Month: September 2020

Remember that Strike Busting Vegan Meat Company?

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Well, the NLRB has filed a complaint against them for firing union organizers.

Considering the fact that this is the Trump National Labor Relations Board, the ironically named No Evil Foods (I wrote about them previously here) had to be pretty egregiously over the line:

Earlier this year, the vegan meat company No Evil Foods—which sells socialist-branded products at 5,500 grocery stores nationwide, including Whole Foods—fired two production workers at its Weaverville, North Carolina production plant who led a union drive at the company and circulated a petition asking for hazard pay during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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This week, the National Labor Review Board (NLRB) found merit that the company illegally terminated the two workers, an NLRB spokesperson confirmed to Motherboard. According to a federal complaint issued Wednesday and obtained by Motherboard, the company violated the law by firing workers because they “assisted a union” and “circulat[ed] a petition seeking hazard pay…for the purposes of mutual aid and protection.”

Under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, it is illegal for employers to discriminate or retaliate against workers for organizing coworkers to improve their working conditions or for attempting to form unions.

………

On Wednesday, the NLRB issued a federal complaint against No Evil Foods, alleging the company violated the NLRA by “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed.” According to the complaint, on April 1, 2020, a No Evil Foods HR manager interrogated employees about their union organizing and the petition for hazard pay, creating the impression management was “surveilling employees” by telling them they knew who had circulated the petition in the parking lot outside the production plant.

………

The firing of the two union organizers fits within an ongoing trend of ostensibly progressive companies like Kickstarter and Whole Foods taking anti-union stances when employees seek to improve their working conditions.

Jon Reynolds, the other fired No Evil Foods production worker, told Motherboard, “part of what helped us is that we kept notes, and documented and recorded everything. Throughout the unionization process, we amassed as much evidence as possible [that No Evil Foods was against our union].”

Note to would be labor organizers: DOCUMENT EVERYTHING.

………

Following a series of compulsory anti-union meetings led by management, workers voted against joining the United Food and Commercial Workers union in a landslide 43-15 vote in February.

………

A spokesperson for the National Labor Review Board says that a trial for No Evil Foods has been scheduled for December 7.

“The finding that our case had merit is a cause for any worker anywhere to see that there is an actual law that allows people to organize without fear of retaliation,” said Roche, the fired No Evil Foods worker. “Companies that fire people who organize aren’t on the right side of history. “

I really hope that the hypocrites at No Evil Foods get what’s coming to them.

From the Department of About F%$#ing Time

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A federal judge has issued a temporary injunction against Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s attempt to cripple the Post Office in an attempt to suppress Democratic vote. 

Now, the only question is whether or not they go full Andrew Jackson on this:*

A federal judge in Washington state on Thursday granted a request from 14 states to temporarily block operational changes within the U.S. Postal Service that have been blamed for a slowdown in mail delivery, saying President Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy are “involved in a politically motivated attack” on the agency that could disrupt the 2020 election.

Stanley A. Bastian, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, said policies put in place under DeJoy “likely will slow down delivery of ballots” this fall, creating a “substantial possibility that many voters will be disenfranchised and the states may not be able to effectively, timely, accurately determine election outcomes.”

“The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service,” Bastian said in brief remarks after a 2½-hour hearing in Yakima. “They have also demonstrated that this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election.”

The ruling — the first major decision to come out of several lawsuits filed by states against the Postal Service — was a victory for Democratic state officials who view Trump’s persistent attacks on mail voting and DeJoy’s operational changes as part of a concerted effort to impede the vote on Nov. 3. Partisan tensions are running high as millions of Americans prepare to cast mail ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic, and mail delays have heightened concerns that voters unfamiliar with the process will be disenfranchised.

………

“It is easy to conclude that the recent Postal Services’ changes is an intentional effort on the part the current Administration to disrupt and challenge the legitimacy of upcoming local, state, and federal elections,” he wrote.

Hopefully, this ruling will be followed.

*In case you are wondering, after the Supreme Court ruled against his Indian policies, Jackson is reported to have said, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

Support Your Local Police

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This is f%$#ed Up and Sh%$

Remember when I wrote about a Clackamas County, Oregon Deputy spreading lies about Antifa starting fires?

It gets, worse.  A LOT worse.

The Deputy, who we now know is one Mark Nikolai, did more than spread lies about the fires.

He gave specific instructions on how white supremacist militia could kill people and get away with it.

Please also note, as had been demonstrated time, and time, and time, and time again, this guy is the rule not the exception. 

Most of the cops out there are clearly pro-white supremacist.

It’s why the entire institution of law enforcement in America needs to be torn down brick by brick and replaced with something that is not this corrupt and dysfunctional:

For many of us, September 11 has become a day of remembrance and a time to band together and take care of other people in any small way we can.

But for one sheriff’s deputy in Oregon, it was apparently an opportunity to share some dark advice amidst the wildfires that have spread in the Pacific Northwest.

A video was circulated online after an individual presumably wearing a body camera caught the deputy giving a group of armed White nationalist militia members tips on how to use force and kill civilians without getting caught or being charged.

The sheriff’s deputy has been identified as Deputy Mark Nikolai, who was placed on administrative leave.

………

Nikolai can be heard saying in the video:

“Don’t get yourself in a situation where you lose your rights because you pushed the limit.”

“You all mean to do good, your heart’s in the right place, but the courts nowadays don’t give a s**t where your heart is.”

………

“Now, if you throw a f**king knife in their hand after you shoot them, that’s on you.”

Officials from the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Department have denied any affiliation with Nikolai’s statements or point of view.

They can deny it all they want, but we know what this guy was, and we know that he flourished for years in the department, and good cops don’t tell civilians, or other cops, to carry weapons to plant on their victims.

Any cop who has worked with this guy had to know what he was, and they let it slide, which meant that they were bad cops too.

I’m Beginning to Think That Boeing Doesn’t Want to Make Planes

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It turns out that the problems with the 737 MAX and MCAS were patently obvious early in development in simulator tests, but Boeing ignored and actively covered up these problems. 

