Democracy gone Astray: Wednesday, August 08, 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.]

Wednesday, August 08, 2018

Meet the favorite philosophers of young white supremacists

As Donald Trump basked in his presidential election victory in 2016, white supremacist Richard Spencer unleashed a round of Nazi-inspired praise for Trump’s victory — sentiments echoed by Alexander Dugin, a Russian neo-fascist whose writings reached a broader English-speaking audience thanks to Spencer and his wife, Nina Kouprianova.

These three, writes University of Toronto political science professor Ronald Beiner, all trace their fascistic views back to a pair of German philosophers: Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, both of whom played outsized roles in either inspiring or participating in Hitler’s Nazi party.

It’s been quite a week for AT&T. One of the largest providers of wireless, internet, and cable TV in America, it closed an $85.4 billion deal last Thursday to acquire Time Warner, one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world, after a federal court blessed the merger over the Justice Department’s objections. Judge Richard Leon, of the U.S. District Court for D.C., had rejected the government’s argument that AT&T would lessen competition by leveraging Time Warner’s “must-have” television content to drive rival customers to its products.

In the early years, when he was still a secessionist who believed northern Italy should break off and become an independent state called Padania, Matteo Salvini held his fellow countrymen in such contempt that he even supported Germany over Italy in the 2006 World Cup.

“Italy ... is the worst of the worst,” he said at the time. “My support goes to anyone who is more serious.”

Venezuelan security forces have carried out hundreds of arbitrary killings under the guise of fighting crime, the UN's human rights body says.

In a report, it cites "shocking" accounts of young men being killed during operations, often in poor districts, over the past three years.

The lobbyist for a sanctioned Russian oligarch visited Julian Assange, the Wikileaks head currently holed up in London’s Ecuadorian embassy, numerous times last year.

But no one knows why.

The Guardian reported Wednesday that visitor logs at the Ecuadorian embassy show that Adam Waldman, the longtime lobbyist for sanctioned Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, stopped by to visit Assange a total of nine times last year, more than nearly anyone else.

It has become part of a macabre ritual. Each week, thousands of Palestinians stride towards the fence surrounding the small swath of land in which they have been imprisoned for years, as Israeli snipers pick their victims and shoot.

Since March 30, 132 Palestinians have been killed and over 13,000 have been injured as they have courageously protested the effects of Israel's ongoing military siege on Gaza.

Russia appears to have upgraded a nuclear weapons storage bunker in its Kaliningrad enclave, in the latest sign of Moscow’s increased emphasis on nuclear arms in its standoff with Nato, according to a new report.

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) has published satellite images which the group says show a storage facility in the Baltic coast enclave between Poland and Lithuania being deepened and then covered with a new concrete roof in recent months.

England football fan Di Cunningham was a little apprehensive about travelling to Russia for World Cup 2018.

There have been concerns among rights groups over the rise in homophobia and the safety of homosexual fans in the socially conservative European nation.

Homosexuality, which was classified as a mental illness in Russia until 1999, is a controversial issue in a nation which does not recognise same-sex marriages.

Half a million soccer fans will head to Russia to watch their national teams compete in the FIFA World Cup. Billions more around the world will watch on television. Brazil and Germany are favorites to win the trophy.

But we already know one person who will emerge as a winner: Vladimir Putin.

No one is expecting the Russian team to do very well in the tournament. FIFA’s offical rankings place Russia 70th in the world – the team’s worst ever rating, and a precipitous fall from the 24th place it enjoyed as recently as 2015. Soccer is nevertheless a popular spectator sport in Russia, where sport and nationalism are closely intertwined.

JERUSALEM — Recording or taking unauthorized pictures of Israeli soldiers clashing with Palestinians could soon bring criminal charges and penalties, if legislation proposed by members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish coalition is enacted into law.

On Sunday, the Israeli government endorsed the proposal, which seeks to criminalize the filming and/or distribution of images and video footage showing certain Israeli military operations — if the aim is “hurting a soldier’s spirit” or “harming national security.” A conviction for such crimes could carry prison terms of five to 10 years.

