrote:

In addition to the CIA’s efforts, an FBI hacking division, the Remote Operations Unit, has also been working to discover exploits in iPhones, one of the WikiLeaks documents, the iOS hacking chart, indicates. Last February, while investigating the perpetrator of a mass shooting in San Bernardino, the FBI attempted argued in court that Apple was obligated to give the FBI access to its phones by producing a weakened version of the device’s operating system. If the WikiLeaks documents are authentic, it would appear FBI and other elements of the intelligence community are already deeply involved in discovering their own way into iPhones. The compromise of the documents also calls into question government assurances in the San Bernardino case that any exploit developed by Apple to allow the FBI access to the killer’s phone would never be exposed to criminals or nation states.

The CIA and FBI hacking revelations originate with a trove of more than 8,000 documents released by WikiLeaks, which said the files originated from a CIA network and date from 2013 to 2016. The CIA declined to comment on the documents, which also disclose techniques the CIA allegedly developed to turn so-called smart televisions into listening devices. Apple did not respond to a request for comment, and Google declined to comment, though indicated it was actively investigating the revelations.

However in another article they also pointed out in regards to the Signal app:

Contrary to the clear implication from these journalists and news sources, the documents WikiLeaks published do not appear to show any attack specific to Signal or WhatsApp, but rather a means of hijacking your entire phone, which would of course “bypass” encrypted chat apps because it thwarts virtually all other security systems on the device, granting total remote access to the CIA.

The Wikileaks dump also includes information about CIA malware that can hack, and remotely spy on and control, computers running Windows, macOS, and Linux. Which means that it’s also true that the CIA can bypass PGP email encryption on your computer. And the CIA can bypass your VPN. And the CIA can see everything you’re doing in Tor Browser. All of these things can be inferred by the documents, but that doesn’t mean using PGP, VPNs, or Tor Browser isn’t safe. Basically, if the CIA can hack a device and gain full control of it — whether it’s a smartphone, a laptop, or a TV with a microphone — they can spy on everything that happens on that device. Saying Signal is bypassed because the CIA has control of the entire device Signal is installed on is akin to saying the diary you keep in your bedside table is vulnerable because the CIA has the ability to break into your house. It’s true, technically, but not exactly a revelation, and odd to fixate on to the exclusion of other vulnerable items.

White House Statement Lifts Paragraph from ExxonMobil Press Release https://t.co/vLVg4pu0IE pic.twitter.com/ew9nqo44cY

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) March 8, 2017

Lastly, Democracy Now and the Washington Post reported:

On Monday, the White House issued a statement on ExxonMobil that includes an entire paragraph lifted from an ExxonMobil press release issued less than an hour earlier. The paragraph, which celebrates ExxonMobil’s investments in new oil refineries and chemical manufacturing projects, was first noticed by a Washington Post reporter who posted the side-by-side comparison on Twitter. The ExxonMobil press release was issued at 3:10 p.m., and the White House statement was sent to reporters at 3:44 p.m. Besides small copy editing changes, the paragraphs differ by only one word: The ExxonMobil release calls its project the “Growing the Gulf expansion program,” while the White House statement calls it the “Growing the Gulf program.” The final sentence of the White House statement is also nearly identical to one in the ExxonMobil release, which claims the projects will create “many more jobs.” Longtime ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson is now secretary of state.

Fire to the Patriarchy

In Texas:

Today, just a month after a federal judge in Austin blocked a new state health department rule that would require women bury aborted or miscarried fetal tissue, lawmakers in the Texas House State Affairs Committee held an hours-long hearing considering a bill that seeks to do exactly that.

The point of the measure is to honor the “dignity of the deceased” and nothing more, said the bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Byron Cook. “Let me be clear: This bill has nothing to do with the abortion procedure whatsoever.”

Of course the bill does directly impact the provision of abortion and women seeking such care, as noted by Judge Sam Sparks in a strongly worded January 27 order blocking the Department of Health Services rule. While state lawyers have argued that U.S. Supreme Court precedent protects Texas’ ability to pass a measure that demonstrates its interest in “potential life,” Sparks wrote that desire couldn’t justify a rule that relates to the disposal of aborted or miscarried tissue, an activity that occurs “when there is no potential life to protect.”

Across the world, actions for International Women’s Day and the Global Women’s Strike took place and despite many of the events being controlled or managed by hacks associated with non-profits or the Democratic Party, autonomous, anarchist, and militant feminist actions still shown through:

#InternationalWomensDay #WomensStrike NYC pic.twitter.com/mmDXbqZFB7

— Peter Soeller (@SoellerPower) March 9, 2017

Fave photo from today's #GenderStrike in SF: "Love dumps hate" and "The future is tire fires." pic.twitter.com/yZOWtf7NrC

— Blake Montgomery (@blakersdozen) March 9, 2017

"No borders, no nations, stop deportations" at the #GenderStrike for #InternationalWomensDay in San Francisco pic.twitter.com/KXDKAqKZ5V

— Blake Montgomery (@blakersdozen) March 9, 2017

"Every nation, every race! Punch a nazi in the face!" #InternationalWomensDay pic.twitter.com/B3laRogjy3

— Shay Horse (@HuntedHorse) March 8, 2017

Say it loud Say it clear Immigrants are welcome here!#internationalwomensday #genderstrike pic.twitter.com/9YKmQEvQiz

— Indybay (@Indybay) March 8, 2017

#Anarchist bloc on Dublin march for Choice, IWD 2017 #Strike4Repeal #March4Repeal pic.twitter.com/oLjIxgHE9H

— Workers Solidarity (@WSMIreland) March 8, 2017

As always, send us your action reports!

