OMG. The US has chartered a cruiseship to rescue Americans Israelis who want to come home. Where is a corresponding rescue ship for the beseiged Gazans? Isn’t anyone horrified by our racist inhumanitarianism? Truly Israeli Apartheid is being asserted internationally.
There will no doubt be takers among Israelis who want to escape whatever the dying Palestinians have left to throw at them, though the prospect of more incursions are about as unprobable and fantastical as the first one.
Reading between the headlines, the US paid six billion dollars to ransom five American spies imprisoned by Iran. Three of those deny they were spying. The other two decline to identify themselves. That’s right. Although that’s 1.2 Billion a head, the press refuses to investigate. Both the US and Iran are colluding to keep the secret. What could that be about?
To clarify, it was a prisoner swap: five Iranian sanctions-violators plus six billion in frozen Iranian assets, in exchange for the release of five American spies.
The five sanctions-breakers are Mehrdad Moin-Ansari, Kambiz Attar-Kashani, Reza Sarhangpour-Kafrani, Amin Hassanzadeh and Kaveh Afrasiabi, from among a dozen held by the US for “breaking US sanctions against Iran.” Former vice president Dick Cheney broke those sanctions but wasn’t detained.
The three named US spies are Siamak Namazi, Morad Tahbaz, and Emad Shargi. All three insist their activities were not espionage. There’s little reason to doubt Tehran, a deeply religious and moral society. We also have the hilariously telling example of the famous embassy hostages detained by the Islamic Revolution whom subsequent accounts have dropped all efforts to disguise as other than intelligence officers.
Strangely enough both the press and the Iranian government itself are okay with keeping Washington’s secret. Six billion dollars is a lot of payola.
The pretext is that the two unnamed spies want their privacy. Perhaps they have years to go before retirement, so wish to remain assets to the US intelligence complex. Right. Perhaps their covers, the NGOs which employed them, are not commonly associated with CIA fronts, and networks of similarly inserted operatives would thus be exposed. Is that worth six billion? More likely the two incognitos would be recognized if their faces were seen by earlier dupes than the Iranians. More likely, international figureheads would roll. Iran has probably known this all along and knew that the strength of its bargaining chips lay in concealing their identity.
War Party voices across the media are decrying Candidate Trump’s windfall from merchandizing his jail selfie. They’re convinced that a city and county jail should own the right to exploit the mugshots of its booking victims. Wait what?
Out of spite for the Trumpster, the antipopulist pundits would prefer that a justice system profit from spreading the likenesses of its detainees, innocent-until-proven-guilty be damned? What an unpopular opinion indeed.
Booking officers would have to mandate that arrestees sign releases for the public display of their mugs. That’s an interesting civil illiberty.
I’m sure intellectual property brokers love the idea because those rights could be contracted to IP horders like Getty Images for further control over what the public sees and can’t see. Next would be surveillance footage, doorbell videos, and traffic cams. To my mind the mugshot is overreach enough. If anyone has earned that image it’s the perp themself.
Trump elected to scowl for his jail portrait, apparently peeved at the injustice of his indictment. It seems a rather petty posture considering the theatricality at play. Maybe the Edward G. Robinson menace is his best look, but I always tried to smile for the occasion.
In my experience jailors wouldn’t let you smile. Apprehendees are expected to look glum. and you certainly feel it, being shouted at to stop smiling. I think Tom Delay’s famous car dealer smile mugshot broke the precedent, I told them as much, but wardens have different tools now to snap the expression they prefer. They don’t tell you when they’ve clicked the shutter, or they pretend they have until you stop mugging. With digital equipment they simply record a video and choose the frame of their liking. If you want to effect joviality you have to wear a smile through the entire booking process. For newcomers to our ugly penal system that’s not an easy thing to do.
I’ve lost count, how many times now has Tiger Woods been pulled from the driver’s seat of a wrecked car and not been held accountable for endangering public safety? The laws which restrict driving while impared are reasonable enough, but if the consequences seem too draconian for a cultural role model, then a relaxed enforcement ought to apply to every substance-abuser. especially one unlucky enough to roll his car while speeding through a residential neighborhood.
Uncelebrated schmos are instead hauled through courts, for-profit rehabs, traffic classes and the SR22 insurance scam. If social workers are leaning toward a less punative remediation for drunk drivers, that ought to apply to all victims of drug and drink, not just stars like Tiger Woods and Kevin Hart. Hart, you may remember, crashed his hot rod but had one of his injured passengers climb into the driver’s seat to take the blame, according the eyewitness first on the scene, who pulled Hart out of the crashed car.
I’m for leniency all around, celebrities are too evidently. Of course the kid glove treatment hasn’t curbed Tiger’s recurring impared driving…
Speaking as a street activist, I can assure you that any protester who has traveled to a demonstration in Washington DC would have stormed the Capital Building if the opportunity arose instead of being ignored outside it. Especially if the customary paramilitary posts were unattended and police undercover provocateurs were breaking the windows and doors to ease your access to an edifice that belongs to the people more than any other. Obviously the game plan was to let Trump supporters have their brief moment of unsuppressed anger, then let a “riot” discredit the outgoing party.
What a sham to accuse Trump’s would be rescuers of trespass! How dare law enforcement charge nonviolent demonstrators for the damage which their MAGA-clad plainclothes officers coordinated if not perpetrated?! An unarmed female Air Force veteran was shot dead trying to climb through a window – and who are we calling terrorists?!
