Ross Douthat actually tries to be sane and reasonable, which means his time at The Whore is about done. Sadly, this sort of column would have come in handy forty or fifty years ago. Today, it is simply whistling past AmeriKKKa's graveyard.
From The Old Gray Whore:
Notes on a Political Shooting
The first thing to say about the attempted massacre of congressional Republicans on a baseball field in suburban Virginia is that the motivations of the shooter were unusual. By which I mean that, based on what we know, James Hodgkinson had surprisingly normal political beliefs. He hated Donald Trump, he liked Bernie Sanders, he wanted higher taxes on the wealthy. He was not a Communist or a paranoid knight on a shadowy crusade, but an ordinary Midwestern Democrat with far more rage but the same frustrations as many decent liberals.
Where modern assassinations are concerned, such normal partisan motivations are more unusual than you might think. John F. Kennedy was hated passionately by many Republicans in Dallas, but Lee Harvey Oswald’s beliefs were Marxist, not right-wing. Nationalist movements, not partisanship, inspired Sirhan Sirhan and the Puerto Ricans who almost killed Harry Truman. George Wallace was shot by a man trying to make “a statement of my manhood for the world to see.” One of Gerald Ford’s two would-be assassins was a member of the Manson cult, the other a sympathizer with the Symbionese Liberation Army. John Hinckley famously shot Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster.
And most recently — if a little less famously, because the media spent a long time assuming that he was Tea Party-inspired — Jared Lee Loughner shot Gabby Giffords because he was a lunatic obsessed with (among other things) the government’s control of grammar, and she had failed to answer his town hall question: “What is government if words have no meaning?”
So Hodgkinson’s seeming normalcy, his angry but relatively mainstream Democratic views, might be a warning sign for the future of our politics. The turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s generated segregationist terrorism on the right and a revolutionary underground on the left, but it did not produce much partisan terrorism, violence inspired simply by fear and hatred of the opposition party.
Now, though, we hate each other simply for being Democrats and Republicans more than ever — and violence inspired simply by the polarization of the major parties would be a unique and novel threat.
The second thing to say is that a murderous attack on Republicans by an angry liberal should be an important reminder for our media-cultural establishment that societies can be pulled apart from the left as easily as from the right. Of course, network anchors and magazine editors and editorial boards know this on an intellectual level. But because our centrist elites are actually center-left there is a constant, involuntary tug toward emphasizing what’s wrong on the right-wing side of the spectrum and excusing what’s wrong on the other.
There’s a great deal wrong on the right in the age of Donald Trump, and the scrutiny directed rightward is not at all misplaced. But as Trump proves more hapless than dangerous — or only dangerous because he’s hapless — the derangement that he inspires or amplifies among his critics also matters. And if America slides toward a rendezvous with 1968, the tendency of the establishment to only see one side’s dangers — to treat Marine Le Pen as uniquely terrifying but Jeremy Corbyn as merely dotty, to “remember” that Loughner was a Palin fan or that right-wing hate killed J.F.K. — will make things more dangerous overall.
Part of what went wrong in America in the later ’60s was that the liberal establishment carried water for, protected or excused its far-left children’s rage. Part of what could go wrong today is evident in the way that violence in the left-wing core, the university campus, gets met with excuse-making, appeasement and halfhearted punishment from liberal authorities. The House whip bleeding on a baseball field is a reminder that brighter lines against lesser acts of violence serve the entire culture well.
But the third thing to say is that the worst of what could go wrong hasn’t yet. James Hodgkinson was not part of a network of terrorists, a literal Democratic underground. No prominent politician justified his act; instead both parties prayed together before a cheering D.C. crowd. The Trump era is crazy, but not as crazy as I feared: The Antifa types and Proud Boys are more performative than revolutionary, college campuses are hothouses but not actually in flames, the internet is deranging us but perhaps also encouraging us to express derangement with tweets rather than bullets.
So we have the space to keep our bearings — which includes remembering that hot political rhetoric is a normal part of high-stakes debate, that lies are wicked but insults are very small-d democratic, that comparing self-aggrandizing presidents to Caesars is as American as apple pie, and that martial metaphors are not incitement. Only incitement is incitement.
