🐱 Interesting clickbait, op-eds, fluff pieces and other smaller stories

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/24/caitlyn-jenner-halloween-costume-sparks-social-media-outrage-.html

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ne...een-costume-labeled-817515?utm_source=twitter

It's nowhere near October, but one ensemble is already on track to be named the most controversial Halloween costume of 2015.

Social media users were out in full force on Monday criticizing several Halloween retailers for offering a Caitlyn Jenner costume reminiscent of the former-athlete's Vanity Fair cover earlier this year.

While Jenner's supporters condemned the costume as "transphobic" and "disgusting" on Twitter, Spirit Halloween, a retailer that carries the costume, defended the getup.

"At Spirit Halloween, we create a wide range of costumes that are often based upon celebrities, public figures, heroes and superheroes," said Lisa Barr, senior director of marking at Spirit Halloween. "We feel that Caitlyn Jenner is all of the above and that she should be celebrated. The Caitlyn Jenner costume reflects just that."

 

[PS1gamenwatch]

The Poles wish to tighten media control

 

[keyboredsm4shthe2nd]

Well, not for 110 years. He should probably do a bit of rotting though. This sounds a lot more like a dumb guy panicking and fucking up and not even being trained by whatever shitty company employed him to do a job he clearly didn't know how to do.

People have got much less for cold-blooded, malicious murders.

10 years and mandatory re-education in driving for life

 

[HodgePodgeRogerDodger]

Astronomer Finds No Evidence of Kardashev Type III Civilizations in Local Universe | Sci-News.com


(article may be a little old though)

That sounds like gay Star Trek shit. They should beat that guy up and force him to lift until he can squat 5 plates.

 

[chiobu]

Candidate killed by celebratory gunfire shortly after winning election​

Zakriya was elected general councillor



A young man who had just successfully won the Village Council election on Sunday was killed when political workers in Peshawar’s Surizai area fired guns to celebrate the victory and a bullet hit him.

Mohammad Zakriya Khan Sunday won the election on a General Councillor seat for the local Village Council. A few other candidates from the same constituency secured wins on different seats. A village council has six to seven members.

The supporters of successful candidates indulged in celebratory gunfire and one of the stray bullets hit Zakriya who died.

SAMAA ENGLISH: Latest Breaking News, Videos, In-depth Reports from Pakistan, World

English language website for SAMAA TV. Comprehensive coverage of Pakistan, breaking news stories and analysis on current affairs, business, sports, entertainment and around-the-world stories

www.samaa.tv

Candidate killed by celebratory gunfire shortly after winning electio…

archived 20 Dec 2021 04:04:25 UTC

archive.md

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

​

'Professional cavewoman' survives on 'freezer full of roadkill'

archived 21 Dec 2021 01:23:02 UTC

archive.md

‘Professional cavewoman’ survives on ‘freezer full of roadkill’ ​

This UK woman is livin’ like it’s the Paleolithic era.

Sarah Day, 34, has deemed herself a “professional cavewoman” who survives on roadkill, including repurposing the skin and bones of the dead animals.

The Colchester, Essex, resident said she makes her money as a schoolteacher who educates children on history — and survival skills.

Day claimed she eats “roadkill at least once a week, although there isn’t always an animal on the side of the road,” she told Mercury Press.

“My freezer is full of roadkill finds, which is handy during the winter because I can defrost the deer or rabbit to make a hearty stew,” she continued, adding that the flavor of rats is “very similar to squirrel — it is mild and sweet. It tastes a little bit like chicken, but much nicer.”
Sarah day

Pigeon, on the other hand, reportedly tastes “like a really good beef steak.” Besides just munching on the delicious animal carcasses, Day also likes to turn the skin and guts into leather. The animal skulls are “amazing bits of engineering,” while the bones are used to make tools and weapons.

“I don’t see any harm in [picking up roadkill] because the animal has died anyway, rather than it get skinned in any other way,” she rationalized.

But, sometimes, roadkill may be “too damaged” to eat and Day must find her animal protein in the raw meat aisle of her local supermarket.

n order to get her daily dose of fiber, Day hunts for her own herbs and fruit too. “I tend to forage plants and fruit, but it is so important to do your research so that you don’t end up very sick,” she said.

She also likes to evaluate how certain plants can be used for their medicinal properties instead of going to a doctor.

Willow bark, she claimed, can be used to make tea for headaches. She believes that savory herbs such as rosemary, sage and thyme can help with a cough.

She also offered that cramp bark — a flowering shrub — “is also amazing for period pains. I didn’t want to believe it would work, but it really does!” she exclaimed.

As for her actual living conditions, Day said she has a house “in the middle of town”; however, she would “rather live in a tent.” She reportedly even made her own sleeping bag out of reindeer skin to keep warm at night, as well as “a selection of clothes from roadkill” that she supposedly wears for work.

“It is all about working smart. The more you practice, the better you become,” she concluded.

DAY’S TOP FIVE SURVIVAL TIPS

• Have a tribe. “You should never be alone as it’s hard to provide alone in any time — you need other people to help build stuff and hunt,” she said.
• You need a fire.
• Take it slow. “There is no need to rush, it isn’t a movie.”
• Only eat things that you are certain are edible. “Even drinking stream water without sterilizing it can be harmful, so do your research!”
• Adapt your expectation to a level you can meet. “Never underestimate how hard it is.”

