Mourners hail dead Russian mercenary Prigozhin as hero of the people

Mourners mark 40 days since death of Wagner chief Prigozhin

By Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW (Reuters) - At memorials to Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was killed in an unexplained plane crash exactly 40 days ago, dozens of mourners hailed the mutinous mercenary chief as a patriotic hero of Russia who had spoken to truth to power.
Mourners mark 40 days since death of Wagner chief Prigozhin and commander Utkin© Thomson Reuters

The private Embraer jet on which Prigozhin was travelling to St Petersburg crashed north of Moscow killing all 10 people on board on Aug. 23, including two other top Wagner figures, Prigozhin's four bodyguards and a crew of three.




Mourners mark 40 days since death of Wagner chief Prigozhin and commander Utkin© Thomson Reuters

It is still unclear what caused the plane to crash two months to the day since Prigozhin's failed mutiny. The Kremlin said on Aug. 30 that investigators were considering the possibility that the plane was downed on purpose.

At his grave in the former imperial capital of St Petersburg, his mother, Violetta, and his son, Pavel, laid flowers. Supporters waved the black flags of Wagner which sport a skull and the motto "Blood, Honour, Motherland, Courage".

In eastern Orthodoxy, it is believed that the soul makes its final journey to either heaven or hell on the 40th day after death.

At memorials in Moscow and other Russian cities dozens of Wagner fighters and ordinary Russians paid their respects, though there was no mass outpouring of grief. Russian state television was silent.



Mourners mark 40 days since death of Wagner chief Prigozhin© Thomson Reuters

"He can be criticized for certain events, but he was a patriot who defended the motherland's interests on different continents," Wagner's recruitment arm said in a statement on Telegram.


"He was charismatic and importantly he was close to the fighters and to the people. And that's why he became popular both in Russia and abroad," it said.

Prigozhin's mutiny posed the biggest challenge to President Vladimir Putin's rule since the former KGB spy rose to power in 1999. Western diplomats say it exposed the strains on Russia of the war in Ukraine.



Mourners mark 40 days since death of Wagner chief Prigozhin© Thomson Reuters

'LEADER'

After months of insulting Putin's top brass with a variety of crude expletives and prison slang over their perceived failure to fight the Ukraine war properly, Prigozhin took control of the southern city of Rostov in late June.

His fighters shot down a number of Russian aircraft, killing their pilots, and advanced towards Moscow before turning back 200 km (125 miles) from the capital.

Putin initially cast Prigozhin as a traitor whose mutiny could have tipped Russia into civil war, though he later did a deal with him to defuse the crisis.

Mourners spoke of respect for Prigozhin.

"He was a real authority, a leader," Mikhail, a serviceman in Russia's armed forces who refused to give his second name, told Reuters.

Moscow resident Marta, who also refused to give her surname, said the people believed in Prigozhin but that Wagner had been "decapitated" by the deaths of him and co-founder Dmitry Utkin.

"Hope for justice died with him," she said. "People believed in him."

Pro-Wagner groups posted a video of Prigozhin flying to Mali where, after a thunder storm, he met a senior commander known by his call sign "Lotus" - Anton Yelizarov - who is now reported to be leading the group.

Opponents such as the United States cast Wagner as a brutal crime group which plundered African states and meted out sledgehammer deaths to those who challenged it.

Putin was on Friday shown meeting one of the most senior former commanders of the Wagner mercenary group and discussing how best to use "volunteer units" in the Ukraine war.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; Editing by Alison Williams)

Tent-dwelling migrants join protest over Portugal's housing prices

Reuters / Updated: Sep 30, 2023

Thousands of people in Portugal took part in protests against soaring rents and house prices, driven by gentrification and tourism. The average monthly wage in Portugal is around €1,200 ($1,268), making apartments unaffordable for many. Rents in Lisbon have increased by 65% since 2015, while sale prices have risen by 137%. Migrants and precarious workers are particularly vulnerable, with Brazilians, who make up 40% of Portugal's migrant community, earning around 20% less than Portuguese workers. The housing crisis has led to overcrowding and discrimination in access to housing for migrants.Read More


Sale prices have skyrocketed 137% in that period, according to housing data specialists Confidencial Imobiliario. (Reuters)

LISBON - Marcia Leandro moved to Portugal from Brazil six months ago with a goal: to train as a chef. But Portugal's housing crisis curbed her dreams and forced her to live in a tent.

Leandro, 43, and Andreia Costa, her neighbour in an improvised tent camp on an empty plot on the outskirts of Lisbon, marched alongside thousands of Portuguese on Saturday in a protest against soaring rents and house prices stoked by growing gentrification and record tourism.

Portugal is one of Western Europe's poorest countries with an average monthly wage of around 1,200 euros ($1,268), and a 65% increase in Lisbon rents since the start of the tourism boom in 2015 has made apartments unaffordable for many.

Sale prices have skyrocketed 137% in that period, according to housing data specialists Confidencial Imobiliario.

Migrants and other precarious workers are particularly vulnerable. Brazilians, who make up 40% of Portugal's migrant community, on average earn around 20% less than Portuguese, according to the Migration Observatory. Many receive less than the official monthly minimum pay of 760 euros.

Leandro used to pay 230 euros a month for a bunk bed in a shared room in Lisbon, but when she lost her job as a cleaner she could no longer rent. Other options were too expensive. The tent cost her 160 euros and, now newly-employed, she remains there.

"I'm just living here to save money ... I'm here so I can achieve my dream," she told Reuters outside her two-compartment blue tent where she sleeps and keeps belongings. She'd like to rent a one-bedroom flat, but prices are "absurd", she said.

At Saturday's rallies in Lisbon, Porto and other cities, protesters carried banners reading "Housing is a right!" and chanted slogans criticising the Socialist government for what many see as defending landlords and not the people.

Some were dressed up as the moustachioed, top-hat wearing mascot of the board game Monopoly.

"The housing situation is completely unsustainable," said Dinis Lourenco, 31, one of the Portuguese protesters.

"Salaries have to increase significantly so people can pay the rent, there have to be rent controls, a solution for rising interest rates," he said.

Lourenco and other critics say measures announced by the government earlier this year that include curbs on Airbnb short-term rentals are not enough to tame the crisis, exacerbated by various factors including wealthy foreigners ploughing money into property and a chronic shortage of affordable housing.

"People are suffocating because of housing," said Leandro's neighbour Costa, also from Brazil. Half of her 800 euro monthly wage used to go towards renting a dwelling in her landlord's garden. Her goal now is to buy a caravan - ideally before the winter.

The 2021 census showed that nearly 38% of Portugal's foreign population lived in overcrowded households, and various rights groups have said migrants often face discrimination in access to housing.

Slovakia's poll winner defies European consensus on Ukraine

Slovakia holds early parliamentary election© Thomson Reuters

By Jan Lopatka and Jason Hovet

BRATISLAVA (Reuters) -Slovakia's pro-Russian and anti-liberal election winner Robert Fico was poised on Sunday to begin coalition talks to form a government likely to join Hungary in opposing the European Union's military aid for Ukraine.



