Tag: confrontation

Fake President can’t comprehend someone standing up to him

5 Comments


Click to enlarge

❝ Donald Trump released this photo after a contentious meeting in the White House with the Speaker of the House. He may have thought the picture would help show that Nancy Pelosi was “unhinged.” Did it? We’ll let you decide. On the 1000th day of his presidency, it may go down as a defining moment.

❝ Soon after Trump released the photo, Pelosi made it her cover photo on Twitter. To her and many others, it wasn’t a photo of someone unhinged. But rather a picture of someone doing something that people rarely do with Trump, standing up to him both physically and metaphorically.

Click through to the article – and the video up top. Lawrence O’Donnell lays out a pretty clear statement what really happened.

Thanks, UrsaRodinia

In Trump’s Amerika, we need a calendar to track potential protest carnage

9 Comments

❝ People are freaking out about a potential clash between a ‘gang’ of ‘outsiders, misfits, and weirdos’ called the Juggalos and far-right Trump supporters…

Juggalos — fans of the Insane Clown Posse — and a far-right, pro-Trump coalition are both staging marches in Washington, DC on the same day.

And, with both groups promising enormous crowds, a clash between the two groups on September 16 seems likely…

❝ Organizers announced the pro-Trump “Mother of All Rallies” on Sunday, describing the event as the “Woodstock of American Rallies” to defend what organizers call traditional American values and culture. While the march is explicitly nonviolent and inclusive, organizers such as the Alt Knights have stated missions of street activism and “confrontation,” and were involved in organizing the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally.

A “Woodstock” of super-patriots, the chickenshit flavor of bigots who crank out lies in the tradition of Establishment politicians, differ from Charloteesville Nazis and Klan members only in levels of hypocrisy. The intent, direction and funding for much of this crap is interchangeable with any other cell of Right Wing losers.

❝ Meanwhile, Juggalos are marching for a very different issue — to protest being classified as a “loosely organized hybrid gang” by the FBI.

While the Insane Clown Posse draws thousands of fans to festivals, many people are in the dark on what Juggalos actually are. According Juggalos, they’re one of the most misunderstood groups of people in the US…

Freaks in the Frank Zappa sense can be useful, even productive, against bigotry, conformity to reactionary culture, social and political backwardness in general. You can also end up with nothing but intellectual laziness, the Lumpen ethos that has characterized déclassé revolt probably since the first Children’s Crusade.

I haven’t confidence in either side of this confrontation having the political savvy, discipline or direction to produce anything other than confrontation theatre. On the 16th, I’m more likely to be watching Liverpool at West Brom on television than a DC clash between uptight, sterile, rightwing stiffs and a herd of pretend clowns convinced they’re relevant to civil liberties.

Is there a Religious Left in America?

2 Comments


Click to enlarge

❝ The religious left is the Sasquatch of American politics. It leaves footprints in the snow but recent sightings of the creature itself are rare, and not always credible.

Progressive politics is dominated by secular ideals and, increasingly, secular voters. In recent decades, the words “Christian” and “evangelical” have been commandeered as synonyms for “white conservative.” Religious liberals never achieved the power of their conservative opposites…The once-explosive growth of conservative evangelicals has stalled. Yet the religious left doesn’t appear to be benefiting much.

Instead, the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated are growing. A 2016 report by the Public Religion Research Institute stated: “Today, one-quarter (25 percent) of Americans claim no formal religious identity, making this group the single largest ‘religious group’ in the U.S.”

❝ Yet if ever there were a moment for the left to seize the mantle of religion from conservatives, surely it arrives Jan. 20 at noon. Donald Trump received the votes of four in five white evangelical or born-again Christians. Hypocrisy is as old as humanity, but even hypocrisy has a gross weight limit.

Christian conservatives are now inextricably tied to an incoming president with a long, public history of exploiting the weak, and no documented history of charity, faith or Christian communion or witness. They have endorsed a First Lady whose modeling career included a pornographic photo shoot described by the Trump-friendly New York Post as “girl on girl.” Even among the plaster saints of the religious right, Trump is a heavy burden to bear.