Police in Minneapolis asked medical responders to inject people with ketamine, a powerful sedative, even if they were already restrained in handcuffs or strapped to a gurney, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

The newspaper, which obtained a copy of the city’s civil rights review on the practice, wrote on Friday that police pressured EMS to inject victims as they begged them not to. In some cases, the drug caused the victim’s hearts or breathing to stop, requiring intubation or other medical treatment to revive them.

The football World Cup is about to envelope us like a giant sporting burqa, shutting out from sight much else that will take place over the next 30 days. (Donald Trump was no fool to cavort with Kim Jong Un well before June 14.)

Thirty-two teams, comprising 736 men, will play 64 games in 11 Russian cities. But do we really need so much football?

The modern World Cup is a bloated affair, with diplomatic correctness dictating that spots be given to the historically underrepresented nations of Asia, Africa and the non-Latin Western hemisphere. More teams mean more games, which also mean more flabby games between mediocre teams. So even as we salivate at the prospect of Portugal vs. Spain, we brace ourselves for Panama vs. Tunisia.

OTTAWA — Progress on the government's cannabis legalization bill and all other work in the House of Commons was put on hold until next week, thanks to a Conservative filibuster that forced an all-night voting session Friday.

The Conservatives forced the marathon of votes as a procedural stalling tactic to draw attention to their calls for the Trudeau government to disclose how much its carbon pricing plan will cost Canadians.

The World Cup started this week. Potentially thousands of fans and athletes who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer have arrived in Russia. As a gay woman and activist, I’m worried sick about what might happen.

I left the Soviet Union 29 years ago because of its discrimination against Jews. Ten years ago, I founded RUSA LGBT, a network for Russian-speaking LGBTIQ immigrants living in the US. I work all the time with people whose lives have been threatened because of their sexual orientation. So despite FIFA’s promise that they stand against “non-discrimination, gender equality and racism,” I’m very concerned that the World Cup-governing organization has failed to explicitly call for protection of LGBTIQ attending the World Cup. As if this wasn’t bad enough, FIFA awarded the following World Cup to Qatar, where homosexuality is prohibited by law.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and former Theranos president and COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani were indicted Thursday on two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and nine counts of wire fraud, according to a Department of Justice (DOJ) release Friday.

Minutes before the DOJ announcement after the indictment was unsealed Friday, Holmes stepped down as CEO of Theranos, less than three years after reporting from The Wall Street Journal exposed the company as a fraud.

Vladimir Putin exulted in Zurich during a news conference organized after officials from FIFA, soccer’s international governing body, had announced his country had won the bid to host the World Cup in 2018. It was December 2010.

Though the highly anticipated vote had been trailed by accusations of corruption, the high-profile arrests of the organization’s officials in predawn raids which cast a harsh light on the unsavory side of international soccer was still five years in the future.

French border police have been accused of detaining migrant children as young as 12 in cells without food or water, cutting the soles off their shoes and stealing sim cards from their mobile phones, before illegally sending them back to Italy.

A report released on Friday by the charity Oxfam also cites the case of a “very young” Eritrean girl, who was forced to walk back to the Italian border town of Ventimiglia along a road with no pavement while carrying her 40-day-old baby.

A Black man has filed a lawsuit against his former employer, a national solar company, saying he faced racial harassment and that a direct manager built a “White Only” clubhouse inside one of the company’s warehouses.

Teshawn Solomon, 36, says that during his time working in Natomas, California for Utah-based Vivint Solar, he experienced ongoing and persistent incidents of racially-based harassment, according to a lawsuit filed Monday in the California Superior Court based in Sacramento County. Solomon worked for the company for nearly a year before resigning.

Antarctic Ice Sheet Is Melting Way Faster Than Expected, Scientists Warn

The Antarctic ice sheet is melting at a faster rate than at any previously recorded time, according to a comprehensive new study.