At this point, I think that we need to seriously consider filing criminal charges against senior figures at Boeing aircraft, and maybe a few FAA officials.

Otherwise, the finance types will kill again:

Six years before the crew flying a Lion Air Boeing 737-8 reacted to an emergency in a very different way than Boeing assumed pilots would, something similar happened within Boeing’s walls.

During simulator sessions to evaluate a new flight control law’s potential hazards, Boeing test pilots took more than 10 sec. to diagnose and correct a runaway stabilizer. The session caused one employee to wonder whether pilots of the newest 737 family member, dubbed the MAX series for marketing purposes, needed more information to diagnose the hazard. A second employee who flew the simulator scenario responded that more analysis was needed.

  • New U.S. Congress report highlights issues with pilot-aircraft interface during 737 MAX development
  • Long-accepted norms for predicting how pilots react are now being challenged
  • Boeing did not deem the issues significant risks and minimized how much information pilots received

Boeing ultimately determined that MAX pilots would react within seconds in such scenarios—and that the new control law, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), could not create new or more severe hazards. The assumptions were not challenged by regulators.

The similar accident sequences of Lion Air Flight 610 (JT610) in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (ET302) less than five months later—both caused by unneeded MCAS activations—showed that Boeing and the FAA were wrong. Now Boeing, the FAA and others point to the accidents as hard, painful evidence that generally accepted assumptions used to evaluate how pilots will react during inflight emergencies need revamping (AW&ST Oct. 14-27, 2019, p. 18).

But newly revealed information collected by U.S. lawmakers investigating the 737 MAX development raises questions about how Boeing handled hazard assessments and whether it ignored evidence that showed MAX pilots would need more help than they were given.

“Multiple Boeing [employees] failed to inform the FAA that Boeing had discovered early on in the MAX program that it took one of its own test pilots more than 10 sec. to respond to an uncommanded activation of MCAS in a flight simulator, a condition the pilot found to be ‘catastrophic,’” states a report released by the House Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) Committee. “This should have called into question Boeing’s assumptions about pilot response times. It did not.”

The committee’s view is based in part on email messages about the 2012 simulator sessions included among thousands of pages of documents Boeing and the FAA provided in response to lawmakers’ requests during the 18-month investigation.

………

In a second run-through, “the reaction time was long,” greater than 10 sec., the employee wrote, before the cutout switches were toggled, stopping the MCAS-triggered automatic nose-down inputs.

“Do you think that with pilot training/knowledge of the system there will be a sufficiently quick response to the [stabilizer] runaway . . . ?” the employee asked.

“I would like to take a look at how much time there is between a hazardous assessment and a catastrophic assessment,” a second employee responds.

The T&I Committee report does not explain what happened next. Testifying before the committee in October 2019, former Boeing Commercial Airplanes chief engineer John Hamilton told lawmakers that subsequent simulator runaway-stabilizer scenarios showed “the typical reaction time was 4 sec.”

Boeing also concluded that a reaction of 10 sec. or longer must be categorized as “catastrophic,” which the FAA’s large aircraft system design and analysis certification guidance defines as “failure conditions which would prevent continued safe flight and landing.” The 10-sec. parameter was listed in 737 MAX internal design parameters, or “coordination sheets,” right through the 737-8’s March 2017 certification.

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“Every new buzzword represents a company and airline cost via changed manuals, changed training, changed maintenance manuals,” says a 2013 Boeing internal “problem statement” document discussing how the MCAS should be categorized. “Recommended action: investigate deletion of MCAS nomenclature and cover under ‘revised speed trim.’”

While the MCAS name did not disappear, it was downplayed.

A 2014 Boeing presentation prepared for Southwest Airlines and included in the committee’s report discusses the MCAS, underscoring that the system was not kept a secret. But Boeing opted not to include it in flight crew operations manuals, so most line pilots did not realize it existed.

Meanwhile, Boeing determined that the MCAS’ original authority was not enough.

Developed in response to 2011 wind-tunnel testing that quantified the effects of the MAX’s CFM Leap 1B engines on the aircraft’s aerodynamics as a requirement to ensure the new model handled like its predecessors in certain rare flight profiles, the MCAS’ original authority covered high-speed scenarios such as wind-up turns.

………

Adding the low-speed authority meant that the MCAS could direct an aircraft from wings-level to full aircraft nose down in two cycles or an elapsed time of 25 sec., counting a 5-sec. pause between activations.

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The day before JT610 went down, a different crew flew the same aircraft and experienced a similar situation (AW&ST Nov. 11-24, 2019, p. 23). While the crew, aided by a pilot flying in the jumpseat, toggled the stabilizer trim cutout switches and eventually landed safely, their reaction did not match Boeing’s assumptions. This flight and the two accident flights are the only three in-service reports of the MCAS triggering unneeded stabilizer inputs.

………

………

The T&I Committee’s 238-page report cites Boeing’s “disturbing pattern of technical miscalculations and troubling management misjudgments” as well as “numerous oversight lapses and accountability gaps by the FAA” as playing a “significant” role in the two accidents. The pilot-response issue is part of a long list that includes designing the MCAS to be activated based on one AOA sensor’s input and deciding, with FAA approval, to keep any discussion of the MCAS out of pilot flight manuals.

………

“Our report lays out disturbing revelations about how Boeing . . . escaped scrutiny from the FAA, withheld critical information from pilots, and ultimately put planes into service that killed 346 innocent people,” says committee Chair Pete DeFazio (D-Ore.). “What’s particularly infuriating is how Boeing and FAA both gambled with public safety in the critical time period between the two crashes.”

They knew.  Their own pilots, who knew the plane like the back of their hands,  could not reliably react in under 10 seconds.

Quote of the Day

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The future is always unpredictable but it’s hard not to think that aerial firefighting aircraft will be the most valuable kind of fighter aircraft in 2040.

It is an extreme optimist who prepares for a high-tech war in 2100.

—Hushkit

It’s a military aviation site, and even they get that we are facing a catastrophic, and perhaps extinction level, climate crisis.