Police what you say for lies, for slander, for stupidity, for simple vileness. Don’t be Sean Hannity; don’t be Kathy Griffin. Abjure the sword, the gun, the bomb.
But don’t parse your every word for what a maniac might make of it. This is a free country, and still, thank God, a mostly peaceful one. Say what you believe.
*See Third World problems...we've got them.
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
I was wrong, kiddies. This particular piece of Kumbaya crap lasted about 48 hours.*
New day, same old crap.
UN chief: US will be replaced if it disengages from world - NY Daily News ...
First paragraph of this story:
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned the Trump administration on Tuesday that if the United States disengages from many issues confronting the international community it will be replaced — and that won't be good for America or for the world.
Second paragraph of this story:
Guterres made clear to reporters at his first press conference here since taking the reins of the United Nations on Jan. 1 that proposed cuts in U.S. funding for the U.N. would be disastrous and create "an unsolvable problem to the management of the U.N."
Which is it you international fascist kleptocrat? The only thin g this asshole fears is the possibility he might have to get a real job someday.
He shouldn't worry. The orange Victim-In-Chief won't do anything but talk.
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Even the once mighty (and once Real Conservative) National Review concentrates on the symptoms and not the disease.
"NONE DARE CALL IT A DISEASE!", anyone?
From Victor Davis Hanson of National Review:
Divided America -- People Must Connect for America to Survive ...
The United States is currently the world’s oldest democracy.
But America is no more immune from collapse than were some of history’s most stable and impressive consensual governments. Fifth-century Athens, Republican Rome, Renaissance Florence and Venice, and many of the elected governments of early 20th-century Western European states eventually destroyed themselves, went bankrupt, or were overrun by invaders.
The United States is dividing as rarely before. Half the country, mostly liberal America, is concentrated in 146 of the nation’s more than 3,000 counties — in an area that collectively represents less than 10 percent of the U.S. land mass. The other half, the conservative Red states of the interior of America, is geographically, culturally, economically, politically, and socially at odds with Blue-state America, which resides mostly on the two coasts.
The two Americas watch different news. They read very different books, listen to different music, and watch different television shows. Increasingly, they now live lives according to two widely different traditions.
Barack Obama was elected president after compiling the most left-wing voting record in the U.S. Senate. His antidote, Donald Trump, was elected largely on the premise that traditional Republicans were hardly conservative.
Red America and Blue America are spiraling into divisions approaching those of 1860, or of the nihilistic hippie/straight divide of 1968.
Currently, some 27 percent of all Californians were not born in the United States. More than 40 million foreign-born immigrants currently live in the U.S. — the highest number in the nation’s history.
Yet widely unchecked immigration comes at a time when the country has lost confidence in its prior successful adherence to melting-pot assimilation and integration. The ultimate result is a fragmenting of society into tribal cliques that vie for power, careers, and influence on the basis of ethnic solidarity rather than shared Americanness.
History is not very kind to multicultural chaos — as opposed to a multiracial society united by a single national culture. The fates of Rwanda, Iraq, and the former Yugoslavia should remind us of our present disastrous trajectory.
Either the United States will return to a shared single language and allegiance to a common and singular culture, or it will eventually descend into clannish violence.
"Culture", Vic? Really? I was joking a few days ago when I typed people should listen to Bach instead of watching "Blood Drive" on SyFy. (See What happens when more-disturbed-than-average teenage boys grow up and put their masturbatory fantasies on television? )
It isn't culture. It is morality. Hell, Bach might have hated blacks, Asians, and Italians, for all we know. But his music was a fine example of a great "culture". Did Bach's music ever stop anyone from killing someone? Or even stop people from disagreeing about politics? Hell, even Lenin loved music.
The bottom line? America cannot produce good men. It is that simple. If you believe "culture" is the problem, produce of an outline of a future culture that will do so. (Hint: Saying "Let's go back to the good old days!" won't cut it. The good old days gave us the present bad days.) Until then, I will stick with timeless things that actually work, like the Decalogue and the Golden Rule .