❝ Sojourners is one of the groups seeking to rally the religious left. “Our Constitution’s protection of religious freedom empowers faith institutions to oppose state-sanctioned bigotry and violence and creates strong sanctuaries for those Jesus called the ‘least of these’ in Matthew 25,” said Lisa Sharon Harper…

A coalition of groups has launched the “Matthew 25” initiative to fight an expected barrage of federal policies targeting the most vulnerable — including the poor, immigrants and Muslims. “These people are organizing under the banner of Jesus,” Harper said.

❝ In North Carolina, the liberal “Moral Mondays” movement has been partially credited with the election in November of Democrat Roy Cooper as governor. The success of the movement — named for weekly public demonstrations against the conservative legislature and incumbent governor — is a powerful precedent. It gained momentum not only because of charismatic religious leadership, but because of unusually aggressive Republican efforts to undermine voting rights and cut funding for education and services…

❝ Trump’s regular shocks to decency, along with an expected Republican assault on funding for the poor, will outrage both secular liberals and the religious left. But will that be enough to bring the left’s religious Sasquatch out of hiding?

I have no idea. Being an old cranky geek, I’m less likely to find myself marching than blogging, nowadays.

There was a time when I could count on cellmates who were priests, partners canvassing door-to-door who were nuns, family and friends who learned childhood ethics in Protestant Yankee denominations who dedicated time and effort to the betterment of life on earth – instead of preaching faith in Wall Street dollar$ over old-timey Christian values.

I wish Sojourners well. Same to the brave folks leading the activism of Moral Monday in Confederate and other Republican states. I respect your courage and integrity. As I always have. But, I surely wish you had more friends.

Coppers asked Facebook to stop Korryn Gaines’ live stream of their confrontation – then they killed her!

1 Comment

Korryn Gaines
Facebook

❝ In the middle of a five-hour standoff that ended in the death of 23-year-old Korryn Gaines, Facebook granted an emergency request from the Baltimore County police department to take her social media accounts offline, police have said.

Baltimore County police officers shot and killed Gaines on Monday after she barricaded herself inside her Randallstown apartment with her five-year-old son and pointed a shotgun at officers attempting to serve an arrest warrant on charges stemming from a 10 March traffic stop including disorderly conduct and resisting arrest.

❝ Gaines was using social media to broadcast the standoff, which began when officers showed up on Monday morning to serve a warrant. Police officials asked Facebook and Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, to suspend Gaines’ accounts through what police called a “law enforcement portal”, a part of the site open to certified law enforcement agencies.

At some point after that, police shot Gaines, killing her…

❝ Though Baltimore County has implemented a body camera program, it is only a few weeks into implementation and according to police none of the officers involved were wearing body cameras, meaning the Facebook video could become particularly important. A police spokeswoman, Elise Armacost, said the department was obtaining a warrant to obtain the videos as evidence.

Activists, however, see such video as the only hope of countering the police narrative. “They get on the 11 o’clock news or the Baltimore Sun with the police side and then everyone forgets it,” said Duane “Shorty” Davis, a Baltimore activist who regularly films encounters with police. “They control the narrative, but in controlling the narrative they have to control social media, because it’s our narrative,” he said. “To keep our message from getting out, they’re going to take [social media] out.”…

❝ No officers were injured, but Gaines’ child was also shot. He was wounded in the arm and is in a good condition in hospital.

Check with your state chapter of the ACLU. I keep an app on my iPhone that streams video directly to the New Mexico chapter via the Cloud. Kept encrypted and secure.

Maybe not as effective as live stream trying to keep coppers from killing you – until they become aware of many folks using the service. Regardless, you’re recording what actually happens. The police, NO social media has any way of interfering with the recording. Of course, the coppers can use electronic devices to interfere with cellphone access. My iPhone is setup to communicate both via wifi and the Web as well as a cellular device.

Yes, I realize we have sufficient tame judges that even this avenue might be blocked. Hackers, geeks, will come up with more answers.

Note #1: The DOJ Report from their investigation of the Baltimore Police Department.

Note #2: Sample form used by cops on the beat to guide paperwork for arrests. It presumes the person arrested is Black.

Doctors more likely to misdiagnose patients who are jerks

1 Comment

❝ Going to see the doctor can bring out the worst in people. Being sick and fitting an appointment into an overcrowded schedule can be stressful. So can a long sit in the colorless cube of a waiting room.