 

[keyboredsm4shthe2nd]

Candidate killed by celebratory gunfire shortly after winning election​

Zakriya was elected general councillor

View attachment 2815640

A young man who had just successfully won the Village Council election on Sunday was killed when political workers in Peshawar’s Surizai area fired guns to celebrate the victory and a bullet hit him.

Mohammad Zakriya Khan Sunday won the election on a General Councillor seat for the local Village Council. A few other candidates from the same constituency secured wins on different seats. A village council has six to seven members.

The supporters of successful candidates indulged in celebratory gunfire and one of the stray bullets hit Zakriya who died.

SAMAA ENGLISH: Latest Breaking News, Videos, In-depth Reports from Pakistan, World

English language website for SAMAA TV. Comprehensive coverage of Pakistan, breaking news stories and analysis on current affairs, business, sports, entertainment and around-the-world stories

www.samaa.tv

Candidate killed by celebratory gunfire shortly after winning electio…

archived 20 Dec 2021 04:04:25 UTC

archive.md

how many people have to die before these backwards fucks realize spraying bullets in celebration is a horrible idea

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

No, we still won’t eat the bugs!

The ongoing efforts to (literally) force bugs down our throats have been kicked up to another level as the European Union recently voted to approve insects for human consumption.

www.rt.com

No, we still won't eat the bugs!​

The ongoing efforts to (literally) force bugs down our throats have been kicked up to another level as the European Union recently voted to approve insects for human consumption.

As warnings of empty shelves and growing food shortages have us quivering in our boots, and inflation turns our bank accounts into vaults full of green-tinted toilet paper, the European Union has come to our rescue with a new (and totally not premeditated at all) food alternative. No, it’s not Soylent Green (yet).

However, it’s the next best thing. European member states have placed their seal of approval on a rainbow of edible bugs: house crickets, yellow mealworms, and grasshoppers can now be sold in frozen, dried, and powdered forms. Bloomberg, the megaphone of the ruling class, which wrote about the development last week, apparently wants to see much more insect action in our cuisine, from expanding on which bugs can be farmed and their uses beyond pet food and livestock operations (presumably to human plates), to reminding us that 80% of the world’s population thinks bugs are a yummy treat.

It’s no coincidence that bugs feature prominently in the popular meme of resistance to the ‘New Normal’ as served up by the World Economic Forum, international banking cartels, and other entities even slimier than the bugs they want us to eat. Insects are seen as gross, inconsequential creatures that breed out of control and make a mess of our worlds. This is uncannily similar to the way in which the elites seem to view most of the planet’s people.

The ruling class seems to have finally gotten the message regarding edible insects – “we will not eat the bugs; we will not live in the pods.”Thus, Bloomberg strives to distance the insect approval from our dinner plates, insisting the real game-changer is that these bugs will be used to feed livestock. But there’s more at hand here than merely bulking up cow-chow with a few grasshoppers – the outlet can’t resist trotting out those statistics claiming almost everyone on earth loves them some bugs, so why don’t we just shut up and suck down a six-legged snack.

After all, Bloomberg points out, Protix BV, owners of the largest insect farm in Europe, are champing at the bit to “commercialize insects as a sustainable protein alternative in dishes various types of food [sic], such as cereal bars or dried pasta.” And for those already bored with cricket flour or cockroach crispies, the company says they have an application for black soldier flies “in the works”! What more could a domesticated population want?

Lamenting Americans are “slow on the uptake, even as the US Food and Drug Administration approved insects for human consumption decades ago,” the narrative managers helplessly gesture at a niche market of insect-based protein bars before returning to the song-and-dance routine about how insects will save the climate by feeding the (presumably still farting) cows and other livestock. It’s like they can’t help themselves.

But there’s no way the edible-bug market will be limited to bulking up nutrient-rich slop for our four-legged friends. Global investments in insect proteins almost doubled last year, and analysts suggest the market will grow to exceed $4.1 billion within five years. A Rabobank estimate suggests the number of insects farmed annually will grow to 50 times its current amount by 2030. That’s human-food numbers.

Of course, that’s the year we’re supposed to own nothing and be happy in, according to the WEF and its ultra-creepy CEO Klaus Schwab. Perhaps that means we will only be renting our insect feasts.

 

[Random Internet Person]

The Ride never ends. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-tells-abcs-david-muir-hell-run-trump/story?id=81901418

President Joe Biden said Wednesday in an exclusive interview with ABC "World News Tonight" anchor David Muir that, "yes," he planned to run again in 2024 -- and if his predecessor, Donald Trump, runs, then it would "increase the prospect" even more.

"Do you plan to run for reelection?" Muir asked Biden during a sit-down interview at the White House.

"Yes," the president replied. "But look, I'm a great respecter of fate. Fate has intervened in my life many many times. If I'm in the health I'm in now -- from a good health. And, in fact, I would run again."

You can watch more of David Muir's full interview with President Joe Biden on ABC's World News Tonight at 6:30 p.m. ET

"And if that means a rematch against Donald Trump?" Muir asked. Trump, who served only one term, is eligible to run again in 2024.

"You’re trying to tempt me now," Biden said, laughing. "Sure. Why would I not run against Donald Trump for the nominee? That’ll increase the prospect of running."

Biden, at age 78, became the oldest person sworn in as president when he took office earlier this year, and questions about whether he would seek a second term have followed him throughout his presidency.