Does the unique American idea of federalism still work, with state rights and laws subordinate to federal law? We fought a Civil War that cost more than 600,000 lives in part to uphold the idea that individual states could not override the federal government.
Yet sanctuary cities declare that they can freely nullify federal immigration law. The California Senate passed a bill earlier this month that would prohibit the state from contracting with any firms that work on the federal government’s wall at the border with Mexico.
States such as California vow that they will ignore Washington and work directly with foreign nations to promote their own policies on global warming. Read carefully what some prominent Californians are saying about the federal government: It is not much different from what influential Confederate South Carolinians boasted about in 1860 on the eve of secession.
The national debt has almost doubled over the last eight years and at nearly $20 trillion is unsustainable.
Entitlement spending rose even as new taxes increased. The have-nots claim the haves make far too much money; the haves retort that they pay most of the income taxes while nearly half the country pays nothing.
All Americans need to take a deep breath, step back, and rein in their anger — and find more ways to connect rather than divide themselves. Most Americans agree that the present levels of borrowing and spending cannot continue. But many believe that the tough medicine to cure the disease of chronic annual deficits and mounting debt is unacceptable.
America’s infrastructure and military are vastly underfunded, even though some voters want more subsidies for themselves and apparently want others to pay for them.
America’s once-preeminent colleges and universities are fatally compromised. Universities charge far too much, resist reform, expect exemption from accountability, and assume their students must take on huge amounts of debt. Yet campuses can’t guarantee that their graduates are competently educated or that they will find jobs.
Illiberal attempts to end free speech, to sanction racial and gender segregation, and to attack rather than argue with opponents are disguised by euphemisms such as “safe spaces,” “trigger warnings,” and various -isms and -ologies.
Behind the guise of campus activism and non-negotiable demands is the reality that too many students simply are unprepared to do their assigned work and seek exemption through protests in lieu of hard studying.
America barely survived the Civil War of 1861–65, the Great Depression of 1929–39, and the rioting and protests of the 1960s. But today’s growing divides are additionally supercharged by instant Internet and social-media communications, 24/7 cable news, partisan media, and the denigration of America’s past traditions.
All Americans need to take a deep breath, step back, and rein in their anger — and find more ways to connect rather than divide themselves.
They should assume their opponents are not all sinners, and that their supporters are not all saints.
Oooh! So close!
Things are bad now. But our own history suggests that if we are not careful, they can get even worse.
A list of symptoms is not a cure. Why do smart people who care insist on feeding aspirins to men who are bleeding to death?
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
Why aren't scientists running projections on how long freakin' alarm clock batteries might last?
Now this is news!
From KDKA:
Alarm Clock Stuck In Wall Goes Off Every Day For 13 Years
ROSS TOWNSHIP, PA — All is calm in a quiet house on a peaceful street in the tranquil township of Ross – until the walls come alive with the sound of a 13-year-old alarm clock.
“I’ll show you where this started out from, why it was convenient,” says homeowner Jerry Lynn, climbing the stairs to the second floor. “Or why I thought it was convenient at the time.”
He says he dropped the clock, tied to a string, through an air vent. Set to go off ten minutes later, it would let him know where to punch a hole in the living room wall to pass a wire through for a TV hookup.
“As I was laying it down, all of a sudden I heard it go ‘thunk!’ as it came loose,” he said. “I thought, well, that’s not a real problem. You know it’s still going to go off. And it did.”
He couldn’t pull it back up, but figured, “Maybe, three-four months it’ll run out of battery. That was in September of 2004. It is still going off every day. And during daylight savings time it goes off at ten minutes ’til eight. And during standard time it goes off at ten minutes to seven at night.”
Jerry’s wife, Sylvia, says the sudden ring can come as a jolt to unsuspecting guests.
“It starts with a soft ‘beep beep beep beep’ and it gets louder and closer together, and that will set people like, ‘What is that?'”
For the Lynn family, it’s a story that has a familiar ring to it.
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
Ack! The sky is falling!
None dare call this kind of "reporting" terrorism!
Just for a laugh, read the following while skipping the largest, bold, and italicized.
