Solidarity hair

Mar 25th, 2017 5:19 pm | By

Time for a feel-good story.

A Brazilian teacher has come up with a unique way to help a schoolgirl who was being bullied because of her hair.

Ana Barbara Ferreira, from Sao Paulo, said her student was “sad” after being ridiculed by a boy, who had said her hair was “ugly”.

“At that moment, the only thing I could tell her was that she was wonderful and shouldn’t care about what he was saying,” she wrote in a Facebook post that went viral.

That would be this post.

That was all she could do at that moment, but the next day she did more.

Image may contain: 2 people, people smiling, child and closeup

 



It was frankly unbelievable

Mar 25th, 2017 9:14 am | By

Fran and Dan Keller are out of prison, after 21 years.

Among the atrocities that Frances and Dan Keller were supposed to have committed while running a day care center out of their Texas home: drowning and dismembering babies in front of the children; killing dogs and cats in front of the children; transporting the children to Mexico to be sexually abused by soldiers in the Mexican army; dressing as pumpkins and shooting children in the arms and legs; putting the children into a pool with sharks that ate babies; putting blood in the children’s Kool-Aid; cutting the arm or a finger off a gorilla at a local park; and exhuming bodies at a cemetery, forcing children to carry the bones.

Hm. Something a bit off there? Wouldn’t that kind of thing be noticed rather quickly? So quickly that no one could actually do all of it? Even if anyone wanted to do all of it, which seems…unlikely

It was frankly unbelievable—except that people, most importantly, a Texas jury, did believe the Kellers had committed at least some of these acts. In 1992, the Kellers were convicted of aggravated sexual assault on a child and each sentenced to 48 years in prison. The investigation into their supposed crimes took slightly more than a year, the trial only six days.

Hm. Seems a bit off. You’d think the weirdness of many of the charges would hint that the others might be unreliable too.

Anyway they’re out now, because the doctor who testified at their trial recanted his testimony.

The Keller case is typical of the satanic ritual abuse panic and the dozens of cases that popped up in breathless media reports. The trouble started when Christy Chaviers, a 3-year-old girl who was an infrequent visitor to the day care during the summer of 1991, told her mother that Dan had spanked her. With coaxing from her mother and her therapist, Donna David-Campbell, whom Christy had been seeing to deal with acting-out issues, an incident of spanking turned into something much worse—Dan Keller, the little girl said, had defecated on her head and raped her with a pen. From there, the stories Christy told David-Campbell became wilder: The Kellers “had everyone take off their clothes and had a parrot that pecked them in the pee-pee,” they made her smoke a cigarette, they “came to her house with a chainsaw and cut her dog Buffy in the vagina until it bled.” David-Campbell concluded not that Christy was an imaginative child having trouble with her parents’ divorce, but that she was the victim of ritual abuse.

Hm. Doesn’t law enforcement normally recognize that very young children can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality?

The panic began in earnest with the McMartin Preschool trial, an investigation that began 30 years ago. The owners of a California preschool and several teachers were accused of molesting a 2½-year-old boy; before it was over, hundreds of children, usually after lengthy sessions with coercive therapists, came forward to say that they, too, had been taken to a church to watch the beheading of a baby, then forced to drink its blood or flown by plane to random cities for sexual abuse, or countless other bizarre stories.

While that investigation and trial unfolded, other cases surfaced. Media poured attention on the claims, which made great fodder for a newly created 24-hour news cycle (CNN Headline News launched in 1982). As televangelists prayed for deliverance from Satan’s scourge, talk show “experts” claimed that every imaginable form of abuse was happening on a massive scale in America and that networks of Satanists had infiltrated schools, the police, and local government.

Now that was “fake news” if you like.

“It sounds laughable,” says Debbie Nathan, an investigative reporter who co-wrote Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt about the panic and is now a director for the National Center for Reason and Justice, which took up the Kellers’ cause. But there is certainly historical precedent, going back even further than the Salem witch trials: Ancient Romans, for example, claimed that Christians ate babies; Christians later claimed that Jews used Christian babies’ blood in religious rituals.

