2019 so far

[ekauqodielak]

[ekauqodielak]

This is dope.

Humans glow in the dark

Elliot Bentley • Fri 17 Jul 2009 13.18 EDT

Ultra-sensitive cameras reveal that our bodies emit tiny amounts of light that are too weak for the human eye to detect

Bioluminescence at different times of day (click on the magnifying glass).
C: 10:10. D: 13:10. E: 16:10. F: 19:10. G: 22:10.
H: Changes in photon intensity from five volunteers over time.
I: Thermal image of the subject.
Photograph: PLoS ONE

Amazing pictures of "glittering" human bodies have been released by Japanese scientists who have captured the first ever images of human "bioluminescence".

Although it has been known for many years that all living creatures produce a small amount of light as a result of chemical reactions within their cells, this is the first time light produced by humans has been captured on camera.

Writing in the online journal PLoS ONE, the researchers describe how they imaged volunteers' upper bodies using ultra-sensitive cameras over a period of several days. Their results show that the amount of light emitted follows a 24-hour cycle, at its highest in late afternoon and lowest late at night, and that the brightest light is emitted from the cheeks, forehead and neck.

Strangely, the areas that produced the brightest light did not correspond with the brightest areas on thermal images of the volunteers' bodies.

The light is a thousand times weaker than the human eye can perceive. At such a low level, it is unlikely to serve any evolutionary purpose in humans – though when emitted more strongly by animals such as fireflies, glow-worms and deep-sea fish, it can be used to attract mates and for illumination.

Bioluminescence is a side-effect of metabolic reactions within all creatures, the result of highly reactive free radicals produced through cell respiration interacting with free-floating lipids and proteins. The "excited" molecules that result can react with chemicals called fluorophores to emit photons.

Human bioluminescence has been suspected for years, but until now the cameras required to detect such dim light sources took over an hour to capture a single image and so were unable to measure the constantly fluctuating light from living creatures.

While the practical applications of the discovery are hard to imagine, one can't help wondering what further surprises the human body has in store for us.

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 21, 2019 1:05:59 GMT -5 timmyb52 said:

Yep...K called it!

Dude, he seriously didn't even bother reading any of the Amazon book reviews by the changed name account? The reviewer is a man with a wife. That shit was debunked before I even noticed the lazy photoshopping. Also, in what world is it more likely that a crew came in and replaced a bus stop billboard on a very busy street twice completely unnoticed than that the image was rx'd --- or hey did anyone check to see if that billboard was there previously. &, sorry, he's just fucking wrong about which elements are phony in the pix. She was not there. If you're going to have someone do image analysis, they should have more than a vague familiarity with the tools used to doctor and otherwise edit images and film. Pisses me off, all this faith put into people with no fucking skillsets or training or experience -- and mountains of mistrust placed on anyone who is actually competent and qualified to do the job. It's all fucking backwards. And that's what you get in a country that frowns upon education.

[ekauqodielak]

This is probably going to come off as completely asinine, but I think one of the biggest positives to come out of this whole Russian propaganda war with the faerie tales about pizzagate and Q, etc. is a lesson in artistry. Specifically, we've been shown how *not* to over-write and the value of hinting. I think I've mentioned my appreciation for the writer Steven Millhauser here before and that one of the things I like so much about his work is that he's very, very generous in leaving narrative gaps for the reader to fill in on their own. It's not laziness like just publishing the outline of a story, but more like letting the readers figure out for themselves what's between the river banks and even when it might be something as absurd as an intentionally floating tent, only hinting at it, so the reader can come to that discovery on their own. It makes the stories very engaging, it makes you very active as a reader and gets your imagination leaping. So, it's fun. And I think we've been witness to and, in some cases, participatory in a similar sort of deft storytelling with all of these propaganda horror fables. There's just enough of a hint to get you to leap to the next rock without falling in the water and so you keep assuming there actually is water there, the river must be real, even if you can't see it or feel it or hear it. Our minds want to fill in the blanks, whether it's a girlfriend refusing to return calls or redactions on a page, and our ability, as a species, to draw comparisons and make predictive outcomes from that historical data is wondrous. But now we're seeing the fallout from basing suppositions on fictive data, presumed facts that turn out to have not been assembled from hints at all, but holes lined up in the shape of hints.

[joseph]

If pizzagate is a fairy tale why did so many prominent people delete their pizza-related tweets? Was it because they were obvious innuendos suggesting sex with child prostitutes? Because that's what the replies contained - and you can't delete the replies.

I was following people from the Bernie Sanders campaign who had their accounts completely scrubbed clean by twitter because they were blatantly using pizza code to find out where the CPs were in several towns they visited on the campaign trail.

The extent to which the police, fbi and media have tried to shut this down shows the depth and breadth this scandal goes.

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 21, 2019 23:45:27 GMT -5 joseph said:

If pizzagate is a fairy tale why did so many prominent people delete their pizza-related tweets? Was it because they were obvious innuendos suggesting sex with child prostitutes? Because that's what the replies contained - and you can't delete the replies.

I was following people from the Bernie Sanders campaign who had their accounts completely scrubbed clean by twitter because they were blatantly using pizza code to find out where the CPs were in several towns they visited on the campaign trail.

The extent to which the police, fbi and media have tried to shut this down shows the depth and breadth this scandal goes.

This was my response, the first time you asked me that question:

Maybe because they were being targeted and harassed and getting death threats from an anonymous swarm of people who were searching for and then zeroing in on anyone tangentially related to The Boogey Woman who used the word "pizza" in a tweet? A man showed up to a busy place of business with a loaded rifle intending to kill people because of the word: pizza. If it was making the news daily that red haired cab drivers were being targeted by homicidal lunatics and I was a red haired cab driver, I might wear a hat, you know?

And I stand by that reasoning. You and I have already had this discussion in the Magic Christian Lennon Double! thread and I'm not really interested in revisiting it because I think this is all a bunch of bullshit that I'm tired of so many, including myself, allowing ourselves to be distracted by. There are plenty of ongoing conspiracies that are actually occurring in reality that all of these curious minds could be unraveling and, instead, they've been diverted by 'hey, look it's a bird/a pizza/a woman who has the gall of demanding to be treated like a full human being!'

[joseph]

Listen, I don't know you from Adam, but being an apologist for people who use a code language to joke about and discuss child rape, is pretty much a barrier to fondness for me, but I'd love to know what the organised trafficking, murder and organ harvesting of children is distracting you from?

And you can't tell me Comet Ping Pong being shot up wasn't a false flag/psyop. One bullet in the computer's hard drive? How convenient.

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 22, 2019 5:21:15 GMT -5 joseph said:

Listen, I don't know you from Adam, but being an apologist for people who use a code language to joke about and discuss child rape, is pretty much a barrier to fondness for me, but I'd love to know what the organised trafficking, murder and organ harvesting of children is distracting you from?

And you can't tell me Comet Ping Pong being shot up wasn't a false flag/psyop. One bullet in the computer's hard drive? How convenient.

It wasn't a false flag. A crazy person, egged on by other crazy people, went into a busy restaurant with a loaded gun with intent of shooting people who were, in his twisted mind, involved in a plot. That plot did not and does not exist. And, if the internet had not allowed people with similar obsessions, tenuous grasps of the facts and abusive relationships with reality to embolden one another, that situation would never have happened.

I'm not an apologist for sex traffickers, for fuck's sake. The story of sex trafficking that you're trafficking is imaginary. It's a sicko paranoid wet dream with zero basis in reality.

If you want to look at real sex trafficking, look at Trump Modeling (a friend of mine was one of their 'hooker bookers'), look at AG Barr, look at Acosta, look at the entire Eastern Bloc visa situation and the thousands of children who have gone missing from Trump's concentration camps. That's where your trafficking is going on and has been going on. And frankly unless you're actively involved in helping sex trafficking victims, something you've never mentioned even having the slightest interest in, I do not believe that your fixation with this subject actually has anything to do with bringing justice or aid to the powerless who have been the victims of unjust, horrific crimes. 

The truth of the matter is that the percentage of the global population who are pedophiles is so small that it would be insignificant, were the crimes not so appalling (to those of us who don't froth at the mouth over and doggedly seek out details of kiddie diddling). There are not pedophiles hiding behind every parking meter. Only a pedophile would hope that was true. Rich people hang out with other rich people, just as people all over the world from the beginning of time have socialized with their perceived peers. That doesn't mean everybody in those sets is best friends or even knows each other by face. And it most certainly does not lead to the "logical conclusion" that two retirees in upstate New York, who have devoted their adult lives to public service, are fucking and eating babies.  

Also: Have you noticed yet that every event which contradicts your preconceived narrative is conveniently either deemed a 'false flag' or resolutely ignored? If you're going to live in a fantasyland, why pick something so grotesque?

[ekauqodielak]

Cyntoia Brown, Sex Trafficked Teen Convicted of Murder, Is Released After 15 Years in Prison

Elliot Hannon • Aug 07, 201910:09 AM

Cyntoia Brown was released from prison Wednesday after serving 15 years for killing a man who sex trafficked her when she was 16.

