Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 8h

Mute your TV & turn on the radio!

Tonight I watched Ms via Youtube tv, & had the radio feed streaming through my phone.

You can also use the MLB app for the radio feed, or use a VPN if you're out of area

Rizzs, Gary, & Goldy are all calling the game 🔱

B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 8h

Yes! Hit pause on TV & listen to radio feed to get a feel for where they're at. Easiest to sync up to the sound of a pitch hitting a glove or bat. Takes me less than a minute to do in the first AB, & then they're synced for the game, even when breaks aren't synced.
tuner.bonneville.com/live/KIRO-AM

Seattle Sports on 710 AM

Seattle's Sports Station

tuner.bonneville.com

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 8h

Congratulations!

Take wonderful care of your wife, enjoy the newborn haze, and get that kiddo a Mariners onesie!

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 8h

Munoz needed to get back to the hotel to check on Matilda so decided to close out the 9th with just 8 pitches💨

#GOMS

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 8h

Absolutely incredible showing from Bryce to settle down and lock in after that first pitch homer.

B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 8h

I watched the Ms via Youtube tv today, & had the radio feed streaming through my phone.

You can also use the MLB app for the radio feed, or use a VPN if you're out of area. Rizzs, Gary, & Goldy are all calling the game! 🔱

www.mlb.com/mariners/sch...

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 8h

Yes! Hit pause on TV & listen to radio feed to get a feel for where they're at. Easiest to sync up to the sound of a pitch hitting a glove or bat. Takes me less than a minute to do in the first AB, & then they're synced for the game, even when breaks aren't synced.
tuner.bonneville.com/live/KIRO-AM

Seattle Sports on 710 AM

Seattle's Sports Station

tuner.bonneville.com

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 8h

I mute the TV and listen to Gary and Rizzs on the radio; when you sync it up by pausing the tv it's absolute perfection 🔱

#GOMS

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 12h

And they flipped on calling out China's human rights abuses as they now get money pushing the Chinese government's propaganda...

B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 14h

Code Pink is pink washing propaganda, particularly Chinese government propaganda.

What is less known, and is hidden amid a tangle of nonprofit groups and shell companies, is that Mr. Singham works closely with the Chinese government media machine and is financing its propaganda worldwide.

From a think tank in Massachusetts to an event space in Manhattan, from a political party in South Africa to news organizations in India and Brazil, The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars to groups linked to Mr. Singham that mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.

Some, like No Cold War, popped up in recent years. Others, like the American antiwar group Code Pink, have morphed over time. Code Pink once criticized China’s rights record but now defends its internment of the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs, which human rights experts have labeled a crime against humanity.
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These groups are funded through American nonprofits flush with at least $275 million in donations.

But Mr. Singham, 69, himself sits in Shanghai, where one outlet in his network is co-producing a YouTube show financed in part by the city’s propaganda department. Two others are working with a Chinese university to “spread China’s voice to the world.” And last month, Mr. Singham joined a Communist Party workshop about promoting the party internationally.

He and his allies are on the front line of what Communist Party officials call a “smokeless war.” Under the rule of Xi Jinping, China has expanded state media operations, teamed up with overseas outlets and cultivated foreign influencers. The goal is to disguise propaganda as independent content.

Mr. Singham’s groups have produced YouTube videos that, together, racked up millions of views. They also seek to influence real-world politics by meeting with congressional aides, training politicians in Africa, running candidates in South African elections and organizing protests like the one in London that erupted into violence.
The result is a seemingly organic bloom of far-left groups that echo Chinese government talking points, echo one another, and are echoed in turn by the Chinese state media.

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 14h

Code Pink uses its funds and pushes its activists to also support & use Chinese propaganda to crush pro democracy voices in China and Taiwan.

Look at who is behind an organization before you get involved; Code Pink is an example of a "women led peace & justice" org that is anything but that.

But Code Pink goes further, defending the Chinese government’s policies. In a 2021 video, a staff member compared Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators to the rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 that year.

In June, Code Pink activists visited staff members on the House Select Committee on China unannounced. In the office of Representative Seth Moulton, Democrat of Massachusetts, activists denied evidence of forced labor in Xinjiang and said the congressman should visit and see how happy people were there, according to an aide.