Too hot to handle: Study shows Earth's killer heat worsens - ABC News
Killer heat is getting worse, a new study shows.
Heat Miser. Much more rational and truthful than a Heat Nazi.
Deadly heat waves like the one now broiling the American West are bigger killers than previously thought and they are going to grow more frequent, according to a new comprehensive study of fatal heat conditions. Still, those stretches may be less lethal in the future, as people become accustomed to them.
A team of researchers examined 1,949 deadly heat waves from around the world since 1980 to look for trends, define when heat is so severe it kills and forecast the future. They found that nearly one in three people now experience 20 days a year when the heat reaches deadly levels. But the study predicts that up to three in four people worldwide will endure that kind of heat by the end of the century, if global warming continues unabated.
"The United States is going to be an oven," said Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii, lead author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change .
The study comes as much of the U.S. swelters through extended triple-digit heat. Temperatures hit records of 106, 105 and 103 in Santa Rosa, Livermore and San Jose, California on Sunday, as a heat wave was forecast to continue through midweek. In late May, temperatures in Turbat, Pakistan, climbed to about 128 degrees (53.5 degrees Celsius); if confirmed, that could be among the five hottest temperatures reliably measured on Earth, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of Weather Underground.
I'll bet those assholes think that is quite a clever name. (Look it up.)
Last year 22 countries or territories set or tied records for their hottest temperatures on record, said Masters, who wasn't part of the study. So far this year, seven have done so.
"This is already bad. We already know it," Mora said. "The empirical data suggest it's getting much worse."
Mora and colleagues created an interactive global map with past heat waves and computer simulations to determine how much more frequent they will become under different carbon dioxide pollution scenarios. The map shows that under the current pollution projections, the entire eastern United States will have a significant number of killer heat days. Even higher numbers are predicted for the Southeast U.S., much of Central and South America, central Africa, India, Pakistan, much of Asia and Australia.
Mora and outside climate scientists said the study and map underestimate past heat waves in many poorer hot areas where record-keeping is weak. It's more accurate when it comes to richer areas like the United States and Europe.
If pollution continues as it has, Mora said, by the end of the century the southern United States will have entire summers of what he called lethal heat conditions.
A hotter world doesn't necessarily mean more deaths in all locales, Mora said. That's because he found over time the same blistering conditions — heat and humidity — killed fewer people than in the past, mostly because of air conditioning and governments doing a better job keeping people from dying in the heat. So while heat kills and temperatures are rising, people are adapting, though mostly in countries that can afford it. And those that can't afford it are likely to get worse heat in the future.
Obviously, evolution hates poor people. If only the dinosaurs had invented credit...
"This work confirms the alarming projections of increasing hot days over coming decades — hot enough to threaten lives on a very large scale," said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a University of Washington environmental health professor who wasn't part of the study.
Golly, I'll bet old Frumkin got his share of noogies when he was a wee lad. Now it's payback time, and payback is a real bitch.
Mora documented more than 100,000 deaths since 1980, but said there are likely far more because of areas that didn't have good data. Not all of them were caused by man-made climate change.
Just one heat wave — in Europe in 2003 — killed more than 70,000 people.
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
Monday, June 19, 2017
Fake Conservatives can't get laid, and are too stupid (or "proud" hee-hee) to jerk off.
The Mortification of Jeff Sessions - The Old Gray Whore -
By Frank Bruni
The appearance of Jeff Sessions before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday didn’t bring us much closer to understanding what did or didn’t happen between Donald Trump and the Russians, or what the president has or hasn’t done to cover it up. Sessions batted away many questions. His answers to others were gauzy and useless.
But as I watched him, a flustered Gump in the headlights, I saw a broader story, a dark parable of bets misplaced and souls under siege. This is what happens when you draw too close to Trump.
You’re diminished at best, mortified at worst. You’ve either done work dirtier than you meant to or told fibs bigger than you ought to or been sullied by contact or been thrown to the wolves.
One day, you’re riding high on the myth of Trump as a transformative figure and reasoning that some tweaking of norms and maybe even breaking of rules are an inevitable part of the unconventional equation.