“Children symbolize the good things about culture, the innocence and purity, the future of the culture,” says Nathan. When a culture feels under threat in some way, fear and anxiety focus on the safety of children. America was experiencing upheavals in gender roles, child-rearing practices, and social expectations, and more and more people were embracing fundamentalist religion and belief in the devil. The fear of satanic ritual abuse was perpetuated by both ends of the political spectrum. “In the right wing, you had that kind of preoccupation with Satan, and on the left, you had a lot of concern with the well-being of children, and women going back to work, and I think it was a perfect storm of fear and anxiety,” says Nathan. Most if not all of those involved believed they were acting in the best interests of the children—which meant that any healthy skepticism was interpreted as anti-child.

We’re seeing that again.

Though satanic ritual abuse cases are virtually unheard of now, the panic hasn’t entirely subsided. A number of groups and people still very much believe in satanic and other ritual abuse; Randy Noblitt, the expert witness called by the prosecution in the Kellers’ trial, is one of them (and he’s still on faculty at Alliant International University).

Even if most of us don’t believe Satan is lurking in day care centers, we’re not immune to the panic people felt. Nathan points to the outsize concern (disproportionate to their rarity) over child “predators” or the epidemic of teen sexting as potential modern panic candidates: “One of the hallmarks of a panic is that you don’t realize it’s a panic when you’re in the middle of it.”

Well, some of you do.



Guest post: As history books have showed

Mar 25th, 2017 8:11 am | By

Originally a comment poem by Lady Mondegreen on Brothas from anotha motha.

The world has held great heroes

As history books have showed

But never a name to go down in fame

Compared with that of Toad Trump.

The clever men at Oxford

Know all that there is to be knowed

But they none of them know one half so much

As intelligent Mr. Toad Trump.



Brothas from anotha motha

Mar 24th, 2017 3:11 pm | By

Related image

Jonathan Barry

Image result for trump truck



Never mind

Mar 24th, 2017 2:58 pm | By

So that didn’t happen.

House Republican leaders abruptly pulled a rewrite of the nation’s health-care system from consideration on Friday, a dramatic acknowledgment that they were unable to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“We just pulled it,” President Trump told The Washington Post in a telephone interview.

The decision came a day after Trump delivered an ultimatum to lawmakers — and represented multiple failures for the new president and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

Good.

In the interview, Trump deflected any responsibility for the setback and blamed Democrats instead.

“We couldn’t get one Democratic vote and we were a little bit shy, very little, but it was still a little bit shy so we pulled it,” he said.

I should hope not. Democrats don’t want to do away with universal health insurance, so it’s stupid to reproach them for not voting for doing away with it.

Trump said he had no problem waiting for Democrats to seek cooperation with Republicans on health-care.

“I never said I was going to repeal and replace in the first 61 days,” he said.

In fact, Trump said repeatedly as a candidate and before his inauguration that he would work to repeal the ACA on his first day in office. And congressional Republicans have spent the last seven years campaigning to undo the law.

Well yeah he said on his first day. But that’s not the first 61 days! Totally different.

The dramatic decision stunned legislators who have spent the last several years crafting proposals to repeal former president Barack Obama’s top domestic policy victory. Some were near tears exiting a meeting where Ryan announced his decision.

Awwwwwwww. Frustrated in their burning desire to yank health care insurance away from poor people.

Trump had personally lobbied 120 lawmakers, either in person or on the phone, White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters on Friday.

The president had “left everything on the field,” Spicer said.

But he failed. He failed. He’s a loser. LOSER.



Zuckerberg!

Mar 24th, 2017 12:09 pm | By

Maryam on Facebook:

Facebook
You suspended my account when I was campaigning against the stoning of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani in Iran; now you have suspended A Gilani’s account for campaigning against blasphemy laws in Pakistan. Doing the dirty work for Islamist states and organisations? Whilst freethinkers are being killed. Shame on you Ayatollah Facebook.

Shame on you Ayatollah Facebook.



Beep beep

Mar 24th, 2017 11:30 am | By

Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman have another State of Trump article, about how he’s encountering self-doubt for perhaps the first time in his life, thanks to discovering that he can’t just ram through the repeal of Obamacare as if he were raping it.

A president who prefers unilateral executive action and takes intense pride in his ability to cut deals finds himself in a humbling negotiation unlike any other in his career, pinned between moderates who believe the health care measure is too harsh, and a larger group of fiscal conservatives adept at using their leverage to scuttle big deals cut by other Republican leaders.