“They are capitalizing on very legitimate concerns in order to push this pro-authoritarian narrative,” said Brian Hioe, an editor with New Bloom, a progressive Taiwanese news site. “And their ideas end up circulating in a way that affects mainstream discourse.”

Chinese state media accounts have retweeted people and organizations in Mr. Singham’s network at least 122 times since February 2020, a Times analysis found, mostly accounts connected with No Cold War and Code Pink.
This May, Mr. Singham attended the opening of a media institute in Shanghai. Organizers distributed tote bags reading “Communications as solidarity.”

A photo shows Mr. Singham sitting up front, next to Yu Yunquan, an official from a publishing group under the Communist Party’s powerful Central Committee.

Just last month, Mr. Singham attended a Chinese Communist Party propaganda forum. In a photo, taken during a breakout session on how to promote the party abroad, Mr. Singham is seen jotting in a notebook adorned with a red hammer and sickle.

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 14h

Code Pink's founder flip-flopped on China's human rights abuses after she married Singham. She now staunchly supports China's crack down on Uyghurs.

Code Pink

Ms. Evans, 68, was once a Democratic insider who managed the 1992 presidential campaign of the California governor Jerry Brown.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, she reinvented herself as an activist. She became known for pink peace-sign earrings and sit-ins that ended with her arrest.
She helped form Code Pink to protest the looming war in Iraq. The group became notorious for disrupting Capitol Hill hearings.

Ms. Evans has organized around progressive causes like climate change, gender and racism. Until a few years ago, she readily criticized China’s authoritarian government.

“We demand China stop brutal repression of their women’s human rights defenders,” she wrote on Twitter in 2015. She later posted on Instagram a photo with the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei.
Since 2017, about a quarter of Code Pink’s donations — more than $1.4 million — have come from two groups linked to Mr. Singham, nonprofit records show. The first was one of the UPS store nonprofits. The second was a charity that Goldman Sachs offers as a conduit for clients’ giving, and that Mr. Singham has used in the past.

Ms. Evans now stridently supports China. She casts it as a defender of the oppressed and a model for economic growth without slavery or war. “If the U.S. crushes China,” she said in 2021, it “would cut off hope for the human race and life on Earth.”

She describes the Uyghurs as terrorists and defends their mass detention. “We have to do something,” she said in 2021. In a recent YouTube video chat, she was asked if she had anything negative to say about China.

“I can’t, for the life of me, think of anything,” Ms. Evans responded. She ultimately had one complaint: She had trouble using China’s phone-based payment apps.

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 14h

And of course with the US pulling aid from Africa, it makes it that much easier for China & Russia's propaganda to take hold there. (Which Code Pink's cofounder gazillionaire husband is working on)

‘Hijacked’ in South Africa

Several times a year, activists and politicians from across Africa fly to South Africa for boot camps at the Nkrumah School, set in a popular safari area.

They come to learn to organize workers and left-wing movements. Once on campus, though, some attendees are surprised to find Chinese topics seeping into the curriculum.

At a recent session, reading packets said that the United States was waging a “hybrid war” against China by distorting information about Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Xinjiang region where Uyghurs were held in camps.

The packets praised Chinese loans, calling them “an opportunity for African states to construct genuine, and sovereign, development projects.” No mention was made of China’s role in a recent debt crisis in Zambia.

“They’re being rounded up to be fed Chinese propaganda,” said Cebelihle Mbuyisa, a former employee who helped prepare materials for the workshop. “Whole social movements on the African continent are being hijacked by what looks like a foreign policy instrument of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Those who objected were shouted down or not invited back, four past attendees said.

U.S. tax records show that one of the UPS store nonprofits, the People’s Support Foundation, donated at least $450,000 for training at the school. On Instagram, Ms. Evans described a photo of the grounds as “Roy’s new place.”

The $450,000 was just part of Mr. Singham’s efforts in South Africa. In all, the foundation has sent $5.6 million to groups that run the school; a news organization; and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, a fringe party launched ahead of the 2019 election.