Screenshot/CBS

Cyntoia Brown was freed from a Tennessee prison Wednesday after her life sentence for killing a man was commuted to 15 years. Brown, now 31, was 16 years old when she ran away from her adoptive parents’ home and became a victim of sex trafficking. She was living at a motel with an abusive pimp who forced her into prostitution when she was picked up by a 43-year-old real estate broker at a Nashville restaurant in 2004. She went back to Johnny Allen’s home in return for $150 to perform sex acts. Later that night, Brown, who testified she was worried Allen was going to kill her, shot and killed Allen in his sleep, grabbed money and two guns from the house, and fled.

Despite her age and circumstances, Brown was tried as an adult and convicted by a Davidson County, Tennessee, jury on charges of first-degree murder and aggravated robbery, carrying a life sentence that left her ineligible for parole until 2055. Brown’s case slowly gained attention over the years as an apparent miscarriage of justice, first among local activists and then a PBS documentary, before the case made national headlines garnering celebrity backing from Rihanna, LeBron James, and Kim Kardashian West, among others.

Under mounting pressure, Tennessee’s then-Gov. Bill Haslam agreed to commute Brown’s sentence in January, setting her release date as Aug. 7—15 years to the day after she was arrested. “Cyntoia Brown committed, by her own admission, a horrific crime at the age of 16,” Haslam, a Republican, said in January. “Yet, imposing a life sentence on a juvenile that would require her to serve at least 51 years before even being eligible for parole consideration is too harsh, especially in light of the extraordinary steps Ms. Brown has taken to rebuild her life.” While in prison, Brown earned a high school equivalency diploma, an associate degree with a 4.0 grade-point average from Lipscomb University, and was working on a bachelor’s degree. “Numerous Department of Correction employees and volunteers attest to her extraordinary personal transformation while incarcerated,” Haslam said, “which will allow her to be a positive influence on the community upon release.”

“I look forward to using my experiences to help other women and girls suffering abuse and exploitation,” Brown said in the statement after her release. Brown’s lead lawyer Charles Bone said of her release: “When her story is told in much greater detail, the words which describe her success include redemption, education, rehabilitation, salvation, mercy and freedom.”

It should really be obvious by now to anyone with an above room temperature IQ (How elitist to value knowledge and intelligence! Only trust the incompetent and ignorant!) that it is ethically wrong to support politicians (the right wing) who vocally espouse and enact legislation that is discriminatory of the poor, of people of color, of women, of anyone of non-heterosexual orientation, and who have turned US prisons into for-profit torture chambers rather than creating spaces for rehabilitation, who go out of their way to deny resources for the convicted to properly appeal, who gleefully bankrupt social services ('entitlements') so that children in already abusive homes leap headlong into living nightmares, and who criminalize women's healthcare so there are even unwanted children to be placed in these abusive foster homes and tricked out for spare change. Context is really important.

[ekauqodielak]

ICE Accidentally Just Revealed How Much its New Contract With Peter Thiel’s Palantir Is Worth

Oops.

Palantir founder Peter Thiel, right, listens as then President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with technology industry leaders.
Evan Vucci/AP

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement renewed its contract with the software company Palantir, according to new government documents made public on Monday, and it could be worth some $49 million over the next three years.

But that number isn’t intentionally public.

The documents, posted online, were redacted to hide information about the size of the contract for case management software. However, through what appears to be a mistake in the redaction process, when copy-and-pasting text from the government document into a word processor, the financial figures are revealed. (A similar embarrassing screw up happened earlier year in a filing in the Paul Manafort case.)

The first year of the deal, from Sept. 2019 to Sept. 2020, is worth $16 million. The contract appears to give ICE the option to renew through 2022, and if it does, Palantir will make a base of over $14 million each year with a possible extra $2.5 million from 2020-2021 and $1.6 million from 2021-2022.

The deal is for Palantir’s Investigative Case Management or ICM software. Palantir has tried to distance its work with ICE from the agency’s work of deportations and family separations. However, documents revealed earlier this year show how Palantir’s software does in fact play a part in ICE’s deportations.

ICE’s current contract with the company founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel was worth $41 million and has provided the software to the agency since 2014.

As long as The Great White Hope and his buddies are making enough dough to pay off the Russian oligarchs they're in hock to, that's all that really matters, right? All heil Donald Q. Christ!

[ekauqodielak]

& with Epstein 86ed, Cheetolini's gotta get party favors from somewhere!

Trump Seeks to Indefinitely Detain Immigrant Children

Jeremy Stahl • Aug 21, 201912:36 PM

Department of Homeland Security acting Secretary Kevin McAleenan announces the new rules at a news conference Wednesday in Washington.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it is seeking to detain immigrant children in federal custody indefinitely. Officials released a long-promised rule that would unilaterally end the Flores settlement agreement, which blocks the government from detaining immigrant children for more than 20 days. The new rule, which the administration announced would take effect in 60 days, will face immediate court challenges.

According to a 2015 federal court ruling updating the 1997 Flores agreement, children arriving with parents at the border cannot be detained for longer than 20 days. That ruling did not require that parents be released as well, which led the Trump administration to begin separating families at the border by the thousands as part of a “zero tolerance” policy last year. Before then, families were generally released together while going through immigration proceedings. After public outcry, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to end the policy but also said that he would seek to keep families detained together until their cases were adjudicated, effectively nullifying the Flores settlement. Last fall, the government put that rule up for a period of public comment, and on Wednesday, the final rule was announced.

As the New York Times reported, under the terms of the original agreement, the government will have seven days to seek the approval of Judge Dolly M. Gee, who decided the original 1997 case. Earlier this summer, Gee rejected a government attempt to argue that the settlement’s demand that children be housed in “safe and sanitary” conditions was vague enough not to require they be given a toothbrush, soap, and a blanket. Last week, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, issuing an opinion that stated “ssuring that children eat enough edible food, drink clean water, are housed in hygienic facilities with sanitary bathrooms, have soap and toothpaste, and are not sleep-deprived are without doubt essential to the children’s safety.”

Now the same administration that argued in court these things were inessential says it must be trusted to provide long-term housing to children that keeps them adequately safe. Under the terms of the agreement, family detention centers had to be licensed by states. Under the new rule, the Department of Homeland Security would select a “third-party entity” to approve of conditions for families if a state license could not be procured (which is often the case).

“[This rule] ensures that all children in U.S. government custody are treated with dignity, respect, and special concern for their particular vulnerability,” said acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan.

Reports from the border suggest the children currently being detained are not being kept safe. At least seven children have died in immigration custody in the past year, and CNBC reported on Tuesday that Customs and Border Protection would not be offering the flu vaccine at its short-term facilities despite three children having died in federal custody of the flu or flu-related complications. Prior to these children dying, no children had died in CBP custody for nearly a decade.

Trump administration officials argue that the family detentions are necessary to stop released migrants from skipping out on court dates during immigration proceedings. As the Wall Street Journal noted, “According to immigration-court statistics analyzed by Syracuse University, about six in seven families released from custody do attend their hearings.”

Administration officials said on Tuesday that children at the facilities received “top-notch food” and that this move was being done as an alternative to family separation, according to the New York Times. Last month, the ACLU accused the Trump administration of continuing unlawful family separations despite a court order last year ending them and ordering swift reunifications of families that had been separated. The judge in that case is set to hear arguments from both sides over the next several weeks before issuing a ruling on continued separations.

On the question of the Flores settlement, Gee seems unlikely to side with the government’s attempts to unilaterally end her consent decree, which means that the case is likely headed for a lengthy appeal.

[ekauqodielak]

There’s no way to stop human trafficking by treating it as an immigration enforcement problem

Bob Spires • March 12, 2019 6.46am EDT

Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots’ billionaire owner, recently made headlines when he was charged with two counts of soliciting prostitution. The women involved were undocumented Chinese immigrants who were human trafficking victims at the Orchids of Asia spa in Jupiter, Florida.

Raids and sting operations like this one, which ensnared about 100 other far less prominent alleged perpetrators and a few other very rich men, have become commonplace across the U.S. and the world. They highlight the ongoing exploitation faced by large numbers of vulnerable people.

While conducting research about human trafficking in Thailand and Cambodia, I’ve observed that grassroots nonprofits are often effective in addressing its root causes.

Good models

While no one knows how big the problem is, human trafficking is getting more attention today. This higher profile has given rise to what the criminology researchers Sanja Milivojevic and Sharon Pickering call a “global trafficking complex,” which they describe as a “tangled web of agendas, priorities, policies and ideological underpinnings.”

In turn, cases like Somaly Mam, a Cambodian woman who was praised by celebrities before resigning from her organization in scandal, show that some exaggerate the scale of human trafficking and misrepresent it to the public for their own financial gain. Fighting human trafficking has become a high-stakes endeavor across the world, with a dozen countries spending more than US$1.2 billion on anti-trafficking efforts between 2003 and 2012.