Just imagine: government is not identical to running a bizness. Who could possibly have known that?

“I don’t know whether he will ultimately succeed or fail, but I will tell you that President Trump is so transactional, who knows what transactions he will be willing to make to pass this,” said Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, who passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010 as speaker.

“So far he’s acting like a rookie. It’s really been amateur hour,” she added. “He seems to think that a charm offensive or a threat will work — that saying ‘I can do this for you’ or ‘I can do this against you’ will work. That’s not the way it works. You have to build real consensus, and you have to gain a real knowledge of the policy — and the president hasn’t done either of those things.”

Crashing on the shoals of Congress marks Mr. Trump’s first true encounter with legislative realities and the realization that a president’s power is less limitless than it appears, particularly in the face of an intransigent voting bloc. Mr. Trump is not used to a hard no — but that was the word of the week.

It must be painful being a huge bully and discovering that bullying doesn’t always work.

If Mr. Trump has any advantage in the negotiations, it is his ideological flexibility: He is more interested in a win, or avoiding a loss, than any of the arcane policy specifics of the complicated measure, according to a dozen aides and allies interviewed over the past week who described his mood as impatient and jittery. Already, he has shown that flexibility by going back on campaign promises that no one would lose coverage when the Affordable Care Act was replaced and he would not cut Medicaid.

Well of course. He’s Donald Trump. Of course he doesn’t give a shit about the realities that his “win” will mean millions of people losing healthcare coverage, and thus tens of thousands of people suffering illness and death. Of course a “win” for him is all he cares about.

Only in the past two weeks, as Mr. Trump focused on his continuing defense of accusations that his presidential campaign colluded with Russia, has he focused his energies and powers of persuasion on ramming through a proposal that is likely to result in the loss of health insurance for millions, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates.

On Wednesday, Mr. Trump made a key concession to fiscal hawks by agreeing to scrap the health care law’s provision mandating “essential benefits” — like outpatient visits, mental health services and some maternity care — in a bid to lower premiums.

Lower premiums in exchange for disappearing benefits! What could possibly go wrong?

However, the dear man found a way to blow off steam.

Mr. Trump appeared almost oblivious to the dire situation unfolding in the hours after he hosted a meeting with members of the House Freedom Caucus at the White House, where he made the case Mr. Winston pointed to — that not passing the health bill risks the rest of the Republican agenda.

In the midafternoon, a beaming Mr. Trump climbed into the rig of a black tractor-trailer, which had been driven to the White House for an event with trucking industry executives, honking the horn and posing for a series of tough-guy photos — one with his fists held aloft, another staring straight ahead, hands gripping the large wheel, his face compressed into an excited scream.

At a meeting inside shortly afterward, Mr. Trump announced that he was pressed for time and needed to go make calls for more votes.

A reporter informed him that the vote had already been called off.

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For being a loud-mouth

Mar 24th, 2017 11:07 am | By

Via the BBC:

A journalist has been shot dead in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, the third to be killed in the country this month.

Miroslava Breach was shot eight times in her car outside her home in the state capital, Chihuahua.

One of her children was in the vehicle but was not hurt.

Not physically hurt.

Mrs Breach had reported on organised crime, drug-trafficking and corruption for a national newspaper, La Jornada, and a regional newspaper, Norte de Juarez.

The gunmen left a note saying: “For being a loud-mouth.”

Thanks for the explanation.

 



He’s president, and we’re not

Mar 23rd, 2017 5:38 pm | By

There’s a lot of buzz about an interview Trump did for Time, in which he told a whole bunch of whoppers. That’s ironic, because the interview is about his testy relationship to the truth. David Graham at the Atlantic

Time and again, Scherer asks Trump about statements that he has made without evidence, and time and again, Trump insists that something that happened later retroactively justifies the claims he has made, effectively arguing that lies have been alchemically transformed into truths after the fact. Time’s cover, the president was surely sad to discover, is not his face but the words, “Is Truth Dead?” over a somber black background.

The problem is that later events don’t make things any less false, and in many cases, Trump is also lying about the ex post facto justifications.