Muslim Ban and Attacks on Immigrants Lead to Protests

This week Trump rolled out a new version of the Muslim Travel ban:

US President Donald Trump issued a revised executive order banning travel from six majority-Muslim countries and halting all refugee entry into the United States for the next 120 days. The order revokes and replaces Executive Order 13769, signed by Trump January 27, which was struck down as unconstitutional by several federal courts.

The revised order targets six of the countries named in the previous order—Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen—but exempts the seventh country, Iraq. This was after objections from the Pentagon, which feared widespread popular anger in the country where 6,000 US troops are deployed alongside tens of thousands of Iraqi army and militia forces in the ongoing conflict with Islamic State guerrillas.

The order omits several of the most flagrantly illegal and unconstitutional provisions of the earlier order, including a specific preference for “minority religious groups,” which in the context of Muslim-majority countries meant overt discrimination against Muslims.

Unlike the first order, the travel ban is prospective only: it freezes new applications for visas for the next 90 days, but has no effect on current visas, or on US legal residents (green card holders) coming back from visits to one of the six targeted countries. There will be no mass cancellation of visas, as was the case under the initial draft of the order.

That said, the reactionary and anti-democratic character of the order remains, with the main immediate effect felt by refugees, who will make up the vast majority of those denied entry to the United States, rather than travelers.

The ACLU wrote:

President Trump’s intentions regarding the Muslim ban have been clear. In a statement “ON PREVENTING MUSLIM IMMIGRATION” posted to his campaign website — and still available on it as I write — then-candidate Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Again and again, he refused to disown this proposal, expressing his opinion that “Islam hates us” and that there are “problems with Muslims coming into the country.”

Democracy Now reported:

An Afghan couple and their three young children have been released after being detained at the Los Angeles airport Thursday and held in custody over the weekend despite having valid visas to enter the U.S. The family all arrived with Special Immigrant Visas, which they had received because the father had worked for the U.S. government in Afghanistan.

Family of Romulo Avelica-Gonzalez Seeks to Stop Deportation https://t.co/KgCuNa46Fp pic.twitter.com/LvbIW2h1dC

— Carl P. DeLuca, Esq (@DeLucaAttorney) March 9, 2017

Meanwhile, deportations continued to led to protests, including the case of Rómulo Avelica-González:

Rómulo Avelica-González is the 48-year-old father of four US citizen daughters. He was seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on February 28 while dropping his daughter Fatima off at school. Fatima recorded the arrest on a mobile phone, and the video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Rómulo is currently being held at a detention center in Adelanto, California. The facility is under quarantine for a measles outbreak, and his family has not been allowed to visit him.

In Santa Cruz, where there has been recent heavy handed ICE activity, it has just come out that an DHS/ICE agent has been embedded within the local police.

In Santa Ana, people have pushed back against ICE:

ICE confirmed they sent Santa Ana officials written notification on Feb. 23 advising them the agency intends to terminate its detention contract in 90 days. The Santa Ana ICE facility announcement comes just weeks after a series of immigration raids across the country left immigrant communities reeling with fear and anxiety. But now that ICE has announced they’re leaving the Santa Ana facility, the activists have been reinvigorated and have a new set of demands for the city officials that approved the ICE contract in the first place.

Trump officials are also now stating that ICE officials will implement radical changes for how the State will deal with families that are apprehended at the border. As MSNBC reported:

The plan is part of a new set of policies for those apprehended at the border that would make good on President Trump’s campaign promise to end the practice critics call “catch and release.”  

“If implemented, this expansion in immigration detention would be the fastest and largest in our country’s history,” says Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer in Nashville who represents clients applying for asylum. “And my worry is it’ll be permanent. Once those beds are in place they’ll never go away.”

Reached by phone, Lafferty said he was not authorized to speak on the matter. The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to a request for comment.

The plans for the expansion reflect the Trump administration’s planned overhaul of U.S. policy for dealing women and children seeking asylum, thousands of whom continue to show up at the southern border fleeing violence, vengeance and sexual assault in Central America.

Under the plan under consideration, DHS would break from the current policy keeping families together. Instead, it would separate women and children after they’ve been detained – leaving mothers to choose between returning to their country of origin with their children, or being separated from their children while staying in detention to pursue their asylum claim.  

In the background, news of mass roundups and incarceration has also meant potential mass profits for certain corporations:

President Donald Trump’s tough-on-immigration agenda has been a boon for the for-profit detention industry, which months ago was facing lost government contracts and waves of negative press. This administration’s insistence on a zero-tolerance illegal immigrant policy, which aspires to undo some, if not all, of President Obama’s Executive Orders, has helped prison stocks return to levels comparable with prices of mid-August, when the DOJ announced it would move to phase out its use of p

[topworldhistory]

Napoleon and Hitler were among those who hailed from outside the countries they ultimately ruled.

Autocrats tend to stir up nationalistic fervor as a way to cement their authority. Yet a surprising number in history, including some of the most ruthless, weren’t actually from the main territory of the countries they ended up ruling.

Below are four autocrats—Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Catherine the Great—who reinvented their national identities prior to taking absolute power.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte was born as Napoleone di Buonaparte in Corsica.

A native of Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte was born as Napoleone di Buonaparte just months after France took over the Mediterranean island from the Italian city-state of Genoa. Despite living under French rule, the future emperor initially considered France to be a foreign nation.

Napoleone grew up speaking Corsican, and first learned to read and write in Italian. He wasn’t taught French until being sent to school in mainland France at age 9, and he never lost his Corsican accent, much to the amusement of his classmates and, later, the soldiers under his command, who purportedly mocked him for it.