But many grassroots nonprofits witness this exploitation firsthand with the people they serve directly and do make a difference.

One excellent nonprofit model is the Coalition of Imokalee Workers, a Florida human rights organization that fights for decent farm worker compensation. Its anti-trafficking and advocacy work has led to effective and much-needed preventive measures. Most notably, the group has collaboratively developed a Fair Food program to ensure that corporations, farm owners and businesses pay farm workers adequately and treat them more ethically.

Another exemplary model is the Anti Human Trafficking and Anti Child Abuse Center in Thailand. The nonprofit aids children who have been sexually and physically abused and trafficked, many of whom are from Burma, Laos and Cambodia.

Realizing that the issue of child exploitation coincides with issues of poverty and vulnerability, the organization also helps law enforcement authorities stage sting operations to hold perpetrators accountable. They also participate in joint task forces together with local, national and international leaders to address the root causes of trafficking.

Immigration policies

Here in the U.S., the Trump administration’s efforts to slow the pace of immigration are making conditions more precarious for undocumented workers and causing an uptick in human trafficking. As migrants lose rights and protections, they tend to become more vulnerable to exploitation, not less.

This is not unique, however. Many other countries, including Thailand, are using trafficking as a rationale for more restrictive immigration policies. Their leaders often try to achieve political ends by demonizing migrants forced to do work they do not wish to do.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that one benefit of the border wall he wants built would be curbing human trafficking. I do not believe that rationale for his harsh immigration policies adds up.

Like many experts, I see no statistical evidence supporting the claim the wall will stop trafficking. Although other complex humanitarian crises exist on both sides of the border, any policy that punishes the people that it is intended to help won’t resolve the issues that jeopardized them in the first place.

In addition, he has maligned immigrants, calling alleged undocumented gang members “animals” or “an infestation.” This kind of disparaging of newcomers can increase human trafficking, two psychologists have found.

To be sure, Trump has signed several important laws, including one that designates US$430 million to fight trafficking. The White House continues, however, to pressure legislators to tie stronger border security to human trafficking, which distracts from the real issue of the exploitation of migrants.

It is also troubling that Trump is a longtime friend of men accused and convicted of crimes involving human trafficking, including Jeffrey Epstein and Kraft. The Miami Herald has unearthed selfies of him posing with Li “Cindy” Yang, a political donor and the founder of the Florida spa chain embroiled in the prostitution bust. The photos were taken weeks earlier, at a Mar-a-Lago Super Bowl viewing party, and Yang no longer owns the spas and has not been charged.

Discourage exploitation

The types of policies I think would help would discourage this exploitation and support survivors, while at the same time not restricting migration in ways that make already vulnerable groups even more vulnerable.

In Southeast Asia, I’ve seen that laborers and sex workers from Cambodia, Burma and Laos are more easily exploited in Thailand, not because of a weak border, but because those on the wrong side of it have no recourse if mistreated.

I believe the same dynamic holds true here in North America and in all areas where the world’s estimated 40 million human trafficking victims are being forced to work for little or no pay.

The new law calls for spending $430 million to fight trafficking, and many major organizations like UNICEF, International Justice Mission and World Vision support the law. Yet Trump immediately undercut its effectiveness by spouting anti-immigrant rhetoric, saying, “This really is an invasion of our country by human traffickers.” In my view, his words undermined at least some of the potential positive impact of this new funding.

I recommend continuing collaborative efforts without sensationalizing with misinformed rhetoric. I also believe that Trump should focus anti-trafficking messages on the abuse of power and the exploitation of the vulnerable instead of taking advantage of trafficking to push for a border wall.

[ekauqodielak]

We Have Been Here Before

Japanese American incarceration is the blueprint for today’s migrant detention camps.

By Brandon Shimoda 

A Japanese relocation camp in Tule Lake, California, 1943. (AP Photo)

On Saturday, June 22, a group of Japanese Americans gathered in front of Bentley Gate, on the edge of Fort Sill, an army base outside Lawton, Oklahoma, to protest the Trump administration’s plan to use the base to incarcerate approximately 1,600 asylum-seeking migrant children from Central America. Among the Japanese Americans were several elders in their 70s and 80s, for whom the site possessed a harrowing correspondence to their own childhoods.

The first to speak was Satsuki Ina, a writer, filmmaker, therapist, and activist. “I am a former child incarceree,” she began. Seventy-seven years ago, “120,000 of us were removed from our homes and forcefully incarcerated in prison camps across the country.” Ina was born in one of the prison camps: Tule Lake, in California, which was one of the 10 main concentration camps, and served as a maximum-security prison for Japanese Americans classified as disloyal. Ina was born into the impossible status of being simultaneously a citizen and an enemy of the United States.

“We were in American concentration camps,” she continued. “We were held under indefinite detention. We were without due process of law. We were charged without any evidence of being a threat to national security, that we were an unassimilable race, that we would be a threat to the economy. We hear these exact words today regarding innocent people seeking asylum in this country.”

Her testimony was followed by that of other elders, each wearing a #StopRepeatingHistory T-shirt, and each stating the name of the camp in which they had been incarcerated. They were all, at the time, children, some of them infants. And though 77 years had passed, along with many cycles of traumatization and healing, the imminent resurrection of Fort Sill as a concentration camp for children exposed those years, and the history they held back, as a single, unrelieved wound.

Ina and the Japanese Americans were speaking not only on behalf of themselves, but on behalf of the 707 Japanese immigrants who were incarcerated at Fort Sill between 1941 and 1942. (“Interned” is the legal term for the imprisonment of noncitizens, but I prefer “incarcerated,” because Asian immigrants were ineligible, by law, to attain citizenship; “incarcerated,” therefore, emphasizes the impossibility of their situation.) That was far from the beginning of Fort Sill’s carceral history. It was established in 1869 to control the indigenous populations on the surrounding land. For 20 years, between 1894 and 1914, approximately 340 Chiricahua Apaches were incarcerated as prisoners of war at Fort Sill. Among them was the Apache leader Geronimo, who is buried there. Fort Sill was also the site of a Native American compulsory boarding school, which separated indigenous children from their families and communities, forcing them into a program of cultural erasure and reidentification. Opened in 1871, the school was not closed until 1980. Fort Sill also incarcerated migrant children during the Obama administration.

I enter history through its graveyard. I first heard of Fort Sill because of a man named Ichiro Shimoda. Shimoda—Issei, or first-generation Japanese immigrant—was a 45-year-old gardener from Los Angeles who died in Fort Sill. His story, which exists in the historical record in contradictory fragments, is that he witnessed the murder of another Issei, Kanesaburo Oshima, a shopkeeper from Hawaii, who was shot and killed by the guards. According to one account, Shimoda suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, and was taken to the military hospital, where he died. None of the other prisoners were with him, and nothing else about the incident is known. Shimoda’s death, with Oshima’s murder, was folded efficiently into the oblivion on which the concentration camp system thrived. No guards stood trial or were otherwise held accountable.

I first heard of Shimoda because, prior to Fort Sill, he had been incarcerated in a Department of Justice prison in Missoula, Montana, with another Shimoda: my grandfather, Midori Shimoda. When I was young, I did not know my grandfather had once been classified as an enemy alien (#1128762) of the country I took for granted as my own. My grandfather was incarcerated in Fort Missoula under suspicion of being a spy for Japan. He was a photographer, and a Japanese immigrant, which made him congenitally guilty in the mind of the US government. Other members of my family had also been incarcerated: my great-aunt Joy in Poston, Arizona; my great-uncle Makeo, great-aunt Tsuruyo, and their daughters, Carole and Sally, in Heart Mountain, Wyoming. As a child, I was not aware of these foundational facts, nor about the incarceration of Japanese Americans in general. My family was silent on the subject. I was too young to understand their silence as the form of speaking they had chosen, or felt forced to choose—which cultivated in me a belief that the future not only meant more than the past but even required the obliteration of the past to be realized.

Current Issue

The Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the culmination of a multigenerational fight to attain recognition and redress for those who had been incarcerated, allowed for reparations. Eighty-two thousand two hundred and nineteeen Japanese American citizens and legal residents each received $20,000 from the United States government as recompense for what they had lost. Or, because “loss” is, in this case, a euphemism for “theft,” they received restitution for a fraction of what had been stolen. My grandmother (Nisei, or second generation, who lived, during the war, in Utah, and therefore avoided incarceration) used my grandfather’s reparations to pay for one year’s rent at the nursing home where he spent the last years of his life. The check came with a boilerplate apology from President George H.W. Bush: “You and your family have our best wishes for the future,” it said. Five years later, my grandfather was dead.

The silence in which he passed suggested, to me, that the price of citizenship was forgetting, and that forgetting was annihilative. Yet his death released in me a torrent of questions about his struggle to become a citizen, and exposed the gravity of my citizenship as both the legacy and the purgatorial afterlife of his experience as an enemy alien. My grandfather struggled his entire life to establish for himself and his family a place in the American scenario, and achieved some version of that place, but at the expense of permitting himself an understanding of the American scenario as a myth predicated on the extinguishing of souls.