Trump says, for example, that after he claimed there was chaos in Sweden, there were riots. “Sweden. I make the statement, everyone goes crazy. The next day they have a massive riot, and death, and problems,” Trump told Time. He is off on the details—the riot was two days later—but he is also misleading. His original statement was, “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this?” There was still no riot the night before. Even his own standards of retroactive justification, he’s only in the vague vicinity of truth.

It’s the same with his lie about Obama abseiling in to tap his phones: he had zero reason to think that when he said it but he’s nudged people into saying things to him that he thinks justify it now, 19 days after he tweeted it. He’s wrong.

The same pattern has gone for his claim that Barack Obama “wiretapped” him at Trump Tower. Trump made an outlandish, inflammatory claim with no evidence, and has now sought to prove it after the fact. “I have articles saying it happened,” he told Time, but there are no reputable reports justifying his claims, only thinly sourced conspiracy theories. Republicans in Congress and intelligence officials have debunked those reports, and Fox News suspended the legal analyst who made a claim on which Trump was relying. Nonetheless, Trump cited the analyst again in his interview.

Somebody somewhere said it, therefore Trump can’t be wrong in saying it.

At other times, Trump simply claims he’s been proven right when that has not happened. He continues to claim, falsely, that Muslims celebrated in Jersey City on 9/11. Pressed on that, he told Scherer, “Well if you look at the reporter, he wrote the story in TheWashingtonPost.” The reporter, Serge Kovaleski, did not write a story saying what Trump says he did.

The president seems to believe that by saying something, he can conjure it into existence. “I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right,” he said.

“Instinctual” – that’s what people say when they’re too lazy or too stupid or both to do the work of investigation and self-correction. It’s what Bush said to Biden when Biden asked him how he knew, and Biden told him that wasn’t good enough. It still isn’t.

His relationship with the press remains vexed. On the one hand, he calls outlets fake and misleading; on the other, he happily points to press reports, real or imagined, to justify what he cannot prove. That includes the Jersey City claim and the wiretap claim. It also includes Trump’s allegation that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination.

“Well, that was in a newspaper,” Trump said. “No, no, I like Ted Cruz, he’s a friend of mine. But that was in the newspaper. I wasn’t, I didn’t say that. I was referring to a newspaper.”

But the “newspaper” in question was the National Enquirer, a tabloid that seldom makes any pretense at accuracy, and even then, Trump “referring” to the paper doesn’t change the fact that he said it.

He’s such a child. He thinks if it’s written down somewhere public, that makes it true – except of course when it’s the Times or the Post or the New Yorker or Vanity Fair or

This reaches to the heart of the problem. Having spent his career in business and entertainment, where he could shoot off his mouth with relatively minor consequences, and despite envying the bully pulpit of the presidency for decades and bragging that he is the president, he cannot understand the difference in importance between what a TV personality says and what the president of the United States says publicly.

And it’s clear that 500 people could sit him down and explain it to him in very short simple words, and he still wouldn’t take it in. He doesn’t take anything in.

Here’s how the interview ended:

But isn’t there, it strikes me there is still an issue of credibility. If the intelligence community came out and said, we have determined that so and so is the leaker here, but you are saying to me now, that you don’t believe the intelligence community when they say your tweet was wrong.

I’m not saying—no, I’m not blaming. First of all, I put Mike Pompeo in. I put Senator Dan Coats in. These are great people. I think they are great people and they are going to, I have a lot of confidence in them. So hopefully things will straighten out. But I inherited a mess, I inherited a mess in so many ways. I inherited a mess in the Middle East, and a mess with North Korea, I inherited a mess with jobs, despite the statistics, you know, my statistics are even better, but they are not the real statistics because you have millions of people that can’t get a job, ok. And I inherited a mess on trade. I mean we have many, you can go up and down the ladder. But that’s the story. Hey look, in the mean time, I guess, I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not. You know. Say hello to everybody OK?

It’s the post facto thing again. He’s president, therefore he’s right about everything. No, dude, that’s not how it works.



Nunes said it was a “judgment call”

Mar 23rd, 2017 1:23 pm | By

Devin Nunes doesn’t get it.

House Intelligence Committee Democrats said Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) apologized to them Thursday during a closed-door meeting for his handling of revelations about surveillance that potentially could have been collected about President Trump and his associates during the transition period.