As a teenager, Napoleone craved Corsican independence, writing in 1786 that his fellow countrymen were “bound in chains” and that the French, “not content with having robbed us of everything we held dear, have also corrupted our character.”

Napoleone’s thinking began to shift following the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. Yet it wasn’t until 1793, when political infighting forced his family to flee their native island, that he completely turned his back on the Corsican independence movement.

From that point on, the “Little Corporal” deemed himself French, downplaying his Italian lineage and changing his name to the French-sounding Napoleon Bonaparte. Meanwhile, he rose through the military ranks, seizing power in a 1799 coup d’état, and then conquered much of Europe on behalf of his newfound country.

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born in Austria but later gave up his Austrian citizenship.

Born in a small Austrian town adjacent to Germany, Adolf Hitler moved around a lot as a youth, spending time on both sides of the border. After several years as a struggling artist in Vienna, he left Austria for good in 1913. Some historians believe Hitler left to avoid serving in the army of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Instead, Hitler served in the German army during World War I. Later, he would state he had never “felt like an Austrian citizen but rather always like a German.”

Joining what would become the Nazi Party, he landed in prison following the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. While he was behind bars, the German authorities considered deporting him to his home country, but the Austrian government refused to take him back.

In order to forestall any future deportation proceedings, Hitler, now a free man again, applied in 1925 to give up his Austrian citizenship, and the Austrians immediately granted his request. He would remain stateless for the next seven years, officially becoming a German only after announcing his candidacy in the 1932 presidential election. (Non-citizens couldn’t run for office.)

At that point, the virulently anti-Semitic Nazis held power in only one German state, Braunschweig, where they were part of a coalition government. Rather than go through the normal path to citizenship, Hitler was given a Braunschweig civil service job, a position for which he never did any work but which automatically conferred German citizenship upon him.

Hitler hadn’t been a German for even one year when he was named chancellor in January 1933, the beginning of 12 years of Nazi rule that cost tens of millions of lives.

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili in the Georgian town of Gori. The year he was born, the final part of Georgia was incorporated into the Russian Empire.

Joseph Stalin was born Josef Vissarionovich Djugashvili in 1878, the same year that the last portion of his native Georgia, which borders the Black Sea in the Caucasus region of Eurasia, was incorporated into the Russian Empire.

A poor youth who embraced revolutionary Marxism while enrolled at a seminary, Djugashvili spoke in Georgian. He did not learn Russian until about the same age Napoleon learned French, when the teenage sons of a local priest taught it to him. Just like Napoleon, Stalin never lost his strong accent.

As with most Georgian boys, Djugashvili resented being forced to speak in Russian in school. He took a fondness to Georgian literature, particularly to a novel about a heroic Caucasian bandit named Koba who fights the Russians. “What impressed [him],” a schoolmate later recalled, “were the works of Georgian literature which glorified the Georgians’ struggle for freedom.”

Djugashvili stopped short of backing Georgia’s secession from Russia. Yet he did want an autonomous Georgian Marxist party, a position he repudiated in 1904 so as to stay in the good graces of his Bolshevik superiors.

From that point on, Djugashvili turned more and more to Russia. By 1912, he was using the name Stalin, a conspicuously Russian name based on the Russian word for steel. Around the same time, he authored an essay claiming that Georgia was not a longstanding nation and suggesting it be drawn “into the general channel of a higher culture.”

Then, in 1921, Stalin engineered a violent invasion of Georgia, bringing his homeland under Bolshevik control and ending a short period of Georgian independence. Two years later, he viciously put down an anti-Soviet uprising there.

During Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, Georgians arguably suffered more than those in any other Soviet republic. Thousands of Georgian officials were killed, including 425 of the 644 delegates who attended the Tenth Georgian Party Congress in 1937.

Georgians moreover found themselves among the millions of people forcibly banished by Stalin to remote parts of the Soviet Union. During World War II, for example, some 100,000 Meskhetians were removed from Georgia to central Asia, with thousands dying along the way.

Even as he maintained somewhat of a distinct Georgian identity, Stalin propped up Russian culture within the USSR, calling Russia the “most Soviet and the most revolutionary” of the Soviet republics. He mandated the teaching of Russian in schools (though other languages could be taught as well), promoted mainly Russians to high government posts, and associated himself with the Russian czars Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great.

His anti-Georgian actions (and murderous personality) notwithstanding, a 2013 poll found that 45 percent of Georgians said they have a positive attitude toward the dictator.

Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great hailed from Prussia (now part of Poland).

The daughter of a minor German prince, Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst grew up in what was then Prussia (but is now part of Poland). When her distant relative Elizabeth took power in Russia in a 1741 coup, Sophie’s mother struck up a correspondence with the new czarina, and the two hit it off.

They later had a falling out, but not before Elizabeth invited the 14-year-old Sophie to Russia as a potential bride for her nephew and heir apparent, Peter.

Sophie wasted no time ingratiating herself with the Russian court. Immersing herself in Russian culture, she mastered the Russian language quickly, in part by eschewing sleep to practice her vocabulary at night. She also embraced the Russian Orthodox religion, asking to see an Orthodox priest rather than a Lutheran pastor when struck by a near-fatal illness.

In June 1744, Sophie formally converted, against her father’s wishes, from Lutheranism to Orthodox Christianity, and that same day was renamed Catherine (Ekaterina in Russian) after Elizabeth’s late mother. Catherine wed Peter the following year, a relationship that would prove tumultuous.