Today’s migrant concentration camps are incontestable proof of the myth, and of the extinguishing. The migrant children—many of whom crossed the US-Mexico border with family members, half of them with parents already in the United States, and yet who are classified as unaccompanied minors—are proof. What happens to migrant children in a place like Fort Sill? What happened there to the generations of indigenous children, to the Chiricahua Apaches, to the Japanese immigrants? What is happening in the concentration camps and prisons and jails and incarceration and detention sites that extend across the country?

Concentration camps are basic units of space the United States has devised for the populations it sees as unassimilable, incongruous with—and threatening to—its self-image. Concentration camps can be, and have been, invented, at will, from sites—military bases to empty box stores—retained for use in the event of a crisis, sometimes real, though more often manufactured. They are outposts of the border wall, therefore materializations of the white settler hatred and rage by which the border wall, and its innumerable chimeras, are motivated. And we are, right now, watching the United States resurrect, with frightening ease, its system of concentration camps, and all the crimes against humanity such a system entails. With this resurrection, the government is coordinating, in the digestible guise of bureaucratic chaos, the disintegration of communities, families, individuals, languages, cultures, physical and mental health, futures. Reliant upon the prevention-through-deterrence method of control, this approach to migration should be considered a form of ethnic cleansing by attrition.

Children are being taken from their families by the US government. They are being held in cages. They are being moved from these overcrowded cages to more indefinite, less visible—and apparently, for some, more acceptable—concentration camps. And they are being deprived of the basic dignities—clean water, warmth, safety, sleep, stimulation, health care, the assurance of being reunited with their parents, their families—that might, in their isolation, remind them that there is, beyond the care they are able to offer each other, a world, and that the world cares.

The Japanese American elders are among the centuries of oppressed peoples of this country who have absorbed and remember this truth. I wrote to Satsuki Ina to ask her how she felt being at Fort Sill. “I found my suffocated voice,” she wrote back. Though she was not incarcerated there, it was as though her childhood, having been arrested at Tule Lake, had been fractured and dispersed across the nation’s geography of incarceration, and that her voice, preceding her, was waiting. “Anger rose to the top of the sorrow.”

A month after the Japanese American elders gathered on the edge of Fort Sill, they returned. On July 20, a coalition of more than 400 protesters, including Buddhist priests, immigrant youth, and members of indigenous, Latinx, black, Jewish, and Asian American activist communities, gathered to protest. Four days later, on July 24, Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe announced that the plan to use the base to incarcerate migrant children was being put on hold. Two days after that, the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, confirmed that, due to a decrease in migrant children crossing the border, there was no longer “an immediate need to place children in influx facilities.” It is important to define these reversals, for the protesters in particular, as victories, which they are. But it is also important to consider that as much as they are victories, they are also occasions for the machinery of incarceration, under cover of false appeasement and bureaucracy, to retaliate, shape-shift, and keep running.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” wrote Martin Luther King Jr., on scraps of paper and a newspaper smuggled to him in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, 1963. The intercoalitional protests at Fort Sill—along with Japanese American-led protests in the ruins of the Department of Justice prison in Crystal City, Texas; at the detention center in Dilley, Texas; in Japantown in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, everywhere—are the expression of traumas and their echoes that are as much a source of solidarity as they are the coordinated product of American violence. The elements that made possible, and inevitable, the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens during WWII, are, as Satsuki Ina reminded us, still operational. They are still being deployed, in both flagrant and subliminal ways, across the spectrum of American existence.

As I think about my grandfather, and the ways he was forced into silence; as I think about the ways my grandfather’s silence haunts my understanding of what it means to be a citizen; as I think about the elders, and the ways their voices have, by the present conditions of their trauma and witness, been newly compelled; as I think about the descendants, like myself, who are uncovering, within the capacity of our inheritance, those facets of injustice which are, in this country, despairingly constitutional; and as I think about the migrants, the people, who are attempting, with tremendous hope, to fashion a future out of their desperation, I am led to believe that Japanese American incarceration, as one example, one blueprint, in an unremitting and interminable system, has not ended. It has entered a new phase.

[ekauqodielak]

Refugees International -


Abused, Blamed and Refused: Protection Denied To Women And Children Trafficked Over The US Southern Border

The current U.S. administration asserts that its border policies are designed to protect women and children from traffickers. However, its actions tell a very different story. Over the course of the last two years, the administration has failed to protect trafficking victims, as reflected in a dramatic increase in denials of visas for them, resulting from a new and highly restrictive interpretation of requirements under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. A review of all published appeals of applications for visas for victims of trafficking since 2017 shows that the administration’s decision-making has been particularly dismissive of claims by women and children who have been trafficked over the southwestern border, and has effectively blamed them for their own victimization. Recently implemented policies also scare survivors from coming forward to report abuse and even push them into the hands of traffickers.

Read The Full Report

There are many links in this lengthy report and in the articles I posted above which will take you to organizations that would LOVE to have more volunteers who are genuinely concerned with the recovery, rehabilitation and ongoing support for people (mostly poor women of color) who have been trafficked. There's also lots of additional factual information about how national and international policies and attitudes enable human bodies to be commodified. So, if your number one 'social justice'* issue is sex trafficking and, thus, the well-being of the women of our world, including their ongoing fights for pay equity, reproductive autonomy and zero tolerance for workplace (or any) misogyny, I do hope you will give some time to any of these organizations working on their behalf.


*'Social Justice Warrior' is Neo-Nazi-speak for 'nigger lover'; see: People Who Accuse Others Of “Virtue Signalling” Are Trying To Stigmatise Empathy

[joseph]

Amazing how you repeat the same talking points concerning pizzagate and THE RUSSIANS! as the FBI. israel owns Trump not Russia - who by the way are also owned by Israel. The people I follow are looking into Trump's involvement in sex trafficking and people are having to fake their own deaths because of it and guess what? Israel again.

[ekauqodielak]

“Pizzagate” and the Nocturnal Ritual Fantasy: Imaginary Cults, Fake News, and Real Violence

Michael Barbezat • May 4, 2017


This is Part XIX of The Public Medievalist’s continuing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Michael Barbezat.

You can find the rest of our special series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages here.

---

A persistent delusion exists Western culture: that shadowy, conspiratorial groups gather together in secret—preferably at night—to plot the overthrow of society. As part of their plotting, the conspirators supposedly ritually abuse, murder, and consume innocent children.

Ideas about this conspiracy have appeared repeatedly throughout our history. Historian Norman Cohn called this recurrent conspiracy theory “the nocturnal ritual fantasy.” Cohn argues that imperial Romans made these claims against early Christians; later medieval Christian authorities, in turn, made similar allegations against Christian heretics, Jews, and so-called “witches”. Belief in the nocturnal ritual delusion helped to justify deadly violence against these marginalized groups, and, in fact, played an important role in establishing their very marginality.

In all cases, the claims were false. They were nothing more than the imagined behaviour of fantastical enemies that existed more in the minds of those who feared them than in reality. The recent “Pizzagate Conspiracy” that came to a head during and in the wake of the recent American presidential election is a modern form of the nocturnal ritual fantasy. In this modern shape it is just as threatening as its past manifestations, with the threat of violence inherent in those who believe it.


What on Earth is “Pizzagate?”

Comet Ping Pong, in 2016.

The conspiracy theory behind Pizzagate goes something like this: Comet Ping Pong, a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C., is, allegedly, a front for a child sex-trafficking ring with deep connections to Democratic politicians (especially the Clintons) and their financiers. These associates of the Democratic Party would call the restaurant to place orders for “pizza” which, to them, was a code word for underage prostitutes. According to the conspiracy, the alleged organised sexual exploitation of children at Comet Ping Pong also had occult overtones. The participants in the ring were largely thought to be members of “illuminati-type” secret political societies, among whom ritualistic sex orgies were just one of many social/bonding activities.

Further complicating an already convoluted conspiracy, according to the Pizzagate believers, underneath the restaurant there are a series of labyrinthine tunnels and rooms. This underground network hosted ritualistic orgies, and connected Comet to the offices of the other organisations involved in the conspiracy. The members of the secret cult also, apparently, used arcane symbols to communicate with each other. The crossed ping pong paddles that the restaurant uses as its logo were, in reality, meant to represent a butterfly—which itself is, according to this theory, a secret symbol that deep-state paedophiles use to recognise one another. In case there was any confusion, let me emphasize, again, that all of these claims are entirely false.


Behind the Delusion

This delusional conspiracy theory took shape over the course of several months through innuendos on social media strained through a filter of intense homophobia. Why Comet Ping Pong? The restaurant’s owner, James Alefantis, is a gay man who once was in a relationship with David Brock, a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter. Brock was once a right-wing journalist. But, he became an “apostate” to the conservative case when he re-aligned himself with left-leaning politics. Comet Ping Pong had hosted democratic fundraisers. But perhaps most importantly, it is popular with beltway government employees, journalists, and politicians tied to liberal causes. It is also, as a profile on Slate put it,

both a neighborhood hang for young families as well as a reliable home for eccentrics, queers, outsiders, and their art.