With Biden's popularity sagging, White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters last month that Biden did intend to run again.

Last year before the election, Biden had told Muir he "absolutely" planned on being president for eight years if elected.

Biden tells ABC's David Muir 'yes' he'll run again, Trump rematch wou…

archived 23 Dec 2021 01:22:18 UTC

archive.md

​

 

[Super-Chevy454]

There's two Democrats politicians who have a little encounter with reality.

Did two Democrat politicians just get mugged by reality?

One of the longstanding problems with Democrat governance is that Democrat politicians enact policies that affect people other than themselves. Thus, affluent professional Dems living in chi-chi gentrified enclaves aren't the ones who ...

www.americanthinker.com

December 23, 2021

Did two Democrat politicians just get mugged by reality?​

By Andrea Widburg

One of the long-standing problems with Democrat governance is that Democrat politicians enact policies that affect people other than themselves. Thus, affluent professional Dems living in chi-chi gentrified enclaves aren’t the ones who lose their jobs due to unconstrained illegal immigration. Likewise, those same neighborhoods insulate them from the havoc their “defund the police” policies wreak. However, on Wednesday, two Democrat politicians, one in Philadelphia and one in Chicago, were mugged by reality when both were carjacked. Fortunately, neither was hurt but I hope it was a learning experience for both of them.
Kimberly Lightford is the Democrat majority leader in the Illinois Senate and a member of her state’s Legislative Black Caucus. To her credit, she was never an ardent proponent of property destruction nor was she calling to defund the police. However, she was at the forefront of the movement to reform policing in her state, which included eliminating cash bail (effective January 2023), giving a pass for people who vanish for 48 hours or less while on electric monitoring, and increasing liability for individual police officers. By October 2021, with crime in Chicago soaring, Lightford had become quite strident in her defense of policing.
Lightford’s disenchantment with attacks on the police may have grown because, on Wednesday, she and her husband were carjacked at gunpoint:

Illinois Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, who championed the state’s criminal justice reform omnibus legislation in January, was carjacked at gunpoint in suburban Broadview on Tuesday evening, authorities said. One of the hijackers fired multiple gunshots at Lightford’s husband, but he was not injured.
Three masked men exited a Dodge Durango and hijacked Lightford’s Mercedes Benz SUV at gunpoint on the 2000 block of South 20th Avenue around 9:45 p.m., according to a statement from the village’s chief of police.
Lightford confirmed the incident in a short statement, saying she was “thankful that my husband and I are alive and physically unharmed. I am trying to process the trauma of what happened.”
She thanked the Broadview Police Department for their “quick and thorough response.”

In other words, a Democrat just got mugged by reality.
Police eventually arrested one of the men involved who had been charged with unlawful use of a weapon and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon—but was out on bail.

Image: A carjacking in Texas. YouTube screen grab.
Ironically, Lightford was not the only Democrat lawmaker who got mugged (or rather, carjacked) by reality on Wednesday. In Philadelphia, Mary Gay Scanlon, a House member from Pennsylvania, was also carjacked in broad daylight:

The incident occurred Wednesday afternoon at FDR Park in South Philadelphia, where the lawmaker had been attending a meeting. Ms. Scanlon was walking to her parked car when she was approached by two men driving a dark-colored SUV.
Police said both men, who were armed, demanded the keys to her car.
They got away with her 2017 Acura MDX, her personal cell phone, her government cell phone, her purse and her identification. There was no immediate report on suspects.

As was the case with Lightford, Scanlon also joined the police reform movement after George Floyd’s death.

We have seen too many lives taken and communities devastated by police brutality and racial profiling. Action is long overdue. @HouseDemocrats are fighting for REAL reform in our country’s police departments. #JusticeInPolicing pic.twitter.com/IS9n6LZXCg
— Congresswoman Mary Gay Scanlon (@RepMGS) June 8, 2020

There is nothing wrong with making policing in America better. There is nothing wrong with expecting the men and women in Blue, who have a great deal of power because they have guns and the criminal justice system at their back, to behave with honor and decency (as almost all already do). However, the criminal justice reform that Democrats have been pushing over the last year has had less to do with helping police be the best they can be and a whole heck of a lot to do with making life easier for criminals.
It turns out that, when you do away with bail, shrink police departments, make police officers feel unsafe, have prosecutors who refuse to prosecute, and have both prosecutors and judges who are loath to place even hardened or extremely violent criminals in prison, you end up with an extraordinary escalation in violent crime in all of America’s Democrat cities. Although all these changes have mostly made life worse for poor and working-class people, the odds were that the problem would eventually hit one or two of the politicians who created this pro-crime environment.
However, I have a hard time calculating the odds of the same crime happening on the same day in two different cities to two Democrat politicians. Honestly, when something happens in this way, you might think that the universe is trying to send a message. I only hope that Democrats start listening.

 

[Random Internet Person]

People are paranoid as hell. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/c...9ffb7524067a6119d32ebea7732&ocid=winp1taskbar

The roar was the first thing to reach Natalie Romero. “I just heard loudness, like thunder, as if the earth was growling,” the University of Virginia student later testified. Hundreds of white supremacists were marching toward her, their low dog barks alternating with rhythmic war chants: “Jews will not replace us.” “Blood and soil.” “White lives matter.” As she clutched a homemade protest banner, huddling with a small group of students around the base of a Thomas Jefferson statue, Romero feared for her life. A lit torch landed at her feet. A burst of mace hit her. “I felt like a mouse, trapped,” she said. “I felt like I’m about to be burned at the stake.”