When Peter assumed the throne in 1762, he quickly alienated church leaders, as well as elements of the military and aristocracy. Sensing an opportunity, Catherine, who feared Peter planned to divorce her, participated in a coup in which her husband was murdered. She would go on to serve as Russia’s longest-ruling female leader, greatly expanding the country’s borders at the expense of Poland and the Ottoman Empire.

Catherine is far from the only monarch to have ruled over an adopted country. Her husband, Peter, for example, grew up in what’s now Germany, as did English kings George I and George II. English king William of Orange, meanwhile, was raised in Holland. 

from Stories - HISTORY https://ift.tt/300gzk7 January 09, 2020 at 03:21AM

[spectaculardistractions]

I had to tell him that after this affair I could not join any Communist-controlled unit. Sooner or later it might mean being used against the Spanish working class. One could not tell when this kind of thing would break out again, and if I had to use my rifle at all in such an affair I would use it on the side of the working class and not against them. He was very decent about it. But from now on the whole atmosphere was changed. You could not, as before, ‘agree to differ’ and have drinks with a man who was supposedly your political opponent. There were some ugly wrangles in the hotel lounge. Meanwhile the jails were already full and overflowing. After the fighting was over the Anarchists had, of course, released their prisoners, but the Civil Guards had not released theirs, and most of them were thrown into prison and kept there without trial, in many cases for months on end. As usual, completely innocent people were being arrested owing to police bungling... It was worst for the Italians and Germans, who had no passports and were generally wanted by the secret police in their own countries. If they were arrested they were liable to be deported to France, which might mean being sent back to Italy or Germany, where God knew what horrors were awaiting them. One or two foreign women hurriedly regularized their position by ‘marrying’ Spaniards. A German girl who had no papers at all dodged the police by posing for several days as a man's mistress. I remember the look of shame and misery on the poor girl's face when I accidentally bumped into her coming out of the man's bedroom. Of course she was not his mistress, but no doubt she thought I thought she was. You had all the while a hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police. The long nightmare of the fighting, the noise, the lack of food and sleep, the mingled strain and boredom of sitting on the roof and wondering whether in another minute I should be shot myself or be obliged to shoot somebody else had put my nerves on edge. I had got to the point when every time a door banged I grabbed for my pistol. On the Saturday morning there was an uproar of shots outside and everyone cried out: ‘It's starting again!’ I ran into the street to find that it was only some Assault Guards shooting a mad dog. No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs of armed men.

George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia

[thewebofslime]

