Democracy gone Astray: Monday, August 06, 2018

Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.

This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Monday, August 06, 2018

‘Don’t try me buddy!’: Unarmed Ohio man told cops he was suicidal and being chased by witches — they shot and killed him

A Cleveland businessman killed by police after he crashed his car and attacked the Good Samaritans who tried to help him had called 911 to say he was suicidal and being chased by witches, The Plain Dealer reports.

Brett Luengo, 33, was shot and killed after he crashed his car on Interstate 90 and then attacked the people who stopped to help him. A Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s deputy showed up and shot him in the chest, killing him.

Vladimir Putin has accused the British of blaming “all their mortal sins” on Russia, saying undue accusations have been placed at Moscow’s door for everything from Brexit to the Skripal poisoning and the downing of MH17.

The Russian president dismissed suggestions that Russian hackers had been interfering in state affairs, claiming this was “not in line with our policy”.

On May 14, during protests near the border fence with Gaza, Israeli military forces killed at least 60 Palestinians and wounded more than 1,000 others. No Israeli soldiers were injured or killed.

What is happening in Gaza is a humanitarian crisis. Israel and the United States are on the wrong side of history.

My parents and their extended family lived in Warsaw, Poland, during World War II. In 1939, the Nazis began to force Poland’s more than three million Jews into crowded ghettos. They were among the 400,000 people packed into a small walled-off area of Warsaw guarded by soldiers and surrounded by barbed wire.

Italy’s President Sergio Mattarella approved the country’s far-right and anti-establishment parties’ nominee for prime minister on Wednesday, putting the nation on track to have one of the most populist and radical administrations in all of Europe.

The far-right Lega and anti-establishment Five Star parties chose law professor Giuseppe Conte as their consensus pick for Italy’s next prime minister, despite his lack of governing experience. Mattarella giving Conte a mandate to form Italy’s next government clears one of the final hurdles for the two parties before they can begin to run the country.

A Kansas police department is facing allegations of racism after a black man used his cellphone to record two white officers yanking him out of a vehicle after seeing “vegetation” on his window.

Rudy Samuel, 31, live-streamed the encounter on Facebook earlier this month after Winfield police stopped his car. Winfield is a small city situated along the Walnut River in Cowley County, Kansas.

“If you want to see a video of racial profiling, this is the poster child right here,” Kansas City attorney Brian McCallister, who is not representing anyone in the case, told HuffPost on Monday. “It was an abuse of power because they had no reason to use that kind of force.”

Over the objections of chemical weapons inspectors, who are still at work in Syria trying to determine if gas was used to kill dozens of civilians in the former rebel stronghold of Douma on April 7, Russia flew 17 Syrians from the war zone to The Hague, Netherlands, on Thursday, where they all testified that they had seen no sign of a chemical attack.

On Tuesday, police arrested the man they believe is one of the most notorious serial rapists and murderers in American history. The news came, astonishingly, thanks to some unidentified person who was likely just intrigued about genealogy and ethnicity. The Sacramento District Attorney's office has attributed the capture of suspected Golden State Killer, ex-cop Joseph James DeAngelo, to "genealogical websites that contained genetic information from a relative." Which, if you've ever spit into a tube and dropped it in the mail, has got to make you wonder.

The ability to transform yourself – and the cultural expectation that we should – has changed the way we think about authenticity. Today, celebrities are often valued less for their “natural beauty” and more for working on their appearance in transformative ways. Women admire the famous for their ability to style themselves, while countless articles are published every day about their weight loss.

On one level, this is a democratisation of attractiveness – if we learn the techniques we can all do it. But it also makes femininity a highly crafted performance.

Kanye West dropped by TMZ on Tuesday to tell the newsroom staff that he loves President Donald Trump and that he believes slavery “sounds like a choice,” only to get completely shut down by writer Van Lathan.

“When you hear about slavery for 400 years ... for 400 years? That sounds like a choice,” West said.

A Kentucky police officer is under investigation for rape charges, according to WLKY News.

Officer John Nissen was indicted for theft, tampering with a witness and misconduct.

As Israel prepares to celebrate its 70th anniversary later this month, the country continues to face a number of existential crises — and internal threats stemming from the tenure of its current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In his aptly timed new memoir, "My Country, My Life," former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak describes Netanyahu's administration as "the most right-wing, deliberately divisive, narrow-minded, and messianic... we have seen in our seven-decade history."

North Korea will suspend its nuclear and missile tests, North Korean state media reported Saturday morning local time.

The Korean Central News Agency said that the country was halting nuclear tests and intercontinental ballistic missile launches as of that day, according to The Associated Press. It also plans to close down a nuclear test site in the country’s northern region.

