Category: Corruption

Putin Accuses West of ‘Satanism’

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Russian TV screen grab

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech at the Kremlin today where he announced the annexation of portions of Ukraine in Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. In his speech he accused the West of being satanists and said that Russia wants to lead an anti-colonial movement to smash the West. He then formally announced the annexation of territory that Russia invaded and took by force…

Putin’s speech and the annexation of these territories is the culmination of a war that began in 2014 when Kremlin-backed forces seized Crimea and pieces of eastern Ukraine.

“I want the Kyiv authorities and their real masters in the West to hear me, so that they remember this. People living in Luhansk and Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are becoming our citizens. Forever,” Putin said in his speech, according to a translation from Reuters. “We call on the Kyiv regime to immediately end hostilities, end the war that they unleashed back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table. We are ready for this … But we will not discuss the choice of the people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. That has been made. Russia will not betray them.”

The article goes on and on from there. I don’t care if he believes his bullshit or not. It doesn’t matter much to the occasion. He’s speaking to his followers, fellows-in-arms, True Believers and opportunists alike.

Americans and Brits and NATO parrots will chide his language and choice of rationales for the military acquisition of land and people. The only difference from the same actions by folks who do the same – only under different flags in the West is language and syntax. Imperialism has never been owned exclusively by one nation.

Teacher in India allegedly kills Dalit student over spelling mistake

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Police in India are searching for a teacher accused of beating a Dalit student to death over a spelling mistake, officers said amid violent protests triggered by the incident.

Nikhil Dohre was struck with a rod and kicked until he fell unconscious by his high school teacher earlier this month after misspelling the word “social” in an exam, according to a police complaint by his father…

The Dalit community – formerly known as the “untouchables” – sits at the lowest rung of India’s caste system and has been subject to prejudice and discrimination for centuries…

“The family says the boy was beaten by his teacher a few weeks ago for making a spelling error. Now the family has called this a caste-based hate crime,” Al Jazeera’s Pavni Mittal said.

No matter how strong you believe you live in modern times in a modern nation, you usually can find someone ready and willing to prove you wrong. Yes, that includes murder at least as often as personal violence, bigotry as often as ignorance.

Violent threats against libraries and staff being spread through our nation

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In the last two weeks, at least a dozen public libraries across the U.S. received threats that resulted in canceled events and systemwide closures. While bomb and active shooter threats to public library systems in Nashville, Fort Worth, Denver, Salt Lake City, Boston, and other cities across the country were ultimately deemed hoaxes, library workers and patrons say they’re still reeling in the aftermath.

Some of the recent threats have been directed at LGBTQ events hosted at libraries across the country…Other threats seemed to have no obvious motive but come at a time when libraries and library workers have increasingly become targets of harassment. Public libraries were also closed statewide in Hawaii over the weekend due to an “unspecified threat.”…

Alison Macrina, executive director of the Library Freedom Project, told Motherboard that librarians have lost trust in their administrations’ ability to keep them safe during a volatile moment.

“It’s been a larger pattern through all these right-wing attacks,” Macrina told Motherboard. “Admin just like, not taking any of it seriously enough, not getting it. So their responses to these bomb threats are seen as more of the same. And also admins just not communicating through these situations [makes] the workers feel even more isolated and at risk.”

This crap starts with the fascist ideology prevalent inside the noisiest rightwing groups around the United States. Nutballs couldn’t care less about democratic norms, constitutional rights and free speech. Advocacy grounded in gangster ethics isn’t likely to spend time re-reading the works of this nation’s founders.

A useful article. One dealing with a Neo-Nazi tactic which ain’t going away easily…or soon.

Send the bill to Donald!

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U.S. District Court Judge Raymond Dearie, a New York City-based jurist named by a federal judge in Florida to act as a so-called special master in the review of more than 11,000 documents the FBI confiscated, proposed on Thursday that former Magistrate Judge James Orenstein help with the process…

Orenstein spent 16 years as a federal magistrate in the same Brooklyn courthouse where Dearie sits…

Dearie proposed that the former magistrate, who has a top secret clearance, be paid $500 an hour for work on the Trump documents case. The federal judge who named Dearie as special master, Florida-based Aileen Cannon, has previously ruled that Trump must assume all expenses related to the review.

HAR!

The US lead industry knew they were poisoning our water

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The lead water crisis facing Chicago and many other US cities today has roots in a nearly century-old campaign to boost the lead industry’s sales. The year was 1933 and, to a group of industrialists gathered in a New York City lunch club, it seemed like the lead industry was doomed.

The women’s pages of newspapers were filled with stories about children being poisoned by the metal, which had been identified as dangerous as early as the mid-1800s. And cities around America had started banning the use of lead pipes for drinking water.

Lead companies were looking for a way to keep their revenues flowing, but, as the secretary of the Lead Industries Association would warn them in a later report, lead poisoning was “taking money out of your pockets every day”…

First, the association mounted an “intensive drive” to get cities to add requirements to their building codes saying that only lead pipes could be used to connect people’s homes to the water system. Secondly, it worked to convince plumbers to become lead advocates as well, urging them to keep cities dependent on complex lead work or risk losing their plumbing jobs to simple handymen…

“They had a big interest in selling this stuff and creating markets that were basically permanent,” said historian David Rosner, who co-authored a book with Gerald Markowitz on the lead industry’s tactics.

Is anyone ever surprised to learn that one or another corporate entity will commit any level of crime to ensure their profits?