In the lead-up to the 2006 Atlantic City mayoral election primary, city councilman and part-time Baptist minister Eugene Robinson decided to back a different candidate than the one supported by Craig Callaway, the president of the city council. The split in their political union happened because Callaway had admitted to taking bribes. Callaway took Robinson’s show of support as a sign of disloyalty. As punishment, he decided to destroy Robinson’s life. With the help of two of his brothers, Ronald and David, and a former municipal worker, Floyd Tally, they hired a 24-year-old prostitute and drug addict who lured Robinson to a motel room equipped with a hidden camera. They recorded Robinson giving the woman money for oral sex, which they also got on tape. After getting caught in the act, Robinson was shown the video and told that the DVD would be leaked to the media if he didn’t resign. Robinson refused to resign, and the blackmailers were true to their word. One of them wore an obvious disguise and delivered a copy of the DVD to a radio station. Meanwhile, Robinson contacted the police and said he was being blackmailed. He explained that the money he gave the woman was for soda, and he thought she was a tourist. The blackmailers were all arrested and convicted. Mastermind Craig Callaway was given three years, which he served concurrently with his sentence for bribery. Tally got 12 years, Ronald Callaway was given nine years, and David Callaway got four years.As for Robinson, he didn’t seek reelection at the end of his term. His health took a turn for the worse, and he said he was forced to move into a nursing home. 9Nelson Bunker Hunt Photo credit: Armin Kubelbeck, CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons Early in 1981, Texas oil tycoon Nelson Bunker Hunt was contacted by a blackmailer who demanded a $440,000 “loan.” In exchange, the blackmailer wouldn’t tell anyone about an $87,000 bribe Hunt had arranged for Idaho Republican Representative George V. Hansen. However, an outraged Hansen immediately went to the Justice Department, protesting his innocence. That spooked the blackmailer, Arthur Greenhill Emens III, who quickly sent a second letter telling Hunt to forget about the whole extortion thing. Unimpressed by that gambit, the FBI tracked him down anyway. It turned out that Emens was employed at an Oklahoma City commodities trading firm, where Representative Hansen’s wife had made $87,000 speculating in silver in 1979. Emens believed that Hunt had set the silver deal up as a way of channeling bribe money to the Hansens, although this was never proven. After Hunt famously caused turmoil in the commodities market with a disastrous attempt to corner the global silver supply, an outraged Emens launched his blackmail plan.Emens was given three years’ probation, but the police weren’t done investigating. They began to look at the relationship between the oil tycoon Hunt and Rep. Hansen. That’s when they found out that Hansen had made false statements on financial disclosure forms. This included the $87,000 that Emens wrote about in his letter. In 1984, Hansen was reprimanded by the House of Representatives, sentenced to 5–15 months in prison, and fined $40,000. Despite the reprimand and facing jail time, Hansen ran for reelection in 1984. With 220,000 votes cast, he lost by only 167. He still went to federal prison and served a year in total. After being released, the charges were vacated by the Supreme Court, and his money was returned to him. But the hits just kept coming. Hansen was then convicted in an entirely different case on 45 counts of bank fraud for which he spent another 40 months in prison. Hansen passed away in August 2014. 8 Cindy Crawford And Rande Gerber Photo credit: Georges Biard In July 2009, former supermodel Cindy Crawford and her husband, Rande Gerber, started getting phone calls demanding money for a compromising picture of the couple’s seven-year-old daughter. The picture, which was taken by the child’s nanny, featured the girl wearing shorts and a T-shirt while bound to a chair and gagged. The nanny had apparently taken the picture as part of a “joke” that she planned on playing on the couple. She had planned on pinning it on the door with a note that read, “The baby sitter went crazy and tied everyone up and they need your help! Please.”The man said that he was a good person and he didn’t want the picture to end up in the tabloids. So Gerber met the man, later identified as Edis Kayalar, and gave him $1,000 for the picture. A short time later, Kayalar called again, this time demanding $500,000, saying he had another copy of the picture. After this call, though, Kayalar was deported back to Germany for an immigration violation. That didn’t stop him from trying to extort more money from the couple. On November 1, he called again, this time demanding $100,000. Crawford and Gerber had had enough and got the FBI involved. Kayalar was arrested and convicted in Germany. He was given two years in prison over the extortion attempts. 7 Ian Strachan And Sean McGuigan Photo credit: David Iliff, CC-BY-SA Thirty-one-year-old Ian Strachan and 41-year-old Sean McGuigan, both from London, believed they had hit the jackpot in 2006 when they met an aide to the royal family. Over five months, Strachan and McGuigan recorded eight hours of video of the aide getting drunk and doing cocaine. In the video, the aide (who was only identified as “Witness D”) claimed that a member of the royal family stuck his genitals in his face. Strachan and McGuigan also edited two lines of the recording together to claim that another male member of the royal family (identified as “Witness A”) performed a sex act on Witness D on the kitchen floor. Strachan and McGuigan tried to take their poor editing skills to the bank and approached various tabloids with the recording. Shockingly, considering the state of the British tabloids, there was no interest at all.With no tabloid buyers, the pair decided to go at it directly. Using Strachan’s mother’s phone, they called the assistant and demanded £50,000 to prevent the release of the video. The police were brought in at this point. When Strachan and McGuigan thought they were getting a meeting with either Witness A or one of his assistants, the police went instead. The two bumbling blackmailers brought the videos to meet the undercover police officer. Unsurprisingly, they were arrested and sentenced to five years in prison. 6 John Stamos Photo credit: iDominick The part of the story that both blackmailer and victim agree is that 17-year-old Alison Coss met actor John Stamos in Orlando in 2004. At the time, Stamos had recently separated from his wife, Rebecca Romijn. This is where the stories start to diverge. Stamos said that Coss mentioned that she was on spring break from college. He hung out with Coss and her friend in his hotel room and socialized, but that was it. Coss’s version of the story is that she met Stamos at a party in a hotel room with strippers and that Stamos did cocaine. She claimed that when she sat nude in a hot tub with Stamos, he came on to her and she spent the night. After the party, Coss and Stamos kept in touch by email. But when Coss saw Stamos with his new girlfriend, Coss’s emails became much more sinister. In November 2009, Coss emailed Stamos saying a man named “Brian” had emailed her about compromising pictures from that night. Coss said she even paid $10,000 to get one back. Then Stamos started to receive emails from someone named “Brian L.” Brian said he had nude pictures of Stamos doing cocaine with strippers. Brian told Stamos that tabloids had offered up to $780,000 but that he would sell the pictures to Stamos for the bargain price of just $680,000. Stamos always maintained that the night in question never happened, so no pictures existed, which made it a no-brainer when it came to contacting the authorities. The FBI told Stamos to play along with the demands, so Stamos arranged the drop at an airport in Michigan in December 2009. Coss and her accomplice, 31-year-old Scott Sippola, were arrested after Sippola made the pick-up. The FBI searched the suspects’ homes, computers, and storage devices and could find no evidence of the pictures. Coss and Sippola were found guilty of breaking a number of federal laws and were each given 48 months in prison. 