State-sponsored Russian hackers are actively seeking to hijack essential internet hardware, US and UK intelligence agencies say.

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security issued a joint alert warning of a global campaign.

Xi Jinping sends warning to Taiwan, United States with live-fire drills

Chinese President Xi Jinping has sent a clear message of Beijing's disapproval over growing ties between the United States and Taiwan by ordering live-fire drills in the Taiwan Strait.

The drills, to be held this coming Wednesday, will mark the first time the Chinese Navy has held drills with live ammunition in the strait since, in the lead-up to the self-ruled island's presidential election.

Prior to those elections, relations between the two were at a high point after Xi met with then-President Ma Ying-jeou, the first such meeting in history between leaders of the two governments.

Russian state-owned television is urging the country’s residents to stock their bunkers with water and basic foodstuffs because Moscow could go to war with Washington.

Warning that the potential conflict between the two superpowers would be “catastrophic,” an anchor for Russia’s Vesti 24 showed off shelves of food, recommending that people buy salt, oatmeal and other products that can last a long time on the shelves. Powdered milk lasts five years while sugar and rice can last up to eight years, the newscaster explained before showing videos of pasta cooking in a bomb shelter.

Remember "peak oil"? Don't worry about it. Nobody else does either. But last night on social media, Alberta appeared to be approaching "peak oil hysteria." Peak oil pipeline hysteria, anyway. I expect we'll get there today.

The proximate cause of this unusual Sunday uproar was Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd.'s skillfully timed news release saying that if Canada can't quickly come up with a way to silence political opposition to the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project in British Columbia, it'll pull the plug on the plan by the end of next month.

Strategic Communications Laboratories, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, previously boasted on its website on it how re-branded Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte into a “strong, no-nonsense man of action” during the country’s 2016 election.

In an archived version of its website, first obtained by the South China Morning Post, SCL talks about how it helped fashion Duterte into an election-winning candidate. The brief doesn’t refer to the candidate by name, but it does point to the former mayor of Davao City — Duterte’s previous role.

BUDAPEST — Call it electioneering, Viktor Orbán style.

In the weeks ahead of Hungary’s parliamentary election on Sunday, postboxes across the country delivered some welcome news — courtesy of the prime minister. One letter informed households that due to a one-time action by the government, their next gas bill would be reduced by roughly €38. Another, delivered to each of the country’s more than 2 million pensioners, contained about €32 in gift vouchers.

An Israeli private intelligence firm was hired last year to conduct a smear campaign against Obama administration officials, as part of an effort to discredit the Iran nuclear deal, according to leaked documents obtained by the New Yorker and London’s Observer newspaper.

The contours of the campaign, in which spies posed as representatives of fictional firms and requested meetings to discuss financial opportunities, appeared to closely match those of a similar effort carried out by operatives of an Israeli firm this year to smear critics of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the far-right populist who is an ally of both President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

Four Yale University police officers were called to a graduate student dorm in downtown New Haven on Monday after one resident deemed another’s nap a situation worthy of dialing 911.

Lolade Siyonbola, the sleep offender, captured her uncomfortable ensuing interactions with the officers on video. Officers struggle to verify her Yale identification card, reportedly because their own security list misspelled the first-year African Studies graduate student’s name. She repeatedly points out that officers have seen her use her keys to unlock her dorm room, and tells them she feels harassed by their ongoing scrutiny of her right to be in the building where she pays to live.

A North Carolina police officer put a black man wearing a tuxedo into a chokehold — and then slammed him to the ground — during a violent Waffle House arrest.

Police were called to the Warsaw restaurant Saturday after 22-year-old Anthony Wall got into an argument with some of the servers, reported WTVD-TV.

Michael Hayden really, really doesn’t like it when people talk about the Deep State.

Well, of course! is what you’re probably thinking. Hayden is a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a former director of the National Security Agency, and a former deputy director of national intelligence. If anybody embodies what President Trump, numerous right-wing Trump acolytes, and all too many progressives refer to as the Deep State, it would be Hayden. But in his just-released book, The Assault on Intelligence, Hayden patiently—and, at times, not so patiently—makes the case for why the Deep State, well, doesn’t exist.

Currently, there are three important issues on which there is scientific consensus but controversy among laypeople: climate change, biological evolution and childhood vaccination. On all three issues, prominent members of the Trump administration, including the president, have lined up against the conclusions of research.

This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.

An elderly African-American woman is the latest person of color to receive unduly harsh treatment at the hands of local law enforcement, during a traffic arrest that local police in Georgia admitted raised “major concerns.”

Video that has gone viral in recent days shows 65-year-old grandmother Rose Campbell being pulled over by police in Alpharetta City, Georgia for failing to stay in her lane while driving on a local road on May 4.