Slovakia holds early parliamentary election© Thomson Reuters

The 59-year-old former prime minister's SMER-SSD party scored nearly 23% of Saturday's parliamentary poll, earning the president's nod to start talks to replace a technocrat government that has been backing Kyiv against Russia's invasion.



Michal Simecka, leader of the Progressive Slovakia party, Peter Pellegrini, leader of the HLAS party, and Robert Fico, leader of the SMER-SSD party, stand next to each other after a televised debate at TV TA3© Thomson Reuters

"We are not changing that we are prepared to help Ukraine in a humanitarian way," said Fico, whom analysts consider to be inspired by Hungary's nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban who has frequently clashed with the EU.

"We are prepared to help with the reconstruction of the state but you know our opinion on arming Ukraine," he added at a news conference.

Fico's campaign call of "Not a single round" for neighbouring Ukraine resonated in the nation of 5.5 million.

Slovakia is a member of the NATO military alliance, which is backing Ukraine against Russian President Vladimir Putin, but many of its people are sympathetic to Moscow's line that the West wants to annihilate it.

Slovakia's Pro Russia Robert Fitzroy was in pole position to
Reuters
Slovakia's Pro-Russia former PM Fico wins election

Fico said Slovakia has bigger problems than the Ukraine issue, including energy prices and living costs, but his party would do everything possible to start peace talks.

Sloviakia's liberal Progresivne Slovensko (Progressive Slovakia, PS) party came second in Saturday's vote with almost 18% of votes and wants to stay the course on backing Ukraine.

So Fico may well look to the moderate leftist HLAS (Voice) party, which came third with nearly 15% of votes, as a partner along with the nationalist, pro-Russian Slovak National Party.

He said coalition talks could take two weeks.

HLAS leader Peter Pellegrini has said ammunition supplies to Ukraine are good for Slovakia's defence industry and the party has backed the EU stance against the invasion.

Fico's record of pragmatism may mean he tones down his rhetoric going forward, analysts and diplomats say, especially in a coalition with HLAS.

Slovakia has already donated to Ukraine most of what it could from state reserves - including fighter jets - and Fico has not clarified whether his party would seek to end commercial supplies from the defence industry.

ANTI-LIBERAL SHIFT

A Fico-led government would signal a further shift in central Europe against political liberalism, which would be reinforced if the ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) wins an election in Poland later this month.

Hungary's Orban congratulated Fico on Sunday with a post on X social media platform saying: "Guess who's back!"

"Always good to work together with a patriot," he added.

Fico, who campaigned strongly against illegal migration in the run-up to Saturday's election and criticised a caretaker government for not doing more, said re-starting border controls with Hungary would represent a top priority.

"One of the first decisions of the government must be an order renewing border controls with Hungary," Fico told a news conference. "It will not be a pretty picture," he said, adding force would be needed on the 655 km (400 miles) border.

The migrants, predominantly young men from the Middle East and Afghanistan, mostly come via the so-called Balkan route, entering Hungary from Serbia despite a steel fence that Orban had built after the 2015 refugee crisis that rocked Europe.

Slovakia's PS party, which is liberal on green policies, LGBT rights, deeper European integration and human rights, also plans to court HLAS.

"We believe that this is very bad news for Slovakia," PS leader Michal Simecka told a news conference of SMER-SSD's victory. "And it would be even worse news if Robert Fico succeeds in forming a government."

Born to a working-class family, Fico graduated with a law degree in 1986 and joined the then ruling Communist party.

After the 1989 fall of Communist rule, he worked as a government lawyer, won a seat in parliament under the renamed Communist party, and represented Slovakia at the European Court for Human Rights.

Fico has run SMER-SDD since 1999.

** Click here for an interactive graphic on election results:

(Reporting by Jan Lopatka and Jason Hovet; Writing by Jason Hovet and Michael Kahn; Editing by Kirsten Donovan and Andrew Cawthorne)

Pro-Russia ex-PM leads leftist party to win in Slovakia's parliamentary elections

Updated October 1, 2023
By The Associated Press

Chairman of Smer-Social Democracy party Robert Fico, center, adresses the results of an early parliamentary election during a press conference in Bratislava, Slovakia, on Sunday, Oct. 1, 2023.

Darko Bandic/AP

PRAGUE — A populist former prime minister and his leftist party have won early parliamentary elections in Slovakia, staging a political comeback after campaigning on a pro-Russian and anti-American message, according to complete results announced Sunday.

Former Prime Minister Robert Fico and the leftist Smer, or Direction, party had 22.9% of the votes, or 42 seats in the 150-seat Parliament, the Slovak Statistics Office said.

Public and exit polls predicted a tight race but in the end, Fico won relatively big after his campaign — considered aggressive and the most radical of his career — attracted voters who favored the far-right.

With no party winning a majority of seats, a coalition government will need to be formed. The president traditionally asks an election's winner to try to form a government, so Fico is likely to become prime minister again. He served as prime minister in 2006-2010 and again in 2012-2018.

Fico said he was ready to open talks with other parties on forming a coalition government as soon as President Zuzana Caputova asks him. Caputova said she will do it on Monday.

"We're here, we're ready, we've learned something, we're more experienced," he said.

Saturday's election was a test for the small central European country's support for neighboring Ukraine in its war with Russia, and the win by Fico could strain a fragile unity in the European Union and NATO.

Fico, 59, has vowed to withdraw Slovakia's military support for Ukraine in Russia's war if his attempt to return to power succeeds. "People in Slovakia have bigger problems than Ukraine," he said.

The country of 5.5 million people created in 1993 following the breakup of Czechoslovakia has been a staunch supporter of Ukraine since Russia invaded last February, donating arms and opening the borders for refugees fleeing the war.

Slovakia has delivered to Ukraine its fleet of Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jets, the S-300 air defense system, helicopters, armored vehicles and much-needed demining equipment.

The current caretaker government is planning to send Ukraine artillery ammunition and to train Ukrainian service members in demining.

Winning approval for sending more arms to Ukraine is getting more difficult in many countries. In the U.S. Congress, a bill to avert a government shutdown in Washington, D.C., excluded President Joe Biden's request to provide more security assistance to the war-torn nation.

In other countries, including Germany, France, and Spain, populist parties skeptical of intervention in Ukraine also command significant support. Many of these countries have national or regional elections coming up that could tip the balance of popular opinion away from Kyiv and toward Moscow.

A liberal, pro-West newcomer, the Progressive Slovakia party, took second place, with 18% of the votes, or 32 seats.

Its leader Michal Simecka, who is deputy president of the European Parliament, said his party respected the result. "But it's bad news for Slovakia," he said. "And it would be even worse if Robert Fico manages to create a government."

He said he'd like try to form a governing coalition if Fico fails.

The left-wing Hlas (Voice) party, led by Fico's former deputy in Smer, Peter Pellegrini, came in third with 14.7% (27 seats). Pellegrini parted ways with Fico after the scandal-tainted Smer lost the previous election in 2020, but their possible reunion would boost Fico's chances to form a government.