Yes, Fascism

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This is literally subordinating the entire machinery of justice to the personal service of Donald Trump:

Attorney General William P. Barr told federal prosecutors in a call last week that they should consider charging rioters and others who had committed violent crimes at protests in recent months with sedition, according to two people familiar with the call.

The highly unusual suggestion to charge people with insurrection against lawful authority alarmed some on the call, which included U.S. attorneys around the country, said the people, who described Mr. Barr’s comments on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

The attorney general has also asked prosecutors in the Justice Department’s civil rights division to explore whether they could bring criminal charges against Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle for allowing some residents to establish a police-free protest zone near the city’s downtown for weeks this summer, according to two people briefed on those discussions.

………

During a speech on Wednesday night, Mr. Barr noted that the Supreme Court had determined that the executive branch had “virtually unchecked discretion” in deciding whether to prosecute cases. He did not mention Ms. Durkan or the sedition statute.

“The power to execute and enforce the law is an executive function altogether,” Mr. Barr said in remarks at an event in suburban Washington celebrating the Constitution. “That means discretion is invested in the executive to determine when to exercise the prosecutorial power.”

The disclosures came as Mr. Barr directly inserted himself into the presidential race in recent days to warn that the United States would be on the brink of destruction if Mr. Trump lost. He told a Chicago Tribune columnist that the nation could find itself “irrevocably committed to the socialist path” if Mr. Trump lost and that the country faced “a clear fork in the road.”

………

The attorney general’s question about whether Ms. Durkan, the former U.S. attorney in Seattle, had violated any federal statutes by allowing the protest zone was highly unusual, former law enforcement officials said.

“The attorney general seems personally, deeply offended by the autonomous zone and wants someone to pay for it,” said Chuck Rosenberg, the former U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. “If the people of Seattle are personally offended, they have political recourse. There is no reason to try to stretch a criminal statute to cover the conduct.”

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Mr. Barr mentioned sedition as part of a list of possible federal statutes that prosecutors could use to bring charges, including assaulting a federal officer, rioting, use of explosives and racketeering, according to the people familiar with the call. Justice Department officials included sedition on a list of such charges in a follow-up email.

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The most extreme form of the federal sedition law, which is rarely invoked, criminalizes conspiracies to overthrow the government of the United States — an extraordinary situation that does not seem to fit the circumstances of the protests and unrest in places like Portland, Ore., and elsewhere in response to police killings of Black men.

………

Congress has stipulated that a conviction on a charge of seditious conspiracy can carry up to 20 years in prison.

He is also excoriating professional staff for resisting the politicization of the Department of Justice, ignoring the obvious, even the most junior associate at a law firm is required to speak out if they think that what is proposed is illegal or unethical.

If Barr has his law license a year after he leaves office, they system will have failed:

Attorney General William P. Barr delivered a scathing critique of his own Justice Department on Wednesday night, insisting on his absolute authority to overrule career staffers, who he said too often injected themselves into politics and went “headhunting” for high-profile targets.

Speaking at an event hosted by Hillsdale College, a school with deep ties to conservative politics, Barr directly addressed the criticism that has been building for months inside the department toward his heavy hand in politically sensitive cases, particularly those involving associates of President Trump.

“What exactly am I interfering with?” he asked. “Under the law, all prosecutorial power is invested in the attorney general.”

………

Barr said that argument, in essence, means “the will of the most junior member of the organization” would determine decisions, but he insisted he would not “blindly” defer to “whatever those subordinates want to do.”

“Letting the most junior members set the agenda might be a good philosophy for a Montessori preschool, but it is no way to run a federal agency,” he said.

The attorney general, the nation’s top law enforcement official, spent much of the speech eviscerating the idea of the Justice Department as a place where nonpolitical career prosecutors should be left to decide how sensitive cases are resolved.

BTW, what he is describing is why most state forbid corporate owned law firms, because the non-lawyer managers ordering their employees to file unlawful motions.

Andrey Vyshinsky wishes that he was William Barr.

Because the Consulting Get Their Vig

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Not a great report card

Over at The Nation, they are wondering why so many of the super-PACs were spending their money so stupidly.

The answer is simple: The consultants are paid a percentage of the media buys, so the more that is spent, the more money they get.

Quoting Upton Sinclair YET AGAIN, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

If the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) managed to kick the looters and snake oil salesmen out of the party, they would get a lot more bang for their proverbial buck:

Why do we settle for mediocrity when we should be insisting on excellence? Having spent the past few weeks working on a report card grading the Democratic super PACs and the more than $600 million they’re planning to spend on the fall elections, my main takeaway is that we tolerate far too much mediocrity in progressive politics.

The grades given in the report cards span the spectrum from D+ and C- (American Bridge 21st Century and Senate Majority PAC) to A and A- (Fair Fight, Next Gen Climate Action, and the Progressive Turnout Project), and the underlying analysis clearly shows that tens of millions of dollars are being wasted on spending strategies that are unsupported by—if not directly contradictory to—what the empirical evidence says we should be doing. A summary chart is below, and you can read the full report here.

The consultants are paid a percentage of he spending, so it is no wonder that they try to maximize spending, and hence their pay.

Q.E.D.

Federal Reserve Open Market Committee Issues Report

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 A brief summary of their statement is, “Sh%$ is f%$#ed up, and we have to do something.”

Federal Reserve officials expect to leave interest rates near zero for years — through at least 2023 — and will tolerate periods of higher inflation as they try to revive the labor market and economy, based on their September policy statement and economic projections released Wednesday.

The announcement codifies that the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, and his colleagues plan to be extraordinarily patient as they try to cushion the economy in the months and years ahead.

The policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee “expects it will be appropriate to maintain this target range until labor market conditions have reached levels consistent with the committee’s assessments of maximum employment and inflation has risen to 2 percent and is on track to moderately exceed 2 percent for some time,” officials said in their statement.

………

The Fed updated its Summary of Economic Projections, a set of estimates for how the economy and interest rates will develop in coming years. Officials saw unemployment ending 2020 at a lower rate than it previously forecast: The median official expects the rate to average 7.6 percent over the final three months of the year, compared with 9.3 percent when the Fed released its last set of projections in June.