But if you’ve ever given a doctor attitude, next time you might want to think twice — or risk being misdiagnosed.

That’s the implication of two new studies published in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety. Separately, the authors demonstrated that clinicians are more likely to make errors of judgment when they’re treating frustrating and difficult patients…

❝ The researchers suspected physicians’ mental resources are so taxed from thinking about how to deal with tricky patients that their ability to process medical information becomes impaired. “If resource depletion affects simpler, everyday problems,” they wrote, “it is not surprising that these highly complex cognitive processes are impaired if a substantial proportion of mental resources is seized by the confrontation with emotional experiences triggered by patients’ troublesome behaviors…”

❝ From the patient perspective, leaving any attitude outside the doctor’s office is probably a good idea, lest you risk being misdiagnosed.

I’ll second that emotion.

RTFA for an outline of the two studies. Actually, the suggestion is useful in many a context. I’d suggest you treat your doctor like a friendly, professional; but, overworked copper. And vice versa.

Politeness counts.

Remember, remember, remember!

Leave a comment

Traditional conservative John Kasich confronts Fascism in the Republican Party

A few remaining Republican moderates have joined with Breitbart-class reactionaries in calling for critics to shut up about how hard Trump works at proto-fascist pandering. At best, some may get to play the role of Pastor Martin Niemöller. At worst, they’ll be standing in line next to me waiting for a blanket in a Tea Party re-education camp.

Hopefully, American voters will turn their petrified butts out and vote against the evil of two lessers in 2016. That may be all we can hope for. I know it’s frustrating and difficult. But, I always remember a conversation I had with Harvey O’Connor, a class-conscious peace activist [and a helluva journalist], chatting over our 3rd or 4th beer in a New Hampshire bar. I was early days into fierce civil rights battles in the 1960’s while Harvey had been fighting to turn the Cold War away from becoming a nuclear holocaust right from Day One of the Churchill/Truman transfer from British Imperialism to the new American flavor.

I said something brash about the need to focus first and foremost on civil rights. Harvey retorted that I had priorities right for domestic issues in Jim Crow America – but, don’t count on achieving very much if we’re just glowing embers keeping cockroaches warm in a nuclear winter. He was very right.

You can’t fight the good fight for progress, for equal rights – if intellectual ennui overcomes self-preservation and the good people of America decide to sit out the moment when vindictive populists are trying their best to turn this nation’s clock back to the 19th Century. Or worse.

Henry Kissinger — on the Ukraine crisis

116 Comments

Public discussion on Ukraine is all about confrontation. But do we know where we are going? In my life, I have seen four wars begun with great enthusiasm and public support, all of which we did not know how to end and from three of which we withdrew unilaterally. The test of policy is how it ends, not how it begins.

Far too often the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other — it should function as a bridge between them.

Russia must accept that to try to force Ukraine into a satellite status, and thereby move Russia’s borders again, would doom Moscow to repeat its history of self-fulfilling cycles of reciprocal pressures with Europe and the United States.

The West must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country. Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus. The Russian religion spread from there. Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then. Some of the most important battles for Russian freedom, starting with the Battle of Poltava in 1709 , were fought on Ukrainian soil. The Black Sea Fleet — Russia’s means of projecting power in the Mediterranean — is based by long-term lease in Sevastopol, in Crimea. Even such famed dissidents as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky insisted that Ukraine was an integral part of Russian history and, indeed, of Russia.

The European Union must recognize that its bureaucratic dilatoriness and subordination of the strategic element to domestic politics in negotiating Ukraine’s relationship to Europe contributed to turning a negotiation into a crisis. Foreign policy is the art of establishing priorities.