Pellegrini replaced Fico as prime minister after he was forced to resign following major anti-government street protests resulting from the 2018 killing of journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee.

Pellegrini congratulated Fico on his victory but said that two former prime ministers in one government might not work well. "It's not ideal but that doesn't mean such a coalition can't be created," he said.

Another potential coalition partner, the ultranationalist Slovak National Party, a clear pro-Russian group, received 5.6% (10 seats).

Those three parties would have a parliamentary majority of 79 seats if they joined forces in a coalition government.

Fico opposes EU sanctions on Russia, questions whether Ukraine can force out the invading Russian troops and wants to block Ukraine from joining NATO. He proposes that instead of sending arms to Kyiv, the EU and the U.S. should use their influence to force Russia and Ukraine to strike a compromise peace deal.

Fico's critics worry that his return to power could lead Slovakia to abandon its course in other ways, following the path of Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and to a lesser extent of Poland under the Law and Justice party.

"It can't be ruled out that he will be looking for a partner who uses similar rhetoric, and the partner will be Viktor Orbán," said Radoslav Stefancik, an analyst from the University of Economics in Bratislava.

Orbán welcomed Fico's victory.

"Always good to work together with a patriot," he posted on X, the former Twitter.

Hungary has — uniquely among EU countries — maintained close relations with Moscow and argued against supplying arms to Ukraine or providing it with economic assistance.

Fico repeats Russian President Vladimir Putin's unsupported claim that the Ukrainian government runs a Nazi state from which ethnic Russians in the country's east needed protection. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish and lost relatives in the Holocaust.

Pro-Russian politician wins Slovakia’s parliamentary election

By Ivana Kottasová, Sophie Tanno and Heather Chen, CNN
 Sun October 1, 2023

A party headed by a pro-Kremlin figure came out top after securing more votes than expected in an election in Slovakia, preliminary results show, in what could pose a challenge to NATO and EU unity on Ukraine.

According to preliminary results released by Slovakia’s Statistical Office at 9 a.m. local time, Robert Fico’s populist SMER party won 22.9% of the vote.

Progressive Slovakia (PS), a liberal and pro-Ukrainian party won 17.9%.

Fico, a two-time former prime minister, now has a chance to regain the job but must first seek coalition partners as his party did not secure a big enough share of the vote to govern on its own.

Speaking after his victory, Fico said he “will do everything” in his power to kickstart Russia-Ukraine peace talks.

“More killing is not going to help anyone,” Fico said.

Negotiations are unlikely to be welcomed in Ukraine, as for now they would likely involve proposals in which territory is ceded to Russia – a non-starter for Kyiv.

The moderate-left Hlas party, led by a former SMER member and formed as an offshoot of SMER following internal disputes, came third with 14.7% of the vote, and could play kingmaker.

With seven political parties reaching the 5% threshold needed to enter the parliament, coalition negotiations will almost certainly include multiple players and could be long and messy.

While not a landslide, SMER’s result is better than expected – last opinion polls published earlier this week showed SMER and PS neck and neck.

Fico has pledged an immediate end to Slovak military support for Ukraine and promised to block Ukraine’s NATO ambitions in what would upend Slovakia’s staunch support for Ukraine.

Michal Šimečka, the leader of PS, said the result was “bad news for the country.”

“The fact of the matter is that SMER is the winner. And we of course respect that although we think it’s bad news for the country. And it will be even worse news if Mr Fico forms the government,” he said at a news conference early on Sunday.

Slovakia’s President Zuzana Čaputová said before the election that she would ask the leader of the strongest party to form the government, meaning Fico will get the first stab at forming a government.

Fico and SMER have not yet commented on the results.

Šimečka said his party will do “everything it could” to prevent Fico from governing.

“I will be in touch with other political leaders of parties that were elected to parliament — on an informal basis — to discuss ways of preventing that,” he said. “We think it will be really bad news for the country, for our democracy, for our rule of law, and for our international standing and for our finances and for our economy if Mr Fico forms the government.”

Peter Pellegrini, the leader of Hlas, said his party was “very pleased with the result.”

“The results so far show that Hlas will be a party without which it will be impossible to form any kind of normal, functioning coalition government,” he said, adding that the party will “make the right decision” to become part of a government that will lead Slovakia out of the “decay and crisis that (the country’s previous leaders) got us into.”

Hlas has been vague about its position on Ukraine in the election campaign. Pellegrini has previously suggested Slovakia “had nothing left to donate” to Kyiv, but also said that the country should continue to manufacture ammunition that is shipped to Ukraine.
Serious consequences for the region

Slovakia, an eastern European nation of about 5.5 million people, was going to the polls to choose its fifth prime minister in four years after seeing a series of shaky coalition governments.

A SMER-led government could have serious consequences for the region. Slovakia is a member of both NATO and the European Union, was among the handful of European countries pushing for tough EU sanctions against Russia and has donated a large amount of military equipment to Ukraine.

But this will likely change under Fico, who has blamed “Ukrainian Nazis and fascists” for provoking Russia’s President Vladimir Putin into launching the invasion, repeating the false narrative Putin has used to justify his invasion.

While in opposition, Fico became a close ally of Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orban, especially when it came to criticism of the European Union. There is speculation that, if he returns to power, Fico and Orban could gang up together and create obstacles for Brussels. If Poland’s governing Law and Justice party manages to win a third term in Polish parliamentary elections next month, this bloc of EU troublemakers could become even stronger.

Meanwhile, the liberal PS party had been pushing for a completely different future for Slovakia – including a continued strong support for Kyiv and strong links with the West.

Fico previously served as Slovakia’s prime minister for more than a decade, first between 2006 and 2010 and then again from 2012 to 2018.

He was forced to resign in March 2018 after weeks of mass protests over the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová. Kuciak reported on corruption among the country’s elite, including people directly connected to Fico and his party SMER.

The campaign was marked by concerns over disinformation, with Věra Jourová, the European Commission’s top digital affairs official, saying in advance the vote would be a “test case” of how effective social media companies have been in countering Russian propaganda in Slovakia.

Polls suggest Fico’s pro-Russia sentiments are shared by many Slovaks.

According to a survey by GlobSec, a Bratislava-based security think tank, only 40% of Slovaks believed Russia was responsible for the war in Ukraine, the lowest proportion among the eight central and eastern European and Baltic states GlobSec focused on. In the Czech Republic, which used to form one country with Slovakia, 71% of people blame Russia for the war.

The same research found that 50% of Slovaks perceive the United States – the country’s long-term ally – as a security threat.

TAIWAN 
Lawmakers call for investigation into indigenous submarine controversy

A PROVINCE OF CHINA

09/29/2023

Taiwan's first Indigenous Defense Submarine "Narwhal" is on display at a ceremony in Kaohsiung Thursday on Sept. 28, 2023. CNA file photo

Taipei, Sept. 29 (CNA) Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators on Friday urged prosecutors to look into a controversy involving the construction of Taiwan's first Indigenous Defense Submarine (IDS), which was unveiled Thursday amid the country's goal to strengthen its deterrence against the Chinese navy.