The next, you’re ensnared in his recklessness, at the mercy of his tempestuousness and quite possibly the butt of his rage: the case with Sessions, who sank low enough that he felt compelled last month to offer Trump his resignation.
Right there, kiddies. The last two sentences are the reason I posted this column. They are the very definition of Fake Conservativism. Where Charlie Sheen-like "winning" is so important to you and your ego you don't care if the whole country gets social and political AIDS.
But you will never even get the alleged satisfaction of that Clump-induced transformative legislative orgasm. You have the world's worst case of political blue balls EVER. And your orange lover turns out to be a liar and a cheat at best and a sociopathic pervert at worst. It doesn't love you. It doesn't care about your interests or priorities. It detests you because it sees how weak and submissive you are while it sees itself as nothing less than the übermensch himself. (Not that it could or would read a book that would expose it to an idea. It is simply a psychologically damaged terminal adolescent. Just add the clap and a silly mustache and you've got a fair imitation of Nietzsche.)
See what happens to dumbasses, you dumbasses?
“It’s just like through the looking glass: What is this?” Sessions said during his Senate testimony, and while he was alluding to the suggestion that he and the Russian ambassador had plotted together to steal a presidential election, he could just as easily have been referring to the warped topography of Trumplandia.
It’s a reputation-savaging place. Ask Rod Rosenstein for sure. Herbert McMaster, too. Also James Mattis. Sean Spicer. Reince Priebus. Rex Tillerson. Dan Coats. All have been under pressure, undercut or contradicted. They’ve been asked to pledge their fidelity to — even proclaim their adoration for — a man who adores only himself.
My God, that video, the one of the cabinet in full session at long last. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s the most chilling measure yet of Trump’s narcissism, and it’s a breathtaking glimpse into what that means for the people around him.
They don’t volunteer purplish flattery like that because it’s their wont. He wants it so badly that they cough it up. To buoy his ego, they debase themselves, and what you heard them doing in that meeting wasn’t just swallowing their pride but choking on it. They looked like hostages — hostages in need of the Heimlich.
Well, most of them. Mike Pence has discovered a freaky talent for such freakish sycophancy, and called it “the greatest privilege of my life” to assist “the president who’s keeping his word to the American people.” (Which word is that?) He sounded like he believed it. The mysteries of faith, indeed.
A few others in the meeting summoned less ardor. “It’s an honor,” Mattis said, but then continued, “to represent the men and women of the Department of Defense.” Trump turned away just then, as if the absence of his name equaled the loss of his interest.
Mattis has suffered the humiliation of assuring allies of our commitment to NATO just before Trump, without warning him, sowed doubts about precisely that. McMaster, whose book “Dereliction of Duty” is expressly about talking truth to power, found himself at a lectern doing damage control for his damage-prone boss. He vouched that Trump’s divulgence of classified information to Russian officials at the White House was no big deal.
No one in Trump’s administration was forced into this service and its compromises. Some hungered for power, in whatever bastard package delivered it. At least a few, like Sessions, had poisoned reputations already.
You could sense the stress of that in Sessions, who endorsed Trump before any other senator did, won the prize of attorney general but on Tuesday was the prosecuted, not the prosecutor.
At times he had a hurt, helpless air. He cried foul at the “secret innuendo being leaked out there about me.”
He called the suggestion that he’d conspired with Russia “an appalling and detestable lie.”
“I did not recuse myself from defending my honor against scurrilous and false allegations,” he declared. No, but he made it a hell of a lot harder the moment he took Trump’s hand.
For all Trump’s career and all his campaign, he played the part of Midas, claiming that everything he touched turned to gold. That was never true. This is: Almost everyone who touches him is tarnished, whether testifying or not.
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
David Brooks and The West are on their deathbeds and they don't think they're sick.
The Old Gray Whore's token fake Fake Conservative believes he knows how and why men abandon their children.
Does he?
Why Fathers Leave Their Children - The New York Times
Millions of poor children and teenagers grow up without their biological father, and often when you ask them about it, you hear a litany of male barbarism. You hear teens describe how their dad used to beat up their mom, how an absent father had five kids with different women and abandoned them all.
