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The US is a lawless government

Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
Sun, 03 Feb 2019 18:43 UTC
cnn stone arrest
© CNN
CNN was the only news agency tipped off to the pre-dawn raid on Roger Stone's house.
I remember when a suspect was regarded as innocent until proven guilty in a fair trial. Today prosecutors convict their victims in the media in order to make an unbiased jury impossible and thereby coerce a plea bargain that saves the prosecutor from having to prove his case. In the United States law is no longer a shield of the people. Law is a weapon in the hands of prosecutors. (See Roberts & Stratton, The Tyranny of Good Intentions.)

Formerly, if a prosecutor staged an arrest for publicity purposes, as Mueller did by placing a CNN presstitute on the scene and sending a couple of dozen heavily armed men in a pre-dawn raid to arrest a well known political consultant for allegedly "lying to Congress" when the appropriate procedure is for Mueller to inform Stone's lawyer to present his client for indictment, the judge would throw out the case on the grounds that the prosecutor's unethical action had biased the juror pool and made a fair trial impossible. The judge might also have thrown out the case on the grounds of selective prosecution. James Clapper while serving as Director of National Intelligence lied to Congress under oath and suffered no consequences, and Hillary Clinton has clearly broken the law and lied about it.
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Fire

'The Book Community' and the return of book-burning

Tim Dawson
Spiked
Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00 UTC
Amelie Wen Zhao
© Crystal Wong
Amelie Wen Zhao
The Book Community has jumped the shark. Who are the 'Book Community'? Well, they're the nebulous group of super-woke flakes who bullied young-adult (YA) fantasy author Amelie Wen Zhao into pulling the publication of her debut novel, Blood Heir. While it wasn't slated for release until June, some review copies had been sent out. Apparently the book has already shaken some readers - and some people who obviously haven't read it - to the core. Zhao's depiction of slavery in one scene has been deemed problematic. Reverse racism, lack of genderqueer representation, and a central antagonist with a limp are some of the other criticisms leveled against it, and Twitter is fuming. Zhao has issued an apology and agreed with her publishers to cancel publication.

The novel is probably terrible. I'm not particularly into sword and sorcery stuff - though the fact that it has upset so many flakes has naturally piqued my interest. But you don't need to like, or even read, a book to defend its right to be published. Of course, Amelie Wen Zhao halted publication herself. You could argue that she has 'listened to feedback' and acted accordingly. But the line between listening to feedback and being bullied by very angry zealots is a thin one, and this incident seems to have crossed it. Zhao relies on these people for her income and is scared. That's understandable. And really, really bad.

Comment: More from Vulture, 1/31/2019
"The issues around Affinite indenturement in the story represent a specific critique of the epidemic of indentured labor and human trafficking prevalent in many industries across Asia, including in my own home country," Zhao wrote. "The narrative and history of slavery in the United States is not something I can, would, or intended to write, but I recognize that I am not writing in merely my own cultural context." The statement continued: "I don't wish to clarify, defend, or have anyone defend me. This is not that; this is an apology."
Book cover Blood Heir
© Blood Heir
Unsurprisingly, the response was wide-ranging and intense. Some (including Ellen Oh) lauded Zhao for her bravery, others derided her for cowardice, and many wondered aloud if the author had self-censored voluntarily out of fear of a mob that would hound her until publication and beyond.



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Car Black

Brexit chicken: 1-2 years of pain now or permanent idiocy?

Mish
Mishtalk
Sun, 03 Feb 2019 18:32 UTC
brexit choices
The UK is at a crossroads. Fearmongering of "crashing" out of the EU is in play. The EU is playing "chicken".

In the classic game of Chicken, the first person to blink loses.

The name "chicken" has its origins in a game in which two drivers drive towards each other on a collision course: one must swerve, or both may die in the crash, but if one driver swerves and the other does not, the one who swerved will be called a "chicken", meaning a coward.