The $450,000 was just part of Mr. Singham’s efforts in South Africa. In all, the foundation has sent $5.6 million to groups that run the school; a news organization; and the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, a fringe party launched ahead of the 2019 election.

Former party members said they were perplexed that, despite severe local unemployment and poverty, the party seemed interested in China. Mr. Singham, for example, urged them to attend an online lecture by a Chinese academic, Li Bo of Fudan University, an email shows.

After a party member called China’s presence in Africa “a second colonization,” leaders responded defensively in a WhatsApp group. “When it came to us questioning certain behaviors from the Chinese state, that was a no-no,” said Lindiwe Mkhumbane, a former member.

In a statement, the party said its members have attended workshops on progressive issues but that it had never forced anyone to attend.
Mr. Singham also funded an online news start-up, New Frame, according to a recording obtained by The Times. One employee, Aragorn Eloff, said Mr. Singham interviewed him for a job.

The outlet hired talented reporters and paid them well. Readership was small, but the stated goal was “quality, not clicks.”

Its former top editor has denied that New Frame had a pro-China slant. But a former reporter, Anna Majavu, said that an editor removed criticism of Chinese labor practices from a story on mining. “The resistance from the editor was purely political,” she said.

And in June 2022, an editor, Darryl Accone, wrote a resignation letter criticizing New Frame’s soft coverage of China and Russia. The “unavoidable conclusion,” he wrote, “is that this is an ideological directive emanating from above and outside New Frame.”

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 14h

This is how his multiple groups get funded.

In his statement, Mr. Singham acknowledged giving his money to unnamed intermediaries that fit the description of these four UPS store nonprofits. And several groups that received donations from them have identified Mr. Singham as the source.
One of them is the Massachusetts-based think tank Tricontinental. Its executive director, Vijay Prashad, recounted Mr. Singham’s financing in 2021. “A Marxist with a massive software company!” he wrote on Twitter.

Tricontinental produces videos and articles on socialist issues. Mr. Prashad did not answer questions about Mr. Singham, but said the organization followed the law. “We do not and have never received funds or instructions from any government or political party,” he said in a statement.

From the UPS store nonprofits, millions of dollars flowed around the world. The Times tracked money to a South African political party, YouTube channels in the United States and nonprofits in Ghana and Zambia. In Brazil, records show, money flowed to a group that produces a publication, Brasil de Fato, that intersperses articles about land rights with praise for Xi Jinping.

In New Delhi, corporate filings show, Mr. Singham’s network financed a news site, NewsClick, that sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points. “China’s history continues to inspire the working classes,” one video said.

These groups operate in coordination. They have cross-posted articles and shared one another’s content on social media hundreds of times. Many share staff members and office space. They organize events together and interview one another’s representatives without disclosing their ties.

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 14h

Singham runs his money through various non-profits, which then make donations. His wife runs Code Pink

While other moguls slapped their names on foundations, Mr. Singham sent his money through a system that concealed his giving.

At its center were four new nonprofits with dust-dry names like “United Community Fund” and “Justice and Education Fund.” They have almost no real-world footprints, listing their addresses only as UPS store mailboxes in Illinois, Wisconsin and New York.

Because American nonprofit groups do not need to disclose individual donors, these four nonprofits worked like a financial geyser, throwing out a shower of money from an invisible source.
In their public filings, none list Mr. Singham as a board member or donor. “I do not control them,” he said in his statement, “although I have been known to share my opinions.”

In reality, Mr. Singham has close ties to all four.

The largest is run by Ms. Evans. The group’s founding bylaws say that Mr. Singham can fire her and the rest of the board. They also require that the group dissolve after Mr. Singham’s death.

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 14h

Code Pink is pink washing propaganda, particularly Chinese government propaganda.

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 1d

surprised they didn't throw in something about accepting payment for work was anti-trans because "you choose to exist under capitalism" is so baked in to that flavor of "my online doom life is more virtuous than anything you could even conceive of; you ever experiencing joy proves you're corrupt"

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Reposted by B Lanson

Gravel Influencer @gravelinfluencer.bsky.social · 2d

They continue to eviscerate the public health machinery that has quietly kept Americans, and others around the world, safe and healthy for decades.