Nunes’s apology was “generic,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), a member of the Intelligence Committee, said on CNN, adding that it was “not clear” precisely which actions his apology covered.

Nunes came under heavy fire from Democrats on Wednesday after going first to the press, then to the White House, and then to the press again before consulting with committee colleagues about what he said was fresh intelligence about the president and his campaign aides.

That might sound like no big deal until you remember that the committee is investigating the White House and therefore the committee chairman should not be toddling over there to share new information at all, let alone before sharing it with the rest of the committee. Imagine a committee investigating malfeasance at Speedigo Car Corporation. Imagine the committee chair getting new information and immediately dashing off to Detroit to share it with Speedigo, without consulting the rest of the committee. What would that look like? It would look as if the chair had been bought and paid for, that’s what.

On Thursday, Nunes said it was a “judgment call” to personally brief Trump before speaking with his Intelligence Committee colleagues, who are actively investigating allegations that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections and suspected links between Trump aides and the Kremlin.

But Trump is the subject of investigation.

This is just bonkers. This isn’t a government, it’s a madhouse.

Nunes told reporters that the identities of the individuals in the report were “very clear to me,” and that they were members of the Trump team.

That has sparked charges that if anybody is revealing more than they should, it is Nunes — for potentially telling the public that hidden names in surveillance reports referred to the president and his advisers, something that is likely classified information.

Nunes said the information was classified, but he argued that disclosing the existence of the report and the nature of it did not reveal any classified information.

Nunes’s own staff were not aware of the chairman’s decision to go public and brief the president and were dismayed by his actions, said several individuals familiar with the matter.

Because the chair of the investigating committee isn’t supposed to go blabbing to Speedigo.



The xenophobe has spoken

Mar 23rd, 2017 12:41 pm | By

He can’t get even this right.

Two other people were killed – but they weren’t American, so Donald “the Boor” Trump ignores them.

One was Keith Palmer.

PC Keith Palmer, 48, was stabbed as he tried to stop the attacker in a courtyard outside the Houses of Parliament.

He was an unarmed member of the Parliamentary and Diplomatic Protection Squad who had served for 15 years.

“Keith was a genuinely nice person; nobody had a bad word to say about him. When I heard what had happened I knew it would be him because that’s just the sort of guy he was, to step straight in when others might step back,” said PC James Aitkenhead, who worked alongside Keith in the TSG.

Conservative MP and former colleague James Cleverly tweeted: “A lovely man, a friend. I’m heartbroken.” Mr Cleverly said the two had served together in the Royal Artillery before PC Palmer joined the police.

In an emotional tribute in the Commons, he later described him as a “strong, professional public servant”.

The other was Aysha Frade.

Aysha Frade, who worked at DLD College London, close to Westminster Bridge, also died in the attack.

She was a British national whose mother was Spanish, the Spanish foreign ministry said.

Ms Frade lived in London with her two young daughters and husband, according to Spanish media reports.

Her father was of Cypriot origin, while her mother was from the Galician town of Betanzos, where her two sisters run an English school, the Voz de Galicia reports.

The principal of the independent sixth form college said she worked in the administration team and described her as “a highly regarded and loved” member of staff.

“She will be deeply missed by all of us,” Rachel Borland added.

But Trump, I suppose in the interests of Making America Great Again, didn’t bother to mention them. Somehow I don’t feel greater.



The coordination may have taken place

Mar 23rd, 2017 11:37 am | By

And today the FBI is telling us some of what it has.

The FBI has information that indicates associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, US officials told CNN.

This is partly what FBI Director James Comey was referring to when he made a bombshell announcement Monday before Congress that the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, according to one source.

The FBI is now reviewing that information, which includes human intelligence, travel, business and phone records and accounts of in-person meetings, according to those U.S. officials. The information is raising the suspicions of FBI counterintelligence investigators that the coordination may have taken place, though officials cautioned that the information was not conclusive and that the investigation is ongoing.

Maybe it’s all a big misunderstanding. Maybe.

One of the obstacles the sources say the FBI now faces in finding conclusive intelligence is that communications between Trump’s associates and Russians have ceased in recent months given the public focus on Russia’s alleged ties to the Trump campaign. Some Russian officials have also changed their methods of communications, making monitoring more difficult, the officials said.

Do your best. It’s kind of urgent.