Prosecutors should open an investigation following allegations that an opposition legislator and arms dealers tried to hinder the IDS project and even leaked information to China, according to DPP lawmakers Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) and Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬).

The controversy not only concerns national security but also people's trust in legislators and so requires further investigation, Cheng said in a Facebook post, adding that failure to do so would be negligent on the part of the Ministry of Justice.

According to local media reports, IDS program convener Huang Shu-kuang (黃曙光) recently accused a lawmaker of "continually sabotaging" construction of "Narwhal," a submarine prototype with a price tag of NT$49.3 billion (US$1.53 billion).

While Huang did not name the legislator, he reportedly said that person had tried to obstruct the government's acquisition of key parts from foreign suppliers during the building of Narwhal, adding that local arms dealers also leaked information about the submarine to a Chinese embassy after failing to win the bid.

However, when asked by reporters to identify the lawmaker during the launch ceremony on Thursday, Huang only replied "guess yourselves."

In a more explicit accusation later that day, former arms dealer and advisor to the navy Kuo Hsi (郭璽) identified the individual allegedly behind the sabotage and leaking information to China as Kuomintang (KMT) lawmaker Ma Wen-chun (馬文君), a member of the Foreign and National Defense Committee.

Calling Ma a "traitor to the country," Kuo said he welcomes any lawsuit from Ma if what he said is not true.

In response, Ma accused Huang of using Kuo as henchman to attack her and others who questioned the future development of the project before a prototype submarine has proved successful.

Several lawmakers across party lines have in recent years called for parts of IDS funding to be withheld, with Ma considered a major critic against the program.

"(Huang) started the fire to grab media attention and then hid behind the scenes," Ma said, accusing him of pushing through a budget for seven more submarines to be earmarked, "before the prototype itself even touched the water."

Huang said on Sept. 25 that Narwhal will undergo a harbor acceptance test on Oct. 1, followed by a sea acceptance test, and hopefully be delivered to the Navy before the end of 2024.

(By Hsiao Po-yang, Su Lung-chi and Lee Hsin-Yin)

Enditem/AW

RAIL IS SAFER

‘Multiple people’ dead, evacuations ordered after Illinois crash involving semitruck carrying toxic ammonia

2023/09/30

Five people died in an Illinois crash involving multiple vehicles, including a semitruck carrying ammonia, according to police. - Dreamstime/Dreamstime/TNS

A crash involving multiple vehicles — including a semitruck carrying ammonia — in south-central Illinois has killed “multiple people” and prompted the evacuation of parts of an Effingham County village, authorities said Saturday morning.

The incident happened Friday night on Route 40 east of Teutopolis, just before 9 p.m. local time, Effingham County Sheriff Paul Kuhns told reporters during a Saturday news conference.

Teutopolis is a village of around 1,600 people located 90 miles southeast of state capital Springfield.

The incident caused “a large plume, cloud of anhydrous ammonia on the roadway that caused terribly dangerous air conditions in the northeast area of Teutopolis,” Kuhns said.

County Coroner Kim Rhode initially told reporters that one person was dead and five others had been taken to nearby hospitals. But in a 6 a.m. update, authorities said the number of fatalities had grown to five, according to local TV station WCLA.

Kuhns later confirmed “multiple” people had died, but said he didn’t have “the exact number.”

People within a mile radius of the crash were asked to evacuate immediately due to the toxic chemical plume. Residents who live west of the crash scene were asked to shelter in place, local radio station 979XFM reported.

Exposure to anhydrous ammonia gas can cause severe respiratory and ocular damage, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A shelter for those asked to evacuate was set up at a nearby school, WTHI-TV reported.

Crews were still working to contain the leak around 9 a.m.

“We have a lot of brave firemen, EMT, hazmat specialists, police officers that are working on the scene as we speak,” Kuhns said.

© New York Daily News

WORD OF THE DAY

Face pareidolia: how pregnant women could help us understand why we see faces in inanimate objects

The Conversation
September 30, 2023 

Pregnant woman (AFP)

Sometimes we see faces that aren’t really there. You may be looking at the front of a car or a burnt piece of toast when you notice a face-like pattern. This is called face pareidolia and is a mistake made by the brain’s face detection system.

But it’s an error that can help us understand the workings of the human mind. A recent study has argued that having a baby may affect this aspect of our brains, suggesting it may vary across our lifetimes.

Many scientific studies exclude pregnant women out of concern that the dramatic changes to their hormone levels may affect results. But researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia realised these hormonal changes can give us interesting insights.

They found women who had had recently given birth were more likely to see face-like patterns than those who were pregnant. The researchers have suggested this might be because of changing levels of the hormone oxytocin. However, the full picture may be more complicated.

People are have evolved to be sensitive to faces and face-like patterns from birth, probably because attention to faces underlies our social interactions and may also help us stay safe (it’s how we tell friends and family from strangers). Monkeys also show face pareidolia, suggesting that we share features of our face-detection system, including the mistakes that it makes, with other species.

It’s well established that chemical messengers in the brain play a role in our social interactions. For instance, oxytocin is often called the “love hormone” due to its links with social bonding and reproduction. Studies have shown that artificially increasing levels of oxytocin, using a nasal spray, causes people to spend longer looking at the eye regions of faces and enhances recognition of positive facial expressions.

Oxytocin levels change naturally within women who are pregnant and after they have given birth. Previous research that compared women at different stages in their pregnancy and postpartum has found that levels of oxytocin and other hormones vary dramatically.

The Australian researchers decided to test whether levels of oxytocin (given its role in face perception) and the likelihood of seeing face-like patterns are related to each other. They predicted that postpartum women would have higher levels of oxytocin than pregnant women, therefore making it easier for them to see faces in face-like patterns.
Seeing faces in objects

The researchers compared two groups of women on a test of face pareidolia. One group were pregnant while the other group had given birth in the last 12 months. During the test, all of the women were shown three types of images: human faces, ordinary objects and illusory faces (objects with face-like patterns in them). The women were asked to respond to the images using an 11-point scale from zero (no, I don’t see a face) to ten (yes, I definitely see a face).

The results showed that the postpartum women did indeed report seeing more faces for the illusory face images (median response was 7.08) in comparison with the pregnant women (median response of 5.30). As expected, these groups didn’t differ much in their responses to the images of human faces and ordinary objects.

The authors concluded that women’s sensitivity to levels of face pareidolia may be heightened during early parenthood, and might encourage social bonding, which is obviously important for mothers and their infants. This increase in sensitivity, according to the researchers, is caused by heightened levels of oxytocin in the months after giving birth.


Seeing faces in objects is known as face pareidolia. Valeriana Y/Shutterstock

The authors of the study noted that they didn’t actually measure their participants’ oxytocin levels. Instead, they assumed oxytocin differences caused the differences in face pareidolia.

However, this means other differences between the two groups may have led to their result. Perhaps pregnant and postpartum women differ in their levels of anxiety, stress, or fatigue, all of which could affect their performance on the task.

