Welcome to the State of Intolerance. Teens mock Native American at Washington rally

Life in Trump’s Amerika

Deutsche Welle 1.20.2019

A Catholic school has apologized after a group of its students harrassed a Native American elder while he was singing. The incident has been widely condemned and the videos have gone viral on social media.

A US diocese on Sunday promised to take action after boys from a Catholic private school mocked an elderly Native American man at a rally by indigenous communities in Washington.

The footage, which spread on social media over the weekend, shows a student from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky smirking as he stands exceptionally close to Nathan Phillips, a Native American Vietnam war veteran, who beats a traditional drum while chanting.

Other teens, many also wearing clothing bearing President Donald Trump’s political slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ jeered, jumped and appeared to mock the man.

Several intimidating minutes

A member of Phillips’ march, Marcus Frejo, said the boisterous students began chanting slogans and then started doing the haka, a traditional Maori dance.

At one point, students chanted, “build the wall, build the wall,” the 64-year-old Phillips said in a separate video.

“These are indigenous lands, we’re not supposed to have walls,” the elder of Nebraska’s Omaha tribe added, wiping away the tears.

“I wish I could see that energy of that young mass of young men, put that energy into making this country, really, really great, helping those that are hungry.”

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial

The incident took place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Friday when the annual anti-abortion March for Life, which the boys had attended, coincided with a rally by indigenous communities calling for their rights to be respected.

After the video drew widespread criticism on social media, the Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School issued a statement rebuking the students.

“We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general, Jan. 18, after the March for Life, in Washington, D.C,” the statement said.

Boys face expulsion

“We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips. This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person. The matter is being investigated, and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”

Deb Haaland, one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress in November, linked the students’ behavior to rising levels of racial intolerance under the Trump administration.

“The students’ display of blatant hate, disrespect, and intolerance is a signal of how common decency has decayed under this administration. Heartbreaking,” she wrote on Twitter.

Weimar, 1919: Birth of Germany’s first democracy

Deutsche Welle 1.19.2019

In 1919, German women voted for the first time — in an election that was to play a pivotal role in the country’s history. It came on the heels of the disastrous Great War and the year before Hitler formed the Nazi party.

https://www.dw.com/en/weimar-1919-birth-of-germanys-first-democracy/a-47143440

Couple sue SFPD. Police mistakenly ransacked their apartment

San Francisco Chronicle – Evan Sernoffsky 1.19.2019

Police mistakenly raided a San Francisco couple’s apartment in search of stolen iPhones, ransacking the unit while officers took a young man into custody and shouting at his shocked wife, who was wearing only a towel, according to a federal lawsuit filed Friday.

“After the SFPD left with their battering ram and pry bar, Mr. Garcia and Ms. Knuth sat and witnessed the disarray that their home was put in by the SFPD,” Attorney Josh Brownstein wrote. “As they commiserated, they overheard several SFPD officers outside their window laughing and joking about a ‘pending lawsuit.’”

As  the team of officers ripped through the couple’s personal belongings that day in 2017, they slowly began to realize they had goofed, attorney  Brownstein wrote in the lawsuit.

It turns out Rick Garcia had legally purchased his iPhone two weeks earlier from the Apple store at Stonestown Galleria. And, at 5 feet 9 and 120 pounds, he clearly wasn’t one of the three “husky” burglars police were looking for who had targeted that store, his attorney said.

Garcia and his wife, Shannon Knuth, are now suing the city and its Police Department after suffering “physical and emotional injuries” in the episode, Brownstein wrote.

The episode began after a team of burglars stole 300 iPhones from the Apple store at Stonestown Galleria on Nov. 1, 2017, according to the lawsuit.

The investigation was assigned to the Police Department’s newly formed General Crimes Unit, a team of 35 officers dedicated to crimes such as burglaries, robberies and bicycle thefts. The case, Brownstein said, was the first one assigned to the new unit.

More than two weeks later, on Nov. 19, Garcia bought his new iPhone X from the same Apple store along with a leather case, totaling $1,498.84, his attorney said.

Then on the early morning of Dec. 4, 2017, Garcia was “abruptly awakened by a shouting and banging emanating from his exterior hallway,” Brownstein said, adding that police were shouting from the hall, “San Francisco Police Department” and “search warrant.”

While his wife was in the shower, Garcia approached the door, looked through the eyehole and saw police with a battering ram preparing to bust in, his attorney wrote.