Now the FBI is circulating photos of their top 37 persons of interests, wanted for violating a curfew and treading on the sanctity of our congressional den of thieves. The curfew was a blatant breach of the First Amendment and Congress is the People’s House. The demonstrators wanted to confront their pretend representatives and they did it. Trump expressed his gratitude and they earned it.
Whatever their politics, they are heroes and genuine patriots. They look funny because the FBI and the media shitshowrunners selected for cross-eyes and cro-magnon brows, but such alleged freaks showed initiative, restraint, a sense of humor, and an audacious love of their country. They braved COVID to save Democracy, they accused Congress of betraying the people and they’re not wrong. Their critics don’t have a clue, and the smarter among those let Bernie and Elizabeth Warren deliver them hook line and sinker into the fold of the Democratic Party, where status quo reigns at its ugliest. As a Biden presidency sinks in, their skin will crawl once more, and the cycle of impotent “resistance” will begin again at square one.
WHO stole the 2020 presidential election? I think the evidence was in our faces every day on the telly. And the perpetrators pulled it off fair and square, just as the kleptocrats among our founding fathers intended. The corporate media pundits were unanimous about who Americans should vote for and enough of the country believed them. In the final stretch they even blacked out a story that would have been widely damaging to the Biden plunderbund and blocked the president’s Tweets, deciding for themselves which news was “real” and which “fake”. Which is their prerogative of course, as costodians of a universally false narrative. Early in his term Trump declared the media to be the American People’s most dangerous enemy. But only the MAGA crowd believed him. Blue America is still making fun of red but who are the bigger fools really?
As a South Korean court decides that Japan owes more compensation to the Korean women it abducted during WWII to serve as “Comfort Women” for the Japanese troops, Americans should own up to the reality that all militaries rely on involuntary prostitution and gang rape to motivate their soldiers.
From antiquity through the Napoleonic Wars, through America’s Civil War to its imperial conquests westward and abroad, and until World War One immobilized warfare, “comfort women” were called “camp followers.” US servicemen in Vietnam established a sex industry in Southeast Asia that is fertilized still today by veterans of all nationalities. But while America’s Defense Department outsources more and more of its functions to contractor profiteers, it has moved the sexual services in-house. This shifts the customary impact on victim populations unto another consumable pool of sexual prey called FELLOW SOLDIERS.
In brief the scheme is simple: Recruit young women, let male soldiers to rape them, replenish as needed. Mission Accomplished as they say. Among your female grunts, purge would-be careerists to ensure you are trafficking in only the age of vulnerability suited to your comfort-seekers. That perverse finess is of course the giveaway.
In the US military, 100% of women are sexually harassed or raped. Officials say the figure is 70%, or they discount attacks as cases of harassment and not rape. This allows service women who chose not to report their rapes to save face, and it ameleorates the stigma which otherwise would fall on every woman in uniform. Like the single blank bullet issued to firing squads to ease the conscience of every member allowing them to believe their gun did not chamber a live and fatal bullet. The confidential medical records say the frequency of sexual victimhood is actually 90%, but that suggestes an improbable paucity of unreported cases. In the civilian world, it’s believed that half of all rapes go unreported. Assuming a correlation, how can you have twice as many as 90%?
Besides addressing the rape culture endemic to professioonal soldiering, a remedy suggests itself in at least pretending to care about the well being of female soldiers. For a start, America’s military branches could easily relax the basic training requirements for women. The current standards, which pander to a feminist insistance on a physical equality of the genders, quickly destroy all female recruits. The same backpack weight loads of boot camp, which eventually debilitate men’s backs and knees by the time they’re 40, cripple women before they’re 25. An obscenely high percentage of women have to be med-boarded out of active duty with destroyed backs, ankles and wrists. And the female re-enlistment rate is abysmal. You’d think the army, navy, air force and marines would want to retain trained soldiers. Unless women are more valuable to them young, untrained, and uninitiated.
Comfort Women and Camp followers suffered attrition from the natural consequences of communicable disease and abuse, allowing for a regular turnover of fresh stock. Pretending your soldiers don’t consume comfort women means having to be duplicitous about where you are dumping your bodies.
The New York Times’ woke campaign “1619 Project” offers restitution for slavery with typical newspaperman philanthropy: the in-kind contribution! Thus “all the news that’s fit to print” gets trimmed by what isn’t centric to the African American experience, not for news in real-time but retroactively! The Grey Lady of Yellow Journalism is courting younger audiences fresh from history courses featuring personages created in their diverse image. As if the past is a pageant of participation awards, purged of the characters whose relevance used to be the making of history. Never mind how you got here, the study of history is now a showcase of what insignificant role you might aspire to when it’s your turn to play a part.
The US Air Force flew one of its intelligence workers’ wives out of the UK after she committed vehicular homicide, then claimed diplomatic immunity. The British press reports that the whereabouts of Anne Sacoolas are being concealed from journalists and investigators. The US media is conspiring to keep all personal details being made public. Freedom the the Press does not protect your freedom to know.
Anne Sacoolas, 42, wife of US “diplomat” Jonathan Sacoolas (reportedly an intelligence officer with the NSA), fled the UK after killing Harry Dunn, 19, when her Volvo collided with his motorbike while she was driving on wrong side of road. Sacoolas had just exited the RAF Croughton base in Northamptonshire, which is leased to the US and called the Joint Intelligence Analysis Centre (JIAC). Sacoolas’ eldest of three children was in the car at the time of the accident. Usually diplomatic immunity only covers diplomats in London, but a special deal signed as early at 1994 includes this particular base. US media is reporting the story, without mentioning her name, or that her “diplomatic immunity” is a cover for intelligence work.