The children’s tales often reinforce the standard image we have of the deadbeat dad — the selfish cad who spreads his seed and leaves generations of wreckage in his wake.
Yet when you ask absent fathers themselves, you get a different picture. You meet guys who desperately did not want to leave their children, who swear they have tried to be with them, who may feel unworthy of fatherhood but who don’t want to be the missing dad their own father was.
In truth, when fathers abandon their own children, it’s not a momentary decision; it’s a long, tragic process. A number of researchers have tried to understand how father abandonment happens, most importantly Kathryn Edin and Timothy J. Nelson, who moved to Philadelphia and Camden, N.J., immersed themselves in the neighborhoods there and produced an amazing account, “Doing the Best I Can.”
Yeah? Their "best" is nowhere near good enough. These are not statistics. These are our brothers and sisters who have very little chance of ever being free of the poverty, crime, addiction, and the cycle of evil that brought them into this world. Pray for all souls, kiddies. They need God's help and we need His mercy because we created this cesspool and continue to permit it.
Pregnancy is rarely planned among the populations they studied. Typically the parents are in a semi-relationship that is somewhere between a one-night stand and an actual boyfriend-girlfriend bond. The couple use contraception at the beginning, but when it becomes understood they are “together,” they stop. They don’t really talk about pregnancy, but they sort of make it possible.
Rubbers, sterilizations, and abortions for all! Technology will save us!
When the men learn that their partner is pregnant, they don’t panic, or lament all the freedom they are going to miss. On the contrary, three-quarters of the men in Edin and Nelson’s research were joyous at the news. The men are less likely than the women to want to end the pregnancy with an abortion.
These guys have often had a lot of negativity in their lives. The child is a chance to turn things around and live a disciplined life. The child is a chance to have a respected role, to find love and purpose.
The men at this stage are filled with earnest resolve. They begin to take the relationship more seriously and commit to the kid during infancy. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, black single fathers are more involved in their kids’ lives than white single fathers at this stage.
This is a profound moment, kiddies. David Brooks admits that white jerks and black jerks are jerks.
The key weakness is not the father’s bond to the child; it’s the parents’ bond with each other. They usually went into this without much love or sense of commitment. The fathers often retain a traditional and idealistic “Leave It to Beaver” view of marriage. They dream of the perfect soul mate. They know this woman isn’t it, so they are still looking.
HOLY FUCKIN' SHIT! "Leave It To Beaver" in the 'hood? Even Urkel lived in the suburbs.
Buried in the rigors of motherhood, the women, meanwhile, take a very practical view of what they need in a man: Will this guy provide the financial stability I need, and if not, can I trade up to someone who will?
Who needs love and morality when you have cash? (Especially taxpayer cash. You don't have to keep fucking him to get it.)
The father begins to perceive the mother as bossy, just another authority figure to be skirted. Run-ins with drugs, the law and other women begin to make him look even more disreputable in her eyes.
By the time the child is 1, half these couples have split up, and many of the rest will part ways soon after. Suddenly there’s a new guy living in the house, a man who resents the old one. The father redefines his role. He no longer aims to be the provider and caregiver, just the occasional “best friend” who can drop by and provide a little love. This is a role he has a shot at fulfilling, but it destroys parental responsibility.
He believes in fatherhood and tries it again with other women, with the same high hopes, but he’s really only taking care of the child he happens to be living with at any given moment. The rest are abandoned.
Awwwww...they're trying.
When you try and fail in this "game", kiddies, people are destroyed.
People are rising up to provide that help. In Chicago the poet Harold Green has been championing fatherhood. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a vocal leader in this cause, had Green recite his poem “Something to Live For” at his inaugural in 2015, and this Sunday the two of them will be appearing together to honor role model fathers on the South Side.
Wrong Emanuel and his pet poet are part of the problem.
It would be great if society could rally around the six or seven key bridges on the path to fatherhood. For example, find someone you love before you have intercourse. Or, make sure you want to spend years with this partner before you get off the pill. Or, create a couple’s budget to make sure you can afford this.
The stable two-parent family is what we want. A few economic support programs and a confident social script could make an enormous difference in getting us there.