When Garcia opened the door, Brownstein said, police rushed in, pulled Garcia into the hallway, handcuffed him and took him to Taraval Station for questioning.

Back at the apartment, officers shouted at Knuth, who was in a towel and was “confused and extremely frightened,” Brownstein said. “She insisted that something was wrong — that they must be mistaken.”

Police began searching the home and handed Knuth “a bra, thong underwear, yoga pants and a sweatshirt” and told her to get dressed in the bathroom, her attorney said.

Once Knuth was dressed, and police told her they were looking for a iPhone X, she showed them the receipt, proving Garcia legally owned the phone, Brownstein said.

Realizing their blunder, police brought Garcia back home to the ransacked apartment, the attorneys said.

Chesa Boudin and The Media

My Post in the San Francisco Examiner 1.18.2019

Chesa Boudin will wage a spirited and intelligent race. Chesa will bring a level of intelligence and a perspective of the criminal justice system which is sadly missing. He knows up close and personally the impact the American system has on people caught up in its tentacles. Regrettably, Chesa will have to fend off the disparaging attacks all too apparent in the Mainstream Media and a portion of the public at large. Chesa will be fine and his campaign will gather a large following.

Deepfakes and the New Disinformation War. Post-Truth Geopolitics

This is Definitely a Big Deal!!!

Foreign Affairs – January-February 2019

By Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but there is nothing that persuades quite like an audio or video recording of an event. At a time when partisans can barely agree on facts, such persuasiveness might seem as if it could bring a welcome clarity. Audio and video recordings allow people to become firsthand witnesses of an event, sparing them the need to decide whether to trust someone else’s account of it. And thanks to smartphones, which make it easy to capture audio and video content, and social media platforms, which allow that content to be shared and consumed, people today can rely on their own eyes and ears to an unprecedented degree.

Therein lies a great danger. Imagine a video depicting the Israeli prime minister in private conversation with a colleague, seemingly revealing a plan to carry out a series of political assassinations in Tehran. Or an audio clip of Iranian officials planning a covert operation to kill Sunni leaders in a particular province of Iraq. Or a video showing an American general in Afghanistan burning a Koran. In a world already primed for violence, such recordings would have a powerful potential for incitement. Now imagine that these recordings could be faked using tools available to almost anyone with a laptop and access to the Internet—and that the resulting fakes are so convincing that they are impossible to distinguish from the real thing.

 

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2018-12-11/deepfakes-and-new-disinformation-war?cid=int-nbb&pgtype=hpg

Gillibrand’s “Me-Too” Moment. Running as the women’s candidate.

A Classic Snarky WSJ Editorial. It’s Hilarious 1.17.2019

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand joined the 2020 presidential race this week, and you might call it her “me too” moment. We mean that in the sense that like Hillary Clinton she is running first and foremost as a woman candidate representing women’s interests. “I’m going to run for President of the United States,” she told a friendly TV interviewer on Tuesday, “because as a young mom I’m going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own.”

Like Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Gillibrand plays up her gender more than her ideas. The 52-year-old is probably best known for her outspoken role in the #MeToo movement. She and former Senator Al Franken used to be squash partners, back before he was accused in 2017 of groping women. Ms. Gillibrand nevertheless was the first Senator to demand Mr. Franken’s resignation, calling it a “moment of reckoning.” Around that time she also made news by saying that, in retrospect, Bill Clinton should have stepped down in the wake of the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Other Democrats soon lamented that Mr. Franken had quit too quickly, without getting a full hearing. Big donors, including George Soros, accused Ms. Gillibrand of railroading Mr. Franken for her own political benefit. Philippe Reines, a longtime Hillary Clinton aide, jabbedon Twitter: “Over 20 yrs you took the Clintons’ endorsements, money, and seat. Hypocrite. Interesting strategy for 2020 primaries.”

The jolt leftward started in 2009. Mrs. Clinton became Secretary of State, and Ms. Gillibrand was elevated to fill the newly vacant Senate seat. By 2010 the NRA had downgraded her to an F rating. Today, Ms. Gillibrand wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while saying that President Trump’s positions on the issue are outright “racist.”

Ms. Gillibrand now says her old positions simply weren’t thought out. “I came from a district that was 98% white,” she said last year. “I didn’t take the time to understand why these issues mattered, because it wasn’t right in front of me. And that was my fault. It was something that I’m embarrassed about and I’m ashamed of.” Apparently this daughter of a legendary Albany lobbyist spent years at Dartmouth College and UCLA, and then worked at big Manhattan law firms, and somehow these issues never came up. Authenticity will not be her strength.