That's essentially the game the EU is playing with Theresa May and the UK.
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Bad Guys

Ohio police shot military vet multiple times, then let him bleed to death without rendering aid


The Rutherford Institute
Thu, 24 Jan 2019 00:00 UTC
police brutality killing
© The Free Thought Project
The Rutherford Institute's amicus brief in Stevens-Rucker v. Frenz.

The Rutherford Institute is weighing in on a case in which police shot a military veteran multiple times, then let him bleed to death rather than rendering emergency aid. Arguing that police have a constitutional obligation to provide life-saving aid to those injured during the course of an arrest, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate a lawsuit against two Ohio police officers who, despite being trained in first aid, failed to intervene to save the life of a military veteran as he lay bleeding to death from at least four gunshot wounds. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that police satisfy their constitutional obligations to assist a person they injure in the course of an arrest simply by calling for an ambulance to transport the arrestee to a hospital. In asking the Court to hear the case, Rutherford Institute attorneys argue that if prisoners have a constitutional right to medical care under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments, then police should be held to a comparable standard in their treatment of arrestees who require urgent medical attention.

Affiliate attorneys Anand Agneshwar, Paige Hester Sharpe, and Upnit K. Bhatti of Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, LLP, of New York and Washington, D.C., assisted The Rutherford Institute in presenting its arguments in the Stevens-Rucker case.

"While this case demands that police officers be made to abide by the Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments, it also demands that they be held to a higher moral law-that of basic decency, humanity and a truer understanding of what it means to be a public servant," said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. "Common decency demands that the police not merely stand by while a person endures the pain of serious injury. As the Supreme Court itself has recognized, such disregard for human suffering is 'incompatible with the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.'"
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Whistle

Chinese scientists who created gene-edited babies will be punished, say authorities

Phoebe Zhang
South China Post
Mon, 21 Jan 2019 17:34 UTC
He Jiankui

He Jiankui
The Chinese authorities are holding scientist He Jiankui wholly responsible for creating the world's first gene-edited babies.

He had announced their birth in November, after which the authorities announced an investigation into the matter.

A team of investigators told the official Xinhua news agency on Monday that a preliminary investigation had concluded that He had "organised a project team that included foreign staff, which intentionally avoided surveillance and used technology of uncertain safety and effectiveness to perform human embryo gene-editing activity with the purpose of reproduction, which is officially banned in the country".

Between March 2017 and November 2018, He forged ethical review papers and recruited eight couples to participate in his experiment, resulting in two pregnancies.

Comment: See also:

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Hearts

Chinese company grants 30-something, female employees extra time off for dating

Laurie Chen
South China Morning Post
Mon, 21 Jan 2019 17:23 UTC
dinner date
Two companies behind a Song dynasty-themed tourist attraction in eastern China are giving their thirty-something single women employees extra time off during the Lunar New Year to "go home and date".

In a notice on Monday, Hangzhou Songcheng Performance and Hangzhou Songcheng Tourism Management said unmarried women over 30 in "non-frontline" roles would be granted an extra eight days of "dating leave" on top of the traditional seven-day break.

Those workers also had the option to extend the dating leave, the notice said.

Single women over 30 are commonly regarded as "leftover women" in China due to long-held conservative beliefs that women who remain unmarried beyond their mid-twenties are less desirable to men.
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Attention

Kaluga, Russia: Seven dead in bus crash on way to childrens' dance event


RT
Sun, 03 Feb 2019 17:10 UTC
Russian bus crash
© Russian Emergencies Ministry
At least seven people, most of them children, have died in a horrific crash involving a packed bus south-west of Moscow. Over 20 more have been injured.

"There were 48 people in the bus, including 33 children," according to Emergencies Ministry. The vehicle overturned while en-route to the city of Kaluga (south-west of Moscow).