Its stage has been a mainstay of DC’s punk scene, alt scene, and drag scene for over a decade. For the purposes of this supposed conspiracy though, it is a den of left-wing political insiders presided over by a homosexual, against a backdrop of a wide range of “queers”. Whatever one thinks those kinds of people get up to, Comet Ping Pong is an excellent setting for it.

As outrageous as a subterranean child-sex cult operating under a pizza parlour might sound, the story spread quickly and widely on right-wing media. It took off on a subsection of Reddit dedicated to Donald Trump [we don’t link to such sites, but if you must find it, we are referring to the The_Donald subreddit —ed.]. Well-known conspiracy theorist Alex Jones picked it up on his InfoWars radio program. The original Pizzagate subreddit is now closed to avoid “a witch hunt,” and Alex Jones has since apologised for promoting the story. But he has not exactly been chastened; he now calls Pizzagate a distraction from supposedly real conspiracies that threaten his listeners.

Long before Alex Jones’ quasi-apology, one of his listeners, Edgar Maddison Welch, believed what he was told. Armed with an AR-15 assault-style rifle, on December 4, 2016, he entered the popular pizza restaurant to find and to free the child sex slaves he believed were being held there. In his own words, he “just wanted to do some good.” In the restaurant, he brandished his weapon at employees, and fired it into the air about three times. But he found no children taken hostage. As it turns out, the building has no basement.

After Welch was arrested, he still believed it was possible that a hidden child-sex cult connected to liberal politics existed somewhere. But he admitted that “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.”


Medieval Pizzagates

The Pizzagate hoax closely follows the model of Cohn’s nocturnal ritual delusion, and has a number of medieval analogues. Take, for example, the sect of supposed Christian heretics near Soissons described by Guibert of Nogent in 1114. Guibert explained that these heretics had a number of unorthodox views on the sacraments, the role of priests, and human salvation. These opinions threatened, what he took to be, the fundamental order of the world.

Beyond their threatening theology, he also described how these heretics rejected heteronormativity by engaging in same-sex sex. They, according to Guibert, held secret meetings, grouping both men and women together, in “underground vaults or unfrequented cellars.” Guibert claimed that in the light of candles:

Some loose woman lies down for all to watch, and so it is said, uncovers her buttocks, and they present their candles at her from behind; and as soon as the candles are put out, they shout “Chaos” from all sides, and everyone fornicates with whatever person comes first to hand.

This is certainly not a regular church service.

But it doesn’t stop there: if one of the women became pregnant in the ritual, they apparently waited until the child was born before taking it back to the underground chamber. There, they tossed it back and forth through a fire until it died. But wait, there’s more: finally, they would take its ashes and make bread from them—and then use that as their sacrament of communion.

Guibert says that after authorities uncovered the sect, two of its leaders were confronted publicly by the Bishop of Soissons. One underwent the ordeal of water, where a person was thrown into a body of water, with their innocence proven by sinking. Perhaps sadly for this person, they failed it by floating.

The second confessed that he believed forbidden things, but refused to be reconciled to the Church. Both were then imprisoned. Soon after, a lynch mob took both of them from their cells and burned them alive.


Papal Persecutions and “Luciferians”

Accusations like Guibert’s continued to be made against supposed heretics. The thirteenth-century papal bull, Vox in Rama (A Voice in Rama), described a form of the nocturnal ritual fantasy that ultimately had an enormous influence over the later persecutions of other groups, particularly the Knights Templar and so-called witches.

In 1233 Pope Gregory IX issued Vox in Rama in response to reports from the Rhineland regarding a group of heretics labelled the “Luciferians.” These heretics, according to the Pope, gathered together in secret to conduct their rituals; their initiation rites were especially sordid. New members joined the sect at these meetings by first kissing toads, (thought in the Middle Ages to be poisonous), and then later by kissing an emaciated pallid man, who appeared during the rite. After sharing a ritual meal, a cat would appear, which they in turn would kiss on its hindquarters. Only after these escalating kisses, would the heretics engage in an indiscriminate orgy, like that earlier described by Guibert.

Templars and accused witches had similar accusations made against them. In the early fourteenth-century, the Templars were accused of conducting initiation rituals like those described in Vox in Rama, but with an even stronger emphasis on accusations of homosexual intercourse.

At the end of the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern period, the rituals ascribed to witches also followed this template. One of the earliest accounts of witches’ rites comes from the Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1486. The authors of the Malleus, Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, argued that witches gathered together at night to fornicate with demons, the Devil, animals, and each other. They also reportedly killed children and used their body parts to work magic or ate them. Captured witches, when questioned, supposedly claimed that unbaptised babies were best.

Sprenger and Kramer also described how witches performed many other feats, such as flying through the air or apparently stealing men’s penises and storing them in bird’s nests or a handy cabinet (though they stressed that witches couldn’t really steal a man’s penis; witches could only make it look like they had).

Obviously, none of these tales are true. There were no witches. The Templars did not hold ritualistic homosexual orgies. King Philip IV “The Fair” of France destroyed the Templars in order to get access to their vast wealth, which he used to pay his massive debts. Philip understood the power of propaganda, and he regularly used the typology of the nocturnal ritual fantasy against his foreign and domestic enemies, including even Pope Boniface VIII.

Revealingly, no Templars confessed to Philip’s charges unless they had been tortured first. The causes for authorities’ pursuit of supposed witches are more complicated and variable than Philip’s attack upon the Templars. Explanations have ranged from tensions between Protestant and Catholic communities, especially in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Germany where the majority of burnings occurred, to local politics, economics, and other factors. The point remains, however, that historians have continually found that the accusations made against so-called witches were patently false. The accusations against all these groups are part of what might be the oldest pattern of “fake news” that exists.


Jewish Conspiracy Libels

A fictional depiction of the murder of Simon of Trent, which was wrongly blamed on the Jews. It became one of the medieval instances of the blood libel, where Jews were accused of murdering Christian children and using their blood in Jewish rituals. Illustration in Hartmann Schedel’s Weltchronik, 1493.

Medieval Jews were also often accused according to this pattern. One of the libels repeatedly levied against European Jews was that they kidnapped Christian boys and tortured them to death in a twisted re-enactment of Christ’s crucifixion.

These tales began in England with the fabricated story of the kidnap, ritual abuse and murder of the Christian boy William of Norwich, written and elaborated by Thomas of Monmouth between the early 1150s and 1174. In the middle of his imagining of William’s ritual crucifixion, Thomas has the Jews of Norwich pause to remark upon the fact that in the torture and murder of little William they are, finally, just as wicked as Christians expect them to be, saying: “That which they ascribe to us we will inflict on them.” In his write up, Thomas manifested his own negative opinions of Jews by putting them into the very mouths of imaginary Jews he presented as real. This is a circular logic that provides justification for prejudice based upon evidence generated by prejudice.

The belief that Jews tortured Christian children, which has come to be known as the “blood libel”, often featured a sexual component as well. In some versions of the blood libel accusation, kidnapped Christian boys were reportedly circumcised against their wills as depicted in a woodcut of the martyrdom of Simon of Trent in 1475. The Jews supposedly used the blood from this circumcision and other tortures to make the matzos for Passover.

Scholars now read accounts like Guibert’s as entirely delusional. According to medievalists such as R. I. Moore and Mark Gregory Pegg, most accounts of medieval heretics before the early thirteenth century are entirely invented. As Pegg argues most strenuously,

There were no pre-existing heresies in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries until the thinking of Latin Christian intellectuals invented them. The ‘reality’ of heresy that these intellectuals so genuinely feared was actually fabricated by them.

Like the supposed continent-wide conspiracy behind witchcraft, or the secret torture cults of Jews they did not exist. Medieval authors made them up; they imagined them into being.


A Persecuting Society

Medieval authors and authorities created these accounts of heretics as part of their re-organisation of the world into what Moore calls a “persecuting society.” In the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, Western society underwent a permanent change in which “persecution became habitual.” In that period, Moore says:

deliberate and socially sanctioned violence began to be directed through established governmental, judicial and social institutions, against groups of people defined by general characteristics such as race, religion or way of life.

The trope of the nocturnal ritual fantasy played a role in the creation of this persecuting society. By creating an enemy that had to be fought, these authors justified the changes they wanted to make in their world. This legitimated their forceful suppression of other changes to the world that they did not want to see continue.

In Guibert’s case, the people he described did not exist, or at least they did not engage in the lurid behaviour he describes. But those heretics may have been some of the Christian reforming groups—composed of both men and women—like those studied by Herbert Grundmann. These groups were part of a wider movement that included figures who would become pillars of orthodox reform and others who would later be described as infamous heretics.