Believable or not, Ms. Gillibrand easily won re-election in November with 67% of the vote. She also ended 2018 with $10.5 million in cash on hand, second among Democrats to Elizabeth Warren. As Ms. Gillibrand passes the hat down Wall Street, the money will keep piling up. Maybe she can tap the Clintons’ network, too, if she has convinced them to forgive her.

Asked last February if she had spoken to them recently, Ms. Gillibrand demurred. “I don’t wanna talk about that, but—I can tell you one thing,” she said. “Hillary Clinton is still my greatest role model in politics.”

Now there’s a slogan for 2020.

German police raid suspected KKK homes

Nazis, KKK. All the Same. Repugnant, and Disgusting Vile People

Deutsche Welle 1.16.2019

Police conducted raids on several properties throughout Germany thought to be connected to an extremist group that associates itself with the Ku Klux Klan. A total of 17 people are at the center of the investigation.

German police on Wednesday raided 12 apartments in eight different German states belonging to suspected members of an extreme-right group calling itself the National Socialist Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Deutschland.

A total of 200 police officers searched properties in Baden-Württemberg, Bremen, Hamburg, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland Palatinate, Saxony Anhalt and Thuringia. More than 100 weapons — including air guns, swords, machetes and knives — were seized in the raids, prosecutors and regional police in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg said.

Read more: ‘The KKK is active here in Germany’

The raids targeted 17 people between the ages of 17 and 59, but there was no official word of any arrests. Authorities say around 40 people are under investigation.

“The members were united in their right-wing orientation, which included expressing a glorification of National Socialism,” investigators said.

Investigators began looking into the accused after they showed up in a chat history on a mobile phone. The device had been seized as part of initial investigations into the use of insignia of illegal organizations.

Authorities said they have found no evidence linking the extremist group with other KKK organizations. They say the group recruited members partly online and charged monthly fees.

The KKK is well known in the United States as a hate group. However, there is now research and publications on activities by similarly named groups in Germany.

California students caught forming swastika with their bodies

“No way to delay that trouble coming everyday,” to quote Frank Zappa in his 1966 LP “Freakout!”

Excerpted from The Guardian of London 1.15.2019

California youths traded racist and violent messages in Ojai.  County called ‘hotbed for white supremacists’

A group of California junior high students were caught forming a swastika with their bodies on school grounds and exchanging racist and violent messages on a group chat, administrators said.

The scandal at Matilija junior high school, which culminated in an emotional meeting with parents and school officials Monday night, has sparked intense debate in a region that has experienced a sharp increase in reported antisemitic incidents.

The middle school in Ojai, a small city 80 miles north-west of Los Angeles, told parents in a letter in December that officials had discovered photos showing “nine students laying on the field together to form the shape of a swastika during lunch”. Administrators said the images appeared in a group chat that was active in November and December and featured “racist, sexually inappropriate and threatening commentary”, including one student’s call “to bring knives to school”. The photos and texts have not been released.

Cyndi Silverman, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), who has been working with Ojai school officials, told the Guardian that there were 28 students on the group chat, which featured a wide range of hateful content: “There were a number of texts that were anti-LGBTQ, antisemitic, anti-black, anti-Latino.”

Antisemitic incidents in the US have recently surged to the highest level in two decades, according to the ADL, which documented 457 cases in K-12 schools in 2017, a 94% increase from the previous year.

The local ADL for Ventura, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties responded to five antisemitic incidents in 2016, followed by 19 in 2017 and 21 in the last year, Silverman said. Ventura County is a “hotbed for white supremacists and the ‘alt-right’ movement”, she added.

The Ojai controversy follows numerous reports across the country of increased school bullying echoing the hateful rhetoric of Donald Trump, and a rise in harassment, abuse and offensive language by students on Instagram, Facebook and other digital platforms.

Chesa Boudin, son of radicals, looks to become SF district attorney

Chesa Boudin is a caring, intelligent and motivated person. His election as District Attorney will be a history making event in the criminal justice system.

San Francisco Chronicle 1.15.2019

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Chesa-Boudin-son-of-imprisoned-radicals-looks-13533584.php

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Chesa-Boudin-son-of-imprisoned-radicals-looks-13533584.php