5 Joe Francis Photo credit: Toglenn, Wikipedia On January 22, 2004, a masked man broke into the home of Joe Francis, who rose to fame and fortune for his “Girls Gone Wild” videos. The intruder tied Francis up and helped himself to a few items around the house. Then the masked man made Francis undress and placed a dildo near his naked backside. Holding him at gunpoint, he made Francis tell the camera that he was gay. Then the man stuffed Francis in the trunk of his own car and drove it a short distance away. A little later, Francis was able to free himself. He ran to his neighborhood security team, and the police were called. The next day, Francis was contacted by the home invader. He told Francis (then and in subsequent phone calls) to pay him $500,000 or else he would release the tape. Francis had a hard time deciding how to deal with the caller and often changed his mind. Sometimes, he said that he planned to pay the extortion; other times, he told the man to just release the video. After all, what did someone like Francis care about a dirty movie that he was forced to make at gunpoint? Amazingly, 10 months after the home invasion, the case was cracked wide open by none other than Paris Hilton. Hilton, who used to date Francis, pulled him aside at a party and said she knew who broke into his house and was blackmailing him. She said that a man at a late-night party in Las Vegas told her about the video involving Francis. The man said that one Darnell Riley had filmed it. Riley had been incarcerated from the age of 15 until he was 24 for killing two Korean shopkeepers in Los Angeles. Four years after being released from prison, he had worked his way into the same social circle as Hilton and Francis. Francis made Hilton talk to the police, and Riley was arrested and convicted for the home invasion and blackmail. He was given a sentence of 10 years and eight months in February 2006. 4 Mohamed Arshad Sometime in 2004, 38-year-old cab driver Mohamed Arshad picked up a woman who had flagged him down in Newport, Wales. Once in the cab, 37-year-old Mussarat Nazir recognized Arshad as a childhood friend. As children, they had a rather awkward moment together. Twenty-five years prior, when Arshad was 13 and Nazir was 12, they used to walk together to school. Then one morning in 1980, Arshad made his way into Nazir’s bedroom and exposed himself.One could write this off as an embarrassing youthful indiscretion, but Nazir, who was a heroin addict, decided to use this as a source of blackmail. She told Arshad to give her money so she wouldn’t tell his family about the childhood incident. Arshad, who did not want to disgrace his family, agreed to pay. Over time, he forked over a total of £20,000 (US$30,000). Each time, Nazir said it would be the last time she would ask him for money, but she always came back for more. In late 2004, when Nazir asked for an additional £4,000 (US$6,000), Arshad had had enough. Instead of just publicly admitting to the incident and taking away Nazir’s blackmail ammunition, he cooked up a plan. Arshad lured Nazir to a remote location and strangled her to death with a tow rope. After she was dead, he poured gasoline in her car and set it ablaze. The fiery car was found a short time later, and police had no problem tracking down Arshad, who still smelled like gasoline when they interviewed him.The odd case surrounding the chance encounter led to Arshad being sentenced to life in prison. 3 Yuan BaojingYuan Baojing was the president of the Beijing-based Jianhao Group, which was a multimillion-dollar trading house in the 1990s. At some point, the company lost ¥3 billion (US$11 million), for which Baojing blamed his business partner, Liu Han. Looking to get revenge, Baojing enlisted the help of former police officer Wang Xing to kill Han. Xing hired a professional hit man for the job, but when the hit went down, the gunman missed both of his shots and was arrested.Xing then saw his opportunity to blackmail Baojing. He demanded money from the tycoon in exchange for his silence about the assassination attempt. In perhaps the most predictable criminal move ever, Baojing and his brother decided to hire an assassin to kill Xing. They were better at hiring than Xing had been: Baojing’s assassin (his cousin) didn’t miss. Xing was shot to death in October 2003.In December 2005, Baojing, his brother, and his cousin were found guilty of the murder and sentenced to death. On March 16, 2005, Baojing appeared in court for his final appeal. When he was told the ruling would be upheld, he looked agitated and apparently said, “I refuse to accept it. I will inform against someone.” He was led out of the court and executed 15 minutes later via lethal injection. His wife wasn’t allowed to attend and was shipped the ashes after his cremation. 2 The Duke Of Wellington Photo credit: Thomas Lawrence Arthur Wellesley, the original Duke of Wellington, is probably most famous for defeating Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815. But everyone moves on from their fame eventually. Later in his life, Wellington was so tired of his marriage that he didn’t even try to hide his affairs from his wife. One such affair in 1924 was with a courtesan named Harriette Wilson. Wilson had written a tell-all book about her affair with Wellington and had taken it to Joseph Stockdale, a notorious publisher of scandal and pornography. Stockdale wrote to Wellington and tried to blackmail him. He said he would give over the diary if Wellington paid him a lump sum. Wellington wrote back, saying unequivocally, “Publish and be damned!”The situation caught the attention of the media, and the story became very popular with cartoonists and satirists. Instead of shaming him for having an affair with a prostitute, Stockdale only helped solidify Wellington’s reputation as the Iron Duke. 1 Emily Post Photo credit: Emil Fuchs Today, Emily Post is famous for literally writing the book on American etiquette and good manners in the aptly titled book Etiquette. Post became beloved for simplifying the etiquette process. For example, she suggested that if someone picks up the wrong fork for the wrong course, perhaps the host shouldn’t have put so many forks on the table.But before she became famous for Etiquette, Emily was the wife of a wealthy banker, Edwin, and mother of two. When her sons were old enough to go to boarding school, she started writing and found work with Scribner’s and Harper’s before publishing her first novel in 1904. During this time, Edwin was having a number of affairs, often with young, struggling actresses. In 1905, a scorned lover decided to contact a popular magazine in New York about her affair with Edwin. Edwin was soon called to the editor’s office. The editor said they were writing a tabloid book and that it would cost Edwin $500 to stay out of it.Edwin refused to bend to the extortion demand, quite possibly because he didn’t have that much money due to a string of bad investments. Instead, he went to the police. The police set up a sting in the washroom of a restaurant and caught the blackmailer red-handed. The New York Times caught a whiff of the story and portrayed Edwin as a hero. The day after the arrest, he received a standing ovation on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.While the blackmail only improved Edwin’s image, Emily, who was a very proud woman, was humiliated by the scandal. The marriage had been in trouble for years, but this was the final straw for her. They divorced six months after the scandal began. Finding herself single and her children away at boarding school, Post more or less wrote full-time. In 1920, she started to write Etiquette. When it was published in 1922, it was a best seller for 18 months and continued to sell well when different editions came out decades later. Even today, editions are put out by Emily’s descendants. So while Emily Post had suffered unbelievable and very public humiliation because of blackmail, she very successfully vindicated herself. Her name is still synonymous with American etiquette and manners, and she was incredibly influential in American culture for generations. She passed away in 1960 at the age of 86.