It may also be that pregnant and postpartum women who choose to complete online psychology experiments differ in some way that we’re not aware of. Carrying out a follow-up study which compares the same women during pregnancy and after they’ve given birth could rule out some of these alternatives.

There is also another problem with assuming that oxytocin differences underlie the face pareidolia result. While the study’s authors reason that oxytocin levels will be higher postpartum than during pregnancy, this idea isn’t clearly supported by previous research.

In fact, some studies seem to show that oxytocin levels don’t differ from pregnancy to postpartum, are lower postpartum, or that they rise during pregnancy but then fall during the postpartum period. At the very least, these studies seem to agree that women vary greatly in the patterns they show.

Some more than others

While the Australian study focused on pregnant and postpartum women, we know that most people experience seeing face-like patterns. However, there are large differences in how susceptible you might be.

For instance, studies have shown that women report seeing these illusory faces more often than men do, while strong believers in paranormal phenomena and religions show more frequent experiences than sceptics and non-believers. Researchers have even found that loneliness may cause people to see these face-like patterns more often.

Face pareidolia is also less commonly experienced by some groups like those with autism spectrum disorder, as well as genetic disorders like Williams syndrome and Down syndrome.

And we know that some people are “face blind” (prosopagnosic) and can struggle to recognise even their family and close friends. These people also show less sensitivity to face-like patterns.

As a preliminary study, this team’s new finding that postpartum women show increased face pareidolia is certainly an interesting one. If sensitivity to face-like patterns changes across our lifetimes, and is also determined by underlying hormone levels, then measuring face pareidolia could represent a useful tool for monitoring more complex internal changes that might underlie mental health issues.


Robin Kramer, Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology, University of Lincoln

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Consciousness: why a leading theory has been branded ‘pseudoscience’

The Conversation
September 30, 2023 

Brain

Civil war has broken out in the field of consciousness research. More than 100 consciousness researchers have signed a letter accusing one of the most popular scientific theories of consciousness – the integrated information theory – of being pseudoscience.

Immediately, several other figures in the field responded by critiquing the letter as poorly reasoned and disproportionate.

Both sides are motivated by a concern for the long-term health and respectability of consciousness science. One side (including the letter signatories) is worrying that the association of consciousness science with what they perceive to be a pseudoscientific theory will undermine the credibility of the field.

The other side is pressing that what they perceive as unsupported charges of pseudoscience will ultimately result in the whole science of consciousness being perceived as pseudoscience.

Integrated information theory – often referred to as IIT – is a very ambitious theory of consciousness proposed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. It ultimately aims to give mathematically precise conditions for when any system – a brain or some other lump or matter – is or is not conscious.

The theory revolves around a mathematical measure of integration of information, or interconnections, labelled with the Greek letter ϕ. The basic idea is that a system becomes conscious at the precise moment when there is more ϕ in the system as a whole than in any of its parts.

IIT implies that many more things are conscious than we ordinarily suppose. This means it gets close to a kind of “panpsychism” – the view that consciousness pervades the physical universe. Having said that, there are big differences between IIT and the new wave of Bertrand Russell-inspired panpsychism which has recently been making waves in academic philosophy, and which has been the focus of much of my research.

IIT even implies, as pointed out by the computer scientist Scott Aaronson, that an inactive grid of connected logic gates would be conscious.

The signatories of the letter worry that, while certain aspects of IIT may have been tested, the theory as a whole has not. Therefore, they argue, there is little experimental support for these bold and counter-intuitive implications. Opponents of the letter say that this is true of all current theories of consciousness, and reflects challenges with current neuroimaging techniques.

Adversarial collaboration

All of this follows the announcement over the summer of the first results of an “adversarial collaboration” between IIT and another popular theory of consciousness, known as the global workspace theory.

According to this theory, information in the brain becomes conscious when it is in a “global workspace”, which means it is available to be used by many and varied systems throughout the brain – perceptual areas, long-term memory and motor control – for a wide variety of tasks. In contrast, if certain information is only available to a single system in the brain to perform a highly specific task, such as to regulate breathing, then that information is not conscious.

The idea of an adversarial collaboration is that the proponents of each of the rival theories design experiments together, and agree in advance on which results would favour each theory.

The hope is that agreeing in advance about what the results would mean will prevent theorists from interpreting whatever results come up as fitting with their preferred theory. This first round of experimental results turned out to be mixed. Some confirmed certain parts of IIT, and some backed up particular aspects of global workspace theory. On balance, there was arguably a slight advantage to IIT.

The announcement of these ambiguous results was accompanied by the neuroscientist Christof Koch – a prominent proponent of IIT – publicly conceding defeat on a bet he made 25 years ago with philosopher David Chalmers, that the science of consciousness would be all wrapped up by now.


Christof Koch giving a TED talk. CC BY-NC-ND

One factor which may be playing a big role, although it has not been explicitly mentioned in any of these online skirmishes, is that IIT does not merely justify itself through scientific experimentation. It also involves philosophical reflection.

IIT begins with five “axioms”, which its proponents claim each of us can know through attention to our own conscious experience. These include that conscious experience is unified – that we don’t experience, say, colours and shapes separately but as aspects of a single, unbroken experience.

The theory then translates these axioms into five corresponding “postulates” – properties which it claims are required for a physical system to embody consciousness. For example, IIT explains the unity of our conscious experience in terms of the integration of the physical system.

Opponents of IIT may in part be motivated by a desire to sharply distinguish the science from the philosophy of consciousness, thus ensuring the former is perceived – in particular by funders – as a serious scientific enterprise.

Beyond science

The problem is that consciousness is not merely a scientific issue. The task of science is to explain publicly observable phenomena. But consciousness is not a publicly observable phenomenon: you can’t look inside someone’s brain and see their feelings and experiences. Of course, science theorises about unobservable phenomena, such as fundamental particles, but it only does this to explain what can be observed. In the unique case of consciousness, the phenomenon we are trying to explain is not publicly observable.

Instead, consciousness is known about privately, through the immediate awareness each of us has of our own feelings and experience. The downside of this is that it’s very hard to experimentally demonstrate which theory of consciousness is correct. The upside is that, in contrast to other scientific phenomena, we have direct access to the phenomenon, and our direct access may provide insights into its nature.

Crucially, to accept that our knowledge of consciousness is not limited to what we can glean from experiments is to accept that we need both science and philosophy to deal with consciousness. In my new book Why? The Purpose of the Universe, I explore how such a partnership could be achieved.

IIT is not perfect, either in its scientific or its philosophical aspects. But it is pioneering in accepting the need for science and philosophy to work hand in glove to crack the mystery of consciousness.

Philip Goff, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

'Russia helped elect Donald Trump': GOP strategist calls out Republicans over Ukraine

David McAfee
September 30, 2023 

U.S. President Donald Trump and Russia's President Vladimir Putin talk during the family photo session at the APEC Summit in Danang, Vietnam November 11, 2017. REUTERS/Jorge Silva

Numerous Republican lawmakers are wrongly supporting Donald Trump and Russian interests over Ukraine and American democracy, Stuart Stevens, Chief Strategist of Romney's 2012 presidential campaign, said on Saturday.