The planet’s largest ice sheet is now losing more than 240 billion tons of ice every year ― a threefold increase from less than a decade ago. The melting is happening so fast that it could cause sea levels to rise 6 inches by the end of the century, the study projects.

Researcher Keith Payne has found something surprising: When people flying coach are forced to walk past the pampered first-class flyers in the front of the plane, the likelihood of some sort of air rage incident rises sharply.

In his 2017 book The Broken Ladder, Payne, a social psychologist at the University of North Carolina, argues that humans are hardwired to notice relative differences. When we’re reminded that we’re poorer or less powerful than others, we become less healthy, more angry, and more politically polarized.

Congratulations, you made it! The 2018 World Cup officially kicks off on Thursday evening in Moscow — Thursday morning for those of us in the United States — with a match between Russia and Saudi Arabia.

If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s a quick debrief: The United States failed to qualify, and has nobody to blame but themselves. Brazil and Germany are the favorites, Spain is a mess, Will Smith sang the official song, and both FIFA and Russia have ensured that the spectacle of world-class soccer comes with a heaping side of corruption and systemic oppression.

The War on Drugs Is Working

In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control warned that overdosesinvolving prescription painkillers had reached “epidemic levels.”

That same year, the Office of National Drug Control Policy released a plan to curb prescription drug abuse. It focused on opioids and involved four components: education, monitoring, disposal, and enforcement. Over the next few years, state and federal officials cracked down on “pill mills” and “doctor shoppers,” yet the number of opioid-related deaths continued to rise.

When Californians head to the polls this fall, they’ll get to vote on whether or not America’s largest and arguably most important state should be broken into three.

On Tuesday, a voter initiative known as Cal 3 qualified to be on the state’s November 6. The measure is the brainchild of Bay Area venture capitalist/Theranos investor (and Bitcoin booster) Tim Draper. As he did when he pushed a failed initiative to break the state into six states, Draper says California as it currently exists is simply too large to be governed effectively. Dividing it into three smaller Californias, he claims, would lead to “better decision making,” “a dramatically more effective education system,” and “more reliable roads.”

Commenting on the fake news that Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko had been killed in Kiev, many Russian colleagues maintained that what had died, instead of Babchenko, was traditional journalism. Recent history and new media trends suggest that is not so.

The Babchenko case is a live illustration of an obvious crisis in the media. On the evening of May 29, reports came from Kiev that Babchenko, a Russian opposition journalist, had been killed by three shots as he stood in the doorway of his apartment. His wife found the bleeding reporter and he died in the ambulance en route to the hospital, police said. Photographs of his body flew around the world. His colleagues saw in the details of his murder a similarity to the murders of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and opposition politician Boris Nemtsov. Many of his colleagues wrote powerful statements about the victim, forgetting and forgiving former slights and disputes. Reporters, opinion makers, Internet users, all called for justice and an end to the unpunished violence toward journalists.

Italy’s new hard-line interior minister prevented a rescue ship carrying 629 migrants from docking on Italian shores, leaving them stranded at sea for a day before Spain accepted them.

The Aquarius, a rescue vessel operated by aid organizations Doctors Without Borders (also known as Médecins Sans Frontières) and SOS Mediterranée, was forced to wait in the Mediterranean Sea between Italy and Malta after failing to receive guidance from Italian authorities. Spain on Monday allowed the ship to dock in the city of Valencia, a rare move for a country that typically keeps its borders sealed.

Thousands of right-wing white nationalists thronged the streets of central London late Saturday, attacking police while chanting their demands that one of their leaders be released from prison.

Supporters of Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson online, had rallied outside Downing Street to call for the release of the islamophobic writer and former leader of the oft-violent English Defense League (EDL).

A trove of new emails revealed by the British press this weekend are helping shine new light on the role Russia may have played in backing the 2016 Brexit referendum.

The documents, reported by both The Times and Observer, reveal that Brexit’s biggest bankroller, Arron Banks, and Leave.EU Director of Communications Andy Wigmore had far more extensive contact with Russian officials than either had previously admitted.