Curious things, these media moratoriums.
It should come as no surprise that public radio’s RADIOLAB would take government’s side against the growing grassroots effort to awaken citizens to the repressed potential of jury nullification. Any attention to the subject helps inform ordinary jurors of the power they have to stand up to the regular abuses of our judicial system. The benefit is tempered of course when liberal gatekeepers lean in with theatrics to fearmonger about anarchistic challenges to law and order and security. That’s exactly what Radiolab achieved though given plenty of material with which to have taken a more honest tack. Their program “Null and Void” aired May 12 and painted nullifiers as irrational extremists, giving a pass to the judges who purge juries and break the law by having nullifiers arrested.
I had high hopes when contacted by a producer for Radiolab in March. Our federal injunction protecting Denver jury nullification outreach efforts against an order by the Second Judicial District’s Chief Judge Michael Martinez was coming to trial in April. I imagined reporters would be sympathetic to our predicted success making our injunction permanent and the similar likeliness of our prevailing on contempt charges in a hearing which was to follow. I faciliated Radiolab’s access to Mark Iannicelli, who Denver arrested in violation of our injunction, and whose dismissed charges of felony tampering continue to be appealed by our legal adversaries. Thus far it’s a simple story of hoisting a chief justice on his own petard, using the justice system against itself, in defense of the people’s historical power as jurors.
Heicklen
But Radiolab had an alternate narrative in mind. Their story would center on a jury nullification champion who they could characterize as coming off the rails, the celebrated frequent arrestee Julian Heicklen. Septegenarian Heicklen became tired of judges warning him of arrest, despite his continued legal victories. By November 2016, Heicklen issued a manifesto of sorts, asking for armed backup to preempt a judge from making good on his renewed threat to arrest him. Heicklen posted this warning online and called it to everyone’s attention. Presumably it’s what drew Radiolab’s attention. Heicklen had put it out there, hoping to spark a John Brown-esque conflagration, I’d call it a bluff, meant to curtail the court’s continued abuse of power. It’s obvious from Heicklan’s hyperbole. I attach the significant excerpt in the notes below.
Radiolab didn’t reference this tract, nor mention their and the court’s foreknowledge of it. As they interviewed Heicklen, they asked him about his cause and even brought him to tears as he explained his distress about the injustice of the system, which continues to reinforce inequity and deny jurors their prerogative to step in its way. Then Radiolab prodded Heicklen to explain what he anticipated would happen when he showed up at the courthouse in defiance of the judge’s threat. On cue, Heicklen repeated his entreaty that supporters show up with guns to enforce his right to pass out fliers and avert the judge’s illegal threat to arrest him.
Many of us might share the elderly activist’s frustration with being habitually arrested then exhonerated, each time without apparent progress being made. Radiolab’s pretend reaction was to cue ominous silence, let the pin drop, cue indignant alarm, ostracize Heicklen, cue a spontaneous meting of Radiolab minds to elect to call the cops on Heicklen lest law enforcement personnel be shot.
Radiolab didn’t call the Chief Judge Frederick J. Lauten to question the irregularity of his repeating an illegal threat. How absolutely insane for a judge, already proven to be in the wrong, to keep asserting his authority to have a citizen falsely arrested?
When Heicklen showed up to the courthouse, with a friend, both without weapons of any kind, and without the backup support of “Tyranny Fighters” he’d hoped to mobilize, Heicklen was arrested for the more serious charges involving threats.
Radiolab may or may to have exacerbated Heicklen’s arrest. They certainly took credit for it, which is the least they could do for having exploited Heicklen as their straw man extremist.
Because Radiolab makes little effort to conceal their liberal bourgeois elitism. FIJA, the Fully Informed Jury Association was founded, according to Radiolab, in a Montana “bunghole”, which they qualify, they are entitled to call Helena, the capitol of Montana, because one of the show’s producers is from Montana.
Wolverine
You might ask, what’s Wolverine got to do with this? Anyone who’s read Ariel Dorfman knows better than to bring superheroes into political discourse. Radiolab didn’t know how better to distinguish between a citizen’s right, as proscribed by the Bill of Rights, and a power, something grown from common law. Whatever, they’re wrong. Juries are guaranteed by the sixth amendment, now commonly understood to be “a jury of your peers.”
Radiolab never uses that phrase, it’s too everyman. But they do riff ad nauseum on Wolverine, who’s a superhero with superpowers, namely CLAWS, which for Radiolab described this aberrant power that jury nullification advocates are promoting. The public as beast, and mutant power threatening elitists like a werewolf’s claws. Someone adds, as a further irrelevance, that Wolverine’s real superpower is regenerative, the power to heal but nevermind. They say that, and it’s the only trivia that actually does apply to jury nullification. Radiolab autistic savants.
They recorded Mark Iannicelli in front of the Denver courthouse, that was our single consolation!
It’s no surprise that Radiolab takes the government’s side against the public’s growing inclination to “burn it down.” Radiolab got great quotes from Mark, but chose to demonize other jury nullification pamphleteers who were so frustrated with being arrested that wanted to deter future arrests with guns.
By the show’s end, the white privileged NPR broadcasters feel more comfortable with the law in the hands of “unelected, white” judges over inexpert jurors described as “twelve random jerk-offs from the street.” They’re taking about your constitutionally protected jury of your peers.
Hopefully listeners will glean the great information offered by this piece and nullify Radiolabs’s privileged condescension.