Stevens, who appeared on CNN's The Source with Kaitlan Collins earlier this month and said Mitch McConnell was wrong about Republicans who secretly hate Trump but can't voice that concern, said today's Republican legislators are veering off course and that voters would be better off supporting President Joe Biden in the upcoming election.

Stevens began by saying Russia "helped elect" Trump in 2016.

"Today the party that once was the most consistent antagonist of Soviet Union/Russia is the home of the large and growing pro-Putin element of American politics," Stevens said, adding that Biden "is in the role that represents the best of America: leading a coalition to fight tyranny and genocide."

The strategist added:

"If Ronald Reagan were president today, he would do the same," he said. "If you care about liberty and the defense of freedom, if you believe it is wrong to stand by while thousands of children are kidnapped and a tyrant sends an army of rapists and murderers to prey on the innocent, you have one choice in this election: support" Biden.

Stevens further encouraged everyone to "stand with" the President.

"There is no neutral position on confronting an evil unlike any we have seen since WW2. To do nothing is to help the evil spread. Stand with freedom. Stand with human dignity. Stand with Ukraine."

Libertarianism and why Republicans embrace cruelty

Thom Hartmann
September 30, 2023

Ronald Reagan (Edalisse Hirst/Flickr)

Last night was the Republican debate, where we heard lots of predictable rants about crushing the “welfare state” and restoring “freedom” and “self-reliance.”

So, once again, why are Republicans so cruel and why do they seem so fond of libertarianism? Why does Greg Abbott put razor wire in the Rio Grande river? Why does Donald Trump target people for assassination by his followers? Why does Ron DeSantis revel in keeping tens of thousands of low-income Florida children from getting Medicaid?

Yesterday, I laid out the terrible impact Libertarian policies, which have infected the GOP for five decades, have had on the United States. But where did the whole idea of libertarianism come from, and who started the Libertarian Party?

Get ready for a wild ride as we do a deep dive into America’s most bizarre (and phony) political party.

How is it that Republicans so often embrace casual cruelty like tearing mothers from their children or throwing pregnant women in poverty off public assistance? Why have 12 GOP-controlled states refused to this day to expand Medicaid for their 30 million minimum-wage working people when the federal government covers 90 percent of the cost?

Why are Republicans so committed to destroying Medicare and Social Security? Why do they go so far as to use the disrespectful slur “Democrat Party” when there’s no such a thing in America and never has been?

Why are Democratic members of Congress having to armor their own homes, having received over 9000 death threats so far this year, virtually all of them from domestic terrorists who Republicans refuse to repudiate? The FBI still is looking for a Matt Gaetz supporter who threatened to murder Gaetz’s Democratic opponent: why are these people attracted to the GOP?

It turns out this is not just politics; the roots of this brutal movement in today’s GOP run from a 1927 child murderer, through a greedy real-estate lobbying group, to Ronald Reagan putting both of their philosophies into actual practice and bringing morbidly rich rightwing billionaires into the GOP fold.

As a result, Republican policies over the past 42 years not only gutted America’s middle class and transferred $50 trillion from working people to the top 1 percent, but also led straight to the Trump presidency and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th that he led.

The Libertarians

Reporter Mark Ames documents how, back in the 1940s, a real estate lobbying group came up with the idea of creating a new political party to justify deregulating the real estate and finance industries so they could make more money.

This new “Libertarian Party” would give an ideological and political cover to their goal of becoming government-free, and they developed an elaborate pretense of governing philosophy around it.

Their principal argument was that if everybody acted separately and independently, in all cases with maximum selfishness, such behavior would actually benefit society. There would be no government needed beyond an army and a police force, and a court system to defend the rights of property owners. It was a bizarre twisting of Adam Smith’s reference to the “invisible hand” that regulated trade among nations.

In 1980, billionaire David Koch ran for vice president on the newly formed Libertarian Party ticket.

His platform included calls to privatize the Post Office, end all public schools, give Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, end all taxation of the morbidly rich, terminate food and housing support and all other forms of “welfare,” deregulate all corporate oversight while shutting down the EPA and FDA, and selling off much of the federal government’s land and other assets to billionaires and big corporations.

Reagan, who won that 1980 election, embraced this view in his inaugural address, saying, “[G]overnment is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” He then doubled down on the idea by beginning the systematic process of gutting and crippling governmental institutions that historically had supported working people and the middle class.

The child-killer who inspired a movement

Reagan wasn’t just echoing the Libertarian vision; he was also endorsing Ayn Rand’s “objectivist” view of the world, which traces its roots to a murderous psychopath in 1927.

Back in 2015, Donald Trump told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that his favorite book was Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, “The Fountainhead.”

“It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions,” he told Powers. “That book relates to … everything.”

Ayn Rand’s novels have informed libertarian Republicans like former Speaker of the House of Representatives and current Fox News board member Paul Ryan, who required interns to read her books when they joined his staff.

Powers added, “He [Trump],” told her that he “identified with Howard Roark, the protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.”

Rand’s hero Roark, in fact, “raged” so much in her novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite.

Rand, in her Journals, explained where she got her inspiration for Howard Roark and the leading male characters in so many of her other novels. She writes that the theme of The Fountainhead, for example, is:

“One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself.”

On Trump’s hero Howard Roark, she wrote that he:

“…has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”


It turns out that Roark and many of her other characters were based on a real person. The man who so inspired Ayn Rand’s fictional heroes was named William Edward Hickman, and he lived in Los Angeles during the Roaring Twenties.


Ten days before Christmas in 1927, Hickman, a teenager with slicked dark hair and tiny, muted eyes, drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High School in Los Angeles and kidnapped Marion Parker — the daughter of a wealthy banker in town.

Hickman held the girl ransom, demanding $1,500 from her father — back then about a year’s salary. Supremely confident that he would elude capture, Hickman signed his name on the ransom notes, “The Fox.”

After two days, Marion’s father agreed to hand over the ransom in exchange for the safety of his daughter. What Perry Parker didn’t know is that Hickman never intended to live up to his end of the bargain.


The Pittsburgh Press detailed what Hickman, in his own words, did next.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he said. “I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then, before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly.”


Hickman didn’t hold back on any of these details: he was proud of his cold-bloodedness.

“I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead.”


But Hickman wasn’t finished:

“After she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”


Hickman then dismembered the child piece-by-piece, putting her limbs in a cabinet in his apartment, and then wrapped up the carved-up torso, powdered the lifeless face of Marion Parker, set what was left of her stump torso with the head sitting atop it in the passenger seat of his car, and drove to meet her father to collect the ransom money.

He even sewed open her eyelids to make it look like she was alive.

On the way, Hickman dumped body parts out of his car window, before rendezvousing with Marion Parker’s father.

Armed with a shotgun so her father wouldn’t come close enough to Hickman’s car to see that Marion was dead, Hickman collected his $1,500, then kicked open the door and tossed the rest of Marion Parker onto the road. As he sped off, her father fell to his knees, screaming.