The racist rage that enveloped Romero and other student counterprotesters on the night of August 11, 2017, erupted again the next morning in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. As white-supremacist groups convened for the “Unite the Right” rally in defense of the city’s Robert E. Lee statue, they marched defiantly into a diverse, boisterous crowd of counterprotesters composed of local clergy, students, activists, and townspeople. They used their flag poles and riot shields to attack anyone they perceived to be a Jew or a Communist, or to be affiliated with antifa or Black Lives Matter. The rally was swiftly shut down by authorities, and the crowds began to disperse. Two blocks from the park, James Fields Jr., an alt-right foot soldier from Ohio, raced his Dodge Charger down a narrow street and directly into a crowd of people, including Romero, leaving Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal, dead and several others severely injured.

Charlottesville that August offered a preview of the America that we would become: a country in which violently racist sloganeering freely mixes with absurd, carnival antics; a culture in which constitutional principles are treated as cudgels with which to crush political opponents; a society in which gun-toting extremists parade openly in the streets in search of enemies to strike, and then claim self-defense if anyone is injured; and an online ecosphere in which virtual hate escalates before spilling over into real-world terror. None of these nightmarish trends began that weekend, but Charlottesville propelled them into the heart of American public life. And then Donald Trump’s invocation of the “very fine people on both sides” ripped away one of the last remaining rhetorical guardrails separating Christian racial populism from liberal democracy.

Charlottesville’s greatest legacy, however, is its fracturing of a common set of truths. Our national conversation about race and religion has since devolved into a contest of warring slogans and dueling dates. Words fail us; we cannot even agree on the definitions of racism and anti-Semitism.

We have never had the national reckoning that we need over the events of August 2017. The closest we have come is the civil trial against the white-supremacist organizers, which concluded just before Thanksgiving. I spent a month inside the federal courthouse where that trial took place, just a mile down the road from the university where I teach Jewish history. What I heard and saw proved even more disturbing than I had anticipated. For it was not only white supremacy on trial in Charlottesville, but also the law itself, and its capacity to quarantine a virulent ideology from overwhelming our enfeebled, all-too-distracted democracy.

After four years of planning, four weeks of trial, 36 witnesses, and five terabytes of digital evidence, a Charlottesville jury found the defendants liable under Virginia law for an unlawful civil conspiracy to commit racially motivated violence. It awarded damages to the tune of some $26 million. The architects of the trial established an unassailable historical record of the moral trespass that occurred. Yet significant as they are, the verdicts represent only partial victory. The jury deadlocked on two federal conspiracy claims. The sum of the damages it did award will likely drop for technical reasons, and the money may not even be collectible from the defendants.

Of greater concern, however, is the deafening public silence surrounding the trial. Four years ago, Americans were transfixed by Charlottesville. This time around, they all but ignored it. Attention from national media outlets was surprisingly scant or, in the case of conservative outlets, practically nonexistent. Even the city of Charlottesville itself seemed to pretend that the trial was not taking place. The fall college-football games attracted thousands of visitors each week. Meanwhile, the courthouse plaza remained almost completely empty of onlookers and protesters most days of the trial. A legal reckoning works only if society pays attention.

The U.S. Federal Courthouse for the Western District of Virginia is a squat, three-story red-brick building at the far west end of downtown Charlottesville’s pedestrian mall. The courthouse sits on land that once contained Vinegar Hill, a historically Black neighborhood razed in 1964. It is steps from Emancipation Park (still known as Lee Park in 2017, while the statue stood) and Congregation Beth Israel, the town’s historic synagogue. It is also less than a five-minute walk from Fourth Street, where shortly after noon on August 12, 2017, James Fields Jr. drove into the crowd of protesters.

Fields acted alone, but he was hardly a lone wolf. He left his native Ohio for Charlottesville to answer a specific call from the organized white-supremacist movement that had convened the event they officially named “Unite the Right” and privately referred to as the “Battle of Charlottesville.” The organizers had planned the event on a Discord server, where they discussed dress code, equipment, tactics, and theoretical questions such as the legality of driving through protesters on roadways. Yet the main men of the American far right—the alt-right ideologist Richard Spencer, the shock jock Christopher Cantwell, the neo-Nazi Matthew Heimbach, and a passel of other leading neo-Confederates and white nationalists—fled Charlottesville after the rally and have never faced criminal prosecution for their role in organizing the event. (In 2018, Cantwell pleaded guilty to two counts of assault and battery for pepper-spraying counterprotesters.) The Trump Justice Department evinced no interest in federal hate-crimes prosecution.

What finally brought these men back to town and into a courtroom was a lawsuit filed by nine of their victims. The victims were represented by Roberta Kaplan, who argued the landmark 2013 Supreme Court marriage-equality case United States v. Windsor, and Karen Dunn, a former federal prosecutor, who together assembled a pro bono team of expert lawyers backed by a new legal nonprofit, Integrity First for America. The plaintiffs sued the “Unite the Right” organizers and their groups, 24 individuals and corporate entities all told, for monetary damages. Seven of the defendants simply refused to cooperate at all with the legal proceedings, leading to default judgments against them. That left 17 to face trial. They were represented by five different lawyers, except for Cantwell and Spencer, who acted pro se, or in their own defense.