NOTES:
1. Julian Heicklen’s post of November 24:
Hi Tyranny Fighters:
Orlando Courthouse: I plan to be at the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando, FL distributing Fully Informed Jury information from 10:30 am – 1:30 pm, unless arrested earlier, on Monday-Wednesday, December 5-8, 2016. All of you are invited (urged) to join me. Bring your guns. I have requested protection from the Florida Militia, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Governor of Florida. None of them responded to my requests. Copies of the letters to the Department of Homeland Security and the governor were sent to the Clerk of the Orange County Court and to you in my previous report.
I have not received replies from any of these people. However I have received a letter from Frederick J. Lauten, Chief Judge, Ninth Judicial Cicuit of Georgia. Here is his letter:
Dear Mr. Heicklen:
A copy of your letter to Rick Scott dated October 13, 2016, was given to me. In your letter, you stateit is your intent to “distribute flyers regarding the duties of jurors and witnesses at criminal trials” at the Orange County Courthouse during th first week of December.” This letter is a reminder that such conduct continues to be proscribed on courthouse grounds under Administrative Order 2011-03 which governs expressive conduct taward summoned jurors. Enclosed is a copy of Adminiustrative Order 2011-03 for your perusal.
As you know, this Administrative Order is constituional as the Fifth District Court of appeal had “no difficulry upholding Administrative Order No. 2011–03 as reasonable, viewpoint neutral regulation….” Schmidter & Heicklen v. State, 103 So. 3d 2663,270 (Fla. 5th DCA 2012)(a copy of which is enclosed). This Court, as well as the Orange Cpounty Sheriff, qill enforce the provisions of Admionistrative Order No. 2011-03 to ensure the fair and orderly conduct of jury trials and to prevent dissruptions or interference with that basic right.
Based on the Administrative Order’s continuing validity, you may wish to reconsider your intended course of action and find alternative means in which to disseminate your message. If you intend on distributing materials to jurors, you will be issued a trespass notice and if you then remain on courthouse grounds, you could be arrested for trespass.
Sincerely,
Frederick J. Lauten
Chief Judge
____________________________________
Unfortunately there seems to be a disagreement between the Florida court and the United States Federal Court. I was one of the appellants in the Florida case. The decision was based on lies and incorrect information introduced by the state attorneys. The judges should have know this, since I carefully pointed out the errors, but they did not care. They had made up their minds before hearing the case.
Previously I was arrested 5 times for distributing this literature at the the U. S. District Court in Manhattan, NY. I was arrested and charged with jury tampering. After 17 months of trial, Judge Kimba Wood declared that distributing this literature was not jury tampering because I did not discuss any case with a juror sitting on that trial. She dismissed my case. Her decision is at: http://constitution.org/jury/pj/10-cr-01154-KMW_order.pdf This decision was published in many journals. The NY Times publication is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/nyregion/indictment-against-julian-heicklen-jury-nullification-advocate-is-dismissed.html
Other publications can be found at: http://search.myway.com/search/GGmain.jhtml?p2=%5EC73%5Exdm007%5ETTAB02%5Eus&ptb=304CD70B-562C-491B-9E0F-EEEA96D81532&n=782b17fd&ind=&tpr=hpsb&trs=wtt&cn=us&ln=en&si=CJSjz-LK7s4CFdgQgQodEmkJvA&brwsid=343148da-648b-46c2-8171-a9e312ac5776&searchfor=Jury%20nullification%20case%20of%20Julian%20Heicklen&st=tab
I was invited to Harvard University Law School to give a lecture on my case. Also I have been informed that my case is being taught to all students at Yale Law School. Presumably it is being taught elsewhere as well.
Currently I distribute the same flyers at both state and federal courthouses around the country. None of them arrest me. Three of these courthouses are state courthouses. They are in Fort Lauderdale, Fl; Pittsburgh, PA (last week); and Newark, NJ. The federal courthouses this year have been in Fort Lauderdale, FL; Newark, NJ; Manhattan, NY; Palo Alto, CA; Pittsburgh, PA (last week) and San Jose, CA; The state courthouses do not approach me. The federal courthouse Homeland Security officers at federal courts all threatened to arrest me until I told them to check it with a judge. They did, and none of them made an arrest.
December 5, 2016 will be a critical day in the history of the United States. I will appear at the Orange County Courthouse, 425 N. Orange Avenue, Orlando, FL and distribute “Nullification by Jury” flyers on the public sidewalk leading from the parking lot to the courthouse. I am asking all Tyranny fighters and anyone else to join me armed with loaded guns to shoot any courthouse employee or officer of the court (i.e. guards, Orlando police, State police, Sheriffs, or lawyers) that approach within 15 feet of me. One of 4 things can happen:
Neither the court personnel, the Tyranny Fighters, nor the press will appear. That will be the smoothest, but dullest, situation.
The Court officers only will appear and arrest me.
The Tyranny Fighters only will appear and protect me.
Both the Court officers and the Tyranny Fighters will appear. The gun battle for the return of a free country with a democratic republic will occur.
I am irrelevant. The future of the United States will be determined by the others or by you. Either we will continue the route to the gas chambers as described in the attached document, or we shall backtrack to a democratic republic. In either case I will have died by then.