[enetproperty-blog]

Rogue Landlords Making A Killing from Benefit Tenants

Rogue Landlords Making A Killing from Benefit Tenants… or are they? I’m a regular subscriber to the newsletter written by Ben Reeve Lewis, who writes for LandlordLaw, Tessa Shepperson’ s great website. I highly recommend both his newsletter and LandlordLaw to you. Ben is a real south east London boy, a little like me, (though I was adopted by the area so I’m not quite the real deal). You may have seen Ben on TV. He regularly pops up on the box exposing hopeless and rogue private landlords, (there is a difference, read on to “Mrs. Moggs” below). He also exposes tenants from hell too. But he also has a day job, most often working as a Tenancy Relations Officer for a local authority and doing the same thing. Ben really understands the realities of the private rented sector far more than the top local and government politicians do. Like many people at the coalface he will tell you that myriad laws imposed on private landlords will not do a thing without enough enforcement bodies on the ground to go after the rogue landlords who blight our profession, whilst causing misery to their tenant-victims. The rogues, hey, let’s call them what they are, the criminal landlords, will just ignore all the rules and do their best to stay under the radar. In the absence of enough enforcement at local government level most continue to get away with it for years, probably forever! Rogue Landlords Killings In a recent blog post, Ben highlighted a piece form a national newspaper that said some £2.5 billion in housing benefit (HB) goes out every year to landlords running properties in what they term a “non-decent” condition by which they mean properties with inadequate heating, outdated sanitation and serious disrepair such as vermin, dodgy boilers and faulty wiring Ben remarks how this article piqued his interest. He says, “Given my day job, I’m interested in this. I go into these properties every day but in actual fact, in London, you find that 90% of the crappiest properties aren’t occupied by people on HB at all but by foreign nationals paying cash, usually with no receipts given.” He remarks that he first noticed rogue landlords swapping over to this market 4 or 5 years back when they evidently realized that benefit claimants meant “people inside the system”, which in turn means documentation and traceability, not to mention people entitled to claim homelessness and approach the council for advice who then could potentially turn into “Witnesses for the Prosecution”. Ben goes on to say, “In the worst areas, the worst properties are occupied by people paying rent to the worst types of landlords and the worst kinds of agents, all too eager to exploit vulnerable people desperately cramming themselves into rooms in order to be able to afford the rents out of their meagre earnings garnered through either cash in hand work (often with the same landlords) and zero hours contracts cleaning hotels for £4 an hour. In London, this is the real bad end of the rogue landlord market as people, like Dick Whittington, still think the streets are paved with gold.  I suppose if you are a criminal landlord with a ready supply of migrant workers desperate to just get by – they are.” Right to Rent Our daft government and the top civil servants at County Hall might like to  think that the “Right to Rent” controls would deal with this. But, of course, it won’t, because, as Ben says, “The criminals playing the system who don’t give a flying fox about those laws either. They are not ‘ordinary’ landlords who obey the rules! This is organized crime, including people trafficking, not poor Mrs. Moggs from Cheltenham who accidentally let to a turbaned man from Lahore, because she’d once taken a weekend break in La Rochelle and understandably thought they were both in France.” Meanwhile, you dear landlord-reader, given that you are reading this, will no doubt be complying with all the laws. You will still be struggling to deal with the multi-pronged tax assaults unleashed on our business by George Osborne. And right now, if you have more than four mortgaged and let properties you may be reading about how the government in the shape of the PRA (part of the Bank of England) has just made it even harder for landlords like you to get finance or even to refinance your existing mortgage loans. The fact that it has got harder for you to get financing or to turn a profit will be part and parcel of the cost of having to comply with all the rules and regulations (many of them overlapping) that now govern our business. But the criminal landlord will not have your cost base to worry about because he will not be meeting any regulations. His often illegal tenants will hardly dare complain for fear of being deported by the Border Control people. The chances of him ever being found out are very low because there are so few officers like Ben at the town halls – the councils are hopelessly overstretched. For the criminal landlord, life goes on very happily indeed. And meanwhile, you dear good landlord, will be castigated by the likes of some in the press for supposedly ripping off benefit tenants. Yes, it’s a mad world in which the government plays continually to the press gallery, who themselves fail to understand what is really going on in the real world of the private rented sector. Welcome to the mad house! ABOUT LETTINGFOCUS Services for Private Landlords We help landlords and property investors by showing them how to make money in the private rented sector using ways which are fair to tenants and which involve minimal risk. Our advice is completely independent. We take don’t commission payments or fees from anyone, ever. Services to Businesses and the Public Sector We advise a range of organisations including banks, building societies, local authorities, social housing providers, institutional investors and insurers. We help them develop and improve their services and products for private landlords. David Lawrenson, founder of LettingFocus, also writes for property portals, speaks at property events and is regularly quoted by the media. 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My Book for Tenants is also Available TO JOIN OUR FREE NEWSLETTER MAILER which goes to over 3,950 people (as at Jan 2017) just send an email to david@LettingFocus.com We do not send spam or sell our mailing list to advertisers, though we occasionally mail landlords about good products from third parties. Please put us on your “white list” to ensure you receive our emails. OFFERS ON PRODUCTS FOR LANDLORDS and TO ADVERTISE YOUR PRODUCTS to LANDLORDS: Landlords Resources PERUSE LAST TEN BLOGS BY GETTING THE RSS FEED: Click Here NEXT ANNUAL SEMINAR EVENT FOR LANDLORDS: Landlord and Property Letting Seminar TWITTER PAGE My thoughts on property, personal finance, plus a lot of other random things: Twitter  Copyright of Blog: David Lawrenson 2017. Please link to us here or quote us. We actively pursue copyright infringements. The blog is updated roughly every two weeks.   The post Rogue Landlords Making A Killing from Benefit Tenants appeared first on Letting Focus.

http://www.lettingfocus.com/blogs/2017/09/rogue-landlords-making-a-killing-from-benefit-tenants/

[claritywithachanceofnuance]

What Rear Window Taught Me About Our Current American Moment

I have always wanted girls to like me. When I was younger, I studied leading men in movies and on television, hoping to develop an arsenal of moves and phrases that would keep my lips in business regardless of my proximity to jukeboxes I would coax music from with one perfect slug. But somehow, my voracious gaze usually internalized the quirky sidekick so instead of accessing my inner Fonz, I wound up acting more like Ralph Mouth.