For example, Norbert of Xanten, founder of the Premonstratensian Canons, began as a poor preacher with both female and male followers, like the “heretics” described by Guibert. When his movement became an official order, his followers, who found official positions in the hierarchy of the Church, abandoned the mixing of the sexes. Much later, Waldes of Lyon, founder of the heretical Waldensians, and Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscans and later a saint, began their careers virtually identical to each other.

Guibert, as an orthodoxically-minded monk, did not approve of the mixing the sexes in the religious life; his account of the heretics’ underground orgies emerged from what he assumed such sexual miscegenation would entail. He described what he, essentially, believed these people must be or would become—not what they were. As he portrayed them, potential Christian reformers became monsters, deserving neither dialogue nor understanding but, instead, only death.


The Bloody Consequence of Conspiracy

Templars burned at the stake. British Library Royal 20 C VII f. 44v. 

Just because the heretics described by men like Guibert did not exist does not mean that real people did not die as a result of these descriptions. They did. Real Templars died for participating in a fake conspiracy. Real women died as supposed witches, and real Jews died as a result of the lies behind the blood libel accusation.

Using the formula of the nocturnal ritual fantasy to describe an enemy du jour justifies violence against that enemy. That Edgar Maddison Welch responded to accounts of Pizzagate with an assault rifle in his hands is no accident; it’s a result consistent with thousands of years of experience. As such, with a little knowledge of history, it’s entirely foreseeable.

The formula of the nocturnal ritual fantasy keeps being used again and again. And it continues to find audiences ready to believe it. For example, before Pizzagate, modern America had a tussle with the nocturnal ritual fantasy in the form of the “satanic panic” of the 1980s and 90s.

During that time, law enforcement and day-time talk shows became concerned with an imaginary ring of secret cults, apparently operating throughout America, whose influence could be seeing everywhere—from the Dungeons and Dragons role playing game to heavy metal music. Geraldo Rivera advised his viewers regarding the warning signs that their children may be drifting towards Satanism.

These cults supposedly meet in secret, among other things, to—you guessed it—engage in the sexual abuse and murder of children. Because of belief in these cults, a string of day-care workers were accused of sexually abusing the children in their care as ritualistic offerings to Satan. Most of the stories of ritual satanic ritual abuse from the 80s and 90s are wildly implausible; under close scrutiny, they have always been proven false. Nonetheless, the nocturnal ritual fantasy hasn’t gone away.


Endlessly Repeated Nocturnal Fantasies

One of the (obviously) photoshopped memes depicting Hillary Clinton as a demon prior to the 2016 election.
In October of 2016, Alex Jones of Infowars called Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama “demons from hell”.

The nocturnal ritual fantasy demonstrates that fake news isn’t new. It’s a tried-and-true strategy of literal demonization that gets used when the basic pillars of a society are being remade. Modern America is undergoing just such a remaking. Its racial, religious, and economic demographics are changing, and women, like Hillary Clinton, are slowly moving into social spaces and positions of power traditionally reserved for men. Likewise, homosexuality is becoming more accepted both socially and in law.

The nocturnal ritual fantasy can serve as a weapon for those threatened by such changes, but it also can serve as a weathervane of sorts or a declaration of intent. Following Hannah Arendt’s thoughts about totalitarian thought, it’s the sort of thing that would need to be true in order to justify what certain right-wing groups would like to do. For us today, it’s an indication of the seething desire to use violence, justified, righteous violence, in response to a changing society. The conclusion to a recent article in Spin Magazine stated that Welch was:

the first gunman to take the warning of the right-wing conspiracy theory complex as literal calls to arms

In our immediate context that might be true. But in a longer historical view, however, the kind of conspiratorial thinking behind proto-Pizzagates have always worked as a call to arms. We need to understand the deep genealogy behind the more extraordinary examples of false information presented as fact that we are currently seeing in our world. If this genealogy is clear to us, it will be easier to identify the directions in which the larger tides of modern violent and persecutory delusion are taking us.

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 22, 2019 10:05:55 GMT -5 joseph said:

Amazing how you repeat the same talking points concerning pizzagate and THE RUSSIANS! as the FBI. israel owns Trump not Russia - who by the way are also owned by Israel. The people I follow are looking into Trump's involvement in sex trafficking and people are having to fake their own deaths because of it and guess what? Israel again.

I cite provable fucking facts. I've been waiting for you to provide citations, dubious or otherwise, for any of your claims since our last conversation on this topic. My 'talking points', right. I'm not the one who 'follows people'. And I cannot say I am at all surprised that the people who you choose to follow, much like Putin, himself, blame the Jews. Try thinking for yourself.

[ekauqodielak]

In “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power,” Merlan immerses herself in various subcultures of suspicion.…One of her first stops is a rally of Pizzagate diehards in Lafayette Park, not far from the White House.…Merlan finds the crowd split into factions, each convinced that the other is made up of plants. She’s interviewing a woman who wants to be known as LaLa when she notices a man filming them with his phone. The man accuses LaLa of belonging to the “controlled opposition.” He, in turn, is approached by other phone-wielding demonstrators and charged with working to undermine the cause.

“You’re protecting child molesters, bro,” someone yells at him. But who’s supposed to be doing the controlling or why is never quite clear. “It seems that the core element from everyone inside this ‘movement’ is distrust for everyone around them,” LaLa relates to Merlan. “Nobody knows who’s on whose side, or what the truth is.”

Merlan encounters this dynamic frequently. People who believe conspiracy theories, it turns out, often suspect others who believe such theories of being crazy, or worse.

--- What’s New About Conspiracy Theories?

[hotman637]

Aug 22, 2019 11:07:44 GMT -5 ekauqodielak said:

In “Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power,” Merlan immerses herself in various subcultures of suspicion.…One of her first stops is a rally of Pizzagate diehards in Lafayette Park, not far from the White House.…Merlan finds the crowd split into factions, each convinced that the other is made up of plants. She’s interviewing a woman who wants to be known as LaLa when she notices a man filming them with his phone. The man accuses LaLa of belonging to the “controlled opposition.” He, in turn, is approached by other phone-wielding demonstrators and charged with working to undermine the cause.

“You’re protecting child molesters, bro,” someone yells at him. But who’s supposed to be doing the controlling or why is never quite clear. “It seems that the core element from everyone inside this ‘movement’ is distrust for everyone around them,” LaLa relates to Merlan. “Nobody knows who’s on whose side, or what the truth is.”

Merlan encounters this dynamic frequently. People who believe conspiracy theories, it turns out, often suspect others who believe such theories of being crazy, or worse.

--- What’s New About Conspiracy Theories?

ALL "conspiracies" and just about everything else can easily be explained!

God is a vain and jealous woman and the Devil is a man and they fight about sex money and kids!

That's it!

[ekauqodielak]

FEC Republicans block efforts to investigate NRA’s financial ties to Russia

It's the latest roadblock in trying to untangle the NRA's links with a sanctioned Russian figure.

Aug 20, 2019, 3:10 pm

Republicans on the FEC declined to investigate whether Russia financed the NRA's political donations in 2016. CREDIT: SOPA Images / GETTY

Late last week, the Federal Election Commission (FEC) deadlocked on whether to pursue an investigation into potential Russian financing of the National Rifle Association (NRA). The split 2-2 vote fell along partisan lines, with the FEC’s two Republicans voting against any further inquiry into whether Alexander Torshin, a sanctioned Russian official, and Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent, grew close to the NRA in order to help direct the group’s 2016 political donations.

FEC Chair Ellen Weintraub castigated her Republican colleagues in an open letter, issued immediately after the vote.

In the letter, Weintraub noted that the NRA not only admitted that it had received previous donations from unidentified Russian nationals, but that the NRA likewise saw a substantial spike in its own political donations in 2016, issuing nearly $35 million more in political donations in 2016 than in the previous presidential election. The NRA admitted that Butina had once paid nearly $570 at a 2015 NRA fundraiser, but said it was unable to locate any donations from Torshin or sanctioned Russian official Dmitry Rogozin, with whom NRA officials also met in Moscow in 2015.

Indeed, Weintraub’s letter was scathing, regarding both her Republicans colleagues’ votes against further investigation, as well as regarding the NRA’s relationship with Torshin and Butina.

As Weintraub wrote:

Some allegations are too serious to ignore. Too serious to simply take Respondents’ denials at face value. Too serious to play games with. Yet in this matter, my colleagues ran their usual evidence-blocking play and the Commission’s attorneys placed too much faith in the few facts Respondents put before us.

As a result, this agency barely lifted a finger to find out the truth behind one of the most blockbuster campaign finance allegations in recent memory….

[The NRA’s] search of its records for foreign contributions in this enforcement context was ludicrously inadequate. Who’s on this list of “known Russian nationals”? We don’t know. Were there any suspicious patterns of transactions that would indicate that contributions were being made in the name of another? We don’t know. The NRA’s effort was hardly more thorough than searching a contributor list for the name “Vladimir Putin” and calling it a day.

View this document on Scribd

Weintraub wasn’t the only one to condemn the FEC Republicans’ votes. In a statement to ThinkProgress, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) slammed FEC Republicans.