The choice is yours—Julian
Even the rightest wing-est extremist in Texas don’t hold a candle to Some Colorado Wingnuts, the ones who call Natives “prairie niggers” or “wagon burners”, especially when any negative reviews of the Seventh Cavalry massacres. Like Wounded knee, a vengeance quest for Custer and a bunch of his homicidal lunatic troopers got their own asses sent to Hell. And before that, at the Little Ouachita, murdering men, women and children at a mostly Cheyenne winter encampment. Must not criticize heroic asswipes like Custer. Oh, that song they adopted, Garryowen, that’s about a really rowdy custom (performed by the lads of Garryowen, a town in Ireland) of getting drunk and beating up on cops. Anyhoo, I got this from Wiki because it’s easy. Sue me. It’s about another massacre and why the people of Korea aren’t as enthusiastic about the U.S. Big Brother as the South Korean Government. Hint: it’s because the corrupt U.S. Government pays the S. Korean Puppet Government to pretend to like us.
The No Gun Ri massacre (Hangul: ??? ??? ?? ??; Hanja: ?????????; RR: Nogeun-ri minganin haksal sageon) occurred on July 26–29, 1950, early in the Korean War, when an undetermined number of South Korean refugees were killed in a U.S. air attack and by small- and heavy-weapons fire of the 7th U.S. Cavalry at a railroad bridge near the village of Nogeun-ri (Korean: ???), 100 miles (160 km) southeast of Seoul. In 2005, a South Korean government inquest certified the names of 163 dead or missing and 55 wounded, and added that many other victims’ names were not reported. The South Korean government-funded No Gun Ri Peace Foundation estimated in 2011 that 250–300 were killed, mostly women and children.
The incident was little-known outside Korea until publication of an Associated Press (AP) story in 1999 in which 7th Cavalry veterans corroborated survivors’ accounts. The AP also uncovered declassified U.S. Army orders to fire on approaching civilians because of reports of North Korean infiltration of refugee groups. Some details were disputed, but the massacre account was found to be essentially correct. In 2001, the U.S. Army conducted an investigation and, after previously rejecting survivors’ claims, acknowledged the killings, but described the three-day event as “an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing”. The army rejected survivors’ demands for an apology and compensation. United States President Bill Clinton issued a statement of regret, adding the next day that “things happened which were wrong”.
South Korean investigators disagreed with the U.S. report, saying that they believed that 7th Cavalry troops were ordered to fire on the refugees. The survivors’ group called the U.S. report a “whitewash”. The AP later discovered additional archival documents showing that U.S. commanders ordered troops to “shoot” and “fire on” civilians at the war front during this period; these declassified documents had been found but not disclosed by the Pentagon investigators. American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz reported that among the undisclosed documents was a letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea stating that the U.S. military had adopted a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Despite demands, the U.S. investigation was not reopened.
Prompted by the exposure of No Gun Ri, survivors of similar alleged incidents from 1950–51 filed reports with the Seoul government. In 2008, an investigative commission said more than 200 cases of alleged large-scale killings by the U.S. military had been registered, mostly air attacks
If you’re a vet from that arena, and was above the rank of captain at the time, I won’t give two thirds of a sex act about your damn feelings.
DENVER, COLORADO- Homeless sweeps continue in Denver, this round the downtown development authority is sweeping away their furniture. In particular the Wazee-to-Wynkoop block of the 16th Street Mall, in front of the Tattered Cover Bookstore.
Not only was the quiet block popular with Denver homeless, it is the site of Occupy Denver’s friday night feed, the weekly shared community meal hosted at the doorstep of the Tattered Cover in protest of their support of the city’s anti-homeless measures. With the benches gone, there remain no surfaces from which to serve food, nor of course, seating areas to accommodate the homeless community.
There is no written record of the Stone Age executions, but in our recorded history we began with; “Stoning”, “Impaling”, “Disemboweling”, “Beheading”, and “Burning at the Stake”.
In our more recent history we have used; “A Firing Squad”, “The Guillotine” “Hanging”, “The Electric Chair”, “The Gas Chamber”, and now we are told “the most humane way to kill a human being”.
“Lethal Injection”.
Why has this search for the “Humane” way to kill a human being continued?
Public executions used to be public but we banned them and moved them to a more dignified private setting with only a few selected witnesses. Are we afraid to face the guilt we feel or agony of the condemned?
Knowing that we are guilty of the very crime the accused must sacrifice their life for is not a very comfortable position, to say nothing about the thought of execution of an innocent person.
No matter how long the search continues, we will never find a “Humane” way to kill another human being. There is none.
You may want to disagree with everything the Trump says, but I’d like to see you argue that he’s wrong about the media being “the enemy of the American People.” President Trump is a maniacal clown, but the larconist corporate media is public enemy number one.
Vancouver has staged an opera about Fallujah. Not about the massacre of its people as the US invaded Iraq, where civilian refugees were forbidden to flee from the incoming assault, where entire families were shot from helicopters as they tried to escape across the river, but the human tragedy of what the genocidal US soldiers had to endure. PTSD. That’s apparently what’s commemorable about the war crime of Fallujah. That “Fallujah”.
Does it downplay the tragedy in Orlando to point out that America’s worst mass shooting, as many have called it, falls well short of the headcounts of shooting massacres which the US perpetrated upon Native Americans? Is it critical to differentiate lone gunmen from state sanctioned crimes against humanity? The first describes renegade racist lunacy, the second systemic. I find the conflation entirely useful. The atrocities of solo shooters spark petition drives to promote gun control. The tyrannical acts of our government against its subjects are reminders why the people fought for and won the right to bear arms.