In an apparent assassination

Mar 23rd, 2017 11:25 am | By

Congress and national intelligence are investigating ties between Trump and his campaign and Russia, and today we get another unsubtle bumping off:

A former Russian parliamentarian named Denis Voronenkov, who fled Russia last October and has criticized President Vladimir Putin’s government, was killed in Kiev on Thursday, in an apparent assassination that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is reportedly calling “state terrorism.”

Voronenkov, 45, had just left the Premier Palace hotel when he was shot twice in the head on a sidewalk along a busy street in Ukraine’s capital, according to the Kyiv Post. Citing police, the newspaper adds that both Voronenkov’s bodyguard and the attacker were wounded and in the hospital.

The killing has the “handwriting” of the Russian special services, Poroshenko said in a statement Thursday. According to a translation by Reuters, he said Voronenkov’s murder was “an act of state terrorism on the part of Russia, which he was forced to leave for political reasons.”

Responding to those accusations, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said, “We believe that all speculations about a Russian connection are absurd,” according to state-run Tass media. He also said Ukraine “had proved unable to take care of Voronenkov’s security,” the outlet reports.

Poroshenko said Voronenkov was a key witness in Ukraine’s inquiry into former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Russian military involvement in the country.

It feels a bit like being locked in a basement watching a pool of sewage rise higher and higher.



A chip

Mar 23rd, 2017 11:07 am | By

Donnie Junior must make Daddy proud.

It has become something of an online custom in the social media age to react to tragic news stories — like Wednesday’s attack in London — with well-meaning if sometimes rote messages like “thoughts and prayers.” But that does not appear to be Donald Trump Jr.’s style.

“You have to be kidding me?!” Mr. Trump said Wednesday afternoon on Twitter, as details of the episode — which left at least five dead, including the assailant, and 40 injured — continued to unfold. The message continued, “Terror attacks are part of living in big city, says London Mayor Sadiq Khan.”

Mr. Trump, the oldest son of President Trump, was calling attention to an article from September in The Independent, a British newspaper, that described Mr. Khan’s reaction to a bombing then in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City.

Which, oddly enough, was not a flip “oh well that’s life in the big city!” but rather an explanation of what kind of preparedness is necessary for a big city likely to face terrorist attacks.

Mr. Trump mischaracterized the London mayor’s remarks. Mr. Khan did not describe terrorism as “part of living in a big city,” as if bombings and shootings were an inescapable fact of life. He said that terrorism preparedness, including providing sufficient support to the police, was “part and parcel of living in a great global city.”

So young Donnie maligned the mayor of London because he didn’t bother to figure out what he’d said. Was it something about his name perhaps? “Sadiq Khan” struck him as a name that a London mayor shouldn’t have?

The Times reporter, Liam Stack, apparently emailed young Donnie to ask him why he’s such an asshole.

Mr. Trump declined to elaborate later on Wednesday. “I’m not going to comment on every tweet I send,” he said in an email.

Attaboy young Donnie. Send out insulting tweets based on your own incomprehension and ignorance, and then refuse to withdraw or apologize. Just like Daddy.



Grievous bodily harm

Mar 23rd, 2017 10:54 am | By

The police have identified the marauding attacker:

The man believed to have carried out the attack in Westminster has been named by police as Khalid Masood.

Kent-born Masood, who was shot dead in the attack, was not the subject of any current police investigations, but had a range of previous convictions.

The 52-year-old was believed to have been living in the West Midlands.

The so-called Islamic State group has said it was behind the attack, in which PC Keith Palmer, Aysha Frade and US tourist Kurt Cochran were killed.

Whether or not IS gave any planning or logistical help, of course it’s “behind” the attack in the larger sense: it models violence and brutality in the name of religion, and people who love violence and brutality feel justified in their pet hobby.

The Metropolitan Police said there had been no prior intelligence about Masood’s intention to carry out an attack.

But he was known to the police and his previous convictions included causing grievous bodily harm, possession of offensive weapons and public order offences.

A violence-loving guy. Which is prior, the religion or the love of violence and brutality? I think it’s the latter.

A JustGiving page set up for the family of PC Palmer reached its target of £100,000 on Thursday afternoon, less than 24 hours after it had been set up. That target has since been doubled.