“A foreign adversary interfered in the 2016 presidential election and the response from Republicans at every level, whether it be President [Donald] Trump, congressional Republicans, or now the Republican appointees on the Federal Election Commission, has been to bury their heads in the sand or actively obstruct getting to the bottom of what happened,” Wyden said.

It’s unclear what next steps may remain to uncover ties between Russia and the NRA. The gun-rights group has imploded over the past few months, with unprecedented infighting spilling into the public. Six NRA board members have already resigned this year, and multiple attorneys general have opened formal inquiries into the group’s internal financing.

Regardless of the FEC vote, it’s clear that the group’s proximity to Torshin and Butina in the lead-up to the 2016 election was, to say the least, inadvisable. As a series of internal FBI analyses, released just earlier this month, indicate, Torshin — who had previously been linked to a massive Spanish money laundering operation — was considered by the FBI a “mobster” who was well-known for his ties to “Russian Organized Crime… and the Russian government.”

[ekauqodielak]

Aug 22, 2019 11:40:59 GMT -5 hotman637 said:

ALL "conspiracies" and just about everything else can easily be explained!

God is a vain and jealous woman and the Devil is a man and they fight about sex money and kids!

That's it!

[ekauqodielak]

Federal funding needed to thwart attacks on 2020 elections, state officials say

"It's time we put some dollars behind what’s happening," said Connecticut's secretary of state.

Aug 16, 2019, 8:01 am

Voters in New York City cast their ballots during the 2018 midterm elections CREDIT: Atilgan Ozdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

State election officials are sounding what is becoming an increasingly dire warning about the integrity of the voting process heading into the 2020 election, pleading for federal funds to help secure next year’s balloting against cyberattacks.

At a public forum on Thursday, the top election officials from Connecticut and Louisiana said underfunded election systems in their states are vulnerable to hacking from outside agents who might want to create mischief, or even seek to change the outcome of the vote.

“We all have the same expectation, which is a secure environment for our elections, and that every vote is accurately counted and everybody gets to participate who wishes to participate,” Kyle Ardoin, Louisiana’s secretary of state, said at a forum hosted by the Election Assistance Commission.

State officials, Ardoin said are “constantly asking for additional resources to fend off cybersecurity issues, to update equipment, and to do what is necessary to secure our elections and offer our people the right to vote.”

Denise Merrill, the secretary of state for Connecticut, underscored the threat to elections there, pleading for additional federal funding to secure the vote.

“This is one of the fundamental operations of government. You’re not going to privatize elections, and so it’s time we put some dollars behind what’s happening,” Merrill told the forum sponsored by the commission, an independent agency of the United States government, which serves as a national clearinghouse and resource of information on administering elections.

“I do think some funding needs to come from the federal level,” Merrill said.

Their pleas came just two days after President Donald Trump tweeted that he was open to shoring up election security — but only if Congress agreed to put voter ID laws supported by Republicans into place. Such laws historically have been used to block access to the ballot box to people of color, students, and other groups that tend to lean Democratic.

“No debate on Election Security should go forward without first agreeing that Voter ID (Identification) must play a very strong part in any final agreement. Without Voter ID, it is all so meaningless!” Trump tweeted late Tuesday.

There is little debate surrounding the need to prevent hostile foreign countries like Russia from hacking into outdated, paperless ballot boxes during the 2020 election. Such attacks occurred during the 2016 election and it will happen again in 2020, according to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation and the country’s entire intelligence apparatus.

Although election security continues to be the focus of concern by some officials on both sides of the aisle in the aftermath of efforts by Russia to hack into U.S. voting systems, steps taken to try to fix the problem have been modest, at best.

On Thursday, a federal judge, citing security concerns, ordered election officials in Abrams’ home state to stop using paperless touch screen voting machines ahead of the 2020 election. In her 153-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg said that hand-marked paper ballots must be used if a new system isn’t in place by next year’s presidential primaries.

Election integrity advocates had argued in a 2017 lawsuit that paperless touch screen voting machines in use since 2002 were vulnerable to hacking and could not be audited.

Meanwhile, Democrats are also concerned about the effects of gerrymandering and other efforts to discourage voter participation — moves that disproportionately impact their voters.

The same day that Trump tweeted his refusal to shore election security unless officials clamp down harder on voter ID laws, former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams announced she was launching Fair Fight 2020, an initiative to help enfranchise voters in a number of key swing states.

Even helping shore up voting systems from hacking can’t protect the ballot from intentional manipulation of the vote, with Republicans doubling down on gerrymandering and other untoward actions that have helped them eke out wins in close elections.

Democrats like Abrams say they believe that, by allowing as many eligible voters to cast a ballot as possible, they will win elections. Republicans, meanwhile, have been imposing burdensome laws and regulations that are designed to stop likely Democratic voters, including college students and African and Latinx Americans, from casting ballots.

It would cost an estimated $900 million to replace electronic voter machines throughout the country and protect America’s elections from online attacks. Russia, which meddled in the 2016 election to swing the results in Trump’s favor, targeted election systems in all 50 states during the 2016 election, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report.

However, Trump has indicated that he would be willing to accept help from foreign adversaries to win the 2020 presidential election and last month Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked an election security bill that would have helped stop the hacking threat.

A number of reports and studies have confirmed that documented cases of voter fraud are astronomically rare. A Washington Post investigation found that out of over 1 billion ballots cast, there were only 31 credible cases of impersonation fraud between 2000 and 2014.

Republicans who insist that voter fraud, rather than election security, is the real issue go to great lengths to prove it, such as establishing a dubious and now disbanded voter fraud commission. That is because voter fraud is their excuse for imposing their voter suppression laws that place barriers on likely Democratic voters.

A number of Republican-controlled states began imposing voter ID laws in 2012 based on model legislation crafted by a secretive and powerful far-right organization, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Those laws disproportionately disenfranchise voters from minority communities, studies have shown.

A federal judge for instance struck down North Carolina’s voter ID law in 2016 after it was proven that state lawmakers requested racial voting data when crafting its legislation. African Americans disproportionately lacked the type of photo ID that North Carolina’s law required, Department of Motor Vehicles data showed.

North Dakota also imposed voter ID laws after former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp’s (D-ND) election upset in 2012. The state’s law required voters to present IDs with a residential mailing address when voting. Because many tribal members do not have a formal mailing addresses on reservations and instead rely on P.O. boxes, the law effectively stripped many Native Americans of their voting rights.

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US justice department news email links to white nationalist website

Email sent to immigration judges links to virulently anti-immigrant site full of antisemitic references

Julia Carrie Wong • Last modified on Thu 22 Aug 2019 20.38 EDT

Activists hold protest signs during a rally against the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Photograph: Kevin Hagen/AP

The US Department of Justice distributed a morning news briefing to immigration judges that contained a link to a white nationalist website riddled with antisemitic references.

As first identified in a report by BuzzFeed News, the executive office for immigration review (EOIR), a division of the justice department, included a link to a blogpost on the website VDare in the briefing, which was emailed to immigration court employees earlier this week.

VDare is a virulently anti-immigrant website that promotes white nationalism, white supremacy and antisemitism.

The blogpost was about an effort to dissolve the National Association of Immigration Judges, a union representing employees of the immigration courts. The post refers to the New York Times as “lugenpresse”, a German term meaning “lying press” that was adopted by the Nazis to stigmatize Jews, communists, and critics of Adolf Hitler. In recent years the slur has regained popularity within the far-right and among white nationalists. The blogpost also uses the word “kritarch” to refer to judges, a reference to a system of governance involving rule by judges in ancient Israeli history and an apparent invocation of antisemitism.

“VDare’s use of the term in a pejorative manner casts Jewish history in a negative light as an Anti-Semitic trope of Jews seeking power and control,” Ashley Tabaddor, the union president, wrote in a letter to the EOIR about the incident, according to BuzzFeed News. “Publication and dissemination of a white supremacist, anti-semitic website throughout the EOIR is antithetical to the goals and ideals of the Department of Justice.”

“The daily EOIR morning news briefings are compiled by a contractor and the blog post should not have been included,” said Kathryn Mattingly, an assistant press secretary for the Executive Office for Immigration Review, in a statement to the Guardian. “The Department of Justice condemns Anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.”

Mattingly did not immediately respond to questions about the contractor, whether the DOJ will launch an investigation or whether anyone will be disciplined.

VDare was founded by Peter Brimelow, a British immigrant to the US, and is named after Virginia Dare, who is supposed to be the first English child born in the Americas. The Southern Poverty Law Center describes it as an “an anti-immigration hate website”.

The newsletter was sent in a week in which Donald Trump twice accused Jewish Americans of “disloyalty” if they vote for Democrats. “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty,” he said on Tuesday.

Despite immediate criticism of the blatant antisemitism of the statement, which both invoked the bigoted trope of “dual loyalty” and assumed that Jewish Americans do and should vote solely based on US policy toward Israel, Trump repeated the comments on Wednesday.