Because the official one will be (a) months away and (b) it’s going to be a party for office workers more than laborers. All the bars and restaurants and stores will be open. THEIR employees ain’t going to have the day off.
But since this is also a Communist holiday, and of course in Northern Europe an ancient celebration of spring, well, I can’t really write about it without being called a commie. Too bad.
It doesn’t bother me any. Communism as an economic structure has been continuously practiced for more than a century and has proved more stable than Capital. In just my lifetime we’ve been subjected to recession after recession or as the Wall Street Elitists (not the same thing as being elite, just thinking that they are) “market corrections” more times than I have kept count thereof.
the “corrections” actually put more control of resources into fewer pockets/hands/bank accounts and especially if there’s massive bail outs. The ones who engineer these “corrections” know full well what they do. Nice for them, but for those who have been repeatedly impoverished by the same scam being perpetrated over and over and over… shit, we don’t even have to participate in the scam to be steamrollered. Although Steam Rollers are kind of outdated, the name lives on as a verb.
And as the first sentences said, the Corporates have taken Labor Day and are selling us a shadow of what it is supposedly the meaning of actually celebrating Labor and our contributions to the world.
Try to have a good time anyway. Sometimes it actually works.
Some might be asking themselves (as I often do) “Self, just what in Hell is Brother Jonah thinking, ragging on obscure moments in American and British history and raggin’ on the Queen?” Hmmm…
Perhaps it has much ado about something. Like the partitioning of Arabia which has taken an uncounted (by me) number of wars to keep in about the same political and religious boundaries.
Here I should interject the very much related wars on the ol’ Pipeline Grid such as VietNam, Thailand, (they host U.S. Air Farce Bases) (so do about two thirds of the countries around) India in all its manifestations, Ceylon which is now Sri Lanka as per the wishes of the people there, same with Mumbai, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, the new yet strangely ancient British and American policies to keep China as a client state rather than a superpower (way too late, fellas, way too late) by encircling them militarily and economically… but let’s start with the partitioning of Arabia. The Saudi, Jordanian, Yemeni, defunct Syrian and Iraqi, Kuwaiti etc Royal Houses have been placed on their thrones not by genuine common consent of the people the Kings and Emirs but by the Armed Forces and on behalf by the British and American 1% oil (and every other marketable commodity) cartels.
By the way Iran is not an Arabic nation. They’re Persian and the muddled inclusion in the Arabian bloc by people who say stupid shit like “well, they’re all alike” just pisses off some people.
While the Queen doesn’t have full political power in England or her royal former colonial empire, she IS a major shareholder in British Petroleum. The ones who screwed up the Gulf of Mexico and told the American/Mexican/Cuban and all other nations to mind our own business, they would take care of everything and we should just run along and play somewhere.
Economic concerns fuel military affairs. In the case oil, fueling is the correct word.
AND.. the 3 leading Protestant churches in America, Methodist, Baptist and AOG, are offspring of the Episcopal Church. And there’s movements in these churches to re-start the Crusades. Taking ISIS and al Qaeda as the excuse.
I have witnessed the Colorado prison and jail system allowing and encouraging volunteer Religious Leaders who spread the Gospel of Hate and exclude as many dissenters to that perverted gospel as possible. I’ll assume here that it’s a nationwide deal. Radicalizing American prisoners, many of whom are actually habitual violent criminals, to continue a war inflamed by the actions in behalf of the 1%.
And insisting all along that every “Ay-rab” meaning every Muslim in the entire world (it hurts my brain to translate Standard English into Standard Redneck) is born with a bomb in his or her hand.
maybe not that extreme, but hyperbole spawns hyperbole. It doesn’t matter who gets in the way of the bullets or shrapnel, not to the bigpigs at least.
You might remember this…
“Charlie asd Camilla almost got their asses dragged out of their limo and street just would have prevailed, blue blood would have flowed in the gutters of London etc… (sic) the London Anarchists found a neat way to defeat kettling”
Maybe the rich bitch establishment ought to really worry about reprisals.Their gated communities can be kettled and turned into ghettoes in the most real definition of the term.
By volunteers who probably wouldn’t ask a dime in pay, merely a just society for their children.
One in which their kids or siblings or parents won’t be shot down in the street by the cops. Or shot in their own homes. I hadn’t been up here a red hot two months when the Denver cops shot a man to death in his bed, said they saw him “reaching for something” and the evidence at their automatic acquittal hearing was their word against that of a dead man. Then they charged the victim’s nephew for the killing because he wasn’t home when they went in to serve a warrant on him but shot his uncle instead. True Story, from the summer of ’04.
They obviously want war, or think they do. Or at least their masters believe they’ll come out on top.
But their social doctrine is entwined and mirrored in Capitalism. Which is a pyramid scheme, can’t last forever and when it falls, and their social doctrine goes down with the supply of non-existent money, based on resources they don’t actually have… too bad, right? Only we’ll have the privilege of joining them in their misery.
And John Walter got beat to death by the Fremont Co Sheriffs deputies for talking back.
One of the few good things coming from the Cromwell Regime civil war in England was the Union Constitution. That’s the “British Empire” as represented by the Union Jack flag. Their constitution was much more liberal than that of the US and a hundred years earlier. My apologies, IS more liberal still.
And one part of it is that the succession is decided in Parliament. But there was another (yet another) gaudy news headline on a gossip “news” paper at the checkout line in King Soopers. Stating that QE2 had chosen Prince William to succeed her on the throne.