HOLY FUCKIN' SHIT! WHY DIDN'T SOMEBODY IN GOVERNMENT THINK OF THAT LIKE FIFTY YEARS AGO?
Oh, right. I guess $22 trillion isn't enough to buy morality. (See Standstill in the 'War on Poverty' | Watching America )
Let's spend more! That will ease our consciences.
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
Third World Britain: Only slightly ahead of us.
Phase II: People take things into their own hands because government does not represent them and their interests, only its own.
London mosque attack: man arrested on suspicion of terrorism | The Guardian ...
A father of four from Cardiff is believed to be responsible for a terrorist attack which left one person dead and 11 others injured when a van he was driving ploughed into a group of worshippers near a mosque in north London.
Darren Osborne, 47, is alleged to have shouted “I want to kill all Muslims – I did my bit” after the hire van hit a crowd which had gathered to help a elderly man who had collapsed near a mosque.
The Met said a 47-year-old man had been arrested on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of terrorism including murder and attempted murder in the immediate aftermath of the incident which occurred near two mosques in Finsbury Park after late prayers in the small hours of Monday morning.
On Monday neighbours in Pentwyn, where Osborne had lived for several years, described him as “aggressive” and “strange”. They said that over the weekend he told a 10-year old Muslim neighbour he was an “inbred” and had been thrown out of a local pub for getting drunk, “cursing Muslims and saying he would do some damage”.
Witnesses to the attack said it had occurred after a small crowd had gathered round a man who had collapsed outside the Muslim Welfare House near the Finsbury Park mosque when the van ploughed into them at around 12.20am.
One man, who did not want to give his name, said he and his friends had stopped to help the “elderly man” who was lying on the ground.
“In seconds this terrible thing happened,”’ he said. “Within a minute, a van with speed, turned to where we were and ran over the man who was laying on the floor and the people around him, around eight people or 10 people got injured, some of them seriously. Thank God I’m safe, but my friends got injured.”
Onlookers said the driver then got out of the van and shouted “I want to kill Muslims” before he was wrestled to the ground.
Abdikadar Warfa said he was one of those who caught hold of the van driver, who tried to kick and punch people as he tried to escape. He said: “He tried to run away, he tried to escape. Some people were hitting him. He was fighting to run away.”
Theresa May, said that the “hatred and evil” seen in the attack would never succeed and visited the scene at lunchtime on Monday. The prime minister said the attack on Muslims was “every bit as insidious and destructive to our values and our way of life” as the recent string of attacks apparently motivated by Islamist extremism, adding: “We will stop at nothing to defeat it.”
Mohammed Mahmoud, an imam at the Muslim Welfare House, arrived moments later and was praised for stopping anybody attacking the suspect. “By God’s grace we managed to surround him and protect him from any harm,” Mahmoud said at a press conference on Monday afternoon.
“We stopped all forms of attack and abuse towards him that were coming from every angle.”
Mahmoud said he and others managed to flag down a passing police van. “We told them the situation and said there’s a mob attempting to hurt him. If you don’t take him God forbid he might be seriously hurt.”
The elderly man who had collapsed had come round moments before the van ploughed into the crowd. He died at the scene and has not been named. Mahmoud said: “People came to tend to him. They brought him a chair. He regained consciousness and then, as he regained consciousness, the van drove perpendicular to Seven Sisters Road.”
The attack took place in the constituency of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who spent much of the day at the mosque. He said the targeting of the Muslim community at the height of Ramadan had shocked the community. “A lot of the time people are saying Islamophobia isn’t real, but this time it’s actually killed someone and injured others,” he said, adding: “There are kids who grew up (watching this) on TV and never expected it to happen in their own backyard.”
The Muslim Council of Britain said the attack was the most violent incident in a wave of Islamophobic attacks to hit muslim communities over the past few months and called for “transformative action ... to tackle not only this incident but the hugely worrying growth in Islamophobia”.
DO NOT TRUST ANYONE WHO THINKS "PHOBIA" MEANS HATE!
Writing in the Guardian, the home secretary, Amber Rudd, said the scale of policing operations to protect and reassure Muslim communities across the country has been enhanced as a result of the attack and would continue “for as long as necessary”.