On the opening day of the trial, Judge Norman Moon, an 85-year-old native Virginian appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, laid out the question at the heart of the case: Did the defendants conspire to commit racially motivated violence at the “Unite the Right” rally? Under that heading, he explained to the jurors, the lawsuit grouped a variety of violations of Virginia’s civil-conspiracy and hate-crimes statutes, including assault, battery, intimidation, harassment, and other forms of violence “motivated by racial, religious, or ethnic animosity.” Two more claims were directed specifically at Fields for intentional infliction of emotional distress and assault and battery.

The legal threshold for establishing a civil conspiracy is quite low. The law requires evidence of only a single unlawful act, even if other behaviors and objectives were completely legal (such as a permitted public protest). Individual actions before, during, or after the events in question can be used to adduce intentions. Added to that, the standard of proof in a civil case is not the more familiar criminal-trial phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” but rather a “preponderance of evidence,” defined as 51 percent favoring the plaintiff’s outcome.

However, torts constitute a double-edged sword. Tort claims allow victims to seek recompense for their personal injuries and mental harms. The costs of litigation and potential punitive damages can bankrupt extremist groups. Monetizing liability sends a huge signal, a proxy for guilt. But a civil suit reframes bodily violence as a property dispute between two equal parties. An uncollectible debt can further deflate the value of punishment. Either way, in the end, no one goes to prison.

To compensate for those potential limitations, the plaintiffs tried an ambitious legal gambit. They drew on the 1871 KKK Act—federal legislation passed after the Civil War to stop white-supremacist terror from disenfranchising newly emancipated Black Americans and derailing the democratic electoral process—adding to the lawsuit two federal claims of unlawful “conspiracy to commit racially-motivated violence” and “failure to stop [said] conspiracy” against “Black or Jewish individuals” and their supporters. A federal civil-conspiracy charge elevated the case to federal court. The move also increased the potential for public awareness and media interest.

Equally important, the federal claims made explicit the symbolic links between our own time and the historical moment when white supremacists embraced racial violence to terrorize Black freedmen and repel immigrants whom they believed to be racially inferior, including Jews from Eastern Europe. The 1870s also saw southern American cities and towns beginning to erect monuments honoring Confederate heroes and perpetuating the false narrative of the Lost Cause. One such statue, of Robert E. Lee, was commissioned in Charlottesville in 1917 and erected in 1924. In April 2017, after years of debate and a lawsuit, the Charlottesville City Council voted to remove the Lee statue, providing the pretext for the “Unite the Right” march four months later.

“We’re raising an army, my liege,” Jason Kessler texted Richard Spencer in early June 2017, adding, “For free speech, and the cracking of skulls if it comes to it.” A few weeks before, Kessler, a recent UVA grad and far-right provocateur, had begun reaching out to noted white-supremacist leaders across the country to get them to rally around the Lee statue. He proposed to “unite the right,” capitalizing on the new momentum the far right felt in the early months of the Trump administration.