By the way, all through the time I spent thinking of this and now writing it, I’ve had this Python routine being an obsessive waking dream… “strange ladies lying in puddles distributing swords is no basis for kingship… true executive authority comes by a mandate from The Masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony” and you either know the rest of that or you really should buy the DVD of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and just damned learn it. It is worthwhile. What Mrs Saxe-Goetheberg needs to really do is make a big grand gesture, not the one involving the middle finger nor the brit version which is a backward peace sign…
Instruct the Prime Minister to push a bill in Parliament to dissolve the monarchy, have all her heirs executed and abdicate. Charlie and Camilla almost got their asses dragged out of their limo and street justice would have prevailed, blue blood would have run in the gutters of London etc…
5 years ago more or less. I was impressed that the London Anarchists had found a neat way to block and defeat “kettling” and that the issue at hand was BessTwo planning a royal pain in the ass I mean “Royal Wedding” which cost the people millions of USD (only in euros) while and at the same time the Tory government which licks her feet was demanding austerity measures for the peasants.
But in return of the original thread, even though the most recognized Hereditary Dictator on earth, she is powerless to name her successor in advance. I don’t know if Will and Kate actually are the sweetest people in the world. Wouldn’t matter. Nobody is actually born to serve under or rule over any other person. It’s that simple.
As for the niceness of any of the Royals, their family has trained their bastard get to be nothing like nice for generations. Nature v Nurture but they sure have a lot of the latter. And it’s almost universally bad. The family has Dracula, Jack the Ripper and the Bush family tagged onto them.
Very ugly indeed.
The day was 20 March 2014. Eastern Med. N Korean tanker Morning Glory departs from a port disapproved of by the American Corporate Police State. The New Libyan Puppet Dictatorship gets a call from the U.S. that the “rebels” had been intercepted and that the oil, claimed by the ‘Oil’-igarchy, is to be turned over to the Puppet “democracy”.
The picture is a “quick sloppy” but the issue at the top shows the front cover. It’s for sale on Ebay as a collectible but I don’t give a damn by whom. Piracy. The date, sometime in 1978. National Lampoon magazine publishes a “revenge” issue.
Showing on the cover is a person who is clearly Arab being punched in the face.
Why and how is it “revenge”? Because the OPEC ‘cartel’ demanded the price they wanted for THEIR property from the US/British Oil Cartels. Oh my, those dark skinned people need to be punished for their impudence. One of the suggested “revenge” tactics suggested was “what if a lot of American Navy crews uh.. “mutineed” and ehrr “Stole” their ships. It wouldn’t be our fault if these Bad Fellows became the Terrors of the Seven Seas, now would it? (Queen Elizabeth I did the same thing to the Spanish)” Which is true, the English DID that. It goes on with a US submarine with a skull and crossbones (!) flying and the legend “Yo ho ho and $2 a barrel for Arabian crude!”
So now, according to the not-very-abandoned-or-even-noticeably-modified Bush Doctrine, the Navy thieves and murderers don’t even have to mutiny to enjoy their fantasies about being Captain Hook and Captain Kidd and Blackbeard and Long John Silver. The American Taxpayers subsidize their piracy on behalf of the richest 1% who skirt paying their own way through taxes as quickly as they dodge military service for themselves and their demon spawn piglets.
They get to sit around on their fat arses collecting the blood money and not pay nor fight nor work to earn the spoils.
That’s what we of the “Peasant” class get to do for them.
Not meaning to poke fun at young Ms Dare who disappeared along with the rest of the Roanoke Colony more than 400 years ago. More like mocking and reproving redneck bigots who make a big stink about other people having the same immigration privileges as THEIR ancestors did. Especially as it’s an election issue.
Along with the Religious Refugees. See, the first English immigrants were notably religious extremists fleeing from other religious extremists. Virginia the colony was named not for the Virgin Mary, but for Queen Elizabeth. The one who bullied Parliament into passing the Conformity doctrines. Which led to some hugely large massive horrifying monstrous big “civil” wars in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland. Then exported to America along with the ongoing British v Spain and France wars. The plan was then as now (think Israel) put a large amount of people who are just too contentious to allow them to stay in the Motherland, give them discount passage and sell them limited supplies and weapons. And do a lot of it on credit. The French term for it was pioneers. A support system for military adventures. Make sure they’re likely to piss off the natives, but not likely to survive without some “emergency” backup from Momma England.
Others did the same thing, the English just were the ones who got away with it. Davy Crockett was part of two such maneuvers. Born in Tennessee when the Revolution hadn’t been worked out, Tennessee having been treaty land which the Crown was refusing to allow English expansion. One of the sore spots that the sorehead revolutionaries used as an excuse for the revolution. It’s referenced in the Declaration of Independence. The British government honoring some of their treaty obligations by selling weapons to Natives. And blankets (ahem!) and other goods. The Treaties in question being the peace agreements after the 7 Years War which was fought mostly in Europe but in American History class we’re taught to call it the French and Indian War. And since he was born in 1786 which was just barely almost 20 years before the Louisiana purchase, where the kings of France and Spain took turns financing each others wars by selling land in The New World which had never been visited by any European king. They sold land back and forth that they had never seen. Along with the people of the region. Subject of Spain one morning and France the next. The English and their bastard child The United States did the same thing.
to tie it all together….