The Met said that as a mark of respect, the constable’s shoulder number, 4157U, would be retired and not reissued to any other officer.

Mrs Frade worked at a London college, while Mr Cochran was from Utah, in the US, and had been visiting the capital with his wife Melissa, who is in hospital with serious injuries.

According to a family statement, the couple had been celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary and were due to return to the US on Thursday.

The casualties included 12 Britons, three French children -who have since returned home – two Romanians, four South Koreans, one German, one Pole, one Irish, one Chinese, one Italian, one American and two Greeks.

A multicultural bridge, an international bridge, a bridge that draws people from all over. It’s the bridge where the gaudy Victorian-Gothic Houses of Parliament are right in front of you (going south to north), so naturally it draws people who want to get a look at London. I like the view from Waterloo bridge even more, myself, but Westminster bridge is nothing to sneeze at. Now it will be a place of horror for years to come.

Image result for view from westminster bridge



Saving Trump

Mar 22nd, 2017 5:28 pm | By

Now Devin Nunes is using the intelligence investigation to try to bail out Trump. It’s my understanding that that’s a no-no.

Representative Devin Nunes said Wednesday that the intelligence community collected multiple conversations involving members of Trump’s transition team during legal surveillance of foreign targets after he won election last year. After Nunes went to the White House to brief Trump, the president told reporters “I somewhat do” feel vindicated by the latest development.

The committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff of California, said Nunes’s decision to go to Trump before informing other members of the panel “casts quite a profound cloud” over whether the committee can conduct a proper investigation.

The Intelligence Committee chairman is taking a risk in providing a measure of cover for the president. His committee is one of the congressional panels that’s supposed to be providing oversight of the investigation by the FBI and other agencies into Russian meddling in last year’s presidential campaign. Nunes — who served on Trump’s transition team — said the surveillance that picked up Trump’s associates wasn’t aimed at Russia.

Schiff said Nunes has to decide whether he’s going to lead the Intelligence Committee or “act as a surrogate of the White House. He cannot do both.” The Democrat said an independent investigation is needed to investigate Russia’s interference and any contacts between those around Trump and the Russian government.

Schiff also said in a statement that Nunes told him the names of U.S. citizens in the intercepted communications “were in fact masked, but that he could still figure out the probable identity of the parties.” He said, “This does not indicate that there was any flaw in the procedures followed by the intelligence agencies.”

Trump and his aides have tried to deflect attention from the probe of Russian meddling by focusing on the assertion that they were the victims of surveillance and through complaints that information about the investigation — and contacts between Trump allies and Russian officials — have been leaked by the intelligence community.

And Nunes is helping him, while leading the investigating committee. What a joke.



Rough day

Mar 22nd, 2017 4:50 pm | By



Adventurer

Mar 22nd, 2017 4:31 pm | By

It’s a gorgeous blowy spring-like afternoon here. I went for a walk in the cemetery about a mile from where I live, and in wandering about I saw a surprising inscription:

Elisabeth Utke Jorgensen
Scholar, Pioneer, Artist, Adventurer
1867-1939

I looked her up and found a brief biography by Seattle historian Paul Dorpat:

One of the first women to graduate from the University of Copenhagen, Elizabeth Utke immigrated in the early 1890s to the United States, where she found her degrees in logic and mathematics useless. Pursuing two of the few occupations open to her, she attended secretary school while earning her way as a seam­stress with a knack for “fancy work.” She married Carl Jorgensen, a Norwegian sea captain, and the couple toured the West Coast before winding up in Nome, Alaska, during the gold rush in the early 20th century.

In Alaska Elizabeth designed and built shallow draft landing craft that she and her husband operated in a prosperous lighterage (barge) business, moving miners and supplies between the ships they arrived on and the shallow shoreline of Nome. After returning to Seattle and constructing their home overlooking the ravine, the couple raised a family while Elizabeth continued to practice her skills in photography, sewing and watercolors.



This is fundamentally about language orthodoxy

Mar 22nd, 2017 1:14 pm | By

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is not apologizing.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist and feminist, has condemned a “language orthodoxy” on the political left after she endured a vitriolic backlash over comments about transgender women.