The next steps are documented in a stunning archive of digital evidence compiled by the plaintiffs’ legal team—texts, Discord messages, Facebook exchanges, and emails—that reveals how Kessler, Spencer, and others conspired to bait their enemies into a physical confrontation similar to the one that had taken place in the spring at the “Battle of Berkeley,” where the Identity Evropa leader Nathan Damigo punched a female counterprotester in the face. The spectacle of street violence, with the enemy drawn out and then smashed in a triumphant display of white power, was a core goal of the Charlottesville gathering. The months of planning included discussions of such violence, communications strategies, plans for enticing antifa to appear, and endless racist and anti-Semitic rants and memes.
The online talk also included crude juvenile boasts, edgy jokes, and bizarre fantasy scenarios. At the trial, the defendants insisted that this online invective bore no relationship to real-world violence. They had never conspired to do more than show up and speak at a rally. They had aimed to provoke outrage, not violence. It was their political enemies who had responded ferociously; they acted only in self-defense. Their humor was taken out of context, its import exaggerated. Holocaust jokes about gassing “kikes” were a far cry from pepper-spraying counterprotesters. Online fantasies of racial warfare hardly equaled street scrums and body blows with riot shields.
Beyond simply proving the existence of an unlawful conspiracy, the plaintiffs’ lawyers worked hard to overcome the defendants’ argument and expose their fundamental duplicity and deceit. To do so, the lawyers returned time and again to gaps between the defendants’ pretrial depositions and cross-examination testimony on the stand, snatches of online dialogue that suggested awareness of real-world plans, and the underlying ideology of genocidal extermination. The result was a damning portrait of the ugly innards of the American far right.
There were moments when the lawyers caught the defendants in obvious lies. When Spencer spoke of his lofty views on global politics and claimed that his philosophical sincerity proscribed political violence and verbal disparagement of his opponents, they countered with footage of him on the night of August 13 in which he is heard wildly screaming about his anger at “fucking kikes” and “fucking octoroons,” the latter once enslaved by his ancestors, and his desire to return to Charlottesville for more confrontation. “This, ladies and gentlemen,” Dunn remarked, “is the real Richard Spencer.” Most of the time, however, the defendants simply weaved and dodged in response to cross-examination, admitting their prejudices while disclaiming the seriousness of their online rhetoric.
There is something both noble and tragic about these efforts to reveal the true face of white supremacy. Noble because calmly discussing racism and anti-Semitism with racists and anti-Semites is hard, painful work, even in the placid confines of a courtroom. Tragic because doing so reflects the great liberal faith in the power of honesty. If you just expose the lies and hatred, then eventually the liars and haters will come clean about their intentions. Yet the law is supremely challenged by a postmodern racist ideology that deliberately blurs the line between fact and fiction.
In that regard, arguably the trial’s most important line arrived on the 17th day, during the witness testimony by Samantha Froelich, the former girlfriend of the defendant Eli Kline. When she was initiated into the movement, she recalled being told: “Welcome to the alt-right, where the Holocaust never happened and we want it to happen again.” That quote perfectly captures the strangeness of the danger that appeared in Charlottesville four years ago, and the difficulty in reckoning with it in a court of law. The architects of Charlottesville openly espoused genocidal fantasies, yet they also gleefully dissolved the line between role-playing and incitement. Part of this reflects a strategy of desensitization and deception. As the style guide of The Daily Stormer, a white-supremacist website for which many of the defendants wrote, counsels its writers, they should express themselves so that people “can’t know whether we’re joking or not.” Sometimes even the members of the alt-right who are speaking don’t know either. That, too, is the point. Contemporary white supremacists have turned paradox into operating principle, creating a world in which everything can be plausibly denied because nothing is genuine—until suddenly it becomes all too real.
What kind of reckoning, then, did the Charlottesville trial provide? As the verdicts rolled in, audible gasps greeted the announcement of the large damages awarded. Yet observers immediately spotted the wrinkles. The jury awarded $1 each to seven plaintiffs on the charge of violating Virginia conspiracy law, and $0 to two plaintiffs in terms of compensatory damages—for actual harms suffered—but then several million more for punitive damages, intended to punish outrageous conduct and deter other offenders. Yet because of a 2003 Supreme Court ruling that requires a narrow ratio between punitive and compensatory damages, the discrepancy may very well lead to a drastic reduction in the awards.
More puzzling was the jury’s decision to find for the plaintiffs on the state claims but deadlock on the two similar federal civil-conspiracy claims. Why did the jury find liability for racially motivated violence under state law but not federal law? Perhaps it found the statutes confusing, or insisted on a higher level of proof for the federal claims. Perhaps it reached a point of mental exhaustion or internal division, and compromised on a mixed verdict. Perhaps it wished to send some message; perhaps not.
Whatever the jury’s reasons, its decision highlights the sense of a necessary but incomplete victory. The trial is not over. It’s not over because the plaintiffs must still collect the money and may never do so. It’s not over because they have the option to refile the federal civil claims and may yet do so. It’s not over because the transcript and the exhibits remain under court seal, yet to be released as promised. Most of all, it is not over because America has not yet embraced the significance of Charlottesville, for what it represents and what we have become.
At the end of many trial days, those exiting the courthouse were confronted by a single person standing alone, clutching a small protest sign, in the November darkness. It was Rabbi Tom Gutherz of the local synagogue. His lonely vigil was a poignant reminder of how shockingly little attention the town was paying to the trial. Each day, Richard Spencer strolled up and down the downtown mall, retracing his fateful steps during the court’s lunch hour, as life went on around him. Tourists and office workers paid him no heed. If even a single one of the 22,000 students at UVA bothered to visit the courthouse plaza, I did not see them.
Charlottesville was evidently preoccupied with other dramas, such as the turmoil in local government involving the acrimonious departures of the mayor, the police chief, and the city manager. Perhaps apathy and exhaustion kept local activists at home. The fact that Judge Moon had closed the courtroom because of the pandemic surely also had an effect, especially in terms of media coverage.
Or perhaps, just like the rest of America, the people of Charlottesville were more transfixed by the other race-related-murder trials happening in Wisconsin and Georgia. The murderer in Charlottesville, after all, is already serving 30 life sentences for his crime. So much has happened since August 2017: police shootings, street protests and riots, political insurrection. Or maybe what riveted and horrified a nation in 2017 no longer seems all that remarkable. One of the attorneys defending the white supremacists told reporters that he deliberately repeated the word kike in his questioning in order to drain it of any shock value for the jurors. Perhaps the events of Charlottesville themselves have been normalized in the intervening years.
Yet that is precisely why Charlottesville matters. Four years on, the white-supremacist ideologues may have suffered a variety of personal setbacks, organizational failures, and legal struggles. But their ideas have successfully migrated into the mainstream in many obvious ways: the open talk of racial demography and threats to white existence in the conservative media. The moral panic about esoteric legal theories as evidence of a full-blown reverse racism sweeping the land. The frightening demand for a single American religion, Christianity, to replace the creeping atheism blamed on Jews and Communists. The winking calls for violence against political opponents, all too often racial or religious minorities, coupled with the “just joking” defense. The willful desensitization to the malice of hate speech. The skyrocketing FBI statistics about white-supremacist threats and actual episodes of violence. Above all, the unmistakable outlines of January 6, 2021, in the debris of August 11 and 12, 2017.
During the trial, Natalie Romero and the eight other plaintiffs each took the stand to testify about their injuries and experiences. More than one was asked about their motivations for joining the lawsuit. When April Muñiz, a 48-year-old Mexican American Charlottesville resident, began to explain her desire for justice and accountability, Moon quickly cut her off: “It’s not proper to come in and say you have some greater plan than the lawsuit itself.” As a point of law, he was correct. But his remark also reminds us that a trial can provide only a portion of the moral accountability involved in a reckoning. The rest must come from outside, in the work of listening, recording, and remembering.
Justice depends as much on a common public narrative as it does on the pursuit of truth and the authority of the law. We focus so much these days on the distant historical past, on debates about the American founding as an explanation for our present ills. Or we peer anxiously ahead to the elections soon to come. Yet until we can agree on a common understanding of our recent past, we have little hope of repairing our troubled present.
In his final jury instructions, Moon reiterated a theme he had offered at the outset of the trial: “Remember, at all times you are not partisans. You are judges—judges of the facts. Your sole interest is to seek the truth from the evidence of the case.” No words better convey the American faith in the law, and the crucial element of public trust. Law can fix truth, but it cannot do so by itself. The courts will not save us from ourselves, because ultimately, we are the guardians of our own justice. In this perilous moment, we must have the courage to judge ourselves honestly, and completely.