It’s not a bad policy, but it comes from a horrible reality.

Quote of the Day

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Trump is horrible, but as most commenters on this blog keep pointing out – he’s the stench, not the rot.

—Commenter a different chris in the comments section at Naked Capitalism.

Until people understand this, and people like consultants in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) make their salaries by NOT understanding this, things will not get any better.

Interesting Chemisty? Yes. Life? No.

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Not Life as We Know It

The fact that the Royal Astronomical Society has announced that the atmosphere of Venus contains significant amounts of phosphine (PH3), a substance that, on earth at least, is only produced through the action of anaerobic life and complex industrial processes, where it is a precursor to a number of organophosphorus compounds.

It could be a sign of life, but with no free liquid water, and atmosphere that is largely CO2, Nitrogen, and Sulfuric Acid, I’m dubious.

On the other hand, it is clear that Venus has been the red-headed stepchild of planetary studies, with Mars getting most of the attention, so if we see a few more probes sent to Venus as a result of this finding, I’ll take it.

Their press release is after the break:

Hints of life on Venus

An international team of astronomers, led by Professor Jane Greaves of Cardiff University, today announced the discovery of a rare molecule – phosphine – in the clouds of Venus. On Earth, this gas is only made industrially, or by microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments.

Astronomers have speculated for decades that high clouds on Venus could offer a home for microbes – floating free of the scorching surface, but still needing to tolerate very high acidity. The detection of phosphine molecules, which consist of hydrogen and phosphorus, could point to this extra-terrestrial ‘aerial’ life. The new discovery is described in a paper in Nature Astronomy.

The team first used the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii to detect the phosphine, and were then awarded time to follow up their discovery with 45 telescopes of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. Both facilities observed Venus at a wavelength of about 1 millimetre, much longer than the human eye can see – only telescopes at high altitude can detect this wavelength effectively.

Professor Greaves says, “This was an experiment made out of pure curiosity, really – taking advantage of JCMT’s powerful technology, and thinking about future instruments. I thought we’d just be able to rule out extreme scenarios, like the clouds being stuffed full of organisms. When we got the first hints of phosphine in Venus’ spectrum, it was a shock!”

Naturally cautious about the initial findings, Greaves and her team were delighted to get three hours of time with the more sensitive ALMA observatory. Bad weather added a frustrating delay, but after six months of data processing, the discovery was confirmed.

Team member Dr Anita Richards, of the UK ALMA Regional Centre and the University of Manchester, adds: “To our great relief, the conditions were good at ALMA for follow-up observations while Venus was at a suitable angle to Earth. Processing the data was tricky, though, as ALMA isn’t usually looking for very subtle effects in very bright objects like Venus.”

Greaves adds: “In the end, we found that both observatories had seen the same thing – faint absorption at the right wavelength to be phosphine gas, where the molecules are backlit by the warmer clouds below.”

Professor Hideo Sagawa of Kyoto Sangyo University then used his models for the Venusian atmosphere to interpret the data, finding that phosphine is present but scarce – only about twenty molecules in every billion.

The astronomers then ran calculations to see if the phosphine could come from natural processes on Venus. They caution that some information is lacking – in fact, the only other study of phosphorus on Venus came from one lander experiment, carried by the Soviet Vega 2 mission in 1985.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Dr William Bains led the work on assessing natural ways to make phosphine. Some ideas included sunlight, minerals blown upwards from the surface, volcanoes, or lightning, but none of these could make anywhere near enough of it. Natural sources were found to make at most one ten thousandth of the amount of phosphine that the telescopes saw.

To create the observed quantity of phosphine on Venus, terrestrial organisms would only need to work at about 10% of their maximum productivity, according to calculations by Dr Paul Rimmer of Cambridge University. Any microbes on Venus will likely be very different to their Earth cousins though, to survive in hyper-acidic conditions.

Earth bacteria can absorb phosphate minerals, add hydrogen, and ultimately expel phosphine gas. It costs them energy to do this, so why they do it is not clear. The phosphine could be just a waste product, but other scientists have suggested purposes like warding off rival bacteria.

Another MIT team-member, Dr Clara Sousa Silva, was also thinking about searching for phosphine as a ‘biosignature’ gas of non-oxygen-using life on planets around other stars, because normal chemistry makes so little of it.

She comments: “Finding phosphine on Venus was an unexpected bonus! The discovery raises many questions, such as how any organisms could survive. On Earth, some microbes can cope with up to about 5% of acid in their environment – but the clouds of Venus are almost entirely made of acid.”

Other possible biosignatures in the Solar System may exist, like methane on Mars and water venting from the icy moons Europa and Enceladus. On Venus, it has been suggested that dark streaks where ultraviolet light is absorbed could come from colonies of microbes. The Akatsuki spacecraft, launched by the Japanese space agency JAXA, is currently mapping these dark streaks to understand more about this “unknown ultraviolet absorber”.

The team believes their discovery is significant because they can rule out many alternative ways to make phosphine, but they acknowledge that confirming the presence of “life” needs a lot more work. Although the high clouds of Venus have temperatures up to a pleasant 30 degrees centigrade, they are incredibly acidic – around 90% sulphuric acid – posing major issues for microbes to survive there. Professor Sara Seager and Dr Janusz Petkowski, also both at MIT, are investigating how microbes could shield themselves inside droplets.

The team are now eagerly awaiting more telescope time, for example to establish whether the phosphine is in a relatively temperate part of the clouds, and to look for other gases associated with life. New space missions could also travel to our neighbouring planet, and sample the clouds in situ to further search for signs of life.

Professor Emma Bunce, President of the Royal Astronomical Society, congratulated the team on their work:

“A key question in science is whether life exists beyond Earth, and the discovery by Professor Jane Greaves and her team is a key step forward in that quest. I’m particularly delighted to see UK scientists leading such an important breakthrough – something that makes a strong case for a return space mission to Venus.”

Science Minister Amanda Solloway said:

“Venus has for decades captured the imagination of scientists and astronomers across the world.”