Seven people have died, the Interior Ministry confirmed, with "four children among them." More than two dozen - the majority also children - were injured. Videos from the scene show a bus lying on its roof in a snowy ditch, with the front window shattered and doors open.
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Candle

TSA officer jumps to his death from balcony at Orlando International Airport

Tess Sheets
Orlando Sentinel
Sat, 02 Feb 2019 05:45 UTC
Florida airport
© James Shaw
A TSA officer died Saturday after police said he jumped from a Hyatt Regency Hotel balcony into an open area inside the Orlando International Airport.
A Transportation Security Administration officer died Saturday after police said he jumped from a Hyatt Regency Hotel balcony into an open area inside the Orlando International Airport.

The man, who was in his 40s, had just clocked out of work, TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz said. He was in critical condition when police arrived and died at a hospital.

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the officer's family, friends and everyone in our TSA family," Koshetz said in an email.

The incident happened about 9:30 a.m. near the east checkpoint, which funnels to gates 70 through 129, airport spokeswoman Carolyn Fennell said in a statement.
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Bad Guys

'There will be blood' - Germany's radical Antifa Leftists publish instructions for assassinating AfD politicians

Jim Hoft
The Gateway Pundit
Fri, 01 Feb 2019 00:00 UTC
Germany Antifa riot
Radical German Antifa website Indymedia published detailed instructions for assassinating specific AfD politicians as part of the 2019 Euro election campaign.

The post was published on Jan. 30 by the Anti-German Antifa Underground (AAU).

Comment: Antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis
And let's be clear: Totalitarian is precisely what they are. Mark Bray, a Dartmouth lecturer who has defended antifa's violent tactics, recently explained in The Post, "Its adherents are predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists" who believe that physical violence "is both ethically justifiable and strategically effective." In other words, they are no different from neo-Nazis. Neo-Nazis are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that killed 25 million people last century. Antifa members are the violent advocates of a murderous ideology that, according to "The Black Book of Communism," killed between 85 million and 100 million people last century. Both practice violence and preach hate. They are morally indistinguishable. There is no difference between those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Hitler and Himmler and those who beat innocent people in the name of the ideology that gave us Stalin and Dzerzhinsky.


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Star of David

As Israel expands its 'settler colonialism' policy, resistance group IfNotNow shifts toward anti-Zionism

Jonathan Ofir
Mondoweiss
Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00 UTC
#Ifnotnow

Member of #IfNotNow is dragged away from Damascus Gate on Jerusalem Day, May 24, 2017.
Last Monday, Israeli authorities announced a plan to "forcibly transfer 36,000 Arab Bedouin citizens of Israel living in unrecognized villages in the country's southern Naqab (Negev) region in order to expand military training areas and implement what it called 'economic development' projects," according to Adalah (The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel).

The American Jewish group IfNotNow noticed this, and posted the article with the heading:
This is ethnic cleansing.
IfNotNow are now making it clear that when they speak of opposition to "occupation", they are not just speaking about the 1967 occupation, but also the 1948 occupation. Or as they formulate it:

And this is part of what, when we demand that the Occupation end, we are talking about

This is a critical qualification. Opposition to the 1967 occupation, be it real or ostensible, has not really been that radical an issue as far as Zionism is concerned. Liberal Zionists could easily take that position and still call themselves proud Zionists. In fact, liberal Zionists have used this position to claim that they were protecting Zionism from a "demographic threat", in that controlling a large Palestinian population without rights means Apartheid (which they have warned that people will 'accuse Israel of'), whereas granting them rights means an end to Jewish State.

But calling 1948 an occupation marks a whole other kind of opposition to Israeli policy. It points to its inherently racial and racist character, also in what is considered "Israel proper", and shatters the notion that if Israel merely relinquished its 1967-occupation, it would be a normal, liberal and democratic country. In other words, lumping 1948 into opposition to occupation is saying that Israel is not a democracy, and that its core and founding ideology, Zionism, is essentially racism.

Comment: More recent news on Israel's settler colonialism:

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