Charlottesville Was Only a Preview

Charlottesville Was Only a Preview

archived 23 Dec 2021 14:24:36 UTC

archive.md

 

[Elwood P. Dowd]

Jealous woman makes boyfriend FaceTime her for his entire 12-hour work shift

https://archive.md/4NOFv

Jose Macias with his girlfriend, Nela.​

Jealous much?

A woman has been called “insane” on social media for reportedly forcing her boyfriend to FaceTime her for the duration of his 12-hour shift at an Amazon warehouse.

Her reason? She apparently doesn’t “trust” other women.

Over a TikTok video, Nela — who allegedly hails from Fresno, California — wrote, “My boyfriend needs to facetime me his whole 12 hours shift. NOT BECAUSE I don’t trust him but because I don’t trust females,” even adding in the caption: “Might quit my job and go work with him.”

Her boyfriend, identified as Jose Macias by the Daily Mail, is seen packaging products in a warehouse as Nela is doing dishes on the other end of the FaceTime call.

The clip resulted in strong backlash and a firestorm of responses, with many people calling her “not normal” and labeling her as someone who “needed to get help.”

“Free him,” one user responded succinctly, while another offered, “THIS ISNT NORMAL.” One respondent offered that she was “putting his job at risk,” with someone else suggesting she “just let him do his job.”

“You could probably cook an egg on his phone,” another user joked, referring to how hot his phone battery probably got.

The video has since amassed nearly 5 million views since it was posted last month.

In a follow-up first video, she posted a second clip on Dec. 14, which she labeled: “Facetiming my boyfriend part two, so I know he isn’t flirting with girls.”

“In a relationship trust is the key so you’re doing to much!” one commenter told her. “If you don’t trust them leave him.”

It remains unconfirmed whether Nela is actually FaceTiming her boyfriend for 12 hours, but she apparently had no problem admitting her extreme actions.

“Wait ain’t this being toxic?” one user responded, while another user gave Jose some advice: “leave her bro u need better.”

 

[Random Internet Person]

Robert E. Lee Statue-Makers Troll Us Via Time Capsule

Robert E. Lee Statue-Makers Troll Us Via Time Capsule

archived 24 Dec 2021 14:43:45 UTC

archive.ph

Taking down a famous piece of racist propaganda is always its own reward. But the recent removal of Richmond, Virginia’s Robert E. Lee statue seemed to include an additional, much-anticipated perk for history buffs, as a time capsule was believed to be embedded in its pedestal. Upon further investigation, though, it seems we may have been trolled by the same folks who thought it was a good idea to erect a six-story monument to the Confederacy 25 years after the end of the Civil War and despite Lee’s own objections.

On December 17, workers dismantling the statue’s 40-foot stone plinth stumbled on an odd piece of rock that seemed like the right size to contain the capsule, which had reportedly been placed in the statue’s base in 1887.

An 1887 newspaper article and records from the Library of Virginia suggested that the capsule contained 60 items, including a good deal of Confederate paraphernalia and a “picture of Lincoln lying in his coffin.” As Richmond Magazine explained in 2017, that morbid and ethically questionable artifact would hold major historical significance:

While the appropriateness of placing a picture of a murdered U.S. president inside a monument dedicated to the glorification of Confederate Army leader Robert E. Lee is open to discussion, what makes the artifact so potentially extraordinary is that there is only one genuine photograph of Lincoln’s corpse — and it was supposed to have been destroyed, per the wishes of Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s widow. And while the other items listed in the cornerstone are described in detail, the description of the Lincoln picture is maddeningly vague, which only increases the speculation about what exactly it is.
Conservators at the Virginia Department of Historic Resource excitedly set to work, and by Wednesday they were finally ready to open the box. But as the Washington Post reports, they’d already begun to suspect that something was amiss:

The dimensions of this box, carefully removed Tuesday from a 1,500-pound slab of granite, are smaller than the one documented in the historical record. It is also made of lead, instead of the expected copper. And there’s no sign of a florid inscription that was supposedly carved into the box’s side.
Conservationists spent about five hours poking and prying at the box’s lid as cameras, historians, and local officials looked on. They then allowed Governor Ralph Northam to finally open the capsule:


Inside was found … zero dead president pics and an assortment of seemingly random items that didn’t match descriptions of the time capsule’s contents. Per the Post:

The objects inside included “American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac” of 1875; a copy of “The Huguenot Lovers: A Tale of the Old Dominion,” which records indicate was published in 1889; and an unlabeled maroon-colored book that was too wet to open.
There was also a soggy envelope containing a photograph from a studio on Broad Street in Richmond, at least one pamphlet describing a waterworks project on the south side of Richmond dated 1888 and a Victorian-era British coin.
Dale Brumfield, a local historian who has researched the time capsule, theorized that it might be a kind of “vanity project” put together by people involved in constructing the Lee statue. The Huguenot book is a romance written by the engineer who designed the circle around the statue, and the photo depicts the mustachioed man who designed its pedestal.