In retrospect, I understand that my chief obstacle to achieving studliness was the fear that for all I wanted from whatever girl I liked, I had little to offer her in return. I was too young to recognize how badly I was objectifying the fairer sex, and too cowardly to realize that I’d learn more from talking to them than I would from men onscreen, but I did sense there was something fundamentally unjust about my approach to women. To glorify my girl troubles, I convinced myself that undermining my own desires was a form of beauty worship- that I was protecting the people I liked by keeping my filthy paws to myself (which of course, I did with vision-compromising frequency). Maybe I sensed that the comic relief was also more introspective and self-deprecating than the hero and thus more kindred with me. But whatever the explanation I was an absolute mess of competing desires and fears. I lacked clarity.

So of all of the lady killers I guru-ized, from nebbishy Dr. Bricker charming the pants off of passenger after passenger to street smart David Addison making some weird toast to a lady at a bar and jump-cutting to putting his clothes back on the next morning to Brando wiping an eyelash out of a damsel’s eye as pretext to kissing her, the strongest impression I got was from Jimmy Stewart’s portrayal of J.B. “Jeff” Jefferies in Rear Window. While Jimmy Stewart wasn’t as obvious a surrogate of romantic overachievement as Richard Dreyfuss or Woody Allen, he neither was as beautiful as Paul Newman or Brad Pitt. His attractiveness relied heavily on his personality. Hoping against hope that my own personality was still fledgling enough to sculpt into something charistmatic enough to make Grace Kelly throw herself at me, I replayed every interaction the two actors had, hoping to crack the code for what made a creature that delicious fawn so shamelessly over a tortoise-like fuddy duddy, and maybe more importantly, how he handled it without betraying any sense that his reception of her unbridled affection sullied her beauty. And what I found was that, in line after line, he remained steadfast, unruffled by any temptation his girlfriend offered to coax him from his principles. Never mind how easily he was drawn into Perry Mason’s backyard intrigue, the more interesting story for me was how he faced off with a woman far more self-possessed than any I had ever met, and emerged equanimous, his code dominating hers. The chief quality his character exuded was clarity (romantically, at least).

To extend the analog, I did not start ferreting out heinous national crimes until George W. Bush was sworn in. Much like our current moment, my outrages and heartbreaks were daily. And really it was not until his winning a second term (still can’t call it a re-election) that I was able to calm down and realize that the apocalyptic tenor his opposition assumed was a tad overheated. It’s not that I thought he was a good president or even decent human being, overseeing the most violent foreign policy of my lifetime and snickering all the way. But I began to understand that my own life was only different by knowledge of events far away from me. And the local injustice I did combat had very little to do with W. None of his supposed draconian domestic policies affected me at all. And moreover, I noticed how unflappably Bush administration officials would react to damning evidence presented by news program moderators. And while I question the validity of the principles they clung to, there is no question that they withstood the onslaught of opposition through firm rooting in some central idea that was more important than whatever cudgel of facts Tim Russert employed to unmoore them.

Trump is not like this. He’s undisciplined and insecure. But he champions one idea and it’s what delivered him those rust belt states on November 8: America First. I have paid close attention to Steve Bannon, not to look for evidence of his evilness, but for the source of his strength. America First. Strange as it may seem, no public figure has been touting that as clearly as Trump has for a very long time (with the notable exception of Pat Buchanan, but somehow he frightens people that Trump doesn’t). Regardless of their cultural sophistication, vast segments of our populace believe that American sovereignty has been undermined by soft immigration policies and globalist trade agreements. I am well aware that our current economy would not benefit from tariffs and mass deportations. But I am also aware that us coastal elites don’t give a shit about American First. Meanwhile, the Sconies, Michiganders and Pennsylvanians sure as hell do.  This is their lodestar, and why they think we’re dumb no matter how smart we think we are. Whether they’re right or wrong is beside the point. The point is American nationalism has been given a bad name and right wing talk radio has spent the past 20 years priming its audience to fight back against maligners of our sovereignty. Why does America First feel so threatening? It’s not a question to be answered by an argument packaged by Rachel Maddow or Charles Blow. It’s a question for us to grapple with individually, without all the media noise. Do we want to grant citizenship to anybody who shows up? Do we want trade agreements that bleed jobs by the millions in favor of cheaper goods? Many of us on the left expect the top 1% to pay more taxes to fund programs to help the poor. Would we be willing to pay extra for clothes and electronics if it guaranteed more jobs for men and women struggling to put food on their tables?

We are in a heated moment and if I get any reaction from this (or if anybody reads it at all) I would anticipate it to be pushback against any advocacy of normalizing Trump. And I am sympathetic to that vigilance. And I remain virulently anti-Trump myself. But I am wary of the chasm between resistence and support. Like many marital arguments, I suspect a lot of I’m right/You’re wrong could be ameliorated if not upended by greater communication. I see so much eagerness for scandal and disaster, so much longing for vindication. It’s natural. But setting aside what a gaping, fetid asshole Trump is, what idea do we have that’s better than America First? Because when the most prescient man in America doesn’t understand how resonant a message is, how can we justify skipping our own personal recalibrations?

Fight for refugees, fight for immigrants, fight for workers, fight for minorities, fight for the press, fight for your neighbors and yourselves. But while you’re at it, see if you can reconcile inclusion and sensitivity with a shoring up of American sovereignty. It’s actually not that hard. And it will help us win.