“This discovery is immensely exciting, helping us increase our understanding of the universe and even whether there could be life on Venus. I am incredibly proud that this fascinating detection was led by some of the UK’s leading scientists and engineers using state of the art facilities built on our own soil.”

F%$# Zuck

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We have yet another Facebook whistle-blower, this time they are claiming Facebook ignored fake accounts used from despots and foreign governments to harass opponents online and manufacture consent.

This is not a surprise.  Facebook has been ignoring fake accounts so that they can sell non-existent eyeballs to advertisers for years.

The former Facebook data scientist Sophie Yang thinks that Facebook is not taking the issue seriously.

I think that Facebook DOES take this seriously.  They simply CHOOSE to profit from it:

Facebook ignored or was slow to act on evidence that fake accounts on its platform have been undermining elections and political affairs around the world, according to an explosive memo sent by a recently fired Facebook employee and obtained by BuzzFeed News.

The 6,600-word memo, written by former Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang, is filled with concrete examples of heads of government and political parties in Azerbaijan and Honduras using fake accounts or misrepresenting themselves to sway public opinion. In countries including India, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Bolivia, and Ecuador, she found evidence of coordinated campaigns of varying sizes to boost or hinder political candidates or outcomes, though she did not always conclude who was behind them.

………

The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It’s also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.

………

These are some of the biggest revelations in Zhang’s memo:

  • It took Facebook’s leaders nine months to act on a coordinated campaign “that used thousands of inauthentic assets to boost President Juan Orlando Hernandez of Honduras on a massive scale to mislead the Honduran people.” Two weeks after Facebook took action against the perpetrators in July, they returned, leading to a game of “whack-a-mole” between Zhang and the operatives behind the fake accounts, which are still active.
  • In Azerbaijan, Zhang discovered the ruling political party “utilized thousands of inauthentic assets… to harass the opposition en masse.” Facebook began looking into the issue a year after Zhang reported it. The investigation is ongoing.
  • Zhang and her colleagues removed “10.5 million fake reactions and fans from high-profile politicians in Brazil and the US in the 2018 elections.”
  • In February 2019, a NATO researcher informed Facebook that “he’d obtained Russian inauthentic activity on a high-profile U.S. political figure that we didn’t catch.” Zhang removed the activity, “dousing the immediate fire,” she wrote.
  • In Ukraine, Zhang “found inauthentic scripted activity” supporting both former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, a pro–European Union politician and former presidential candidate, as well as Volodymyr Groysman, a former prime minister and ally of former president Petro Poroshenko. “Volodymyr Zelensky and his faction was the only major group not affected,” Zhang said of the current Ukrainian president.
  • Zhang discovered inauthentic activity — a Facebook term for engagement from bot accounts and coordinated manual accounts— in Bolivia and Ecuador but chose “not to prioritize it,” due to her workload. The amount of power she had as a mid-level employee to make decisions about a country’s political outcomes took a toll on her health.
  • After becoming aware of coordinated manipulation on the Spanish Health Ministry’s Facebook page during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhang helped find and remove 672,000 fake accounts “acting on similar targets globally” including in the US.
  • In India, she worked to remove “a politically-sophisticated network of more than a thousand actors working to influence” the local elections taking place in Delhi in February. Facebook never publicly disclosed this network or that it had taken it down.

………

In her post, Zhang said she did not want it to go public for fear of disrupting Facebook’s efforts to prevent problems around the upcoming 2020 US presidential election, and due to concerns about her own safety. BuzzFeed News is publishing parts of her memo that are clearly in the public interest.

………

Zhang said she turned down a $64,000 severance package from the company to avoid signing a nondisparagement agreement. Doing so allowed her to speak out internally, and she used that freedom to reckon with the power that she had to police political speech.

………

A former Facebook engineer who knew her told BuzzFeed News that Zhang was skilled at discovering fake account networks on the platform.

“She’s the only person in this entire field at Facebook that I ever trusted to be earnest about this work,” said the engineer, who had seen a copy of Zhang’s post and asked not to be named because they no longer work at the company.

“A lot of what I learned from that post was shocking even to me as someone who’s often been disappointed at how the company treats its best people,” they said.

………

Still, she did not believe that the failures she observed during her two and a half years at the company were the result of bad intent by Facebook’s employees or leadership. It was a lack of resources, Zhang wrote, and the company’s tendency to focus on global activity that posed public relations risks, as opposed to electoral or civic harm.

No, it’s malice, and it comes from the top.

Expect an insincere apology from Mark Zuckerberg in 3………2………

………

Katy Pearce, an associate professor at the University of Washington who studies social media and communication technology in Azerbaijan, told BuzzFeed News that fake Facebook accounts have been used to undermine the opposition and independent media in the country for years.

“One of the big tools of authoritarian regimes is to humiliate the opposition in the mind of the public so that they’re not viewed as a credible or legitimate alternative,” she told BuzzFeed News. “There’s a chilling effect. Why would I post something if I know that I’m going to deal with thousands or hundreds of these comments, that I’m going to be targeted?”

Pearce said Zhang’s comment in the memo that Facebook “didn’t care enough to stop” the fake accounts and trolling aligns with her experience. “They have bigger fish to fry,” she said.

………

They said Facebook has at times made things worse by removing the accounts or pages of human rights activists and other people after trolls report them. “We tried to tell Facebook that this is a real person who does important work,” but it took weeks for the page to be restored.

Facebook is notorious for this, and they honestly don’t care.  If they did, they would change it.

………

Zhang outlined the political processes within Facebook itself. She said the best way for her to gain attention for her work was not to go through the proper reporting channels, but to post about the issues on Facebook’s internal employee message board to build pressure.

“In the office, I realized that my viewpoints weren’t respected unless I acted like an arrogant asshole,” Zhang said.

Surprising, a toxic founder created a toxic workplace.

Even by the psychopathic standards of Silicon Valley, Facebook is remarkably evil.

Well, That was Quick

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They just can’t resist stepping their own dicks to kowtow to the rich:

Democrats are backing away from vows to reverse President Trump’s tax cuts if they take control of the Senate and White House.