Many questions remain. Was this a second, unauthorized time capsule? Why does it include a British coin? Were the contemporary reports on the contents of the official time capsule wrong? Was that box ever embedded in the pedestal? Was it secretly removed in the National Treasure crew’s least exciting heist ever?

Historians have their work cut out for them, but we’ve already (re)learned one important lesson: Confederate sympathizers are not to be trusted.

 

[Super-Chevy454]

Someone tweeted then Winnie the Pooh will enter public domain on January 1st.

https://mobile.twitter.com/textfiles/status/1474488517074067460

 

[PS1gamenwatch]

Great Scott. Is this even legitimate?

 

[Butcher Pete]

Japanese troons and other assorted genderspecials are crying about the male vs. female format of NHK Kohaku Utagassen, (“Red vs. White Song Battle”), which they’ve been doing every year since being a genderspecial became a thing.

The constant claim is that somehow, dividing into male and female teams “causes harm” and ‘incites violence against sexual minorities.” (((Sounds familiar))).

Luckily, no one listens to these freaks, much less lets them run a library story hour.

 

[JustSomeDong]

Luckily, no one listens to these freaks, much less lets them run a library story hour.

I (only vaguely now...) remember a time when that was true in America... Get ready to poor one out for our nippon homies.

 

[Irrational Exuberance]

Robert E. Lee Statue-Makers Troll Us Via Time Capsule

Robert E. Lee Statue-Makers Troll Us Via Time Capsule

archived 24 Dec 2021 14:43:45 UTC

archive.ph

“We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like. I have prepared one of my own. I have placed some rather large samples of dynamite, gunpowder, and nitroglycerin. My time capsule is set to go off in the year 3000. It will show them what we are really like.”
― Alfred Hitchcock

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

More Than 200 Marines Have Been Removed for Refusing to Get Vaccinated

A total of 206 Marines have been removed for refusing to comply with the Pentagon’s mandate that all troops get vaccinated against the Wuhan coronavirus, a Marine Corps spokesperson announced

townhall.com

More Than 200 Marines Have Been Removed for Refusing to Get Vaccinated

By: Madeline Leesman

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/

A total of 206 Marines have been removed for refusing to comply with the Pentagon’s mandate that all troops get vaccinated against the Wuhan coronavirus, a Marine Corps spokesperson announced Thursday.

In an emailed statement, Capt. Andrew Wood, who is a Marine Corps spokesperson, said that 95 percent of the more than 182,000 active-duty Marines have at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. The vaccination rate for reservists increased from 86 percent partially-vaccinated to 83 percent fully vaccinated.

Two weeks ago, on Dec. 16, a spokesperson for the Marine Corps said that 103 members had been kicked out for refusing to get vaccinated. The announcement, from Maj. Jim Stenger, a Marine Corps spokesperson, said that the service members were separated with a “vaccine refusal” discharge code. Last week, Politico reported that the number had risen to 169.

The deadline for active-duty Marines to be vaccinated was Nov. 28. Reservists were given until Dec. 28 to comply with the mandate. The Marine Corps is still processing over 1,000 administrative and medical exemptions. They have not approved any processed religious exemptions, which exceeds 3,000.

In August, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin mandated that all members of the military get vaccinated. Each branch enforced its own vaccination deadlines.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Army announced that 98 percent of active-duty soldiers had gotten vaccinated against COVID-19. In January, the announcement noted, the Army will begin separating soldiers who did not get vaccinated who are not waiting for a medical or religious exemption to be processed. At the time of the announcement, the Army had made four permanent medical exemptions and no religious exemptions.

 

[JosephStalin]

25 to life with parole. He'll rot for a time, but not forever.

Sentence cut to TEN years. Up for parole in FIVE years. For killing FOUR people, and injuring others. Once again, the criminals have more rights than the victims. Had no problem with the original 110 years.

Truck driver's sentence lowered from 110 years to 10 after outcry

https://archive.ph/kYeO3

Brother of one crash victim has a major problem with the drastic commutation of the sentence.

Brother of crash victim calls Gov. Polis a ‘despicable human being’ for commuting truck driver's sentence

The brother of a victim of the truck driver whose sentence was reduced from 110 years to 10 by Polis is calling him a despicable human being.

www.bizpacreview.com

Brother of crash victim calls Gov. Polis a ‘despicable human being’ f…

archived 3 Jan 2022 21:22:11 UTC

archive.ph

 

[JosephStalin]

10 years and mandatory re-education in driving for life

Four dead, others injured...time for a helicopter ride. As happens too often these days, the criminals have more rights than the victims.