[Guardian] When I first read the Washington Post story that the US attorney general, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, wants to "bring back" the "war on drugs", I thought to myself: bring back? Where did it go? Is General Sessions himself on drugs? Because, despite a few modest reforms, somebody would have to be high to think the war on drugs has really gone away.
But the framing of an impetus to "bring back" the drug war is the same as Donald Trump’s fantasy of making America "great again" and must be understood for exactly what it is: a white power grab to control black and brown people couched in the restoration of past glory.
Drugs have long been used to scapegoat black and Latino people, even as study after study finds that white youth use drugs more than their non-white peers and white people are the more likely to have contraband on them when stopped by police. As Trump plans a "deportation force", a war on drugs amped up on raids will help create darker-skinned scapegoats as he rips immigrant communities apart.
General Sessions will lead this war for Trump. Standing on the US-Mexico border, General Sessions mischaracterized immigration as consisting of "criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones, that rape and kill innocent citizens". Evoking the same racialized sexual fear to stoke anti-immigrant sentiment that his boss did when he began his campaign by calling Mexican rapists, Sessions ignored that immigrants commit fewer crimes as he defiantly took a "stand against this filth".
The war on drugs is itself a kind of opiate of the white masses, hustled and imbibed to stoke white people’s fear about people of color ‐ even as there already about 1.5 million black men already disappeared from US society by early death or incarceration.
#1
Calling other people racist. It is truly evergreen.
Posted by: Herb McCoy7309 ||
04/18/2017 9:15 Comments ||
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#2
About the writer:
Steven W Thrasher is writer-at-large for Guardian US. He was named Journalist of the Year 2012 by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, BuzzFeed, the Advocate and more.
#3
And I suppose he considers himself a nationalist gentleman-of-color as well but that does nothing to correct his 'near vision'. He writes about "criminal organizations that turn cities and suburbs into warzones" with a projection across The Pond. That desperate focus denies Europe's own 'no go' neighborhoods populated by "non-founders". His venom paints him as another prejudiced leftist word hack bashing Trump. I wonder what unoriginal content he has for May?
[Breitbart] The Department of Justice should keep the public informed about the results of former President Barack Obama’s decision to grant early releases to 1,715 convicts, says a former federal prosecutor.
"What [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions Justice Department needs to do now is track the hundreds of fellows who got these pardons and commutations," said former federal prosecutor Bill Otis. "With overall recidivism rates for drug offenses already being 77 percent, I think we have a pretty good idea, but [the public] should get specifics: How many of these guys re-offend; what’s the nature of the new crime; were there related violent crimes in the mix as well; and how many victims (including but not limited to addicts and overdose victims) were there?"
But only the Department of Justice has the manpower and access to raw data needed to detail and analyze Obama’s last-minute, closed-door process which released a record 1,715 convicts back into Americans’ neighborhoods. At least one other group has tried to gauge the impact of President George W. Bush’s pardons--but that group had to hire three researchers to assemble only some of the data that the federal government has at its fingertips but does not share.
Looks like we need some Pence images. In the meantime, this will suffice.
[NewYorker]. PYONGYANG (The Borowitz Report)--In a major foreign-policy coup for the Trump Administration, North Korea offered to unconditionally abandon its nuclear program on Monday, after Mike Pence spent several minutes angrily squinting at the nation from just across the border.
Warning North Korea that the United States had jettisoned its policy of "strategic patience" and that "all options were on the table," Pence fixed his steely glare on the isolated Communist nation and began furiously staring it down.
After Pence spent between five and six minutes demonstrating U.S. resolve by squinting indignantly, the government in Pyongyang released a statement indicating that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions were a thing of the past.
"We will henceforth abandon our nuclear program and dismantle all existing nuclear facilities," read the official statement from North Korean President Kim Jong-un. "In exchange, we request that Mike Pence stop giving us that really mean look."
Moments after the North Korean statement, Pence ordered his facial muscles to stand down, and the Vice-President’s face assumed a peacetime footing.
At the White House, press secretary Sean Spicer said that the successful U.S. action in North Korea should "send a strong message to barbaric dictators around the world that the United States stands ready to use the full force and fury of Mike Pence’s angry face."
Spicer said that, after leaving North Korea, Pence was dispatched to Mosul, Iraq, where he is scheduled to spend several minutes angrily squinting at ISIS.
#2
While I like VP Pence, I think SecDef Mattis would do a better job at staring down the NorKs.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
04/18/2017 13:46 Comments ||
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#3
Maybe the Norks should be provided with some of General Mattis' more familiar quotes prior to glaring across the DMZ.
1. "The first time you blow someone away is not an insignificant event. That said, there are some assholes in the world that just need to be shot."
2. "I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all."
3. "Find the enemy that wants to end this experiment (in American democracy) and kill every one of them until they’re so sick of the killing that they leave us and our freedoms intact."
4. "Marines don't know how to spell the word defeat."
5. "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."
'Uploaded' Excerpt (Guardian) What makes the transhumanist movement so seductive is that it promises to restore, through science, the transcendent hopes that science itself has obliterated. Transhumanists do not believe in the existence of a soul, but they are not strict materialists, either. Kurzweil claims he is a "patternist", characterising consciousness as the result of biological processes, "a pattern of matter and energy that persists over time". These patterns, which contain what we tend to think of as our identity, are currently running on physical hardware ‐ the body ‐ that will one day give out. But they can, at least in theory, be transferred onto supercomputers, robotic surrogates or human clones. A pattern, transhumanists would insist, is not the same as a soul. But it’s not difficult to see how it satisfies the same longing. At the very least, a pattern suggests that there is some essential core of our being that will survive and perhaps transcend the inevitable degradation of flesh.