Senate Democrats had suggested they could move quickly on the issue, but now say they are likely to delay stand-alone tax legislation if Democratic nominee Joe Biden is elected president and their party controls the House and Senate.

………

Democrats realize they need to tread carefully on taxes and the economy. While Biden is leading Trump in the national polls, voters still give Trump higher marks on handling the economy.

There are also divisions among Democrats over how far to go with taxes on corporations and the wealthy, which makes it difficult to move quickly on the issue.

The Blue Dogs, the New Dems, and the rest of their “Third Way” fellow travelers want to make sure that they can continue to deliver inequality and corruption for their corporate and moneybags clients.

“I think we ought to make the decision when we have a better sense of where the economy is going,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who added “there’s an element of truth” to the argument that policymakers shouldn’t raise taxes during a recession.

My second cousin once removed being a classic example of this.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), a member of the Senate Finance Committee and one of Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) closest allies, said she has “no idea” when Democrats would move a tax package next year if they win control of the White House and the Senate.

………

“I’m sure a tax piece will be in there somewhere, but No. 1 priority will be COVID,” she added.

That means never, at least not in a meaningful way.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Democrats will need to “balance” the need to raise revenues with the overall health of the economy, which has slowed dramatically as a result of the pandemic.

Also, never.

………

Some Democrats are pushing for ratcheting up taxes on millionaires and billionaires immediately if their party wins big in November.

Charles Chamberlain, executive director of Democracy for America, a liberal political action committee, said waiting to raise taxes on the rich is a “terrible idea.”

………

Progressive leaders such as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) are pushing for a wealth tax, but Schumer is more focused on lifting the cap on deductions for state and local taxes (SALT), a top priority in New York and other states with high costs of living.

Schumer is pushing for tax relief to the already very well off.

………

Biden’s tax plan does not include a wealth tax. Instead, he would raise revenue by raising the top income tax rate on individuals from 37 percent to 39.6 percent, subject earnings over $400,000 to Social Security payroll taxes, and tax capital gains at the same rate as other income for people who earn more than $1 million.

Half measures.

The between the corporate Democrats, and the relentless hippie punching against anyone who wants to help ordinary folks, seems almost calculated to demoralize the base.

Stating the Obvious

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Retired federal judge John Gleeson, the special master brought in by judge Emmett Sullivan to investigate the DoJ’s attempt to dismiss charges against Michael Flynn, has come out with his report, and it’s a doozy.

In it he calls the decision a, “Corrupt and politically motivated favor unworthy of our justice system,” in addition to noting that it is, “A gross abuse of prosecutorial power.”

It’s nice that someone has finally called William Barr corrupt.

Barr makes Nixon Attorney General John Mitchell look like Perry Mason:

A retired federal judge accused the Justice Department on Friday of yielding to a pressure campaign led by President Trump in its bid to dismiss the prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to federal investigators.

In a 30-page court filing in Washington, former New York federal judge John Gleeson called Attorney General William P. Barr’s request to drop Flynn’s case a “corrupt and politically motivated favor unworthy of our justice system.”

“In the United States, Presidents do not orchestrate pressure campaigns to get the Justice Department to drop charges against defendants who have pleaded guilty — twice, before two different judges — and whose guilt is obvious,” said Gleeson, who was appointed by the court to argue against the government’s request to dismiss the case.

Gleeson’s filing set the stage for a potentially dramatic courtroom confrontation Sept. 29 with the Justice Department and Flynn’s defense over the fate of the highest-ranking Trump adviser to plead guilty in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation. Friday’s filings echo earlier arguments from Gleeson, who called the Justice Department’s attempt to undo Flynn’s conviction a politically motivated and “a gross abuse of prosecutorial power.”

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the District of Columbia set the hearing date after a federal appeals court upheld his authority to review and rule on the government’s dismissal request on Aug. 31. The hearing before Sullivan was selected from three dates proposed by the parties and is scheduled the same day as the first presidential debate between Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell on Friday called Gleeson’s filing “predictable and meaningless,” saying again that Flynn’s investigation was “corrupt from its inception.”

Sidney Powell is  complete nutjob, by the way, less than a half step away from Q-Anon.

………

Although Flynn cooperated with the Mueller probe and was prepared to be sentenced December 2018, he switched course after Mueller’s investigation ended and Barr took office last year. Flynn then accused prosecutors and his former attorneys of coercing him into pleading guilty and concealing FBI misconduct, claims that the department and Sullivan rejected.

When Barr came in, someone told Flynn that the fix was in.

………

“Pursuant to an active investigation into whether President Trump’s campaign officials coordinated activities with the Government of Russia, one of those officials lied to the FBI about coordinating activities with the Government of Russia,” Gleeson said earlier in the case.

“That is about as straightforward a case of materiality as a prosecutor, court, or jury will ever see,” he wrote.

Of all the people who need to go to jail, and be disbarred in the Trump administration, Billy Barr needs it the worst.

I Have Been Calling for This for a While

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He is right.

One of the most corrosive forces in our society today is the (Completely Accurate) perception that our elites are never subject to consequences when they break the law.

It’s been getting worse for years, but I believe that it took a definitive turn for the worse when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon before he was even tried.

Since then, the perception is that if your are one of the powerful, you should not be subjected to the same laws as the rest of us.

It needs to end:

If Democrats do hold their House majority and retake the Senate and the White House, pressure will be intense to avoid looking backward and focus solely on solving the problems in front of them. This is understandable: the wreckage the Trump administration would leave behind after just four short years is immense, the policy challenges dire. If successful in November (and if Trump doesn’t create irredeemable chaos in the transition), Biden and Congressional Democrats will have to deal with a raging pandemic, a collapsing small business and renter economy, a climate crisis and continuing unrest over racist police violence—as well as the myriad ongoing policy challenges related to healthcare, tuition, inequality, tech giant accountability and so much more. It’s easy to foresee a scenario where, coupled with pressure from Republicans and centrists, Democrats decide that the public is sick of even thinking about Trump and bygones are allowed to be bygones.

But that would be a huge mistake. If Trump and his enablers are allowed to get away with the misdeeds of the last four years unscathed, it may mean the end of the American experiment.