She said British Muslims had been quick to show solidarity and support victims of other attacks in recent weeks, and it was “now time to extend the same hand of friendship to them. Other faiths have already been quick to express their shock and lend their support.”
The home secretary said that she had been have been saddened to see suggestions that this “cowardly crime” was not being dealt with in the same way as the Westminster Bridge, Manchester or London Bridge attacks.
“Let there be no doubt this attack is every bit as horrifying as theothers we have seen. Our grief is no less raw.” And she pledged to be tough on terror “wherever it strikes” and stressed she would not shy away from tackling the “stark figure” that more than half of victims of religious hate attacks were Muslims.
The suspect is believed to have links to the extreme right wing, according to investigators. They said they extent is not clear at this stage, but the finding cemented the view this should be classed as a hate crime.
The man’s mental health is also being explored by the counter terrorism investigation which is trying too establish if the attack was preplanned and premeditated or opportunistic.
Police are also concerned about the possible fallout from the attack - either copycat incidents or retaliation for an attack on Muslim targets.
London mayor Sadiq Khan spent much of the day at the scene of the attack. Writing in the Guardian, he said London had been through “an incredibly difficult few weeks”.
“I know Londoners will remain strong and united. While we have been filled with great sorrow and anger at the unnecessary loss of innocent lives, we have also shown time and again our great resolve not to allow those who seek to divide us to succeed.”
Our rulers shall henceforth allow us the right to say "Ladies and gentlemen, The Slants!"
"Hail To The Redskins" might also be safe.
From the Clump News Network:
Supreme Court sides with The Slants, rules ban on offensive names is unconstitutional...
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a federal trademark law banning offensive names is unconstitutional, siding with a rock band whose name had been deemed racially disparaging by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The case centered on Oregon-based, Asian-American band The Slants, which was denied a trademark because its name was considered offensive. The band countered that the 70-year-old law at issue violates free-speech rights -- and Justice Samuel Alito, in the court’s opinion, agreed.
“The commercial market is well stocked with merchandise that disparages prominent figures and groups, and the line between commercial and non-commercial speech is not always clear, as this case illustrates. If affixing the commercial label permits the suppression of any speech that may lead to political or social ‘volatility,’ free speech would be endangered,” he wrote.
The victory for the band could have broader implications and be welcome news for the Washington Redskins, embroiled in its own legal fight over the team’s name. The trademark office canceled the football team’s lucrative trademarks in 2014 after finding the word “Redskins” is disparaging to Native Americans.
At issue in The Slants’ case was a law that prohibits registration of trademarks that “may disparage ... persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs or national symbols.”
Slants founder Simon Tam said his goal was to reclaim a derisive slur and transform it into a badge of ethnic pride. But the trademark office said a term can be disparaging even when used in a positive light. A federal appeals court had sided with the band, ruling that the law violates the First Amendment.
Alito cautioned in his opinion that the government still “has an interest in preventing speech expressing ideas that offend.”
Uh-oh. I smell more trouble coming, kiddies. It looks like another case that depends on whose Al is being Gored.
But he suggested the clause in question was too sweeping: “The clause reaches any trademark that disparages any person, group, or institution. It applies to trademarks like the following: ‘Down with racists,’ ‘Down with sexists,’ ‘Down with homophobes.’ It is not an anti-discrimination clause; it is a happy-talk clause. In this way, it goes much further than is necessary to serve the interest asserted.”
Lee Rowland, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union which had supported the band, called the ruling a “major victory for the First Amendment.”
It seems the Red Devils had a blind squirrel moment.
TheChurchMilitant: Sometimes anti-social, but always anti-fascist since 2005.
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- TheChurchMilitant
- First of all, the word is SEX, not GENDER. If you are ever tempted to use the word GENDER, don't. The word is SEX! SEX! SEX! SEX! For example: "My sex is male." is correct. "My gender is male." means nothing. Look it up. What kind of sick neo-Puritan nonsense is this? Idiot left-fascists, get your blood-soaked paws off the English language. Hence I am choosing "male" under protest.