The author of Half of a Yellow Sun plunged into a row about identity politics when she suggested in an interview last week that the experiences of transgender women, who she said are born with the privileges the world accords to men, are distinct from those of women born female. She was criticised for implying that trans women are not “real women”.

But Adichie defended her comments during a public appearance in Washington on Monday night. “This is fundamentally about language orthodoxy,” she told a sellout event organised by the bookshop Politics & Prose. “There’s a part of me that resists this sort of thing because I don’t think it’s helpful to insist that unless you want to use the exact language I want you to use, I will not listen to what you’re saying.

“From the very beginning, I think it’s been quite clear that there’s no way I could possibly say that trans women are not women. It’s the sort of thing to me that’s obvious, so I start from that obvious premise. Of course they are women but in talking about feminism and gender and all of that, it’s important for us to acknowledge the differences in experence of gender. That’s really what my point is.”

Yes but that’s not allowed to be what anyone’s point is. No one is allowed to have such a point. It is Forbidden.

“I didn’t apologise because I don’t think I have anything to apologise for,” she said on Monday. “What’s interesting to me is this is in many ways about language and I think it also illustrates the less pleasant aspects of the American left, that there sometimes is a kind of language orthodoxy that you’re supposed to participate in, and when you don’t there’s a kind of backlash that gets very personal and very hostile and very closed to debate.

“Had I said, ‘a cis woman is a cis woman, and a trans woman is a trans woman’, I don’t think I would get all the crap that I’m getting, but that’s actually really what I was saying.

“But because ‘cis’ is not a part of my vocabulary – it just isn’t – it really becomes about language and the reason I find that troubling is to insist that you have to speak in a certain way and use certain expressions, otherwise we cannot have a conversation, can close up debate. And if we can’t have conversations, we can’t have progress.”

She’s a writer, after all. Writers don’t like being told what words they have to use. I know this from profound personal experience. Writers need to choose their own words.

Adichie distanced herself from academic feminism and said her new book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, is careful to avoid jargon. “I don’t really partake in that kind of language orthodoxy and there’s a part of me that really resists it. So I resist to be coopted into it.”

Jargon is a toxin to language.

“But really, my position remains: I think gender is about what we experience, gender is about how the world treats us, and I think a lot of the outrage and anger comes from the idea that in order to be inclusive, we sometimes have to deny difference. I think that because human difference for so long, in all its various forms, has been the root of so much oppression, sometimes there’s the impulse to say let’s deny the difference, as though by wishing away the difference we can then wish away the oppression.”

This echoes over-optimistic claims of a post-racial society, the award-winning author continued. “In some ways it’s like the idea of colour-blindness, which is, I think, just a really hollow idea that if we say we don’t see colour, then somehow all the oppressions will disappear. That’s not the case …”

It’s very like it. At times it’s identical to it.

During a question and answer session, Adichie was asked about issues of “intersectionality”, the overlap of social identities such as race, gender and sexuality. She remained sceptical: “Speaking of language, even the word ‘intersectionality’ comes from a certain kind of academic discourse that sometimes I don’t know what it means.”

Sometimes it means “I am better than you so sit down and shut up.”



The conversion of Trevor Brooks

Mar 22nd, 2017 12:42 pm | By

The Independent reports that the perp has been identified.

Abu Izzadeen, who was born Trevor Brooks, has been named in reports as the man who drove a car into the Houses of Parliament and attempted to attack police officers.

His views were far from secret: videos of him can be seen across YouTube, in which he rants about how important it is to kill the police and how everyone in Parliament are kufar, or infidels.

Not quite: he says those raised as unbelievers are kufar, but those born and raised Muslim are apostates. He helpfully names Sadiq Khan and Baroness Warsi. (Khan was an MP before he became Mayor.)

In other words he was a loathsome man who peddled loathsome ideas.

Izzadeen was born in Hackney in east London and named Trevor Brooks. He converted to Islam just before he turned 18, in 1993, originally changing his name to Omar but preferring to be known by Abu Izadeen.

He is thought to have been radicalised after he met other famous islamists Omar Bakri Muhammed and Abu Hamza al-Misri at Finsbury Park Mosque in the 1990s. From there, his engagement with terror appeared to grow – he praised the 7/7 suicide bombers and expressed his hope that he too could die a suicide bomber.

He died as a suicide driver and stabber.