The Ukrainians are the decisive element. They live in a country with a complex history and a polyglot composition. The Western part was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1939 , when Stalin and Hitler divided up the spoils. Crimea, 60 percent of whose population is Russian , became part of Ukraine only in 1954 , when Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian by birth, awarded it as part of the 300th-year celebration of a Russian agreement with the Cossacks. The west is largely Catholic; the east largely Russian Orthodox. The west speaks Ukrainian; the east speaks mostly Russian. Any attempt by one wing of Ukraine to dominate the other — as has been the pattern — would lead eventually to civil war or break up. To treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation would scuttle for decades any prospect to bring Russia and the West — especially Russia and Europe — into a cooperative international system…

A wise U.S. policy toward Ukraine would seek a way for the two parts of the country to cooperate with each other. We should seek reconciliation, not the domination of a faction…Russia and the West, and least of all the various factions in Ukraine, have not acted on this principle. Each has made the situation worse. Russia would not be able to impose a military solution without isolating itself at a time when many of its borders are already precarious. For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one…

Leaders of all sides should return to examining outcomes, not compete in posturing. The test is not absolute satisfaction but balanced dissatisfaction. If some solution based on these or comparable elements is not achieved, the drift toward confrontation will accelerate. The time for that will come soon enough.

Of course, Kissinger may as well be describing Congress under the misleadership of what passes for a Republican Party, today. He speaks from memories of days when Republicans and Democrats had principled, educated, knowledgeable leaders. Days long gone.

Kissinger is not a diplomat I have a whole boatload of respect for. He rarely challenged the Cold War status quo in his years of service. What positive results attended his efforts resulted from a simple understanding that politics should trump war, trade brings more long-lasting change than imperial bullying.

Frankly, I doubt if anyone in the Confederate Club in Congress will even read his suggested principles. However, they are worth reading at least as a base for your understanding.

Boats from Taiwan join China confronting Japan at sea

Leave a comment

Japanese Coast Guard vessels fired water cannon to turn away about 40 Taiwan fishing boats and eight Taiwan Coast Guard vessels from waters Japan considers its own on Tuesday in the latest twist to a row between Tokyo and Beijing.

Japan protested to Taiwan, a day after it lodged a complaint with China over what it said was a similar intrusion by Chinese boats.

Sino-Japanese relations deteriorated sharply this month after Japan bought disputed East China Sea islands, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, from their private owner, sparking anti-Japan protests across China.

Taiwan has friendly ties with Japan, but the two sides have long squabbled over fishing rights in the area. China and Taiwan both argue they have inherited China’s historic sovereignty over the islands…

Japanese public broadcaster NHK showed footage of a Japanese Coast Guard ship shooting water at a Taiwan fishing boat, while a Taiwan patrol vessel blasted water at the Coast Guard ship in reply.

While few experts expect a military confrontation, an unintended clash at sea would increase tension, although all sides are expected to try to manage the row before it spirals out of control.

Japan’s top diplomat, Vice Foreign Minister Chikao Kawai, was in Beijing for a meeting with Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Zhijun in a bid to ease tensions between Asia’s two biggest economies.

Anyone with an acceptable knowledge of history of the region through the last 150 years or so would have no reason to support Japan other than political opportunism, deliberate pandering to Japan’s imperial past – instead of the victims of that imperialism.

Which means, yes, of course, I expect the United States and President Obama to back the Japanese.

Sisters of St. Francis – occupying Wall Street since 1980

Leave a comment


Sister Nora Nash

Long before Occupy Wall Street, the Sisters of St. Francis were quietly staging an occupation of their own. In recent years, this Roman Catholic order of 540 or so nuns has become one of the most surprising groups of corporate activists around.

The nuns have gone toe-to-toe with Kroger, the grocery store chain, over farm worker rights; with McDonald’s, over childhood obesity; and with Wells Fargo, over lending practices. They have tried, with mixed success, to exert some moral suasion over Fortune 500 executives, a group not always known for its piety…

The Sisters of St. Francis are an unusual example of the shareholder activism that has ripped through corporate America since the 1980s. Public pension funds led the way, flexing their financial muscles on issues from investment returns to workplace violence. Then, mutual fund managers charged in, followed by rabble-rousing hedge fund managers who tried to shame companies into replacing their C.E.O.’s, shaking up their boards — anything to bolster the value of their investments.

The nuns have something else in mind: using the investments in their retirement fund to become Wall Street’s moral minority…

In 1980, Sister Nora Nash and her community formed a corporate responsibility committee to combat what they saw as troubling developments at the businesses in which they invested their retirement fund. A year later, in coordination with groups like the Philadelphia Area Coalition for Responsible Investment, they mounted their offensive. They boycotted Big Oil, took aim at Nestlé over labor policies, and urged Big Tobacco to change its ways.

Continue reading →