Tag: USA-USA

Lame response to white riot

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If the riot on the Right wasn’t white, you would be seeing 100 times more cops!

…Observers were appalled by what they describe as the glaring disparity in how police responded to the mostly white rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.

“When white vigilantes commit violence, police stand by,” said Jeralyn Cave, senior communications associate with the Advancement Project, a national civil rights and racial justice organization. “And when Black organizers and Black and Brown people are seeking justice, police are violent and attack.”

The scene at the Capitol on Wednesday, Cave said, “is a real testament to the power of whiteness in America.”

PUBLISHED JANUARY 7, 2021

History repeats itself

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The People’s Republic China (PRC) is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal and “intends to produce over 1,000 warheads by 2030”, a new report by the Pentagon has revealed. In a report titled “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China (PRC) 2021”…

Meanwhile, the report also mentioned that China is seeking to establish a more robust overseas logistics and basing infrastructure to allow China’s People’s Liberation Army “to project and sustain military power at greater distances”. “Beyond its base in Djibouti, the PRC is pursuing additional military facilities to support naval, air, ground, cyber, and space power projection,” the Pentagon said in the report.

Who says “No one ever learned anything from the examples set by the United States!” And, BTW, the GOUSA acknowledges now down to only 3750 nuclear warheads.

American Dark Money Funds Europe’s Far Right/Populist Politicians

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Pier Marco Tacca/Getty

❝ Five years ago, Matteo Salvini stripped and posed half-naked for a series of “sexy” photos that were auctioned on eBay…Today, Salvini’s party has transformed itself into one of the most prominent nationalist movements in Europe (now known only as Lega). Salvini himself has become Italy’s interior minister and the country’s most recognizable politician…

❝ Along with Marine le Pen in France, leader of the National Front (now rebranded as the National Rally party), Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and others, Salvini is leading a startling resurgence of Europe’s far right…Holding up a rosary, kissing a crucifix, and thanking the “Immaculate Heart of Mary,” he proclaimed it time to “save” Europe’s “Judeo-Christian roots.”…

❝ These movements did not emerge overnight, nor will they fade anytime soon. Since mid-2016, together with colleagues at openDemocracy, we have tracked the growth of Europe’s nativist movements, from the Brexit campaign, to Orbán’s increasing stranglehold on the levers of power in Hungary, to cross-border networks seeking to block or roll back women’s and LGBTQI rights. Their strategy begins by influencing elections, courts, education, and healthcare systems, as well as policymakers and public opinion, and ends by taking power.

RTFA. Not quite up to the beerhall putschists of the 1930’s. The mindset is the same. Lots of the money comes from “the land of the free, the home of the brave”. Trumpkins.

Most scientists agree – Americans don’t know much about science

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Sandra Cunningham/Shutterstock

Americans’ purported cluelessness about science has led to wide gaps in how the general public views the world compared to how scientists perceive it, according to a new study released…by the Pew Research Center.

Some 98 percent of scientists polled rated the general public’s lack of science knowledge as a problem, with 84 percent of them calling it a major issue.

One result: Regulations on land use, the environment and food safety aren’t generally influenced by the best science, according to a recent poll of 3,748 scientists conducted by the Pew Research Center in cooperation with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The spread between what scientists think and what the general public thinks about a dozen science-related issues varied, but there were some noticeable gaps…

There was a 51 percentage point difference in views about whether genetically modified food is safe to eat. Some 88 percent of scientists were for it while less than 40 percent of the public agreed.

Sixty-eight percent of scientists think it’s safe to eat foods grown with pesticides compared with 28 percent of the public.

Almost all of the scientists believe in evolution. Just 65 percent of the general public feels the same way, according to Pew polling…

There was one notable — if sad — area on which everyone polled appears to agree: Americans need to improve the science, math and technology education available to students across the country.

Historically, we have a consistent if backwards track record on improving any aspects of education. If there is potential benefit to our war machine – we’re all for it. Go America! Rah, rah.

Though a lesser influence, reflect upon our teacher’s unions which have adopted the sort of protectionist policies characteristic of AFL craft unions. Treating schoolteachers – and teaching – like plumbers with city contracts is not my idea of building useful education, a nation of bright young kids stepping out of school to create a positive, progressive world.

Worse than that – is the tradition that we seem to have acquired in the late 1950’s that moved the core responsibility of school systems to keeping our little darlings safe from hurt feelings – at the expense of standards of learning. And how to learn.

Nope. The creeps at the top of our economic pyramid would like a small improvement in meat machines capable of a slightly higher level of technical performance – where they can’t be replaced by a robot on the assembly line. That’s all, folks.

Black convicts free after 30 years: five questions racist cops must answer

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brown and mccollum
Leon Brown and Henry McCollum

Henry McCollum, North Carolina’s longest-serving death row inmate, and his half-brother Leon Brown were released after more than 30 years in prison on Tuesday after DNA tests proved their innocence of rape and murder. The exoneration followed dogged investigations by the two men’s lawyers and by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, an independent body that operates with the full statutory powers of the state.

The exoneration and release of the two men now puts the spotlight on the police department in Red Springs, North Carolina, that carried out the initial investigation leading to the 1984 convictions of the then teenagers and their subsequent languishing behind bars.

Here are five questions the police authorities in Red Springs now have to answer:

1. Why did the Red Springs police department consistently deny that it had any evidence in its possession relevant to the murder convictions of McCollum and Brown? Only last month the commission found a box full of physical evidence being held by the police that had been in the department’s possession since the early 1990s.

2. Why did the Red Springs police department consistently fail to disclose to lawyers for the two men or to the local district attorney’s office that detectives had requested a potentially critical fingerprint test just days before the 1984 McCollum-Brown trial? The test would have compared the print found on a beer can at the crime scene with the fingerprints of Roscoe Artis, a convicted sex offender and murderer who lived just feet away from the field in which the body of the victim, Sabrina Buie, was found. Neither the request for the test, nor the fact that it was cancelled a year later before being completed, was ever disclosed.

3. Why was the crime scene investigator, who knew all the details of the crime scene as well as key findings from the autopsy of the victim, involved in the interrogation of McCollum, thus risking that his “confession” would be contaminated?

4. Why did detectives write out confessions for both Brown, then 15, and McCollum, then 19, and ask them to sign the statements? Why did they do so knowing that the confessions were incriminating, that the boys were both intellectually disabled and that they were being interrogated in the absence of any legal representation?

5. Why did the police continue to pursue McCollum and Brown knowing that key elements of their confessions were inconsistent with each other? In their “confessions” the two boys incriminated three other youths as accomplices, and yet when the police investigated those three individuals they found they had watertight alibis and were never prosecuted?

Incompetent racist creeps! And you can extend that subtle description all the way up to the Supreme Court and scumbags like Anthony Scalia.

Take a wander through this companion article at slate.com – the second half of the article focuses in on Scalia’s Old Testament ideology. He actually advocates that if someone [by his low-life standards] receives a fair trial, they should be executed even if innocent!

Thanks, Mike