The staff of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the journal that reports on health trends and emerging infectious threats, was also laid off. The publication’s storied history includes a June 1981 report that five previously healthy gay men were treated for an unusual pneumonia — the first hint of the AIDS epidemic.

Roughly 70 Epidemic Intelligence Service officers — the so-called “disease detectives” who respond to outbreaks around the globe — received layoff notices, according to a person familiar with them. The service was spared during an earlier round of layoffs in February.

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Reposted by B Lanson

Patrick De Klotz @patdeklotz.bsky.social · 2d

“Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor’s new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!”

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 2d

Dr Oz: "Drugs for lung diseases are discounted massively. The president highlighted 650%. Significant discounts ... "

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 2d

"throwing ketchup on the walls" levels of emotional control

the walls are the US economy

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 2d

Remember all last year when the press "fact checked" Harris and said she and other Dems were not being truthful when they said Trump was going to implement Project 2025?

Trump admin begins laying off federal workers amid shutdown
The shutdown layoffs are the culmination of years of groundwork by WH budget director Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025

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Reposted by B Lanson

RainSurname @rainsurname.bsky.social · 2d

We're not really bailing out Argentina so much as we're bailing out an American billionaire hedge fund manager who is close to the Treasury Secretary, who invested heavily in Argentina after Milei took power.

We're actually screwing Argentina, bc the wealthy will be able to cash out & move their $

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Reposted by B Lanson

Katherine Clark @whipkclark.bsky.social · 2d

The GOP will stop at nothing to pay for billionaires’ tax cuts.

Firing hardworking Americans. Slashing health care. Even withholding troops’ pay.

Democrats refuse to rubber stamp their cruelty and corruption. We’ll keep fighting back.

Politico @politico.com · 2d

The Trump admin has started firing federal workers 10 days into the shutdown, according OMB Director Russ Vought — who called the firings "substantial."

At least nine agencies appear to be affected.

Vought sounds layoff siren: 'The RIFs have begun'

At least nine agencies appear to be affected.

www.politico.com

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Reposted by B Lanson

Stars and Stripes @starsandstripes.bsky.social · 2d

Democratic lawmakers on the House and Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committees accused VA leaders of “artificially ending communications with Congress,” even though constituent services remain fully funded.

Democratic lawmakers accuse VA Secretary Collins of ‘weaponizing’ the shutdown and ignoring requests to assist constituents

Democratic lawmakers accused VA leaders of “weaponizing” the shutdown by ignoring requests to assist veterans and their families in their districts.

www.stripes.com

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Reposted by B Lanson

Heidi Kitrosser @heidikitrosser.bsky.social · 2d

Painful to hear the fear in her voice as she says, "let them know." And as others have noted, this seems to violate Judge Ellis's order issued just yesterday about arresting journalists & also about unnecessary physical force. (See 1(a) and 1(h) of order). storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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B Lanson @blanson100.bsky.social · 2d

She's still at it. Oof.

I wrote this after she crashed out in 2024 & started trashing Dems because she didn't win 🙄

She's responsible for her own track record- she kept seeking viral attention & never pivoted to getting anything done. Which is the actual job of a Rep!

Katie Porter burning bridges on her way out, is also (unfortunately) showing why she wasn’t ready to be a Senator.

She confused her persona as “getting clips online with the whiteboard “ with being politically capable, and getting things done and passed.

Claiming Schiff used tricks to win - like campaigning against the GOP rather than Dem infighting with her, plus running on his record…? Oof. Yeah, those are “tricks”

(And also, she endorsed Nina Turner over Brown, which holy hell, was bad judgement.)

I’d hoped that she would leverage some of her visibility into working with others and consusus building and passing legislation. But she never really made that pivot.

In any event, glad that’s officially over.

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Reposted by B Lanson

Brendan Cantwell @cantb.bsky.social · 2d

I don’t know about you but I’m a little uncomfortable by the fact that anyone who disagrees with the GOP is increasingly classified by elected Republicans as terrorists.

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