Days later, the police caught up with a defiant and unrepentant Hickman in Oregon. His lawyers pleaded insanity, but the jury gave him the gallows.

To nearly everyone, Hickman was a monster. The year of the murder, the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s.” Hickman was America’s most despicable villain at the time.

Ayn Rand falls in love with a “superman”

But to Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum, a 21-year-old Russian political science student who’d arrived in America just two years earlier, Hickman was a hero.

Alissa was a squat five-foot-two with a flapper hairdo and wide, sunken dark eyes that gave her a haunting stare. Etched into those brooding eyes was burned the memory of a childhood backlit by the Russian Revolution.

She had just departed Leninist Russia where, almost a decade earlier, there was a harsh backlash against the Russian property owners by the Bolsheviks. Alissa’s own family was targeted, and at the age of 12 she watched as Bolshevik soldiers burst into her father’s pharmacy, looted the store, and plastered on her Dad’s doors the red emblem of the state, indicating that his private business now belonged to “the people.”

That incident left such a deep and burning wound in young Alissa’s mind that she went to college to study political science and vowed one day she’d become a famous writer to warn the world of the dangers of Bolshevism.

Starting afresh in Hollywood, she anglicized her name to Ayn Rand, and moved from prop-girl to screenwriter/novelist, basing the heroes of several of her stories on a man she was reading about in the newspapers at the time. A man she wrote effusively about in her diaries. A man she hero-worshipped.

William Edward Hickman was the most notorious man in American in 1928, having achieved the level of national fame that she craved.

Young Ayn Rand saw in Hickman the “ideal man” she based The Fountainhead on, and used to ground her philosophy and her life’s work. His greatest quality, she believed, was his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.

Hickman’s words were carefully recounted by Rand in her Journals. His statement that, “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” resonated deeply with her. It was the perfect articulation of her belief that if people pursued their own interests above all else — even above friends, family, or nation — the result would be utopian.

She wrote in her diary that those words of Hickman’s were, “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”

Hickman — the monster who boasted about how he had hacked up a 12-year-old girl — had Rand’s ear, as well as her heart. She saw a strongman archetype in him, the way that people wearing red MAGA hats see a strongman savior in Donald Trump.

As Hickman’s murder trial unfolded, Rand grew increasingly enraged at how the “mediocre” American masses had rushed to condemn her Superman.

“The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote in reference to the Hickman trial in early notes for a book she was working on titled The Little Street, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”


Astounded that Americans didn’t recognize the heroism Hickman showed when he proudly rose above simply conforming to society’s rules, Rand wrote:

“It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”


Rand explained that when the masses are confronted with such a bold actor, they neither understood nor empathized with him.

Thus, “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy [was] turned [by the media] into a purposeless monster.”


The protagonist of the book that Rand was writing around that time was a boy named Danny Renahan. In her notes for the book, she wrote, “The model for the boy [Renahan] is Hickman.” He would be her ideal man, and the archetype for a philosophical movement that would transform a nation.

“He is born with the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord,” Rand wrote in her notes describing Renahan. “Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.”


Rand wanted capitalism in its most raw form, unchecked by any government that could control the rules of the market or promote the benefits of society. Such good intentions had, after all, caused the hell she’d experienced in the Bolshevik Revolution.

Ayn Rand, like Hickman, found peace and justification in the extremes of her economic, political, and moral philosophy. Forget about democratic institutions, forget about regulating markets, and forget about pursuing any policies that benefit the majority at the expense of the very rich — the petty political rule-makers and rule-enforcers could never, ever do anything well or good.

Libertarianism and Ayn Rand set the stage for Trumpism

Only billionaires should rule the world, Trump has suggested.

And he tried to put it into place, installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, an billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department.

Trump’s chief of staff said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven died) would actually be a public good.

As Ayn Rand might say, “Don’t just ignore the rules; destroy them.”

Welfare and other social safety net programs were, as Rand saw it, “the glorification of mediocrity” in society. Providing a social safety net for the poor, disabled, or unemployed, she believed, were part of a way of thinking that promoted, “satisfaction instead of joy, contentment instead of happiness… a glow-worm instead of a fire.”

Sociopaths of the world, unite!

Rand, like Trump, lived a largely joyless life. She mercilessly manipulated people, particularly her husband and Alan Greenspan (who brought a dollar-sign-shaped floral arrangement to her funeral), and, like Trump, surrounded herself with cult-like followers who were only on the inside so long as they gave her total, unhesitating loyalty.

Like Trump, McConnell, McCarthy and their billionaire backers, Rand believed that a government working to help out working-class “looters,” instead of solely looking out for rich capitalist “producers,” was throwing its “best people” under the bus.

In Rand’s universe, the producers had no obligations to the looters. Providing welfare or sacrificing one nickel of your own money to help a “looter” on welfare, unemployment, or Social Security — particularly if it was “taken at the barrel of a gun” (taxes) — was morally reprehensible.

Like Trump saying, “My whole life I’ve been greedy,” for Rand looking out for numero uno was the singular name of the game — selfishness was next to godliness.

Later in Rand’s life, in 1959, as she gained more notoriety for the moral philosophy of selfishness that she named “Objectivism” and that is today at the core of libertarianism and the GOP, she sat down for an interview with CBS reporter Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes.

Suggesting that selfishness undermines most truly American values, Wallace bluntly challenged Rand.

“You are out to destroy almost every edifice in the contemporary American way of life,” Wallace said to Rand. “Our Judeo-Christian religion, our modified government-regulated capitalism, our rule by the majority will… you scorn churches, and the concept of God… are these accurate criticisms?”


As Wallace was reciting the public criticisms of Rand, the CBS television cameras zoomed in closely on her face, as her eyes darted back and forth between the ground and Wallace’s fingers. But the question, with its implied condemnation, didn’t faze her at all. Rand said with confidence in a matter-of-fact tone, “Yes.”

“We’re taught to feel concern for our fellow man,” Wallace challenged, “to feel responsible for his welfare, to feel that we are, as religious people might put it, children under God and responsible one for the other — now why do you rebel?”


“That is what in fact makes man a sacrificial animal,” Rand answered. She added, “[Man’s] highest moral purpose is the achievement of his own happiness.”


Rand’s philosophy, though popular in high school and on college campuses, never did — in her lifetime — achieve the sort of mass appeal she had hoped. But today Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a central tenet of the Republican Party and grounds the moral code proudly cited and followed by high-profile billionaires and three former presidents of the United States.

Ironically, when she was finally beginning to be taken seriously, Ayn Rand became ill with lung cancer and went on Social Security and Medicare to make it through her last days. She died a “looter” in 1982, unaware that her promotion of William Edward Hickman’s sociopathic worldview would one day validate an entire political party’s embrace of a similarly sociopathic president.

The result so far is over a million dead Americans from Covid, an epidemic of homelessness, and the collapse of this nation’s working class.

While the ideas and policies promoted by the libertarian wing of the Republican Party have made CEOs and billionaire investors very, very rich in recent decades, it’s killing the rest of us.