SEATTLE ― The 9:30 a.m. meeting of the Seattle City Council’s Finance and Neighborhoods Committee ― the most boring name imaginable ― was overflowing. People in the crowd held up signs: “Don’t vote our jobs away” or “Tax the rich.”

The committee was taking public comment on the proposed Progressive Tax on Business, a fee on Seattle’s largest corporations to support homeless services. Last week, Amazon — the employer of more than 45,000 Seattleites that is on the hook for an estimated $20 million under the tax — announced it was pausing construction planning on a tower downtown and would consider renting some of its office space to other companies if the fee goes through.

Israel celebrates a double anniversary on May 15 this year, the founding of the state and the formal establishment of the Israeli Defense Forces, the name the state gave to its combined army, navy, and air force. Armed statehood fulfilled the political Zionists’ dream of gathering Jews from the ancient Diaspora under their own government in what they declared to be their “promised land.” During the battle over the land between 1947 and 1949, the IDF expelled three-quarters of the indigenous population. Of the 750,000 Palestinian Arabs who fled, 250,000 took shelter in Gaza, a tiny pocket of southwest Palestine then occupied by the Egyptian army. The destitute and traumatized refugees were three times more numerous than the 80,000 Gazans who took them in.

A white Wisconsin police officer repeatedly punched a 17-year-old Black teenager in the face, while a mall security officer restrained the teenager, according to cellphone video filmed by a bystander.

The incident took place Friday afternoon in the Mayfair Mall parking lot in Wauwatosa, a Milwaukee suburb. After the teen fell to the ground, the mall security officer and the police officer tried to hold the teenagers’ arms behind his back. The teenager asks for someone to call his mom, and the cop punches him in the back and the face again.

Lawyers representing a Russian company indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for supporting meddling in the 2016 US elections accused the US of hypocrisy in a Monday court filing.

Concord Management and Consulting LLC is one of the Russian companies indicted by Mueller on February 16 and accused of being used by its owner, Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, to fund the Internet Research Agency, the Russian “troll farm” that Mueller has accused of having “a strategic goal to sow discord in the US political system.” The IRA’s tactics included posting derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, boosting Donald Trump, and staging political rallies focused on politically-divisive issues like gun control and police violence. Mueller says the group violated the law by failing to register as foreign agents carrying out political activities within the US, and by obtaining visas through false and fraudulent statements.

“Oh, heavens no,” says John Kiriakou, host of Sputnik Radio’s Loud and Clear. I’ve just asked him whether he believes Russian-sponsored news outlets, like the one he works for, are trying to destabilize American democracy. “No, that’s ridiculous,” he says.

Back in 2013, when Kiriakou’s life was spinning out of control, a New Yorker profile described him as someone with “the exuberance of a Labrador retriever.” Five years later—after two spent in prison—the description still stands.

One of the key targets of the “Great March of Return” protests in Gaza, which began six weeks ago and culminated Tuesday, is Israel’s brutal, decade-long blockade of the small territory, which is about the size of Detroit. The siege has caused Gaza’s economy to shrink by one-half, and the United Nations has warned that it will soon render Gaza literally “uninhabitable.”

The barrier enclosing the two million Palestinians “living” in the Gaza Strip is not a border between two countries, as the media have insistently called it. It is a wall erected by Israel to make the suffering of those living inside the Gaza ghetto as invisible as possible to those living outside it.

Israel has told Gazans that anyone attempting to breach this wall and escape from Gaza will be shot. Anyone approaching it will be shot. And that is precisely what has happened over the weeks of protests by Palestinian refugees seeking to highlight their seventy-year exile from land they can see just beyond the wall. Scores of Palestinians have been killed, including journalists and children. Thousands more have been injured by live fire, with many losing legs and arms to amputations. Alongside this, there has been a report of one Israeli soldier hurt by a stone.

China’s air force has landed bombers on islands and reefs in the South China Sea as part of a training exercise in the disputed region, it said in a statement.

Several bombers of various types – including the long-range, nuclear strike-capable H-6K – carried out landing and take off drills at an unidentified island airfield after carrying out simulated strike training on targets at sea, the Chinese airforce said.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince appears to have a problem. The New York Times reported Saturday that Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, arranged and attended an August 3, 2016 Trump Tower meeting where George Nader, an adviser to the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates, told Donald Trump Jr. that UAE and Saudi Arabia were eager to help his father win the election.

In the fall of 2012, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, it became clear that my family and I were being followed. I had been in Moscow as ambassador then for less than a year. As I wrote to the head of our security team on October 7, “My guards informed me that I was followed today while attending my son’s soccer game. And they then kept with us as we went to McDonald’s.” My head of security replied that if we saw them, it was because they wanted us to see them.

Democracy gone Astray