“If you vote for a Democrat, you’re being disloyal to Jewish people and you’re being very disloyal to Israel,” he said.

According to the Pew Research Center, 79% of Jewish voters supported Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterm election. According to 2018 Election Day polling by J Street, a progressive Jewish American lobbying group, the top two voting issues for Jews in 2018 were healthcare and gun violence. Just 4% of American Jewish voters selected Israel as one of their top two voting issues.

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70 US Mayors Issue Scathing Letter Demanding Trump USDA Call Off Effort to Strip Food Stamps From 3 Million People

"Executive action should not be used to hurt individuals, families, and communities."

Jessica Corbett, staff writer



In a letter Wednesday to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, mayors from 70 cities across the country expressed their "strong opposition" to the Trump administration's proposed federal rule that could cut off food stamps for more than 3 million people.

USDA Secretary Sonny Purdue announced the rule, which would end automatic Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligibility for those who receive other federal and state aid, last month. Critics swiftly condemned the proposal as an "unconscionable" attack on low-income Americans that would increase hunger among the most vulnerable.

Written on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM) the new letter (pdf) describes SNAP as "one of our nation's key resources in the fight against hunger and... particularly important to vulnerable populations in our cities."

The letter highlights the proposal's anticipated consequences that have dozens of mayors so concerned:

As noted in the proposal's regulatory analysis, this far reaching executive action will escalate food insecurity and hunger for an estimated 3.1 million individuals—including children, seniors, and people with disabilities in our states, regions, and cities nationwide. Furthermore, this proposal will put children's health and development at risk by removing their access to healthy school meals; and harm our economy by reducing the amount of SNAP dollars available to spur regional and local economic activity.

As mayors, we serve as the CEOs of the nation's cities; and remain most concerned about any proposal that will reduce improvements to the health of our residents, weaken nutrition programs, deteriorate advances to healthy food access, and spur declines in local and regional economies.

The mayors emphasize research that has shown that SNAP has lifted millions of people out of poverty, improved health and education outcomes, and boosted local economies.

"Executive action should not be used to hurt individuals, families, and communities; and we urge you to abandon this proposal," the letter concludes. "Our nation cannot remain globally competitive if our children do not have enough to eat; if our citizens do not have access to affordable healthcare; if housing and other basic needs are priced out of reach; and if adults who are willing and able to work cannot find jobs that will help them support their families."

The mayors who signed on to the letter include Mayors Bill de Blasio of New York City; Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles; Jim Kenney of Philadelphia; Martin Walsh of Boston; Muriel Bowser of Washington, D.C.; Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana; and Sylvester Turner of Houston. Buttigieg and de Blasio are also candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary.

Mayor Steve Adler of Austin, Texas also signed the letter. He told Axios, "I am opposed to any action by the White House to take away nutrition assistance from millions of our most vulnerable—including children, the disabled, and seniors—and that is exactly what this proposal to limit SNAP has the potential to do."

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If a Child Is Jailed and No One Is There to Hear Him Cry

New Trump-administration rules stand to block the public from knowing
anything about the treatment of migrant children in America’s detention facilities.

Barbara Bradley Hagerty for The Atlantic

For months at a time, the detention of migrant children seems to fall off the national radar, somehow fading to the background, behind the daily dramas of scandals big and small. And then suddenly, news will erupt: The children don’t have soap. They are freezing. The food is rotten.

Where this information comes from is not primarily from journalists but monitors—lawyers and advocates who regularly visit the nation’s detention facilities and border-patrol facilities to document the conditions. They do so not because these sites request the monitoring, but because that monitoring is allowed by what’s known as the Flores settlement, 22-year-old consent decree that governs the care of migrant children in custody.

But with new rules that the Trump administration is expected to publish this week, even that single, infrequent geyser of information could go away. As part of a sweeping proposal to scrap the Flores regulations—including a change that would enable the Trump administration to detain migrant children in secure facilities indefinitely—the administration will lose the existing monitoring requirements entirely, according to two lawyers familiar with this area of law. The result will be that the long-term detention of migrant children would carry on out of view from advocates, the American public at large, and the entire world.

For example, the uproar over the Border Patrol facility in Clint, Texas, this past June came after Flores monitors visited the facility and described conditions there to journalists and the public. “We saw a large number of children who were ill and not being cared for,” recalls Warren Binford, a law professor at Willamette University College of Law and one of the official monitors. They reported outbreaks of scabies, shingles, and chicken pox. The children were filthy, lacking soap to bathe. With no adults to help, children were changing the diapers of babies. They received no exercise; they ate processed food three meals a day: oatmeal for breakfast, instant soup for lunch, frozen burritos for dinner. If the new rules are approved by a judge, Binford says, “we’ll never be able to go back in there and have eyes on these children. We won't be able to sit down and interview these children and find out whether or not they're being well cared for.”

Also part of the proposed changes will be the ability to detain children for longer stretches of time. Under the Flores consent decree as it is now, which has been overseen by a federal court since 1997, the government is not allowed to detain children under 18 for more than 20 days. This provision has bothered President Donald Trump. He has called it a “catch-and-release” loophole that allows migrants to enter the U.S. illegally, and he has been urging the Department of Homeland Security to replace Flores with a new rule for more than a year. “We’re being very strong on the border,” Mr. Trump told reporters Wednesday morning. “You see the numbers are way, way down.”

The administration has “no intent” to hold families for a long period of time, acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan said yesterday. But he said, “no child should be a pawn in a scheme to manipulate our immigration system,” and that abandoning Flores “plays a vital role in the strategy to restore the integrity to our immigration system and our national security.” In other words, in the administration’s view, the changes will make it impossible for people to rely on Flores to get their children into the country after a limited amount of time in a facility.

By law, any presidential administration has the power to develop regulations for the care and custody of children who cross the border, says Binford. But what worries Binford is that the task now falls to the Trump administration, which has an unparalleled record of mistreating children. “It leaves these children vulnerable to the abuse of this particular Administration, which we know can't be entrusted with children because they've already abused neglected children on a wide scale, to the point that children literally have been dying in their care.”

Yet, even without making the changes, the administration has failed to abide by Flores’s provisions, and has detained hundreds of children for weeks or months, as part of its effort to deter migrants from even attempting to cross the border. In fact, Binford and others say, the administration has disregarded Flores from the start, as epitomized in the zero-tolerance policy that separated children as young as four months old from their parents at the border and held them for months. That policy officially ended in June 2018, after a federal judge issued an injunction and ordered the government to reunite the families, although the ACLU has found that nearly 1,000 children have been detained apart from their parents since then, some being held long beyond Flores’s 20-day limit.

President Trump insisted that the new rule will improve conditions for migrants by attempting to keep families together in facilities. Currently there are three ICE facilities that can accommodate families, although one has been designated for single adults. Lee Gelernt, who heads the national Immigrants’ Rights Project at the ACLU, says the administration’s proposed regulations are “horrendous.” “The medical community has made clear that long-term detention of children, just like separating them from their parents, will cause serious if not irreparable harm.”

It’s far too early to know the long-term effects of throwing a child into a facility for weeks or months at a time. But psychologists and advocates already hear stories of trauma; I’ve been told of children who cut themselves, who cry when their parents leave the room, or refuse to board the school bus, fearful that their parents will be deported while they’re gone, children who won’t sleep with light off, and when they do, dream about being put in a cage called “the icebox.”

Abner, whose last name is being withheld to protect his privacy, was 10 years old when he fled Guatemala with his father. He told me his memories of those five months, separated from his family, continue to visit his dreams. In one, he is snatched from his father’s side. In another, “I was left in a kind of jail, very alone, I got very sad, and they told me my dad had been deported.” In a third, a strange woman fwants to adopt him. "I didn’t want to be adopted. I didn’t want to be with a family that wasn’t my own." All three events actually happened.

President Trump says the situation distresses him: “Let me just tell you,” he said yesterday, “very much I have the children on my mind. It bothers me very greatly.” And yet, the end-game for the president is slowing the flow of migrants, and he says his new rule will achieve that. “When they see you can’t get into the United States, or when they see if they do get into the United States, they will be brought back to their country… they won’t come.”

That’s an “absurd” prediction, according to Binford. Detention in a U.S. facility pales compared to what many migrants face back home. Binford recalls one young man telling her that he fled his country after a gang decapitated his best friend in front of him. The teenager is willing to wait years if necessary in a U.S. detention facility—“anywhere but back where they're going to decapitate him too.” Another man from El Salvador told me that even if he had known his children would be taken from him and detained for several months, he would have made the same decision. “The truth is, I would have still risked coming with them. It would have been much worse to have gangs murder my children than separate them from me.”

Under the terms of the Flores consent decree, the federal judge overseeing the decree—Judge Dolly Gee of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California—must approve the new rule. Immigration lawyers have a week to challenge it in court, and will be drafting a response to what they’ve already called a cruel effort to imprison, out of the public’s view, desperate people seeking refuge from violence and corruption.