A return to sanity

In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950’s Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower put America back together after the Republican Great Depression and built the largest and wealthiest middle class in the history of the world at the time.

Today, 42 years of Ayn Rand’s ideas being put into practice by libertarian Republicans from Reagan to Bush to Trump have gutted the middle class, made a handful of oligarchs wealthier than any king or pharaoh in the history of the world, and brought a whole new generation of criminals, hustlers and grifters into the GOP.

Three men in America today own more wealth than the entire bottom 50 percent of the country, a level of inequality never before seen in the modern developed world.

When America was still coasting on FDR’s success in rebuilding our government and institutions, nobody took very seriously Rand’s or Koch’s misguided idealist efforts to tear it all down.

Now that Libertarians and objectivists in the GOP have had 42 years to make their project work, we’re hitting peak libertarianism and it’s tearing our country apart, pitting Americans against each other, and literally killing people every day.

If America is to survive as a functioning democratic republic, we must repudiate the “greed is good” ideology of Ayn Rand and libertarianism, get billionaires and their money out of politics, and rebuild our civic institutions.

That starts with waking Americans up to the incredible damage that 40 years of Rand’s writings and libertarian “Reagan Republicans” have done to this country.

It will succeed if President Biden can overcome the cynicism and greed celebrated by McConnell, Trump, Gaetz, Greene, Cruz, and Hawley; reclaim the mantle of FDR; and put America back on the upward trajectory the middle class enjoyed before the Reagan Revolution.

What Mark Meadows did with classified docs ended Dick Cheney's chief of staff; Scooter Libby, before a grand jury

WHICH SENT HIM TO JAIL
Sarah K. Burris
October 1, 2023 

Mark Meadows (Photo by Nicholas Kamm for AFP)


Cassidy Hutchinson revealed in her new book Enough, that she was lugging around classified information in a Whole Foods bag after pro-Donald Trump reporters returned the documents to Mark Meadows.

The documents were given to far-right writers Mollie Hemingway and John Solomon, Hutchinson wrote. It infuriated the White House counsel, who witnessed what happened.

It was previously reported that Meadows made a last-minute mad-dash for the Justice Department, claiming Trump declassified the information after Trump had already left the White House, according to Hutchinson. The DOJ refused to declassify the information, but Trump's allies maintain Trump filed the necessary paperwork in time. It was 15 minutes before President Joe Biden was sworn in as the president.

"At around 10:30 p.m. [the night before], I saw Pat Philbin power walking toward my office. Great, I thought. What could possibly be going wrong now?" she writes. Trump had already left the office and many other staffers carried their belongings out.

“How many copies of that Crossfire Hurricane binder did Mark make? Where are all the copies?” Pat asked Hutchinson. “How many of them have been distributed?”

"Slow down,” she told Philbin. “How many copies? I have no idea. There are some in our office…”

She described many binders thrown around the room with "still-classified but supposedly soon-to-be-declassified information, but the Crossfire Hurricane binders were easy to identify because of how thick they were."

“Did Mark already give copies to Mollie Hemingway and John Solomon?" Philbin asked. Hutchinson describes them as "the conservative journalists who the president and Mark were acquainted with."

“Yeah, he had a few of his Secret Service agents meet Mollie and John in Georgetown earlier tonight while you all were in the Oval Office with the boss," she told Philbin.

"The color drained from Pat’s face. 'Seriously?'"

The following day, a Secret Service agent dropped off a bag full of loose papers in the Whole Foods sack. It's unknown if the writers kept any documents and what they were given.

What is certain, however, is that the act of giving classified information to reporters is exactly what sent Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. "Scooter" Libby, to prison.

"In 2007, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton sentenced I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to 30 months in federal prison, imposed a $250,000 fine and ordered Libby to undergo a further two years of supervised release, including 400 hours of community service," reported Politico on the one-year anniversary.

Libby was indicted in 2005 by a federal grand jury in wake of a federal investigation into who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to New York Times reporter Judith Miller. He ultimately made a plea deal and President George W. Bush commuted his prison sentence, but left the $250,000 fine in place. Libby was ultimately found to have lied to the grand jury, obstructed justice and false statements.

Richard Nixon's White House counsel John Dean wrote about the trial in 2006. Among the things explained are that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald found "Libby said that he was authorized" by Cheney and Bush to leak the name to the Times.

"This revelation has been accompanied by a number of public misstatements, which call for correction," Dean wrote at the time. "The most blatant of these is the claim that Fitzgerald's filing indicates that the President authorized the release of Valerie Plame's covert status at the CIA. In fact, the document is conspicuously silent on this fact. The filing does indicate that the President authorized the release of classified information, but it was different information — a National Intelligence Estimate that had been classified pursuant to an executive order."

It began with an op-ed in 2003 by Joseph Wilson, accusing the Bush administration of lying about Iraqi president Saddam Hussein attempting to acquire uranium to make nuclear weapons. It was the motivation for the administration to enter into a decade-long war.

Wilson's op-ed begins: "Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

The special counsel found that the vice president's office saw this as a direct attack on them. Plame's name and information were leaked to the press, destroying her career as a covert operative. Libby was accused of using her information to discredit Wilson.

Fitzgerald's report said Libby "undertook vigorous efforts to rebut" Wilson because "Vice President Cheney, defendant's immediate superior, expressed concern to defendant regarding whether Mr. Wilson's [CIA-sponsored] trip [to Africa to determine if Iraq was getting uranium from Niger] was legitimate or whether it was in effect a junket set up by Mr. Wilson's wife."

Libby "testified that he was specifically authorized … to disclose the key judgments of the classified National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to Miller" because the information "was 'pretty definite' against Ambassador Wilson… and that the Vice President thought that it was 'very important' for the key judgments of the NIE to come out."

Libby claimed the president "later" authorized him to leak the information. It was never known whether "later" meant before or after he gave the info to Miller.

"The word 'later,' in the filing, is crucially ambiguous," wrote Dean. "Did the President authorize Libby's actions before Libby actually revealed the classified information to Miller, or afterward? The distinction may make a large difference in Libby's defense: If the authorization was retroactive, then Libby initially revealed classified information without permission to do so; thus, he would have reason to lie."

Cheney's lawyer claimed that because Bush granted that it be publicly disclosed essentially meant it was declassified. The text specifically said, "Publicly disclos[ing] a document amountedto a declassification of the document."

Donald Trump has used similar claims, saying that because he took them out of the Oval Office they became declassified. Bush and Cheney had the benefit of still being in office at the time of the investigation.

The United States of America v. I. Lewis Libby started in 2007, and he was able to be bailed out by the administration so he wasn't charged with leaking classified information. He was only charged and convicted of lying to the grand jury and others, along with obstruction.

No special counsel has been called to investigate the case of Mark Meadows handing the classified binders to conservative reporters, as Hutchinson alleges. It's also unclear if he was given a similar order as Libby to share the information by former President Donald Trump.

A federal grand jury has been called in Washington, D.C. for Wednesday, Nov. 8.

He was unable to have the information declassified by the Justice Department in the last few minutes of the Trump administration.