The American system of government has proven to be far more fragile and norms-dependent than most public policy professionals and politics nerds had thought possible. It may only take one more president of limited moral constraints to topple it entirely. And given that impeachment and removal have proven to be an empty threat, the only deterrent to a future Trumplike president and their enablers will be the fear of being held legally and financially accountable for wrongdoing after leaving office.

………

What else is to prevent a future Michael Caputo from rigging scientific findings in a pandemic to make his boss look good while endangering millions? What else is to prevent a future Louis DeJoy from sabotaging the Postal Service again? What else would stop a future Bill Barr from using the Justice Department as the president’s private legal firm? What else would stop a future Donald Trump from…well, everything?

Certainly not shame or normative pressure. Not the balance of powers in the Senate envisioned by the framers. Only the fear of subpoenas, jail and penury stands in the way.

So as much as Democrats will have their work cut out for them next year, and as much as Republicans will howl about it, they cannot avoid the necessity of full investigations and inquiries into this administration’s abuses. People have to go to jail for what has happened, or there probably won’t be a democracy worth saving for long.

Yes.

First Reform the Police Need: End Impunity for Lying

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Warning: Violence

Josie Huang, an NPR reporter was brutalized and arrested by LA Sheriffs, who then claimed that she was interfering with their actions and did not declare that she was a member of the press.

Unfortunately for them, she caught it all on tape, as her Twitter thread shows:

As Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies tackled Josie Huang to the street on Saturday night, the reporter for NPR affiliate KPCC screamed repeatedly she was a journalist. Deputies arrested her anyway, leaving her with scrapes, bruises, a five-hour stay in custody — and an obstruction charge that carries up to a year in jail.

Police claimed Huang, who also reports for LAist, didn’t have credentials and ignored demands to leave the area.

But those claims are contradicted by video Huang shared on Sunday showing her quickly backing away from police when ordered to do so and repeatedly identifying herself as a journalist. Huang said she also had a press badge around her neck.

NPR executives and reporters groups condemned Huang’s arrest, demanding her charges be dropped and the sheriff’s department explain why officers forcefully tackled her.

“We hold the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department accountable to provide answers for the excessive use of force in the detainment of our colleague,” the Asian American Journalists Association said in a statement. “The Los Angeles chapter of AAJA demands an investigation and apology for her arrest.”

An independent monitor who oversees investigations into the sheriff’s department also launched a probe into her arrest. “What surprises me the most is that once she was identified as a reporter that they transported her, that they cited her,” L.A. County Inspector Gen. Max Huntsman told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday.

……

Huang said that is precisely what happened to her on Saturday.

Like dozens of other reporters, she had gone to a news conference outside St. Francis Medical Center, where doctors were treating two officers who had been shot in the head in an ambush earlier that night. Afterward, she was typing notes in her car in a parking garage when she heard a commotion in the street, Huang recounted in a Twitter thread on Sunday.

She ventured outside, with her press ID hanging around her neck, and found a few men waving flags and taunting deputies. As the police chased one man and then tackled him, she followed at a distance, filming the incident with her camera’s zoom function.

Suddenly, as seen in a video she shot, one deputy yelled, “Back up.” In her next video, Huang backed quickly away as a number of officers marched toward her, and then knocked the phone from her hand and took her to the ground.

“I’m a reporter,” she yelled. “I’m with KPCC!”

Her phone continued recording during her arrest, capturing her telling officers that they were hurting her and yelling yet again that she is a journalist. Another bystander’s video shows Huang being roughly pulled to the ground while a number of officers piled on top of her.

………

Early on Sunday morning, the sheriff’s office told a different story in recounting her arrest. The department said that as officers were struggling to arrest a protester, “a female adult ran towards the deputies, ignored repeated commands to stay back as they struggled with the male and interfered with the arrest.”

Huang “did not identify herself as press,” the department claimed, “and later admitted she did not have proper press credentials on her person.”

………

“Her arrest is the latest in a series of troubling interactions between our reporters and some local law enforcement officers,” Herb Scannell, chief executive of Southern California Public Radio, said in a statement to the Times. “Journalists provide an essential service, providing fair, accurate and timely journalism and without them, our democracy is at risk.”

The first step of fixing the police is to make sure that when they lie in the course of their official duties, they need to be fired, charged with a felony, and have their guns taken away forever.

Godwin My Ass. This is Nazi Sh%$

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My guess is that this is a combination of greed and bigotry. The doctor and his accomplice want to sterilize brown women, and that they are getting over-reimbursed for what can be a routing procedure, there have been news reports of for-profit hysterectomy mills since at least the 1970s.

Still, it looks like we have a bunch of Josef Mengele wannabees here.

This is beyond horrifying:

Several legal advocacy groups on Monday filed a whistleblower complaint on behalf of a nurse at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center documenting “jarring medical neglect” within the facility, including a refusal to test detainees for the novel coronavirus and an exorbitant rate of hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women.

The nurse, Dawn Wooten, was employed at the Irwin County Detention Center (ICDC) in Georgia, which is operated by LaSalle Corrections, a private prison company. The complaint was filed with the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by advocacy groups Project South, Georgia Detention Watch, Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and South Georgia Immigrant Support Network.

Multiple women came forward to tell Project South about what they perceived to be the inordinate rate at which women in ICDC were subjected to hysterectomies – a surgical operation in which all or part of the uterus is removed. Additionally, many of the immigrant women who underwent the procedure were reportedly “confused” when asked to explain why they had the surgery, with one detainee likening their treatment to prisoners in concentration camps.

Yes, this sounds a lot like Nazi eugenics programs.

“When I met all these women who had had surgeries, I thought this was like an experimental concentration camp. It was like they’re experimenting with our bodies,” the detainee said.

According to Wooten, ICDC consistently used a particular gynecologist – outside the facility – who almost always opted to remove all or part of the uterus of his female detainee patients.

“Everybody he sees has a hysterectomy—just about everybody,” Wooten said, adding that, “everybody’s uterus cannot be that bad.”