Definitely Davy Crockett was born of illegal immigrants on Cherokee land. The Roanoke colony was located in what’s now the Carolinas, named for one of the Kings Charles of England. The Conformity Acts caused such frictions between English Christians that Protestant groups like the Pilgrim Church, Puritans, Presbyterians and of course Catholics were slaughtered and persecuted whenever their factions weren’t persecuting every other faction. And a whole bunch of Christians who just could not conform to other Christian doctrines fled to America to set up shop. And put up shot. There was for instance a running feud which often broke into gunfire between South Carolina and North Carolina about the difference between Presbyterian and Episcopalian and another cross-Potomac same thing because Virginia was mostly Protestant and Maryland was predominately Catholic. You didn’t have to be across the Catholic Protestant line to piss off the authorities. Just being a Non Conformist protestant would do the trick. I got that from the Oxford World Almanac which interestingly enough is sponsored by the Episcopal Church.
Whatever happened to Ms Dare and the rest of the Roanoke settlers is pure speculation but there sure is a lot of that too. Some have said in my hearing that the Roanoke people assimilated into the Cherokee or other nearby tribes. No documentation of that, all the documentation is on the lines that they Never Were Found Again. Some of the speculation seems, to me, very cult like.
And a lot of the ones who promote that kind of conspiracy theories are also heavily into the Birther and Minuteman militias. And with ties to the Klan.
But with all these centuries of Christian v Christian slaughter, it’s somehow the fault of Jewish merchants (who say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas)and Muslims. There have already been calls for the opening of internment camps for American Muslims.
Although the Hate Groups keep telling us that Muslims can’t be Americans. Or Native American Church. Or Jews. Or anybody who doesn’t attend Their Church. Ask any of those who proposing a Church State which one is to be the State Church and he’ll probably (eventually) say his own church of course.
Before any of all that comes around, maybe Christians better stop hating each other first. And your fellow Americans regardless of whether you think we’re actually Americans.
In retrospect, awarding the newly elected Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize was about as smartly ambitious as it gets. Everyone knows humanitarians don’t do it for the reward. A Nobel Prize is wasted if there’s not some eligible sociopath who might be influenced with the pressure to behave themselves. President Obama’s Nobel medal was an experiment in paying it forward. Who knows how much more bloodthirsty Obama might have gotten with his drones had not the Nobel committee tried to extort him with its higher expectations? The Nobel award givers took a lot of ribbing for their foolishness from those of us who weren’t idealist enough. AND SO IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE when Norway’s mass murdering overachiever Anders Breivik sued his jailers for abusing his human rights because he wasn’t getting sufficient visitors in his cushy prison suite, that the Norwegian supreme court would rule Breivik was right.
Of course they did. If you’re not going to give a death sentence to a crazed bigot who guns down 76 children, if you’re not going to throw him in a hole but instead give him a spacious accommodation, if instead of a life sentence you let him pursue university studies and limit his incarceration to twenty some years, then you don’t want to isolate your prisoner from human contact if it might appear even as a semblance of solitary confinement. Because lesser cultures do that.
Lesser capitalist flagship states isolate, execute and torture. I so appreciate that Norway wants to set a high bar, but I despair that the land of Guantanamo and waterboarding and indefinite detention and ILLEGAL detention and rendition and extrajudicial assassination and no habeus corpus can’t even see this bar to reach it.
Some of the issues of today are so far into the wrong, like Trump,
it’s just staggering. Like, where do you start on a mess like that? The
dude reiterated his boast of ripping off “screwing” Gaddafi, and still
calling for the death penalty for the Central Park teenagers who spent
more than a decade in prison for shit they did not do. The lack of
response from the republicans is frightening. Giuliani should have
prosecuted Trump for the hundreds or thousands of New York State tenant
relations laws and especially the one about Gaddafi.
And Tump is the front runner. It’s like reality as we knew it just went
down the rabbit hole. My brother Luke who supports the Bernie candidacy
thinks that the Republicans are playing to lose, and that they’re
playing a spoiler/agent provocateur role for which 9/11 was just a
practice run. And that seems to be the zeitgeist. Fatalism on a scale so
massive that the term “massive” isn’t enough.
Apparently it was the traditional Viking practice to wait until launching day of each Operation Rape & Pillage before affixing the dragon heads to the bows of their long ships. Modern Norway’s largest replica Viking ship, the DRAKEN HARALD, began its transatlantic voyage yesterday but press photos circulated to promote the event featured a headless ship instead of a fearsome surface raider. The Vikings were pioneers of exported extortion and exploitation, though apparently they lagged behind on fearmongering propaganda. Just kidding. The dragehode was the original Shock and Awe. The berserker reputation preceeded the Vikings, literally, as the prow of their ship hit shore.
Norwegian reenactors will be rowing the Draken Harald to the New World anew. This time to visit with the Vikings of this age. Gluttons, slavers, and despoilers of an exponentially vast scale. The replica ship is heralded as the world’s largest, but it’s tiny next ships of today, including those belonging to many of today’s celebrated chieftans which they call yachts.
Here’s the itinerary of the Draken Harald vikings, crossing the Atlantic as friendship ambassadors.
Med Vikingskip over Atlanterhavet til USA
Reiserute:
24. april: Avreise frå Haugesund
3. mai: Reykjavik på Island
16. mai: Quqortoq, Greenland
1. june: St Antony, Newfoundland, Canada
15. june: Quebec City, Quebec, Canada
1. – 3. juli: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
8. juli: Fairport Harbor, Ohio, USA
14. juli: Bay City, Michigan, USA
27. juli: Chicago, Illinois, USA
5. august: Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA
18. august: Duluth, Minnesota, USA
September: Oswego, NY Canals, New York, USA
15. september: New York City, New York, USA
Oktober: Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, USA