In 2014, United States officials encountered a new form of Kremlin disinformation in Ukraine. As “little green men” streamed into the country’s south, blatant falsehoods over anything from the history of World War II to weapon-system deployments spread across the internet and the airwaves. Propagandists disguised as professors, activists, and journalists sowed confusion about what was actually happening on the ground: soldiers bearing no flag had occupied strategic territory in eastern Ukraine. Intelligence collectors supplied propagandists with tapped calls and hacked emails containing compromising language, and the Kremlin leaked all of this to the media at key moments.

Arron Banks, the millionaire businessman who bankrolled Nigel Farage’s campaign to quit the EU, had multiple meetings with Russian embassy officials in the run-up to the Brexit referendum, documents seen by the Observer suggest.

Banks, who gave £12m of services to the campaign, becoming the biggest donor in UK history, has repeatedly denied any involvement with Russian officials, or that Russian money played any part in the Brexit campaign. The Observer has seen documents which a senior Tory MP says, if correct, raise urgent and troubling questions about his relationship with the Russian government.

On Friday, the Austrian government announced that it plans to close down seven mosques and potentially expel about 60 imams from the country.

The announcement, which was made by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, is rooted in a 2015 law that requires Muslim organizations to express a “positive fundamental view towards [the] state and society” of Austria, and bans foreign funding of religious institutions. “Political Islam’s parallel societies and radicalizing tendencies have no place in our country,” said Kurz at a press conference. His vice chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache, added ominously, “This is just the beginning.”

The right-wing government in Austria has escalated its hostility toward Muslims in the country by announcing this week that it plans to shut down seven mosques and deport between 40 and 60 Islamic clerics who receive foreign funding.

The coalition government, led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, said that this is “just the beginning” of its fight against what it sees as “radical Islam,” Reuters reported on Friday.

Chinese government hackers breached a US naval contractor and made off with more than 600 gigabytes of data, American officials speaking to two US media outlets said.

The breaches occurred in January and February and affected a contractor working on submarines and underwater weapons, the Washington Post first reported on Friday.

More than 1300 private conversations between a private prison’s inmates and their lawyers were recorded according to information in a new lawsuit against CoreCivic, the private company running the facility, and its technology provider Securus Technologies. Numerous charges and convictions against the inmates could ultimately be overturned if a judge finds prosecutors violated attorney-client privilege by listening to the recordings.

A steady stream of garbage-laden trucks moves the waste of Russia’s capital to landfills in the surrounding region. The resulting mountains of refuse emit noxious fumes and leach pollutants into nearby waters, endangering the residents of the region around Moscow.

Citizens living near these landfills have had enough.

As the vote counts are finalized and the dust settles on California’s June 5 primary, one thing that’s clear is the pre-election predictions and fears about its “top-two” system, where the two top vote getters, regardless of party, face off in the fall, were wrong.

The system, which was instituted in 2010 and backed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, was promoted as elevating more moderate candidates. The 2018 primary showed that wasn’t the case. Democrats, echoing other 2018 primaries, saw swarms of grassroots-backed progressives and fewer party-backed centrists face off. Republicans saw a mix of incumbents and challengers standing with President Trump or ignoring Trump while playing up local ties. In both cases, the political middle was barren.

Suddenly, Vladimir Putin has some useful friends in the west.

As he looks to improve relations with Europe, at a new low since the March nerve-agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, the Russian president knows he can count on the backing of at least two capitals.

Both Austria and Italy’s new governments, formed late last year and last month, include populist, far-right parties that make little secret of their sympathy for Moscow – and have even signed cooperation agreements with Putin’s ruling United Russia party.

Vladimir Putin has demanded that Russian officials be given consular access to Yulia Skripal and that Russian law enforcement agencies take part in the investigation into her poisoning with a military-grade nerve agent.

Skripal and her father, Sergei, a former double agent who was released from a Russian prison in a spy swap with the UK in 2010, were poisoned with novichok in Salisbury in March.

Democracy gone Astray