[Fox] The circumstantial evidence is mounting that the Kremlin succeeded in infiltrating the US government at the highest levels.
How else to explain a newly elected president looking the other way after an act of Russian aggression? Agreeing to a farcically one-sided nuclear deal? Mercilessly mocking the idea that Russia represents our foremost geo-political foe?
Accommodating the illicit nuclear ambitions of a Russian ally? Welcoming a Russian foothold in the Middle East? Refusing to provide arms to a sovereign country invaded by Russia? Diminishing our defenses and pursuing a Moscow-friendly policy of hostility to fossil fuels?
All of these items, of course, refer to things said or done by President Barack Obama.
[DAWN] RECEP Tayyip Erdogan has won a referendum which would change The Sick Man of Europe Turkey ...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire.... from a parliamentary to a presidential democracy. Right? Not quite. Parliament would still have considerable powers. Nevertheless with the abolition of the post of prime minister and the authority to appoint ministers, members of the highest judiciary and to dissolve the national assembly, the powers of the president would be very significantly enhanced.
Erdogan will still need to win the 2019 elections. Given the closeness of the result this may not be a sure thing. His decision to restore the death penalty is also a clear signal that he has downgraded the priority of applying to join the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... . This may please a right-wing Europe but it will disappoint many Turks.
The margin of Erdogan’s ’yes’ vote over the ’no’ vote was around 1.3 million votes and more or less equal to the number of votes that were not stamped by the electoral authorities. This could become a problem for Erdogan similar to the one that has dogged Nawaz Sharif ... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf... since his election in 2013. Moreover, there seem to have been a number of divides: an urban/rural divide; a borderlands/ central lands divide; a Kemalist (secular)/ conservative (Islamic) divide; a civil/military divide; and an internationalist (pro-West)/nationalist (Turkey first) divide.
Are these divides deep-rooted? Do they threaten national unity? Not necessarily. With good and inclusive governance they can be transcended and reduced to the normal range and variety of political opinions to be found in any functioning polity. But here comes another divide: does such governance need to meet Western criteria of democracy which reflect the historical development of responsible government? Or does it require a much stronger and transforming executive functioning within the parameters of the rule of law and a constitution that politically privileges and institutionalises the rights and entitlements of historically deprived segments of society -- the poor, women, minorities of all kinds, and, yes, political and non-violent dissidents?
Posted by: Fred ||
04/18/2017 00:00 ||
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#1
And I thought "resigns", why he just got elected!
[Hot Air] Get ready for more red-lining from Bashar al-Assad. Despite claims from Russia and the Syrian dictator himself that he fully disarmed his chemical-weapons program, a high-ranking defector tells the UK Telegraph that Assad still has hundreds of tons of those munitions stockpiled for use by his military. General Zaher al-Sakat says that includes sarin gas, the munitions used against a village in Idlib province that provoked a military strike from the US in reprisal (via Guy Benson):
President Bashar al-Assad continues to retain hundreds of tonnes of his country’s chemical stockpile after deceiving United Nations inspectors sent in to dismantle it, according to Syria’s former chemical weapons research chief and other experts.
Brigadier-General Zaher al-Sakat ‐ who served as head of chemical warfare in the powerful 5th Division of the military until he defected in 2013 ‐ told The Telegraph that Assad’s regime failed to declare large amounts of sarin and its precursor chemicals. ...
"They [the regime] admitted only to 1,300 tonnes, but we knew in reality they had nearly double that," said Brig Gen Sakat, who was one of the most senior figures in the country’s chemical programme. "They had at least 2,000 tonnes. At least."
How does Sakat know this? As one of Assad’s brigadier generals, he received orders to carry out these attacks. He claims that he ordered the deadly chemicals replaced with harmless substances, and then defected over the genocidal nature of the regime:
Sakat has said in the past that he himself was ordered to carry out chemical strikes on three different occasions before he defected. In those instances he switched out the deadly agents in the bombs for harmless chemicals.
"I couldn’t believe at the beginning that Assad would use these weapons on his people," he said. "I could not stand and watch the genocide. I couldn’t hurt my own people."
And there we have the root problem with the fascist, socialist, communist, progressive left philosophy.
They are NOT his people. Until the individual reigns supreme and the government works for the people in the ideal as expressed in the US is supposed to work tyrants will continue to commit these crimes.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Breitbart] The Department of Justice should keep the public informed about the results of former President Barack Obama’s decision to grant early releases to 1,715 convicts, says a former federal prosecutor.
[DAWN] RECEP Tayyip Erdogan has won a referendum which would change 
[Hot Air] Get ready for more red-lining from Bashar al-Assad. Despite claims from Russia and the Syrian dictator himself that he fully disarmed his chemical-weapons program, a high-ranking defector tells the UK Telegraph that Assad still has hundreds of tons of those munitions stockpiled for use by his military. General Zaher al-Sakat says that includes sarin gas, the munitions used against a village in Idlib province that provoked a military strike from the US in reprisal (via Guy Benson):