“We’ve questioned among ourselves like goodness he’s taking everybody’s stuff out…That’s his specialty, he’s the uterus collector. I know that’s ugly…is he collecting these things or something…Everybody he sees, he’s taking all their uteruses out or he’s taken their tubes out. What in the world.”

(emphasis mine)

It’s clear that someone wanted to sterilize people because of the color of their skin.

The term for this is, “Good German”

Wooten – who is being represented in the matter by the Government Accountability Project – also confirmed that many of the detained women told her that they didn’t understand why they were being forced to have the procedure. She explained that some of the nurses who didn’t speak Spanish obtained consent from detainees “by simply googling Spanish.”

The complaint details several accounts from detainees, including one woman who was not properly anesthetized during the procedure and heard the aforementioned doctor tell the nurse he had mistakenly removed the wrong ovary, resulting in her losing all reproductive ability. Another said she was scheduled for the procedure but when she questioned why it was necessary, she was given at least three completely different answers.

The private prison company has denied any wrongdoing.

Mandy Rice-Davies applies.*

*Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?  Seriously, know your history.

Linkage

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How Netflix Manages to Have So Many Shows – Alternatino:

The Reinoehl Death Looks Increasingly Like a Hit

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It now appears that Michael Reinoehl’s death at hands of police appears to have been a deliberate execution, with the police opening fire without warning:

Officers who first confronted Michael Forest Reinoehl outside an apartment complex in Washington last week yelled no warnings or commands before firing and killing the Oregon man wanted on a murder warrant in the death of a right-wing demonstrator in Portland, according to a witness now represented by a lawyer.

Nathaniel Dingess, 39, lives in the apartment complex near Lacey, Washington, where Reinoehl apparently was hiding.

Dingess said he saw Reinoehl walk toward his car holding a cellphone in his hand when two unmarked law enforcement vehicles converged outside the complex in the 7600 block of Third Way Southeast last Thursday night. Officers began firing at Reinoehl, according to a statement issued by Dingess’ lawyer, Luke Laughlin, on his behalf.

Reinoehl ducked for cover near his car, but it was blocked by police cars and he never got into it, according to Dingess.

“Officers shot multiple rapid-fire rounds at Reinoehl before issuing a brief ‘stop’ command, quickly followed by more rapid-fire shooting by additional officers,” according to the statement.

Dingess said he never saw a handgun on Reinoehl or saw him reach for anything.

………

Dingess, an ordained minister of 19 years, fears for his and his family’s safety for speaking out in what has become a flashpoint in the political swirl around Portland’s ongoing protests, according to his lawyers.

Laughlin and other lawyers are calling for an independent authority to investigate the shooting of Reinoehl, arguing that the Thurston County Sheriff’s Office is not an uninvolved party.

………

The night of the shooting, the U.S. Marshals Service issued a statement that said, “Initial reports indicate the suspect produced a firearm, threatening the lives of law enforcement officers. Task force members responded to the threat and struck the suspect who was pronounced dead at the scene.”

Normally, I would be inclined to wait for an investigation, and perhaps some more information before coming to that conclusion, but given that both Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr gave their official imprimatur to this as an extrajudicial killing, I have to believe that orders were given that Reinoehl was not to be taken alive:

President Donald Trump seemed to endorse the extrajudicial killing of suspects while discussing the fatal shooting of the antifascist activist Michael Reinoehl by U.S. Marshals in early September.

………

“The U.S. Marshals went in to get [Reinoehl], and, in a short period of time, they ended up in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal, and the U.S. Marshals killed him. And I will tell you something, that’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this,” Trump said.

Trump’s comments seemed to line-up with Attorney General William Barr’s official statement following the killing of Reinoehl, calling the officers’ actions “a significant accomplishment in the ongoing effort to restore law and order.”

Given the eyewitness account, I’m not inclined to believe that Trump and Barr both gave tacit, if not explicit, approval to a shoot on sight order.

Certainly, given the pro-fascist proclivities of both the US and local state security apparatus, I don’t think that you would need a smoking gun type order to do this, just vague language about how no risks being taken.

If you are not worried, note that, if the allegations are true, this is only one step away drone strikes against US citizens on US soil.

Some Uncompensated Endorsements

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After picking up Nat from a hangout with a friend, and on the way home, I picked up a snack from Habib Mediterranean Market and Cafe, a nice spinach and cheese pie. 

The kids got some very nice stuffed grape leaves and some za’atar spiced fries. Additionally, I got a bottle of a very nice non-alcoholic malt beverage made in Dubai, UAE, Barbican. 

Unlike many near-beers, it is not too sweet, and not too malty, and lightly hopped, which makes for an easy drink when one wants to cool down a hot day.

Objectively Pro Fascist

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Let’s be clear here:  This is not an isolated case.

Police have been openly and aggressively supporting white supremacists and militia members, no where more so than in Oregon:

A Clackamas County sheriff’s deputy was placed on administrative leave Saturday after a video was posted online of the deputy claiming anti-fascist activists had been starting fires in the area.

The patrol deputy’s statements in the video are in direct conflict with efforts by law enforcement to dispel false rumors that antifa is responsible for wildfires burning in Clackamas County.

The deputy, whose face and name badge are not fully shown in the video, is recorded saying: “Antifa motherfuckers are out causing hell, and there’s a lot of lives at stake. And there’s a lot of people’s property at stake because these guys got some vendetta.”

The sheriff’s office said in a statement Saturday that the on-duty patrol deputy was tasked with ensuring residents knew of wildfire hazards in the area. The agency said he has been placed on administrative leave while its Professional Standards Unit investigates a potential policy violation. The deputy has not been publicly identified.

………

Law enforcement officials across the state, including with the FBI, are attempting to dispel rumors that political groups, including antifa — a loosely defined leftist group that is a frequent focus of far-right conspiracy theorists — are behind the unprecedented wildfires that have burned more than 1 million acres in Oregon. One plea law enforcement has made is that conspiracy theories take resources away from law enforcement who are attempting to keep the public safe.

There needs to be a persistent and aggressive effort to get right-wing terrorists and right-wing terrorist sympathizers out of law enforcement.